Andrew Post was born in Erie, PA in 1984. He lives in Minnesota with his wife and two dogs. He is currently seeking representation for his first novel. Besides writing, he enjoys wandering aimlessly around department stores and frequenting the local movie theater as much as his bank account can withstand. You can read his exhaustively dorky blog at: http://andrewpost.blogspot.com/ He also offers a free, serialized novel at http://issuu.com/andrewpost/docs/onebyone_001.

Two Stories (August 20, 2010. Issue 20.)

Harold

A trilling rammed itself into his dreams, a rusty brown harpoon jousted through the soft aqua membrane of his sleep. The phone was ringing incessantly, loudly. He picked it up and without opening his eyes, said, “Yes?”

“Good morning. This is your—six,” pause, “thirty—wake up call. The temperature in Minneapolis is currently—two degrees. Have a great day and thank you for staying at Radisson Inn and Suites.”

He hung up and laid there for another series of minutes, staring at the ceiling and letting his vision slowly accumulate clarity and focus. The cheap plastic vertical blinds clicked and clacked together in the soft breeze of the heating and air conditioning unit mounted to the wall beneath it. Warm air stirred the otherwise stale, vacuum-scented oxygen that occupied the hotel room with him. Silence, utter silence.

He opened his eyes, wide, toward the textured ceiling with the strand of dust or cobwebs dangling there, dancing in the heater’s soft breath. He didn’t dare move. He closed his eyes and thought about Harold.

But as soon as he whirled his legs around to the edge of the bed and stood, there it was—that terrible chomping. A pain so precise and sharp that it made his toes curl, the crown of his head go numb. The sensation wasn’t anything less than what he imagined dirty cops suffered nightly at the local jailhouse during shower time. To him, it felt like he was sitting on a combat knife, the serrated edge chewing a jagged and messy divot into his insides with each and every false movement.

He tried to remain standing to see if that would help. He clicked on the "Today Show" and paced the well-tread carpet the color of vomit. The pacing didn’t help. He stood before the TV set, with its color all fucked up and making Anne Curry look like she had the skin tone of an Oompa-Loompa or that she had been sent on an in-the-field story that was to be covered in the glowing neon green heart of Chernobyl. He imagined his asshole was being treated in much the same way, like it had taken a trip to Chernobyl or had been injected with a healthy dose of Agent Orange. His ass felt mutated, like it was developing a second head. He imagined going over to the full-length mirror and bending down before it, looking coyly through his legs at his own rear end and seeing something like that freak that came out of that guy’s stomach in *Total Recall* staring back at him, pleading to be taken out of its misery. “Please, end my suffering…” it would agonize with shaking fists. “Kill me, please!”

“Mother fucker,” he groaned, doubling forward, taking handfuls of the slippery comforter in his balled fists, gritting his teeth and clenching his eyes closed so tightly it made the colors of the insides of his lids go purple, then green. Purple, then green.

It was something that he had inherited from his father, the hemorrhoids. He wasn’t fortunate enough to have them be interior ones, which were still painful but altogether easier to treat. They were trapped inside the rectum wall and couldn’t really grow any larger than their environment allowed. They were doable, and on a few occasions, our protagonist had suffered them after double feature movie events at his favorite theater back in Phoenix and epic drives to and from his in-laws in Vegas. But once in a great while, after a lengthy flight with lots of delays and stand-stills for hours at a time on the runway, the little bastard on the outside of his asshole would crop up. He would usually discover them while innocently bathing himself in the hotel he was to spend, sometimes, up to a week in. And there it’d be, under the soft pad of his fingertip, a tiny hemisphere of flesh that was easily manipulated and painless, as if his butt was blowing a bubble. And given a few days of sitting in on long and drawn out conferences, meetings, brain storming sessions, the thing would become angry—as if it were being ignored and did not appreciate it in the least. He would sit there and listen to his peers in their expensive suits point at things projected onto the screen, all of them sitting around a bland gray conference table in the dark, maybe a bottled water slowly, silently, being crushed in his fist under the torment that the being in his trousers was causing him. Whenever one of these exterior hemorrhoids would spring forth from his rectum to delight him in a rainbow of excruciations, he would think to himself, “Harold’s back. The son of a bitch is back.”

Harold was also the name of a completely unpleasant young man who was a true pain in the ass. He was our protagonist’s manager at the little mom and pop grocery store that served as his first job and no matter what our protagonist did, Harold was there to make sure to comment upon it in the harshest of ways. “Dude, that looks like shit. Do it again.” Whether it be stack cans of refried beans into a perfect pyramid time and time again or simply voiding the parking lot of discarded cigarette butts in the early gray-skied summer mornings, Harold was there to survey his work, put his hands on his slender hips and with his blue apron flapping before him like a tribal loincloth, would say in his most just-pretend-I’m-the-alpha-male-just-for-today voice, “What the fuck is wrong with you, dude? Are you retarded or something?”

And so from that point on, all through his young twenties, his tumultuous thirties, his early forties and today, our protagonist referred to his exterior hemorrhoids as Harold. And despite having only had to endure only a small handful of them during the course of his life, each and every one was deserving of the title. It was only fitting, our protagonist thought. One pain in the ass named Harold existed in the world. Might as well be consistent and name all of the pains in all the asses Harold.

