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My Little Puppets
My Little Puppets
My Little Puppets
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My Little Puppets

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Raquel Oliver is a relationship therapist who, by her own admittance, refuses to use her own advice regardless of how bad she may need it. Raquel ends one bad relationship only to embark upon another that is just as bad, or perhaps even worse. Will her love for the small antiquated township of Eden entice her to turn her head on the unfavorable treatment that she is experiencing in her relationship, or will she be willing to give up her wonderful new ‘dream-life’ in order to abide by her own relationship rules?

LanguageEnglish
PublisherRenee Pippens
Release dateMar 15, 2012
ISBN9781476322780
My Little Puppets
Author

Renee Pippens

I have several book titles to offer and, like every other author, I wish to sell my books, but I don’t expect anyone to buy a pig in a poke. In other words, who should I expect to be willing to take a chance on whether or not my writing style is any good without the advantage of sampling its flavor? How many times have you gone into a grocery store and noticed a new product and said to yourself, “Hmm, that sure looks yummy. Perhaps I should give it a try.” But then you recall what happened the last time you purchased a particular food just because the picture on the box looked appealing. -You ended up with a bulk-load of crap that made even the dog wish for a second night of Ramen Noodles. There were also times when you went into a grocery store and noticed a product, along with a friendly person sitting in front a platter full of freshly sautéed bite sized morsels. All it took was one taste to make you want to gobble-up the entire platter – toothpick and all. The same goes for books because so many times readers are lured in by an attractive front cover and sometimes even an exciting back cover summary, but after you’ve purchased the book, or wasted your time lugging it home from the library, you discover that it is not what you expected. Wouldn’t it be grand if, before purchasing a book, you could read a few short stories by the author just to get a feel of his writing style? Yes it would, and that is why I thank Heaven for a smashwords opportunity. Enjoy – toothpick and all.

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    Book preview

    My Little Puppets - Renee Pippens

    My Little Puppets

    By

    Renee Pippens

    SMASHWORDS EDITION

    *****

    PUBLISHED BY

    Renee Pippens on Smashwords

    My Little Puppets

    Copyright © 2012 by Renee Pippens

    I am honored that you would download my free book, and I encourage you to share it book with as many of your friends as you wish. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the content remains in its complete form.

    This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or deceased, or places, events or locales is strictly coincidental. All characters in this book are products of the author’s imagination and were not created with any particular individual in mind.

    This book contains mature subject matter and should be screened by a responsible adult before rendering into the hands of a minor.

    *****

    There are two things that my daddy always told me when I was a child, and one of them was to never run from my problems. The other was that not every story has a happy ending. My daddy and I were really close; it was like we shared the same brain at times. When I was about ten, I overheard my mother telling my aunt that it was a love for food that bonded my daddy and me. At the time I thought my mother was just being funny-sarcastic, but after my daddy died I realized that she was probably right. My daddy was only forty eight when he died of a heart attack. He was overweight and couldn’t seem to stick to a diet. My momma was always on my dad’s case about his weight and cholesterol level, and he was always promising her that he would try harder to lose weight, but then he and I would end up sneaking off to his restaurant and eating whatever we wanted. My dad was a professional chef, and he did introduce me to the finer foods, but he also instilled in me the importance of a college education and making something of myself. Sometimes I wonder what my dad would say if he could see what a mess I made of my life and if he would blame me for running away from my problems.

    I love my mother and my two sisters, but I don’t think that I could have survived my father’s death if it weren’t for Toot-toot. I’d just turned thirteen the summer that my father died, and I became so depressed that I didn’t want to do anything. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have the entire summer to grieve and Toot-toot to pull me through the tragedy. Toot-toot and I met when we were nine, and before that, the only friends I ever had besides the ones at school, were the three little chubby girls who came into my dad’s restaurant with their mother ‘The Greens lady’ a couple of times a month.

