Troy Smithers and Milly Porpentine

 

 

Part One: The First Date

 

Her friends told her very little about Troy Smithers, and she didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.  Troy Smithers, they said, conducted psychological research on twins which sounded a little creepy but interesting.  Maybe they set her up with a weird perverted mad scientist.  They said he was also shy and that he never had a long term girlfriend which had stalker written all over it.  But then they said this Troy Smithers guy was just the kind of wild Milly would appreciate.  None of that seemed to fit together, she thought – a shy scientific type who was also the kind of wild she’d appreciate – unless this guy was a stalker who was going to tie her up and beat her and kill her.  That’s wild, not the kind she’d appreciate necessarily but definitely wild.  So Milly chalked it up to some elaborate practical joke her friends were playing on her she wouldn’t fully understand until she met the guy.

At least he was the one who was going to wait in the restaurant for her to arrive.  He was the one who was going to put up the sign, two red roses, so that she could know which one he was.  If she got the creepy vibe – well, the wrong kind of creepy vibe – she could bolt, and she had her pepper spray and her twenty two in her purse in case it came to that.

Milly was hoping her friends didn’t tell the guy much about her so that she could have some measure of anonymity.  She was otherwise unmistakable because of her blood red hair.  She hated that first meeting with guys because the badassness she hoped would be communicated with her hair was contradicted by her sweet and childlike face.  “Pretty” people would call her instead of all the other things she would prefer.  Even banalities like “hot” would be preferable, but “pretty” or “cute” is all she ever got.  She guessed the guy would be some creep with pedophilia issues anyway and that her friends probably called her “pretty” and “cute” just to make the joke more hilarious – for them at least.

She couldn’t quite see all the tables as she stood at the front of the restaurant clutching the purse with the gun in it.  There were three tables that had one guy sitting alone, three Troy Smithers possibilities.  There was this one really gorgeous guy, all around dark complexion, like an Arabic male model.  Very likely gay.  Is that what her friends meant?  A coked up gay male model type?  She didn’t know if they were exactly wrong that he was what she’d like, but that had too much of the been-there-done-that quality to really make sense as the kind of wild her friends were implying.  The other two guys were a frumpy balding married looking dude and a buff tatted-up biker type.  All together unappealing and disappointingly lacking in the kind of wildness she hoped for.  Of the three, she found the gay one most interesting, so she went up to him and said, “Troy Smithers?”  He said, “No sorry.”

But now that she was in the table area, she saw in the back corner a table with two roses, and she saw the guy sitting there.  She wondered how she missed him since he took up most of the corner.  He was about thirty feet long and five feet in diameter.  He was a sand-colored serpentine worm creature with no eyes but three long skinny jawbeaks that BMW logoed together as a mouth.  “Great,” she said.  “They set me up with a fucking Tremors monster.” She realized she must have missed him because this restaurant had a bunch of oversized exposed air ducts, and he kind of just looked like another air duct.  These creatures ate people, right, but all the people around the table seemed to be okay with him sitting there, so why should she, who prided herself on ballsiness, be any less assured?  Of course, if he got rough with her the twenty two wasn’t going to do much good.  But her friends were right, goddamnit: she was intrigued.  Not that she found him appealing, not that he was marriage material, but there was no way she could walk out of the restaurant without seeing what would happen next. At least she could say she went on a date with a Tremors monster.  When she entered the pearly gates, Saint Peter wouldn’t have a chance to say to her, “Why did you pussy out when you had the chance to go on a date with a Tremors monster?”

She went up to the table and said, “Troy Smithers?”

“Yeah right that’s me,” he said.  His mouth opened modestly as he spoke and came off as more a puppet than a human speaking.  His voice, likewise, was more puppet than monster.  But everything other than the mouth – the movement, the mannerisms, even the smell which wasn’t offensive but was certainly animal – indicated this was not a puppet but a real life creature present before her.  “Are you Milly?”

“Milly Porpentine, nice to meet you.”  She extended her hand, but then blushed, pulled her hand away, and said, “Sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“I reached out my hand like for a handshake.”

“Oh, I usually use my tongues for hands which sounds gross but isn’t actually because they’re not, like, not like human tongues for digestion, they really are my hands basically, but I figured that would freak you out, am I babbling?  Sorry, I’m nervous.  You’re just a lot prettier than I expected.”

“I’m sorry if I don’t know how all of this works, but you can see me?”

