I submitted a story to the Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest this year and, of course, didn't win. Not phased, I know I'm an amateur pretending to wear the big kid pants. The winners were legit and published (and very professional) writers. Truth is, the story I submitted is the longest and most complete piece I've ever done. As I said, amateur. Who cares? I love the story and I'd really like to work on it more. Now that the contest is over and I can officially hang my head in shame with the other 610 non-placers (I had unofficially hung my head a month ago when I realized my story really wasn't clear...or completed), I'd like to post it for ya'll to read... but only do so if you're old enough to handle foul language and adult situations because it's not a pretty story. So...



Watermelon Patch

Janna knew from the way he looked at her that he wasn’t a good man. A good man wouldn’t stare like that, like he’s asking forgiveness and blaming her at the same time. His eyes were drooped skin encircling two small pools of sludge, like a couple of mud puddles sunk in his face.  There wasn’t much to him but an intense stare and tufts of gray fluff shooting out of his head. Janna wouldn’t have noticed him if he wasn’t noticing so much of her. He sat three booths back, alone and watching while she listened to her friend talk.

“ Pulled him over by Davis Street. The bastard cop reeked of whiskey and we‘d only been drinkin‘ beer. He says, ‘If you don‘t tell I wont‘. Can you believe that shit? Jesus, we got lucky and thank god for small towns.”  The friend reached across the table, scooped the last of Janna’s fries and dropped them onto a napkin in front of her. “Thanks for the fries. I was starvin marvin.”

“Hey, Lacey, don’t turn around right this second, but turn around after maybe a minute-or-so and tell me if that guy is staring. I think he is.”

“What does he look like?” Lacey began turning her head then scratched her nose to appear casual and disinterested.

“Don’t turn around yet. I don’t know, he’s got a coffee cup. Umm….gray hair, blue button-up.”

The friend bit off the end of a thick spear-shaped fry and cracked her neck on one side, then after a couple of moments she turned with a slow yawn to look over her shoulder. It was obvious, but the man didn’t seem to notice his eyes fixated on the face of the other girl.

“Ok, creepy, yeah he’s staring at you,” she said, turning back. 

“Yeah.” Janna tugged on the end of a loose strand of hair and tried not to make eye contact with the entranced stranger. She looked down at a pool of red ketchup, feeling uneasy.

“He aint much, my little sister could probably kick his ass. Just some pervy trucker taking a break in town to stare at high school girl’s tits.” Her friend seemed confident in the assessment of the stranger, but her posture had stiffened and she spoke in a low, quiet voice. Girls in the truck-stop towns of East Texas learned to be cautious of men early on, strangers or otherwise.

“Listen, Janna, I’m gonna go. My daddy’s probly pissed I’m not back yet. You want me to tell Justin to throw that freak out for you?”  Justin, a shit-kicker townie with a lepers face full of puffy pimples worked behind the counter serving up fast food and apathy to the going-thrus. Not a hero, but having a pair of dropped balls gave him an authority the two girls occasionally took advantage of when their teenage-girl attitudes weren’t up to the challenge.

Janna smiled at her friend, something she did with little strain despite the staring stranger, and shook her head. “Nah, I’ll be fine. Like you said, just a sorry ass perv. He aint trouble. I‘m leaving soon anyway.” She half-waved a  hand in front of her face like swiping flies or casting a trouble-be-gone spell. She was a teenager and full of all the stupid pride that swells in bellies and newly-formed breasts of juveniles from the unburdened hovering between youth and adulthood. Her friend gave the same gusty smile, a touch of confidence realigning her stiffened neck into a more natural couldn’t-care-less slouch .

“See ya at school.” Lacey waved, snagged her fringed leather purse over a tanned shoulder and strode out of the restaurant slash gas station with the tinkle of the doorbell and a flash of sunlight in her wake.

Janna slouched into her booth seat. The cotton-filled vinyl cushion puffed and harrumphed beneath  her, unwilling to adjust under the shifting weight of her bottom. Janna hardly noticed being used to the crusty booth seats. She slid her flip-flops off and cracked her toes, touching them to the cold laminate floor. Though the globule of ketchup was unappetizing without fries to spoon it up with, Janna stared sullenly into the red squirt in the center of the sunny yellow napkin on the table below her. The totality of the still, sharp red centered within equally sharp yellow reminded her of a chrysanthemum, like the one glued to a loop of elastic her date had slipped around her wrist on the night of the homecoming dance two years prior. The night she’d shoved the naked, unadorned hand down his pants in the boys locker room, him in a one-legged kneel on the bench that ran between two rows of shark gray lockers, her standing in front of him pressed against half his body, trying to get a rhythm within the awkward confines of his zipped down but way too tight trousers.

