the world. “People make too much of prom night. Let Fido and Bowser have fun, let blood be spilt, but for gosh sakes, let lovable old Pelf read his thriller.”
Mia turned to Bonn. “He’s begging for it.”
“I think so too.” Bonn eyed the instruments of pleasure on the coffee table.
“Isn’t he begging for it?” asked Mia.
Bonn reached to retrieve.
A pair of stiff riding crops stuck out from between his fingers like black leather drumsticks. “Yes honeybunch, no question.”
He handed Mia her weapon of choice.
“I’m not begging for it,” Pelf insisted, grinning as he closed his book.
He probed deep into the cushion crack and coaxed out a hand-tooled, vegetable-tanned, sharkskin beauty, the riding crop his spouses had given him on his fiftieth birthday. Despite eleven years of wear, the thing had staying power and a humming thwack that sang of quality. It shone with crusted weltflow. Pelf gripped its handle and hunched forward.
Bonn said, “Let’s get him,” and charged in.
Mia followed, raising her lustiest yowl to the rafters. Her crop whistled down hard on Pelf’s terryclothed buttocks as he rose to meet his attackers.
Back into the armchair they drove him, riding its floorward arc but not missing a battering beat as they tumbled across the carpet.
Mia lost herself in gaiety and torn clothing, ending up in her favorite position: cushioned by soft pillows, plugged below, her crop hand free to punish her lovers.
Bonn crouched to rouse her as his lickables bobbed hot against her lips.
Their laughter stopped when Fido yelled, not for the first time, “Dad, Mom, Dad. Bowser just drove up.”
Mia, unBonning her mouth, angled toward her son. Spiffed and slicked to steal the heart of any youngster, Fido, class clown, stood there waiting for his special night to begin.
Door chimes rang out bing-bong-bing-bong, followed at once by Bowser McPhee’s irritating shave-and-a- haircut rap.
The skin on Pelf’s shoulder was red and raw. He slipped out of her, pulled about himself the tatters of his bathrobe, cinched it, and said he would get the door.
Mia righted the armchair and sat down.
She’d be damned if she would bother getting up to greet a belligerent little no-account like Bowser McPhee.
She touched the gaping flesh of one welt and made sizzling-lips sound and a face of pain. As the door opened, her fingers shot up to check her left lobe.
No problem, nothing showing, bag in place. But it never hurt to be sure.
Bowser McPhee was as fleshy and dark as ever. “Good evening, sir. Good evening, sir.” He waved at Mia and she nodded. “Ma’am.”
Fido came into the creepy kid’s arms as they traded perfunctory right-lobe kisses.
Her husbands engaged in small talk, half-nods and smiles in her direction, until her son and his date were out the door. Mia crossed her legs. Her fingers fidgeted on the chair’s arms.
Bonn misinterpreted. “Worried?”
“Nope,” she said. “My son’s from a charmed line. Fido will come home with a choice slice of flesh in his Futterware. But my God, he could do so much better than Bowser McPhee.”
“Bowser is a bucket of slime, isn’t he?” said Pelf. “But our boy is young. He’s testing the waters. I don’t believe the McPhee kid will be his final choice.”
“We shouldn’t have picked a dog’s name,” said Mia.
Bonn spoke up. “Something more normal may have helped.”
Easy for Bonn to say, thought Mia, since he had had nothing to do with the decision.
“Dog names were all the rage back then,” said Pelf in their defense. “Mia and I had no way of knowing. Besides, we’ve met plenty of Rexes and Spots, even another Fido our son’s age, who have all been super kids. Nope, I don’t think his name’s the problem.”
After a glum pause, Bonn offered, “At least he has a date. The school didn’t have to pair him up.”
“Small favors,” Mia said. Her younger spouse was a handsome brute, juicy with passion, but his mind was as limp as week-old lettuce.
“Don’t worry,” said Pelf, massaging her shoulders. “He’ll turn out fine.”
“Once he dumps that walking embarrassment.”
Pelf gave Mia’s right cheek a resounding swat, raising a blush there. “For the love of Christ, sweetie, relax. Fido has more sense than people credit him with. Sure he’s in tight with Bowser McPhee now. But it’s more a buddy-buddy thing than love, from what I can see.”
Mia took the hand that had struck her. “You think so?” She raised it to her mouth and bit deep into Pelf’s thumb. Blood welled bitter upon her lips.
Pelf winced. “I’m betting that Fido goes into the prom with his eyes open and scavenging. Jesus, honey, that hurts.”
Mia reseated her jaw and hit the nerves, again, again.
Bonn, having stripped off his lobebag, now fumbled at the drawstrings of Mia’s.
Pelf seethed upon a savage in-breath. He lifted his wife’s hand toward his face so that her fingers claimed the dangle of his lobebag, a taut tug and rustle as it shimmied down and off.
For as long as their dalliance lasted, all thoughts of Mia’s son, and what might happen to him at the prom and beyond, quite deserted her.
Peyton “Futzy” Buttweiler, for thirty years the principal of Corundum High, sat alone in his office.
The rolltop desk, his bookshelves, the stark paneling that covered the office walls, were all a dark delicious rosewood. This place was Futzy’s arena of shame. So it had been for twenty years, since his daughter’s prom.
That year, Kitty’s final year of high school, Futzy had refused all knowledge of who the victims would be. The handful of teachers in the know had displayed nothing but impenetrable pokerfaces.
Futzy had had them dismissed or transferred, the image of Kitty, slain and futtered, burning into his brain.
Propped on his desk blotter, Kitty’s senior picture was framed in fake-gold. The velvet fuzz at its back bore a shine from frequent handling.
Funny how, when her portrait lay facedown in his desk drawer, Futzy’s office hummed with academic concerns. But as soon as he raised it into view, this place became a sanctuary of guilt, a quiet confessional, all of his administrative woes momentarily set aside.
It wasn’t the dark dress, angled tastefully between shoulders and cleavage, that caught his attention. Neither was it her matching lobebag, the firmness of her young flesh, nor the sweet innocence of that hope-filled gaze into a future she would never live.
No, it was the knockout impact of the whole, the way it brought back a world of promise taken from him in one vicious night. Kitty had been its linchpin, her natural vibrancy infusing him and his wives, Freia and Keech, with what had seemed a deep and abiding commitment to their marriage.
When Kitty and her date were carried lifeless to the Ice Ghoul at the center of the gym, Futzy had borne for hours the sight of her slain body.
At midnight, the cleavers had come out.
Futzy Buttweiler sat among the chaperones a destroyed man, watching in disbelief the mayhem.
When he came home that night, it felt as if their house were kept together with spit and baling wire. Worse, his gradual drift away from Freia and Keech-long unsuspected beneath their shared happiness in Kitty- made itself plain.
Two weeks later, they left him.
His new wives Futzy had found lurking outside the bereavement clinic waiting to snag some guilt-eyed
