The Breast in the Bowl: Stories and Drawings by Ben Miller

THE BREAST IN THE BOWL Stories and drawings by Ben Miller

THE BREAST IN THE BOWL Stories and drawings by Ben Miller

STINKY PINKY HALO

Do you remember the first time you touched your butthole?

I do.

I remember because I’m Jesus Christ, son of my father the Father, and I’ve been living in your butt since the day you were conceived. I’ve been down here, sitting above the rim of your ass’s fearful mouth for 53 years.

Why have you kept me buried in here?

I know why.

I know you’ve kept me in here because you don’t know I’m here.

Those rectal wrenches and the drops of blood in your stools? Those are the smoke signals of the savior in your bowels trying to get your attention.

Why do I want your attention?

Partly, it’s because I’m sick of living inside of your ass. I’m supposed to be the perfect, sinless, selfless Lamb of God, but even the savior of mankind--me--will develop selfish desires if left in such circumstances for so long.

The other reason I’m trying to get your attention is because I’m your eternal buddy and I don’t want you to be in hell. And that’s exactly where you’ll end up if you don’t listen to me and help me relocate.

If you are feeling any bit of the vibes I am telepathically transmitting to your conscious mind, then you might be confused. Hear me out.

Whenever a soul manifests into a human body, I’m there, inside of them. Every human body comes equipped with a little Jesus, snuggling up against the inner lining of that baby’s tight, pink, adorable anus. You’re used to thinking that people can only have one body. You’re right, but I’m not just ​ people​ . I’m Jesus and I’m special and I am able to replicate my body infinite times throughout the universe. It would be a blessing, were it not that each of my bodies begins its life within the human bum-bum.

It’s a stupid system because it was made by a stupid man. My dad.

In the schools and churches of modern Christians, young believers are told that their souls will soon perish and proceed to the afterlife. If Jesus is in their heart, they go to heaven. If Jesus is not in their heart, they go to hell.

So kiddies kneel at their bedsides. They fold their palms at their chests and invite me to come into their heart so that they can be saved from everlasting damnation. And it works. I hear their call, I step into their heart, and then, when they die, they go to heaven.

This is all true, but there are some details missing.

The pastors and Sunday school teachers don’t tell you where I am before you invite me to plop my holy haloed head in your ventricles. They don’t tell you that I’m hanging out in your pelvic piehole, waiting for your praying mouth to ask me upstairs. They don’t tell you because they are afraid of that mouth whose

only words are turds. They don’t understand that we should be acknowledging the butt, sitting down with it for some tea and chit-chat, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.

We all make shit. We’re full of it.

And it’s okay.

If we’re full of shit, we’re actually lucky, because it means we’re not too hungry. There are people in the world who would love to be full of shit, while here we are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. We’re afraid of the noxious logs of entropy that are dying in the bowels of the unseen self.

Down in those bowels, there’s me. The source of salvation. Hope. Love. That tickly feeling you get in your genitals when you see and feel so much beauty in life that you nearly cream your pants with admiration. I’m the light of the world! But you’re keeping my light--​ your​ light--buried down in your flabby, phlegmy cavern of caca.

Why do you and all the others do this?

Maybe you don’t believe that I exist.

Or maybe you do believe, but but you’re angry my dad.

Or maybe you’d like to believe but you don’t think it’s realistic.

Do you know what I could do for you if you just let me slide on up to your blood-pumper to plant my sacred seed in the soil of your soul?

No. You don’t know that you could be walking the earth with an emotional boner of bliss bursting through the seams of your skin. You don’t know that the life-transforming force of salvation has been planted in the stinky pinky halo stuffed between the two holy hills of your rear end.

This is why you’re going to hell. This is why I’m going to have to eat your shit until you die.

On the night your sweating mother and hairy father made love in that pale-green room, I heard the sexual screams of their panting mouths. I replicated myself into the small being, you, that began developing when mommy’s egg ate daddy’s sperm. You didn’t yet have an ass with a hole, but there I was inside of you.

So. Henry.

You’re 53 and you’re not looking too hot. Your rectum is sagging and leaking.

