Date: 2004-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Erotic Horror; Horror
Description: Jeffrey Thomas returns with his second Delirium collection, this time featuring 8 very bizarre erotic horror stories, including the original novelette "Damask". This collection showcases why Jeffrey Thomas is one of the rising stars of the genre. From fan favorite "A Puppet Show For No One" to the offbeat "Can You Pass Strother's Love Test" to the over the top " My Sexual Exploits", this is a must-have for serious Thomas fans and anyone interested in discovering a truly original talent at his best. This is a limited, signed hardcover produced in only a 250-copy print run.
Publisher: Delirium Books

HONEY IS SWEETER THAN BLOOD

Jeffrey Thomas

First Digital Edition

February 2010

Darkside Digital

A Horror Mall Company

P.O. Box 338

North Webster, IN 46555
www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital

Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood © 2010, 2004 by Jeffrey Thomas

Cover Artwork © 2010, 2004 by Alan M. Clark

All Rights Reserved.

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood

“ . . . for me eroticism must always be ugly, the aesthetic always divine, and death beautiful.”

–Salvador Dali

In leaning forward, practically sprawling her chest upon her desk in the lazy body english of a teenager, the new girl caused her shirt to ride up and her black stretch pants to be tugged low in back, exposing a sort of gaping wound of bare skin.  She was studying some papers inches from her nose, and Justin paused from sorting more papers into their various wire baskets behind her to eye the temp’s back surreptitiously.  Generally he liked very pale skin; this girl had the plastic pink tan of a Barbie doll.  But he could easily forgive her for that, all things considered.   Because besides the generous portion of secretive body flesh she presented, he could also see her underwear.  With the current fashion being shirts that revealed midriff and pants slung low on the hips, he often caught delicious glimpses of a bit of indigo briefs here, a sliver of burgundy briefs there.  (Just the elastic waistbands of these underpants, but knowing that they were such intimate articles was intoxicating.) But on this girl, because of her posture and because her choice of undergarments was daring, he was witness to something even more tantalizing.  The girl wore black thong briefs; he could see the entire waistband and the beginning of the narrow center strip before it was blocked by the rim of her pants.  Therefore, he could also see the tops of both buttocks; taut, curving skin.  The black strap would be just wide enough to cover the furrow that bisected them…was perhaps even tucked intimately into that dark fissure.

From that point on, Justin went out of his way to file work into the baskets as often as he could, without letting it build up first.  Sometimes he’d walk into her aisle just to file a single sheet.  The girl had a pretty enough face, in a kind of slack-mouthed flat-eyed way, but he now took note of her body with a keener interest.  She had heavy breasts and wore tight sweaters.  She had broadish shoulders and nicely rounded thighs.  She never spoke to him, and he never spoke to her, though he caught her looking at him with the faintest trace of wariness, once in a while, as though her animal instincts detected his stealthy appraisal.

At home, he would sit in front of his computer and masturbate to the images of womenwho were fully naked.  All of their secret skin on display.  (But then it didn’t seem so secret anymore.) Cupping their own breasts, spreading themselves open.  And yet, he might end up glazing his eyes and recalling that window of flesh he had seen at work, more exciting for being a tease, a peek through a for-bidden doorway.

Justin fixated on that image for several weeks.  His focus never varied much from it.  Even though he took in her breasts, her legs when he could, it was always that flash of back that he ached for.  Some men, he reflected, dwelled on women’s rears.  His focus was narrower still—just a part of a rear, a crescent moon, he joked to himself.  He was fully aware of the way in which his erotic aesthetic narrowed itself in a kind of tunnel vision.  But for Justin, it made the pleasure all the more intense, compacted, as when a star collapses to a fraction of its former size and ends up weighing so much more…

But after several weeks, the girl was gone, her stint as a temporary come to an end, and Justin’s focus began to drift.

*     *     *

He found the painting—and first met Kristen—in the same week.  Both on the Internet.

He had always liked Dali, but he might never have chanced upon the painting had it not been so long and gray a Saturday, had he not been numbly wandering the web for so many hours that even the porn sites bored him.  He looked at a few of Dali’s paintings, admired them briskly without really dwelling on any of their remarkable details, was about to surf the next wave of his boredom when he saw a thumbnail of a Dali piece whose caption identified it as a study for Honey Is
Sweeter than Blood.  Intriguing title.  He clicked the cursor on the miniature version to call up the larger view to be had.

He would learn later that it was an early work, Dali only about twenty, and certain details in the painting put Justin in mind of Joan Miro’s organic little squiggles.  But there were some less abstracted details as well.  Strewn along a kind of desert horizon were a huge disembodied head resting on its cheek (blood vessels of the scalp exposed and eyes blissfully shut: a dreamer), a rotting donkey carcass (with distinct testicles), and in the center foreground, a woman’s body lying on its side.  Its feet, hands and head had been chopped off, apparently, and were missing.  Blood from the neck and wrist stumps appeared to be collecting in an odd-shaped trench.

The painting was utterly compelling, utterly mysterious.  Really, beyond interpretation, in Justin’s opinion.  But its impact was no less profound for that.  Indeed, perhaps more profound because of it.

He right-clicked his mouse on the image, saving it to his personal documents.  Then, when he viewed it there, he could use a magnifying tool to enlarge certain portions of the artwork.  Specifically, that dismembered corpse.  Though, in studying it, it really didn’t seem like a dead thing to him, despite the spurting gore.  It had a lush vitality to it which in a way the lively bright blood personified.  After all, the figure’s contours were still so ripe and sensual.  The shapely shoulder, the high globular breasts, the smooth swell of belly, the full and rounded hip where it curved into bottom.  This hacked beautiful creature might have posed for the Venus de Milo.

Justin imagined himself into the painting.  He heard the flies buzzing around the donkey carcass, smelled its decaying stench.  But he knelt by the woman on that barren dream plain, and rested his hand on her thigh as he listened to the soothing running brook sound of the blood that gurgled from her neck.  More lovely than the gentlest voice cooing avowals of love.

Justin realized that his left hand was rubbing his crotch through his jeans.  Unashamed, he unzipped and freed himself, stroked himself to fullness as he imagined himself lying down behind the woman, cupping himself to her back in the position cozy couples called “making spoons.” In his mind’s eye, he improved upon Dali’s piece in one way.  His dismembered woman wore black thong panties.

*     *     *

On their first live date, Justin took Kristen to a big noisy Hollywood thriller about a serial killer and the dedicated female cop who defeated him, and then to dinner at a pub-style steak house.  He ordered a smallish steak.  He didn’t want to feel heavy and impacted, in case they ended up going to bed together, though he didn’t think it likely.  Still, Kristen seemed very open, very funny in a cynical, sharp-tongued way.  She was twenty-eight, divorced with no kids, to Justin’s thirty and never married.  She was pretty enough, he supposed, with her black hair cut short in a sophisticated way.  Her black clothing was stylishly baggy so he couldn’t tell much about her body, but she wasn’t too thin.  He didn’t care for thin-thin (women who had ribs like the rotting donkey in Dali’s painting) and flat little asses.  He had the artist’s love of the lush, the ripe.  One of Dali’s own obsessions, he had read, was a woman’s nicely-shaped posterior.  The bottoms of his sister Ana Maria and later his wife Gala had embodied his aesthetic.  Funny, Justin thought as he chewed, trying to gauge Kristen’s chest as she sawed her hunk of cow, how much great art had come from the sheer lusty pleasure of simulating girl flesh with the caress of a brush.

They had a mutual love of art; it was one of the first things they chatted about when they met through the online personal ads for singles.  Even now, Kristen was going on about her favorite artists like Picasso.  Except for some of Picasso’s earlier work like the hyper-curvy, overly-plush subject of his Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, Justin didn’t care for Picasso’s women.  Too sharp, pointy, unfriendly to the touch.

The subject moved on to Kristen’s ex.  She cut him up into smaller pieces than her beef, masticating them with a bitter smile.  “Mike wouldn’t know an Andre Masson from a Boris Vallejo,” she said.  “Really…the guy reads comic books.  Oh, I’m sorry—graphic novels.  He loves those nice misogynistic Japanese mangas.  All those little school girls getting raped by gigantic tentacles and all that good shit.”

“My ex-girlfriend wasn’t into art at all, either,” Justin said.  He was a bit more quiet and reserved than Kristen, but he thought he was doing okay tonight.

“So what happened to her?” Kristen asked.

Justin’s fork hovered in the air, short of his mouth.  “What…happened to her? Nothing happened to her.”

Kristen barked a loud laugh.  “Jesus, I didn’t mean to suggest you buried her somewhere.  I mean, who dumped who? Where’s she at now?”

“She left me,” Justin replied softly.

Kristen nodded.  When he didn’t elaborate she shrugged and scooped up some rice pilaf.  “Well, Mike left me, too.  For some little cubicle trash he works with.  She doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together but she’s oh-so-cute, and that’s all that counts.”

“It’s hard,” he said.  “To be rejected.” He sawed at his steak and mused aloud.  “But it’s hard to be in a relationship, too.  The fighting.  The ugliness.” He stopped, realizing that this was not a favorable turn of conversation, and he looked up to smile unevenly.  “But what are the options?” he said, making a joke of it.

*     *     *

At the mall, seated at a tiny, sticky table in the coffee shop, Justin gazed out through the window and played a little game with himself.  Of the next five women who walked by him (from left to right only), he had to pick the one he would most want to take to bed.  He grew dismayed when the first three were, respectively, an elderly Asian woman, a middle-aged Indian woman, and an obese African-American woman.  But there was an attractive younger African-American woman, a daughter perhaps, walking with her.  Yet number five was the winner: a very attractive young mother pushing a baby stroller.  As if to further accommodate him, she even sat on the bench directly opposite his window and dug in the baby’s tote for a bottle.  His elbow on the table, Justin subtly raised his hand to block off the woman’s feet from his view, so that her shapely legs—bared by shorts—ended at the ankles.  Keeping her feet covered with his lower two fingers, he spread his hand so that his upper two fingers blocked off her head.  He couldn’t do anything to mask her busied hands.

