Chapter 1: Mega Milf
The front door slammed hard enough to rattle the framed license plates on the wall. Barb kicked off her boots, sending one skidding across the cheap laminate floor and into the leg of a neon pink recliner. The smell of stale beer and her cheap, overpowering perfume—something called ‘Midnight Riot’—hit her first, as comforting as a punch to the gut.
“Home sweet shithole,” she grumbled, her voice a low, gravelly rumble.
She headed straight for the kitchen, her bare feet slapping against the floor. The refrigerator hummed a tired tune. She yanked it open, the light blaring on her face, highlighting the weary lines around her eyes that even her brash demeanor couldn’t erase. She grabbed a can of Bud Light, popped the tab with a sharp hiss, and took a long, deep pull, letting some of it dribble down her chin and onto her uniform shirt.
From the living room doorway, a small voice piped up. “Mom? You’re back early. Was the, um, stakeout okay?”
Barb turned, her eyes narrowing. Melvin stood there, a human toothpick in a faded Firefly t-shirt that swam on him. His glasses were crooked. He looked like a strong breeze from the air conditioner could fold him in half.
“Stakeout was bullshit,” Barb said, walking toward him, the floorboards creaking under her weight. She towered over him, a six-two mountain of disgruntled woman. “Perp never showed. Wasted four hours sitting in a car with Jenkins, who farts like a dying horse. Don’t you have homework or something?”
“I was just getting a snack,” Melvin mumbled, trying to sidle past her impressive bulk toward the kitchen.
She didn’t move. She looked down at him, a slow smirk spreading across her face. “A snack. Right. Gotta keep your strength up, slugger. Wouldn’t want you to strain yourself lifting a textbook.” She reached out and flicked his skinny bicep with a finger. “Still waiting for that muscle to pop. Any day now.”
Melvin flinched. “Please don’t.”
“Please don’t,” she mocked, her voice pitching high. She took another swig of beer. “What’s the matter? Truth hurt? You’re twenty years old, Melvin. You look like a strong sneeze would snap you in two. What are they feeding you at that college? Opinions and regret?”
He stared at the floor, at her enormous feet. “I eat.”
“You eat like a bird. A sick bird.” She finally moved, letting him pass. He scurried to the cupboard and pulled out a bag of pretzel sticks. Barb dropped onto the couch, which emitted a deep, groaning sigh of protest. She flicked on the TV, the blare of a reality show filling the room. “Your father was a little guy too,” she said, not taking her eyes off the screen where people were screaming at each other. “Stringbean. But at least he had a pair on him. You? I don’t know where you came from.”
Melvin stood in the kitchen, silently chewing a pretzel. He knew better than to reply. Any defense would just be ammunition. He listened to the crunch of the pretzel in his own head, the roar of the TV, the glug as his mother drained her beer and reached for another from the six-pack on the floor.
The night rolled on in a fog of canned laughter and canned beer. Barb’s commentary was crude, relentless, and directed at both the TV personalities and her son. Eventually, the beer won. Her loud remarks slurred into silence, followed by the deep, rattling snores that meant she was down for the count.
Melvin waited. He waited until the snores were regular, a seismic rhythm shaking the ceiling above him. He clicked off the TV, plunging the room into a silence broken only by that sound and the hum of the fridge.
He moved quietly, a ghost in his own home. He didn’t head to his room. Instead, he walked to the basement door. It always hung slightly ajar, the latch broken. A cool, damp draft whispered from the darkness beyond. He pushed it open, the hinges letting out a long, slow creak that made him freeze and glance up the stairs toward his mother’s room.
The snores continued.
He slipped through and pulled the door mostly shut behind him, then flicked on the single, bare bulb at the bottom of the stairs.
The basement was a concrete tomb, half storage, half forgotten. Boxes of Barb’s old patrol manuals and yearbooks sat moldering next to a broken exercise bike. But in the far corner, behind the water heater, was Melvin’s space.
A fold-out card table was covered not with fantasy game boards, but with beakers, a small but precise digital scale, a hotplate, and rows of meticulously labeled vials and chemical bottles purchased with painstaking savings from his lab assistant job. A notebook, filled with his tight, precise handwriting and complex biochemical formulae, lay open.
He sat on a stool, the cold of the concrete seeping through his jeans. He stared at the notebook, then at the central piece of his work: a 50ml glass vial, three-quarters full of a viscous, iridescent blue liquid. It glimmered under the harsh bulb light, beautiful and alien.
“Biomolecular targeted myocyte hypertrophy,” he whispered to the empty, damp air. “Stimulation of somatotropin receptors with a stabilizing