Sock Puppets

 

 

 

 

‘My so-called friends

Where are they now?

I guess a love that bends

Isn’t worth much anyhow.’

-‘Jet Lag’

Brendan Benson

 

Sock Puppets

1

 

You go along unsuspecting the treachery while a grey, untouchable horizon builds beyond your wife’s eyes. She’s exhausted when you ask for sex, and yes, you ask. Her kisses, once soft and wet with welcome, now pucker as if the sight of you is sour.

I don’t care anymore, damnit, I once assured myself with a brisk straightening of my shirt. I don’t need it.

At the end of that two-week stint, finding her at the television eating dates, unbothered by my resolution while I positively baked with rage, I gave in, asked, and was denied with the excuse and worried brow of a headache. 

After I went to bed that night, my wife spent a long time in the bath. 

She was a beautiful woman, and even after our ten years together, I craved her and kept my mind free of infidelity when I privately took care of myself.

One night I couldn’t sleep, and like a maintenance man who can no longer ignore a cracking foundation, I stepped into the empty hallway where we’d made love against the walls, sat opposite each other talking about children that never came, and eventually stood with folded arms discussing the mortgage and ignored the wall between us that I now sought to address.

I cleared my throat, a mid-life battle cry, and set out for the tangerine light leaking from the cracks of her closed, quiet bathroom time. 

“Kate,” I said. I held a hand to the door. Deciding this was too intimate, I clenched my fist and rested a knuckle against the splintering wood. 

She did not respond, so I went on. “I … I’m losing it, Kate.” My voice betrayed me with a crack. “I’m losing you, and … I won’t … I can’t just sit here and watch. I’m looking for a job, you know that, and I only write when all the housework’s done. I know you’re working hard for the both of us, and … well, shit, Kate, if you want me to change, tell me. I’ll throw the damn computer away, I’ll throw my manuscripts away, I’ll do whatever you want.”

The door opened, and I nearly fell into the toilet. 

It was oddly quiet. Feeling like a pervert in my own house, I averted my eyes as I walked to the shower to inch open the curtain. 

“I’m sorry, Kate, but this can’t wait any long–”

I looked down to the dry porcelain around the shower drain. I removed the chastening hand from my forehead. Dry. Empty. No wife. 

“Huh,” I said to myself, looking around as if she might be in the cabinets or walls, watching and giggling as I tried to speak with her about our sex life. 

I went to the kitchen, to our finished basement with the carpet she so loved, to our sunroom–or cat room, as Kate called it–and finally to the garage. Both cars slept in their berths. I touched the hoods and found them cold. I pulled out my phone and dialed her. 

Two rings, then Kate’s voice: “Hi, you’ve reached Kate Lonergan with Lonergan Realty. I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and a brief–”

I dialed again. No luck. 

“What the fuck?” I said, sending a text. “What in the blue fuck?” 

Before my wife and I made the decision that her income could support us while I pursued my writing, I had a decent job. I made most of the money, helping Kate get her feet wet in real estate. I supported her, she emotionally supported me, and we fucked often enough.

I had a rule: we don’t stress about money, we find solutions. I didn’t want my home holding court over such trivialities. 

I found that devaluing dollars is easier when you bring them home.

I quit my job in 2020, when the interest rates were down, and Kate took home thirty grand that first month. I got a placement in a local literary magazine called Horn Rim. Only two hundred for that job, but it was a start. 

I sold another story; I bought Kate this diamond teardrop necklace she’d been wanting. And I won an agent from the Chicago-based Chester and Jack Literary Agency for my short story Rabbit’s Day Away. It was looking like the ROI of “Collie the Writer” was paying out sooner than either of us expected. 

Four years passed. Interest rates spiked. Cost of gas and groceries doubled annually.

AI started writing books.

I lost my agent, and publishers were tired of gatekeeping. Done were the days of send a book in and get rich quick. It was the age of the self-published, and good fucking luck. 

“You want the keys?” Big Publishing said, tossing them to us as we greedily scrambled, blinded by our phone screens. “Have fun.”

You had to plug yourself on social media before an agent would even consider opening your query, and shame on you if you didn’t ask enough questions, farm engagement, and show your introverted face to the world with jokes that have nothing to do with your work. I found it repulsive and remained agentless.

If I grabbed something extra at the grocer, a treat let’s say, Kate would get home from work, toss her heels off, scan the house for any left messes, then go to the fridge and say, “Collie?”

