stalemates

a work-in-progress chunk from a work-in-progress novel

Hello friends,

The following is a work-in-progress vignette from a work-in-progress novel. I won’t say much about how it relates to the novel other than none of these characters are the “main” character. I’ve reached a point where this is “polished” enough to share but certainly not in its final form; it needs to taste the fresh air of Substack-rumspringa before I can baptize it into adulthood. I’m interested in your brutal candor: what worked? What didn’t? Did you get bored? If so where? Are the characters believable? Interesting? Are they people you give a hoot about? Any awkward phrases? Clogs in the flow (I’m sure there are many)? etc. etc. etc…Feel free to comment, DM or email (willbchr@gmail.com).

One important bit of context: this vignette is a “story within a story” written by the novel’s main character. From reading this, what are your thoughts about the writer? What kind of person are they? What is important to them?

Thanks for stopping by :)

Love love love,

wb

Photo by Krzysztof Kotkowicz on Unsplash

The luggage is on the Sentra’s roof. The woman is in the Sentra. She was there when he shame-jogged through the morning scorch and dove behind his wheel. He clocked her when he turned the ignition: Victorian roadkill, ramrod spine, frugal bun, dimpled chin folded double as she ogled her lap. She implicates him. The luggage—the luggage on the Sentra’s roof—implicates him. Her status as lingual flesh capable of imbibing good Samaritan gobbledygook implicates him. His nape goes sweatslick. Implicated. He knows. He thrums the steering wheel, working to guess the contents of her crotch: a kitten? A tangerine? A severed thumb? He knows he’s supposed to act; knows what the world—the world mama beat between his ears—demands: the opening of the door, the walking over, the ‘scuse me miss…happens to the best …don’t mention it…His nape sweat cools. Salted. Spatchcocked. She’s familiar, yes? He squints, eager to place her, unaware his fists have balled and shrunk, withered into sea monkey blips, schoolyard nubs that weathered wallops when mama judged no good! no good!

Freon jissom trickles from the Sentra’s underbelly. The woman hasn’t moved. Hasn’t blinked. Under her roof the radio bawls. Suave voices speak of Muzak and harsh …in the morning acronyms. They waft through the a.m. stink rawdogging his cochleas in Sinatra-faced woofs. Behind her the lot feeds S188th. Blonde headlights—farting yawps of motionblur assert brief existence and relapse into sneeze spittle. The woman is unaware of the sneeze spittle—unaware of her luggage, the luggage on the roof of her Sentra—unaware of the man, oblivious to his man-boy fists and head full of mama wallops.

The AC kicks up. His left nipple calcifies, erect, hand-chiseled pink held still by a sternal bushman. It chafes. A sea monkey adjusts his shirt. Freon slithers up and in, burrowing between Puebloan jelly. He shivers. Chickenskined. His gaze doesn’t leave the luggage as he neuters the AC. She’s familiar, tongue-tip familiar yet he cannot place her…The AC cycles a fresh cache of air filling his car with first rain, the corpse waxen petrichor of Kamikaze drops boiled on sunfucked pavement—had it rained last night? He peels his eyes from the luggage and gulps the sky—fast cumuli smear against muted blue-grey, the sun’s haze-cucked but strong, kicking up a waggish breeze bovine enough to rattle his car. It’s nice. The morning is nice, and yes, yes, it did rain. The motel, the concrete box motel stands stained with Pangea blotches of bygone wet. The thirty feet of lot between him and the Sentra sits steaming and puddled, pocked with sea pork gum colonies, days-old Eclipse globs drunk off the night’s rain, bulging—liable to barf spearmint if the breeze gets wise and tickles their funnybones.

Motels are strategic luxuries, break glass bastions for when she gets spooked. She’s spent the last two weeks in a shelter. As far as shelters go, it was fine, the typical unspooky orgy of too-close bunks ripe with sweating, half-lactating flesh. For the last week, her bottom bunk was a revolving door: Monday, a Draino-throated blonde napped in fits until she overdosed. Tuesday, a pregnant tween set her things down and missed curfew. Wednesday, an obese be-muumuued whore bitchslapped a volunteer. On Thursday came the spooking. The volunteers brought her at dusk: a perma-smiling thing that sang its name with summer camp verve. It was her name that did the spooking: something something “Beautiful.” Her first name is lost— Desorae? Shaundra?—but it doesn’t matter, makes no difference—something something “Beautiful”…Beautiful despite a face engineered to refute the name in every possible register—prolapsed anus nose, boiled meat flesh, tape worm hair…Beautiful.

