“Remember me, now, alright?”
Did you know that there’s a second trailer for the upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie? I gotta say, I do like this one a whole lot better than the first one. The first one was fine, I guess, the animation is really impressive, but this second one? Oh, man, it made me actually feel excited! Do you know how weird of a feeling that is? I mean, I’ve been half-dreading the Mario movie for a while now, expecting it to be terrible drivel similar to the same kind of stuff I’ve expected from Illumination in the past, but after watching this second trailer? I’m actually kind of excited for the movie now. What an about face that is, huh? I got a warm little feeling in my tummy when it started flipping through the different scenes and Peach grabbed the fire flower and talked about galaxies and things. It looks cool!
That being said, I do think the humor is pretty weak still. It’s kind of rote and about what you’d expect from Illumination, I guess. So that’s a bit disappointing. And although I like Jack Black as Bowser better this time around, I still do not like Chris Pratt as Mario. As a youtuber I watch mentioned, he sounds… boring? Sad? Depressed? Lackluster? Like he’s being held at gunpoint? Like they have his family captive? I don’t know, but he doesn’t bring anything to the movie. He’s just a dude. I mean, you’ll never be able to match Bob Hoskins or Lou Albano, spaghetti unto him, for the sheer character they brought to Mario. But come on, I can think of dozens (well, I only know the names of about five famous people in total, and most of them are dead, but you get the idea) of other actors who be better suited to Mario. Danny Devito was an easy pick. They slept on that hard.
In other news, here’s a new short story I’ve been working on for a little bit. It’s, uh, kind of weird, so let’s get this over with right up front:
Content Warning: Body Horror
I didn’t think I’d be needing a second one of those, to be honest. But this story is… something different than I usually do, I guess. Which is a good thing, I think? It’s good for writers to stretch their legs/fingers and whatnot, so I’m broadening my horizon a bit for the kind of stories I can tell. Can I do it well? Erm, I don’t really know. I mean, I’m the worst judge of my own writing. I write a lot but I’m still not really convinced that I’m any good at it. It’s the sentence-by-sentence stuff that kills me. And sure, a lot of that gets cleaned up in later drafts. But I just don’t think I can match the skill of even other writers. I’m not going for the Pulitzer or anything, sure, so there’s no expectation that every paragraph I write have something beautiful in it, but it sure would be nice to at least feel like I’ve got a few good lines in there. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that, no matter how hard I try, the sentence-by-sentence will never be good enough.
I feel pretty confident about the stories themselves, which is nice, but I still don’t know if it’s any good to read. And that’s the hardest part of it all, I suppose.
Anyway, I could go on all day about my own self-doubt. As I have, time and time again. We don’t need to beat more horses to death, and I’ll just let the writing speak for itself/me. This is part one of what will hopefully be only a two-part story. A proper “short” story this time!
“Motorhead,” by Andy Sima (2022)
Stepping out of the garage door and into the hazy orange light of the late afternoon, my wheel bearing caught again, and I fell forward with a lurch. My hands broke my fall as best they could while my right leg stiffened up and stopped moving. My metal hit the cracked pavement with a sound like overturning a toolbox.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, eyeing the rainbow sheen of my blood as it dropped from a gash in my hand, cut on some glass in the sidewalk. Turning myself over, I pushed myself back up into a sitting position. I took stock of my right leg, unhelpfully locked into part of a goose step. My wheel bearing throbbed, and I massaged it with my uninjured hand as I tried to stand with my good leg.
Once again upright, I hobbled my way onto the street and kept at the wheel bearing. I could feel it loosening up some as I pushed at it, pulled at it, prodded at it, and my bad leg started to move a little and I could transition from a painful march into almost a limp. The steel bolts and concentric rings of the bearing creaked and groaned.
Passing an alley between some of the other garages, a group of streeteaters lay parked next to an abandoned engine block, stripped clean of spare parts. I could hear them rumbling quietly, apparently asleep. Though one of them looked up at me as I hobbled by.
“Give me some steel, pops?” The gears in his throat normally only spun downward, crushing up asphalt, bone, and steel together. Changing direction to speak must have been difficult. Another of his companions looked up from their rest, engine still idling.
“I ain’t got enough steel for myself,” I said, still massaging my wheel bearing. “Would if I could.”
The first streeteater, teeth on the end of drive shafts gnashing up and down in what might have been a smile, chuckled. “Sure, I bet you would.” I waved him off and kept on down the street.
Glass crunched under my passage, one boot and one tread. The streetlamp above me had exploded, and its litter left behind covered the sidewalk. A smear of blood, rainbow rivulet stains alternating between hues of violets, greens, blues and grey ichor, coated the base of the streetlamp where the access hatch had been pried off. A scene of intense desperation. Or stupidity. Or both.
My leg was mostly back to normal now, but the muscles at my hip throbbed as the wheel bearing rearranged itself. Each step wound the ligaments and tendons tighter and tighter, until it would turn over and the pressure would ease up, and whatever bit had been caught in the muscles spun back around. I flexed my leg and gave a kick to see if I still could, but the pain flared up to say it was here, it could not be ignored. My need could not be ignored. Good thing it wasn’t too far now.
The residential garages gave way to more commercial enterprises, and the wide front of the mechanic-barber’s shop squatted on the side of the road. Windows on the second floor were still smashed in, and the brickwork was crumbling. Oil and grease stains covered the concrete of the ground before the entrance, and the double-wide iron-framed garage door muffled the sounds of machinery inside. “Blitz’s Mechanic and Barber” was painted in big, flashy letters on the front, long since starting to chip away.
