The Janitor

Today’s post is a writing challenge. This is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, here’s a fun twist; no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words are:

detour ~ cygnet ~ Poké Bowl ~ cascading ~ golf club

They were submitted by: https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/ 

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The cygnet swam behind its mother across the pond that bordered the old golf club. The two of them were in their own little world while Sadie ate her Poké bowl from the little Asian fusion place a couple blocks down the street from work and a half block shortcut from the pond. She often found herself drawn to this place like it was a santuary from the business of the city behind her and the mindlessness of her job. The golf club had long closed down so there weren't any rich assholes bloviating about stocks or politics to ruin the mood as they played around hole 8, the closest to the pond. And it was far enough from the street that traffic was muffled and people were scarce. It was just her, the quiet, and the birds.

Something was different about today though, and she couldn't quite put her finger on it. The undercurrent was different. She felt...

She felt like she was being watched.

And not by the swans.

Sure enough she looked around and saw some "gentlemen" standing on the unkempt green looking her way. They looked completely out of place in their track suits and black tinted sunglasses, but that didn't mean they were definitely here to mess with her. Maybe they just needed to get out of her line of sight so they could take a leak. Whatever. It must be nice to just stand around and relieve yourself wherever.

She wasn't going to give up her spot quite that easy and tried waiting them out. But they stood there. Staring quietly. And then one of them, the larger of the two, pointed his finger towards her and pantomimed shooting her before both of them erupted into laughter.

She tried to stay calm and finish her food, every bite feeling like a lead weight. The safety she normally felt here had been completely obliterated, and now she had to figure out an alternate path back to work, a detour of sorts, since the shortcut took her down a pretty isolated woody path between the old club and the street. She'd never once seen anyone on it unless you count Stevie, the albino squirrel she sometimes left a few peanuts and almonds for if she saw him around. She was on high alert and not taking any chances. One of the men could easily catch up to her there and very likely no one would even hear her scream.

So she walked around the pond to the gates of the park situated on the opposite bank to her lunch spot to put her on the street and in public for her return. She could be a few minutes late. It's not like she had anything too pressing waiting on her.

One block from the parking lot, she realized the two men were behind her. Walking briskly. With intent. She sped up a little thinking she could make it inside before they caught up with her and took off running as she neared the door. She tugged it open and made a leap for the elevator that would take her up to the 3rd floor where she knew people would be waiting. Of all the days for the lobby to be empty. Not even Stanley, the security guard, was in...

Wait.

Where was Stanley?

The elevator doors opened just as the two men reached the front. She ran inside. Finding Stanley took a backseat to running from these two clowns. She pounded the 3 and watched as the doors closed. The men seemed remarkably calm for two dudes who seemed so intent on catching up to her, and then it dawned on her they knew now exactly what floor she would be on or at least what floor she would stop on. She never got a good enough signal in this building to dial out but she could still do her s.o.s. function. The notification would go straight to her mom, and knowing her mom, she would immediately worry and call 911 when she heard Sadie saying "HELP."

The doors opened on her floor just as the message recorded. She half expected a cascading wave of blood a la Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining given the way the day had already gone, but nothing looked amiss. She shoved the phone back in her pocket, and took a chance and left the elevator hoping her coworkers would know what to do next when she noticed how quiet it was. No typing. No one fielding calls. Milton's fucking speaker wasn't even blasting his stupid sports podcasts, and he usually had it one notch above the level of human decency for an office.

She walked down through the hallway. She peered into the first office to the left, no one. The right, no one. Each office, same story. Until the last. There she found them. Jenelle, Filipè, Larry, Madison, Ashlyn, Sid... Even Sid's dad Tony was there. Tony ran the whole building. He was dead. They were all dead or nearly there.

She was frozen. She'd never seen anything...the goriest of movies could never compare to the scene in front of her. She'd never get it clean. As the scream welled up ready to erupt out of her, a rather large hand clamped over her mouth. She hadn't even heard the elevator doors open. They must have taken the stairs.

"Listen, toots, you're going to tell us everything we need to know and you're going to do it quietly or I'm going to put you in pain you've never felt before."

He lowered his hand, and she couldn't help herself. "Worse than kidney stones?"

"What?"

