“Oh, God, yes! Don’t stop! Don’t stop! Harder! Harder!”
Melanie Clover really wished that she were the one making those requests instead of the one lying alone in bed hearing them through the thin apartment wall. Here she was, halfway through her twenty-third consecutive month without sex, being forced to listen almost every night while her neighbors went at it in a frenzy of nymphomaniacal glee. Though at least tonight the woman wasn’t shouting out Olympic-style ratings for each pelvic thrust.
She tried to ignore them and focus on the handheld video game she was playing, Milton Monkey’s Banana Quest. She’d gathered two hundred and eighty-seven bananas, her all-time record, and if she found thirteen more she’d move on to level six. This was the highlight of her day, made even more pathetic by the fact that she’d gotten this far by using a hint guide she had downloaded off the Internet.
“Oooooooh, fuck me, you stud! Sledge that hammer! Sledge that hammer!”
She sighed deeply. Life was so cruel. Why did this neighbor lady, who stole Melanie’s newspaper every morning, deserve to get bed-breakingly laid while the closest Melanie had come to sex in the past year was catching a brief glimpse of the cable repairman’s butt crack?
It just wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t like she was unattractive or bitchy or foul smelling. When she was a kid she’d hated her curly red hair and freckles, but she’d long outgrown that phase and now at age thirty she only hated the way she could get sunburned just by looking at a picture of the sun. Sure, she’d put on a few extra pounds from her childhood discovery that chocolate tasted really good, but she carried the weight well. And she had big tits. So why was she dateless?
That is, aside from her unbearable shyness and the fact that she rarely left her apartment except to go to work. Kind of hard to get laid without going out to meet the type of gentleman who would graciously lay her.
She successfully maneuvered Milton Monkey past the mutant coconut creature and acquired another banana. Yes! She was the Banana Queen! Hail Melanie! All kneel before her might!
“Ooooh…oooooh God…oooohhhh…”
A different voice, coming from a different spot. Now the neighbors on the other side of her apartment were having sex. That was just mean. Had they no sense of compassion? No simple human decency?
“Harder! Harder! Fuck me with that rocket!”
“Oooohhhhhh…oh Lord, yes…oooohhhhh that’s sooooo goooood…”
“Fuck me, baby, fuck me! Ram me! Show me no mercy!”
“Oooohhhhhhhh yeeeeessssssss…”
“Harder! Give me all you’ve got!”
“Oooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…”
“Okay, it’s Joey’s turn now!”
Milton Monkey fell into the lava pit.
Melanie shut off the game, closed her eyes, and mourned his tragic loss.
* * * * *
She walked into work at exactly 8:30 a.m. as always. Another day at Lavin, Inc. She’d be creating many a spreadsheet, reconciling many a financial report, and drinking many a caffeinated beverage. The job itself wasn’t really that bad. Melanie liked working with numbers, and she was good at what she did. But they’d recently hired a new vice president who had initiated a program called Our Employees Suck (not its real name), which basically revolved around the concept that this was a place of work and nothing else.
So all but the most innocuous decorations had been removed from everybody’s cubicle (each employee was permitted two family pictures, provided they didn’t exceed the 5x7 size restriction), birthday and holiday celebrations were eliminated, and the entire fourth floor now had an antiseptic, half-dead feel.
Last week, the new VP had instructed Melanie’s supervisor to write a report exploring the reasons for low employee morale.
Melanie sat down at her desk and booted up her computer. She was the first one here, which was odd. There were twelve other employees in her department, and she was usually the last one to arrive. Maybe they’d scheduled a meeting or something and nobody told her.
She checked her e-mail and voice mail. Nothing interesting.
Around nine o’clock, she started to get worried. She hadn’t missed daylight savings time, it wasn’t a holiday, their systems were up, and the other departments didn’t seem to be missing anybody…so what was going on?
Had somebody died?
She flipped through her Rolodex and looked up the cell phone number for Tracy, the giggly middle-aged brunette who sat right next to her. Tracy answered on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Tracy? It’s Melanie.”
“Melanie, hi! How’re things going?”
“Okay, but I’m the only person here. Where are you?”
“I’m on my way to the Golden Grotto for breakfast. Everybody else is probably there already, but I’m running a bit late.”
Melanie frowned. “Did I miss an e-mail or something?”
“No, didn’t you hear? Our numbers came in.”
“What?”
“Our lottery numbers. You know how everybody but you pitches in for lottery tickets every week? We won! Sixty-five million split twelve ways!”
Melanie stared at her pictureless cubicle wall for a long moment. “What?”
“We all quit! You know those people who win the lottery and go right back to their jobs? We unanimously decided that they’re idiots! Sorry, gotta go, I’m pulling into the parking lot right now. Tell Harold I said hi.”
Tracy hung up. Melanie continued to stare at her cubicle wall for an extremely long time. She blinked occasionally to break up the monotony.
Sixty-five million. That wasn’t so much, split twelve ways. Not even five-point-five million each. And taxes would take half of it. To say nothing of the dollar a week it cost them to win in the first place. They really weren’t that much better off than her. After all, she was still employed.
Harold, her supervisor, walked into the department a few minutes later, looking physically ill. “Ah, Melanie, I think I’m going to have to ask you to put in a bit of overtime this week,” he said.
