Please check back every couple weeks for new stories. They aren't all about peeping toms.

***



My Girlfriend the Exterminator

The 2006 Cooper River Bridge Run Story

It was 4:30 in the morning. I woke up to go to the bathroom. When I got back, Sherry had shifted her leg as though she were a Heisman trophy, and I had to shove it back to the starboard side of the bed.

I’ve never worked in a morgue but it felt like a bit like working with a rigor-mortised body.

As I lay there and tried to go back to sleep I realized that the crickets weren’t chirping. I tried not to panic, told myself it was the middle of the night and I could get to sleep without the crickets, but the harder I tried to not think about it the more worried I became.

I got out of bed and checked on the guys. They were fine. Probably just adjusting to the spring cage.

Not that I didn’t have reason to worry. We’d only had the crickets for a week and Sherry couldn’t guarantee their safety.

“All I’m saying is, they’re bugs Rick and I kill bugs.”

I think she had been joking, but she had just lit a cigarette and flipped through a celebrity magazine. I didn’t press her for a guarantee. It’s important to leave some mystery in a relationship.

It would be nice if the mystery didn’t involve wondering if your significant other was going to kill your pets, but you can’t pick your mysteries.



I had to open at work. It was a normal morning, quiet. I did some alphabetizing. We had American Beauty playing and then The Great Muppet Caper.

Steve came in at 3:15. He dropped his backpack in front of the counter -- well, it wasn’t a backpack; he never wore it on his back. It was more like a rolling suitcase, that’s what the parents give the little kids now, to prevent spinal damage.

He headed straight for the foreign films, came back two minutes later with a VHS copy of Jambon, Jambon, featuring a young Penelope Cruz, and which is more relevant to our purposes here, her young bare breasts.

“Hey Rick what’s happening. I’ll take this and a box of Twizzlers, one of those popcorn buckets, and a copy of The Hollywood Video Movie Companion.”

“Alright,” I said. “The magazine is on the house, this, I’m not renting you, and if you still want the candy and popcorn it’s seven-fifty.”

He didn’t really say anything, just pouted and got flustered and peevish.

“Eh…Eh…”

“You know Steve, as your friend, I’d appreciate it if you’d at least make an effort to be sociable when you come in here, as opposed to just grabbing the first booby movie that slips through the loophole in your child’s membership.”

“I’d like to see the manager.”

“You know I’m the only keyholder here right now. You can talk to Dakota if you want.”

Dakota was sitting up on the counter behind me. Her dyed black hair was in front of her face, she flipped it back, briefly looked up from a Betty and Veronica comic.

“This is so unbelievably unfair. It’s just because you know me.”

“You’re welcome to try some time when I’m not here, but I doubt you’ll have any luck. I will say the fact that you live down the street from me with a mother who likes to wind down after work by hitting the firing range makes it that much easier a decision.”

“I thought you were cool Rick. You used to be cool. But now you’re just a talking head, a stooge for a faceless corporate entity!”

He took the box of Twizzlers and threw it across the store. I think he’d hoped they would splatter like crimson alien guts, but he merely knocked Season 7 of Divorce Court off the shelf. He left, wheeling his loaded bookbag behind him. I walked around the counter, returned the DVD to the shelf and the candy to the rack.



A few days later I was driving home and I realized I was listening to the commercials on the radio.

On Tuesday nights at A.C.’s, mini-Rolling Rocks were going for seven dollars a bucket. Ordinarily, that information would have just been wallpaper, but Sherry and I had had a brutal fight the night before, and she’d packed a grip and left.

This had happened to us twice before, and like then, I had not made a conscious decision to research where I could get a good deal on beer in a tin pail, served by a young woman in a bulging tank-top with hands that could crack walnuts. My mind just opened that single-guy window automatically.

