Monica leaned a hand against the ancient gas pump for balance and rested for a while. She was even more ancient than the gas pump and normally used a sturdy walker for her sturdy body when she walked. She had left the walker behind when it kept getting stuck in the cracks of broken asphalt surrounding Jake’s Gas.
Jake was a scumbag and his failing business was a reflection of himself. Dirty, poorly maintained and repulsive to look at. Only someone desperate for gas would stop here. A month ago, Monica’s granddaughter Justine had reluctantly stopped here with her gas gauge showing empty.
She pushed herself away from the gas pump and slowly walked toward the open garage doors. The smell of gas and oil was so strong it made her eyes water. It was a miracle this place hadn’t burnt down yet from a stray spark or a careless smoker.
Monica entered the garage and was immediately spotted by Jake’s son. He tapped his father on the shoulder and Jake pulled his head out of the engine compartment of a car to look at her with a surprised expression.
“What are you.” He looked toward the empty country road outside the garage and then lunged for the bottom drawer of a toolbox cabinet. He pulled out a handgun and pointed it toward the open doors.
She sat down on a chair with a relieved sigh and watched Jake look up and down the road with the gun at his side. His gun looked as cheap and poorly maintained as everything else here. She figured the odds were 50/50 that it would blow up in his hand if he pulled the trigger.
“What are you doing here? You come alone?”
“I’m alone. I’ve been alone since my granddaughter committed suicide.”
“That’s got nothing to do with me you old bitch. It ain’t my fault she’s sick in the head.”
“She committed suicide because you raped her right here in this garage. You and your son.”
“That’s a lie. You can’t prove anything. That case was dismissed because I’m an innocent man.”
Jake was pointing his piece of shit gun at Monica with a shaking hand. Getting shot wasn’t much of a concern for a seventy five year old woman with stage four cancer but she hoped he didn’t shoot her all the same. She didn’t want to miss what was coming.
Monica heard the groan of shifting earth from the sewage pipes under the garage and she smiled. “Well now, we’ll find out how innocent you are in just a minute.”
Jake looked at her in confusion. He stumbled and dropped the gun when the ground shook.
There was a small washroom connected to the garage and Monica looked toward its open doorway. A slick, glistening shape emerged from the toilet bowl and entered the garage area.
Jake looked at the head of an enormous fluke worm floating in the air above him that smiled to reveal multiple ridges of brown stained teeth. A voice spoke inside the heads of all three of the people inside the garage. “Hi there sweetmeat.”
He dropped to his hands and knees and scrambled for his gun. A coil wet with sewer water looped around him and picked him off the floor. “Do you want to shoot me with your little 9mm penis big boy? Do you really wanna hurt me? Do you really wanna make me cry?”
Jake heaved for breath as the coil tightened. Tears leaked from his bulging eyes as the head floated toward his face. “Swee… Sweet Marie.”
“Oh! You know who I am! You’re stroking my ego boyfriend. I’m positively tumescent with pleasure. Just look at me swell.”
Sweet Marie stopped playing with her food and her head lunged at Jake’s son creeping toward an exit. With a flick of her head, she sent him flying into a corner of the garage where he crashed into metal shelves full of auto parts.
“Stay there and don’t move boy. Any more sassy behaviour and Sweet Marie is going to get testy. You wait your turn now.”
Sweet Marie returned her attention to Jake. Her mouth opened and closed and her head floated around him as is she was searching for something.
“Is he guilty Sweet Marie? Did he do it?”
Sweet Marie didn’t have any eyes but it still looked like she glanced at Monica when she answered. “Yes, I knew he did it when I entered the sewage lines under the garage. The stink of his rapist mind is that strong. The question isn’t who he raped. More like who hasn’t he raped.”
“I’m inno…” There was a series of sharp cracks and blood flowed out of Jake’s mouth when Sweet Marie tightened her grip. “Shut up boy. You’re a rapist and your sweet meat is mine. I don’t like my food giving me any backtalk.”
She slammed Jake into a car high above the ground on a hydraulic hoist. “How did you get away with it for so long Jake? Your memories are such a mess I can’t sort out how many women you’ve raped. You found yourself a county where the police just don’t care I ‘spose.”
She released her grip and threw him across the garage toward a green metal desk. His lower back hit first. His spine was severed and his lower vertebrae were crushed. “That’s the desk you bent Justine over, isn’t it? How’s that feel big man?”
Jake’s upper body was sprawled on top of the desk. His lifeless legs hung over the side. Sweet Marie’s head rose up and dove between his legs with a wet crunch. She ripped off his scrotum and penis and pulled her head away with a satisfied groan.
Sweet Marie seemed to grow even larger as she gulped down her meal. “Mmmm, tasty for a micro penis son of a bitch.”
