We regret that we won’t be able to publish your story at this time. Due to the high volume of manuscripts received, we cannot reply on a personal basis to each submission. We wish you luck in your future writing endeavors.
—The Editors
I stole a swig of the whiskey. Slowly, I steamed. You would have thought at that point in the game, I’d be immune to this kind of treatment, this total ignorance, this amateurishness. My guess was that a college grad student was hired by the journal to sift through the slush pile of submissions. In general, they read the first sentence. Maybe, just maybe they read an entire first paragraph before deciding whether or not to read on or just flat out reject the piece. Like a story has no way of getting better as it progresses.
“Assholes.” It felt good to say it out loud.
The first line of my most recent story was a killer. Literally.
Josh always knew he wanted to kill someone, but he wasn’t sure he had the guts, or the stomach, or the courage. He also knew that one day, he’d have no choice but to try.
Okay, so that’s the first couple of sentences, and I’m not sure they’re all that good since I’m making them up out of thin air, but you get the drift. Still, don’t you feel like Josh is in for a train wreck of a ride just by reading those words? How could you resist reading more, knowing that, eventually, the man who lacked the courage to kill would one day have no choice but to attempt it? Oh, and the title of the story?
Obsessive Compulsive. Killer, right?
I placed the story off to the side for resubmission to another journal. I tore the envelope up like I was tearing off the head of the editor.
Next envelope.
I ripped it open, pulled out the story. Like the first one, this manuscript had a note attached to it. But unlike the first impersonal one, this note it was handwritten. It was a personal note.
My heart began to pound, my mouth went dry.
Maybe whoever wrote the note was sending back revision suggestions and asking me to resubmit as soon as possible. Amazing how just the mere possibility of publication filled me with renewed optimism. I experienced this before, and the editor ended up taking the story. The journal wasn’t huge or all that important, and it only paid in author copies, but it was a success. One for the W column. A success in a sea of constant rejection and failure.
I avoided reading the note until I drank down what was in my glass and poured another. Inhaling a deep breath, I slid the note off the paper clip and read.
Dear Victor,
There’s some good stuff here. Great stuff in some places. I wonder, though, if your prose would benefit from authority of voice. I’m not suggesting you actually go out and kill someone. Of course not. But have you perhaps visited a morgue, or engaged in a drive-around with the local paramedics, or a squad of EMTs, or even the police? Such research can prove a valuable writing experience. Hemingway didn’t get where was by sitting in his living room all day. He went to war. He killed fish. He killed animals. He killed men in World War II. He was even a spy. And, whether he realized it or not, he did it all for the benefit of his craft. Just a thought. Keep up the good work, and if you wish to take the time to collect that hands-on research, you are welcome to resubmit a revision of Obsessive Compulsive whenever you feel the time is appropriate.
It was signed by an editor who went by the name of Pat. He or she added a little smiley face right after their name, telling me he/she liked me and my story. I drank some more whiskey and felt my heart pound in my chest. My blood sped through my veins. I saw the rejected story sitting next to my typewriter, and I tore it up. I scanned through the pages of the story Pat had returned, saw that there were no edits, and tore that one up too.
I would have to start from scratch. My character, Josh, could benefit from some new experience and therefore, so could Obsessive Compulsive.
Sitting back in my chair, I sipped some more whiskey.
But how? I thought.
That’s when I thought of Tara, and her offer of murder entered back into my brain.
I might have contacted her right away. Told her I’d take the job. I would be her handyman. If she could assure me no one would be the wiser when her husband suffered an “accident” and that I would get the money and the pussy she promised, then I would do it. Not gladly, but I would do it for the experience. I would become like Hemingway. He killed men, so, why shouldn’t I?
But I wanted to give it more thought. Maybe sleep on it, if it was even possible to sleep on the prospect of committing homicide in cold blood. I wished I could go over it with Stella, but even if it were possible for her to hear me out without kicking me out of the house for good, I would never place her in danger like that. What good would it do to make her an accomplice in a premeditated murder?
As the afternoon wore on, half the bottle of whiskey disappeared. I was drunk by the time Stella came home at half past three. Drunk, and horny as all hell. I’d been rejected again, after all. But not entirely.
Standing in the door of the garage where she’d just parked her car directly beside my wall of rejections, she issued me a strange, if not suspicious, glance. My hand wasn’t exactly stuffed in the cookie jar, but I knew that she knew she’d caught me red-handed.
Caught me red-handed at what, exactly, she had no idea.
For sure, she would have no clue that I spent much of the morning fucking the daylights out of Tara, our sweet next-door neighbor with the two sweet kids and the handsome, responsible, money-making husband. The near empty whiskey bottle was also a clue. The blank page stuffed in the typewriter. Not a goddamned word typed on it.
There was, however, the note.
The note from an editor who wanted to see another revised version of my short story, Obsessive Compulsive. I put a smile on, picked up the note.
“Offer to resubmit.” I smiled wide. “It’s a big deal, Stel.”
She took a step inside, tried to plant a grin on her face.
“Will it pay, Vic? As in real dollars and cents?”
The question I fully expected.
