Matty: Then everything went south. Joey received a letter from some religious fanatic group saying that the newspaper would be attacked if they did not fire me and Stella immediately. Somebody had seen us making out in the cubicle and it had leaked that there were two lesbians working at the newspaper. Maybe Joey had told someone, or people had been privy to the chemistry between Stella and me, the similar dressing and the hairstyles and all that stuff that was going on between us. Now everyone at the newspaper knew about Stella and me.

Stella: Joey called the Sheriff and he told us that a fundamentalist group called “Touch of Christ” was active in Bismarck, threatening gays and lesbians. We were advised to take a break from work and post our typed article every week to the newspaper from an anonymous post box. The North Dakota police needed time to arrest the members of the fundamentalist group. The Sheriff said it was a token threat meant to scare us and he did not believe they would actually murder us. That wasn’t too comforting.

Matty: Joey booked us both at this motel up in the mountains in this small town called Shark Tooth. We left in Stella’s car with my typewriter in the back. Beside it was a bag containing six Jim Beam’s. I wrapped them in towels in case we had a rough drive to Shark Tooth. I wasn’t anxious about the death threat. I was more concerned about what people thought about my relationship with Stella.

Stella: We weren’t talking much in the car. Matty kept a distance from me. I could play that game too. I didn’t talk much either. It was snowing like a maniac and I had to drive slowly. It was irritating with Matty acting so stuck up and me having to drive through the snow. I kept glancing at the foxy bitch.

Matty: We took turns driving. The scenery outside was as depressing as it was inside the car. The cold winds had forced the trees to shed their leaves, their branches were twisted up bestowing them with a grotesque visage. The roads were deserted. On the way, there was a procession of monstrous oil tankers. We couldn’t see the drivers inside them. Everything and everywhere was frozen and deserted as if all humanity were squeezed out of them.

Stella: We finally got there after what seemed like months. We didn’t see much of Shark Tooth because it was snowing. I saw a cemetery, the lights from what could be a bar and the steeple of a church. I had kept checking the rearview mirror to see if anyone was following us. Even if there was, I couldn’t see anything. The motel was on the way up a hill. On the side of a winding road was a little open pathway with a large neon red sign that simply said Motel Vacancy. Matty drove up the snowy road and we parked outside a rather large building. I looked back once again as we got down from the car. There were nothing bunch leafless trees.

Matty: A young man and his elderly mother came out to greet us. The young man’s name was Herbert Todhunter and his mother went by the name of Linden Todhunter. Herbert was well mannered and helped us take the typewriter out of the car. He offered to carry our luggage up to the first floor where our room was, but we carried it all up ourselves. Linden said she would send our food upstairs if we were too tired from the drive. We said that would be great. We had driven for four hours and I needed a drink or three.

Stella: Our room was the first pleasant sight on the whole trip. It was spacious with a large bed, a couple of chairs and a table with a lamp on it. Nothing fancy, but clean and well maintained. The walls were of oak panels and they gave out a cozy smell. The bathroom had a large tub. The young guy Herbert brought up some chicken knoephla soup and garlic bread. He hung around. We didn’t encourage him. I wouldn’t say he was creepy or anything, just a little curious. It was too early to determine what sort of person he was. I hoped son and mother would stay away from us.

Matty: Atleast he had a real mother, so maybe he wasn’t Norman Bates. When I thought about Norman Bates, I thought about Hitchcock. There were two glasses on the table and I poured a couple of drinks, handing one glass to Stella. She took it gladly and we sat on the two chairs facing each other, a bit awkward at first. The first drink went down fast and I felt nice and easy and Stella’s face told me that the whiskey was working on her too. I poured more whiskey into our glasses and we took off our shoes, our bare feet side by side, not touching.

Stella: Perhaps it was the pleasant room and the whiskey, Matty opened up about her life. She had been single for the last fifteen years. I wasn’t surprised. The guy she had dated in her early thirties had married someone else and Matty often saw him around town. At one point, Matty got so lonely that began to stalk him and his wife. She would just follow them around town in her car. Then she got bored of it and buried her head in movies. I could relate to her and understood why she tried to keep her distance from me. She did not want to get burned again. North Dakota was a harsh place for single women. There simply weren’t enough men out here. Once you dated a man, there was nothing much to do except cling onto him, hoping that he would marry you, failing which, you were destined to a life of loneliness and misery.

