I’m making love to my face when comes a knock at the door. I don’t answer. Pull the thing closer, almost to my nose, when she beats down the door and bursts in. It is the mother nextdoor – hysterical because my dog bit off her son’s penis, which she pronounces pen-iz, as in the pen iz mightier than the sword.
My tongue tip wags one inch shy of the bullet hole in the helmet atop my tumid unit. But it’s no use. There is nothing for it but deal with this crazy bitch.
I roll out of the posture. Spring up naked before her. “Actually,” I say, catching my breath, “I don’t own a dog. I’m sorry about your son’s pen-is-mightier-than-the-S-word. What was it – a poodle?’
“Standard!” she barks.
“A stray,” I jump into a jock. “Been hanging around all week.”
“I’ve seen you feed it.”
“You’ve heard me kick it.” I look around for jeans. “You’re confusing avenues of sensory input. Do you see my pants anywhere?”
“You’ve had contact with the animal. It’s your dog. I’m gonna sue you for your rectum, buster!”
“That’s really about all you’d get. You can’t get blood out of a hemorrhoid; or whatever. Look, Mrs. Johnson, I’m doing something important here, and if I could just persuade you to step back out in the hall and close the door?”
She bursts into tears. Blubbers, OK, she knows I’m not worth anything. Just another two-bit bum. But won’t I please help get back her son’s pianist?”
She seems to pronounce the male organ with inconsistent stops. Then I figure to myself – why jeans? Once I toss this bitch I’ll get right back to giving myself a facial. The jock meantime adequately cancels jay nakedness.
“I figure anybody can retrieve it, you can.”
“On what,” I idly snap elastic against hip, “do you base this assumption?”
She screams in my face, “Because all you jackoff weirdos living in crummy little rented rooms are witches – y’all got witch power. And it’s gonna take witches to relocate what that hellhound did with my poor boy’s pee-next.”
“I would imagine the pen-iz the canine ate, seven?”
“Then I want you to exercise the gonad out!”
“Look,” I clear my throat, look her in the eye. Mrs. J. is obese. Probably also pregnant. Her flab has flab. Her spare tire boasts a spare tire that sports yet another spare. Even her eyelids bloat – burdened with compact cottage cheese, drooped half-down her eyeballs. “I’m studying to be an accountant. I take a test tomorrow. Would it pain your anus awfully if I asked you to go to Mars? I need time to study. Accounting is not for dummies; look at Enron – those guys were smart, OK?” I jerk my head in a vain effort to body-language her back into the hall.
“You look yourself – you’re the witch doctor in this slum!”
The retort which doctor? crosses my mind; but tired of being cute, let it pass… sigh, “OK – let’s go look. Where did you see this?”
“Down in the basement,” she’s got my hand, her 400-plus pounds tugging me toward the stairwell.
Down in the basement hang the fumes of gas, insecticide, ratcrap, mildew. The light is scarce – barely enough sixty-watters to tell a rancid puddle from an article of clothing burst from a rotted trunk, dragged about by rats. The low, unfinished, insulation-leaking ceiling makes my five-six feel Godzilla tall. I stoop a foot more than necessary, anxious to keep the asbestos and the spiders off my coiff.
“Stupid bitch gulped it whole,” she growls, threading her girth between the furnace and a sweaty brick wall.
I follow like a dugout behind a harbor tug. My curiosity – despite disgust – is up; my pianist now completely down, soft-pedaling a lullaby about an ax abandoned in a stump.
On the other side of the antique furnace, in the middle of the floor, squats upsidedown a stationary tub. The stand that once held the tub looms in the shadows up against the wall perpendicular to the one we were creeping along; gives off a rusty cobweb odeur.
“Animal’s under there,” she points to the overturned hundred-gallon cast iron tub. “Here,” she presses a revolver into my hand. “Shoot the bitch.”
“You trapped the dog under that tub?’
“Yep,” the lipidic howitzer shell of her head nods. “After she bit my boy, she stands there gulping down his pen-iz. I had just enough time to dump down the tub before the bitch could bolt. Mister, my boy just come down here to play. I was supervising, having a pie and coffee, when out of the blue, while the child toys with himself, leaps this skinny mutt kinda chihuahua-dachshund cross. Latches on to my boy’s crotch and the rest is amputated.”
I’m stunned – standard poodle thoughts racing. Not even wanting to point out her lie, realizing she just wanted to get me down here to… I eye, in my right fist, the loaded snub-nose.
Finally clear my throat, say, “Why don’t you shoot it?’
“Cause I’m the one’s gonna lift up that sink. You ain’t built,” she grins, “for the heavy work.”
