i.
This world is animated. It was conceived long ago by brand necromancers from the California Institute of the Arts, in storyboards that became concept art that became sculpted basic primitives. It’s three-dimensional (3D). Its aesthetic is “Pixar style.”
This world is killing another, less lucky world: Earth-794. It’s plugged in there just siphoning life, sucking down those vibrant watts or joules or lightning bolts, or whatever. Whatever. Whatever the case, some poor janitor named Earl is sucking on a Juul in computer farm #34B with nothing but Juul-glow to light his way, because the boxes serving up the animated world’s images just eat power—Kirby. 794 is really cold, since it’s been optimized for hot boxes that crush triangles all day like dancing boots in concentration camps. No civilization, no globalization, no vroom-vroom of vehicles (renderin’ is what’s hinderin’). Look at these workstations. They’re blitzkrieg-fast. Fuck. Benchmarks so ridiculous you’d think yo mama sat on that bench. Animation pipeline—and every living creature on Earth-794—go brrr.
This world is killing a weird mouse named Robert(a), who lives in it. It’s true. Right at this moment, Robert(a), who would rather be called Roberta, wants to Fin herself because she was first drawn by the renderers as a mouse with pants instead of one with a little dress. This is the most salient reason Roberta is presently sad (but this story is present tense for a reason). Other life stuff factors in, too, “but not really,” according to Roberta. Roberta is pretty successful otherwise, according to Roberta.
But Roberta is two-dimensional (2D).
Roberta is 2D because she feels like no one. Not enough depth.
She has a mother who is 3D, a father also and he’s 3D. She lives in her parents’ 3D house.
Almost every adult is 3D.
A lot of 3D people are too symmetrical for Roberta’s tastes. Roberta thinks that whatever program makes normal people 3D just copy/pastes a bunch of flat cutouts of them next to each other until some rough facsimile of a 3D shape exists.
Roberta is absolutely right. The boxes that manifest objective reality are basically just big GPUs used to leverage really, really advanced sketch-based modeling applications.
Normies have to try hard to be unique, because everybody does. They have to take themselves apart with their own tools and put themselves back together, imperfectly. Those imperfections give more moar verisimilitude. A plucked whisker on the left side. A right shoe that’s bigger than the left one. An eye taken out. Personhood is both kiln and blender.
The process of doing this is difficult and arduous, and includes a lot of “finding oneself” (within some greater file structure, Robera knows; Explorer > C:\Users\Me\me.obj > Load … except things are never that simple, because finding drive is always hard, at least for Roberta).
Roberta doesn’t want to sit around trying to find things all day. Roberta never lost anything. Roberta is not in employment or training. Roberta doesn’t give a [train sound] about working on meshing with a society that she feels excluded from.
That’s why Roberta is kind of a loser. That’s why Roberta is angry all the time. Well, that, and the various conditions described by her therapist—a garden snake—in clinical language (“co-morbid”).
Everything is co-something.
It’s co-op when you’re on the couch with friends moving lots of Mario’s around (mama mia!). It’s co-dependency when you get carried by others in a co-operative game (such as the game of Life). It’s Co-bain when you’re co-dependent and the couch co-op isn’t there to lend you a temporary extra dimension.
Most of Roberta’s friends are 3D. She knows of very few people who are 2D at 27 years old.
2D people are always hard or impossible to find, mostly because 2D objects moving in 3D space are largely invisible unless you’re gazing at them from the right angle. Everybody has some kind of angle. The politicians spew them in rhetorical form. The {{{garden snakes}}} perch on them and sell pills that provide false, fleeting, or limited depth. 2.5D. 3D with rails. Little Big Globalists.
Roberta spends a lot of time looking for/at 2D’s, because she feels alone.
She wishes she could look cute like an anime girl (Sophie, or even Kiki) in a stylish witch-hat or princess’s gown. But she looks like Mrs. Brisby with stubble—or without stubble when she shaves, though even then, ugh. She’s even got the ratty cloak, because forget washing clothes.
Roberta also spends a lot of time laying in her house making silly or outright unhinged things that interest her. She builds them on her computer in AUTOCAD. Afterwards, she prints them with her 3D printer. (That is, a fabrication printer—a cube primitive with some tapered edges, if we’re talking what it looks like here—placed within three-dimensional space, that prints other, also three-dimensional objects. Yeah, I know.)
