Verve

Verve

1:

Natalie Pennis:

Sixteen and perfectly callipygian, Natalie Pennis walks under the neon gray August twilight waiting for someone to blow up her iPhone.  She hasn't heard word one from Nick in a week, and it's still getting awful hot out, and he is getting fucking dumped.
In the East Q 7-11,  she's contemplating the slurpee machine's whirling syrup ice goo and her phone blooms to life and her heart blooms with it.  The giant wispy mustached boy behind the counter watches her.  The call is from a blocked number.  'Hello?'

For forty minutes, sitting on the curb under the neon storefront, she has it out with Nick.  Cars whir by on Montauk Highway.  The darkness accelerates and the glow of the storefront grows with it.  She's babysitting tonight, down and around the road, in a huge fucking house, for a pair of twelve year old twins.  The curb is warm through her jean shorts, and she's wearing a dayglo bikini underneath so she can go in her client's giant ass pool.  She's considering sneaking a few gulps of vodka beforehand.

So fast forward—→Doorbell sounds muffly through white double doors.  Her head is all tangled from the phone call.  A figure suddenly glides up behind the glass and yanks the door open: 'Hiiiiiiiiiiiiii!'  White dress, gold jewelry, blonde, tiny, tight, and lasery eyes, Mrs. Arms Wide Open, hug, light cheek kiss. 'We're just walking out the door now.  The boys are downstairs.  Sergio!  We're going to be late!'

The couple are sucked out into the night through the front doors and Natalie's mind settles into the silence.  She makes a beeline for the freezer, does a hipswing maneuver around the granite island.  Grey Goose.  Plops the cork and lets the liquid ice in her.  Mouthful, swallow.  Ok, one more.  The pool glows blue through the sliding back door.
Through the first floor maze she finds the basement door, opens it, and travels down the tight staircase.  The amount of blood spattered across the room scrambles her entirely, momentarily, lost temporarily in a hospital sized second, she begins screaming.

2:

Nick Dickerson:

On the TV a videogame clamors.  His eyes white rings around brown rings around black pinpoints stare at the screaming mess at the foot of the stairs.  He runs a trembling hand through his sweat marinated mane.  Stendhal syndrome, he thinks.

'Nat.'

The screaming pulls back like a tide, his voice the moon pulling her attention to him.  Her screams still dancing in rings around his nerves, a spark lighting in him seeing the darkness growing in her crotch.  He raises his eyebrows and smiles, a jack-o-lantern.

Suddenly they are entangled, a frame cut, edited out, the blood on him now on her.  Her runner's body hard against him, both to the blond wood floor, guns rattling from the TV, from the surround sound.  Still unsure, he grabs for her head for a good bathyspheric kiss and it's all just pounding fists, fucking cunt.

Doorknobs fill his head, each one accounted for.  He tickles her into a twitching bundle of confused giggles, smeared with red goo.  Standing over her, fifty feet tall, white T-shirt, tie-dyed with blood, pulls out a pistol, points: 'We're going to smoke this meth.', tossing the sandwich bag on the floor.

Fast forward—→The master bedroom mirror reflecting the two fucking: 'Don't stop watching.' he's breathing into her ear, one hand around her neck, the other a V at their wet hot and pounding intersection.  She angles her head back for that deepwater kiss.  'Tell me and I'll do it.' she says. 'Don't stop.' she says.

And so it begins.

3:

David Domino Domingo:

Sunday morning.  My head feels stuffed with towels.  Dry towels.  I'm biking, sweating down Dune Road, Westhampton.  Beach grass shishes and heliotropic landscaping whizzes by.  The sun is the Devil's invention and it's overwhelming me, overwhelming the road.  Everywhere too bright.

A smell, a stomach lurch, then the sight of what might have been a German shepherd, what is definitely a severed paw, my face wrenches, suddenly out of my control.  Fucking fuck.  Empty multimillion dollar homes loom.  The cicada chorus.

I ride past, east, even bigger houses in Q.  Tennis courts, basketball courts, a white Rolls-Royce Phantom pulls out from a gated driveway.  Sergio LaFloppocinni.  How am I sweating this much?  Through the gate are three police cars, lights turning but invisible under Satan's sun.

4:

David Domino Domingo's Reflection:

The Q  Club shimmers by way of reflections in glasses, mirrors, silverware, phones, clocks, computers, the outside world bent and twisted, dancing in the wind, a storm rushing across the island.

