Leticia loved haunting the Appledale’s farmhouse. It always smelt of blueberry syrup and fresh linen, with a tiny tang of far-off manure to keep it real.

She loved watching the Appledale brothers dig for worms, and later, watching them stuff those worms down their sister Amelda’s cotton blouse.

Leticia loved bobbing invisibly behind Mother Appledale, watching as she darned Papa Appledale’s socks with a slightly arthritic hand. Leticia knew that soon Mother Appledale would “accidentally” be tossed into the combine, but she didn’t try to warn her because it would be handy to have someone like Mother Appledale on the other side; on top of the darning, she made a mean chicken fried steak.

Papa Appledale. Big, overall’d Papa Appledale with the grass stains on his forearms and worn leather belt for whippin’. Leticia generally stayed away from him. He always moved within a flock of pernicious energy which often stunk of cabbaged flatulence.

While Papa Appledale was killing Mother Appledale, the boys were down by the train tracks playing with the box car children, Amelda was at her girlfriend’s house learning about Kegel, and Leticia cowered in the safety of the washing machine.

And that’s where she remained while Papa Appledale lumbered into the laundry room, peeled off his ensanguined murder uniform, and stuffed it into the washing machine, along with Leticia and a handful of sweaty socks unappreciatively marked by Mother Appledale’s handiwork.

“Hey Leticia,” one of her friends taunted back home. “What happened, someone throw you in with the reds?” A bunch of them held their bellies and laughed till they wheezed, all a’shimmer in her God-given pearlescent suits.

“Yep. Something like that,” Leticia muttered, while waiting for Mother Appledale to ladle some gravy on her chicken fried steak.

It was difficult sometimes, especially when Rue was meeting someone new. There were several ways it could go:

- The person would ignore her stutter, in the same way someone might ignore an obese albino who just got flattened by a trolley.

- The person might get so agitated after only a few minutes that they flee the scene with no other explanation aside from their body language screaming, “Freak!”

- The person just might have the audacity to ask her how she acquired her stutter.

They’d expect fantastical explanations from her, to check against their elaborate theories.

They expected tales of toddler play dates gone awry when an over-achieving jack-in-the-box’s appearance came packed with too much vim and vigor, scarring her vocal tenacity for life.

Or they’d pin a childhood bicycle accident as the culprit, imagining Rue so stunned after careening over the crest of a ravine that it would always take her longer than others to place an order at McDonald’s or give an eulogy at a funeral.

Or when they’d learn of Rue’s abduction from 1986-1989, a time for which she has no recollection, they’d be so sure that was the origin for her habitual stammer. But the only thing Rue took away from that experience was an aversion to nylons and a taste for peanut butter and Cheez-Wiz on sardines.

So Rue doesn’t even flinch when her date, scratching a pair of too-perfect breasts in the leftover syrup on his plate, blatantly asks, “What’s the deal with the stutter?”

Over the din of the roadside diner, busty waitresses hollering at the counter-perched regulars and knives raping plate surfaces as they slaughter through chicken-fried steak, Rue contemplates telling him what he wants to hear, what they’ve all wanted to hear – some woeful yarn of an incident so traumatic, her speech is still impaired twenty years later.

But she likes this guy. He’s not as good-looking as the one before him, the one who looked like that Edward fellow from Twilight but had a propensity for calling her “Mama” and had a scarily large collection of used band-aids (a few dozen are OK, but an entire chest is overboard, Rue thought). But he’s definitely a step up from the one eight dates ago who had plastic surgery to purposely look like Steve Buscemi and wore purple polyester slacks every day.

Rue opts for the truth. She wrings her hands, coughs a little, sits up straighter so he’ll focus on the fact that she’s not wearing a bra and the top four buttons of her paisley blouse had busted open sometime between ordering breakfast and leaving the ladies room after busting open the top four buttons.

“Ok,” she starts, modestly shaking her rack. His eyes dart down. “I really like the hit MTV series The Jersey Shore.” She waits, but his ogling eyeballs are still focused below her chin. “And The Situation was on the radio a few weeks ago. He said he likes Rues that stutter. So I rented My Cousin Vinny and started practicing, so that if I ever run into him, he might call me ‘broad’ and plop me in a jacuzzi somewhere.”

Behind her, a trucker with pits that smelt of bologna and urine and the giant steaming shit which Miley Cyrus dumped on Top 40, turned around and splayed a thick chunk of arm across the back of their booth. “Not that I’ve been eavesdropping, but I heard that interview too. It was the American Idol has-been Rueben Studdard he said he likes.” He paused to hawker out a muculent pud of chew into his empty coffee cup. “Not ‘Rues that stutter’.” His belly-laughter shook both booths.

“You’ve been FAKING your stutter?” her date bellowed. “That’s the only reason I came out for this second date, because your stutter gives me an erection.” And with that, he snatched his top hat and accordion off the seat and stormed out of the diner, leaving Rue alone with a lingering tendril of smoke from his anger-stubbed cigarette, the still-laughing trucker, and the check.

“And it wasn’t The Situation who was on the radio,” the trucker added, lifting his Jim Deere cap to brush back a greasy pelt of hair. “It was Pauly D!” he exclaimed, giving Rue one last rib-kick.