“Hm?” I’d say from my study. 

“What’s this cake for?” 

I would finish the sentence I was working on with some placeholder garbage and crane my neck to answer. “You like that one! It’s from—”

“Collie, we can’t afford this,” she would say, sounding … defeated. I had defeated my wife with chocolate cake. 

When I finally decided Kate was under too much strain and knocked on the bathroom door, it was too late.

She was gone. 

The cat came rubbing against my shins and I picked her up. Ami was her name. I scratched just below her left ear the way she liked. 

“Where is she, Ami?” 

Ami mewled in her dehydrated voice. 

I phoned the neighbor. 

Gone, too, were the days of a home phone line where you could assault your neighbors with a cacophonous jangle unless they put it off the hook.

Now there were do not disturb settings, or you could switch the thing off. Just then, the world seemed like it was a better place before the screens.

It wasn’t, really, I know that. But to me it was, because in those days, my wife hadn’t fallen out of love with me. 

But has she fallen out of love with me?

“Where is she?” I asked Ami again. 

Ami only crackled low, her version of a purr. 

I went out to our back patio. One of those red-clay jobs fenced in our backyard. The moon was orange and huge. 

I went back inside. I tried reading in the chair by the front door, but my eyes kept sliding over the words, drifting to the window. I had never wanted my wife worse than I did in that moment.

“Jesus, what’s wrong with me?” 

I chewed a nail, shut my book and set it on the lamp table, then fiddled with the chain dangling from the lamp’s green shade. 

I sat that way for a good half hour, cycling through the possible activities I could occupy my worried mind with. Not one of them caught. Kate was the only activity—worrying over Kate, speculating over Kate, feeling guilty about Kate, betrayed by Kate—

Cheated on … by Kate. 

And why not? I knew my own attitude toward money, but Kate, as she’d shown me in these four years since the great ‘Chase Our Dream’ project, did not share the sentiment of, “Don’t worry about it, honey.” And here I was with no job, spending most of my time writing while she struggled to pay for everything.

Why wouldn’t Kate find a tanned man in a suit who only had feelings when he sawed, measured, and then nailed them together? In fact, he could hardly feel anything at all, and what’s more attractive? As much as women claim they want a sensitive man, they only want those men to be friends, not lovers.

And some seem to realize this fact too late in the form of some defunct carpentry or plumbing that an unfeeling man could have fixed, would want to fix, would enjoy fixing. 

I imagined such a man holding Kate’s naked body—no, no, not naked, not sexy enough. She wore the black one-piece that clutched to her and her breasts all but spilled out of. He had her propped up on Kate’s desk, the one I’d helped her pick out, a desk that this man could have built for her. Her hair was down (because in the few times we’d made love since the money stopped coming in, Kate had only worn it up) and as the big man went inside her, she shrieked. 

“Oh god,” I said, hand going to my mouth. I could hear it. I could hear my wife come from downtown. I bit the fat part of my finger, stood, paced the room, Ami mewling up at me. I shooed her away with a foot, then sat abruptly back in the chair, giving my back a little unfriendly pop, but I didn’t care. Nothing could hurt like the sound of that shriek. 

The dark view out the window brought no comfort. I pulled out my phone. 

The Wi-Fi bars were low, and had been since our budget had forced a switch to Pioneer, the bottom of the bucket as far as internet providers are concerned. Thirty a month for one, sometimes two, bars. 

I tried Instagram. It was frozen on the photo from yesterday of Peter Grossman in his garden with his Maine Coons and the small writer’s shed he’d just built. Peter Grossman lived a few blocks away where the houses all had just one more story than ours, just two-hundred more square feet, and just one more pool to our no pool. He had quit his job too, but only after his books had started selling, like, a lot.

There, below Peter’s picture, was the like count, just under five-hundred, and the ‘liked by’ line with one name of special interest: Kate Lonergan. 

Suddenly all the times she’d mentioned Peter to me in passing or otherwise sang like a tree of startled birds in my mind. How Peter had utilized Instagram to gain readers without relying on a publisher; how Peter made more money a year than most traditionally published authors; how Peter asked questions of his followers more often than he posted about his work, a manipulation tactic acting on the human desire to talk about themselves so they would then have a good association with Peter and want to buy his books; how it was all working for Peter. I wanted to throw my phone, because I now pictured Peter as the carpenter who was currently fucking my wife and making her come with zero percent clitoral stimulation in an office in downtown Jacksonville. Peter, who’s stories were shit, but boy could he build an audience and a shed.