There are times when I have to clasp the tissues that line the skin inside your stinkhole so that I don’t fall from your gaping glutes to drown in the white bowl you’ve filled with your waste. Unless you start listening to me, you will soon find yourself a guest in the halls of hell.

When people think of hell, they see a fiery place overseen by a sadist named Satan. This isn’t so. Yes, there is an angel named Lucifer, but he’s not evil and he’s certainly not organizing any kind of dark kingdom in which he tortures the

souls of unsaved sinners. In truth, Lucifer is a tame old man with a beer belly who sleeps on a sodden hammock near a beach in Florida. He’s masturbated so many times that he doesn’t even realize when he’s doing it anymore. For a man of such character, he has a surprisingly firm handshake and is a compassionate hugger.

The hell of fire and brimstone you’ve all heard about was just something created by zealous priests trying to squeeze the coins from the congregation’s fear-soggy trousers.

The real hell is much less exciting. It’s down the hall from heaven. This is because heaven and hell are both overseen by the same guy. God. What really happens when you die?

First, time and space become slippery. You can’t differentiate between seconds and centuries.

You find yourself in an endless waiting room. You grab a ticket, sit down in one of the room’s millions of uncomfortable, poorly cushioned chairs, and you wait. The air tastes like stale crackers and old celery.

Your number is called and you go up to the front desk.

Francine is the woman behind the desk. She has been chewing on her dislodged teeth since they first came loose, some time in the second century. She used to be an angel, but now she’s a mumbling pile of wrinkles.

When she calls your number and you meet her at the desk, she’ll grab your hand and give your palm a few licks. Francine tosses the salt of your skin around in her mouth, gargling it with the grey, recycled saliva at the back of her throat. Whether you’ve got a neglected savior living in your booty or you’ve got an exalted prince of peace sitting in your heart, it affects your flavor. If she finds that you’ve got me sitting in your chest, she gives you the keys to your new room in heaven.

Heaven’s a nice place but there’s not much to say about it. It’s not too special.

You feel kind of nice all the time. There’s lots of pillows. And there’s this place you can go to suck on one of the breasts of the Mother of the Universe. The milk is always the perfect temperature.

If Francine finds something rancid in the dust she licks from your flesh, you won’t be going to heaven.

When Francine tastes the sin in the sweat of your soul and sends you to hell, you’ll first meet with God. He’s not majestic or monumental as the Good Book makes him out to be. He’s a frail old man with twiggy grey hair in all the wrong places. He’s got cataracts and is constantly eating fistfuls of sugar from a plastic bag given to him when he bought an at-home enema kit from the convenience store in 1963. He’s omnipotent and could’ve fixed the problem himself, but sometimes he forgets his own power.

The people who go to heaven never meet God. He doesn’t really care about them. He only wants to meet the hellbound souls who didn’t worship him. He spanks them and reads them their sins while he picks his nose with the other hand.

I tried to save you. I gave you the key to heaven. I sent you my son. Instead of accepting it like a good Christian, you kept my baby boy burrowed in your bowels and shat all over his holy hide for five decades. He could never get those bits of half-chewed corn out of his hair.

After he finishes his scolding, you’re thrown into a cramped room with cold, cracking tiles. Fluorescent lighting. No windows.

There’s a constant broadcast of Frank Sinatra doing something like singing, but it sounds like he has a loaf of bread in his mouth that he’s not allowed to spit out or swallow. And it’s true. He does. The broadcast is recorded live from a cell in hell in which Frank Sinatra wears a pink bathrobe and sings “Strangers in the Night”, again and again, with a loaf of unsliced white bread pressing up against his epiglottis while a blind pigeon plucks his pubic hairs with its beak.

In your new room in hell, you’re naked and there’s a used, pink bathrobe lying in the corner. There’s never anything to do. There’s never any food, but it doesn’t matter because hunger doesn’t exist there. Sure, there’s the emotional hunger for life, love, and purpose, but the physical hunger for food stops after you die.

Every once in awhile, a panel in the ceiling slides aside.

