Hello. Here is the first chapter of my novel, The Gospel of Zeke.
Chapter One
Just as his ass and the chair had made contact, Zeke Gerald Ford Abramowitz leapt to his feet. He thought he had sat on something cold and wet; however upon examination of the sitting surface, found not a drop of any sort of liquid at all. It was considerably warmer inside of the room where his twelve o’clock class was held, the name and subject matter of which escaped him at the moment, than it was outside. When the air temperature reached this low Zeke would say, most often to himself, that the weather was ‘just turtling’ as in; “It is just turtlingly cold outside this morning.” This was in reference to the way in which his penis and balls, which Zeke termed Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, retracted into the warmth and safety of his lower pelvic region much like the way a turtle would pull itself into his hard, green carapace. He had originally toyed with calling this phenomena snailing, however, he rationalized that since a snail only drew one body part into its shell, a turtle would make much more sense as it drew at least the required three.
The girl sitting to Zeke’s left was, by most standards, quite unattractive. A head far too big for such a scrawny body gracelessly swayed side to side on a giraffe neck. Zeke stared at one particularly vicious outcropping of acne on her pale, oily face. Squeezing puss from ripe zits was one of Zeke’s favorite activities, and he fantasized the endless enjoyment a face like hers could provide. He looked down at her notebook. A bony hand with knuckles covered in sparse dark hairs scratched the numbers 1-15-96 on the upper right hand corner of the page.
“Excuse me, but how are you here, right now, but also in the past?” Zeke had thought his question to be a remarkably brilliant conversation starter.
With a look of absolute incomprehension, the girl replied, “What?”
“Well,” said Zeke, “it’s just that you have written on the upper right hand corner of your notebook page that you are in the year 1996. It’s 1997,” he explained.
“Oh,” Said the girl. With that she erased the number 6 and replaced it with the number 7. A minute or two passed by as the girl prepared herself for an hour and fifteen minutes of intense note taking.
Turning to the girl, he shoved his hand in her face, brushing by the cluster of beautifully swollen whiteheads on her cheek. “Zeke,” he said.
With a handshake weaker than a geriatric erection, she replied, “Julie.”
“Are you a Rolling Stone’s fan?” Zeke asked the shy, lonely girl whom he had convinced himself led a double life as a seductive dominatrix nymphomaniac.
“Yeah, I guess,” she replied in what Zeke falsely interpreted indifferent boredom as catty verbal foreplay.
“Maybe someday I can introduce you to them,” he said with a cool, sly wink that Julie falsely interpreted as a turret’s-induced twitch.
She decided to humor him, “You know the band members?”
“No I do not.”
With that, a smile spread across Zeke’s face as he stared into Julie’s eyes. Julie was confused and reasoned that Zeke was one of those poor kids that spent most of his high school career in the room for differently gifted children, decided to pity him, and realized she had to pee.
As Julie stood up to leave for the restroom, Zeke’s anus opened slightly, allowing for a claustrophobic bubble of gas to nervously seek the outside world. The word nervously is used because this particular gas bubble, in addition to having one of the worst cases of claustrophobia its therapist had ever seen; was also a diagnosed agoraphobic. His therapist, now that we’re getting into it, this disturbed gas bubble’s name was Angston; Angston’s therapist had been working with him for quite some time, almost five minutes now, which in the universe of a gas bubble is something equivalent to twenty five human years, and had told Angst--that’s what Angston would tell people that his friends called him--
The fact was that Angston had no friends, and apart from his therapist, he had not uttered a single word to anybody in over thirty years. Actually that is somewhat inaccurate. Fourteen years ago an attractive female gas bubble selling bibles had knocked on his door. Peering through the peep hole, kneeling on a chair so his feet could not be seen underneath the door jamb, Angston could not decide whether he wanted her to go away or come in. He swung open the door and screamed “COME AWAY.” Horrified and confused, he slammed the door shut and wept in a corner of his mid-town apartment for three days.
Regardless, his therapist (who was the only person to ever call him Angst) had told him that their latest session had produced a breakthrough and instructed Angston to get out and have some fun. He told him this because Angst had begun to display the classic symptoms of suicidal tendencies, and his therapist had attributed this to the abnormal severity of his claustrophobia.
Angston stood at the opening of Zeke’s anus. As he looked out at the vast expanse of cotton and denim, his agoraphobia got the better of him and he vomited.
Zeke felt a strange sensation around his butt cheeks, considered the possibilities of what had happened, and attributed it to the sensation of his frozen bottom thawing in the warmth of the classroom.
Trembling with fear and paranoia, Angston reached into his pocket and pulled out the small handgun that he had begun carrying with him two days prior. He positioned the end of the gun at his left temple and pulled the trigger. As the bullet sped at incredible speed through the barrel and into his brain, Angston’s life flashed before his eyes. He recalled his mother, a piece of broccoli and his father, a small portion of Zeke’s gastric juices, his first girlfriend, a petite piece of fecal matter named Sally with the most gorgeous eyes Angston had ever seen on a piece of shit, and his dog, Mark, all of whom had perished years before in the great Laxative Storm of ’96. All became dark, and Angston was finally at peace.
Sadly and quite unfortunately for Zeke, nobody else in the classroom, including him, knew of the terrible affair that had taken place just moments before inside of his trousers. To all of them, the gunshot and Angston’s last words which were quite moving to anybody that had been listening, sounded nothing at all like a firearm and a disturbed man’s final utterances, but instead had the distinct resonance of a quite vocal bit of flatulence.
Zeke cast an immediate and violent look to the girl at his right. She glared at him in disgust as the oppressive stench of gaseous suicide attacked her nostrils.
Zeke turned beet red, and that was that.
Maybe I'll put chapter three on later.
-dave
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