He had been here all morning in the Asylum at Saint-Remy deep in Absinthe country visiting his big brother Jack Philbin who hadn't been the same since that Kurt Newton incident back in Slaughter Town. In the canteen of the asylum, pushing his coq-au-vin round the grimy plate while he sips his luminous green aniseed, Hertzan Chimera wonders where his life is going and why everything seems so doom laden, so hopeless.

CHARLEE JACOB: I hate chickens!

HERTZAN CHIMERA: You...?

CHARLEE JACOB: (sits herself down on the opposite chair and stares into the eyes of Chimera) I get sick a lot, always have, but I can rarely throw up. Is this a clue that my work is a substitute for my own impotent gag reflex, thus I project words in seemingly endless, often polysyllabic, horror to compensate myself for not being able to projectile. Help, I'm crawlin' and I can't throw up. Ripples and reams of bile-encrusted dreams until somewhere a reader vomits. By proxy now I feel better.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: (clicks his fingers) The woman in red.

CHARLEE JACOB: (coughs blood into a stained handkerchief) Did I mention I'm ill right now? All those Bible thumpers who predicted I would get blasted for my literary blasphemies were right. Bolt of lightning to my clitoris (THAT wasn't so bad), plague of locusts running wild in the colon (getting warmer, Lord), waters turning to blood (don't get too personal here), boils filled with rancid banana pudding bursting from my nipples (I always wanted to be an object lesson).

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Can I taste that, the handkerchief?

CHARLEE JACOB: No, you Kant. Besides, it isn't a handkerchief. It's a page from Thus Spake Zarathustra. I love blowing snot in Nietzsche's existential crap about Superman. I'm a Spider-man girl myself. Here, read it if you want. (spreads flat the soiled page on the table) The blood improves it, yes? Blood improves everything. That and other bodily emissions. It's how we claim a part of the world for ourselves.

Hertzan Chimera takes the blood-smeared page and sniffs at it, there is a distinct smell of gasoline. He stuffs the soiled sheet into his mouth, chews and swallows.

CHARLEE JACOB: Actually I've been sick a lot in my life. And I've been injured being rear-ended in traffic accidents which kept me seeing doctors and made going to physical therapy a seemingly endless chore. And my mother was in the hospital a lot when I was little. Some idiot had decided to use her as a guinea pig without asking and she nearly died. My father's painful death, partially caused by a doctor's stupidity, still haunts me a lot--as well as the terrible way my brother died. Surely tends to taint my outlook and make hospitals and just about anything to do with being sick a horror topic. By the way, you shouldn't have done that...

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Done?

Hertzan Chimera bursts into flames. Erotic licks devour his flesh, turning the soft whiteness to crisp blackness. Charlee Jacob makes a grab for him but he turns to black powder scattered to the four winds. She looks around and chooses another Hertzan Chimera sat at another table, sulking into his coq-au-vin.

CHARLEE JACOB: I hate chickens.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Have we met before?

CHARLEE JACOB: (holds out a lit firecracker) Hi, my name's Anna's Thesia to many people. Let me teach you something about pain. It's a son-of-a-bitch and it's a lover. It's humanity's number 2 obsession, death being number 1. It rubs its oily self against you until you can't bear anymore, then leaves you with wet dreams for its return.

Charlee Jacob bends down, giving him a look at the ample cleavage in her low cut dress. She places the firecracker between the breasts and the it goes off messily, blood and charred mammary fat and flesh flying to spatter the startled and grossed-out Hertzan. She shudders, hands clenching the edge of his table, eyes fluttering to ecstatic whites. She stands up, then does an amazing pirouette for a woman who has just barbequed the insides of her tits. When she's facing him again, he sees no damage at all. Just another-bigger- firecracker in her hand. This time she bends down and puts it in the ass end of his coq-au-vin, which is simply too close to him for comfort.

CHARLEE JACOB: Pain itself becomes the anaesthetic, shocking you, numbing you until you feel danced to oblivion. Prepare to be swept away, sweetie. And she lights the fuse with a burning kiss.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: I once had a wet dream, tasted nothing like this. Hertzan Chimera turns round his plate and begins to fellate the lit end of the Jumbo Firecracker. A howling chorus of insanity breaks out from down in the bowels of the asylum.

The blue touch paper fizzles on, as he gags and groans, his head dipping back and forth over the lethal incendiary device. At the climax of the act, when the firecracker opens up the back of his head in a sparkly shower of jet exhaust, tumbling buildings, screaming eyes, mother's smiles. A slow motion analysis pans around the ejaculation and in its glowing cloud of baby massacre, emotional unleash and anal buzz-sawing a vision resolves itself momentarily in the sparks of Hell. A familiar face. Her eyes a manufacture of sorrow in a land devoid of shame. Lina Hidalgo.

CHARLEE JACOB: Behold!

HERTZAN CHIMERA: (the back of his head dripping gore down the back of his white shirt, his finger out pointing - a howling noise emits from down in the festering bowels of the asylum) My big brother Jack Philbin doesn't like it when I let these terrible things happen.
There is a serious Dread in the Beast.
Over in the far corner of the canteen, pouring a hot sauce over an exposed chest, the flaps of the white shirt open to this scalding of flesh, Hertzan Chimera is ridden to a fuck death by the alluring Lina Hidalgo, her eyes like laser drills carving erotic slashes all over his chest singeing the sauce with flesh-burning sigils. Charlee Jacob races over and attacks the filthy pair with a Roman short sword. As she hacks the fucking pair to thick dismemberment, she sings this beautiful song about her clitoris and why it defies the illogic of long-form narrative, expressing her prose in a rhythm that reminds one of onanism in extremis, the screaming labia drenched with battery acid, doused in turpentine, sluiced with petrol.