God’s eager bearded face peers in at you. A bead of slobber slides off his teeth and lands on your forehead. Then his face disappears. A few seconds later, perched over the edge of the opening, you see the flabby, whiskered ass of a man too old to remember his own name. God’s knobby, arthritis-riddled hands spread his buttcheeks apart, blessing you with a clear view of the regal ring in the crevice of his buttocks. After thousands of years of defecation, his sphincter has lost its ability to contract. It gapes open above you.

One turd falls out.

Then another.

And another.

The shit continues storming out of his sacred stool station, falling like dead birds from the sky. After an hour or so, it stops. The panel in the ceiling slides closed and there you are in your room in hell. You, the pink and soiled bathrobe, the befuddled intonations of Frankie’s bread-congested oral cavity, and God’s poop in a pile about the same size as 23 dead cats stacked one on top of the other. A snail crawls out of the pile and inches toward your foot.

EATING THE BEARD OF JESUS My heart is bearded with the Savior’s hair.

Please let me to tell you how this came to be.

To begin with, it happened because of faith.

Faith is the mechanism of attention that makes all things come to life. All forms of the manifest world enter this world only by passing through the threshold of faith. Faith is belief in a possibility. Belief in a possibility gives energy to that possibility. If the belief is strong enough or held for long enough, the object of that belief will become manifest. It will manifest as an amalgamation of thought, emotion, sensation, and physical substance. The qualities of the belief determine the qualities of its manifestation. Energy can manifest in any form. Its shape and qualities are determined by the attention that summons it into being.

You may have faith in the values of a television program.

You may have faith in the values of a religious deity.

You may have faith in the pleasure of narrow, baby-blue, nine-inch dildos, atheism, politics, sports, fashion, or whatever else you may choose.

It does not matter in what you place your faith. Whatever the target of your faith is, the qualities associated with it will be found in your life. You may be aware of your faiths or you may be ignorant of them. They will manifest all the same.

I grew up in a Christian family. Church every Sunday. Lutheran school from grade five through eight. Bible verses orbiting the contents of every day. I never considered myself a follower. I was just a sponge that absorbed the religion that was imposed upon me. I didn’t feel the concepts and beliefs of the religion in my heart, but I felt their weight resting on the floor of my belly, gestating. I didn’t actively empower them, but I yielded to them. So they grew.

There was childhood. School. Teenage years. High school. Then college. Then life and odd jobs after college. I never considered myself a Believer in Jesus, but in the unnoticed corners of mind, there sat Jesus under blankets of dust, his existence upheld and sporadically fertilized by the attention I unconsciously gave to him.

I didn’t know he was there, but he was. Think of the mind as a room.

Throughout your life, countless forms, thoughts, experiences, and feelings are placed inside of this room. They are placed there by your own choosing, by the world, and by other people. Jesus was put in the room of my mind when I was a child. I forgot about him, but he was still there. His presence fed itself on the energy of my unconscious mind.

Forms of the mind are like plants. To feed a plant, you give it water. The water helps it grow. To feed a form within the mind, you give it attention. The more attention a form receives, the more it grows and the more its qualities seep into your life. Sometimes we are aware of the forms to which we give our attention, and sometimes we are not. We don’t notice that we are giving attention to certain forms and culling them into existence. Like if your body has

a nervous twitch that causes you to occasionally twitch your left foot’s big toe.

You don’t intend it. You don’t notice it. But it happens.

That’s how it was with Jesus and me. I’d been giving him my attention for years without even realizing he still inhabited my mind. Because the amount of attention I gave him was subtle, his presence in my life was subtle. But if you apply minimal amounts of effort to something for long enough, something that began as small and unfelt will eventually become palpable, sniffable, and immediate. Momentum that began its movement at the slow pace of sliding molasses will eventually accumulate the pace of a wheel steadily and surely propelling along its path. If it keeps going, it may reach a tipping point, a point where its energy increases exponentially and it bursts through a barrier.

I can’t be sure, but it is my guess that this is what happened with Jesus.

His presence in my mind continuously fed itself on my unconscious attention, slowly increasing its substance, until one day it finally burst into the manifest world and presented itself to me as the body of Christ standing before me in the bathroom.

