short fiction by Ken Dushek
Art Imitating Life Imitating Art Imitating ken…
Let me cut to what I know so far. If you’re reading this first, then shit’s out of order, and you should probably go forward one to the first post introducing myself, because I actually did write this first, but it’s not ‘the first’–know what I mean?
Alright. You seem kind of dumb. So, I’m gonna start off with smaller sentences. Maybe use some slang and street to gradually return your reading back to the normal English you’ll need to succeed in the white collar world of not being poor. Right, okay, so that’s the intro. We’ll circle back to that…
Intro: Read if you’re dumb or skip to Nobody Cares
Some love stories begin at the beginning, when two lovebirds meet, and look into each other’s eyes, and they live miserably ever after. In my version, unfortunately, we’re going to start with the beginning of the divorce. I mean. The fact that she hasn’t poisoned or killed me thus far is a testament to her patience, and possibly also her patients too; she is a doctor. But me. I’m like an idiot savant but not quite as stupid as I’d lead you to believe based on appearances alone when combined with the things I say and the mismatching poetic license of autistic uncontrolled movements misguiding the intention of my other actions and sounds. It’s a wonderful ride if you happen to have been hit in the head with hard objects since birth. I don’t recommend it, but who am I to tell you how to live my life? What am I fucken idiot? Alright, so that should explain me and her relationship in a nutshell. If I’m not saying ridiculous things that don’t make sense, then she’ll have too much time to accuse me of things I think of but never act upon. Though she doesn’t know that, but I mean logically she is technically right, but only because she pushes me into situations that she can then be jealous about. It’s a vicious cycle, and I have a giant Jewish nose, so I just appreciate all the different. alright you see now.. this is going to be a wild divorce, and let me tell you something. Niether of us is happy with the lack of sex lately. Which is why we agreed to continue having sex, and kinkly stuff that only we like that really makes it more like love than sex, anyway, so until we finalize the divorce, that’s the least I can do for her. And also, couple years ago, I broke my left hand in a fight with some weird PTSD army hammered my fist into the Jewish hammer. Story for another day. Let’s not digress more than we have to. She broke the rules. Now, I’m going to fuck a dead Southern corpse somewhere north of texas to teach her not to cheat.
Let me explain…
Nobody Cares
“I don’t care!” I yell harshly at my wife standing disarmed and defeated only a few feet away.
“He’s not even attractive. You’re being…” she interrupts me again. And again, I return volley with a repetition of my insistence of indifference. Her back stroke is no match for my detached tennis elbow–another injury that never quite healed, and one we might circle back to another day.
“How dare you interrupt me with useless words again. It doesn’t matter what you say.”
“I understand you’re mad.”
“Oh I know you understand. All you’re friends and coworkers and clients and people I’ve never even met before understand how angry I am, since you keep telling them.”
“Sorry.”
Wise Wifely Gossip
“It’s no wonder they don’t like me. All of a sudden, all of them don’t give a fuck if they never hear from me again. Someone I’ve never been anything but nice to tells me I’m toxic. What the fuck did I ever do to her?”
“Well, maybe you call her too much. She said she told you to get a job.”
“What? She never said that.”
“She told me you guys had a long talk about how you have too much time on your hands.”
“That never happened.”
“Oh, so what did you guys talk about.”
“Honestly, we talked about starting a family, and having three sets of triplets three years in a row, so she can puff out twice as fat as my mom did after good old dad sent her on a three-year child birthing marathon, starting with the most evil bitch to ever walk this planet, then my middle sister, then me.”
Start A Family?
“What the fuck did I just hear? Family?”
“No, you fucken idiot. She called me toxic. I grabbed the dog and left as soon as she stopped playing ‘everybody chase me’ all over this bitch’s backyard.”
“Oh…” she finally admits.
“Oh, fucken moron,” I explain in greater detail, “you think I’m some fucken whore that’s gonna run around catching aids from some young dumbass I told you all I wanted was her delicious homemade Russian Molipops. That’s good fucken candy. I stuck to the plan. Nowhere along this ride did I ever even touch her or make any physical contact other than a high five or two.”
“Oh, so now you can’t touch her?”
“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“What do you mean you can’t even touch her? You want to touch her?”
“What in the name of sweet merciful innocent little holy baby Jesus are you yammering on about? I don’t want to touch Bayla or Banjella or the dog, or myself, or you. Especially not you. You cheated.”
“I did not. I’ll take a lie detector to prove it.”
“Every word you speak just adds to the list of shit I’m not going to be believing.”
