Let's Get It On!

Mark re-racked the barbell after his 10th repetition and jumped up from the bench, placing his hands on the dipping bar and leaning forward until the pain in his chest was unbearable. And then he held the stretch for a count of 60, his head bent down and away from the 20 sets of eyes marveling at him. His chest filled with extra-hot, ravenous blood as he righted himself, his new choker made of white bone cool around his neck.

"Jesus Christ, man," said Maury.

"What?"

"Dude, you just hit 10 reps with 315 like it was nothing-"

Mark shrugged. "The last few were pretty hard-"

"It didn't look like it."

Mark took a deep breath and squeezed his chest until he thought it might burst. He exhaled. "Dude, what do you call a girl who's a slut and a cunt?"

"I don't know. What?"

"A sclunt."

Maury's expression, as always, remained the same, his blue eyes locked in place, unblinking, like those of a sphinx; his lips separated as if about to speak though it rarely happened; and his complexion a pale eggshell white that never saw another color brought to it. "That's funny, man. Real funny-"

"Really?" Mark looked into the boy's eyes as his pony-tailed head nodded at him. "Dude, are you fucking autistic or something?"

"Huh?"

"Nothing-"

"How much do you weigh, Dennison?"

Mark turned to face his interlocutor, the teacher of his weight training class, Mr. Trees, the school's sports Renaissance man, as he coached every sport that mattered: football and wrestling. "Um, about 150-"

"Really? That's it?"

"Uh huh-"

"Ever thought about coming out for the football team?"

"Nah-"

"Why not? You don't like football?"

"No, I like football. I'm a big New York Giants fan-"

"You should try out next fall-"

"It's the team thing I don't like-"

"What do you mean?" Mr. Trees put one hand on his bald head and rubbed his large belly, which hung out from under his Cedarville High polo shirt, with the other.

"I don't like groups. I don't join groups or teams or clubs or organizations-"

"How about wrestling? There are individual classes-"

"Yeah, but you're still on a team. I'm just-"

"Scared!" came a loud voice from across the room.

Mark looked in the direction of the insult and narrowed his eyes. "I'm not scared of anything or anyone." He sniffed a quick loogie into his throat and popped his left elbow. "A wise man once said that if you're going to commit a crime, you should do it alone. I think the same applies for anything you do in life."

"Well," said Mr. Trees, tugging at the bottom of his shirt, which snapped back up to his belly button, "I think you ought to reconsider. As a matter of fact, I'm going to ask you every day until you do." He laughed.

Mark wiped a swath of sweat from his forehead and smeared it on his shorts. "How about this?" He pointed at the boy who had interjected himself in his and Mr. Trees' conversation. "I wrestle him and if I win, you never ask me about football or wrestling again."

"And if he wins?"

"He won't-"

A collective "Oooh" arose from the other boys in the weight training room as Mr. Trees leaned towards Mark. "Dennison, Jesse Simons is a 4-year letterman in wrestling. He's won States three years in a row and hasn't lost a match during that whole time. Plus, he outweighs you by 30 pounds-"

"If you're saying he's scared-"

"Let's get it on!" screamed Jesse's voice from behind Mr. Trees' blimp of a body.

The weight benches, dumbbells, and barbells crowding the middle of the room were rolled away to the farthest corners, and Mark and Jesse stood facing one another, Mr. Trees between them, acting as referee.

"Do you even know how to wrestle, Dennison?" snarled Jesse.

"I've seen it on TV-"

The boys circling the makeshift wrestling area laughed. Then became quiet just as quickly as Mr. Trees blew his whistle and Mark and Jesse lunged at one another, each grasping the other's biceps, their wet heads knocking and rubbing together. Suddenly, Mark rocked to his right, then jerked left, twisting his arms with all the force he could summon from his legs, Jesse's body pirouetting horizontally in the air twice before thudding face first into the weight room's rubber flooring. Quickly, Mark flipped him over and slid across his torso, pressing the boy's shoulders into the floor, a smile cementing itself on his face as he watched the blood trickle upward from Jesse's nose into his closed eyes.

Mr. Trees tapped Jesse out, then fell to one rickety knee to tend to the boy. Mark high-fived Maury and the two walked out of the weight room between two rows of mute, wide-eyed boys who couldn't back away fast enough.

