The Minotauress

and the ultimate revelation of his newfound calling...

That was the best nut of my LIFE...

He pulled his jeans back up, then dusted off his hands. Now his grin toward McKully sharpened to a cunning glare. 'Down'n dirty enough for ya, Mr. McKully?'

'I'd say so.'

'Hardcore enough?'

'All right, boy, now don't git cocky. I just done admitted ya proved me wrong. Yer badder than I thought. Yer hardcore.'

'Good,' Balls gloated. 'So's just you watch this... '

Even McKully looked appalled now. Balls kneeled back between the corpse's legs and spread the buttocks wide. Then—

'Aw, no, son!' McKully objected. 'Don't do that! Ya done proved yer point!'

Balls wedged his face right into the corpse's ass-crack, guttering muffled laughter, and then planted his lips in a tight circle around the sullied rectum...

And sucked.

He sucked hard, good and hard.

Of course, the girl hadn't been fed in a week, so there wasn't much in the way of fecal matter down there, but there was plenty of pasty, tacky, revolting stink, and there was plenty of something else as well: Balls' semen.

Balls sucked it all out of her ass right into his mouth. McKully, Dicky, the blond girl, and even the baby stared open-mouthed.

Balls rose. He picked up the severed head, then spat his own sperm into the dead girl's lips.

He cast the head aside and grinned right at McKully.

'Now that, Mr. McKully, is how Tritt Balls Conner puts a ruckin' on a gal.'

(II)

This is how much of his new novel the Writer had completed in a month's time:

WHITE TRASH GOTHIC

CHAPTER ONE

There was a knock at the door. When Nikoff Raskol opened it, he

That was it. The Writer stared at the lone page in the Remington Model No. 2, dismayed. One and a half damn sentences in a month? Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three days! But when the Writer scrutinized that sentence and a half—really just one independent clause, and a prepositional clause, he saw no falseness in it. Time means nothing to true art, he reminded himself. He was one of a privileged lot: a full-time fiction writer. Percy Shelley didn't rush Prometheus Unbound, and Eliot didn't rush Prufrock...  And wasn't it Flaubert who said that not only was it the author's luxury to spend the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out, it was also his obligation?

Yes, the Writer was certain of it.

'That's enough work for today,' he talked to himself and stood up and stretched. He lit a cigarette, opening the shade to let his gaze plummet down to the moonlit junkyard. Small animals which he presumed were rats scurried about the debris, and he could swear the dog defecating next to a junked car was the same dog he's seen doing the same his very first night. A bum staggered about, then plopped down by a heap of trash, opened a bottle of something. After several chugs, he tilted his head, vomited, then continued to imbibe.

Real life, the Writer thought with some satisfaction. Ideology reduced to material elements and physiological addictions contrary to the ethereal pursuit. Biological mechanism versus determinism...

Of course, the word 'addiction' was subject to interpretation.

He went to the bathroom, then, and considered his use of the name Nikoff Raskol—the protagonist for his novel—and wondered if it were too obvious a reversion of Dostoevsky's protagonist in Crime and Punishment, the greatest fictional work of existential enlightenment in the history of the written word. Might critics think it trite? The Writer urinated mightily. No. Of course not. Great painters often paid homage to their contemporaries by ingeminating authoritative themes. He flushed the toilet and smiled, knowing beyond all doubt that White Trash Gothic would herald him as the Dostoevsky of the modern age of literature.

He turned on the old radio, which always drifted off the only classical station he could find. 'Jaysus WANTS you to drive fine cars!' an evangelist trumpeted, 'because it's Jaysus who rewards the faithful so long as you remember the importance of charity and leave those fine cars to the church in your wills!' The dial pushed through static, then he caught a snippet of moody slide guitars and a man singing, 'I will fuck you until you die, bury you and kiss this town goodbye!' The Writer winced—Gracious!— finnicked further, then stumbled on insipid hard rock and some sports stations before he found the following manic voice-warble, asserting, 'I could be Raskolnikov, but Mother Nature RIPPED me off!'

Portents in the wind, he thought, emboldened by the coincidence. Surely it's a sign of Dante's Sisters of the Heavenly Spring, whispering their approval in my ear...

Then:

I deserve a drink!

He left and locked his room, only to turn into a burst of commotion. 'Gimme that, you ‘ho!' a chubby blonde girl in holey lingerie snapped at a chubby brunette in holey lingerie: 'Fuck you, Irene! It's mine!' and, of course, she pronounced mine as 'man.' The pair were playing tug-of-war with a box about the size of a box of aluminum foil. The Writer squinted, noticing the words AS SEEN ON TV! printed on the box.

'It ain't yers!' wailed the blonde. Her breasts and a belly of baby fat bounced. 'It's both ours!'

'Well I'se usin' it now, so's you kin grow a dick'n blow yerself!' but then both girls looked with alarm at the Writer. Their eyes shot wide and their argument abated.

'Shhh!' whispered the blonde. 'It's that famous writer fella! Mrs. Gilman said she'd kick any girl out the house if'n we disturb him.'

'Oh, you're not disturbing me,' the Writer ingratiated them. 'But harsh words and un-civil gestures are no way to solve a disagreement. What is that, anyway?'