Here's a short 980-word story I'd like to post for comment and critique. It's excerpted from my novella-in-progress mentioned above, and I've rewritten it to try to get it to stand alone. Does anyone have suggestions on how to make it better?
"Old Porno"
Sally leaned against the wall where the phone was and related the news as if reading from a teleprompter.
"Hey," Bud said. "Tell you what. I'll call Snoz and we'll head downtown. Best thing right now will be some fun."
He had to reach past her for the receiver.
Rutherford St. sang like a kewpie salvation army. The setting sun sent shadows like dark ivy creeping up the buildings and three doorways down a man and woman argued into each other's faces. Bud, Sally, and Snoz panned around themselves. The streets were congested without cause, and they took care to dodge a man selling renter's insurance and the handful picketing him. They were beset by a gaggle in flashy pastels spotted with frumpy matrons all singing Over the Rainbow in a belligerent vibrato. Bud cringed. "Judy was best on the small screen!" yelled Snoz and they lit off in a laughing run as audible gasps and one loud tsk! chased them on their way.
Sally led them to a bookstore. The place smelled of dust and wood. Browning cartoons hung taped against the ends of the aisles and boxes of LPs and sheet music sat at their feet. Sally managed a little skip. Snoz aped her.
"Don't swing your purse at me," he said in an affected accent.
Behind the counter an adolescent girl sat with her elbow propped up, leaning against her hand. "Help you?" she asked just glancing up.
"Do you have any movies of the classics?" asked Sally.
"Try the back room."
Snoz sniggered. "Check it out. Old porno."
"What?" asked Bud.
Snoz held out to them a frayed book, its stitching snaking out willy-nilly, turned on its side with the right-half hanging free. Eyes gleaming he shook it. The exposed page was gatefolded and fell open section by section with the soft snapping of a blind man's collapsible cane. It was a water-stained photo of a coed standing at a cafe counter, her back to the camera, wearing a dark tank top and pastel panties visible through snug cotton shorts. "This turns my crank," he continued. "I could swear I've seen that ass before."
"Maybe it's your grandmother," Sally said. Actually it was.
Snoz stuffed it into his satchel. Already his mind was on to the next thing: a craving for tea cakes dusted with confectioners sugar, a name for the band he wanted to start (Lo-fi Fo Fum), and the charcoal incense, candle parrafin, and reams of textiles essential for the sex seance he was to host. Snoz was a genealophile and could only achieve orgasm in communion with his ancestors, which he'd been doing since 15 when he jerked off for the first time in the hospice room of his expiring great aunt.
"I'm going to look around the back," Sally told Bud. "Find something to watch."
If possible the back room was dustier than the front, and each breath caked her sinuses with a brush of plaster of paris. The room was a scrap heap, piled with the heavy tin shells, obsolete circuit boards, and vacuum tubes of old computers. A VCR sat plugged in and Sally was surprised to find a tape already inside. She sat cross-legged upon some boxes to watch.
A news broadcast appeared, an attractive anchorwoman in a business jacket and matching blouse, hair coiffed into rigor mortis, talking about a man of one descent murdering a man of another descent. Upon finishing another clip started, the same anchor relating another story about a murder, and then another, and so on from clip after clip. The clips began cutting into one another, story and teller ineffably constant except for the outfits. The tape sped, "death," "killed," "suffered when a," "murdered," "fallen today," "dead," until Sally's brain swam unable to understand it all wrenching faster and then black. Sally caught her breath and reached up to press Stop when the woman reappeared on the screen.
"Charles M Schulz, creator of the comic strip Peanuts, has died," the anchor said. "Starting in the funny pages, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the gang became cultural icons the world over." The clip went on to describe his career and interview his family, colleagues, and men-on-the-street.
She was thinking about the son telling the cameras of his father's last day when she felt the sensation of the door standing open. She pressed Stop on the VCR and froze, still and silent and not peering round the shelving to see if it were true. The door clicked shut. Sally grabbed a screwdriver off the table before her, dislodging a mouse stacked above. It fell to the floor like a crack of lightning and its trackball shot loose rolling across the concrete floor past the shelving and into the same metaphoric category as roadside flares, pointer hounds, and sweepstake giveaways. She heard steps. She looked around. There were no good hiding spots. There were no other exits. She crouched down. The steps grew closer. A man came round the corner. A figure in silhouette. Sally leapt up. The man's hands thrust toward her. The screwdriver glinted.
"Hey! Shit! What?"
"Dammit Snozzer!"
"What? Shit! Easy!"
Sally was heaving. "What did you have to scare me like that for?"
"I didn't mean..."
"Where's Bud?"
"He went next door for a drink."
"Well, look at this." She played him the tape.
"You know what that was?" Snoz told her. "Some comic geek's wack off tape. Probably obsessed with that woman. And see how it speeds up 10 minutes in, right when he's about to blow his wad? I'll bet you. Let's go."
"Everything comes down to sex," she said.
"Why not?" Snoz asked. "It's natural. We're programmed for it."
The piles of circuitry had presence, had weight, but plugged in and powered up would remain obsolete. Sally flinched and left the tape behind.
END
Thanks for reading. I've also got some new mp3s of indie pop available for downloading on my site. |
