Bundettes

Crime Fiction by Richard Weems

When Cheryl’s tablet chirped with an invitation to her online group–7:00pm, on the dot–the home nurse looked at the device, then at Cheryl, then at the tablet again, this time with venom, as though the tablet was at all audible among the wheezes and chimes of the monitors and mechanical ventilator. Cheryl took deep, easy breaths to tamp down the old habit of apologizing to every man who showed displeasure with her. In the hospital bed beside them, Cheryl’s husband Peter continued to scan the living room walls, his dull eyes registering nothing.

Cheryl picked up her tablet as though shushing a fidgeting child. She tucked it under her arm as it continued to vibrate. “Thank you,” she muttered to the nurse, who continued to glare and rub his goatee. “That’ll be all.”

This home nurse was just further evidence of how the John Deere lawyers were oozing their way out of their agreement. In the five years since an engine block had fallen on Peter at the factory, doctor visits had whittled back to questionnaires sent through the wellness portal. Housekeeping services had stopped altogether, and Cheryl’s messages about the company car’s check engine light had gone unanswered. And this bargain bin, so-called homecare specialist, who handled Peter as though he was a sack of kitty litter.

The nurse slung on his bag and showed himself out. The tablet kept up its pushy chirp. There were a lot of things Cheryl held against Sally, the organizer of her online group. Her nagging punctuality sat near the top.

Cheryl checked herself in the mirror by the front door. She undid a couple of buttons and hefted up her breasts a hopeful moment before they flopped back to their separate corners. She yanked off her panties and dropped them on the dirty sheets and pillowcases she’d get around to eventually. Peter continued his irregularly timed gazes across Cheryl’s midriff and the TV. The nurse had left a tendril of crusted drool on Peter’s beard, and Cheryl had no urge to wipe it away.

“Later, Piggy,” she muttered. The John Deere settlement included a hefty life insurance policy, a treasure trove ready to be broken into once the machines could no longer sustain him.

In the kitchen, Cheryl grabbed a margarine tub from the fridge and dug out a spoon from the sink. She opened the lid and scooped up a mound of cold mac and cheese as she propped her tablet on the table. While the invitation to Bundettes 3_16 from SallyGivesIt110 pulsed on the screen, Cheryl fetched the surprise she’d prepared for tonight–a small stack of letters still in their envelopes–and arranged them just below camera view before she touched ACCEPT. A white dot chased its ghostly tail in the center of the screen. The dot dissolved, and Sally, in full ponytail and sports bra splendor, snapped onto the screen.

“There she is!” Sally lifted up her chin, her collarbones sharp and pronounced, her defined shoulders lifting up her sports bra straps and already perky tits. While Cheryl chewed on a mouthful of carbs steeped in reconstituted cheese powder, Sally sucked at a metal water bottle. Sally was a fitness influencer who posted videos of herself juicing bananas, bikejoring with her German shorthair pointers and executing textbook yoga poses on the deck of her California condo, a super-fit entrepreneur whose toilet paper Cheryl would have loved to douse with poison sumac. Dinnertime was not winnertime in Sally’s Diet, Already! A Rulebook to Normalcy, available in paperback and Kindle. Rule 263? Every calorie consumed two hours before bed congeals into cellulite during sleep.

Instead of acknowledging Sally, Cheryl took up another spoonful and waved at the row of much smaller boxes at the bottom of the screen. Their denizens waved and called out her name. Peter hadn’t allowed Cheryl any friends outside of his drinking crew, who called her Sweetie and gave her sidesaddle hugs so they could press their junk against her hip. Now she had a screen full of people happy to see her.

“That looks like everyone.” Sally holstered her water bottle and tightened her ponytail. “Any trouble getting away tonight, Cheryl?”

Cheryl put up a thumb while she chewed. Her story when she joined was that she had to sneak off to her sister’s house to get online because of her controlling husband. Cheryl didn’t have a sister, but pretending the stacks of plates and pots in her background were someone else’s diluted her shame.