He admired her abbreviated form.  The smooth, pale legs…pale as if bloodless.  Her breasts pushing plump against her T-shirt.  It was a classical artistic subject, wasn’t it? The female form unencumbered by head, full limbs, those hands and feet that were so tricky to get right.  One of Justin’s favorite art pieces was Hans Bellmer’s sculpture The Doll, which had a legless set of hips growing out of the top of a mirrored set of hips, so that the creature possessed two bald vaginas but no head.  Just rounded stubs for its four legs.  A creature that one could fuck and suck at the same time, Justin had joked to himself.

He finished his coffee, set down his paper cup, rotated it clockwise five full turns (he could judge this by the seam along its side, which when he finished had to be on the right).  He had a thing about the number five, doing or touching things five times.  He was an intelligent man; he realized it was an obsessive compulsive disorder.  Oh well…that was him.  Didn’t make him crazy, did it? As Dali himself had said, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad!”

*     *     *

On their second date, Justin and Kristen played it casual and had lunch over at her sister’s house, then lounged about into the evening watching TV.  Kristen wore blue jeans this time and Justin decided she had a very commendable ass—on the large side, but that was fine with him.  Actually, though, her sister had a nicer shape.  When she would come in and out of the room or briefly sit with them, he would prop his elbow on the sofa’s arm and slyly block off her feet or her head.  Cover a hand so that her shapely forearm tapered to a cleanly shorn wrist.

When he began to doze he decided it was time to leave.  Kristen seemed a bit disappointed, he thought, but when she walked him out to his car she took him by the arm and drew him close for a goodnight kiss on the lips.  She lingered a bit, and even slithered her tongue into his mouth.  Its parasitic intrusion both excited and repulsed him.  Justin did his best to reciprocate, and he supposed he did well because when they slipped apart she was smiling at him mischievously.

“Next time we should watch TV at your house,” she all but purred.

Justin’s guts rolled over one another.  He felt an initial rush of blood into his penis.  “Sure,” he managed to get out.  But he was trembling now.  It seemed to belong to another lifetime, having his ex-girlfriend inside his house.  As though it had been someone else who had been inside her body, touched and smelled and kissed her secret flesh.

He waved from his car as he drove off.  And returned to his house in a very charged state.  He powered up his computer immediately.  Considered sending Kristen a message complimenting her on her kiss, instead went to look at the collection of photos he had lifted off the web and stored in his documents folder.

It was all his new stuff.  The stuff he’d gathered since he’d first found himself so taken with, so connected to, Dali’s Honey Is Sweeter than Blood.

Before computers, he might have cut these figures out of centerfolds.  Snipped off their hands and feet, their heads.  But he could do that more neatly in his Photoshop program.  In his private gallery, Sports Illustrated bikini models lounged on sand with bloodless, scarless nubs at the ends of their wrists and ankles, and he had carefully airbrushed away the hair that fell upon their shoulders, since they no longer had heads.

In other pictures, for a bit of variety, he had fashioned raw bloody wounds instead, so that these supermodels, TV and movie stars, and fully naked women from the porn sites looked like so many carcasses processed and hung up in a butcher’s shop.

He had even found a few photos of actual amputees.  One woman was missing her left leg above the knee and stood disrobed in front of a fireplace.  He didn’t like her very obviously enhanced breasts, though—too synthetic.  Her dimpled stump was much more natural and appealing.  And then there was a pretty blond woman smiling at the camera who had no arms and no legs at all…her stumps barely cleared her shoulders and her hips.  They seemed scarred at the ends; if she’d been in an accident, how could the rest of her be so smooth, flawless? Justin imagined some madman breaking into her house to lop off her limbs but sadistically leaving her alive.  Who had taken this picture? A boyfriend? A husband? He must have to spoon feed her.  Wipe her ass for her.  Dress her.  Undress her.  Carry her to bed…

Justin was grunting very softly now as he stared at her, tugging at his turgid cock.

But he began to feel self-conscious about her eyes on him.  Smiling at the camera.  Hard white teeth like bone.  Clear sharp eyes like teeth.  He grew embarrassed.  He took a sticky post-it note from a pad on his desk, and pasted it to the monitor to block off her face.  Did her husband ever want to cover her face, so she wouldn’t stare at him while he was inside her, impatient for him to finish? Did he ever want to muffle her mouth so she wouldn’t demand to be carried to the car, driven to the mall, pushed in her wheelchair, whining, complaining, criticizing, judging, rejecting him even while she remained with him? Did her husband ever want to make her incompleteness complete…by taking an axe, and raising it above that pretty pale throat?

*     *     *

“She’s the perfect woman, huh?” Kristen joked, referring to the figure lying on the sand in Honey Is Sweeter than Blood.  She was inside Justin’s house, sitting before his computer.  He had wanted her to see this painting.  He hovered very close by, however, in case he needed to dissuade her from looking further into his gallery on her own.

“Perfect woman?” he echoed.

“Sure.  No head.  No nagging.  Just the essentials.  What every man wants.  The human blow-up doll.”

Justin remembered the quadruple amputee he’d fantasized about last night.  Yes.  No hands to touch him.  He would do the touching.  His girlfriend had once slapped him across the face and split his lower lip.  No legs to walk away, to storm out the door.  No mouth to yell.  To call you names.  No hard eyes to loathe you.

“This is amazing considering how young he was,” Kristen went on.  “Yeesh—gross donkey.” Its ribbed belly was split wide open like a vagina full of teeth.

“Mm,” Justin grunted absent-mindedly.  He was trying not to breathe in the smell of her hair, just below his own head as he lingered at her shoulder.  Her breath smelled of cigarettes.  He hated that.  They had kissed again, this time in greeting.  He hadn’t liked the warm smell of the air that she expelled through her nostrils.

Yes, he mused, the woman in the painting was lovely, a simplified form, its symmetry abstracted, refined.  In addition to the inviting orifices of vagina and anus, there were now the raw red wounds at the wrists and ankles, at the end of that lovely neck.  One, two, three, four, five tapered red stems.  He had a thing for the number five.  A star made of flesh.  He would like to walk across that dream sand right now and actually spread the body out into a star, arms and legs wide.  He was growing hard as he pictured it.

The women whose pictures he had collected off the Internet previously had been his willing sex partners as well.  Though they had hands, they couldn’t push him away.  They wore smiles and never frowned.  They were like exotic spiders mounted under glass, for him to admire without fear of being stung and poisoned.  But now…his new collection…so much better…their forms so improved upon.  He felt like an artist himself, now.

“Here’s a cool one,” he muttered, leaning over her shoulder to open up the next picture in his gallery, Hans Bellmer’s weirdly conjoined The Doll.

“Oh, now here’s the ultimate woman!” Kristen laughed.  “Jeesh, she can give birth out of both ends, even.  They should genetically engineer a whole bunch of these things, raise them on a farm,” she joked.  She elbowed Justin lightly in the ribs and grinned up at him.  “You’re a kinky bastard, aren’t you, Just?”

He smiled bashfully, gave a shrug.

She curled her hand in his shirt front.  He shuddered as her fingers slipped behind the buttons to brush his bare skin.  “Are you showing me this stuff to try to turn me on?”

“I…” He didn’t know.  Part of him desperately wanted to get her into his bed.  After all, hadn’t he prepared carefully for just such a possibility? Wasn’t his bed even now in readiness?

And yet, he was also terrified.  Of her hands, like the one inside his shirt, its sharp nails playfully raking him as if to threaten him with disembowelment, or worse, castration.

Kristen rose up from her chair.  Her arms snaked around him and she pressed him into her.  When they kissed, her full breasts flattened their bulk against him, and he courageously willed his hands to reach behind her and squeeze her ample bottom.  Yes…these sensations…her curves, her body, her veiled secret flesh…helped him side-step his doubts, his fears.  These magical parts of her that she so took for granted…that she scratched, that she washed, that she could look at any time she wanted to…but for him, so charged with mystery, with enigma, with terrifying power…

He broke his mouth from hers and whispered, “I want to show you what I’ve done with my bedroom.”

*     *     *

“Wow…you are kinky, aren’t you?” Kristen purred, smiling.  She looked at the bed again.  It was a deep dark void like outer space without the stars.  Slithery black satin sheets gleaming with purplish/bluish highlights.  She added, “It’s a bit tacky, in a way…but I like it.”

Justin’s grin felt stapled at the corners as he stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders, her nice and meaty upper arms.  He was glad that her hair was so short; he was able to admire, to kiss and nuzzle the bare nape of her neck.  He in turn purred, “I have some other interesting ideas, if you’re game…”

“Hm?” she turned toward him, and he saw she was already unbuttoning her shirt front.  “Sounds intriguing.  But…” and her playful flirtation flickered with a touch of seriousness “…I’m not into pain, Just.”

“No,” he said.  “Neither am I.  But…” he stammered, averted his eyes “…would you let me tie your hands and feet to the bed posts?”

“Are you serious?” Her expression flickered again.

“Well…”

“Not the first time, Just.  I mean, I know you but I don’t know you, you know?”

He snorted a strained little laugh.  “Sure.  I’m sorry.  I don’t want to play all our games in one night.”

“Right,” she reassured him, taking his hands and putting them on her breasts, now covered only by the lacy filigrees of her teal-colored bra.  “So what else do you have in mind?”

*     *     *

Justin stood at the side of the bed, the black satin sheets slippery and wet-feeling against his bare legs.  He was naked and his erection swung out in front of him like a dowsing rod.  He was slowly stroking it in one hand.  Before him on the bed lay a figure with skin the way he liked it, flawlessly pallid, a landscape of snow-covered gentle hills, and a dark mysterious forest near its center that the snow hadn’t touched.  A faint musk wafted from it, agonizing him with his desire to explore it and lose himself forever in it.  A few dark dots of moles, some minor cellulite dimples and irregularities, but insignificant details; he admired their naturalism, their honesty.  He was relieved there were no tattoos, no pierced nipples or navel.  Such delicate membranes as those rose-pink nipples should not be desecrated.

That said, the figure on the bed had no head, hands or feet.

Kristen’s solid, shapely arms were spread-eagled out to her sides.  As were her plumpish, silky-skinned thighs.  Though her thighs were not, her shins were shiny, as it was with women’s legs.  One of those beguiling mysteries of the female form.

