Meanwhile, across the local bog, on the wrong side of the tracks, Pandora Pinkerton, otherwise known as “Mandy Pandy,” lit a votive candle. “Mandy Pandy” was a nickname she had inherited as a child, by way of endless shaming for her Rubinesque physique. A nickname she had coopted and turned into a rhetorical fist up everyone’s ass once she hit puberty and blossomed into a brunette facsimile of Anna Nicole Smith in her prime. Agreeing with Dr. Freud that anatomy is destiny, Mandy Pandy had taken it upon herself to raise the proverbial stakes by emulating her idol, Betty Page, in her own gothic gone dominatrix kind of way. She always wore stilettos, and she knew how to use them.
Presently, MP, as she liked to call herself, was in half a trance, activating her shrine to the dark goddess, Lillith. Smiling wickedly from within, she recited yet another arcane incantation, summoning the demon goddess from her cold, distant star in space. “Oh, Lilith!” she cried. “You were Adam’s first wife. He defiled you and called you the daughter of excrement and shame. You called upon the secret name of God, and he made you an immortal star in the heavens, shining like Lucifer, offering true knowledge to man in the form of the celestial serpent!”
Lost in a ketamine enhanced epiphany of manic devotion to the vampire queen that she had summoned from her loins, Mandy Pandy orgasmed with perpetual, bottomless, self-righteous fury. She felt as if she was the reincarnation of Lady Macbeth, endowed with esoteric super powers that rendered her invincible and completely free from ever having to align herself with any man other than Lucifer ever again!
Mandy Pandy couldn’t “prove” that she had been the primary cause of all the present mayhem raging like a hurricane through the little town of Ruffneck. What she knew for certain in the nether regions of her morally bankrupt soul was that she had willed it all to happen. In a court of law, the mountain of circumstantial evidence confirming that she was the eye of the perfect shit storm would have been found insurmountable and undeniable. Everything had gone helter-skelter at the very moment she summoned the tide of fear rising in Ruffneck County into being. She was in complete alignment with the forces of evil and chaos. Oh, the power she felt coursing salaciously through her deliciously sinful body! She chanted, sang and cried out to Eris for vengeance against her enemies! She was not forgotten! She was NOT incidental! She WAS the GODDESS of discord herself, rising, rising, RISING! Into full consciousness as the curiosity that compelled Pandora to open the box!
Just as she was about to pierce her right index finger and write out a long list of bad intentions in blood, her cell phone received a text. It turned out to be her x best friend, Bvrenda (with a silent “V”). It read, “Beyatch, are you hexing people up again?”
Mandy Pandy compulsively shot a text straight back at her, answering venomously, “I’m busy, dickhole! Fuck off!”
To which, Bvrenda, textually retorted, “I told you not to do that, Mandy! It’s bad Karma!”
Mandy didn’t have time to argue about bad karma. She was on a roll. She had already taken down the ugly girl with the dread locks who had challenged her position on whether or not the ghosts in Henry James’s novel, The Turn of the Screw, were real. It happened during Professor Buttholes Introduction to Literary Genres class at the local junior college, which was a core class for English Majors, like Mandy Pandy and Dreadlock girl. Mandy Pandy knew that the ghosts were real, because even Henry James had answered the question himself in an essay in which he explained that he intended the ghosts to be real. Case closed.
But Dreadlock Girl insisted that the governess in the story was crazy, and that she was projecting her own paranoia onto the children under her charge as a form of trauma bonding, which is what ultimately killed the beatific little boy in the story. But Mandy Pandy KNEW that the ghosts were real. The voices in her head all said so. And so did Henry Fucking James!
Having successfully taught Dreadlock Girl a valuable object lesson in the validity of paranormal explanations, by way of telekinetic assassination through bi-location, Mandy Pandy felt somewhat vindicated. She had proven to herself that she had mastered her craft to such a level of refinement that she could annihilate her enemies even more precisely and stealthily than a programmed drone missile.
