by Phouka
Peach was a sexy woman, and she knew how to use it. At work, her clothes were always a little too dressy, a little too sexy, a little too little. Most of the men thought she was great. They flocked to her like butterflies to a candle flame -- flirting, joking, begging to be given tasks so they could please her. Most of the women hated her. They called her a tramp, a ‘ho, and a skank. While most of their name-calling was kindled by the taste of sour grapes, there was also an undercurrent of honest resentment that one woman could, by her very nature, make men act foolish, shallow, and obsessive, and leave the rest of them to deal with a pitiful assortment of cynics, burnouts, and eunuchs.
Peach had only one female friend, and no real male friends. Her friend-woman was a large, overweight, over-intelligent spinster with an eccentric sense of humor and a far-too-honest appraisal of her own chances of finding love and romance in an office filled with the disciples of Peach. But, she liked Peach, because -- aside from her androniverous diet habits -- Peach was overly intelligent and possessed the same eccentric sense of humor. The friend, whose plain name of Heather could never rival the sheer erotic value of “Peach,” was annoyed when Peach missed lunches and movie dates to go out with her flavor-of-the-month boy. It happened on such a regular cycle that Heather never counted on Peach’s offer of a “girl’s night out,” and made other plans after agreeing that it was a swell idea.
Men were, after all, something of a habit with Peach. She used them up like a junkie used up small vials filled with white rock. Done with one fellow, she would toy with three or four of the butterflies that constantly fluttered around her until she found one that responded just right to her whimsical attentions. Then, she would date him and fuck him for a month or two, all the while crying to Heather about her relationship problems and sex problems and self-esteem problems. At the end of that relationship, the man would disappear, never to be seen again, and Peach would start over again. Well, it was a technical field with a high rate of mobility. The staff had a 150% turnover rate every six months, and it was just as likely that the hapless sap quit without notice and taken another job so he could get away from Peach’s smoldering looks, office innuendo, and flirtatious bantering.
Still, Heather had the unnerving feeling that some of those guys hadn’t quit and hadn’t moved on to greener pastures. They couldn’t all have been so forgetful or un-materialistic to leave toothbrushes, favorite t-shirts, and other detritus behind when the breakups happened. And it was never quite a “breakup” in the sense that they fought the last fight or one of them gave the speech. He just went away and never came back. Peach hauled off boxes of abandoned belongings to Goodwill twice a year, and once had to have a former boyfriend’s car towed, because it had sat next to the sidewalk for a month with no one ever coming to get it.
With images of backyard graves or crimson woodchippers dancing through her mind, Heather decided to pay Peach an unannounced visit one night. It was nearing the end of one of her cycles, and Peach had been complaining about the quantity and quality of attention she got from her latest feast of love. From her two years of bystander experience, Heather guessed that the breakup would be that night or the following weekend.
She got there relatively late in the evening. Peach was in, or at least, her car was there. There was no sign of her boyfriend. Patrick. That was this one’s name. Heather knocked loudly on the door, envious that her friend had been able to buy a house on the same salary she scraped for her assortment of rent and bills. Peach answered the door, adorable and wholesomely sexy in teddy-bear flannel pajamas. Her tousled red hair was the envy and hatred of the entire female contingent of the office. In her hand was an enormous baked turkey leg she was currently stripping with her teeth.
“Heather!” she squealed. “I was just thinking of calling you. I am so down. Patrick and I broke up. You know how it goes. I just can’t help but wonder when the hell I’m going to find a man of decent taste, you know?”
She ushered Heather in and let her drop her workbag just inside the front door, talking and gesturing with the meaty leg. Sniffing out the heavy aroma of barbequed meat and sauce in the air, Heather glanced around, a little confused.
“You guys broke up over . . . what? Hickory smoked versus mesquite?”
Peach chuckled, pulling another strip of meat off with her greasy fingers and popping it in her mouth. “Nothing so important. No, he just couldn’t handle commitment -- like every other walking Y chromosome I’ve ever dated, you know?”
“So, what’d you do with him when you were finished with him, bury him in the backyard?” Heather asked, mostly joking, but partly not.
“Oh, well, maybe when I am finished with him,” Peach admitted, waving her drumstick dramatically.
