Stopping the Blobbies by Richard Pitaniello

Rosie was all blood and bawling in her arts and crafts room, wiping gray eyes with child fists, sticking her black hair together. Her hot tears melted eye shadow, dripping lines down her face, lines much like the dark tattoos on her back and her legs and her arms. Those tattoos and her age and her body all belonged to someone who was too old for the crayons and construction paper all around Rosie, but she still liked them as much as she liked knives and scalpels and the needles that had licked tattoos onto her body. Some people wondered if her brain was tattooed too and that's why it didn't work any more.

At any rate, Rosie was damn damn sad in her art room that day, because: "No more Blobbies!" she cried. "I can't make no more! I'm clean out of hearts!"

She had gallons of blue gel-glue, but she didn't have objects to pour the glue over and encapsulate.

For that's how to make her art Blobbies: pour blue glue on a small something--a heart--and make a little blob that she could talk to and touch and kiss. Rosie had made so many of these and she wanted to make so many more.

But her piggybank money on her dresser, all the spiders in the corners of the room, all the roaches flowing up the walls, all her own bloody teeth and fingernails that she ripped out with pliers and which turned the blue gel-glue black and ruined it all dammit . . . all these things were gone.

So Rosie cried, sputtered, streaked red over the table in despair. She knew: There can be no more blobbies.

Unless . . .

She stopped, open gray eyes she had scratched rosy. She smiled, squealed: "Of course!"

So she got up and drank a whole friggin' gallon of gel-glue. Then she sloshed her body out to the garage where the chipper-shredder waited. She poured tons more glue under the shredder. Then she yanked the starter cord and fired the shredder up in a whirl.

And Rosie was happy again, ready to make her body into thousands of hearts for thousands of Blobbies, even if she wouldn't have eyes left to see them with. In the end, heart is all that matters.

So she jumped in the shredder and gave all the babies her heart and the rest of her, smiling as long as she still had a smile and a face.