Devil’s Hopper, a literary mystery

Devil’s Hopper, a literary mystery, Chapter 1

In Devil’s Hopper the small New England town west of Boston, Marktree, basically deconstructs after discovering two mummified bodies, a colonist and Indian woman from Colonial times in the early 18th century. The mystery unravels through five characters and their voices. In the opening chapters we hear from the archetypal couple of contemporary Marktree, Lucky and Jewel.

Chapter 1

The babies were crying in the woods and staggering like zombies toward Lucky Taylor. Sure it was a dream or at least he hoped it was. Maybe he needed to urinate. Just wake up for God’s sake. But here they came. Naked rubber babies. Burned into grisly dark colors, like bruised souls. The dump back of the Bakerville Toy Factory where he was foreman…well sort of. Still he had responsibilities. He had to do something. This residential community in Marktree, Massachusetts, an old suburban town west of Boston. These were upstanding, hardworking middle class folk. They wouldn’t put up with zombie babies invading their overpriced ranchers and extended capes. What with the inanities of cable TV he knew these babies intended serious harm to living families. Thrown out as defectives by the earlier generations running the Bakerville outfit. And outfit in the gang sense, Lucky meant.
“We know, we know!” the babies cried from the swamp, the wetlands where there was a stand of bamboo, where deer still infiltrated from the thick brush near the town reservoir.
“What do you know?” Lucky yelled back at the end of the paved road fading into the wetlands, squared off by a public garden walk.
He could see their gnarled heads bobbing in the murky light. A phosphorescence violet in aspect befitting their electric natures. This was bad. Real bad. Lucky a middle-aged Anglo-Irish male, with moderate exercise and a few carloads of cigarettes and a tank car of spirits behind him in a life of moderate self-denial…felt a shortness of breath as he advanced toward the babies.
“We know, we know!” the babies chorused.
“What? What do you know?” Lucky cried out and sank to his knees on the mucky ground.
They came right up to him with their bug eyes and their filthy bodies.
“We know everything!” they said and reached forward to feel him up.
That’s when Lucky awoke in a total sweat. His heart pounding, his own eyes bugging into the purple depths of his bedroom.
His long time partner Jewel Hunnecutt was propped up with her finger poking him.
“You’re driving me nuts! You’ve been raving again. You’ll wake up the neighbors.”
Lucky climbed from the bed and in his boxers staggered to the bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face. The night-light was a pirate ship and it seemed to wink with evil rays. There was more than enough light to make him look like a derelict with baggy eyes and a face frightened by age, mortality and hopelessness. This is me, Lucky wondered, and tapped the mirror.
“Oh God,” he moaned and stood wavering over the toilet to relieve his bladder. “I need a vacation. Maybe a new job.”
A voice inside his head, he hoped was the case, said rather smartly: “How you doing, Lucky?”
The room seemed to brighten around him and the toilet. Lucky let his eyes move side to side and then out the open door into the stairwell. There seemed to be someone there. A shadow. His peripheral vision saw an old man, humpbacked, fragile, one step below the landing, bent forward as if to hike himself further up the stairs.
The hair on Lucky’s neck rose and he turned to confront the old man. In the process of whipping about, he peed his final jet around the bathroom floor in a golden arc.
The old man wasn’t there now. But he wasn’t really new. Jewel had picked up on him years before growing up in this house. Her family had an old Yankee great great uncle who spent his final Civil War veteran years in the house. Having survived the horrors of war, Jewel said he just never wanted to admit defeat to death, so he hovered in the stairwell where people came and went.
“Harmless really. Just another piss ant, like most old men,” Jewel had said, her eyebrows arching at Lucky.
“Gimme a break,” Lucky said. “You know too much.”
“You’re all the same,” Jewel said. “You do dangerous things we girls don’t wanna do. You make us laugh. It’s like having a dog…you gotta enjoy the trade-off of cleaning up the mess.”
Lucky wiped up the bathroom and washed up, keeping his eye on the stairs. The pirate ship night-light blurred as he bent over one time too many. I’m gonna stroke out wiping up piss, he thought, a ghost uncle, territorial and a gang of toxic dump babies. This way to Hell…
He stumbled back to bed and tried to ease down onto the Maui Zephyr, a large futon favored by Jewel and her New Age friends. Whatever. Just a good night’s sleep for a change. He unscrewed the cap on his spring water and sipped. The water caught in his throat and began to gag, but he quickly recovered.
“Good grief,” Jewel said from her side, deep in darkness. “You gotta cut back on the margaritas.”
“Oh please,” Lucky said and eased back onto his pillow. Please, Morpheus or whoever was in charge, just a few hours lazy sleep. He had to be at the plant on time for a management meeting…things were going to hell in a hand basket, whatever that meant.
How could those cast off babies know everything…he wondered and felt himself sinking beneath a lily-padded pond of swamp water. He just didn’t care anymore. He’d sink into the mud and be preserved like one of those toxic castaway babies.