The Sentra woman shot up when she heard it, choked down a knee-jerk chuckle and asked—asked what she had to ask, what hundreds of others had to ask. Beautiful laughed, expectant, “No, no, it’s legal...born with it...comes from daddy’s side.”

Beautiful was (again) running from a man who, it seemed to the Sentra woman, felt duped by the promise of her daddy’s forbears, another moth-to-light horndog lured into orbit by her honeytrap name. For a while, things with this man were, according to Beautiful “…real damn dandy.” But, as he worked to square the dissonance between name and face, the honeytrap festered, grew sunspoiled and rank and soured in the horndog’s blood until he saw red and broke her right orbital.

The moment she heard that name assigned to that face a fever took root, throbbing morse-coded revelation in her temples: look at her, look… Will? Free will? Nope…no no no…we’re all marked. Beautiful? Ha! Fate gets bored and saddles the un-beautiful with impossible crosses…Fate is a toddler squirming in God’s lap, impatient for the punchline, waiting…exploding in thunderous yawps when horny piggies come for their honey, come to collect her phonemic promise, work to square the dissonance and go berserk in the double-cross…

The crown fever says she’s no different, no different from un-beautiful Beautiful. Through her pores wafts pheromonal fate, informing gatekeepers, lovers, passersby whether or not they should cold shoulder or spare change. She gets spooked when she sniffs her preordained musk—when she senses Fate leading her towards the punchline and retreats to the cheapest motel. If she hasn’t enough squirreled away she hits the freeways, parks, 7/11s, panhandling until her jeans sag with a night’s coin. Then she’s free. For a night. Free to thumb her nose at the cock crow, strangle the sun with black garments, burn both ends, blast sitcoms in the wee hours, hot box the no-smoking room, kill-screw red tips against framed prints of nondescript evergreens, stand naked in the window, hawk loogies in the bedside Bible, order grilled cheese at midnight, set immigrant flesh in motion because tummy said so, tummy needs, tummy wants—a night of Fate-fucking carnival, reprise from the Beautiful stench of mantic assumption in a consulate of yes yes illeterates ignorant to Fate, Fortune, God—olfactory eunuchs hovering in mama-pressed linens who go “yes m’am” and smile-wave when she checks out unaware her morning shit waits for them, unflushed and steaming.

She checked in and hit the bar, jonesing to fuck and/or fuck with the barkeep. The bar! Recognition unfurls his brow. The bar—he saw her last night at the bar, gargoyled up on her too-tall stool, hunched forward, dog-slurping martinis. She’s wearing the same blouse, right? He’s no women’s wear buff, but sure, yes, it appears to be last night’s piss yellow blouse. Or…no? He’s unsure again, wondering if the bar blouse was more red? Mauve? Mauveish and less…less…winter fucked? Or…whatever. It’s her. Definitely her. He leans back, unsquints his eyes, performs the barely there nod reserved for regular barkeeps. His mouth is dry. His teeth are bucked. He doesn’t remember bucking them. His upper incisors are bucked in a silent hiss pressing hard against his bottom lip, pinching a swatch of chapped skin.

He entered the bar around nineish; claimed the corner booth and sat, freshly douched, nursing negronis, half expecting the evening to death-fart a raspberry. She was well-sauced by then, shitfaced and tooth-laughing, throwing fistfuls of change at the barkeep.

He Bataan marches his mandible towards the window, peeling the dead kisser loose.

