This story is absurd and incredibly stupid. You still have a chance NOT to read it.
One time, my house broke and I couldn’t live there anymore. It shouldn't have been a problem since I'd bought so much stuff over the years but it turns out none of that stuff was any good for fixing my house. Naturally, the only solution was to go off and buy more stuff. Such is the nature of being alive.
“Hello, welcome to The Capitalism Store,” the clerk said as I walked in. “Can I sell you some fucking bullshit?”
“Yeah man,” I said. “Let’s fucking do it.”
“I actually will, though,” he said.
“I’m here to party.”
“Awwww shit,” he said, rubbing his palms together. “Here we go, bitch.”
If you thought maybe we looked at some fucking bullshit, you were right. We looked at shelves of it. Aisles of it. You couldn’t not look at it. There was so much of it. At one point, we stacked up so much bullshit on the checkout stand that the floor caved in and we died. But death wasn’t for sale that day so God brought us back to life and all we could think to do was continue stacking up bullshit.
“Have you had enough capitalism for today?” the clerk asked. I shook my head and he said, “Yeah, bitch. You like it.”
He led me to a special backroom that everyone knows about but no one ever goes into. I felt pretty special, and he told me I was a special boy. We went up to this frail looking old man who was fastened to the wall by leather belts and the clerk said I had to whip him a little bit. I was like, “Do I have to? I don’t really want to,” but he made it seem like I was being an asshole so I whipped the old guy a couple times. They were pretty pathetic whips, though.
“You’ll never become the boss of The Capitalism Store if you keep whipping like that,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t want to be the boss,” I said. “I just want to buy some fucking bullshit.”
“Sure, dream small,” he said, “but keep in mind that if you’re the boss of The Capitalism Store, you can buy a lot more fucking bullshit than when you’re not the boss.”
“If you’re so smart, how come you’re not the boss yet?” I asked, even though I didn’t want to be rude.
“I’m doing my best, okay?” he said. “You gotta start at the bottom of capitalism and work your way up.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “Also, remember when we died earlier and met God?”
“He’s the boss of all Capitalism,” the clerk said. “You know how much fucking bullshit that guy has?”
“A lot?”
“It’s even more than that.”
“Pretty cool,” I said with a whistle. “Pretttyyyyy cooooool.”
All of a sudden, there was a bunch of blood everywhere.
“Hey, when did this get here?” I asked. “I feel like there wasn’t this much blood before.”
“Oh no,” the clerk said. “Communism Kitchen is leaking again.”
“What? No it's not,” said Joseph Stalin. “Take it back.”
“That’s so Stalin-y of you: trying to pretend all this blood isn't your fault,” the clerk said. “Why don’t you just admit it?”
“This blood is from The Capitalism Store,” he said, “and I can prove it.”
Stalin led us through the backdoor, into the alley behind Communism Kitchen, where lots of blood was seeping out of a lumpy, rough-looking sack labelled, “It's Fine, Don't Worry About It,” but we walked past that and over to a manhole.
“Just you wait,” Stalin said as he wrenched the manhole open. A ladder sank down into the dark depths and I couldn’t see the bottom. We followed him down the ladder and a couple hours later, we stepped out into a sewer but it wasn’t like any sewer I’d ever followed a dictator into before. This strange sewer was full of acid and chunks of plutonium, which seemed unusual. However, Stalin said that acid and plutonium were like piss and shit for the Ancient Ones so I guess it really wasn’t that weird after all.
We stayed pressed up against the wall so as not to fall in. There were weird, frightening creatures swimming in the acid and they didn’t look very friendly but Stalin assured us that if we fell in, we’d melt before the monsters would have a chance to devour us.
“It’s nature’s way of saying hunger is okay,” he said, and waved towards the acid monsters. “Look how hungry those guys are. Nothing tasty can live in there.”
“Who cares about that?” the clerk said. His name was Clark, just so you know. We figured that out on the trip down the ladder. “I thought we were going to find out where all that blood was coming from.”
“Wait, what’s that?” I pointed to a metal door that had the word “BLOOD” embossed in giant letters. “I bet there’s blood in there.”
“Yeah, but how funny would it be if there wasn’t?” Stalin asked with a giggle. “Nah, you’re right. There’s so much blood in there. Let’s go check it out.”
He opened the door and there was a woman in a lab coat with a clipboard standing next to a giant vat of blood, which was connected to a pipe that led up into the ceiling. A noisy pump pushed gallons of blood upwards through the pipe while the woman took readings off a meter labeled with vulgar runes. She turned to look at us as we crowded into the room.
“Aw, this motherfucker again,” she said, when she saw Stalin. “I already told you, we don’t need anymore blood. Can’t you see how much we already have?” She tapped on the vat. “It’s probably too much.”
“Look, just tell these guys where you got that blood from and we’ll leave,” he said, pointing to the column of blood shooting into the ceiling.
“From the Capitalism Store,” she said.
“See, you guys?” Stalin said. “All the blood in your store is your own doing."
“That doesn’t count,” Clark the clerk said. “I sold that blood to her a few days ago, so it’s not my responsibility anymore.”
“Everybody shut up for a second,” the woman said as she pulled out a crossbow. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it sucks down here,” she said. “God it fucking sucks. Also, monsters are coming.”
“Okay, well, how do we get out?”
“We just have to run back to the ladder before I shoot everyone,” she said, as she loaded an arrow. “Otherwise, it’ll be too late and I’ll have killed us all.” Before anyone could object, she shot Clark in the stomach and pinned him to the wall. “There,” she said. “Now the monsters will get him first. Let’s run for a little while and then I’ll pin another one of you to the wall.”
