Bob Bodey's Body Parts

Bob Bodey is bored.

He hates not being able to drive. It’s a pain in the butt. His driver’s license was suspended three months ago when he totaled his car, mistakenly trying to park it in a space already claimed by a tree. Luckily, he was so drunk at the time, he wasn’t injured.

If being arrested for D.U.I. wasn’t bad enough, he also had no car insurance at the time of the accident. His case goes before a judge next month and, with the lousy public defender assigned to him, Bob thinks he’s in big trouble.

He has no way of knowing he won’t be making his court date because of a bizarre problem with his body parts.

Bob Bodey is a twenty-two-year old virgin living in modern day Midwestern America. He’s not mentally retarded; he just appears as if he is. His eyes don’t always look in the same direction, the left one is slightly askew. He has unruly, oily black hair and a nearly perfect uni-brow. His cheeks are droopy, meaty, and his mouth seems unusually far from his nose, as if sunken. Two small but frighteningly thick forests of black hair grow in Bob’s elephantine ears, looking a lot like fuzzy caterpillars. Bob is beefy, tall and wide, with a Buddha belly. His feet and hands are so big they make him appear clumsy, even though he isn’t.

Bob’s mother died in childbirth giving birth to Bob, who was a big nine-pound baby. Bob was raised by his father, who eventually remarried, but then divorced five years later, and died five years after that. His only family is his grandmother, his mother’s mother, and she lives in Florida. Bob talks to her twice a week on the phone but he hid the automobile accident from her, not because it would worry her, but because it was his grandma that bought him that car.

Thankfully the Burger King where he’s employed is within walking distance of his apartment, as is a little grocery, a barber, a Keg-n-Bottle liquor store, and a laundry mat. Still, he’s tired of eating at Burger King, tired of not having a washer and dryer, and really tired of walking.

Here is it, Friday night, a rare Friday night when he’s not scheduled to work, and where does he find himself?

At the laundry mat, doing laundry.

The place is dead, deserted. Everybody else has something to do tonight.

Bob is bored.

He paces back and forth. If there were other people here, he’d have a seat. He might even pick up one of those free Employment Source newspapers and look at it, even though he has no hope of finding a different job, not without any transportation.

The laundry mat is deserted, however, so Bob paces, walking back and forth down the long row of washing machines, with dryers built into the wall on the other side.

At the far end of the laundry mat is the busted door to the grungy bathroom. It’s been patched with a small piece of paneling where a hole was made by someone’s fist. There’s a long table for folding clothes. And on the wall is a bulletin board where people hang Help Wanted, Lost Pet, and Babysitter Available postings.

At the other end of the laundry mat— near the plate glass windows and doors— are the vending machines. Next to a Change machine sits a dirty old Suds ‘n Such vending machine which provides little boxes of Tide, Cheer, Downy, Oxi-Clean, and Bounce. Beside it are the gumball machines and the dispensers which give cheap junk prizes. Here are Super Charged Thunder Bolts (apparently some kind of jawbreaker), Wonka Nerds Gumballs, Laser Lights, Rave Jewelry, and Bouncing Balls provided by the A&A Company. Finally, next to these mechanical kid magnets is a Coca-Cola machine.

One of the vending machines suddenly catches Bob’s eye, a prize capsule dispenser he doesn’t remember seeing here the last time he did laundry.

He wanders over and looks at it.

There’s a cardboard display inside the machine and written on it, in what looks like dripping blood is...

REAL BODY PARTS‼

The parts attached to the cardboard sign include a very realistic (albeit small) ear, a long flapping lifelike tongue, what looks very much like a human belly button, a nose, and a pair of wind-up chattering teeth.

Bob smiles when he sees the sticker on the inside of the dispenser which reads...

WARNING: REAL means REAL!

In the Rave Jewelry machine right next to the body parts, the warning reads...

CHOKING HAZARD! THE SMALL TOYS, MARBLES, OR BALLS IN THIS MACHINE ARE NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN UNDER THREE YEARS.

It’s the teeth that catch Bob’s attention. He fondly remembers a larger set of chattering teeth he had as a boy.

As it so happens, Bob has seventy-five cents in his pocket left over from doing laundry and Real Body Parts only cost fifty cents.

Just as Bob is reaching into the silver chrome-plated flap to retrieve his prize, the buzzer on one of the dryers goes off with the volume of an air raid siren, startling him.

Bob slips the plastic egg into his pocket without even looking at it.

He unloads the dryers, walks home to his tiny apartment (just a living room/bedroom, a small bathroom, and a small kitchen), and puts away his clean clothes. He then kicks off his shoes and empties his pants pockets, putting everything he’s carrying on his dresser— his keys, his wallet, his pocket knife, his dental floss.

He finds the plastic bubble.

When he looks at his prize, it looks back at him, giving Bob quite a start.

The real body part he bought is an eye. 👁

Bob grabs his chest, laughing a nervous titter. His heart is beating twice as fast as it was a minute ago.

The eye inside the plastic bulb stares at him, the pupil fat and black, the iris a shade of dull brown identical to Bob’s.

