Swine Before Pearls

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Swine Before Pearls

Short fiction by Scott Urban and DF Lewis

Naysmith woke up and caught the alarm before it could ring off. Let Pearl sleep another quarter hour, she'd appreciate the extra rest. He rubbed the grime out of the corners of his eyes and stood up, trying not to set the mattress undulating like the surface of a pool. After stretching and shoving feet into slippers, he trudged out to the kitchen to set the tea kettle boiling.

He turned away from the stove and peered out the window above the sink in order to determine what sort of weather the day held.

And he saw himself looking back at him.

Not his reflection in the glass. Although that was there, too. Physics hadn't been subverted that far. Rather there was his unlovely middle-aged mug on the billboard positioned atop the building across the street.

The building contained a newsstand on the first floor and several families of Pakis on the second - and, up until that morning, a billboard which as far as Naysmith could recall, advertised Coca-Cola by displaying a gigantic bottle held aloft by an anonymous hand.

But the soft drink was gone...

And an extreme close-up of his face was in its place.

Naysmith closed his eyes, squinting hard, harder, imagining that he simply must still be dreaming. But no, when he opened them again, it was still there. His face, from chin to hairline, gaping pores, unsightly nose hairs and reddish blemishes blazoned on the billboard for all the world to see. No writing, no logo, nothing but a black background in evidence.

Pearl was his next thought. This must be something that Pearl came up with. What had he said to her? Ah yes, something about foreigners being OK when at a distance, preferably at a great global distance, but he couldn't bear them close up on the underground train or gobbling next to him in his favourite ham-and-eggs parlour. She had tutted at his overt xenophobia and said that he wasn't a pretty sight *himself* close-up!

Naysmith turned from the window and peered at his face in the kitchen mirror. A chicken breast drained of all appetising features, stuck all about with red bits and creamy blobs, middled off with a dab of nose sauce...

He laughed. He hadn't really believed what he had seen through the window. A crazy vision sparked off by chance comments and random memories. He turned back to confirm his suspicions...

But his huge face was still there. Unchanged. It stared at him accusingly. Pearl was by now up and about, humming in the bathroom with the backing track of gurgles. Surely this must all be a dream, he thought. What else could he be advertising, but a sad case of hallucinatory drugs? He'd wake up in a minute.

What was that? Or rather, who? There was a small man (small by distance, if not small by choice) on some swaying cradle moving over Naysmith's face with cleaning implements. Pearl's swishing noises in the bath seemed to echo the movements of the man's squeegie on a stick. And Naysmith no longer saw the joke. He was actually becoming scared as hell.

'Pearl?' he called out, first questioning then demanding. 'Pearl! Get in here!'

He could hear the rampants coming down in her voice. 'Don't you take that tone of voice with me, Naysmith! If you want to ask me something, you toddle your scrawny bum back here and look me in the face. Don't go rattling the pantry with your shouts!'

Muttering, Naysmith turned away from the window. He had to take the tea-kettle off the burner. Opening the icebox, he brought out a pitcher of cream from the shelf. As he straightened up, he caught sight of a package of oleo...and there was his rather dazed-looking visage staring back at him from the cardboard panels.

*What on God's green earth?* He snatched the package and brought it up close to his eyes.

'What are you barking about like a pitbull?' Pearl asked, coming up behind him.

'Look at this!' he demanded, holding up the package emblazoned with his face as if it were a piece of evidence in a murder. She jerked her head back as if he had pressed a poisonous serpent to her face. 'And look over there - across the street! That billboard, on the roof!'

Pearl frowned, taking the oleo package from him and turning it over in her hands. 'All right, it's the bread-spread. What about it?'

He jabbed a finger at his own countenance, tapping the package in her hands. 'It's my face! My photo's on the package!'

Pearl shrugged. 'And not too flattering either, I must say. I'm certain that if there'd been anyone else in the world, they wouldn't have picked you.'

Naysmith blew out a frustrated snort. 'Oh, you...' He walked back to the window and pointed at the billboard. 'How about that? How did that get up there? What's this all *mean*?'

'I'm certain I don't know, but have you poured out yet?' Pearl bustled around her husband, getting out the cups and saucers.

*She doesn't get it*, Naysmith thought, leaning over to look at the billboard once more. The little man who had been squeegieing his image was actually either scraping off his image or painting over it. Naysmith was too far away to be able to tell for certain. The man had so far divested the billboard of Naysmith's right ear. Without really realising what he was doing, Naysmith put his right hand up to the right side of his head...

Where his fingertips encountered smooth, uninterrupted flesh. There was no ear protruding, with whorls and curves, on the right side of his skull.

Pearl's a singer. Or Pearl's a fisher. Naysmith was King Creole. With mono sound, he could only hear with half an ear. He gave his neck a rick, a half-nelson, trying to hear the words that nobody spoke. Written words made audible by the scratch of the nib. This was advertising copy - pukka and blindingly persuasive.