Instead of throwing the phone, I refreshed my feed and refused to look directly at the screen until Peter’s too-white smile faded from my periphery. 

 

The screen was loading when I looked back down, the spinning wheel that was so prevalent in my life now that we had Pioneer digging its trenches in my eyes until it spun in my eyelids when I blinked.

The sponsored video of the sock puppets formed from the wheel of doom to ride the algorithm of my writer’s Instagram. This was the seventh time I’d seen it, and all the social media jockeys say it takes seven times for the brain to comprehend what it’s seeing and be willing to buy.

Stephanie Sharp silently spoke, a male sock puppet on one hand, a female on the other. The male sock seemed to interrupt, and Stephanie Sharp reprimanded him with a playful head-tilt.

I clicked the sound on.

Stephanie faced the screen again, smiling. She looked like a younger version of Kate, but she was a thriller writer, a successful one who would understand exactly what I was going through.

“Look,” Stephanie Sharp said, “I get it. You hate promoting yourself as much as I do. I consider myself very privileged. Which is why—”

“You’re giving money to poor, sad writers out there trying to write the next How to Fuck Your Dragon?” said the male sock.

“That’s not the title, Isaac,” Stephanie said, “and I’m—”

“Oo! I know! She’s going to give away a book so as anyone who reads it will know how to write a smash-hit suspense novel like Stephanie Sharp.”

Stephanie laughed and looked between the two socks. Her mouth hadn’t moved once, and both socks spoke with distinct British accents.

“No. I want to share the two of you with the world,” Stephanie said.

“Yeah, Isabella,” Isaac the sock said, mouth opening comically wide to annunciate as he glided over to Isabella like a gloating brother.

“Now you two behave,” Stephanie said. They hung their heads, and Stephanie nodded to herself. “That’s better. Now, while they can be a hand-full, they’re the reason for my success. I know how it sounds, but I promise you, when I was stuck on the first draft of Honey in the Maiden’s Head, a friend suggested Isaac and Isabella to me, and I finished the book in two weeks, got an agent after three queries and the rest is—”

“Misery,” Isaac said, shaking his head.

“History, you dolt!” Isabella said.

“The rest is up to you. Click the link for the magic.”

Then the ad was over, and I was shocked awake from it by the darkened screen and refresh option. There was never an explanation of how the puppets worked, only that they did. And Stephanie was the proof: her near-vacant, hypnotized eyes and those socks that wormed their way into your brain until you knew that’s what you were missing.

I looked out the window. No Kate. I went to the bedroom, the bathroom, back outside. No … Kate.

It was then that the self-righteous anger kicked in. I clicked the link. I ordered Isaac and Isabella for next day delivery with Kate’s money—oh, hell, it was my money too and I’d earned my break to write, hadn’t I?

She’d see. If she was fucking Peter Grossman, or some brainless handyman, she’d see, and she’d regret it. I felt vindicated because not only was this a potential help for my writing, but if it didn’t work, it was so ridiculous that I could throw it in Kate’s face as something she’d done to me with her coldness, with her leaving me, with her … scaring me.

I bought socks, Kate. Socks for writing. And I’m going to use them because you’ve driven me fucking batshit, nutso, coo-coo-ka-choo, and the walrus wore a pair of socks on its tusks.

I laughed and went to bed.

And slept like two dirty socks.

If you’ve ever had a dream where you’ve done something so terrible then woken to find you were only at home, you hadn’t robbed the liquor store with a knife, or whatever, and there was no need for guilt because you hadn’t actually done anything, then you’ll understand why when I first woke and saw the blonde pile of curls that were my wife’s head of hair, I felt relief. And then terror when I realized I hadn’t dreamed ordering the socks.

I jerked up in the bed, away from my wife’s head, pulling covers in toward my chest as if this could cover whatever taint the previous evening had left on my soul.

“Collie?” Kate said, tilting her chin up to look at me from the pillow. Mascara smeared, flushed cheeks, and hair more a mess than any stationary mattress had business doing.

She had been up to something, and only got home very recently, I realized, as I looked at the clock and saw I had only been asleep for two hours and now the mustard yellow sun was leaking in through the French doors. And she smelled like somebody else.

My guilt fled me.

