Deposition from the
Derringer v. Vuoto
Custody Hearing:
Lewis Webster, Attorney for the Plaintiff, Richard Derringer: Whom would you like to live with?
Ginny Vuoto: My father. I think he'd be a lot less strict.
Lewis Webster: Do you ever think your mother doesn't love you?
Ginny Vuoto: Sure. I mean, I have to. Because of everything. It's like, what would have happened if my mother had used a Smart Twat before she got pregnant? I mean, from everything she's ever said to me or written about my dad, I'm pretty sure that she wouldn't have had that affair with him if she'd "only known better." And if she hadn't, like, you know, done it, then I wouldn't have been born. So, like, maybe she'd be happier, more fulfilled, but I'd still be an egg and that's why I want to go and live with my dad.
It wasn't intentional. Seretta hadn't meant to spy.
She had gone into Ginny's room to open the windows and air out the house. She scooped up a bundle of clothes for the wash and, in the laundry room, sorted Ginny's things by color. That was when she found the packet of birth control pills in Ginny's pocket.
Seretta's first impulse was to flush the pills down the toilet, but something made her stop. Her hands trembled as she slipped the package back into the jeans jacket. She brought all of Ginny's clothes back into her room and left them in a pile.
She picked up the phone and dialed Richard's number from memory.
"Hello," she said.
"Hello," he answered coldly, still furious because of the custody hearing. He had the right. Having her attorney expose Richard's arrest for an old charge regarding his unsuccessful solicitation of a prostitute was a low blow. But a mother fought for her child, and, lucky for her, the judge had been a prudish and conservative appointee.
"Is Ginny there?"
An uncomfortable pause followed. "I haven't heard from her in a coupla days," he said. "Anything wrong?"
"No," she said. "Nothing." She hung up the phone.
She had broken up his marriage, and he hated her. His ex-wife hated her. Ginny hated her. Sometimes it was a struggle for her not to hate herself.
She decided to cancel her date, stay home, and watch TV.
From above her she heard a whirring sound as a camera clicked on automatically. Seretta threw a book at the lens and managed to dislodge the whole thing. "Show's over," Seretta said. She sat on the process couch, her head in her hands, self-conscious despite the broken camera. God, Seretta thought, why won't Ginny let me help? Why is she so stubborn?
Labor Day – September 3 – Back To Work
Big date was tonight. I tried cutting out my chip with a blade, but it was deeper than I thought and the blood was so gross I had to stop.
The boy's name was Eric Something. I met him in a chat room. He had promised me dinner, but before we got there we stopped to park in an empty furniture store lot. We went to the back of his van, on top of pillows on the floor where the seats should have been.
I took my pants all the way off, but he left his scrunched down around his ankles, like there wasn't enough time to remove his shoes. I knew he didn't love me, which was fine. I didn't even know him and didn't much like him.
What I wanted to do had no relation to love.
My Smart Twat allowed me to kiss him and get in a few gropes before sounding its electronic alarm. I managed to temporarily disable it by cutting off the circulation with my arm, but, as things progressed, the device sensed that a threat still loomed and it mounted a full-scale attack. First, it released chemical scavengers in my bloodstream and made me breathe out some nitrous compound that effectively constricted the blood supply to the arteries feeding Eric's penis. His erection wilted; he pushed away from me.
"Fuck," I said, "Sorry."
I could have given him a better explanation. Mom has told me often enough, in graphic detail and with diagrams and anatomically correct language, exactly how the chip operated; she's made me take sex education classes from the age of two.
Eric looked embarrassed, maybe angry.
"It's not your fault," I said to make him feel better. Male ego. You know. I tried to give him a blowjob so he wouldn't be angry. He had hair there, but it didn't seem all that gross compared to everything else. It got me hot to know I could get him so excited, to feel I had such power over him.
Too bad the Smart Twat was smarter and more persistent than I anticipated. It attacked my immune system. My nose ran, my eyes teared, my throat closed, and I had to pull my mouth away from his penis to catch my breath. I broke out into hives and started to swell like a basted turkey.
