Dick, Felicia and Jane

Felicia, Dick and Jane

Dick Challenger loved Jane Smith despite her many flaws. She was tall, but not taller than he was, with legs and breasts that were as defined as they were smooth. So Dick married Jane, few questions asked, after one month of dating.

Not long after they had been married Mrs. Challenger asked her husband a simple, yet revealing question. Why was Dick always coming home so late from the office? Dick responded respectfully enough – said that the telecommunications business was booming and that he, being a corporate executive and all, was left to finish the daily paper shuffling long after the employees had punched the clock for the day’s end.

“Who in the hell are you screwin’, Dick?” Jane said, her beautiful face contorted to the texture of a prune.

“Jane, I…you know me. You’re my world…I –“

“Oh cut the bull sissy man.”

Jane stormed out of the house, but not before snatching the keys for Dick’s shiny black Lincoln off of the sofa table. Seven hours later, two in the morning, Dick heard a car honk, the front door open, and Jane’s high heels clunk to the hardwoods.

“Honey, I’m home – but your precious car isn’t. You know, at the price you paid for that car you really don’t get very good handling. I crashed it on I-8,” Jane hollered up the spiral staircase. “I am so sorry.”

Dick was at a loss for words. This was not the woman he married. He had heard stories about romance diminishing from relationships after years of togetherness, but Jane and he had only been married for three months.

Jane would remain jealous and belligerent towards Dick for another year. Throughout those unrelenting twelve months, Dick continued to buy his wife Buckeyes in heart shaped candy boxes on Valentines day, diamond rings for her birthday and pearl necklaces for Christmas. He knew that before God and human witness he had taken Jane to be his lawfully wedded wife through the good and the bad. The bad had come first in their case, so the good must have been just waiting in the wing…right?

One night, when Jane was angry at something other than Dick for a change, she found herself looking for a way to vent her emotions. That’s when little Nell Challenger was created. Things got better for a spell, as babies are natural peacemakers like hugging in a boxing ring. But after a few months the referee broke it all up and they were back at it once again.

“We were at lunch today and – remember that new secretary I was telling you about? Felicia? She’s going places, I tell you. Held her own discussing the limitation of coverage areas in order to increase profit margins,” Dick said one night, hunched over a plate of steak and steaming vegetables.

Jane had a pitcher of lemonade in her hand with the well intentions of filling her husband’s glass. Instead, at the mention of yet another woman, upon yet another night of late arrival from the office, Jane chose to dump the entire contents onto Dick’s lap.

Shocked by the ice-cold liquid, Dick toppled backward in his chair and landed on Jane’s bare foot. She hollered in pain, cursed, then picked up the steak knife lying next to Dick’s plate.

Six hours and ten emergency vehicles later, Dick lay in the ICU at Saving Grace Hospital thinking about his wife and how she was probably crying her eyes out behind hard, steel prison bars right. She would be booked, put on trial with a high-end lawyer using Dick’s high-end money and sentenced to fifteen years with no possibility of parole.

Three months later, Dick would be released from the hospital.


On September fourteenth two thousand and six, Dick Challenger left his new black Lexus in the drive of his Victorian style mansion and walked up the long, winding stone path towards the oversized birchwood front door. He was jangling his keys out of his briefcase, the day that he never thought would end spilling through his thoughts, when he realized that the front door was ajar.

Pushing it open Dick caught a whiff of something he hadn’t smelled in five years – Pantene Pro V hair conditioner. Dick perceived the smell as overbearing and nauseating, though in actuality, to the average Joe, it would have been faint and pleasant. Maybe it was the association Dick had attached to it throughout his years of marriage. Jane was here.

But how could she be? Hadn’t Judge Winburn said that the next time she’d be up for parole would be the day three headed beasts took to the sky? Still, Dick instinctively ran into the open living room, grabbed the remote and pressed the ON/OFF button.

The newscaster was in mid-sentence reporting on a prison break from Newburgh penitentiary – the state’s only all-female prison. One unidentified woman had seduced a new prison guard and lifted his keys right off of his belt buckle. She then, along with two other women on yard work detail, popped the lock and barely escaped down the grassy slope leading into the city.

The teakettle began to whistle in the kitchen. Dick’s head snapped up.

“Jane!” His voice cracked like after being alone for the day and finally receiving a phonecall. All at once the feeling of femininity flooded back into his mind from years of his ex-wife’s verbal abuse.

Dick got up and - leaving the television on - walked into the kitchen. Sure enough, the stainless steel Cephlon teakettle his ex-wife had bought for a bargain at Bed Bath and Beyond was whistling Dixie and blowing out steam on top of the stove. Jane was nowhere to be seen, though.

Little winch is probably upstairs fishing money out of my safe, Dick thought as he took the teakettle off the oven’s eye. He walked back into the living room and headed up the spiral staircase. When he got to the midpoint, someone started to scream but was abruptly cut off. It sounded like a child  - a child with a very similar voice to that of his own daughter.

“Nellie!” Dick screamed. He took off up the stairs, every few steps taking two at a time until he reached the top.

He didn’t know which direction to go. Left led to his daughter’s room, but the smell of Pantene shampoo was even stronger now, coming from the direction of his own room. Then it happened again.

“Daaaaddy!” His daughter screamed, much more definite.

Dick was in his daughter’s room in five seconds. It only took one more for a year and a half of unadulterated torment to flood his mind and make him feel dizzy. Jane stood over Nell’s bed with a pillow pressed so hard against her daughter’s face that the outline of her nose protruded like a face mold. Little Nell was pumping her legs against the bed with very little fight – almost uncaringly.

“She’s my creation if I can’t have her you sure as hell can’t!” was what Jane screamed as Dick tore her off of Nell. Nell fell back against the headboard of the bed, pulled her legs to her chest and started crying.

Jane’s eyes twitched in tempo with the tick of the alarm clock on Nell’s nightstand. Her creation? Nell was as much his as she was Jane’s, if not more. After all, he was the one who took care of their daughter for the past five years. This past year had been an extremely tiring experience for him as a single parent – Nell starting both kindergarten and junior soccer. So as far as Dick was concerned, Jane had sold her motherly position to him once she had buried the steak knife in his shoulder.

“You’re dead to us,” Dick mumbled.

“Sorry? What did you say to me?”

Dick stood up like a jackrabbit from his crouching position next to his daughter, “I said get the hell out of our lives, Jane!”

Dick took the alarm clock from Nell’s nightstand and brought it down straight-armed – not unlike a sledge hammer – onto the top of his ex-wife’s head. Jane’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and she began to topple backwards, her eyelids closing slowly like one of Little Nell’s baby dolls. Her back caught against Nell’s princess-themed vanity and she slid down to the carpeted floor, her head slumped against her chest.

Nell slid out of bed and ran to Dick.

“Is she dead, daddy?” she asked, clinging to her father’s legs like a jellyfish.

Dick, still unable to pull his eyes away from an unconscious Jane, simply nodded.