The Case for Not Leaving Home

The female approached me with completely unwarranted confidence, interrupting my casual conversation with the bartender. “So wait, now remind me what was your name again? Karen? Have you met my friend Brian? I know him from forever long ago. I mean, back in the day we all hung out together, maybe you were there too? Probably! Remember how much fun we had? Those were the days! Anyway, Brian this is Karen.”

I shook Brian’s hand distractedly, balancing with one ass cheek on the barstool and one foot on the floor. I examined my escape routes and looked for friends standing near me who might serve as possible distractions. Where the everliving fuck had everyone gone?

“Great to meet you.” I stretched a smile out of the morphing elastic of my lying mouth. I paid no attention to his response as I was trying to both take in and make sense of his choice of personal scent. Troubling.

“It’s SOOOO good to see you!” The female gobbled and babbled and bounced around as she spun some long-winded tale of days of goth yore in my direction. She was truly horrific, a spectre of whorish bad taste and consummate whining annoyance. I contemplated picking up the beer bottle that was next to my drink on the bar and smashing it into her face. I imagined the broken shards sprinkling down, raining through her horrible frazzled hair. Maybe they would tinkle sweetly down like tiny amber raindrops, right before the jagged bottle edge sliced open the bridge of her shiny, shiny nose. My mouth tightened in pleasure at the thought, and perhaps she assumed I was smiling at whatever banality was spilling from her wizened little mouth. I watched the crusty edges of her lipstick stretch and crack as she continued with whatever the fuck she was carrying on about.

My eyes narrowed as I contemplated the horror that was this female person. Her orange-foundationed jawline. Her low-cut printed rayon shirt. Her squinty, slitted eyes—her cheeks were threatening to swallow them completely. Why was she still existing, when I so obviously wanted her not to? How was it that we could physically cohabit the same space? Like matter and anti-matter, our combined presences in this place should not be possible. And she should definitely be the one exploding into nothingness.

“So Brian and I were wondering if you’d be up for a little three-way action later on tonight?” My attention snapped back in her direction, though I was loathe to move away from my almost erotic musings on her gory destruction. Stabbed in the face with a bottle and explosion both worked for me, actually.

“Sorry, what?” I was praying she had not had the blond balls to actually proposition me. Her and skeevy little Brian, who grinned expectantly at me in a quite trollish fashion. She giggled with feigned nervousness. It was clear she thought her revolting offer would be welcomed.

“Well, I hooked back up with Brian tonight, I haven’t seen him in YEARS and he’s so hot…” Another one of those repulsive giggles erupted from her mouth. “…and I thought maybe we’d go back to my place. But he says he’s not up for it unless I can find a third.” She pouted at me, and stupidly her curls continued bouncing around as she blathered and blathered. She had now forcibly inserted a truly horrific mental image into my brain and I gagged a little, swinging around to grab my sweaty pint glass from the bar to give me some time to think of a response that didn’t end in violence. I turned around just in time to see a thick globule of palpable desperation drip from her brow. It landed on my foot and rolled wetly across the black leather of my shoe. I kicked it away in disgust and watched it splatter against the wall.

“I really don’t think so.” It was all I could grit out between lockjaws. Brian sidled up closer to me and I realized that there was some rubbing of body parts I didn’t want to know about against my leg. I considered kneeing him in the crotch and wondered if it would get both of us ejected from the bar, or just me.

“You sure? It would be totally hot.” His breath swamped us in a beery, smokey cloud and I saw a hand snaking out toward me. Abruptly I stood. Fuck it all, I was abandoning this stool. I was abandoning this bar, I would abandon this body if that guy touched me.

“So very sure. I need to go, actually.” I grabbed my bag and made to move away, scanning the crowd again and wondering where my people had got to.

“What the fuck, you ugly cunt? You think you’re going to get a better offer?” He reared back, angry and sneering at me now. His cockblocked, dipshitted threesome partner stared in doltish dismay at this unexpected turn of abstinence. This was my least favorite part of the conversation, the part where the rejected male turns viciously on the female who somehow owes him both gratitude and pussy.

I looked at him, standing there all wide-eyed and limbs-akimbo, ready to attack me further with any small provocation. I looked at her, the fuckwit who’d brought this mess into my life in the first place. Her crusty lower lip trembled at the thought of going home to an empty bed without the fucktard. I sincerely hoped that at no point in my life “together with fucktard” would look better to me than “alone.” I looked around at my friends, laughing and talking to each other—presumably not suddenly submerged with me in my world of hookup horror. I looked longingly back over my shoulder at my bar stool, the place where just ten minutes ago I’d known peace and contentment. Then without another word I walked away.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.