Post by wilgutspleens on Jul 7, 2021 7:26:31 GMT
Barry Scott, kneeling on the locker room floor, ear to the floor, listening. Eyes closed, inhaling slowly through one nostril then the other. “It’s here” he thought “I know it”
Barry had a purpose!
It was all surfaces, all things to be super shiny and clean and gleaming like a new penny! It was his one role in life to achieve this. His every waking moment was filled with planning, experimentation, testing new cleaning products.
It was all surfaces, all things to be super shiny and clean and gleaming like a new penny! It was his one role in life to achieve this. His every waking moment was filled with planning, experimentation, testing new cleaning products.
And now he was feeling the call of the Gleaming. Somewhere, he knew, lay the answer to eternal cleanliness, a universal product that could shine chrome, bleach ceramics, restore the weft to felt, enhance the hue of delicate russets and embellish the purity of the deepest black.
He knew that the problem was entropy, decay, excrement, contamination…and he knew the solution was probably a solution, a compound of the most efficacious , most stringent cleaning products, the best of which were already in his vast library of fumigants, purgatives, abstergents , abrasives and purifiers. There were no two commercially available cleaning products that Barry hadn’t mixed, combined, resublimated, distilled or refined.
Barry’s mad yellow eyes stared into a world of filth, putrescence and decay. They could pick out individual bacteria, discern microbial spoor, descry viral contaminations. Such an awareness of the corruption of the universe would bring fear and phobia to those who inhabited a more normal plane of sanity but Barry was a warrior, a hero, a leader of the crusade against filth and he was winning. He knew it. The Gleaming was within reach, he just had to find the key that opened the door to universal cleanliness in a handy spray bottle.
Something was happening to Barry. He was changing. Even as he crouched on the dressing room floor, strange spasms ran across his face like a rip tide of expressions. His tiny muscles twitched and gyrated under his sallow, pallid skin, small veins popped into blue tinged cables that writhed and sketched new roads across his waxen hide, his limbs twisted and contorted and his joints bent back upon themselves until he looked like a bizarre advert for Twister.
Barry, with tremendous effort, turns his face towards the nearest mirror, something that might be described as a smile, a rictus, an irregular, lopsided grin of ecstasy and despair stretches across his face “Smokinnnnn’” he growls.