“Where …” I started. But no. No, she did not deserve such an easy prompt. I got out of the bed.

“Collie? Where are you going, Collie?”

“I bought socks, Kate. With the credit card. They’re for my writing. Next day delivery.”

She shot up at that. “Credit card?” Her arms stiffened, and she scowled, and I hated her then more than ever before—in fact, I don’t know if I ever hated her before that moment. “We can’t afford that, Collie. We can’t—”

I walked to my study and shut the door.

Put my headphones on. And went to work.

Because no matter what that bitch said or did, that’s what it was: my work.

 

 

I was working on a short story about a serial killer named Jim Mulligan whose ritual was to gain employment some place, become best friends with one of the employees, then describe a trip he’s always wanted to go on to the best friend. As the story goes on, the serial killer starts dropping little hints about these places and why they are important to him. Jim Mulligan was molested by his father in all three of these spots, and Jim had considered his father his best friend until the third time it had happened on the beach of Lake Michigan.

Jim would eventually convince his surrogate best friends to come to these spots with him. This part of the process took anywhere from six months to a year with much party attending and asking questions, acting interested, and so on, much like Peter Grossman on Instagram. All the parts of developing a relationship, all the things Jim had watched his father do to groom him.

I knew that Jim killed the friend at Lake Michigan, but I wasn’t sure how to ramp up the tension. The story was there, but how to slowly trickle these bits about Jim’s father without giving it all away?

I stared at my computer screen for three hours, typing a paragraph, deleting it, then going back and doing a copy edit hoping that would get the flow going, but no answer came. There’s nothing worse than a dry well when you’re in the chair.

But as I was combing through, I noticed some of the changes I’d made the day before were gone!

“No! Shit!” I said, moving the mouse up to the little floppy disc icon.

“Sign into your Microsoft Account so you do not lose any progress. Syncing has paused,” the message said at the top of my document.

“I am signed in, motherfucker!” I said, then clicked the strip of text to sign in. I followed the prompts, entered my e-mail and password. My eyes flicked up to the WiFi where there was one bar at the bottom like an unfinished martini. Nothing.

I packed up my laptop. The housework could fuck itself if Kate was going to stay out all night without so much as a text—though, I thought, sometimes those didn’t come through due to our shitty service in South Jacksonville and the bad Wi-Fi—or a visit home to let me know she’d be staying somewhere else.

But god, what could have given a good excuse? A friend? Some work outing she’d failed to mention? And so close to my birthday.

For your birthday, you got yourself a pair of socks, Collie, I told myself, and the thought of their bobbing heads in my office, and my books—my fucking books, not Stephanie Sharp’s—being the validation behind the sale of those puppets, gave me a good spike of dopamine.

I walked through the house. Ami had shit on the carpet, as she always seemed to do when Kate and I were fighting. I smiled at the shit, thinking Kate could clean it up when she got home from work.

I drove to the Soap Co. Coffee House downtown which had pretty good Wi-Fi—only a block away from Lonergan Realty—and splurged on a caramel latté, half sweet, with a blueberry scone and poffertjes. I sat in a booth so no-one could look at my screen—I absolutely cannot abide someone reading over my shoulder—and got to work.

Or tried to.

But the words wouldn’t come. The holes were glaring on every line. Maybe I could have Jim say, ‘I always wanted to go back there, where my dad really showed me how much he cared for me the first time.’ But was that enough? Did it insinuate enough of the ominous tone I was going for?

I remembered the whole reason I was here, and pressed the save key. Several lines changed in the document as it thankfully synced with my edits from the previous day.

I sat there for a few hours, tinkering with lines, settling with the lines about Jim’s father loving him for the first time, then went on typing some of the more mundane elements of the story, the fun and games section where Jim Mulligan grooms his new best friend and gains his affection.

  

2

 

I drove home with no great sense of accomplishment to fill my grief over Kate’s possible betrayal. Sometimes the writing does that: if it’s good, the buzz can trump everything else. Today it did nothing but make me feel worse for the hours I’d spent trying to force it and yielding no results. I turned onto Maine by CVS and Community Park. Me and Kate used to walk around Community when we first got together when she was shy, and I was confident I could coax out her secret desires with my charm.

Like Peter Grossman on Instagram, I thought, but shook this away.