As I made dinner I envisioned myself in a bar or at a party. When you’re single every social situation is like covering football for the AP, you’re constantly fretting over your BCS top ten list, scanning the room. The girl with the streaked hair is number three, the one with the wide eyes holding a can of PBR is number two, the blonde in the two-hundred-dollar jeans is atop the rankings. You’re constantly on the look for some upstart to climb the polls, maybe a four-seed you could take a shot at. And then as the rounds go by, they all fall, knocked off by undeserving Cinderella guys with more game, until you realize there never really was a list at all.

After dinner I went out back and threw tennis balls at the clothesline pole. It’s quite a narrow target, even at 45 feet, and I didn’t hit the pole but I had a few near misses. I wished Sherry had been there. She always validated the throws when it looked like the ball went right through. “Whoa!” she’d say. “Ghost pole!”

I was picking up balls by the fence when I heard footsteps in the side yard. It was Steve. He had a clipboard.

I knew what was coming. At least once a year, an inspirational speaker, of sorts, would come and give an assembly at his school. You may be familiar. You walk in and the guy has a mustache and he’s about your dad’s age, but he’s disarming in how comfortable he is to be blaring “Hot in Herrre,” on a gaudy stereo that he’s got set up with all his other bait.

So he’s already got the kids thinking this a fun and decidedly unacademic assembly, and 45 minutes later they’re salivating, ready to canvas the neighborhoods pushing magazines or candy bars in order to win boxes of Hot Tamales or a giant inflatable pencil or maybe even that very pink-and-gray stereo playing Nelly. I think Steve’s biggest incentive was always the pizza party, which you could win for your homeroom and make you cool.

“Hey Rick,” he said. “I thought you usually didn’t throw tennis balls till seven?”

“What are you, charting my behavior now? What are you selling?”

“I’m not selling anything.”

I got set, wheeled and fired, hitting the pole square. The ball came back past me so fast I couldn’t grab it. It was arguably the best throw I’d ever made. Probably about 90 or 95 miles an hour, and Sherry wasn’t there to see it. Steve likely assumed you hit the pole every time, and he wouldn’t know what 90 miles an hour looked like if Gaylord Perry lived next door. He launched into his spiel.

“I’m planning to run the Cooper River Bridge Run next month, and I was wondering if you’d like to sponsor me.”

He handed me the clipboard. I could check a box for 10, 20 or 50 dollars a mile.

“I’ll give you a buck a mile.”

“It’s only a ten-K,” he said. “That’s just six-point-two miles.”

“Hey, this is America. That’s what you get for turning to the metric system.”

“But that’s only six-twenty.”

“Six-twenty ain’t bad for an hour’s worth of work. What are you raising money for anyway? Your school already has more computers than NORAD. When I was in school we wrote our own programs on Apple IIe’s and saved them on cassette tapes.”

“I’m raising money for a telescope.”

“You go to school in broad daylight.”

“It’s for me.”

I laughed and threw another ball. It missed wildly, over the fence and into the neighbor’s yard.

“What about Sherry?” he said. “She makes more than six-twenty an hour.” “Sherry’s gone kid. She went to Vegas for a Formosan conference.”

“When’s she coming back?”

“She might not be coming back. We had a falling out.”

You know how they say you can almost see a teenager shoot up during a growth sport. I could almost see Steve get a little older just then, see a line form across his smooth forehead, the rose-tinted cataracts over his eyes go a shade grayer.

“Oh. Okay, whatever.” He turned and shuffled away, struggling to push his feet through the St. Augustine grass.



An hour or so passed. I drank a glass of wine, turned off the TV, listened for the phone to ring. It didn’t but the crickets started up, and I was relishing my little melancholy haiku when the doorbell sounded. It was Steve’s mom.

“Hey Mrs. Vogel.”

“You know Rick, I’m like five years older than you. You can call me Lydia.”

“Right.”

“Listen, I need to ask you a favor.”

