DIRECTIONS: Hold SEXUAL ORGANS upright, pull trigger back and spray the air in a sweeping motion until entire area is covered. For noticeably fresh SEXUAL ORGANS, spray all the rooms in your home.

INGREDIENTS: Odor eliminator, water, fragrance, nonflammable natural repellant, embalming fluid, quality control ingredients. SEXUAL ORGANS Contain no Phosphates.

CAUTION: USE ONLY AS DIRECTED. Intentional misuse by deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents can be harmful or fatal. Help stop SEXUAL ORGAN abuse. Some surfaces may become damp when sprayed. Avoid slips or falls.

KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN. Do not point at face. If eye contact occurs, rinse well with water. If irritation persists, get medical attention. Do not expose SEXUAL ORGANS to heat or open flame, or store at temperatures above 120 degrees fahrenheit. Dispose of properly. Do not puncture or incinerate organs.

"Sexual Organs"

Copyright: © 2011 Dustin Reade

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Dustin Reade has been published a bunch in magazines, online, and in dozens of anthologies. He lives in Washington. 'Nuff Said.

So a few months ago I accidentally built a time machine. I don’t know what I was trying to make, but it wasn’t a time machine. A lot of people were very excited, but because I hadn’t set out to build a time machine I considered the experiment a failure. I was in all the papers for a while, and then one day I put the time machine in the garage and forgot about it.

Well, a few days ago, my dad was out cleaning the garage when he came across the Time Machine. He came up to my room to tell me about it. His face was red and he was angry.

“That doo-hickey of yours has got a hornet’s nest in it,” he told me. “I’m not gonna clean it up. You can do that yourself. You’re twenty-seven years old; I shouldn’t have to tell you to clean up after yourself.”

“Fine, I’ll clean it up,” I said.

Then, I said: “Jeez.”

I put on my purple windbreaker and my favorite pair of jeans and headed for the garage. My mother was in the kitchen, juggling bombs. They were round and black and all of the fuses were lit. One of them looked like it could blow up at any minute but she didn’t seem to care. I had to assume she knew what she was doing, but it seemed to me that my dad should have stepped in and done something. A bomb with a lit fuse was a heck of a lot more dangerous than a hornets nest in my crappy Time Machine.

I went out into the garage and looked at the Time Machine. It didn’t look like much, just a chair and some tinfoil, really. There was a little platform built around it, but it only went out about six or so feet. Looking at it, I still couldn’t figure out what it was I had been trying to make.

The hornets nest was under the seat, so I grabbed a can of spray paint and started spraying them. I had no idea how to kill hornets but I found out that spray paint doesn’t do anything to them. Soon they were buzzing all around me, and I had no choice but to kick the nest from the chair and use the Time Machine.

Everything went dark for a minute, and then I saw a bunch of rainbows. They were tiny, no bigger than my fingernail, and there were thousands of them.

After a few minutes, the rainbows faded, and gradually a sort of desert came into focus. My parents were standing there. Their faces were streaked with black and their hair was standing straight up on their heads. I looked around and realized it wasn’t really a desert, more of an impact crater. I could see bits of my neighbor’s houses, a few tires and other indications of a great explosion. Like, there was a tree up on the top of the crater that had been split in half, and there were body parts scattered all over the place.

My mother reached up and touched her hair. There was a spark, and she quickly pulled her hand away. Smoke trailed out of both of their ears.

“What the heck are you guys doing here?” I asked.

My dad brushed himself off. “Your dumbass mother blew us up.”

“Yeah,” mom said sheepishly. “I was practicing my juggling. My teacher told me that, if I wanted to get really good at it, I had to try juggling something dangerous. That way, I wouldn’t lose my focus.”

I threw up my hands. “Jesus, Mom! He meant to try juggling knives, or chainsaws, not bombs!”

She just shrugged.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to improve my juggling skills.”

