Arnold Holes (with audio experience)
A small-time criminal suffering from amnesia has questions about human anatomy after his crime spree goes awry.
Here’s another entry in the “Weird Fiction” category. It’s absurd, surreal, and idiotic. Do you enjoy shows like, I Think You Should Leave? No? Then you probably won’t like this either.
I’m also doing a little experiment with sound design here, so you might enjoy the audio version better. Let me know if you like it or not.
Alarms blared somewhere in the background, jolting Arnold back into consciousness, and the first thing he noticed was how hungry he was. That was probably because of the disemboweled man lying next to him. This guy’s not having lunch anytime soon, Arnold thought, which reminded him of the roast beef sandwich he’d packed earlier that morning. He felt a little blue as he realized he might not get to have lunch today either, if present circumstances were any indication. Ho-boy, what have I gotten myself into this time?
It wasn’t the first time Arnold committed a crime but it was the first time he’d ever seen somebody’s intestines outside of their body in real life. My God, they were everywhere. If God thought this was the best way to turn food into energy, then Arnold thought, fuck me sideways and call me a collapsible hotdog holster, because Arnold was the kind of person who had thoughts like that when he was confused.
But Arnold had bigger problems. The police were expected to arrive any minute now, and when they did, it wouldn’t take them more than a few minutes to figure out that those pink, slimy hoses piling out of the deep gash in the dying man’s sides were in fact the Good Lord’s best and only digestive solution for the human race. As such, the boys in blue were likely to surmise that Arnold's attempted removal of them from the dying man was a problem of significant proportion and then guns would be drawn and a good deal of paperwork would be in the cards.
Arnold hated paperwork almost as much as he hated trying to understand why a mile’s worth of slippery tubing was the best way to get the maximum value out of a roast beef sandwich.
“I didn’t even mean to cut your intestines out like that,” Arnold said to the dying man. “I should have stopped cutting much sooner than I did.”
“Why aren’t you helping me live?” the guy with the total bullshit intestines asked in a rather weak tone. He was cradling his innards in his hands, for all the fucking good that was doing — which actually seemed to be quite a bit. He’d been cradling his intestines for a while now and wasn’t dead yet, so clearly he was doing something right. “Please! You’ve got to fix this!"
“We’re not close friends,” Arnold said. “I’m not sure I want to touch you like that right now. It seems a bit…intimate.”
“I’m not asking you to do the surgery yourself.”
“Are you asking me to have sex with your intestines?” Arnold scratched his head. “Because it feels like that’s what you’re asking.”
“What?”
“I just don’t think it’ll help.”
That’s when the lightbulb exploded above Arnold’s head, giving him the perfect idea for what to do about the dying man but also sending a current of electricity down his skull and through his spine, causing most of his muscles to spasm and stopping his heart. He wondered how weird death would be when a passing motorist distracted him by yelling for him to find a yellow circle surrounded by sixteen smaller circles of varying sizes. This, she assured him, would unlock something but he couldn’t hear what it was because she said it at the same time as she ran over him with her car. The rhythm of the front and back tires over his chest was enough to restart his heart, although now it was under some duress because of the many broken bones in his body. Also, he had been dragged a few feet, which seemed important.
“I had a brilliant idea about how to help you,” Arnold said, although the pain of his broken ribs made it hard to know if his words were coming out at the proper volume.
“Scream louder,” the dying man said. “I can’t hear you over my own screaming.” He'd been screaming the whole time, except when he was talking, which he did at a normal, speaking volume.
“No! We shouldn’t even be talking about having sex with your intestines right now,” Arnold screamed because he hadn’t heard what the dying man was really saying. “We’re way past that.”
But it was too late (or too early, if you were hoping for gastrointestinal eroticism). A police car screeched to a halt just short of where the two men were lying in the middle of the children’s playground. An ambulance arrived a few moments later. Upon reviewing the scene, the EMTs and cops agreed that Arnold should go to the hospital first because the dying man was so expertly cradling his intestines. It seemed like he had the situation under control.
“They’re his intestines, after all,” one of the EMTs said. Everyone nodded in approval.
“Is he going to make it?” Arnold asked as they dragged him across the pavement to the ambulance.
