Published by Grindhouse Press
POB 292644
Dayton, OH 45429
www.grindhousepress.com
Sociopaths In Love
Grindhouse Press #019
ISBN-13: 978-0-9883484-7-9
ISBN-10: 0988348470
Copyright © 2013 by Andersen Prunty . All rights reserved.
Cover photograph courtesy of Dorothy Bhawl.
www.dorothybhawl.com
eolq.tumblr.com
This book is a work of fiction.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author or publisher.
Also by Andersen Prunty
The Warm Glow of Happy Homes
Bury the Children in the Yard: Horror Stories
Satanic Summer
Fill the Grand Canyon and Live Forever
Pray You Die Alone: Horror Stories
Sunruined: Horror Stories
The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians
Hi I’m a Social Disease: Horror Stories
Fuckness
The Sorrow King
Slag Attack
My Fake War
Morning is Dead
The Beard
Zerostrata
Jack and Mr. Grin
The Overwhelming Urge
SOCIOPATHS
IN LOVE
For Carrie –
There are no words . . .
Part One
Want
Girl Meets Boy
The man came in without a sound and enclosed his powerful hands around Erica’s upper arms right after she finished applying the last of her black eyeliner. She jumped, startled by the physical contact. A few other things hit her at the same time and her heart, thrown into overdrive by the scare, felt like it kept going faster and faster. She wondered how fast it would have to go before it exploded. These things that hit her . . .
She didn’t know the man standing in the small bathroom of the small house with his hands gripped around her arms. She hadn’t seen him in the mirror, hadn’t seen him until she’d felt his flesh on hers. Maybe her attention had been a hundred percent consumed, divided as much as possible between putting the liner pencil to her eye and glancing down at her instruction manual, the June issue of Glamor Face.
What did this man want with her?
Why didn’t she try to get away?
She needed to calm down. If she didn’t calm down it felt entirely possible her heart would spasm through her chest and bounce around the white room, leaving bloody cartoon heart prints all over the walls. While she had wondered how fast it could go before it exploded, she wasn’t in a hurry to find out. Besides, it would be a chore to clean up and Granny wasn’t in any condition to do it.
Deep breath. She inhaled. Breath was power. Breath was reason.
She knew what she needed to do. The instructions scrolled across her cortex, dredged up from some collective conscious rape manual all young girls carried with them.
Look at this man’s face.
Study it.
See if she knew it.
Make eye contact.
Plead with him not to hurt her.
She was twenty-one, figured him to be early- to mid-thirties. Tan, but not magazine tan. More like construction worker or landscaper tan. Blue eyes, clean and piercing, radiated the kind of calm intensity that could easily be mistaken for insanity. Straight, blocky nose, wide enough to have character, but not big enough to be off-putting. Chin, possibly this man’s best feature, squared and chiseled, no cleft, blackened with two or three days’ growth and shot through with a few white hairs. High forehead, a single shallow crease running a wavy horizontal line through the sweaty gleam of the dark skin.
The way his skin shone with the faintest trace of sweat made her once again conscious of his hands around her arms. She looked back at her magazine, all the male models in it gleamed with sweat or something used to represent sweat, the photographer or stylist or whoever’s attempt to make this one-dimensional image produce a sensation. Touch. The oil or sweat on the skin made her think immediately about what that moisture would feel like on her fingertips. The thought of contact made her heart slow down. Maybe slowing down was the wrong way to put it. The heartbeat changed directions. From fear to, what? Lust?
Deep breath. She inhaled. Breath was power. Breath was reason.
“Don’t move.” The man’s grip loosened a degree.
Don’t move. Had she planned on moving? Maybe she had thought about it when he first grabbed her, a panicked thought of bringing her left leg up into his groin and turning around and going for his eyes with fingernails that were not overly long but probably could have used a trim three days ago. Now she didn’t think about moving. She thought about contact. She thought about touch. Something slow and frictional and distant. It had been a while since she’d had any contact with something that wasn’t herself, Granny’s papery skin, or the brute room temperature objects of routine.
Don’t move. What he’d meant to say, she thought, was, Don’t try to get away.
She exhaled slowly, her heart beating deep and quicker than usual but not racing like before.
She felt him, hard and pressing against her lower back. Thought she saw him sniff her clean hair in the mirror.
Deep breath. She inhaled. Breath was power. Breath was reason. Reason told her this did not have to be ugly.
She thought of everything touching her. The thin cotton fabric of her white v-neck t-shirt. The satiny acrylic of her bra. The Lycra of her underwear that sometimes felt like it breathed cool breaths between the heat of her skin and the stretchy denim of her shorts, barely long enough to cover her ass.
And beneath her feet, the once cold tile, grown clammy with her heat.
And behind her, him.
This does not have to be ugly.
He was not ugly.
She thought he was beautiful.