Carefully, Justin moved onto the bed, as if afraid to awaken a sleeper.  He straddled the star-shaped figure, positioned himself over it.  His chin was still slick from his lips and nose having only a minute before been buried in the dark copse.  Now, he guided another part of himself toward that region.  And in.  His shaft slid deeper, deeper, through the moist veils of the flesh, as if it had entered into another plane, another dimension, a realm of dream and “convulsive beauty”, as Breton had dubbed it, a place only a Dali could envision.

Propping himself above the unmoving body, Justin pumped so slowly, so luxuriously into it, staring at the breasts, spread and flattened out because their owner lay on her back, staring down at where he was sunk to his very base in that dark thatch, staring at the neck where it ended in blackness.

He heard a shuddery little exhalation or a moan from Kristen’s invisible lips.  He smelled cigarettes on her wafting warm breath.  He tried to ignore it.  He tried to ignore the wet glisten he saw of one of her eyes through the tight black mesh across her face.

As he pumped, he felt a dry touch upon his back.  “No!” he husked almost desperately, the contact all but shattering his near hypnotic state.  He tried to make his tone less urgent.  “Please, Kristen…don’t touch me…not yet…”

He felt her hand withdraw.   Sensed the reluctance in the motion.  Again she extended her pure white arm across the field of black sheets, which pooled under her like dark blood.  The black lace glove she wore made her hand disappear, as much as was possible, against that expanse of black satin.

He hadn’t had to have the gloves made.  But he had had black lace coverings made for her feet, that were a cross between a sock and a slipper.  And he had had a black lace mask made for her, which covered the whole of her head.  Though she could breathe through its web-like weave, there were no holes for her eyes, nose or mouth.  The lights were low.  It was a nearly convincing effect.  With the additional benefit of Justin’s ample imagination, it was a very gratifying effect.

He started to moan more deeply, to pump more and more quickly and aggressively.  The bed began rocking like a black ocean.  In the emptiness where her head should have been, Justin heard Kristen moan through her mask as well.  In her own mounting ardor, she drew up her legs and hooked them over the backs of Justin’s calves.

“No,” he rasped, “Jesus, Kristen, please!” In one fluid movement, as though the slippery sheets aided him, he was out of her and sitting on the edge of the bed, lowering his forehead into his palms, his flushed heart jackhammering.

“Oh, Just, come on,” Kristen sighed, sitting up beside him.  She peeled the caul-like black membrane off her face, but left on the gloves and stockings.  “I’ve been playing along…it’s been fun…but don’t get like this about it.”

“I’m just…” he began.  But he didn’t know what he meant to add to that.

“You’re self-conscious because you’re em-barrassed to be revealing your fantasies to me.  That’s natural…fantasies are very private and personal things.  I’m proud you trust me to share yours with me.” She obviously noticed his fading member, because she slid off the bed and knelt between his knees, and took it in hand.  “Come on, baby, let’s get you back in the mood, huh?”

Justin looked down at the top of Kristen’s head, her black hair, as she took him into her mouth.  He saw that she had white hairs at the top of her head where she was graying prematurely.  She obviously dyed her hair black to hide them.  He almost put his hands on that head to hold her at his groin, but couldn’t bring himself to touch it.  And yet he was inside it.  He was on her tongue.  That saliva-slicked steamy-hot chamber from which the voice issued.  Teeth raked along his shaft…

He pushed her off him.  She fell backwards but was able to catch herself from falling all the way onto her back.  Justin had bolted to his feet, his penis flopping weakly.

“Fuck this,” Kristen hissed under her breath, jolting to her feet and turning away from him.  “I was only trying to help you, asshole.  See how many other girls you can find off the web that will be so patient with your fucked-up games…”

“Kristen…”

She whirled to blaze her cold eyes at him, to bare those raking sharp animal teeth at him, like the ribs in the donkey’s split belly.  Jabbed a finger at him.  “You pushed me, motherfucker! Do you know how many guys never get head at all from their girlfriends or their wives? And you push me off like that? No, sorry, I’m not into physical abuse, thanks   …” She swept past him, snatched up her teal briefs, put them on in brusque, awkward, utterly non-sexual movements.  The same ugly fast motions in harnessing herself into her bra.

“No wonder your last girlfriend dumped you,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.

He watched her face as she said this.  Sneering lips peeled back.  Snarling lips.  She had a broad face and her head suddenly looked disproportionately large for her body.  When she faced him again it seemed to swim at him, hugely.

“What did you do to her to make her leave you, Justin? This? Or did you tie her hands and feet to the bed posts and…and I don’t even wanna imagine.”

Justin remembered the slap across his face.  Tasting his own blood.  He remembered wanting, in a flash of red light, to taste hers in turn…to swallow gallons of it and vomit them back onto her rent and sundered flesh…but instead standing there numbly, immobilized, and listening to her shoes clack, clack, clack toward the door.  She the tough female cop, he the serial killer defeated even before he could begin.

“You have the balls to want to tie me up…to ask me to put on this freaky shit…to push me on the fucking floor…and you won’t even talk to me now?” she raged, her twisted countenance looming into his vision again.  He flinched and blinked as if afraid to be sprayed with spittle, and kept his eyes averted.

She finished dressing.  Headed for the door.  Looked back.  “Goodbye, Justin,” she said tightly.

“Goodbye,” he whispered, not looking up.  He listened to her heavy tread across his apartment.  Diminishing.  Gone…

…out of this dimension, back into another.  Back behind the monitor’s glass.  Back behind the TV’s screen.  Back onto the glossy magazine page.  Back into pixel, into ink, into brush strokes on a painting.  Back to the desert dream plain.

Justin slipped into his bathrobe.  He picked up the black nets she had worn over her head, her hands and feet, folded them neatly away into a drawer.  His face expressionless.  No tears.  He drifted wraith-like into his livingroom and seated himself before his computer.

As was his habit, he spun the mouse in five clockwise rotations on his mouse pad while he waited for his computer to boot up.

He started his Photoshop program.  Pulled into it his photo of the pretty blond woman smiling into the camera, fully naked, a torso with the barest nubs for limbs.

Using the art program’s airbrush and cloning features, he was able to quite convincingly remove the woman’s head completely.

A Puppet Show For No Oneor, The Story of Tristan and Isolde

Act One: The Discarded Kingdom

The borders of the kingdom are the borders of the galaxy, and the universe beyond is a hugeness of steel giants that hurtle past in gleaming streams by day, and by night they are fewer but their unblinking eyes blaze light like twin comets, and each giant is larger than the palace of Isolde the Beautiful.

The kingdom is contained by a web of rust that stretches high into the heavens, its links interlaced with bushes and branches, vines and seed pods, rattling brown in winter like the hands of dead infants groping through a cemetery fence.  The many trees imprisoned within this enclosure soar even higher, and help to obscure the kingdom from the world beyond the rusted web.  This plot of land has been thus portioned off for decades, and the people of the town outside do not know or even question who owns it.  Perhaps it is part of the land owned by an old mill next door which was at one time converted into a plastic molding company but has since been divided into smaller spaces for offices, a print shop and a shoe store.  One could easily fit a twin of the old brick mill into this fenced-off strip of land, but nothing has ever been built here.  Not by the people of the outer town, in any case, who walk or bicycle or drive past every day, tossing over the fence a discarded coffee cup or gum wrapper, soda can, full bag of trash.  Their parents and grandparents might have thrown their refuse over that fence, sending it thumping and tumbling into another realm silently and secretly conterminous with their own.  Of course they suspect that there is furtive life down in that hollowed spot, which dips below street level like a foundation into which no building was ever socketed, but they do not fathom its nature.  If they were to pause to imagine it at all, which they do not, their speculations would end at the squirrels and birds and many insects which do indeed thrive within the apparently vacant lot, but which do not represent its only citizens.

Act Two: The Spiked Brain

Tristan raises his face from where it was pressed for many hours into the dry dirt beneath the strata of dead and decaying leaves; it will be easier to soak traces of life-giving chemicals or oil into his pores when spring returns and the earth gets damp and spongy.  He jerks himself to his feet, his movements quick and bird-like, darting looks around him at the graying dusk as he becomes active once again.  His head is that of a very old jester doll with its stuffed cloth body long rotted away; even his bifurcated belled hat and the cottony inside of his skull are gone, leaving a hollow into which he once inserted a plump and thorny green chestnut which has since gone brown as a sea urchin.  His skin is cracked and partially blackened, but his eyes are bright, nose aquiline, his smile brave if his lips are no longer red.  Before he was fully sentient, others made him a body of sticks and small metal bits wired together into articulate joints, and his clothing is black tatters that stream from his arms like lacerated wings.

He is in his tiny chamber hidden within a large heap of dead and fallen branches toward the back corner of the kingdom, and stoops to follow a twisting, scratching passageway through a barbed maze of twigs like brittle, grasping fingers.  The tangle of branches which makes up the palace of King Mark has been fortified and combined with scrap metal and rain-warped cardboard, garbage bag plastic and ceiling tiles, tinfoil and hubcaps, and he passes other rooms and even tunnels that descend into subterranean levels before he enters the throne room of the King.

King Mark sits on a block of wood from which nails protrude, his hands resting on green glass telephone pole transformers.  His head is that of a military doll with realistic hair and beard which have been shaped with rusty razors so that he has an intellectual receding hairline and neat goatee.  He has a plastic scar on his cheek.  Most of his original body is intact, though his feet are missing and he walks by spearing his stumps into the soil.

Jerkily and silently, Tristan approaches the King and bows.  When he rises, the King’s assistant, who has a spindly scarecrow body like Tristan’s but without a covering of clothing, and whose head is the denuded skull of a squirrel, traces intricate lines and patterns into the dirt floor while the King’s arms wave and thrash and clack against each other in a complex sign language.  Tristan nods in understanding.  He is to cross the kingdom, and go to the far-flung palace of Isolde the Beautiful at its further edge.  There, he is to make known to the beauty the love of the King, and Tristan is to bring her back here.

Bowing again, Tristan is dismissed, and makes his way through the thorny palace so as to exit it and venture into the evening, which blackens as if the very air mildews.

Act Three: The Beautiful

No animals attack Tristan along his journey (one time he was savaged by a raccoon, but he was rescued by comrades who speared it, and afterwards they all lay in its blood to soak it into their pores).  He hunkers down sometimes when the steel giants pass the rusted fence, their lights weaving and plunging through the massive tree trunks around him.  The air roars with their passage, as if they are planets racing by.  He picks his way like a scrabbling insect over branches and through matted leaves, flicking his head with its unmoving eyes this way and that.

