A Darling I Killed

Finishing up a murder mystery novel and had this darling left over. I love her because, well, you’ll see… But ultimately she’s just a gag, and didn’t move the story forward, so I had to kill her. But here she is in all her glory.

Officer Purvis Nimrod scanned his ID badge, put his face in front of the security access reader camera lens, and unsuccessfully struggled to keep his eyes from roaming, but they involuntarily panned from the fire engine sparkles of Jamie’s toenails all the way up her legs to their heavenly intersection above the fringe of her stressed jorts.

“ACCESS DENIED,” the security monitor screen flashed.

“It don’t recognize me for some reason,” Nimrod said. “Hold on.” He turned his back on her, hunched over, and palmed something she couldn’t see from his pocket up to his face. After flaring his elbows one at a time, he returned the mysterious object to his pocket, then scanned his ID badge again and grinned into the lens of the security camera.

The red light turned green and the electric door lock buzzed. “You can just look at her picture,” he said, gripping the large stainless steel door latch with both hands as he turned to display the eyebrow replacement he’d Sharpied onto his face to satisfy the biometric security system. “You don’t have to see her like that, you know, with the…” He mimed putting a pistol to his head and pulling the trigger while crossing his eyes.

“I wanna see her.”

“Okay,” he said, leaning backwards to pull the insulated walk-in fridge door open. “It’s your funeral.”

A wave of ice-cold formaldehyde-laden air gushed across the floor, flowing between her legs like ghosts fleeing a Confederate cemetery. She followed the detective into the cooler where a wall of avocado steel file cabinets—each large enough to hold a dead body—was illuminated by a bare dollar-store incandescent.

He went to a Formica countertop, where he flipped through a small box of file cards until he found the one he was looking for. “Number six,” he said reverently as he pulled a folded paper barf bag out of a drawer. “Here,” he said, shaking it open and offering it to her. “You might need this.”

She looked at it but didn’t accept it. “She’s my mother.”

“You might get sick anyways.”

“I’m not going to get sick.”

“I mean, she—” Nimrod began. “He shot her right through the head, right through the—”

“I know, goddammit!” Jamie said, snatching the bag out of Nimrod’s hand. “You told me already.”

Nimrod went to locker number six, grasped the handle, and spun toward her before pulling it open. “Brace yourself,” he said, yanking the handle. An unholy chorus of rusty ball bearings sang as he walked the long drawer open, progressively revealing a white sheet covering a human form until she saw an identification tag twist-tied to a purple toe that was adorned with the exact same polish as her own.

Gazing down at the figure beneath the sheet, she recognized her mother’s slim hips, slender tummy, and the perfect set of D-cups that she still hoped to inherit, but wondered what could possibly be making the tent pole in the center.

Nimrod grabbed the corner of the sheet and fixed his eyes on Jamie’s. “Ready?” he asked.

Jamie nodded.

Nimrod yanked the sheet off like he was a magician, revealing a cross-dressing grampaw in a frilly pink camisole with alligator clips on twisted nipples and a rock hard dick launched straight up toward the ceiling from out of a pair of pink crotchless panties.

Jamie’s eyes got big and round as she stared at the elderly dead transvestite. “Who in the hell is this?” she asked. “That’s not my momma!”

Nimrod turned beet red. “Omigod!” he uttered. “Uncle Kenny?” He snatched the vomit bag from Jamie’s hands, but puked all over the concrete floor before he could position it under his mouth. After he caught his breath, he re-covered the old man with the sheet and bumped the cadaver drawer with his fat ass to slam it closed, then stumbled over to flip through the card file. “Gimme a sec,” he said, wiping his mouth with the barf bag. “I’ll find your momma.”

Taylor E-2 Cub

My dad and his best friend (who became my Uncle JB) “borrowed” (kinda stole) this airplane when they were around 15 years old. It was owned by Wes Hillman, who kept it in a barn in Vinton, Virginia that is now the Southampton neighborhood. They had taken a few “lessons” (glorified rides) from Wes and knew Wes was going to be away for the day. They decided to sneak it out of the barn and just taxi it around on the ground but not fly it. They jumped out of the hayloft a few times to get their nerve up. Then one of them got into the plane while the other spun the prop to start it. Then the prop man jumped into the plane once it was started. The taxiing around plan was dropped when they taxied it too fast and had no choice but to take off. People saw the plane flying around (an unusual occurrence circa 1941) and mentioned to Wes that they had seen him flying. Wes put two and two together and confronted my dad and JB, who confessed. Then Wes forgave them and taught them both to fly. 

Here is the entry, backdated in my dad’s first log book, written after Wes had confronted them and forgiven them. June 6, 1941. My dad had turned 15 one month before. He had logged 8 hours and 48 minutes riding in planes. It took about a month for Wes to get over it and let the two boys hang out with him again.

This is the first page of my dad’s log book. He was 13 years old when he took his first airplane ride in 1939.

The Dixie Drive-In Movie Theater in Vinton, Virginia

I remember sneaking into the back of the Dixie one night when I was around 14 years old. A few of us boys slept out in sleeping bags in the back yard and snuck away in the dead of night (probably around 10 p.m.) a few minutes after our parents turned out the lights. There was a double feature playing, and we knew the second movie was rated R, which meant nudity. The movie starred Richard Thomas, the dude who played John Boy Walton on tv, which was really weird, because John Boy was such a pure and innocent lad. It was an absolutely horrible movie, but we were determined to sweat it out. We sat back in the bushes, hiding from the old dude that owned the drive-in. He would patrol the perimeter and raise hell when he found kids sneaking in. It took forever for the scene that made the movie into an R to show up, but finally near the end, there were about three seconds of titty projected on that old screen in the climactic scene. Actually I don’t remember if it was the dramatic climax, but it was the visual climax for sure. 

Dawkins Scale

If Richard Dawkins made this, then I’ve just lost some confidence in his logic.

Theism and its opposite — atheism — have little to do with a belief about whether there is a god or not.

Theism is not simply the belief that there is a god. Theism is the belief that there is a god who can be influenced by his human believers. (What good is a god who doesn’t change stuff anyway? Can’t make any money on that kind of god, can we?) 

Atheism, on the other hand, is not by definition the belief that there is no god. Atheism is only the belief that no matter how much you sing, dance, grovel on your knees, cry, weep, scream, shout, mutter under your breath, or swing incense, there ain’t no god who is giving a single shit about it.

So, that doesn’t mean that atheists must believe there is no god. It just means that if there is a god, atheists believe he’s not listening to you. He doesn’t give a shit about you or your prayers. He doesn’t engage in do-overs. He doesn’t come to your rescue. He doesn’t give you your daily bread, or cure your illnesses, or decide who wins your goddamn football games.

To an atheist, the likelihood of the existence of, for instance, the God of Abraham, is approximately equal to the likelihood of a giant tortoise carrying the earth on its back, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Zeus, or Apollo, or any other of the thousands of deities we’ve created, or any other random explanation made up of whole cloth from zero evidence by illiterates sitting around a campfire.

But whether such a disinterested deity exists or not doesn’t actually matter. An uncaring, unresponsive god has absolutely zero effect on the laws of physics, and thus, it has zero effect on our lives. 

So an atheist does not have to believe there is no god. An atheist only has to believe that there is no god who is subject to influence by human believers.