He decided to inspect himself, something he had never done before when Harold came to visit. He thought it might be a good idea to take a look at the enemy and really see what he was working with, what he was up against. He had a full twelve hours before his flight back to Phoenix and he knew that with the weather, the icy conditions of the runways and the possible onslaught of a blizzard rumored, he was going to be spending a lot more time on the plane than the ticket indicated. And so over to the mirror he went, hitching down his boxers and dropped his head down between his knees and peered into his reflection, the swashing sensation of blood running to the top of his head making his cheeks grow red. He looked at himself there, avoiding eye contact with himself, as he surveyed his nether-regions. There he was, good old Harold, developed into a tangerine-sized mass of bright red flesh laced all about with dark throbbing veins. It looked like a third testicle, clinging there, sprung out of the side of his poor, poor asshole. It was the largest one he had ever had. He blamed the coach seats on the flight in, the terrible, over-priced food he had gotten in the airport that caused him to have to heave whilst on the shitter like a one-armed sailor pulling an two-ton anchor up out of the gripping sea floor. Harold stared back at him with an eyeless snarl, comfortably throbbing there, nestled between the two pale boulders of our protagonist’s butt cheeks.

In the past, whenever Harold would pay our protagonist a visit, he would resort to the usual methods—the Preparation-H, the laxatives, the inflatable donuts that look like a lifesaving ring for a squirrel, the muscle relaxers procured over the counter in the form of Midol. And none of it was really worth the money or the suffering of having to get in and out of the car to find all of the things at various stores. In the end, it just took time and having to endure it until Harold decided to throw in the towel, disappointed he had not killed his resolute host, and retire back into the darkness of our protagonist’s bowels waving the white flag smugly over his shoulder.

But our protagonist had a flight ahead of him, a long one, from Minneapolis International Airport to Chicago O’Hare and then to Dallas Forth Worth for a two-hour layover and then finally to Phoenix . It was the best that his company could spring for. “Take one for the team, bud. Tough times and all of that have made us have to put the kibosh on the first class flights. So, eat your nuts or pretzels or tortilla chips or whatever they give to the coach peasants and "enjoy" it. The next flight out to Minneapolis will have my ass in the seat, you have my word,” his boss and surrogate father, Alan, said with flashing white dentures.

He opened his garment bag and discovered that he had brought no casual clothes besides his pajama bottoms, which were for sleeping in. He had a t-shirt, but the thing was ratty and only meant for wearing to the gym. He sniffed it; it stunk of onions. So, the only thing he had to wear on his planned trip down to the drug store was his Calvin Klein pinstriped. Fine, he thought. But I’m not wearing a tie. I’m just going to god damn Walgreens.

With each step issuing a gnashing of Harold’s pointed teeth, our protagonist made his way up and down each isle in the brightly lit convenience store that stood as the Mecca for all things pharmaceutical, impulse-worthy and holiday related. Thanksgiving was the following day and since no one decorated for that besides maybe a cartoon turkey with a pilgrim hat stitched into a banner or flag meant to be raised outside of suburban and low-income trailer park homes, the décor of isle five was nothing but Christmas. Snow globes, Snuggies in Christmas red or Christmas green, twinkle lights, light-up snowmen and paunchy leering fat men in ill-fitting red and white. Our protagonist was in no mood for canned music spewing from each device that caught his presence with an electronic eye and sprang to life in robotic dances and gyrations. He was gritting his teeth, his ass hurt, and he was looking for a remedy. God bless it, there needs to be an isle called Quick Fixes, he snarled internally.

At the end of isle seven, next to where the reading glasses in varying styles stood, a magical white box shone brightly to our protagonist. It was something that caught his eye almost immediately. A soothing white square standing boldly upon the edge of the shelf, and on its face read in swirling, elegant green lettering: "New Age Remedies" and beneath that, "For Hemorrhoid Relief". Our protagonist lurched with a faint hitch in his giddy-up, reaching out his hand and plucking the package from the shelf and feeling surprised at its unexpected weight. He flipped the box over and saw that the entire thing included a CD, a book, a soothing gel mask, some aromatherapy candles, bath salts. These were things my wife would undoubtedly have, our protagonist thought, figuring that if he had somehow opted out of the Minneapolis trip, that he might be able to perform his own ass-exorcising séance in the comfort of his own bathroom, with his own assembled goodies. He flipped the box back over to see the image of the nude woman, her bits submerged in a mass of bubbles, a pregnant belly rising up like the humped back of Nessie reaching up out of the water. The woman in the picture, with her soothing gel mask and the lavender-scented candle burning on the soap ledge of the tub looked comfortable and devoid of Harolds. He didn’t bother checking the price tag, instead, he took the item to the register and took out his company’s credit card.

With snow-wet shoes squeaking beneath each agonized-laden step, he approached the register and mumbled to myself, “You owe me this one, Alan. You really fucking do.” He considered his boss, in super great shape at sixty-five, snowboarding with his grandchildren down the side of Mount Everest or Fuji or wherever the daffy old tomcat went to clear his mind.

