Cancel Toby Chalmers!: Chapters 4 and 5
Well, since my novelette Cancel Toby Chalmers! (copyright me, now) has been sitting around, completed, for nearly 16 months, I’ve decided to share it for free, until it’s later released as part of a Toby Chalmers collection.
Chapters 1-3 can be found at: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
Here are Chapters 4 and 5.
Chapter 4
Eyeing his laptop as if it were a dog on its deathbed, Toby Chalmers read what he’d just written aloud: “Grandpappy reached deep into Grandmother’s white-maned punani, wherein he’d stored his dentures to keep them warm and fragrant, and retrieved thirty-two porcelain chompers that he popped into his mouth. The pair then beckoned me to sit between them on the couch. ‘Come here, sonny boy. Lemme tell you a story,’ said Grandpappy, ‘about how a simple sheepfucker invented the first condom.’”
Is this supposed to be funny or ghastly? Toby wondered. Have I no shame left within me? He consulted the clock. Well past dinnertime, he thought. I’ve been fleshing out this ridiculous narrative for hours. A tale within a tale within a tale within a tale, how complex. Good thing I had a large breakfast.
He saved what he’d written to a thumb drive and powered off his computer. Well, I’m too tired to have something delivered, but there’s still time to drink, he thought, making his way to the kitchen.
Toby had mostly given up drugs—no more cocaine, seer’s sage, mummy clumps, or opium—though he still enjoyed MDMA and marijuana at concerts. He exercised every morning to combat the effects of middle age. He’d cut caffeine from his life entirely and even given up sweets. Still, he couldn’t go a day without downing some beers.
IPAs were his favorite. Whensoever he went grocery shopping, any untried variety was an instant purchase. When feeling festive, he layered them in mugs beneath Guinness to make black and tans. Currently, his refrigerator housed eleven different options.
His absolute favorite was known as Aetheric IPA. Sadly, the homebrewing geniuses who’d brewed the stuff were now dead—part of a suicidal death cult, allegedly—and once Toby finished off the few he had left, there’d be no more attainable. Its fruity, floral flavor made every meal, even reheated eggs, feel like a royal banquet. When accompanied by no food, it eroded hunger pangs anyway.
“Well, there’s no time like the present,” he muttered, grabbing a cold bottle and uncapping it. He took a swig and wandered into the living room. He’d recently bought a new sectional sofa, replacing one that always smelled like a dog’s bed for some reason, though Toby had never owned a pet. Onto it he plopped, to bring his TV to life.
It was just his luck that a news broadcast awaited him. Current events were dour, as per usual. Four African American cops had killed an unarmed African American motorist, who’d run a stop sign without slowing in a low-income neighborhood. Footage showed them dragging the man from his Hummer H2 and stomping his dreadlocked head, again and again, as he begged them for mercy, for the sake of his children, then for the sake of his parents, spitting teeth shards with each uttered syllable. Bystanders filmed the assault with their iPhones, chanting, “Police brutality!” and, “Stop, you’re killin’ him!” All kept their distance, lest the bloodlust of those badge-toting sadists next target them.
“Okay, that’s enough of that,” Toby muttered. Though he’d been obsessed with horror fiction for as long as he could remember, real life horror always turned his stomach. Occasionally, it found him, and he had to endure it. Other times, it found others, and he could escape it by changing the channel.
On this night, however, a simple channel change couldn’t erase the sight of the brutalized man’s visage from Toby’s mind. Though he drank beer after beer and binged Rick and Morty episodes back-to-back, the man’s fading speech, growing increasingly dreamlike as his death’s certainty burgeoned, echoed through Toby’s noggin, hauntingly. The soil beneath Toby’s home, glutted with the blood of innocents since times immemorial, seemed to pulse, as if the continent was awakening and would soon shake civilization from its back.
To make his night even more depressing, he pulled his cellphone from his pocket and scrolled down his social media feed. Naturally, most of the posts that he encountered were reactions to the murder.
“He shouldn’t have resisted arrest!” wrote Zombifkr42.
“Your momma shouldn’t have resisted abortion,” replied ProudLinny.
“White supremacy at its worst!” wrote Uplizft.
“Everyone involved was black, though,” EqualityWhore replied. “If you wiped your ass too hard, you’d blame Caucasians for that, too, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, I am a Caucasian, so I’d be right if I did,” Uplizft countered.
