Orgonomicon by Boris D. Schleinkofer Page A

from him and turn him into an experiment… Of anyone
in the world, didn't she deserve to suffer, even just a
little bit?
    She continued to strike out at him, the
flailing of her weak arms against him getting weaker by the second.
Scott loosened his grasp, just for a moment, to let her draw in one
ragged breath, and regretted it immediately.
    "Go on, kill me, you dickless motherfucker!
Big man, I bet you can't even get that right!" She tried hitting
him in the face but couldn't connect and got ready to scream again,
and Scott lifted her off the ground by her throat and slammed her
into the wall, again and again, until she stopped moving. The woman
who'd given birth to him lay in a small pile by his feet, and Scott
questioned the worth of what he'd just done. He'd killed his…
    Mother?
    But then the red fog cleared from his eyes
and he saw, at last, who it was he'd just killed, and he began to
moan, and the moan turned into a howl, and the howl became a
full-throated wail.
     
    He'd done everything but what he'd sat down
to do. The pencils were sorted, his email was all read and the
miserable hopeless want-ads skimmed. Listening to music distracted
him, but then he always found himself drifting back to thoughts of
what he should be doing.
    But Emmanuel wasn't in the mood to
create.
    He tried to feel inspired, to let the ideas
flow through him and down his fingers and onto the page the way
they always had, but the well had run dry. It was the result of
failure and discouragement, he knew it; too much negative
conditioning piling up on him made the effort more painful than the
results would merit.
    And what would the results be? If he came up
with the best story in the world, if he put all his heart and soul
into creating something totally unique and fully immersive, an
entire universe for others to discover and explore, with all its
intrigue and surprise, what would happen at the end? Someone with
better tools and a wider reach would somehow tell his story, with
their name on it in massive letters of flame and glory, before he
could ever get the chance to open his mouth about it.
    Over all the years he'd struggled to get the
right people to notice him, only Karen had seen it happen time and
time again, and he was sure it was part of the reason she'd lost
respect for him in the end. How many times could someone let their
most prized possession get snatched out of their hands while they
did nothing but watch it happen, before you came to blame them,
just a little, for letting it happen? And he kept at it, to the
exclusion of everything else; he never went to school, never
learned a trade, never learned to make anything of himself.
    He was, of course, to blame for everything
that had gone wrong in his life, in the whole miserable span of it,
especially in the mockery that had been his marriage. In life, you
had to have a job and you had to have a plan; for the longest time
he'd had neither. Yeah, okay, odd jobs, side gigs and the
occasional hustle, but nothing regular, nothing reliable, nothing
like a career. And they'd suffered for it. Karen had quickly lost
respect for him and his inability to provide for his family, and
gotten mean. Being the breadwinner wasn't supposed to be her job
and it meant that she would have to wield fantastic and awful
powers: if something happened under her roof which she did not
approve of, it was her responsibility to make sure the wrongdoer
was brought to swift and effective justice, in order that her roof
be secure. And it was her roof—if it sprang a leak, she was the one who'd pay for it to be repaired, and she
would hire the men to do it and she'd be the one to see they finish
to the job right. Manny didn't know about any of that stuff; he was
useless for anything but his stories, and those weren't his to
benefit from, either. He'd let her down; he'd let them both down.
He was useless.
    Useless.
    And she had done the only sensible thing in
her position: she'd made him leave, cut him off from