Andersen Prunty's Blog, page 7

Gravedigger

Gladys goes downstairs and aggressively taps on her husband’s shoulder. Her husband’s name is Hank.

“You gotta go upstairs and talk to that boy,” she says.

“What’s the little jackass done now?” Hank asks.

“Why, I left him alone for two minutes and he done cut off his balls and glued them to his forehead.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Hanks says. “Let me get my pants on.”

He puts his pants on and heads for the stairs. Gladys calls out from behind him. “And remember to call him Snake or he won’t answer ya!”

Hank gets upstairs and opens the door to the boy’s room. The boy, “Snake,” lies on the bed, wistfully staring out the window, his balls glistening on his forehead. Hank snaps. He rushes over to the bed and begins shaking the boy.

“You listen here,” he says. “If you think you can get away with murder just ’cause you got them damn leg braces, then you got another thing comin’. Get them balls off your head.”

“I can’t,” Snake says.

“Well you better find a way.”

“You try it. They’re glued.”

Hank angrily reaches out and clutches one of the testicles in his fingers. The thing won’t come loose. It just squishes there between his fingers.

“That does it,” Hank says.

He yanks Snake off the bed and throws him to the floor, the boy’s leg braces clattering.

“Get your pants down. I’m givin’ you the spankin’ you deserve.”

The boy moans pathetically and frantically tries to crawl to his bathroom.

Gladys comes into the room before Hank has a chance to spank Snake.

“Hank! You cut that out!” she yells.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he says. He kneels by the bed and begins to pray.

Snake makes it into the bathroom. He finds a razor and slashes at his wrists. The blood courses out and Snake discovers he can now walk without the aid of the braces. With blood-covered hands, he removes the braces and tosses them into the bathtub. He throws open the door to his bedroom and charges across the room, launching himself through the glass in his window. He plummets to the ground outside. His parents call the ambulance but a hearse shows up instead. Which is appropriate because Snake is dead. He lies in a crumpled heap on the front lawn. A huge man gets out of the hearse.

The man is a gravedigger.

He takes an enormous shovel from the back of the hearse and proceeds to dig a hole in the front yard. Once the hole is deep enough, he nudges Snake into it with his foot.

Snake’s parents stand on the front lawn, crying as the gravedigger finishes filling in the grave. After tamping down the dirt, the gravedigger tips his hat to Snake’s parents and gets back into his car. Hank and Gladys go back inside the house to begin anew.

Privacy Fence

I once again fell asleep in the yard last night and now my wife is real mad.

“Just because we have a privacy fence doesn’t mean you can act homeless!”

I’m sitting up now, my head heavy with last night’s drinks.

“Unhoused!” I shout back.

“You fucking twat!”

She slams the door and goes back inside. I lean to my right and quietly vomit into the grass.

I look around the perimeter of the yard at our gleaming white privacy fence. It came with the house. I would never erect a privacy fence unless my neighbors were super shitty or dog owners. Our neighbors are great. They’ve never accused me of being an unhoused person. They respect my quirks.

Unhousing myself was something that came naturally. I’m always at risk of losing everything, including my wife, so I’ve decided to ease into it. Practice, just in case the time ever comes.

I suppose I’ll start spending more time indoors when the weather gets a little chillier. I’ve never been one for the cold. The early spring and gorgeous weather is how this all started. I’d wander outside after my wife went to bed. She turns the air conditioning way down because she says she’s tired of waking up in pools of sweat. I stayed outside longer and longer, pounding beers, smoking cigarettes, and either muttering to myself or thinking really deep thoughts, dragging myself inside after she went to work so I could work from home writing hardcore pornography very few people read. I told myself it was an office and not a house.

This continues for several more nights—rain or shine. When it rains, I’ve found a spot under the garage eave with a large tree growing over it. It keeps me relatively dry.

One night I hear the back door open and my wife bellow, “Where are you, you disgusting piece of shit!”

I’m between a large bush and the privacy fence, masturbating slowly. Being outside, I’m usually able to take my time with it. Inside, I always had to furiously pound one out whenever I could find the time and the privacy.

I put my dick away but don’t respond to her.

Not yet.

She goes into the house and comes back out with a palm of cigarettes she sprinkles around the porch. I scamper out of the bushes to collect them.