Screaming with pain, Clark tried to walk forward away from the wall so the crossbow bolt would pass through his body. He was almost free by the time we ran out of the room. As we made our way back towards the ladder, we could hear him yelling after us, something about all the great stuff we left behind in the room and how easy it would be to sell.
“He’s right,” I said. “We should help him take some of that stuff back to the Capitalism Store.”
“The monsters, though,” the woman said.
“The real monster is the human condition,” Stalin said with a knowing grimace.
Clark managed to free himself and had almost caught up to us while we were deliberating. He seemed quite unhappy about the gash in his midsection where he’d been impaled by the crossbow bolt. “Look at all this valuable blood going to waste,” he said. “Also, I’m in a transcendental amount of pain. I should probably pay you for this once-in-a-lifetime experience but I left my wallet back at the shop.”
All of a sudden, Clark was whisked into the darkness by large, shadowy claws. He didn’t even make a sound.
“Shit,” the woman said. “We need another decoy.” She pointed the crossbow at me but I made a stupid face at her and she laughed, causing the bolt to miss wide. It whizzed with a zip over my shoulder. “That face you made was super funny,” she said, “so, I guess I’ll kill Stalin instead.”
“Who will run Communism Kitchen?” he protested. “Besides, we’ve made it to the ladder.”
Stalin started climbing up and the woman next. I reached for the nearest rung but then felt a cold, claw-like appendage grabbing at my midsection. The claws got ahold of me and began pulling me away from the ladder. I tried looking behind me but could not see what the creature looked like. Everything behind me was consumed by darkness. Then I heard the “thwack” of the crossbow. There was a sickly, wet thud followed by a scream that seemed to be coming from every direction, and then the claws let go of me. I ran to the ladder and climbed as fast I could (but without seeming like I was in too much of a hurry because desperation isn’t very cool).
“Thanks for saving me,” I said to the woman.
“I was actually trying to shoot you,” she said.
“Why?”
“For science.”
“Science?”
“I wanted to test my ability to shoot accurately under pressure," she said, "but I have to shoot at you 10,000 more times for it to be a meaningful sample size. Hold still." She thought for a moment. "No, wait. Wiggle around a lot. It'll be more fun that way."
In the end, we decided that science was too socially awkward and continued up the ladder. Stalin kept climbing while the woman and I argued about the crossbow experiment, so he was way ahead of us. We didn't catch up to him until we'd reached the top. By then, he was already out of the manhole and back in the alley. He reached down into the hole to help us out, which would've been a really sweet gesture if his hands weren't all sweaty and gross.
"Thanks, I guess," I said as I climbed out. The woman just cringed and wiped her hands on her lab coat.
"We've got to find a way to keep those monsters from getting up here," Stalin said.
"There should be a law against this kind of thing," I said. "Wait, maybe there is! Has anyone here memorized the entire United States Constitution?"
"Ha! The fat cats in D.C. don't care about Ancient Sewer Monsters," Stalin said. "But then again, I would say that," He sighed. "Alas, I too am a victim of confirmation bias."
"Are you trying to hit on me?" the woman asked. "Because it's working."
"Listen, let's just put the manhole cover back on and assume everything will be fine," I said because I was feeling jealous of Stalin and just wanted to go to a bar and drown out my sadness.
"That's not very scientific," the woman said, "but I no longer have the funding or equipment to give a fuck, thanks to you." She muttered curses at me as we slid the manhole cover back over the opening but I just wrote it off as a case of the Mondays.
"I never did catch your name," I said.
"It's a string of numbers that would take too long to say out loud," she said.
"That's sad."
"Why do you think I was working in a blood cellar?"
"I just assumed it was a passion project or something," I said.
"No. Just cruelty."
For a moment, we stood there, watching the sun rise over the graveyard on the far side of the alley. "Look at this fucking symbolism," a nearby film student shouted down the alley but we all flipped her off, which caused her to give up on her dreams and become a tech billionaire instead. I think she invented a way to put unskippable ads on carbon molecules. Or maybe puppies? I'm not sure. Either way, what a hero.
"Want to get a drink?" the woman asked after we'd stood in silence for an hour or two.
"It's a little early for that," Stalin said. “I haven’t had time to sober up from yesterday.”
"Fine, whatever," she said. "Let's never speak again."
She walked off while Stalin shook his head in dismay. I wanted to tell the woman that I actually was interested in having a drink but it took me several weeks to come up with a clever way to say it. By then she had already taken up a job in a new blood cellar across town. Missed opportunity, I suppose.
I never did fix my broken house. The rubble reminded me too much of Clark. Every now and then, I find myself weeping in the quiet hours of the night, wondering what horrible fate met him in the darkness of that sewer. Sometimes, I think he'd want me to buy the things I need to fix my house or buy a new house altogether, but it's just not the same without him. In fact, I haven't spent a dime since that terrible day. Needless to say, I'm very hungry. However, my loneliness is usually the more powerful sensation so they kind of cancel each other out. Stalin said that was a good sign but I think he was just trying to make me feel better. It didn’t work. Eventually, he stopped coming around.
If this experience has taught me anything, it's to never rely on external metrics to measure your self worth, such as the snarling taunts of Ancient Sewer Monsters. You'll never get their approval anyway. It's the Ancient Sewer Monster inside that really counts.
Sometimes I think that's what Clark was trying to tell me all along.
THE END