Willie Smith

Willie Smith

Flash Fiction
Winter 2006

~Growing up White~

Fall 2005
~My Promiscous Bicentennial~

Growing up White

When I was twelve and my parents would go away and leave me the house, I’d play Tchaikovsky, tear off my clothes and try to interest the dog in sex. Usually we’d play the 4^th Symphony. I’d eat hot dogs and beans. Kennel Ration and Gravy Train for the dog. She was a two year old neutered German shepherd.

The wienies and beans I heated up on the electric stove. Dumped a few cups of dry Gravy Train into the dog’s plastic bowl. Added water. Whacked out half a can of Kennel Ration, T-bone steak flavor. Fresh water in the dog’s other plastic bowl. Can of pop for myself.

Mom and Pop were off to the Shenandoah for this particular weekend. Turned up Tchai a few notches beyond distortion. Deigned to slip out of my underpants. Pranced nude back into the kitchen to see how the dog was doing.

Doing nice, wolfing down the greasy brown with gulping liquid sounds making her whole back lope as though she were vomiting in reverse.

Moved a hand to my crotch. The blood down there heavied. French horns echoed in the house like Germans conquering the world and nobody awake enough to care. Deciding to let the dog finish, I drifted back out into the living room. Smiled out the bay window. Felt golden and free.

The sun was setting on the hill. Twilight coming in like an extremely distant toothache – vaguely pleasant, pastel, suggestive, mildly interesting. Out in the kitchen, no longer heard sloppy noises. The dog belched.

Ambling nude and cock of the walk back into the kitchen, confronted the dog.

She looked up at me with a neutral grin. Her snout caked with processed horsemeat. I liked the dog, because she really knew how to get down and eat.

The cellos tripped into pizzicato. Flutes and piccolos flurried around them. It was only September, but I wished hard for snow. Then, after dark, the dog and I could run out naked in the backyard – engage in a snowball fight. The dog made a perfect target – big, mobile, stupid, no hands.

But it was clear and not nearly cold enough. War was out of the question; so we’d have to orchestrate a little sex. I didn’t know what I was doing, although the dog seemed to have some idea. Tchaikovsky boomed.

I grabbed her by the violin. Began applying the rosin of my palm to her string. She rolled over. Showed me her nippled kettle drum. French horns, after a dramatic pause, restated the theme everybody is solemn to remember. Even the dog grunted approval – or was it suppressed lust?

Then Tchai got dreamy. Woodwinds tapered off. A solo oboe took the stage.

The dog and I became a mythical animal with six legs, two arms and a shotgun for a tail. We went off in search of damsels, and not to save them. We galloped over rolling hills carpeted with daisies. The sun beat down on us like a waterfall of chicken feathers. The animal grew hungry, starved, and still it galloped.

At last, under a live oak tree, we found a woman with large bosom, a pretty face and the promise of nice legs under the satin gown she wore. She screamed. We fell to gulping her in a hurry.

I started with the nose. The dog ripped off her gown; went straight for the crotch. The snot in her nose tasted delightfully familiar. I couldn’t see what the dog was doing, but sounded like she was enjoying herself because it sounded like she was throwing up backwards again. I was licking out the inner recesses of her sinuses when the dog’s tail went off.

Dead pigeons dropped out of the sky like volcano ash. Tchai was booming the kettles, not to mention the bit of Dresden in cupboard. It was an all out nuclear attack on our souls. The dog and me were split apart. The girl vanished like cigarette ash at the touch of a thumb.

I was back in the kitchen. The dog was panting. The stereo blowing the dust out of its lungs. The entire orchestra gone insane with authority.

Then came steps up the porch to the door. Key slotted in lock, turned. My parents were coming home early.

I covered the dog up best I could. Then locked myself naked inside the refrigerator. It was dark in there, but I managed to find a pop; also to scrape off most of the doghair.

Pop found me while he was rooting around for a beer. He thought it a joke in poor taste. Made me go to bed early. He had killed Tchaikovsky the moment he walked in, of course.