“That explains the 666 birthmark on your head,” was EqualityWhore’s rejoinder.
Scrolling past an ad for a hat he’d already purchased twice, Toby then encountered SloopJamalB’s “Defund the police!!!!!!!!!” post.
“Then who’ll get your crackhead mother to stop licking my dog’s asshole?” replied NahDawgUTrippin.
“It’s a media hoax,” claimed 62BiscuitsYumYum. “Those aren’t even African Americans, just five Jews wearing masks.”
“I seent it! I seent it!” replied DonBibblestick.
“Crackers aren’t allowed to discuss this!” wrote DieWhitiesDieDie. “Let ’em choke on their forked tongues if they attempt to!”
Toby closed his eyes for a few moments, focusing his thoughts. With a series of deep breaths, he cultivated an inner stillness. Reminding himself that each and every post and reply that he’d read belonged to just one person, he chugged the last of his beer and forced himself to grin. “Let a better world start with me,” he said to himself, hoping that it might become his new mantra.
Now soused optimistic, suddenly sure that he could contribute to rational discourse and help better all of humanity, he began to craft a post of his own.
Chapter 5
Kneeling at his backyard’s east-facing edge, Lamonte Achebe pruned dead hydrangeas and branches, reveling in the morning quiet. His wife and daughters were late sleepers on weekends; there’d be plenty of time to fix them breakfast—grits and eggs with toast on the side, perhaps even freshly-squeezed orange juice.
One day, Lamonte would retire from his soul-shriveling insurance adjuster job and devote every morning to his flowers. He’d inherited his green thumb from his mother. The good woman’s ghost yet survived in his garden’s floral ambiance, he believed, shaping its heady perfumes and vibrant colors into something truly angelic.
Suddenly, the morning’s sanctity was shattered by heinous sonance: “Pick that cotton, you dumb nigger! Pick it until I say you can stop!”
Lamonte’s eyes narrowed; his hands squeezed into fists. He’d always been a large African American: nearly seven feet tall even in high school, just over three hundred pounds now. Ergo, even the most racist of racists had kept their words civil in his presence. Every time a cop pulled his car over, they took one look at Lamonte and let him off with a warning, unsure whether they were carrying enough ammunition to put him down, should he decide to attack them. Unasked, Caucasians told him of their favorite black sports stars, as if he was some dark totem come to life, and required oblations.
“Well, what are you waitin’ for, nigger?! I don’t have all day!”
Lamonte realized that the hate speech emanated from the backyard next door. Is that Joseph McCarthy Jr. I’m hearing? he wondered. Just a few weeks ago, he spotted me on the way to the mailbox and assured me that Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror is the best horror anthology film ever made. I guess that the leopard’s showing his spots now!
Well aware that, with his size and strength, he could kill a man like Joe easily, Lamonte attempted to modulate his anger and tune out his neighbor’s bigoted outbursts. Then came, “That’s better, you dirty coon! Be good for your master and I’ll spare you the whip!”
“What the hell’s wrong with that man?” Lamonte muttered, carefully setting his pruning shears down and rising to his feet. I’d better put the fear of God into him right quick, show him that I won’t be bullied, he thought.
Lamonte peered over the fence and his mouth opened, aghast, the retort that he’d planned to unleash dissolving, unvoiced. The surreality of the scene before him made his surroundings seem most fragile, as if they might soon shatter to reveal that he’d been in bed dreaming all along.
There was little Shadrach McCarthy, he of the premature facial hair, now shirtless and shoeless, wearing only a pair of hand-me-down Bugle Boy jeans, which had been cut around the ankles to hang raggedly. Behind him loomed Joseph McCarthy Jr., dressed in a white suit, black tie, and well-polished Oxfords, gripping a replica of Catwoman’s Batman Returns whip.
Cotton balls covered Joe’s entire back lawn. One at a time, carefully, quite terrified, eight-year-old Shadrach picked them up and dropped them into the pillowcase he was carrying. Tears streamed down his cheeks. His lower lip was aquiver. What the hell’s going on here? Lamonte wondered.
“Nigger, nigger, nigger!” Joe shouted, cracking the whip so that the tip of it just missed Shadrach’s trembling buttocks. “Smile while you work, boy! You’re makin’ me nauseous!”
Okay, I’ve seen enough of this madness, thought Lamonte. “Hey, Joe!” he shouted. “Just what do you think you’re doin’?!”
