They made me wear a lilac bridesmaid dress. In all the wedding pictures I could be seen staring at the ground hatefully. Andrew smiling and lifting a flute of champagne like a jolly king at a feast. He wore his green Dr Martens with his tux to show how fucking edgy he was. Mum wore a classic white wedding dress, and her auburn hair was curled and covered with white hibiscus. She looked pretty and happy and brainless.
At the reception I sat at a table opposite Andrew’s brother, who looked more miserable than me. He had thick black hair and shaving nicks up his neck. He was a better-looking version of his brother but he stunk like onions, sweat and booze. I imagined taking him to the toilets and fucking him, leaving the door unlocked so someone – preferably Andrew and Mum – could walk in and catch me mid-straddle. But this was silly thinking. I was a virgin. I’d never even been touched outside clothes. The brother brooded in silence, hunched over his drink and glancing up resentfully at anyone having fun. After his fifth pint, he got up, staggered off and didn’t come back.
Mum tried to make me dance with her to T’Pau and I told her to fuck herself. She looked at me tearfully before running back to her groom. The buffet was full of meat and cheese. There was nothing I could eat. The only crisps were beef and onion. It was a statement. He might as well have had a spit-roasted hog with an apple in its mouth at the centre of the spread. I stared down into my lemonade feeling the fizzy bubbles tickle my chin, my stomach grumbling.
Andrew came over. He was drunk. He put his glass of wine on the table and crouched down to look me in the eye.
“Why can’t we be friends? Eh?”
I said nothing. He continued to look at me, head swaying a little. I could hear him breathing loud through his nose.
He sighed, standing up. “Fine. I’ve tried and tried and still you – Hey, Joey!” His face spread into a greasy smile and he raised his hands in the air. A man came over and they hugged like drunken frat boys, almost toppling over. They started talking and laughing, their backs turned to me.
I looked at Andrew’s glass of wine. I glanced at the two men. I quickly picked up the flute and spat into it. I placed it back down. I watched and waited. Without turning his head away from Joey, Andrew reached his hand around, groped for his drink, and picked it up. He took a swig.
To your health, Stepfather.
*
Openly, I’d live by his rules. Secretly, though, I’d fuck them. Small things, I decided. Small victories. I was fifteen. I had no power. It would have to be small things.
My favourite thing was to dismantle Andrew’s razors and use the bare blade to cut my thigh. I’d let the scabs form over a couple of weeks, and once they were ready, I’d pick them off and sprinkle them onto his Tuesday bolognese, along with my bogies. My second favourite thing was to do a load of exercises in my room, sneak into his and Mum’s bedroom and then mop up the sweat and musk from my arse and fanny with the work shirt draped over the rocking chair. I liked to watch him crinkling his nose and frowning with confusion the next day at breakfast. “I think someone needs a shower,” he’d say, not looking at me but meaning me.
I understood I was behaving like a sick person. But this didn’t alter my pleasure.
*
One day Andrew came home early from work dripping wet and in a foul mood. Mum’s Clio was being MOTd so he’d had to walk home in the rain (he wouldn’t use buses because of some article he’d read about all the germs and fecal particles found in seats). He’d got splashed by fast cars. A tramp had laughed at him. He was tired and coming down with something. He was hungry.
I was lying on the couch. “Oh, poor, poor you,” I simpered from over my homework.
Andrew looked at me with acid eyes. He walked over, snatched the book out of my hands and threw it against the wall. “You will not talk to me like shit! I am your stepfather!” He raked his hand through his hair, his cheeks all pouched up with anger. “It’s no wonder you’re being a cow. You’re on your period, aren’t you? I can smell it. You’re a real—”
“Shut up about my fucking periods, Andrew!”
He leaned over me until his nose was almost touching mine. “I will not shut up!”
He grabbed my ankles and ripped them off the couch. “And get your feet off my fucking furniture!”
I stared at him with cool, dead eyes and slowly walked to my room. I sat on the bed and cried into my hands, the words fucking hate him, fucking hate him, fucking hate him repeating in my mind like a siren.