"Worse pain than kidney stones?" she nearly whispered.

"Much worse."

Shit. This is seriously fucked up, she thought. Kidney stones fucking hurt.

They took her into the office next door and sat her in a chair then sat on the desk in front of her gun pointing directly at her face.

"You move, doll, and you die."

She nodded not trusting her voice enough to speak. Her mom better get the message.

They'd pulled the glasses off and were giving her quite the death stare when one finally said, "so what's your job here, sweetheart?" A lot of pet names for men who were threatening to kill her...

"I'm the janitor."

They both shook their heads. "You expect us," one said as he pointed his thumb at himself then the other one, "to believe they let a broad like you scrub the toilets on one floor of a building during business hours? What do you take us for?"

She tilted her head to the side out of confusion. "Well, no... I do the whole building, but my locker and storage closet are here on the 3rd floor. I only really know the people here. Most of the other floors aren't occupied during the day much."

"You got some real nice nails for a lady who mops floors."

"I mean, I do wear gloves. Wouldn't you?"

"You don't smell like cleaner."

"Because before lunch I sweep and vacuum the empty floors and take out trash. I don't use cleaning stuff until after lunch. What's the point?"

"But you're... Tiny. Like a child."

"Ok and? I make $12 an hour. What do you expect me to be? Mr. Universe?"

The big one leaned over and whispered to the not as big one. She couldn't quite make our what was being said but they seemed to come to some kind of agreement.

"What can you tell us about your boss?"

"Sid?"

The smaller one massaged his forehead a little bit. He looked tired.

"No, honey, Tony. You know fat tony? The guy that runs this building?"

"Well how was I supposed to know? Hes never really here. And calling him fat tony is kind of mean. He's just stocky."

"You want we should believe you don't even know who runs this place?"

"I'm just the goddamn janitor."

"You don't know Fat Tony of the Don Bilotti crew? Fat Tony the *second* most powerful don in this state? Fat Tony, your boss, who stole from my boss,The Bull Gravano, the most powerful don in this state. Maybe all the states. You don't know that Fat Tony?"

"Am I on like some new kind of candid camera show? What the fuck are you fat shaming Tony for? I don't know anything about Tony except he's Sid's dad and he technically owns this place. Ive only even met the guy 3 times and if you had asked him before you...before he uh died then he wouldn't have even known my name and then you wouldn't be asking me all these questions."

"Ok girlie do you have any idea what they do in this building?"

"Uh...phone stuff?"

"Phone stuff. How long you been working here? 2 years?"

"How'd you know?"

"Because we know. And there ain't no way Fat Tony hired an actual janitor to work in a front business laundering money. He ain't capable of that sort of irony."

"Excuse me, Mr, uh, sir, but I don't think that actually counts as irony."

"OH SO WE'RE LYING TODAY AND CORRECTING MY USE OF A LITERARY TERM?"

She heard the sirens the same time they did. Mom came through! She was so predictably neurotic and it finally paid off.

The bigger one pulled the hammer back on his gun and pointed it at her, but the other one pulled him away. "Leave her. We can come back for her" before they took off.

That was fiveish hours ago? And she'd been trying to explain the whole thing to the police but apparently no one was ready to believe she was a just the fucking janitor today.

She sighed as yet another cop sat in front of her in the interrogation room. This one was playing good cop. He'd brought a sandwich and a coffee at least.

"Now what can you tell me about Fat Tony, Sadie?"

He wasn't even Fat, she thought. And repeated the whole thing once again. If she ever got out of this, she would never, ever take another cleaning job for the rest of her life.

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Links to the other “Use Your Words” posts:



Baking In A Tornado https://www.bakinginatornado.com/

On the Border https://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/

The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver https://thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/blog.html/

Climaxed https://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/

Her Own Skin

Today’s post is a writing challenge. This is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, but here’s a fun twist--no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words are:

July ~ vacation ~ seashell ~ full moon ~ dancing ~ shooting star

They were submitted by: http://www.thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/

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Denny laid on the strewn leaves looking up at the full moon hoping she might catch a shooting star dancing across the sky. The heat of the South in late July had baked the ground keeping her warm despite the breeze blowing her hair into a tangled mess of chestnut curls. She should be on vacation right now hunting for seashells along a white, sandy beach or sitting on a lakeside dock somewhere dipping her toes in the water and hoping beyond hope that nothing eats them. Instead, she’s here, staring at the sky.