I was missing Kate. I wanted it all to just be ok. I hadn’t even given her a chance to explain, had I? It could be nothing, after all. Sometimes that’s how it is. I know I had my late nights, and though I always called or found a way to let her know, accidents happened. What if she’d fallen asleep at the office, overworked and underpaid, and here I was ordering magic sock puppets we couldn’t afford to spite her.

I would ask. I would ask, and I would accept her answer, whatever it was.

I passed the Dairy Queen, thinking I should go grab Kate a chicken basket as a treat, then diligently shook my head at the thought, smiling to myself, knowing that Kate would prefer we saved our money.

“I could return them still,” I thought, and I pulled out my phone, bringing it up to the steering wheel. Eyes flicking between screen and road, I managed to get to my browser and type in Amazon, but because the service was shit, the screen didn’t load until I pulled up to the house.

Where a yellow Volvo wagon that was not ours sat in the drive. Bumper stickers littered the back window:

It’s my world too, stop fracking!

PETA

Fugazi

Minor Threat

Bread

American Football

Love knows no borders

26.2

Waldo finds himself

Colorado

And so on.

There was only one Volvo so incessantly pretentious as this, and it belonged to one Peter Grossman.

I parked in front of the house and clicked my lock button as if it could detonate a bomb and blow Kate, and this Instagram question-asker, to self-published heaven where the agents sneer, and everyone lies about reading the book you sent them.

I would not be returning my puppets. I got out of the car just as Peter stepped out of the front door, Kate’s blonde hair and smile an apparition in the doorway before she drifted back inside.

Peter nodded his head, white smile in brown beard, then turned his head to me. He was always wearing sunglasses, which somehow made him look friendlier. The piece of shit.

He flipped his long, brown hair as the screen door shut behind him and his head turned to me. I walked to my passenger side and stood on the curb, leaning against my car with folded arms.  

Peter gave me a neighbor’s wave as he walked down the steps.

“Hey, Collie.”

“Hi, Peter,” I said.

He started toward me. “How’s the story coming?” He pointed finger guns at me like I couldn’t see right through his sociopathic ploy. “You said you were working on a short last time I saw you?”

“Yeah, it’s good. Stuck a bit on a thing. But good.”

“Ah, that’s the rub of it, eh? You in the middle?”

I hesitated, not wanting him to be right. “Yes.”

He laughed. “Listen, you ever need a fresh set of eyes, I’m right down the street.”

“Sure. Thanks, Peter,” I said.

“Birthday week?” Peter said, stuffing hands in his brown, leather jacket.

“Sure is.”

Peter threw a thumb over his shoulder at my house, where behind the sky swirled purple and pink as if it couldn’t decide between anger or hurt. He smiled, licked his lips like he wanted to say something, like he wasn’t sure how to explain himself, then he stuffed the hand back in his pocket. He was trying to win me over, like what he’d just done was okay, because he was such a good fucking guy.

“Happy birthday, Collie. I hope it’s a good one.”

“Sure thing, Peter,” I said. God, I was holding onto the word ‘sure’ as if it could wound such egos as the undulating horror that was Peter Grossman’s.

Peter got into his Volvo wagon, some unlistenable punk band starting up loud, the members likely all vegan, socialists, and just as right as any right-wing, homophobic sexist having a stroke over his right to bear arms.

I watched the wagon bounce out of the drive, and he waved, and for one moment I thought this man was better than me, and that Kate would be happier for it. That big pink in the sky grew wide. And I cried.

Peter was gone.

My tears only lasted the distance from my car to the front steps. I wiped at them furiously with both hands, straightened my shoulders, and frowned, looking down.

I stepped inside.

“Collie?”

Kate’s form outlined in the dying red sky to my left, in the sitting chair with her jewelry still on. I did not look her in the eyes, I could not. My eyes resolved to stay down and to the right, I angled my body slightly away from Kate to the piano she’d wanted gone for so long. I almost stepped in Ami’s cat shit in my little fit of body language.

“Collie, why don’t you sit with me a minute? I’d like to talk something over. I—”

I walked through the front room without looking at her. The feet I’d rubbed so many times in the hopes of receiving physical affection in return splayed gross, red-painted toes like cut rhubarb in the corner of my eye. I felt a strange relief at the notion that they made me feel a bit sick.

I shut the study door, plugged my computer in to charge and made a point to stare at the wallpaper, imagining I looked like Luke Wilson in a Wes Anderson movie. I was not going to kill myself today, but I was going to lock that door and sleep in here, and I would only come out to use the bathroom.

