Your Fist, Like a Knife In My Nose
By Missy

SERIES: Goosebumps!
SUBSERIES: Your Fist, Like a Knife In My Nose
PART: one of one parts for this arc
Author: Missy
Email: HIMH@aol.com
RATING: G
PAIRING(s): L/L; S/C; S/R

DISTRIBUTION: To LW, Kai, and FG so far; any other archives are welcome to ask (Please Email Me), but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine. Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"

Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!

DISCLAIMER: Laverne and Shirley, of course, not my property and belongs to its creators.

CATEGORY: Epic Drama
CANNON/SPOILERS: Pre-Reunion Show Cannon; set five years after the series' conclusion.
FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!
SPOILLER/SUMMARY: Squiggy and Rhonda argue when he decides they would be better off in Milwaukee; Laverne becomes conceared with her mortality when something Lenny says disturbs her.
NOTES: The first of one chapters in the seventeenth portion to this series. For previous chapters, see the Goosebumps! Section at LAS Fic or The Look.

Some light S/C in this chapter. They're back, full-force, in the next part.

***

"No."

Squiggy frowned at his wife, re-arranging Moth against his shoulder. "You ain't gettin' work, Rhonda."

She stuck her chin out stubbornly. "I happen to have two readings upcomming."

"Yeah? Lemme see the scripts!"

"I don't have to justify anything to you, Andrew Squiggman!" She snapped. "I gave my life to raise OUR DAUGHTER!"

He winced at her dramatic tone. "That's cause you ain't got none!"

Rhonda gasped. "I had an audition this afternoon! For 'Audrey: Queen of the Wasp People!'

"That's my point; ya had six interviews, and ya ain't landed nothin'!"

"And your suggestion is..."

"Well, I got a little nest egg from the army; whattya say we move back to Milwaukee, buy a little business?"

She laughed in his face. "Milwaukee?! How would an actress of my stature ever launch herself in such a god-forsaken berg?"

"Well, ya could start the decent way; strippin'."

This, to Squiggy was a high compliment. His wife, however, did not meet his words with such aplomb.

Instead, she promptly smacked Squiggy across he face. "How dare you!"

Squiggy's reaction was far more visceral; his hand slammed through the wall of their house, rending it.

His perception cleared almost instantly, and just as quickly he was sorry.

"Give me our daughter!" Squiggy froze, shame clouding his vision. "GIVE HER TO ME!"

He did so.

"What do you have to say for yourself?"

The answer was nothing. He walked out the door, and ran until he could no longer move.

***

"There once was a rabbit, that sang in the woods..."

Laverne looked up from the dishes. "Rabbits don't sing, Len."

"This song ain't about reality, Vernie! It's for kids."

"Yeah, I know." She turned around to face him. "Lemme listen."

Lenny bowed over his guitar, carefully strumming. "There once was a rabbit, that sang in the woods. Singing Hi di di di-ay..."

Billie laughed hard, falling backward against her blanket.

"I think this'll work on the sixth-graders." He decided.

Laverne abandoned the dishes, sitting down beside Lenny. "Look at her...lookit us."

He nodded. "Yeah. I got a kid, a wife, a job...I thought I was gonna be drivin' a truck forever." He lay his chin against her shoulder. "I could die right now and be real happy."

"What?"

He didn't seem to notice the fear in her voice. "This is the happiest I've ever been, an' I don't think it could get better."

Laverne's throat tightened with anxiety, and she reached out for the comforting presence of her daughter.

***

"Yer a coward, Andrew Squiggman."

The mirror didn't provide him any comfort. With a groan, Squiggy splashed a bit of water on his face.

He trudged his way back to the apartment, expecting an empty room to greet him. Instead, he saw Rhonda, sitting on the bed, holding a sleeping Moth.

Sobbing.

"Awww Jeez...don't cry..."

"I can't help it." She sniffled. "Oh, Andrew, everything you said was right! We don't have enough money to stay out here. They can't look at a mother like me and see a twenty-year old any more." The self-deprecation reached a crescendo in her voice, and he felt all the guiltier.

"You tried, Rhonda. Yer a great actress. Maybe...sometime...we'll come back, and it'll happen fer ya."

"No." She sighed. "But maybe it's time for us to follow your dream this time, Andrew."

"If ya really wanna..."

"I want to raise Moth somewhere nice. Nicer," she said, her voice heavier with meaning than he had ever heard, "than Hollywood."

He loved her for her brave face, if that, in the end, was all it was.

***

Laverne scribbled a note across a scrap of blank paper. The words to Lenny's song played amusingly through her head, and she welcomed them, anything to take her mind away from the specter of death.

It seemed to be haunting her tonight. She didn't want to know why.

"Vernie? Come to bed?"

Lenny tended to phrase commands as questions. A good way to make her break down and do what he asked of her.

"Commin'."

She folded up her daughter's blanket, taking a moment to breathe in the soft, clean scent it gave off.

She would drive back the specter of death. For all of them.


To Chapter One of "Do Me So"
To Chapter One of "So Close"