We buried the dog the next morning. To this day Mom and Pop still think somebody drove a truck up her ass. The truth is more boring.

Lady Fragments by Donna Dixon 2005

Fall 2006

MY PROMISCUOUS BICENTENNIAL

    I had been told Doreen was great. I had also been told she had the
clap. I seduced her with one of my famous homemade soups, plus a fifth of
cheap vodka.
    After, as we lay on the narrow bed, we talked for a delightful hour
about what we discovered was a mutual obsession: screwing. I called it, at
one point, fucking; but she slapped me, frowned that was crude. So I quietly
avoided further use of the unrefinement.
    She then, as the sting faded from my cheek, petulantly pointed out how
her nipples didn’t work. She tweaked both, demonstrating how they refused to
erect. I muttered, I wasn’t really a nipple guy anyway.
    She asked, was I still seeing Faith?
    “No. She got rid of me.”
    Into my mind sprang the berries Faith’s nipples tautened into; and
those limp dugs perhaps did a bit begin to disappoint…
    Doreen was glad to hear it, because when she had slept with Faith’s
husband, Faith had gotten furious. She didn’t want to go through that again.
    Faith was the estranged wife of my best friend Jake. He and I never
discussed Faith; at least, not Faith and me. It was Jake who had warned
about the clap; which he knew for a fact, because, six months before, after
that mad night of screwing Doreen, he had acquired a dose.
    Jake had also claimed Doreen was a nymphomaniac. And when I’d smilingly
confessed myself to be one too, he countered, “Yes, but Doreen is no mere
garden variety.”
    I was about to boast neither was I, when the glint in his eye and the
sneer on his lips reminded me I was then fucking his wife – however
estranged she be – and consequently I should just shut up. I did.
    It was, after all, such careful reads of Jake’s face that kept Faith
and me out of our conversations.
    Then I noticed Doreen was peering into my face, in her bedroom of
deepening shadows, saying, “Jake insists I gave him clap. He’s nuts. He’s
not living with his wife. He’s a handsome guy – he’s screwing around; he did
not get it from me.”
    That was a relief. I didn’t care about the nipples. It was OK not to
have to fuck my best friend’s wife anymore. I could see Doreen now and then;
to see me through. Or maybe just see Doreen. She liked my soup. Was a
promising drinking companion. And we were having this wonderful talk, where
I was actually picking up a few pointers on screwing.
    For instance, men over fifty, when they try to seduce you, first take
off their shoes; then suggest you do the same. She knew, because she had
once allowed one to pick her up. She thought the shoe business was silly;
but when in Rome…
    She had been concerned the old guy would have a similar problem, in a
different part of his anatomy, that she had with her nipples. But that
turned out to be not true; especially once she practiced on him her oral
expertise.
    He, however, did fall short on endurance.
    But she in no way regretted the experience. It had been educational.
She didn’t surrender her phone number, and she never again visited that bar.
No great loss, as she had only been inside twice – counting the night
previous to the experiment, when she had ducked in to reconnoiter the
oldsters hunched over their cocktails.
    They removed their shoes first, they could get hard, but they didn’t
last long and shot feebly. You couldn’t talk to them – they were bloated
with baggage, oozing drivel about failed marriages, children they couldn’t
see but had to pay for; expensive girlfriends who left; cheap girlfriends;
dead girlfriends over whom they still blubbered…
    I myself might have stuck with Doreen into my own fifties – another
three decades. But the very next day, following a successful experiment with
after-lunch sex – the entire joyride me suppressing a fart from my own beef
stew – the unforgivable occurred.
    I excel at forgiving. I like to – easier than getting mad. And getting
mad terminates conversation. I love to talk. Or more accurately – listen,
interposing the occasional word to keep the person coming forth.
I easily forgave Doreen when, the next week, pus leaked from my pizzle.
Well, not that easily. Especially after the disaster following our
post-lunch session.
