“This is called a phalanx. It’s a very small bone but you’d be surprised how hard it is to break. See, the joint ligaments and capsule tend to rupture before the bone snaps. Which is pretty intense too but it’s not what we’re after here. You have to do it fast and you only get one try.”
She drew up and down, up and down. A smile in her eyes and on her lips.
“C’mon, Stroup,” she said. “Astound me.”
I TOOK HER HAND. I placed my fingers just so.
I guess I got it right.
“YOU KNOW, NOT MANY guys will do this, Stroup.”
“I’m not surprised.”
She moved aside the heavy butcher-block cutting board and snuggled close. It was the following night. I had just taken out her terminal phalanx—the tip of her pinkie—with a ball peen hammer. Smashed it against the board.
Same hand.
The board was wet with blood. The bed was wet with us.
She’d decided to wait on dealing with the first break—just splinted it herself. She was going in to work tomorrow and she’d have both of them taken care of then. She hadn’t decided on the right explanation yet.
I couldn’t help her on that one. My imagination failed me.
Meantime she’d thought ahead this time and had gauze and tape and peroxide and codeine waiting on the nightstand. At least I didn’t have to look at the thing. Unless you counted seepage.
“How bad is it?”
She smiled. “Bad. I took the codeine, though. I really want you to know, Stroup. That was one of the best. God, that was good!”
“Thanks. You weren’t so bad yourself. What next?”
She considered. “I dunno. I work with my hands. So I have to give these time to heal. A toe, maybe?”
“You’ll limp.”
“I bought these shoes that are a little too big, you know? just in case.”
“In case?
“In case I met somebody like you, Stroup.”
I couldn’t fathom what in the hell it was she was feeling. Imagination failed me there too. She seemed happy though.
“Yeah. Toes, I think,” she said.
“Plural?”
“One to start with, silly. I’ve got this vise under the bed in the toolbox. You can do it slowly. Little by little. Oh my god, Stroup, there I go, I’m getting wet again!”
“Wait a minute. You’re not saying…?”
“No, jesus, I couldn’t take that now. Not after this.”
“Okay. I get it. You got it. I’m there.”
I slid down the long delicious length of her and proceeded.
I MASHED HER MIDDLE toe, right foot, the following week.
It occurred to me that Carol might have done very well during the Inquisition. Thumbscrews, The Boot, The Rack. I doubt they’d have known what to make of her though, except to be terrified out of their freaking minds that they’d actually finally met a witch and would’ve burned her first chance they got. That would have been the downside I guess. Carol wasn’t into burning.
I’d asked her.
If they noticed the limp at work, nobody said anything.
SHE HAD SOME VACATION days coming so I took some time off from the ad copy and we flew to Sarasota. The agency was pissed. They wanted me to do a TV-only ad for a Best of Barry Manilow collection. You know the type. Your CD starts skipping before you hit the PLAY button. I told them I was wrong for the job anyway. I liked heavy metal. They said there was evidence heavy metal was turning kids into murderers. I told them if that was true then Barry Manilow was probably turning them into florists.
It was the beginning of May, so the Florida humidity hadn’t descended yet and the hotel was cheap enough so we rented a car and spent the days basking in the sun on the fine white sand at Siesta Key and window shopping at St. Armand’s Circle, eating streetside there and then going back to our hotel to do what we did best together and it was only when she showed me the Louisville Slugger that I got worried.
We were lying in bed. Mr. Muscle was very sore.
“Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t that assault and battery? No pun intended.”
“Not if it’s consensual. I figure if you choke up high on it you can bring it down right over my forearm.
“Both hands?”
“I think you’d have to use both hands, yeah. Otherwise it’s not gonna break. I’ll just wind up with a hell of a bruise.”
“And we don’t want that.”
“No.”
“Can I think about it?”
“Sure. I’m too pooped tonight anyway. I just thought, how appropriate, you know? We’re here in Sarasota. The Cincinnati Reds do their spring training down here. Whenever I see them on TV I’ll think of you.”
I was dead tired too, but I kept thinking, lying there in bed that I was maybe getting in a little over my head on this and that the pinkie or toe were one thing but that the radius or ulna were probably another. Not to mention all the sensitive nerves and tender blood vessels in attendance. That I could possibly cripple the nutty bitch and then where would I be? My sleep was troubled. I remember morphing into Yogi Berra at some point and that Berra was striking out again—he could never hit worth a damn—and I remember thinking the way you do when you’re half asleep and half awake that I wasn’t even playing for the right team.
At another point I was arrested by the Sarasota police.
The charge was breaking and entering.
The wake-up call was good though. The wake up call was Carol’s lips sliding up and down my dick and before you could say Boy Howdy I was tickling her tonsils with the thing.
She looked up and smiled around it and I think she said, “morning.”
I know I said morning back.
She lifted herself up onto her knees and slid me inside her and started moving back and forth and side to side and soon I was starting to come, I could tell it was on its way, not only from the feeling down below but because I have this sort of involuntary grunting moaning thing I do way back in my throat—and because I had my eyes closed I didn’t see it coming a second time.
She’d reached down behind her on the bed I guess and next thing I knew my right collarbone felt like it had just exploded. I screamed and bucked her off me back hard onto my thighs and the bat flew out of her hands to the floor and my come whipped off into her hair like strands of gooey tinsel on a Christmas tree. She was smiling. I was shouting, groaning.
“You fucking…!”
“I thought you’d like to see what it was like,” she said. “So, what do you think?”
“You fucking…you crazy….fucking…!”
And I don’t know how I managed it through the pain or even saw her clearly enough through the dots of yellow bursting in front of my eyes, but I leaned up into her and planted my left fist into the side of her jaw like it was born to be there once, just once in a goddamn lifetime and then leave its mark forever.
She didn’t fall off the bed—she dove off the bed. Sideways, almost gracefully. She looked like a girl sliding dreamlike off her ski in some Esther Williams movie. Well, we were in Florida.
My collarbone was killing me. My fist was killing me. I felt like one big sack of pain.
So much for the thrill of broken bones.
Thanks so much for sharing.
I could hear her sobbing down beside the bed.
Somehow I got to my feet and walked over. She was lying on her back, her right shoulder off at a strange unnatural angle. She was trying to hold her jaw in place with her left hand.
“I think you broke my jaw,” she sobbed.