“Well, I hope you’re happy,” dad said, putting his hands on his hips and staring at her. “You and your damn juggling have knocked us all into next week.”

I checked the time-o-meter on the Time Machine. It said we had, in fact, travelled exactly one week into the future. I was momentarily upset, because I had missed a couple of my favorite shows, but luckily I had the Time Machine.

“Luckily,” I said. “I have this Time Machine.”

They both looked at me.

“So?”

“So,” I explained. “We can use it to go back to last week, before any of this happened.”

They climbed on and we went back to our own time. When we got there, we walked into the kitchen and looked at the bombs mom had left on the table. None of them had blown up yet, so the machine must’ve worked.

My father sat down and put his elbows up on the table.

“Well, Marie,” he said. “Was it worth it? Do you feel your juggling has improved as a result of this accident?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Here, let me show you!”

She picked up the bombs, lit the fuses, and started juggling them. She really was quite good.

"Tiny Rainbows"

Copyright: © 2011 Dustin Reade

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Dustin Reade likes old surrealist movies, Sangria Senorial Soda, writing stories and using his body for shock value. His work can be found in numerous magazines and anthologies. All of his stories are weird.

My neighbor stops screaming long enough to punch the Power Guy in the mouth. Watching from my living room window, even I am surprised by the sudden burst of violence. The Power Guy just sits there on the sidewalk, holding his clipboard to his chest, crying like a child.

My neighbor is still angry. He jumps up and down, screaming his head off. When the Power Guy doesn’t respond, he runs into his tool shed and emerges a few moments later with a pair of gardening shears. The Power Guy climbs awkwardly to his feet and tries to run away. My neighbor chases him around the house a few times, brandishing the shears like a sword. His bathrobe flies open, exposing his beer belly which droops a bit over the elastic of his dirty white underpants.

The Power Guy is screaming for help. I can see several of my other neighbors watching the chaotic scene from their living room windows. Most of them are smiling, except for Mrs. Bradley. There is a multi-colored parrot on her shoulder and she has a phone pressed up to her ear, talking excitedly to someone, probably the police.

Way to ruin it for the rest of us, Mrs. Bradley.

"Power"

Copyright: © 2011 Dustin Reade

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Dustin Reade likes old surrealist movies, Sangria Senorial Soda, writing stories and using his body for shock value. He is obsessed with The Manson Family, and his work can be found in numerous magazines and anthologies. All of his stories are weird.

A monolithic structure juts abruptly from a vast and isolated wheat field. An entire population of miniscule creatures screams in unison, driven mad. Insects move in suicide cult lines to dive into and explode upon the structure. Guts and yellow stains soon turn the Monolith into a violent eruption of modern art. The contrast is shocking and sudden.

The Old Farmer can’t believe it.

The crops become safe, no longer the victims of thousands of gnawing maws. They grow fat and stooped with the heaviness of their bounty. The Old Farmer becomes a rich man. He dies with pennies lining his pockets years later.

Everyday more insects fly into the Monolith, adding splatters of expression to the hulking mass. The Children of the Old Farmer find themselves locked inside of cars on the interstate, driving home to shove their father into the Earth. They move in from all directions to cover him in dirt.

A grasshopper batters its head against the structure. Soon its body lies inert at the base, its brains adding stain to the stones. The Children’s feet crunch over gravel in long forgotten driveways. They trample over weeds and dirt, old steps, creaky wooden farmhouse floorboards, matted carpets. They breathe in heavy aromas of cigarette smoke and senescence. Windows rimmed with dust allow a dim view of the Monolith.

A daughter moves a finger through the dust, swirling designs into the panes. Swirling fingerprints. The Monolith grabs at her attention.

“What’s that?” she asks, pulling two brothers from their reveries.

They look.

In the space of ten seconds countless ants dive from the structure. Their bodies erupt in unseen bubbles as they return to the Earth, adding gore.

One brother breaks the silence that is not silence so much as it is mourning.

