Month: October 2016

Tucker

This one was recently rejected, and I would like to know more about why. Please have a read and leave me a comment describing what about the story would make you reject it. 

Tucker

What surprised him was that he didn’t feel, he heard–heard every fist, every knee as it slammed into his head and back. Heard a thumping like plastic watercooler bottles being thrown onto a wooden floor, hollow and fluid. Transmitted through his bones. Heard from the inside, not through his ears.

Tucker had never been in a fight before, mostly because he was sure that it would hurt. He wasn’t the kind of man who could put hurt in a box and ignore it in order to get things done. He hadn’t been that kind of boy, either. He avoided hurt—he avoided almost everything hard, in fact—and now that he was actually in a fight, he wondered why.

Still, he wasn’t fighting. There was no violence in him. A fight had started, true—a beating really in which he fell to the ground the second he was hit, resting on his left side, hands covering head, knees protecting belly. To be honest, the fact that he had defied his soon-to-be attacker at all, a stringy teenager in a concert t-shirt, surprised him. He knew the kid was going to have to hit him, to show the rest of his friends that he wasn’t a coward, but he didn’t back down, didn’t run like he always had before. He had no idea why.

And now the boy was on top of him, sort of sitting on him and punching at the patches of hair and skull that Tucker couldn’t cover with his hands. The friends were hooting. The parking lot smelled sweet and dirty from so close up. The boy grunted as he inflicted his damage.

There was a kind of peace in it, in suffering if that’s what it was. Why had schoolmates teased him because he wouldn’t fight? Sissy. He hated the word. Why did women reject him because he lacked courage? Spineless. Weak. If he had known how easy it was, he would have been brave long ago. The pain of something you accept is nothing compared to pain that you’re trying to keep out. He hadn’t wanted the fight when it started of course, but now that he was in it—now, he could lie there on the ground and absorb the thumping for the rest of his life.

He chuckled at the thought, and the pounding stopped. “What are you laughin’ at Faggot?”

Tucker laughed even harder at the question. The word faggot seemed funny, infantile, weak. But the situation wasn’t funny. Asphalt grated the left side of his face. His eye tooth seemed broken. He could taste blood in his mouth for the first time, ever, and was surprised that it tasted so much like metal, like the stink that stained his hands when he helped his grandma roll coins into paper sleeves. For the first time in his life, Tucker was in danger. But he wasn’t scared.

Nearby, he saw the feet of one of the girls who was watching, just her feet, one crossed in front of the other, and noticed through the open toe of her high heeled, little-girl-trying-to-look-chic shoes that her big toenail had a happy face painted on it. He laughed, hard this time, from the belly. Bobby slapped him, just behind his right eye. “Shut UP!”

“Oh, gross. I think he likes it,” a girl said, one he couldn’t see. “Bobby, I think he likes you being on top of him and shit.”

Suddenly, the weight was off him and the kid was yelling, hollering. Tucker didn’t pay attention to the words, just to the sound the retreating voice made. He could tell that Bobby had moved a few feet away and he heard the others jeering, calling their one-time hero names. Tucker uncoiled from his protective ball, and stood. There seemed nothing else to do. He swiped with the back of his hand at a tickle near his right ear, and was astonished at seeing his own blood. He had feared it so long, seeing his inside come out, but now he knew that there was no reason for it. He licked the crimson from his hand. And smiled.

“Oh my God, look at him.” the unseen girl’s voice said. “He’s totally like, in-to this.”

Silence.

They stood, quiet and motionless, all of them looking at Tucker, staring at Tucker, now not a group of hormone fueled hoodlums but a gaggle of bewildered children. Tucker enjoyed calmly looking back at them, breathing heavily, exhausted, and smiling. He rubbed his thumb against the ragged edge of his eye tooth—broken.

“Come on you guys,” Bobby finally said, tugging at the arm of the happy face toe girl like a little kid who sees the playground but who knows that Mom would rather go home. “Let’s GO!”

The rest of the little gang followed him across the parking lot, turning here and there to look over their shoulders as if they expected Tucker to follow, ready to scatter like gazelles in every direction if he did. He could hear them beginning to relive the experience as they got further away, telling each other the tale with ever widening ranges of exaggeration so that, when they spun the yarn at school on Monday, the story would be more captivating and more scandalous than any Hollywood blockbuster could ever hope to be.

And Tucker loved it, loved that he would be the villain in their epic, the pervert, the trickster who had manipulated Bobby into the fight, lured him in as a pawn to satisfy masochistic urges. He imagined that in their telling, he would be huge, muscly, hyper-aggressive. The anti-hero. He imagined that he—he–would become an urban legend.

“Thanks Bobby!” he yelled after them as they passed between the shrubs that separated the parking lot from the city sidewalk. “See you soon!”

His joy was boundless when he saw them all run as fast as they could.

Cal

This one is based on something that happened in my life recently. It’s a rough draft–just a getting down of the thoughts and emotions. Is the story enough to hold your interest? Is this something I should refine?

Cal and Grant had been friends since they were boys. They played high school sports together. They went to college together and both majored in finance. They both worked for the same mega-bank early in their careers. They were the best men at each other’s weddings. So when, one night, they sat together in Grant’s back yard sharing beer and talking about the future, it was a natural thought for them to go into business together.