*
I started Googling natural poisons: deadly nightshade, nutmeg, bryony berries, hemlock, aconite root, death cap, cowbane, jimson weed. Too many oysters can cause paralysis. Too much pepper can kill you. Too much water will flush all the sodium out of your body and make you drop dead. Then there’s food poisoning – poorly cooked meat, poultry gone bad. Salmonella, E. coli. Ingesting faeces can give you worms and sickness.
I researched household poisons. Bleach and ammonia. Oven cleaner. Paraquat. Rat poison. Wood alcohol. Antifreeze. I read about the deaths – ingesting any corrosive cleaning product will burn through your mouth, oesophagus, stomach. Your stomach acid will be released into the trunk of the body, where it will dissolve your internal organs. Rat poison can cause massive internal bleeding followed by death in large quantities; dizziness, bleeding, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea in smaller amounts. Drinking antifreeze causes depression followed by heart and breathing difficulty, kidney failure, brain damage and possibly (hopefully) death. I liked that one, the way it starts with depression. I sat crouched over my laptop imagining Andrew getting sad, really sad, and then dying.
I calmed down after a few hours. I thought, I don’t want to kill Andrew. I’m not a murderer. I just want to make him sick for a while.
*
I ordered some rat poison from China, hoping it would get through customs. It did. A package of white powder, apparently banned from most countries. I didn’t want the blue pellets, for obvious reasons. The website had said it would be tasteless, but when it arrived I dabbed the tiniest amount on my finger and tried it. Slightly bitter. Like well-cut speed.
Luckily Andrew had a thing for garlic. Whenever he cooked up a curry or a pasta dish he would crush a whole bulb. I don’t know how Mum put up with it. My best friend from school said when her boyfriend ate garlic, it made his cum taste disgusting.
One night he cooked lamb madras from scratch. He got the kitchen stinking of coriander and cumin and garlic and oil. Stirred the bubbling curry while humming along to ‘This Charming Man’ by The Smiths. He plated up. A large mountain for him, a smaller one for Mum. I was at the kitchen table, pretending to do my history homework. He left the room to call Mum, who was upstairs resting. I got up, took out the bottle of powder from my hoodie pocket and sprinkled some into Andrew’s curry. I swirled it around with my finger to make sure it mixed, then ran back to the table before Andrew reappeared. I wiped my hand on my trousers. My heart was beating fast.
Andrew put the plates on the table and sat down next to me. Mum sat opposite us. Andrew poured two glasses of wine and they picked up their forks.
“Aren’t you having any with us?” said Mum.
I shook my head.
“You could just pick the meat out.”
“The juices will still be there.”
“Andrew, you could’ve made a little vegetable one on the side for her?”
Andrew snorted through his nose. “Why should I go out of my way? Being a vegan is her choice, not mine.”
Mum raised her eyebrows and sipped her wine.
I watched Andrew shovel the first forkful of curry into his mouth, my pen frozen in mid-air. He chewed, swallowed. Drank some wine.
“You feeling better?” he asked Mum.
She nodded, her jaw working. “I just needed a nap.”
“How’s the curry?”
“Lovely,” she said.
He frowned slightly. “I think I might’ve burned the cardamom again. It’s slightly bitter.”
“It’s lovely, Andrew.”
He shrugged and sipped some more wine. “It’s not bad.” Ate another forkful. “Not as nice as that bhuna I made last month though. That was epic.” He side-eyed me. “Isn’t that what the kids are saying these days? ‘That bhuna was totes epic. This madras, though, is blates pedestrian.’”
“Don’t try to talk like the yoot, Andrew,” said Mum.
“I was being ironic,” he said.
“More like moronic,” she replied, flashing me a conspiratory smile. Still trying to make us a family. She sipped her wine and watched him eat with smiley love in her massive green eyes.
He ate every mouthful, mopping up the sauce with a naan.
*
It wasn’t easy sneaking the powder into his food – sometimes he cooked something bland like mashed potatoes and roast chicken. I wouldn’t bother those times. I always waited until he was calling Mum for dinner; I didn’t want to poison her. Well, I kind of did. But I wouldn’t.
