Tree Frog

The Flammable Man
Humanous Lives
Sonic Mothman
B. Franklin’s Discovery of Electricity
The Return of Flammable Man
Echo of the Humanous
Easy Mothman
Gravity Lighthouse
Flammable Man = mc(2)

The Flammable Man

She said it got her all hot and bothered. He wouldn’t have
done it if it wasn’t an aphrodisiac. He remembered the good
old days when he used to think an aphrodisiac was a hair style…
before she read that fateful article in the woman’s magazine
and said she wanted him to try it.
He was a gas station attendant. He worked there all day and
would come home Michelin black from oil and rubber and
smelling of gasoline. The gasoline smell drove her wild. She
would go crazy: touching him, caressing him, pawing him,
massage heavy burning, her breath ecstatic.
After she told him about the gasoline smell (blurting
“my aphrodisiac!”) he accepted her suggestion and rubbed
a hand of gas down across his hair before going home.
It ran greasy down his forehead, stung his eyes, but he
combed it in, his hair slicked back, black and shining.
When he got home, she crashed at him like a moth to
the flame and they rolled across the carpet, tearing at
each other, ripping at each other with their teeth and
nails, her faint gas-inhaling head glued to his shoulder,
panting like a big mile walked dog. He groaned, they
pinwheeled over the carpet, tumbleweeded with a crash
into a table, knocking books, magazines and pencils
down on top of their skin. And an ashtray fell too,
scattering gray dust down like Hiroshima rain.
And also a half burned cigarette, smoking still,
toppled down onto his head. An orange flash erupted
and the two of them woke up looking through eyeslit
bandages in a linoleum ammonia smell hospital.
“Ammonia!” he lusty looked over at her across from
him, wrapped in white and she gasped beautifully.




Humanous Lives

We became amateur Doctor Frankensteins one hungry
night, playing Gods, creating new life. What we had
wanted to begin with was simply a soup that could last
all week. “It’s okay, so it’s more of a stew than a soup.”
That wooden spoon was getting stuck as I tried to stir it.
And he kept adding more rice, “I think it needs more
curry.” Something primeval was bubbling in the pot
and finally we gave up and banished it to the frozen
wastelands of the fridge…There was still no food in
the cupboards though and in desperation it wasn’t
long before we took a daring new look at the soup/stew.
As it glowed and growed on the refrigerator shelf in
a thick, silver spacesuit helmet-like cooking bowl,
I said it was luminous.
“What?”
“I said it’s luminous in there.”
He laughed. “I thought you said it’s humanous.”
It shifted uneasily towards its name, making a sloshing
sound.
Fortunately, no vengeful mob of angry townspeople
with torches was necessary to kill Humanous. No terrifying
chase across rocks to a burning windmill. Humanous was
buried in the garbage bag and dumped like a pirate’s
fool’s gold on the sidewalk at midnight.
No mad scientist can again release Humanous onto
the world, there is no recorded recipe. There will be no:
Son Of Humanous
No:
The Curse Of Humanous
No:
I Was A Teenage Humanous
And no:
Humanous vs. Rodan
Humanous will not return like black and white 1950s sci-fis.
It will not arise from the ocean or out of a landfill. It will be
discovered by archaeologists in 3012 A.D and wrongly
identified as Post-Modern Art.




Sonic Mothman

There’s a place in South Dakota where the days and nights are
the loneliest of any place south of Nome. The Church of U.F.O
was painted over the door and a neon eye surrounded by stars
glowed on the peak of the roof. Mosquitos and moths traveled
miles in Ziebach county to flap around the eye light.
As luck would have it, he was working under the hood of his
junked Cadillac when the air split at the seams with a sonic boom.
He smashed his head and screamed, deafened and startled
beyond belief. He cursed the sky, the invention of the jet engine
and the United States Air Force, rubbing the painful tender bump.
“My name is Mothman and I’ve come to save the human race.”
A moth winged man with red eyes stared down at him from
the roof. Mothman snapped his fingers and all the weapons
on planet Earth turned into a butter. Mothman clapped his
furry hands and every politician became a flowerpot.
Suddenly, Washington D.C became theGreenhouse Effect,
the Republican Party is poison ivy. Then Mothman exploded
away and reappeared on a tall glowing 7-11 sign in
Viola, Tennessee.




B. Franklin’s Discovery of Electricity

She was a tall woman and that was her downfall.
If she’d been three feet shorter, this might never
have happened.
Bea Franklin was worried that lightning might
strike the metal flagpole saluting off the corner of
her house.
So with the dark clouds boiling over her, she went
to the roof and pulled the retractable flagpole under
the eaves.
Rain made the shingles slippery, she nearly fell.
Just as she got her balance, lightning bolted out
of the sky and hit her in the head.
Her seven foot frame tipped over the edge like
a smoking dinosaur skeleton and set the garden
on fire.




