The Bedwetter: Journal of a Budding Psychopath

By Lee Allen Howard

Armed with electric hair trimmers and a military fighting knife, Russell accepts his dark commission.

Russell Pisarek is twenty-six years old and still wets the bed. He grew up different from other young men because his vicious mother punished him for wetting by shaving his head. When he confided this to his girlfriend Tin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Three First Names
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733700917

Lee Allen Howard

Although born and raised the son of a preacher, Lee Allen Howard knew since second grade he wanted to be a horror writer. He loved all things creepy and was terrorized by a recurring nightmare in which Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Mummy chased him all around the house. This led to telling stories on the dark side of reality. Since then, he's written five novels-Death Perception, The Sixth Seed, The Adamson Family, The Bedwetter: Journal of a Budding Psychopath, The Covenant Sacrifice-and a collection of early short stories, Perpetual Nightmares. His dark fiction spans the genres of horror, LGBTQ horror, dark mystery, supernatural crime, and psychological thrillers. Howard earned his bachelor's in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. He's been a professional writer in the software industry since 1985 and also edits fiction. Howard is the founder and editor at Dark Cloud Press, which published the horror and dark crime anthologies Thou Shalt Not... and Tales of Blood and Squalor. He resides in western New York with a ton of books. Visit him online at https://leeallenhoward.com, Lee Allen Howard, author on Facebook, and @LeeAllenHoward on Twitter.

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THE BEDWETTER

by Lee Allen Howard

https://leeallenhoward.com/

Copyright © 2021 Lee Allen Howard. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments

To Michael A. Arnzen and his Instigation.

To Bradley Kurtik for vet tech inspiration.

To Timothy Craft, for lab and rabbit information,

and for being a good friend

and the son I never had.

And to all my faithful—and

new to be faithful—readers.

He who loves his son will whip him often,

so that he may rejoice at the way he turns out.

−Sirach 30:1 NRSVCE 

Even if my father and mother abandon me,

the Lord will hold me close.

−Psalm 27:10 NLT

When you look into the abyss,

the abyss also looks into you.

−Friedrich Nietzsche

1

In the house where we lived when Becky and me were in school, my mother’s lying on the basement floor, fugly and naked on the red linoleum, with the electric hair clippers jammed up her cooz. They’re plugged in and running, eating her alive on the inside.

She’s diddling herself with her big manly hands, yowling like a cat. I can’t tell if it’s from pleasure or pain till I step up and piss on her. Then it’s all pain.

My arc of hot whizz hits her right in the face and splashes over her buzzed head and the pile of gray hair like dirty laundry on the tile. She gasps, spits, and curses me like she always does.

I say, "Shame on you, now. Shame on you! SHAME ON YOU, YOU FUCKIN EVIL BITCH!"

I continue spraying a golden fountain over her flat tits, the bunched hysterectomy scar, and onto the mound of matted gray fur between her ricotta thighs.

When my piss hits the trimmers, she’s electrocuted and bucks like a rhino getting shock therapy. Sparks fly. She spews blue lightning out her hole, and then she bursts into flames, screaming like a demon.

A flame dances up my piss-stream like it’s lighter fluid, an unquenchable fire climbing the stairway to heaven.

But in the dream I never get electrocuted—I never get burned. At least I ain’t yet. I always wake up. And I always wet the bed.

·    ·    ·

The angry red digits of my alarm clock across the room tell me it’s 3:00 a.m., the pissing hour.

I ain’t wet the bed in a long time. I thought I was completely over it, but I guess not. It happened because of the dream. I’ve had this dream before, lots of times, when I lived at home. Always the same thing, and every time it makes me wet. And that’s not all.

My cock is a rock. I stick my hand in my sopping undies and rub one out real quick before my piss turns cold. Then I shuck my shorts, strip the sour mattress, and wrap myself in my catskin rug I keep hid under the bed. It’s the only dry thing I got.

2

I’m an animal tech at a research facility in Pittsburgh. East Liberty, or Slibberty as the yokels call it.

I don’t know if I like working at this place yet because I only been here two weeks. So far it’s better than the animal hospital I left. I didn’t get along with the management there. Or the customers. Some pet owners think more of Miss Kitty than they do their own damn grandma. And the pay was shit. So I quit and took this job where I don’t gotta deal with the public. I got my own laptop, and that’s cool because I can write this. We’ll see how it all pans out. But I’ve always worked with animals. Always.

Today I’m tired because I got up before 6:00 to catch the 86 from West Penn Hospital in Bloomfield to Slibberty. I have a car, but Becky’s RAV4 is in the shop. She’s got farther to go and has to take Aiden to daycare, so I let her drive my Focus. It’s a real beater, but it gets me here to there and ain’t too bad on gas.