“Oh, totally, you’re like a big vibrator to me.”

“I’m sorry what?”

“We sense vibrations which allows me to approximate sight and hearing very precisely, sort of an echo location type thing.  You’re vibrating even if you don’t realize it.  You’re vibrating a lot.”

“Well, you know blind dates … nerves and all that, like you said, I didn’t expect …”

“Oh, I’m sorry, do I look scary?”

“No, of course not … Well, yes actually.  I don’t mean any offense by that.  But my friends might’ve told you I like that sort of thing, scary situations.”

“Oh, well, good I guess.”

“Um.”

“Um.”

Then silence.

The waiter came up.  Milly ordered a salad.  Troy ordered ten steaks.

When the waiter left, Troy said, “My food costs are killer, but I save a lot because I live underground.  Plus, I have this whole settlement thing, long story.  I probably eat as much meat in a week as this restaurant serves in a day.”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

“Well, there’s that then.”  Silence.  Then Troy said, “Did it sound like I was calling you fat a second ago?”

“What?”

“When I said you were a big vibrator your heart beat especially fast.  Is that because you thought I was calling you fat?”

“No, no, it’s because the word ‘vibrator.’  It’s just out of place for so many reasons.”

“Vibrator?  Is that a scary word?  You have to be patient.  I’m a little rusty on human stuff.”

“Well a vibrator … I can’t believe … actually I was about to say I can’t believe I’m explaining what a vibrator is on a blind date, but that seems like a fairly banal disbelief at this point.  Well, let’s just say a vibrator is kind of an intimate, personal, private, you know, sexual thing for women.”

“Like with masturbation?”

“Right.”

“They went over masturbation devices in Psych 101, so I should’ve known that, but I think they used different terminology.  I work mostly with kids, so that sort of thing doesn’t come up.  I realize now masturbation devices are not first date conversation material.  I’ll change subjects.  You said your name was Milly Porpentine, but your friends said you had a different last name.  Was it because of marriage?”

“Oh God no.  It’s a stage name, Milly Sixsixsix.  It’s not an actual last name a human would have.  I don’t know how much my friends told you, but we’re in a Motley Crue cover band except we hate Motley Crue music.  Don’t get that impression that I’m the Motley Crue type.  I think they’re pretty terrible.  So we take their music and try to make it better.  Kind of our gimmick: the all girl Motley Crue cover band that doesn’t suck.  I’m more of the Pixies end of the spectrum.  I started playing bass because I wanted to be Kim Deal, but then somebody said, ‘You know the worst thing you could do right now is start a Motley Crue cover band and call yourself “Girls Girls Girls.”  That would be hilarious.’  So I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s do it.’  I ended up with the Nicky Sixx part, but since I’m three times as awesome … plus of course the whole antichrist thing … so I’m Milly Sixsixsix.”

“You’d be one hundred and eleven times as awesome.”

“What?”

“The math was wrong.”

“Oh, well, math isn’t my …”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to be condescending.  I just wanted to point out that one hundred and eleven times is better than three times.  I was just pointing out, you know, how awesome you are.  I mean I assume you’re that awesome.  I just met you.”

“No, don’t worry about it.  No offense taken.”  Silence.  “Do you like music?”

 “Of course.  I’m just a normal guy, really.”

“No, I mean, no offense, I thought with the vibration thing …”

“Oh, no, it’s fine.  I can regulate it.  It’s like bright lights for you … I guess … I mean I don’t really know from experience because I’ve never seen light, but I’ve been told, you know … It’s funny, my favorite musician is Reba McIntyre.  ‘The Heart Don’t Lie.’  That sort of thing.”

“Why’s that funny?  You have a right to like whoever you want to like, no matter how corny.”

“No, I don’t think it’s corny.  I mean it’s funny because she was in that movie.”

“What movie?”

“Oh, you know … Tremors.”

“Oh right, I didn’t want to be the one to bring that up, but, yeah, I guess that movie must have a big place in, you know, the lives of your people.”

“I know, tell me about it.  It’s like take all the bad stereotypes, roll it in a ball times a million.”

“That brings up a question I’ve been meaning to ask.  So, how should I put this?  You don’t … eat people?”

“Well, yeah, sure, I mean I don’t personally.  I guess you can call me the vegetarian of Tremors worms.”  He laughed.  Milly didn’t.  “No, that’s a joke.  That whole eating people thing is blown way out of proportion.”