 /////////////////////////////////////////////////

Scribe Tribe Reflections on A Hot Day

I’ve always been fascinated by this scribe tribe image…this clan of ours that stretches back to the first cuneiform scribes, bent over their tablets of mud. I guess before that we were the characters in the tribes that told the stories. But something must have happened when it came time to scratch out symbols and convey some sense of a story. Most of that early writing was census tallies and merchant deals. Not unlike most of the scribbling today, as an aspect of the business and market processes globally. Enough to put you to sleep but as many of us have experienced…technical and business writing can pay bills. Fiction…well? That’s another story, isn’t it? So, anyway, this is just a short blast of words to make some noise, maybe even music now and then, about what it means to be in this scribe tribe, this manic scribbling that captures our quotidian and universal experiences. We may not be the most powerful clan in the history of the world, but there have been times when our civilizational product has made a critical difference in the preservation of “frozen speech”, of cultural knowledge, of memory and experience from the pre-literate times, true today, in Gilgamesh’s search for the flower of immortality. Bear with this scribe…I’ll be back with more. Please feel free to write me and express your opinions about this maddeningly aggravating and joyous art. Here’s something Flaubert supposedly said…and I think it well applies to our time as scribes…”Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” More on that…and more on more…next time.

The Latest Bloodshed, a mystery, chapter 1

The Latest Bloodshed is a mystery novel about a young South Georgia police detective who comes to an unavoidable personal and professional crossroad in his life.

This novel available for sale; see http://www.jimstallings.com/

The novel was inspired by a long postponed visit to my Georgia birthplace where my parents grew up and returned to retire. While visiting there last fall, the Mexican cartel executed a local family of Mexicans, a father and mother, a housekeeper, a visiting female relative and a small boy under school age. The school age children came home on the bus in the afternoon and found their family murdered. Apparently the father and mother had been involved in the local drug trade and had talked to police about the cartel’s involvement in the area. The surviving children who rode the bus that day passed my sister and I as we walked along a county road just a few miles from the crime scene. It was a beautiful, sunny November day. Later, returning to the Boston area, the horror of this contrast, the presence of violence and bloodshed on so many levels in our society, sparked a creative reaction that suggested this novel…The Latest Bloodshed. The novel is available through iUniverse.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and booksamillion.com: Here’s how the novel opens:

