#3 WORKED Dark, Humorous Fiction

Name: Laura Ehlers
Title: WORKED
Genre: dark, humorous fiction

75 word pitch: 

Buddy Bowden cooks the lunch shift at Stub's diner. And he cooks meth. But Buddy is beginning to think he might want more out of life. Problem is, everyone wants more out of Buddy's life and most of those people have guns.Worked tells the darkly humorous story of Buddy Bowden's search for something more while evading the Feds and his horny neighbor and quitting the business by throwing one mother of a cook off.

First 500 words:

Buddy worked the lunch shift at Stub's Diner. He also cooked methamphetamine, which is an entirely different sort of work. He enjoyed his job at the diner. It paid the bills. The meth, well, it paid pretty good too, but he never seemed to have any extra cash lying around at the end of each month. This was not the problem Buddy pondered at present. Today he was caught in a moral debate, which had nothing to do with the social and health concerns of his work.

As he flipped burgers onto the grill at Stub's Diner, he thought less about the high cholesterol of his food or the addictive properties and legality of meth. Instead, he put way too much thought into the gentle slope of Jessica Bierman's boobs. And they were lovely boobs, full and rounded...probably real...although with the money Steve Bierman had anything was possible.

Buddy studied those boobs and slapped two more ground beef patties down over the fire. He tried to pull his eyes from the cleavage in question, seated just across the Formica counter but he was not successful. "I ain't no adulterer." The statement repeated itself in Buddy's head, part of an on-going conversation.

"Is it my fault some women are just too hot? If they happen to be married, well hell. Thinking about them don't make me an adulterer." Buddy was positive of this because he had read the Oxford Dictionary, revised, American Edition, while an inmate at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Facility. During his latest eighteen month stay he had taken every opportunity to study that dictionary. He hoped it would help keep his mind off Jessica, or any other woman and over time served, he found that reading the words and their various meanings was pretty interesting. He enjoyed following the phonetic spelling and carefully saying the words out loud, under his breath. He would let his fingers caress the gold leafed indentations marking the alphabetic dividers, picking a letter at random and dropping the book open to a page under 'F' or 'M'. It was amazing to Buddy how many dirty words were held within the book and he began to keep a list which he would read at night in his bunk.

As it turned out, reading the dictionary did little to keep his mind off women. And with Jessica Bierman being the ideal, he thought about her all the more; her thick, blond shampoo commercial hair, her sparkling white teeth and big blue eyes rimmed in long fluttering lashes. If he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply he could almost smell the herbal essence of her shampoo. And if he licked his lips just so, he could nearly feel those pouty pink lips of hers press against his as he leaned in...

Yeah, Buddy Bowden knew what the word 'adulterer' meant. And he wanted to adulter Jessica Bierman's brains out.

But here in the present, smoke boiled from the fryer as a batch of tater tots met a fiery death, punctuated by the muted ding of the order bell as Uncle Stub slapped down on it with his meaty hand.