Fridge Within a Fridge

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A dreadful sense of foreboding swept through Aryn as he was pushed face-first into a brick wall and held there. He felt warm, stale breath down the back of his neck that made itself known all the way down his back as a voice gruffly enunciated: "Boy, I'm gonna make you suffer."

Aryn's pupils suddenly widened as he turned to face the man, and he disconcertingly began to relax a bit.

"No, this simply won't do. I'm sorry for having wasted your time."

A look of ungratified shock fell across the man's face, as though Aryn had somehow affronted him. "What do you mean, 'won't do'? I'm not sure you get the whole jist of this."

"Well, as it stands you haven't given me what I was looking for. Again, I'm sorry, but I'm on a mission here."

The man was so stupefied that Aryn managed to skitter away completely without struggle, hopping elegantly over a trash can and stumbling sharply face-first into a pot-hole full of cat urine. Goddamnit, will nothing work? he thought before skipping around a corner.

I guess this kinda needs an explanation, so, like most authors before me, I am going to use an age-old trick: doing it extremely inadequately.

At the age of somewhere between 2 and 14, or maybe 15? I'm not even sure. Anyway, at one of those years or something, Aryn had experienced something which filled him with an unfathomable dread, something which he couldn't remember but made all subsequent dreads seem extraordinarily weak in comparison. This of course made dread something of a thrill to him and he had since spent his life actively seeking a dread on a similar level. Put it this way: it's like a boy falling out of a window as a baby and, when he grows up, he wants to be a skydiver. Aryn was a professional dread-seeker, and as such was well-known in many circles of prostitutes, disco musicians, local politicians and Burger Kings.

So, in a nutshell, Aryn wasn't filled with enough dread by the hairy, aggressive and, if we're honest, pretty dang rapey man, and thus he left him in the alley, dejected. I hope that cleared that up inadequately enough.

Damn, thought the man, now what am I going to do with all these Garfield books?

This counts as a header

Aryn looked out on the city he lived in from his viewing point on the roof of a speeding school bus. He saw so many things that disgusted him. Old women being forced to buy rap CDs at gunpoint. A naked Chinese preteen boy tied to a railing with 3 enraged squirrels and what looked like a giant leech crawling over him. A neatly-dressed young lady picking up a piece of litter and putting it in a trash can. A group of boys playing kick the can with a dead deer. Two men amicably shaking hands and smiling. A lampshade. These were the sort of things that made Aryn sick. Where was their sense of dread? Aryn could create dread for himself in his sleep. Literally. He once went out sleep shopping, bought an old Gramophone, a large quantity of blood sausage, turned on a creepy record when he got home and threw the blood sausage all over his house. He woke with an almost orgasmic sense of portent.

But of course, nothing really matched up to his first experience of dread. He had tried so much, and would definitely know the feeling were it to arise, but he just couldn't find it, like forgetting what you put in a delicious recipe, and substituting grandma's ashes because you're out of pepper simply won't cut it.

He passed an alleyway on his journey where an inexpressibly huge police force were bearing down on a man kneeling, crying, masturbating and screaming "LASAGNE!!!" at the very top of his voice. This made him feel a little better.

Aryn arrived at his destination of choice and leapt off the still-moving school bus which was inexplicably speeding along a high street on a Saturday. This worried Aryn somewhat as it was full of children, at least two of whom sounded particularly distressed and nude, however it didn't really worry him enough to give two shits because he knew from experience that kids got over things easy, even if their stretched bodies never fully healed. And that you could get aubergines really cheap if you bought them in bulk.

As Aryn landed he broke pretty much every bone in his body, the leg of a passing woman he had landed on and a couple of bones of a man a few hundred meters away in a newsagent's buying a bottle of water and a travelcard. This didn't thrill him particularly, so he jogged off to his destination, a friend's flat. Her name was Gudrun. She had a lambchop bluetacked to her left cheek.

"Hey Aryn. Your body's looking kinda floppy and bruised today; it suits you. How's things?" She picked up a mug and began to drink what she thought was tea before realising it was empty and threw it out of the window as Aryn talked.

"Pretty lousy. You know how it is. The feeling when you become aware your kind is being victim to genocide and the knowledge that you're next but that not being entertaining enough. This must be what Che Guevara felt, or something. How about you?"

"I'm ok, just said goodbye to my boyfriend who's travelling up to Scotland to visit his family. Course, he had to pop to the newsagents to get his ticket first but you know what I mean." She took off her bra from under her shirt, removed a bracelet, carefully placed them both on a shelf before sitting cross-legged on a white platter on her coffee-table.

"What is this?," remarked Aryn, "the lambchop growing thistles on your face, your wacky behaviour, your right hand clearly inflating and deflating, what is this supposed to be, some kind of surreal crap?"

"Studious eggplant," replied Gudrun.

"Oh. You're right."

When Aryn left, he was struck on the back of the head by the mug Gudrun had thrown out of the window some 2 days earlier; they had spent those days saying literally nothing and staring at each other. Those who interpret this as some kind of sexual tension failed to read the above part about surreal crap and should probably get it when a writer hammers in an awful joke over and over.

On one of his walks where he got lost on purpose, Aryn found himself in a car park, so he naturally decided to fall asleep on one of the spaces. When he awoke, he found himself with a rare, virulent disease previously only found on Venus and covered from head to toe in tattoos of doll's heads, and for some reason he had a piece of sellotape stuck to the sole of his shoe which was pretty annoying.

