#1: Luanne Phillips

Here we go! This is my first entry, Luanne Phillips, the mother character in my work-in-progress Roscoe and Alice Find God. You can check out the initial 8-pages here, and you’ll see that she’s a fun, horrifically abnormal human being that we spend far too little time with. The artwork in this post is Jonathan Moore’s work from the comic, so enjoy!

I’m not crazy. I’m not. I just needed a baby. I wanted his baby. Roscoe should have been mine anyways. All I really did was free him of the prison sentence he was being born into unwillingly. I’ll be his mother, his father, his best friend and his lover. I can be everything for him.

When Michael left me, I knew that he was confused. We were young, he wanted to “experiment”. But he broke my heart, and I couldn’t just let him get away with it. After the day he left, I hardly spoke to him again. But I followed him wherever he moved to, I isolated myself like I’m going to isolate my son. Call it tunnel vision if you want, but my goal was clear cut. Unfortunately, that dirty c**t Mary Beth had to get involved and ruin everything.

My plan changed. They got married. She got my life. So I took it back.

It was for the best. Some part of me is always going to have to live in fear, I guess, but when you look at the situation from the view of everyone in Michael and Mary Beth’s lives, no one had seen me in ten years. I’m sure Michael never even mentioned me. I’m sure all my photos were still in his mother’s basement where we used to f**k, and he hasn’t so much as thought about them in the past decade. The hardest part of taking my baby back is that I’ll never know what will become of Michael. He’ll kill himself maybe, after losing his whole “world”, but I guess that’s what he deserves.

We moved to Idaho and settled in some hick town. The community was nice enough. They didn’t ask questions and I prefer it that way. As far as they were concerned, Luanne and Roscoe are an unfortunate case of lower-middle class America whose Daddy left them in the lurch. In my opinion, that’s not too far off from the truth.

We did everything together, Roscoe and I. We did all the normal stuff kids are supposed to do. He went to school, we built tree forts, we got ice cream. Those years in Idaho were the best times of my life. Roscoe had it tough in school, he’s different. Quiet. But when he’d come home, he was the polite, happy boy I raised. We’d play board games and watch Entertainment Tonight. He was always mesmorized by Hollywood drama and all that.

Then when Roscoe was about seven or eight, the trail seemed to heat up a bit. I got paranoid. More than a few cops had been by asking some questions, saying it was in regards to the town census or something or other. They drove Ford Crowne Victorias and I’ve seen too many cop movies not to know they were undercover. The neighbors started watching too; snooping around. So I decided we would leave. That was really the end of the happy times.

I brought Roscoe back to the Berkshires, where I grew up. I wanted him to experience the same great schools I had in my youth. But the same thing happened. He was picked on, ignored. He did make one friend, but she’s a spoiled, free-thinking little happy-go-lucky brat that doesn’t deserve to know my son. As he grows older it’s harder for me to connect with him, at least it feels that way. He grew a lot tighter, spending more time in front of the TV and inside his own head than talking to me. Still, I was happy just sitting with him while he watched.

It’s Christmas time now. The snow is heavy and the weather is cold. At least we’re safe. Roscoe has got a school performance coming up for the holidays. He’s nervous as hell but late at night I can hear him practicing the song in his room, when he thinks I’m dead asleep. More than once I’ve sat in the hallway outside his door just listening. It’s so sweet hearing his soft little voice being used.

Category: Participants