    I was a shy chubby kid who spent most of my teen years sitting on my porch or in my bedroom hanging out with my best friend Toot-Toot. Toot-Toot and I spent endless hours listening to music and fantasizing about what kind of a man we were going to marry, what kind of career we were going to have, and what our children would be like. It didn’t seem to bother Toot-Toot the fact that he and I were not on even playing grounds in terms of future relationships in compliance with the American standards. I always secretly wondered if he was aware of the unjust way that gay people were discriminated against when it comes to situations like marriage and adoption. I never asked him because it didn’t really matter because I already knew what he would say if someone was to point it out to him. He would say, Then I guess I’ll just be a first. And he probably would most likely be right because that’s how his personality was driven.

    Toot-Toot’s grandmother, Stella Mae Jones was the craziest woman in the projects, known for raising all sorts of hell with her kids and fighting at the drop of a hat. Stella Mae was a stout red-skinned woman with freckles and a short nappy orange afro. After Toot-toot’s mother went to prison when he was eight, his grandmother took over raising him. Stella Mae was somewhat of a clean fanatic, so her home was always spotless, but all of her furniture had been sacrificed and destroyed during the many family brawls that had taken place inside of her home among her two kids and three grandchildren who lived with her. Toot-toot liked nice things, so needless to say he didn’t like spending time in his own home. He practically lived at my house. He loved the suburbs and often praised me for being ‘blessed enough to be rich.’ Of course my family wasn’t rich, just upper middle class, but I guess for someone who’d been raised in the environment that Toot-toot came from, seeing a family that respected each other and their home, and a house full of decent furniture, defined his perception of wealth.

    My dad taught my sisters and me something that he referred to in acronym form as ‘Don’t Cry About Life’s Challenges.’ Each first letter meant something, and it held the key to his advice for teenagers on how to be a success in life. ‘D’ meant stay drug-free. ‘C’ stood for remaining credit-worthy. ‘A’ was to remind them to have an Associate’s Degree by their twenty-first birthday. ‘L’ is for being a law-abiding citizen, and ‘C’ meant to remain child-free. Of course I shared my father’s virtues with Toot-toot, and he was doing really well at honoring them until the fall that we turned fifteen. Halloween was on a Friday that year, and all of the children celebrated it on Friday and Saturday. Every Halloween for as far back as I could remember Toot-Toot had dressed up like a girl, and that year was no exception. For the first time, Toot-Toot didn’t wear his usual evening gown and waist-length wig like he usually did; he wore a mini skirt and a trendy blouse with a shoulder length wig and just a dab of lipstick. He was on his way to pick me up to go to a Halloween party and he was walking alone. A boy from our school named Mason Hill was walking with two of his friends, when he spotted Toot-toot and mistook Toot-toot for a girl. Mason yelled out to Toot-toot for him to come over and talk to him. He started shouting nasty sexual propositions to Toot-toot, and just as I walked up – Mason put it together that Toot-toot wasn’t a girl and figured out exactly who he was. Mason didn’t address Toot-toot any further right then because he was so busy catching heat from his friends over his indecent proposal to another male, so I just figured that it was the end of it. I was wrong, it wasn’t the end of it because Mason and his friends returned to school that Monday morning and told everyone that Toot-toot had come on to Mason. On up until that point, everyone at school had seemed to accept that Samuel ‘Toot-toot’ Bowers was gay, but since he wasn’t bothering anyone, most of the girls were his friends and the boys chose to just ignore him. The lie that Mason and his friends told on Toot-toot seemed to open a floodgate for harassment from a few miserable boys at our junior high, especially Mason and his crowd.

    One week after the incident with Mason, Toot-toot and I were going to the store for his mother when we ran into Mason and his girlfriend Tya. I can’t even tell you where the two emerged from, only that they seemed to suddenly pop up right in front of us.

    Mason spoke through gritted teeth. If I put hands on this faggot right now – I’ll end up killing him.

    Tya held up a jar of some brownish-yellow liquid. If I didn’t have to bring this piss to the doctor’s with me, I’d throw it on him right now… she said.

    Right then, spontaneously, Tya tossed the liquid right into Toot-toot’s face. The liquid got into his eyes, and he began to scream frantically and rub his eyes. I was stunned -

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