1

Was it raining? It didn’t matter. At some point in all his dreams, Jelly Lovejoy knew it had to rain. Trouble had to come home to roost. That was the nature of where he was. Strickland County, Georgia, county seat, Warden. Forty thousand souls in the Land of Nod. This was Jesus country. Old and New Testament. A hard land laced with blood and suffering. And in his recurrent nightmare, there was something dark and cloudy, plasma of sorts, nothing definite, except in flashes it took on definiteness, yes it did…and it chased him through his dreams. Like down a slick silver highway through the dark Georgia night. And there was that rain, making things slick. Like blood…slick and sticky all at the same time. And if you made the wrong move, you’d be off that road and off into the pine forest night. And then God help you, nobody knew for sure the limits of your suffering. It took Jelly a long time to figure out what it was chasing him through the dark nights. But it was akin to ignorance. Bilious, unformed, never certain, never obvious, just a vague display of horrid ignorance. One hand not knowing the other…
And it came after you like a mob of monsters that could not get enough of hate and pain. They wanted to punish Jerry “Jelly” Lovejoy for all his wandering thoughts. What had he been thinking when he first began to question things? Was he insane?
But there it was, that questioning mind, asking, does it have to be this way? And the answer from the rearview mirror was, yeah, boy, it does have to be hard and mean and stupid. This is the land of suffering…and the dark hostile force redoubled and chased his failing car through the Georgia nights and he stuck his head out into the wet and cried out for a savior and he or she just didn’t come…That cruelty behind him, Death, or whatever it was, just came on apace and swallowed him…
And he awoke in a sweat in his great aunt’s old farm house where he now lived alone and he howled. He howled his pain and shook the heartwood old frame that sustained him above the alluvial clay soil of Strickland County, miles only from the Florida line. These semi-tropical fantasies with all its rich farm lands alight with the ghosts of the past. Jelly screamed his pain, his absolute fear, and shook in a malarial sweat ’til he pitched back into his wet sheets and stared once again at the speckled ceiling of his family’s old homestead. You boy, somebody whispered, you got the curse of remembering. The ghosts of the ancestors walked the soil all around him and he knew in his gut he couldn’t escape their curses.
“I’m not carrying this guilt anymore,” he said to no one in particular and rose to drench his head in a sink of cold well water. In the kitchen window’s reflection he saw a tall young muscled man with wild blonde hair, slumped forward, his face freckled by years in the sun…his wide set gray eyes sunken in dark shadows of fatigue.
Overhead a lonely pilot ferried a tiny plane through the dark moonless night. The drone of the engine gave him some sense of his own time but the past in all its thickness came round him like a suffocation, an asthma of gasping breath that caused him to see stars in the black hallway of the old frame farmhouse. Sleep, sleep, he whispered, and made his way back to his bed and slumped back into the damp cotton.
God help me, he prayed, and felt himself sinking into the great miasma of dreams and fears again. Soon, too soon, his own present life would be awakening with the morning sun. He had to outrun that reality, he had to make his way through the darkness to that light where he had a chance to vanquish the weight of the past.
Coyotes yipped in the woods to the east. A hoot owl called out of the ramshackle old tobacco curing barn, put together with pegs and dowels, now leaning over at a crazy angle, all the past shading its weariness into his present life. Was this fair? It didn’t matter. It was the truth. He gasped for breath and in his exhaustion, in his battle with ignorance and death, and every other unknown, fell backwards into blessed dreamless sleep.

Narcolept–Another Chapter of Sorts…

2. The Mockingbirds.

 

First bird Lept remembers hearingkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk….

There it is. Lept fell asleep recalling the mockingbird mimicking the old rusty gate, or was it the bathroom door or the bedroom door where  his young parents lay sleeping soundly?

What was that? Another dream intersects? But slips away as he recovers temporary consciousness. Another lost wire connection. Well, maybe not hardwired, a virtual limb? A shunt.

Suddenly Lept sees his daughter and her husband eating Chinese food in a noisy restaurant. Everyone has a good appetite. They hope Lept can stay awake during the meal. In the blessing of the food, Lept’s prayer wanders to the necessity of regular laundry, whites and darks, just so his former wife will remember how he drifted away into this dark void as if cast off a space station. It wasn’t his fault, or hers? But wouldn’t this be good enough for government work? He dreamed a scene of a final exam, a favorite professor reviewing his question and answer list…and coming up short. Too many questions, not enough answers. Lines, lines, lines…orange bands with black bar graphs dividers. Beautiful but for what purpose?

