Clem Hohmann

Originally written on April 2, 2022




Clem Hohmann, he walked like he was contemplating every step. When he stopped at the bus stop, he stood like a bird perched. 

The bus scooped him in like a frozen sandwich and craned him onto his seat.

From a hobbling speaker, bedroom pop tunes flash-banged the room and gassed it with a sharp hum. Street lights snuck a blitzkrieg into his bubble-brittle eyes. A wrinkle-faced mother spanked her stifled son. This clicked away the bus’s wheel scuff and cranked up the tongue-twinged atmosphere. A coughing fit was to begin in three seconds, but the careening bus yelped to a halt.

A lurching man with a limp’s gait, Clem dropped down from the whirring bus door. He slopped through his swamp of a body that intoxicated body and spirit like a bar shaking hands with a jazz solo.

He tripped and dropped a coin, his hands reuniting with his stalk walk like a pin prick to a spinning wheel. His home’s faculties quickened his steps. and coordinated like jotted lines of text and his expression grin like a doll on a breaking wheel.

He opened his slow door.

A grouchy voice like a blanket of rain splattered the sweat-porous rooms. Dialed calls ate up his time going home. Galloping exhales tore into his words like a holiday gift unopened past January 1st.

Those nearby got their items checked and a self-obstructed view of him.

“… Beautiful artwork you got there, Von … I loved those games, but it’s nostalgic thinking about it now…”

He hiccupped. His left arm swung past a refrigerator door. Extra corners dousing his movements with sprint. He clasped a cup of water and broke his hiccup through a gulp loose like a scree.

He closed the hover-silent door to his condo and slung what he carried into his home’s pull-down–efficient organization like a boxer in a clinch. He slinked to his dining table and sat down with a wide, rounded, tiptoed stride. He was like a deer in a human’s body. His face sensuous in a curious squinch, he made a list concerning an oil painting he modeled after himself and a ship-moulded mall.

Red in tooth and claw, he bagged an eaten mango with a hand-carved spoon. He washed his hands and let them skim across a plopped hand towel that had thinned at the lower half because of wear. His wrists and the sides of his fingers still moist. He took a bath under a demanding of red lights.

He twice snapped his fingers as he dried himself with a rubbing. His eyes were like a lighthouse focused on a speck of a person, tripedaling through his gaining thoughts.

“I should try something new. I need ideas, and I have plenty. How about creating an online blog with art that doesn’t match my tastes?”

Angry fumes pressed him like a hardy butter batter as he sifted that disappointed like a stranger’s touch in a public transportation vehicle.

A nudge broke him out of his impact grenade of a mind. He had bipolar I disorder. He was a human and unarmed.

He submerged raw chicken under running water until he was satisfied, cleaning it to perfection. He placed the meat in an air-fryer and set it to read “20 minutes” and “180 C”.

He shook like harps’ strings had strung him in return. He heard sparks and rumbling as shoves snapped his joints into skews like an amateur tango dancer to his partner; his hope faced its ruin like a dysfunctioning gun in its toting, blasting machinery. The air-fryer electrocuted him somehow.

His A stuffed body fell through physics past a portal into a gloating cavern in another world.


Biomimicry architecture, especially spirals; and farmland like waves onto sand stuck in time loosened across a floating city in a sprawled, rain-irrigated loom above air-buffed plants.

“A pandemonium,” said a young man alighting from a storage train; his mouth stuffed with a stiff-jointed, wrinkled forehead groans similar to stopping before a mountain’s peak. “What says the woman with the disposable, white ‘pre-shirt’?”

“Do you have coffee?” asked a young woman; joining the man in solemn, long strides, her brows pressed like lemons for a slice of pancake. “I need my quick fix immediately.”

“Wants later—” said the man with a mouth bloated like a stand-in puffer fish, Ashur.

“Needs now,” completed an older man behind the two travelers dressed in a piquant blend of black and sour-grape purple; tiptoeing on flip flops.



Each person in the heavens was taking part in an event wearing fitted clothes of three colors and textures: charcoal black, stained red, and grainy purple. Each of them scooped seven maces from a drawer and wedged them in a bag; keeping each of their maces’ spikes’ tips clapped ‘cover by the clap of the hands or as if with the clap of the hands’ with a handful of clay and a scent of lemon.

“No,” he thoroughly said with a smile.

Clem thought they wore like cranks 'eccentric people, especially those whom a particular subject or theory possesses’

As if a coin dropped where he sat, the passengers in worship of a sultry figure. The figure resembled a giant cockatrice and broke inside through the bus’ rear. It wore flip flops and thin-rimmed glasses. “Aha, not so fun being a nitwit, Jacob?” the cockatrice spoke like warming coconut oil. It stood right behind Clem; its smell, feathers, and voice leaving him too stunned to speak. Numerous faces looked past him at every angle.

Classical music exploded into the bus, gushed them with a sound smooth like butter, and took the slippers off of their feet like a criminal undercover. 

He saw white and nothing else but the beauty of perfect lines.

He woke up a computer and browsed through the internet where his humanity revealed itself. His functional dull house was a melody of mockery toward him and a challenge to make color in the world.