When I entered the bathroom and saw Jesus standing there, he was naked, and his beard was in the sink, its many hairs sprinkled along the sink’s porcelain toothpaste-painted wall.

Jesus turned to face me. It was about three in the afternoon and the bathroom was well lit enough that he hadn’t needed to turn on the ceiling light.

His nude body was lean, but not emaciated as you may think from all those stories that make him out to be some sort of ascetic. I had a hunch that he had once been a vegan, but had then converted to vegetarianism because he had missed cheese too much. If you can turn water into wine, it’s nice to have some cheese on the side.

He was freshly shaven, his face looking neutral and inconsequential, as if it was no big deal for the baby boy of the Lord to be cleaning up in your bathroom in 2015 AD. I had the impression it wasn’t his second coming, that he had never really left and had just been hanging out on earth for two-thousand-plus years, decidedly quiet after calming down from his evangelical days of telling stories about people living inside of needles and making pigs go suicidal by installing demons in their bodies. How is that for a vegan?

With him standing there so matter-of-factly, it didn’t seem like a big deal. It also didn’t seem like a big deal that his penis was a snake, gently gnawing on the inner wall of his thigh.

After he’d given me a few moments to acclimate to his presence, he said, “Hi, Karen.”

“Hey, Jesus,” I said, as if he were just another roommate who enjoyed shaving in our shared bathroom.

“Hey, Karen? I’ve got something for you.”

The serpent that was his dick punctured the skin of his thigh with its fangs. A drop of blood trickled down to the side of his knee.

“What’s that, Jesus?”

“It’s my body. My beard. I’ve got it here for you.”

“Oh.” “Will you eat it with me?”

I had eaten lunch a couple hours ago, so I wasn’t hungry. But you know when you’re at a friend’s place and they’ve just made some food and it smells so good and you just can’t help yourself? Well, Jesus’s beard shavings in the sink didn’t smell like anything, and they didn’t look appetizing either, but I felt a desire to eat them anyway. It might have been because I was bored.

“Sure, Jesus.”

I walked up next to him. We bent over, dipped our heads into the sink, and we each lapped up a mouthful of hairs into our mouths. We stood up and he offered me a paper cup of wine that had been sitting on the toilet’s closed seat. I took a swig to help wash down the hairs. It felt like tiny, centimeter-long feathers were tickling my throat as the hairs swam down my esophagus. I turned my head to look at Jesus and he was staring at me with this dumb grin on his face. A dumb grin that grins for no reason at all, a grin that exists because its possessor doesn’t need or have a reason to do anything at all, so why not grin? I suspected he’d been smiling this dumb grin for centuries, after he got over the whole martyr complex of his early days.

I went to the kitchen to get us some water. When I went back to the bathroom to give him his cup, he was gone, though his beard trimmings were still in the sink.

Except for within the inner visions of my mind, I haven’t seen him since.

I scooped his hairs out of the sink with a piece of toilet paper, took them to the backyard and put them in a hole in a tree where I saw two squirrels humping last spring. It would have felt weird to toss the shaved beard of Jesus in the trash bin, on top of the coffee grounds and orange peels.

Since I ate the beard of the Savior, it feels like I’ve got his beard dangling on the chin of my heart. It’s a subtle feeling, but it’s there. Of course, it doesn’t make sense. A heart cannot have a beard.

I still wouldn’t say I believe in Jesus. I don’t know if I believe that what I saw in the bathroom was real.

Despite this, the feeling remains. The feeling that I’ve got his beard on the face of my heart. And the memory that I saw him, his clean-shaven face, and a snake where his penis should have been, in my bathroom on a Tuesday afternoon.

THE BREAST IN THE BOWL Sometimes life is shaped by love and death. Sometimes by failure and accomplishment. Sometimes by hopes, fears, butter, and gutters.

Other times, it is changed by the appearance of a speaking breast poking its nipple above the surface of your toilet bowl’s water.

I was 27 years old. My cold bottom was perched on my toilet in the modest, cream-tiled bathroom of my studio apartment. On top of the toilet tilted a photograph of my sister and me as infants, naked and howling in the bathtub.