“But it’s true.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s true. You lied. Everything you’re saying right now might be true. But you deceived me in the process. Deleting texts. Sneaking around town with these deviants to help them score or teach them high school health class first hand, or whatever the fuck explains that behavior. I stuck to the plan. I was nice. I asked nicely. Not too insistent. Shit got too weird. It became clear getting that delicious candy was going to have to be from somewhere else. That’s it. She’s not coming back. She thinks I care.”
“I Don’t Need A Fucken Job, Get Back to Work!”
– low believability rating. Nobody will take credit for saying this if it was said, which we all know it definitely was not said.
“What about that talk about getting a job? And what do you mean thinks I care?”
“I never talked about a job. If she mentioned it, how the fuck would I know? We’re married, and I listen to a word you say?”
“But she thinks you care?” she swings right back with all her forward momentum.
“Honey!” I plead to my wife, “you think I care, right?”
“Of course, I’m your wife.”
“Exactly!” I win, and then keep things moving with…. “Now, you know what I’m going to do next?”
Not For Long Buddy
“WHAT?” she yells in defeat at me with a timid back chop that slices just under where my ribs would have been if she ever fed me. Another small victory for the victim. Winning!
Desensitized from years of undercooked sauté-style fried chicken that never quite cooks in the middle because she just flops the whole breast down, figuring if there’s no bone then there’s no work. That just about sums up our love life. She don’t get my delicious bone on the reg, she starts suspecting some stupid shit. “You’re like a snowball of stupidity…” I pick up my trail of thoughts into vocal scatterings, sufficient to confuse and maintain advantage love before the match ends, “constantly creating these ridiculous scenarios of irrational things I think might happen, meanwhile, I’m secretly making sure they don’t happen bamn, so me and you can finally enjoy some peace together, and what do you do? You go spending my fucken money to compromise my contracts with my clients by authorizing spyware on the devices I’m using for work. You fucked me!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Then you fucken cheat on me?”
“I did not.”
“Oh shut up. It doesn’t matter if you had sex or not. Every action you made after you left this house was cheating. You calling someone other than me when you landed safely was cheating. You telling me you’re not coming home after buying lingerie on a business trip in a men’s suit store is not only confusing and completely unbelievable. I already know you lied to me. So that’s it.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Fuck your mother! That’s what I’m going to do!” I slip out before my teeth can bite down so hard on my tongue that the massive hemorrhaging of blood out of my face will decrease the likelihood of her punting my nuts into the empty space between my ears.”
“My mother? You’re fucken mother?”
“What? My mother’s still alive,” I demand as collateral for the shitshow my mouth is about to perform,
…”I didn’t mean…”
“No! You know what I’m gonna do? What?”
“I’m gonna cheat on you with your mother’s cadaver in Texas.”
“My mother wasn’t buried in Texas you fucken moron. I want a divorce!”
“Fine, right after I fuck your mother in Kentucky. Or whatever. I don’t care who. Anybody’s dead mom in Kentucky will do. I don’t give a fuck. Bunch of fucken hillbillies probably give me a medal for doing their dead dad a favor.”
“So, now it’s not even my mom anymore?”
“Yeah, I guess. I mean if I can find her in Texas or Nebraska or whatever the fuck you keep hiding her delicious end trails from me.”
“You son of a bitch!”
“Yeah, yeah, oh shit! I better write this down.”
“Now, that’s a good idea.”
“Maybe start a new website. Instead of rxpublish.com, we’ll be publishrx.com, because the writing is the prescription.”
“What do you think?”
“I’ll come up with a title for the website, just see if you can get publishrx.com?”
“Yeah, funny shit.”
“Wait a second… you’re friends gave you mace to spray at me! You fucken bitch!”
“They didn’t give me mace, I told you.”
“Okay, pepper spray whatever…” I acquiesce defeat for lack of sufficient evidence to back up my claim her friends armed before returning to me.
“Yeah, they gave me pepper spray…” she admits–let’s take a sidebar immediately my new friends and most likely anti-my-wife turncoats. She just admitted another lie. This whole time she swore and made up this whole story about how she bought it because she was sleeping in the woods and this grizzly dude kept circling her car and peeing on her tires. She said he spoke Southern, but she still couldn’t make out firm sentences based on the fragments dripping down his droopy lower lip, somehow also doubling as the anchor for the one top center tooth that mother nature could not have purposely placed dead center without another tooth next to it; unless he once had three front teeth (second sidebar: did I just reveal a plausible birth defect the Kentuckians have been hiding from us because of all their incestuous inbreeding with sheep and squirrels for the young’ins.
“Holy shit! Did you just fucken admit…” I don’t even bother finishing. She knows what she did. She knows I’ll figure out the backstory of all the lies connected to her first sacrificial offering of a slight drop of truth clouded and drowning in the last thirteen months of post-marital sin.