Come the third martini—at least, the third martini he’d, himself, observed—she produced a bag of almonds. Salted and roasted, de-pocketing them with magician stealth. She slung teeth at Mr. Barkeep, finger-fishing blind until she’d snagged an almond with thumb and fore. When the barkeep turned tail she tossed the nut into her mouth. Her tongue worked quick to squirrel it in a tooth-cheek chasm. Once the nut was in place, she shot from dog slouch to Victorian ramrod and sat. Quiet. Uber-still. Still and smiling and sucking. From across the bar, he watched her left dimple kegel in and out, watched and smelled her salivary low tide baptize the nut in halitotic ebbs.

Ten minutes post-insertion—he tended to sip every two minutes and, since the nut’s insertion, he had taken five sips—the almond was satisfactorily nude. The ramrod lost perfection. Her shoulders slouched as she, again, waited for the barkeep’s tail. The moment he turned, she expectorated the almond into her palm. She shot upright and lunged, toes curled around the stool’s foot ring, hovering over the bartop olives. She worked quick, her eyes never leaving the barkeep, lips never not-smiling as she re-pit an olive with the desalinated nut. Her hands were surprisingly deft, surgical—careful to wedge the nut into the green without scarring or squishing; ensuring the shell was sufficiently buried, leaving the brown, tapered edges peeking out, suggesting the mass was a forgotten pit or, perhaps, a chunk of roast garlic. She staged her Frankenstein at an inconspicuous angle and slouched back. He watched her violate the bartop three times. Each time she inseminated an olive without reprimand, she kicked her legs in toddler glee and let loose a blouse button.

The transparent was-lip detaches. He sits, eyes on the luggage, the luggage on the roof of the Sentra, tongue-poking old skin into a tight rollie pollie.

She repulsed him, repulsed but entertained, entertained to a degree sufficient enough to make him want to fuck her. I could fuck her… Perhaps. Options. If the night farts a raspberry, it’s nice to have options.

He tastes blood.

She was beginning to yowl and mean-slur and coochi coo the barkeep’s rump when the faceless Grindr square texted: “just leave it unlocked.” He killed his last negroni and settled up. As the barkeep swiped his card he checked her out, admired her buxom rack and glistening mound of hybrid children. He was tempted to dig one out, tempted to make an obnoxious effort to acquire what he knew to be there and pop it on his tongue. He’d chew open-mouthed, staring at her, into her, unblinking, the eensy muscles under his eyes shrugging off the wrongness she craved. He knew she’d be watching, bent over, dog-lapping martini seven? Eight? Side-eyeing her “victim” as he munched. He knew remaining cordial and unfazed while chomping her wet Franken-kin would ruin something in her, make her second-guess the heft of her impact in the World of Others while—at the same time—endearing him to her in a primal, coital capacity, making potential fornication (should that become necessary) more likely. He tipped the barkeep and took one last cleavage peek as he scribble-signed the receipt. He checked for more faceless messages, nothing, and stumbled back to his room. 106. Room 106. Always one-oh-x—always a room with a potato chip door that opens right out into the wild lot. He sat on the bed and called home. He spoke to the wife: “Good?” Good. The daughter: “Good?” Good! The wife again: “Night.” Night……..…I lov—

He hung up and unlocked the door. He shimmied off his slacks and assumed a downward dog, letting the stale AC chap his lubed hole, praying the thrill of forced entry would keep him from drunk slumber.

He swallows his dead lip. As the wad crashes into his belly, she —the woman in the Sentra, the Sentra with the luggage on its roof —pops something into her mouth. The insertion so breakneck it evades him, his brain reconstructs it in hindsight as her lips yo-yo between turned wine anus and wan hyphen. Sour? Salty? Chapped labia yo-yo a few tricks before settling to baseline non-intent.

The no-face cock left a heart in his asshole; punched space between close-knit polyp neighbors who now must yell and pucker and throb across great distance. She starts to chew, slow and herbivore-like—hawking cud and to-froing her mandible. His rectal heart hockets against the Sentra woman’s yakish mastication, twanging in the reprieve between jaw swipes. There’s something new with her—a pelican potential in her gullet. If she were, this instant, to open her mouth, unhinge a wide doctor ahhhhhh a torrent of crumpled butts would spew out, half aglow with smoldering red heads, burn-branding the Schrödinger infinity in her crotch.