He twists the cap and pulls it off. As he reaches for the eyeball, his right index finger gets to it before his right thumb and immediately sticks. Startled by the wet, spongy feel of the eye, he hisses and pulls away, only to discover the eye is stuck to his finger.

Bob Bodey is stunned as a new visual field opens up to him.

His third eye sees!

He gasps and nearly swoons. He’s healthy as an ox, never squeamish, never sick; he rarely even gets a hangover. Never in his life has he ever come close to fainting but he’s suddenly close now. An intense head rush shrivels his brain.

He looks down at his fingertip...

The fingertip looks back.

This split vision is like nothing he’s ever dreamed or could ever imagine. He’s quite comfortable with his eyes receiving input directly into the place where he thinks. Bob likes having sight and consciousness neatly stitched together, thank you very much, and suddenly having eyes where there is no thought, only touch, is like having mental sutures ripped open somewhere deep inside his brain.

There is an immediate sting of pain behind his old eyes. He winces and unconsciously reaches up to clasp his aching head, causing dizziness as his new eye races up toward his hair.

He stops the movement of his right hand, holding it before his face, looking at it.

He peers back from his finger at his face, which looks really frightened and pale.

Trivision is overwhelming. Instinctively he closes the only eyes he can, the lidded ones on his face.

Possessing only monofocal instead of bifocal vision, he’s amazed at the depth and breadth of the field of his third eye’s vision.

Bob doesn’t like fingerseeing how pallid his own face is.

He tries to close the fingereye but can’t. He keeps trying, straining nonexistent muscles in his finger until it finally sinks in that the eye can’t close.

It has no lid!

He needs a glove.

Bob opens his real eyes without thinking about it, intent on going to the coat closet for gloves, and feels another surge of dizziness. His forehead knits, his face scrunching up as if he’s suffering horrible agony. He’s not in any pain but having two distinctively different sets of visual impulses hitting his consciousness at the same time is mind-wrenching.

He quickly closes his real eyes again.

Bob pulls his finger back toward him, his nail before his old eyes, his new fingereye pointed forward. Doing this, he tries to recreate with his new eye something familiar for his old beleaguered brain.

He puts his nose on the second knuckle of his index finger to steady it, to lock the movement of the eye to the movement of his head.

He realizes suddenly he’s burning up, drenched in nervous sweat, and he wants to take off his sweat suit, but that would require two hands and he’s keeping his fingereye right where it is.

Nose and fingereye leading the way, Bob stumbles across his tiny living room to his coat closet. Even though he hasn’t worn gloves since last winter, he knows right where they are, on a high shelf beside a stack of scarves and stocking caps.

He starts to reach out with his right hand but then pulls his finger back to his nose and reaches out, instead, with his left. Grabbing the gloves, he knocks over the stack of stocking caps, spilling them to the closet floor.

Wincing, he opens his headeyes, knowing he needs them too.

Bob is holding tight black leather gloves. When he looks at the size of the eye puffing out the end of his index finger, he realizes there is no way whatsoever it’s going to fit.

He growls with frustration and throws the gloves down.

He needs an artificial lid for his third eye!

Seeing a black stocking cap on the floor, he grabs it up and plunges his right fist into it.

Just closing his finger into a fist obstructs most of the third eye’s vision and the stocking cap does the rest. He still receives visual input from that third eye but that input consists of total darkness.

Now that his finger is a finger again (mostly) and his vision is back conjoined to his thoughts, he starts using his brain to question what’s happening to him.

He remembers the sign that advertised REAL BODY PARTS.

And the: WARNING: REAL means REAL!

Bob needs a drink.

He has a brand new twelve pack of cheap beer in his fridge he bought earlier this afternoon after picking up his paycheck but he needs something a lot more potent than beer. He has a bottle of Captain Morgan’s he was saving for a special occasion. This wasn’t what he had in mind when he bought it but he’s thinking anything that can help him deal with the fact he now has a real third eye connected to his right index finger would be really special indeed.

He doesn’t bother with a glass. He retrieves the bottle from beneath the sink in his kitchen, uncaps it, and guzzles rum like it’s water.

Bob likes Captain Morgan’s tremendously and one of the big reasons why is it seems to get him drunk quicker than any other booze. Bob sets a new personal record tonight, getting totally plastered in a flat ninety seconds.

He burps loudly, feels like he might throw up, and decides it’s time to stop guzzling.

He looks at the stocking cap on his right hand and realizes he wants to see it. Now that he’s got a little Captain Morgan in him, he thinks he’ll be able to look at the fingereye without freaking out.

He plops down on the couch, holding the rum bottle between his legs. He holds up his hand, unclenches his fist, and removes the stocking cap.

The single fingereye looks at the pair of headeyes with a glint of envy.

Bob realizes now that he’s gotten drunk, it’s much easier to deal with visual stimuli coming from different parts of his body. He begins moving his finger about, waving it in the air, and doesn’t feel the least bit of vertigo this time.

Now that he’s inebriated, there’s very little thought going on behind his old eyes and that helps enormously. Instead of being a thinking creature, he becomes a creature of trisight.

