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Member
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Oklahoma
Gender: Male
Posts: 18
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The Trespassers -- 1,250 words
welcome thoughts and crits on this "quickie" piece. thanks.
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They were into violations, public and private and running on a diet of 3 parts adrenaline and 2 parts cheap sparkling wine poured copiously into their morning orange juice tumblers.
Felix was on another of his increasingly frequent “business trips” and Isabelle was “attending a conference” in Orlando on website marketing.
And now they were prowling about under the dark dripping limbs of black oaks and white pines on a cool, early April morning in rural Wisconsin. They had started off down a muddy dirt lane in ill-fitting rubber galoshes and came to a rusty barbed wire fence stretched between smooth, femur like wooden fence posts. A hand painted sign read: “Trespassers will be punished”
Felix held the wire apart and Isabelle squeezed through. He snagged his waterproof khaki jacket, the one his wife had given him on his 42nd birthday, on the wire as he came through and ripped 2-inch gash in it.
“Oh hell,” he said only half annoyed and still pleasantly buzzed from the morning libations.
“I feel, so…” Isabelle began to say.
“Bad?” he said with a smile.
“Naughty, is a better word,” she replied. “And I like it.”
He felt his heart quicken, his throat tighten, and a warm, engorging surge of blood.
He took her hand, their fingers interlaced, as they crossed the fallow field.
“Over there,” she said, pointing to a thicket strewn with fallen braches, pine needles and decaying leaves. “Let’s look over there.”
Under a big, white pine she came from behind him suddenly and he felt her cold, damp hand slither expertly under his jacket and down his trousers to clutch him. He gasped at the coldness and the audacity of the unexpected invasion. She giggled.
“Here,” she breathed warmly into his ear.
“Here?” he asked, her cold hand stiffening him instantly.
“It’s warm,” she said. “It feels good.”
He lay on his back, on the springy ground, the fecund smell of earth and pine needles and rot filling his nostrils, a smell of the potential of ill-begotten life. Isabelle was astride him, her eyes closed, her thin lips slightly parted, she grunted, the green hood of her rain slicker framing her face against the grey sky above. She worked herself with one hand and with the other she seized at his chest proprietously. He looked away and there next to a log less than five feet away was a morel, big, brown, penis shaped with a spongy head. He made a mental note of its location.
Then the rain came lightly, pattering on her slicker, a drop of water suspended on the tip of her nose. She groaned loudly, brazenly.
It was the only mushroom they found that morning. They took it back to the bed and breakfast and the owner cooked it for them along with a tough cut of sirloin and a bottle of cheap Shiraz. They ate off paper picnic plates and drank their wine from plastic cups.
“Oh my God,” she said, taking a bite of the morel. “This tastes so…so fucking good.”
He winced visibly at her use of the f-word. He felt a woman in her 40s, a professional woman, should have matured beyond such adolescent vulgarities.
“What? It feels good to say “fucking” she said. “Why don’t you say it with me.”
“No, I think I’ll pass.”
“What’s the matter with you? Mr. Larry Literary. Mr. Effete.”
He took a bite of the morel, nutty, rich, the taste of the earth as it smelled to him under the tree that morning. The smell of himself and of regret. If he could only now abort that unfortunate emission. He heaved a little, nearly wretching.
She watched him closely with her glassy, doe-like black eyes and a sly smile.
He choked down the bit of morel and quickly took a large swallow of the tart Shiraz.
“I’ll eat the rest of that,” she said, poking her fork into his soggy morel.
Later, they lay in bed, her legs entwined with his. Her legs felt like fine, 200-grit sandpaper because she hadn’t shaved during her evening bath. She was reading Tropic of Cancer and he tried his best to finish the first chapter of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.
He thought of his wife and his 6 six-year-old daughter Emma and his 8-year-old son Ben. He was missing Ben’s soccer game to be here. He hadn’t been to one since last fall.
Isabelle put her book down and slid her reading glasses off her straight, patrician nose. He sensed something heavy coming and tried to hamper its arrival.
“How’s that book?” he asked.
“It’s like taking a bath in filth,” she said. “A bath of muck and sweat and hunger and vulgarity and life.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I highly recommend it,” she said. “Do you like the word cunt?”
He laughed uncomfortably. “It’s rather, well, blunt.”
She chuckled. “Blunt and cunt. You’re a poet.”
He smiled without enthusiasm.
“I’m your cunt,” she offered. “I like being your cunt.”
Just hours ago, this might have aroused him. Now it put him off.
“You know, you can live how you want without consequences,” she said, tracing her finger across his lips. “Why shouldn’t you be able to do that?”
“Do you really think so?” he replied.
“I believe you can,” she said.
There was silence between them for a long moment. She moved her hand onto his and clutched it.
“I also believe…I love you.”
Felix felt like that deer buck must have felt, the first one he ever shot with his dad when he was 10 and the recoil of the bolt action .308 Winchester bruised his shoulder. His buck fever was bad and his bullet struck the poor animal in the gut. The wounded animal bounded forward in agony and lurched into the brush, leaving a bloody trail behind it.
They found it after an hour of following the blood trail. The wounded creature lay on the ground in a bed of rotting leaves, its glassy black eye staring up, indolent from exhaustion. Felix could see the thin line of reddish white foam around its mouth and hear the soft, desperate, wheezy breathing of it and his dad had made him finish it off with a shot to the head.
“Never let a thing suffer,” his dad said. “That was a terrible shot you made. You must learn from it, son.”
Outside it rained and he listened to it thrumming on the roof.
“I’m not just going to let you go,” Isabelle said. “You know that don’t you?”
Felix let his silence speak for itself.
She withdrew her hand, put her reading glasses back on and with a self-satisfied smile began to read again.
Felix pretended to read, too. But he was thinking about the smooth, cool feel of that Winchester in his hands and the “snick” sound the bolt made when he pulled it back and then slammed it forward to chamber a round. He thought of his dad who had been dead two decades and what he said.
He listened to the rain on the roof.
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