Thinking of Mother’s treatment led Leonard to absentmindedly rub his wrists, massaging scars that had long since faded—physically, if not emotionally. His return to the here-and-now was accompanied by the realization that his bladder was uncomfortably full. Pushing himself away from the varied piles that constituted his desktop, Leonard rose to go to the washroom.
Turning the corner from his cubicle, he spied Heather and Anna from Accounting, standing together at the coffee station. They were both total babes, although almost exact opposites—Heather tall and willowy, golden-haired with small, perky breasts, a taut bottom, and incredible legs that seemed to just keep going and going and going, from her tightly-muscled calves all the way up under the hemline of her barely-there skirts; Anna, meanwhile, was short, dark-haired and very curvy, with hourglass hips and huge breasts that nestled beneath her tight sweaters, demanding attention. The two gals were close friends, and had played starring roles in Leonard’s fantasies—both separately and together.
Still staring at the pair, he caught his toe on the carpeting and stumbled, barely catching himself before he fell. When he looked up, the two women were eyeing him with undisguised amusement.
“I hate it when that happens,” Leonard offered, rearranging his substantial lips into what he hoped was a tentative smile. He hurried on past them.
As the Men’s room door swung shut behind him, he thought he heard one of them make a remark. To Leonard’s burning ears, it sounded like: “What a geek.”
Someday, they’ll be sorry...It was an old vow, but with this particular utterance came the sudden realization that, with Mother’s resources now at his disposal, he might be able to finally bring to bear some of his dimly conceived vengeance. Of course, with his inattention to detail, he could just as easily get himself into some serious trouble.
Leonard cast a quick, reflexive glance at the mirror and suddenly froze. There, just above his arrow of a chin, speckled on his sunken cheek, was a telltale spot of red. Leonard’s Adam’s apple seemed to grow larger and lodge in his throat as he stepped closer to the mirror, marveling at his own carelessness and stupidity.
Except...it looked a little too bright to be blood. Wetting his finger and scraping off a bit of the unknown substance, Leonard brought a fleck first to his nose and then to his lips.
“Not bad,” he muttered in response to the familiar tang.
Leonard never ate his scrambled eggs without catsup, and sometimes it seemed that he never completed his breakfast without wearing some of it. Wiping the smudge of Heinz away, Leonard couldn’t help but wonder how many people had already seen that beauty mark this morning and smirked accordingly.
With a final, resigned glance at the mirror, Leonard turned away to proceed with his business. Possessed of beak-like nose and similarly bird-like body, Leonard resembled nothing so much as an ornitharian shoved rudely and unwillingly into a human form. All elbows and sharp angles, prominent Adam’s apple and fly-away ears, Leonard was decidedly unattractive—or at least that seemed to be the verdict of all those who had ever cared to pass judgment.
With matching sigh and shrug, Leonard continued on his way to the urinal. He took his time, hoping that his audience would have departed the coffee station by the time he exited. Even though potential tormentors still lurked around every corner, Leonard sought refuge in the thought that his elementary enemy—his Mommy dearest—had been conquered...and divided.
In the hours and days that followed, though, Leonard’s cheery bravado began to falter. Despite repeated self-assurances, he couldn’t completely convince himself that he had done an adequate or thorough job on his Mother. This was perhaps not surprising, given that Leonard was almost innately incapable of self-confidence. Most of his waking moments in the first few days after the act were marked by an ever-present anxiety that he attempted to sublimate, but which kept popping to the surface of his mind with the persistence of a gas-bloated corpse.
On the fourth or fifth day afterwards, though, he began to relax a bit. The nervous glances over his shoulder when he was home alone became less frequent, and soon he ceased to peer around corners with dread.
After a full week, a certain enthusiasm took hold, and Leonard even began to display a newfound heartiness at work, although his cheerfully offered greetings were generally greeted with curious stares from those who had come to regard Leonard as an ambulatory aspect of the decor, no more capable of speech than the average fern, and perhaps slightly more diseased.
Soon caught up in his newfound ebullience, Leonard barely noticed the days slipping by. Another week came and went like a blur, and Leonard found himself actually viewing the onset of the weekend, and the resulting loss of interaction with other people, with disappointment, a shocking discovery in view of the fact that he had formerly eagerly awaited the two-day respite. The only thing he was looking forward to this weekend was finally removing the impressive assortment of padlocks that were still adorning the cellar door. He hadn’t a clue where Mother had put the keys, but he was now the proud owner of a top-of-the-line set of bolt-cutters, and those would most certainly do the trick. Truth be known, Leonard held out faint hope that some of his old comic books might still be down in the cellar, shoved back in a cobwebby corner.
Whistling his way out through the revolving doorway and into the sunny late afternoon, he felt a twinge of jealousy as he watched a clique of co-workers head off rowdily with cries of “happy hour.” So moved was Leonard, in fact, so full of his new carefree, jocular attitude, that he came to the momentous decision to go out on the town himself that evening.
Moving in random spurts through the herds of cars that jostled through two- and three-lane chutes, Leonard mulled over his evening’s destination, sampling random club names from those he had heard mentioned by others at work. “McMullens, I think,” he crowed to his empty Fiesta, “or maybe Uncle Ernie’s!” Buoyed by his effusive new attitude, Leonard took little notice of the bothersome traffic, and was home before he knew it.
Having decided upon Dapper Dan’s as his destination—at least initially, and after that, who knows, he might even go bar-hopping—Leonard pursed his lips now in consideration of what to wear on his coming-out night. Trying vainly to visualize an acceptable mode of dress from the meager, outdated selection hanging in his closet, Leonard entered the house (his house now, he reminded himself) and was halfway across the living room before the word insinuated its way into his head, causing his jolly whistle to wither and die upon his lips.
“Leonard.”
If Leonard hadn’t relieved himself prior to leaving work, he would have wet his pants at that moment, guaranteed.
“How nice of you to come home to take care of your poor, sick mother,” came the voice, muttered fleshily, as though through lips numb with Novocain.
As Leonard turned, the key ring slipped from his hand, jangling as it struck the hardwood floor and echoing the tortuous strumming of his every nerve ending. In the shadow of the kitchen doorway—a shadow too deep to exist this early in a summer afternoon, a shadow that bore a stench of rotting carrion—there, there stood Mother.
Or more accurately, there hunched Mother, her upper body twisted forward and sideways at a crazy angle, the etchings of Leonard’s handiwork plainly visible on her flesh. No miracle had recombined her various parts from beyond the grave, no sudden deific act had assembled her wholly and artistically; rather, it appeared to Leonard as though the sundry bits and pieces of Mother had burrowed and wormed their way up through the soggy ground, squirming together like lustful lemmings, attaching themselves to their neighbors as best they could. In places the reformation was impressively accurate, marred only by still-healing angry scars and clumps of drying mud, in other spots the job was more...haphazard, as though reconstructive surgery had been performed by a blind man with hooks for hands.