This does not have to be ugly.
He could be the one.
A gift.
Risen from some depressed muck.
Enough ugliness. How many times had she had fantasies that were exactly like this?
Fantasies were beautiful.
Behind her, him.
Him.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He ran his hand down her flat stomach and pulled at the button of her shorts.
“Does it matter?” His breath was hot in her ear.
“Just a name.”
“Your name’s Erica Monroe.”
She smiled. She didn’t know why a stranger would know her name. She almost laughed, wondered if she was dreaming, knew she wasn’t, and realized that didn’t make any of this make any more sense. Only it made perfect sense. Girls were raped all the time. Rape was an ugly word. That wasn’t what was happening. It didn’t have to be ugly. And maybe it wasn’t rape until she fought back or said something. Maybe she wanted this.
She said, still smiling slightly, “Not my name.”
“Walt. Will that do for now?”
“Got a last name?”
“Haha,” he barked and she couldn’t tell if he was laughing or speaking. If it was laughter, it didn’t make it to his eyes.
“That your last name? Haha?”
“Why not?” Now he smiled slightly.
“Who are you, Walt Haha?”
In the mirror, their eyes locked. “I’m the person who’s going to show you how to be happy.”
He unzipped her shorts and shucked them down, plunging his hand against the moist heat between her legs.
She lowered her head, felt him move her blonde hair from the back of her neck, felt his tongue and breath and te
eth against the top of her spine.
She licked her lips. “Can we go into my bedroom?”
“We’ll have plenty of time for that.”
She closed her eyes and let him do what he wanted.
Afterward, leaning against the cold vanity and dabbing at a couple spots of blood with a wad of toilet paper, she thought about how much she had wanted it too.
Walt leaned against the opposite wall, smoking a cigarette and looking down at his orange-dusted hands.
“What’s this shit?”
“That’s my spray tan.”
“You always use it?”
“Yep.”
Chemistry
She sat in the living room listlessly twirling a strand of hair and dividing her time between her magazine and a large black bird, possibly a crow, outside the window. The shower ran and she found the cascading rhythm of the water soothing. The sound wasn’t constant like it would have been if Walt weren’t in there. He changed the direction of the water, gave it meaning, made it a tool of cleanliness. Otherwise it was just water and would have been doing whatever it was water did. Probably just sitting around being water.
The article in Glamor Face was on something called ‘weirdstream,’ the fashion-side of it anyway. She wasn’t sure she got it. It showed photos of girls dressed normally with just one or two things slightly off about them. One girl wore a flannel shirt with khaki shorts (normal) but had applied two streaks of black makeup under her eyes like an athlete (weird, but not really too weird). Another photo was of a girl wearing a black and white club dress with corpse paint on her face. Erica actually kind of liked that. She didn’t really know where weirdstream had started but figured it would probably fizzle out soon enough. Maybe it had started with the show Dan Banal, she didn’t know. Dan Banal was a weekly sitcom, supposedly so mundane it was fascinating. She’d tried to watch it and, for the most part, just found it boring. Maybe people were entertained by boredom now. Who knew? She, for one, was really fucking tired of boredom. Maybe that was the thing . . . maybe people’s lives were actually so exciting now they needed boredom to come down, needed boredom to be entertained. Whatever. She just thought it seemed like everyone had given up and stopped trying. For the first time in a long time, she actually felt like something could be happening with her. She didn’t want to think about it too much. Thinking about it would diminish the excitement. Iron out all the fun.
She smiled and felt all the makeup on her face bend with the folds of her skin. She made herself up every day even though she never went anywhere. It was like the more she thought about getting out and going someplace the less likely she was to do it. Another reason she didn’t want to think about what could happen with Walt. Nothing would probably come from it anyway. Too many things to do around here. Take care of Granny. Take care of the house. It didn’t seem like much but ever since getting out of high school it had been everything.
Deep breath. Keep the anxiety at bay. Thinking about everything she had to do sometimes overwhelmed her. Sometimes she felt like she didn’t do anything.
