This is a story about a girl I'm after named Ohey! that ends with me on The Worm Gang's couch watching Jeopardy! Ohey! is a witch I'm after with benefits. I'm heading to The Worm Gang's hideout on the flip side of my fictional city and stopping at stop signs in my VW Ghia.
 
I get there, am let in, and it's like how it is when I go there. Ohey! is there but I can't see her. I see the rest of the gang on couches and leaning. Clev's in the kitchen cleaving. Nina's wiping the cover of a book with a cloth. Annie and Angi, the twins, sit at the couch, conjoined at the calves, and there's Ohey! peeking from the hall. I wink and she disappears.
 
What's cooking? I say something like to Clev who won't be bothered.
 
How did I even walk in here? No one sees me?
 
Oh, Hi Nina, how's the new job? It's fine, I'm dusting these books. Like a jacket, I offer. Solid, she says like it's her new slang. Where's, I begin but stop because there's Ohey! from the hallway again, so I venture.
 
The trouble is, once Ohey! and I get our clothes floored, we're no longer ourselves. We become metal-headed heroin machines. It's rocky at first but the going's rock-rupturing and nearly nauseating, like how the last full moon lasted.
 
But there's screaming from the kitchen. Oh god. Ohey! says this and something else. We go to the kitchen wearing what we're wearing and it's Clev on the floor with her arm severed and in a large popcorn bowl full of ice Nina's preparing like a snack. Clev's wah-wahing on the floor. Ohey! jackets herself and follows Nina and the bowl out the door. The twins pick up Clev and help her out the door, and that's the last of The Worm Gang gone. A leaf floats in on a breeze through a window and follows them out the door. A dog behind me barks. I sit on the couch. What is... Jupiter.

Darby Larson's stories have been published in Caketrain, New York Tyrant, SmokeLong Quarterly, No Colony and others.

To link to this story directly: http://wigleaf.com/201003ohey.htm

Detail of illustration on main page courtesy of Roy Blumenthal.

Read other DL stuff from the archive.

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