“Do you want the receipt with you or in the bag?” the smiling clerk asked pleasantly. She had the tiny slip of white paper in between finger and thumb, poised over the bag of containing the New Age Remedies combo pack. Our protagonist thought again of Alan, going over the Minnesota trip’s accounting paperwork just to see if his employee ordered porn or not, maybe put down a shiatsu happy-ending massage on the company credit card. Even though the transaction was already made, and the information was being

jettisoned back to Phoenix , to his offices, to the accounting department, our protagonist didn’t care. But he thought of that slip of paper somehow making its way into his baggage, onto the TSA bag check station and someone discovering that and flaunting it and reading it aloud for all of the other pugilistic, failed cops and the strangers around him also in line with no belts or shoes on, could all gather in one big ha-ha-ha at the guy with butthole problems.

“No receipt,” our protagonist grinned. If his boss gave him any shit, all he would have to do was remind him of the time that he walked in on him and his twenty-one-year-old secretary going at it in the custodian’s closet. How surprised they both looked. How our protagonist went back to the Christmas party and offered Alan’s wife a refill on her Pinot without her having to ask for it.

Back at the hotel, our protagonist felt a sudden surge of readiness to do whatever it took to cure himself of the jagged fire poker that was jabbing itself into him with every step, breath, thought. He disrobed and left his suit in a heap on the floor and pulled his laptop from its bag and brought it and the New Age Remedies box into the bathroom with him, closing and locking the door behind himself.

He set the laptop onto the lid of the toilet and let it warm up after its slumber within his carry-on bag. He tore open the corner of the New Age Remedies box with his teeth and with excited, trembling hands, placed the plain white disk into the drive and slammed it home. He climbed into the tub and poured the pre-measured packet of bath salts onto the tub floor and began running hot water. Easing himself into a supine position, he felt

Harold give a good tug and a twist and our protagonist winced, swore under his breath and let the music player program on his laptop automatically start playing Track One of the New Age Remedies.

“Hello,” a soothing voice said, tender and female, with the faintest, faded hint of an Irish brogue. “And welcome to New Age Remedies for hemorrhoid relief.” A twinkle of wind chimes sounded. “First, get comfortable. This process works best when in a warm bath. Take time to fill the tub first if you like. Add the soothing bath salts for a more enveloping experience. Light the lavender-scented candle if you wish. Now, let yourself ease into the water—*slowly*.”

It sounded like bad phone sex. The woman spoke at such a crawl that our protagonist, already half-submerged in the running bathwater, found himself growing bored. He had the gel mask on his face and catching himself in the mirror, he immediately thought of Robin from the old Adam West Batman series. A naked, hairy-chested, middle-aged Robin that wore his Domino mask into the bath. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the slick plastic wall of the shower, trying to push any negative thoughts from his mind. A nude Dynamic Duo in the tub together being the number one.

A soft gust of spring wind through weeping willows. “Now, close your eyes. Take a deep breath in, and release it. Deep breath in, and re-lease it…” the tinny speakers of his laptop urged. Our protagonist listened, closed his eyes and took a breath in and re-leased it. He began picturing what the mildly Irish-sounding girl who did the recording for the CD looked like.  He pictured buxom, blond wavy hair, maybe a set of tits that could grip his dick between them and—No, no. That’s not being relaxed. Deep breath in, and re-lease it.

A burbling creek, complete with crickets and bullfrogs making that plunk sound. “Picture your anus as a perfect circle. Imagine it in your mind. Picture it as a perfect blue circle, with no imperfections or abnormalities. Just a perfectly round, perfectly blue perfect circle. Imagine it contracting, narrowing, becoming half its size. Now picture it

expanding, opening up, as if the whole world could pass through there. Closed. Open. Closed…Open. Now, with your finger, gently feel the affected area. Run your finger over it gently, as you would stroke your newborn child. Do not press too hard. You do not want to hurt the baby, after all.”

He did so, running his hand under the water and making the bend around his thigh and hooking around to Harold, in his home. Immediately, as his finger made contact with the tangerine-sized knot of puffed flesh, a surprising jolt comparable to a bee sting snapped at him. His hand retreated and he could feel that his entire body had tensed up from the pain, his stomach felt cramped, his chest felt tight. The Irish woman speaking through his computer, as if she were some kind of feminine version of HAL guiding Dave through a manatee birth from the comfort of the toilet lid, issued, “Carefully feel this area. Become associated with it. It is your anus, it is part of you, become friends with it.”

Our protagonist couldn’t resist himself. “Pleased to meet you. Heard you’re a real asshole.” He laughed once and Harold did not greet this with pleasure, but another thunderbolt of nerve-deadening pain.

A waterfall, complete with the hissing of gentle mist. “Guide the affected area as you meditate. Imagine again the perfectly blue perfect circle, open—and closed. Open. And closed. Let the affected area drain, feel yourself unclenching. Feel the blood in the affected area flow out, as naturally as a river. Imagine the blue circle, open and closed. As the circle closes, breathe in. As the circle slowly opens, slowly—breathe out.”