Having ticked personalized concern for group members off her agenda, Sally scanned the screen. “Brigid must be on the road. Weak wifi again.” Indeed, alarmingly beautiful Brigid, who sold test prep software to elementary schools, eked through a series of freeze-framed snarls of frustration.

While Sally touched her chin to each shoulder to check her hair, Cheryl fumbled with the settings to arrange her friends into a Brady Bunch square. Sally sat up even straighter, if such a thing was possible, and spread her hands as she receded into the center.

“Welcome, Bundettes, to our March 16 session.”

The group erupted into a mixed chorus of Hey girlfriend’s and ‘Sup bitch’s. Brigid sat frozen in left center, gothy Xenia pouting right above her. Raziel, the self-identified Flaming Mexican, bottom-center. Mel/anie loomed in the bottom left, in poor lighting as usual, their face barely lit.

Meg, upper right corner, kept her hands on both sides of her laptop lid, ready as always to snap it shut should her twin tweens wander into the den. “Cheryl, we were complimenting Sally on her latest name for the group.” Meg was part of an organic co-op in Oregon but praised fast food chains for feeding the inner cities. She was also the one who had discovered Sally’s OnlyFans that featured nude yoga and food play and subsequently forwarded everyone else a screenshot of Sally coaxing a turnip into herself.

“Sounds to me like the name of a killer group of singing hos.” Raziel bobbed his chin to a song only he could hear.

Mel/anie chimed in from their dim box. “Bundymaniacs might have been more appropriate.” They swept tendrils of wilted pompadour from their face.

Steph, the TERFy realtor in the right column, groaned, “There they go again,” stressing Mel/anie’s preferred pronoun with annoyance.

Cheryl waited for the turbulence to recede before she offered, “They have a point. We’re not all women. Look at Raziel,” to which Raziel countered, “I don’t mind bitching up for this group.” Steph looked ready to debate but relented and crossed her, no doubt feeling victimized. Mel/anie’s hair lilted, and in a moment a chat bubble from Mel.anie.DAMMIT popped up at the bottom of Cheryl’s screen: Thanks, sweetness. Cheryl sucked in her lips to keep from smiling.

Sally broke in. “A good point, Mel/anie,” she said, rhyming with bell/fanny, as per Mel/anie’s frequent corrections, including the pause at the slash as though suppressing a burp. “I just can’t change the title of a session once it’s live, but I’ll try to be more considerate next time.”

Mel/anie offered a half-assed thumb-up. But Sally was all too proud of the names she’d come up with since Cheryl had joined the group: Daughters of Sam Bundy’s Bitches, the Butchered Co-Eds, Dahmer’s Models. When Sally revised the last one to Dahmer’s Mommas, she effected a heavy Boston accent to force a rhyme, which sparked a trend–Nightstalker’s Streetwalkers, Ripper’s Strippers, BTK’s Easy Lays. Last month? Gein’s Queens.

Cheryl messaged back to Mel/anie, Anything, but hesitated over whether to call them ‘dude.’ She might have been Mel/anie’s main ally in the group, but the particulars of fluidity still confused her. She finished her message for you, punctuated with a winking emoji.

Mel.anie.DAMMIT responded, ANYthing?!? Cheryl hoped her blush wasn’t too obvious. She and Mel/anie had only ever masturbated together during private sessions, but at thirty-nine, Cheryl had never known anything so exciting. Until she was sixteen, boys had called her Cheryl the Barrel. When breasts suddenly emerged beneath her sweatshirts, the boys altered their taunt to Cherry Swell. They bumped into her in the hallway and the lunch line to sneak in squeezes. Her gym teacher gave her extra coaching on the proper way to serve a volleyball.

She told Dad about the gym teacher, but he called her a whore at heart, and after that, Mom accompanied her to and from school and muttered, “See that, whore?” when boys made their comments. She dragged Cheryl to Sunday services and commanded her to forgive Dad’s punching fits–the walls, a window, Mom’s chest, Cheryl’s back. Peter was a dropout, but he drank with Dad, who was his supervisor at the factory, so Dad let him come over for dinner. Peter surveyed everything about Cheryl below her neck, but Dad still considered him the kind of man Cheryl needed to make her decent.

