Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

“Chicky, listen. Remember how you used to pick pockets? Well, you know the sperm in Arty’s balls?” I had his attention at least. “Could you move that sperm—the wiggly little things—could you move them into me and get ’em into the egg thing in me so I could have a baby like Iphy?”

This, Miranda, is how you were conceived. Don’t ever doubt that it was an act of love. Your father was as happy then as he was capable of being. Your uncle Chick, the dove, was delighted to do it, to be able to do it. And I was a seventeen-year-old dwarf, pink-cheeked, rosy-humped, scarlet-eyed.

“But what about the Pin Kid?” I couldn’t see Chick’s face in the dark. He waited a few seconds before he answered. A dozen heartbeats. “He just says, ‘What Pin Kid?’

Understand, daughter, that the only reason for your existing was as a tribute to your uncle-father. You were meant to love him. I planned to teach you how to serve him and adore him. You would be his monument and his fortress against mortality. Forgive me. As soon as you arrived I realized that you were worth far more than that.

Arty examined himself in the mirror and his wide mouth wriggled from corner to corner. “My, my. Won’t they just lick my jizz today?”

Many died. Many burned. Babes snuffed to grease smears in the blackened arms of their charcoaled mothers. Sudden switches, lean and brittle, had started as dancing children only seconds before. All the dark, gaping corpses, in their fire-frenzy ballet, flexed and tangled in the dreams of the finders.

That was the time when I realized that the peculiar look on people’s faces when they saw me was not envy or hatred, but could be translated into one simple question: “What the hell happened to you?”

if those are tears puddling in the bottom of those wire-framed glasses she’s wearing, then this flabby old douche bag will be too blind to stay on the platform and will drop and crack like a beetle on the garage roof, next to the ornamental pool.

“If I could think of a way to seal her asshole, I’d do it. And maybe stitch her mouth shut and feed her with a tube going in under her chin.” Miss Lick is half-joking in the elevator.

If I let her walk from her room to the can, three men would climb out of the light sockets on the way and find holes in her to cram their dicks into.”

Yet I hope that someday you’ll come to collect us all from the shelves of the vault. Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that’s left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again.