Even still, she has no desire to move from this spot. Maybe ever. Maybe it would be perfectly fine if her body melded with the ground below her so she never had to miss this sky full of stars or her shooting star. Instead, though, she would have to tear herself away and drag her feet back to reality, back to the home where she had never been accepted and probably never would.

At home, she had a closet full of dresses that felt like alien skin when she wore them. A costume. The walls of her room were pink. The comforter was white lace. There were posters of boy bands and a box full of Seventeen and Elle and Vogue. She hadn’t had a choice or voice with any of it. In fact, she had worked all summer long to save up and buy mens’ jeans and tshirts and baseball caps and boxer shorts that she didn’t dare let her mama find. Instead, whenever she went out, she donned one of her dresses just long enough to stop off by Jessica’s (her girlfriend) to change out of the costume and into what made her feel like herself.

When she was alone, she could walk and talk the way she wanted. She could have on makeup and still wear the clothes that she loved, that fit *her* the way she wanted. When she was out of that house from under her mama’s prying, judgmental eyes, she was free—free to be herself instead of forced and modeled into this box full of expectations and stereotypes, a box build on social acceptance that she didn’t really give two shits about. It was mama who was always asking what people would think if she went out in “that getup” before all her clothes were trashed and replaced with frilly dresses. It was mama that wore that face of shame whenever she heard of her classmates call her Denny instead of Denise, and it was mama that flew into a rage every time Denny wasn’t “ladylike.”

If she was fully trans instead of more or less androgynous, Mama would probably lock her in the basement. As it was, Denny still thought of herself as a girl, still accepted “her” and “she,” but she wanted to be her own definition, and Mama didn’t accept that girl could mean whatever anybody wanted. To Mama, "girl" meant something very specific.

In short, Denny had her own way, and Mama refused to let her live it, so Denny hid and planned and plotted. She had to. If she was ever going to live in her own skin by her own rules, she had to get out of that house, out of the stupid dresses and the box they came out of, and away from Mama’s expectations and ignorance.

Too many times she read stories about people like her (well…people like her and trans people) killing themselves to get out. She could understand that. It’s not like it hadn’t crossed her mind a time or two when she was younger and especially when Mama burned all her clothes and redecorated her room. But, she wasn’t going to do that. She couldn’t do that. As much as she dreamed about a future where she didn’t have to hide anymore, a life where she could really be herself, love who she wants to love without fear, dress and be who she is without being bullied by the one person who was supposed to love her no matter what, she couldn’t give up on that. She couldn’t give up on the future just because her now was a little difficult.

Still, sometimes in her weakest moments she felt like giving up, giving in, and letting go. If it wasn’t for Jessica and Jessica’s parents being more accepting, she wouldn’t have any support or anyone to turn to when she had those dark days. When the bullshit Mama put her through seemed to cave in on her all at once, and she felt like she would be crushed under the weight of it, she couldn't help but think that being free of that anycway possible would be the sweetest release. This wasn't her end, though. She refused to let the darkness win when so many people made sure she knew that they were there to help her carry that weight whenever she needed them.

The breeze picked up again blowing the long hair Denny mostly hated across her face tickling her nose. She reaches up, moves it out the way, and sighs before she finally pushes herself up from the ground giving one last look up at the stars—a sight that never gets old, never fails her the way so many people have—and trudges off towards home. She smoothes the dress and pulls her hair back into a loose ponytail, throws on an extra coat of lip gloss and feels the tension pull her shoulders even tighter.

She may as well have been going into battle.

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Links to the other “Use Your Words” posts:



http://www.BakingInATornado.com Baking In A Tornado

http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/ Spatulas on Parade

http://themomisodes.com The Momisodes

http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com The Bergham’s Life Chronicles

http://www.southernbellecharm.com Southern Belle Charm

http://dinoheromommy.com/ Dinosaur Superhero Mommy

http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch Confessions of a part-time working mom

http://www.someoneelsesgenius.com Someone Else’s Genius

http://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com Climaxed

http://batteredhope.blogspot.com Never Ever Give Up Hope

http://sparklyjenn.blogspot.com/ Sparkly Poetic Weirdo

http://www.thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/ The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver

http://www.angrivatedmom.wordpress.com The Angrivated Mom

Transformation

Today’s post is a writing challenge. This is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, here’s a fun twist; no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words are: margarita, ceiling fan, flogging, stilettos, bungee cord and were submitted by www.themomisodes.com

*also I feel like this post needs a trigger warning.

