Chum

By on Oct 7, 2012 in Fiction

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Corn with superimposed nerves

Jimmy was the guy who invented the Pestilent Maize, the sentient corn genome. He was working for Rybogerm at the time. It was Jimmy’s job to come up with new species to patent. Jimmy was no genius. He got into food chemistry at first. Worked on Popsicles. Flavor retention, color purity, that sort of thing. Then he did some interesting work with spreadable cheese. Rybogerm hired Jimmy to figure out how to make ice cream that wouldn’t melt. One day he was fiddling around with some stem cells and managed to splice human DNA with corn DNA. He went home and told the Resource chick what happened, and she started calling him Doctor Mengele. Jimmy didn’t appreciate that.

When they saw what Jimmy had stumbled into, the higher level geneticists immediately took control of the project. They decided that were going to feed the world by creating a legion of thinking plants. But somehow the thing got out of the lab before they could hobble it. And that’s when the tiny giants appeared. It was like Jimmy’s experiments unlocked a hidden gene sequence, activating a dormant fail-safe. Maybe were living inside us all the time, like vanishing fetuses. You know, like how some people have teeth or an eyeball in their brains from the twin they absorbed in utero? Like a second, tiny heart inside out left ventricle. Some philosophers claim tiny giants are escape pods, a replication of yourself that jettisons from your ruined body.

We each got assigned a tiny giant, although to this day most folks aren’t even aware of theirs. They mistake it for a headache. Or maybe a thumping sound in the apartment above them. Some appear as a bad odor. Jimmy’s tiny giant sleeps under the sink, because he craves the sound of the dishwasher. Reminds him of his home planet. He’s five inches tall and carts around an itsy-bitsy club with spikes. Made it from a broken chopstick and carpet tacks. Jimmy’s giant’s uncircumcised cock is huge for its size. Foreskin like a duffle bag. He pisses on Jimmy’s dental floss to mark his territory. Or he’ll eat Jimmy’s pocket change to establish dominance and then shit it out in Jimmy’s coffee. He licks Jimmy’s cigarettes before he smokes them. He solves calculus equations on the toilet paper, just to make Jimmy feel stupid when he’s sitting on the john. Jimmy’s giant calls himself “the Chum.” Jimmy has no idea if that’s his given name or the communal name of his people. The Chum herds bees for a living. He’s got pollen covering his ball sack, which hangs down well below his knees.

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About

David Hancock has received playwriting OBIE Awards for The Race of The Ark Tattoo and The Convention of Cartography, both presented by the Foundry Theatre. His other writing awards include the Hodder Fellowship, the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in Theatre, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a TCG/NEA Playwriting Residency Fellowship. Hancock's recent stories can be found in Permafrost, The Massachusetts Review, Interim, Ping Pong and Amarillo Bay. His co-authored fiction with Spencer Golub is forthcoming in Petrichor Machine, Otis Nebula, Danse Macabre, and scissors and spackle. An avid gardener and business systems analyst, David lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his wife and sons.