The Poster Trick
by Jason Earls, author of How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/ http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
Roger Freemont’s wife of 12 years filed for a divorce one weekend for no reason. Roger came home from the foundry where he worked as boss of the grinding room and found the locks on his house changed and a few boxes of his clothes and belongings setting out on the front porch. There was a brief note on top of the clothes saying she had filed for a divorce. What the hell. Roger thought his marriage to Sally had been going well. He was not a drunk, he didn’t shoot dope, he didn’t throw his money away at those lousy casinos on the weekends, he handed over most of his paycheck to Sally every Friday afternoon. And Roger had only cheated on her twice during their 12 year marriage and was almost positive she had never found out. Maybe she had though. But after Sally kicked him out, at least he didn’t have to worry about finding a place to live. Roger had three dilapidated shack/rent homes in a small town a few miles away, the town he had been born and raised in. After taking the boxes to his best rent house and getting things in fair working order around the place, the next day Roger Freemont went into his “Bible Routine” to try and get his wife back. He put on his best suit and dusted off his Bible and started attending the Presbyterian Church every time they opened the doors. When Roger was in trouble in life, he would immediately put on his best suit and start carrying a Bible around pontificating about the Lord to everyone he saw. But after two weeks of Sally simply ignoring Roger’s fake religious behavior which everyone easily saw through, he switched plans and went in the opposite direction. He put his Bible up and took off the suit and started his “Harassment Routine.” He would park a few blocks from her house, take out a pellet gun and shoot through a few of her windows, then at night he would sneak up and kick over her potted plants and break other things around her property, tear up her fence, rip off various decorations on the outside of her home, and he would also prank call her house all hours of the night, making weird noises into the talk piece, whispering vulgar phrases and growling sexual innuendos. Once Roger even ran up and blasted a loud air siren through her mail slot during dinner time while her mother was there and it nearly scared the crap out of both of them, after which Roger jumped in his truck and sped away. One afternoon while Sally was at work, Roger took a step ladder and broke into her house by climbing in through the air vent up near the roof. He climbed down
through the attic and saw a multitude of Christmas presents scattered around addressed to Sally’s friends who had supported her thus far in her divorce decision. Roger quickly gathered the biggest presents up and took them to a back closet and hid them under some old newspapers. The rest he scattered around the house, stashing them in strange locations. Then he went in the bathroom, sat down on the toilet and grabbed a Sports Illustrated magazine underneath the sink. He sat there smiling, flipping through the pages as he voided his bowels, gradually filling up nearly the entire toilet with a massive amount of dung, and when he was finished he did not flush the toilet. Roger then left the house without damaging any of her property, his dual goals of hiding her presents and leaving a massive amount of crap in the toilet for her to find having been accomplished. That did it. After coming home from work and finding her Christmas gifts missing and the toilet bowl filled with long giant turds, Sally decided to file a restraining order against Roger. The next day the Sheriff drove out to where Roger was now living, carrying a stack of legal papers with him to deliver in person and also hoping to have a chat with Roger. The Sheriff caught him just as he was driving into his gravel driveway after getting off work from the foundry. The Sheriff, Shawn Laugherty, was the same age as Roger and they had actually went through school together, from kindergarten through high school, sharing many of the same classes over the years. The Sheriff also knew Sally quite well and didn’t exactly have a high opinion of her. Roger got out of his truck. He stopped and stared as the Sheriff walked toward him with the handful of legal documents. “What are you carrying?” Roger said. “Well, she’s put a restraining order on you, Roger,” the Sheriff said, stopping and holding out the papers. “Damn.” “I know. Now just take it easy, Roger, and try not to bother her anymore. Can you do that for me?” Roger flipped through a couple of the pages and scanned the confusing legal jargon. “I just don’t understand her, Shawn. She has no reason to divorce me.” “I know, Roger. But hey, you really shouldn’t be too surprised. She’s been married six times before you. That should’ve told you something.” “I guess you’re right, Shawn, but you know what they say. Love is blind... love is blind.”
“Yeah, stupidity’s blind too, Roger. And I always figured you for a smart one. Ya know, sometimes a man has to take into consideration how a woman’s acted in the past, since it may be a good indicator of what she’ll do in the future.” “True... you’re right. But still, this whole situation really pisses me off though.” “I know it does. But you gotta pay attention to the law and try to hold yourself back. Drink a beer tonight. Relax. Go out and have some fun this weekend. Find yourself another girl to take your mind off all this. Just let it go and soon you can start over again with somebody better. A LOT BETTER.” “All easier said than done, Shawn. I still want to talk to Sally, just one last time.” “Won’t do any good. I’ve noticed a pattern with her, Roger. Sally gets married, everything seems to be going fine, months pass, maybe a couple years, then one day the husband does the LEAST little thing to piss her off, and she just calls it quits and gets rid of the poor bastard with no warning whatsoever. She never takes them back, Roger. Once she’s done with a man, ya better just write him off cuz she is DONE. The sooner you accept that, the better.” “So now she’s gone and put a stupid restraining order on me. She really is something else, ya know. I thought I knew her. I thought I understood what was in her heart, but I guess I don’t understand a damn thing about her.” “Nobody does, Roger. The woman is crazy. Six husbands, man. SIX PRIOR HUSBANDS BEFORE YOU. That makes you good old number seven. SEVEN. And that ain’t normal, man. That is NOT normal... So what do you say? What do you think you’ll do now, Roger? Are you going to try and forget about her?” “Yeah. I’ll leave her alone. Don’t worry.” “You sure?” “Yeah, I’m positive, Shawn. I’m done with this. You got my word.” “Glad to hear it, my friend. You’re doing the right thing my man. And you’re gonna be back on top in no time. You’ll see.”