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She lays in her bed, sheets haphazardly tossed across her legs. She’s not really awake yet but somewhere in that between-state that comes with a hangover, head full of cotton, achy, unable to pull out of dreamland completely. The remnants of an unfinished margarita from the night before sours in the heat of the room while she watches the slow swirl of the dust-covered ceiling fan above her. Flogging Molly’s Salty Dog plays lightly, as lightly as a band like that can anyway, from the iphone dock on the nightstand making her wonder just what the hell is the deal...this isn't something she would ever play. 

She groans at the thought of having to move to change the fucking station, but this just really isn’t helping things at the moment. Her music tastes, whatever she listened to at the moment, were totally dependent on her mood, and she was in no kind of mood for fast-paced Celtic rock songs about pirates or whatever the hell this was. Attempting to roll over forces a wave of nausea to take her for a ride threatening to send her running for the bathroom, but it passes. She pushes on for the phone but immediately cries out from a stabbing pain in her side. She looks down and notices one of her neon yellow stilettos still in the bed with her, poking her roughly in the ribs and tosses it down angrily causing another blanket of sickness to whirl around in her head.

Grunting with effort she reaches for her phone to change this shitfest of a song when she notices the huge bruise on her arm just below her elbow. What the fuck happened she thinks rolling back onto the bed, the song currently forgotten. She examines it closely seeing the distinct outline of fingers which only confuses her more. She doesn’t have a clue what could have happened.

She lays there, staring at it, trying to make the fuzziness of the night before dissipate. The pieces don’t seem to want to fall into place, though, and she finds herself tracing the lines of the bruise with her other hand, getting lost in the mottled blues and purples. Whatever happened, the person must have had a big hand. The bruise wraps around her entire arm and extends halfway down her forearm.

A tune by Creedence comes on the phone snapping her out of her near-trance. Bad Moon Rising. She wonders if maybe there is something in her messages that might lead her to piecing back the night before. Rolling over and stretching for the phone is a chore even without the stiletto stabbing into her ribs, but she finally reaches far enough to push her fingers into it knocking it from the speaker stand into her reach.

She enters in the passcode to unlock the phone and sees she has 17 text messages and nearly as many voicemails. She starts with the text messages first. 15 of them are from her best friend, Lacey, who was out with her last night, so she checks those first.

where r u

did u leave w that guy

Come on Julie pick up the phone

Im worried

Did u make it home

Call me pls

Julie don’t make me worry

The messages from Lacey were all the same, in a nutshell. Concern, worry, fear, begging…totally out of Lacey’s character. What fucking guy, she thinks? I don’t remember any guy.

Then she sees a text from an unknown number.

Had fun wit u lst nite ;) Hope I wasnt 2ruff. Gimme a call when we can do it again lol

What the hell happened?

The room is still spinning when she sits up in bed, but she pushes past it, determined. She needs to know what happened. With the sheets thrown off her and her mind a little more focused, she sees the bruises covering her legs and the absence of any clothing. She isn’t the kind of girl who sleeps in the nude. Everything is wrong. Why cant I remember? A sense of desperation to pull back the fog and figure out her night starts to rise in her throat burning like indigestion and pushing her forward.

Once out of the bed, she finds her clothes spread around the room on the floor. The panties she had on last night are ripped in half and several of the buttons on her favorite corset blouse are popped off. She grabs a tshirt and pajama pants to throw on then heads to the kitchen for something to drink, ice water. She needs coffee, hydration, and hangover food stat so she can get this sorted.

After downing a 20 oz bottle of water in almost one gulp, she grabs some cherry Pop-Tarts from the cabinet and sets her Keurig up for a 10 oz cup of pumpkin pie flavored coffee. Maybe it’s a weird combination, but she’s okay with weird. The coffee steams and drips in a slow stream into her favorite mug—a blue asymmetrical cylinder with a malformed handle that she made in a high school art class. The process hypnotizes her in a way, her mind a blank.