My sister’s two years younger than me. She’s got a lot going for her, and I mean that. Soon as she graduated high school, she started nursing college. At West Penn, right near where we live. She got her R.N. in twenty-two months, and during her second year I moved in with her while she finished school. I’m real proud of her. Seems like somebody in our screwed-up family deserves to do right and be a success. Sure as hell ain’t me.

The day I turned seventeen, I dropped out of school and left home. I would’ve quit sooner, but it’s illegal in Pennsylvania, the kind of illegal you can’t get away with. If you don’t go to school, they come and find you.

I sold drugs for a while, mostly pot and K and X. I shacked up with some guys who quit McKeesport High too. It went ok for a while till they found out about my issue, or my pissue as I call it. They turned out to be real assholes, all of them.

When one of Becky’s roommates graduated, I asked Becky could I move in with her. She didn’t like the idea, but she couldn’t afford the rent by herself, so I wore her down pretty quick.

After she graduated, she got a job—a good job—at a nursing home. We’re still living in the same townhouse, and things are going great.

Becky’s real mature. Definitely the stable one in our family. I can’t say enough about her. She got me to quit dealing. Encouraged me to get my G.E.D. and even helped me go to school to become a vet tech.

You’re not dumb, Russell, she says. You just need to apply yourself.

I’m trying.

I took most of the vet tech classes, but I never graduated. I lie about it, though, and say I did. The first place I applied to checked, and I didn’t get the job, the bastards. But I didn’t need a vet tech degree to work at the pet shop. A year there got me the gig at the animal hospital and, a few months after that, the job I’m at now. One thing leads to another. So my animal experience gets me the jobs.

I been cheated out of pay and benefits more than once cuz I don’t got a degree, so that kind of chaps my ass. But I’m working, I’m working. Always with animals.

You could say animals have paved the way to greater things for me.

·    ·    ·

My arms are covered with scratches and scars. Occupational hazard from working with animals. I’m here now, at the lab, 7:00 a.m., drinking AMP Energy Drink I got at Tobacco Outlet last night.

I just got done feeding the rabbits. There’s cages and cages of them, stacked three high in the rabbit room, where we keep the test subjects. One of them got its foot stuck in the cage floor sometime during the night and hurt itself. Gnawed its own foot. Dumb bunny, for realz. I put a cone on its head to keep it from chewing its foot off. The rabbits can get like that, all stressed out because of what we’re doing to them.

Then I scraped their pans. SUCKS A BUNCH! By morning they’re full of bunny beans as we call them here. The bedding stuff we use, these pale wood shavings that come in a big plastic sack, remind me of Jody’s whittling on the oily garage floor back home. Anyway, the bedding gets soggy with piss and stinks. Kind of like my bed this morning, haha.

I should explain about that.

I wet the bed because I don’t wake up when I gotta go. Sounds obvious, but that’s what it’s really about. What other people have that wakes them up, I don’t got. So when I’m sleeping, when I’m dreaming, I just let go. I know it ain’t cool for a guy twenty-six to pee the bed, but like I said, I don’t do it all the time. Ain’t since I moved in with Becky, and that was YEARS ago.

Even when I lived at home, I could go for months without wetting. Then I’d piss two or three nights in a row, skip a night, and piss again. Like, Hey, it’s just my week to piss the bed.

I mean, girls get their period once a month like clockwork, and some of them rag on the sheets even if they’re wearing a tampon, right? But I’m the bad guy, the loser. Always the loser. Well, it pisses me off. Did you catch that? I try to keep a sense of humor about my problem even if nobody else thinks it’s funny, the FUCKS.

I got a urinary tract infection once. NO, IT WAS NOT AN STD—I was only a kid. Hurt like hell when I peed. And I have a small bladder. I think my balls are bigger than my bladder. One of them, anyway. So I always gotta pee, and I don’t wake up. Wish I did.

I gotta wake up.

Unless I’m having a nightmare, I’m a deep sleeper. Always have been. The alarm don’t wake me if I ain’t got enough sleep. I have to turn the volume all the way up (Becky sure bitches about that) and put the clock on the other side of the room to make sure I haul my ass outta bed to shut it off. Still, I can get up, slap that bitch into silence, and crawl right back under the covers and not remember doing it.

Guess I’m just fulla piss and vinegar. AND MOTHERFUCKING BATTERY ACID, BITCHES!

Uma just walked by my desk. She’s the receptionist and administrative assistant here.

