Home Is For The Birds

Pilot and Skye had a beautiful home, high up in the trunk of a dead tree. A wood pecker hollowed out an already rotting part in search of a meal. He found what he was looking for and abandoned the site when the food ran out. It was  a perfect home for a young couple of swallows.

One day Pilot went out to look for some food. He gave Skye a kiss on the beak and went his way. He flew almost a full mile until he found a promising location. He looked around for a perch to assess the area. He saw a branch with a wide angle view of the ground below.

Already on the branch was a beautiful female swallow.  Pilot thought he should maybe find another branch but she waved him over with a wink.

“Hello” she said.

“Hello” Pilot said.

“Name´s Libi” she said.

“I´m Pilot” he said, blushing.

“That´s a strong name. Are you a strong bird?” Libi asked.

“Well, not really, I guess I can be” he answered. Libi stayed quite. She knew that silence can drive a male mad.

Pilot´s mind raced, searching for something to say, to break the deafening silence. All he could come up was, “Do you live close?”

“Close to what?” Libi giggled. Pilot blushed again. Libi leaned over and kissed him on the beak. An explosion of emotions rushed over Pilot. The thought that rose to the top was “What am I doing?”

Swallows are hard wired for monogamy. They take a mate for life. This went against thousands of years of evolution.

Pilot pulled away. “I cannot do this! I already have a female”

Libi said with a devilish look, “You do and you don´t now”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the moment you return home, your “ex” will smell my pheromones on you, so you don´t. But, you have me now” she said.

Pilot wanted to protest but he couldn´t. She was right. Dejected, Pilot asked “Where do you live?”

“I don´t have a home, dear” she answered. “You have to make one for us”

“Oh great…” Pilot thought.

Over the course of a week Pilot made a home just as good as the one he left.  Two days after, Libi kicked him out.

“I thought we were going to be together forever” Pilot said.

“That´s so old fashioned. That instinct must have passed over me” Libi said.

“What am I going to do?” Pilot cried.

“I don´t know. Do the same as the others. Go crawling back to your old home” Libi said.

“Others?” Pilot asked.

“Yeah, the others that I tricked into building me a house. I´m just going to flip it for some quick cash” Libi said.

Pilot wanted revenge but realized this would just get more of her pheromones on him. In fact, he was so busy working, he hadn´t had contact with Libi for days. He flew off to see if he could get his life back.