For twelve years, their business flourished. They looked forward to going to the office each day, to seeing one another. Cal was the working brain of the organization and Grant was the face, traveling to meet their clients. They had the midas touch, and everything seemed to go their way.

The hot July morning seemed to Cal like it would be the same. He unlocked the office door at 6:00am, just as he always did, turned on lights and started coffee for the staff who would be arriving soon, and sat behind his desk. The computer clicked and whizzed when he rolled the mouse, and its monitor leapt to colorful life. His morning ritual was underway, and as he clicked open the windows he needed in order to get his bearings, he heard the front door open—far earlier than it should have been.

Cal rolled his desk chair to the left so that he could see the entrance. It was standing open, but no one came through. “Hello?” he called through his open door. He was surprised to see Rachel, his assistant, enter the building. She looked as if something was wrong. “Rachel?”

Without a word, she walked toward him. He could see that she was crying. He got out of the chair and met her half way. “Rachel, what’s the matter? What happened?”

“I have to quit, Cal.”

“What?” He chuckled a little, disbelieving. “That’s silly. Why do you have to quit?”

She said nothing, but handed him her cell phone, bursting into sobs as he took it from her. The text messaging app was open, and Cal was shocked to see images of a man’s naked body. He scrolled quickly up and down, scanning through dozens of them. He looked at her, bewildered.

Rachel was still sobbing, but knew that he wanted more explanation. She choked through her tears to say “Look who they’re from.”

Cal looked at the phone number that the messages came from. He recognized it. Knew it as well as he knew his own. It was Grant’s.

During the next hour, Rachel explained that when she had attended the conference with Grant a few months earlier, he had kissed her and fondled her and tried to have sex with her. Since then, every day, he had been sending the texts that Cal had seen, and had been pressuring her while they were in the office together to meet him at night. He groped her at every chance he had when others couldn’t see. She explained that she hadn’t said anything because she hoped that he would stop, that he would get tired of being rejected. And she had rejected him, a thousand times.

“Rachel, don’t you worry. I’ll talk to Grant. He’ll stop. I promise.”

“Oh, Cal.” Her tears refreshed, and she wailed “It’s too late for that now. I have to quit, and I have to move away.”

“Why?”

“Because for the past few nights, Grant has been at my house, outside. He’s sick Cal, and I’m afraid of what he might do.” Her eyes were pleading with him to simply accept, and not to ask anything more.

He did the best he could for her. He would pay her until she could find a new job, and he cashed out her vacation and sick time to give her a little money to work with. Once she was resettled, he would send her things from the office. Grant was traveling to see one of their customers, so he wouldn’t notice she was gone from work for a couple of days. She apologized to him for leaving him and the company, told him how much she loved everything about it, wished him luck, and left.

Cal’s routine ground to a halt for the next few hours. He closed his office door, and shut out the lights. The implications were incredible. What would he tell his wife? What would Grant say to his family? How could he explain to his children that they couldn’t spend time with Grant’s any more? What would he tell customers? How would the business be effected—could he eject Grant, or would he have to leave? His phone was ringing, both the desk phone and his cell. He knew it was Grant, checking in as he always did.

Cal ignored the calls and messages. How could he possibly remain composed and professional knowing what his one-time friend had done? Although he knew it was unfair, he felt as violated by Grant as Rachel did. Everything that made Cal who he was, everything that he believed about himself, had been crushed by this new understanding that Grant would take what he wanted with no regard for anyone else—not Rachel, not Cal, not his own children or wife.

But anger wasn’t the main thing he was feeling. It was shame, and that surprised him. He hadn’t done anything wrong—he hadn’t been involved at all. Nonetheless, he kept searching through his mind to find the thing that made Grant do what he had done, to find what he had done himself that made it happen. And shame draped itself over him as he searched, made him feel like this would happen again with someone else who he trusted, and that it probably had happened before with Grant, with other women—and he felt stupid for not being able to recognize it in him, for not knowing that he shouldn’t trust this man and shouldn’t accept him as a friend and shouldn’t bring him close.

There was anger in him too, a force that was prodding him to do something, to take action, to lash out. He heard Anger’s voice in his head, telling him to call the police, to tell Grant’s wife, to punch Grant square in the nose and to tell him that he knew what he did, and to tell him that he was a sick fuck who was worth less than nothing.

Shame reminded him though, that if he did that, he would have to explain all of this over and over, and showed him how embarrassing that would be, and warned him that people wouldn’t believe such a thing about Grant and that people would point their fingers back at him, and accuse him, and ridicule him.

He sat in his desk chair, in that place that had been a symbol of everything good in his life for more than a decade, and cried. His cell phone buzzed on the desk again, and he smashed it with his hand, cracking the glass. He could still see through the shattered screen that it was Grant texting him, and in his fury he picked the device up and, with his high-school baseball pitcher’s arm, dashed it against the office wall, sending pieces of electronics scattering all around the place. And his shame deepened.

He wiped his nose and cheeks with the back of his hand, rolled his chair back in front of his desk, and picked up the desk phone. Everyone who worked for him had arrived while he had been thinking about what had happened, so the first thing he did was to tell Gustavo that Rachel wasn’t going to be in today, so he would need to cover her duties. He surprised himself with how normal he sounded despite how he felt. Next, he dialed his wife’s number.

“Hey, Baby.”

“No, I’m fine. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Hey, what do you think about taking a few weeks and going up to Maine for a vacation?”