**** But Roger was still pissed off about the restraining order. He wanted to beat it in some way, while still keeping his word to the Sheriff. Roger was a highly competitive man. He did not want anyone giving him a ‘legal threat’ with no
chance of payback. He didn’t go out the next weekend as the Sheriff suggested. He stayed home Saturday night and drank a few beers alone and had a few whiskey shots and watched a long Science Fiction movie. The last thing on his mind was finding another woman. Too many friggin problems with those. Too much damn heartache involved. And he’d had enough of that in his life already. He slept in Sunday morning and then had a long breakfast and in the afternoon went out to his shed in the backyard and saw a large poster he and Sally had taken at the county fair about three years ago. The poster was huge and their heads were life-sized sticking through a big piece of painted cardboard that made him look like an outlaw gunfighter and her his sidekick spouse. Roger stared at Sally’s face for several minutes. Throughout this entire divorce-proceedings mess he had almost forgotten what his wife really looked like in the face. The picture of her in his mind’s eye did not match the image of her face now showing before him. He rubbed his forehead and stared at the poster for a long time. Her large blue eyes, the small nose and soft mouth, the brown hair with the natural curl waving down to her shoulders, the lovely silver necklace her mother had given her that she always wore. Roger walked closer, still staring into her face, then he backed up, adjusted his eyes, moved closer again, staring at her, almost in a trance. He felt a pain burn in his chest and then had the urge to try to call her but then remembered the restraining order against him. After that an idea popped into his head. He went over and grabbed the poster and took out his pocket knife and cut the poster in half. He kept the side with Sally’s face and stared into her eyes up close for several more seconds until the pain in his chest became too much to handle. He carried the half of the poster out of the shed and over to his pickup, opened the cab door and layed it down in the seat. He went back in the shed and found an old inner tube for swimming, still partially filled with air and carried it back to his truck where he found a roll of duct tape laying in the bed. He got the tape and went up to the cab, lifted the poster and held it in place as he wrapped duct tape all around it with the inner tube behind, propping it up in the seat with the poster secured tightly around it. When he was finished he walked to the front of his truck and backed up several paces looking into the windshield. Sally’s face on the poster around the inner tube was there clearly visible in the cab of the truck. It looked extremely real and perfectly life-sized as if she were sitting there in the passenger seat with a huge smile on her pretty face. Her image looked so real it took Roger back several years to when he had first met Sally and he felt an intense wave of happiness and contentment flow through his body beginning in his chest and moving down to his feet and toes. But then the feeling turned to loneliness and bitterness and misery as he realized he might not ever hold his wife in his arms again. He went into the house and took two beers from the fridge and drained them one
after the other in five large gulps trying to kill the pain of how badly he missed Sally. Then he went in his bedroom and found his best blue suit and put it on. In the bathroom he washed his face and combed his hair and splashed on some cheap cologne. He felt like he was getting ready for a date, happy now and the beer working inside him so well that he could not stop smiling. Climbing in the cab of his pickup, he looked over at the poster of Sally that he had taped to the seat. “It looks so damn real, it’s like she’s still here with me,” he said. Then he stomped the accelerator and peeled out of the driveway heading toward main street of the next town where he used to live with Sally. He arrived in no time and every car he passed on the road, Roger would wave exaggeratedly at the driver to get their attention. Since he knew almost everyone in their small town, he waved at nearly everyone he saw. The first car he passed was one of his neighbor’s back when he lived with Sally. “Look, there’s Roger,” the neighbor in the car said to her husband. “And Sally’s in the truck with him! I thought they were getting a divorce and now there she is sitting beside him smiling away. Look at her.” The next car Roger passed was Sally’s boss at the newspaper. Roger waved at the man and he waved back. Well I’ll be damned, Sally’s boss thought in his car. She told me she had a restraining order put on him and there she is riding down main street with the son-of-a-bitch. Roger drove a couple more blocks, waving at every passing car but not recognizing anyone he knew. He looked over at the poster of Sally taped to the inner tube fastened to his seat. Damn, he thought, it’s the perfect size and a great picture of her, even her profile from the side looks so real. He came to Sally’s aunt Matilda driving down the street and waved fast and hard at her. Inside the car, aunt Matilda stared at the poster of Sally in Roger’s truck, thinking it was her niece, then saying aloud: “Is it? Is that her? My God it is! She told her mother she’s divorcing him and even got a restraining order and there she is riding in his pickup! I can’t believe she changed her mind and is sitting next to him like nothing ever happened.” Roger passed the Sheriff next, the same one who had delivered the restraining order the day before. Roger leaned forward and smiled showing all his teeth while waving at the Sheriff with his eyes opened wide.
Sheriff Laugherty leaned forward and stared into the cab. “Holy crap, there’s Sally riding around with old number seven. Her restraining order can’t be enforced now. Boy, I knew she was a little off but I didn’t think she was stupid enough to cancel a restraining order after only one day. Nobody can ever guess what that woman’s gonna do, I doubt she even knows herself. Sweet Jesus, she’s just sitting there in the cab of his truck, smiling away at the whole town.” -end(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this story, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.) http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711 http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/ http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/ Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.