Billy and the Meat
WOULD YOU RATHER:
a) you sit by an indoor swimming pool- there are no doors or windows- watching Billy Lipinski swim back and forth. You went to middle and high school with him; you were nodding acquaintances who occasionally shared classes and perhaps even worked together on a project, but you never got to know him or feel compelled to get to know him. He, for his part, seemed to have his own thing going on, worlds away from yours. You don't recall if he was ever actually a swimmer.
After an indeterminate amount of time he emerges from the pool. You are your own age, and he's 18, just like he was when you last saw or thought about him, but with great manful whorls of hair in patches on his upper half. He's dripping not the way you'd expect but in a furious torrent coming down around him, as if he were under a waterfall, and it doesn't let up as he waddles towards you and you kiss (in the most generous sense of the word; both your mouths are loose and limp, so you're really just mashing them together and wagging your tongues around. At least once you feel the clank of tooth hitting tooth). He takes off his goggles and you see that he has no eyes, but you do not recoil.
b) you are an indefinite guest at the suburban home of the butcher and his beautiful adult daughter. You have only pajamas to wear. Each day the butcher, who forever wears an executioner's cowl and communicates only in a guttural, menacing laugh, comes home with his muscular person slathered in blood and an inexplicable amount of dirt and other filth; he watches Young Sheldon until it is time for dinner. Only he may sit at the family -sized dining table, ripping off bits of his raw steak and tucking them under his hood and laughing; you and his beautiful adult daughter (who, like her Papá, has no name) sit barefoot on the floor at the foot of the table, a plate of celery sticks and Cool Whip between you.
If the butcher's beautiful adult daughter has complaints about this life she never expresses them; she sings endlessly, cheerfully, about a boy-prince who succumbed to a fever and the different flowers that each of his adoring subjects put in his casket, all the while cleaning the things her father touched the day before and not acknowledging you beyond a smile.
You are free to leave the house, but outside there is a circuitous labyrinth of interchangeable locked two-story homes. If you knock on a door, one or some or all the members of a nuclear WASP family will stare at you from a nearby window, fascinated and terrified and apparently unaware that you can see them. If you manage to break into one, you find yourself back at the butcher's home