Cheryl resisted the pairing at first, but Mom reminded her every night what a cow she was, what a bloated manatee, how lucky she was to have anyone want to marry her. Now Dad was dead, and the last she’d heard from Mom was when she called to blame her for the drinking that killed him. Peter’s idea of matrimony had been to criticize every inch of Cheryl’s existence and throw himself on top of her at night. Watching him deteriorate into a husk and fingering herself onscreen for Mel/anie was a vast improvement.

Cheryl touched the envelopes on the table in front of her. They too made her wet, but it wasn’t yet time to reveal them.

Sally moved on to new business and read aloud an article on the latest victim in the Okie child murders: a seventh grader abducted from a parked car while her single mom picked up a pizza and later found clogging up the sluice to a cattle farm. Sally shared the crime scene report and conducted the discussion. Raziel categorized the perp, who bashed in the skulls of his victims, a disorganized killer, but Xenia disagreed, as this latest girl was absent of hair and fluids. Mel/anie reintroduced their go-to diagnosis of incest during potty training. Brigid sent her contributions through the group chat. Brenda, the midwestern mother of five who considered divorce the hub of evil in the world, harped on the fact that this victim had come from a single-parent home.

“See?” Brenda sang. “See what happens when you don’t have a proper man in the house?”

“Thank you, Brenda.” Sally moved to the next item. “Xenia, please confirm that everyone contributed to the Donnie Cherry Defense Fund.” Sally looked around her screen like a teacher out to nab anyone who hadn’t completed their homework. Xenia, purple lipstick matching her bangs, clicked around on her desktop.

“Can’t say everyone chipped in equally.” Xenia sighed.

“Poor kid.” Steph stroked her perfectly arced eyelashes. “I hear he doesn’t have anyone in his corner.” Donnie Cherry was a college rugby player indicted for the rape of a doped freshman. Steph was the one who had proposed the collection.

Mel/anie’s chin shot up, their hair rising like the coxcomb of a rooster being challenged. “I know, right? Sodomize a teen while she’s puking and crying for her mommy, and next thing you know, your Tinder feed goes empty.”

Meg shook her laptop lid and cried out about presumed innocence. Steph shouted, “She agreed to go upstairs with him!” Raziel hummed and added, “Give me a shot at that Cherry,” before Steph continued: “Did you see what she wore to the arraignment?”

Cheryl messaged Mel/anie, That got em riled.

Mel/anie responded, That dress of yours is what gets me riled. Chat tonight? I want to make you cum-m-m-m-m-m!

Cheryl hid her face with the bowl of mac and cheese. Mel/anie wouldn’t strip or show Cheryl what kind of equipment they fiddled with during their private sessions, but they helped Cheryl along with any position, any number of participants, any combination of gender (or lack thereof) she wanted to fantasize about. She’d exchanged private messages with Brigid too, mostly to throw shade at the conservative elements of the group, but when Brigid said she was going to be in Rochester finalizing a contract, Cheryl suggested they meet up and get lunch or something. Brigid hadn’t responded to that invitation yet, but Cheryl had already taken a topless pic to send her–something Mel/anie had been begging her for.

Sally concluded the Donnie Cherry item with a quick hit from her water bottle. “So,” as she checked on her ponytail again, “with everyone contributing, you’ll donate in our name, Xenia? Forward the receipt to the group?”

Xenia nodded. “$120 to the defense fund,” she said. “Correction: $120.25 if you include Mel’s contribution.”

A live, trimmed middle finger rose from the bottom of Mel/anie’s screen. Xenia returned in kind. Mel/anie had once copped to Cheryl about diddling online with Xenia for a little while, but the goth’s dirty talk had had all the pep of a Catholic litany, and she turned psychoprudebitch when Mel/anie reminded her that pharoah-cuts had gone out with Siouxse-Sioux’s recording career. Cheryl got so engrossed in the flurry between Xenia and Mel/anie that Sally took her by surprise.