The EMT shook his head in dismay. “He was screaming an awful lot and that’s a sure sign of depression.”
“It’s the silent killer,” the other EMT chimed in as she slipped a needle into Arnold’s arm.
“I hope none of that was my fault,” Arnold said as a wave of painkillers washed over him. “Oh, give me another hit of that, Caroline Funsponge! I feel like I’m floating to heaven in a balloon filled with angel farts.”
Arnold’s vision began to blur and for a moment he saw a creature made of jagged edges sucking light out of every surface it touched and its eyes were ragged holes that seemed to extend farther and farther back into the fabric of the universe the more he gazed into them. The creature was perched above some of the ambulance’s cabinets, but it had also become part of the ceiling. The lady EMT who administered the needle pushed a strand of hair out of her face and whispered, “Deliver this, thy humble offering,” in every frequency audible to the human ear, which Arnold thought was pretty funny.
“We’re worried these bloody pruning shears are going to get in the way once we get to the hospital,” she said as she removed the lawn tool from Arnold’s jacket pocket. Little bits of intestine were stuck to the blades.
“Oh, yes, I think I was using those for some sort of sex act,” Arnold said. “I’m not sure, though.”
The EMT put the shears in a plastic baggy and wrote “SEX BAG” on the side of it in marker. “Now we won’t forget about sex or that this is a bag.”
The ambulance drove for seventeen hours to the next state because Arnold was needed at the morgue. The EMTs propped him up in a wheelchair and rolled him through the bleak, gray halls of the hospital. Arnold enjoyed watching the walls bleed for a few moments but became bored when he remembered seeing something similar in a movie. His broken ribs had already begun to heal — not to any significant degree, mind you; it’s just that the body begins healing as soon as it's injured. Anyway, the ribs were not completely healed by the time they wheeled Arnold into the morgue and up to a table where the dying man from earlier lay. This time, however, he was all-the-way dead but Arnold made a note to continue referring to him as the dying man so that this experience wouldn’t be confusing. A sheet covered everything but the dying man's dead head.
A police officer from the current jurisdiction walked into the room and greeted Arnold. “Is this the man you were lying next to seventeen hours ago?”
“Yes,” said Arnold, “only the last time I saw him, he was alive and expertly cradling his intestines.”
“Well, that’s a bit confusing,” said the officer with a sigh as he pulled the sheet down to reveal the rest of the body. “Because this man’s intestinal-cradling technique was amateur at best.”
“It’s an honest mistake,” Arnold said. “I’m only a layman in these subjects. But I’m sure that’s him.” The EMTs agreed that it was the same man and everyone shared high-fives, which was incredibly painful for Arnold.
The police officer, the EMTs, and a few of the morgue technicians prayed over the body for several minutes in a strange language that Arnold did not understand. Not wanting to feel left out, he began wailing like a tortured manatee, which was well-received by the group. Then the head morgue technician placed the sheet back over the body and began pouring gasoline all over it and laughing in short bursts that also sounded a bit like sobs when Arnold tilted his head slightly in one direction or the other. The laugh/sobs reverberated throughout the room and sometimes sounded like giant waves crashing against a rock face. Later on, everyone agreed that this was the kind of thing one should expect but Arnold wasn’t in the room to hear it.
The EMTs wheeled Arnold back up the elevator to the main floor of the hospital where he was given his sex shears and allowed to keep the plastic baggy as a complimentary gift. When he asked about what was being done to fix his broken body, an on-duty nurse promised that someone would be right with him but she had always been a liar and never returned to the hospital after stepping outside for a smoke break.
Arnold played with his phone for few hours before the battery died. His new nurse was passed out in the corner, having asphyxiated herself with Arnold’s phone charger. Feeling a bit sleepy himself, Arnold adjusted his torso into a position it had never achieved before and pulled the stale, yellow sheet over his head so the nurse wouldn’t see if he started crying (Arnold was very concerned with his macho image, in case that wasn’t already obvious). As he nodded off, he wondered if the police would ever figure out what he’d really been up to with those shears. He hoped they would let him know if they ever figured it out but for the time being, he was content to slip into a painful sleep plagued by horrible dreams in which he was falling forever through the holes in the bread of a roast beef sandwich.
— THE END —