Her shoulders twitch as she swallows the unknown bolus. His focus shifts behind her. The Sentra, the Sentra with the luggage, is full to the brim. The back seat is a volcanic heap of clothing and bags and soda cans. His sea monkeys beat the wheel. Fresh sweat licks his hairline. It would be easy, so so easy: open the door, stroll over, knuckle-knock, ‘scuse me miss…your roof…the luggage…happens to the best… Laugh laugh laugh—a real one, a real love thy neighbor chest chuckle and a wave? A single-handed, splayed digit, bye-bye now wave? Easy…yes? Yes. A knock, a ‘scuse me…, a wave (splay those fingers, don’t salute), then retreat: right, left, right, left, keep the pace normal, easy—easy easy easy…done! Forget it. Left, right, left, right—easy…easy easy easy it’s—

He’s not sure what happened. At some point he went off to pasture, lured into comatose daydream for a minute or two or ten. A car door slammed next to him. He jumped. He’s back. Half of his hair sweat-hugs his skull, the rest flaps his forehead in the AC. The AC which is inexplicably back at full bore. He reaches to turn it down but finds both hands wrapped around his phone. The screen’s held close, the camera pinch-zoomed, recording the Sentra woman’s face in obscene detail: rusty blonde pubes pepper her snot-lip No Man’s, rustling as her AC or breath or other unseen disturbance rakes through them. A clan of brave pubes grow into her right—her right, his left—nostril, the gaping, cavernous one that dwarfs her left—his right—pinprick sniffer. The yin-yang caverns slouch together in a fault-line A-frame, terminating with an upflung rhino hook. The poor thing likely snores—snores loud enough to eclipse the overpass’ roar, loud enough to earn a black eye, to which she’s no stranger. Black-jaundiced pools sparkle under both eyes but the left eye (her left) is soufflé-puffed, burned mid-heal mauve. The eyes themselves are nondescript—bland, shit brown monotones lacking the redeeming burl of tesselate crypts. The eye on the screen, her left, appears a smidge closer and skyward (relative to her nose) than her right (his left). She takes tiny rabbit breaths, sharp shallow inhales, holds, and releases with an incomplete purge. Her jawline is clear and boxy—unobscured by flab and fowl waddles, pulled taut by the stage mom hand of hunger, evading the stereotypical sunk eyes and washboard ribs, or at least, that’s not how he imagines her torso—he is zoomed in on her neck now, slowly panning towards her cleavage. In the bar, he remembers staring as he twitched his Hancock, the negronis in his belly pulling wool, feeding his horned up brain illusory parade floats straining blouse buttons and yes—yes he thought about them, thought of them when his head was pillow-mashed, his hole filled, imagined the mildewed pillow was the center of her good fertile breasts and he was her good boy drowning in her good carotid song but no, he had it wrong, through the lens, the buxom blimps deflate into two white pool cues, tight, unmoving, more tumorous than maternal. He pans. Malnutrition has spared her arm meat, tremors ripple through curdled milk pudge to her boneish shoulders as she strokes her groinal infinity. The fat folds anus-like into her armpits; spider pleats hide environments of lint and foliage and pebbles that have leeched onto—into her—for mobility. A Tesla parks beside him. He lowers the phone into his lap and looks down in the prayerful symbol of occupation. The motel’s lobby is filling up. Inside, a techbro itching to be balls deep in his secretary waits as the street-slimed Mother Hen corals her autistic brood of TANF requisites, raining crumpled singles upon the counter, praying there’s enough for another night of plumbing. A suave, suited man unfolds from the Tesla. He straightens his suit and powers towards the rain-blotched box. His shoes echo the heel-toe confidence of goin’ for smokes fathers. He smile-nods at the ratty bleach-blonde smoking at the vending machine, her legs X-scissored to hold her bladder which she will soon empty on his chest for a crisp Benjamin.