It was quite miraculous. Under the guiding tip of his index finger, he could feel Harold shrinking. With each deep breath in and every exhale, the bastard shrunk ever so slightly. A mild jump of excitement shot through our protagonist at this moment and—*wham*—Harold shot back up to his regular size. He had gone from a tangerine down to the size of a pea—and then back again in less than a second.

With wet hands, he reached from the tub to the toilet and clicked the Back button on the laptop’s media player function keys. The stupid waterfall, with its god damn mist, started again. He allowed himself back into the fizzing water and began his breathing exercises. He guided with his finger, as if he were doing a reverse birth. He let the soothing gel mask soothe his gel or his mask or whatever it was supposed to be doing. He put both feet up on the wall of the tub as if he were in the stirrups at the gynecologist’s office. He guided with his finger, pleading in his mind for Harold to just go the fuck away. Plague me when I’m back in Phoenix , he begged. And each time, he’d shrink down to the size of a pea, a speck, just a faintly raised ridge on the right side of his anus. And then, in a flood, he’d shoot right back up to full size in all of his unholy glory when our protagonist allowed himself just one short-lived moment of victory.

Out of the tub he stood, blasted with frustration. He waddled the floor of the hotel room. He tried sitting, he tried standing. He had spent the entire morning and the beginning of the afternoon on this attempt to let himself un-*fucking*-clench and it just wasn’t working. He took the lavender-scented candle and fastball pitched it at the pillow where it made a heavy, muffled thud. He took the soothing gel mask and threw it at the window, colliding with the glass in a hearty slap, where it temporarily hung, and gave a sort thud when it hit the floor. He took the CD from his laptop and cracked it in two, tossing both reflective semicircles behind the minifridge. He looked at the digital numbers upon the alarm clock, seeing with the purest and blackest of frustration coupled with the cold thrill of anxiety that he now only had eight hours before his evening flight back to Phoenix . Most likely, with the news crawl going across the bottom of Rachel Ray displaying word of the worst blizzard in recent years on fast approach, he wouldn’t make it home until noon or later the following day. Delayed departures, bumpy turbulent flights, sleepless nights at the gate waiting for the next available take-off, listening ever intently for gate changes, delays, reschedules, reroutes. It was almost Thanksgiving and if he weren’t home for it, his wife would surely think that he was cheating on her with some floozy from Minnesota . And if he was going to have to endure all of that, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be the worst hemorrhoid of his life clinging to his asshole, causing him the most brilliant version of hell on earth he could ever imagine besides being drawn and quartered or maybe being castrated and then dunked in a vat of lemon juice. But those seemed like a day of mind bending sex compared to having Harold, hour after hour, sponge our protagonist’s insanity from his very skull.

Getting redressed in his now-wrinkled Calvin Klein pinstriped, our protagonist thought back on all of the other visitations he had been blessed with by Harold the Hemorrhoid over the years. A week after his return from Cancun for spring break back in college. Not only had he ignored the repeated warnings about drinking Mexican water, but he had Harold to keep him company all through that shit-spraying week at the dorm. And again, after a long ride to Abby’s folks’ place out in Vegas. She had opted to drive, and he rode passenger, sitting in a weird way for a majority of the trip. Once there, he realized that Harold was cropping up on him, occupying the back of his pants like an unwanted party of German soldiers with Joe Boxers playing the part of France . For an entire twelve days they were in Vegas, our protagonist caught in a perpetual state of between standing up and sitting down. He was forever fidgeting and squirming. Everything hurt. The visit sucked. He was curt and withdrawn from everyone, not even speaking the source of his agony to his wife. Afterward, when they had returned home, Abby’s mother phoned and discreetly asked if her new son-in-law had that Michael J. Fox disease.

Every time he thought of Harold the Hemorrhoid, he thought of Harold the Manager from all those days back and how much of a heinous prick that guy had been. He couldn’t help but picture that pizza-faced mouth breather’s face inside his ass, commenting on every shortcoming our protagonist had ever dared to perpetrate. He pictured Harold the Manager’s lips being two sizes too big for his face, bruised and chapped, flapping at him and telling him that he missed a spot on the front window of the store and that he needed to go out there again and do all of them, and no, he didn’t care how hot it was out there—all from inside the seat of our protagonist’s pants. “Your dick is small, I can see it from here. Maybe you should consider tugging it on once in a while, stretching it out,” Harold the Hemorrhoid suggested as our protagonist got into the rental car and took off at a breakneck speed back en route for a return trip to Walgreens. “Maybe you should consider a new line of work because that presentation you gave on the importance of work-place safety fucking sucked. Made me want to take a bath with that projector you were using, fucking frying my brains out,” Harold the Hemorrhoid remarked glibly. Our protagonist turned the zippy little rental car into the Walgreens parking lot and with a crunch of Minnesota ice beneath the tires, parked in the handicapped spot and with shirt blaring open against the frigid wind, pushed through the automatic doors and heard Christmas music. “Your wife is probably fucking someone else. God only knows how she acted at that one party you went to. She got all sloppy and was hanging on some guy she went to school with. Imagine him, beefy farmer guy, sticking the pork to your woman—and her, loving it, not feeling the least bit of shame about it. You dumb fuck,” Harold the Hemorrhoid recommended.