“Yes. You betcha it’ll pay.”
Not a lot, of course. But it would be something. Five hundred bucks maybe. Something to add to the pot instead of my usual nothing. It wasn’t that we were dirt poor, or in danger of starving. It was more a matter of Stella’s job not paying a whole lot, and the credit cards being wracked up to the max, and us always being behind so far even the creditors were laughing at us.
But I didn’t care about that right now.
Right now, I had to decide if I was going to go through with Tara’s offer. An offer that would not only get me published in a well-respected magazine. But one that would pay. It would pay big, and that would make Stella happy again. It would make her love me again.
My eyes looked her up and down. She was wearing a dress that hugged her creamy smooth thighs. It was so short, I could practically make out the mound her pussy made inside her panties. I wondered how many men and women had been able to see up her dress today. If they liked it. If they went back to their offices, closed the doors, and masturbated. I wondered if Stella knew they were trying to get a look at her pussy. She was a tease like that. My girlfriend was a major tease.
“You have a drink left for me?” she asked.
She ran her hand slowly through her long, thick, dark hair so that it hung heavily over the left side of her face. It made her big brown eyes light up. Her breasts were pressed together in her push up bra, and her nipples were hard. I got up, a noticeable erection pressing against my jeans. I grabbed a glass from the cabinet in the kitchen, brought it back out with me to the dining room table, set it down hard.
I poured us both a shot. She took hers off the table.
“So, what in heaven’s name shall we drink to, Vic?”
My eyes locked on hers, I used my free hand to feel her up under her dress. She blinked but didn’t protest.
“How about we drink to your pussy.”
“That doesn’t see
m right. Why don’t we drink to your accomplishment? Then I’ll allow you to go down on me.”
I felt a start in my heart and a heaviness in my chest that always accompanied even the simple suggestion of her pussy—something I was obsessed with. We both drank. I didn’t taste the whiskey. I didn’t even feel it go down. I tossed the glass against the wall. It shattered. She didn’t bat an eye. She just drank her whiskey, set her glass gently onto the table.
“You’re a fucking animal, Vic,” she said. “But I love that about you.”
Grabbing hold of her arm, I pulled her to me, kissed her hard on the mouth. Then, shoving the typewriter to the side, I threw her up onto the table. She decided to fight me. Meaning, she wouldn’t spread her legs. She knew it would drive me insane if she wouldn’t spread her legs. She knew I’d fight her back.
I reached for her panties anyway.
I didn’t pull them off. I tore them off. Then, using my hands like pry bars, I pulled her knees apart and bulled my way to her pussy.
The Golden Fleece.
She was drenched. Her hair was trimmed to perfection, and I went hunting for her clit with my tongue. It wasn’t hard to find. It was so swelled and throbbing. She no longer resisted me, but instead, slowly relaxed, laid back on the dining room table like it was a chaise lounge. She pulled her dress over her titties, pulled up on her bra and began pinching her nipples so that they were as erect, thick, and as long as my thumbs.
I kept working on her, hard and violently, but somehow gently at the same time. My tongue and lips doing all the work. She began gyrating her hips, thrusting herself at me like she wanted more from me. Like she wanted my entire being inside of her. Like she wouldn’t be satisfied until my whole body was up inside her. Like she wanted to consume me. Eat me up. Make me disappear.
She was a vicious woman.
She hated me. I was convinced of it. She hated me. She wanted to destroy me. Chop me up like raw meat. Make hamburger of me. But at the same time, she wanted me. She wanted me to do the things to her that only I could do. And when she came, she gushed. She planted both of her hands around the back of my head, pressed my face against her pussy like it was caught in a vice grip. She wouldn’t let go if it killed her. I thought I would drown. I swallowed what I could, and the rest just dripped out of my mouth like the juice from an overly ripe peach.
When she finally released me, I drew back, stood up straight. Breathed.
“Fuck me,” she insisted. “Fuck me hard, you son of a bitch.”
The bitch didn’t have to ask me twice.
I unbuckled my belt, pried open my pants, grabbed hold of her legs. I pulled her toward me and entered her in one swift motion. She was hot and wet but tight. I tried to go slow. But slow was an impossible dream. Slow was for romantics. Slow was for dreamers. Slow was for love.
Love never entered the equation. Hadn’t in a long time. This was anger. It was rage. It was naked aggression. The fluids were sweat and tears but they were the color of blood—dark crimson blood bled from severed arteries. Always we would bleed one another out as if it were possible to murder one another in the process of one good fuck. When I came, it was an explosion, a bullet lodged deep inside her pelvis. I wanted her to feel it. Feel the pain. Feel the shock, the awe, the destruction.
I pulled out of her, my breathing heavy and labored, my biceps burning from the pressure of supporting my upper body weight. That’s when I became aware of just how much I was sweating. It’s not like I wanted to. But for the first time, I looked down into her eyes. She looked into mine. The gaze contained all the feeling of identifying the body of an acquaintance on a stainless-steel slab inside the local morgue. A single drop of sweat dripped off my chin, landed onto her lips. She spit it out with revulsion.
“Get off me,” she demanded.
