6.9.10

i wrote you a story but i ate it

interesting fact: the protagonist, like my dog, is short, chubby and called Frankie.


frankie
Lepht Anonym 06.09.10
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Frankie sits outside, for once, smoking her fifth cigarette. She didn't mind the dolls, she thinks bitterly, not as much. Oh, she knew about them - she knew, and she burned them all, the bastard things, the last time. He had three. What the fuck did he need three of them for? She doesn't want to answer that. They were already bad enough: thinner, smaller, able to be picked up and put down wherever he wanted them, not like her stocky middle-aged ass. More beautiful, with their perfect faces. More obedient, with their AI personalities tuned into geometric stereotypes - the blonde was the slut, the brunette was the librarian and the redhead was the domme vixen, obviously. Was being the past tense. The past tense - Frankie flicks ash onto Markus' rosebush - being appropriate because now they are bubbly twisted scraps of charred plastic and melted steel, buried at the bottom of the garden. Because Frankie is a psychopath. Because she finally got sick of pretending she didn't know about them. Because Markus, who said that he would always love her - she grits her teeth - Markus loved those fucking dolls more. She's not as crazy as he thinks. He never once stroked her hair the way he did theirs.

So she got rid of them. Was that so crazy?

Of course, she knows that this is crazy for real. This really warrants being called a psychopath. It doesn't mean she won't get away with it; she hasn't even thought about that yet, but she knows Markus' heart condition will probably mean no autopsy. Frankie isn't quite as doolally as he likes to think she is. She takes a drag, and admits privately that sure - she's unhinged. A normal wife would have left. A normal wife would never have put up with it for a year and a half after she first found out, would have thrown him out of the house, would have cried to some best friend for hours. Frankie doesn't have any friends. She played nice. She waited. Then she stopped taking the medication, and she built his secret lovers a little funeral pyre. When he came back, she was roasting a skewerful of pink marshmallows amidst the wreckage of their stinking latex skin and their once-tumbling tresses, smiling softly. She had thought the ultimatum she gave him then (and it was simple enough: no more fuckdolls, or no more love and no more house) would be enough.

Silly, isn't it, that a psychopath like Frankie would have been so naive about her lover. Crazy people are supposed to be bitter and untrusting. Aren't they? She stubs out the end of her smoke and lights up automatically again.

Fucking literalism. She didn't mean that this would be fine. Frankie wonders how long it took him to find this woman, this... mistress, from his office. It doesn't matter now, anyway; he's asleep, and he'll stay asleep for long enough. She had considered just butchering the woman, but she let them fuck, let this Marlena go home, content that the aftermath and the possible investigation - silly bitch, leaving your long black hairs in the shower - will fuck her up enough that Frankie won't have to do anything. She runs her hand through her own cropped brown bob. Neither one of them think about anything. He didn't even notice the smell in his coffee when Frankie disappeared silently from the window vantage point, made her way back to her car in the street and drove it into the driveway, playing happy return. Would he like a coffee? She was dead tired from work, she could do with one. Of course he would love a coffee. Sleeping tablets, she muses, are good things to keep around. He's got an overdose that might just finish him off, but he was still breathing when she left him.

Frankie is not quite as incapable as he thinks. Distilling the nicotine wasn't hard; she pulled a sick day, as much to give him a last chance to redeem himself as to prepare, and like a snake he told her he had to work. Does he think she wouldn't go through his planner? He's a fool. He left for his mistress' house, and Frankie had enough time not only to boil out the poison, but to store it safely away in the pantry. She tested it out on a cat or two. It's a good thing she never actually cooks with liquid glycerine.

She has the syringe ready, filled in the kitchen with the care only true hatred produces. All it will take is one little shot right into his pupil. She isn't as dumb as he thinks. Markus, who vowed to love her and her alone, who put the ring on her finger and pretended he'd try to mend her scarred-up, fucked-up heart - he ought to have kept those vows.

She stubs out her cigarette, and stands up resolutely, dusting off her jeans. Frankie is a psychopath. She accepts that.

She smiles softly as she lifts his eyelid.


[EOF]

11 comments:

Max said...

Nice story. Enjoyed it as I usually do with your stories.

Also, you have a dog? Don't ask me why, but I wouldn't have thought of you being the dog type, but then that probably stems from my mental image of you being your avatar, a heartless, silent ninja assassin.

Max said...

Ugh, I wish my sentences made more sense. I must adopt a habit of proof-reading anything written after midnight.