At last, looming before him is another palace of debris and detritus, flotsam and jetsam, discard and decay.  He crouches through the entrance of the palace, and is stopped by twin guards who are connected by red and green wires running from two halves of the opened and dissected transistor radio which composes their torsos.  He is admitted, and allowed to duck under their conjoining wires so as to proceed into the heart of the woven nest.

A loping guide that is a shed cicada husk lashed to three plastic drinking straws for stilt-like legs leads Tristan through halls of soggy cardboard across which whisk millipedes and silverfish.  They pass an open nursery in which infants sleep in beds fashioned from styrofoam hamburger containers, stuffed with leaves, twine and cotton.  A curious head pops up from one of these nests; it is a red Christmas bulb tapered like the glans of a penis, which turns to watch the pair go by.

The guide leaves Tristan at the outside of the chamber of the princess Isolde.  She swivels her head to face him as he enters.

She is, as they have heard in his palace, beautiful.  Her head is that of a small porcelain doll with delicately painted eyes and lips, most of the paint still intact though her pure glossy skin is spider-webbed with fine cracks.  Her hair is a weave of dried flowers, white cotton, and delicate twigs blended into a poignant bouquet.  Her finely-formed and articulated body of metal, wood and smooth glass is hinted at through the ragged white muslin that enshrouds it.  Her hands are of pink plastic from a less ancient doll, and Tristan aches at their dainty loveliness, instantly imagines them caressing his jutting crescent moon of a face.

Transfixed, Tristan accepts the drawing stick she extends to him, and she nods at the dirt between them, indicating that he should relay his message.  Remembering with a surge of desperation that he hasn’t bowed in the princess’s presence, so struck is he by her appearance, he now bows deeply with a forward jerk.  The motion is too violent.  The chestnut was once large enough to fit snugly into the hollow at the top of his head, but the shriveled husk it has become is dislodged, and rolls to Isolde’s tiny feet.  It is a withered, cracked thing; pathetic.  Tristan is mortified.

But before he can act, the princess herself stoops to retrieve his chestnut.  Straightening with it in her tiny pink hands as though it were an infant, she draws very close to the messenger, and reaches up to his head to reinsert the prickly globe.  Her nearness intoxicates him, and his mind is blanked, particularly from having been so intimately handled by her.  But now he is dismayed, because the princess withdraws her hands sharply.  He sees why: a thorn from the ball has broken off and just barely penetrated the rubbery skin of her right hand.

Tristan reaches out and takes her hand between his to steady it, and then he pinches the root of the prickle delicately between his scissored wrists, not having fingers to articulate.  He dislodges the thorn, then looks into Isolde’s close, upturned face.

For a delirious, teetering moment Tristan feels beneath his feet the spiraling of the galaxy of which he is a part.  And then, he realizes, the princess is smitten with him as well.  It is unthinkable, but plain in her expressionlessly yearning countenance.  Emboldened by her power, and by her desire, she reaches out to him.  She must know that he will not dare take the initiative.  Watching those pink hands with their fused fingers glide toward him, Tristan feels his head start to twitch and quiver so rapidly that it nearly blurs his grinning features.

Act Four: Turn Away, Children

As he fantasized, the pink hands float to his face, but they are shaken off by its vibrations, so they descend to his body instead, which only makes his head blur the more.  The lower front of his black garments tents out in a point.  A pink hand rubs in little circles over this straining hard point, and against the cloth the point opens into a little mouth that nips at her hand passionately with serrated teeth.

A hard point tents out of her own dress.  Its bright tip pierces the gauzy muslin.  Like a hungry steel bird beak, the tip yawns open.  It is a pair of fingernail scissors, the ringed handles forming the princess’s lovely pelvis.  These hooped hips are worked by rubber bands and levered segments of her musculature.  The curved blades, thus, cut through his black garb, releasing his nipping point.  It is, once revealed, a pair of tweezers which now extends further from his groin.  With them, Tristan takes hold of one of the pink hands, and squeezes it just enough for the teeth to impress her rubbery skin.  He can feel the tremor of pleasure radiate through her frame.

She scissors away more of his clothing until it falls from him in rags, baring his intricate exoskeleton jointed like an artist’s mannikin.  With his tweezered protrusion, he pulls at her dress, dragging it away from her body, so that it tears against her sharp points.  Her beauty is further revealed, like a butterfly with its cocoon cut away: the rustless steel rods of her arms, so smooth when he runs his fingerless mitts along their surfaces.  The warm, vaguely rough textures of her wooden thighs, this wood not warped and worm-eaten because she is the princess and wondrously made.  And her torso, praise creation, is primarily formed by a small glass perfume bottle, deep dark blue, inverted so that the cap points downward, which he imagines still has a little of its residue sealed inside its smooth interior.

They draw closer yet, so that his tweezers skitter against the blue glass, pointing upwards as the instrument is sandwiched between them.  Likewise her scissors.  He grips the scissors with his tweezers and the scissors clench his organ back, so that they are locked fiercely.  He runs his mitts along her sides, deliciously feeling their glossy sleekness, and he shudders in ecstacy as he feels some raised lettering on the bottle ripple across his palms.

Isolde pulls Tristan down on top of her on the floor of her chamber.  Their limbs trace patterns of indecipherable pleasure in the dirt where he was to have told her that his uncle, King Mark, sent him on his behalf.

Propped above her reclining form, that glowing pale face gazing up at him with puckered cherub lips of red enamel, Tristan unscrews with his tweezers the blue bottle’s cap where it lies between her legs.  He was correct: a trace of its hidden fragrant juices drips free, and he can imagine its vertiginous scent   …as he slips his now glistening tweezers into this inviting threaded hole.

In and out he slides, so deeply that the tweezers nearly become wedged in the opening time and again, the metal grating with a soft screech against the glass lips.  Her scissors snap at the air between them as if clicking out a language of passion.

Suddenly, there is another sound behind them.  An angry scratching noise, and their heads swivel around to look.  Figures draw furiously in the dirt, or wave and clack their frenzied limbs.  They have been found out, the princess and the lowly nephew of King Mark, who has sent him here on a trusted errand.  Tristan has betrayed his King and disgraced this princess.  The lovers reluctantly and shamefully withdraw from their embrace.

Tristan knows that he can not return to his uncle, nor can he remain here.  He reads the dirt writing, so emphatic that it churns up a mist of dust.  He is to be exiled; banished off to the third palace within the kingdom of the discarded.

Act Five: The White Hand

Tristan treks to the rear of the kingdom, where the great rusted fence looks upon the back of an automotive garage from which come roars and hisses, metallic whines and shrieks, as from a haunted mountain…as if that garage contains the gnashing clockwork of the universe.

The palace is largely contained within the tank and bowl of a toilet heavily half sunk in the compost of dead leaves, and covered with branches.  In the great white dome of the bowl, Tristan has an audience with the Duke, and his daughter, Iseult of the White Hand.

Her hands are indeed white; they are of snowy porcelain.  Tristan realizes that they might in fact be the hands that should go along with the face of his beloved Isolde.  Also, Isolde seems to possess the warm pink hands that should belong to this lady’s face.  For her small head is that of a smiling teenage girl with blue eye shadow and long hair so blond it is almost white, though much of this is torn out leaving a peppering of black holes.  Her gown is black like Tristan’s new garments.  She comes to greet him, and she towers over him on her long rubbery legs, her body fairly intact except that her arms have been replaced with articulated limbs ending in those cool glassy hands, one of which Tristan touches to his grinning jester mouth as he bows to his new hosts and benefactors.

When he rises, he sees Iseult smiling down at him with perfectly painted white teeth.  He realizes that she is attracted to him.  Once, he might have hungered to touch her warm rubber legs with their bendable wire cores, and to see naked the harder plastic shell of her torso, but he can only think of the exquisite white face of his lover, of her flowered nest of hair and her blue glass depths.

In the days that follow, the princess Iseult’s attraction to him becomes increasingly apparent to Tristan, until one day she surprises him at the doorway to his own humble chamber.  She steps inside on her dainty arched feet, which lack the minuscule high-heeled plastic shoes they are contorted to fit.  Nervously, Tristan notes that one of her ankles is split so that he can see the flexible wire inside her resilient flesh.  It is as though he has glimpsed her actual essence, that of a cool gray worm masquerading in a soft pink body.

After sliding back into place the warped Christmas card, heavy with foil and embossing, that serves as his door panel, Iseult swivels her bright smile toward him.  As mild as it is, the smile nonetheless appears to him as a carnal leer filling the world, hatefully eclipsing the pursed dainty lips of his true love.  He has to take his gaze from her, and looks past her at his door.  The Christmas card shows a gorgeous angel, but it is inverted, so that she seems to be plunging head-first toward the floor, fallen from the heavens of ink and glitter.

The princess puts her white porcelain hands on him.  He resents their temptation, their seduction, their mocking resemblance to Isolde’s white face; he hates her for those beautiful hands, as if she has hacked and stolen them from his love.  Furthermore, he hates himself, as he begins to become aroused by the princess’s roving caresses.

The white hands free his tweezers from his black garments, and the steel instrument thrusts to its full length under her deft ministrations.  The glassy hands skitter and slide up and down his polished tool until inadvertently he begins to nip hungrily at them.  Her own mounting lust is made evident by the lengthening of her nipples as they press out the fabric of her garb.  The princess further makes known her pleasure by reaching up to part those ebony garments, allowing them to fall away, her body fully revealed to him.

He sees her nipples are still lengthening in corkscrew twists, their metal ends sharp points, and he realizes she has two long screws inserted into her back so that their tips protrude through her front.  Some marvelous mechanism inside her hollow torso, or perhaps her powerful will alone, commands their movement.

Princess Iseult puts her white palms upon Tristan’s cheeks, and draws his face down to those nipples, which have reached their fullness at last.  He wonders if she means to drill one of them into his face, making him a true orifice for a mouth.  Or does she mean to stab them into his eyes, to obliterate Isolde forever from his gaze, leaving only hollow blackness such as resides within her own being?

