Short Fiction

Get Homer

Author note - to be mocked up as dead Frank’s Facebook page with the following shown below. Profile picture of Frank with R.I.P type comments below, usual commiseratory epiphets punctuated by txt spk.

By day Homer is a genial oaf. He says what he says and it’s cool to pop a beer and hear that shit. Even though he always says the same thing, it never gets old. Not while the sun shines anyway. I’ve always been a big Simpsons fan, sometimes marathonning through entire seasons in an evening. Cackling and bleating like a drunken goat.

By night though, Homer sometimes deviates from the script. I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but once the toyroom is quiet, don’t Woody and Buzz stray far, far away from their string-pull programming?

True, I’ve usually had one or two by then. A cigarette of dubious content may or may not have been smoked. But you’ll not catch my next bottle neck going clunk at his shiny popper after dark. I’ll use the one on the electric tin-opener instead, the one that makes no sound apart from the regulation ‘pssst’ of the Heavens being opened. Not ‘pssst’ with added “Mmmm, Beer,” *pop!* *Pssst!* *Glug-glug-glug* “Yes! Oh Yes! Woo-hoo!”

No.

Just ‘pssst’ followed by the blissful silence of bubbles rising and malty aromas brimming coldly at the opened wound. I began to think of Homer as a bit of a shit for spoiling that with his “Mmmm, Beer,” *pop!* just when you needed to savour it most. But it’s not just what he says, it’s how he says it. I figure he might well be the bottle-opener Homer from hell. What’s clear in these moments is that hell is where he resides, and he doesn’t care for it. Not one bit. All day long being closest to that which he loves most. Close enough to smell it, feel the breeze and bubble of it on his steel tongue, but never to drink, for it is always destined to quench the thirst of another, leaving him to convey all the dry-mouthed pain of this thousandth denial with an inadequate, “Yes! Oh Yes! Woo-hoo!”

Of course it builds up in the day time, that resentment and bitterness. Thing is, it might be a Britvic or a J2o he’s chewing at, doesn’t have to be beer (although it almost always is). What then? He’s still got to say the same thing, the stupid prick.

“Mmmm, Beer,”
“No it’s not, it’s Orangina.”
*Glug-glug-glug* “Yes! Oh Yes!” Woo-hoo!”
“For fuck’s sake Homer, let it go.”

But he can’t, and it takes that long for his Duff-addled brain to realise the drink has been whisked away, and that he’s just a face on a red plastic novelty opener, a face plastered beneath the tidy speckle of holes through which his scratchy voice comes forth. His power. His only power.

Surprising then, that I am considering letting him speak for the first time since two weeks ago when he snipped the lid off a Becks and went, “Mmmm, Beer.”

So far so ordinary, but then when I dragged the foil-necked bottle to my lips and took a good swallow, waiting for the complementary *Glug-glug-glug* that would validate my industry what came out was “Huh huh huh” in that chesty wheeze you use when mimicking ironic laughter.

He did say “Yes! Oh Yes!” but the sneer could be sensed a mile off. Sarcastic Homer, strange Homer, his customary croon replaced by something wanton and sinister. I turned him over in my hand, noticing the fading yellow of his face on the sticker. Careful there, Homie. I could wipe you out with one wave of a Sharpie.

“Woo-hoo!” came then, bent with irony through the muffling of my thumb and then some stuff got said that wasn’t good to hear, even for sober ears, let alone those buzzed by beer, or tickled by dank smoke. Stuff about my mum and sister, doing each other with fists. All sorts. Since then I’ve given him a wide berth after supper. It’s clear there are two sides to him, and the sun going down brings out the worst. But aren’t we all a bit like that?

It’s not like you can open a Bud without him saying it either, it’s triggered by the bite of the bottle top. Clicked on, like a beery light to bathe him in his finest moment. “Mmmm, Beer.” The rest follows like night and day. Then he’s quiet until the next fizz needs uncorking.

So it is after nine and there’s a sort of fierce buzzing in the kitchen, as if the appliances are all annoyed. But I’m buoyed up by the Hobgoblin (5.2%) and he seems to have shown me an aggressive bent. No wonder they call it wife-beater. If I had a mate here now I’d probably wrestle him to the ground, I think, as I eye Homer dangling from his hook, his upside-down face far from affable, his grin inverted. An intensity to his gaze, a sternness going against the idiotic grain.

The Hobgoblin, no sufferer of fools himself as his demonic label scowl suggests, glares up at me. “He’s not the idiot, you are. Letting him rule you. Dictating when and where. What are you, a snivelling drunk?”

The silent opener is only there, by the stove. Eight feet down the kitchen galley. And to be honest, Wifebeater, I reason, grounding his slur with the slur of my thoughts, I’d rather listen to you purr and hiss and pssst, not have it drowned out by his stupid blether. It gets old at night, I plead. Desperately old. Ancient.

I turn his brown shape in my hand, knowing he means it. His leathery devil arms are crossed, hobnails tapping, the stink and wartiness of him rising from the paper. “Let him do his worst, I’ll feckin’ marmalize ‘im.”

“You’ve not heard him. He’s no simpleton in these moments, his face turns to Hannibal Lecter, drooling whispers at his cellmate in the dark. I just want a little drinky and a bit of peace. Is that so much to ask?”