He brings his third eye closer to the other two, moving his fingertip within two inches of his nose.

His third eye is the same width as his normal eye, about an inch and a half wide. The normal width of his index finger is half an inch. That finger has swollen up like a balloon to accommodate the eye. It would be a comedic clown finger if not for its stare.

He flips the finger over, his fingereye looking out across his living room, while his headeyes examine the back of his finger.

The back does look humorous, like a fat puppet finger. The fingernail is as big as a Kennedy half dollar.

Bob flips his finger over so the eye is facing up, looking at his face. He crouches over, resting his right arm along his leg, right palm up.

Without thinking about what he’s doing (Three Cheers for Captain Morgan!), he places his left index finger on top of his right index finger, where it joins his hand. Pressing down hard, he then pushes his way slowly up the finger.

And just like a pea being squeezed from a pod, the eye pops out of his finger.

Bob then goes into a kind of crazy spasm, his head and body rolling in jerky circles. This happens when Bob’s third eye hits the floor and rolls away. Despite the fact the eye is now detached from him, Bob can still see with it.

It bounces off the base of his entertainment center and rolls back toward him, coming to rest pupil up almost directly in front of his feet.

The dizziness returns and so does the queasy belly. He again fights throwing up.

His third eye stares calmly at the ceiling.

Bob never realized how many cracks there are in his ceiling. As the queasiness passes, he makes a mental note to contact the landlord about that.

Now that all three eyes are still again, Bob realizes he’s not having as much difficulty dealing with the visuals. That’s because of Captain Morgan. He takes a quick sip from the bottle, before setting it on his coffee table.

Bob gets up, stumbles, nearly loses his balance, then kneels down before his errant eye.

On his hands and knees, he very slowly brings his right index finger and right thumb into contact with the orb. Both fingers touch the eye (and stick) at the same time.

Again startled by the odd resiliency of the eye, Bob pulls his fingers apart. His digits break free of the stickiness. The eye rolls a couple spins across the carpet, again coming to a stop looking up, pointed at the corner.

He wonders how long there have been cobwebs up there. He never noticed those before.

Crawling forward, Bob again carefully clamps his index finger and thumb onto the eye. Barely breathing, he picks it up.

Holding the eyeball with a steady but gentle grip, he again looks at it.

It looks at him.

He shakes his head, wondering what to do now. Bob sets the eye on the battered coffee table in front of him, on top of the small stack of Playboy magazines. He positions the eye so it’s watching him kick back on the couch, like some out-of-mind webcam.

He realizes he’s horny (no surprise there; that’s another reason he likes rum) and considers exposing himself to his third eye.

That makes him laugh.

But then, suddenly, he has a wicked thought, a crazy idea that really makes him aroused.

Maybe he could use the third eye to spy on the lady in the apartment next to his. She’s a cute skinny redhead (90% of all women are skinny by Bob’s standards) who never smiles at him when he bumps into her at the mailboxes, despite the fact he always smiles (leers) at her.

He thinks about how great it would be to put the eye in her bedroom, or even better yet, in her bathroom, someplace where she’s certain to get naked.

He looks at the bottle, realizing that’s the Captain talking. He sighs heavily, then guzzles some more rum. There’s no way he can think of to get his third eye into the redhead’s apartment.

He isn’t that clever to begin with and now that he’s also drunk as a skunk, Bob is stymied about how to use his new eye to see some booty.

He damns the day he hit that tree. If he could drive, he could head out to The Pole Barn— the local topless bar— and really have some fun. He could open the door to the dancer’s dressing room and just roll his third eye in.

He chuckles, thinking about the eyeful he’d get then.

Souring quickly, Bob becomes depressed. It bugs him he can’t use the eye for some salacious purpose. He thinks he might as well shove the damn thing up his butt for all the good it’s doing him.

He picks up the eyeball, carefully sticking it equally to both his thumb and index finger.

Bob kicks back on his couch, sighing, lying down.

This has been one really weird day!

He holds the eye up above his head, so that the single eye is looking down at the two eyes looking up.

And that’s the last thing he remembers before passing out.

Bob Bodey awakens five hours later to bloody brains.

Regaining consciousness is traumatic. Unable to assimilate what’s happening, he thinks the brains are on him. He sits up, flailing, brushing at his chest, his sweat adding wetness to the illusion.

Then he remembers that his third eye was staring back at himself from the coffee table. That recollection allows him to figure out what’s going on.

He gasps with horror.

Last night, Bob passed out holding the third eye. At some point while he slept, he must have rolled over on top of it and it slipped inside his head. How it got so deep he isn’t certain but he knows the eye is now at the core of his brain.

He finds it terribly difficult to breathe, almost as if the view coming from inside his skull is reaching down his throat to choke him. His brains look almost like cherry Jell-O to him, he can see right through them. Unfortunately, however, he can’t see through his skull.

He wonders how he can see anything at all inside his light-proof cranium!

It makes no sense to him. How can he possibly see his brains with no illumination inside his head?

He groans, grabbing his face. He tries to punch his fingers into his head to retrieve the eye and succeeds only in hurting both his fingers and his forehead.

