Jenny Catlin, Los Angeles CA, Brownie Scout.

Bread Bag (October 25, 2011. Issue 32.)

"It's exactly the same as a condom." She reassured him, her experienced hands having already aroused the desired result from his persistently flaccid penis. She wished that she was able to wipe the dumbstruck look from his face. She slid the bread bag over him quickly, for fear of having to start from scratch. When he came, it was with horror. His eyes sheened with primal fear.

For the most part Shiela was satisfied with the encounter, perhaps not sexually, but intellectually. She left him to finish the stack of dishes mounted in the sink. To clean the grill and finish pulling the dough for morning rush. She instructed him on how to properly dispose of the bread bag.

Caleb wanted to cry. He knew that he had wronged god and shamed his mother's memory and that his brother was sitting at the bar only feet away sipping a disappointed Budweiser. Perhaps nodding his huge head in resignation.

Shiela was nearly canonized for her heroic effort. Everyone having generally agreed that Caleb's problem, Caleb's real problem, was not in fact his fractured skull, his damaged brain. It was lack of a woman and good pussy. That was what could fix him up.

There wasn't a boy or man from there to the county line that couldn't have just about all of their problems erased with a good dose of the right lady. And as nearly all the men from a range as large could attest, Sheila was fit for the job. It took a handfull of convincing and more than a couple free drafts to persuade her, but once the seed was planted it took only hours for the magic of bar-room photosynthesis to grow the idea to fruition.

She had learned long ago to hold her head high when she walked away from her encounters. Sheila viewed her exploits as a kind of donation to the final liberation of women. Caleb, however, offered her real entry into the boy's club of backroom deeds.

When the stained double doors flapped behind her as she exited the kitchen, her painted fingers still fastening blouse buttons, she was met with raucous cheers from the bar. She got high fives and butt pats from men who only knew her as Honey.

Caleb lacked the words to provide himself a defense against her, or the subsequent questioning that would follow for weeks. He had accustomed himself over the years to entertaining them, a big and bumbling mascot for the one stop light town. He just couldn't find tools to use the way they looked at him now.

Big cock eyed grins and handshakes met him at the county store and post office. Even old Mrs. Windcrest blushed him an 'oh, you' face at the VFW Saturday dance. His feeble mind was unable to piece together the meaning of the new gestures and winks of his townsfolk.

His mistook their playing and jibes as shaming; he was un-accustomed to being at the center of their attentions. Caleb had always been a generally happy man, even as a boy before his accident. He was blissfully content to work his way through stacks of labor and took pride in a shining stove top or perfectly sliced tomato.

Even at the death of his beloved mother, his unshakable faith in the lord prevented him from experiencing any real sense of grief. He mourned the way one might the marriage of a childhood friend, whose nuptials would take them away to the city.

But now Caleb found himself at odds with sadness for the first time. His memory was only able to hold onto a few slides at a time. At night when he wished to be sleeping his mind replayed a reel of breasts and unseemly hair. His private part looking the way he believed it was only supposed to in the morning. The sensations of various wetness.

It was Caleb's boss who found him, cold through and bluer than he knew a human being to turn. Unusual passings were not uncommon to the small town, as people were often slipping off highways or meeting with the blunt end of a neighborly disagreement.

Everyone came out for his memorial; as such events were often treated as an unfortunate, impromptu party. Caleb had spent all of his forty one years in the same place and all the residents knew him. They told the same stories over and joked about the poor dumb lug letting the freezer door close behind him, during a deep clean.

It was only Shiela who gagged when Caleb's boss talked about how he just couldn't render what the sap was doing with bread bag over his face.