“So, Cheryl. Where we at with the Pen Pussies initiative?”

Cheryl’s face went hot as though Sally had just described out loud the threesome fantasy she’d slipped into. This was the moment Cheryl had prepped for, but she had hoped for a little more build up. She stammered, poked around at her tablet screen as though looking for something, then finally muttered, “I was thinking…Brenton Wayne Willem?”

The whole board rattled with shock. Raziel leaned in close to his camera. “That’s one man who don’t know ‘No Means No’!” Mel/anie applauded, and even Xenia smiled warmly. Only Sally scowled.

“That’s an ambitious target, Cheryl,” she warned. “You sure a celebrity like that will want to correspond with a little online group like ours?”

Cheryl gushed, and she didn’t care who noticed. Sally’s position in the center square relied on her experience as the only one in the group who’d met a convicted killer in the flesh. She told the story every time she could chisel the topic into conversation: back when she was a Women’s Studies major in Jacksonville, she requested an interview with rapist/torturer/immolator Joseph E. Duncan III. The prison agreed to one hour in a supervised interview room, sans glass partitions. Sally asked generic questions about upbringing and dietary habits while Duncan, in belly and ankle chains, muttered monosyllables and kept his gaze up Sally’s skirt. When the guard took his requisite gander out the wired glass, Sally lunged forward, camera app at the ready, plunked her firm butt onto Duncan’s knee and snapped away until the guard shooed her off. In her profile pic, the two of them threw huge, toothy smiles at the camera. Her caption read, “Don’t know which of us came first!”

To challenge that status, Cheryl fanned out the eight envelopes she’d been keeping in front of her. “I have a good feeling about this,” she said.

The outer squares hooted and gasped, even Brigid, though in still-life. And in her center square, Sally let slip a moment of agoggery.

“You’ve been in touch with him, Cheryl?” Sally ran both thumbs under the straps of her sports bra. “The Publix Killer?”

Cheryl brought the return address of the top envelope close to the camera to show off the Florida State Prison stamp and hopefully shut the controlling carrot-fucker down.

But Cheryl also made sure to keep the postmark hidden. She wanted everyone to think she’d gotten these letters in the two months since Sally had volunteered her to find the group a pen pal. The actual timeline–a year before she ever found this online group–was a far paler accomplishment.

Peter had been something of a true crime nut before the accident: a full set of the Time-Life book series and unyielding control over the remote whenever the Biography Channel held one of their true crime marathons. So a string of rape/murders down in Ocala County, FL, the victims suffocated with plastic bags, was just another case for him to obsess over. The perpetrator wasn’t partial to a particular brand of bag, but in a viral crime scene photo, a windfilled Publix plastic bag lingered in the corner like a discarded watermelon. The scene had already been cleared by CSU, so the bag couldn’t have been the one taped over the victim’s head, but the name Publix Killer stuck fast.

In the end, Brenton Wayne Willem, a budding singer/songwriter, drew suspicion through his TikToks. In most of his posts, he sing-talked about whores who slutted their way into huge record deals, or unnamed lovers who got rich stealing his lyrics. But every now and then, he sang of sluts who thanked him for making them bleed and gifted him their nipples, a detail authorities had withheld from the public.

One night, as Cheryl served Peter mac and cheese and a tuna fish sandwich, she caught a glimpse of this man in prison coveralls, hands cuffed at his waist, balding and portly, escorted into an Ocala County courtroom for arraignment. Desire geysered from her belly into her legs. She’d never felt such a blast of lust for anyone before.

“That’s him?” she muttered. Her knees buckled a bit. Buckled! Would a swoon come next? All the men she’d ever known had been mean and abusive, but now she realized they’d all been mere farm leaguers. Wayne was a legitimate All-Star.