Silence.

Then Milly said, “So Chastity told me you work with twins.  What is it you do?”

“I eat them.”  She opened her mouth in shock, but then he laughed.  Whenever he laughed, his midsection would undulate up and down disturbingly. “No, but seriously, we do schizophrenia research.  There’s a lot of research with twins to see what’s genetic and what’s learned since they have the same genes but maybe different circumstances.  So studying twins is useful for a lot of different things, not just psychological disorders.  I’m working indirectly with the work done by Doctor Nicthklein.  He’s pretty big in our community.  He’s working with twins where one’s schizophrenic and one isn’t.  That’s actually really rare, as you can imagine.  So I work with a lot of control groups, recording data so that it might be useful for schizophrenia studies, but I’m also putting it in a big data base so it’ll be useful for other studies in the future.  And don’t worry, I don’t meet with the subjects.  I get my grad assistants to do that for me.  Don’t want to traumatize the kids more than necessary, right?  So anyway, that’s what’s going on with my life.  That’s how I met your friends, actually.  Because of the …”

“Right.  Well, I assumed.”

“Are you a twin by chance?  We can always use more.”

“I don’t like to talk about my family.”

Silence.

Then Troy said, “It’s  funny, I actually really like children.  I know they say rule number one on a blind date is don’t talk about children, but with the whole, you know, interspecial thing I figured that rule was off the table.  Anyway, one of my ambitions is to use what I learn from my studies to write a kids book.  I’ve had this one idea for a long time for this kids book.  Tell me if you think I could get it published.  It’s about this Mexican farmer who’s so poor he eats his own hands and feet, but he can’t farm because he has no hands and feet, so he takes … How should I say this?  He uses his feces to form new hands and feet.”

“But how does he do that without hands?”

“That’s the mystery.  Nobody knows how.  The book ends with that mystery still up in the air.  You think that would sell.”

“I … I don’t think so, honestly.  What does that have to do with your studies?”

“I thought it would appeal to kids in the oral/anal stage.”

“No, I don’t think that would be appealing … to anyone … ever.  No offense.  You told me to be honest.”

“None taken.  I appreciate it.”

“Why don’t you write a book about your people?  About the … what do you prefer to be called?”

“Tremors worm is fine.”

“Why don’t you write, like, a memoir about Tremors worms?”

“I don’t know how comfortable I’d be pouring my heart out to the whole world like that.  Besides, I never really grew up with many Tremors worms.  I’ve mostly known humans.  Government workers, stuff like that.  The government kind of annihilated most of my species after that movie, and then they felt really bad and gave us millions of dollars.  If you remember, I mentioned that settlement a few minutes ago.  It’s kind of like if people suddenly discover the existence of bears and that they eat people, then freak out, kill most of the bears in the world, find out bears are sentient, feel bad, and give the bear community millions of dollars.  It’s not something I really feel I’m qualified to write about since other Tremors worms I’ve met are just bitter and depressed, and they call me a sellout.  I thought about charity work instead maybe.  Actually, I’ve felt pretty bad for Indians because I don’t think they got millions of dollars for the same thing.  I’ve been looking into Indian charities.  Maybe one day I’ll sponsor one.  We’ll see.”

“That reminds me, let me back up.  How is it you can read and write and do research?”

“Oh, everything has a vibratory signature.  Everything’s vibrating at a molecular level.  Except for the giant ground sloth.  Weird bit of trivia for you.  Anyway, I can sense it precisely enough so that I can make out letters on a page.  I can also tell the difference between colors.  I can see, you know, quote unquote see through walls.”

“Like Superman?”

“I don’t know about that.  It’s not x-ray.”

“So you can, like, see through clothes?”

“Yes.  Red lace?  Matches your hair, interesting touch.  Was that wrong of me to see that.  Sorry, so sorry.”

The waiter came with Milly’s salad and Troy’s ten steaks.  Troy mumbled, “So, um , so … I love this place,” he said.  “I come here all the time because they’re so accommodating.  They know I always order the same thing, ten steaks super rare.”

“Is it also because the air ducts are a kind of camouflage?”

“Why would I need camouflage?”

“Oh, no, nothing, sorry.”

As Milly was poking her salad with her fork, Troy’s three tongues came out, snatched all of the steaks in about three swipes, pulled them up into his big mouth, and his meal was over within seconds.  Milly almost vomited.  She pushed her salad away.