“Keep going,” Joe said to his nephew, before sauntering over to the fence. To Lamonte, he said, “Well, hey there, neighbor. Fantastic weather we’re havin’ today, isn’t it?”
“Sure. A great day for an ass whuppin’, if ever I saw one.”
“Excuse me?”
“You think I’m cool with you shoutin’ the N-word? Next door to my house, where my wife and daughters might hear it? And don’t even get me started on this bizarre slavery reenactment.”
“Oh, come on, neighbor. How else is Shadrach gonna learn?”
“Learn what? How to be a sadistic, racist piece of shit?”
“Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“Is that right?”
“Listen, man. Shadrach isn’t like me. He doesn’t empathize with other races. I even caught him laughin’ at an African American he saw on TV. So I thought to myself, if I make him experience a bit of the struggle that blacks have coped with in America, he’ll learn to love his fellow man as I do.”
“Joe, so help me God, if you hurt that boy…”
“Have no fear, neighbor. He knows that I won’t really strike him. Once this is all over, we’ll go out for dinner, and he can eat whatever he wants to. I respect and value your opinion, though. Please understand that. My ears are always wide open for whatever you have to say.”
“I say stop this atrocity.”
“Just as soon as he’s finished.”
Lamonte’s eyes narrowed to slits. He wanted to hurl himself through the fence and crater Joe’s smirking countenance. This piece of shit probably thinks that he knows more about being African American than I do, he thought, just because he read a few leftist articles.
But as far as he knew, as fucked up as it was, Joe’d committed no actual crime. Sure, Lamonte could film the man’s sickening exhibition with his phone and release the footage on social media. Millions would hurl insults at Joe and scream for his cancellation. But then Joe would post his rationale to the applause of like-minded thinkers, and other Caucasian children would be subjected to cotton ball barbarism. Joe wouldn’t lose his job. He’d pat himself on the back for standing up to “anti-woke bullies” and author a child-raising handbook that’d make him rich. It was always dangerous to give the Joes of the world more attention. Lamonte would have to consider his next move quite carefully.
“Enough of this nonsense,” Lamonte grunted, turning his back on his neighbor and heading inside. As he slid his sliding glass door shut behind him, he heard one last bit of hate speech.
“Did I say you could rest, nigger?! I want a good day’s work outta you!”
Chapters 1-3 can be found at: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
Here are Chapters 4 and 5.
Chapter 4
Eyeing his laptop as if it were a dog on its deathbed, Toby Chalmers read what he’d just written aloud: “Grandpappy reached deep into Grandmother’s white-maned punani, wherein he’d stored his dentures to keep them warm and fragrant, and retrieved thirty-two porcelain chompers that he popped into his mouth. The pair then beckoned me to sit between them on the couch. ‘Come here, sonny boy. Lemme tell you a story,’ said Grandpappy, ‘about how a simple sheepfucker invented the first condom.’”
Is this supposed to be funny or ghastly? Toby wondered. Have I no shame left within me? He consulted the clock. Well past dinnertime, he thought. I’ve been fleshing out this ridiculous narrative for hours. A tale within a tale within a tale within a tale, how complex. Good thing I had a large breakfast.
He saved what he’d written to a thumb drive and powered off his computer. Well, I’m too tired to have something delivered, but there’s still time to drink, he thought, making his way to the kitchen.
Toby had mostly given up drugs—no more cocaine, seer’s sage, mummy clumps, or opium—though he still enjoyed MDMA and marijuana at concerts. He exercised every morning to combat the effects of middle age. He’d cut caffeine from his life entirely and even given up sweets. Still, he couldn’t go a day without downing some beers.
IPAs were his favorite. Whensoever he went grocery shopping, any untried variety was an instant purchase. When feeling festive, he layered them in mugs beneath Guinness to make black and tans. Currently, his refrigerator housed eleven different options.
His absolute favorite was known as Aetheric IPA. Sadly, the homebrewing geniuses who’d brewed the stuff were now dead—part of a suicidal death cult, allegedly—and once Toby finished off the few he had left, there’d be no more attainable. Its fruity, floral flavor made every meal, even reheated eggs, feel like a royal banquet. When accompanied by no food, it eroded hunger pangs anyway.
