Billy "Boy" Comet

Brenda was beautiful, I kid you not. Everyone thought so, even Brenda. She knew she was beautiful since the day she was conscious of the power that her beauty could give her. So, since she was a small child, Brenda got everything she asked for. And she asked for a lot of things. Some normal but most unusual, she was that type of beautiful. She had a mind filled to the brim with the good stuff.
Oh yes, Brenda had it all. Everything that was needed to make it, but she wanted me. I was surprised when I found out. Me? Silly, clumsy, stuttering Bill Comet? You would think that with a last name like that I had something going for me but alas, no. I was still a virgin when Brenda set her cap for me.
The first date we went on I didn´t even know how to take her bra off to get a feel of the real deal. She laughed in my face, in a nice way I suppose, and just whipped it off, making her boobs dance from side to side. I never saw anything that I wanted to feel so much in my life. Her look said, feel, feel to your heart’s content.
That seems like eons ago. Now if I wanted to cop a feel I had to catch her in a good mood. Something pretty little Brenda didn´t have much of anymore. I knew better than to complain. Wasn’t I married to the most beautiful girl in the whole world? Bill Comet “the schmuck” wanted to complain about his wonderful beautiful wife? What the hell was wrong with him?
Well, I could say, that sweet Brenda wasn´t so sweet after we had been married for about a year. That if things didn’t go her way plates would fly, filled with food if possible, vases would end up shattered on the floor, and maybe, let´s make our tantrum special, Bill Comet would get wonked in the head with a skillet.
I thought that maybe this was hormonal. You know how you hear about women behaving strangely because of this very serious womanly thing that men don’t understand. So I asked her to let’s start a family. Such a good idea for marriages that are not going up the hill happily together, to have a baby, this would make everything alright again. Beautiful Brenda would smile at the lovely little child in her arms and everything would look like a fucking rainbow.
Silly me, silly Bill, Brenda hated the baby from day one.  I had to make sure that she wasn’t alone with the child because, by her first year of life, the little tike had had so many accidents, that I had to go from one hospital to another so as to raise no suspicions.
Not that in those hospitals they didn’t know about Bill “schmuck” Comet, who got the shit kicked out by his wife every once in a while. Yes, sir, they knew me well, stitches, bruises, broken ribs; you name it I had gotten it. I also got the occasional too loud laugh behind my back plus the concerned doctor asking me to go see a social worker about my situation at home.
But one day Brenda went too far. If I wanted to save my child from her very beautiful psychotic mother I would have to get some balls and ask for a restraining order along with a divorce.
Oh “Billy Boy”, did you think that would stop her? Did you think that beautiful Brenda would take that humiliation with a pretty smile? No, she took it with a vengeance.
The baby and I had moved out three weeks ago, breaking contact with everyone, as no one who knew Brenda could believe a word I said. She was beautiful! ¡What was I thinking?! But me and baby girl were doing just fine. No stitches, bruises, or broken items around the house. No more keeping our voices quiet lest mommy get angry.
I should have known better. I knew, somewhere in my schmuck of a mind, that she would do something. I just didn´t expect it to be a barbecue, with baby and me as the main dish.
I woke up to the sound of fire raging through the woodwork, smoke so heavy you couldn´t see your hand in front of you. I wet a towel in the en suite bath and covered baby and myself. We were lucky, I had always been careful about fire hazard safety and the first thing I did was install one of those little fire roll up ladders under the window of the main bedroom.
When I opened this window, the fire was eating up the wall outside of it, but a smart neighbor got a hose when he saw me look out and started drenching the fire with water in this area. I was able to swing out the ladder, and with baby clinging to me, we made it out of the blazing barbecue.
Of course, Brenda was apprehended and sent to jail for attempted manslaughter. They gave her a ten year sentence. Made me breathe again, free as a newborn babe, a ten year rest for baby and me with no worries about custody, divorce fights, etc…
***
I did not expect ten years to fly past so very fast. She had no parole, so that was another worry off my back. All of my so-called friends who said that I was crazy to have left my so very beautiful wife disappeared into the woodwork. Even her parents didn’t want anything to do with their grandchild. After all, wasn’t it I who had tainted their precious beautiful little girl? How else could she have been driven to do such a horrible thing? Surely the baby and I were to blame? So for the last ten years, life for Bill Comet and his so very fucking normal looking daughter had been good.
It was summertime, the heat as sticky as an annoying fly that would not stop landing on you. I had left my daughter at summer camp three weeks ago. She was a quiet kid, not prone to get into trouble, though sometimes in the last three years I had caught her often looking at me with a strange expression in her eyes. It made me uncomfortable but surely she was nothing like her mother, I always repeated to myself, as I said; she was a quiet little thing.  