“Is your salad not good?” he said.

“No, I’m not hungry.”

“Are you anorexic?”

“No, no, I’m not.”

“Is that an inappropriate question?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, bad habit.”  Silence.  “I guess I should go ahead and pay.”  Two of his tongues came out: one held a normal leather wallet while the other tongue pulled out some cash.

“You keep your wallet in your stomach?” Milly said, still a little nauseous.

“No, my cephalothorax section, the first third of my body, is totally dry.  It’s like keeping my wallet in my arm pit.  It’s all pockets and digging muscles.  It gets sandy in there when I’m digging maybe, but that’s why I have all the pockets.  You don’t even get to digestion until you get to my midsection. I bet you could ride in there.  I mean I’ve heard of other guys doing that, I mean taking girls for a ride in their cephalothorax pockets, but I mean, you know, whatever.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be doing that.”

“Understandable.  Not on a first date.”

“Not ever.”

“Right.” Silence.  “So what do you want to do now?” Troy said.

“Look, Troy, I’ll have to be honest with you.  I don’t know what you expected from this.  I don’t know what my friends said to you, but I’m afraid they set us up together mostly as a joke.  Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but that’s how my friends are.  Do you really believe they saw this as some sort of long term thing?  We might as well just call it a night right here.”

“What did I do wrong?”

“This doesn’t need to turn into some self pity thing.  That’s why I’m being honest with you now so I won’t hurt your feelings more than I could.”

“No, I’m asking to learn. I thought things were going okay.”

“Oh, honey, no.   I’m sorry.  You’re really new at this, aren’t you?”

“What part was bad specifically?”

“I would say beginning to end, but there was a lot that was, you know, neutral.  Like when you were telling me about your job, that was interesting.”

“Oh good, but I have to ask you, does it have anything to do with my looks?”

“Oh no, no, no, no … yes, I’ll be honest.  Definitely, the looks are an issue.  I don’t scare easy, but first impression, you’re a pretty scary guy.  Don’t take that as me being judgmental like I look down on you or anything.  I’m just a very honest person.  That’s kind of what I’m known for.”

“Yeah, your friends said that.  They also said you had crazy adventures.  When I heard about that, I thought maybe you’d give me a chance.  Like you’d think of me as a crazy adventure.  I’ve always been kind of scared to get out there and date.  When your friends told me about you, it seemed like the perfect opportunity, like somebody who wouldn’t turn down a chance, somebody who wouldn’t be afraid to try.  Now I know I was just being stupid.  I’m not in it for any of the normal human dating stuff.  I mean look at me.  How could I expect anything like that?  I just wanted somebody to have fun with, hang out with, somebody to talk to, somebody who’d listen, somebody I could call when I’d get bored, somebody I can send messages about nothing and she’d actually write back.  Not people screaming and running away and not me hiding in book theories which has been my whole life.  Just a present person to be around who wanted me to be around too.”

“Troy, what you’re looking for is a friend, not a girlfriend.  Don’t you have any friends?”

“I have work friends, and I used to have school friends, but it doesn’t go beyond that.  We sort of say good bye at the office and that’s it.”

“Well, what you need to do is say to your friends at work, very simply, ‘Let’s go out for a beer.’  That’s all you need to do.  Build it up from there.  I really should be heading out.  It was nice to meet you, Troy.  I hope you find what you need.”

She gathered her things and left.  She was at the door as a big crowd was leaving, and in the few minutes it took, she looked back to where she had been sitting.  Troy was still sitting there looking around – without eyes, so more like he was orienting his snout than looking – then he oriented his snout toward the table like he was looking down in dejection.

Milly had a tattoo on her left shoulder blade that said “Life is short so fuck it” because that’s what she said a lot.  Her friends told her she said that so much she ought to have it tattooed on her, so Milly immediately did it.  There in the restaurant staring back at the pitiful monster, she said, “Fuck it.”  She thought back to how she was before that whole thing with Thurgood and Mister Lord.  Was she really all that different from Troy back then?  She went back over to the table and said, “Hey, Troy, do you sleep?”

“What do you mean?  I have a hibernation period every winter.”

“Cool.  Follow me.  We’re going to go have some fun.” She walked toward the door, and he followed.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” he said.  “Oh, there’s a big crowd at the door.”