Mandy hated just about everybody. Most especially, she hated herself. All of her self-hatred was turned outward as infernal rage pouring perpetually into the world at large without restraint. No one was safe from her avaricious evil eye. The greatest difficulty she was really having in the present moment involved having too many potential victims available for her psychopathic mind to sort out at whim. The world opened up before her like an oyster ready to be shucked and swallowed with a twist of lemon and a vodka chaser.
“Who’s NEXT?” She thought to herself. She plopped down idly on her belly and sprawled out across the Hello Kitty comforter covering her bed, and began leafing through her high school yearbook. Even though she had graduated and moved on to junior college, her senior high school yearbook was a road map to her deepest personal resentments. It served her well as catalogue for plotting out the trajectory of her intended killing spree. There were so many assholes and fuck ups to choose from. She pondered this delicious quandary, while bighting down thoughtfully on the end of her pen. Kicking her feet absent-mindedly in the air, she exuded the aura of a cat casually stalking a sparrow or a mouse.
First there was Roger, dear sweet, stupid, gay, fudge packer Rodger! Roger, who should have been her soul mate, if only he weren’t a cock sucking butt boy! Roger was a sore subject for Mandy, because she couldn’t accept the fact that the only man that she had ever met that she truly wanted didn’t want her in return. Not the way she wanted him to anyway. She wanted a true partner in crime, like Bonnie and Clyde. What she really wanted in her black little heart was a man who would be her king as she formed her metaphysical empire. A man who would be beside her, to encourage her, and rub her feet, while she plotted, planned, and systematically materialized her passion for revenge and world domination.
But Roger didn’t read the psychic script she had concocted in her Irish imagination. Or if he had, he had chucked it out the window to fulfill his own preoccupation with sodomy and disco dancing. So cliché. She hated him even more for being a stereotype. He was a young Greek god that had been chiseled right out of her wet dreams, only to spurn her devotion to his marble form, like Pygmalion. She had realized that he was a homo on the day of the English Honors Society’s Summer Swim Soirée. He wore a speedo. All the other boys (all three of them) were wearing board shorts.
Mandy had stood, completely disgusted, in her sheer two piece bikini that left absolutely nothing to the imagination (not to mention a tantalizing peek at the tattoo of the ticking time bomb on her bodacious left breast), gob stopped with chagrin, taking in the shock and horror of her intended’s bulging package pleasantly suspended in a pink paisley man’s bikini brief! And to make matters worse, Chuck, the swarthy Coast Guard vet, couldn’t keep his eyes off of Roger. And he was getting a chubby! Mandy Pandy’s heart palpitated, and she had to reach behind herself and grab the back of a chair for support. Because, as she watched Roger’s eyes meet Chuck’s, rising up from his crotch with a long sly, shy grin, she realized, to her mind splitting “this means war” OUTRAGE, that Roger was not only completely unavailable to her, he was also COMPETITION!
To make matters worse, once Mandy Pandy had composed herself and found the right moment to confront Roger with the obvious fact that he had never tried to hide from anyone, he didn’t appear to be even remotely flummoxed by her martyred, horse whispered fury. Then he had the audacity to tell her that his therapist had suggested that the reason she was a closet “fag hag” was because she felt safe with gay men for the very reason that they were unavailable, and safe for her to psychically imprint upon without any risk of ever having to engage in any real intimacy. Upon hearing this, her mind exploded silently like a planet that had just been destroyed by the Death Star. Screams that only a true Jedi could hear reverberated between her ears. Roger’s harsh words rang so true that she knew right then and there with absolute certainty that he must die!
Roger would be punished for his multitude of unpardonable sins at the perfect moment. But perhaps she would save him for later. This was revenge that had to be perfectly sweet. Perhaps she could use the Monarch Slave programming techniques she had learned from her father to turn Roger into her sex slave. She chuckled to herself, fiendishly, thinking fondly of the cattle prod lying in the pretty box with all of the other toys she had hidden under her bed. So effective for shattering the mind and obliterating the soul.