But she pulls his head down lower, and it isn’t into his face that she plunges the sharp points, but his mummified chestnut brain.  The screws have not reached their limit after all, as they begin to turn anew, skewering him deeper…deeper.  But he doesn’t fight against her.  How can he? He submits, bent to her as if bowing to her, submissive and surrendering, miserable and yet still aching with lust, as Iseult of the White Hand penetrates his mind.  They both shudder then, convulse, one spasming body, as they reach their climax.

It is not much longer before Tristan has bowed, surrendered fatalistically, yet again.  He and Iseult are married.

Act Six: Wounded

Spring has come and turned feverishly lush, becoming summer, and the kingdom is crowded to its borders with life and fertility.  Even now, servants are assembling a first child for Tristan and Iseult.  And yet, this brings him no joy.  He has been abject, as if mourning a death, ever since learning that his uncle King Mark has married the princess Isolde.

One day, he reluctantly accompanies his father-in-law the Duke and others on a hunt.  Anything to get away from the tiresome ecstasies of his bride.  For when she is not brow-drilling him, raping his already mutilated brain, whose thorns can not compete with her steely teats, she is brow-beating him, accusing him, mocking him.  She is well aware of the reason he was banished from his own palace.  Fully aware of his crime.  And she has noted how much more glum he has become since learning of the marriage of Isolde.  Iseult is jealous, contemptuous   …but determined to be the one who owns him.  Her lust for him is a triumphant ritual of dominance.  It is as though he is a prize she has won from the other princess in a war of passion.  He can’t imagine that his wife loves him any more than he does her.

The hunt takes place at twilight, when the larger and more challenging animals of the kingdom begin to venture forth on their own hunts.  Tonight the musk of skunk is heavy on the thick summer air.  But it is an opossum they encounter, and which they surround and lunge at with their weapons.  The Duke lets his fellows make the first lunges, so that the great white beast will be adequately wounded before he administers the final thrust with his darning needle.

But the opossum fights wildly, its fleshy tail whipping across the Duke and several others, scattering their light bodies.  With various needles and nails hanging from its bleeding flanks, the animal rages away from its tormentors by charging directly at Tristan.

A long sharp splinter of wood has been lashed to both his wrists with twine, so that he might use it as a spear, but he has not thought to really take part in the killing tonight.  Thus, it does not even occur to him to raise his weapon until it is too late.  Maddened by its pain and frenzied with fear, the ghost-like animal seizes Tristan in its jaws and front paws and begins savaging him madly.

His new black garments are shredded, tattered by sharp fangs and claws.  An arm is ripped from him.  His tweezers drop from his loins to the forest floor.  And his withered chestnut brain is dislodged, rolls away into the dense vegetation and is lost from sight.

The Duke and the others have righted themselves, and attack the briefly preoccupied beast from behind.  It releases its struggling prey but rolls upon his body, trampling and crushing it, while it thrashes horribly in its protracted death throes, the Duke’s long aluminum lance deeply embedded in its side.  But as its spasms grow less violent, become more like a diminishing succession of electrified jolts, the others are able to get close enough to Tristan to pull his ravaged body clear.

They all know, him most of all, that his wounds are mortal.

He is lifted so that he might be borne back to the palace.  He is too weak to ask them to remain and locate the lost chestnut.

Act Seven: The White Flag

The blood of the opossum is painted on Tristan’s pallid face, his head propped up so that blood can be poured into it like a bowl, but these efforts only prolong the inevitable.  He is dying, and this knowledge frees him; he becomes bold.  By feebly scratching in the dirt, he tells his servant to summon to his death bed Isolde the Beautiful, wife of his uncle King Mark.

If it is her intention to come, she is to send the messenger back to Tristan bearing a white flag in his arms.  If she will not come to his side, the servant is to return carrying a flag of black.  Then he will know whether or not to cling to these last shreds of life.

Tristan may be dying, and thus emboldened, but the servant is not nearly so free.  Afraid to comply with Tristan’s wishes behind his wife’s back, the servant makes known to Iseult the final request of her husband.

Iseult is enraged, but her rage burns cold even in this summer swelter.

Wildly waving two leafy twigs in a kind of semaphore, she commands the servant to fashion a flag of black.

After waiting a suitable amount of time, so that it will seem he has indeed traveled to the far palace of King Mark, the servant enters the bed chamber of Tristan carrying a stick to which has been tied a scrap of black plastic trash bag.  The servant stands at the foot of the cigar box bed nervously, as if awaiting Tristan’s next command.

But there is no final command.  Tristan simply lowers his head back.  His eyes are still bright in his cracked, blood-caked white face, and his lips are still curled in a great smile, but his soul rolls out of him as his desiccated brain has already rolled out of him.  As the chestnut became lost amongst the rich flora of the kingdom, so his soul vanishes into a greater, invisible kingdom to which only spirit, not matter, is discarded.

It is as if a hand has been withdrawn from inside a puppet.  Tristan is no longer a prince, in his dismembered state not even a doll.  And yet despite this, he is loved.  Despite his wife’s betrayal, word of his death reaches the palace of Isolde the Beautiful.

Act Eight: Inanimated

Though both King Mark and Iseult protest, Isolde insists that she must go to the side of her fallen, former lover.  She can not be dissuaded or denied.  Reluctantly, the King accompanies her, as he feels obligated to pay his respects to his disrespectful nephew.  But when they arrive at the impressive toilet-palace of the Duke, King Mark allows his wife to first go to Tristan’s side alone.  He is heart-broken by Isolde’s greater love for his nephew, but loves her enough to grant her this private mourning.

Even the servant beside the bed leaves her alone with her suffering and the still form of her lover, lying in a cigar box packed with layers of leaves and plastic bubble wrap (it was one of Iseult’s pleasures to make love with him upon this material so that it popped beneath them).  Isolde nearly swoons at the sight of him.  The unabsorbed animal blood crusted to his grinning handsome face.  And that poor, empty, empty skull…

She kneels at his side, gently stroking his cheek with her pink plastic hand, recalling how his face vibrated in nervousness the first time she touched him thus.

She will never love her great husband as she loved this humble being.

Since learning of his demise, Isolde the Beautiful has been secretly planning to dismantle herself violently by using her scissored sex organs and her lover’s tweezers, so that she might join him in death, if such a thing is possible, or cast herself into oblivion to escape her torment if it is not…but she finds his gleaming tool has been torn away.

No matter.  She is strong.  She is a princess.  Her will is powerful.  She knows she needs no weapon, ultimately, to achieve her aim.

Rising from her kneeling position, she lies down inside the cigar box, upon the very body of her lover, and slowly withdraws her existence.  Unwills the animation of these gathered scraps of pretty junk.  Her lovely blue glass torso becomes an empty perfume bottle.  Her porcelain head like that of a marionette with its strings cut by its own hand.

They are found that way.  They are remembered that way.  There are a few who resent them, betrayed by them.  But for most of those who dwell in the three palaces of the kingdom, they become legend.  Their love inspires.  It lives on in the bodies of the inspired.  It lives on without vessels to carry it, as a fable and an ideal.

Their parts are not reused, recycled.  They are not buried together, but they are both buried.  And part of the legend that survives like a thing that can not be killed is this: that even now, those buried pieces are reanimating themselves under the soil, the leaves.  He, finding new pieces in that soil to complete his sundered body.  Even now, so it is told, they are working their way toward each other through the very flesh of the kingdom.  Slowly, arduously, crossing the great distance between their respective palaces.  It may take years.  It may take until those greater beings who live beyond the rusted fence have themselves all passed into the earth.

But such is the patience of immortals.

Clouds and Rain

The naked man stood before the plate glass window, its curtains fully drawn back to unveil the nightscape of Hong Kong.  The window was like an aquarium through which the naked man gazed into the ocean’s deepest depths…black, but filled with the alluring light of life.  The phosphorescence of hungry creatures.  Like most great cities, at night Hong Kong looked to be a city made of volcanic glass and scintillating jewels.  But that was the glamour of midnight, the painted gloss of a prostitute.  By day, the city showed its ulcers and tumors.

But the flesh of the naked man held no such imperfections.  Against the window, he appeared to be floating in space, some serene god.  His short black hair was still slicked back from his shower, beads of water still clinging to him like dew.  Behind him, Cheung watched one bead wind down the man’s lower back, and vanish at the cleft of his small, hard buttocks.

It was a testimony to Kot’s trust in Cheung that he would turn his naked back to him, knowing that Cheung had a pistol holstered beneath his jacket.  And it was a testimony to Cheung’s skill at his job that Kot would have made him his personal bodyguard, not knowing that Cheung was an undercover agent…a constable with the Royal Hong Kong Police.

It was beginning to rain.  The first drops pattered hard against the glass wall, like bullets attempting to pierce it.  They trickled down, resembling the bead of water Cheung had watched run down Kot’s back.

“Clouds and rain,” Kot murmured in Cantonese.  Cheung could see the man’s reflected face, saw him smiling.  Clouds and rain was Chinese slang for the sex act.

A half hour ago, a handsome male prostitute had left Kot’s apartment.  Cheung finally spoke up about the man.

“It isn’t wise to bring…guests into your own home, Kot.  You shouldn’t make yourself vulnerable.”

“What do you propose, Cheung? That I become celibate?” A soft crackle as Kot drew on his cigarette.  He took a savoring, almost sensual approach to smoking.  “My career has its dangers.  But I’m not willing to give up the pleasures of living.” He held his cigarette in front of his face in pointed contemplation.  “This could kill me, too.” He shrugged.

Although he masqueraded as Kot’s bodyguard, Cheung truly was a bodyguard of sorts.  He didn’t want any of Kot’s potential enemies to kill him…not until he had used the man to get closer to his bosses in the 24K gang, as it was called…the most powerful of Hong Kong’s Triads.

“You should at least take just one trusted lover.  Not strangers each time,” Cheung persisted.  His own voice sounded distant to him.  He found his eyes drawn again to Kot’s bare ass, smooth and dully shining with the light of the room.  He imagined the flesh was still warm from the hot shower.  He imagined the flesh was as soft as a satin pillow.  In his trousers his penis had roused, an agitated snake hiding in its den.  Cheung wrenched his eyes from the man’s nude figure.  He forced them up again to Kot’s reflected face.  And his heart flinched when he saw Kot’s eyes on his in the glass.  Kot was smiling again.