I lay down on my belly and fell asleep.

The doorbell rang in blue light, quiet night, too hot for sleep. No breath was held; the night was a hot exhalation.

I stood finding myself erect and quite bothered about it. But the doorbell rang again. I thought it could be Peter trying to come back for round two of ‘You don’t mind, Collie? You don’t mind if I fuck your wife, right? I’m just a nice guy after all, no hard feelings, and hey, I’ll even add you to my e-mail list for bonus content and free—’

“Collie?”

I opened the study door, boner and all, stretching the bottom of my shirt as far down as it would go, but no luck.

Kate looked down the tent in my boxers and was there a … spark there? a lingering flash of desire before she came back to herself and met my eyes? There was a box in her hands.

“I signed for you,” she said, holding the box out to me. “The, um … delivery woman seemed in a bit of a hurry to get away from the door. You sure you trust where you ordered this from? Did it have any reviews, or did you just—”

“Fucks sake, Kate, here,” I said, grabbing the box out of her hands.

She flinched back.

“I …” I almost said sorry, but then I remembered Peter Grossman’s shitty, unbothered grin. ‘No hard feelings, Collie.’

I went back to the study with my box. When I couldn’t ignore the whimpering coming from the front hall any longer, I put on my headphones and started opening the box.

There was no packaging, only the two limp tube socks with button eyes, one with male features, the other female.

“Isaac and Isabella,” I mouthed, half expecting them to rise and respond all on their own. But of course, they did not.

 

I remembered from Stephanie Sharp’s Instagram videos—which I had spent entirely too long of a time watching—that she would put the puppets on for thirty minutes before each writing session, with the intention of taking them off and not writing after the thirty minutes were up. When she hit the thirty-minute mark, without fail, she would take the socks off her hands and be possessed by an insatiable desire to create. That’s how she got four-thousand words a day, every day, without fail. She had the books to prove it, too. She wouldn’t force the voices of Isaac or Isabella; it was something about putting them on that brought the voices out and put her into the flow state where that blank screen feeling didn’t exist.

This is the burden of the writer. The one who is not writing, doing other mundane tasks, wishes they could be writing. The one who is writing loves writing, is in the flow state, and would love nothing more than to carry on doing that the rest of the day. But there is an in-between self, the one who stares at screens, who is terrified, who knows cold. The in-between writer knows only cold, and words do not signify a goddamn thing—in fact, neither does a life, so you might as well kill yourself.

Isaac and Isabella mitigated this in-between self. I always wondered if it was some form of self-hypnosis, and that by becoming these two externalized personalities, there was no room for the in-between blank page self. From desire to flow. No staring at the pool afraid to get in.

I looked at them lying limp, however, and had that cold feeling of the in-between. How foolish, to think I could be a successful writer, to think that this snake oil could improve my manuscripts.

“You’ll think it’s silly,” Stephanie Sharp had said, “but let me tell you; it’s much easier to slip socks on your hands than it is to type the first word, let alone the first sentence.”

I turned back to the door, where my cheating wife very well may still have been whimpering. My headphones blared ‘Legend Of A Mind’ from The Moody Blues album ‘In Search Of The Lost Chord’.  

And I put the socks on.

“Well, that was a bit of a stuffy ride.”

“Only cause all your gained weight was sat on top of me.”

“Really, Isaac, you’re cruel. Where’s all this weight? I’m a sock.”

“I meant psychological weight, Isabella, didn’t I, which is the only place anyone carries it, really.”

“Really.”

“Quite.”

“I want you inside me.”

My playlist took a sharp left turn, playing Shpongle’s ‘The God Particle’.

And the socks … were kissing. And though I had my headphones on, I could hear every pleased groan, every wet parting. And somehow, I could sense limbs coming from the socks, and I could feel them touching, and I could feel myself growing painfully hard, the kind of hard I can only remember from high school dry humping where I’d finished in my pants and had to lie to my girlfriend about needing to run for a quick piss.

It was wonderful. It was terrifying. It was the best I’d felt in years.

I ripped the socks off my hands, cock still hard, but content to stay that way, unsatisfied. I flipped open my laptop. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I could not be bothered to get up. The bright LED screen hit my eyes like a divine merging, and ‘The God Particle’ was climaxing. I typed furiously, teeth bared, tips of my fingers aching, a point in my back stabbing and sore, but there was no suffering.