Yes, Roger was high on Mandy’s shit list. His name had been indelibly woven into the fabric of Mandy Pandy’s plot to wreak havoc and seek revenge on everyone and anyone who had ever even remotely wronged her (which included all of China, just because there are so many Chinese). But then, keeping Roger alive might be useful for a while. He could be manipulated as a pawn in Mandy’s larger scheme to terrorize Ruffneck High School (which just happened to be located on top of an Indian burial ground, and the local legends said that it was cursed). Mandy remembered that revenge is a dish best served cold. She decided that these things must be done delicately. Freeing the world from Roger would come later. Yes, much later. Waiting for the perfect moment to erase Roger would only sweeten the taste of revenge.
She would kill Roger over time with premeditated poetic justice. The punishment would have to fit the crime, of course. Mandy Pandy knew somehow that her powers were going to amplify exponentially every time she killed. She wanted to take her time to savor and perfect her newly discovered gifts as a telekinetic murderess, while segueing, at times, into the realm of a “hands on,” cold-blooded serial killer. She was determined to pace herself. Each fresh kill would be a step up the mountain of her wrath. Like the volcano goddess, Pele, Mandy Pandy’s rising inferno of molten martyred entitlement shook through her entire body, causing the blood in her veins to boil! She capitulated with complete abandon to the tsunami of hatred welling from within her, causing her to seethe and writhe with edging insatiable blood lust.
Somewhat capriciously, she decided in that moment to practice her art on someone less deserving of her wrath. It had to be someone almost incidental, but not quite. She wanted simply to squash a human life like a bug. Simultaneously, she wanted to learn to savor killing in a disciplined manner. She wanted to emulate a monk taking his time to eat slowly, turning mastication into a form of meditation and deep reflection. Otherwise she knew that the carnal repast spread before her wouldn’t be nearly as fulfilling.
The answer came to her almost instantly. It came to her at just the moment she surrendered to following her own bliss. “Who would I enjoy killing the most, right now, in this present moment?” She mused. Closing her eyes, she simply listened to her intuition. Eureka! The answer had been staring her straight in the face all along! Mr. Butthoale, of course!
Mr. Butthoale had given her an A- in Literary Genres, even though she clearly deserved an A. He had also given her a B- on her semester final in class essay on Ibsen’s, A Doll’s House. She had chosen the option to contrast Isben’s Nora to Medea, exploring the prompt, “how do classical ideals of a woman’s place in society influence the way we see women in literature today?” Mandy Pandy had argued that it was right for Medea to murder her children and that Nora was a big baby for running away from her pathetic husband and miserable children. Furthermore, she expounded upon the premise that Nora should have killed her entire family and taken all the money she had squirreled away to Paris on a Holiday.
Having presented a perfectly sound argument to support her thesis, Mandy was still furious at Professor Butthoale for insulting her essay with a B-. And the A- for the semester was nothing short of a gauntlet signaling his own latent death wish. Upon reminiscence, and in the heat of the moment, killing Professor Butthoale seemed like the most emotionally pleasing and practical thing Mandy Pandy could think of to do. Immediately she set to work. In a bacchanalian frenzy of ritualistic fervor, she darted down to her metaphysical laboratory in the basement. Like a bolt out of the blue, she lit five large black votive candles and placed them at the points of the inverted pentagram she had spray painted hot lava red inside a circle on the cement floor of her basement, adjacent to the washer and dryer.
Mandy Pandy cackled with delight as the witching hour drew near! The tiny kitten, in the cardboard box next to the utility cupboard under the aquarium housing her pet python, Jewel, “mewed” pathetically in the dank, subterranean air. The python twisted slowly around her branch, flame tongue flickering with anticipation in the dancing candlelight. The kitten cried out again. Mandy Pandy chuckled sadistically. Don’t worry, Jewel, It’s almost suppertime…” The kitten’s cries fell on her ice-cold heart and stuck there. Just another chink in the armor of the lost little girl flash frozen inside.
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