Lord Byron Circus
>>text BY D. Harlan Wilson >>PIC by Matt Williams

Polar bears inundated the Midwest, walking on their hind legs and willing to work for below minimum wage...The Mexicans shed their tuxedos and picketed until dusk. The Puerto Ricans went home and ate breakfast. The pterodactyl men pulled up their trousers and ran to the DMV, shrieking like moths and requesting dire audiences with the Secretary of Hate...What happened to The Parataxis Man? He slipped off a cliff and landed on his head but he was all right and he got up and dusted himself off and looked both ways and a red-eyed bull nailed him in the tailbone. He flipped end over end back onto the lip of the cliff in a casual standing position. Meanwhile the polar bears were stealing everybody’s jobs. They operated at the very pinnacle of efficiency, pausing only to use the men’s room and devour the odd assistant manager...“The technology of the mechanized retroflesh,” said a barnyard fetishist in response to an organ donor who asked him for the time and directions to the cafeteria. Sometimes the connections don’t work. Sometimes a work ethic isn’t enough to excel in the postcapitalist scheme of intelligent design...Down the hallway Judge Schreber slipped out of a straight jacket, snuck up behind a sunflower, and strapped the jacket onto the thing’s green limbs. The sunflower resisted, petals flying off its oversized head like sparks. Just last night Judge Schreber sentenced a Venus flytrap to two years in Auschwitz for eating more than its lawful share — EIGHT FLIES PER TRAP PER DAY OR ELSE, say the Rules of the Game — and now here he stood oppressing yet another member of the plant family. A wildly anabolic sense of guilt induced an epileptic seizure. He hit the floor and vibrated and clanked like a rusty turbine. Clock springs flew out of his ears and nostrils and then his flesh gave way to the Machine, sharp follicles of metal growing from his pores in fasttime until he became a porcupine of conductivity and electric panache. “That’s fucked up,” said a hole in the blackface of the sunflower. A polar bear said the same thing when it discovered its boss making love to the candy bar dispenser in the break room. It didn’t know what to do. Quit or hang tight? It cleared its mind and searched for an answer...nothing. Best consult the I Ching. The polar bear dumped a bag of yarrow stalks onto the table, carefully arranged them according to the schiz-flows of its psyche, then consulted an out-of-date translation of Lao-tzu’s New York Times bestseller:

When taxes are too high,
people go hungry.
When the government is too intrusive,
people lose their spirit.

Act for the people’s benefit.
Trust them; leave them alone.

The candy bar dispenser groaned as the polar bear pushed out its lips in dark understanding...Life as nothing more than the struggle not to shout expletives at Black Tie Luncheons. Life as nothing more than the shouting of expletives at Red Lobster when the food comes out and the depressed-emaciated-browbeaten waitress breaks down and cries thick oily tears all over your Seaside Shrimp Trio because her husband’s in the clink and her snaggletoothed kids have low self esteem and too many VDs...Breakfast at Tiffany Texarkania’s. George Peppard is there and so is the rest of the A-Team. After the gangbang a machinegunfight breaks out. No blood. Nobody gets shot and everybody dies...“Don’t forget to boil that nipple!” exclaimed Mother as she goosesteppped across the balance beam. Father saluted and thought: Who serves a perfectly healthy infant a cold nipple? Then the acrobats began to spill out of the ceiling ducts in a somersaulting tsunami of hard-boiled aggression. The gymnasium filled up quickly. Mother and Father escaped through an emergency exit. Infant was left behind and grew up to be a comic book villain...(Don’t neglect the polar bears now.)...Neglect is the fundament of psychopathy. Schreber’ll tell you. Freud, too...Consider Freud’s analysis of Schreber via his memoirs: “The exciting cause of his illness, then, was an outburst of homosexual libido; the object of this libido was probably from the very first his physician, who enjoyed masquerading around the asylum in various polar bear costumes”...That’s when everybody started goosing and trying to fuck the animals. Bestiality became the apple of the working man’s eye, but humanality wasn’t the polar bears’ bag. They clocked out, collected payment for services rendered, dropped back onto all fours, and returned to the North Pole where the sun raced around the horizon like a tangerine in a blue, blue toilet bowl...In their wake, the gears and girders of existence fell into an abrupt Romantic stupor. Pistons, cogs, engines sang in the cornfield breeze as the Lord Byron Circus emerged from the dust and tore across the landscape of the Midwest at 120 mph. Freshly shaved asses hung out the windows of the mechanical centipede that served as the circus’s caboose. Taking the lead was a virgin mime who had yet to officially parody the wiles of men in the public sphere. His vast goosesteps progressed forward in a deafening, technologized blur…

D. Harlan Wilson is the author of three collections of irreal stories and an upcoming pulp science fiction novel, Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Dream People, a journal of Bizarro texts, and an English professor at Wright State University-Lake Campus.  For more information on Wilson and his work, visit his official website at www.dharlanwilson.com.