I meet my wife’s gaze.

She’s not wearing a lot of clothes.

“I need a fucking,” she says.

I look longingly at the cigarettes in my hand. I don’t know why. I’d much rather be fucking my wife. Theater, I guess. Dramatic tension.

“After,” she says.

I follow her inside.

Later, as we both lie in my collective stink and smoke cigarettes in bed, I remember this unhoused thing was not really my idea at all. I leaned into her fetish with a ferocity I exhibit for very few things. She’ll delouse me and hose me down. Maybe pull off a couple of ticks. We’ll clean the house together. Go to bed together. In the morning she’ll seduce me again and tell me I clean up nice. Then I’ll go outside to do yardwork and it’ll start again.

Lost

Lon spends three weeks growing a thick, dark mustache.

One day he invites his girlfriend, Tina, over.

It isn’t long before he is performing cunnilingus on her. She laughs and tells him she likes the way the mustache feels. Within a few minutes, she reaches a shivering climax. Afterward, Tina giggles and leaves. It isn’t until the next morning, when Lon goes into the bathroom to shave, he notices his mustache missing.

“That bitch,” he says between clenched teeth.

He tries to grow another mustache but it isn’t the same; the symmetry is all wrong, the thickness subpar. It has an odor.

Lon tries to call Tina but she won’t pick up the phone. He can’t leave a message. What would he say?

Many months later, Lon rents a porno, it being a long time since his last sexual encounter. Midway through the porno, after Lon has masturbated three times, he notices Tina. She is calling herself Glenda Bummings now. He doesn’t want to watch, he’s so angry with her, but her image sparks memories of being with her and Lon is, once again, aroused.

Soon, the male actor in the porno enters Tina. Lon remembers the days when that was him. The man slides his penis out and Lon is flabbergasted. He scrambles to kneel in front of the TV. Attached to the man’s penis is Lon’s mustache.

“That bitch,” Lon thinks.

Captivated, he watches as his mustache rumples up against her vagina and then disappears inside once more. There are times when Lon thinks he can see it peeking out, nearly taunting him, whispering softly, “Remember when I used to be on your lip?”

Telepathy

We’ve been telepathically linked for years. We’re in each other’s energy fields nearly every hour of every day. When we’re not, it’s usually fine … Sometimes it’s terrible. It always feels incomplete, missing something. We try to create a world the other wants to inhabit. We never need to talk. We don’t even really have to meow. We exchange energy. It’s uncomplicated. It’s effortless. We only talk because we like the sound of our voices.

Slab

Ever since he’s started eating on the humans in the freezer, Ross has gained an amazing 150 pounds. He finishes a slab of the human’s ribs and reflects on what life used to be like. He had been a social creature: parties, girlfriends, a good job.

Then one day, he just got tired of it all. He no longer wanted anything more than to kill a few humans and keep them in his new deluxe freezer.

Ross had, on a number of occasions after eating human flesh, tried to venture out into the world but it had become too difficult. The phone calls and drop-ins had ceased shortly after he quit going to parties and the job. After all communication with the outside world had ended it became too difficult for him to go outside. He could feel people staring at his fat, pale unwashed flesh. Ross had stopped shaving and he knew whenever he farted they all smelled the stink of death. People shot him the evil eye. Priests crossed themselves after walking by and none of it meant anything to Ross. He only wanted to eat his freshly prepared meals, wash them down with some tap water and masturbate, the taste of the last bite still fresh on his tongue.

Ross brings himself back into present time and rises from the table, going to the sink and washing his dish. After washing, Ross retires to his chair for a pleasant post-meal slumber.

Then a very strange thing happens.

The phone rings.

At first, Ross doesn’t know what to do.

Then he swallows, takes a deep breath, and goes to answer the phone.

“Hullo,” he says.

“Mr. Ross?” the voice on the other line asks.

“Yes, this is Mr. Ross.”

“Mr. Ross. We know you have a dead body in your apartment.”

“Not true.”

“What?”

“Not true.”

“So you don’t have a dead body in your apartment?”

“No way. That’s illegal.”

“What about a dead cow. Neighbors say they’ve heard you sawin’ on something over there.”

“Is it illegal to keep a dead cow?”

“If it becomes a nuisance to those around you. Say, are you sure you don’t have a dead body there?”

