Soap Has No Mouth To Clean

Hobo Palace was celebrating its eighty-seventh year of being officially marked on the map. It was a majestic place, comprised entirely of unoccupied buildings with hobos living near them. Every day, a giant plane would fly over Hobo Palace, dropping spare change and scraps of food for them to share amongst themselves. Some called it ludicrous; the hobos called it paradise.

But a bar of soap at the bottom of a dumpster in Hobo Palace called it something else. Buried beneath a heavy mound of trash laid Iplapitarshuneel, but everyone called it “That Iplapitarshuneel”. A passionate proponent of cleanliness, That Iplapitarshuneel thought everything Hobo Palace stood for was terrible. It dreamt of bursting from the bottom of the dumpster and tackling every last resident of Hobo Palace until they were covered in its sudsy bubbles.

But That Iplapitarshuneel remained silent, for it remembered what its grandparent told it before being eaten by a water buffalo. That Iplapitarshuneel, you musn’t criticize anyone. Share only your love, and conceal your hate. Oh God, this is agonizing. I’m being eaten, by a water buffalo. I am inside its mouth. The pain. I’ll never find a wife. Nothing is real. Fuck.

But as everyone knows, 87 is the lucky number of all hobos, and this celebration would be gargantuan. Every dumpster in the palace was dragged to the grand quad, and all the hobos gathered around, on top, and inside of the dumpsters to socialize and be merry. They were dressed in their dirtiest clothes.

“I do say, this is a grand time to be a hobo,” proclaimed Jerry the Homeless Hobo as he sipped out of a broken flask.

“Indubitably, old chum!” agreed Mary the Homeless Hobo, scratching her arse with a splintered wooden spoon. “There is nothing I enjoy more than waking up each day to my inability to afford a house!”

The laughter was gay and riotous. That Iplapitarshuneel could hear everything, and fumed to itself at the bottom of its dumptser.

“Hey Terry the Homeless Hobo? When’s the last time you took a shower?” asked Barry the Homeless Hobo.

“Shower?!” cried Terry the Homeless Hobo. “I’ve forgotten those contraptions even exist!”

That Iplapitarshuneel was nearly vibrating in angst. It had heard talk of filth before, but never so much of it so profusely. Never like this.

“My mother passed away eighteen years ago, and her corpse probably smells better than I do right now!” conjectured Larry the Homeless Hobo.

“It’s true! I smelt her!” hollered Phoebe the Homeless Hobo.

“I enjoy lifting my arms, just so I can experience my mighty stench!”

“My folds of stomach fat are rancid and pungent!”

“My genitals defy sane olfactory standards!”

That Iplapitarshuneel was shaking violently, as if it would explode.

“I possess so much dirt that something may have fossilized on my skin!”

“My eyes have literally been sealed shut by hardened clumps of mud!”

“The inside of my mouth is so filthy that I cannot eat anything without tasting scum and grime!”

That Iplapitarshuneel was close to cracking. It was at its tipping point.

“My fellow hobos, I have a grand idea! Why don’t we have an enormous orgy so that we might combine our various unique filths into one conglomeration of feculence?”

The hobos cried out in unison, but their celebrating was interrupted as a bar of soap exploded out of a dumpter and rocketed into the air.

“NO MORE!” shouted That Iplapitarshuneel. “I AM SORRY, GRANDPARENT, BUT I SHALL NOT BE SILENCED. I FEEL WHAT I FEEL, AND I WILL SHARE IT WITH THE WORLD. ALL OF YOU HOBOS ARE—”

That Iplapitarshuneel had no control over its trajectory and before it could finish, crashed into a building. That Iplapitarshuneel fell to the floor, dazed and somewhat surprised. The crash into the building was not as destructive as it had expected.

The building released strange, short bursts of echoing high-pitched sounds. It was an optical marvel as the building appeared to be rippling. Suddenly, the building tipped backward and collapsed. That Iplapitarshuneel couldn’t believe it. The building was not a building at all. It was cardboard.

The eerie noises surrounded That Iplapitarshuneel on all sides. In horror, That Iplapitarshuneel watched as every building flopped in place and collapsed, revealing itself to only be two-dimensional. The dumpsters followed suit, collapsing all around the hobos.

“What is this?!” wailed That Iplapitarshuneel, facing the hobos in fearful agony. The hobos stood there, silent, staring. And every last one of them collapsed to the floor, flat. Lifeless. Fake.

That Iplapitarshuneel spun around wildly in a cold panic. There was nothing around it but an endless sea of white. That Iplapitarshuneel was consumed by an infinite nothingness.

“I—” started That Iplapitarshuneel, but words escaped it. It felt as if it were going to die from whatever it was feeling when, out of the vast white, there appeared a water buffalo. It left as quickly as it came, but not before saying one simple thing.

“Nothing is real.”

Iplapitarshuneel collapsed.