That month saw a fall of singed frogs across Central America.

The skies turned black and blue and drivers saw their blackened bodies bounce off their hoods and ricochet onto the road.

It also saw the Texan police baffled by the murder of a woman.

She was a waitress called Carla Blayse and she’d been slashed from ear to ear with an unknown weapon.

They found something unusual inside her.

Someone had inserted a mustard seed into her vagina and plugged her up with a bottle of tomato ketchup.

The police officer who opened and closed the investigation scratched his head when confronted with this piece of bizarre morbidity and stared at the pathologist who held the seed in front of his face at the end of his surgical pliers.

‘Who the hell would do something like that?’, he said.

The pathologist shrugged and said ‘Someone who’s fussy about his sauces.’

That month also saw some strange happenings at the Kentucky Derby.

And editor of Blood Metal Magazine and novelist Jason Maverick saw an unprecedented number of orders for his novel ‘Confessions of a Blood Hound’ from that same state.

It was a sultry day that some might call a nothing day, an in between day, a day full of splats of rain and bursts of sunlight that put people in a bad mood.

Linda Farlane served at the local drive through Hot Sauce A Bongo Diner at the edge of the Texas border.

She’d worked there for years and liked to give the drivers a bit of her mouth when she wasn’t sucking off Rod the boss.

He’d whip it out in the back room and she’d chew him to a froth.

She even liked spitting a bit of come into the sauces just to perk them up a little.

On special occasions she’s tear a bit of soiled Kotex and add it to the burgers and laugh as the customers took away a nicely ruined platter of what she called her ‘menses meat special treat’.

That day as she yawned and poked a finger into her enormous mouth, she saw a black Dodge drive up.

The driver was indiscernible behind the tinted glass and she leaned out of her window to get a look at him.

She could make out a cowboy hat with some horns on it, although what type of horns they were she wasn’t sure.

Rod was in the back jacking himself off to some online porn after a hard day while she waited to take her last order.

The window rolled down and a deep voice said ‘Afternoon Ma’am’.

Linda chewed on her gum, stretching it elastically between her soiled teeth.

‘What’s yer order?’

‘Excuse me, my order?’

‘We serve food, we’re the Hot Sauce A Bongo Diner.’

‘I can see your name right there’, the driver said and pointed at the sign which hung sideways. ‘It seems you have a mischief maker on your hands.’

She turned to see that someone had scrawled over the name so it read Shit Sauce At Blowjob’s Diner.

‘Order’, she barked into her microphone.

‘Is it true?’, the driver said.

‘Is what true?’

‘You spit come into the burgers?’

‘What are you a fucking health inspector?’

‘Yes that is exactly what I am.’

‘Are you gonna buy something?’

‘How could I not from Blowjob’s Diner?’

‘Well?’

‘I’ll have a burger.’

‘Sauce?’

‘What you got?’

‘We got Texan hot, Texan mild, we got ketchup, brown, barbecue, special cheese, blue cheese, ranch dressing sauce, chilli sauce, mop sauce, Tabasco sauce.’

‘Well that’s a crime.’

The driver leaned towards her and she could see his eyes and there was something about them that unnerved her a little. They seemed to be on fire.

Linda was about to say something smart when she restrained herself.

‘May I ask you which sauce you want?’, she said.

‘I’ll have mustard.’

‘We don’t have no mustard, I told you what we got.’

‘It’s a crime not to have mustard.’

‘We don’t have no mustard.’

‘Come here bitch.’

Before Linda could move she found a hand around her throat.

Rod was taking a breath of air at the back when he saw Linda yanked through the window so that her body hung out of it.

Then a long blade with a hook moved through the air with a whistling sound and Linda’s head rolled onto the forecourt. Her severed neck pumped blood furiously across the menu as the Dodge backed up.

Rod stood there as a huge man with a towering figure got out and walked slowly towards him.

He was dressed in black and had a sartorial elegance about him that didn’t match his general actions that day.

He walked up to Rod and looked down at him.

‘No more blowjobs for you’, he said.

Then he disembowelled him.

The police found the two bodies and opened and closed the case almost as fast as they had the murder of Carla Blayse.

‘What the fuck’, the senior police officer said. ‘I just want to retire.’

The driver of the Dodge headed out of the state of Texas.

He stopped at a car dealer a few miles up the road and bought a large black Trans Am.

Then he drove to Kentucky.

He made a call on his mobile and said ‘I’m gonna take care of em.’

Lidia Smalldrop and her husband John Reedman were snobs.

They’d lived in Kentucky for years and stayed on because they goaded as many people as they could and got a kick out of it.

Lidia had started a small magazine called ‘The Knowers’ and she wrote rude illiterate articles about writers and artists in the area.

She also used to write defamatory comments about people on websites.

Her favourite saying was ‘If I can’t have my cock I’ll ruin the man.’

Her victims were those who hadn’t found her attractive and snubbed her.

She was a small minded whore who liked screwing other wives’ men.

If someone didn’t succumb to her few attractions which required the augmenting lens of alcohol, she tried to destroy them.

She liked to get fucked in car parks and use to bark when she got particularly excited.

John Reedman was a fat epicene bully with a penchant for teenagers.

He had money and he and Lidia were making the lives of many writers and artists hell when a new lecturer arrived at Kentucky University.

He strode into his first class and commanded the students’ attention with his masterful rendition of a lecture so engraved with passion and mystery that they hung on every word he said.