Monica turned her head away in revulsion but not with any regret.
Sweet Marie abruptly dove toward the closing door for a stairway that led to the second floor of the old building. Jake’s son frantically closed the door and clambered up the stairs.
“I told you not to test my patience boy! You’ve done gone and spoiled my good mood.”
The cheap door disintegrated into fragments when Sweet Marie rammed through the obstacle and shook off the shards of wood sticking to her moist skin.
The young man looked back in terror and fell on the steps, but he kept climbing upward.
Sweet Marie surged upward and grabbed at his feet with an open mouth dripping with blood and clumps of feces. She was pulled up short two steps away from her goal. There was a limit to how far she could stretch and she had to keep her tail in the sewage line. “Come on now, don’t be a tease. Get down her and give Sweet Marie a little summer loving.”
His actions told her that he declined her invitation when he scrambled out of the stairway and into the upstairs hallway. “Playing hard to get, are we? You’re starting to hurt my feelings you little bitch.” Sweet Marie left behind a thick coating of slime when she disappeared out of the stairway.
He went down on all fours and threw up in the hallway. Now he knew there was a limit to her range. All he had to do was stay far away from anything connected to a sewer line.
The young man remembered the water fountain in the hallway five seconds before it exploded into chunks of porcelain that tore holes in the wall.
He felt the warmth of urine trickle down his legs as he sat in the hallway, hypnotized by the weaving head that loomed over him.
“What’s going on here boy? Tell me the truth! Is there someone else? I’m a jealous girl. Sweet Marie doesn’t share her sweet meat with anybody.”
Sweet Marie stopped amusing herself and moved closer to the teenager. She cocked her head in a puzzled manner as she examined him. Blood from his father dripped onto him from Sweet Marie as he sat convulsing with fear. Maybe some of the clumps of shit that dripped on him were from his father as well.
She pulled back and regarded him silently for a moment. “You aren’t what I expected boy. You aren’t what I expected at all.”
They both turned and looked toward the stairwell when Monica entered the hallway after carefully climbing the stairs. She gave Sweet Marie a questioning look.
“He’s not a rapist Monica. He’s a victim. It wasn’t just women his father raped.”
Monica looked at the young man with confusion. She was so sure it had been both of them. This boy had been raised by Jake since his mother had ‘disappeared’ over a decade ago. It made her feel sick to think of what he had suffered from his sick beast of a father.
“I can’t feed off someone who isn’t a rapist, but I can kill him for you. He was still too much of a coward to stop his father or talk to the police.”
Monica shook her head. This poor boy had likely been sexually abused by his father most of his life. He probably thought it was normal. “Leave him be.”
Sweet Marie performed a flukeworm’s equivalent of a shrug. “Your call.” She whipped a coil around the young teenager and pulled him off the floor. “Mind yourself boy. I’ll be watching you. If you try to follow your daddy’s footsteps, you’ll finish your dinner date with Sweet Marie.”
She put him back down on the floor beside Monica and withdrew. Her body lengthened and narrowed. She started to slide down the plumbing line that had led to the destroyed drinking fountain. Sweet Marie disappeared with a loud slurping sound and a fine mist of sewer water.
Monica looked at the young man and he lowered his head to stare at the floor. “Thank you for sparing me. I’m sorry I was a coward. You must hate me.”
“What’s your name?” Monica didn’t want to call him boy anymore.
“Joshua.”
She nodded. A biblical name like that must have been given to him by his long absent mother. “I don’t hate you, Joshua. You’re a victim just like my granddaughter. I’m all out of hate.”
Monica was the mother of five children, grandmother of fourteen and great grandmother of twenty three. She knew a lost child when she saw one. “Where’s your family, Joshua?”
“The only family I know is downstairs in pieces.” He didn’t sound very upset about it.
She studied the young teenage boy for a while. The doctors told her she had, at best, three years left before the cancer took her. Monica welcomed the sense of purpose that raising and saving one more child would give her. She wanted to believe something good could come out of all this foul violence.
“You’re coming with me Joshua. You’re broken and you need fixing. You need a proper home. My daughters will help me.”
“But.”
“Come on now. I’m not asking.” She started walking toward the stairway and he followed her wearing a perplexed expression.
She noticed he took a wide berth around the twisted pipe that Sweet Marie had emerged from. “Don’t worry about Sweet Marie. You live like a proper man should and she won’t touch you.”
Joshua continued to look nervously at the pipe as they walked past it. “All the same ma’am, I think I’m still gonna crap in the woods for the rest of my life.”
😳 I am Marie’s biggest fan.
Stellar. Vulgar. Sweet Marie is the sweetest. And the best kind of obligate parasite.