You Can Never Spit It All Out Read online

  Critical Praise for Ralph Robert Moore

  Father Figure

  "It is easy to see why Father Figure has become an underground classic over the years. It is a dark, extremely disturbing but completely gripping suspense thriller with a strongly erotic subtext...Moore is an extremely talented writer with a gift for pushing the reader's emotional buttons...certainly liable to become a cult classic, and deservedly so." – Editorial Review

  Remove the Eyes

  "Tired of the usual suspects? Bored with the same old genre clichés? Then follow my advice and read Ralph Robert Moore, a hell of a writer whose work is provocative and refreshing, never ordinary, always imaginative and graced by a compelling narrative style…Try him, you won't regret it." – Mario Guslandi

  "…[Moore's] work is not quite like that of anybody else. He is a true original…and if you are looking for something different, then I can't recommend this collection highly enough." – Peter Tennant

  "Unusual, erotic, frightening and stunningly good…This collection showcases the wide and versatile range of [Moore's] work." – Trevor Denyer

  I Smell Blood

  "With eight stories and the short novel "Kid", the new collection…[is] one of the best collections I've read this year, delivering exactly the kind of uncompromising thrills and spills I've come to expect from this writer." – Peter Tennant

  "Ralph Robert Moore's second collection confirms the excellent qualities displayed in his previous book Remove the Eyes, namely a powerful imagination, an extraordinary degree of originality and a great storytelling ability…A highly recommended book." – Mario Guslandi

  "Moore's work is consistently fascinating, original and devastating. His characters speak to you from whatever hell they inhabit, with clear, unambiguous voices...[I Smell Blood] is a worthy successor to Remove the Eyes." – Trevor Denyer

  "Disturbing. Nightmarish. Terrifying. And above all original... reinforces his reputation, amongst those in the know, that here we have a genre-storytelling giant in our midst." – AJ Kirby

  As Dead As Me

  "Relentless, unsentimental, and with a plot that moves like a freight train. You want bleak? Read this…an excellent novel from an excellent writer." – Gary McMahon

  "This book…has the advantage of Moore's extraordinary imagination being brought to bear, introducing characters and situations that you care passionately about. Without giving too much away, the climax to the story astounds the reader by its spectacular, heartrending audacity. A brilliant achievement." – Trevor Denyer

  "By making his characters so fully rounded, Moore gives us a reason to care about them, and this in turn makes the book's resolution all the more poignant and painful… These are just ordinary human beings, acting with common decency in the face of the unacceptable…He takes the familiar and makes it heartrendingly sad." – Peter Tennant

  Ghosters

  Best Novel 2015 - Dark Musings Awards

  "…Moore has written a book that contains a thoroughly original and totally convincing portrayal of the supernatural world, one in which cosmic vision and human feeling collide. I loved every single page of it, not least for the wealth of incidental detail and the assured way in which Moore so often circles around the crux of each story, slowly dragging it out into the light of day, letting us see and experience what is really at stake. It does for ghosts what his novel As Dead As Me did for zombies, with bells on." – Peter Tennant

  "These are not ordinary ghosts and the Ghosters are far from being normal individuals. The ghosts are startlingly original creations from the mind of one of the most accomplished writers in the field…The solutions to the hauntings are spectacularly horrifying. Once again, Ralph Robert Moore has produced a startlingly original book that surprises and unsettles with every page turn. He has seamlessly fused these elements with a genuinely sympathetic understanding of character and personal tragedy that propels this collection into the literary stratosphere. His work inspires as it reinvents familiar themes, infusing them with something that only the most talented writers can achieve: a sense of wonder that takes your breath away." – Trevor Denyer

  "Moore's writing is consistently powerful, his descriptions (even of the smallest minutia) terrifically rendered. He is not afraid to tap into his darkest imaginings and to go places most writers might very well shy away from. Indeed, he is one of the most singularly powerful authors I've encountered in a long, long while…" – C.M. Muller