Lazy

"Oh, my God-"

Mark looked up from his runny eggs, a yolk-soaked piece of toast in his hand. "What?"

"Isn't this your teacher?"

"Who?"

"Irwin Cook? Isn't he the one whose house you used to go to?"

"No." Mark chewed off a slimy bite and swallowed it. "I mean, I only went over there once. I left right away. He was a creep-"

"He was murdered-"

"I know-"

"And this girl, did you know her?"

"Not really. She was in my English class. She was a whore-"

"Mark! Your mouth-"

"Whatever. She was. A whore, that is. She slept with everybody-"

"Well, she was murdered too. That's not nice to talk about her like that-"

"What do you know? Maybe she deserved it."

Sarah looked back at the newspaper on the table in front of her with a shake of her curler-strewn head.

Mark yawned and rubbed some more sleep out of his eyes. He circled the last of the transparent egg white and hardening yolk off his plate with his last piece of toast and devoured it as he put his plate in the sink. "Where's Lightning Dan?"

"Mr. Wheate to you, Mark-"

"Yeah." He coughed. "So where is the old fart?"

Sarah shook her head again. "He's run up to the hardware store. We need a plunger."

"Is that what they're calling Viagra these days?"

"Shut up-"

Mark laughed. "Are you finished reading that crap yet?"

"Mark, this is serious stuff. They haven't caught anybody yet-"

"They never will-"

"Yes, they will, and when they do, I hope they string him up-"

"That's nice. Then you'll be just like him-"

"Mark, we've been over this-"

"Too many times." Mark rubbed his bare belly with both of his veiny hands, looking at the nub protruding from his nylon rugby shorts just below. "I'm going up to my room."

"Did you know this Phil kid too?"

"Not really. He was some retarded kid they put in my Art class so he wouldn't feel different-"

"Oh."

Mark was in his room in ten seconds, locking the door behind him, sliding his shorts over his erection and off his body. He sat bare-assed at his tiny desk, on which sat an old computer monitor, CPU, and keyboard, a stack of graphic novels, a large file, a small, battery-operated hand drill, and 32 teeth. The trash can next to his desk was filled with sticky Kleenex tissues and the New York Giants sheets on his bed were crumpled with a restless night's sleep. He picked up the last tooth he'd been working on, which he had filed into the shape of a triangle and leaned back in his creaking chair.

It was Daniel's tooth. One of the top canines. So it was easy to make it a triangle and not some other geometric shape. The incisors were harder. But not. They were more fragile, but they were larger. If you were careful, you could make any shape you wanted. If you weren't, then you were fucked. Just little floaty bits that you couldn't do shit with. The molars were the worst. Very thin. And you had to split them. Just right. Or it was another mess and a prayer the SuperGlue would work.

He put the triangle to his own canine, which was so sharp that he'd cut his tongue just brushing against it a couple times. He wanted to SuperGlue Daniel's over his. But he couldn't. Because it'd look like shit. Everyone'd call him Mr. Ed. So he stuck it in his dickhole. Daniel's dick was perfect. A perfect fit. He could fuck it all day without it hurting but he'd feel it intensely against his prostate the whole time. Daniel'd been the only boy who'd made him come just by fucking him, without touching his little dick.

FUCK! MEMORIES! They were nothing. Nothing but bruises on the brain. Nothing but pain. People are masochists. Which is why they keep mementos. Clothes, jewelry, love letters, teddy bears, furniture, whatever. Teeth. They stab those parts of their brains over and over - and fucking feel good about it. Because they're scared they might feel better without it-

Mark sat up quickly and pulled the tooth out of his dick before it slipped so far in he couldn't get it out and placed it back on the table in a puddle of his pre-ejaculate. He queued up the music player on his computer and began filing as the song he'd written and recorded on his old Hewlett-Packard let loose through the speakers on the floor beneath his desk:

"I fell in love with a boy
until he told me
to shut the fuck up
to shut the fuck up
to shut the fuck up
Just shut the fuck up"

The Life and Times of Phil Wii, Part II

Mark, crouching over the boy’s head, watched him as he awakened, wheezing through his nose, moaning through the rocks stuffed in his mouth. The boy began to roll on his side, at which Mark pushed him back over and rapped him on the forehead with the straight razor. “Don’t fucking move, you idiot. You’re just gonna make it harder on yourself.”