She had known what it was he wanted that night, what the cheap chrysanthemum corsage had been about, why he‘d asked her to the dance in the first place. He’d finished himself off in the boys shower and left her standing alone between tall stoic lockers, palm smelling of old mushrooms and urine, skin blotchy, chaffed. She had known that all he’d wanted was ‘Janna Watts, The Slut!‘ - a name he’d call her to his friends later that night - and she had tried her best to give it to him. It was her first sexual experience.

Janna Watts was a slut in a small town.

Janna had been a slut the moment a doctor slapped her pink baby ass and announced, ‘It’s a girl’ to a doped and limp-eyed mother. It was her heritage. Like a person claiming half Cherokee or one-third Irish, Janna rested under the old greasy crest of ’Slut’. She hailed from a line of loose aunts and easy cousins. Her mom had been and sometimes still was a Lot Lizard, a woman who prowled truck stops for lonely men and easy money.  At the public dock on Houston County Lake, someone grafittied ‘Janna Watts is a slut!’ across the rotting wooden planks. This was the same dock where the town’s younger kids spent summer days jumping off into tepid sludgy waters and teenagers spent nights drinking their parent’s beer and daring each other to get naked and skinny dip.  All had read the slanderous graffiti, had laughed and pronounced to their friends that, yes, it was so.

Janna Watts is a slut!

The cruelty of the title affected Janna in undulations, lightly touching her during good natured times when she could laugh it off with friends, soaking her in others with a child’s anger and indignation. Still, she didn’t understand it, not the full realty, until she reached the age of thirteen and the family secrets began crawling out sink drains, smearing memories with a layer of sludge and slick where she‘d only glimpsed rainbows before. She hadn’t known what the words ‘rape’ or ‘molestation’ meant until they began bobbing up into salted sexual half-wisdoms of her teenage friends during summertime sleepovers and extended afternoons at the lake.

She started asking questions.  Why did Aunt Linda hate men? How did Anne lose the eye  and why does her daughter , Janna’s cousin, walk crooked? Who was her father? The answers never came straight but if her mom and aunts drank enough during their gospel inspired karaoke nights at the trailer, they would talk loosely and curse with each other. Janna would listen. She started to understand. She came from a family of victims.

In small towns, poverty and violence are unhappy lovers.  When a family is poor and miserable someone within it - sometimes more than one person - will act out like a pissed-off kid pounding at the bleachers for not having been picked to play.  Janna’s family had always been poor, the men angry, the women a convenient place to drop a punch or kick. Eventually the men left and the women, tired and hungry for sex or romance, found other men. Never the right ones. They gravitated toward the kind who reminded them of the tormentors who had left, angry and tired working rough-necks looking for someone to overpower. The Watts women were also targets.  Something about  the raw sexuality of their carriage, vulnerable nerves, tough skin hiding spongy wet, attracted men with violent needs. Men who wanted to break something open, expose it’s insides.

The Watts women, Janna found out, were easy . Easy because they had given up caring for survival. A week in the boss’s bed amounted to a month of food and comfort, and damn it if they had to endure black eyes or a hospital visit in return.

This was her heritage. This was what she had to work with.

Janna decided not to be a victim that night two years prior in the boys locker room, decided they wouldn’t take from her what she could give freely. It started and continued through the school year, the next. Any boy who wanted her, she made herself available. Summers she spent giving boys blow jobs in the woods behind the watermelon patches. The townies took summer jobs picking watermelons, sometimes poking holes in the melons, painting lips around the holes, pretending and fucking honeydews and yellow meats through Texas humidity and teenage boredom. She’d show up and show them what real lips felt like. Janna pretending not to care. Janna pretending not to be a victim.

She slipped her flip-flops back onto her feet and pushed herself out of the booth, looping a wrist through the handle of her soiled canvas purse. She turned and left the restaurant slash gas station, didn’t look back at the man though intuitively sure he was still watching. Janna walked light, pushed through the smeared glass door and started home.

A thought came to her, a memory of her mother scolding. She was twelve and had wanted her mom to check the closet for monsters.

“Baby,” her mom had said, “only thing waitin’ in there is monster time. He’s creepin’ and snoopin‘, snottin’ up your pretty dresses, wiping boogers in your shoes. He’s waitin’ and there ain’t a thing you can do when he decides to come crawlin’ out. He’s gonna getcha, honey bear. I can’t fix that.”

Janna walked slowly down the sidewalk, feeling the bliss of sunlight on her exposed shoulders. Behind her, she heard the tinkling of the bells, heard heavy shuffling feet.

“He’s waitin’, honey bear, aint nothing you can do about that monster. He’s waitin’.”