Free Book of Jim: Agnostic Parables and Dick Jokes From Lucifer's Paradise by Adam Spielman Page A

ran his fingers over the haggard body of the guitar.  “I never thought I’d play again,” he said.  “Everything got so fucked up the first time around.  But there’s something about this place.  The bleakness .  Like, this guitar, I hacked the wood for the body out of a tree with a sharp rock.  The tuning pegs are hawk bones.  The strings are guts.  It’s the best guitar I ever played.”
    Jim sat down on a bare rock in the shallow cave.  Cobain strummed his guitar.  The cave reverberated the imperfections of the sound and the bleakness hid in the cracks of the mountain.
    “It’s raw,” Jim said.
    Cobain moved the hair from his eyes.  “It’s strange.  When you get everything you’ve got nothing.  I had everything once, and then paradise was just everything all over again.  It took somebody to come along and take it all away, and now I’ve got something again.”  He played a single chord.  “I got raw again.”
    “Can I ask you something?  I guess it’s kind of personal.”
    “That’s alright.”
    “Why did you kill yourself?”
    A smile played between Cobain’s teeth.  “It seemed important at the time,” he said.  “And there was a lot of pain.  The useless kind of pain, the kind that just sits in your head and makes you heavy and takes the color out of everything.  It makes you ugly.  I guess the worst part is being able to see how ugly you’ve gotten, and not being able to do anything about it.  So I did something about it.”  He turned a hawk-bone peg and the tone of the deepest gut-string fell.  “I didn’t kill myself for any special reason.  I killed myself because I wanted to die.”   
    Jim tried to think of something to say.  He couldn’t.  Then Cobain said,
    “It was crazy to see it.  I just expected darkness.  Then I was standing there over my body, looking at the chunks of my brain mashed into the ceiling.  Like, the mess never occurred to me.  The pain was all cerebral.  Metaphysical.  Seeing your metaphysics splattered around the room, gushing out of the back of your head, it’s a pretty harsh trip.
    “But what really fucked with me was when the angel popped up next to me.  He said, I bet you’d have written a kick-ass song about that.”
    “Did you?”
    Cobain plucked a few notes.  “It’s a little rough around the edges,” he said.
    And he played a song.
    5
    The peak of the Stupid Fucking Mountain was just another rock.  Jim kicked it down the side of the mountain and watched it roll.  With the song of Cobain in his head he showed his balls to the bleakness, and his heart drummed four beats at a measure. 
    He pulled out his smart phone and texted to Cherry,
    the nuke is hot

 
     

 
    IX
    1
    Paradise lay flat and gray.  Ashes fell from the mushroom cloud and made a quiet blanket on the ground. 
    Jim looked at his dick.  “How many megatons was that?”
    “I don’t know, but I can’t move,” Cherry said.  Her breasts were soft and pink beneath the fallout.  Her blasted pussy murmured queefs that stirred the ashes.
    Jim thought, When she does move, she’ll leave an angel in those ashes.  He kissed her on the forehead.  Then he stood and stretched.  He wanted a sandwich, but he doubted any sandwiches survived.
    “Did we overdo it?” he said.
    “Water,” Cherry said.
    “I don’t see any water.”
    “I’m so thirsty.”
    Jim looked out over the flatness and the grayness.  There was nothing, and he beheld it.   Then a jagged light broke the sky and it ripped through the air like lightning.  The atomic flakes shuddered in the waves of the ripping.  A tremor swam through the ground.
    “No more,” Cherry said.
    “That wasn’t me.”
    Then there was a warbling whoomf.  A hole came into the world and the devil walked out of it.  Jim thought for a moment that she had painted her face, but the black lines were mascara.  She was crying.
    2
    “They are so cruel to me,” she said.  “Why are they so