In Laymon's Terms

Turning the corner from his cubicle, he spied Heather and Anna from Accounting, standing together at the coffee station. They were both total babes, although almost exact opposites—Heather tall and willowy, golden-haired with small, perky breasts, a taut bottom, and incredible legs that seemed to just keep going and going and going, from her tightly-muscled calves all the way up under the hemline of her barely-there skirts; Anna, meanwhile, was short, dark-haired and very curvy, with hourglass hips and huge breasts that nestled beneath her tight sweaters, demanding attention. The two gals were close friends, and had played starring roles in Leonard’s fantasies—both separately and together.

Still staring at the pair, he caught his toe on the carpeting and stumbled, barely catching himself before he fell. When he looked up, the two women were eyeing him with undisguised amusement.

“I hate it when that happens,” Leonard offered, rearranging his substantial lips into what he hoped was a tentative smile. He hurried on past them.

As the Men’s room door swung shut behind him, he thought he heard one of them make a remark. To Leonard’s burning ears, it sounded like: “What a geek.”

Someday, they’ll be sorry...It was an old vow, but with this particular utterance came the sudden realization that, with Mother’s resources now at his disposal, he might be able to finally bring to bear some of his dimly conceived vengeance. Of course, with his inattention to detail, he could just as easily get himself into some serious trouble.

Leonard cast a quick, reflexive glance at the mirror and suddenly froze. There, just above his arrow of a chin, speckled on his sunken cheek, was a telltale spot of red. Leonard’s Adam’s apple seemed to grow larger and lodge in his throat as he stepped closer to the mirror, marveling at his own carelessness and stupidity.

Except...it looked a little too bright to be blood. Wetting his finger and scraping off a bit of the unknown substance, Leonard brought a fleck first to his nose and then to his lips.

“Not bad,” he muttered in response to the familiar tang.

Leonard never ate his scrambled eggs without catsup, and sometimes it seemed that he never completed his breakfast without wearing some of it. Wiping the smudge of Heinz away, Leonard couldn’t help but wonder how many people had already seen that beauty mark this morning and smirked accordingly.

With a final, resigned glance at the mirror, Leonard turned away to proceed with his business. Possessed of beak-like nose and similarly bird-like body, Leonard resembled nothing so much as an ornitharian shoved rudely and unwillingly into a human form. All elbows and sharp angles, prominent Adam’s apple and fly-away ears, Leonard was decidedly unattractive—or at least that seemed to be the verdict of all those who had ever cared to pass judgment.

With matching sigh and shrug, Leonard continued on his way to the urinal. He took his time, hoping that his audience would have departed the coffee station by the time he exited. Even though potential tormentors still lurked around every corner, Leonard sought refuge in the thought that his elementary enemy—his Mommy dearest—had been conquered...and divided.

In the hours and days that followed, though, Leonard’s cheery bravado began to falter. Despite repeated self-assurances, he couldn’t completely convince himself that he had done an adequate or thorough job on his Mother. This was perhaps not surprising, given that Leonard was almost innately incapable of self-confidence. Most of his waking moments in the first few days after the act were marked by an ever-present anxiety that he attempted to sublimate, but which kept popping to the surface of his mind with the persistence of a gas-bloated corpse.

On the fourth or fifth day afterwards, though, he began to relax a bit. The nervous glances over his shoulder when he was home alone became less frequent, and soon he ceased to peer around corners with dread.

After a full week, a certain enthusiasm took hold, and Leonard even began to display a newfound heartiness at work, although his cheerfully offered greetings were generally greeted with curious stares from those who had come to regard Leonard as an ambulatory aspect of the decor, no more capable of speech than the average fern, and perhaps slightly more diseased.