“I should take just one trusted lover, eh, Cheung? One man I trust—as I trust you, for instance?”

“Yes,” Cheung said, and cleared his voice.  “One you trust as you trust me.”

“You’re jealous, aren’t you? Jealous of my guests? Is that the real source of your concern?”

Cheung felt his face flush with hot blood.  “No…of course not,” he stammered.  “Like I told you, I’m only…”

He broke off.  Kot had turned to face him.  Now his naked front was plainly displayed.  Cheung had briefly seen the man without clothing, in recent weeks, as Kot had come to trust him more and more.  But never so blatantly.  Not like this.

Kot took hold of his own scrotum and rolled his balls in his palm languidly, running his thumb up over his slumbering penis.  “You like to look at me, don’t you, Cheung? You needn’t be embarrassed.  I’m not embarrassed, obviously, am I? Do you think I didn’t recognize right away that you like men as I do?”

Cheung swallowed hard.  He felt more naked than Kot was—as if it were not his attraction to men that had been found out, dragged into the light, but his deception.  Yet despite his desperate discomfort, he couldn’t help but stare, his heart thudding, as Kot coaxed his prick awake, now concentrating more effort there, stroking it, pulling at it, until it strained alert and eager, a fleshy spike thrusting up from a patch of glinting black hair.

Cheung’s own cock now tented out the material of his loose-fitting white trousers.  He had to reach into them to readjust the painful angle of his erection; there was no sense in further denial of his arousal.  But with his hand on his cock, he found it impossible to let go of it.  He stroked it as Kot fondled his own, across the carpeted room from him.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Kot cooed, his grin lopsided, boyish and mischievous in a way Cheung had found winning from the start.  “Yeah…rub your cock.  Make it hard.  It feels so good.”

Cheung swallowed harder yet, and let out an imperceptible moan.

Kot gave a nod toward Cheung’s body.  “Take your clothes off.” He made no attempt to approach the other man across the room.  “It’s only fair that I should see you, too.”

Cheung was beyond questioning the professionalism, the ethics of his actions.  He was not celibate, either…like Kot, did not believe in forgoing the pleasures of life.  Without further hesitation, he removed his white jacket, tossed it across a chair.  He slipped out of the harness of his holster, and carefully draped that across the jacket, his passion too insistent now for him to be alarmed at his own vulnerability.  He next unbuttoned his shirt to bare his smooth, hairless chest, unzipped his pants so that his cock dropped free like a heavy tree falling, so anxious was it to point toward the object of its desire.  Cheung stepped out of his shoes, the trousers, his underpants, until he stood naked across from Kot like a second reflection of the handsome gangster.

Gazing at each other, Kot grinning and Cheung’s face slack as if he were the stunned victim of his own craving, the two men continued to work their tumescent organs.  But Cheung could take this game no longer.  Still clutching his cock in his fist, he at last broke forward and approached the other man.  It didn’t matter that the window was unveiled behind Kot, that the whole of Hong Kong seemed to be watching with its myriad, glittering diamond eyes.  All that mattered was to touch the naked flesh of the smiling gangster.

Kot reached out his left hand invitingly, put it on Cheung’s hip and drew him closer.  Cheung put both his hands on Kot’s shoulders as if to support himself, his trembling legs feeling as insubstantial as smoke.  Now Kot wrapped both his hands around both their veiny poles, and tugged at them, the shafts rubbing against each other even as Kot’s strong hands rubbed them.  Tears of clear lubricant wept from the slits in their shiny twin heads.

“I want to fuck you,” Cheung whispered.  “Please let me fuck you.  I want to be inside you.”

“I’m the boss, remember?” Kot replied, grinning.  “I should fuck you, shouldn’t I?”

Cheung wrapped his arms around Kot’s back, and hungrily clamped his mouth over the other’s as if to suck the very life essence from him.  Kot let Cheung’s tongue into his mouth, and twined his own around it until the slick organs were joined together like those other organs below.

Kot at last broke his lips free and pressed them into Cheung’s ear.  “You can fuck me this time.  Next time I fuck you.  Just don’t tell the boys, okay? I’m supposed to be the dominant one here.” His voice had a wink in it.

And with that, Kot turned again to face out the window.  He braced his palms flat against the glass like suction cups, and spread his legs far apart, arching his back to thrust out his rear.  To Cheung, it looked unsettlingly as if Kot were allowing himself to be frisked.  Cheung blotted the thought from his mind.  He blotted the fact that he was a police officer from his mind…and stepped up behind the handsome gangster.

Kot winced at the first penetration, let out a little grunt and glanced over his shoulder.  Cheung was afraid to press on, almost withdrew, but Kot blurted, “No.  Don’t stop.  Don’t be afraid.” In more of a whisper he asked, “Have you ever fucked a man before?”

“Never you,” Cheung whispered back.

Cheung bored his way deeper into the other’s flesh, slowly and gently, until at last his entire shaft was skewered up into the molten interior of Kot’s body.  He was able to withdraw now, press in again, withdraw, press in, as his shaft became naturally moistened.  The slick sound of this slow piston action only heightened his intoxication.  He put his hands on Kot’s hips and gave the strokes a little more force, withdrew a bit more fully before plunging in again, until his balls were audibly slapping against the other’s.

Kot’s palms squeaked against the glass but he held his crucified pose.  The sound made Cheung look up from the taut, bunched muscles in Kot’s back, out at the city again.  What if there were someone out there with a telescope? Tourists with binoculars? Or even other investigators like himself with binoculars, staking out Kot’s apartment on their own?

It didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered.  Corruption was rampant amongst the Hong Kong police in this year of 1990.  It was seven long years before the city would revert to Chinese rule, and the Triads had not yet really felt the challenge of that day of reckoning, still controlled the city like a second government.  Or, more accurately, like a linked parasitic part of the government, their power was so deeply rooted and entwined.  It was said that at least 35 percent of the police force was either affiliated with the Triads or actual members of the gangs themselves.  Cheung was not one of these men.  He had never taken money from a Triad.  He had never been corrupted.  It was why he had been trusted to become part of the dangerous undercover investigation team.

And yet here he was…stripped naked, fucking a member of the 24K gang in the ass before the whole of the city.  And it didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered, but the secret heat that sheathed the thrusting sword of his cock.  The feel of Kot’s smooth hips in his crushing fingers.  The carnal smells rising up from them.  The slick sound of their joining.  Cheung watched a bead of sweat trickle down Kot’s lower back, become lost in the crack of his spread ass.

The rain now pounded against the vast window, gaining in force also, until it blurred the whole city into running, melting, multi-colored light.  Cheung watched their joint reflections in the glass; Kot squinting in intensity, his cock bobbing crazily with each smacking thrust into his rear…Cheung’s own face, clenched with an almost severe determination.  It was as if they were wrestling with each other.  Locked in a desperate battle to wring the passion out of themselves.

Abruptly Cheung dug his fingers harder into Kot’s waist and drove in one last thrust like a killing coup de grace, launching his sperm as if firing a gun into the very guts of the handsome gangster.

*     *     *

“Have you ever been to the Walled City, Cheung?”

The two men lay in Kot’s wide bed, Cheung bent over the gangster’s belly; with a slow, dreamlike rhythm he sucked on Kot’s saliva-slick cock.  Kot stroked the policeman’s head absentmindedly, as if petting a favorite dog.  Cheung only shook his head slightly in reply to Kot’s question, not releasing the erection from his mouth as he did so.

“I was born in the Walled City,” Kot went on.  “I fought my way out of it like you would fight your way out of hell.  My father died in the Walled City.  He never saw me make my success.  Never saw this apartment, the way I dress, the places I eat.  But neither has my mother, and she is still alive.  Do you know, Cheung, that some people never set foot out of the Walled City, not once in their entire lives? My mother is one of those people.  As much a hell as it is, it is the only world she knows.  She’s frightened to leave it.”

Cheung wasn’t lying; he had never entered the infamous Kowloon Walled City.  For many years, few policemen had.  It was a relatively small spot, but a place like all of Calcutta concentrated into a fraction of the space; it was the most densely populated spot on earth.  The buildings of this hive-like slum had been added onto and reconfigured over the years so that they formed almost one unified structure, a nightmare fortress, a crazy human honeycomb in which the sky could no longer be seen and day was indistinguishable from midnight.  In its single-room factories and miniature sweat shops were manufactured children’s toys for export to glamorous America, and edibles for the posh Hong Kong hotels.  For many years, the spot’s ownership had been in dispute between the Chinese and the British, leaving possession of the Walled City open to the Triads, who were its only government as such.

But finally, an effort was underway to begin cleaning up this blight now before the changes of 1997 arrived in earnest.  The police were entering the Walled City, slowly but surely its denizens were being flushed out and relocated.  The ghetto was ultimately to be destroyed and a park, by contrast, created in its place.  If nowhere else quite yet, the Triad presence in the Walled City was fading.

“Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday,” Kot said softly.  “I want to go see her.” At last Cheung lifted his head, slid Kot’s glistening cock from his lips.

“That isn’t wise.  There are enemy gangs in the Walled City, and now policemen…”

“The gangs are weak in there, now.  And I have been back to see her when that wasn’t the case.  I’m not afraid of the police, either.  I must see my mother.  Not only because it is her birthday.  I must try again to convince her to leave the city, before she is forced to do so.”

“But…can’t you send some other relative?”

“There is no other.  It’s my mother, Cheung.  Mind your position.  You’re my bodyguard, my assistant…my lover.” He smiled.  In the past few weeks, he had invited no more guests, no more strangers, to his bed.  Just this one trusted companion.  “But you are not my adviser.  We are going.”

“I understand,” Cheung replied quietly, respectfully.  But he was worried that danger might befall this man he was using to gain access to more powerful men.  And more than that, he was afraid danger might befall his lover.

*     *     *

The two men slipped from bright, noisy day into a subterranean darkness, weirdly quiet considering its many occupants, as if it were a cave they had entered.  Or, as Kot had described it, hell.  Cheung felt like Dante to Kot’s tour guide Virgil.

