METH ~ CRANK and Rotten Teeth
“Piggin and Wiggin’ Out” Combination Convenience Store, Rib Joint, and Asian Fingernail Parlor.
A SHORT STORY FROM NEWT LIVESAY
"SHE’S A FLOATER"
Okay, you stop in the “Piggin and Wiggin’ Out” Combination Convenience Store, Rib Joint, and Asian Fingernail Parlor to pick up a thirty-six-can suitcase of Lite Beer. While there, you strike up a conversation with this smoking-hot, dishwater-bleached blonde and former truck-stop lot-lizard queen who works behind the counter. Your libido jumps when you notice that she doesn’t have any grease burns on her forearms from cooking all that gas-station sushi, corn dogs, and chicken tenders.
She smiles, and you catch the acidic aroma of acetone-induced “crack fumes” that still linger around your dog-pecker-gnat-infested beard. Instantly, your stud-muffin syndrome kicks in, precipitated by the two bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 and the three small crack rocks you inhaled before leaving the house. During her fifteen-minute personal break, you make plans to meet her out behind the convenience store later in the day and fire off a bong.
Heading for your 1983 Toyota Hilux pickup, you flop down in the front seat, squirming slightly to remove the pointed end of a chopstick that had impaled itself in your right butt cheek. The chopstick came with the carryout teriyaki chicken you had for supper two nights ago. You kick it and all the other trash that has collected in the floorboard before gently moving a squashed Little Debbie’s Creme Cake off the center console into the passenger-side seat of the car.
Then you see it. Something lying on the sticky, beer-stained center console catches your eye. It’s half of a small white pill, and a big smile comes across your face when you realize it is one-third of a 10 mg hydrocodone. After pulling a couple of unknown hairs off the surface of the pill, you lay it on the chromed lid of the ashtray. Using the metal edge of your Skoal tobacco can, you pulverize the pill into a fairly fine consistency and bend close as your nose makes a snorting sound like a Hoover vacuum cleaner plugged with a giant hairball. Moistening your finger, you wipe the residue off the lid and rub it under your tongue. The rush blurs your eyes, and everything looks like you’re seeing it through a soda straw, so you suck down a can of warm beer to clear your vision and to get the bitter taste out of your mouth. Most of the beer makes it down your throat.
With your head nearly clear, the only sound you hear is something like a fruit jar with cicadas buzzing inside. You can see all ten of your fingers, so you decide to head out on the two-lane blacktop toward the house.
Ya suck down three or four more warm beers while driving and begin fighting the bar ditches as you drive back to your double-wide house trailer. Your mind is running a hundred miles an hour, and all you think about is taking some hits with the blonde at the store later in the day. You sink lower into the seat, one eyelid shut, and begin to drool. That is when it hits you, and damn, you come fully awake. You realize your old lady is living at the double-wide, and she doesn’t take kindly to you hanging out with other old hides. You need to get her out of your hair since she is cramping your style. Suddenly, a voice whispers inside your pea-vine head.
Now, how do you hide a five-foot-two-inch fat girl who tips the scales at two hundred and sixty pounds? Your mind is racing while it bounces off the sides of your cranium. All the time, in the background, a film is running of the skinny blonde with a pocket full of rocks and the keys to the Brown Derby depository.
So the question is, “How do you get rid of the little fat girl at home?” You know if you shoot her, there will be “stuff” everywhere, and after watching one hundred and eleven hours of CSI Miami and over three hundred hours of COPS, you know all about good “stuff.” You just need her to disappear and not come back, and that is when it comes to you: you’ll take her fishing. She likes to fish, and she won’t think anything of you coming home with a bucket of stink bait and wanting to go a-fishin’. You tell everyone that she left a note saying she was going to see her sister down in Little Rock, and no one will know the difference. All you need to “figure out” is how to sink her and keep her down until nature does its work.
Keeping a body down depends upon several factors, beginning with, but not limited to, water temperature. Is the water moving, such as in a river or a stream? Is the water still, such as would be found in a pond or lake? Is it shallow, like in a slough or the slow-moving backwaters off a naturally meandering stream? Is the water warm or cold? Is the water fresh, such as in a river, or saline or brackish, such as in ocean inlets, etc.? Water that is sufficiently warm will cause a body to decompose and float much quicker than cold water, which may prevent decomposition in a corpse and keep the body from floating.
How do you get her in the water? You hit her on the head and dump her overboard. No! If you do that, there will be a big bump on her head. Remember episode number … ah … something or other where the CSI determined that the guy was killed and thrown in the lake?
Hell, she can’t swim, so why not just throw her out of the boat into the water? You row off, and she thrashes around like a wounded whale and then sinks once she takes in a good lungful of water. She will begin to rot away at the moment of death. The correct term is “decompose.” The decay of the flesh will generate gases that will be trapped in her body, causing it to float. Seeing how a body is normally heavier than the water, she should get a good lungful of swamp water and sink like a rock. Even if she does sink, after a few days in the warm water, the decomposition will generate enough gas to float her to the top. You’ll have to come back down to the swamp and find her floating corpse and shoot her with your twenty-two rifle a few times, and she might just up and explode like a bloated cow when stuck with a sharp stick and sink.
Then again, maybe when she comes to the surface, the birds, some bugs, snapping turtles, alligators, or some other scavengers will be a-eatin’ on her. Once the critters chew a hole in her, it will cause the bloating body to lose the gases (hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and methane) that are building up, and she will fall apart and sink to the bottom. The only other way to keep her from floatin’ like a dead carp is to wrap her real tight with chicken-house wire and wait for her to grow. In only about three days in the swamp, she’ll start swelling from the gases, and the wire will cut her up into dozens of six-sided plugs, and she will sink like a rock.
You can see her now, floating in the lagoon like a grazing manatee, head, arms, and legs all hanging down beneath her. Then it is off to the “Piggin and Wiggin’ Out” Combination Convenience Store, Rib Joint, and Asian Fingernail Parlor, where that hot, dishwater-bleached blonde and former truck-stop lot-lizard queen works.
You dream of the moments you can share with her and the half dozen crack rocks she has in her pocket.
Life is good.
~Newt Livesay
All rights reserved by Newt Livesay ©2023.
Disclaimer: This blog does not suggest that anyone should do anything that would be considered illegal. I do not even know why I should have to write this, but my lawyer said the world is made up of malcontents looking for a way to sue someone. Anyway, this is a blog for people who want to know and enjoy a funny horror story. It pokes fun at a very serious problem. If you do not understand this fully or, for any reason, you think this gives you the right to commit an illegal act or hurt someone, then you’re one sick bastard, and you should seek competent mental counseling immediately.
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