unwelcomeness

When the world ends, it’s not because of asteroids, plagues, or global war. It’s because a few of the old gods return to fuck things up finally in a way that makes our lame fuckups look like a billion microbes jerking off into a mist of pee. For example: at the Boy Scout meeting we learn how to make a fake scar by pasting rubber cement onto pinched skin. This is the secret of scouting: all the lessons are bullshit, but if you persevere and observe patiently with splatter-vision, you uncover useful secrets. You rip the rubbery layer off in an offhanded but interested way when you’re done, like removing a skin cancer in the quickest possible fashion: with your fingers, or teeth. We have no time for anesthesia, the world is over. Doctors are dead, medicine is trial-and-error. But the knowledge of berserker healing is recovered from the viking ghost world if you can force yourself to sit quietly. Then we find as many snails as possible, all the snails on the continent purged, all in our coffee can. When rolled, for example downhill, the can’s a land-mollusk centrifuge, shells in the center, guts on the outside. There’s a surprising amount of fluid in snails. A new method for emergency water collection is always welcome. The scout house is a cave, made of rocks and debris. Cast iron webs hold it together here and there. Scoutmaster is a rejected viking with a blonde mustache and blond curly hair, which was cut short as punishment for being a retard. Scoutmaster is ashamed of his killed beard and braids and built this fucked house to feel better. In the bathroom it smells like copper and I pee in the hammered-brass sink basin. I have tentacles instead of a dick, some for which grabbing is easy, some which are made for the purpose of peeing, some which are strictly sensory organs, and all of which object to the chilled metal of the sink, a sick joke. I laugh. But in Scoutmaster’s secret office we silently evaluate every concealed truth. Beneath a metal bust of Cthulhu in one corner I find a dread portal, wherein Scoutmaster hides a clan-stash of the ancient version of our modern pot. Cthulhu’s green metal octopus arms are sharp and one pokes me. A demented dwarf scout objects to my discovery: Scoutmaster’s his dad. Alarms are raised, time to flee invisibly. There is an empty corrupted ritual about to start, and our absence has been noted. Instructions for a group task: we’re supposed to scour the destroyed subdivision for alive souls, knock on burned doors, inquire with knife blades and burlwood tree stumps. All beneath the charade of a scout activity, a pitiful clinging to gone society. Girls are absent, no one can tell us why. Scoutmaster’s wife hardly counts. Morale is low. Exiting the smelly scout HQ, it’s said that all the girls in the world are busy doing exactly what we are at this moment, except without us. We’d all benefit from female companionship. Separation of the sexes is unnatural, time to shed outdated notions. Someone theorizes that Scoutmaster is actually a woman, like Grendel’s mother, a monster pretending to be human. I make it known that someone forgot the snail can. I also point out that if Scoutmaster’s a female monster, hiding in an excommunicated viking suit, she’s got the strangest pussy ever invented, because it looks like the biggest hard-on imaginable, with ugly nuts beneath like stinky goat balls. Demented dwarf objects yet again, but my argument is seconded, thirded, fourthed. A mixed truth, for him: his patriarch isn’t actually a female monster, but does shamefully reveal his weird dick to us. We all grow stronger with newly found shared experience, I think. The innocents will be killed and those near death already anyway will also be killed. Death is the natural side-effect of the end of the world.