Sociopaths In Love

Sociopaths In Love

Andersen Prunty

Sociopaths In Love

Grindhouse Press #019

ISBN-13:
978-0-9883484-7-9

ISBN-10:
0988348470

Copyright © 2013 by Andersen Prunty. All
rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition

Cover photograph courtesy of Dorothy
Bhawl.

www.dorothybhawl.com

eolq.tumblr.com

This book is a work of fiction.

No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without
the written permission of the author or publisher.

Also by Andersen Prunty

The Warm Glow of Happy Homes

Bury the Children in the Yard: Horror
Stories

Satanic Summer

Fill the Grand Canyon and Live Forever

Pray You Die Alone: Horror Stories

Sunruined: Horror Stories

The Driver's Guide to Hitting
Pedestrians

Hi I'm a Social Disease: Horror Stories

Fuckness

The Sorrow King

Slag Attack

My Fake War

Morning is Dead

The Beard

Zerostrata

Jack and Mr. Grin

The Overwhelming Urge

SOCIOPATHS

IN LOVE

For Carrie –

There are no words . . .

Part One

Want

Girl Meets Boy

The man came in without a sound and enclosed
his powerful hands around Erica's upper arms right after she
finished applying the last of her black eyeliner. She jumped,
startled by the physical contact. A few other things hit her at the
same time and her heart, thrown into overdrive by the scare, felt
like it kept going faster and faster. She wondered how fast it
would have to go before it exploded. These things that hit her
. . .

She didn't know the man
standing in the small bathroom of the small house with his hands
gripped around her arms. She hadn't seen him in the mirror, hadn't
seen him until she'd felt his flesh on hers. Maybe her attention
had been a hundred percent consumed, divided as much as possible
between putting the liner pencil to her eye and glancing down at
her instruction manual, the June issue of
Glamor Face
.

What did this man want with her?

Why didn't she try to get away?

She needed to calm down. If she didn't calm
down it felt entirely possible her heart would spasm through her
chest and bounce around the white room, leaving bloody cartoon
heart prints all over the walls. While she had wondered how fast it
could go before it exploded, she wasn't in a hurry to find out.
Besides, it would be a chore to clean up and Granny wasn't in any
condition to do it.

Deep breath. She inhaled. Breath was power.
Breath was reason.

She knew what she needed to do. The
instructions scrolled across her cortex, dredged up from some
collective conscious rape manual all young girls carried with
them.

Look at this man's face.

Study it.

See if she knew it.

Make eye contact.

Plead with him not to hurt her.

She was twenty-one, figured him to be early-
to mid-thirties. Tan, but not magazine tan. More like construction
worker or landscaper tan. Blue eyes, clean and piercing, radiated
the kind of calm intensity that could easily be mistaken for
insanity. Straight, blocky nose, wide enough to have character, but
not big enough to be off-putting. Chin, possibly this man's best
feature, squared and chiseled, no cleft, blackened with two or
three days' growth and shot through with a few white hairs. High
forehead, a single shallow crease running a wavy horizontal line
through the sweaty gleam of the dark skin.

The way his skin shone with the faintest
trace of sweat made her once again conscious of his hands around
her arms. She looked back at her magazine, all the male models in
it gleamed with sweat or something used to represent sweat, the
photographer or stylist or whoever's attempt to make this
one-dimensional image produce a sensation. Touch. The oil or sweat
on the skin made her think immediately about what that moisture
would feel like on her fingertips. The thought of contact made her
heart slow down. Maybe slowing down was the wrong way to put it.
The heartbeat changed directions. From fear to, what? Lust?

Deep breath. She inhaled. Breath was power.
Breath was reason.

"Don't move." The man's grip loosened a
degree.