They moved down an alleyway that stretched high above them like a deep riven canyon, disappearing into utter blackness, but the alley itself was only as wide as their shoulders.  Here and there a bare lightbulb hung down from the nest of wires and cables bundled above their heads like twisted jungle vines.  Water dripped on the cables from crazy makeshift plumbing, and in one place some wires were sparking.  Garbage was thick under their feet, and they passed through the smoke of cooking.  The alley stank of human sweat, human waste and animal guts.

At last and with uncanny suddenness, the sounds of humans burst upon them: chattering voices, radio songs, laughter, babies wailing.  The chorus of the damned.  Light poured from little factories above them, reached only by ladders.  Kot told Cheung that they had now entered the main “street” of the Walled City, called
Pak Fa’an Gai…which meant White Powder Street, in reference to heroin.  The source of Kot’s wealth.

As they negotiated this squalid human termite nest, Kot said, “Men tremble at my anger, Cheung.  I have given them reason to.  Men follow my orders.  But my mother isn’t frightened of me.  My mother won’t listen to commands from me.  I can’t force her, today.  All I can do is beg her…”

They broke off down an off-shooting alley, the chaos of sound dwindling somewhat behind them, and came to a flight of stairs nearly impossible to ascend for all the trash and garbage heaped upon it.  They picked their way up a narrow path that others must regularly kick or shovel through the debris.  In the claustrophobic hallway above, they stopped outside a tiny flat, its threshold covered only by a dark curtain.  Still, Kot politely rapped his knuckles on the doorway.  “Mother?” he called.  “It’s your son.”

At the end of the hallway, a little boy stood watching them.  On his temple there was an open festering sore that almost made Cheung wince to look at it.  But the boy gave him a lopsided grin, turned and darted off out of sight.  Cheung thought he heard a fading laugh.

A few moments ticked by.  Cheung kept glancing up and down the corridor, watching for trouble, conscious of the gun inside his jacket.  It was not a police issue, but the same pistol Kot favored; a semi-automatic Model 77B, manufactured by the People’s Republic.  It could be cocked and fired with one hand only; squeezing back on what was merely the trigger guard on most handguns chambered the first round.

“Mother?” Kot called again, and this time parted the curtain and thrust his head into the flat.

Cheung heard him gasp.  Without further hesitation, he tore his 77B from its holster and pushed past Kot into the tiny apartment.

He expected a scene of horror, from Kot’s reaction.  His mother lying murdered, perhaps.  Or a number of enemy Triad men, lying in ambush.  Instead, he found only a withered little doll of a woman, looking like some ancient monkey garbed in human attire, her tiny black eyes glittering in shock.

“What’s wrong, Kot?”
Cheung said, baffled.

“This is not my mother!” Kot entered the room fully, and loomed over the living mummy.  “Old woman, where is my mother?”

“The woman who lived here before me is dead,” came the frightened creature’s reply.

Cheung shot a look at Kot, and the expression on the gangster’s face actually made him frightened, as well.  It was seething, volcanic.  “Dead? I don’t believe you!”

“I am sorry…your mother took her own life, over a month ago.  She…slashed her wrists, and died in this room.” And with that, she pointed toward a corner where there was a ratty scrap of rug across the floor.

Kot flashed to the comer, whipped back the rug, then went rigid with shock as if he had uncovered his mother’s month-old corpse underneath.

He had not, but there was still a great dark stain that could not be erased.  Like the shadow of a ghost, of a life departed.

Kot’s facial muscles rippled, spasmed.  “Why?” he managed.

“They came here.  They told her she had to leave.  She told them she wouldn’t…that this was her home.  They insisted.  They were forceful.  She asked them to wait until her son could come for her, at least, but they would not listen.  And so she told them to leave her alone while she gathered her belongings.  And when they came back…she had  …killed herself ”

Kot now turned to the wall, denying Cheung the opportunity to see tears in his eyes for the first time

“I was moved out of my flat,” the old woman continued apologetically.  “So I moved in here instead.  I don’t want to leave this place, either.  This is my home…”

Cheung moved up behind the gangster, gently touched his shoulder.  “We should go…”

Kot whirled, pushed his hand away, and burst through the curtain with such force that he tore it half away.

Cheung dashed after him.  “Kot! Wait! Where are you going?”

Within moments the gangster had already escaped him in the labyrinth, and Cheung only succeeded in getting himself hopelessly lost.  Moments became minutes.  Cheung blundered into a corridor clotted with garbage heaped like moldering bodies, impassable, and one of his shoes filled with a gelatinous slime.  “Kot!” he bellowed.  Two little boys with their arms around each other’s shoulders, dangling their legs from a honeycomb above, tittered down at him.

And then, some distance ahead, he heard the thunder of gunfire.

Cheung used the sounds as his compass.  There had been three reports, a second of silence, then three more.

Now he followed a commotion of anxious voices, and he turned an alley to see a knot of teenage boys huddled over something of interest.  They scattered like roaches when Cheung appeared, his pistol in hand, and in scattering revealed the bodies of two dead men, slumped against a wall.  Though they had been stripped of some of their uniforms, it was obvious they were constables.

Cheung did not recognize them, not only because of the sheer number of officers in Hong Kong, but because his department covered Hong Kong Island, and these men would be with the Kowloon unit, each division of the RHKP being an entity unto itself.  One of the men had been shot in the chest and throat, the blood still flowing heavily out of these wounds, forming pools and channels in the folds of his trousers.  The other was missing an eye and his nose gaped like a skull’s from where bullets had crashed into his head.  Thinner ribbons of gore trickled from his ears and over his lip.  The remaining eye seemed to gaze at the partner whose head rested against his shoulder as if he’d fallen asleep beside his lover.

“Kot!” Cheung yelled, spinning around.  “Damn you! Listen to me!”

He heard running.  Growing nearer.  Triad men, coming to see what was happening in their section of the Walled City? Or Kot, heeding his call?

Cheung pointed his handgun, sweat running down his face.  He squeezed the trigger guard back.  His hair was plastered to his forehead…

A policeman with drawn pistol, then another, appeared around the corner.  And as they appeared, they opened fire.

Cheung dropped his gun and began to raise his hands, but even as he did so a bullet plowed into his shoulder.  Another pierced an upraised palm…exited through the top of his hand…a crimson flower bloomed on the wall behind him.  He fell back against it, blood spreading across his white suit, pierced and half-crucified like some modern, debased saint.  He was a fallen angel…fallen into hell.  He was Orpheus, and had failed to rescue his Eurydice from the underworld…

“Don’t!” he cried weakly at the approaching men, still holding out his streaming hand to ward them off.  “Don’t! I’m a policeman, too!”

He was struck across the temple with the butt of a pistol, dropped to his knees.  “Liar! “ one of the constables shouted at him.  “You killed these two men!”

“It wasn’t me,” Cheung groaned, his eyesight having become a rippling red haze, as if he were submerged in a deep pool of blood.  “It was a Triad man…”

He felt a hand inside his jacket.  His billfold was examined.  “Liar! Where is your badge?”

“Undercover,” Cheung muttered, beginning to lose consciousness.

“Take him,” one man said to the other.

“Not me,” Cheung mumbled once more, the red haze becoming a black one.  “Kot…Kot…”

He didn’t know if he were calling out to his lover, or betraying his name.

*     *     *

Cheung filed his reports.  He was told he would eventually be called to testify at the trial of the murderer/heroin trafficker Kot Si Fu when he was apprehended.  And he would be caught, the policemen swore, so that the brutal killer of their brothers might answer for his crimes.

And then Cheung retired, with honors, his promising career ended.  His shoulder wound had been clean and not serious, but his right hand had been smashed.  It was still too early to tell to what extent physical therapy might restore it, but the outlook did not seem promising.

Cheung had been offered office work.  He had declined.  It was not so much that he felt such work would represent a sad decline after his former duties.  It was that he felt unworthy of wearing a badge at all, unworthy of his service awards, after having fallen in love with the murderer/heroin trafficker Kot Si Fu.

He lost himself in his apartment, hid there like a wounded animal, for weeks.  He had been away from it for quite a while, and after having lived in Kot’s apartment for over a month, this humble flat seemed like something from the Walled City.

Most nights, he drank himself to sleep.

This night he had finished off the dregs of a bottle, all he had left until he could will himself to venture out again.  His mind was unbearably sober.  He lay naked on his belly on the sheets, his hard-on pinned beneath him.  For lack of another’s flesh, he took comfort in the feel of his own skin against the hungry organ.  He joked bitterly to himself that he should masturbate by fucking the hole through his right hand.  There was a downpour outside.  The sound made him lonelier even than the straining yearning of his cock, which seemed to reach out from him hopelessly, like an arm with its hand hacked off.

And then, as if a telepathic beacon had been answered, a knee depressed the bed beside him.  Cheung’s eyes opened, and he began to lift his head…but his movement was halted by a gun muzzle that pressed against his scarred temple.

“I’ve been looking for you,” came a soft, familiar voice.

“And I was looking for you,” Cheung replied.

“Your friends still are looking.  They have bloodlust in them.”

“You should leave Hong Kong,” Cheung said.

“This is my home,” replied Kot Si Fu.

The bed was depressed further.  Cheung felt the other man stretch upon his back, and realized that Kot had disrobed after breaking into the apartment.  Their combined weight pressed his erection more deeply into his own belly, as if it ached to tunnel through him if it must in order to reach the subject of its craving.

Kot did not remove the muzzle of the Model 77B from against the former policeman’s head.  His former lover’s head.

“Are you going to hurt me?” Cheung whispered.  He felt Kot’s hard prick nestle in the crevice of his ass.  Almost imperceptibly, Kot began rubbing his shaft along that dark channel.

“I’m a cop killer.  A monster.  You expect me to kill you, don’t you?”

Cheung swallowed.  “I don’t know what to expect of you.”

“And I don’t know what to expect of you.  I trusted you.  But after those two bastards shot you, I heard you.  I was still close by.  You told them you were one of them, and I felt as if a bullet had been fired into my heart.  You told them my name, as well.  You betrayed me.”

“I was doing my job.”

“I loved you,” Kot rasped, grinding the cold gun muzzle more firmly against Cheung’s head.

After a moment, Cheung said, “And I loved you, too.”