There is no suffering. Only pain. And bliss. Blissful agony. Who said that? Who am I? I am in here. I am somewhere inside this computer, in these words, in these fingers, in this pulsing cock, in the castaway socks whose mouths hang open like forgotten fiends of hell, waiting for my hands. But they are part of my hands. My eyes are the screen. The screen is my vision. The words are my heart. They are real. They are true.

I typed the last line of the Jim Mulligan serial killer story as the dawn bloodied the carpet. I knew it was finished, and that it was the best thing I had ever written.

I set the computer down. Some hitch had come undone in my chest, and I thought of the demon’s wings in Fantasia, the ones that hooked over the chest, and imagined them undone, and a pool of infinite golden light pouring out from the heaven within. I smiled and fell back asleep.

The socks were on my chest when I woke up. I threw them off, inching away. They didn’t move, didn’t speak, only lay there.

I remembered the story. And the internet. “Shit!”

I opened the laptop, and ‘The End’ was written there at the bottom of the document like it had been when I’d finished, and at the top where the document title was, it read ‘saved’ to the right. I looked back to the socks, wondering if they’d also fixed my Wi-Fi.

I read the story over, eyes flicking every couple paragraphs to the socks to be sure they hadn’t moved. The story sang with every line. Without any planning or worrying, my fingers had foraged for every beat, every nuance of Jim Mulligan’s relationship with his new best friend, of the relationship with his father that led him to the ritual with the three locations.

I thought I deserved a little celebration after the intense session, and the good work I’d gotten done. This one will get me a new agent, I thought. I was sure of it.

I stood up, unlocked the door, ready to go out and find Kate for our lone remaining ritual: when I finished a manuscript, we’d pull a spliff from my father’s old Boston Tea Party cigar box to smoke and then listen to jazz—no fucking, of course, but …

No fucking. But she can fuck Peter Grossman just fine, can’t she?

The last remaining cord between us, finally broken. And today was my birthday, wasn’t it? Saturday.

It was my birthday, and I deserved a treat.

My eyes, seemingly of their own volition, slid down to the sock puppets.

I put them back on my hands.

“Well, about time, isn’t it?” Isaac said, turning to his female counterpart.

“Thought he’d stand there rest of the time with that sad look on, Isaac. Like a baby.”

“Quite right, Isabella, like a baby, wasn’t he? And after we’d gave him that story.”

“Ungrateful,” Isabella said, closing her mouth and shaking her head.

“Ruddy ungrateful.” As the words escaped Isaac’s lint-ball littered mouth, Isabella put hers on his neck. Isaac shuddered and as he did, I did as well.

Both socks froze, sharing a look then slowly turning their button eyes on me.

They looked at each other once more before again looking at me, Isaac cocking his head.

“He wants us,” Isabella said.

“And not just one of us, Isabella.”

Keeping her gaze trained on me, Isabella sank in the air, fiddled with the button on my pants, then the zipper.

My breath came in trembling gasps, spittle fluttering from my lips, little moans of pleasure moving in my throat. “Oh … oh Jesus. Oh Jesus fuck,” I said.

Isaac pulled off my shirt, my pants, my shoes, my … socks, and then he came up to join Isabella whose mouth held my cock in a soft, somehow wet embrace. They made little sounds as they pleasured me, and I only vaguely heard the creak of steps and the soft voices outside the door.

“Oh god! Collie, what the fuck!”

But Kate’s voice didn’t stop Isaac or Isabella who existed in-between, and I’m not sure how much they could perceive anything in our world but me. And I wasn’t going to stop them.

“What, Kate? Not like you’re gonna fucking do it!” I shouted back without turning to her. I shook with laughter. “They’re better than you anyway, better than you could ever be!”

I rolled over then—I wanted her to watch me come.

But it wasn’t just Kate.

Peter Grossman stood under the threshold with Kate, his kindly face finally falling to something like sadness, maybe even compassion, for Chrissakes.

“Oh Collie,” Peter said, and he turned to the man standing between them, a man in a suit holding a Montblanc fountain pen, cap off, and a piece of paper.

The gaped slack-jawed, wide eyes seemingly unable to look away. He flinched back a step as I came on the button eyes of the now-limp sock puppets, which had somehow made their way off my hands.

“Peter, is this some sick fucking joke?” the man said.