“The Monolith,” he says. “Dad told me about it a few times. He said it was just kind of there one morning.”

The daughter asks, “Did he paint it or something? It is incredibly colorful.”

“I don’t think so. If he did he didn’t mention it to me.”

A Praying mantis flies into a protrusion of hardened stinkbug intestines, impaling herself through the thorax and dying without unfolding her arms. She is forever fossilized in this moment of supplication.

The other brother says, “The color is bugs.”

“Bugs?” Swirls settle into the glass, crop circles on a window.

The other brother nods. “Yeah, that’s what dad said. He said the day that thing showed up in the field, all these bugs started killing themselves on it.”

A collective shaking of heads.

“I guess he went pretty crazy there, near the end.”

A millipede and a centipede spend the better part of an hour eating one another’s legs. They bleed yellow pus onto the structure. Caked wings, brittle as old Bible paper, flap languidly in a passing breeze, long since removed from living bodies.

The Children sell the farmhouse. Each child grows and withers, becoming bent old men and women. Soon enough they too are returned to the Earth and covered in dirt, a portion of their father’s pennies handed down to their own Children.

The Diaspora is no longer reserved for insects and arachnids. The long arm of carnage now reaches to include rabbits, rock chucks, weasels and raccoons.

Fur mats the base of the Monolith, pasted with blood and entrails. The farmhouse settles into itself, until finally it collapses. The wheat dies, untended, the blades heavy and rotten. A nearby town has faded to ruin and memories.

There is no life to be found for hundreds of miles.

The Monolith stands immobile in the desolate field.

A mindless pillar of death without purpose, without end.

Then, the people come...

"The Color is Bugs"

Copyright: © 2011 Dustin Reade

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Dustin Reade's fiction has appeared in the magazines "Encounters", "Golden Visions", "Nerve Cowboy", and "Sideshow Fables", online at "The New Flesh", and roughly two dozen antholgies for Static Movement, Pill Hill Press, Living Dead Press, and Lame Goat Press. He is an Atheist and a staunch Bigfoot supporter.

A deer lifts its head…factories loom over the treetops, spewing gallons of black smoke into the sky…birds fall en masse…corpses line the highways…the deer falls dead, its stomach bloats, pops…a chemical spill of intestines and maggots and blood.

A sudden explosion…all over the world smoke stacks sprout from the soil…they grow and swell like time-lapse mushrooms.

Septic tanks erupt…shit rain…dysentery…A vile black cloud stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A man in military garb stands over a rotten moose carcass.

“This isn’t your father’s pollution,” he says as he runs a steel-toed work boot through a mass of putrescence.

Fish crawl from the black oceans trailing lungs…a new evolution…miasmas of gore…a man squats in the jungle shitting out a miles-long tapeworm…extreme chaos as Nuclear Reactors grow from the dirt, reaching for the sky like concrete tree trunks…chemical gardens filled to the brim with toxic death.

Some of this is unnecessary…we call it “setting the scene”. The viewer is made to feel as if all of this is in some way their fault.

Maggots make short work of our deer…face and personality are eaten away…an elongated skull is revealed to be the final product. A smoke stack belches a toxic plume of purple-grey smoke…a cloud is ripped to shreds…blood rains down…people race from vehicles to fast-food chains holding red soaked newspapers over their heads. “What’s black-and-white-and-red all over?”

Two nuns in a chainsaw fight.

A dirty Jesus character with mud-caked beard slumps under the heaviness of a shovel-load of dirt and debris…slow pan…pull back…the world comes into view…bodies being thrown into mass graves…high-definition bead of sweat rolls down an emaciated cheek…maggots pouring from rotten wounds and ribcages. Now the camera is falling down the mouth of a fathomless cavern…hundreds of broken bodies slumped under shovels.

Dirty Jesus looks off camera. A deer is grazing atop a mountain of garbage.

Fade to black.