Her favorite thing to make is traps. Intricate ones. Totally theoretical of course. She would never want to harm anyone. Roberta hates people, but she isn’t a people-hurter. Mostly, she hates the world, “the game” as IceT puts it in the song that beeps more than her mouse-sized mobile phone. This is what she tells herself every night when she snuggles up awkwardly against her 3D body pillow that has a 2D girl on it.
She logs into her AUTODESK account. Her room is filled with hundreds of spring-loaded machinations, all built with a malice that’s scattershot, but also precision. Clockwork. This cube primitive has dimensions of 15 x 15 x 10 and one inset face that has been extruded to add a recess. It is situated over a cylinder primitive measuring 1 x 1 x 17.5. A torus-shaped piece of cheese that has dimensions of 1.8 x 1 x 1.2 rests on the floor plane underneath the box. This piece of rope has dimensions of …
“Ironic,” Roberta says to nobody in a goofy Palpatine voice, “She can tinker all day with .DWG files in Inventor, but can’t find the drive to tinker with herself.”
Goshdarnit, Roberta.
ii.
It’s Monday the somethingth, and today Roberta is visiting the Gate Keeper, because she feels—in this moment—that she needs to transition to 3D. She has felt this way in the past. Her many conditions make this mood big, but ephemeral.
The Gate Keeper is a huge piece of black obsidian named Galleo (he/him) that interrupts people a lot and listens very poorly (stone doesn’t have any ears, after all). Galleo is the biggest structure in the Smoking-Free Mental Health Campus. He’s even bigger than the Pharmaceutical-Industrial Complex, which is a building to his office’s rear that’s filled mostly with suboxone, SSRIs and people with various degrees, and some who languish in varying degrees of unconsciousness.
People say that there exists a door somewhere on Galleo that opens up when he helps you transition. Some people on r/DIY3D even claim to know where it is. Good luck finding it, you dummies, Roberta subvocalizes as she enters his office. He’s like 130 x 30 x 490. That’s a lot of space to search.
“I’m super here for you,” Galleo says in a sickly-sweet voice that sounds like an amalgam of all the male reporters featured on National Public Radio, “We can definitely get this figured out.”
Roberta wells up almost immediately, becoming spilly and sloshy like the Utah teapot.
“I can’t even feel anything when I hug my parents, how am I supposed to be anything but a fake?” she says through messy tears that splash against spiky stubble like Czech hedgehogs meeting the rolling waves on French beaches.
Galleo listens, for now. He knows Roberta is one of the biggest whales the Campus has. A medication management golden goose. Like the teapot, she’s become an in-joke to a cabal of programmers.
“Why do you think that is?” Galleo interjects as Roberta choke-hiccups.
“Because they’re complex polygonal structures, and I’m a 2D plane?!”
“I see,” Galleo is lying, because he has no eyes, nor is he capable of feeling any empathy.
“I just… I, I dunno, it’s…”
“Just a second,” Galleo stalls, “I need to redo your treatment plan. If you could answer a few of these questions.”
“Nearly every day, for everything.”
“Got it,” his heart is stone, but still it trembles.
He fills the awkward void between spiels by somehow displaying an emotion that he isn’t capable of—because he’s a piece of stone—in some novel or metaphorical way, just like I’m filling this space with words that are useless.
“So, it seems like we need to work on getting your self-image squared away.”
“Oh god,” Roberta says furiously and with some exhaustion, “I just… everytime I come in here, it’s back to the beginning of the maze.”
“This is necessary work, Roberta. It’s basic. Once we have that down, we can start the rest of the process. But YOU have to do this. Lots of soul searching and such.”
Roberta HAD been searching. She is searching now. She pictures herself. Her sweatpants, her matted brown hair, her file structure. The latter is a complete mess. Downloaded games in My Documents, 400 icons on the desktop, just trash.
How is she going to get through meshing, a process where you literally deconstruct your 3D self and reconstruct it to be unique, to be YOU, if she couldn’t even find me.PNG, her self-image. But at this point, it could literally be named anything. You.PNG. Them.PNG. Trashfag.PNG.
Now it’s 30 minutes into the session, and Roberta is feeling stupid like “why did I come?”
She’s feeling like adding dimensions to herself is just going to add problems, responsibilities that she doesn’t want, and extend her life into spaces (social and physical) that she doesn’t feel she belongs in.
2 x 4 are Roberta’s dimensions.
