Friday 5: October 23, 2009

It's my goal (and don't quote me on this) to write a 500 word short using five random words. For today's, I used four random words plus the word LOUD for the 5x5 fall theme. I don't know if I like this, but I'm posting it anyway.¹ Enjoy (?).

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Words: LOUD, GENERAL, SHEER, REQUEST, DISCUSSION

She caught him around the collar of the shirt and dragged him to the old bed, the springs squeaking with rust and her $10 sex-shop outfit complaining like plastic in a paper-shredder. Suddenly his pants were gone and he shielded his face as she plunged her fingers into to his hair, finding handles in his head and then it was happening – or was it, what was happening? – all he could hear was a deafening wail like a cat with its tail stuck in a door.

“Oh God, what is that noise?”

She punched him in the neck. “No talking!” Her voice was raspy now as if she had been screaming. He coughed and adjusted his glasses. The noise came back and he located the source – her big, red, o-shaped mouth. She was wheezing and screaming like a squeaky toy in the jaws of a lazy Saint Bernard.

They called her the General. General was such a general word in and of itself. As he followed her down the groaning, moaning wood platform towards her room at the end of the hall, his first thought was a general store. He pictured her room ribbed with shelves stock full of useful pantry items: Paper towels, baking powder, olive oil, ziplock bags. Dusty and oily things that would catch in the sheer drapery of the General’s loose-fitting shawl like spit in pantyhose.

There had been a queue of girls waiting in the hall, lined up the stairs like newel posts strung together with hair and scarves and long, black cigarette holders. Standing next to each other like that, watching him with those eyes, they had reminded him of kids with their wrists tied together on a field trip to the zoo. Or at least, that’s what they used to do – tie the kids together at the wrist or the belt and then pull them between the zebras and the elephants like a train on a string. These days, of course, kids got handles to hold, though the kids that wouldn’t be quiet and grab on got to stay home and scream.

The General said nothing as she opened the door. Inside was a bed, and little else – no shelves of baker’s sugar or nets full of bawling children.

“Just one thing,” she said finally, turning about and dropping her big, sexy poncho down to her booted, buckled ankles. Her vinyl creaked and whined, shinier and cheaper than leather and five times as loud. “No talking. No discussion. You’re not rich – we both know it, so handle that much now, can’t you, Stud?”

He nodded. “Sure, that’s—“

She jabbed a finger at him and he flinched like he’d been punched in the solar plexus.

“I said, no talking.”

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^{1 For posterity.}