"Final Scene Before End Credits"

Copyright: © 2011 Dustin Reade

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Dustin Reade has brown hair and a Ringleader mustache. He has written and sold many stories for several magazines and anthologies. He still believes in Bigfoot.

Lisa stood in the corner, tapping her foot impatiently. Another woman, Linda, was perched over the bookshelf like a gargoyle. A few waited outside, sitting like a row of feminine crows on the telephone poles. Mary sat at the foot of the bed, gorging herself on his feet.

He lowered the saw and began cutting through sinew, meat and bone. His left hand plopped on the floor and Sandra and several other women began fighting over the bloody appendage. They frothed at the mouth like dogs. He raised the hand still clutching the saw.

“Ladies, please,” he said. “There’s plenty of me to go around.”

Even as he said it, he knew it was a lie. He was quickly running out of body parts. And he was becoming increasingly light-headed as more and more blood pumped from the holes in his torso where limbs used to be. He felt a sudden, deep loss for his legs.

Linda wrestled the bloody hand away from the others and began shoving the fingers into her lipstick stained mouth. Her features were soft, but made sharper and more distinct by heavy make up. Watching her shovel his severed hand into her mouth, He could not for the life of him remember what he had ever seen in her. The other women retreated to their perches over the bed. Some hung upside down from the overhead lights. Some slithered under the bed and lapped up the heavy droplets of blood before they could soak into the carpet.

He sawed through his left elbow, wondering who would get the forearm. His vision began to flicker in and out. Flashes of blue, red, and yellow. He laughed at nothing as his forearm hit the ground with a wet plop. Linda leapt at the limb, tearing it from Jennifer’s grasp and flew out the window gnawing on it.

Soon, everyone had eaten some part of him except for Lisa. While the others battled for their bits, she had remained in the corner, watching. She was always so dependable, so devoted. She would wait forever if she had to. He looked up at her beautiful face and managed a weak smile. Both his legs were gone, as were his arms. He’d had to gnaw through his right shoulder to get it off. It had taken some time, but in the end it hit the floor with the same plop as the others. Kylee had wrapped him in his bed sheets to minimize the bleeding. She was always so caring.

Lisa bent down and placed her hand against his cheek. Her long, thin lips stretched into a caring smile.

“Thank you for saving it for me,” she said.

He managed a bizarre shrug, made stranger by the fact that he had no arms.

“It’s no big deal. It has always been yours.”

She laughed. “You always were so sweet.”

She kissed him on the forehead as she picked up the saw and began sawing away at his penis.

"Lisa's Piece"

Copyright: © 2011 Dustin Reade

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Dustin Reade lives in Port Angeles, WA with his daughter, Percephone, and a rat named Michael Jackson. His work appears in several anthologies and a handful of magazines, both online and otherwise. He can feel it when you google him.

Sam reaches in his mouth to find his teeth have fallen out...painless, but with the nightmare feeling of terror welling up in his chest as they hit the floor (tink! tink! tink!)...stinking holes expose dangling, twitching nerve endings...a cascading waterfall of blood pushes out passed the tongue...animal panic.

He rips at his lips and tongue, turning his lower jaw into a mass of eviscerated meat...his bottom jaw rips itself loose and joins his teeth on the floor, the tongue flopping madly around like a severed octopus limb...a death worthy of Hollywood.

The Director runs around screaming, "More Blood! More Blood!"

"But sir," a shrill voice screams, “if we add anymore blood, no one will believe it! It won't look real!"

The director runs on camera and slits his wrists...has just enough time to carve three sixes into his chest before he dies...the whole thing has a sort of "end of the world" feel coupled with an old spaghetti western.

A shrill voice screams, "Did you get that?! Did you get that?!"

Someone offstage answers, "Yes, but it didn't move me...”

"To hell with you! We're getting the Academy Award for that death scene!"

The gaffer climbs down from a lamp pole...all the lights dim...mood music floats across the room from out of nowhere.

