Writer's Block: The Losers

So the Losers is the beginning of a loose concept for a novel. I don't want to tell much more, other than it'll involve four friends who deal with a supernatural menace. I don't know what this character's name is yet. Art Donovan? But I've used that name before.

...

He had named her Silica.

Her hand emerged from the fresh earth as though reaching toward the moon. Light shone on the stretched fingers, their nails crimson with chipped paint, blood-like in the faint darkness. The strange tone of her skin, the surface peeling from heavy use, was obvious even at a distance. He heard the breath of the woman next to him intake sharply, felt her recede back into the house, her interpretation clear. What else would she think? He tried to explain but all that came out was a babble of information, none of it intelligible. I had to do something with her, there was no room, you don’t understand, I’m going through a rough period in my life. He made a grab for her arm, more frantically than he intended, and his fingers closed roughly on her skin. The shriek his touch elicited was enough to wake every house in the neighborhood. Just hold on a minute… he began when her fist smashed into his face. Wet, hot blood sputtered from his nose, leaking down his chin and into his mouth. He’d always been a bleeder, ever since that first beating in middle school. In a way, this entire train wreck of a situation could be traced back to those bygone days, when the boys in gym class taped his clothes to the ceiling of the locker room. The past always came bubbling up like vomit in his brain at the worst of times.

He chased her through his narrow house, stumbling into a collection of empty glass wine bottles, two-dollar Aldi’s vintage, cursing as the glass shattered beneath his feet. As she ran, she’d knocked the spaghetti dinner he’d prepared off the stove, and he paused to stare at the tangled mess of noodles lying on the linoleum like the entrails of a disemboweled beast. She was stuck at the door, hysterically trying to figure out his byzantine assortment of locks, when he loomed up before her like the monstrous creature she imagined him to be. Again the babble of words: She’s not real, she’s just a toy, a tool, really, something I bought for six hundred dollars if you can believe it, come on, let me show you. His date, however, was not convinced. Out of her purse came a can of mace, and like a jabroni, he stood there, hands at his sides as she sprayed the acid right into his eyeballs. Now his wails filled the house, a keening for his vanished sight, a death song for the one night stand that rose in pitch until the windows trembled and the woman covered her ears. Crashing through the house, he put his arm into his fifty-two inch flatscreen and bounced his forehead off the edge of the narrow doorway to the bathroom. Fumbling with sink, he splashed water into his inflamed eye sockets in a futile attempt to wash away the pain along with the incredible misfortune of the night. He could hear her smashing his window, heard the distant sound of a police siren. Part of his brain had detached and floated above isometrically, and that part contemplated the stupidity of his decision to bury the sex doll in his backyard like an amateur serial killer. Why did he do these things? Where did this self-sabotaging impulse manifest from? What dark, evil partition of his mind was responsible? Again he thought of school, of a girl who had been forced by her friends to take him on the flimsiest of dates. The awkward conversation, the humiliation that he had taken part in, just to have an excuse to talk to her, this tanned, long-legged pixie. They were all faeries, mythical creatures, manic dreams that would somehow put together the fragile pieces of his ego, tape the egg back together like Humpty-Dumpty sitting on the wall. Know-it-all Nick would say that this desire for female fixing was the root of all of his problems. Trouble was, he never listened to anybody.

The police had the decency not to shoot him on sight. They cuffed him, listened to what he said, and together they moved to the backyard. A flashlight shone on the hand, and he had to stifle a manic laugh. This would be published somewhere, posted on the Internet, immortalized not just in local memory, but for all of perpetuity, the absolute rock bottom nadir of a bottom-dwelling subcreature. Catfish. Mole-rat. Tube worm.

“Why did you paint the fingernails?” asked the cop. He had a mustache like a pornographic filmmaker, hair all over his arms and hands.

He started to speak and then closed his mouth, gaping for air. What could he tell them? That he painted Silica’s fingernails because she wanted him to? Because it made her look pretty?

“He did it to enhance the illusion,” replied the other cop. She was a woman, hair pulled tight in a bun, an unreadable expression on the edges of her thin mouth. He always looked to women for sympathy, and so he favored her with what he thought was a charming smile, baring his teeth like a fox huddled in a cage. Her hand went reflexively to her stun gun.

“Well we gotta dig her out,” said the mustache cop. “You got a shovel around here?”

“Why?” was all he managed.

“Gotta make sure it’s a sex doll and not a person.”

“It’s obviously not a… flesh and blood… being,” he stammered, feeling incriminated. The woman cop shined a flashlight in his eyes, hand still on the stun gun. The formerly unreadable expression on the corners of her mouth was very readable now.

“Dig it up,” she said, and so they did.

…

The girl’s name was Fiona, and he’d met her at the local coffee shop. She was twenty-three, had a kid that she didn’t see much, and had just gotten out of state prison for a drug offense. She never quite looked him in the eyes but often stared at a point just behind his right ear before looking down at her cell phone, thumbs twitching, messaging people that, for all he knew, did not exist. Their relationship had started innocent enough, if you could say that anything he did had a pure purpose. He was looking to score and she hailed from the socio-economic class that would have sex with him, when intoxicated or bribed with drugs. The date tonight was to be their last rendezvous, for she’d basically turned him into her pot dealer, and the benefits of that role were increasingly dubious. Some mad part of him had decided to make this last dance less of a “Netflix and chill” situation and more of an actual romantic tryst. He had lighted scented candles, cooked pasta, and had cleaned up a bit, or at least pushed much of the mess out of sight. There was nowhere, however, to put Silica. His closets were full of comic books and piles of clothes, and his spare bedroom was ghastly memorial to a horrible relationship, and he couldn’t bear the thought of keeping her in there. The backyard, then, became the not-so-logical choice, and the idea of literally burying all of his eccentricities, embodied by Silica, took in his brain. There was a perfectly good shed he could have stored her in, but yet again, he couldn’t put her there, among the rusty yard implements, a simple tool. She was more than that, for he had given her value, and if he was going to put her a way, then it had to be for good. A friend deserved a proper burial. And she was more than a friend.

Halfway through digging the hole, however, he’d had second thoughts. It was a little shallow, and he’d made the hole five feet deep rather than five feet long. After he’d hauled her eighty-five pound bulk into the grave, he realized that her hand wouldn’t be interred. Oh well. He’d had a couple of beers by then, and the somberness with which he had begun his task had dissipated, replaced with a weariness that emanated deep within his being. He was never refreshed, always tired, always on some sleep cycle that fucked up his circadian rhythms beyond repair. Blue light lighted his eyeballs twenty-four seven. Having ditched his high speed internet after an argument with a representative over price gouging, he had transitioned to DVDs ordered over the phone. A boxed set of Welcome Back, Kotter played on loop. The other standby was the Tom Green abomination Freddy Got Fingered.

If there was one thing he was something of an expert on, it was Freddy Got Fingered. Unlike much of the film’s cult fanbase, he did not derive ironic enjoyment out of the universally panned movie. He appreciated the film’s surrealism, its utter lack of a plot, its bizarre and expansive conception of humor. It was an anti-comedy, a nightmarish exploration of the human condition, replete with the grotesqueness and stupidity of actual life. Plus, anytime he played the movie while in the presence of a female, it seemed to initiate sex, perhaps because its sheer unwatchability forced his guest to do anything, including fucking him, if that meant they did not have to view Freddy Got Fingered.