Dreams and Shadows by C. Robert Cargill

Author:C. Robert Cargill [Cargill, C. Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780062190420
Publisher: HarperVoyager
Published: 2013-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SECOND STREET PREDATORS

Simon Sparks was an oozing slug of a man poured neatly into a three-piece suit. Well-dressed and impeccably coifed, he was like cheap scotch—just refined enough to seem classy to anyone who didn’t know better. Mid-thirties, condo, job in finance, a sleek car that could be started by remote, a band of pale flesh around his left ring finger, and a gold ring tucked neatly into his front-right pocket.

Simon had a theory about women, and if you knew him well enough that he both trusted and wanted to impress you, he would lay it all out. “They’re all broken,” he would say. “Every last one of them. Oh, it’s not their fault. It’s not biological either. I’m no sexist. It’s societal. We do it to them; we break them down, bit by bit, year by year. With magazines and commercials and movies starring big-breasted bimbos who can barely get a line out of their mouths before spilling out of their dresses. Women look around them, see a media full of undeniably—and unattainably—beautiful women, and then they look in the mirror and see a collection of flaws too numerous to name.” Then he would take a drink. He always drank right there to let it all sink in.

“ ‘My hips are too big, my ankles too fat, my nose is too long, my lips are too thin, my hair too stringy, my breasts a little lopsided, my nipples are too large or too small or too brown or too pink.’ And the worst ones, the very worst offenders of all, are the really, spectacularly beautiful ones. The ones who stop traffic.” He would take another drink right here, nodding, smiling, as if he were about to tell you one of life’s biggest secrets. “The ones the nice guys are terrified to talk to and who spend all of their time getting battered to pieces by the cocky assholes who do. Those girls are kicked to shit and left hungry for any kind of attention.

“Those are the girls that do the dirtiest stuff. They’ll let you do anything to them. They’ll drop down and give you twenty and beg you at the top of their lungs to give it to them harder, give it to them deeper, and give it to them in any place you want. As long as you give it to them. And don’t leave in the morning before getting their number. Because that’s what breaks them. That’s what they don’t understand. They think that if they were prettier, you’d call them back. That if they had done it right, you would call them back. That if they were only interesting enough, you would call them back. But you won’t. You will never call them back. Because pretty as they are, they are not worth the hassle with your wife.”

That was Simon Sparks. And Simon Sparks was once again on the prowl, once more hustling his wares in a walk-up Second Street bar too trendy to be open during normal hours on normal days.

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