  "Ghosters…are members of a small group who travel around America "curing" people of their hauntings…All are beautifully drawn characters…There's a lot of humour in this book then but there's also real horror– the opening and closing stories in particular, set in the upper floors of a haunted mall, contain some truly disturbing imagery–and there's also poignancy, often when you least expect it. The Ghosters themselves are wonderful creations and the skill the author shows in moulding them is also evident in the characters of the clients…[he] manages to invest all his characters with real personality and depth. [Moore]…is an extremely imaginative writer, coming up with some truly original ideas. That skill is demonstrated emphatically in Ghosters and I sincerely hope the world he's created here is one the author will return to in future publications. It's a book I urge you to buy." – Anthony Watson

  Also by Ralph Robert Moore

  Father Figure (novel)

  Remove the Eyes (short story collection)

  I Smell Blood (short story collection)

  As Dead As Me (novel)

  Ghosters (novel in ten stories)

  You Can

  Never

  Spit It

  All Out

  10 Novelettes by

  Ralph Robert Moore

  SENTENCE Publishing

  www.ralphrobertmoore.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Ralph Robert Moore

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof (other than for review purposes), may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  The following stories first appeared, in slightly different versions, in these publications: "Dirt Land", "Kebab Bob" and "Drown Town" in Black Static; "She Has Maids" in Hellfire Crossroads; "They Hide in Tomatoes", "Nobody I Knew" and "Suddenly the Sun Appeared" in Midnight Street. This is the first publication for "During the Time I Was Out", "Imperfect Boy", and "Boyfriend".

  Cover image from the New York Public Library's Security Administrator's photographs, "Scott's Run Outside of Morgantown, West Virginia", free to use without restrictions; photograph by Walker Evans.

  Cover design by Ralph Robert Moore

  To Mary

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN-13: 978-1539541707

  ISBN-10: 1539541703

  Table of Contents

  Dirt Land 1

  Kebab Bob 41

  During the Time I Was Out 77

  She Has Maids 119

  Imperfect Boy 163

  They Hide in Tomatoes 195

  Boyfriend 235

  Nobody I Knew 289

  Suddenly the Sun Appeared 325

  Drown Town 361

  Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

  Missing me one place search another,

  I stop somewhere waiting for you.

  –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

  Dirt Land

  Up on the mountain, not everything that gets born is human. Or at least, human enough. That's just the way it is. Some of them are kept, if they look close enough, but a lot are taken down to the river before they get big, and drowned. Shaken out of a blanket. If you go downstream, you'll find all kinds of dead babies bumping against the gray river rocks. Stiff limbs, open mouths. Getting picked at by fish. Of course, up on the mou
ntain, the people who live there catch that fish, like they catch all fish. Fry it. Eat it. That may be part of the problem.

  Audrey was six months pregnant when she thought maybe the baby in her belly wasn't going to turn out human enough. Because of the way it was starting to move inside. A mother can tell.

  She went to see her aunt, who she could confide in more than her mother, because her mother had never left the hollow, but her aunt had worked for years at a bank down in Farmer's Crossing. Her aunt had slept with a lot more men than her mother ever did, so she knew a lot more about the world. She used to tell Audrey stories about, for example, what it was like sucking off a man who wouldn't remove his socks and shoes, because he was afraid of feet, even his own feet, and how to behave in a restaurant.

  Aunt Telise was in the back of her cabin, in the kitchen looking out over the river. The kitchen had a strong smell of cucumbers.

  "Aunt Telise? Are you making salad again?"

  Audrey told her aunt her fears about the baby she was carrying.

  "Do you know who the father is?"

  "I'm saying it's Roy."

  Her aunt added some sliced radishes to the wooden bowl. Radishes are so easy to grow. Twenty-eight days, and that redness is ready to be pulled out of the dirt. "That'd be nice. Always try to align yourself with a man who's not a hitter. And Roy's not a hitter, right?"