He felt himself actually free-wheeling amid slogans and slurred packages of propaganda. Loose talk kills, they'd said in London during the Blitz. He tried to stop himself from inventing the most infectious logo. The neatest 'bon mot'. The slickest sound-bite.

And he felt his other ear lose purchase of the meatier side of his head. He was deaf to Pearl's strictures as she made blurred faces at him.

The squeegie man, it could be seen, was now leaning into the mouth of Naysmith's alter visage on the billboard. Leaning so far down the gullet that even the man's tiny legs looked upon the brink of being swallowed to the toecaps if not to the phantom limb extensions that a recent reincarnation had arbitrarily removed - rather cruelly.

Naysmith simultaneously felt his heart leave the hotel of his chest squeezing up like the mauve-veined meat they gave the bellboy, as not being quite fresh enough for a real guest. This blood-thumper of a bodily organ seemed to drag up the gummy sinews connecting the root of Naysmith's penis to its world of knickers.

This penis now ascending, too, in a rather bone-grating trawl, turning its vulnerability inside out in the process, which was rather like having excruciating erysipelas of the nether regions together with imploding testicles. Testicles which rather reluctantly accompanied the penis upon its upward journey within a noisily ripping scrotum.

Except he couldn't hear anything at all, let alone the ruminations of his internal organs as they became more or less misplaced in their search for their own souls.

Pearl seemed to take all such matters in the natural course of events. Like she had all his married life. She always turned any critical mass into a trivial pursuit of longevity.

She could pooh-pooh even any chance of winning the National Lottery jackpot, even though she had a subconscious urge to change the course of mathematics into a rather oblique form of dick-headed science fiction...

She drew the curtains with a swish.

'There! No need for any of that.'

'But, you saw, didn't you? My face is everywhere.' Naysmith squeezed his thighs together in a rather pathetic attempt to re-site his vitals. No need, though, for the three-dimensional jigsaw of his conscious edges were fast returning to the optimum shape of flesh-corrupted hologram.

Except his skin had somehow turned a blacker shade of Pearl. And even *she* wasn't exactly unmixed by blood or pigment at the best of times.

'I know that I see you making a silly ass out of yourself,' she said (and how was he perceiving her words without ears?). To Naysmith, it appeared as if her own countenance was losing its internal integrity, becoming loose, the muscles disconnecting from their cranial anchors.

Her cheeks descending into jowls, her chin transformed into wattle, her forehead now one great lid half-covering her eyes. Naysmith felt his stomach seize up, almost losing the little fodder he had inside.

He couldn't take it anymore. It would have been all right had the aliens landed, he could have handled angel trumps announcing Apocalypse. But this, this erosion of banality in his flat, was more than he could take on an otherwise bland Monday morning.

He ran out of the kitchen, down the stairs, bouncing off the walls like a faggot off skinheads' fists, his sense of balance gone with his ears. Everything inside turning around as if his existence were making a U-turn. Opening the front door became an operation of unexpected complexity. Nothing worked like he thought it ought to work and was that because his environment had changed or because he had regressed/devolved/transmogrified himself?

Teetering on the sidewalk like a loose antenna in a strong gale, he saw his face posted at every turning: on street-signs, on handbills, on awnings, on gates, *ad nauseum* (and, indeed, Naysmith again felt close to upchucking his thorax). He had become ubiquitous, omnipresent. His image a trademark. His features a cachet. How had this happened in the course of an evening's sleep, and more to the question, why?

But even more urgent was the turmoil in his human clay. The thin slit of his turgid glans was protruding from his collar while his cranium was slipping back below the yoke of his shirt. He was inverting, heels over head, and sure enough, Pearl was right. He *had* made an ass out of himself, if not a pig's bladder...able to see only when he passed enough gas to inflate the diameter of his sphincter to allow the light within.

Having a foreign body himself was surely punishment enough. But then for him actually to *be* his own body's cancer - surely nothing to shout about. A single perfect logo in its endless oysterish suppurations.

end

Biographies:-

DF Lewis - recipient of the British Fantasy Society Karl Edward Wagner Award 1998. Around 1,300 different stories published in printed books and magazines from 1987. Five consecutive years in YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES (Daw - USA).

Stories in literary journals such as STAND, ORBIS, IRON, PANURGE and LONDON MAGAZINE. In 2001, trying to sell two recent novel-length accretions called MISCREANT IN MOONSTREAM and EMOSS CRACK. Currently busy with Weirdmonger e-mail discussion forum and Wordhunger email collaborative forum.

Scott H. Urban’s fiction, poetry, articles and reviews can be found through the small press print and electronic media. His work has also appeared in many anthologies, most recently THE ITHIQUA CYCLE and NORTHERN HORROR.

He edits the small press poetry zine FRISSON: DISCONCERTING VERSE. He lives and works in southeastern North Carolina. His family and friends continue to worry about him.

Liked this? Then visit the DF Lewis websites on:

http://www.weirdmonger.com/

http://www.redsine.com/archives/two/featured.html

http://www.dowse.com/classical-music.html

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