The man watching the Sentra is alone again. He brings the camera to his face and focuses on the luggage. It’s the typical hobo fare: ancient non-wheeler boxcar luggage more suitcaseish than jetsetty, bile yellow-green pocked with Pollock gashes left by the kiss of hard surfaces. He belches. The camera shakes, blurs, and steadies upon the latches. One of them, the left (his left), stands erect with two combination wheels MIA. He pinch-zooms. The remaining wheel is cockeyed and bulged, limboed between 0 and 9. A herniated fleece tongue pokes between the luggage’s clam lips. It is clear the thing, the luggage, the luggage on the roof of the Sentra, is liable to burst—its innards boil in the sun, vapored BO implores the upper clam, edges the solo clasp until it gives in and ejaculates her life, raptures her garments into a surefooted breeze that ferries them to a Goodwill—one in an bougie suburb where they’d be washed and purchased and draped upon the fine smelling skin of sorority pledges. A plane soars low over the luggage. He remembers the rain. He peeks from behind his phone; the puddles have gone extinct. The rain was brief and measly, lacking charisma to evict the heat. He remembers. His phone rang late, long after no-face left him gaping. It was twoish…threeish? The wife reports the baby, the newborn, is colicky and restless: it’s too much goddamnit you need to come home! The newborn, another girl, screamed into the receiver as he sleep-slurred: “Oh, hon—darling, you know this conference is a huge deal…mandatory…won’t—can’t get promoted without it…be home soon…soon as I can…love love love.” He hung up. He lay back, absorbing the pitter of rain through the thin chip door. A plane flew overhead as he pulled up the covers. The best thing about this motel is its proximity to SeaTac, the constant parade of hohum planes seeking permission to touch earth, their engines close and whining. He listens to the plane above the luggage, hoping for sputters and pops—praying for errant migratory fowl to charge headlong into the blades and crash the oafish Boeing down upon Renton, prays that the plane be full, full of mothers and children and celebrities and the infirm, prays for paperwork and emergency all-hands that, as a Boeing PR rep, permit the “sorry hon, late nights, no choice” that give his life meaning.

He swoops back to the woman—did she always have those freckles? The herd of light-brown dots barnacle-climbing her nostril? The pygmy, pinprick one? Thinning out as they summit her dorsum? The windows of the Sentra have started to fog, cloud with slight Gaussian must. He pans to focus on the backseat heap, foothills of thrown clothing and duffels, Safeway bags choked with redeemable refuse, coolers, tent poles, slippers, stolen North Faces, stuffed bunnies and teddies and froggies, off-kilter lamps, an Adidas box leaking loose papers and—and the piebald face of a border collie, peaking out, wreathed in volcanic potpourri. A panting, smiling collie hot boxing the car with his fish brine. The collie stares down the lens, aware of the peeping man. He’s been parked too long, parked and staring and the collie works to afford his human the privacy of blurred windows or no—no, perhaps the collie feels implicated, senses something in his pile is absent, the luggage, the luggage on the roof of the Sentra, his Sentra, is missing and he pants to make his inner sanctum fishy and farty to force the woman into fresh exodus, to unfold in the lot, stretch her spine and facepalm her ditziness when she sees the boiling luggage.

