I like to to experiment with new methods of storytelling. The classic “book in hand” variety that I favour is sadly, no longer in vogue. That said, I present to you the first in my series of texted tales, a format more engratiating to the modern reader. (Thank you to my very understanding friends, who tolerate these novels spontaneously unfolding on their smartphones!)
This one’s a bit of a romance!
He Never Came Home
Prologue
He’d only been dating her for a few weeks, and yet when she’d suggested they move in together, it just felt right! 😍
And why not? She had a sex drive to match his own lusty tempermant. It was a rare treat after enduring countless bed mates, who laid there still, unmoved,even annoyed by the prospect of love making. 😴 Bedding them had been about as satiating as the nights he’d spent humping his pillow in that first miserable flush of puberty.😅
She talked like a pornstar. It was a bit embarrassing sometimes actually, especially in front of his friends. Sometimes the things that came out of her mouth bordered on something from a cheesy 70’s flick, the kind that smear across the television screen on a Sunday afternoon. Still, he didn’t dare call her out on it. He was scared that might stop it all together. 😱
She called him by those stupid pet names couples use. No, these were stranger, demeaning almost, but not quite. Names like Meat Puppet, or Sex Clown. Sometimes she’d come up with things that sounded as if they’d been lifted straight out of some old time cartoon. What was it she’d called him the other day? Scuzzo The Clown?😳
He got a thrill out of it really. Towards the end, his last girlfriend seemed to have come to the belief that his given name was “asshole.” Scuzzo was a marked improvement. 😝
Sometimes, he’d divulged to his closest friends, there was a sort of savagery to her. There were moments when the woman was lost, and she became something more like an animal, tearing into its prey. The deep grating scratches down his back and scabby bite marks she’d left had won him the envy of other men. Maybe that was why he couldn’t bring himself to admit that it honestly frightened him. Still, it beat the alternative, didn’t it?
Maybe.
He didn’t come home last night. She’d said something to set him off, and considering her usual conversation, it must have been a special kind of vile. In a frantic call to his best friend, he’d barely managed to communicate that he would be spending the night in a motel, which one he didn’t know.
Turns out it was the Travelodge on Main. Maybe she’d found him there. In this age of technological litter, a man is left with few secrets. Maybe she’d tracked him there, maybe not.
He didn’t come home last night, and he wasn’t in his room this morning. No crime scene to speak of, no blood splatter and gore. Instead, there was a neatly made bed and his iPhone, fully charged. Just a phone, left waiting on the nightstand, as if it were an open book, waiting to be read.