She came in and sat down in the wing back chair. Her knees were at the same angle as when she cleaned her gun, something she liked to do when I came over to watch movies with Steve. I could imagine the Luger in her hands and I knew I was going to do whatever she asked.

“I was so pleased when Steve said he was going to run the ten-K,” she said. “The kid really needs more physical activity. I mean, they’re giving him PE credit for chess club. And now he’s saying he’s not going to run. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less if he gets another freaking telescope. I’m just sick of him being so pasty-looking.”

“Mrs. Vogel--”

“Lydia.”

“I’m an out-of-work bassist. I don’t know what misconceptions you have about classical musicians or video store employees, but we’re not usually known for our physical vigor.”

“He really looks up to you Rick.”

She wanted me to train for the race with him. I gave in pretty easily. We went back over there, but Steve had locked himself on the roof.

The next night Sherry came home. She moved into the conservatory, otherwise known as the room where I used to practice and where we kept the NordicTrack. We were to be like roommates.

The day after that, Steve came over after school. He was back in good spirits and we were going to go for a run. We had six weeks to the race.

“We’re using a specially calibrated training program,” he said. “Increasing our mileage each week. I went ahead and clocked out today’s workout on my bike.”

“Okay, whatever.”

We ran past his house, two more blocks, and then turned around and came back. It took us about six minutes.

“Okay, good first day.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“That seemed a little short.”

He snorted.

“Read the schedule. Point-four miles is the first run of week one. I know what I’m doing okay. I reconfigured a marathon training program for a ten-K. Our event is twenty-three-and-a-half percent of a marathon, so all we have to do is run twenty-three percent of the training mileage.”

I knew how stupid it was but I wasn’t about to argue my way into more running.

We continued on the program for the next six weeks. Two weeks before the race we did our big long run of 5.2 miles. All of the other runs were less than two miles long though, and I’m pretty sure Steve lied about the distance on the five-miler. I remember we left at the beginning of “Sanford and Son” and the credits were rolling when we got back.

Thanks to his training plan, our new starchy diet, and a steady stream of Twizzlers on my employee discount, I put on twelve pounds over those six weeks.

If our training were a movie montage, it would have been to a Nick Drake song.

But at least it kept me busy. My ex-girlfriend would get up in the morning, go kill bugs. Steve and I would run after work, and at night Sherry and I would retire to our separate rooms. We made separate dinners. She would fix a Lipton pasta packet. I would eat a dog bowl of Sugar Pops, either with Steve or not.

Not that it was any of his business, but I feel I made it pretty clear that we were still for all practical purposes broken up. He didn’t seem to care.

A week before the race, Sherry brought home a katydid for her room. I didn’t ask about it.

On the morning of the race, Steve and I stood in the street with the multitudes. We’d been up since five. He’d come over with a box of Lucky Charms and we’d polished it off together. With all the pledges added up, he stood to earn $1240 if and when we crossed the line.

After the first mile he looked up and smiled.

“That’s two hundred bucks.”

“Nice work man.”

At the second mile marker we were a bit separated.

“That’s four hundred,” he shouted.

Then we hit the bridge. We hadn’t done any hill training. We passed the third mile marker somewhere on the climb. I don’t remember very well. I think Steve had planned to say he’d just earned 600 bucks and maybe something about having ten times more magnification and a 700 millimeter focal length, but instead he just said he didn’t want the telescope anymore.

I couldn’t manage a response. I was behind a woman in a T-shirt that said: “Maybe men would respect women’s intellects if their brains bounced gently as they walked.”

I watched her brains bounce for another half-mile and then we couldn’t keep up.

By then Steve was crying audibly.

It took us a half-hour to run the next two miles.

As we passed the fifth mile marker I had an interesting philosophical thought. I don’t know if you’ve ever considered this yourself, but it occurred to me just then that life is a horrible horrible thing, and that there was no one in the world that I didn’t loathe with the same burning ardor I felt in every godforsaken cell of my body.