The potential Samaritan hasn’t decided if he’ll heed mama’s wallops, if he’ll walk the few paces and tap glass and ‘scuse me miss…your roof… His nipple’s still erect, only the left, the sternal bushman poised and ready, ready to plow the spear into the airbag, have it fling out and snap his neck if he fails to be good. The AC has a mind of its own; it kicks up again. His scrotum retreats, calling attention to something trapped in his penis. He clears his throat. Lonely. He is lonely. Again. So soon? He knows he is lonely when his cock chipmunks dollops of piss, the internet said so. The internet told him loneliness manifests as perma-stuck piss—real or imagined—trembling yellow lodged behind the puckering eye, throwing sharp hello!s when he kegels or walks or lap-bounces his daughter. The internet said a lonesome, idle mind tends to go rogue, goes berserk and tantrum-pinches urethral tunnels hoping to trap rancid piss, hoping to cultivate UTIs in search of more interesting deliria. So long as you distract it, the lonesome mind, distract it with table scrap people, endless scrolls, stiff negronis, it will abide in Weimar satiation and tolerate the doldrumic now, or at least, it used to. He followed the internet’s rules: he sacrificed the table scrap Grindr cock at the altar of loneliness and, therefore, should be sat pretty in thumbnail reprieve, a few hours, or, if lucky, a day of urinary detente, but no, he kegels to confirm, no, the agoraphobic sebum still roosts, raindancing for cytokines. He turns his attention back to the Sentra woman. Is that steam coming off her luggage? Another plane drones low overhead. Listen: sputters? Goose cries? Is she lonely too? Maybe she feels hibernating piss in her urethra? Maybe it hurts when she moves? Maybe she’s playing dead in the Sentra until it passes? Maybe she knows, knows about the luggage, the luggage on the roof of the Sentra, but the piss is too sharp for her to stand? Would it be different for women? Do women have urethras in the same way he does? He doesn’t know, hasn’t spent much time contemplating female urethras, but supposes yes, sure, all piss-beings have urethras, piss is piss, and she, the Sentra woman, as a being capable of piss, sits thirsting for new delirium, an inflation of the brain that manufactures a facsimile of tolerance. Did her detente collapse as well? The detente negotiated by revolving martinis? The barkeep flirting? The olive/almond fuckery? That’s why she did it, right? Why she made the Frankensteins? Something, anything, to steer attention from the interned yellow? His mouth waters with resonance; his tongue ejects, hungry, petting the infant blastoma, craving brine. Maybe he would do it...brave the lava tarmac and rain-bulged gum to do what mama taught. Perhaps the walk and the Samaritan gesture would negotiate fresh detente and purge old piss and quiet the colicky thing at home and make him good? Make him mama’s good little boy? And when he walks back, easy paced, right left right left, his steps shall fall with Messianic value. His ass will return to driver’s nylon, sugar-high, feeling the warm blanket of piss blossom free into his briefs. It would be easy. So. Easy. ‘scuse me ma’am…no—miss, miss is better, ma’am implies turkey waddles, or at least it would for him—knock knock, smile (neighborly, not-creepy) ‘scuse me miss…your roof…the luggage…easy! He could do it, should do it, must do it. The phone’s still in his hand, camera trained on the sky. Do it. That cloud looks like mama, mama stood akimbo in the kitchen, in her robe and curlers, up in the blue keeping the planes alive, filling his 9-5 with thumb twiddles and zero excuse to rendezvous ass up in airport motels, leaving nothing but home—no option but to drive home, unfucked, piss-stuck and tight holed to her precious daughter-in-law. He feels her stare perched on his shoulder. Do. It. He breaths in. Long. He removes a sea monkey nub from the phone and slowly reaches for the door. He’s about to put his phone down and peel his ass into the parking lot when she, the woman in the Sentra, the Sentra with the luggage on its roof, suddenly brings her hand to her chest. A dirt-nailed, claw-shaped thing flies up quick, moving to the prolapsed now-V of her blouse, pulling it down to expose her right breast. Her tiny blip nip stands spearpoint hard, the tip thrusting out by her sternal Amazonian, leering across the tired tarmac and rococo Eclipse slugs, staring down his bushman, ready for blood. The hand falls back into her infinite crotch. She sits, single tit out, glass-eyed. Both of his nipples are hard now. His legs scissor. He’d like to fuck her. He could do it if he wants; there’s time. She takes a deep breath, the deepest of the morning, pushing out her chest, eyes closed, exhaling as she lifts from the groinal void an infant, a naked larval cyst of abalone. It appears stillborn as she trucks the hairless nub to her tumor tit. The thing smells grub and pulsates, writhes like a wasp rump, throws up chapped talons and opens a toothless cavern, craning its mushy skull to flick the Amazonian tip with bloated tongue. It latches. It feeds, docking spoiled-milk mitts around mama’s pool cue, squeezing the trough, wringing every drop of plastic white mama can muster. She winces slightly when the thing sucks her. He watches. He is semi-erect, scissoring legs in and out, making the car shake a little, shake even in the absence of the impish breeze. He zooms out to get it all: the muffled drone of Muzak, the collie in the refuse, the clam boiling on the Sentra, the planes overhead. She takes a dozen rabbit breaths and repositions, supporting the hominoid’s skull with her right hand. She bends down, quick, a small courtesy tick, and comes back to ramrod Victorian, blinks once, and brings a hot pink crack pipe to her lips.