When he made a spicy, garlic-soaked pasta one Saturday night, I used loads, stirring it into his portion with my finger and wiping the edge of the plate with a tea towel to hide the fact the food had been disturbed. He’d drunk red wine while cooking it and was pissed by the time of eating. He didn’t notice.
On one occasion he almost caught me. I spun away from his plate and walked with a too-straight back to the fridge, my eyes petrified. It was a nervy business.
After a few days he started getting nosebleeds. He’d be watching TV and suddenly bright red blood would drizzle onto his chin, his chest. Loads of it. Scarlet droplets the size of pennies appeared on the miserable cadet-grey rug. The coffee table became covered with twists of blood-and-snot-tipped tissue. The bleeding took ages to stop. “Must be the eighties catching up with me,” he’d joke. Mum told him to see a doctor but he waved her worry away and said he felt fine, nosebleeds were normal. “I used to have them all the time when I was little. It’s nothing.” After a week he went sickly pale. Large bruises appeared on his arms and legs like thunderclouds.
I watched these developments with a strange mix of guilt, fear and ecstasy. I was going too far.
I liked that I was going too far.
*
A Tuesday. Andrew pulled a sicky from work because he felt dizzy. He lay on the couch in a U2 t-shirt and white boxers, one arm hanging limp off the side. Mum pressed her hand to his forehead and told him to see the doctor. “Please, Andrew. I’m worried.”
“It’s just man flu,” he said with a weak smile, a film of blood pinking his teeth.
“I’m going to make an appointment for you,” she said, kissing the tip of his nose.
“Good luck with that. Last time I tried calling that surgery, the waiting time was two weeks.”
“I’ll tell them about the bleeding.”
“They won’t take it seriously, love. Two weeks, bet you anything.”
“I will make them take it seriously, Andrew.” She looked down at him tenderly. “I’m worried about you.”
“I’m a trooper. I’ll be fine.”
“You are not a trooper. You’re a sick man.”
“You’re a cunt,” I whispered.
Mum went off to make the call. It was half-term and I was home from school. I was in a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a baggy Fruit of the Loom t-shirt. Daytime TV was on, but I was reading a Poppy Z Brite book about gay vampires. Mum came back and told Andrew he had an appointment with Dr Hunter for half four in the afternoon.
“You’re a star,” he said.
Her proud pink face, her shining eyes.
“You’re a twat,” I whispered.
*
Mum went to the shop for some ‘bits and bobs.’ I stayed in the living room with Andrew. We didn’t speak. He lay on the couch in his crisp white boxers. His legs were chunky and hairless. When he shifted onto his side, he lifted his leg slightly and I saw his smooth pink bellend in the gap between cloth and thigh. He changed the channel until he found The News. Soon, his breathing slowed down and he was asleep. He had a wad of baby-blue tissue skewered into one of his nostrils.
I watched him closely, elbows on my knees, leaning forward. Have a good look, I thought. This is my stepfather. The man who has taken over the house. The man who has lobotomised my mother with his dick. I looked at his face. His eyelids were quivering. He was breathing quietly through his mouth. He looked peaceful.
Blood began to drizzle from his free nostril. It ran down his cheek and soaked through the cushion. I felt bad seeing it. I don’t know why. Maybe because he was asleep. Powerless.
His leg twitched. I noticed a small red dot like a bindi on the crotch of his shorts. Blood. I watched as it slowly spread into a poppy, then a rose. A lovely red against his white boxers. A Japanese flag.
“Who’s on their period now?” I said.
Suck On This, Bitch
Ty Schwamberger
“What do ya think we should do tonight?” Steve asked, taking one last long draw on his Marlboro and then snuffing it out in the butt-filled ashtray sitting on top of the dirty end table.
His friend – hell, his only friend – just sat there like a lazy bullfrog, not moving except for the pulsating fat that encircled his neck.
“Hey. Marc!”
“Huh… what?” his friend mumbled, barely turning his head to the left.
“I said, what do you think we should do tonight?”
Marc choked out a phlegmy cough and then replied, “Tonight? Shit, Steve, I don’t know… How about one-eight-hundred dial-a-whore?” He laughed; his belly shook like a bowl full of jelly.
“Very funny.”