  Audrey took a seat at her aunt's kitchen table, brushing her pale blonde hair from her blue eyes. Too beautiful to be living in the hollow, if there was any justice in the world, but since there wasn't, it kind of made sense. "No, he never hit me. I got him really drunk a couple of times, just to see, and started talking about other boys, that test we all do? But he stayed calm. He cried, but he didn't reach out to strike me. I've put him through a lot of misery, but the worse it ever caused was he'd start seeing hallucinations."

  "Like what kind of hallucinations?"

  "Things crawling behind the boxes and jars in my mother's pantry that weren't there."

  "Or so you assume."

  "Never thought of that. But even then, in that stress, he never raised a hand against me."

  Aunt Telise added some fried potatoes to the salad. "Talk to him then. See what he wants to do. Young boy like that, cock as big as his is, so I've been told, he could give you lots more babies, if the first one is craps."

  Roy worked at the sawmill, like just about every other man in the hollow. Fourteen, but mature for his age. She didn't like him at first, when they were growing up, because he used to always throw mud balls at her. Her mother told her to stay away from him, to go into the woods if she saw him approaching on the road, but her aunt told her to talk him up. "If he's throwing mud balls at you, that means he's trying to get your attention. He just doesn't know how to do it yet with words."

  So Audrey went over his house one time when no one was home but him. She was fifteen back then and he was twelve, but because he was bigger than her he managed to get her out of her clothes, then he shoved her naked in the house's one bathroom with a wild raccoon he caught by the scruff of its neck, leaning against the door, not letting her out, while she banged her fists and pleaded, because the raccoon was attacking her, clawing her legs, and when he finally had her completely dissolved in tears he creaked the door open so she could stumble out, all composure gone, and fucked her in the little hallway outside the bathroom, raccoon scratches on her thighs and stomach.

  After that, he'd have her come over every day while his mother was at the saw mill. She always showed up, obediently, not knowing why she was obeying this little kid, but she did. He'd get her naked as soon as he closed the front door behind her, then ride on top of her, pulling her hair back, or make her eat grease from the skillet that had been left out overnight, or have her lie on the ground in the backyard while he stood over her, pissing down on her. Children can be particularly good at meanness.

  After a while, if she was a horse, she was broken in. The way he humiliated her, day after day? Made her do things, that sitting at her school desk in the civilized world she never thought she would do? No matter how much she loved a man? After a while, she kind of liked it. It was supposed to be the boy begging the girl for sex. But what it turned out to be, after he had worked on her mind long enough, was her begging him for sex. Even though he was so young, he had the tallest cock she had ever seen. Wasn't a day that went by where visiting him in his mother's home she wouldn't cross one bare thigh of hers over the other, jiggling her foot like girls do, yearning to have that thick cock slide back up inside her again, so she wouldn't have to think about anything. He got the upper hand on her, that's for sure, and she found out she really liked that.

  When she ran into Roy at the saw mill, she told him her misgivings about their baby. "Well, have it, and we'll see when it comes out. If it isn't close enough to human to pass, give it to me."

  "And you'll drown it?"

  "I may play with it for a while first. I'm the father. I got that right."

  So she carried their baby to term. Roy took a day off from his work to be with her in her mother's home, where there was running water, while she delivered. All kinds of blood and tissue slid out of her, along with a lot of big, red bubbles. Finally the fetus tumbled out, with a clickity-clack you don't often hear during a birth, limbs kicking, too many knees and knobbiness, big eyelids shut.

  It looked normal, except instead of two arms and two legs, it had four legs.

  Like a cow.

  Roy and Audrey had to decide what to do with it.

  She suckled it at her breast while still in her mother's bed, its little front hooves clamped around her nipple, squeezing to get it to squirt, big eyes still closed. Her head tilted down, watching it slurp at her breast, rubbing her lips together. Wishing it was born normal, or at least near-normal. She started singing to it in a low, whispery voice. Old mountain songs. About men and women with three names who had a hard lot in life and often made bad decisions.