DD Domingo, his flat-gray reflection convex in the clock, looks to be contemplating how pregnant women in their final trimester carry a jar of pickles around so they can cover up their water breaking by breaking the jar on the floor.  But upon reflection this is unlikely.

Soon enough, Rod Pennis's reflection is twisting and jumping along the dining rooms silverware, heading towards the image of his lawyer, D3 AKA the Dominator.  The club is mostly empty and the crystal glasses vibrate invisibly with angry and haunted sound waves.  But the vibrations remain untranslated outside the lawyer's and client's heads.

5:

Domino's Psychic Copy Domino David Domingo:

Domino David Domingo—3D to his friends—is always just somewhere beyond three seconds either behind or ahead of his best buddy and psychic twin D3, the legendary lawyer.

Anyway, 3D is with his pals Guy, Black Angus, D3 and Hand, shooting around the target range: BANG BANG BANG etc.  The range is an awful lot like a car showroom.  12,500,000 watts chattering D3's teeth with each squeeze.

When the BANGs pitter out, the door swings open and a group of women sashay in.  After a shimmering beat or two, the now-man-children gawk and funnel out through the door.

Black Angus is the real deal, 3D reflects.  His shoot sheet is punctured only in the ten ring.  A prince of precision.  This is probably because Black Angus was a hoodrat before he got drafted into and through the NBA and into fistfuls of wet cunt and hard cash.

The reason 3D knows this is because it was told to Domino, but Domino wasn't really paying attention.  Black Angus also has a PhD.

'Tennis, everyone?' D3 asks.

'FOCK YEAH!' says Black Angus.  Guy and Hand nod vigorously.  Black Angus flashes his Addidas sponsorship smile.

They all hi-five and bump chests and run to their cars, 3D still trying to grasp the situation his twin just generated.

Fast forward→POCK POCK POCK POCK.  D3 (With 3D's help) and Black Angus brutalize Hand and Guy across 4 matches.  Their technique involves walloping the yellow fuzz hornet at H&G's faces.  'Quick and painless!' they shout, out of synch.

3D's the better player, shimmying D3 by his nervous system like a marionette.

After, they sit on the beach staring out over the trinitite ocean. D3 is treating his horror irradiated brain with Heineken radiation, while 3D transforms into a Geiger–Müller counter, scanning the Pennis Situation for, well—

6:

D3:

Seagulls run along the beach.  A freighter is on the horizon.  The fucking sun.  The police recovered a freezer bag containing liver.  On Dune Road.  And another bag with two hearts three houses down from my own.

Everyone has gone home.  They don't know.  Soon enough, I guess.  I doubt she's alive.  But hey, retainer is retainer.  A greenhead fly starts attacking me.  Time to go.  My ears are still ringing from the range.

7:

3D:

Rewind—→Natalie Pennis leans against the court fence, and I immediately take over D3. We use his muscle tissues and surprisingly scary gameface to force three consecutive points against Black Angus.

Forty Love.

Now Natalie isn’t the only one up against the fence.  Tatiana McGillicuddy and Maggie and Birthday Cake and everyone else on the grass start making match watching noises.

D3 races crosscourt to the ball.

With five women watching, D3 whaps at Black Angus, attempting the Hampton Face Rattle. He smacks him right in his kisser.  The ball piddle pocks on the court and D3 runs around his side of the court hooting.

But Black Angus throws the ball up and sends it right into the back of D3’s head.  Tatiana, Maggie, and Birthday go crazy on the sidelines, and Natalie Pennis flashes her 16 year old tits for Black Angus. And so: Domino runs and shoves Black Angus, Black Angus shoves him back, I shove D3, and D3 really, really shoves Black Angus.

Now D3 and Black Angus are squared off at the net.

There’s a yelp, people scattering, and Birthday Cake yells, “Domino, he’s got a gun!”

I swing over to Black Angus, and he’s holding a black pistol to the side of D3’s head, and with a click pulls the trigger spraying water all over the side of Domino’s face.  We all fall the hot court and roll around laughing into the sunset.

7:

D3:

I spent this morning on the living room couch looking at Cherise in her jar.  She is my dear dead wife and her ashes sit on top of the white mantel over the fireplace. It went like this: autoerotic asphyxiation and the pool vacuum and a colorectal polyp and a prolapse and a bleeding out through the pool filter.  I came home, summoned her, nothing, went out to the pool, it had turned pink and had grand red plumes blowing out the jets. She drowned. Officially.