Awakening over the hot and sour soup prayer, an island of sanity, his wife …a gap again. They look away…he smiles, only slightly embarrassed. He has an excuse. Yes sir.

Wanna hear it? He asks his son in law…

–Sure, he says, chewing a king crab leg, juice dripping from the claw.

–Gimme a second,

To the side in a diorama, Lept saw his father watching him. Toss the ball into his court. I’ll handle it from here, his father’s nod seemed to say. Or was his own father asleep? What did it take to be fully awake? lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

Okay. Let’s take a break.

Somewhere Lept hears his first wife singing a hymn, Rock of Ages. He slipped off that hoary seaweed rock many a tide ago…go…

Narcolept–A Blog Serial Novel

Here the author as such attempts a spontaneously composed novel, one damned thing after another with hopefully some semblance of entertainment to the reader and writer…me, myself and sole puppeteer, Jim Stallings. This follows the previously demonstration of a string of spontaneously written short short fictions, entitled DIFFICULT PEOPLE, forthcoming by publisher CreateSpace, a division of Amazon.com. The storybook of adult flash fictions will be available by the end of April 2009.

Here we continue the use of improvisation, with slight or no revision, to break free from the suffocation of critical thinking that denies or inhibits the joy of playfulness in literature…storytelling. Here we eschew in this initial draft the great concern with “higher standards” and the cross of sacrifice of infinite revision. I suspect that revision as a way of life, while valuable in and of itself, is also a ploy of a publishing system overloaded with supply of manuscript material. This may indeed be the thematic underbelly of this novel on the fly…Narcolept, a free blog serial novel composed by an alter-ego fictive authorial self.

And Free. Exactly. Free.

 Now, let us begin this absurd exercise in playfulness free from careerist and capitalist intentions.

 

NARCOLEPT

By

 

Byron Lewis

 

 

narcolepsy 

1880, from Fr. narcolepsie, coined 1880 by Fr. physician Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Gélineau (1859-1928) from comb. form of Gk. narke “numbness, stupor” (see narcotic) + lepsis “an attack, seizure.”

A disorder characterized by sudden and uncontrollable, though often brief, attacks of deep sleep, sometimes accompanied by paralysis and hallucinations.
nar’co·lep’tic (-lěp’tĭk) adj.

 

Lepton: a definition: Leptons are a family of elementary particles, alongside quarks and gauge bosons (also known as force carriers).

 

Chapter 1. Fuzz Center.

 

You begin with the fact of not enough sleep.

Fuzz center. Smack dab in your brain stem.

Nod off.

Never know what hits you.

Blam!

Out!

One minute you’re watching a re-run of the Cone heads. Next minute something’s invaded your corpo, a reel of feelings and unctuous gooey liners from alternate dream realms? Goo with a purpose.

In short, the stuff takes over. You’re somewhere else.

Thank god you’re propped up in front of your TV and not behind the wheel of your shitbox from Star Used Cars, right off Loop 410, twirl of the index finger, setting off a protological itch. Hope she trims that long blue fingernail.

Oh, yeah, there are causes for narcolepsy. Exhaustion, boredom, brain fry…and believe me there are cures as such. Napping highly recommended. Middle of the afternoon. A cot, a pallet on the floor, dim the lights, cut the sound, lock the office door (if you are lucky enough to have privacy, most narcolepts don’t earn such privileges for one of the greatest crimes in society is to doze on the job…not give enough of a shit to keep the job). The aforementioned, initial indictment parenthetical is enough for now. This isn’t a legal brief. I’m not looking for victims. Enough of those. I’m here to tell one small leptic tale.

Lept Frazier’s tale, my pseudonym.

Right there. I slipped off. Saw a carnie’s display of cheap bracelets, false gold plated ringlets and the smell of sawdust, the taint of shoving crowds. Lept is in some sense the very opposite of Frazier’s problem. Fact is the boy never lept into anything with full vigor. He held back. Maybe waited too long. Weary of life from the beginning.