The too-loud ringtone of her phone pulls her back to the real world with its repetitive snippet from her favorite cartoon. “Eat my shorts! Ay Caramba! Ow! Quit it.” She sees Lacey’s photo pop onto the screen and figures she may as well answer it. Maybe she will find out more about what happened that way…

“Hello?”

“Wherethefuckhaveyoubeen!!??!? I have been worried sick, Julie. What the fuck?!”

“I just woke up.”

“I thought that guy you were talking to had left you for dead, for fuck’s sake!”

“No, Im still here. But…well… what guy?”

“What do you mean ‘what guy?’”

“I don’t remember any guy.”

“You don’t remember the guy you were flirting with half the night? The one that offered to take you home when you started feeling bad? The cute one with the undercut and the beard? That guy?”

“Uh….no. No, I don’t remember much of anything after getting to the show. I do have a text from some dude who says that he hopes he wasn’t too rough on me. And Im covered in bruises and freaking out right about now, so don’t get all accusatory. Just tell me who the hell he was. And what do you mean I started feeling bad?”

Lacey explains it all. The hole in the wall bar having shitty acoustics. The local band with the cute bearded guys that sounded like dying cats having one last half-assed attempt at sex. The sparse audience. Luke warm beer. All in all the night was turning out to be a complete shitfest. Lacey’s words. But then these two guys walked up and offered to buy them yet another luke warm beer. Lacey had passed on the drink, but Julie obliged. The guys, Mason and Pete, were flirty and gorgeous so the two girls had to run to the bathroom, the awful smelling, piss covered bathroom, to gush about them. All of this was coming back to Julie piece by piece. She remembers the guy now, Pete, touching her arm, laughing at her jokes… The two of them going to the bathroom then coming back out. She remembers talking about cartoons with the guy and drinking her beer then nothing. There’s nothing but blankness after that. Lacey says that’s when things got weird. Julie had started feeling like hell, lightheaded, sleepy, and off. Lacey started to get up and take her home, but the guy, Pete, had offered. Lacey hadn’t felt right about it, but Julie (and Mason) had insisted that Lacey stay and have a good time. Lacey had agreed but had tried calling and texting Julie the rest of the night to no avail and had even come by the apartment knocking on the door but didn’t get an answer.

“So I started feeling bad after the beer he bought me? Did we leave it with them while we went to the bathroom?”

“yeah. We did. Like idiots.”

“Ugh. Do you think I was drugged?!!? I cant remember shit, Lacey.”

“Seems that way. Do you want me to come get you to take you to the hospital? Maybe they can check. I think it stays in your system for a few hours at least afterwards. Maybe a couple days. “

“I don’t know, man. I… what do you think will happen? What if Im overreacting, Lace?”

“Is anything else weird? What about your room? Your clothes? What do the bruises look like?”

She feels tears swelling in her eyes, her voice wavering with emotion when she finally says, “my clothes are torn… I wasn’t wearing anything when I woke up and you know I don’t like sleeping naked…” She sighs, tears spilling down her cheeks, “And there are bruises on my arm shaped like a hand, more on my legs. I haven’t checked all over yet though. Can you just come over so we can figure out what to do next?”

“Jules, you need to get to the hospital now. I’m coming to pick you up so get ready.”

“We’ll talk about it when you get here. I don’t… I don’t want to go through what Amber did when that dick she works with tied her up with bungee cord and well…you know. Everyone knows what he did. There were pictures for fuck’s sake and nothing had happened to him.” I can’t do it, she thinks. Amber was put through hell answering questions about who she had slept with and if she provoked the dude and why she didn’t fight back…it was over and over and over with the questions and accusations until she couldn’t take it anymore and had killed herself. Jumped out of her apartment window.

“I’m on my way, but I’m not letting this go. You HAVE to do something or he’s going to do this sick shit to other girls, Jules.”

She couldn’t deal with this conversation. Not right now. She ends the call knowing Lacey will be pissed but needing to get away from her regardless. She cant even remember what happened. How is she supposed to be a savior for allllll these other women? Apparently none of them thought enough to report him and save her the trouble!

