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Wilma & Betty: Episode IV
Wilma & Betty IV: Betty and Yesterday
By
Jason Mott
On the table between them, a half-empty glass of wine filled the space.
“God!” Betty exclaimed, smiling. “I just can’t believe how long it’s been.”
It had been decades since Betty last saw the woman now sitting across from her at the small, circular table in the window of Black Jurassic Java & Spirits. When Betty last saw the woman, she was not a woman at all. She was a girl, a dark-skinned Cro-Magnon girl—young and brown and glib.
“I’ve been living in New Pebble Beach,” the woman said. “I still love the sun.”
“It shows,” Betty replied.
The woman extended a thick, sienna hand and raised the glass of wine to her lips. She drank it slowly, in timid sips, as though each would be her last.
“And what have you been up to?” the woman asked. “That little gray stone on your finger tells me that, somewhere out there lost in a storm of mail, there’s an invitation with my name on it.”
Betty laughed. It was a light, sparkling laugh. It arched her back.
“I didn’t know how to get in touch with you. You disappeared after that summer, remember? It was your parents, right? They picked up and moved to Morocco. That’s what my mother told me anyhow.”
“It was something like that,” Dive deeper…
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Wilma & Betty: Episode III
Wilma & Betty III: New Year’s Eve
By
Jason Mott
The night was early. The moon was still awakening from the dusk. But, already, all of them—Wilma and Betty and Fred and Barney—were so drunk on Jack Danielstone whiskey that none of them could remember who had suggested “wife swapping.”
The four of them lay sprawled across the new saber-toothed tiger rug that Fred had bought with his Christmas bonus from Mr. Slate a few days earlier.
Wilma and Barney went first. Dive deeper…
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Wilma & Betty. Episode II
The Further Adventures of Wilma & Betty
Episode II: A Beautiful Afternoon
Wilma had been unsettled for weeks.
“What’s been eating you?” Betty asked. The two of them sat in Wilma’s kitchen sipping coffee. In the backyard, Dino clawed the base of a wide, gray tree. Above him, in the branches, something moved. Dino yipped. Wilma and Betty watched through the open kitchen window.
“You know what’s eating me,” Wilma grumbled.
“Well,” Betty said with a wry grin, “hopefully it’s Fred.”
Wilma groaned. “Don’t even start me on that,” she said. “It’s been months. He can’t get it up no matter how many Diamond Hards his doctor prescribes. And, to be honest, even if he could get it up, I’d rather read a book.”
“Well, I feel for you,” Betty said. “My Barney’s a dynamo though. He may not look like it, but I’ll tell you, Wilma, the man’s a carnivore in a thousand different ways.”
This was old news to Wilma. This was old news to everyone in the Wilma’s neighborhood. The air around Betty and Barney’s house was always filled with guttural groans and the thick, musty scent of sweat and arousal. On warm summer evenings the neighbors often sat, quietly, on their rooftops listening—never speaking. Sometimes they smiled at one another.
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Wilma & Betty (a short). Episode I
The Further Adventures of Wilma & Betty
Episode I: Start the Revolution
It started one day because Wilma just got fed up with cleaning up Dino’s dino droppings that were always springing up on Fred’s favorite Saber-toothed rug. And when she wasn’t trying to get that smell out of the rug she was cleaning up whatever mess Pebbles and Bam-Bam had managed to make. Jesus Christ, that damned Bam-Bam was always breaking the bamboo dishes or the granite coffee mugs or putting cracks on the marble coffee table that Fred bought with his Christmas bonus.
“Dammit Betty, can’t you keep that kid of yours home sometimes? Let him bam-bam and break up your fine China set hand made and imported from the Yangtze Rock delta.”
“Don’t talk to me, Wilma. My house is already broken up. I can’t do a damned thing about that boy. Barney’s got him spoiled rotten. He thinks Bam-Bam’s gonna be some big time Slateball star and make it to the major leagues the way he never did. Damned men, always trying to cling to some glory they never even had.”
“Tell me about it. It’s the same thing with Fred. ‘I coulda’ been a football star! I coulda been a football star.’ Yeah, and I coulda been married to Brad Pittstone but it just didn’t work out that way. I coulda been a lot of things if I’d been given half a chance and a set of stones between my legs, but you don’t see me clinging to that, do you? Do you hear me whining?”
“So, Wilma, what’s the solution?”
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