Seven and a half hours to be at the airport. Snow falling from the sky, not in drifting, softly tumbling baby chick feathers snowflakes, but actual gathered clumps of snow, falling out of the sky like a roll of attic insulation had been struck by a surface-to-air missile a few hundred feet off the ground. Clumps of it, literal clumps of it. And our protagonist could see it as he stood in line with his gathered things, his shirt hanging open, the smell of lavender and bath salts clinging to his still-moist skin. The intruder in his pants roaring, “Where do you see yourself in five years, shit-dick? Do you see yourself being promoted, maybe getting that HD TV you’ve had your eye on, maybe finally getting up the nerve to ask your wife to swallow, maybe sometime in there get that addition put on the house. Maybe sometime in the next five years you’ll get the nerve to ask your fucking son about his limp wrist feminine take-it-up-the-butt ways that he doesn’t want to share with you. You’re useless. I fucking hate you and I hope and pray on bleeding fucking knees to the darkest of gods that you fucking die.”

“Back again?” the cashier smiled. Our protagonist said nothing. Upon the counter, he laid down a double armful of items. Among them: hydrogen peroxide, latex gloves, cotton balls, two rolls of paper towels, one roll of medical tape, a roll of gauze, a six pack of white boxer shorts, and an Exact-O knife.

“No receipt.”

*

Something soothed her, something about the whole scene. The air conditioner spraying flecks of super chilled droplets, like it was blowing a raspberry at the whole, dark place. She sat on the couch, wedged neatly into one corner. She felt like she was fortified, sitting there, on her birthday no less, smelling blood. Locked in and determined to get an indelible drunk burrowed so deep into her mind that it would take her a week to feel normal again. It would be one great night, followed by a half week of misery—so the night had better had good plans for her. She sat there, watching daytime TV, listening to the air conditioner spit, waiting for him to come home. She wanted him to get his dues, to get what was coming to him, so she could move on with her life, to bigger and better things. She was young still, only turning twenty-five that fateful morning, and she wanted to get started, get him out of the way and just fucking get started.

She was dejected, rejected, used up and unwanted. Everything that would make any other woman crumble, crack and fall apart. But not Ashleigh, no—not Ashleigh. She was determined to make lemonade out of lemons, coleslaw out of cabbage, water out of wine. Something like that. Either way, she had a picnic planned and she was sure as hell going to be  RSVP “fuck yes.” So she wasn’t good with metaphors. She shrugged to herself, eyes at half-mast, chuckling all alone at her own inner monologue. Where would she be in six months? Hell, where would she be in just one month? Three weeks? Two weeks? A handful of days? Tobey had dropped her of all the things she knew, given a firm boot-to-buttocks kick out the front door, so to speak. Truth was, he had the maid pack her things, what things she had brought to his place, a blanket for when they watched TV together, her balance ball, some candles, her cell phone charger. She found all of these things packed up in a nice little box, set by the front door, with a note attached to the handle of the umbrella that stuck highest from the box among her things.

Ashleigh,

Don’t take this as personal, but it’s over. And it has been for quite a while. I love you all the same, but I just can’t manage you and my career at the same time. The firm is taking off and I want to make partner by the end of the quarter. I hope you understand. I mean, we were only seeing one another for eight months—so it’s not like we were married. You were always a tough cookie, you’ll probably read this,  shrug, walk out the door and land a new guy by the end of the week. Listen, I like you and I want us to remain firm friends. And if you ever need any legal advice or if you need me to get you out of a speeding ticket (which I’m sure you’ll end up getting in that new car of yours) be sure to keep my number. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this break-up, be sure to call me afteroffice hours.

Yours,

Tobey F. Wellington III

She could hardly believe it. She read the note three times just to look for any hint of a joke between the lines, any iota of an inkling of a fraction of a hint that he was just joking. But that’s the way he was, straight to the jugular, here’s how it is, take it or leave it, call me if you have the audacity and you want to hear me repeat the note, orally, for you. If the maid had been around, she certainly would’ve asked her if she was in on it or if there was some kind of hint that she could give her. But she wasn’t, Lauren the Maid had left hours ago. And there she was, in his apartment, with her box of shit sitting next to the front door like it was a reminder to take out the recycling. That narcissistic motherfucker, Ashleigh thought, still in her pajamas and her stomach rumbling with the ache for breakfast. She decided to take some time to make up her mind about what she should do next, preparing the espresso and toast, mulling it all over. She supposed that he was right, that they hadn’t really been so close in the last few months of their relationship. Things had gotten cold with them fast, scarily so. When they first met, it was sex every night, even sometimes during the middle of the day when they could find a parking garage that didn’t have security cameras. And just like that, one night, he rolled over and said he wasn’t feeling up to it, that he had a lot on his mind and that he wasn’t feeling particularly well. “Big meeting tomorrow, kid,” he said. “Plus, I think I had some bad sushi today,” he moaned, grabbing his muscle-quilted stomach for effect. Her knew her well enough to bring up the subject of bodily dysfunction to scare her from pursuing the topic of sex any further. She had confided in him that her biggest fear in the world was getting vomited on and he often used this to his advantage, whether employing some torturous gag or, now, as a scapegoat to get out of sex. I should’ve known, Ashleigh thought, chewing her toast slathered with fat-free margarine and sipping her scalding espresso carefully.

