Unforeseen Difficulties

Fiction by Luke O'Neil

The guilt

He was in the garage jigsaw-puzzling the architecture of the bones. After some doing he looked upon his works and thought well that’s spooky. Nothing crazy but still. He rifled through the boxes and coolers of bullshit he had stashed out here from when he had last had to move in a hurry and went back to work fitting the joints and then stuffing it all with fistfuls of viscera and organs and when he had tried that it still looked somehow slightly lacking. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Like all the meat had gone bad instantaneously. All of it everywhere. Never mind though he evened out the spread of gaseous organs from tip to tail and it was certainly just about as ugly as sin but nonetheless. Goddamnit he said. He fixed a two way hose rig and hydrated the guts with a taste of his own hot pumping fluid which yet again didn't sufficiently alter the level of monstrosity and not knowing what to do and almost ready to punt on the whole thing he wrapped and dressed the entire heaving wound of the mess in some discarded skin and peppered it with miscellaneous hair he had lying around from another project and then feeling himself now kind of in the rhythm of the zone of creation he painted it with all of the hues of the universe and then plopped in the glistening globs of the eyes and brightened them into pools of infinity and reddened the lips with the blush of a billion burning stars and curled them up just so over the skull’s jagged hungry jaw and placed one of his own stabbing tools in its grip to test out how it might be held later on when both existed and whispered something into its ear and he was after all of this labor satisfied. Finally it was the appropriate amount of terrifying. He had to step back from the table.