"Can someone clean this up?!" A tired janitor picks up the carcass of the pale Director and crams it into an oil drum filled with sulfuric acid.

"Keep that pulp for the banquet scene!"

"Yes, sir!"

"And what are all these teeth everywhere? What are we, forgetful dentists? Someone push a broom around this place, for goodness sakes!"

The dry whisk of a broom on the floor.

"Action!" A door bangs open and closed offstage...Sam goes lurching around outside, bleeding on the sidewalk, mouth a miasma of gore.

"Pleesh! Pleesh helf me! My teef! My teef!"

"Cut!"

The blockbuster hit of the summer.

"On the Set With Dante and Beelzebub"

Copyright: © 2011 Dustin Reade

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Dustin Reade lives somewhere in Washington, where he spends a great deal of time reading about, but not looking for, Bigfoot. His work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines. He also makes short films that feature strange characters living out exotic fantasies on strange worlds. He is a Leo.

Job. Life in general.

No mail. No messages.

Stubbed toe. Shit for television.

Devon Remus shook violently. His face grew hot. Steam billowed from his ears like a cartoon. Sweat forced its way through his pores so quickly all the hair fell off of his arms, legs, crotch, and armpits.

His vision warped and he exploded.

Gore rained down over his new sofa.

The television spit blue sparks throughout the room.

His feet alone remain intact, still standing up in their boots, the only remains, a thin stream of smoke issuing from the bleeding ankles. Bits of a bloodied work shirt clung to the Rabbit ears atop the television. The hands of the clock spin exceptionally fast. They become a blur of motion. He switches from present tense, to past and future.

For a fleeting moment he knows peace.

Deep inside a calm like the ocean spreading out beyond anyone’s field of vision.

Fleeting moments flit away, burnt paper from a campfire, butterfly wings.

Heaven is a rented apartment. You cannot stay indefinitely.

Soon, he is curled into a ball beneath the sofa. Dustballs fly overhead and curse him to get out of their way. He is buffeted on all sides by cockroaches the size of minivans.

He has been scaled down to size.

He vomits up a healthy portion of shimmering blue paint; the heavy smell of chemicals floods his nostrils. His feet get tangled up in the tall carpet fibers.

A cockroach walks up behind him and bites his head off. It rolls under a mammoth potato chip. His body stumbles drunkenly over to retrieve it.

The puddle of blue paint begins to gurgle and splat the underside of the sofa with tiny blue specks. The specks remind him of skid marks. He laughs until his sides split and a river of blue paint pours out along with several of his ribs. Looking closer he realizes the ribs are made of toothpicks.

A cockroach that had been busy chewing away at the potato chip picks up one of the ribs and begins picking bits of potato chip from its pincers.

“Mind if I use this?” it asks in a cartoon falsetto.

Devon shakes his head in his hands.

“No,” he says. “Be my guest.”

He does not feel angry anymore.

"Under the Couch"

Copyright: © 2011 Dustin Reade

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Dustin Reade is a funeral Director-in-training. He lives in Port Angeles, Washington with his three-year-old daughter, Percephone, and their rat, Michael Jackson. He has been published in several anthologies, as well as a handful of magazines. He likes the rain and gloom of the Pacific Northwest, and will not be moving anytime soon.

She sat across the table, arms folded in anger. I looked down at the plates.

"These dishes aren't going to wash themselves," I said.

She stood up quickly, tears of rage forming in her eyes, grabbed the dishes, and walked into the kitchen. I could hear her banging around in there, cursing under her breath. I walked over to the typewriter and got started.

It was good. The words really flew. It's always good when it's like that: pure, the burning words setting fire to the page. Poetry.

She finished in the kitchen, came in and sat down on the sofa. She had a glass of wine in her hand; deep red wine, the color of old blood on a t-shirt. She looked at me over the glass.

"Writing a story, are you?"

"Yep," I said.

She took a sip of her red wine. She exhaled deeply, smacking her lips, and said, "That’s nice."

