Joshua Minton’s Online Pulpit : Lovell E. Boner and the Case of the Senior Citizen’s Library Nipple by Joshua Minton

Lovell Edward Boner was the greatest book thief in Sangamon County and he approached the university library desk with the same smugness his great-great-grandfather had with the slaves he oversaw in Georgia cotton fields.

The library was a hundred and fifty two years old, illuminated like an Irish pub at midnight, and Lovell E. Boner (as he liked to introduce himself to women) was still wearing his $900 custom made sunglasses that bore a lazered imaged of himself smiling in each lens and were animated when struck by light. Smiling Boner morphed to smirking Boner and back again as long as the light remained.

Boner also sported behind the neck earloop headphones whose mp3 emissions inspired him to sing along with the chorus of Snoop Doggy Dog’s opus “For My Niggaz and My Bitches.” He passed quiet foursomes whispering in the sharp panic breaths of a Friday morning chemistry quiz.

Halfway from the door to the desk, he pulled the loops from his ears and they hung blaring over his shoulders so everyone in his immediate proximity could “Thow theah muthafuggin hands in the a-yah” with him.

Boner gripped the edge of the cherry wood desk as he inched up on it, swinging back and forward like a sling shot, putting his face inches from that of the reference room clerk who was reading the campus daily news and popping bubbles with her breath gum.

Boner parted his lips, bared his teeth, and huffed hot breath in her face like someone in a commercial who just gargled with mouthwash.

Her pupils were telescope lenses under a star dome sky and he was a supernova that drew her immediate attention to the horizon. Her face registered no emotion or muscle movement and her reaction was genetic.

Can I help you?

Boner smiled and pulled the sunglasses halfway down his nose. His eyes darted to the nametag.

Yes, hehloohoH Janice. My name is Lovell E. Boner, nice to meet you.

He plucked her first two fingers from the page she was reading and gave them a loose shake.

I am interested in viewing a book in your antique collection and I would appreciate a comfortable room in which to purvey it.

Janice replied in a tone of voice she normally reserved for phone call salesmen during dinner.

What’s the book title?

Boner nodded at her like accepting an overdue apology.

This is a very rare book and the author was Hammil George Winslow.

She bugged her eyes out at him and her voice coiled to a huff.

What’s the title?

Boner cleared his throat.

The title of the book, Janice, is The Art of Nipple Sucking.

He looked at her breasts as he spoke the title, smiled, and looked back to her face. He spoke to her as if he had just seen her naked at her request.

The book was written in 1572 in what eventually became the Massachusetts Bay Colony…

Her tone had become sales phone call at dawn.

…Uh, I got it.

Her eyes were still bugged out and the breath gum now hung stuck from her bottom lip like porno semen.

He touched her elbow with his first two fingers now joined by a circling thumb on her upper forearm.

Janice, this book was the authoritative text for almost two hundred years and is the first documented American experience with getting an infant to latch onto a nipple immediately following birth.

The moment spiraled as they stared at each other. She was here on a work-study program. He was engaged in Grand Larceny at the paid bequest of a 56-year-old health insurance corporate CEO. Their circumstances were now intermingling in the contact of his rubbing thumb pad and the freckle tanned flesh of her upper forearm.

The moment broke and she pulled away in revulsion and began attacking the keyboard of her reference computer with keystrokes. She forced herself to stare at the screen to avoid looking back at him. She did look up once out of disgusted curiosity. He winked at her and pushed the sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose.

After typing exactly 47 characters, she asked him for ID and he snapped a driver’s license from his front pocket and held it an inch and a half from the bridge of her nose like an American Express commercial gone wrong.

When she walked to the copy machine with his license, he stared at her puffed out butt cheeks muffled by the thick cotton skirt. Boner looked up to find himself caught by a steel-eyed old betty who eyed him with the knowledge of a father meeting the guy he knows is banging his daughter.

He gripped the temple of his sunglasses and slid them down his nose, launching a dirty look that said, What the fuck are you looking at lady?

She turned and huffed to the elevator, stopping only once to look at him with tightened eyes.

Janice directed him to the fourth floor, handed him a permission slip, and turned her back on him when he bent to grab and kiss her hand.

The elevator buzzer counted to four and the doors slid open to reveal a dark wood paneled room with an alabaster ceiling. There was a monstrous desk in the center mounted by the same old betty he had just scrapped eyes with.

Boner took off his sunglasses and eyed her nametag.

HehloohoH Betty.

He tossed Janet’s permission slip on desk.

I’ll take this book, Betty, and a cozy little room with a fireplace and an 18th century leather back wing chair to read it in.

She stared at him for a moment and spoke with the exactitude and drained-of-bullshit tone that only someone at the very end of their life can pull off.

You’re an asshole.

She left to retrieve the book and returned to find Boner casually reviewing and finger-shuffling her desk papers.

Here’s the book.

He nodded again in the semi-DeNiro smile.

Excellent.

Boner snapped three times and finger waved her a summons for her to cross the room and hand him the book, which she did.

He took the book from her and put the earloop headphones back, the mp3 player now leaking “Against the Wind” by Bob
Seger.

She stood next to him as he flipped to the fourteenth page and began scanning while fingertip soloing the first stanza of the Seger song on the desktop. He began singing, nothing left to burn and nothing left to prove.

He licked his finger and thumb and flipped three more pages. Wish I didn’t know what I didn’t know then.

He folded a corner of a page and shuffled on. He finally looked up and feigned surprise to find her still there. He shook his head back and forth in a contained motion of genuine curiosity when he spoke to her.

What do you know about nipple sucking, Betty?

He reached out and touched the cotton covered swell of her left breast with his left hand.

She spun around and hunched away in recoil like the Germans were still bombing England. Boner profited from the violation by slipping the book into the back of his pants, increasing the value of their contents by $7,463.

She picked up a sharpened pencil on the desk and lunged at him with the speed of an earthworm fleeing freeway traffic.

He backed away from her, punched the elevator button and smiled when the doors opened immediately behind him. No one had used the elevator after 23:00 for the entire three weeks he performed observational research on the target and their immediate availability was an assumption his plan depended upon. The assumption paid off.

He brushed aside her feeble sharpened graphite attack and pulled the stray wisps of white hair behind her right ear. She screamed and he slapped her face on a downstroke, forcing her to the ground in a crying, mumbling heap.

Boner pulled the fire alarm next to the call button, backed into the elevator and punched the star button with the fluid motions of a rehearsed physical comedian in a primetime sitcom.

None of the seventy three people in the library (including the rent-a-cop) noticed a man wearing sunglasses and earloop headphones exit the library with a rectangular load in his pants because the shrieking of the fire alarm had them all squinting their eyes and covering their ears in pain.

Lovell E. Boner had struck again in the name of the righteous and wealthy who, because ridiculous tax laws drained all incentive from taking financial risks, allocated their abundant resources to acquiring every slob pleasure the people who worked for them could uselessly dream of one day owning for themselves.

Lovell E. Boner, Knight of the Round Table that seats only one, walked square-ass into the parking lot darkness with the shrill fire alarm singing his crimes and triumphs behind him.

photo credit: kansasliberal