CHARLEE JACOB: Nether,
X of the deep-six vulva,
twisted to push the threshold of senses
to total destruction, the opposite of genesis,
cathartic of the little idiocies and idiosyncrasies
that make us neurotic:
why we bite our nails,
why we're helpless in nightmares,
why we resent our parents,
why we've always been so hard to love...
but never emptied of the needs
which put us into psychotic overdrive,
the compulsive amphetamine of extreme abuse
raised up out of this zombie
of a planet-obsessed-with-sanitation
to charge, horny as a devil, into laxative night.
Dark for a reason,
what the gods shit out with a vespers bowel movement,
the stars just bone bits from a meal
of meat followed by a purge.

She plunges the sword through a pair of meshed groins, the tip striking the floor and making a spark. She runs the blade among a mixed bag of guts which burst their confetti fillings of multicolored crap. A fragment with a bladder attached rolls free and she stomps it with a yellow squirt.

CHARLEE JACOB: (to Lina) Take that, you cummie-faced bitch! (then to Hertzan) And you, too, you knuckle-nutted chicken licker!"

She pauses to wipe a stray blond hair from her eyes.

CHARLEE JACOB: Sin-objective, self-mutilating,
scars the antidote to a perfection unreachable and unacceptable.
I jerk off to the juggernaut of shock therapy,
my clit a raw oyster,
a happy, resonating victim.
And maybe Kierkegard knew--
his "Fear And Trembling",
"The Sickness Unto Death",
and "The Concept of Dread" coded and disguised
for those who would stroke
the standard literati sump to rigor mortis.
And maybe Nietzsche knew
and that was why he went insane,
mind gone to that place "Between Good And Evil",
preposterous of pompous sex crimes
in philosophical dreck.

Both Hertzan and Lina are long dead but Charlee cannot stop, gripped in ecstasy, occasionally missing with the sword and managing to slash off a couple of her own toes with part of her shoes. So she kicks the ruined shoes off and with her ruined feet prances as she slashes and stabs, feeling the gore rich with sanguine sewer ooze between her remaining toes, caressing in choppy ripples around her ankles.

CHARLEE JACOB: I know there is a YOU out there,
in every leeching stupor my backward narcotic,
my psychopath's incendiary avatar,
standing bare-assed before the gateway,
prick-teasing my 'malade imaginaire'.
You are the lotus blooming in my edge,
the promise of delights that shriek
in the shithouses of cessworld Aralu
where each piece of you I hack
rises to be all of you again,
the cause and effect of my sexplosive panthering.
Cross now to that place with me,
willing or dragged by your itch,
even as I squeeze and scratch toward a terrible Heaven.

Charlee has become so transported in rapture that she seems to be fading, going invisible. Maybe she is on her way to that disneyland for death freaks which she always believed existed. Or...

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Pass me the salt for these wounds, will ya? Merci.

Charlee Jacob whirls round in erotomanic attack pose, her Roman short sword throbbing like a bull's cock just before execution, the viscid pre-cumm a rank puke-stink discolouring the air. Hertzan Chimera is sat at every table in the canteen of the Saint-Remy asylum, an undercooked meal of coq-au-vin and a jug of absinthe thirstily quaffed. They all look in her direction. Adulants of salt. Chicken lickers. Wound rapers. Mind chokers. Charlee Jacob knows what to do. There is only one way to end this cycling fetish of cicatrice whores in mindmud.

CHARLEE JACOB: (sobbing copiously) When I was a little girl, I visited a farm belonging to the grandparents of a school friend. They raised a lot of chickens. The stench was horrible, of chicken shit and chicken blood and meat-rancid feather dander fogging everywhere like an explosion of cloudy maggots.

Charlee whirls that deadly-graceful pirouette again, blond hair and black skirts the perfect combination of crone gold and antithesis shadow. The Roman Sword transforms into a blowtorch.

CHARLEE JACOB: You think you've foiled me, Hertzan Chimera, and maybe you have. It's been the same story all my life. When I was a kid, I wanted a kitten, my brother wanted a dog, but our mother insisted we get a monkey. I was just grateful it wasn't a chicken.

She begins blasting the Hertzans, the tables, bottles of absinthe burtsing with wormwood screams. The fire rushed up curtains and across the ceiling's dry rot timbers, pewing a sparking tinsel. Shapes simultaneously bright and dark danced like ancient gods in the conflagration which began to sweep the entire hospital. Some of the Hertzans rushed to throw themselves through windows, not more than blistered, yet they were cut up with glass.

CHARLEE JACOB: What a fucked-up head I've got! So many tragedies, not enough ink. The only thing left to do is provide my own mercy death...

She turns the blowtorch's belching nozzle at her own feet.

CHARLEE JACOB: (laughing maniacally even as saltless tears pop on her cheeks) But I am not afraid! There's no fear in this beast! Well, maybe just a wee bit of fear but not so's anyone would really notice. I mean one can't help a certain amount of reasonable fear because that's just a part of the human instinct for survival, right? But it isn't really cowardice. Not as if I were chicken for chrissakes. I mean I'm ready, aren't I? The stalwart will to end it all defies Nature's implants in the neurons! Death marches on and so on...

Then flames fill her mouth and, except for hissing and crackling, Charlee Jacob falls silent forever.