Don't
move
. Had she planned on moving? Maybe she
had thought about it when he first grabbed her, a panicked thought
of bringing her left leg up into his groin and turning around and
going for his eyes with fingernails that were not overly long but
probably could have used a trim three days ago. Now she didn't
think about moving. She thought about contact. She thought about
touch. Something slow and frictional and distant. It had been a
while since she'd had any contact with something that wasn't
herself, Granny's papery skin, or the brute room temperature
objects of routine.

Don't
move
. What he'd meant to say, she thought,
was,
Don't try to get
away
.

She exhaled slowly, her heart beating deep
and quicker than usual but not racing like before.

She felt him, hard and pressing against her
lower back. Thought she saw him sniff her clean hair in the
mirror.

Deep breath. She inhaled. Breath was power.
Breath was reason. Reason told her this did not have to be
ugly.

She thought of everything touching her. The
thin cotton fabric of her white v-neck t-shirt. The satiny acrylic
of her bra. The Lycra of her underwear that sometimes felt like it
breathed cool breaths between the heat of her skin and the stretchy
denim of her shorts, barely long enough to cover her ass.

And beneath her feet, the once cold tile,
grown clammy with her heat.

And behind her, him.

This does not have to be ugly.

He was not ugly.

She thought he was beautiful.

This does not have to be ugly.

He could be the one.

A gift.

Risen from some depressed muck.

Enough ugliness. How many times had she had
fantasies that were exactly like this?

Fantasies were beautiful.

Behind her, him.

Him.

"Who are you?" she asked.

He ran his hand down her flat stomach and
pulled at the button of her shorts.

"Does it matter?" His breath was hot in her
ear.

"Just a name."

"Your name's Erica Monroe."

She smiled. She didn't know why a stranger
would know her name. She almost laughed, wondered if she was
dreaming, knew she wasn't, and realized that didn't make any of
this make any more sense. Only it made perfect sense. Girls were
raped all the time. Rape was an ugly word. That wasn't what was
happening. It didn't have to be ugly. And maybe it wasn't rape
until she fought back or said something. Maybe she wanted this.

She said, still smiling
slightly, "Not
my
name."

"Walt. Will that do for now?"

"Got a last name?"

"Haha," he barked and she couldn't tell if
he was laughing or speaking. If it was laughter, it didn't make it
to his eyes.

"That your last name? Haha?"

"Why not?" Now he smiled slightly.

"Who are you, Walt Haha?"

In the mirror, their eyes locked. "I'm the
person who's going to show you how to be happy."

He unzipped her shorts and shucked them
down, plunging his hand against the moist heat between her
legs.

She lowered her head, felt him move her
blonde hair from the back of her neck, felt his tongue and breath
and teeth against the top of her spine.

She licked her lips. "Can we go into my
bedroom?"

"We'll have plenty of time for that."

She closed her eyes and let him do what he
wanted.

Afterward, leaning against the cold vanity
and dabbing at a couple spots of blood with a wad of toilet paper,
she thought about how much she had wanted it too.

Walt leaned against the opposite wall,
smoking a cigarette and looking down at his orange-dusted
hands.

"What's this shit?"

"That's my spray tan."

"You always use it?"

"Yep."

Chemistry

She sat in the living room listlessly
twirling a strand of hair and dividing her time between her
magazine and a large black bird, possibly a crow, outside the
window. The shower ran and she found the cascading rhythm of the
water soothing. The sound wasn't constant like it would have been
if Walt weren't in there. He changed the direction of the water,
gave it meaning, made it a tool of cleanliness. Otherwise it was
just water and would have been doing whatever it was water did.
Probably just sitting around being water.

