Growing wings.
Beginnings, endings. Thursday, becoming Friday.
The day of chances…
Play to win
Game 45
Mucky jung Doom Day. Dippy mould Unchester. Blow the numbs. Game 45, telling bone natives. Make some pimples, loopyvision. Watch with honey, gamble credits digit- come. Crawling, stalling, numbernauting. Chancing flip, dancing pip; Dalmatian damnation. Domination. Blurb-o-matica, heavy flies, pregnant with babyverts, motherhatching the streets. Play to win some, winsome Moonchester! All over the dirty, shitty, bonefried Fryday, squeeze us some game-juice. Six thoughts from pipflight, how howling the slithy hordes! Clacky doms on dommy clacks, clutched in fingers, banged down hard. Boardrooms, bedrooms, headrooms, hidden rooms, unbidden rooms. Jabberbone and punyburg. Gyre and gimble ultraspeed. All of Mobchester, playing the gambles.
Super-zoom, it’s a bone boom!
Domino dots pulsate in bloom, the dream song, working the pop.
It’s dummino time! Wondering dummino time!
Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dummino time!—Blurbflies
Tommy Tumbler, tumbling Tommy. Cookie Luck, cooking the luck. The players busy licking their bones, mooning their breath, tuning some last faulty prayers, taking a collective merger-burger, singing their hosannas to rusty pianos. Masturbating some dumb-sucking squeezer to the patent-pending gods of sex.
Squeeze to win!
As the blurbflies joined their bodies, mutating wild to fill the city with new, never-before-seen messages:
Squeeza Teeza to win! Hoviz to win! Chokanova to win! Biscuit Booms to win! Madkow Spirit to win! Napalm Zigarettes to win! Filter Breath to win! Möbius Dick Whalesteaks to win! Sticky Smellotape to win! Yummy Gum to win! Unintendo to win! Deadly Venom to win! Domino Choks to win! Enola Cola to win! Flipchart Messiah to win! Micro Jackson to win! Goon Juice to win! Long Distance Davis to win! Quirk Moths to win! Demon Bacon to win! Klueless Klan to win! Dull English Breakfast to win! Takki Donald’s to win! Chukky’s Strikken Chikken to win! Long Distance Domino to win! Artificial Facial to win! Demon Teeza Bacon to win! All- Over-in-a-Second Delay Cream to win! Dizzy Knees Theme Park to win! Napalm Yummy Whalechok to win! Salsa Mane to win! MacDizzy’s Meat Pies to win! Takki Jack’s Enola Boomtape to win! Flipchart Hoviz Chikken to win! Madkow Klueless Klan to win! All- Over-in-a-Domino Delay Biscuits to win! Stickytakk Yummyflip to win! Domikow Teezachikk Goonobooms to win!
The streets of Blurbchester were thick with the mergers, a corporate fog of brand images. People had to battle through them just to buy their latest dominoes. The Government was at a loss regarding the overwhelming messages; they knew the experiment had gone wrong, but how to right it? With the AnnoDomino Company the Government whispered, with the burgercops they pontificated, with the big Whoomphies they made a big beef; stop this plague of flies immediately, they urged, before the people stop voting for us.
No deal. This is what you get, fucking the adverts.
OK, let’s play!
Play to win
‘Is it just me,’ said Jazir, ‘or are the blurbs getting louder?’
Hackle’s house, where the clock ticks towards nine. Where the Fractals gather, each with their bones in a young girl’s hands. Watch their eyes dance as Cookie Luck dances to their eyes. Jazir Malik at the computer, working the keys. Joe Crocus looking over Jazir’s shoulder, telling him how to capture it better. Jazir telling him to get the fuck out of his domain. Daisy Love sitting beside her father on the settee, actually holding her father’s hand, thinking, If only they’d all stop arguing, maybe we could get somewhere.
Max Hackle in his counting house, below ground, walking the maze of corridors, counting out his chances. Little Miss Celia sitting cross-legged in the centre of the chalk circle; the child who held all their bones to her frozen heart. Sweet Benny Fenton, standing alone, leaning against the wall where the clock ticked.
Joe, Joe, Joe! Sweet Benny’s soul was full of the name, but his mind was as empty as his chances of ever winning anything. Joe Crocus, the man he had once loved so deeply, only a few days ago, but now…
Where the fuck was that Hackle bastard? No wonder he never came to these meetings. Down in the cellar, I’ll bet, waiting for Joe to finish here.
What to do about it? How to confront it, to finish it, to win it over. How to give up, how to fight for his rightful love. How many years has this been going on?
Surely, it would all come to him.
Joe was shouting now. ‘OK, children. Here we go. Pray for a winning.’
At last, and at a long last, the stars of Cookie Luck fall into an exact nine o’clock shape. Into a bone of rare occurrence…
Play to lose
It was as though Manchester took a collective breath. A sudden whoosh! of fear and surprise as nine o’clock struck and Lady Cookie Luck started to change. All creamy she went, screaming as her tight black catsuit turned into twilight, her illustrious breasts flattening, her fertile hips becoming two thin curves of pure bone. One by one the stars on her body went out. Her skin started to shrivel and die, to let her skeleton poke through. Her lovely face turning to a skull’s grin. Her famous hair of ebony falling out in chunks. Until she was all jutting bones, all a rattling puppet of fibulas and tibias, scapula and humerus, kneecaps and pubis.