Peter put fingers under his sunglasses to rub his eyes. “Stu, listen, just … just … you deal with all kinds of writers, right? He’s still the writer of Rabbit’s Day Away, we were just trying to surprise him is all, and … it’s our fault. Don’t blame Collie, we’ve all—”

“No,” Kate said, snatching the paper from the man’s hands. She ripped it in two. “No, this is exactly who Collie is.”

I pulled on my clothes. “Who the fuck are you to say anything about me?” I said, tripping over my jeans, righting myself, then jerking them over my hips and pointing at Peter. “You’ve been fucking him! I knew you were up to something, I fucking knew, Kate, and I was going to beg you the other night, for something I could do to make it better, but you were gone—all fucking night. With him!”

Kate’s blonde hair bobbed left and right as she shook her head. “I was with Peter. Calling, e-mailing, Instagram messaging, querying agents on Twitter, Collie.”

“What, more fuck buddies?”

Kate’s eyes went wide with rage as she threw both arms at the man in the suit. “Literary agents, you disgusting fuck! For your birthday!”

“Right! Oh that’s fucking rich. And you couldn’t have done all that here, or over the phone, could you?”

“Our WiFi doesn’t work, Collie, and cell service is shit. So, I went to Peter’s—Peter who knows agents.” Her voice broke. “For you. For one last chance, but you’ve RUINED IT! OH, GOD!” She covered her face and trembled into her hands.

Stu raised his hands, dusted his suit off, raised unbelieving eyebrows at Peter who shrugged and frowned apologetically. Then Stu left.

Then Peter.

Then Kate.

My eyes followed my trail of come across the floor. And I put the puppets back on.

 

 

END

 

 

 

Note:

 

Thank you for reading Sock Puppets, ya sick pup! If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review on Amazon—reviews are incredibly valuable to authors, and I would very much appreciate it!

 

I’d like to thank a few specific people for helping keep the dream alive in my head on a daily basis: Travis, Nicole, Will, Sian, Sam, Elaine, Ali, Evan, Kayleigh, Pete, Jasmine, Colby, Chelsea, Tyler, Stanley, Nia, Steven, Phoebe, Drake, Tornike, Curtis, Ann, Carson, Sean, Trina, Deea, Kristen, Iryna, Kevin, E.M., Hallie, Maggie, Gentzy, Kari, Erin, Summer, Mom, Dad, and if I missed you it’s because I haven’t put the sock puppets on today.

 

I publish regular short stories as I finish them on my Substack which can be found here:

Jfranz.substack.com

 

Follow me on Instagram: @authorjohnfranz

 

E-mail me to get added to my e-mail list for advance copies of stories and exclusive content: Johnmarkerfranz@gmail.com

 

You can find audio versions of my short stories, as well as the WRRD Podcast, on my YouTube by searching: @Johnmarkerfranz

 

 

 

 

 

You can find my other work on Amazon by searching for these titles:

 

Before The Sky Falls: A cyberpunk/fantasy novel.

Ningyo returns to the city of her birth after five years seeking to kill her mentor, Morfran, who murdered her son.

 

Junkie Jack: A magical realism/cyberpunk short story.

Functional heroin addict PI, Junkie Jack, is hired by Tony Twofingers to investigate Tony’s daughter, Whinnie, whose saxophone performances make Jack hallucinate and touch God.

 

Starfish: A magical realism short story.

'Starfish' follows Leeroy, a man deeply infatuated with a librarian he calls Starfish. Despite never having spoken to her, Leeroy believes they share a silent, profound connection through eye contact, convinced that they understand and love each other. However, every time Leeroy visits the library, Starfish's boyfriend Frank is always present. Leeroy is certain that Starfish doesn't truly love Frank; Starfish told him with her eyes.

 

Secondhand Sunshine: A noir/sci-fi short story.

'Secondhand Sunshine' centers on Chester, a retired detective who returns to work for the Syndicate to uncover the mystery of the stolen sun. Chester's daughter, Joanna, suffers from dark-sickness, and the opiate-laced sunshine pills no longer alleviate her condition. In a world where the rain never stops, and the towering neon-trees exhale only plastic, filmy air, even the Unified I of the People cannot cure dark-sickness in the Forever Night, despite their easy distribution of sunshine pills. Desperate to save Joanna, Chester seeks answers from Safe, the wealthiest man on the Sunshine Strip.

 

 

Thank you very much,

-JF