“Well, there’s no time like the present,” he muttered, grabbing a cold bottle and uncapping it. He took a swig and wandered into the living room. He’d recently bought a new sectional sofa, replacing one that always smelled like a dog’s bed for some reason, though Toby had never owned a pet. Onto it he plopped, to bring his TV to life.
It was just his luck that a news broadcast awaited him. Current events were dour, as per usual. Four African American cops had killed an unarmed African American motorist, who’d run a stop sign without slowing in a low-income neighborhood. Footage showed them dragging the man from his Hummer H2 and stomping his dreadlocked head, again and again, as he begged them for mercy, for the sake of his children, then for the sake of his parents, spitting teeth shards with each uttered syllable. Bystanders filmed the assault with their iPhones, chanting, “Police brutality!” and, “Stop, you’re killin’ him!” All kept their distance, lest the bloodlust of those badge-toting sadists next target them.
“Okay, that’s enough of that,” Toby muttered. Though he’d been obsessed with horror fiction for as long as he could remember, real life horror always turned his stomach. Occasionally, it found him, and he had to endure it. Other times, it found others, and he could escape it by changing the channel.
On this night, however, a simple channel change couldn’t erase the sight of the brutalized man’s visage from Toby’s mind. Though he drank beer after beer and binged Rick and Morty episodes back-to-back, the man’s fading speech, growing increasingly dreamlike as his death’s certainty burgeoned, echoed through Toby’s noggin, hauntingly. The soil beneath Toby’s home, glutted with the blood of innocents since times immemorial, seemed to pulse, as if the continent was awakening and would soon shake civilization from its back.
To make his night even more depressing, he pulled his cellphone from his pocket and scrolled down his social media feed. Naturally, most of the posts that he encountered were reactions to the murder.
“He shouldn’t have resisted arrest!” wrote Zombifkr42.
“Your momma shouldn’t have resisted abortion,” replied ProudLinny.
“White supremacy at its worst!” wrote Uplizft.
“Everyone involved was black, though,” EqualityWhore replied. “If you wiped your ass too hard, you’d blame Caucasians for that, too, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, I am a Caucasian, so I’d be right if I did,” Uplizft countered.
“That explains the 666 birthmark on your head,” was EqualityWhore’s rejoinder.
Scrolling past an ad for a hat he’d already purchased twice, Toby then encountered SloopJamalB’s “Defund the police!!!!!!!!!” post.
“Then who’ll get your crackhead mother to stop licking my dog’s asshole?” replied NahDawgUTrippin.
“It’s a media hoax,” claimed 62BiscuitsYumYum. “Those aren’t even African Americans, just five Jews wearing masks.”
“I seent it! I seent it!” replied DonBibblestick.
“Crackers aren’t allowed to discuss this!” wrote DieWhitiesDieDie. “Let ’em choke on their forked tongues if they attempt to!”
Toby closed his eyes for a few moments, focusing his thoughts. With a series of deep breaths, he cultivated an inner stillness. Reminding himself that each and every post and reply that he’d read belonged to just one person, he chugged the last of his beer and forced himself to grin. “Let a better world start with me,” he said to himself, hoping that it might become his new mantra.
Now soused optimistic, suddenly sure that he could contribute to rational discourse and help better all of humanity, he began to craft a post of his own.
Chapter 5
Kneeling at his backyard’s east-facing edge, Lamonte Achebe pruned dead hydrangeas and branches, reveling in the morning quiet. His wife and daughters were late sleepers on weekends; there’d be plenty of time to fix them breakfast—grits and eggs with toast on the side, perhaps even freshly-squeezed orange juice.
One day, Lamonte would retire from his soul-shriveling insurance adjuster job and devote every morning to his flowers. He’d inherited his green thumb from his mother. The good woman’s ghost yet survived in his garden’s floral ambiance, he believed, shaping its heady perfumes and vibrant colors into something truly angelic.
Suddenly, the morning’s sanctity was shattered by heinous sonance: “Pick that cotton, you dumb nigger! Pick it until I say you can stop!”
Lamonte’s eyes narrowed; his hands squeezed into fists. He’d always been a large African American: nearly seven feet tall even in high school, just over three hundred pounds now. Ergo, even the most racist of racists had kept their words civil in his presence. Every time a cop pulled his car over, they took one look at Lamonte and let him off with a warning, unsure whether they were carrying enough ammunition to put him down, should he decide to attack them. Unasked, Caucasians told him of their favorite black sports stars, as if he was some dark totem come to life, and required oblations.