Where do we start this dismal tale of modern hypocrisies?

The damage is done. What’s the point?

Start somewhere.

Literary Asides: “Niagara” & Marilyn Monroe and More

extract from email with polymath, Pedro T.:

Niagara in all its color glory arrived. This was a film that I’ve always come in on in Act 2, about when Joseph Cotten stalks her in the bell tower and chokes her to death. Right out of pulp fiction covers, graphically speaking. So I got to see MM in her Act 1 slinky dresses, her hip twanging walk and her in bed scenes. Apparently Nabokov was smitten by MM when he met her in Hollywood years later in the making of Lolita by Kubrick. He was quite impressed by her beauty and brains. I know Vlad’s wife Vera was right at his side throughout the meetings. She was really a quite small woman. Some guy recently on Antiques Roadshow got an appraisal for one of her tight dresses in Some Like It Hot for a cool $300k. Damn. Now there’s a nest egg pepper-upper. My B-actress Aunt M.E. was in Hollywood in the 50s and like many other aspirants converted to the peroxide blonde look and the bright red lipstick vagina lip look. Fetching. But I digress into shadowy libido areas and Mailer and a herd of other slavering slaves to MM have worn this trail bare. Historically, mythically, the life of a love goddess is not untroubled with all that yang energy focused on her every wiggle and wink. Back to the film itself, it was a sleazy kind of pulp novel of the 50s with the blonde draped over the cover, Niagara Falls in the background…something probably about doomed honeymoons…This was the age of paperback novels edging on the erotic/pornographic. Back then a fast typing, hard drinking, heavy smoking novelist with a run time of 60,000 words could knock out a torrid affair/crime caper in a couple of months. I know an agent from those days who had a “stable” of such writers. One guy in particular he recalled, not his name, but that his technique was to come to Chicago and rent a suite at the Drake Hotel and order a case of his favorite booze. He’s sit down at the typewriter and knock out a novel in about two or three weeks while consuming the firewater. Then he’d drop off the ms. and disappear into Main Street anonymity. The agent said  he sold everything he ever wrote. Ah, tales from the dark side of the creative world. Another odd reaction I had to Niagara. In 1952 when they were shooting the Falls area, which is structurally for obvious reasons much the same tody, I was struck by the paucity of people. There were just fewer people back then, probably half the population of today. I was about six when this shot and part of its attraction to me is to remind me visually of the stuff in the film, the cars, buildings, signage, clothing of “ordinary people.”
Anyway, old bud, I feel underneath this torrid love/murder plot something deeper…but here is not the place to go into it. Something tragic and troubling not only about an American icon of the screen, but something about America post Korea, and all the rest to come (including the love goddess’ death)…maybe it was the lie about love and marriage, about Niagara as a love renewal backdrop and Mecca? Divorce rates were about to take off like a rocket, an unheard of practice prior to this decade (a family shame); something was eating into the old standards of faith and loyalty and long term commitment. Here was a pulp story that actually emerged from the currency of the times and revealed the hollowness of the war and commercial culture (the Cutler’s & Shredded Wheat). zzzzzzzzzzzz….
Sorry, narcolepsy is my current malady! I must move on as I know you must to…but just wanting you to know I dearly love these old films. I love the hermeneutics of the visual text in my act 3 decrepitude. One more observation…from DOA with Edmund OBrien…you know I watched it recently and realized how physically gifted EO was…quite good on  his feet. In fact after watching him run and dodge bullets and death itself within…I gradually saw a correspondence to today’s bullet solid body type action guy…Bruce Willis.
No, I haven’t been drinking…not yet anyway. It’s morning in America, and god bless us, it’s actually raining in the desert! Exit Stage Obama Left:
gracias, amigo…
Jaime

PS. Difficult People may or may not reappear here. Currently the story book of 172 flash fictions is being prepped for publication as a paperback and e-book. Publication dates, etc. forthcoming…many thanks for readership! Huzzah! Turn off that TV! Bless the fiction reader!