“You’re a huge mother fucker.  They’ll move.  Don’t worry.”  They got out of the restaurant and went down the street, Milly in front, Troy sliding behind.  Some people screamed and jumped out of the way.  Milly loved the screams.  That’s something she didn’t even think about, but it confirmed this as the right decision.  She said to Troy while she was walking, “First, before we go any farther, I’m going to be honest.  We’re going to have a hell of a time, but it’s going to involve a little exploitation.  By that I mean I am going to be exploiting you.  How much do you get from that endangered species grant?”

“A million dollars, but I invested it with this guy named Abraham Masoch.  I recommend him highly.  Anyway, it’s a couple of million now.”

“Wow, so you’re a millionaire.  No fucking way.  I did not see that coming.  Okay, here’s the deal: I’m going to exploit you tonight, but we’re going to have fun, and you’re going to end up with tons of friends.  You agree?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you really want what you said you wanted, you can’t be a pussy.  I make you a promise now: if you don’t have an awesome night, one hundred and eleven times more awesome than any night you’ve ever had in your life, I’ll pay you back all the money we spend tonight, and you never have to see me again.  For one night, just say fuck it, okay?”

 “Okay.”

The first place they went was a bar called The Changeling Child where Milly was a regular.  It was a simple place to start, a good easing in point for Troy, and if the whole idea went to hell, she’d probably be allowed to come back.  When Troy came in, half the bar screamed and ran to the farthest wall.  They couldn’t run out because Troy was blocking the door.  But then Milly got up on the bar, made it very clear she and Troy were together that night, and shouted, “Drinks are on the Tremor’s monster!” and everybody cheered.  Most of them knew Milly and accepted the absurdity without much question.  They all drank and talked and laughed and sang while Troy mostly listened silently.  They poured alcoholic drinks down Troy’s throat, tons and tons of it, trying to get him drunk, but it didn’t seem to have much effect.  Troy kept apologizing, but Milly said, “They love you.  Quit apologizing.”

They went to another bar and did the same routine and about five more bars after that.  At bar number seven, Milly got Troy to play “guess the color of my underwear” for money with a bunch of mostly drunk bar goers who didn’t catch on for a long time.  Milly told Troy it was for cock fighting money.  “Cock fighting money?” Troy said.

“Don’t worry.  That’s later.  I guarantee you we’ll double what we’re making right now, and you’ll have your money back in no time.”

The next place they went wasn’t cock fighting but a dance club where Milly danced around Troy, even straddling him like a horse at one point, while Troy spent most of the time sitting there saying “Um” over and over.

Then they looked up some of Milly’s old boyfriends – this was an idea she had around three in the morning and the whole routine lasted for about another hour – she knocked on their doors or rang their door bells while Troy waited in the hall, and she tried to keep herself from laughing.  Sometimes the ex-boyfriend didn’t come to the door, but when he did come, Milly said, “You remember when I said your dick was an adequate size?”  The word “adequate” gave her trouble.  “That’s until I got a whole new context with my new boyfriend.  Check his shit out.”  And she pointed to Troy.

Most of the guys glanced at Troy and closed the door immediately without comment.  One guy said, “I’m married, and I have a new born, Milly.  Real mature.  I hope you remember this tomorrow, and you feel bad about yourself.”  That guy didn’t even bother to look at Troy.

They went to a strip club called Pygmalion, and Milly bought Troy a lap dance with his money.  Troy was only able to fit his head into the champagne room, and the stripper spent most of the time bumping her ass against his face.  She said, “You like that?  Is that what you want?”

“No, but I think you’re good at what you do, so please don’t stop.”  Milly was there too just laughing her ass off.  The stripper somehow didn’t catch on.

They went to a cock fighting ring as she promised.  Troy waited outside a few minutes because he said he was nervous about doing something illegal.  Milly went ahead in and placed the bets.  When Troy came in, the cocks freaked out, and the cock fighting organizers chased them off, shooting guns in the air.

Later, when Milly had convinced Troy to block a back street so that they – Milly and the half dozen or so brand new friends she’d made – could challenge a random group to a break dancing contest and fail miserably and the legit break dance crew got annoyed and left, Milly said, “We totally need to steal a bus.”

“Why would we steal a bus?” one of the random new friends said.

But she only replied, “Dude we need to steal a bus no seriously we have to steal a bus.”