“Well, what are you waitin’ for, nigger?! I don’t have all day!”
Lamonte realized that the hate speech emanated from the backyard next door. Is that Joseph McCarthy Jr. I’m hearing? he wondered. Just a few weeks ago, he spotted me on the way to the mailbox and assured me that Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror is the best horror anthology film ever made. I guess that the leopard’s showing his spots now!
Well aware that, with his size and strength, he could kill a man like Joe easily, Lamonte attempted to modulate his anger and tune out his neighbor’s bigoted outbursts. Then came, “That’s better, you dirty coon! Be good for your master and I’ll spare you the whip!”
“What the hell’s wrong with that man?” Lamonte muttered, carefully setting his pruning shears down and rising to his feet. I’d better put the fear of God into him right quick, show him that I won’t be bullied, he thought.
Lamonte peered over the fence and his mouth opened, aghast, the retort that he’d planned to unleash dissolving, unvoiced. The surreality of the scene before him made his surroundings seem most fragile, as if they might soon shatter to reveal that he’d been in bed dreaming all along.
There was little Shadrach McCarthy, he of the premature facial hair, now shirtless and shoeless, wearing only a pair of hand-me-down Bugle Boy jeans, which had been cut around the ankles to hang raggedly. Behind him loomed Joseph McCarthy Jr., dressed in a white suit, black tie, and well-polished Oxfords, gripping a replica of Catwoman’s Batman Returns whip.
Cotton balls covered Joe’s entire back lawn. One at a time, carefully, quite terrified, eight-year-old Shadrach picked them up and dropped them into the pillowcase he was carrying. Tears streamed down his cheeks. His lower lip was aquiver. What the hell’s going on here? Lamonte wondered.
“Nigger, nigger, nigger!” Joe shouted, cracking the whip so that the tip of it just missed Shadrach’s trembling buttocks. “Smile while you work, boy! You’re makin’ me nauseous!”
Okay, I’ve seen enough of this madness, thought Lamonte. “Hey, Joe!” he shouted. “Just what do you think you’re doin’?!”
“Keep going,” Joe said to his nephew, before sauntering over to the fence. To Lamonte, he said, “Well, hey there, neighbor. Fantastic weather we’re havin’ today, isn’t it?”
“Sure. A great day for an ass whuppin’, if ever I saw one.”
“Excuse me?”
“You think I’m cool with you shoutin’ the N-word? Next door to my house, where my wife and daughters might hear it? And don’t even get me started on this bizarre slavery reenactment.”
“Oh, come on, neighbor. How else is Shadrach gonna learn?”
“Learn what? How to be a sadistic, racist piece of shit?”
“Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“Is that right?”
“Listen, man. Shadrach isn’t like me. He doesn’t empathize with other races. I even caught him laughin’ at an African American he saw on TV. So I thought to myself, if I make him experience a bit of the struggle that blacks have coped with in America, he’ll learn to love his fellow man as I do.”
“Joe, so help me God, if you hurt that boy…”
“Have no fear, neighbor. He knows that I won’t really strike him. Once this is all over, we’ll go out for dinner, and he can eat whatever he wants to. I respect and value your opinion, though. Please understand that. My ears are always wide open for whatever you have to say.”
“I say stop this atrocity.”
“Just as soon as he’s finished.”
Lamonte’s eyes narrowed to slits. He wanted to hurl himself through the fence and crater Joe’s smirking countenance. This piece of shit probably thinks that he knows more about being African American than I do, he thought, just because he read a few leftist articles.
But as far as he knew, as fucked up as it was, Joe’d committed no actual crime. Sure, Lamonte could film the man’s sickening exhibition with his phone and release the footage on social media. Millions would hurl insults at Joe and scream for his cancellation. But then Joe would post his rationale to the applause of like-minded thinkers, and other Caucasian children would be subjected to cotton ball barbarism. Joe wouldn’t lose his job. He’d pat himself on the back for standing up to “anti-woke bullies” and author a child-raising handbook that’d make him rich. It was always dangerous to give the Joes of the world more attention. Lamonte would have to consider his next move quite carefully.
“Enough of this nonsense,” Lamonte grunted, turning his back on his neighbor and heading inside. As he slid his sliding glass door shut behind him, he heard one last bit of hate speech.
“Did I say you could rest, nigger?! I want a good day’s work outta you!”
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