“Stupid fucker,” Peter grumbled through a mouthful of mayonnaise. He pinched a noodle from his pristine mustache (the first thing Cheryl would make sure went to pot once he turned vegetable).

The tubby man on the news scratched at his crotch and looked around the courtroom. When asked for his plea, his lawyer, who had the downward gaze of the Sam the Eagle muppet, prompted him to speak, but Brenton Wayne Willem kept scanning the room until he found the very camera Cheryl sat at the other end of. He took a deep breath…

And he sang, sang of a You, Who makes me smile / For whom I would crawl miles. Such a sweet face on this Brenton Wayne Willem, this lumpy man in his orange coveralls, a reddened forehead that rose nearly to the top of his skull. And undeniably guilty. Cheryl was so lost in the song that she didn’t hear Peter when he demanded her crinkled ass stop blocking the TV.

She sat with Peter through all the trial coverage (on the floor if he declared the couch off limits to cattle). Wayne (he didn’t go by Brenton, as it was his father’s name) pled guilty after the prosecution rested in an attempt to avoid the death penalty, but the state still pushed for it. At the sentencing hearing, Wayne tried to apologize to the families who’d gathered in the courtroom but kept getting his victims’ names wrong. The jury voted to put Wayne to death, but as such sentences took years to execute, sometimes decades, Cheryl knew she had plenty of time to connect with him. And that in this relationship, she would be the one in charge.

Three years later, John Deere’s lax safety protocols dropped the engine block on Peter’s head. When the lawyers and their doctors recommended home care, Cheryl agreed because the deal included a company tablet for her own use. Her lust for Wayne had gathered no rust as she pored through articles and watched interviews like a fangirl. She could barely keep her hands off herself.

The only time her long-distant love let her down was during a jailhouse interview for a conservative Christian channel. When the interviewer asked him how he could be so cruel, Wayne covered his mouth as though at an unwanted thought.

Cut back to the interviewer, who squinted with concern, his hairpiece not as quick to follow his eyebrows. “What’s wrong, Wayne?”

Cheryl sat forward on the couch, ready to hear her love take pride in what he’d done.

Wayne cleared his throat, as though to cough back a sob. Finally, he muttered, “Taurus.”

The interviewer put on his best Investigative Reporter concern. “What do you mean, ‘Taurus’?”

Wayne kept up the act. “Taurus took over.” After raping a victim, he’d black out and come to on top of a mutilated body, “Its head wrapped in plastic,” a Ziploc with a chunk of breast in his pocket. The channel’s CEO, a faith healer with hair a cyclone couldn’t disturb, interrupted the broadcast to beg for donations to his exorcism institute while Cheryl shook her head at the framed picture of Wayne in mid-croon she’d hung in the living room.

“Oh, Wayne,” she muttered. She clicked back to the interview and paused on Wayne’s near-tears confession. She played him back slowly, a frame at a time, as she slid back on the sofa. She was close to climax when Peter met her eyes. She was so used to the noise of the medical machinery in the living room that she’d sometimes forget about her husband’s bed a couple of feet away. Cheryl seized, even as Peter rolled his head back the other way, but Wayne’s distressed expression pulled her through.

The next day, Cheryl googled the prison’s mailing address and decided to introduce herself formally:

Mr. Willem,

I am a housewife in upstate New York, and I saw your story on television. So moving, and such lovely music. Do you need someone to write to? I imagine it must get very lonely where you are.

Sincere and anxious,

A month passed, and no response. Her surges of excitement when she fished her hand into the mailbox were followed quickly by pain (yes, pain) when she found no handwritten envelopes in her grip. She held out ten months before she wrote another letter:

Wayne,

My name is Cheryl. I wrote you before. I hope I am not bothering you. Your story on the news excited me. Would you like someone to exchange letters with? I hope you will write back.

Yours,

This time, she included an old picture, just after her wedding, forty pounds lighter and deep cleavage. She got a response six months later:

Cheryl,

Lonely here. Please send anuther picher. I need to see you as I read your werds.

Wayne

PS – Not crazy, a sex offender, murder. Not one of those things.