Seeing brains, Bob gets up and goes into the bathroom, grabbing a bottle of Bayer from his medicine cabinet. Seeing brains, he fills a Dixie cup from his Superman dispenser with tap water. Seeing brains, he washes down four aspirin.

Seeing brains, he spends about ten minutes on the toilet.

As he sits on the commode, he repeatedly tilts his head to one side, slamming the side of it with his hand, as if he’s trying to dislodge water from his ear after swimming. The view of the third eye doesn’t even jiggle.

Seeing brains, he realizes he can’t get the eyeball out of his brains.

Seeing brains, he realizes if he doesn’t get it out and continues seeing brains, he’s going to go insane.

He wonders for a moment if he’s already insane but then decides a lunatic would never feel this kind of stress. A psycho would embrace the eye and live happily ever after seeing brains.

Despite the pain it causes his head, Bob suddenly roars with frustration and a desperation that’s nearly panic.

He must get this eye out of his head (brains)!

Bob knows he needs to get drunk again but also knows if he doesn’t eat something first, he’ll just throw up the rum. When he goes to his refrigerator, however, he keeps seeing brains and nothing appeals to him. He decides to force a couple slices of unadorned bread into his mouth, washing them down with water.

He must get the eye out of his head (brains)!

He tries to calm himself so he can think. Seeing brains, that’s not easy.

He recalls the machine that got him into this bloody brain predicament in the first place, the one advertising REAL BODY PARTS.

Seeing brains, Bob hatches a crazy idea.

Seeing brains, he straightens his clothes, slips on his shoes, grabs a jacket and his keys and his wallet and leaves his apartment. For the first time since he lost his license (and his car) Bob is glad to be walking. Today, he’d be a dangerous driver, seeing brains all the time.

The strip mall where the barber, grocery, and laundry mat are located is six blocks from where Bob lives. He hurries along the sidewalk beside the busy street, his head down, seeing brains.

When he comes to an intersection near the strip mall, sure enough, he almost steps out in front of oncoming traffic, because he’s so distracted seeing brains. If he’d been driving instead of walking, an automobile accident might result in a lot of people seeing brains.

Finally, he returns to the laundry mat.

Realizing he has no change, he takes out a five dollar bill and feeds it into the change machine. Gathering up his quarters, he then rushes over to the dispenser displaying Real Body Parts.

He wants the chattering teeth.

His idea depends on him getting the chattering teeth.

Holding his breath, Bob feeds fifty cents into the machine and turns the crank.

He gets a SuperBall. That confuses him. A SuperBall isn’t a body part.

He feeds fifty more cents into the machine and cranks out another prize...

Which turns out to be a miniature pair of handcuffs. Definitely not a body part!

Bob assumes some prizes are fakes and there are only a few real body parts mixed in.

Fifty more cents gets him a cheap plastic medallion on a cheap chain. Another non-body part.

Seeing brains, Bob is frustrated. He wonders what’s different. Why isn’t the machine giving him Real Body Parts?

Then he realizes the warning has changed.

When he got the eye last night, the warning was REAL means REAL!

Now the warning is like all the normal junk dispensing machines...

SMALL PARTS AND SMALL BALLS NOT FOR CHILDREN UNDER 3 YEARS OLD.

Bob goes cold, thinking he’ll never get what he needs. He’s going to be doomed to see brains forever. But then he looks around the laundry mat and realizes two other things have changed, along with the warning in the Real Body Parts dispenser. The most obvious difference, of course, is when he bought the eye last night, it was pitch dark outside, whereas now the sun is shining bright through the plate glass windows. The other change is last night he was here alone and right now the laundry mat is fairly busy. There are two women here, three kids, and an elderly couple.

He doesn’t know how he knows and yet he does. Real Body Parts are private parts. He can’t buy them in public, with other people watching. Paying your fifty cents, turning the crank, and taking out a Real Body Part is a secret act you must do alone.

The idea of spending an entire day seeing brains, just waiting for night, for a time when the laundry mat is empty— it’s almost more than Bob can bear.

He walks home and microwaves a Hot Pocket, flushing it down with Captain Morgan. He turns on the television and tries to get interested but that turns out to be laughable since every one of his 160 channels is showing brains.

Shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon his phone begins to ring and he remembers he was scheduled to work tonight. He decides not to answer the phone, even though he doesn’t have either voice mail or an answering machine. Bob doesn’t really think his boss will accept seeing brains as a legitimate excuse for not showing up to work.

Not three minutes after the phone stops ringing, it starts ringing again. Bob is certain it’s his boss and he knows his boss is furious, but he still has absolutely no intention of picking up the phone. It rings so many times, he loses count.

The ringing phone begins to get on his nerves. Bob drinks more Captain Morgan. The ringing is almost as bad as seeing brains.

Almost.

Finally, his boss gives up. Bob wonders if he’s fired.

If he is, considering he’s currently looking at his own brains, he sees that as the least of his worries.

Bob sets his alarm clock for one a.m. and lies down. Seeing brains, he passes out.