At this moment, she hates the prospect of adding Z to the mix. Z is for zombie, just like everyone else. Z is zzz, BORING.
“I see your gears working, Roberta. What’s really on your mind?”
Roberta lets loose with a rant on Everything. Theory of everything / Hybrid Theory vibes. She says “everything” 17 times. She says or implies “snakes” 15 times.
Galleo just wants the clock to jump ahead. Holy cow. He wants someone to adjust it to a time that transports him to a place—like those clever at-risk youth did in The Wire—preferably one that is far from here.
Condensation forms on the top of Galleo and runs down his patient-facing side, which is scrawled with the names of everyone who has ever Cobained because of Wellbutrin. During Roberta’s uncomfortable rant, a little blue woodpecker lands and starts etching another name onto the list.
“Ok, ok, so, just a second … “ He says finally.
Roberta is still going.
Galleo takes on the assertive voice he calls “Paul” in his highly-compartmentalized mind, the one that’s half McCartney, half Atreides, and says: “Slow down.”
Roberta continues, slower. She’s at 12 frames per second now.
“Come on Roberta, it’s OK.”
There is strain in her face, her little mousy features are twitching something powerful, even though she’s now only half as animated.
Galleo’s inscrutable senses catch something. He spins around so that his Complex-facing side, which has been polished to the point that it’s a black mirror, is facing Roberta.
“Slower,” he commands, “You have a lot of stuff hiding in your in-betweens.”
6 frames per second.
Roberta looks up, then stares, agape.
Between two keyframes that contain tormented facial expressions, she sees an image. Something out of character for her. Out of character for this reality.
Her face isn’t there. Her body isn’t there.
A strangely unsettling image—a woman in a bedroom “flanked” by two large black men—is occupying the entirety of the space where Roberta should be. But the people, they’re not colored right. No, Roberta isn’t prejudiced. What she means, she clarifies mentally, is that their skin tones exist outside of the palettes she’s familiar with seeing. They’re less consistent. In what kind of world do people have little blotches of discoloration? And why the mushrooms? Is this what they call … [flanking noises]?
And her little 2D window, her personal space, is just that image. The image has no transparency. It takes up the whole thing. There’s no part of Roberta, or anything else, anywhere.
She does a double take (“robert(a)_blink” in the animations library visible only to God and you, the reader), and the image is gone.
“Slower, Roberta,” the Gate Keeper drones.
She’s a languid crawl, now. Not her usual “on 1’s” self. Not even on 3’s. Not even on 4’s. Yikes.
Roberta is forced to look at every piece of stubble on her trainwreck face. 5, 10 second-long holds.
Then, more images. She sees planes dropping anvils on indeterminately-Asian humans. She sees what looks like Nightmare Before Christmas concept art rendered in eye-bleeding definition and—WHAT’S THIS?—the snowflake Jack’s holding is… yellow?
The clock on the wall says “Time’s up!” and then it’s back to the usual 24 for Roberta.
“Well, I hope we’ve made some progress here,” Gate Keeper Galleo says as he rotates back to his initial position.
Roberta is one hour older.
Roberta is idling.
Roberta is still 2D.
iii.
The artist formerly known as Roberta is now, right this instant at 6:52 PM Cartoon Standard Time, engaged in building horrible traps that will drop several anvils on live (!) people.
“Bertie?” her mom, who should probably shut up, queries while rapping against her door.
“It’s MouseTRAP, mom.” comes the terse reply.
“Must be roleplaying time,” her dad says with a smile, en route to his matchbox recliner in the TV room.
Her brother, home on a visit, is cracking up hard.
“Robert, hey. You freak.” Snicker, snicker. “You can’t really call yourself Mouse ‘TRAP’ because you could never trap anyone. Ha! A trap would be able to [sound of Gaius Terentius Varro’s troops being flanked hard by Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae].”
But MouseTRAP is undeterred, despite the sounds of war outside. Inside, Cobain is mumbling about Frances Farmer or something. The 3D printer is brrr’ing.
The hours roll off the clock as she extrudes and bevels away in Inventor. Any questions from family are waved away, with replies that are curt at best (and Kurt at worst).
Tick tick tick.
***
Kiki the witch comes out of her little wooden clock on the wall to say “Midnight” in Japanese, just as MouseTRAP’s brother is forcing the door.
