This is an excerpt from my recently published novel The Falling Circle, available for Kindle and in paperback on Amazon.com
https://www.amazon.com/Falling-Circle-Jeffrey-Matucha-ebook/dp/B07K7NVKBW/
Talking to Gust
Preston was meditating on the faint, translucent swirls oozing around the surface of his coffee when he heard someone bounding down the hall.
Ka-flump, KA-flumP, KAFLuMP!
The kaflumping got closer and closer until Gust bounced through the hallway door and into the kitchen. She suddenly stopped at the sight of Preston as he looked up.
Gust looked away and calmly walked to the kitchen counter. She took down a cup and poured herself a cup of coffee. Preston looked back down into his coffee.
He could hear her meandering about the kitchen as he resumed studying his coffee’s swirls. He heard a chair squeal against the floor as Gust pulled it away from the table. Looking up, he saw that she had seated herself directly across the table from him. She was staring right at him.
“What?” blurted Preston at the staring Gust.
She sipped her coffee. “Does your penis ever talk to you?” She tilted her head with a serious look of inquisition on her face.
“What?” said Preston.
“What? Does your penis ever talk to you?”
“No, but it does a lot a’ thinkin’. Why?”
“Just curious.”
“Does your vagina ever talk to you?”
“Not that I know of, but my friend Tim says that it does.”
“Does what?”
“Tim says my vagina talks to him. He says it calls out to him when I walk by. ‘Tim, Tim.’”
“Cisco Tim?”
“Eeyuh! No way! Tim from the Misinformed.”
“I know that guy.”
“Y’know Tim?”
“Yeah. He owes me a dollar.”
“Ah. A dollar.”
“Like, he asked me for a dollar once at Gilman so he could get a soda, and I said ‘Sure, here’, and he takes the dollar while tellin’ me, ‘I’ll pay ya’ back, really I will,’ and I’m like yeah, yeah, and he’s all ‘No, really, next time I see you.’ Like I care about a damn dollar.”
“Ha!”
“He still hasn’t paid it back, but he keeps tellin’ me he will. It’s been like, six months.”
“He ain’t never got no money.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I don’t care if I got my dollar back.”
“Hey, watch this,” said Gust.
Gust took a long drag off of her coffee and then tilted back her head and gargled her coffee.
She brought her head back down and swallowed.
“Bet that’s not the only thing you gargle,” said Preston.
“So if you penis never says anything, then what about your asshole?”
“Huh?”
“Does your asshole ever talk to you?”
“Yeah, it says, ‘keep me away from Gust. I think she’s after me.’”
“It must’ve been talkin’ to my vagina.”
“No doubt.”
“Y’know,” said Gust, as she leaned onto the table, “We make porno films in your room when you’re not here.”
“Who does?”
“Me an’ my friends.”
“Your friends and your talkin’ vagina?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s why my room smells like that.”
“Yeah. Sorry about the stains on the ceiling.”
“Hey, you know Shang, don’tcha’?” asked Preston.
“Yeah.”
“You seen him lately?”
“Nuh-uh. His squat got busted.”
“I know. I tried to go crash there last week, and when I got there it was all covered up with police tape.”
“No shit? I never saw you at that squat.”
“Shang told me I could crash there if I wanted to. I went down there on Wednesday to take him up on his offer.”
“That’s the day it got busted.”
“What happened?”
Gust took another swig of her coffee. “A couple a’ weeks ago, a couple a’ new people showed up at the squat, only some people weren’t too sure about em’. They thought maybe they were a bit too straight an’ tweaky, y’know? They usually like to make sure that the people crashing out down there aren’t too straight or lame.”
“Did Shang tell you all of this?”
“Naw. Jason did.”
“Jason…?”
“Jason th’ gutter punk, the dude with th’ big purple mohawk who’s always on the graph?”
“I think I know who you’re talkin’ about.”
