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Skeeter Kitefly's Sugardaddy Confessor

a novel by P. S. Ehrlich

Click here to download the Split Infinitive Edition of Skeeter Kitefly's Sugardaddy Confessor

Skeeter Kitefly Index

  PART THREE:  The Confusions & The Conclusions 

The Ups and Downs of Skeeter Kitefly

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

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Skeeter Kitefly's Sugardaddy Confessor

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

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Skeeter Kitefly's
Titular Assets

COMPACTIFICATION
behind the scenes


RoBynne O'Ring's
GRUNTS OF
PASSION

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TO BE HONEST

FINE LINEAGE

MARAT À LA MODE

13 BLACK CATS
UNDER A LADDER

BAGELANNA

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About the Author

Contact the Author

Characters

Book Covers

Skeeterography

Etc.ography

Site Map

Links

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Last Updated

March 20, 2010

Peyton and the badly-hungover Skeeter
reconcile over the phone, and Skeeter
asks him to tell her a long boring
sleep-inducing story.

“...Now everybody points at me and says, ‘There goes a dummy.’”
     “I’m sure no one’s ever called you a dummy—”
     “How do you know?!  Maybe lots of people have!  (Shniff.)  Like one of those big dumb happy broads that hang around bars and clubs and—Ramada Inns, places like that.  ‘Cept I’m just a little dumb happy broad.  When I’m happy, that is…  (Shniff.)”

Click here to read "—Or Flounder, Flounder in the Sea"
(webchapter version)

and here to read "—Or Flounder, Flounder in the Sea"
as it appeared in The Sidewalk's End
 

A bedtime story of Peyton's early life as
"Lumpy," his evolvement into the
Wizard of Schnoz, and what turned
him into a babe magnet ... for awhile.
 

...Popping the buttons off a Rapunzel’s blouse (“This is brand-new!” she would wail) or wrenching the hooks right out of her bra (“I just bought this!  I don’t BELIEVE you!!”)  The incredible pitfalls of getting to second base.  Cornwallettes almost always dressed expensively, and Lumpy had to shell out a hell of a lot—without any reciprocation worth mentioning—to make amends after each infrequent date.
     (But I’m a wizard, dammit!...)

"La Belle Debbie" (a poetic excerpt from "A Very Bad Wizard")
appeared in the printmag
The Duckabush Journal

Click here to read "A Very Bad Wizard"
(webchapter version)
 

A flashback look at Peyton's attempt
to beguile Skeeter's stepsister Sadie,
years before being bowled over by
Ms. Kitefly.
 

“...You,” said Mercedes, “have been talking to our chests for the past
ten minutes.”  “That’s because I’ve been talking to you from my chest,” he responded, clapping a hand on his heart.  “Oh gag!”  “Not at all—entirely in earnest.  I plan to be an art historian, you see, so it’s my duty to penetrate to the heart of things.”  “Not by staring down my front you’re not,” said Mercedes...

"Dilated Nostrils"
appeared in the first (August 2002) issue of the printmag
Rhapsoidia

Click here to read "Dilated Nostrils"
(webchapter version)
 

Times having changed in the Reagan
era, Peyton's artwork is no longer
welcome at a magazine he helped
found.  Skeeter meanwhile plans her
return to college.
 

...Downstairs the phone began to ring again.  That would be Skeeter, calling from Wheeville as had become her nightly habit.  “I’m here.  Talk to me,” she would say—and hang up.  At which point Peyton would call back and assume the charges, Sadie having squawked about the triplex phone bill.  “Why don’t you simply call collect?” he’d asked.  “I like to hear the phone ring,” Skeeter’d replied.  So he would dial her number and she would say, “Whoever can this be?” and they would have long nonsensical conversations...

Click here to read "Dilated Nostrils"
(webchapter version)

and  here to read "No-Nazz"
as it appeared in Unlikely Stories
 

Peyton joins Skeeter's family for
Thanksgiving, but absorbed in his own
stagnancy he feels (and acts) far from
thankful.
 

...The old question: What is the purpose of Life?  The old answer:
To puncture romances, O Tillie.  So take off your green spectacles and see your Emerald City as the handiwork of a hoodwinking Wizard, a snake-oily charlatan peddling purple-bark sarsaparilla to the unwary. 
A fraud and a sham: I am, I am—
     (And there was Skeeter peering through the window, Skeeter popping through the door, Skeeter in a bright red apron and ovenmitt, radiant as any sled-in-the-furnace rosebud...)

Click here to read "As Per Usual"
(webchapter version)
 

Skeeter's effort to snap Peyton out
of his funk causes a fresh breach
between them; so the penitent Peyton
offers a confession of his own—about
Joyce Finian, the spectral Girl of His Dreams.
 

...Peyton had grown somewhat accustomed to her hollow brink-of-drowning eyes, but tonight he was struck by how infinitely dry they seemed: all tears shed.  The very pupils losing their Glocka Morra glint, dissolving into the irises to form two black holes—
     And then; and then.  A lass and a lack.
     Like that scene at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter hide in a cave from the pod-people who’ve replaced their friends.  Dana’s exhausted, dozes for just a
second … and awakes taken over, body-snatched, having become a pod-person with coldblooded eyes in a blank masklike face, one of the chillingest images in Peyton’s picturewatching memory: you’re next! you’re next!!...

Click here to read "Fine Lines"
(webchapter version)

"Swandive" (a poetic excerpt from "Fine Lines")
appeared in the printmag
The Lithic Review

Click here to read a replica of "Heightened Clarity"
(another excerpt from "Fine Lines")
as it appeared in Organic Literature Experiment

and here to read "Banshee"
(another excerpt from "Fine Lines")
as it appeared in The Swamp

 

In the middle of a Yuppiefied winter,
Skeeter and Peyton face different
interpretations of faith and joy.
 

...They sat awhile in silence then.  Weary of confession-making and
-taking: the confusions of absolution.  Skeeter disentangled her
hairbrush, setting it down among the sprung-loose flaxen threads.  Split ends in need of gathering up and tying together; winkle winkle winkle.
      “So,” she said, “is that It, then?”
     His eyelids twitched, and turned to her.  “Lately,” he said, “I haven’t been so sure…”

Click here to read "Angelmaking"
(webchapter version)
 

Springtime comes: Skeeter graduates
from college after only seven years,
and Peyton marks the occasion with a
validating present.
 

“...Jeez, what have you got in here?” Skeeter gasped.  “Big flat emeralds?  Or, I know—my thousand pairs of fishnet stockings!  You went to Tickle Me and bought out the store!”
     “Guess again,” said Peyton.  “Take your time and take your choice,” he added, laying a small sealed envelope beside the box, and holding Skeeter back as she lunged for the loot.
     “Wha-utt?  Do I only get one of these?  I have to choose between them?”
     “Ask me another.”
     “I want another, I want ‘em both!  Why should I have to pick just one?”
     Gallic shrug: your life, my love...

Click here to read "The Ruby Hotstuff Skeeter Kitefly"
(webchapter version)