I was about to step into a small door just off to the side when the garage door trundled open, wheels lumbering along tracks hanging just above the frame. The garage door on my side slammed into the brick wall and blocked the entrance to the other door. With a low growl that became a howl that became a roar of ten thousand pounds of steel churning and flesh spitting, a two-axle model burst out of the barber shop and onto the street, fumes spewing from its exhaust and arms grabbing at the roadway.
The thing experimentally flexed its spine, arching itself off the ground for a moment, and spun its tires in place. A heavy, bolted fist smashed the asphalt, freeing up chunks of black-tarred stone. And then, a pouncing predator, it flattened itself against the earth and floored it, engine block extruding from its skull and pistons flying at a million miles an hour. It screamed in pleasure as it disappeared over the horizon.
The garage doors slammed shut again with a boom, spinning me around and knocking the thoughts of envy and disgust out of my skull. When I looked back down the road, it was gone. My gaze lingered on the faint pulse of dust. For too long, I told myself. I pushed open the side door and entered into the barber’s shop.
Chains hung from the ceiling. Steel gangways skirted across the top of the space, glancing by the shattered windows and tracing hollow veins throughout the upper floor of the building. The cement floor was cracked and pitted with damage, and heavy machinery, pipes and valves and oil drums, livers and intestines and clenching, unfeeling mouths lined the walls. Shelves upon shelves of spare parts, of all shapes, sizes, colors, and viscosities crowded around the spaces that weren’t filled with machinery.
In the center of the room, a vast lift rose out of the ground, metal fingers tearing at the heavens and threatening to mangle anyone who dared come too close, or worse yet, ascend that surgical table to be seated at the mercy of the barber.
Off to the side, back where I had entered through the door, was a low steel counter, rusted at the edges and where the bolts poked through. Fresh blood and oil both dripped from a set of instruments that had been carefully arranged on the counter, arranged clearly with intention. Perhaps to spell some profane message to a careful listener. I had never been careful enough. None of us had.
Behind the counter, stepping out from a curtained-off area containing a bed and a few personal effects, was Blitz. He hefted a sledgehammer over his shoulder and his barber’s apron was already stained with a variety of fluids. The apron looked new, I thought. Though it would see much use soon enough.
“Eisen, back so soon?” Blitz said, mouth cracking into a smile. The two gears that made up the top part of his head clicked together in interest.
“I didn’t think you did work on two-axles,” I said.
“I don’t. Normally. But he wanted some extra spinal work done. Under the table. Real experimental stuff. The discerning customer with some extra steel knows where to come looking, though, you get what I’m saying?” Blitz said.
It didn’t matter how much steel a client had, really. Blitz would work on anyone. On anything. For almost any price. He wouldn’t spare a streeteater his own asphalt, but fuel could be as good as steel to Blitz. With the right octane mix, anyway.
Which is why I had little choice in where I was serviced. “My wheel bearing keeps getting stuck. I can’t barely walk,” I said, gesturing to my right leg. The metal drive shaft below my knee thumped against the floor.
“Nothing to do with me, now, does it? All work is final.” Blitz said. His smile took on a hungry quality, listing to the left, where the larger of his two gears spun. His teeth were rivets.
“I need you to look at it,” I said. “Don’t bullshit me, either. You promised it would be as good as the real thing, last time.”
“Well, call it a margin of error,” Blitz said, frowning. “I don’t know if I’ve got a new wheel bearing for your model.”
“Can you just take a look?” I said. I tried to keep the pleading out of my voice. It was an emotion I was expecting to become familiar with in this new stage of my life.
“Sure, I’ll look, but I won’t promise anything,” Blitz said. The muscles on his arm bulged as they connected to the copper wiring deeper in his shoulder. The hand that wasn’t clutching the hammer scratched his exhaust. As he turned to walk towards the wall of shelves, I realized he was only wearing the apron, and nothing else. A large piston dangled from between his legs. New model, not scavenged. Not something you’d see in this part of town. Normally.
I waited by the counter while Blitz tossed parts back and forth, shaking the shelves and putting on a show clearly intended to demonstrate he was at least making an effort. At some point, he tossed a glob of something thick and black into the maw of one of the pipes along the wall. There was the crunching noise of bones being shattered under the grooved rubber of gasoline-fueled engines, and the powered lift at the center of the room began to lower to the ground with the same violence of a mountain face collapsing.
“No dice,” Blitz yelled over the sound throbbing metal. He trudged his way back to the counter, leaned his weight on it and stared at me with this spinning gears. They clicked away, almost clock-like in their intensity and focus. The flesh where the gears met with his head was red and wet.
“What about other models? Other years?” I asked.
“Replacing your wheel bearing with the wrong part, especially as such a sensitive junction, could result in, ah, more permanent damage. Especially at your level of wear,” he said……..
And that’s the end of part one. Yeah, I get it, kind of weird. I wanted this story to originally be in only one piece, but I just didn’t have the energy or time to finish it up while I was writing it the other day. So it’ll be in two parts, and hopefully, one day, will be a single, complete story that is less than 3,000 words long! That’s a quarter of what “Periphery” was! Let me know what you think in the comments. Or just text me or something, I guess? Chances are you know me personally if you’re reading this anyway.
And, credit where credit is due, the initial inspiration for this story came from this short visual novel game, “Greaser.” Which I found from this article. Give it a go! Hopefully this story doesn’t come off as too similar. It kind of came to me as I was sitting in the parking lot a Walgreens and listening to, of course, Motorhead by Motorhead from their album Motorhead. Because I have terrible taste. See you next week!
