The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written by H. M. Mann Page A

harmless unless she was on her pain medicine and falling all over the place holding a switchblade, and I have the scars on my arms to prove it. Why had Cat been armed with an Uzi submachine gun and Chinese throwing stars, both of which police found unused and tucked under the cushions in my sectional sofa?
    Little did he know
    Johnny remembered using that phrase already and deleted it.
    Littler did he know, Gunn would soon run into the aforementioned mother of Rafe, a.k.a. “Sparky,” his first child who would be born in a trough in a barn on a commune in Flagstaff, Arizona, in only thirty-four short months.
    After kissing Cat’s tombstone and getting a cemetery worker to help him get his lips unstuck from the frozen marble, Gunn got blind drunk and left new Geo Storm paint on thirty-four cars along Main Street.
    Johnny sat back. There’s that number again, Johnny thought. I have established this number in this book for some reason. I am obviously subconsciously fixated on the number thirty-four. Johnny knew that English majors dissecting this novel would be able to tell the world why in a few years: “Well, let’s see, Bob, thirty-four is a number divisible by two prime numbers, and therefore the author is trying to tell us something mathematical about the universe involving the numbers two and seventeen. Two … scoops? Seventeen … magazine? Seventeen magazine has the scoops?”
    Johnny knew, of course, that they would be dead wrong.
    Johnny shook off his tortured past and plowed ahead:
    Gunn plowed down Main Street in the snow in a drunken attempt to rekindle the fiery image of Cat’s hair and the collision that originally brought Cat singed and bleeding into his life. That’s when he ran smack dab into the back of Thais Knotts’s police cruiser at precisely 7:34 AM.
    Johnny scrolled back to read his work so far, declared it “thin,” and decided to add some back-story to interrupt the plot and amaze the reader with his command of useless back-story.
    Thais Knotts was the aforementioned mother of Rafe, Rafe who would despise her name because it was a boy’s name and what, were her parents crazy when they named her, or blind, or what? Rafe kind of liked “Sparky,” though. That name had spark. It had fire. It was combustible. It was fiery. It sizzled.
    Maybe, Rafe the unborn baby thought, they were relighting the pilot light in the water heater when they named me, or am I nicknamed for Old Sparky, the nickname for electric chairs in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, New York, Texas, and West Virginia, and why do I have so many questions for one not yet born, though I can’t wait to be born, learn to talk, get potty-trained, and ask my parents about my screwy name?
     
    Why are there green lines here? Johnny thought. I’m only getting a little experimental. Other writers do it, that stream-of-consciousness stuff that wins them awards and critical acclaim, but when I do it, I get all these freaking green lines. What does Microsoft have against a little experimentation? Forget Microsoft. Bill Gates never wrote a romance novel. Johnny took another sip of tea and continued.
    Thais Knotts limped back to Gunn’s window and pointed a very large, scary, police-issue, snub-nosed .38 at him. “Don’t you move a single, solitary muscle, buster! Don’t you even sneeze! Don’t you even flinch a capillary or I’ll cap you, you scum-sucking pig!”
    Gunn froze, willing his capillaries not to flinch. He had already taken several muscle relaxers to smooth out his drunken rampage, so he wasn’t worried about moving any muscles.
    But when Thais saw Gunn all frozen and inert and bleeding and stinking blind drunk and gagging on half a Cuban cigar, she smiled a silly little smile when she beheld his masculine manliness. He was manly in a way other men weren’t. He was a manly, mannish man with a manly, mannish smell, a manly, mannish face, and long, manly, mannish nose hairs. Lesser men would have