The Creeping Slurry

My old pal Wil Wheaton turned me on to this short story called "Jack Baby" by comic book writer Warren Ellis. Ellis has a resume as long as my johnson, but I'm most impressed with the fact that he writes a weekly column for the Suicide Girls. I told Wheaton as much, and he just gave me that familiar roll of his eyes followed by a "nigga, you crazy." Fuckin' Wheaton. I love that son of a bitch and I'd follow him straight into hell.

It's amazing how economical Ellis is with his prose. He creates a fantastically dense setting in a paltry 200 words. His talent is staggering. Basically, it makes me want to put a shotgun in my mouth-- but only after going on a massive killing spree to destroy everyone in The World but Wheaton and Warren Ellis. I guess in that situation I'd also let each of those guys pick four loved ones who I'd also allow to live. I wouldn't want those guys to have any hard feelings.

****

"Jack Baby"

By Warren Ellis

I dipped the old jar down into the creeping slurry and scooped a pint of shit-water out of the Thames, down where the sewers meet the river. It's come to this, I said to no-one: making jenkem rather than seeing the Jack Baby.

Seal up the jar, watch it ferment for long sleepless days, and then inhale the gas off the top. Jenkem: ghetto drugs. An hour of laying like a corpse and seeing dead things instead of the orgasm-jerking and spacewalk day of a Jack high. But I couldn't afford Jack, and I didn't want to think about the Jack Baby.

Jack was a bastard brew of neurotransmitters and genetic plug-ins, the black market product of universities that wanted to keep the power on. Addictive and deep-tissue-persistent enough that, like crack before it, Jack babies were born. But they weren't just thin and sickly. Jack was bound into their genetic structure. Narcotophores pulsed under their grey skins, tiny little Jack labs.

The things we choose to care about. Not getting clean, but huffing shit-gas instead of seeing her.

Squatting under the jagged stump of the bridge, I twisted the jar shut, willing the muck inside to do its stinking magic. Dreading the sleepless days of waiting, where I knew I'd see nothing but my grown-up Jack Baby, letting men make her sweat so they could lick the Jack from her pores.

The things we choose to care about: I could live with her being a whore, but I couldn't stand her being someone else's fix.