Shovel Sisters

Dan loved open mic reading nights. He almost never missed one. There was so much young talent to see. There were goth girls reading poetry about how much they hated their parents and how repressed they were, ripe to lose their virginity for the sake of rebellion. Blonde lipstick feminists with piercings and fashion that was appropriated from the indigenous culture du jour who wrote very literary prose about wanderlust and being in touch with mother earth. That, or poetry about their vagina. Occasionally there was a cougar who wrote about her anger towards her exes and getting her groove back, and, also, about her vagina. This was peppered in by ex military guys, or guys who wished they were ex military, who read bloody war stories. Pimply teenagers read their fan fiction that paired the male leads in hackneyed romantic trysts. Awkward D&D kids, some of them in their 30's, were always trying to be the next Tolkien. There was even the occasional old Christian lady wearing something purple who read stories about angels.

Dan taught lit and writing at the local community college. He was published a few times about 10 or 15 years ago, (okay, actually more like 20), in literary magazines that have since moved over to being all online or that just disappeared. But still, published was published. He's been tooling with a memoir now for a few years and was always looking for more conquests/chapters to add to it. Since his divorce a few years back his writing has really taken off, he felt. And these readings were great. He got to bounce his material off a crowd, judging the room in advance if he should trade out "pussy" for "cunt", and ready to explain how his blunt language was necessary to embody the raw passions and drive of his protagonist in the piece. And he would take notes on the readers that looked like someone he would like to get to know better, nodding along emphatically and trying to catch their eye before he bowed his head and scrawled in his leather bound journal, the one he bought because it reminded him of the one from the Indiana Jones movie where Sean Connery played Indie's dad. He was prepped to compliment each woman or girl about a few choice lines or images they used, drop in a side mention about how it was the perfect example of something he had been trying to get his class to understand just this last week, and that it may be something that they could submit to a journal for publication or expand into a novel.

"I mean, I'd read it!" He'd laugh as he looked down at his shoes and rubbed the back of his neck, the perfect depiction of shyness.

If he was really really lucky, he could convince a "fellow writer" to go out for drinks or a coffee with him after the reading. If he felt that he could get them to come back to his place afterwards, he would hold off slipping a little GHB into their drink until then. If he didn't think he could get them there, and if he hadn't gotten laid in a while, he would do it right at the bar or cafe. Sometimes he couldn't pull it off because of those damn plastic coffee lids with the little openings, in which case it was saying goodnight while exchanging numbers and Twitter handles instead of helping her into his backseat and helping her out of her panties.

He was eyeing up the girl with the black fishnet stockings on. There was a hole in the thigh that he was thinking of putting his fingers through. He was slowly getting hard, spread his thighs a little wider as he leaned back onto the creaky wooden bookshop chair.

He was pulled from his reverie by the clunk of a heavy sack of a purse hitting the floor at the front of the room. The next reader up was a soccer-mom looking woman who mouthed a grimacing "sorry" to the crowd for the sudden bang. She then rummaged through her bag and pulled out a stack of papers, smoothed them on the podium, and prepared to read. Dan summed her up at a glance. Wedding band, necklace with her kids birth stones in it, nice legs in her skinny jeans but her loose sweater was probably hiding a muffin top, and her socks had cats on them. Boring. He got comfortable and did his best to look like he was listening while still half-focused on that hole in the goth girl's stocking.