“No, I’m serious,” Marc said, trying to sit up straight, his rotund body fighting against him. “Let’s dial a hooker or something, man. It’ll be a hoot. Hell, it’s probably been at least a week since I last called Miss Jena’s Escort Service, and I just got my welfare check yesterday, so why not? Fuck, I’ll even spring for a broad for you, man.”
“Nah, I’m good,” Steve replied, standing up from the couch and slinking his boney frame towards the kitchen. Then he shouted from the next room, “Besides, man, don’t you think it’s wrong to be treating women like that? Like pieces of meat or something. Ya know what I’m saying?”
“Actually, no, I don’t, asshole. And hey, grab a knife outta the drawer to cut this pizza. All the damn cheese comes off each time I remove a slice of pie.”
“Hey, no need to give me lip service. I didn’t do anything to you. Hell, if anything, I probably treat you the best of anyone you know. And yes, I’ll get the knife.”
Marc mumbled something in return but Steve couldn’t understand him from where he was now standing in the kitchen. “Huh?” Steve called out and then pulled open the fridge to grab another brew. He twisted his head to the right and yelled, “Hey, man! You want another brewski or not?”
Nothing.
“The hell with him,” Steve muttered under his breath, grabbing one bottle of beer and then slamming the fridge door. “Let the bastard get a fresh one if he needs it. I’m nobody’s bitch.” He then opened the utensils drawer and pulled out a long, non-serrated knife.
Walking out of the kitchen, Steve twisted off the cap of the beer bottle and entered the small, trash-covered living room.
Marc was holding his cell phone to his ear. “That’s right. I’d like your finest two whores for the night.” He paused. Then, “Oh… Oh! Well shit, bitch… What do you think I’m made out of, money? Fuck that noise.” Another pause, a bit longer than the last. Then Marc said in a somewhat depressed voice, “Yeah, OK. I guess one Miss Amy will do. But hey, could you make sure she can blow cock like she’s sucking the chrome off a trailer hitch?”
After a few more “right”, “you got it”, “yes, I’ll pay cash” type things, Marc ended the call and shouted to Steve, “Get ready, buddy. We’ve got a bitch coming over and it’s a two-for-one deal.” He pumped his fat arm into the air and shouted, “Woot! Bitches ain’t shit but hos and
tricks, yo! Woot woot! It’s just too bad that this particular bitch don’t know she’s gonna get pounded by two guys.”
“What?” Steve asked, taking a nervous swig from this beer and then tossing the knife onto the cluttered coffee table. It bounced a few times before coming to a rest next to the open pizza box.
“You heard what I said, fool. The hooker, er, escort service wanted to charge me near a grand for two bitches for the night. I said fuck that—”
“No you didn’t.”
“Well, OK, I didn’t actually say ‘fuck that’, but I was thinking it, ya know? Anyway, the hooker—”
“Escort.”
“Ah, yes. Well, the fine ladies of the escort service were gonna charge me a ridiculous price for two whores, so we’re just gonna have to share one. But hey, no worries. These bitches don’t care if they get tag-teamed or not, ya know? Hell, why do you think they call them ‘hookers’? ‘Cause they’re sluts and shit, that’s why.”
“I don’t know, man.”
“Hey, what’s there to know? She comes over, we give her the six hundred bucks, and then inform her that she’ll be getting the purple snake from two instead of one. I’m sure she’ll dig it.”
“Uh huh. And what if she doesn’t, man? I told you before that I still haven’t been with a woman, which is one of the many reasons you know why I’ve never wanted to be with a prostit—”
“Whoa whoa whoa, man. What the hell are you talking about? You letting a whore pop your cherry makes a whole helluva lotta sense. Think about it: when you bust your nut after fifteen seconds, she won’t start talking smack about your tiny dick and telling you what a piece of shit you are in the sack. Instead, it’ll be ‘wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am’ and she takes off. Hell, I always knew you were a virgin, and to be honest didn’t give a damn, but if you’re gonna act like a dry pussy then you might as well just leave now. I mean, if you wanna be a loser all your life, why should I give a rat’s ass?”
Fuck the Rules Page 14