SHORT STORY: Real Literature

NOTES: Welcome to, hey, here's a short story I wrote a while ago, am no longer submitting to lit mags, and would just like to share. Possibly there will be more of these in the future, I have a lot of them and I only keep them on submission for a year because to tell you the truth, I am BAD AT SHORT STORIES. But enjoy.

He was disgusted.

            Never had he read something so disgusting—something so base, so disturbingly gory and violent. At least when it came to submissions for the literary magazine that he read, he had never read something so disgusting. Normally, he got graduate students who were trying to be Kerouac and middle-aged women who were trying to be Christie, with the occasional non-traditional undergrad trying to be Hemingway. This was someone trying to be Stephen King on acid. Stephen King if he’d written with the same viscosity as William S. Burroughs.

            The story was about a cannibal. No, it wasn’t about a cannibal; it was the first scene of Texas Chainsaw Massacre vomited up on a page. All the globular fat and wrinkled skin, complete with camera flashes and exploitation.

            He was disgusted.

            The knock on his door made him jump; he’d been planning on cleansing his literary palate with some Byron or some Keats, nothing like a Romantic to clean blood and guts off of one’s tongue, but his dinner guest was there. It was one of his failing freshman composition students. He wasn’t one of those professors that would invite students to his house to violate them—this one was a boy, first of all, and he did not swing the way of Walt Whitman or Oscar Wilde. But the boy was desperate to bring his grade up, couldn’t make any of his office hours, and in a fit of nicety, he’d said that the boy could come over and they could discuss his grade over dinner. He had no doubt that the boy thought that he was propositioning him, but he was desperate enough to accept regardless.

            Said something about him.    

            He answered the door and the boy stood there, shifting from foot-to-foot in white Crocs, which were making an unprecedented and baffling comeback, baseball bat squarely backwards on his head, crushing his 2011-style Justin Bieber bangs against his forehead, looking nervous. The boy was very typical as far as an eighteen-year-old boy went, if it weren’t for his fantastic nerves.

            “Hey, professor,” the boy said. He swallowed. His grade had risen. He’d been going to the writing center. From the amount of semi-colons that had started popping up (correctly) in his papers, the professor had an idea that the girl working the center was taking pity on him and doing much more than the writing center should. “Am I late? Sorry about that.”

            “It’s fine,” the professor said. “I was just reading over some literary magazine submissions. Come in.”

            “Cool,” the boy said, and the professor stood aside to let him enter. The boy was thin; not stick-thin, but thin enough that his wrists stuck out of the sleeves of his hoodie in bony knobs. This was good; the professor did not hold a high opinion of those who let themselves go to gluttony. The professor enjoyed hiking and his good health well into his sixties.

            “What’s for supper?” the boy asked, and then reddened. “Sorry. That sounded like, a lot less… super rude in my head.”

            The professor laughed. “Dinner will be ready soon. And don’t worry about being late. You are right on time.”

            “Oh,” the boy asked. He forced a smile. The professor thought anyone would be able to see that the smile was forced. “Cool. I guess. Um. Cool. I’ll shut up now.”

            “Calm your nerves,” the professor said. “I’m not after what you think I’m after.”

            The boy’s face darkened further; he looked near-aneurysm. “Oh—I’m, I’m not—“

            “Come into the kitchen,” the professor said. “I thought we’d eat in there. Less stress than a dining room, right?”

            “Oh-okay,” the boy said. He spoke more quickly now, tripping over his words, but he followed the professor docilely enough into the kitchen. The kitchen table was where the professor had stacks of literary submissions, and so he swept them all into a pile before taking what he was really after in the kitchen—a meat tenderizer.

            He had only done some preparation for dinner.

            “So—so what are we having?” the boy said, and the professor didn’t answer him. Instead he turned, meat tenderizer in hand, and swung it up and into the boy’s temple. The boy dropped but wasn’t even unconscious immediately, so the professor dropped on top of him, pinning his arms with knees to the elbows, and brought the tenderizer down again. A few more times. The boy made mewling noises and quiet shrieks and pleads but then the professor was left with the head, caved in and raw and mushed, and he stood again. He’d gotten blood on his jacket, but that was all right. He knew by now how to get blood out of a jacket. He felt wetness on his face and let his tongue slip out to lick it. He caught his reflection on his stainless steel dishwasher and saw the beading of blood on his face like the polka dots on an old-style swing dress, and he watched his tongue touch and erase the dot closest to his mouth.

            He looked down at the boy again. He’d stopped even twitching; now he was just dead. He thought back to that story—it had been disgusting; the cannibals had ground up their victims into hamburgers and had a big juicy cheeseburger and fries.

            Disgusting.

            Red meat was bad for your heart, but it was better in a steak over a cheeseburger. A cheeseburger, for Christ’s sake. It was creative, he would give it that, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t the most disgusting thing he’d ever read.

            He thought about it as he pulled the boy out of his kitchen and down to his basement. He dropped the body into a red-tinted bathtub and went back upstairs to clean up the mess. When blood dried it looked akin to marinara sauce, but he didn’t take chances. He wasn’t stupid. So he cleaned immediately, scrubbed down his floors (his colleagues, when they visited him, always remarked on how clean his floors were) and his cabinet doors and then his face. He changed his jacket. Tossed the one he’d been wearing into a basin of cold water. Cold water took out bloodstains. Any woman could tell you that.

            Then he went back to the body. He never used all of the body. He wasn’t that resourceful, and anyway, it wasn’t like he subsided entirely on a diet of his students. He did have a freezerful of old cuts that were too choice to pass up. He didn’t like to admit it, because to him it sounded like he was Jeffrey Dahmer, and he was not Jeffrey Dahmer, but he did have a freezerful of good cuts. This boy was thin, though, and would probably only do well for a fresh meal.

            When he’d taken what he wanted from the body, he dumped the rest of it—mostly long gangly limbs and some of the less tender organs—into a black plastic garbage bag. He doused the garbage bag in Febreeze and then put it in the trunk of his car. He’d drop it off in some neighborhood blocks away from his while supper was in the oven. He kept a map that he marked up, to see where he’d made the drop last. They’d found barely any of the bodies, but he liked to space them out anyways, just for safety’s sake.

            He passed the story again on his way back to his kitchen, and shook his head. The girl was a good writer. She just didn’t write real literature.

            He’d read some Wordsworth while he ate. That would have to cleanse his palate.