So they stole a bus.  The details got a little fuzzy.  There was a parking lot of unused city buses nearby.  Troy told them where all the security cameras were, so they took them out.  One of their new friends just happened to be a mechanical engineer – isn’t that always the way with shit like that?  So while they crept in, Troy was sort of the lookout with his whole vibratory sense thing.  And then something something something.  The next thing she knew, they were speeding down the street, somebody else driving, Troy sprawled out in the middle aisle of the bus, and some cops were speeding along behind them with their lights going.  The next thing Milly knew she was riding down the street on the back of Troy.  She thought about his trepidation with the cock fighting, and now he was running away from cops and laughing – there must’ve been something in the middle she missed, some middle step that brought him to joy.  She then looked back, and their friends were running behind them.  The bus had knocked down a lamp post and was now cattycorner in the street in such way that the cops couldn’t get past, but she could see the blue and red lights blinking at the other side.  She looked forward and saw that they were headed for the park.  Then it was darkness.

 

Milly woke up on a couch in what seemed like a normal apartment.  She tried to cycle through which of the bus-stealing friends from last night it must be and realized she didn’t actually know any of those people.  “Oh shit, I stole a bus,” she realized.  She looked around to see if she could see some sign of who this must be, but everything seemed so fake like it had come right out of a catalogue picture re-imagined by a child.  And then there was Troy in front of her fooling with something in the kitchen area.  Everything else came back to her.  The blurriness of her eyes made it all seem like left over dream stuff.  But that terrible date and the Tremors worm and all the normal stuff afterwards must’ve been real after all.  And why the hell did he have this normal apartment.  He said he lived underground.  But why would anything be surprising about this guy?  She then saw the walls were made of dirt and realized why it seemed like a facsimile.  “This is a cool place.”

“Hey, you’re awake.  You feel okay?”

“What do you think?”

“I’m glad I had kind of a human place to take you so I didn’t have to drag you underground to nothing.  Do you really like the place?  I haven’t gotten anyone to tell me whether it looks okay or not.  I kind of found out piece by piece what people have in their apartments.  I don’t need most of this stuff like what am I going to do with a couch?  I went out and got this coffee maker while you were sleeping because I heard this is great for a hangover.  I’m assuming you feel bad now because of a hangover”

“Clearly.  You’re real chipper.  Do you have a hangover?  Did you even get drunk at all?”

“No, I think it would take a lot more alcohol to get to that point.”

“Sounds like a goal.  Hey, Troy, I don’t remember much about the last little bit of last night.  Did I ride down her in that sack in your cephalothorax you told me about?”

“No.  My door’s wide enough that you just rode on my back.”

“I didn’t proposition you or anything, right?  We didn’t do anything, like, freaky sexual did we?”

“No, I didn’t even know how that would be accomplished.  You were asleep by the time we got here.  I put you on the couch and went out to the store.  I’ve kind of been messing with this ever since.  I would ask you how to make coffee, but I think it’s a valuable lesson to try and do it myself.”

“Actually, do you have a bathroom?”

“Do you need to pee or vomit which is what happens after a lot of alcohol?”

“Thankfully, it’s just number one.”

“It’s the pink door.”

The bathroom was awkwardly decorated like a Miami Vice episode, pictures of palm trees and pineapple sand flamingos.  The toilet was a regular porcelain toilet, but below it was a very deep hole.  It didn’t look like it had ever been used.  It didn’t smell like anything but dirt.  She was leaning over, staring down the hole too long.  She ended up puking and then peeing in it.  She was worried about doing this in the bathroom of a guy she didn’t know, a guy who probably could hear and sort of see in his own way exactly what she was doing, but then they were way, way beyond first date niceties at this point.  When she got back out, the coffee was ready.  He handed the mug to her with his tongue, something that was only gross the first few times he did it and now was essentially like a regular person’s hand.

“Tell me if the coffee’s any good,” he said.

“It’s awful.  About twice as dark as any human being needs.”

“I can try again.”

“No, it’s fine for me right now.”

They sat there quietly.  While she sipped her coffee, Milly thought about those awkward silences during their awful date, but this was a different kind of silence. “Look, Troy … I can understand if you hate me.”

 “Why would I hate you?”

“I tend to come off as an asshole sometimes.”

“Remember when you told me to quit apologizing.  You apologize more than you probably think you do.”

