Ken is lost on a train heading from Seattle toward Los Angeles. He needs to find a Barbie Girl before he reaches L.A. More importantly, he needs to pee.

He stumbles through the hallways and trips up and down the stairs of the Amtrak. His body swells like a pimple.

At the end of the corridor leading to the last train car, a stewardess pukes into a cardboard trash can.

“Excuse me,” Ken says, dancing the squirrelly dance.

The stewardess pauses. She stretches her neck around to address him. She has a pretty face. Sun-glazed freckles compliment the flecks of her puke. Bee-sting lips mask her chipped incisor. Ken steps back when he sees that hair. Her hair is algae green. Green is the opposite of blonde, he thinks. How appalling.

He sucks in another eyeful of the waitress, studying the way her neck coils around her shoulders. This freak-haired girl’s neck is longer than her torso, he thinks. How very appalling.

“Down in the lounge car, we have t-shirts for sale,” she says. “They’re ten dollars.” She buries her head in the trash can.

“No, thank you,” Ken says. Amtrak t-shirts? How very, very appalling. He hurries beyond her to the final staircase. “Creep,” he mutters.

He finds a bathroom, the only motherfucking bathroom on the motherfucking train. He locks the door and struggles to unzip with shaky hands. Ken has finally arrived, no longer lost, and his bladder refuses to wait.

Ken pees on his hands. Ken pees on his pants. Ken pees on the floor. Ken pees on the walls. Ken finally gets a hold of himself.

He focuses his aim on the toilet.

The toilet lid is down. Instead of pissing in the toilet, he pisses on the toilet. The spray ricochets off the cheap ceramic lid and speckles his albino snakeskin shoes.

No matter how mad or reckless or shameful, Ken can’t let go. Urination has never felt so good. He thinks of the green-haired, long-necked woman . . . and the shiver-bones rattle his spine. He will need someone like her in a little bit. No matter how appalling, she will have to do. He must love someone very soon.

Five minutes later, piss sloshes around his ankles. His bladder sighs. Empty.
Disgruntled by this moment of holistic peace, his bowels lurch. They cough a slimy, screaming fart out of his anus.

He plugs his nose, disgusted by his own foulness. His gaseous expulsions always smell deathly, but this one comes on stronger than usual. Sweet as a glazed ham, there is also a sickness to it. Like a half-alive starfish baking in the farmland of southern California, dying in a moving vehicle called Earth. “I will be clean soon enough,” he tells himself. “Soon enough, this whole country will be washed clean.”

A knock on the bathroom door.

He unbuckles his belt and cries, “Somebody’s in here!”

He drops his black slacks; reveals a lone dingleberry patch in a shaved Arctic Circle, from the toilet bowl’s perspective. The dingleberry patch itches, but it doesn’t matter. Ken knows what he has to do.

“Open the door, sir. I’m afraid we have a problem.”

“You have a problem,” he screams. He’s not ready for her. He needs to buy time.

The train makes a sudden jolt. Thu-wump! He braces the silver rails designed to aid cripples. Toilet water chills his crusted ass hairs.

“Sir, if you don’t open this door, I will inform the conductor.”

He recognizes the voice now. It is the green-haired, long-necked stewardess. He opens his mouth to let her know that he will open the door after he takes a dump, but something kicks him in the stomach from the inside. “Ah!”

His stomach doubles in size, then shrinks down again. He has suffered from “bathroom troubles” all his life, but never this bad. He knew it was coming. He knew to expect this. His bowels cue their exit doors, his sphincter relaxes like a deflating balloon, and he closes his eyes, mouth agape. “Ah!”

He feels much better when he is shitting than when he is not shitting. He never wants to stop. He tunes out the empty threats of the stewardess and lets the squishy euphoria lift him onto a hardtack field of shit-flowers where a half-machine gun, half-Barbie Girl creature parts her red lips and blows rings of bullet flames. The flames char him. His blackened skin flaps in the breeze like a flag.

“It feels so good,” he says.
When he no longer feels good, he opens his eyes and resigns himself to reality. All of his terrible odors crash over him at once.

He is no longer squatting on the toilet. It is far below him. His forehead touches the low ceiling. He has buried the toilet in a mountain of his own shit. He’s ready for his Barbie now.

He scuttles down from the mountain and unlatches the door for the stewardess. She steps inside. He slides the door shut behind her, relocks the door, and turns around. “Barbie,” he chuckles, arms spread. He tries to embrace her, but he’s still a little disgusted by her long neck and green hair.

Barbie Girl, he thinks, Barbie Girl. You can be Barbie. You can be Barbie.

They stand waist-high in feces. They press against each other. They say nothing.

He wants to explain his mission.

They are so close now.

Surely she’ll understand if he speaks from his heart.

Barbie pukes. Her bile swims around their waists. It is the catalyst that will bring his plan to life.

“It’s too late to warn anyone,” Ken says. “This train will be a shithouse within the hour. The world will know Alchemical Awfulness.”

“What’s Alchemical Awfulness?” Barbie asks.

Those will be her last words on this ride, Ken thinks. He takes her long neck in both hands and cackles maniacally. He hopes his face looks as menacing as it did when he practiced evil laughs in front of his bathroom mirror.

The shit froths and bubbles.

“Let there be l-augh!” Barbie punches him in the throat before he can utter life.

She punches him twice, hard, busting his nose and lip. She drops her fists as the first new life forms emerge from the sludge.

“It’s all over,” he croaks. He tries laughing. Blood bubbles in his nostrils. Barbie has punched his voice into an embarrassing wheeze.

A miniature version of Ken backstrokes toward them. The miniature salutes the man and continues on. His mini is made of shit.

Barbie goes white. Her hair becomes stiff, electrical green wires. Fetuses float like soap bubbles from the tip of each hair strand.

In another lightning minute, the bathroom is teeming with fecal Ken’s. Ken holds his Barbie in his arms. There are so many little versions of himself swimming around. They grow up so fast, he thinks. A plastic tear in his eye.

Barbie comes to. She beats him on the chest. His heart throbs like a side cramp. He holds onto her. He has to see this through to the end. “They’re not on their own yet!” he screams.

“Puke!” he screams at her.

“What?” she asks.

“Puke some more! Puke with me if you want to live!”

He grabs her head and forces her down, into the stinking waste. Maybe another mouthful of his crap is just what she needs. Just to prove to her that he’s willing to uphold his half of the bargain, he dunks his own head under and wiggles his tongue in the foulness.

He keeps her under. She flails her arms. He rises when she stops flailing. She opens mouth to scream, but shit and vomit gush out. She tilts her head back. Her fecal brew splatters against the ceiling. Violent waves crash on the surface of the shit flood around them. Every little Ken lets out a HURRAH! and swims out of the bathroom.

He tilts his head back and unleashes his own fire spout of bile. He feels a real connection between the stewardess and himself as they puke together like two heads of a hydra. Soon they will make babies in the likeness of her, and her baby versions will join his baby versions, and soon their brood will be the only ones left on Earth.

Her long neck and green hair no longer seem so creepy anymore. Having babies always makes Ken fonder of Barbie. They just have to keep puking them out.

He thinks maybe he will ask her to marry him after he destroys the nation.

—

Cameron Pierce is the author of The Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, Lost in Cat Brain Land, Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden, and The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island (forthcoming). He lives in Portland, Oregon.