She’d enrolled in the community college in Alvamore but had only managed to go for a couple of weeks. It seemed pointless to drive an hour out of the hills to sit around and think, “This is high school.” She’d hated high school. Why would she want to repeat two to four years of it? And she wasn’t much of a people person. She didn’t need a psychologist to tell her why she was obsessed with her appearance and why she found the need to play with and alter it, why she felt the need to cover every inch of her body with a foreign substance. Hair dye, makeup, spray tan, colored contact lenses – it all seemed like the only socially acceptable disguise she could wear. She was trying to become someone else only, so far, she was as uncomfortable with everyone she could possibly become as she was with the base coat.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried. She’d had as many boyfriends as her tiny high school could afford, within reason. In her brief stint at the college, there was obvious male interest in her. Even professors standing around and talking to her before class while she sucked down a cigarette. She used to occasionally go places without makeup. Maybe she didn’t get as much attention, but guys still noticed her. While she liked the attention, she didn’t know what was supposed to happen. She just . . . wasn’t interested. Only one guy had told her she’d look a lot better without “all that shit” on her face. But, and she told him this, it had nothing to do with appearance, not really. The makeup felt like depth. Literally, like one more layer of skin someone had to pass through before seeing the real her. Just little Erica Monroe from Breathitt, Missouri, living in a shack in the hills and taking care of her grandmother. Little Erica Monroe, mother dead and father gone crazy and run off. This was how she defined herself. She was uncomfortable with thinking about her insides, like what went on in her head, so she thought of her life in terms of what surrounded it. This was easier for her. And it was mostly how she defined those around her, accounts of what she knew about them. The stuff that couldn’t change. Thoughts, philosophies, lifestyles – those were all transient things mostly influenced by the circumstances surrounding a person. She read Glamor Face because it seemed like the editors or whatever were aware of this fleeting quality in human nature and the only important book she could remember the name of was the Bible, which she’d never had any interest in reading. So maybe there was a thirst for something more but she felt like she needed to know what that something more was before she’d ever set out to find it. She used to be able to go to Granny for advice and there was a point in time when Granny would have encouraged her to leave, to get as far away from these shitty hills and trees and people as she could. But then Granny had gone scared and then quiet. Erica couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard her voice. Erica glanced back down at the magazine. Fuck. Maybe her life was weirdstream. The more she thought about that term, the more it bothered her. Weird was relative. The mainstream was a fruit rotting on the inside. Put them together and you got shit.
This is why she tried not to think too much.
The more she thought, the shittier things became.
She wanted to be entertained. She wanted what everyone else had. She wanted to be entertained by what everyone else had. This life she’d been given wasn’t enough for her. She felt like she was being punished. She wanted a new life.
The bathroom door opened behind her and scented steam rolled out. She closed her magazine and lit a cigarette, pictured all that steam curling around Walt, slicking and warming his skin. She had a brief image of him washing the shit and come and blood off his cock. She imagined it soft and reddened by the hot water. Imagined him standing in the bathroom, making a human impression in the steam, carving out his space in the vapor. She wondered where he put his gun, if he even had it on him. She hadn’t found out he was carrying one until he’d put it on the vanity before taking down his pants.
She took a deep drag off her cigarette.
Walt stood in front of her wearing the same clothes he’d worn before. Still, she thought he seemed clean and pressed. His hair was wet and she liked the darker color and added density of it. She imagined touching it, feeling its damp warmth on her fingertips.
“Get what you need so we can take off. I’ll have one of those.” He pointed at the white and gold pack of cigarettes. She tossed the whole thing and a half-empty book of matches at him. He sat down in the chair across from her, lighting the cigarette and hoisting his feet up on the shiny coffee table in what seemed like one single motion.
“I can’t leave.” She crossed her legs and stared into his eyes, surprised he was asking her to go someplace with him. “You’re welcome to stay here though. It’s free rent.” It suddenly seemed like there could be no alternative. She couldn’t go anywhere, but she didn’t see how they could possibly be apart. He’d brought more excitement into her life in the last half hour than she had experienced since before Granny got sick. And he was here in front of her without her having to do anything at all.
He exhaled a gray plume of smoke and almost laughed. “I can’t stay here. Feels like I’ve been here too long already.”
“It wouldn’t be a problem.”
“No. It’s not your inconvenience I’m worried about. I just don’t want to be here.” He looked around the small room. “This house, it’s . . . gross.”
“I keep it clean.”
“I don’t mean like that. It’s just small and in the middle of nowhere and it seems kind of boring. Depressing.”
“It’s a lot boring. A lot depressing.”
“Doesn’t matter now, anyway. You’re coming with me.”
“I can’t do that.”
“It’s not like I’m giving you a choice.”
“You’re going to kidnap me?”
“Don’t have to.”
“I have to stay here with my granny. She’s sick.”
“Let’s have a look at her.”
Erica crushed out her cigarette in the amber ashtray. “She doesn’t like visitors. She said the only person besides me she ever wants to see again is my dad. And only then so she can spit in his face.”
“I want to see her. I’m sure she won’t mind. Which room is it?” He pointed his two fingers holding the cigarette toward the doors in the wall to his left. “That one or that one?” And she didn’t know if he was making fun of her or not but it made her feel small and boxed in, sitting in an old worn velvet chair surrounded by four doors, a small opening to the kitchen, and hundreds of acres of nothing but trees and dirt and dumb animals. And that was all one of those four doors led to.
Erica stood and walked toward the door on the left. It faced east and let in all the good morning light and Granny liked that. Before grabbing the knob, Erica turned to face Walt, standing spookily close behind her.
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