loomer silentbob The Loomers Rot A Bobby Evers Absurdity It was a cold dark morning that Yodule Unkulian realized he was going to die. It started with him brushing his teeth. When suddenly blood gushed from his mouth. Salty discomfort crowded his tongue like when he fell in the water on a fishing trip in Florida that time. The blood wasn’t fresh. It was as if it had come from a dead body. It was black, rotting. It misted through the sink drain the way his memories did when he tried hardest to forget about them. The beginning, the very beginning, not what I started you with just now, actually began in Oblong, Texas, a small suburb of Ghoulz. He had just been released from prison and was now driving away in an old pick-up truck. It was 1978, he was young and he could play the guitar. Yodule was nick-named The Shark in the hole because if ever he sensed blood running through the prison he wanted a piece of the action. He was beaten severely in the prison. Mostly it was by the butch homosexuals that caught him when he dropped the soap in the shower. But it was also by the straight crooks who would get sticks and nails from the outside and beat Yodule with them. But the worst thing about being in a Texas prison was being born in Missouri. The horrible racism of Texans towards Missourians still penetrated The Shark as he stood spitting up blood into the sink. The guards would beat him and anyone else from Missouri they found because they were from Missouri. "We’re gonna show you slick hippies how to behave here in Texas. Got it? Now get down on your knees so I can beat you with a baton!" the guards would scream. Yodule shivered. It was as if the only authority, real authority, that the hicks had was that baton. So anyway, The Shark was driving down a lonely Texas road, completely rehabilitated after a year in the Big House, then suddenly his headlights go off and he accidentally veers off the road and into a lake, in appalment of what has just happened. So there he is, the Shark, sitting in a lake. When suddenly he hears a horrid catcall and looks around in mute horror as water fills his truck. He sees something at his feet. An eel-like creature, and yet more alive, more intelligent. Like a swamp thing. It emerged from the water and looked up at him, a small bubbly hiss at the back of its gilled throat. It stood up and swiped at his face. Blood sprang from his cheek and he closed his eyes and screamed. When he looked again it was gone and water was to his chest. He quickly exited his truck and weakly swam back to shore. For how long he walked, The Shark didn’t know. He ended up at an old gas station that looked freakishly similar to something from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He shook off some water in his hair, wiggled his foot, releasing a frog, and proceeded within. An old man stood there. He was drinking with a slightly younger man, discussing how hot it was. The Shark began to explain his situation. "I was…driving and my car…went into the water. There was something in there…something…a monster, green and sc-scaly. It scratched me. If I could…if I could only just make one phone call…I’d be much obliged." "Son…" the older one said. "That certainly is a fascinating tale. But what my concern is…why do you come in to my place of businness and try to spread the Loomer’s rot? Why the consarnin’ world would you come into my establishment and try to kill me and old Bill, here?" "The…what?" he asked. "Loomer’s rot? What is that?" "Well, son," said the younger one, said Bill. "The Looma is ahh local Loch Ness Monsta. He lives in dat swamp you went inta. He scratches ya, and gives you a rot. You’re dyin already. You just can’t feel it yet. And you comin in here is definitely spreading the rot. Son…let me explain somethin to ya. There is no way in Goodson’s Godfather we’d let you use the phone. Spreads the rot, m’boy. Spreads the rot." He hacked into an old coffee can and went into a back room to get some more hooch. The Shark left the crazy guy’s place, got a new car, and drove to a hotel where he stayed the weekend. He wondered if what Old Bill said was true, that he was rotting from within, that he was dying slowly but surely. Then he decided that the old men were simply insane, as all Texans were at that age, or any age, for that matter, and that he wasn’t dying. Maybe he had only cut himself in the accident and hallucinated being scratched by The Loomer and had in fact hallucinated the old men. He found an apartment in Minnesota and then began working at a computer retail store. They soon promoted him to manager and soon he became president of Shark Enterprises, a computer company that was "more ferocious than Microsoft" as stated their logo in the latter years. All through those 20 years of being at the top he never thought about the Loomer. Then one day in 1988 he sat in his den watching a new episode of Quantum Leap when suddenly his arm fell off. The doctor examined it and diagnosed it as malnutrition of the appendage, which was quite often in the late 70’s in Texas. He got a prosthetic and happily went on with life. Every once in a while through the nineties losing a finger which had randomly rotted off. Or the time he lost that ear to the rot. And anyone who seemed to come in his bedroom and have relationships with him would die of the rot too. He didn’t even think much of the Loomer until 1994 when he was introducing a new program for The Shark X2 Computer which would make it go faster and run clearer when suddenly patches of his skin turned greyish-blue and rot off. Blood splat-splat-splatted onto the table. No one seemed to notice except vice-president of the company, Steve Debono. The program which was eventually nick-named The Rot (an unrelated coincidence) was successful and very prominent in modern day computers. Which brings us up to now, where Yodule is standing over his sink, his entire mouth rotting away. He turned on the faucet and ran water, rinsing away his dead blood. When it was all gone and only the pat-pat-pat of real blood spurting into the sink could be heard he turned off the sink. There in the drain slithered something evil. It was the Loomer, back for more. He tried to run, but his corpse-like legs wasted away as he weighed on them. The Loomer broke out of his expensive sink and perpetrated him. It gnawed on his dead legs which were no longer connected to his waist. He moved slightly away with his prosthetic and his one good arm. He didn’t get far before his neck cinged off as well. Like ashes. Or dead leaves that crumble away like sand in an hour-glass, the metaphor for time. Not wasted time, like Yodule had used so many times in the past. But real time. The time that really mattered. The time when real things that really mattered occurred, fastening their grip on humanity like a jock onto a football. Like the loomer’s clammy hands on Yodules dead skull as he crushed it between its fingertips. The end. © Bobby Evers 1998 000721 what's it to you? who go blather from