The summer camp was a simple institution with none of that fancy shit with girls all decked out in Tommy Hilfiger shorts and shoes, perfect hair, and manicures. Uniforms were made up of white T and brown shorts, ponytails for girls with long hair, and no crap as to what was politically correct for a girl to do. I didn’t expect her back till tomorrow morning.
I had gotten home early to find a letter in the mailbox from the sheriff’s office explaining to me that Brenda had walked free that day and had been deemed ready to face the world totally reformed. What the hell did reformed mean?
I put the key in the lock with a miserly feeling in my gut. Blissful times were over. I knew that with her pretty face she had taken them all in and there was going to be hell to pay.
Something was fishy with the house. I stood in the foyer but couldn’t put my finger on what. Probably just nerves, I needed to calm down. She had to have learned her lesson; I mean who wants to go back to jail? I would start dinner and open that very nice bottle of red wine I had bought last month. I would even eat it watching my favorite TV show in my nice recliner. Oh, you simple ass, if this was your idea of a big night you were in real trouble.
As I stepped into the kitchen the feeling hit me again like a flip flop smack in the face. I stopped in my tracks because I had just seen something that was bothering me. The table was set for two. My only nice wine glasses, the chipped china that I found in a garage sale, my mother’s table cloth and one, tiny, lit candle in the center.
She was here, in the house, that is what I noticed strange when I walked into the foyer, everything was neat, placed in straight lines on the entry table. No dust, no bills lying about, no ragged tennis shoes, just order.
I started to shake so hard I pissed my pants. Yep, big Bill Comet did “we we” in his undies. She would get a kick out of that. Because not even for a second did I think that the lovely table set up was a way to make amends. No, she was out for blood again and this time she wanted me to suffer. No more quick barbecue “a la Comet” recipes. She had spent ten years in jail thinking of this day, this moment, planning my demise and suffering. She was probably somewhere behind me, in such a good mood that her beauty would be amplified to infinity and beyond, as our friend Bud would say.
That is pretty much what I remembered thinking before she bashed me in the head. I awoke to find myself tied to the dining chair and Brenda cooking up a storm in the kitchen. I was fully naked, my poor mister bald guy looking pitiful and my ass stuck to the leather seat like scotch tape on paper.
I wish I could have pissed some more, that is how scared I was. But I almost shit myself when my once beautiful wife turned around to smile a grotesque crooked smile, from a disfigured face, on which a horrid scar ran from her scalp to her chin on its left side.
Beautiful Brenda had turned into horrid Brenda; she knew it and she blamed me of course. Who else was to blame than plain old Comet, whose rocket had never had too much firepower in it, to begin with, so why in God´s name had she ever wanted to play with it. What had driven her to do it, how had everything gone so wrong in her life? I was to blame; there was no doubt in her mind.
“Hello dear, miss me? I bet you have. All lonely in this crappy house just wishing for your Brenda girl to come back and put some excitement into your life again”.
While she was saying this she took the dinner knife from my side of the table and stabbed me in the leg. Of course, I could not scream very loud with my mom´s fucking napkin stuck in my mouth but I think I did a pretty good job of it anyway by the satisfied look in her eyes.
“You know, I have looked and looked in the fridge but I find that like always you have forgotten to buy any meat. We will just have to improvise, won't we?” she said.
My bald guy totally disappeared at her words. I could hear him saying in my head “yep, nice to have gotten to know you dude, even if all you ever did was jerk on me a lot”, while he tried to return to where he came from.
“Oh, how cute, look at it trying to hide. Don’t worry little guy we would starve if you were the meat on the table” Brenda purred.
She went back to the kitchen and grabbed from the counter the gardens shears. She slowly walked towards me holding me mesmerized, fearful, with her still lovely icy blue eyes. She got on her knees next to me, never breaking eye contact, and proceeded to cut the toes off from my left foot one by one.
Well, I probably hollered for a while trying to do a kind of gig dance on the chair but hey, it was time to faint anyway and I wasn’t going to be embarrassed for fainting like a girl or screaming like one.
I think Brenda cooked my toes, I remember waking a little from my faint and thinking, damn those smell tasty before barfing up everything I had ever eaten in my simple life. I tasted every fruit, every Cracker Jack popcorn, beer, fish, hell… even every Kentucky Fried Chicken I had ever eaten came out of me all over my sad naked self and the table before me.
“God Dad… that is so gross” I heard my daughter say through the fog of barf.
I opened my eyes all the way, swaying from side to side from the pain shooting up my leg, tears and bile running down my face to find my ex-wife and my daughter, looking at me with a calm manner while munching on my toes on chipped white china plates.
My last thought was a disjointed flurry of disgusting smells, painful feelings, and horrid sights before I, Billy “boy” Comet, realized that I packed a lot of meat on me… especially around my middle.
“Don´t worry Daddy, I called Mommy. I was getting real sick of your cooking”.
THE END