“Extra Credit”, flash fiction, Difficult People

Extra Credit

 Jim Stallings

 

          “You’ll get another chance,” the bachelor assistant professor said, tapping the podium, while the young red head pressed close, her breasts practically touching the top edge of his lecture notes. “If you’d like to talk about it, I have office hours this afternoon, 1 to 3 p.m. Office…”

          Her plump cherry lips formed the silent number, 1-7-0, holding the oval zero a breathless extra beat.

          What was it? Never seen a C+ on an essay, a slap dashed collage of quotes and paraphrases with a redundant conclusion? He searched in vain for an original thought, a touch of whimsy, anything odd or edgy. She was intelligent, savvy even, but probably a cynical manipulator like so many suburban “excellent students.” They lobbied for the grades. They hung around his cramped office; they left breathy voicemails, even more plaintive and insinuating on his home phone. They slipped papers and notes under his door, stuck “fascinating articles” in his mailbox and stopped him after class, books and papers offering up their breasts; and usually in spring warm weather they wore a tee shirt with a sexual overture printed across their heaving mammaries: “Good luck comes in two’s.”

          But finally, it was the lecture room where these sexy lobbyists did their masterwork of enslaving your lustful attention. Philosophy of Popular Culture 303 was Miss Impertinent’s junior centerpiece, and her very prominent nipples…and her very firm convex ass…bespoke her deepest need for a solid A.

          And so the day would come…following the assault of brushing body parts and husky-voiced innuendos…yes, at last the surrender to the assignation at the Ramada Inn just outside of the small college town near the Interstate…and then the midnight tryst in his book-lined writing room in his country farmhouse digs.

          Thank God, you live alone, they all praised him, in one ladylike fashion or another, grasping the main chance, making extra credit so much simpler.

 

“Frontier Buzz”–flash fiction, Difficult People

Frontier Buzz

 

 

          –Let’s see what you got? Big Ed said.

          Tommy put the gold nugget on the table. The metal lump looked like a miniature naked woman.

          –Damn, Big Ed said and stared closer. She looks like a mermaid.

          –That’s what we been calling her, the golden mermaid.

          Big Ed’s thick fingers trembled over her.

          –Appreciate if you wouldn’t touch her, Big Ed. I do this—and Tommy turned her over gently with a pencil tip. I use a number 3 hard lead so it don’t leave no mark on her body.

          Big Ed made a rumbling sound deep in his chest almost like a cat’s purr.

          –Yeah, okay, he said. So what can I do you for?

          –Well, I’m wondering should I sell her for the pure gold…or you think I could do better putting her up at auction?

          Big Ed drew back and stared through Tommy like maybe he was figuring out the national debt or something. He was damn good at numbers and some said he didn’t strain counting cards neither at the Silver Moon on Friday nights. But he’d sure give you a fair idea when his massive brain stopped whirring.

          –You gotta get behind this…publicize, see. Get all the players on to it. That costs money up front…photos, drawings, flyers, telegraphs, stories in the papers. Lotta work…not to mention security issues.

          –Oh lord, I dunno. That’s awful hard, Tommy said with a nasal whine.

          –Well it is, Big Ed said and let out a slow deep breath smelling of something like kerosene. Course you can take fair market for it…probably a couple of thousand.

          –Or I could keep her for myself, Tommy said and narrowed his eyes.

          Big Ed smiled.

          –Smart, he said, fingers trembling near her voluptuous curves. The Golden Mermaid you’re thinking…word o’ mouth promotion. Smart, Tommy, real smart.