A trip wire snags his foot as he tiptoes in with a worried expression on his face, then plop. Pie right in the eye. He stumbles sideways and steps onto a rake, which sits up like Undertaker to deliver a savage blow to his forehead.
His forehead bleeds—something sharp on the rake, probably—and when he leans forward, the blood drips off and deposits itself into a petri dish that runs on fast little legs while spinning its cylindrical body like a centrifuge. When the dish reaches its goal, a small box with a petri dish-sized opening, it leaps inside.
“Brother identified!” it says after a comically small amount of time that mostly serves to start a dialogue about the inefficiency of New York City forensic crime labs—shame on them for all those unprocessed rape kits. The box slides across the floor until it bumps into a power strip connected to a television and an XBox Series 9. ‘Off’ becomes ‘On’. The devices power up, casting light on the face of a man in a wifebeater who fits inside this mouse-sized house because perspective is a fickle mistress, especially when all the images are in your head.
He plays Halo: Infinite Ultimate Edition. Various @#$%#!’s fall out of his mouth into another box, which sits on a scale, and when the number on the digital display reads ‘69’, the scale explodes into shrapnel, a piece of which bounces off a spigot, activating a fire hose that sprays water on MouseTRAP’s brother.
He stumbles to the right and his foot depresses a pressure plate. This, finally, results in an anvil being dropped on the fattest, dumbest head in this house of mice with stylistically swollen noggins.
Stars, tons of them, appear above him and swirl for what seems like too long.
MouseTRAP’s brother has lost consciousness and has to be taken to the mousepital. He’ll attend Alcoholics Anonymouse at some point.
This is the last time he ever tries to interrupt his sister.
Ditto for the parents. They create new tunnels inside the house so that they don’t have to move through the same corridors as MouseTRAP, who they rarely see anyway.
Anvils are really heavy.
***
It’s days, weeks, months later and MouseTRAP is still dropping anvils on people. Around town. In the park. In the houses of worship. At the red carpet (a star-studded affair, heh). At the ComicCons. At the sad ball pit with like four people in it (ouch).
With every progressive drop, she is becoming a little bit better at it and a little more evil, like she’s the main guy from Diablo who winds up shoving a gem into his skull to contain Great Satan Daddy.
MouseTRAP is hunting.
Today, she has her sights set on a cute bug she wants to ensnare to keep as a pet. A spider to be exact, and a big one at that. This boi is thicc (unlike her), and comes up to what passes for her chest. The park is the perfect place to catch such a specimen.
She sets up her anvil dropper, adjusting the impact of the drop to “delicate” so as to not make her prey too sore.
She steps into a nearby ramen shop to do brunch.
She emerges, clean shaven chin-fur soaked in ramen juices. Mmmm.
She returns and checks the trap. Stars are emerging from below the anvil, making a familiar holding pattern. Success! Out of her pocket, she produces a net and draws closer.
But there is no spider underneath. As she comes upon the scene, she realizes that the anvil is also levitating. She nudges it with her net, sending it clattering to the rocky ground.
This is very bizarre, but what’s more unusual is the behavior of the stars. They don’t disappear.
MouseTRAP’s brow is on the ceiling. She crouches next to the miniature cosmic parade and watches it all day. The stars never dim. Their ambient glow shines brightly, as morning sun becomes afternoon sun. As cloud cover gathers. In the pouring rain.
Very strange.
***
EUREKA!
It has been only through diligent probing and prodding that MouseTRAP has discovered the secrets of stardust—inherent in all things—and by extension, the hidden power of the universe.
A little jar full of swirling stars sits next to her, various alligator clips attached to its base.
Her 3D printer is busy printing off a special net whose mesh is very fine. Not for catching spiders, but for bugs of another kind. Somewhere, Michael Faraday is saying “No fucking way bro.”
When it finishes, she dips the net into the jar and carefully plucks out a single star. It bounces furiously inside its prison until she lets it go.
The entire room glows yellow-gold.
Inside the jar, another starlet appears in its stead. The dance continues.
***
Kiki is shouting in MouseTRAP’s ear, and parents are stirring in the hallway, but who gives a damn about any of that?
Roberta’s room now looks like a planetarium. She’s pulled dozens of stars from the jar by this point. Each time, they replenish, as if by, well, you know. Starlight is ubiquitous, oppressive.
MouseTRAP emerges from her closet with a handheld voltmeter. She places it inside of one of the bouncing celestials.
Holy shit.