I ain’t much of a smiler. But I’ve learned enough to play along when I’m in public, so I smile back. She blushes and keeps going, swinging her ass like she wants me to follow. I sit tight and think of the clippers.

She’s got a nice hairline, what you call a widow’s peak, and hair the color of japanese maple leaves in the fall, flowing like silk down to one shoulder. The other side is Skrillex BUZZED. This makes me hard and I gotta go to the men’s room. I’ll be back.

I promise to wash my hands. (-;

3

All young children wet the bed and must learn to wake themselves to be responsible.

That’s what a social worker told me once. I never learned it. Or there’s something wrong in my body—my kidneys or bladder or something. Maybe both. I don’t know.

I always been ridiculed for it. I was seven when my mother started in on me. She got everybody else involved, although Becky was too young to join in at first.

Did YOU wash your own sheets and make YOUR bed when you were seven? I did.

I started having nightmares about pissing on Melanoma. (Her name’s Melanie, but I call her Melanoma, NEVER MOM, because she’s like a deadly cancer.) Pissing on Melanoma, the clippers chewing up her cooz.

ELECTROfuckinCUTION!

In real life, of course, I would be electrocuted too. But in my dream I’m floating like I’m on Ketamine, hovering over her like THE ANGEL OF GODDAMN DEATH. And after that, the sparks, the flames… When I wake up I should be happy the bed’s wet instead of on fire. LOLz!!

Since I moved out of my parents’ torture house, I thought I was over the wetting. Maybe it is my body after all. Some kind of weird cycle I don’t understand.

Whatever, when I had this dream in the past, it led to a bad place. I wonder where it’ll lead to this time.

Ok, time to check the rabbits.

4

I wear a gentleman’s hat. Not because I’m gentle, but because gentlemen get respect, which is something I require. Cuts a lot of bullshit in my daily doings with people. Like coming home on the bus tonight. Freaking bus always smells like ass.

I like to sit down, but sometimes it’s crowded. Some fat bitch taking up two seats. Or a REALLY IMPORTANT business man with his bulging briefcase parked on the seat next to him, all so some ethnic won’t sit beside him. The bigger the briefcase, the smaller the cock, I say.

Or the pussy little queer with the poofie hair and nerd glasses. P coat and button-down, hipster skinny pants showing his ankles and buckskin saddle shoes. Balancing his messenger bag on his spindly gay legs. Least he didn’t take up an extra seat for his purse. He climbed on the PAT bus right before I did and prissed his ass real quicklike into the only seat left. Then wouldn’t make eye contact with me because he knew what he done.

Asshole!

I stare at him from under the brim of my gentleman’s hat, but he pretends not to notice, looking everywhere but AT ME, all the while exuding snottiness. I can’t stand that. I give him the stinkeye and imagine how he’d cry if I held him down and buzzed all that orange cottoncandy off his noggin. Guys like him inspire the bully in me.

He finally looks up at me, his mouth all sour and sphinctery. Something I can help you with?

So phony. Believe you me, help is the LAST thing he’s interested in giving me.

Matter a fact, there is, I say. I like to sit down when I ride the bus.

Don’t we all? He sniffs and turns his hip to me as if we’re through.

"Yes, don’t we. I grasp the center pole and stretch myself out, hanging down, till I can look him in the face. I was gonna sit there till you so rudely pushed ahead of me."

He scowls. "I didn’t push in front of anybody. I got on the bus and took the first seat I saw. First on, first seated. Look around, you might find another seat." He clutches his bag with white hands.

Other people look at him, at me. But I don’t care. I never care what other people think. There’s certain things that ain’t right in society, and I make a point to stand up for what’s proper. That’s just the way I am.

I shield my eyes with my hand and make a show of looking toward the front and back of the bus.

"Nope, I say. I was at the bus stop before you were, but you pranced up the steps first and took my seat from me, Carrot Top. Or is it Carrot Bottom?"

Carrot Bottom turns pink as pussy lips, then caves in on himself, like some wilted petunia.

SICKENING.

I know where you live, I say. Above the mural on the corner of Cedarville. And I got twice as far to walk. So have some respect and let me take my seat.

The color drains from his face, leaving freckles like poo splattered on porcelain.

If you don’t, I say, "We’ll discuss why on our walk home."

A woman in teddy bear scrubs is dirtylooking me, but I give her the BIG EYES, and she turns around.

Carrot Bottom looks like he’s gonna cry. He yanks the pull-cord, and like magic the bus stops with a PSSS. He jumps up and slinks off. Guess he’s got a long walk home. That’s ok, the gays like to keep fit.

I sit down, meeting everybody’s gaze, till one by one the bastards turn away. Then I take off my gentleman’s hat