The article in
Glamor Face
was on
something called 'weirdstream,' the fashion-side of it anyway. She
wasn't sure she got it. It showed photos of girls dressed normally
with just one or two things slightly off about them. One girl wore
a flannel shirt with khaki shorts (normal) but had applied two
streaks of black makeup under her eyes like an athlete (weird, but
not really too weird). Another photo was of a girl wearing a black
and white club dress with corpse paint on her face. Erica actually
kind of liked that. She didn't really know where weirdstream had
started but figured it would probably fizzle out soon enough. Maybe
it had started with the show
Dan
Banal
, she didn't know.
Dan Banal
was a weekly sitcom,
supposedly so mundane it was fascinating. She'd tried to watch it
and, for the most part, just found it boring. Maybe people were
entertained by boredom now. Who knew? She, for one, was really
fucking tired of boredom. Maybe that was the thing . . .
maybe people's lives were actually so exciting now they needed
boredom to come down, needed boredom to be entertained. Whatever.
She just thought it seemed like everyone had given up and stopped
trying. For the first time in a long time, she actually felt like
something
could be
happening with her. She didn't want to think about it too
much. Thinking about it would diminish the excitement. Iron out all
the fun.

She smiled and felt all the makeup on her
face bend with the folds of her skin. She made herself up every day
even though she never went anywhere. It was like the more she
thought about getting out and going someplace the less likely she
was to do it. Another reason she didn't want to think about what
could happen with Walt. Nothing would probably come from it anyway.
Too many things to do around here. Take care of Granny. Take care
of the house. It didn't seem like much but ever since getting out
of high school it had been everything.

Deep breath. Keep the anxiety at bay.
Thinking about everything she had to do sometimes overwhelmed her.
Sometimes she felt like she didn't do anything.

She'd enrolled in the community college in
Alvamore but had only managed to go for a couple of weeks. It
seemed pointless to drive an hour out of the hills to sit around
and think, "This is high school." She'd hated high school. Why
would she want to repeat two to four years of it? And she wasn't
much of a people person. She didn't need a psychologist to tell her
why she was obsessed with her appearance and why she found the need
to play with and alter it, why she felt the need to cover every
inch of her body with a foreign substance. Hair dye, makeup, spray
tan, colored contact lenses – it all seemed like the only socially
acceptable disguise she could wear. She was trying to become
someone else only, so far, she was as uncomfortable with everyone
she could possibly become as she was with the base coat.

It wasn't like she hadn't
tried. She'd had as many boyfriends as her tiny high school could
afford, within reason. In her brief stint at the college, there was
obvious male interest in her. Even professors standing around and
talking to her before class while she sucked down a cigarette. She
used to occasionally go places without makeup. Maybe she didn't get
as much attention, but guys still noticed her. While she liked the
attention, she didn't know what was supposed to happen. She just
. . . wasn't interested. Only one guy had told her she'd
look a lot better without "all that shit" on her face. But, and she
told him this, it had nothing to do with appearance, not really.
The makeup felt like depth. Literally, like one more layer of skin
someone had to pass through before seeing the real her. Just little
Erica Monroe from Breathitt, Missouri, living in a shack in the
hills and taking care of her grandmother. Little Erica Monroe,
mother dead and father gone crazy and run off. This was how she
defined herself. She was uncomfortable with thinking about her
insides, like what went on in her head, so she thought of her life
in terms of what surrounded it. This was easier for her. And it was
mostly how she defined those around her, accounts of what she knew
about them. The stuff that
couldn't
change. Thoughts, philosophies, lifestyles – those
were all transcendental things mostly influenced by the
circumstances surrounding a person. She read
Glamor Face
because it seemed like
the editors or whatever were aware of this fleeting quality in
human nature and the only important book she could remember the
name of was the Bible, which she'd never had any interest in
reading. So maybe there was a thirst for something more but she
felt like she needed to know what that something more was before
she'd ever set out to find it. She used to be able to go to Granny
for advice and there was a point in time when Granny would have
encouraged her to leave, to get as far away from these shitty hills
and trees and people as she could. But then Granny had gone scared
and then quiet. Erica couldn't remember the last time she'd heard
her voice. Erica glanced back down at the magazine. Fuck. Maybe her
life was weirdstream. The more she thought about that term, the
more it bothered her. Weird was relative. The mainstream was a
fruit rotting on the inside. Put them together and you got
shit.