Lepht said...

Max - i had a dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier, when i lived with my ma. that was a long time ago now. i fucking loved that dog, though.

i am sorta heartless and silent.

L

Max said...

Ah, silent and heartless, but no assassin, and that little word, my friend, makes all the difference. Also, heartless is kind of ill-defined. If being heartless means being in favor of abortion, or having no mercy for ignorant, obnoxious idiots who 'have had it coming', as they say, then you can call me heartless too.

Lepht said...

i'd make a shitty assassin, despite my rather good homebrew anatomical knowledge; i have all the lung capacity of a two-day-old kitten, and possibly even less physical stamina than Professor Hawking himself.

"Get back - *huff* *huuuuff* here so - *huuuuuuff* *wheeeze* I can st -" *cardiac arrest*

L

Max said...

Well you don't need much physical stamina or lung volume to be an assassin. That would be the bounty hunter. An assassin strikes from a hiding spot, and only has to make sure he is not detected before making his approach.

Then, I'm obviously not someone who judges people who are in favor of abortion, but I for myself have actually been called a 'baby-eating heathen' during an argument about religion, abortion, consciousness and the like. I'm sad to report that that expression was about the wittiest and most poignant thing said person's mouth has ever been heard giving utterance to.

Lepht said...

i laughed at that; i've been called the exact same thing, and a murderer more times than i can count.

i suppose we'll just have to deal with the awful, awful guilt from being vile murderers of insentient balls of stem cells.

L

Max said...

Actually I don't get the murderer thing too often. I fucking love crunching and munching on some of 'em embryos though.

On the topic of shocking people: do you have any notion of what's called 'future shock level'? It'll help you predict the severity of people's reactions when talking about transhumanism and other things from 'oh that's kinda cool' all the way to 'burn the witch, burn the witch!'. (All of us are Sapiens-Anonym-readers/writer are either at level 3 or 4, for obvious reasons.)

evilness afoot: I've secretly been working away at an american acquaintance of mine who started out deeply religious and on shock level -1 or so ("sometimes I think we went too far with technology". I got him somewhere in between SL2 and 3 now), and am actually gaining ground on deconverting him from religion to common fucking sense. Ah, the wonders of psychology
Muar, gyar, gyar, if I may say so.

Oh, right. Guilt. That guilt is totally incessantly gnawing away at my nonexistant, but evil and black soul. I'm starting to think I should soon grow horns and get a black aura. Yeah, that most precisely expresses my mind about these matters in words.

Lepht said...

odd. i find "murderer" is the most common insult for me.

i've never heard of future shock or of any metric for it, but your idea seems to make sense as a sort of cultural variable. how do you gauge it, generally?

(collective plural for the readers of this here backwater: sapes.)

go for it with the Yank. it's amazing how far someone can get mentally, once removed from their home set of beliefs and forced to question their assumptions.

we must be guilty. religious people say so. so guilty we might just go out for ice cream every now and again.

L

Max said...

Gauging it? Well you can't gauge it when first seeing somebody, but if he/she's carrying a bible, chances are that person prefers to talk about the rapture rather than the singularity.
Just asking "What's your take on genetically modified foodstuffs?" often lets you know pretty quickly what kind of future shock level you're talking to.
(you can also ask about euthanasia, abortion, or something else, but I've found genetically modified food is a pretty safe thing to ask about. It displays the kind of mind you're talking to, yet doesn't carry any of the connotations that talking about the soul/heaven/hell/god/genetic engineering on humans/abortion/etc... has)

My name is Sapes, for we are... a handful?
Oh well, that's gonna change pretty quickly after your lecture at 27C3 (still trying to work out how to get there) there's gonna be a shitload of people on this blog. We'll all unite as the global transhuman legion.

Unfortunately, the yank has somehow vanished from my field of view. I'm too busy with my studies, and he's really not in my time zone, so I don't have many opportunities to talk to him...

Funnily enough, religious people actually are the authority when it comes to guilt, seeing as what kind of abominations they've committed in the name of their respective deity...
I'm all for ice cream though.

Lepht said...

hm. that's not a bad idea. i've never actually seen anyone in person who has a rational outlook on GM, though; they all take the ridiculous "moderate" approach and say it "needs more testing" and "we don't know what it could do!"

one sape. two sapes. a multipack of sapes. i don't think popularity is that easily won, friend; it's not going to be a very big talk.

L

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[pls no ask about the vodka. debate is always welcome. remember, Tramadol fucks you up]