The Handyman

It was an old muffler that aroused him that morning. For years, he neglected that major car repair on purpose. The beauty in its inadequacy was that it vibrated the vehicle with both veracity and velocity. Driving back and forth to his odd jobs, it gave him the soft erection of low expectations. Traversing a city of ill-repute, dotted with the mentally ill and the illegally mental, he puttered onto a property he knew like the back of his cupped hand.

Ms. Marlborough's residence. Or as it secretly was felt to him, a patch in the proverbial woods of his mating grounds. His penis had become like a divining rod, involuntarily pulling him back to that primordial place where he might dowse himself. Taking a break from the usual wood, he set his sights on a different task.

Leaves. Leaves long left lingering to the point of desiccation and abandonment. Leaves left so long you felt sorry for them. Like some loose wad of hair clung to the side of a shower wall, they disgusted him. Beneath it all, a lawn begged to thrive in the repudiation of never being touched by another twig, and instead, feel the invigorating release by being combed aggressively by someone already in labored breath removing a rake from a truck bed.

As he approached the first section of his depilation, he treaded carefully, though in vain, he immediately stepped in dog shit. He stood there, for what felt like an eternity, gripping the handle of the rake as if it was the only thing keeping him upright, holding his chest with his eyes closed, allowing his internal tea kettle to simmer from its roaring boil, as both the realisation and miasma of animal excrement spread amongst the grooves his bootheel like wet dough.

In futility, he dragged his extremity against the leaves, hoping they might provide him absorption and friction. They crumbled into an obstinate, coarse dust as he made contact. Rather than deal with the problem at hand, he persisted in his scatophilic sashay. He may have been wearing boots, but his foot moved with grace like a soft shoe dancer. Even more exhausted than before, he began to rake.

The weather that Spring morning was the sort of temperature that required both a jacket and introspection. Though his limbs were cold, he stored a great deal of body heat at his core. And at the tip of his core, was the eternally warm sprout of his manhood, eager to take soil. As he groomed the yard, he envisioned the supple topography of Alyssa. It no doubt had its share of peaks and valleys that he was well-equipped to traverse, the endurance to walk them, and a compass that was already pointed due north.

He often drew pleasure letting his member just rest against the bare ass or backside of a woman, like some unbaked loaf, slowly proofing on a warm surface. This gave him ample time to draw in pheromones from the back of the neck, and then sink his teeth into it to activate them further. Half-assed in his work, he dreamt of her with wreckless abandon.

Alyssa was just tall enough to appreciate without sensing such sexual dimorphism you might find in most species. She was his equal, both in lengths and strengths. He had become obsessed with her neck. The way her shorter haircut sort of revealed it. Its pale pigment, with a soft blue vein running along its left side into her suprasternal notch. He had spied her once in a beautiful pearl necklace and earrings set with lace that aroused him in a way he could not easily process.

The thought of a woman wearing something that represented class, while allowing the most lascivious acts to be done to her without hesitancy of thought, truly was his highest admiration of her. He could probably satiate himself on that tonic alone. But James was no conventional man, despite his ability to loiter among the lesser deviants, whose sexual proclivities were as vanilla as the ice cream truck clanging 3 blocks away. He would settle for nothing less than a completely subservient feminine muse, lower-middle class, worn out from a world that won't give her a moment's peace. Slightly covered in dog hair and cereal, she'd need to be given the release of serotonin that would give her the energy and desire to suck a man off in return. It wasn't transactional. It was love in its simplest form, with the least amount of steps involved.

Deep down she might have been embarrassed of her untidy home, but what was shown on her porcelain surface was ambivalence. There was just enough time to feed her daughter, fetch a nap, read some third rate smut, and rub out an uninterrupted orgasm, in the muffled silence of a bedroom with a dreamcatcher and a dirty duvet. A mother in martyrdom. Who was she to be dealt such a bad hand in life? Though he was ruled by the lizard part of his brain, the mammalian portion made him see that her inadequacies were no cause of her own, and she was a selfless woman with a good heart, caught in an exhaustion of an existence.

Hers was a world where males brought her dissonance. She had to be careful of the sort of men she let in. They had to earn her trust and demonstrate docility long before the realm of the physical and the psychosexual could be mutually exploited. Those who could, were rewarded in the expert care of a woman who simply knew how to please. Compared to a toddler, a man was an easy task to handle.

James began to bag the piles of leaves, casually heaving them to the front curb in haphazard stacks. His off-key whistling only briefly stopping as he grunted and wheezed like an octogenarian bending slightly to reach. This cacophony aroused the attention of a neighbor, who had just moved in next door. Unknown how long he was being watched, he nodded to the woman, clearing his throat, as he navigated the narrow corridor between their properties to the backyard.

The leaves would never truly be vanquished. No sooner would he remove the last, Summer would end, and Fall would rear its shedding head, ready to make another mess to be removed. He relished in this security of work, which kept him close to such a specimen. Every good turf needs constant trimming to appreciate its beauty. Even more precious, the good nature of trying in vain to make produce in uneven dirt. The climate in West Virginia could be mercurial, as could his emotions towards her unavailability. He possessed the tools she needed, he was both eager and assertive. He could fix what she could not. She could do the same, but only in proper dosage of time alone, number of hours slept, pages of smut read, and position of the moon in relation to her vessel.

His success it seemed, would to be reliably available, and demonstrate being an asset. There were of course chores she could do alone, that flared his genitalia in jealous desperation that he could not do them for her whenever she wished. What people refer to as soul mates, he had distilled into a simpler belief, that two people have the potential to have private parts fit so well, they were destined, if not forever, to intersect and make the worst of a good situation. If he only had her on top of him, hips grasped firmly, delivering a thrust at a 45° angle, she then might feel the ease of tension only a toolset like his might provide.