When he tried to stand up he found himself considerably impeded by the presence of a 4x4 Jeep. Rolling out, he heard a couple of scientist-type people walking away from the 4x4 talking about their latest experiment. Due to having no ears, Aryn heard little of it other than "massive tentacles", "blunt pressure" and "liquid neon fuckin' EVERYWHERE", so naturally he was in. He followed behind them, eventually leading to what seemed to be their lab.

Intermission

Please feel free to grab a smoothie as our characters take a break to assuage their desperate need to break the fourth wall by comfort eating, i.e. eating Comfort Edison, the former actress who played the part of the neatly-dressed young lady who helped clean up litter. Please note that despite her having no further part in the story she is now being played by Lisa Kudrow.

Now, please take your seats, and try to ignore the dog training class in the orchestra, it's the only way we could afford to rent this stage.

Well I guess this is another headline

As if by magic, the scientists and Aryn all appeared outside the laboratory. This is what the magic of having an intermission does.

The lab was supposed to be 150 miles away and the scientists were just getting out of their jeep to get some travel supplies. The most magical part about the intermission is it moved the scientists and Aryn, but not the Jeep. It simply turned it upside down and set it on fire. But that's another story, to be elaborated on when the inevitable musical sequel comes out to critical acclaim.

Anyway, something was happening. Um. They did something with a door and it made them inside of their lab as opposed to outside, except for Aryn, who was still outside, so he went inside also. This came as a shock to the scientists, who noticed he was following them for the entire intermission but didn't expect for a second that he would also go into the lab. But go into the lab he did, feet and all, until he was inside the lab.

Naturally, being scientists, they did not question his motives and strapped him to the roof of a windsurfing simulator. Aryn felt sort of nervous about this, but mostly because they had not said a single word to him, or indeed any words at all since "liquid neon fuckin' EVERYWHERE". Then, one of the scientists turned to him. This was about half a week later.

"Hi Aryn, my name's Frum, and your name is...?" Aryn got up from his position, which was apparently reverse cowgirl on the other scientist, and looked confused.

"But you just said my name? Also, while we're on the subject, how do you know my name?

"Your what?"

"My name!" The scientist looked baffled.

"What's a name?" Aryn began to form a reply, but couldn't be bothered.

He walked up to one of the machines and started feeling up the material. It was exquisite, like it was some kind of metal, which it was. He couldn't stop himself from touching and touching; eventually he was basically dry-humping the dang thing while the naked other scientist looked up from his prone position, confused.

"Ah, I see you've met Kaz." Aryn looked confused, and gestured for him to continue.

"Kaz is that thing you're doing a thing to." Of course, it all made perfect sense now!

"How do I stop?" enquired Aryn, one hand on Kaz, the other on the oddly-alluring chest of Frum.

"You don't. Well, actually, that's not true. I mean, as far as lying goes, that's a pretty flagrant one, because in order to stop touching it all you have to do is remove your hands, thus not touching it any more." Aryn looked astounded at Frum's extremely scientific explanation and did so at once.

"What does Kaz do?" Aryn asked, once again sitting on the now-dead scientist on the floor and going to town.

"Kaz is a milkmaid. She milks maids. It's a cheap and cost-effective way of milking maids from cows. Most people think maids are hired people, this simply isn't true. Maids are cow babies. That have to be milked from the cow in order to be born. Everyone knows this, except you, for some reason. Well, I assume so, anyway."

"No, I knew," replied Aryn, losing interest in the lovely squidgy remains of the former scientist and melting his skin onto a table with a solder iron.

"Oh. In that case, could I get your help with an experiment? I must warn you though, there is a lot of risk involved." Aryn was already dead before he'd finished the sentence.

"Sure," replied Aryn. Frum set to business and strapped Aryn onto the windsurf simulator, which was now conveniently like a dentist's chair in every way.

Frum stripped naked and began pouring honey onto Aryn; this caused him to die.

"Remarkable!" said Frum, "it appears you are completely capable of dying! I've never seen anything like it!"

"That's cool," said Aryn, who was too busy noticing an odd feeling in his stomach.

The scientist continued testing things out on Aryn. He read an erotic novel to him, same reaction. He tousled Aryn's hair and called him pretty, same reaction again, maybe even a little more death. He exposed him to obliteratingly powerful waves of gamma radiation, again, death. All the while, Aryn could feel something stirring, beyond the teaspoon being stirred in his brain and the obvious onset of an erection on the part of Frum. Something was tiding over...

Just as Frum had finished feeding him pizza and flaying him with a riding crop, he snapped. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he realised this was it. The thing that he'd been searching all his life: that sense of dread, it was here! So all it took was to die 11 times! It all made sense now! If only I'd thought of that before, thought Aryn, I must have died 11 times at least twice when I was aged whatever that time was between 2 and 15!

The scientist looked up, and noticed Aryn had disappeared into the ether, or something. Well, he assumed that is what happened, and no evidence, not even the fact that Aryn was behind him, making love to his backside, because as a scientist it was his duty to something something.

So that is the end. And what of Gudrun, you might ask? She became a cereal mascot, and then a sewage plant. Everything had worked out for the best for everyone, exceept the reader obviously.

The en... d?

Incidentally, this article was called Fridge Within a Fridge for a reason.