———————

So I joined this 52 Projects group on Facebook, in hopes that it will inspire me to start making monsters again. This was from week 2.

If you ask her teachers, they will turn taciturn, set their lips in a firm, well-practiced smile and gargle the nerves congesting their throats before feeding you one of the templates they’ve memorized from their Teachers Handbook.

“Prudence never disrupted the class.”
“Prudence always turned in her dittos in a timely fashion.”
“Prudence excelled in cursive and time tables.”

Because you wouldn’t expect them to tell you that Prudence killed frogs on the playground, ate flies between heels of moldy potato bread, and sat in the darkened cubby speaking softly in what was originally thought to be Latin but turned out to be some variant of Appalachian tongues.

Still, Prudence managed to maintain a small clique of friends. Most townsfolk say that these girls only fraternized with the Goosterjuice girl because she had a fancy doll collection and an older brother who mowed the grass without a shirt on and had a predilection for younger tarts who would let him do another kind of mowing, though most of the girls weren’t yet tainted enough by accidental exposure to pornography to know quite what that meant until they were already pinned down on sharp blades of grass, the kinds that cut right through flesh if you try to stroke them, crying as the buttons on their homemade blouses pop off like some kind of Japanese firecrackers.

But they all inevitably walked away from that soiled sex patch behind the water tower feeling as though they were in love with that Goosterjuice boy.

Prudence knew what her friends were doing when they excused themselves from her bedroom, saying they had to attend to matters concerning their bowels, and it disgusted her. Intercourse in general disgusted her, ever since she found out her real daddy was the ringmaster of a traveling carnival who tricked her mother into sleeping with him by promising her the coveted spot atop a sequined elephant, but when she woke up the next morning, the caravan was gone and she was left on the side of the road with her virginity and $34 stolen from her fanny pack. Her mother never told her this story, but she knew it to be true because she heard the man previously thought to be her father speaking about it in slurred and abasing tones during one of his midnight poker games.

Most people who lived in that town would tell you that she was only disgusted about sex because no one ever wanted to have it with her, that she was a hemaphrodite.

Gradually, Prudence’s after-school social hours petered out and she was resigned to spend her evenings sitting cross-legged on her embroidered bedspread, reading dusty tomes about interior decorating which she found the year before at an estate sale at the home of the town’s first gay man who was driven away by the Church.

Her parents, too caught up in the intricate art of slave trading, didn’t seem to notice that their daughter wasn’t getting invited to keggers and seances.

Until the smell happened.

Prudence’s mother was the one to discover it. The acrid aroma trailed from Prudence’s room and wafted down into the sitting room, where it raped her mother’s nasal cavity with the powerful punch of rot.

Following the stench to Prudence’s room, she was quickly distracted by a visual assault. Using crude strokes, Prudence had colored over the floral wallpaper her mother had spent weeks choosing, splashed right over it with a carmine hue that seemed to have chunks of gelatin suspended in some of the heavier streaks. The smell of death emanated.

“Do you like it, Momma? It’s like they’re menstruating. My walls, that is. Don’t touch, Momma. It’s fresh. Doesn’t it smell lovely?”

Her mother stood with one clammy hand on the doorknob, the other covered her mouth and pinched her nostrils, in tandem. Speechless. Agog. Some say she probably didn’t know what was coming until it was too late, that all Prudence had to do was utter a few indecipherable syllables that would make snakes hiss from fifteen miles away. But most people call bullshit on that and believe that the only tongue-lashing going on in that room, on that night, was by the hand of a cleaver-wielding twelve-year-old who was tired of hearing her mother making bank by seducing the milkman and the postman and the dogcatcher in her bedroom with the tapestry-covered windows and the locked door, but the sounds her mother made right before stuffing the wads of bills into her garter belt echoed through the vents and were delivered right behind Prudence’s bed, like a smutty package of wet moans and testicular slappings tied with a bow formed of lecherous grunts and infidelity.

And once it was all said and done, a trunk containing her art supplies was discovered under her bed. Brushes fashioned from the hair of her classmates, the ones who spread their legs, whose parents had reported them missing in the last week. Mason jars sloshed to the brim with hemoglobin. Her mother’s hair, still attached to her scalp, twisted and tangled into hematic ropes. It was determined that these grisly Type O locks helped finish the paint job on the west wall.

The rest of the pieces, the body parts? They were stuffed in garment bags and hung heavily from a brass rod in the closet. A rogue eyeball was found in Prudence’s jewelry box, speared onto the twirling ballerina, who no longer twirled so much now under the weight of the optical orb, but more so staggered along in an arching path to the tune of Greensleeves. It was determined to be the eyeball of Cadie Caldwell, Prudence’s classmate who was obsessed with becoming a flapper and gave Father McNeilly a handjob after confession last summer.

Prudence’s daddy, the one who wasn’t really her daddy, all he said to the police was, “I never knew Prudence had any interest in painting. And she’s not my real daughter, by the way.”

The only person who knew what truly happened was Prudence, but in all the seventy years she sat in prison, all she’d ever do was flash those butter-brick teeth of hers and say, “Ain’t see a damn thing wrong with wantin’ a little rouge to my walls.”