As tears rolled down each side of the boy’s face, Mark looked down the length of the kid’s body, which seemed so much longer unclothed. His eyes stopped at his penis, which he found surprisingly large on a boy who had barely started growing pubic hair. One quick hop and he straddled the boy’s waist, dropping the baggie to the side and grabbing the boy's penis. With his other hand, he pulled the twig from the slit, the boy’s body shaking under him, and began tugging up and down.

When the boy’s penis hardened and a dollop of pinkish fluid at the hole, Mark unclasped his straight razor and nestled it snugly under the boy’s scrotum. Ten or twenty more pumps and the boy’s abdomen tightened between Mark’s legs. He flicked the razor as semen shot straight into the air and held the boy’s genitals up above his head like a trophy. He looked down at the red-black pulp that was the boy’s crotch and just beyond he could see where the kid had shat a couple of the rocks he’d stuffed him with.

He zipped the baggie back up and crouched down by the boy’s whimpering head. “I had to borrow a few things from you,” said Mark. “I’ll take good care of them. I know: same old predictable shit, huh? It’s hard to be original nowadays, what with the genetic code being discovered and all. And so many smart motherfuckers, unlike you, having come before us. We’re all so fucking dull and uninteresting.” Mark laid the warm, slushy baggie of teeth, fingers, thumbs, penis, and testicles to the side and pulled the X-acto out of his pocket. “But there’re two fucking things that I really need.”

The boy’s eyes widened as the blade approached his eyelids.

Storm (or, Batter Up!)

Mark stepped just inside the front door and glided the thin, black gloves over his short, skinny fingers. Closing the door behind him, he sauntered to the bathroom to take a quick piss. When finished, he zipped up and looked in the mirror. He was probably the cutest he'd ever been, his hair spiked stiff and straight up, his blue eyes clear and non-bloodshot, the skin of his face slick, pimple-less, naturally hairless.

He grabbed the aluminum Louisville Slugger from the utility closet across the hall, then nudged open the bedroom door with his shoulder, Jenny's grunts cascading into his ears from over her shoulder, the crack of her ass open to expose her purplish hole as she rode Mr. Cook's cock like a starving squirrel hungry for nuts. Mark took one step into the room and swung the bat in the widest arc he could, so that he had to pry it out of the back of Jenny's head with a thrust of his foot against her spine, her blonde hair soaking gray brain and black blood as she fell to the side of their teacher in a lump of cooling bones.

Mr. Cook's eyes widened behind his glasses, his pupils narrowing, as they met Mark's, and he let out a scream that Mark could have sworn could only have come from Jenny. He looked at his teacher's starved body, which was stretched across the length of the bed, the bony wrists and ankles handcuffed to the metal bars of the headboard and footboard, and laughed.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" He stretched his arms out to each side. "One of those fuckin' sorry dime-store hack novelists you like so much couldn't have written it any better. This is gonna be fun."

"Please don't kill me, please don't kill me," blubbered Mr. Cook, tears plopping onto his pale bird chest and wetting the three hairs he'd been so thankful had grown there.

"Shut the fuck up." Mark flicked the end of the bat in Mr. Cook's face. "You're such a fuckin' girl." He opened the drawer on the night stand, pulled out a chocolate bar, unwrapped it and took a bite. "And to think I wanted you to fuck me when I first met you. You know I would've let you, right?"

"No, I didn't know that," said Mr. Cook between short inhalations. "I didn't know you were gay-"

"I'm not. I just like to fuck-"

"I mean, if you want to talk about anything-"

"What? Like what Principal Voorhees is gonna say when he finds out about you fucking a student?"

"Please. Don't. Listen-"

"I'm listening-"

"Look." Mr. Cook swallowed a deep pocket of air. "Let's forget about everything. Let me go. I'll help you get rid of her. I won't say word. You don't say a word. I swear-"

Mark shook his head. "Nope. Too late."

"You fucking little faggot-"

"Dude, you know she was my girlfriend, right?"