As soon as the thoughts float to the surface, she feels guilt like a heavy weight pulling her down to the floor. She slides down the cabinets, hugs her legs to her chest, and wails.

She takes her phone in hand again and dials.

“Mom? Mom, I need you. No, Im not okay. I think I’ve been…Mom, just come get me please. Lacey is coming to take me to the hospital and I want you there.”

She ends the call already a completely different woman than she was when she set foot in that bar the night before.

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Here are the links to the other participants! Read through and enjoy!

http://www.BakingInATornado.com Baking In A Tornado

http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/ Spatulas on Parade

http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com The Bergham’s Life Chronicles

http://themomisodes.com The Momisodes

http://stacysewsandschools.blogspot.com/ Stacy Sews and Schools

http://sparklyjenn.blogspot.com/ Sparkly Poetic Weirdo

http://eileensperpetuallybusy.blogspot.com Eileen’s Perpetually Busy

http://batteredhope.blogspot.com Battered Hope

http://www.southernbellecharm.com Southern Belle Charm

http://www.someoneelsesgenius.com Someone Else’s Genius

http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch Confessions of a part-time working mom

http://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com Climaxed

http://singlemumplusone.blogspot.com Searching for Sanity

http://www.eviljoyspeaks.wordpress.com Evil Joy Speaks

http://gndisney.wordpress.com Disneyland in Kentucky

Hit Number 9

It's Secret Subject Swap Day! This month 15 bloggers submitted and were given prompts to interpret in our own style. Today, we are all posting those interpretations simultaneously. At the end of this post you'll find a list of all the participants so be sure to check them all out.

My prompt is: No one knew what lay beneath the....

It was submitted by:  http://www.someoneelsesgenius.com

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Lydia stands over him, shovel in hand and grinning ear to ear. There would be plenty of time for congratulations for a job well done later, though. For now she needs to get to work. She has to be long gone before daylight which only leaves her 3 more hours. 4 tops. She starts on the digging making a mental list as she goes. Everyone saw the together which was what she intended, but she still needs to plant the note (the one that says the two of them ran off together that would give the neighborhood the juicy story it so desperately needed), clean up her kitchen, pack enough to make the story look believable, and disappear. The disappearing was the easy part. She just had to get through the next few hours without fucking up.

Earlier that day Lydia had crossed the well-lit suburban street she had been living on for the past year with her famous seafood casserole in hand. She was wearing her matching pink paisley oven mitts on her hands to shield them from the heat of the deep violet, oval-shaped Le Creuset casserole dish. It’s one of the most expensive pieces she owns and perfect for neighborhood pot luck parties. Likewise, the beige A-line skirt, pale green button-down shirt, and navy cardigan she had on were nondescript and pretty much a standard uniform for the ‘burbs. Altogether, it was a perfect costume for the evening no matter how much she hates the way she looks in these conformative atrocities.

As she deepens the hole she’s digging, she figures she probably looks remarkably better in these paper coveralls that she could ever look in a beige skirt. She laughs to herself and replays the events of the evening as she tends to do when a stint in suburbia is over. She’s a bit of a perfectionist and needs to analyze what she might have gotten wrong, where she can improve on the process.

When she got to Gloria’s house, her hands were otherwise too occupied to be able to reach the doorbell, so she tapped lightly on the door with one knee hoping someone would hear without her having to bang harder. She needed to keep her unassuming, unobtrusive image intact, so kicking the door until one of these pretentious assholes answered her was out of the question.

Gloria’s husband, Bill, answered and offered to take the dish out of her hands.

“Now, Bill, you know if I let you take this and you drop it, you’re going to have to give me a kidney to sell on the black market just to start making things even. “

He laughed heartily never once suspecting she might be serious and held the door open for her as she stepped into the foyer of the house.

“Gloria and the other women are in the dining room setting up the buffet. You sure you don’t want any help with that?”

She smiled and thanked him for the offer then headed towards the dining room, a well-disguised fox among the hens.