Matty: Stella told me about how she was dating a security guard out at the Nekoma Anti-Missile Safeguard Complex. They had a bit of a row once and he never came back. She went searching for him and his friends said he had disappeared. She thought his disappearance was very strange and dug deeper. Then she received an anonymous phone call telling her to discontinue investigations. She believed he was murdered because he was privy to classified information about the anti-missile complex which was shut down a couple of years ago. She hit a dead end in her search for her boyfriend and then she really hit the bottle.

Stella: Our mutual confessions melted the freeze around my heart, and I felt a tenderness towards Matty. We had a third and a fourth drink, the alcohol slowly alchemizing the feelings of mutual tenderness to a feeling of mutual competitiveness. Then Matty brought up Alfred Hitchcock.

Matty: I told her to name her top ten Hitchcock movies. I don’t know how we went from relationships to Hitchcock. I am sure it was the alcohol. I don’t know, I was quite tipsy by then.

Stella: We were a bit gone, if you know what I mean, after we downed our fifth whiskey. When Matty told me to name my top ten Hitchcock movies, I was game. Who doesn’t like pervy Hitch? I told Marnie was my favorite Hitch film and Matty countered me with Psycho. How could I leave out Psycho? Well, I said Janet Leigh’s cake face ruined that movie for me. She said what about Tippi Herden’s cake face in Marnie? I told her Tippi was the most beautiful piece of ass ever cast in a Hitch film.

Matty: Tippy Herden the most beautiful piece of ass in a Hitch film ever? What about Ingrid? Shirley Maclaine? And Kim Novack? What about fucking Kim Novack? Good old Kim Novack who could turn any cocksucker into a pussy muncher. I told her that. I was raging now.

Stella: It was the first time that I ever got drunk with Matty. I don’t think its right for middle aged spinsters to drink together. Alcohol flushes out all the anger and bitterness that we keep buried inside us. It was quite funny the way she took off about Kim Novack. I pressed my feet against hers and our foot palms lined up together. The linking of our bare feet seemed to calm her down a little.

Matty: It felt good with our palms against each other. It was nice and tender. I pushed hard with my feet and she pushed back with hers. It was tender, competitive and erotic. Then Stella said we should have a titfight. I asked her what the hell was a titfight.

Stella: I had first seen a titfight in an old Mexican movie at a b-movie film festival. I cannot recall its name. It involved two women pitting their breasts against each other after a fight over a man. I thought it was erotic as hell. I told Matty to take off her coat and t-shirt. I took off mine and we faced each other bare chested, the two of us leering at each other’s naked breasts.

Matty: Neither of us had particularly large breasts. Stella’s breasts looked taut and firm to me. There wasn’t much fat in them. They suited her wiry and thin body frame. I turned off the lights in the room, opting for only the light from a table lamp. She took a step towards me and I noticed that her nipples were rock hard. My hard beat wildly as I took a step toward her and our nipples slowly crashed into each other. My head was swimming from all the alcohol and now this erotic encounter with Stella.

Stella: Our breasts looked alike. Matty’s breasts did not sag one bit. It almost hurt when we began to push at each other’s breasts. The light from the table lamp cast a warm and gloomy pallor over our faces. I pushed Matty back with my breasts until she was leaning against the oak paneled wall. I snaked an arm behind her back, pulling her closer to me. We embraced, our thin bodies crashing together and firm breasts fighting.

Matty: I crashed my mouth onto Stella’s and we blew sweet whiskey breaths into each other’s faces before our tongues locked together in a torrid kiss. Years of pent up sexual frustration had been uncorked by the whiskey and now it threatened to erupt in a volcanic sexual frenzy.

Stella: We both lost control of ourselves. I remember us disentangling briefly to take swigs from the whiskey bottle, snarling at each other to decide who would take the final swig. It was all in flashes now, the whiskey had taken over my sensory experience completely. I remember Matty wrestling me to the floor, the whiskey bottle crashing down and shards of glass hitting my cheek. I remember us rolling around on the floor without a care in the world, our fingers in each other’s hair, kissing wildly with our tongues lashing at each other like serpents.