Till Death Do Us Part

Dan and Carol were together for many years. They fought a lot. Carol thought that Dan´s lack of ambition made him a loser and was vocal about this. Dan thought Carol was cold and incapable of loving anyone. Their fights were never over anything of substance. They just didn´t like the way the other talked. It was a very volatile relationship. One or the other giving an opinion on a current even could lead to a knock down drag out fight resulting in them not talking to one another for a week.
They finally came to a point where they had enough. The both agreed to go their seperate ways. They were able to remain friends for the most part, as long as their contact was short and far between. Dan felt a responsibility to Carol. He didn´t´feel she was truly capable of taking care of herself.
About one year after the break up Dan got a call from Carol. She was hysterical.
“Hello?” Dan answered confused. He knew it was her but was perplexed by the volley of sobs be thrown over the phone.
“I just got back from the doctor” she said.
Dan knew this was not going to be a pleasant call. Carol was a strong person. She rarely cried so he knew this was serious. “Do you want to talk?”
“Of course I do, stupid. That´s why I called” she said.
Dan was about to attack but pulled back. He realized she must be very upset about something. “Ok, then tell me”
“I have cancer. Very agressive cancer. I have to start chemotherapy immediately. The doctor thinks that will only buy me….” she trailed off.
“Oh my god that´s….” he was cut off.
“Months. The chemo will only buy me a few months. I´m going to die” Carol said.
There was silence. Dan had no idea what to say to this. “Can I see you?” he asked.
“Sure. Let´s have dinner tonight” she answered, her sobs coming under control.
That night they met at their favorite restaurant. Carol gave Dan more details about the doctor visit. Carol decided that she was going to forget about the diagnosis, just for the night. She was going to throw caution to the wind. She ordered a bottle of wine. Then another, then another. Although Dan was not comfortable with that but he understood and after the first bottle his level of comfort grew.
They paid the bill and made their ways to their respective cars. In the parking lot Carol turned to Dan and said “Come home with me. I cannot be alone tonight” Dan obliged. He got in his car and followed her home.
They made love that night for the first time in over a year. It was like the first time only better. Carol asked Dan to move in with her. She would need him as the chemo sapped her strength. Dan was weary about this. In the back of his head, even though he was ashamed to admit it, he knew she would not be here too much longer so there was a way out. He did still love her after all and she needed his help so he agreed.
The fighting started almost immediately. Carol complained about the things Dan brought from his apartment. Daily she would remind him how much of a pig she thought he was, she insulted the food he prepared for her and would frequently threaten to kick him out if he didn´t stop fighting with her.
Dan pushed through it. He knew she needed him. He knew of her limitations and again, he knew this was not permanent. Three months in, Carol´s health deterioted rapidly. She lost so much weight that Dan was afraid of breaking her when he put her in bed. She asked him to marry her because she did not want to die single. Dan agreed. They had a minister come to the house to perform the ceremony. It was official, they were married.
Around the sixth month a remarkable thing happened. Carol started to gain weight. Her skin started to look healthy and resumed its normal color. The life was coming back into her eyes. With this new life came more ire thrown Dan´s way.
Each month Carol´s health improved. Her blood exams were confirming what the eye could see. She was getting better. At the one year mark, the doctor told her she could stop chemo. The cancer was completely contained and could possibly go into remission.
Dan thought that with this rebirth maybe Carol would change. He was now contractually obligated to be with her, after all. He was horrified of the thought of giving Carol half of his considerable assets after having nursed her back to health over the past year. He would have to make this work.
A few tortuous months passed. To Dan they felt like an eternity. How did he ever get himself into this situation? He asked himself this every day. One day Carol came home with a grave expression on her face. She told Dan they needed to talk. She informed him that she was seeing another man. It was serious. She was going to divorce him, leave him the apartment and not ask for a dime from him. Everybody involved lived happily ever after.

Half Assed

Martha dreaded Saturday mornings. It was the time when she had to clean the house. It reminded her of everything that was wrong with her life. Why couldn´t she had married a guy with the means to contract a housekeeper? Why did she have to live in such a shabby house? Why was her body giving out on her at such a relatively young age? Just bending over to sweep dirt onto the dust pan gave her pains in the back. Pains that as of late have been ever so increasing.

One Saturday morning, Martha decided that she would do a half assed cleaning job but double down the next week. The next week came and she did another half assed job. After a few months of half assed Saturday cleanings, her poor performance started to show and this raised some concerns from her husband, Merrill.

One day Merrill brought his dissatisfaction to Martha´s attention. “Honey” he started “the house is starting to look like a pig pen. What´s going on?”

Martha steamed. She took it as a personal attack. “What do you mean a pig pen? You see me cleaning every goddamn Saturday morning don´t you?” she shot back.

“Honey, calm down. I´m just saying, the line around the bath tub has been getting darker and darker and the toilet has that awful ring around it” he said, carefully monitoring her reaction. She didn´t look too stable.

“You know where the supplies are” she snarled. “Clean it your damn self”

“Listen, I don´t want to fight here, love. It´s just that you decided that you didn´t want to work and part of the deal was, I pay the bills and you keep the house up” Merrill said, regretting terribly that he had breached the subject.

“Well, mister money bags. Bringing home the bacon. Keeping us is luxury in this piece of shit house!” she screamed, spit flying from the corners of her mouth. “Peggy has a house cleaner come twice a week!”

Merrill felt rather hurt but he held his composure. “Yes, well Peggy´s husband earns a considerable bit more than I and furthermore, Peggy brings home a little extra with her crafts on E-bay”

This flew Martha into an even bigger rage, “So why don´t you marry Peggy if she´s such a better wife? I´ve seen the way you two look at each other. Probably got something going on for years! Don´t you?”