“No way. That is, I mean, I’m sure.”

“This is Mr. Ross, 311 Purple Rose Street, Apartment 4F, correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

“No dead body?”

“Nobody but me.”

“Well, okay, then … Hey, you wouldn’t tell us if you had a dead body in there anyway.”

“Sure I would.”

“Well, I think we’re going to send somebody over there to check it out.”

“I’ll be waiting for you, Mr. …?”

“Black. Stanley Black.”

“Thank you, Mr. Black.”

It was strange talking to another human being, Ross thinks upon hanging up the phone. Well, he thinks, guess I should finish up the rest of that dead body.

It is a lot to eat and his stomach ends up rupturing after the last bite.

The detective who comes over to check out the apartment has been into cannibalism for a little over two years. When he sees Ross’ huge dead body he is both shocked and delighted. He waits a few minutes before calling Detective Black.

“Yeah, Stan, I’m here at that guy’s apartment. No, everything’s clean, checks out fine. I think I’m gonna take off for the day after this, though. All right. Thanks, Chief.”

After hanging up, the detective gets on the phone with one of his cannibal friends to help him drag that bitch of a corpse out to the car.

Dog in Orbit

A woman comes home and discovers her dog is missing. It is an ugly mutt with a face like a leathered wino but, nevertheless, she misses it. She goes back outside. A thin old man is collapsed face down on the sidewalk in a puddle of drool. She nudges his skeletal shoulder with her foot.

“Whu …?” He squints up into the sunlight.

“Have you seen my dog?”

“Can you help me up?”

The woman bends down and grabs the man beneath the arms. It’s a struggle but he makes it to his feet. He sits down on a retaining wall and pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket. The woman sits down on his left and he puts a hand to the side of his face, pretending she can’t see him. She stands up and walks in front of him. “Have you seen my dog?”

The man silently points to a house across the street. He throws his cigarette out into the road and slides back down onto the sidewalk. The woman crosses the street to the house the old man pointed to. It’s pretty dilapidated. She didn’t even know anyone lived there. Once she’s in front of the house, the old man shouts from the sidewalk: “Hey, lady! Think you can help me up?”

She doesn’t want to help him up. She ignores him. She walks up onto the porch of the dilapidated house and knocks on the door. The door opens quickly, as though someone stood just on the other side, waiting. Her dog jumps up on her, his front paws on her thighs. She reaches down to pet him. A rugged-looking man stands behind the dog, a leash in his hand. “Whoa, boy,” he says. He pulls the dog back into the house.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” the woman says. “But I think there’s been a mistake.”

“I like dogs,” the man says. “Make no mistake about that. I love ’em.”

“I’m sure you do. But this is my dog.”

“No. You’re confused. It’s my dog.”

“No. This is most certainly my dog.”

“I like dogs. It’s my dog now.”

“No. It’s still my dog.”

“Hardly.” The man chuckles. “Look, maybe it could be our dog.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah. You move in and stuff. It’ll be our dog.”

“Please just give me my dog back.”

“He likes me better.”

The dog laps at the woman’s face as she continues to pet him. It farts on the man.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the man says. “Or stay. The choice is yours. But you can’t take the dog with you.”

The woman decides to move in. The man isn’t too atrociously ugly and she doesn’t have a boyfriend anyway. The man never leaves the house so she never has the chance to take the dog back. The man never even lets go of the leash. The sex is subpar and awkward.

One day, the dog chews up one of the man’s shirts. “We have to get rid of it,” the man says.

“I’ll just take him and go home.”

“Nope. Gotta make sure he’s far away. I need my shirts. And you need to learn about loss.”

The man drags the dog into the kitchen. He rummages through drawers and opens cabinets. In the refrigerator he finds a pair of large wings. “These oughtta do it,” he says.

He holds the wings against the dog’s fur, as though they’ll just magically adhere themselves. They don’t. “Whatta you think’s the most humane way to go about this?” he asks. “I got staples, nails …”

“I don’t know what you’re planning to do but you’re scaring me. And you’re scaring the dog.” She points to the dog, its tail between its legs and whimpering.

“Maybe glue. Yeah, I got some good glue.”

“I can’t let you do this.”

“You can and you will. This here’s my dog. You ain’t got no say in it.”