"Fuck you. If you knew how to fuck her with that little homo dick of yours-"

"I mean, Irwin, you let underage kids fuck in your house. You gave 'em beer and weed. Then you fucked one of 'em. You sick fuck-"

"You're the sick fuck-"

Mark laughed. Then reached into his pockets and laid their contents on Mr. Cook's empty, striated belly: straight razor, X-acto knife, pliers, and a pair of tin-snips he'd found in the kitchen drawer at home. "You ever been skinned alive?"

Mr. Cook's mouth opened so wide that Mark could see his uvula swinging freely and emitted a sound that was a cross between the locked tires of a semi and the haunted purr of a kitten. "Please. Haven't you done enough-"

"It's never enough-"

Mark reclaimed his tools as he finished the last of the chocolate bar and re-pocketed them, with the exception of the tin-snips. He laid the bat against the closet behind him. With his left thumb and index finger, he stretched his teacher's scrotum to its maximum length. The tin-snips glided through the rubbery, wrinkled skin as if cutting paper, and he lost his grip as the sweaty body jolted against the crisp sharpness of the cold metal.

"You know, if you keep moving like that, it's only gonna hurt worse," said Mark. "And stop fucking yelling like a woman." He shook his head. "I'm glad we never fucked. It would've been like fucking Carol Channing or something. Plus, your dick's not much bigger than mine. I wouldn't even have felt it."

With a few more clips, Mark reached the base of the penis, then retraced his movements until he had circumscribed a perfect ripping arc back to the perineum. He wiped off and pocketed the tin-snips, then grabbed each side of the scrotum and pulled, the testicles and a loose gaggle of thick, clotting blood and soft, tubular coils falling onto the bed between Mr. Cook's legs.

"Does moaning like that make it feel better?" said Mark. He removed the glove from his right hand and picked up one testicle, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger several times. "Wow, it's not at all like I expected. It's like a hard-boiled egg but much firmer. Not as slippery as I thought. Kind of dry actually. I wonder what would happen if I stuck a needle through it?"

"Please," Mr. Cook howled. "Please just kill me-"

"Okay-" And Mark put his glove back on and left the bedroom. He filled the tea kettle with water in the kitchen and put it on the stove. When it whistled, he took it off and made his way back to the bedroom, whistling himself. He set the kettle on Mr. Cook's belly, the man's body jerking with such force that his lungs couldn't expel any sound. "Oops, sorry, didn't see you there." Mark put the kettle on the night stand, then sat on the side of the bed.

"Stop breathing so hard, you pervert." He took out the tin-snips again. "I usually take the eyes or teeth, but that m.o. is so tired. I'll take these." He grabbed the testicles in one hand.

"You?"

"Jesus Christ, you're so dramatic. I swear to God if I didn't see these balls in front of me right here, I'd swear you were a woman." Mark giggled. "Well, you kind of will be in a second-" Quickly, he removed the testicles with the tin-snips and pocketed all three items.

He pulled out his straight razor and flicked it open, holding it up for Mr. Cook's blurred eyes. "Huzzah!" he said. Then shook his head. "Don't you hate it when people say shit like that? Whoever came up with fucking 'Huzzah'?"

Mark stuck the tip of the razor into the man's throat, under the Adam's apple, and drew it down the length of the man's body, the blade disappearing as he reached the abdomen, just below the sternum, and reappearing at the pubic line. The only sound in the room was that of a little boy crying, quick, hearty sobs that emerged from Mr. Cook's lungs in rhythm to the blood spilling from the crevice dissecting his frame.

Mark reapplied the razor to the man's stomach and dug at his incision several times, his strokes so deep that his right wrist was dyed with blood and what must have been compacted feces. He wiped the razor on the back of Jenny's firm ass, then grabbed the kettle, which he tipped over Mr. Cook's body, the fleshy man-made cavern of entrails filling and unfilling, a muted wail thrumming Mark's eardrums with a song of what never was.

With a great heave, the kettle caved in the left side of Mr. Cook's face, settling itself cantilevered to the man's temple when Mark let go. He looked at the two lovers lying in their own waste of bodies and sighed. He rubbed his stomach, then grabbed another chocolate bar and exited the room, munching the candy as he strolled down the sidewalk on his way home.