The cackling from the henhouse could be heard well before she made it to the dining room and already had a tinge of a slur to it. These particular hens have a penchant for wine—all except Heidi from the end of the street. She isn’t allowed to touch a drop. Heidi doesn’t like to admit in public how much control her husband has over her, but the women talk about it nonstop when she isn’t at their monthly gatherings. Heidi isn’t all that good at hiding truths. Or black eyes. If you happened to take a look at her medical chart as Lydia had done, you’d find that Heidi seems awfully clumsy--always falling down the stairs or running into doors. One time, she even missed a book that her darling husband Lloyd happened to toss to her resulting in quite a nasty split lip.

Lloyd is an alcoholic or at least he was. No one knew this in the neighborhood besides his wife and now Lydia. Not really. They had some suspicions, but it wouldn’t matter if they did know…the only thing they’d ever do about it is gossip anyway.

Lydia had put her most charming smile on her face as she made the right turn into the dining room from the hallway, “well, hello, lovelies!”

“Lyd!” the raucous and muddled voices of the women in her neighborhood had replied out of sync and far too loud but warm and inviting all the same.

She can’t help, even as she digs, feeling a little bit of camaraderie with these ladies despite the fact that they remind her far too much of The Stepford Wives. These women aren’t bad people; they just can’t think for themselves. They’ve done what people expected them to do or told them to do all their lives. It’s all they know. So, she doesn’t blame them for not noticing what was painfully obvious about the relationship between Lloyd and Heidi. She didn’t blame them for not doing anything about it. That’s why she was here. People like her were needed to take out the trash. That’s her justification for the last several years of her life anyway.

She set her casserole on the buffet and slid her hands out of the mitts. Her smile never wavered as she took the lid off the dish and deposited both the mitts and it onto the bar separating the kitchen and dining room--the parking lot for such things at these neighborhood gatherings. She had barely set them in place before Gloria was shoving a glass of wine in her direction. It took her all night long to finish that one glass, but she did it. Before too long, most of the people there were too drunk to notice that she hadn’t poured herself more…except Heidi who was too worried about not pissing off Lloyd to give a damn.

Oh well. That poor woman won’t have to spend her nights walking on eggshells anymore.

The hum of the party buzzed all around her as she sipped her wine and pretended to make rounds. She’s more of a watcher than a mingler when she’s in character, but she always makes sure to smile and nod and pretend to give a shit about the small talk and latest gossip when someone stops her. She’d rather avoid these neighborhood functions altogether, but she has an image to keep up. When she’s living among others, she can’t afford to be the subject of petty gossip because she didn’t show up which assuredly would happen in her absence. It’s what Stepfords do.

Blend. That is the crux to her mission. Fit in. Don’t do anything to stand out or seem suspicious.

No one knew what lay beneath the bland façade. Not this time or any of the other times. And she wants to keep it that way. When she is carrying out one of her hits, she is vanilla, boring, an average stay-at-home divorcee living off every drop of alimony she can squeeze from her dog of an ex-husband as far as anyone else is concerned which is perfect. That’s the way she wants things.

She’s finished with the digging, rolls him into the hole she has created, and begins the process of filling it back up. He groans a little which isn’t a shock to her. She didn’t hit him all that hard with the oversized pepper mill that lived on her countertop. The 32 inch tall piece made of beechwood and stainless steel had weight to it and with the calculated arc of her swing, she probably knocked him with the first blow to the temple, but she hadn’t kill him. Yet. She liked it better this way. He’d spent his entire life making other people suffer. It was his turn now . It was just unfortunate to her that said suffering would be so short-lived.

She had actually tried to take the prolonged route in the beginning of all this…her 3rd hit. She couldn’t stomach torture, though. It didn’t make her feel like she was turning the tables on these men that way…it felt like she had become them, like she’d become her own monster of ex—the real one, not the story she created. She didn’t want to be one of the Lloyds of the world. She wanted to eradicate them. It was one thing to take out the trash but something else entirely to be the trash.

She begins to toss the dirt on top of him. Shovelful after shovelful thumps onto his chest and spreads out filling the thin but fairly deep death chamber she had just finished digging. In a way she hopes he wakes up long enough to know what’s going on. It was all too easy to get him to her house-- to seduce him in her stupid navy cardigan of all things--for her to have much sympathy for the man. She had winked at him across the room and suddenly there he was hovering over her. She had laughed at his idiotic jokes even the racist ones while her internal rage grew to epic proportions. The two of them had spent half the party seemingly enthralled in conversation, flirting, and touching like no one else was in the room. When she told him she was headed home and that he should stop by for one more drink, he was chomping at the bit.