The woman is now crying. “It is not your dog.”

The man slathers glue on the base of the right wing and sticks it to the dog, under its right shoulder. “We done been over this. This here’s my dog and I get to choose what happens to it. When you went and moved in you unconditionally accepted the fact that this here was my dog. If you was so upset about it, thinkin’ it was your dog and everything, you woulda called the cops or somethin’.”

The woman takes a deep breath. “There haven’t been any cops for years.”

“I suppose that’s my fault too, huh?”

“I can’t stand here and watch this anymore.”

The woman wants to attack the man but she’s afraid he will hurt her and the dog and then it will have all been pointless. She leaves the room and sits on the rancid couch in the living room, turning on the TV and watching static patterns snow across the fractured glass. In a few minutes the man walks through the living room, carrying the dog. Both wings have now been affixed to the dog’s back.

The man chuckles. “If you love somethin’ you got to set it free.”

The woman buries her face in her hands and cries, her shoulders heaving.

She doesn’t want to follow the man and the dog outside but curiosity gets the best of her. She thinks maybe the dog will run off and she can run after it, knowing the man will be too lazy to follow. The man delicately descends the porch steps and stands in the wasted front yard. A boy rides his bike down the street, dragging an old pushmower behind him. The mower is running, loud, almost drowning out the boy’s shouted obscenities.

“Here goes,” the man says. He tosses the dog up into the air and the wings begin flapping. The dog rises into the sky, higher and higher, until it flies so high it goes into orbit. By this time, it’s well out of sight.

The man and woman go back inside. The man keeps the empty leash strapped to his wrist. In the following days he becomes despondent and mentally abusive. He brings home hideous women covered in various lumps and odors. The lumpy women make fun of the other woman and, eventually, she leaves. She goes back to her house but someone has planted a garden in it. She lies down between two rows of lettuce and stares up through the glass ceiling and waits for her dog to stop orbiting the earth.

Void

I have a bowel movement that lasts for three days. By the time I’m finished—emptied—I’m sweaty, exhausted and famished. No longer myself.

When I go downstairs I discover someone has played a horrible trick on me. They’ve removed every item from the downstairs and replaced it with a cardboard replica. The couch, the refrigerator, the television—all cardboard. Even the carpet has been removed, crayon stippled onto the cardboard, only a simulation of the real thing. I pick up the cardboard phone, ready to call anyone I can think of—I need answers—but, rather than a dial tone, I am greeted with a voice repeatedly asking what I’m wearing. Struggling somewhat, I rip the phone to pieces and toss it onto the floor.

What am I wearing?

I look down at my clothes and see that I, too, am made of cardboard. A terrible shock seizes me. I have to get out of the house. Charging outside, I am horrified to see that it is raining and looks like it has been raining for quite some time. The water sluices its way down the sides of the street, running into the sewer.

Yes. That’s it. If I can get down into the sewer, I can regain that part of myself I have expelled over an arduous three day period. I can reclaim my waste. I rush out to the street, the rain pounding down onto my cardboard flesh. I absorb it, growing heavy and soggy.

I manage to reach the sewer. It is cool outside and a thin mist rises from the slit. I think of a halitosis smile, a diseased vagina. Holding my breath, I enter the sewer. My right arm comes off in the process, remaining on the street.

Plopping down into the sewer, I stumble after the lost part of me, wanting only to be three dimensional and whole once again. Following the tunnel of the sewer, I come to a small door. Hoping it isn’t locked, I pull on the handle. I am greeted by family and friends, everyone I have grown apart from over the past several years, all hunched over in a tiny, brightly lighted room.

“Surprise!” they shout in unison.

My dad steps forward, nervous, smoothing his thin hair with his left hand. In his right hand he holds a box. A present.

“For you,” he says.

“Thanks,” I say, taking the gaily wrapped pink box.

“Go on,” he prods, licking his lips. “Open it.”

Having only one hand, I set the box down on the floor. I try untying the bow but my soggy fingers only bend back. The people in the room chuckle. I hear someone, I’m pretty sure it’s my grandfather, bemusedly say, “He’ll never get that thing open… Not with those fingers.”

“Let me help you with that,” my dad says, crouching down and farting a little.