“Motherfucker,” she grunted to herself, shaking her head, desperately wishing she hadn’t quit smoking for him because in that very moment, perched atop a kitchen stool, staring at his perfect collection of kitchen knives from IKEA, she could’ve really used a cigarette. She got dressed in the clothes she had been wearing the night before, skinny jeans, a pair of ballet flats and a frilly blouse that showed off her massive rack that, yes, Tobey had funded. She looked at herself in the mirror, her clothes wrinkled and her hair flat on one side and her makeup smeared. She shrugged, pacing back into the kitchen when the buzzer rang on the wall. She had existed in the orbit of Tobey for so long that answering his buzzer was second nature and while her mind was busy charting the descent and inevitable flaming wreckage that their relationship had taken, she pressed the button and answered the intercom with an absent, “Huh?” before she realized what she had done.

“Hey, Lauren, can you let me up?” the very-feminine voice asked on the other end, the sound of the midmorning traffic screeching, honking, chattering behind her. Ashleigh stared at the slats of the intercom, the speaker beneath, concealed by its mesh netting of fabric. The news it had just delivered, the voice it just emitted—was not Tobey’s secretary, was not Tobey’s mother, was not Tobey’s sister, was definitely not Tobey’s deceased grandmother. Who the fuck could this be?

Ashleigh pressed the intercom button and said in the sugary-sweet tone that Lauren the maid had always spoken in, a Long Island accent topped with a heavy dollop of motherly sweetness. “Oh, hello dear, come right on up.” She released the button and said, to herself, “Wait—what the fuck am I doing?”

Ashleigh panicked, dancing in place and waving her hands around, looking for a good lampshade to stick on her head to pretend to be a lamp, a harness to latch around her middle to rappel down the side of the building, a jetpack to strap to her back and launch herself back to Midtown where she belonged. Anything as a means to escape. She ran back to the bedroom, nearly breaking her ankle with the quick corners she had to make in the mazelike modern-architecture layout of Tobey’s ultra chic apartment. She was gathering her things, shoving her brush and phone and contact lens case into her bag, trying to make a hasty escape. But then she stopped. She just froze, her hand still clutching the blue and white contact lens case in one hand, her electric toothbrush in the other. Who was this woman that was steadily on her way up to the thirty-third floor to see Tobey, about something, on the same day that Ashleigh was being booted?

She turned and paced back into the kitchen at a regular pace, navigating the twists and turns of the hallway expertly, with grace and a slow I-don’t-rush-for-anyone-with-less-money-than-me walk. She went to the kitchen counter and landed her gaze upon Tobey’s new IKEA knives. One butcher knife, a pair of kitchen shears, a standard kitchen knife, a pairing knife, a boning knife and six cruelly-edged steak knives. She slid one from the block and listened to the blade sing as she did, a sharp shhhing, slowly drawing it from its matte black holder. She held the knife in one hand, with a loose grip, feeling the weight of the butcher knife. It’s big square blade, the hole in the one corner for hanging it up, the blade unmarred by the fact that Tobey never cooked, Lauren did, and she took care of her employer’s stuff. Kept the knives sharp and without dings and didn’t use them to cut open packages or CD cases like Tobey did. Who was this bitch, Ashleigh thought to herself, recalling the movie Psycho and scads of others horror movies that featured a knife as a means of dispatch. She considered going down to Tobey’s closet and getting the hockey mask from his gym bag and donning it, surprising the hell out of this bitch. Maybe she’d even screamed when she jumped out from behind the shower curtain, just to make this girl piss herself even more. And there was no doubt that this was not a woman, standing in the elevator in her DKNY shoes, her Coach bag, her Dolce sunglasses, her god damn fucking manicured nails and her expertly applied makeup by a team of cosmetologists that just waited for her every morning in her bathroom. All of which, Ashleigh was sure, was courtesy of Tobey. He was the kind of smooth fuck that loved to groom a girl into a woman, build them into the perfect Barbie bimbo that would eventually quit her job, become his personal plaything and mid-day fuck buddy, just to have them lose their luster and interestingness, for him to dump them aside. She had seen the woman before her go, some redhead named Chloe. Tall, busy Chloe, tromping down the front steps of Tobey’s building, looking quite rejected, carrying a box of her stuff like she had just received her walking papers from a really great job that meant she was going to have to go live with her parents in god-forsaken New Jersey. Ashleigh was never quite sure, but she had her suspicions, that Chloe, as her name tag read, had been the same Chloe that Tobey had proposed to. Well, before she “became a crazy bitch,” according to Tobey. And by becoming a crazy bitch, Ashleigh supposed, must mean that she gained a little extra weight from all the sitting-around-waiting-to-be-fucked that Tobey assigned her life to be after taking her under his wing. Maybe she told the same story about her sister’s best friend too many times. Maybe she even forgot to shave her legs once or maybe she had a zit on her butt, just once. Whatever it was, she had gone—just like Ashleigh was being nonchalantly hinted to do.