A lady in her late fifties passed me. Based on a reasonable first impression, she seemed a sweet, motherly type, with a heart about a shade darker than that of the Blessed Virgin. She’d likely spent the last thirty years of her life making lunches and volunteering at her church and nursing her twenty-something daughters through tough break-ups.

I hated her so much.

I wanted to throw an elbow at her but I couldn’t manage it.

“Looking good,” she said. “We’re almost there hon.”

Somehow we struggled on, deep into downtown, and then we made the last turn, back on to Meeting Street. My eyes and my body saw the finish line, only a half-mile to go and I started running fast.

So did Steve; we couldn’t have looked like worse runners if we were pregnant and wearing size 18 shoes, but we were really kicking it in. It was fantastic

Steve let out a whoop. I wished the race were longer. I couldn’t run fast enough. People were cheering, beautiful, wonderful people, that bald guy in the “Nixon for President” T-shirt. The morbidly obese woman with the pinch of Skoal in her lip. The cop with the mustache.

I wanted to give him a hug, but thought better of it and just held up my palm for a high five. He passed, but that was cool.

We finished. I picked Steve up in the air and put him on my shoulders, which is something we’ve never done or even spoken about ever again.

After a while we found Steve’s mom, and I was still feeling high, but now a bit chilly, and it hit me that Sherry wouldn’t be there.

I went to go get us some fruit. There was a pretty young Chapel Hill-type wearing a Booty Loop 5K T-shirt, and I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to rank her in my après-race BCS poll.

“Ugh,” she said. “Who’s smoking?”

I smelled the smoke too. It was a Chesterfield. Sherry.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“Thanks for coming.”

“Enh.” She exhaled. “I saw the empty box of Lucky Charms on the breakfast table. I figured I’d either see you accomplish something or some really spectacular vomiting.”

She’d brought Gary and Ken in their new summer cage. She’d put Slobodan in with them. None of them were singing.



I went over to Steve’s that night to see the new telescope. I guess I startled him on the roof. As I climbed out the window he swung it up to the sky awkwardly and stuck his head on the eyepiece.

“How’s it working out for you?” I said.

“Fine, I’m just getting used to it is all.”

Mrs. Vogel called for him. His dad was on the phone. He left reluctantly. The new scope was fancy, autofocus, a clock. I used the memory feature to return it to the previous setting, which was horizontal, not up at the sky at all but six houses up and across the street, a clean line of sight to my bathroom window, where Sherry stood in front of the sink, topless.

It was the first time I’d seen the girls in a while. It occurred to me that Steve had seen more of them than I had lately, although I guess not in such great detail till tonight.

I figured I would plant a wax myrtle in front of the bathroom window. It would have it covered by mid-summer.

Steve and his mom came over for dinner. He was either oblivious or indifferent, but his mom could tell Sherry and I had reconciled. After dinner she got me to pull out my bass.

“Come on, why don’t y’all sing your song?”

I rosined up my bow and started to play, and for the first time in a long time there was nothing else in the room, no resentment, no unemployment, no smoke. No BCS rankings. Just me and Sherry, playing in the Bug and Bass Bowl; we were our own top two.

“Ooouuurrr house, is a very very very fine house. With no cats in the yard.”

And then Steve joined in out of nowhere.

“LIFE USED TO BE SO HA-ARD.”



That night as we lay in bed together, the crickets were ringing. The katydid kept trying to join in with a disharmonious screeching, and I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t care. I just lay there looking up at the constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Sherry was next to me, deep in REM, her leg up in the Heisman position, stiff-arming some monstrous vermin. She was smiling.

****

Galileo's Window

one of eight stories in the 2006 Piccolo Fiction Open

Galileo Galilei never looked at the sky. He invented the telescope because Olivia D’Antonio had taken over her older sister’s bedroom, three blocks away but within a clean line of sight from his kitchen.

            With the naked eye, he was only able to tell if she was in the window or not.