“We’ll deal with each other,” says the old flibbertigibbert. “It’s needed.” And with a hop and a skip, raises his gnarled claws. “Now let’s get to clinkin’, so we can start the drinkin’.

Against better judgement I pop the big bottle and this time the voice is different from the start. Skulls being dragged through sand, linked by chains in a line, like ploughshares. Dragging. Snagging up bits of bird and bone and shell. Homer knows he is in a contest, and that first “Mmmm” comes out like a cavern door yawning, revealing the patient beast behind.

“Be-e-ee-ee-ee-rrrr.”

His voice is a stone, a pebble that rolls down my throat, snowballing in size. “Lo-ser!” blasts through my gullet, but that won’t be the worst by far. Nothing from the script applies here, inside. Nothing at all. Bile instead, worse than when Homer lambasts Mr. Burns for blocking out the sun. Bile that squirts my innards to ink and my balls to water. I stagger to the lounge, cursing the queer Irish runt who seems suddenly all bluster and blarney.

“Quaff me down, you mazy cunt! Lemme get to ‘im,”

A brief flare of hope rises up, and I *glug-glug-glug*, allowing him to follow with the gas and the yeast and the peachy kick of hops.

I stumble to the lounger, kicking over empty beer cans, waiting for it to start. Cans had been the answer, see, but I’d run out. Only the real ales left, and their secrets had to be prized from their squat necks by Homer’s toothy grin. I hope to God he’s met his match, I think, as I settle in front of the telly, blood pressure racing.

“Lo-ser!” echoes the stone as it spins, boulder-sized, down the well of my soul, bouncing off the walls. And as I sink further into the meat of the settee, further into the debt of the beer label brawler, the contest begins.

The times I’d let him speak before were accidents of drunkenness. Maybe there was a game on telly I was anxious to get back to. No time to dwell on the enigma that was Homer, and he was, after all, nearest to the fridge. Nearest to the beer and the fear and the milk. So to grab him and pop him, while craning my neck around the door to see the telly was trivial and thoughtless. But I began to pay for it, because once he was in it was for the duration, or at least until morning. Sometimes I would wake up with his pallid face looming above mine. “Mmmm,” he would go. “Beer.” And I would have to scrunch my face below the covers and thrust my fists into duvet paws for my ears.

Now there were no covers to mask the obscenity. Only the late-night shenanigans of Graham Norton and his guests, whose unfettered ‘fucks’ and ‘bastards’ seemed firmly levelled at the combatants, egging them on.

Mercifully, I passed out after a while, aware only of a dark mud plopping warm holes in a sludge of Madras. In the morning I raised my chin from the pool of sick, took hold of Homer and threw him as far as I could, over the garden fence, into the shrubbery of the gatepath beyond. My beer-dulled senses strained for a dying echo of “Mmmm, Beer.” but nothing happened. He just disappeared with a rustle into the tall grass. Fat jaundiced prick, I thought, And that was that. I never used that route to the off-licence afterwards, though, even though it chopped a good hundred yards off the walk.

Well, he’s here now, you might have guessed, in this other hell. I should have used that Sharpie. Killed him off instead of letting him live a rusty, beerless life among the slugs and wild lettuce. He hates me more than ever now. His saucer eyes are twinkling. “There’s so much more I can do here. So much more I can show you.”

And he does have a trick or two to teach me. We are bedfellows, so there’s no need to worry, he says. He can do things here he couldn’t before. Actually let me watch my mum and sister doing it to each other with fists instead of just describing it. Actually make me join in.

“But for now, watch. Don’t worry about Goblins, they can’t save you now,” he says with a wink, and raises a clenched three-fingered paw, through which the eyeless, pulpy remains of Hobgoblin (5.2%) strain, like blackberries through summer muslin.

Then those iconic clouds parting, and through the miracle of animation, with all the members of his cast on hand, the orgy that follows.

My mum has blue hair like Marge, my sister a similar row of yellow spikes to Lisa and its like one of those videos you wish you hadn’t clicked on but can’t take your eyes off. Bart and the Mayor and Chief Wiggum stand idly by shucking bagel crumbs from their masturbatory fists. Lisa herself is spread akimbo like you’ve never seen her. The faces she pulls watching mum and sis go at it. The indent and pucker of her tiny yellow cunt and the buttery finger of Ned Flanders frigging into it hard. His own zealot eyes rolling in his head as he is alternately rimmed and sucked by a toothless Charles Montgomery Burns. When Ned turns to the side you can see the flash and amber tarnish of a crucifix sticking out of his spotty, Godless arse.

And you can’t turn it off. The episodes are endless, ghastly variations on a theme. This relative, that child; one Treehouse of Horror after another. You need to help me. Find him. Destroy him.

Below was a google map of the area where Homer was last seen. I recognised the area behind Frank’s house where the beer-opening devil lay. Apparently it was up to me to find and destroy him.

One thing the voice had been wrong about was them coming back as animals. Times have moved on. They came back as emails that pointed to Facebook pages containing chilling pleas like the one above. If it was a prank, it was sick and clever and I was totally drawn in by it. Frank’s status was set to a simple, understated, "Help."

I should have listened to Grandad. I’d been noticed. The best I could hope for was that it was for the right reasons.