He awakens hours later, seeing brains. His third eye hasn’t shifted one bit inside his skull (brains). He looks at the clock with his other two eyes and sees it’s almost 2:30 am. Either his alarm didn’t go off or he didn’t hear it.

Groaning, a terrible taste in his mouth, his head throbbing with pain and bloody brains, Bob gets up and goes to use the bathroom, then takes six aspirin with two full glasses of water.

Seeing brains, Bob grabs his coat and his things, leaves his apartment, and walks down the street to the laundry mat.

This street is quite busy during the day but it’s dead at this time of night. The only two cars he sees on his walk are both police cars. Simultaneously seeing cops and bloody brains makes him nervous.

Back in the laundry mat, Bob looks at the machine dispensing REAL BODY PARTS. And, to his great relief, the warning has changed back. Again it says...

WARNING: REAL means REAL!

He’s so nervous, when he pulls out his quarters, he promptly drops them all on the floor. The coins jingle, spin, and roll.

Bob is alone, no surprise at this time of night, and he’s so eager to get more body parts, he doesn’t care about his money. Instead of picking up all his coins, he just snags two and cranks fifty cents into the machine.

He unconsciously holds his breath as he pulls out the plastic egg.

Bob peers into the little capsule without opening it and for a bloody brain moment he can’t tell what the hell he’s looking at. Finally, he realizes the dangling drop of flesh is a human uvula. For some reason— in a way the eye did not— the throat flap gives Bob the creeps.

He throws the uvula in the trash, its container unopened.

He picks up two more quarters off the floor, puts them in the machine, and cranks.

When he sees what’s inside this egg, he feels like he hit the jackpot. He scored exactly what he needs: a set of the wind-up teeth!

He almost leaves right then, but instead takes the time to gather up the coins. He ends up feeding another two dollars into the mysterious machine, buying four more body parts he stashes away in his pocket.

He’s in a hurry to get home. He has a plan for getting the eye out of his head (brains) and he wants to do it now. Bob runs most of the way back to his apartment (and thankfully doesn’t see any more cops).

He doesn’t review his plan or think too much about it, preoccupied as he is with keeping an eye on his frontal lobes.

When he gets home, he snags himself a beer. He’s suddenly of the opinion that Captain Morgan is a bad influence and he should drink something a little less potent. He has no trouble at all blaming the pirate for his current bloody brain predicament.

Plus, he realizes what he intends to do almost amounts to amateur surgery and therefore decides he shouldn’t get too drunk. He guzzles most of his first beer, however, in a matter of minutes.

Bob has a junk drawer in his kitchen, beneath the drawer where he keeps his silverware, and he thought he had a needle and thread in there but when he looks for thread now, he can’t find any. That annoys and frustrates him for a couple minutes until he remembers his dental floss.

Sitting down on his couch with his beer and his floss, Bob opens the plastic egg containing the teeth.

These are supposed to be Real Body Parts but the little wind-up crank on the side destroys the illusion.

And yet, when he touches the teeth, they stick to him exactly the way the eye did, the gums trying to merge with his finger flesh.

Bob pulls the dental floss from its spool, cutting off a piece about three feet long. He ties one end of the dental floss securely around his right wrist. Carefully, meticulously, he then ties the other end to the crank on the chattering teeth.

One of the teeth has a cavity. Touching it causes the twinge of a toothache in his fingers. This tiny jaw is definitely a Real Body Part, despite its wind-up crank.

Bob Bodey looks at the chattering teeth and asks himself if he actually intends to go through with this.

Seeing bloody brains, he cares only about shutting that third eye. He doesn’t know if this is going to work or not but it’s the only idea he’s come up and he’s determined to try.

Bob holds the teeth very delicately, not letting them make a mouth out of his fingers. He winds them up, as tight as he can.

When he lets go of them, the teeth immediately begin bouncing up and down as they chatter.

There is no hum of a little motor, the way Bob would expect. The only sound is the teeth themselves, clicking like the chattering teeth of a child who’s bitterly cold.

Bob doesn’t hesitate. He raises the teeth to the right side of his head and throws them, aiming straight (hopefully) at the eye inside his skull (brains).

He misjudges entirely, using too much strength. The chattering teeth fly into the side of his head, passing through his skull like it’s made of shadow. He sees the teeth with his third eye as the chattering zips past, through his brains, only to come out his head on the other side.

The dental floss string goes taut in Bob’s hand, now stretched directly through his head, the teeth dangling on the other side, chattering below his left ear.

Startled by this outcome, Bob lets out a little yelp as he gives the teeth a vicious yank, pulling them back through his head again. This time the teeth come so close to the third eyeball they almost hit it, which was exactly his intention.

He hopes to catch the eye in the jaws of the chattering teeth so he can drag the orb out of his brains. Barring that, he doesn’t care if the teeth crush the eye, so long as they make it stop seeing brains!

But the teeth only come close and don’t even leave any kind of wake in their trail as they fling through the bloody gray-matter.

The chattering teeth come free of his head, with not even a drop of blood on them to mark their flight through his brains.

Bob is encouraged. He saw the teeth twice, he was close, and if he just throws the teeth with a little more care, he believes he can hook the eye.