‘Art’, he said, ‘is sacred. Antonin Artaud wrote ‘A Spurt Of Blood’ as an iconoclastic gesture aimed at the bourgeoisie, been doing it for years. Eviscerate your audience with wine and mayhem people, reach out a bloody hand from the pit and say ‘be gone foul defilers of writers and artists everywhere for you fuck with forces you do not understand.’ I want y’all to read this by tomorrow together with this fine book by Jason Maverick, ‘Confessions Of A Bloodhound’, for I tell ya, the beast is hungry and his fangs are sharp.’

He returned to his hotel room where he made a call.

‘Jack, get ready for the Kentucky boogy.’

On the other end of the line Jack Laretto hung up the phone and looked out at the verdant lawns of his California home.

His novel ‘No Mercy’ had made him millions and his new one ‘Pony Trip’ about a deranged serial killer, was at the top of the bestseller list.

That afternoon ‘The Knowers’ printed a rude article about art in Kentucky and mentioned Antonin Artaud in a less than flattering light.

That afternoon saw the riders get ready for the Kentucky Derby the next day.

It was a beautiful day with not a cloud in the sky.

The Mustard Man wore a deep black outfit and hat and made his way to the Derby early.

Among the crowd that stood in front of him were Lidia Smalldrop and John Reedman.

They placed bets and gossiped, unaware of the man watching them.

Lidia secured the attentions of a man among her crowd and she disappeared to the ladies toilets with him.

She had her mouth round his dick when the Mustard Man made his entrance.

He stuck a broom handle across the door, and made his way over to the cubicle where Lidia ran her tongue along the edge of the erect member that she stared at with delight.

‘I’m going to make you come real good’, she said. ‘Ah ha, no touching, now let me suck on this.’

She clamped her mouth round the guy’s dick as the Mustard Man kicked the door down and slammed the back of his revolver across Lidia’s head, causing her to bite down hard.

Her beau screamed and fell back on the toilet to stare at his severed member protruding like a sausage from Lidia’s bloody mouth.

‘Hey lovers’, the Mustard Man said, ‘it’s machete time, and he still hasn’t come, maybe you don’t blow too well no more bitch. Ain’t you gonna bark like a dog or yap like a little Pekinese? You’s disrespectful to dogs everywhere to make their noise when you get your snatch filled.’

He pulled out a large smooth handled machete with a custom made blade on it which bore the letters MM and smoothly hacked through the rotund neck of Lidia’s last catch.

He showered her pink blouse with blood and the Mustard Man hoisted up her dress, ran a hand inside her, and said ‘Don’t you ever wash bitch? I prefer meatballs’ and he opened her up with the deft mastery of a butcher and removed her womb.

He took this and the severed penis and laid them out on the sink top just as someone hammered on the door.

‘Lidia, are you in there?’

‘She sure is John’, the Mustard Man said, ‘although she’s all over the place.’

He removed the broom handle, yanked John through the door, throwing him against the back wall and promptly put the broom back.

John stood there in a periwinkle blazer and began to urinate.

A yellow stream oozed out of his trousers and formed a pool around him on the floor.

‘You got no taste in clothes and no taste in art’, the Mustard Man said.

‘I got money’, John said.

‘I know you got money you piece of shit. That’s how you started up your trash rag, and get away with printing your shit, you got no respect for Art and if you damage art revenge will occur, I am the Revenger of Art and all those who have caused it harm fall beneath my law, get ready for what is about to befall you.’

John turned his head and saw his dismembered wife lying in the cubicle.

‘She’s dead, she was absolutely wonderful.’

‘She was an absolute cunt’, the Mustard Man said and walked towards him.

He cut him open from crotch to neck and pulled out his entrails which he placed by the other dainties. Then he removed his heart.

A while later he appeared in the kitchens in a white uniform and made some ketchup.

He cooked up the meat, using all the mustard in the stock room, huge vats of it and served up his dishes for the hungry customers outside.

‘I got sausage meat like you ain’t never tasted Maam’, he said, handing one woman Lidia’s beau’s dick in a hot dog, ‘I got meat balls what will leave you craving flesh, I got tripe, I got every kind of meat even a hot stew with some real treats inside them that’ll leave your taste buds itching, so get it while it’s hot. An there’s my special Kentucky Ketchup on the side.’

His food was cleared up within the hour and he stayed to watch the final race after disappearing to the stables.

It was a memorable day that Kentucky Derby.

The final race saw a horse limp onto the track, upsetting proceedings. It was bleeding and had stitch marks across its belly. The Mustard Man had a remote control in his hand. He flicked a switch. The horse exploded on the track and a dead body fell from its guts.

Spectators saw a stained blouse above the dismembered mutilation that rolled onto the green grass.

The same day Kentucky University ordered copies of ‘Confessions Of A Bloodhound’. Word was spreading about its brilliance and they decided to stock up. The man placing the order had a coke habit and hit the wrong key. Jason Maverick found he’d sold a million in Kentucky.

The students waited the next day for their new lecturer but he didn’t appear.

The Mustard Man left Kentucky as the skies darkened for a big storm. He was leaving a gas station when a trucker asked him to move his Trans Am.

The gas station was next to a frog farm.

The owner bred rare frogs and sold some to restaurants, the rest to collectors.

The signs of a twister were in the air as leaves whirled into a spiral and the clouds moved at speed.

The Mustard Man started his engine, inched past the truck and shot it in the gas tank.

He drove off as it ignited and set fire to the frog farm.

Just as the twister hit.

That day Jack Laretto received a postcard in the mail.

It had a picture of Kentucky on it and read:

‘Kentucky Ketchup: sauce, womb, blood, mustard. MM’

As the Mustard Man left Kentucky he made a call on his mobile.

‘Jack, I’m heading to Oklahoma. I’m gonna visit my buddy JJ Cale, we’re gonna cut a new record together.’

~*~