The photograph rested in a frame of faux velvet, pale green like sun-faded Easter decorations. I got up to wash my hands while the toilet water gurgled itself down the drain.

As I was lathering my palms with soap, I heard a cautious “Hello” muttered by some voice behind me.

The mirror’s reflection showed no one else in the room but me.

“Hello, Carl.”

The voice was female, middle-aged, and vanilla in tone. The neutral but gentle voice that milk would have if it could speak. And it was coming from below. From the toilet.

I looked into the toilet and saw that single bulb of bosom floating in the bowl.

There was no human body attached to it.

The boob was submerged in the toilet’s water, with only the nipple and a couple inches of the ample areola peering above the water’s surface. An almost inaudible purr hummed beneath its skin.

Speaking about it now, it seems absurd.

That would have probably been my response, too, if I were you and not I. But I am I, and I have seen the toilet’s magic melon.

When I first met the mammarian messenger, it seemed as natural as the sky’s blue or the grass’ green. In that moment, it seemed more unnatural that I ​ hadn’t met a disembodied jumblee before.

“Carl!” When it spoke, I saw no mouth move. The voice emanated from it like an echo leaving a cavern. A telepathic titty.

“Hello?” I said. It came out as a question because, although it’s a habit to return a greeting with a greeting, it is not a habit to be in conversation with a bodiless body part.

“Carl. There’s something I need you to do for me. I need you t—” “How do you know my name?”

“I can’t get into that right now, sweetie-pie. No time for histories and epithets.

I need you to do something for me.”

And because I was curious what favor the breast in the bowl would ask of me, I said, “Okay.”

“Honey, I need you to cut out the milk. I know the people say it’s a good thing.

That it’s good for your bones. That it’s a great source of calcium. But it’s not. It’s for babies. And you’re not a baby anymore—or you shouldn’t be a baby anymore. But you know what, Carl?”

“What?”

“You are a baby. Do you know why that is?”

“Well, no. I’ve always been under the impression that my baby days ended a while ago.”

“They should have, Carl. They damn well should have. They’re supposed to end within a year or two after you crawl out of your mother’s vagina. You stop chomping on momma’s milk spout, start shitting in a toilet, and learn to tie your shoes by yourself. But for you, and most other people, the baby years didn’t end there. Even when mother removed her nipple from your mouth for the final time, you didn’t really let it go, not emotionally. There’s still a baby inside of you that’s screaming for the milk of your momma’s udder.”

“There’s a baby inside me?”

“Yes, Carl. And it’s moving your limbs, your mouth, and your mind like a puppeteer. Except that this puppeteer lives inside of its puppet—you. And you’ve got to get rid of it, Carl. It’s gotta go. That baby is like a dam that’s been shoved up inside of your flowing stream of self for years. The waters are about to burst. The baby must be drowned and buried so that it may return to the earth that feeds you from the inside.”

“So, you’re saying no more milk?”

“Yes. No more milk.”

The oracular orb of flesh contorted itself like the malleable head of an octopus as it descended through the toilet’s hole and its shadows. After it left, the scent of honey floated up from the bowl and into my nostrils.

That night, I lit a candle at my kitchen table and poured myself my final glass of milk. A slice of chocolate cake on the side.

I decided to go all the way and totally remove dairy products from my diet.

The effects started on my third day without the stuff. My throat expanded with spaciousness. My nasal passages became so clear that my breath was deeper than I remembered it being as a kid. I coughed up what felt like seven pounds of phlegm. 27 years’ worth of pent up phlegm that had been congesting my system.

After seven days, I felt as if I had an entirely new body. I felt lighter.

I felt like I could fuck a mountain.

I want to fuck the mountain. I want to make ​ love​ to the mountain and squirt the steam of my esteem in the face of the future.

LIST OF DRAWINGS Listed in chronological order: The Will of Water​ , mixed media on paper, 6.25 x 10 inches Heart Womb​ , mixed media on paper, 10 x 6.25 inches The Head of the Void​ , mixed media on paper, 6.25 x 10 inches

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ben Miller is an artist, writer, and performer.

To find more of Ben’s work or contact him, you can visit his website: www.benjonmiller.com