⚡

And so Bob Bodey prepares to again go fishing with teeth for an eye in his brains. 👁🧠

⚡

First he winds the teeth up again. Then, gently, he gives them a little toss, lobbing the chatter into his skull.

The teeth drop into his head, causing a hint of electricity strong enough to make hair stand up.

The chattering teeth land far behind his third eye, at the back of his brain.

Frustrated by his bad aim, Bob gives the dental floss an angry little yank... only to have it break with a snap of pain.

Bob holds a strand of dental floss still tied to his wrist and the end of this piece is bloody. There’s a painful spot near his right temple, now oozing blood, where the floss broke.

Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he understands he got lucky.

As long as the line was attached to the teeth, it remained as intangible as the teeth themselves. The moment the dental floss broke, the end no longer connected to the teeth became solid again. If the line had snapped inside his skull, instead of just outside it, it probably would have given him a brain clot.

At this moment, however— as Bob realizes he now has two Real Body Parts inside his skull (brains)— he would actually welcome an aneurism.

He can’t exactly feel the chattering teeth inside his brains but he can hear them somehow, clicking away! He prays they will stop soon. He tells himself they can’t keep chattering forever!

Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he’s unsure of anything.

He looks at the impotent, drooping dental floss hanging from his wrist and wonders what to do now.

He knows there is only one way to get the Real Body Parts out of his brains.

He’ll need to use more Real Body Parts.

Frantic, hearing chattering teeth, seeing brains, he digs into his pockets to see what other prizes he bought tonight. He has four capsules. He purposely pulls them out one at a time.

The first egg contains a small nose, which he promptly throws in the trash. Seeing brains is bad enough; he doesn’t want to smell them.

When he looks at the next little egg, he isn’t certain at first what he’s seeing. It looks almost like a pink snake (he fleetingly wonders if it’s a penis) but then he sees the stretched nail and realizes it’s a coiled-up finger!

Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he realizes this is exactly what he needs!

Laughing nervously, Bob rubs his chattering head, then polishes off his beer. He almost grabs another but decides instead it’s once again time for Captain Morgan.

After taking a long guzzle of rum, Bob sits down and opens his plastic capsule.

His heart pounding, he carefully shakes the finger out onto the couch.

The moment it’s out of its shell, the finger loses its serpentine elasticity. It hardens, acquiring the length, diameter, and joints of a real finger.

Being careful not to touch it (seeing brains) he holds up his own finger next to it (hearing chattering teeth) and confirms the finger is exactly the same size as his own right index finger (now eyeless and quite happy about it.)

Bob bites his lip, worried about his reach being long enough.

Hoping maybe he got a second finger, Bob digs into his pocket for the last two eggs.

In one of the plastic capsules is an organ Bob can’t begin to recognize. It’s a miniature duplicate of his own gall bladder and he sends it after the nose, throwing it in the trash.

Seeing brains with his third eye, he isn’t certain of his other two eyes when he sees what is inside the final plastic egg. All the other capsules were clean and clear inside.

This one is filled with blood. And suspended in the oddly transparent red liquid is a tiny human heart.

It creeps Bob out to see it's beating. He almost throws the heart away but then spontaneously decides not to. He places it gently on top of his stack of Playboys, then pulls off his stinky sweatshirt and covers the egg up.

Seeing bloody brains already, Bob really doesn’t care to look at a bloody heart.

Sweating, seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, Bob takes another swig of rum. He knows he should stay sober but being drunk makes it so much easier for him to deal with seeing brains and hearing chattering teeth.

He doesn’t understand why the teeth don’t wind down! How can they just keep chattering?

Bob tries to focus his attention on the finger again.

The finger is lying on its side, pointing, the end that would attach to a knuckle cleanly chopped off.

His hands are shaking violently. Bob grabs his arm with his left hand, steadying his right hand as he makes a fist, then extends only his right index finger, which he slides carefully along the couch until his fingertip connects with the bottom of the Real Body Part.

The moment the connection is made, the fusion is made, with just a hint of electric current. His normal fingernail disappears, becoming the fourth joint of a six joint finger.

Seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth, he holds up the monster finger, looking at it with the two eyes focused outside his own skull.

He can’t bend it backwards, it functions like a perfectly natural six-jointed six-inch-long finger.

He prays it’s long enough to reach the eye and the chattering teeth.

Getting up, Bob moves into his tiny bathroom, to stand over to the rusty sink. Looking at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror, (seeing brains, hearing chattering teeth) he begins the operation.

He reaches his extended finger up and, without hesitation, plunges it into the top of his head. With his third interior eye, he sees the finger enter his brains.

He laughs, finding hope, thinking this is actually going to work!

He pushes his finger down into his head, bringing it right up next to the third, brain-buried eyeball, close enough to see his own bloody fingerprint.

He stops himself just as he’s about to nudge the eye.

The sound of chattering teeth reminds him in clicking Morse code that hearing chatter is way worse than seeing brains.

Realizing it will be easier to extract the teeth if he’s not blind, Bob decides to get the teeth first, then the eye.