With his first telescope, he could see her changing, the outline of her breasts, her hips.

With his second model, he could see her face, faintly, couldn’t quite determine her bottom lip from the top. It was like looking at an airbrushed centerfold from across the room.

 He only had a few seconds each night to see her. He knew her schedule. She changed in the window every morning at six, every night around seven. He kept a log. Monday, December 6, at 6:04 a.m., her body was fully exposed for twelve seconds. That Friday night she didn’t show at all, but the next morning she stood naked for a good half-minute. On Thursday, December 16, she was late, and he waited by his telescope.

He waited so long that his roommate Carlo came home, walked in the kitchen to get a snack. Galileo said he was testing out a new model.

               “That still looks like the second one,” Carlo said.    

“It is,” Galileo said. “But I tweaked the lens, improved the focal length.” He aimed at the top of the Duomo and pretended to practice focusing on the cross.

“Oh, okay,” Carlo said.

             The light came on in Olivia’s window. Carlo walked out of the kitchen, smiling. Galileo swung the scope around just in time to see her take her bustier off.

            The Florentine Army was thrilled with the invention and funded its development. Galileo continued grinding his lenses, came out with a third version, a fourth. Each minute spent in his shop, heating and shaping the circles of glass, was a sensual experience, as though his hands were on Olivia’s hips, her thighs, the small of her back.

            January 23rd was a beautiful winter day. The sun went down around five o’clock, the roofline of the city was like a pie crust under sweet cold layers of orange, white and blue.

            At seven, Galileo was in his kitchen, his scope trained on Olivia’s window. It was a new version, very powerful, not easy to focus. At quarter past, Olivia returned from her bath and removed her towel. She had lit more candles than normal and the light was soft and warm, illuminating her every detail.

            She smiled, her mind elsewhere, brushing her dark hair. Galileo was absorbed in her, his scope was so powerful he could only take her in a few inches at a time, only one blue eye, then the other, her nose, then her mouth.

He roamed over the pockmarks of her face, down past her breasts, followed a thin trail of hair that extended from her navel to her waist. He saw stretch marks just above her hips, like ripples left by the tide. He scanned past a mole on her right buttock, found an avalanche of cellulite plummeting down the backs of her thighs.

            He’d never seen her even remotely so close or so clear, and while he’d at first been taken aback by the craters on her face, by the time he found the scar on her left knee, he was more enchanted than ever. No man had ever seen these things, had ever been able to peer so closely at Olivia’s virgin body, and just as he’d already laid claim to her perfect curves and high-hanging breasts, now her every little flaw was his and his alone. He felt a powerful sense of claim over this heavenly being who lingered in the window that night, longer than she ever had before, singing to herself, brushing her hair.

            Feeling as though the scope’s circular field of view was his fingertips, Galileo traced back up her legs, over her soft right hand, up and around her elbow, across one shoulder to the other, down the other arm. His gaze softly brushed the dark hairs on her left forearm, caressed her long fingers, and then, like a record needle hitting a jagged crack, came upon the peak of a new diamond ring.

            His heart plummeted into his socks. Just then the kitchen door swung open, and Carlo came crashing in, a bottle in one hand and girl in the other.

            “Hey pal! Whatcha looking at?”

The girl giggled. They both knew Galileo’s secret. Embarrassed, he swung his spyglass around and angled it up at the darkening sky.

            “Just the moon,” he said, his voice cracking.

            “Oh, okay, buddy. We’ll leave you then.”

            They grabbed two glasses and left, laughing and loud like they came. Galileo kept his eye pressed to his silent worldview. He brought the moon into focus, and was shocked to see that it had craters and hills, was not smooth as everyone had always thought.

            Without lifting his eye, he reached for his field book and made a note. He spent the rest of the night, and many nights after, peering closer and closer, charting the lunar topography, running his eyes over its impure white surface, naming and claiming where no man would stick his flag for three hundred years.