“I just want to let you know, Troy, I kind of live by this philosophy … I live by the philosophy that I’m going to die by the time I’m twenty two.  It is not like I’m sick and dying or anything.  It’s just a state of mind.   A short life and a death worth writing stories about is better than a long drawn out sickness and an anonymous death.  My family has this whole philosophy like the preservation of life is what’s important above everything else.  That back fired in big way I don’t want to go into right now, so I live like no matter what, twenty two is going to be the upper limit.  That puts a lot of things in context.  For one thing, I don’t worry all the time about whether people like me.  If a long term relationship is worth having, it’s not going to be based on bull shit anyway.  But long term is just not something I do.  So I was very up front that what I was going to do was exploit you, but what you were going to experience would be unique, unforgettable, once in a life time.  But if you hate me because I exploited you, it’s fine with me because at least it was an experience you can tell stories about.  But the last thing I want you to do is be polite and say I didn’t do anything to piss you off.  If you hate me, please tell me now.”

“I don’t hate you.  I love you.”

“Whoa, no falling in love here, pal.”

“No, I didn’t mean that.  I meant like, hey, I love that movie or I love that steak … because it … tastes good …”

“You said you wanted somebody to have fun with.  I can give you that.  You want somebody to listen and all that relationship shit, you’re going to be disappointed.”

“No, I understand that, definitely.  It was the most fun I ever had.  I spent so much of my life trying not to be the stereotype of the Tremors worm that I didn’t even know a life like you showed me last night existed.  So you didn’t do a single thing I hated.  Feel free to keep exploiting me.”

“Cool.  I better get out of here.  You got a cell phone, right?  I’ll call you.  I have an idea of something we could do next time.  How do I get out of here?”

“Red door.  Crawl up the tunnel.  Sorry it’s not more glamorous.”

“You should know by now that’s not an issue I care about.  And no more apologizing.”

She crawled through the dirt tunnel and opened a hatch that turned out to be a hidden clump of dirt covered in grass like a trap door spider would d build right there in the middle of the park.  She walked on, hoping the next thing she’d happen upon will be as interesting.

 

 

Troy Smithers and Milly Porpentine part II: Fuzzies and Cages

 

Troy didn’t hear from Milly for two weeks after that crazy first date.  He assumed it was an ephemeral moment of ecstasy, the sort of besotted youth he missed compacted into a single night, but not something that would return to his adult world that now stretched out before him like his long slow work-a-day life compared to that short burst of insanity was a lifeless desert with only occasional spots of green too small to actually nourish him.  He had to force himself not to think that way.  It was only an experiment, he told himself.  He got his findings, and that was that.  No emotion necessary when it was only an experiment.  But what if emotion was the best human experience he’d been hiding from?  What if that’s what he should plunge head forward into?  His own logical defenses were crumbling.  He could at least be distracted by the present moment and the numbing routine.

He was in a meeting, and two grad assistants were reading results of a survey, droning on with the usual sort of thing: “Question number one: Preston answered yes; Weston answered yes.  Question number two: Preston answered no; Weston answered no.  Question number three: Preston answered yes; Weston answered no.”

“Interesting.”  That’s what grad students would always say when the twins answered yes/no questions differently.  “Interesting.”  Nothing controversial or offensive or even specific.  After a few of these, they would inevitably say, “What do you think, Doctor Smithers?”

But this time Troy was on the edge of a dream of Milly laughing, that’s all, laughing, nothing complicated.  Then his cell phone rang.  He kept his cell phone in one of the pockets in his cephalothorax and didn’t really need to pull it out to talk, but this time he made a show of pulling it out with one tongue and pressing buttons with another.  It was Milly.  Shock ran through him if he didn’t actually expect to get what he wanted.  She said, “Remember that bar we went to first?  Meet me there in ten minutes.”

“But I’m working”

“Fuck work.  You’re a millionaire.  Plus I got us a way to make money.  Be there in ten minutes or the deal’s off.”

Nine minutes later he was at the bar.  “What’s this all about?” he said.  “Be thankful I didn’t take my lunch hour today.”

“You’re not going to worry about lunch hours again.  Like I said, I got us a money making venture.”

“What do you mean?”

“First, we’re going to a fuzzies party.  That’s not the money making venture, just something that’s going to be freaking hilarious.  Second, you ready?  Two words: Cage fighting.” She opened her mouth s if on the verge of a laugh.

             All Troy could say was, “What?”