Instead of spinning the eye around to face backwards, however, he makes a mistake and simply reaches over and behind the third eye, searching for the teeth.

The teeth find him.

He experiences fluttering jabs of sharp pain as his finger is repeatedly bitten by the chattering teeth. Yelping, Bob reacts instinctively, yanking his finger back.

And just as cleanly as the dental floss snapped, his extended finger now breaks off inside his own head.

He pulls back his normal three-joint three-inch finger and moans with bitter disappointment when he sees how stubby it is.

Still hearing chattering teeth, still seeing brains, he now adds touch to the list of senses which don’t belong inside his skull. His eleventh finger can somehow feel the wrinkles of his cerebrum.

Bob nearly hyperventilates. His chest is so tight, he can’t catch his breath.

After a few chattering bloody wrinkled minutes, he rushes out of the bathroom, thinking he needs more fingers, he must have more fingers, and he knows where to get them.

He doesn’t bother with his shirt or his jacket. The only thing he pauses for is money. He gathers up $3.00 in coins, as well as four dollars he can feed into the change machine.

Bob leaves the door of his apartment wide open as he dashes out.

He runs all the way to the laundry mat.

The streets are deserted and he expects the laundry mat to be empty also.

He stops just inside the door, huffing and puffing, seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, and he is quite startled to discover he isn’t alone.

The girl is obviously from the nearby college; she’s wearing a t -shirt with their mascot on it. She’s not particularly hot, she looks brainy to Bob, with her black plastic framed glasses and her dark hair done up in a bun.

She appears to be just as startled as Bob.

Bob doesn’t even bother looking at the vending machine offering REAL BODY PARTS.

He knows the warning won’t read 'REAL means REAL!' until he’s alone.

Meaning this college chick needs to go.

Still trying to catch his breath, he looks at her and tells her to leave.

She seems confused, then surprises Bob by actually looking concerned (but that just might be his bloody lumpy chattering brains playing tricks on him). She asks him if something is wrong.

He doesn’t just shout, he bellows, roaring inarticulately at the top of his sizable lungs.

The girl bolts. ⚡ Bob moves out of her way and she rushes through the door without a word, her hand digging into her pocket. He sees her pull out something silver— a cell phone— as she disappears around the corner.

Luckily the grocery store closed hours ago so she won’t find any immediate help in the area.

But he’s certain she’ll call the police.

Seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, he rushes over to the vending machine that dispenses Real Body Parts, yanking his coins out of his pocket. A couple dollar bills spill to the floor but he holds on to his quarters.

Looking at the machine, he sees the display has changed.

There are two blank spots where the chattering teeth and the nose used to be. On the cardboard backing, there are silhouettes of the missing Body Parts with a message written inside each symbol: ONLY ONE PER BODY!

His hands shake so bad, he drops the quarters as he tries to feed them into the vending machine.

Beyond frantic, knowing time is short, he suddenly rears back and kicks the plastic vending machine as hard as he can. He then kicks it a second time, shattering the plastic, causing the entire side to collapse inward. Still panting, he reaches for the eggs.

A trachea, a thymus gland, a miniature liver, a testicle, and a tiny pancreas. He tosses all these aside and digs for more. He handles several kinds of bones, a miniature lung (just one, not two— ONLY ONE PER BODY!), a miniature kidney, a spleen, tonsils, coils of shrunken intestines, an egg packed with hair (exactly the color of his own), tiny parts of the inner ear, even what looks like strings of empty veins.

Nothing he finds does him any good. He wants more fingers, he needs more fingers, and he knows there are no more. He looks at the silhouettes of the nose and chattering teeth, both of which stubbornly read, ONLY ONE PER BODY!

That makes no sense at all! Don't people have ten fingers, not just one?

Furious, harried beyond all reason, seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, Bob goes wild then, jumping around, tromping as hard as he can on all the little Real Body Parts inside their little eggs. Plastic capsules crack beneath the hard heels of his shoes. And while he sees no blood on most of the clean little organs before squishing them, when they pop underfoot, they splatter like bloated mosquitoes, splashing sometimes as high as his knees. Bob does a psychotic blood dance, trying unconsciously to move his feet as fast as the chattering teeth inside his head.

When he finally stops stomping, panting, he realizes he could have used the intestines like a lasso to rope the body parts in his brain!

Too late now! The intestines— like all the other Real Body Parts— are now nothing but a splat on the floor.

Bob looks through the plate glass window, out at the dark street, remembering the college girl pulling out her cell phone.

He looks at all the blood on the floor and decides he doesn’t want to explain to the police that, while there’s not a scratch on him, all this blood belongs to him.

His eleventh finger twitching in the brain matter just behind his third eye, chattering teeth munching on the back of his mind, Bob flees the laundry mat and runs home. Instead of using the sidewalk by the street, he dashes through people’s yards, hiding behind trees and houses whenever he can.

Minutes later, he’s back at his apartment.

Once he’s inside and the door is locked behind him, he doesn’t know what to do.