In a flash, he had instructed Heidi to go home without giving her so much as a hint of an explanation for why he wasn’t going with her. He didn’t have to and he knew it. Heidi was that beaten down, that worn. Maybe she even thought herself lucky that she wouldn’t have to deal with him for awhile. The number of drinks he had at the party was one ingredient of a perfect storm that would probably end with Heidi back in the hospital for one of her numerous accidents.

With Heidi out of sight, Lloyd hadn’t even bothered to cover his tracks. He had brazenly followed her right out of Gloria’s door and across the street, and when she paused to unluck her door, he had the gall to run his hands down her back to give her ass a good squeeze. He had whispered something in her ear at that moment, the stink of the booze on his breath hanging heavy in the air like a rain cloud. She was far too livid by then to really pay attention to the words, but she had gotten the gist of it.

When she finally had the door open, his hands were all over her, exploring and pulling at her clothes. One of the buttons on her shirt popped and plummeted to the floor. She pushed him away a little then moved towards the kitchen, “follow me if you want that drink, big boy.”

He did.

She had been at the counter making their drinks when he rubbed against her, spun her around, and leaned in for a kiss. That had been her cue—she grabbed the peppermill while he was otherwise preoccupied and cracked him in the right temple. Once, twice, and a third time after he crumpled to the floor for good measure.

The dirt is piling higher and higher now. His body is mostly covered. He has to be feeling the weight of it by now, but he hasn’t really come to yet. Fuck, she thinks. I’ve left my Le Creuset at Gloria’s. Well, forget it now. There’s no going back for that thing at this point. It had been with her for years making rounds at neighborhood functions for the better part of a decade. She screwed up. How could she have forgotten something that was such a staple to the image she needed to create? She’d have to spring for a new one before she moved on to the next place, the next hospital she volunteered at, the next hit.

But, first, she was going to have to take a few days to rest—once she got where she was going, of course. These late night trips into the woods dragging bodies and digging were hell on her body.

She pats down the last shovelful of dirt then. The job is done. She takes a few handfuls of forest

debris scattering it all on top of the freshly turned Earth hopefully making things less obvious just in case someone happens to walk this way. She did her homework prior to picking this location making sure to watch the place from a nearby tree stand. She hadn’t seen anyone out here, but you never know. She’s learned a lot about this whole process over the years. One of the earlier bodies had been found by local hunters. The investigation hadn’t really progressed much that from what she read in the papers, but she certainly couldn’t afford to be connected to any of these places or these people—especially the dead ones.

With that done, she heads back to Lydia’s house one last time to clean and throw some things in the few pieces of Vera Bradley luggage she had managed to collect over the years as part of the image. Tomorrow, she’d be someone else, somewhere else, but she would be damned if she’d be wearing that godawful beige skirt again anytime soon.

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A little dark, but the prompt and the last few episodes of The Walking Dead inspired it. Carol would be an excellent Lydia, don't you think? Anyway, hope you enjoyed. Be sure to check out all the other bloggers below. Happy Reading :)

Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts.  Sit back, grab a cup, and check them all out. See you there:

  http://www.BakingInATornado.com                          Baking In A Tornado

http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com                       The Bergham’s Life Chronicles

http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com                         Spatulas on Parade

http://dinoheromommy.com/                                      Dinosaur Superhero Mommy

http://themomisodes.com                                          The Momisodes

http://morethancheeseandbeer.blogspot.com             More Than Cheese and Beer

http://www.southernbellecharm.com                         Southern Belle Charm

http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch                        Confessions of a part-time working mom

http://thelieberfamily.com                                       The Lieber Family

http://www.someoneelsesgenius.com                        Someone Else’s Genius

http://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com                             Climaxed

http://stacysewsandschools.blogspot.com/                 Stacy Sews and Schools

http://sparklyjenn.blogspot.com/                              Sparkly Poetic Weirdo 

http://singlemumplusone.blogspot.com                    Searching for Sanity

http://www.silenceofthemom.blogspot.com                  Silence of the Mom