“Yeah, Jason was a squat regular there. Anyways, the new kids were a couple a’ runaways, some rude boy and his stupid goth puppy girlfriend. The goth puppy had just run away, and she’s all worried what her ma will think, even though th’ rude boy’s already told everyone that her parents are a couple of Nazi assholes.” Gust stopped long enough to take a swig of coffee. “Anyhow, it turns out that the goth puppy sends a letter to her ma to let her know she’s okay.”
“Where were they from?”
“I dunno. Some stupid hick state like Oklahoma or somethin’ like that. Anyways, she sent her parents a postcard and it turns out that she put th’ address of the squat on the postcard as a return address, so once Nazi mom and dad get the postcard, they’re out in front of the squat the very next day. They rushed out to California, on a plane an’ everythin’, all the way out from the Midwest, an’ the ma, who’s some fat ol’ bitch, takes one look at the squat and starts wavin’ her fat, flabby arms around an’ screamin’ ‘My baby! My baby! They’re in there raping my baby!’”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, like at the top of her lungs in the middle of the day an everythin’. An’ she’s yellin’ rape, an’ drugs, an’ torture, and all of this tweaked out bullshit so loud that somebody calls the cops and th’ parents have th’ pigs charge into the place and rake everybody out.”
“Fuckin’ a.”
“I heard a few punks were busted for possession. I dunno. I heard Shang is hangin’ low for awhile.”
“Didn’t th’ cops already know about that place?”
“Hell yeah. They didn’t give a fuck about it though. They didn’t care that we wuz hangin’ out in some fucked up old house that no one else was usin’ anyways, but they hadda do somethin’ with some flabby old loudmouth screamin’ about rape an’ drugs an’ her daughter’s been kidnapped by punks and shit.”
“Damn, that’s fucked up!”
“So how d’ya know Shang?” asked Gust.
“Jus’ from hangin’ out on the ave.”
“I’ve never seen you on the ave.”
“Yeah you have.”
“I have?”
“Yeah! You talked to me once.”
“I did?”
“Yeah.”
“Was I drunk?”
“I dunno. You didn’t seem drunk at the time, but you called me a dildo and a something er’ other, and then something else, and then I called you a stupid bitch or somethin’ like that and you threw a carton of milk at me.”
Gust’s eyes widened in surprise. “I did?”
“Yeah, a small, half empty carton of milk. I got milk all over me. Ya’ threw it at me an’ ran off down the street.”
Gust looked out at the far wall for a moment with wide, wondering eyes as she thought about it.
“I wanted ta’ kill ya’ at the time,” said Preston, “But you’d taken off so fast I couldn’t catch ya’.”
“Dude, I don’t remember that at all!” confessed Gust.
“It was only a couple of weeks ago.”
“Oh, shit. No wonder you got so mad at me the other night.”
“That’s ’cause you was sleepin’ in my room.”
“Waitasec.”
Gust got up and went to the fridge. She took out a half quart carton of milk and held it out to Preston.
“Here,” said Gust.
“What? You gonna throw more milk at me?”
“Naw. Get even.”
“What?”
Gust waved the carton at Preston. “You can throw a carton of milk at me so we’ll be even.”
“No way.”
“Come on, belt me with it!”
“Like you’d care if you got covered with milk.”
“No way man. I don’ wanna smell like sour milk all day.”
“Too late.”
Gust impatiently shook the milk carton. “Come on, dude, just do it!”
“Naw. I ain’t gettin’ milk all over th’ kitchen an’ gettin’ Tam mad at me.”
“Tam? What? Are you scared of a girl?”
“Tam ain’t no girl, bitch.”
“Fine then!” Gust turned around and put the milk back into the fridge. “You had your chance, bitch. Don’t say I never did nuttin’ for ya’.” She downed the rest of her coffee and then bounced out of the kitchen and down the hall.
https://www.amazon.com/Falling-Circle-Jeffrey-Matucha-ebook/dp/B07K7NVKBW/
