cantaraville & cantarabooks

THE SALVATION OF BILLY WAYNE CARTER

M. David Hornbuckle is originally from Birmingham, Alabama. He currently lives in New York, in a one-room apartment, with four roommates, three of whom are feline. By day, he wanders the streets of Manhattan, writing things in a notebook. When he needs money, he works. By night he leads the M. David Hornbuckle Dixieland Space Orchestra. His fiction has appeared in many literary publications, including McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Ruminate Magazine, Air in the Paragraph Line, and Nanofiction.

In The Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter, a rock star becomes  the public face of the rebel movement in a second US Civil War—a war based on art.

Photo by Marie Mundaca.

Excerpt 

    She lightly touches his leg with her foot. She begins to imagine that she has spent her whole life wasting away in this dirty little roadhouse for a reason, that she’s to be his savior. She hears a thump, which must have been one of his boots dropping to the floor because she soon feels a socked foot reaching into the sheath of her skirt. And then he speaks.
    —Today’s my birthday.
    —Really.
    No question mark. The fact, if it is one, does not impress her. She is impressed, however, by the diligence of his foot, which has found its way inside her skirt and is gently yanking at her panties.
    —So how old are you?
    She rests her free foot on his crotch, petting his erection with her toes. She lifts herself a little to help him tug at her underwear.
    —Old enough.
    He’s successfully pulled her panties past one hip, and soon his other boot is off, and he’s beginning to work on the other side.
    —Bartender, another round.
    The bartender brings a bourbon and Coke and one mysterious black drink and sets them on the table. Then he drifts back into his own universe.
    Jenny Mae feels the draft signifying that her panties have dropped to the floor. She knows it’s her move. A table separates her from Billy Wayne. She stares intensely into his deep brown eyes.
    —Listen, I gotta pee, but I will be right back.
    She slowly stands up, not removing her gaze until she’s walked through the slightly less dilapidated of the two bathroom doors. In the restroom, she catches her breath and splashes some cold water on her face.
    Fear grips her shoulders as a swift breeze ripped through the dusty cracked smile in the window pane. She scrutinizes the mirror, runs her fingers over the almost invisible scar under her eye where a table corner had once stopped her running from a gorgon-shadow.
    A warm flush covers her face and neck. She wonders how far she should let things go before inviting him back to her place or maybe a motel. Then she wonders what will happen afterward, and if he will disappoint her. All that she wants was to escape the deathtrap that is her mind. Outside the bar, she has her classes at the junior college and her tiny nondescript apartment. But if she had to pick one thing that had a real presence in her life, it would be the red Naugahyde pew where she sits drinking her black drink, thinking under a blue light.
    She comes back and sits down next to Billy Wayne in the booth.
    —So, do you have any plans?
    —No. The future’s wide open, far as I’m concerned.
    She slides over closer to him, and he puts his right hand over her left leg, which she’s prudently crossed over her knee. She covers his hand with her own. As he massages the lower part of her thigh with his palm, his fingers find the crevice where her leg no longer protect her virtue, and she wonders if he’ll dare to pry it open. He slips his hand along the seam of this fleshy border, and she opens for him.
    As he massages her clitoris and she feels the juice on the inside of her legs, she unbuttons his pants and brings out his cock which flips out of his fly desperate and rigid as if it’s been freed from suffocation. She caresses it with her manicured fingertips for a few seconds then bends down to put it in her mouth.
    She feels a hand affectionately grabbing her breast, and she begins to be driven by a deeper force, the force that runs through all living matter, that forms at the base of the libido and spawns the urge to procreate. If this is the spirituality she had been missing, she wants to break out in a hymn. The only one she can think of was “When the Saints Go Marching In.” In her mind, she sings as loud as a dream, Oh I want to be in that number  /  When the saints go marching in.
    She loves the warm fleshy taste of his erect cock in her mouth, but when she feels it begin to tremble with urgency, she’s not ready for him to spend. She pulls back his testicles and removes her lips from the trunk. She glances over at the barflies. They don’t seem to have noticed anything. She lifts one leg and wraps it around Billy Wayne, and then she sits back onto the table with her knees spread in front of his face.
    She unzips her skirt down the side, and he peels it off. Lacing her legs over his shoulders, she sees that he notices the message tattooed just above her crotch, one word in a simple black ink sans serif font—the word “yes.”
    Every beast and demon that Jenny Mae ever imagined appears before her and then dissolves into the red light with the neon blue halo that lines the back of her eyes. She pulls his face out of her crotch and turns over to mount him from his lap. She reaches into her purse and expertly opens a condom package. She slips the sheath onto his rigid cock and helps him insert this final monster into her body. She cradles it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until neither can stand to go any longer. Her back arches all the way over the table, and she begins to pant and moan. He lets out a small whimper, and she knows it will be over soon, so she rocks backward more forcefully until, face and neck flushed, her flight has landed.

PDF | 60 Pages | 8.5 x 11 | US$4.95

ISBN 9781933688091

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