He easily tears the wrapping off the box, wadding it up and sticking it down his pants. Then he opens the box and pulls out a miniature toilet, setting it beside the empty box.

“Go on,” he says. “Open it.”

I crouch down and try to flip the lid up but, again, my fingers won’t work.

“There there,” my father says, demonstrating a patience he never showed in my childhood, this time only bending over to pull back the lid and reveal the contents to me. I can’t identify what lies inside the toilet.

“Go on,” my father says. “Try some. It’s food.” I reach into the bowl and wrap my waterlogged hand around something that looks like a miniature baseball hat. I put it into my mouth and cautiously chew. It’s delicious. I can’t identify a specific element about it but it is, without a doubt, the most delicious food I have ever eaten. My family and friends all stare eagerly as I extract random items, all familiar-looking, all completely foreign tasting, and shove them into my mouth. Gradually, I become full. My other arm is back and the rain water is sweat seeping from my pores and I have visions of myself sitting on the toilet and straining, voiding sweat and waste… But that is in the future. For now, I eat. Becoming full. Letting the people around me chatter and fill my soul to bursting.

The Cover-up

I’m sitting on my bed reading Extreme Gynecology when my father barges into the room. His face is red and sweaty. He sits on the edge of my bed, breathing heavily and twisting his hands in his lap. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing,” he says, standing up from the bed and walking across the room, headed for the door. He stops and turns around, comes back to the bed, sits down again. “Look,” he says, “you gotta help me.”

“What’s wrong?” I repeat.

“It would be better if I show you.” Some of the nervousness seems to have left him. His eyes go blank and he stands up, walking slowly over to the window. He points out. I sigh heavily, close my book and toss it to the other side of the bed, stand up, and approach the window. My room is on the second floor and has a pretty good view of the neighborhood.

“What? I don’t see anything.”

“Look over there.”

I look across the street, a couple of houses down, into the Robinsons’ yard. A boy lies face down at the edge of the sidewalk.

“I threw a rock at his head.”

“Jesus, Dad!” I’ve never known my father to be violent and this action surprises me. “That’s Benny Robinson. I go to school with him.”

“I’m afraid I clipped him a good one. He might be dead.”

“Jeez!” I clasp a hand to my forehead, massaging my temples.

“I couldn’t help it.” My father throws his arms to either side, begging me to argue with him. “I was picking the rocks out of the garden and he came along and just started … plodding through the grass.”

“So you threw a rock at his head?”

“Well, no, Mr. Smartass, I didn’t just ‘throw a rock at his head.’ I asked him to stop it but he just kept trampling and trampling.”

“Then you threw the rock at his head.”

“It was right there in my hand. It happened before I even knew what I was doing but … well, like I said, it clipped him pretty good. He made it all the way down there before he collapsed.”

“How am I supposed to help you? This is definitely not my problem.”

“I just need you to help me move the body. He’s kind of fat.”

“All the kids at school used to call him fat.” I sit back down on the edge of the bed. “I guess they won’t be calling him fat anymore.”

“Come on. We have to do it before your mother gets home. If she finds out …”

“She’ll what? Call the police?”

“Probably. You don’t want me to go to jail, do you?”

“Maybe you should. Throwing rocks at kids is … ghoulish.”

“Look,” he says, fishing his heavy wallet out of his back pocket. “I’ll make it worth your while.” He riffles the bills inside the wallet.

“What are we gonna do with him?”

“So you’ll help me?”

“Yeah. Do I really have a choice?”

“We might have to bury him.”

“Jesus.”

“We need to hustle up. Before anyone sees him.”

Together, we go downstairs. “You go on over there,” Dad says. “I’ll go out back and get the wheelbarrow.”

Reluctantly, I cross the street. Closing in on Benny Robinson I wonder if he’s dead or not. He looks dead. But that doesn’t always mean anything. Standing next to the probable corpse, I hear a door open and see Benny’s mother stick her head out. She screams in horror, passes out, and lands half in and half out of the door. Sirens scream in the distance. Looking over my shoulder, I do not see my father. I debate running and then think maybe it would be better if I just stand there. I think of the reward for taking the rap for Dad.

There’s no sign of him, even as the police fold me into their car and take me away.

2024 so far

It’s going well.

Bonus 15

I’m going to dress like a pervy yoga instructor all week. Heat Dome!