I did as she told me to do.
Tara’s pretty face entered my brain.
Stella slid off the table, pulled her dress back down like a school girl self-conscious of anyone eying her privates. She bent down at the knees, retrieved the remnants of her shredded panties, rolled them up in her hands like a ball. Entering the kitchen, she stamped down on the garbage pail lid opener, tossed them inside, allowed the lid to drop back down. It was like the metal mouth on an evil robot cleaning up after us.
No one should have to suffer being together as much as we had after we lost our child. It wasn’t two halves of a heart joined together in a silly romantic Hallmark card. More like a tumor attached to a vital organ. Guess who’d become the tumor? Guess, if you will, who’d become the parasite?
Our child . . .
I don’t have the heart or the strength to talk about him right now.
She worked up a half-hearted smile, ran her hands through her hair, pushing it back on her head. The gesture filled me with sadness and dread. What had we done to deserve one another? Why had God forsaken us?
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said. “Then, I’m meeting Allison for a drink and a bite.” She inhaled, exhaled like it was going to take great strength to finish her train of thought. “If you want, I can bring you something back for dinner.”
In other words, I can buy you your dinner once again, and again, and again, and again.
“No worries, Stel. I’ll fix something for myself here.”
Half-hearted smile once more. Or, maybe it was just a hint more than half-hearted. A notch up on the Stella smile meter. Because there was a victory in that smile. A sense that for once, her passive attack proved a winner on the battlefield that was our relationship. Our existence together. Our war of blood and wilted roses.
She turned, walked out of the kitchen and into the hall. But before she got too far, she turned back around.
“You know, Vic,” she said, “you might not believe me, but I am proud of you.”
I nodded. “Means a lot, Stel.”
She pursed her lips. There was no other way to interpret her facial expression as anything other than resignation. A woman resigned to either accept me as I was or simply step outside the door and keep on going.
She disappeared around the corner like she had never been present in the first place.
It had all started with the best of intentions more than three years ago.
I met Stella at a book signing of all places. A local author-makes-good was signing his first novel. Stella was seeing him at the time. Living with him. I waited my place in line until it came to be my turn to have my copy signed. He was a tall, thin man with thick horn-rim eyeglasses. Everyone referred to him not by his full name, but only his last.
Mackey.
This was a time when the big New York publishers were giving out huge contracts to any sixty-thousand-word manuscript that resembled a thriller. Despite numerous attempts and false starts, I hadn’t written one yet, so I’d missed the boat.
But Mackey had scored. And I mean, Mackey scored big. A contract with Random House worth more than a quarter million dollars. Huge money for that time. Still huge money. For Mackey, the future seemed brighter than the light that once shined out of Hemingway’s ass.
He looked so proud and entitled seated at the long table stacked with dozens of hardcover editions of his new book. He wore a purple button down, expensive jeans that had been professionally pressed, and black leather shoes. His corduroy jacket was brown and worn as if he were giving off a kind of professorial intellectual meets seasoned writer who knew what it was to be poor once upon a time.
The biggest trophy of all, however, was not his new novel, but the dame who was standing by his side. She was tall, but not skinny. You could measure the angles and curves on her body by the number of beats per second in my ever-elevating pulse. Her red dress fit her body like a second skin. Her hair was dark, long, and lush, and I wanted only to swim in it and drown. Her eyes were the deepest brown, her nose so perfect it almost hurt to look at it. Her lips were thick and luscious, and when she licked them with her tongue, I thought I would pass out from oxygen deprivation.
Her long legs seemed to rise up all the way to her shoulders. Black open toed pumps protected her feet. They showed off her perfectly manicured red-painted toenails. She was a vision to behold, and I’m convinced Mackey knew it. What he didn’t realize was how her eyes connected with mine and never let go for the entire time he was signing my book.
“I know you from somewhere?” he’d said while signing his name to the book’s inner leaf.
My eyes were dashing from him to her and to him again.
“We were in a workshop together.” It was the truth. “A couple year’s back. New York State Writer’s Institute. You probably don’t remember.”
He raised his hand, pointed an extended index finger at his own head. A gesture indicating he’d just made the connection in his brain. But I knew he was full of shit. He knew who I was all right, and it was humiliating to have to spell it out for him. Still, I played the game. If only to get more time in the proximity of his magnificent girlfriend.
He asked me to join him for a drink after the signing. His agent would be there. Plus, his editor.
“I can introduce you,” he said. “You must have something for them to look at by now. That writer’s institute thing was ages ago.”
My chest went tight. Mackey was looking up at me, the pen in one hand, the book he’d just signed for me in the other. But my eyes kept gravitating to his girlfriend. She was eying me back, like she could see through my skin. See the heart pumping, the blood pulsing, the neurons lighting up. My desire burning.
People were lined up behind me. Impatient people who wanted their face to face time with Mackey. The man planted directly behind me cleared the annoyed frog from his throat. I was holding things up.
“I do have something,” I told him. “A novel. A mystery. But I’m not sure it’s ready for an agent’s eyes. Or an editor.”
Lust and Letters: The Handyman, Episode I Page 3