  Roy scratched the back of his neck, looking down at mother and son. "Guess if any time is the appropriate time to ask this question, this is the time. You ever have sex with an animal before you got pregnant?"

  Head on the white pillow, she raised her face. "No, I did not, Roy. Unlike you."

  "Point taken, I guess."

  He watched the little face as it pulled on his wife's nipple, drinking from her body. "It does seem a little like me, I guess. The love of the breast."

  Audrey smirked, wincing slightly at the strong suck. Blue eyes knowing how to flirt. "Guess you're not too upset, if you're joking."

  "What are we gonna call it? Has to have a name, if for no other reason than convenience."

  "I was thinking Scott? After my dad?"

  Roy considered. "I like your dad. But I think the name has to acknowledge there's something wrong with it. We could hide that in the name itself. I'm thinking, Scowtt. What do you think?"

  They took little Scowtt home with them three days after Audrey gave birth.

  Home was a one-room shack Roy built out of scrap lumber and used nails at the rear of his father's property, in anticipation of the birth, against a large magnolia tree. No running water or electricity, but the square holes in the walls they used as windows caught a nice breeze off the river, and the woods surrounding the shack were full of squirrels and birds. Once Roy finished their home, he dug a pit outside the front door and lined it with stones, and that was where they'd cook their meals and heat their coffee.

  Now let's talk about Roy, and then we're going to talk about Audrey.

  Roy was born into the Worley family as the second son. There was a first son, but he died shortly after birth, according to his father. There was an older sister, Misty, the first born, but she died in a car accident at an intersection in Turner's Crossing, while little Roy was in the passenger seat. He loved his older sister. The first time he ever heard of pizza, and the first time he ever ate a slice of it, was when she took him in the family car to a restaurant in Eli's Gulch. A boy
can learn a lot about respecting women if he has an older sister who takes an interest in him, and introduces him to all the wonders of the outside world. At the time of that fateful car crash, he had accompanied his big sister while she went to Eli's Gulch to enroll in the U.S. Army. She figured that was the best way for her to get thrown out into the wider world, and to visit lands that were so unlike her own. On the wall of the room where all the Worley children slept, by her bed, she had put up a photograph she found somewhere of an Egyptian pyramid. There were little men standing in front of it, to show its scale. "Nobody's ever built something that big in Farmer's Crossing, or even Eli's Gulch. I want to live where the people think big. They build an Eifel Tower, or an Empire State Building. Those are my people."

  On the day of the fateful crash, Misty had just completed her sign-up papers for the Army, and she and little Roy were headed towards Papa Jupe's Restaurant, where she was going to treat him to something called Moussaka, which he kept forgetting how to pronounce correctly, because of all the confusing syllables, but which was a Greek dish, from Greece where Aristotle and Jason and the Argonauts lived, and which had something called eggplant as a main ingredient. That ingredient, eggplant, intrigued him. He pictured a plant that grew eggs. How would those eggs be different from chicken eggs? Would they have yellow yolks inside, or once you pulled an egg off a stem and cracked it open, would it be all green inside? As they were driving towards Papa Jupe's he was eating, from a small brown bag, pistachios she had bought him. Only he didn't understand you were supposed to split the shells first, like clams, then eat the nut inside. So he was just popping the whole nuts in his mouth, cracking the shells with his back grinders, thinking, Well, some of this tastes good, but it's a lot of trouble. Misty, hands on the wheel, glanced over, saw what he was doing, and laughed. "You got it wrong, firefly. Pull the shells apart first, then eat what's inside." He felt embarrassed he couldn't figure that out, and she, good older sister that she was, started to reassure him, minimizing his error, when the steering wheel popped out of her hands and flew up into her jaw, crushing her two rows of teeth together, and she had really good teeth, she took care of them, even though a few were crooked, crushing those loving blue eyes he depended on, the top of her pale brown hair, and he woke up lying on the dirt street, lots of pant legs and high heels around him, wide river of strawberry jam coming out of the upside down car's popped windows and squashed metal, soaking into the ground.