The girl knocked on the door, two little taps. Two little weak taps. Thump…thump. It made Ashleigh’s blood boil, just hearing how lazy this girl was, that she couldn’t even give the door a good thumping when she wanted to be heard. She was robably the type that sat around all afternoon, doing nothing, perhaps going to the gym to keep her figure, perhaps meeting friends to buy things with her father’s credit card, making appearances at movie premieres and basically be a social leech that Tobey, for a period, was more than happy to provide the vein for.

She withdrew the knife, confirming to herself that yes, this girl was going to die. She was going to die, and whenever Tobey came back home for his prescheduled fuck-buddy session, he too, was going to die. But Ashleigh never considered herself a killer, nor did she think that she was ever going to kill anyone. She had grown up a city girl by regular parents that owned a tailor shop in Queens . Just a regular life, school, summer vacations, boys and concerts, college and beer, job in Manhattan, lunch breaks and coffee with friends, cigarettes and drinks at the club, sex with men, lunch with men, dinner with men, living together with men, breakups with men and then sex with another man, etc. The regular life, Christmas at home, Halloween in the Bronx with her friend Julie, every year pretty much the same until she hit twenty-five, and she knew that then, she’d have to settle down, land a guy while she was still pretty and still owned decent legs. She had a career, she had gone to college, she had lived a life. Now, it was time to settle down, find a guy. Find a "good" guy. Get married, have babies, follow the pattern that life has decreed for generations and generations before her. So what if it wasn’t original, she’d make up for all of that with a memoir she planned on starting to write when she hit fifty. "Ashleigh Hatcher: The Makings of Regularity."

But here it was, her life was about to take a drastic, hard left turn. She was about to murder someone. She was about to end someone’s life. Someone’s grand daughter that enjoyed her month-long stays in the summer. Someone’s daughter, who they saw go off to the big bad NYC to chase a fashion photographer dream. Someone’s friend, who they had grown up alongside since kindergarten, who they shared deepest, darkest secrets with, sat up late at night and stared at the popcorn ceiling with tired eyes, whispering to not wake the parents, and shared dreams of what it would be like, to one day, be an adult. Here she was, tapping again. Thump…thump. Followed by, “Come on, Lauren, it’s really cold out here in the hall. Let me in.” Here she was, existing, plodding along, making plans, breathing and living and just generally "being". And then here was Ashleigh, knife in hand, approaching the door, considering the fact that she was about to mess all of that up for this girl. All future lunch dates, cancelled. The tickets she had for the Beyonce show this weekend? Might as well sell them on eBay now. The overloaded credit cards? Have daddy pay for that. The hair appointment at the first of every month? Might as well pencil her out, she’s not going to make it. There they were, two trains set loose on their tracks on opposite ends of the universe, chugging along, day and night, the scenery changing every second, moving and moving and moving—to this one moment, standing there, seeing on either horizons, as the bodies moved, toward one another, blind to the fact that it would be today, that day, right then, within seconds—the big moment, the freeze-frame millisecond that would change everything. The tracks would be changed, forever altered, shot off into different directions. Of course, for one, the tracks would end right then and there. But for Ashleigh’s track, well, who knows where it went. But she hoped that it would aim her directly at Tobey, so that another fateful millisecond could occur. Yes, she decided, hand on knob, knife in hand, that Tobey would also meet his fateful millisecond. She had set her track, she was loading the coal, blowing the horn, the imminent moment approaches.

Ashleigh pulled the door open and the girl stood close to six feet tall. Brown hair, curly, hanging about her olive skinned face, her perfect almond eyes, her puckered lips, her begging mouth, her perfect dimpled chin, the slide and elegant flow of her neck that led the eyes down, down, down, into the cavernous space between her giant breasts. Her clothes, perfect, fashionable to the second, the accessories tasteful and reserved and just as up to the minute in-fashion. She was the idyllic Italian beauty, the knock out that Ashleigh had strived to be, but as Tobey had obviously decided, she had failed.

"Who the fuck are you?” the girl snapped, closing her phone with a pop. Ashleigh could muster nothing else but a lunge forward, sliding the knife with ease into the girl’s front, high on her stomach. She felt the blade hit bone, resist temporarily, and then push through, slipping between ribs. The girl made a terrible gasp, tried to scream, but her face twisted into pain. Ashleigh had hit a lung, and the girl was in too much pain to take another breath. She pulled the girl into the apartment and slammed the door behind her, keeping the blade buried inside of her. They turned together and Ashleigh lowered the girl to the floor. In the process, the girl’s purse overturned and its contents spilled onto the floor with a crash. Ashleigh noted, digging the blade deeper, that the girl used the same hand lotion as her. The same lipstick, even the same brand of birth control. Here was Ashleigh Hatcher, in the future, sculpted and perfect and made smooth, streamline and immaculate. She was stabbing her future self, drawing the blade out, letting the girl take a breath, and then bringing it back down, this time in her throat, that tiny little pit between the collar bones. The girl’s breath stopped, her face spreading out into a look of terror, her mouth open but no sound escaping. Again, Ashleigh brought the blade out and brought it down as fast and as hard as she could—as if she were trying to push not only the knife, but her entire hand and arm through  the girl. It was harder than they made it look in the movies, to puncture not only clothes but the surprising resilience of skin. Each time the knife punched through the girl’s perfectly smooth olive skin, it made a distinct pop when it broke through.