She sinks to her knees. The pink-paisley lilac mumu settles about her like psychedelic snow on a modest mountain. Her steamshovel mitts grasp the square-angled tub.
“OK,” she growls. “At the counta three. Shoot it in the head. Don’t go for the heart – so you don’t miss and hit the stomach, where the pee-next is lodged.”
“Is the safety off?” I know nothing about guns – except you point, trigger, then comes recoil. In reality I’ve never fired anything less imaginary than a cap pistol. Even then only at television phantoms, in a boyhood now three decades gone.
I layed down my arms for good – impotent as they were – at about age eleven. Since have limited violence to daily fantasies; sometimes, on bad days, hourly fantasies. Similar to how I abandoned intercourse ten years ago when the wife left. Although I still use that gun; and in those fantasies once the piece discharges it immediately starts reloading. Doesn’t seem to have a safety.
“Doesn’t have a safety,” she says. “Revolvers got no safeties, dumb-dumb. I stole it off the boy’s dad; if it was an automatic he woulda anyway filed the safety off. Dad was a suicidal maniac. Never wanted anything to thwart the urge. I got it away from him before he could self-use. But that didn’t stop him, a couple months after I got pregnant here again, from the rat poison. Wasn’t a pretty death; but he no looker to begin with.”
Then I remember, from cap gun days, my favorite little moron joke: “Why, after he ate a pickle, did the little moron jump off the Empire State Building?”
After your buddy admits he’s stumped, you quip, “Because he wanted to die jest right… digest right – get it?”
Jest rite. Maybe that’s what’s happening here – a ritual joke, a joke of a ritual.
“One!” she barks. “Two! Three… liftoff!”
She shoves up the tub – hits the concrete floor with a BANG!
The dachshuahua – blinded in the light – stands trembling, butt to my face.
“Shoot the head!” Mom howls.
Trigger squeezes. Pin strikes. Bullet bursts. (Recoil not all that bad.)
I blast the dog’s ass off. No sweat – because I can’t see the eyes – any animal’s primary organs of mercy. Even I – a remarkably numb dumb son of a bitch – am ever meticulous to eschew ejaculation onto my own orbits.
The hindquarters of the two-foot wiener have vanished. Splatted to the shadowy wall. The pelvic basin opens pinata-like… out spills the mutt’s guts, flooded in blood the hue of spinada.
The whole massive hemorrhage acquires a Spanish spin… bullfight, fandango, Salvador Quixote follia, Cortez-butchered Aztec. And in the thick of the tripe bobs the kid’s dick – a bald Abe Lincoln in a Franco-American dysmenorrhea spaghetti.
Mom lunges onto all fours. Roots through the tripes. Only then do I notice her B.O. – how it echoes exploded cordite – or whatever you call that fired firearm aroma. A sharp stink – as if she were sweating balloons of sulfur dioxide.
She wraps an overpadded paw around the five-inch likeness of our martyred president. Staggers plate-tectonically to her feet. Wipes the gettysburg off her dress.
Before we can little note nor long remember, she wolfs the bloody knockwurst. Silence descends, as the unchewed mouthful elbows the length of her esophagus. Our corner of the basement fills with bow-wow bowel pew. I have nothing to say.
Till finally it dawns, and between retches I get out, “Oh, I get it – you already ate the rest of the kid. Tricked him down here to gobble him up. The dog snatched the best part away from you. Doubtless hoping to regrow her little playmate in the womb of her duodenum. She seemed such a nice bitch; certainly not the type to diet.”
“I hate it,” Mom pauses, burps, “when they get much older than four. Love it, actually. That’s when they taste best. Anyway, any minute here I’m gonna squirt a fresh one. You mind filling that tub with hot water, fetch a couple towels?”
I should just get out. Get back to making love to my face. Pull off a healthy climax. Lather up the cheeks. Get the plastic safety razor out. In the decade since Betty split, I’ve saved a good $500 on shaving cream.
But instead here I stand. To prove I’m not just a piece of sculpture in a jockstrap, pick the nose. Eat it. While she settles on the concrete beside the manger of the dead dog. Lets out a groan. Begins to pant.
I’ll upright the tub. Run the water. Fetch towels. In… I swallow (as Mom flops on her back, raises the mumu, spreads thunder thighs…) a minute.
Willie Smith is deeply ashamed of being human. He is the author of Oedipus Cadet (Black Heron Press, 1990) and many, many short stories, vignettes, and poems across the literary world. He turned down an opportunity to be a columnist for GwI. And so be it.
story archived at http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/prose/short/smith-0709-report