I stopped typing. "What's nice?"

She looked at me over the glass...She was running her fingers around the rim, and I could hear a faint hum rising up from the blood-red liquid. It made me feel uneasy, that sound. Like something was writhing around in my brain.

"What's nice?" I asked again.

"Oh," she said, "how you can write one of your stories, while I'm in there doing your dishes."

I was in no mood for that argument. I had had it many, many times before; knew all about it. It wasn't really about my writing, and it wasn't really about the dishes. No, it was about me wanting to do the dishes, about understanding how hard her day had been, etc. To which, I was supposed to say, "Why would anyone want to do the dishes?" and so on and on with that skeleton waltz.

Instead, I stood up, holding the typewriter.

"Here you go!" I shouted, and hurled the typewriter through the living room window. Glass rained down everywhere; it got in her hair, and in her wine. Little bits of crystal danced over the surface of the blood.

"Goddamn you!" She screamed.

She jumped off the couch, threw down her wine glass, and marched into the bedroom. When she came back into the living room, she was holding a long, thin stick in her hand. She walked over to where I was standing. I balled up my fists.

"Don't..."

She raised the wand up to my lips, and I felt my throat go dry.

"Shh," she said, motioning towards the blood-red stain on the floor.
"Get down."

I tried to fight it, tried to resist, but my knees buckled and before I knew what hit me I was down on my knees in the wine, looking up at her.

It was the damndest thing.

She stuck her fingers into the corners of my mouth. "Open," she said.

There was no use fighting, I realized. Something strange had happened, and all I could do was obey, do whatever she said. And the strange thing was I didn't want to fight anymore. It was like all my willpower was gone.

My mouth opened, and she reached her hand inside.

I felt her soft skin with my lips; felt her long, red fingernails slide passed my teeth, tongue, tonsils, and continue down the back of my throat.

"You used to be so sweet," she was saying. "Where did all that sweetness go?"

She was in up to the elbow now, and I could feel her hand going passed my heart. She stopped there for a moment, touched it.

"Tickle, tickle," she giggled, before continuing on to my gut. She felt around in there, and I felt her wrap her hand around something.

A horrible sensation, it about made me sick, and she started pulling her hand out.

Her hand came out of my mouth, and I looked at it.

"What the hell!" I shouted.

"There's some of that sweet stuff!" She smiled.

She was holding a little yellow bird in her hand. I looked and looked at the thing. The little bird ruffled up its feathers, trying to dry itself. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It had a little orange beak and everything!

She walked over to the window, opened it a few inches, and sat the bird on the sill.

"Don't let it get away!" I said. I was surprised at how high my voice sounded, high pitched, pleading; the voice of someone on the verge of tears. She walked over and rested her hand on my cheek.

"Oh, baby," she said, "it's okay! You gotta spread the love around! Now, open!"

I obediently opened my mouth, and she once again reached inside.

I wanted to see what else she could find in there, passed my lips, lungs, and tongue. Her hand busily reaching around, probing the dark recesses of my body, finding...what?

"Ah!" she said happily as her hand popped out. "Oh my, that is too cute!"

I looked.

A little Teddy bear holding a satin heart sat upright in her palm. The heart had white letters that said, "I WUV YOU!!!" I shook my head in disbelief.

"That came out of me?" I asked incredulously.

She nodded. "Yeah," she said. "Isn't it precious?!"

She sat the bear down and reached inside again. I looked at the bear as she dug around. I looked into its little brown eyes.

"I guess it is kind of cute," I thought.

"Aha!" she exclaimed joyously, pulling her hand up through my lower intestine. "I found another one!"

It had been a strange day.

She pulled her hand out and we looked at what she had found.

"The Pull Out Method"
Copyright: © 2010 Dustin Reade

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Dustin Reade's work has been published in two small press anthologies, Nerve Cowboy literary journal, Encounters magazine, and the upcoming issue of Sideshow Fables.