by Aaron Barreras

I wrote David Cronenberg a poem to invite him to tea. We never did, because he never saw the poem, he never saw it because he’s Canadian. Canadians have too much snow to bother with words (or so I imagine, myself a child of the desert where snow is fiction, like film), and so I suspect he never saw it because the mail was white, a white envelope written in snow-colored type. I tried again, but this time with red, with goo, not with letters but with darkness, separation an arm here, a face there, an idea flayed across the ground.

Body horror, the envelope says lustily, but bodies aren’t horrible, they’re just disappointing, and you can’t make a good movie about being disappointed, so the wisest thing is to add blood, like adding a dash of pale milk to a brooding tea, a tea which I would never drink with someone who is famous for being Canadian. Perhaps if I wrote something horrific he would see it? Then I could invite him to tea, maybe only to learn he doesn’t like tea, it keeps him up at night.

So instead we go to an all-night diner, though it’s broad daylight. It is teeming inside, we have to shout to hear over the crowd, as well as over our own chewing. Why is the body horrible? I ask in between bites of something unidentifiable, which cause my teeth to wince as I chew. I never said it was, came the reply of David, for we are on first-names. Living is the most horrible thing, the body is just the sponge through which life is held. 

Not understanding I ask him to demonstrate. He obliges and at-will causes his skin to liquefy and melt into the Creme-Brulé at the next table. One guest screams, one faints, another grabs a butter knife. I follow his lead, and cause my brains (both hemispheres) to boil; having nowhere to go, the pressure pushes my eyes forward until I have to release them with a dinner fork, which causes the ebullient grey matter to shoot across the room onto the sneeze-guard over the half-sized salad-bar. The line-cook loses his lunch over the lunch for table three, deep frying both in the process.

Table six, across from three, is having issues stepping through the fluids now filling the diner, the imitation vinyl floor both slippery and irresistibly sticky at the same time. As others look up from their mashed potatoes and mac-and-cheese, they react in ways that underscore what he and I were talking about. Bowels unwound themselves and turned to slingshots, the repellant projectiles hitting and smearing the large front pane of restaurant glass, Always Open sizzling, lungs inverted, protruding from open mouths like red broccoli blooming from stunned vases, fingernails rent hair from heads, lobes from ears, spinal discs dislodged like stained coasters for stale coffee, which by now was swirling with bile, droplets of sputum, rim caked with marrow.

No. No one will die that day, that would indeed be horrible. They have to keep going, they have to keep pushing, to continue with lives that are dismembered, leaking, lopsided, incomplete, painful, falling apart. I thank David for the dinner and pay for his meal, it’s the least I could do, since it’s in USD and he only carries CAD. We part for the evening but agree to do it again someday. Perhaps tea would be nice. It might keep him up.

Aaron Barreras is an unlikely writer who started life as a small-town boy from New Mexico and somehow stumbled into a career in film, animation and VFX. After making pixels all day, writing is a chance to escape the screen, which he stares at far too often, and to make words instead, which he doesn’t do often enough. He’s no longer a boy, but still lives in a small town.