“Of course not!” Merrill answered though not being completely honest. “Let´s just drop this. I am sorry I brought it up. Hey, how about if I help you today”

“I´m not cleaning shit today! You do it all by yourself” Martha was sobbing uncontrollably. She had a strange distant look in her eyes and they were a little glassy. As she made her way to the front door she even stumbled a little. She slammed the front door, then the car door, then she was off. To where, Merrill had no idea but he decided to clean the house anyway just to smooth things over.

As he was vacuuming the hall carpet, the vacuum cleaner bumped into the air vent grate and it simply popped off. “That´s odd” Merrill thought. It should be held on by two screws. He looked and looked for the screws but they were nowhere to be found. He was crawling around on his hands and knees when he noticed a cigar boxed purposely put in the air vent that was now without its grate. He pulled it out.

When he opened it up a wave of horror and surprised washed over him. There was an array of prescription bottles all with warnings to not operate machinery and addiction cautions. Some were empty, some were half full. There were colorful pills in little baggies with no description. Merrill dropped the box on the floor as if it were too hot to hold.

Merrill was not a man of conflict. He avoided it at all costs. He slowly picked the box and its contents up and put it back into the air vent and carefully placed the grate back over the hole.

As he Googled “divorce attorneys” he thought to himself, “Well that explains a lot”

Love in a Hopeless Place

Betty’s life had been so bad up to this point that her death sentence was almost a reprieve from life. Abuse was the only human contact she had known. Rape was the only intimacy that she had experienced. Once a victim gets marked early, other victimizers sense this with some sort of sick radar and pounce. Healthy people tend to shy away from such people. This isolates a victim and sets them up to be a victim for life.

Her marriage to Jimbo was what she thought was a chance to escape a life of abuse. He was so good to her, in the beginning. She didn´t mind the sneers that they received as this tall handsome white boy was hand in hand with a poor, yet beautiful, black girl. The comments from the women were far worse than those from the men. Women already do not deal with competition so well. Now they have to deal with another race of women, women with more curvaceous bodies than themselves.

Things worsened when they moved from Plano, Texas to Lewisville, Texas. Plano was a liberal metropolitan city in comparison to Lewisville. In Plano, they only had to deal with sneers and comments. In Lewisville, they had to deal with vandalism to their home. Jimbo almost immediately lost the factory job that brought them there. Neither wanted to go back to Plano. Jimbo’s family rejected him for his relationship with Betty and Betty didn’t really have a family to go back to. Jimbo started drinking. Jimbo changed. Betty was stuck.

Jimbo and Betty didn´t have much of a sex life before they were married. Betty had no idea how to be intimate with a man. The only men she knew sexually were her own father and his brothers whom he let have a turn with her when they got together to play cards and drink. Actually, playing cards was a ruse to drink. Drinking was the principle activity. After Betty’s mother left them, in Betty’s infancy, that is just about all he did. Jimbo was raised a fire and brimstone evangelical Christian and was so afraid of hell and the devil that he would burn his penis with a sewing needle that he held over a lit match when he felt the urge to masturbate. Even though he was now married to Betty, he was still afraid of his carnal urges. The drink erased those fears but not the shame.

When Jimbo drank, he felt the need for female companionship but had no idea about how to go about getting it in a polite way. These shameful feelings disgusted him. Betty was no better. Before Jimbo, she had never even been hugged lovingly. She didn´t know the first thing about how to coerce some loving touch from her husband. What ended up happening was that Jimbo would work himself up into a rage and start to hit Betty. Betty knew this role well and went along with it. Jimbo would beat Betty until he felt his erection pulsating through his entire body. All he could feel was a burning shortness in breath and the throbbing of his member. Then, when Betty was as limp as a cadaver entering into emotional shock, Jimbo would enter her and in a few short strokes would finish.

*Note from the author: He shall continue the story if anybody wishes. Just leave a comment that you wish to read on.