* * * * *
“That really bites,” said Dawn, biting a green-and-yellow sour gummi worm in half.
“Yeah,” Melanie agreed.
“I mean it. That really sucks.” She sucked one of the worm halves into her mouth.
“You know, the point of asking you to come over was to help me feel better,” Melanie explained.
“Oh, sorry.” Dawn thought for a moment. “The suicide rate of lottery winners is fifteen times the national average.”
“Really?”
“No. If you were that rich you could hire somebody to kill themselves for you. This really blows.”
“Please don’t blow the gummi worm onto my floor.”
Dawn chewed the gummi worm and swallowed. “Wow. Bad news all over the place today,” she said, leaning back in the couch.
“Why? What else happened?”
Dawn shrugged. “I broke up with Ian.”
“Oh no, really? You were together for fourteen months!”
“Was it that long? Shit.”
“So what happened?”
“He proposed.”
“He proposed…and you broke up with him?”
“Yeah.”
Melanie looked at her incredulously. “Why?”
“He did it all wrong.”
“How?”
“By proposing to his fucking massage therapist instead of me.”
“You can’t be serious!”
Dawn nodded. “He’s had another woman for the past three months. Her name is Vicki. They’re in love. She has a tight ass.”
“Oh, Dawn, I’m so sorry.” She scooted over on the couch and gave her best friend a hug. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Nah. I showed him. I told him that he could marry the beautiful tight-assed masseuse, but it was over between us. That’ll show him.”
Melanie smiled sadly. “We’re really pathetic, aren’t we?”
“No. We are not pathetic.” Dawn stood up from the couch. She was a year younger than Melanie but looked like she was only in her early twenties, with a slim figure, adorable face, and long black hair. They’d been best friends since college, though Ian, who was cute but needy, had sucked up a lot of Dawn’s time over the past year. “Maybe we were pathetic, but no longer. This is the start of a new era for Dawn and Melanie. We’re going to get out into the dating world and have some really good sex!”
“It wasn’t good with Ian? I thought you said it was.”
“It was until about, oh, three months ago. He lost interest. I thought it was because he was worn out from having to work late all the time and going on all of those business trips. But that’s beside the point. The point is, we need to have some fun.”
“I don’t know,” said Melanie. “I haven’t had sex in so long that I think I’m a virgin again. Doesn’t it hurt your first time?”
“I’m serious. Let’s sow some wild oats. Let’s treat men like slabs of meat. I like meat, don’t you? There are plenty of guys I could set you up with if you’d just let me. What do you say?”
* * * * *
“My ex-girlfriend, the one before my last ex, she was such a skank,” said Chet. “She was always, like, whining and griping and stuff. And her hair was all nasty. She was on these meds that dried out her mouth, so she was always drinking water. I must’ve been really wasted when I slept with her that first time, because she was just a skank. You don’t look like a skank, though.”
“Uh, thanks,” said Melanie, uncomfortably looking at the menu.
“Oh, and my ex-girlfriend before that, she wasn’t a skank, but she was so bossy that you couldn’t even be in the same room as her. Do this! Do that! Don’t wear that! Don’t eat that! I mean, kiss my butt. Actually, she was kind of a skank, now that I think about her. Not as bad as my ex-ex-girlfriend, though.”
* * * * *
Terrence gestured angrily with his bread stick. “It’s not the Republicans who are the problem. It’s not the Democrats who are the problem. Do you know who the problem is?”
Melanie shook her head.
“It’s the goddamn third party candidates. I mean, make up your fuckin’ mind. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
* * * * *
Silence.
“The soup is good,” said Melanie.
Brian nodded.
Silence.
“Where do you work?” Melanie asked.
“I don’t.”
Silence.
“This really is good soup,” said Melanie.
“Mine’s getting cold.”
“Oh.”
Silence.
Silence.
Silence.
* * * * *
“I knew this guy who would eat any part of a cow. I mean, any part. If it was cow, this guy would eat it. But if he’d see a whole cow, you know, grazing out in a field or something, he’d always say how ugly they were. It was weird. Not many people liked him.”
* * * * *
“I’ll tell you what, they’d better burn every one of those Harry Potter books before we turn into a nation of Satan worshippers.”
* * * * *
“No,” said Melanie.
“Oh, c’mon,” Dawn protested. “Don’t be such a fuddy-duddy. He’s a nice guy.”
“You’ve said that about every other guy, and I keep dating these…these creatures. You don’t get to set me up any more. That privilege has been revoked.”
“You could still fuck them.”
“No, because I don’t sleep with men that I don’t like.”
Dawn sighed sadly. “Neither do I. God, I’m horny. Are your neighbors always this loud?”
Melanie’s phone rang. She walked into the kitchen and picked it up. “Hello?”
“May I speak to Melanie Clover?”
“This is she.”
“Did I get your last name right?”
“Almost. It’s Clover, rhymes with lover, not the four-leaf kind. Don’t worry, everybody gets it wrong. Who’s speaking?”
“Richard Campbell of Campbell & Campbell, attorneys at law. I’m afraid I have some sad news for you.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Your Aunt Penelope just passed away.”