"Fuck!" I said. "I'm really sorry."
Eric jerked upright and grabbed at his pants.
"No, wait!" I said. "I'm okay. We can still do it!" I could not stop crying or stop the hacking cough and nonstop snot drip.
"Later," he said. He scooted over to unlock the door and push me out.
I stuffed my bra and underpants in my pocket. It was a fifteenminute walk home.
Mom was still awake, reciting a speech for some conference. She had either not seen the monitors or was in denial. I sneezed and coughed and let my underwear fall to the floor. It felt good not to even try to hide what had happened.
Mom stared, her eyes and mouth open wide, as if she'd just eaten a bowling ball and was having second thoughts.
I had to laugh. It was almost better this way than if I had actually gone through with it and gone all the way.
And she'd never even know I was still a virgin.
Six Gun Loner of the High Butte #6
Je
rey Ford
Under a red sun, vultures circling like wagons against the Comanche, dry wind rising from the south laced with a hint of starvation and thirst, like the aroma of Miss Pearl's perfume in a cramped room over the Four Fingers Saloon on a night in August after a blazing gun battle when bullets flew, passersby ducked behind rain barrels, horses pranced sideways, deputies slammed shots of rot gut at the bar, whores giggled, propositioned by Death just passing through, and the school marm clutched her parcel of gingham meant to be sewn into a dress for her Eastern beau who would not arrive by stage that night or any other in this life, Six Gun Loner, AKA Gristled Thunder, better known as Scrap Morrow, who had ushered more arrogant curs to boot hill than a mule has fleas, man of the lightning hand, the eagle eye, the quick wit, and prodigious tobacco spit, scourge of desperadoes, friend to children and brother of the giant red man known as Muskingtoluckok, Indian prince of the lost tribe of Israel with the sign of the coyote carved in his left cheek, the feather of a Thunderbird dangling from one long knotted hank of hair, and a hatchet that once cleaved the skull of the Skunk Ape of Briar Canyon, sat on his trusty steed, Old Parsimony, surveying, from the high butte, the desert where he would soon ride, like a bat out of hell back to Sorrow Gulch for a last kiss from Miss Pearl, a last piss from a bottle of rye, before meeting Doc Holiday's tubercular ghost in a gun duel in the dark that would decide the fate of the West and be remembered forever as the only shootout he ever lost, the one that transformed him from Six Gun Loner into Kid Skeleton, fleshless, fiery, lacking all social graces, with a cackle that could start a stampede, insatiable seeker of gold and murderer of murderers throughout the territory then and now and forever, in perpetuity, until the doggies retire and the stars fall on Alabama.
Encounter of Another Kind
David Langford
At the time it seemed a good night for our work. A thin watery fuzz, half mist and half rain, was blurring the moon and had made haloes round the lights of the main road. This dark lane was still puddled from afternoon showers, so that when our van tilted and bumped along it the headlight reflections rose in silent luminous bubbles through the trees. Even I took a long moment to identify them. The right frame of mind is so important.
This was a high-activity area of Wiltshire, where sightings came regularly with the seasons. It was crop circle country, too, but I had always been uneasy about that work: it's too showy and physical, and too many fanciful hoaxers had spoiled the impact of our own real, authorized creations. But the fertile location was just happenstance. The man Glass lived close at hand and was known to take this lane from Pewsey village to his house. Tonight he had been delivering one of his lying, offensive lectures, and the driving time from London . . .
I checked my watch. Perhaps Glass's wife would be doing the same, and laying out coffee-cups. Would she believe his incredible, incoherent story a few hours hence? We were ready by the roadside, in a field muddy and trampled enough that our own traces could make no difference.
The stage was set in the bubble-tent. Mackay had long finished stringing his cables and was hunched over his little panel of lights, rapt like a boy playing trains. Sometimes I wondered about Mackay. It was easy to imagine him working with anyone, even the IRA, grinning all over that fat face and soldering his fussy circuits for sheer love of gadgetry. He never seemed to absorb the idea that we were evangelists laboring in the service of a great truth.
