Welcome To Shitsville, Asshole by Richard Godwin.

After a busy festive period and some fantastic stories in the Christmas Grit series, the magazine is now back to normal and getting up to speed.

I've also been running the magazine for 12 months now and I'd like to thank you all for a fantastic first year as editor.  Long may it continue!

Right, without further ado...

Welcome To Shitsville, Asshole by Richard Godwin.

Candy lost a tooth giving the mayor of Spruceville a blow job. She never expected the stud on his cock to be so deeply embedded, nor for an old guy like him to be able to raise that kind of hard on. She could feel blood running into her jaw as she stared up at his banner on the wall. ‘Welcome to my town’, it read. It had always bothered her and she never knew what the Mayor was so proud of.

Back at the apartment she told Larry what had happened.

‘I’m a tooth down and he almost knocked my larynx out of place. Spruceville is a shit hole.’

‘Screw him’, Larry said, ‘you’re the deep throat Queen, so go suck another one and buy me some more beers.’

‘I’m sick of this Larry, I didn’t give up crack to become no whore.’

‘It ain’t whoring, it’s paying the fucking rent.’

Larry had a flag on the wall on which he’d written ‘We’re all fucking losers’. His favourite saying was ‘ain’t nothing wrong with paying for sex’.

He and Candy had met at a bar a few years before when she’d stopped using and he fucked her in the john  and wiped his cock on the back of her skirt before taking her back to his place. 

‘I ain’t never going back inside’, Candy told him that night as they sipped beer beneath a summer moon.

‘What were you in for?’, Larry said.

‘Theft mainly.’

She didn’t tell him about the time she stuck a fork in a trick’s throat for trying to bugger her.

She’d given it up, done the church thing, gone and prayed for weeks looking for Jesus. She wanted to find the hidden meaning of the gospel.

Then one day Jesus told her she was nothing better than a goddamned whore and to get the fuck out of his house.

‘I ain’t going back there’, she said to Larry. ‘There’s something wrong with those people.’

‘Yeah, they believe in a freak’, Larry said.

And so she settled down with him and whenever he gambled away his earnings from the gas station she’d go out and give a few blow jobs. Occasionally she’d lift her skirt and let a few tricks climb inside her snatch so she and Larry could stay in their stinking cockroach infested apartment in a town they both hated.

Larry kept her on a tight rein. She knew he had a secret stash of cash.

Over supper she winced as she tried to eat.

‘You need to get that seen to’, Larry said. 

Candy laid her fork down slowly on her plate.

‘I know I need to get it seen to, how are we going to afford it?’

Larry shrugged.

‘Maybe I can find some money.’

‘Oh really? Besides there’s another problem.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t do drugs.’

‘I know you don’t do drugs.’

‘If I go to the dentist he’s going to shoot me full of novocaine and I don’t want nothing like that in my system.’

‘That ain’t a drug.’

‘Larry, you didn’t know me when I was off my head on drugs, you wouldn’t have liked me, I did some things. If I get high I want it to be pure.’

That night as Candy lay next to Larry her tooth gave her such pain she rose from their bed remembering who she used to be. It was always pain that brought the memories back and she looked at Larry and thought how innocent he seemed. 

The next morning he rose to find her making breakfast.

‘I need to go to the dentist’, she said.

Larry gave her the cash.

As she tilted back in the chair and looked up at the dentist’s face she knew her problem was that the Mayor’s message was a lie. She felt the needle in her cheek and then the ceiling moved farther off.

She paid and left and made her way home and detoured at the Mayor’s office, as if someone else was steering the car. It was clear, she would ask for the money to pay for her tooth, that was reasonable, he was a business man, he would understand.

It was lunch time, his secretary had gone out and Candy found him alone eating a sandwich.

He stood up, dabbing his mouth with a napkin when she entered the room.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘I lost a tooth, I had it fixed and I would like the money.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘I think you should pay me.’

‘You got rotten teeth, bitch.  Come on, give it another suck.’ 

He yanked out his cock.

And as the light caught the gold stud Candy saw it all in a vision before it happened.

She heard the heavenly choirs and knew what she needed to do, that if she did it she would make it all right with the Lord.

‘How can you run this town?’, she said.

‘I do all right’, he said, sitting down.

Candy walked over to him and stood inches from his face, smelling the salami on his breath.

‘Do you know what I think of this place?’, she said, pointing at his banner. ‘Do you know what I am going to name it?’

‘What?’

‘I’ll show you.’

And she raised her heel and punched her stiletto into his cheek. She didn’t stop kicking him until his tongue lolled out of his head.

Then she pulled down his banner and dumped it on him.

‘Welcome to shitsville asshole’, she said.

Back at the apartment she ate supper with Larry and went to bed.

She woke up the next morning feeling high.

Over breakfast she said ‘Larry I’m going back to church.’

Larry chewed indifferently on his bacon.

 ‘Yeah, well just make sure you suck some cock on the way back, I want my money back.’

On her way out Candy looked at Larry’s flag.

She smiled and knew she’d found the hidden meaning of the gospel. 

Richard Godwin is the author of crime novel Apostle Rising, in which a serial killer is crucifying politicians and recreating the murder scenes of an original case.  The novel has received great reviews http://www.richardgodwin.net/media

It has just sold foreign rights to the largest publisher in Hungary.

http://www.amazon.com/Apostle-Rising-Richard-Godwin/dp/0956711308/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325697920&sr=1-1  

He is widely published in many magazines and anthologies and also writes horror and Bizarro as well as literary fiction and poetry.  You can find out more about him here http://richardgodwin.net .  His Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse are popular and penetrating interviews he conducts with other authors at his Blog   http://www.richardgodwin.net/blog .

His second crime novel, Mr. Glamour will be published this year (April) by Black Jackal Books as a paperback.