***
One thing you should never give to a person with a chip on their shoulder is power.
Napoleon didn’t need power. Hitler didn’t need power. Tim the Toolman Taylor didn-, well, OK, more power ugh ughn unn unn uughhn.
Now that all of MouseTRAP’s devices had easily-renewable, near infinite sources of power, her hometown got real dangerous.
The first thing she did was live out her (and my) fantasy of completely uprooting the well-meaning-but-completely-inept community mental health apparatus.
Friday morning, 7:00 AM. Smoking-Free Mental Health Campus.
“Oh, hello,” says a homeless man who has been dressed in the uniform of a nondenominational service worker, “I’m here to install the, uhh, the new … “
“Door?” the impatient woman at the desk says, with some entitlement, filing this guy as ‘below her social caste’ as she files her nails (and taxes, on the company’s time).
“Oh, yeah … the door.” He breathes a sigh of relief as the raygun at the small of his back slides away.
“Who’s that with you?” The woman asks.
Before she can look, MouseTRAP has already turned to the side, rendering herself invisible.
“Oh… Just, uh, God?”
The woman rolls her eyes. “Clinging to God and their guns,” she thinks, buzzing the door.
In a couple minutes, the man and the trap are in the Gate Keeper’s office setting up a machine-assisted, star-powered slingshot that generates enough torque to make Johnny Knoxville say something really fucking stupid.
An activation release is rigged to the doorknob with a pulley, and the sling is slung around Gate Keeper Galleo, the big man hisself, who is currently napping.
Now, the intention of this device is, in MouseTRAP’s mind, to punish the intern whose job it is to wake Galleo and get him ready for his morning duties: powering him up, rebooting if necessary, yoga for an hour, etc. Punish them, to be clear, by throwing the whole of the Gate Keeper’s mass at their face/body.
What actually happens is that MouseTRAP forgets her raygun in the office and decides to go back for it, thinking that she can open the door juuuuuust enough to … oops.
In an instant of terror, the trap triggers and some 400 tons of gatekeeping is flung a little farther than expected. MouseTRAP narrowly avoids the stoney clinician’s girth (and shards of his large office door) as it careens through office space at rapid speed, demolishing most of the building before hitting a parked car. But it doesn’t end there.
God, who probably never expected something so big to move so quickly, scratches his head for a moment and then says, “Well, that car isn’t going to stop an out of control black monolith!” So it doesn’t. Gate Keeper Galleo keeps going for some 5500 miles, cutting a swath through this town and the next and the next, sinking slightly into the ground as he travels. And when he reaches Albuquerque, he doesn’t turn left (because he can’t stop)—he simply destroys it in what the mayor later calls “an act of boldly-partisan federal overreach.”
And that’s all, folks!
iv.
But wait, I say, as the curtains close on this narrative of sweet revenge.
“Wait,” MouseTRAP thinks, because she’s my character, but also because she’s legitimately intellectually curious, something I, your narrator, probably won’t ever be.
“What are the limits of these magic stars? Can I just have as many as I want?”
The answer, it turns out, is “Yes, but … “, which is a phrase that helps many tabletop roleplaying game GMs contain burgeoning power creep (or at least make it narratively interesting).
One day, MouseTRAP just spends all her waking hours pulling little stars out of the jar with her net.
She doesn’t use them to power any devices, she just leaves them in the alcoves and nooks and crannies of her (parents’) mouse hole.
Pretty soon she’s got like a thousand starlets in her room. Her room lookin’ like a Disney channel exec’s totally platonic barbeque slash designer bathing suit costumes-but-only-for-hosts party. That’s a mouthful.
Anyway, weird things start to happen.
The walls in MouseTRAP’s room disappear. That’s not to say that they stop holding up the house—structural integrity is maintained—but they are just, like, blinked out of reality. Strangely, she can still see the corridors that run throughout the place. It’s like she can see through everything, into every room.
But there’s more.
Most of the things in the rooms are invisible too. The floor is there, yeah, but many household objects have vanished!
She can see into her parents room—from her own bedroom!—and there’s the parental nest, and the little covers that go on top of it. There’s the depression where her parents should be. There’s the bedpost banging against the wall and… HELLO. Flanking. Flanking. Flanking!
MouseTRAP stumbles outside. Some buildings around her house are just gone. Poof. Some streetlights, too. The cars that go by cast light from their headlamps, but that’s the only sign that they’re present at all.