Ashleigh was content with twenty-five stabs, one for each year of her miserable life. She took a step back, seeing that she had gotten a good deal of blood on herself, on her own jeans, on her ballet flats, on her forearms and chest. The room began to fill the smell of the girl’s insides, a coppery, bitter smell. The girl didn’t last long though, she laid there on the foyer and squirmed on the floor, apparently in too much pain to really fidget about too much. A puddle began to spread out beneath her, nearly getting to the carpet. Instinctively, Ashleigh threw down a handful of towels at the edge of the tiled area that represented the foyer, to prevent the eggshell carpet from getting stained. She had killed someone, sure, but it didn’t mean she had to be a monster. And just as she had tossed the paper towels down, sure enough, the girl stopped moving. Her eyes stayed open, staring up, up, up, at the ceiling, at Jesus, at Buddha, at whoever it was that had come down to claim her, to rescue her from her wreckage that her track had brought her to. Her millisecond was over, the moment passed, and her track was altered, moving upward now, or down—depending on how she lived her life, Ashleigh supposed—to whatever fate waited beyond.

After inspecting the girl’s body for any clue as to why she was there, she discovered an orange post-it indicating that she had an appointment, at Tobey’s address, on the thirtieth of October. Ashleigh checked the calendar, seeing that it was the twenty-ninth, leaving a big bloody fingerprint on the day. She looked back at the body, seeing that fate would have it that the girl, whose driver’s license indicated her name to be Tiffany Piazza, would be a disorganized little tart unable to remember the date, and therefore, fuck up her own life someday. Ashleigh chuckled, seeing the cruel irony in the girl’s demise. She felt no guilt for it despite discovering this, there was no doubt that Tobey had been fucking this girl for months, just to see how good of a replacement she’d be, before dumping Ashleigh.

The phone trilled at close to six that afternoon, by that time Ashleigh had showered and changed into some of the clothes she found in her box by the front door. The body remained there on the floor, and she watched the motionless Tiffany as the phone rang and rang. “Are you going to get that, bitch, or should I?” Ashleigh mused with the corpse, unwilling to get up from her comfortable position upon the couch. The answering machine finally picked up, spewing the caller’s voice into the room.

“Hey, babe, just me. I’m sorry,” he laughed, “Just wanted to let you know—"

Ashleigh interrupted the message, shouting, “You hear that over there? He’s calling you babe, must mean that he really, really likes you!”

“---I’m sorry I’m not there yet, I hope that little prank I pulled on you didn’t get you too upset---” Ashleigh froze, sat up straight so fast that she thought she might fall off the couch. Her hands were claws on the arms of the sofa, her feet planted on the floor, her ears listening so hard that it hurt. “---But I would think that the little bit at the end there about only calling when it wasn’t business hours should’ve been a dead giveaway. Anyway, I love you and happy birthday. To make up for the little scare, I hired Tiffany to come by for an hour session with you tomorrow. Enjoy the night, open that bottle of merlot we were saving—I’ll be home soon. Love you, kid. Kisses. Buh-bye now.”

Ashleigh couldn’t believe it. She kept trying to speak, but only little noises, little chirps, would emerge. She slowly turned and looked at Tobey’s dead masseuse laying on her back, legs cocked out to the sides, twenty-five puncture wounds scattered around on her torso. Acupuncture, Ashleigh thought fleetingly, despite knowing that she had just killed someone. Killed someone. Fucking killed someone. She got to her bare feet and padded across the carpet to the barrier of paper towels blocking the pool of impending stain-maker on the foyer’s tiled floor. She knelt down before Tiffany’s giant ball of curly hair.

She couldn’t speak, but the best she could muster was, “Are you okay?” to which Tiffany did not respond. Again, she asked, and again. Each time, her voice breaking even more. She felt the beginning of it, the crumbling, the cracking. What would break any other woman would certainly not break her. But she felt it, the hairline fracture running down the middle of her cemented determination to teach her boyfriend a lesson. And another, and another. Splintering, breaking, shattering. And just like the arch removed of its keystone, the entire mess came down at once. She rolled into a ball next to Tiffany, pleading for her to take one breath, to bat an eye, to say something, say anything. “Just fucking breathe!” Ashleigh yelled into the woman’s olive skinned and motionless face. But she had laid there for four hours, she was gone, she was dead. But that didn’t spot Ashleigh from remembering her training as a life guard all those years ago, to tip the head back, pinch the nose and breath into the lungs. Ashleigh performed CRP as best as she could remember, folding her hands and pushing one, two, three on Tiffany’s bloody chest. Again, Ashleigh attempted to blow air into Tiffany’s lungs. And blow hard she did, with every stale breath, she blew. Just as she was going to do, later that night, after she had Tobey on the floor just like she had Tiffany. She was going to buy a birthday cake for herself. And just blow.