The Return of Flammable Man

“Hey buddy, got a match?”
At the gas station they laughed and joked about
his burns. He still wore the bandages and walked
around the gas pumps like the Invisible Man in his
misty London, plotting their deaths.
If the 10 Commandments had been juggling pins,
two of them (murder and adultery) flashed from hand
to hand. Adultery…He had never cheated on his wife,
never even would have contemplated it if it wasn’t for
the unexpected arrival of the circus.
A black limousine followed in wake of the circus caravan
of trucks and cars and parked next to him. As the window
rolled down, she spoke from inside. Her voice was concealed
by white cloth and asked quietly for Unleaded Supreme.
It was all she needed to say, all that the 100 million years
of the creation of petroleum mattered.
They both sensed dinosaurs of love.
She opened the passenger door for him and the two of them
disappeared…the carbon monoxide pouring silently through
the floor made them tired and they leaned on each other for
support. The car was flying. 78 mph.




Echo of the Humanous

Humanous, the luminous human, so bright and fiery
he turns his friends into their shadows on the floor,
makes anything into instant candle wax. Before him,
a thick oak door will melt into brown, and as he passes
through, the room will become a sea of colors of what
once was there. Poor Humanous hasn’t talked to anyone
in burned away calendar months…Not since he stood
at the edge of that waterfall canyon (glowing from his
heat like a lighthouse in a pack of crayons) and shouted
across to somebody who would answer him seconds later.
But it may have been just an echo.




Easy Mothman

Out of the sky, to the same ground where Dennis Hopper
and Peter Fonda were blown away and crashed and burned,
Mothman hurtled. He struck that gentle green bayou like
a meteor. A blinding explosion, a spool of green smoke, quiet.
Long minutes passed in that silence, crickets and birds held
their small breath, the wind dropped away, while the sky
turned into glass.
Finally, Mothman stirred in the round torn crater, his antenna
twitched and he rolled onto his side painfully.
Sound returned to the landscape: the baying of bloodhounds
on the trail of some wounded animal.
Wind blew through the shotgun torn wings on his back as he
flapped them hopelessly. “They shot me,” he mourned the
shattered wings and he stumbled out of the ditch.
The dogs were getting closer.
Tangles of kudzu tripped him as he tried to run from the shouting
voices down the road. A mothman attempting to run is a slow big
target, he knew he didn’t stand a chance.
A gunshot ripped overhead.
He leaped back into the underbrush.
There it was, he practically fell on top of it, wrapped in decades
of weeds and flowers. Mothman grabbed the rusty handlebars
and unburied The American Dream.




Gravity Lighthouse

He was living with a girl who was very casually lighting and
throwing firecrackers. At the balcony window, she was like
a gunpowder Rapunzel, ten stories up the tall wall of ivy.
While he was in the kitchen, pouring coins into his shoes.
He clanked heavily into the other room where she leaned up
against the opened window. “I heard that if you put a penny
in your shoe, it’s good luck,” he said. “I’ve got 15 dollars and
37 cents in these shoes!”
She stared at him unimpressed and struck a match with a
sudden flick of her wrist.
He was standing very close to her, smiling enormously.
“Awww, get lost!” she shoved him hard enough for him to
lose his balance and fall right out of the lighthouse window.
His good luck took him straight to the bottom of the Pacific
Ocean with the starfish.




Flammable Man = mc(2)

Without warning, he was prone to suddenly growing,
300 feet tall. It was his latest misfortune: a result of being
blasted with enough radioactive isotopes to boil water on
Pluto. Now he was wandering in the desert somewhere
north of Los Alamos, with only shreds of clothing to cover
his sunburns and living on lizards and cactus. For the fifth
time since Tuesday, he was a giant. He could see past the
mountains, to the oceans and smoggy cities. It was terrifying
for him to be a human skyscraper though and he had his eyes
tightly shut. (He was afraid of heights.)
At least he had been offered a job. Someone in a yellow suit
wanted him to paint ‘Fastfood, Fun, Friends, Next Exit’ on
his chest and sit by the freeway. For $4.50 an hour all day.
Even in the desert it was hard to escape.
News crews followed in his tracks, turning him into a primetime
sideshow. That’s how his wife finally saw him and immediately
she got on the first available flight to New Mexico.
Maybe she was carrying a miracle antidote in her handbag?
Or maybe she just wanted to kick his huge ankle for running
out on her. She was staring out the window at the dull clouds
as plane descended to land.
His eyes snapped open at the sound of jet engines. He didn’t even
have time to duck.
“This is flight 739er to Control Tower requesting GAAAH!!!”
But Los Alamos is used to fireball explosions.




cover drawing: aaron gunderson
writing: allen frost in 1991