“Weird,” she thinks as she’s almost stepped on by a disembodied shoe that has no foot in it, and no person attached to that foot.
***
All Roberta K. Rat ever did was exacerbate problems, and MouseTRAP is no different.
It’s the next day. So far, she has pulled 7,390 stars out of the jar.
This world is in its twilight.
3D people walk around bumping into each other because they can’t see themselves, let alone anyone else. They stay at home wrapped in invisible 3D sheets. They cry invisible 3D tears.
MouseTRAP sits with an invisible cup in her room and drinks these tears, lmao (granted, the cup is invisible because it’s a mental construct, not because of whatever is making the other, tangible things in the world imperceptible).
Standing before the last visible mirror in her house, MouseTRAP peers into herself.
Hey, 2D Roberta is still kicking. And is she gaining a bit of Z?
Nah.
Things come and go, mostly go. She misses her parents. The final thing to disappear is her beloved 3D printer.
She is overcome, and lies flat on her stomach for like 3 days. Now she’s beyond the sight of even God (though possibly not Satan, since he’d be looking up at the front side of her 2D plane).
She wonders where all the other 2D’s are. She stands up, opens her no-show window and serenades the encroaching night with her version of “Somewhere Out There”, which sounds like: “Hey, are there any 2D’s who wanna chill, no Netflix, just cuddle, forever?”
Surely there must be other 2D people out there.
“Maybe I just don’t have the right angle,” she thinks.
She goes to a different window as the sun sets, reiterating her sermon unto the departing volumetric fog.
No reply.
She sees no one, hears nobody.
***
Now, at 10:30 PM Cartoon Standard Time—a time when it would be dark anyway—Roberta gathers up as many stars as she can carry. They bloom brightly, so bright it’s blinding, but their shine has no surfaces except Roberta’s person to illuminate.
There is no pretense of walls, or anything anymore. Roberta can just walk endlessly from here to Timbuktu if she wanted to.
But where are all the 2D’s at?
“I’ll make a new world,” she says, thinking, “If you build it, they will come.”
Then she proceeds to tinker for 3 whole days with reconstructing the insides of Howl’s Moving Castle’s titular estate using star stuff, which seems to be the only stuff remaining.
On Day 3, she gives up because it’s hard. Recreating a 2D anime movie in a 3D space is hard. Drawing is hard. Finding the drive to do anything is hard.
Wait …
… Nevermind.
v.
Earl, the Senior Custodial Technician of Earth-794 is done with this bullshit.
He has to get up at 0’dark 30 to unfuck these damn boxes in 34B.
Boxes sho’ is running hot. Sho’ is warm in heah. Damn.
The boxes are “under maximum load” with “GPU pipeline crashes imminent.” That’s what Boss Man says. Jargon to old Earl. Can’t they just let a man enjoy being toasty?
Everything goes dark when he flicks the reset switch. Darker than black. 15 damn minutes of night.
His Juul keeps his soul, and lower face, alight during this time.
After the reset, the room is bathed in its usual blue/green hue. Lights from the boxes.
Earl exhales menthol goodness and blinks. There’s a huge rat, portly sumbitch, warming itself underneath one of the boxes.
He can’t tell if the rat is male or female, but it sho’ is big, so he says, “I’ma getchu, Mr. Captain.” and picks up his broom. He takes aim and lets loose, swinging for the fences, Jackie. I mean, yeah, he fucking crushes that rat. 1956 World Series, bottom of the 2nd. The crowd erupts. RIP. There’s blood all over the floor and one of the boxes.
Earl has overperformed. Probably gonna need a stain remover to get this mess up.
“Shee-yeeit,” he says.
It takes Earl 10 minutes to get the drive to toss the rat into his rolling waste bin. Getting the clorox might be another 5.
“Ay Earl,” says a voice from behind. Rae, his supervisor, is leaning over his shoulder, glancing at the stain. Earl almost had a damn heart attack. The biggest one. But Rae was cool though.
“How big that sumbitch was?” Rae’s smirk is endearing, even in the gloom.
“Well, I’d reckon, ‘bout … ” Earl stretches his two index fingers apart an eyeballed-rat’s length, “Yeah, ‘bout that size, lengthwise.”
“Thicc as fuck,” Rae says, slapping his buddy on the back.
“Me-oh-my.” Earl says jovially as his gut rumbles.
— Kill Rudy Johnson. Please.