OFF-CUTS!

In Goo We Trust (The Tale of Howie Stickum)

Flaming beasts of pestilence burst through our back windows as usual.

Sunday's here.

They chirp, they chatter, they tear holes through our serenity.

We jump, we move, we follow, leaving everything behind.

Outside the stately gathering house, they dance, then they explode.

I envy the kinship they exhibit in their united self-destruction.

Burly armed men shepherd us inside where our viscid overlord, Clagg, awaits us with glooping arms akimbo.

We kneel upon mats of finely broken glass and flypaper.

Our blood muddles with the adhesive, a divine impurity.

Consecrated desecration.

Every believer gazes skyward in sequence and waits for communion to begin.

The sanctified guards surround us, their fully automatic glue guns in hand.

Clagg raises his hands, and we shout.

"Drown me, drown us in the stickiness of your love so that we may either learn or die. For we'll cling to you forever. In Goo we trust; Ah-shoot!"

Layers of the blessed discharge projects all over us, and we writhe in waves of heavenly pleasure.

At the front of the room, white smoke pours from the mindless eye sockets of a faithless tape-head; does this not prove the gooey power of our almighty?

This plastic-backed heresy has run out of time.

Now is the sticky-icky era.

The heretic's silence as they painfully pulpify to sacred glue amid our holy orgy proves our faith is true.

Wow, the smell wafting off of their sizzling body as it melts emits the most pleasant odor, I have to feel them.

Nothing's better than rolling around a mid-transfigurative while some of their former mortality remains.

You feel so connected, so inhumanly human.

I'm in luck.

The others haven't noticed yet.

I get up, run, and launch myself at their white jellifying form.

The nonbeliever's body bursts, splashing gelatinous chunks of sacred alabaster muck all over the room.

As I wriggle in the tacky bonds of life, the sanctified guards begin the long process of sucking everything back inside their blessed glue guns for reuse, including us.

Our merging is imminent; once we're inside the gun, we'll be one with the majestic glue.

We'll become the sticky-icky.

I feel my body liquefy as the nozzle touches my leg; the sensation is more painful than I expected.

Agonizing liquefaction is punishment for the heathens, so I thought our metamorphic unification would be orgasmic.

Oh well, I'll be gone soon, and there'll be an us, one us.

Every part of me feels like it's being pulled through a gigantic burning mincer.

I'm inside the gun now, and I still have my senses, my individual senses.

When does our melding begin?

Has Clagg lied to us?

I see out of the clear barrel as we're taken into the backroom for ascension, but there's no Goo-God here.

There's only a bunch of small plastic pots.

Oh, my Glob!

We're the glue, we always have been.

Floating consciousnesses built to bond, not to unify.

This glue gun's my prison, this pot, my hell.