 

 

“Oggie”, Flash Fiction, Difficult People

Oggie

 

 

          August Roault, the egotist, yes, infant terrible, wunderkind, polymath. At age twenty-one, silver-haired philosophers and mathematicians were attending his seminars. At twenty-two with a freshly minted Ph.D., he filled amphitheatre lecture halls and spoke slowly in deep baritone on the relation of integers to human consciousness, with particular attention paid to a system of interrelated, harmonic paradigms. Something like an atomic supernova in intellectual consciousness occurred with its publication…an international bestseller, fifty languages, hardcover, soft cover, special signed editions, audio books, e-books…God…the aftershock twenty years later, still his biggest moment in his career, age twenty-three, and the rest…well, a high set of peaks—Himalayan for sure—the later work even better in his estimation. But everyone related to what he called his Big Bang book…The Integer argument, unifying force of the human mind. Very few have ever read his magnum opus…fewer still had a critical opinion. Most were fans of “smart people”, “geniuses,” “wizards”…August as cult figure turned familiar with the nickname…Oggie for his inner circle…yet no one really knew him without the blinding reputation. Loneliness hovered around his reputation for genius. Not all bad.

          So, it had been a life of academic rock star status…with groping high I.Q. groupies at every campus. And Oggie had had his fun in the bedrooms and hotel suites of some of the choicest good-looking bright women in the world.

          Oggie looked in the mirror of his mid-40s bachelorhood and saw the roué…the bags of pewter under the frazzled eyes…exhaustion…a hotel suite behind him, the chrome harsh light of noon checkout, the stabbing glare…and in the bed still…a young thing…doctoral candidate at Harvard’s program in nanotechnology…a philosophy of science specialist, her main focus on the exhaustion of form and meaning and its ethical implications for a limit on miniaturization. The cascade of lush copper hair over a freckled shoulder, luscious breasts, a firm full voluptuous woman in leather boots and cashmere, pearls and a diamond wrist watch, from money, she stared at her conquest, he at her…and knew her emptiness had successfully absorbed his Integer-ness.

          “Zero takes one,” she had said the night before, her full lips forming a warm wet sharp-toothed “Ooohhh…”

 

 

“Local Needs”, flash fiction, Difficult People

Local Needs

 

 

          “I need you,” she would whisper in my ear and hug me close, while her husband slept in their apartment next door to mine.

          The breathy way she said it, the cleavage of her full breasts bulging from the top of her dressing gown, on tiptoe, barefooted in the hall, what was a man to say? Get lost? No way…

          Her husband was older, divorced with two kids in college. And here was his nubile love lust mid-life crisis bride, wife of what…one year plus, applying high-pressure entreaty to a next-door apartment peddler in a suit and tie.

          On other days, mornings after seeing hubby farewell, she would suddenly pop into my bedroom, disrobe, revealing her earth mother symmetries and slip under the covers with me. She was an aggressive wench (if I may be permitted that dated term, a character from an 18^th century bawdy novel); she had hungers, and her sweet desires under secrecy drove her harder to my benefit. She liked to straddle me and ride her “grocery store pony.” She pretended to deposit a quarter in some orifice of choice, and got down to some serious traveling. We showered together; we fucked on the dining room table, on her back, legs spread, buttocks near the edge, feet locked behind my waist. And of course over in her apartment we mirrored everything we did in mine…maybe more so. She seemed to enjoy having me on her sofa, or a kitchen chair, the living room rug, or on the edge of the bed. Once we did chair fucking at night on the porch facing the street, pedestrians strolling by.

          Being a beginning bachelor salesman in those days, my job sent me away at last to another furnished apartment in another state; that was a good thing before we got too wild and careless, and caught. Then one rainy cold night she called me long distance and told me she’d confessed everything to him…

          “We had a big row and he threatened to kill us both,” she said and giggled, “but then he calmed down and we cried and he forgave me…and now he wants to talk to you and work things out…”

          “We’ve got nothing to work out, okay…” I said.

          “I need you, baby,” she whispered, “more than ever…”

          “Sorry, sweetie pie, but a little practical advice…keeps your needs local,” I said. “End of story, I’ve moved on…” and gently hung up the phone.