For the first time in her life, the globules hanging off her chest would get Cheryl something she actually wanted. So she took a photo of herself with more cleavage. Wayne responded, in three months this time, with a single word: Mor. So she bought a top with a plunging neckline. He thanked her for the lovlee pichers but said he couldn’t write to her again until he had more money in his account. So Cheryl set up a wire transfer. She sent him care packages of beef sticks and Zingers. Chocolate mini-muffins. She sent him a box of Betty Boop cards, though he stuck with his spiral notebook, which gave his letters a crisp yet fluffy edge. In his sixth letter, Wayne wrote about how he wanted to bite her breasts, how he pleasured himself over her. Cheryl searched for instructions on how to schedule in-person visits with death row inmates, and during one of her deep dives, she found Sally’s selfie and her online group description: For hotties who are unafraid of a little rough tickling.

Two years and almost three thousand dollars into Wayne’s account, all culminating in this fan of envelopes she held up to her webcam–to show up that administrative cunt Sally, with her pristine ponytail and momentary lapdance in a prison interview room as the highlights of her life. She had no doubt volunteered Cheryl for the Pen Pussies initiative because she thought this flabby North Country girl would flounder, leaving her no other course of action but to step in and take over.

But SallyGivesIt110 had no idea she was dealing with a woman who’d learned at long last the rush of power that came with flipping the switch of a man’s desire. Or a woman’s. Or someone who muddled the binaries. A woman who diddled online with one member of Sally’s precious group and was in line to score herself another. So when she saw Sally studying the envelopes, a sneer curling that hairless upper lip, Cheryl saw it was time to confirm her superiority:

“He’s fantasized about biting my tits.”

Though the digital ratio of the boxes remained fixed, Sally’s center square seemed to shrink as the others whooped it up. Mel/anie messaged a sequence of eggplants growing larger, and Brigid stood up to flail at her screen, her poor connection freezing the moment she stooped forward to reveal those two chocolate drops down the front of her blouse. Cheryl never felt so much desire aimed at her, desire she wanted to slurp up like the syrup at the bottom of a can of peaches. She felt she could turn even that conservative popsicle Steph towards bicuriosity. When she felt tears, she blinked to encourage them on, because in those tears lay the memories of all the men in her life who had used her and groped her and took their pleasures out on her without ever asking what she wanted.

Yes, all the men. Mom would smack her whenever Cheryl dared mention it, so she retained only foggy memories: a slight weight in her small hand, Dad guiding her by the wrist as he told her to utter phrases that no sense to her at the time but drove her to dig one fingernail under another when they came back to her.

Except now. Now, those words and those memories held no sway over her in the spotlight of this adoration.

Would Mel/anie prove to be a disappointment, unable to say in person what they had expressed so avidly in messages, if they ever met in real life? Would Brigid shut down Cheryl’s advances with a curt declaration of not being into that dykey shit? And what would Sally do to reclaim her dominance? Start her own correspondence thread? Send Wayne highlights from her subscriber channel? Convince him to send her a semen-stained Betty Boop card that she could show off to everyone else?

Probably. Cheryl knew, deep down, that joy wasn’t something the world let her keep. But it didn’t need to: she had it right now.

“I guess it’s safe to say,” Sally mumbled (and she never mumbled), “Cheryl has opened the door for us to write to Brenton Wayne Willem, whose address Cheryl will post to the group doc. Good work, Cheryl.” In each member’s box, a sequence of applauding hands in various skin tones. Cheryl treated herself to a heaping spoonful of cold mac and cheese.

Bio: Richard Weems is the author of three short fiction collections: Anything He Wants (finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize), Stark Raving Blue and From Now On, You’re Back. Recent appearances include Write. Teach., Libre, Quibble Lit, Ginosko Literary Journal, The Words Faire, The Raven Review, and North American Review. You can also find him on Facebook and Instagram, and he regularly posts reviews, essays and celebrations of Central New York weirdness on Medium. He recently retired from teaching.