Heather’s eyes focused on the length of bone and tattered meat, some little alarm bell beginning to ring in the back of her head. The funny-strange thing was, the bone was awfully long for a turkey’s drumstick. Thick, too. And the meat on it wasn’t quite the shade it ought to be.
She followed Peach into the kitchen, caught on that drumstick like a flame on a wick, like a man on Peach. In the kitchen, it was readily evident that Peach wasn’t finished with Patrick yet. While he’d been neatly skinned, jointed, and butchered, there was a lot of him left to go on the grill or in the smoker. Obviously, it wasn’t a drumstick Peach was consuming with such relish. From a quick tally of the stock of meat and the bits she remembered from an old anatomy class, Heather judged that it was his right upper arm.
“You’d be surprised how quickly I go through a man,” Peach sighed in dismay. “If I’m PMSed out, there’s nothing like a little jerky to cheer me up. That, and I like the stringy, cowboy type, you know. Not much meat on them.”
“How . . . how do you get rid of the bones?” Heather fumbled for an information soliciting, but not-too-intrusive question.
“Oh, that,” Peach waved her hand down, “there’s a lady at Goodwill who uses them in some sort of crafts class. Tacky pencil holders or something like that. I keep her in femurs; she keeps me out of the landfill.”
“But why?” she finally managed to ask a pertinent question.
Peach thoughtfully nibbled a little more bicep as she considered the question. “Well, it keeps the dating pool pretty fresh, and it’s a lot cheaper than buying ground round, but mostly, it’s because that’s what the guys want. They want a real, live man-eater.
“I mean, God, Heather, I never used to be able to get a date. Guys wouldn’t look at me twice. Then my cousin, God bless her, showed me her secret. Now, I always thought she was a bit of a slut, but I had to admit that she never went without a date unless she wanted too. So, I had a bit of her latest fling -- tough bastard, he was a bronco rider -- and voila! I don’t know how the guys pick up on it, but they do, and they can’t get enough of me. I guess that for some reason, they just never realize that if I’m a real maneater, one of these days, they’re going to be the main course. Shit, I can’t even go to the gas station with funky hair, no make up and trashed sweats without getting hit on.”
And, of course, it made sense. Here was that elusive, intangible element that caused men to flock to her and women to despise her. Heather had always chalked it up to the “je ne sais quois” column and left it at that, but the explanation was actually fairly simple.
“I’m dangerous and mysterious, and obviously no other man has won, so I must be a challenge, too,” Peach concluded.
This was the nicotine of desire that Heather had lacked her entire life, from puberty onward. It was the hook that made men want Peach without inhibition, the switch that removed logic from the equation. It made sublime sense.
“Want some?” Peach offered.
For a moment, Heather studied the section of ribs held out to her. There was a saucer of barbecue sauce on the table to dip them in, some rolls, a little cornslaw and a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola.
“I do have to admit,” Peach said, her mouth turned in rueful honesty, “that sometimes, it sucks. They never want to be really emotionally intimate. They never see the real me - just some sort of apparition.”
That much was definitely true, but Heather also remembered the three dozen roses that had been delivered to Peach’s desk on Valentine’s Day that year when she herself had received only a couple of mass produced grade-school cards. She remembered Peach’s plans for symphonies and operas and the trips to New Orleans and Las Vegas, the multiple nice dinners, the dresses and jewelry, the computer hardware and pirated software, the fucking home entertainment system. All of them had been provided by lovestruck men with computer industry paychecks.
She also thought about how the last time she’d had sex was over a year ago, and he hadn’t been very romantic at all. There were the Friday nights alone, the birthdays that passed by without notice by anyone but her parents, the times she’d been too broke to go out to the bar on the Wednesday night “office night out” and no one had been interested in paying her way.
She also remembered the one time she’d overheard the IS guys gossiping about the women of the office and the casually eviscerating remarks they’d made about her, and she thought about how nice it would be to eviscerate them in return. Come to think of it, Peach had already managed that with at least one.
She took the ribs from Peach, sat down at the table, pulled up a plate and silverware, and started her late dinner.
“You know,” she said to Peach, her one female friend, “we could do sausages.”