The American Dream - Served Raw...

a short story

The sun slid down the shit-brown sky over Mayfield like a grease stain you couldn't scrub off. The air smelled like burned tires and wet dog. The only thing greener than the meth labs was the mold growing on the Baptist Church walls.

About a hundred of them, the proud white trash of Mayfield, circled the cracked concrete village square, gathering at the stage for the annual Inbreeding Contest. No suits. No ties. No degrees. Just cigarette burns on sweatpants and beer foam and puke in baby strollers. At the center, Mr. Opal, wearing a moth-eaten Confederate jacket and a Davy Crockett hat stained with who the fuck knows what. A man so old and pickled he could fart dust and blow away.

He yanked the tarp off the stage.

Cue Calvin and Harlene. Brother and sister. Also aunt and nephew if you went by the family tree, which looked like a fucking noose.

Calvin, who had a face like a melting candle. Harlene, missing a leg but still managing to look proud like some kind of swap-meet beauty queen in a Dollar Tree tiara. They had been practicing since puberty. Fucking behind Walmart dumpsters, under rusty Ford pickups, behind the methadone clinic.

The siblings went at it.

The villagers howled.

They whipped out their crusty cocks and beat them raw. Wives fingered themselves with chewed-down bloody nails. Kids clapped sticky hands. Pork rings flew. Hooch bottles broke.

One big happy family.

The Inbreeding Contest was Mayfield’s Super Bowl. Its Oscars. It’s State of the mother-fucking Union. Only here, the winner didn’t get a trophy.

They got pregnant.

***

Nine months later, the real show began. Private jets buzzed low over Mayfield’s junkyard skyline, their engines purring like fat cats in heat. Blacked-out SUVs coughed dust down pothole roads. The buyers had arrived. Billionaires with fake smiles and blow-dried toupees. "Visionary" tech nerds who thought microchipping toddlers was the future. Orange-faced politicians who preached family values on Sunday morning, and spent Sunday night snorting coke off the backs of trafficked Boy Scouts. They came here for the baby auction. And the menu was pure fire and brimstone.

Harlene, doped to all holy Hell, waddled onstage. Barefoot. Half-conscious. Her belly a pulsing watermelon of incest and desperation. When the baby came, it shot out in a geyser of piss and blood, splattering the front rows. Billionaires in loafers made from the skins of endangered species licked their lips. The baby twitched and howled. Five arms. No eyes. A mouth stitched shut like it knew better. The bidding started at six figures.

The one percenters didn't eat caviar anymore. No more Iberian ham. No more seared duck breast in Gorgonzola sauce.

They ate babies.

Real ones.

Inbred.

Grilled, poached, braised in truffle oil. Baby cheeks roasted to a pink crisp. Baby thighs tenderized with gold-plated mallets. Baby ribs stripped clean between Crest Strip whitened teeth. The man with the bad spray tan and the two-sizes-too-big suit dug into the baby liver with his bare hands, muttering about "Making America Great Again" between bites. The brain-chip entrepreneur who tweeted rocket emojis from his ivory tower demanded his baby be filleted alive to preserve the "vitality."

They told themselves it was power.

They told themselves it was art.

They told themselves it made them invincible.

They told themselves anything to forget the horror melting on their plates.

***

But Mayfield wasn’t stupid.

They knew exactly what they were doing.

The villagers had perfected a biological nuke in human form. A slow, sexy, mouth-watering apocalypse. Each inbred baby sold was a trojan horse.Because the meat was cursed. It wasn’t natural. It rewrote DNA like a deranged tattoo artist with a grudge. Eat enough, and your body forgot how to be human.

Extra arms.

Fused eyelids.

Sackfuls of tumors where your balls used to be.

First the billionaires sprouted tails. Then they drooled in board meetings. Then their heirs were born looking like flesh-colored cockroaches with patches of mangy hair. The country club bathrooms filled with secret sobs and deformed children flushed like goldfish from the school carnival. The "self-made men" collapsed under their own bloated, mutating bodies.

The rich weren't just dying.

They were evolving backwards.

At home, Mayfield tuned in to the cable news shows they pirated through satellite dishes duct-taped to dead oak trees. They laughed until they pissed their pants. There was the billionaire tech "visionary" giving a TED Talk while his third arm wriggled out of his armpit and knocked over the microphone. There was the ex/current-president caught on tape trying to sell miracle cures made of bleach enemas and gorilla cum, his face sagging like a rotting Halloween pumpkin.They weren't leaders anymore. They were freak shows.

Mayfield’s revenge wasn’t bombs or protests. It was simple biology. Feed the monsters their own extinction. One tender, bloody mouthful at a time. Now, Mayfield's daughters stalked Ivy League campuses like smiling saboteurs. They slipped sleek black cards into Republican pockets at fundraisers.

"Come party," they whispered.

"Come taste what real freedom feels like."

The fat men in red hats thought they were getting a secret taste of forbidden fruit. What they were getting was a one-way ticket to mutant city. The White House interns started birthing babies with horns and claws. Senators' grandkids had glowing eyes and prehensile tails. Wall Street executives waddled down trading floors with extra noses sprouting from their cheeks.

But by then it was too late. The white trash they mocked had already won. Mayfield rose up not with guns. Not with prayers. Not with votes. But with tainted wombs and sharpened teeth. The villagers of Mayfield buried the old America under a mountain of deformed flesh. And built a new one. One bloody, beautiful, fucked-up baby at a time.