….you might as well drop your panties and spread your legs. Because, sooner or later, he is going to have his way with you.
Last night, after a busy day of “much ado about nothing,” I was wired-tired. You’ve been there, right? Feeling all day like your left foot was nailed to the floor as your right one kept running you around in endless circles? Yeah, one of those days. So I was really ready to call it quits. Fresh from a hot bath I was looking forward to calling it a night and had been about the business of doing just that when my muse showed up.
“Not tonight, dear,” I told him. “I have a headache.”
But he was having none of it. Hopping up onto my shoulder, he pulled out his teeny-tiny muse-monkey and began spanking it. Not this time, I thought to myself, determined to ignore his lewd, rhythmic keystrokes—right there, beside my ear.
“You know you want it, Angela,” he whispered.
“No. No I don’t, Muse. Please go away.”
I looked longingly at the just-poured glass of merlot sitting on the kitchen countertop only a few steps away. I imagined the beautifully-bound anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird awaiting me just down the hall—perched atop the pillows I’d just fluffed. I thought of the bedside lamp, its amber nimbus waiting to surround me in the sweetest of solitudes as I sank into my pillow to sip my wine and read a page or two of Harper Lee’s masterpiece before drifting off to higher ground.
“Go to your keyboard, Angela.”
Muse’s voice had taken on that sexy growl, the seductive tenor that always makes my little slut-digits quiver. I whimpered. He chuckled—that familiar sleazy snarl of a chuckle. Oh, how I hate you, you insatiable bastard. As if he could read my thoughts, Muse grunted, spit a gob of ink on his little quill and stroked faster. We both watched the jetty fluid oozing from between his pumping fingers, smearing across his knuckles.
I was getting hot—hot to trot right over to my keyboard and writhe, I mean write. The raunchy little raconteur inside me began to tremble. I wanted Muse’s hot jizz to conjugate and punctuate and catenate me. And his grizzled sneer told me Muse knew it.
“Nouns, adverbs, adjectives.”
“Muse, please stop. You know that sentence is incomplete.”
“Then fix it, Angela. You know you can’t resist.” His breath, smelling of parchment and indigo, blew across my fevered face. “Get your panties off and get your horny fingers over to that fucking computer and diddle with that fragment.”
“But…”
“I know, baby. I’ll make it good. Remember the old days? When we did it on everything? Index cards, notebooks, legal pads, steno pads and even napkins. Remember how you liked being bent over that Underwood you found at the yard sale?”
“Okay, Muse. Damn it, you’re right. Do me. Bend me like a bitch over that keyboard and make me your whore. Shove that fragment in front of my face and have your way with me. Use me like the pencil-pushing slut (virgule) strumpet (virgule) tramp (virgule) harlot that I am.”
“I knew you’d give it up,” Muse sniggered as he positioned me in front of the computer. “Now, you filthy little ink-slinging Pandora, listen to this.”
Hunched over the keyboard I opened wide as he started pumping it into me: “Participles, linking verbs, superlative adjectives… You want more?”
“Give it to me, Muse. Give it to me fast and hard and dirty.”
“Grammar, punctuation, conjunctions, interjections, gerunds…”
“Oh, yes! That’s it. Do me. Pound it in to me.”
“Factitive verbs, predicate nominatives, indefinite pronouns, past participles, appositive phrases …”
Muse had me where he wanted me. He knew the dirty truth about the both of us: That I am his whore and he is my whoremonger. It’s been that way since I first picked up a pen. And so I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. Until his profane solicitations became the rhythmic movement of my sticky little fingers across the keyboard and once again, as he always does, the Muse had his way with me.
In the corner he stands. Facing the wall, his hands to his sides. Naked and appearing so vulnerable, so alone. And you might, indeed, think him a lonely man. A sad man. Even maybe a pathetic man. But let’s take a closer look before we go away with our own first impressions, shall we?