    It was educational, taking the bus down to Public Health. Sitting in
the waiting room with the boys; one player flouncing in under a Panama with
a pheasant feather, remarking jauntily from below aviator shades, “Here we
are again!”
    And I so much admired, when I finally got to him, the doctor’s
technique. How, once I’d obeyed the order to drop pants, he bent over my
penis, mumbling, “Let’s have a look here,” and had reamed – using a steel
pin hid in his left fist – my urethra quicker than I could say shit!
slamming my own fist, in pinpoint-pizzle agony, down on his desk.
    I forgave her that. I should have known. It didn’t matter. Nine days of
erythromycin and it was gone. Herby good as new. Unlike the herpes. Which
failed significantly to erupt for another year; and hey – maybe it wasn’t
Doreen. Although she was the only one who announced the fact, and there were
only two others that year.
    I admired her technique. She disclosed, at the close of our sex talk,
when the room was totally dark and sleep was overtaking our pleasantly
exhausted bodies… mumbling into my face, “You might get herpes. It’s
nothing. Just sometimes little blisters.”
    Oh, I forgave her the herpes. I was playing with fire. It was a known
risk. An affliction making the rounds of the magazines. And after all, the
Soviets, at the time, had the whole town securely targeted with a massive
overdose of thermo-nukes; not to mention the sinister coincidence that our
President bore the same last name as the tycoon, also from Michigan, who
first churned out all the cars. How was I to know for sure I’d live long
enough to contract whatever disease?
    Besides, I more importantly that afternoon should have realized that
the unforgivable lurked….
    Doreen lived in a swank apartment with Faith’s sister Hope and Hope’s
husband – a pleasant enough, intelligent older man of twenty-six (Hope was
twenty), who was a well-payed supervisor at the phone company. Hope and Bob
were that week on vacation in London. So, after lunch, Doreen and I used her
apartment-mates’ kingsize.
    I figured Doreen guided us into the larger bedroom in order to explore
wider maneuvers on the bigger bed. And we did. I also guessed it heartened
Doreen to be screwing Faith’s ex-boytoy on Faith’s younger sister’s marriage
bed. It probably did. I myself caught a few sparks of vengeance joy.
    This was all forgivable. All understandable. All human. But none of it
touched on the real reason Doreen chose the kingsize.
    She threw off the sweaty sheets we had just crawled under – sex organs
(except her nipples) beginning a gradual and comforting return to normal
tension and size. She then wiggled nude down to the foot; reached out over
the oak frame; plugged in – two feet beyond that frame – the big screen TV,
with already the volume turned full up. Into the room a game show exploded.
    She retrieved from under the bed the remote. Adjusted the color to
perfection. Burrowed back up under the sheets. Slouched on extra pillows,
angling head so as to glue eyes to tube.
    Television – the deadliest conversation killer known to man. She had
shepherded me into the master bedroom to experience the paradise of post
coital television.
    Neither of us smoked. Though I would have much preferred she lit up –
tobacco stimulates talk. And no herpes, no clap, no venereal warts, no
fullblown crab infestation compares in horror to the soul rot howling
suddenly from the bottom of the bed.
    I excused myself. Slipped into my clothes. Muttered something about
going down to the corner for a pack of smokes.
    She smiled at a new deepfreeze touted on the big screen. Nodded vaguely
– connection between thought and voice cut.
    I left her the remainder of the stew. I was sleazy. I was crude. My
intestinal gas reeks. I am not handsome. But limits – like everybody insists
they have – I do have.
    To the very writing of this account I have not found it in my heart to
forgive that plug. Because it was the plug, it was the switch, it was that
sucking-in electronic box I should have spied the moment we entered the
room. It was not Doreen. Because Doreen was not.
    I know she never really was. Because I myself barely – by the skin of
my teeth – am. Please – talk. Go ahead – let yourself go; to be guided ever
so slightly by my occasional tweak. Forgive me if I, to get comfortable,
remove first my shoes.