As he drifted off he heard the rain pattering on the roof like baby food. All that money wasted on birth control pills. He dreamt of cold steel rubbing him, and chanting Ohm chakras and executing aerobatic flips and wiggles. Maybe sometimes they were vegetables. Cauliflower girders with brussel sprout rivets drilled in with screwdriver carrots; Allen-wrench celery and cucumber peel nuts around coiled pickled bolts. That sort of thing. Maybe they started mumbling about the future. Long lawns with patchy grass and an old fence that never gets around to getting repaired. Cracking but careful parched bone driveways with cursory strips of stretchy black tar settling in its cracks. The occasional ant and the corners where the calm colored paint is just now beginning to chip. The mailbox with the few high tufts of grass clinging to the pole to avoid the weekly buzzing blade. The curtains that don’t match but instead compliment the couch, the chair, all gifts. The slowing of time, multiplied by the division of secular and uneventful time, equals the eventual dimming of the light and raising of the warmth. Or maybe it doesn’t. Because sometimes there are rips in the sky, maybe, sometimes there is a color that lurches, in this place where absolutely everything is permissible except for lurching. God forbid the lurch. But that’s just what happens.

A coffee cup the size of a van falls from the empty cream colored and blinding sky and smashes into the roof just over the master bedroom, crushing the antique dresser and matching vanity taken from a dead or institutionalized grandparent. This it grinds into the four year old pale blue carpet, shattering the ashtray used for a jewelry container, bending irrevocably the black brush with the skinny tufts of hair too annoying to pull out sticking out and tickling the little white impregnated ends of the bristles. Even after the entire house collapses upon it, there are still hairs loosely swinging from this brush. The clock radio is dashed into an organic electronic mess like a slaughtered rat, maybe it squeals a few twerps of an FM prayer or blurts out one last obscenity of the alarm buzzer. Coming down at a beautiful angle reminiscent of a perfectly arched and spinning quarterback’s pass a purple concrete left slipper the size of a Cadillac rams in and through the garage, coming in with a bit too much angle at the top and so taking quite a lot of the roof with it. It wasn’t a soft slipper at all and so hundreds of half empty aerosol spray cans exploded in an infinitesimally short moment of WD-40, weed killer, spray paint, degreaser, brake fluid, windshield wiper fluid, furniture polish, Windex, the occasional can of freon, bug spray, hand lotion, vanilla scent, disinfectant, and petroleum fueled explosive glory. This vomited into the kitchen always the harbinger of such garages along with the insulting stone hard purple toe of the strangely bucolic smelling left slipper from the sky. All was chaos. Jelly mixed with mustard, the trash vaulted into the fridge, lettuce flirted with soda pop, corn chips were brewed with coffee, the windows took on a nice eighteenth century style varnish and the cabinets all turned inside out confessing sins of secret Twinkies and forgotten vitamins and little unassuming mouse turds. The linoleum cracked along its fake tile lines in an orgasmic assumption of an additional tenth of the qualities of its ever-constant object of mockery. The oval vinyl topped center of the world of the family embarrassingly split along where its extension and insert should be and collapsed empty handed inwards like an unprofessionally built dome. The salt and pepper shakers fell and spilt like innocent kitten’s loose bowels. That morning’s paper immediately went up in flames at this utter blasphemy of it’s all Seeing Eye’s divine media truth. The slipper and the coffee cup perhaps had known this incident would never be reported from the get go.

And then of course birds flew out from the oven, the microwave tuned into bad AM bigotry talk shows, and mayonnaise found its fat and devious way into the silverware drawer where it mixed in an unholy alliance with blue Kool-Aid powder. The little seashell toothpick holder melted into a popping porous blood and tar colored mass. Milk and tar fell from the drywall ceiling as the pink insulation in the attic melted to a sick fake carbon based shit and oozed through the holes drilled for light fixtures and this first dripped and then poured onto the hard purple slipper, which ended up now half in the kitchen, half in the garage, of which the kitchen had harked upon. All this was a great mess, and Job dreamed it in modern motion camera style, with realistic camera shaking and room to room crossfades that saw the insides of the walls where mice and spider webs gathered in druidic simplicity among the wood chips, electrical wiring and dust.

And then everything was still, and the dust dripped, and the liquid oozed silently, and puff clouds of purified material played minuets in the sublime sunlight. The coughing hum of the dying refrigerator’s compressor died erratically trying its best to work it up to an almost organic quality. It puttered and rattled, and then all was quiet but for the sound of the dust. And then there was laughing in the background, and then, then there was the sound of Guns and Roses.

As Job peered down through the grating and saw the flannel, and the faded blue, and the glimmerings of flesh, the following is just what he heard.

Buy the Book!