If the police come— and they will come; he believes, somehow, some way, they’ll find him— he knows they’ll think he’s insane. Bob understands he probably is a little bit insane by now but that’s because the finger, teeth, and eye inside his skull are very real. They aren’t figments of his imagination! The extra body parts are causing his insanity; it isn’t insanity causing delusions of extra body parts!

No one will ever believe him.

He’s desperate, panicked, crying without even being aware of it. He must get these hellish things out of his head before the police come! Otherwise, he knows, there’s a good chance They might lock him up in a place where he’ll never be able to get the necessary tools to extract the seeing, chattering, feeling body parts!

He must get them out now!

There’s nothing to be gained by waiting. The machine is broken, it has no more Real Body Parts to dispense; Bob can’t expect any more help from his antagonist.

He’s on his own.

He moves to the dresser where he put his keys and wallet, snatching up his pocket knife. He opens up the biggest blade, looks at it, and thinks it’s entirely too puny to cut through bone.

Seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, Bob goes into his kitchen, opening up his silverware drawer. He takes out a long, sharp, serrated knife. He chooses it over a butcher knife, knowing he’ll need to do some sawing in order to uncap his tortured brain.

He doesn’t know if he’ll survive the procedure and he doesn’t care. He remembers hearing somewhere that the brain feels no pain, so, once he gets through the sensitive scalp, he thinks he might actually have a chance of saving himself before the police come.

Bob guzzles all that’s left of his Captain Morgan’s, polishing off the bottle. He hopes he has more than just a little pirate in him. He hopes there is also a little brain surgeon in there somewhere.

The chattering teeth seem particularly furious and they— even more than the sight of his finger submerged in bloody brains— are making it harder and harder for him to think. And yet he still has enough presence of mind to wrap his head in a couple of towels before beginning, intending to shield his old eyes.

Having one eye seeing through blood is more than enough for him.

Looking at his face in the mirror, Bob brings the knife to his forehead. His entire body clenching up, Bob begins to cut.

The blood flows in a torrent, attempting to break over the towel dam in order to get to his face. The pain is bad but not hideous. He finds that by concentrating on chattering teeth, he’s able to ignore his screaming nerves (and screaming throat) and keep right on cutting.

Bob attempts making a circle completely around his head. He hopes to slice all the way to the bone, so he can lift off his scalp like a cap.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t cut deep enough in spots. He has to go back and do more gouging, and even then, he seems to be just making a mess.

Finally, bleeding profusely, he reaches up with both hands to clasp his hair, which is long enough to afford a really good grip. Shrieking at the top of his lungs, Bob yanks with all the strength he can muster.

There is not only pain, but also a terrible pulling and, even through his wailing, he can also hear the rip of skin being flayed. A large irregular chunk of scalp comes off in his hands, exposing his bloody skull.

Bob drops his hair in the toilet, then puts his head between his legs, afraid he’s going to pass out.

The teeth in his brain quickly drive away unconsciousness with their chatter.

Bob turns on the faucet, splashing cold water on his face.

He looks again in the mirror at his exposed skull.

Smiling, seeing and feeling brains, hearing chattering teeth, Bob picks up his knife again.

He begins sawing into bone.

⚡⚡_________________⚡⚡

The college girl Bob frightened in the laundry mat does indeed call the police, who respond quite quickly. She is just down the street from the laundry mat, standing outside a closed liquor store, when she sees Bob exit the laundry mat and run off into the night.

The police arrive a few minutes later and the girl takes them into the laundry mat.

Bob didn’t realize it but he squashed every single body part, more than three dozen of them, and every one created an enormous bloodstain. Discovering enough blood to easily fill a real human body, the patrolmen call for back-up.

Only a few minutes later, police dispatch receives a call from two of Bob’s neighbors, who have been awakened by his screaming.

Four police units converge on Bob’s apartment building. After quickly speaking with the neighbors, the police knock on Bob’s door. When he doesn’t answer, they eventually break in.

By a weird coincidence, just as the police break into Bob’s apartment, Bob finally breaks open his own skull. Out of sheer persistence (and aided by an electric knife he retrieved when the manual kind proved less than effective), Bob has made a hole in his skull big enough for his hand.

His third eye watches, amazed, as the entire top of the skull is removed, allowing direct light to make bloody brains even brighter.

His eleventh finger twitches in anticipation.

His chattering teeth are eager as ever for more fingers to bite.

Watching himself in the mirror, Bob plunges his hand into his own open skull and begins rooting around in brains for stray body parts.

He dies with his hand in his head, just as the police burst into his bathroom, pointing guns at him.

On the coffee table in the living room, on top of a stack of Playboy magazines, beneath Bob’s shirt, a tiny heart in a plastic egg stops beating.

The autopsy is performed by a veteran coroner with thirty-six years of forensic experience. What he finds in the victim’s head, still glaring and chattering away, causes him to scream.

Bob Bodey's Body Parts originally appeared in ☝️ Issue #346 of Weird Tales Magazine, November 2007— as well as being reprinted in the Anthology: Weird Tales, the 21st Century; Volume One.

I hope your enjoyed the horror show!

Thank you kindly for your support!

___________________Bolt ⚡