Kot reached his free hand between them, and helped guide the head of his prick to Cheung’s pursed hole.  He urged the plump head inside roughly, and Cheung cried out, squirmed under him.  Kot held the gun steady, and once he was more fully inside the former policeman’s pinned body, wrapped his other arm around Cheung’s neck.  His thrusts continued to be rough, but were not violent.  Kot panted in Cheung’s ear, and the bed squeaked rhythmically, and the rainstorm pounded against the windows.

“You don’t need the gun,” Cheung choked between his own panting.  “You don’t need to rape me.  I want you to fuck me, Kot.”

“I’m not sure I believe you, Cheung.”

“Believe me,” Cheung said, hating himself for the truth.  “Believe me.”

Kot bit Cheung’s shoulder, and then moaned and rubbed his stubbled cheek against it, as if torn between brutality and tenderness.  He rotated his hips, churning his cock inside Cheung.  He began a series of rapid staccato thrusts before reverting again to longer, deeper, more pummeling lunges.

Cheung kissed the arm around his neck, ran his tongue along it, as if to demonstrate his sincerity.  “I want you, Kot.  We can go away together.”

“Ahh, Cheung, how can I trust you? You aren’t a criminal.  You aren’t like me.  But even if I could trust you, I won’t leave Hong Kong…I won’t leave my home…but I won’t go to prison, either.  I was a boy in the Walled City.  I told you.  At last I was able to escape that prison.  I won’t end my life in another one.  I won’t let your friends take me away.”

Cheung heard the Model 77B slide and click, as Kot depressed the trigger guard and chambered its first round.

His throat convulsed, tried to seize up.  “Kot…please don’t…don’t hurt me…”

“I wouldn’t hurt you,” Kot panted, more breathless, his thrusts getting closer together, pace quickening as he approached climax.  “I told you, Cheung…” he removed the pistol’s muzzle from Cheung’s temple “…I love you.”

And then there was an explosion, a blast so loud that it blanked Cheung’s mind, robbed his hearing.  All at once he felt Kot’s body violently spasm as he shot his load deep inside him…and at the same moment, the pillows of the bed were spattered with a glittering red constellation.  Cheung felt a hot wet spatter across his neck and shoulders, like ejaculate.

For a moment, he believed the gangster had shot him in the back of the head, but that the bullet had deflected off his skull.  He had heard of such things happening in suicide attempts.

And then he realized that Kot was no longer moving.  His weight had settled heavily across his back, like that of an exhausted lover, but even more still.  Kot’s hard cock remained embedded inside his gut.

With both terror and revulsion, Cheung realized the truth, and pulled himself out from under his lover.  Kot’s erection at last slipped heavily out of Cheung’s ass.  Cheung rolled off the bed to the floor, scrambled backwards across the dirty carpet like a crab, ignoring the pain in his bandaged right hand.  He felt one of the drops of warm fluid on his neck wind its way down to the small of his back.

Kot’s face was turned to the wall, and that was preferable.  Though the back of his head was shattered like a doll’s, blood pouring over a jagged rim of bone to dye the sheets scarlet, it was better to see this horrific exit wound than his beautiful face in death.  Blood soaked into the pillows now, streamed down the side of the bed.

And tears streamed down Cheung’s cheeks.

And the last of the rain streamed down the windows as the deluge began to move on.

Impressions

“I don’t believe two people lying down could get hit by lightning,” said Andrea, having snicked her tongue before saying it.

“Well, it’s the highest point around; it’s like a hill,” defended Jen, who had shown them to this place, had told them the old story about it as related to her by her mother.  As a child her mother had taken her on walks through Pine Grove Cemetery, and passing this spot had said that two people had been struck by lightning and killed here.  It wasn’t until three years ago, when Jen was fifteen, that her mother informed her they’d been copulating at the time.

“Hill.” Andrea sneered.  “There are trees over there.” She pointed with a jut of her chin.  “They’re a lot higher than a guy’s bare ass on this little mound.”

“Maybe they weren’t there, then,” Diane offered meekly.  “Jen said this tree wasn’t.” She had her hand on the flank of a massive oak.

“Oh, so this used to be a desert, huh? I see.  When did this happen, 1923? So that tree is only seventy years old and it’s that big around?”

“That’s long enough, wouldn’t it be? Why not?” Jen said.

“Come on, it’s as big as a house.  That was here in 1923.”

“My mom says it wasn’t.”

“Your mom told you that story when you turned fifteen and started feeling funny new urges, my dear child.  It’s a suburban legend invented to scare people sexless.”

“I’d been feeling funny urges since I was thirteen, Andrea, and my mother doesn’t resort to old wives’ tales as a form of birth control; she put me on the pill herself.”

“See how paranoid she is?”

Jen groaned.  Diane was gaping straight up into the canopy of leaves, the thick branches snaking off into them like black rivers seen from a plane, vanishing into misty jungle.  “It’s so thick,” she heard Jen saying, “because the thing is engorged with their passion.”

“It’s like Apollo and Daphne,” breathed Diane, a restless camouflage of light and shadow stirring on her face.

“Huh?” Andrea turned slowly.

Diane had regretted it the moment she’d said it.  She liked Andrea, but also found her caustic, perpetual cynicism intimidating.  She knew she had to get it out now so she got it out fast and simple.  “The old myth about Apollo? How he and Daphne got shot by Cupid’s arrows…one that made Apollo in love with Daphne, and one that made Daphne repelled by love, so that she kept running away from him.  Just as she was finally about to be caught she begged the Gods to transform her so she could escape him, and they turned her into a laurel tree.” There, it was out and said, and she waited for Andrea to turn to Jen and sputter into laughter.

But Andrea could be oddly gentle toward Diane at times, and only chuckled a little and said, “Yeah, the Gods were always doing shit like that.  You look at them the wrong way and poof…you’re a zucchini.  ‘And that, children, was the birth of the first zucchini.’ ” All three girls laughed.  “See? Jen’s mom was trying to scare her into believing that if she had premarital sex on a hill in a graveyard, Zeus would turn her into a giant oak tree.”

“You want to see their graves now, Andy?” Jen said tolerantly.

“Sure, sure…lead on.”

Diane glanced over her shoulder at the tree as they moved down the grassy, shaded mound, an island in a sea of slanting, pitted tombstones stained with dirt and lichens.  She had shivered for a few moments back there in that deep shade, the rough bark cool under her soft palm.  But she had liked it in the damp shadow.  It was a place that called out for her to return, maybe to sit propped against that trunk with a book in her lap.  The Age of Fables or Beauties of Mythology by Thomas Bullfinch, it would be.  She had her grandmother’s copy printed in 1898.

It was glaringly summer-hot elsewhere in the cemetery, the grass yellowish and dry like straw, not moist and squeaky green as it had been on the mound, where there had even been soft-fleshed pale mushrooms hiding in the grass.

The man’s stone was in the middle of the sprawling graveyard.  DAVID McKAY, it was inscribed.  Born in 1901.  Died in 1923.  There was no clever poem or epitaph to explain his early demise at twenty-two.  “You went out with style, Dave,” Andrea patted the top of the stone, “but that’s what you get for sticking your lightning rod out when a thunderstorm’s brewing.”

“Talk about your orgasms,” Jen speculated.  “What a way to go.”

“Yeah…they didn’t smoke cigarettes after-wards, they just smoked.”

The young woman had no grave of her own, her name chiseled into a looming family monument, a weathered white obelisk.  MARIE BARNES…1903-1923.  Her ignominious fate was inscribed on the tongues of the town folk, and didn’t need to be immortalized here.  Commenting on this, Andrea said, “Hey, at least it’s nice to be remembered for something.  Everybody else in here was probably pretty boring.”

“I think it’s beautiful, in a way,” Diane ventured, a little encouraged by Andrea’s failure to attack before.  “Don’t you?”

“Beautiful? To get burnt to a crisp at twenty? Um, let me think about that for a second.  No.”

“Well, I mean, to die together in a joined moment of love…isn’t that just a little romantic?”

“Honey, who said they were in love? Joined together in lust, it could have been.  If it’s so great why don’t you go make it with somebody in a car on some train tracks? Real romantic.”

Diane decided to keep her feelings and impressions to herself; that had been more the Andrea she knew and feared.  Andrea knew damn well Diane had yet to make it with anybody, in any location.  And that the occasion wasn’t imminent, either.  She was bookish, dark-haired, mushroom-bodied.  Andrea was pretty, blond (artificially, but blond) and a hard, half-anorexic brown.

“Now do you believe me?” Jen said.

“Yes, Jen, I believe you, okay? Davey McKay and Marie Barnes really went out with a bang.”

“Oh God.”

“Oh Zeus, you mean.”

*     *     *

Jen and Diane returned to the mound the next day…without Andrea along.  It had been Diane’s idea to stroll here again.

It had rained earlier, the air thick, almost too heavy to breathe in.  Mosquitoes bobbed in the air.  They stopped, of course, at the mound and climbed its slippery side.  Diane’s sneakers skidded out from under her and she fell on her hands and knees, smearing them with green juice.  A mushroom had become mush under her left palm.  Andrea would have been in hysterics.  Jen helped Diane to her feet.

Under the pavilion of the tree they idly scanned the rest of the graveyard around them.  “Cows used to graze in that field.” Jen pointed beyond a distant fence.  It was a corn field now.  A shiny-domed silo protruded above the trees at its farthest edge.

Diane touched the damp bark of the tree, and shuddered.  She looked directly at it.  Mossy grooves.  Hard wrinkles of age.  “I should carve their names here.  Wouldn’t that he neat?” she breathed.

“Yeah.  But the tree’s so old…you shouldn’t hurt it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t, I’m just saying.  The best thing would be if they were both buried right here.”

“Mm,” Jen grunted, slapping at a mosquito that nuzzled the back of her neck.  She wanted to go.  It was near dusk, too, and she sure didn’t want to be in a graveyard in the dark.

“I can picture them.”

Jen looked to Diane with a big grin.  “Oh? Doing it right here where we stand, huh?”

“No.  Right here where the tree stands.”

“Yeah, with mosquitoes all over Dave’s rear.” Slap.

“How is it, Jen…with you and Kevin?”

“Don’t feel bad about it, Diane, you’re only eighteen…you aren’t a crone.  It can be excellent and it can be blah and usually it’s somewhere in-between.  You aren’t any less alive than me, Di, believe me.”

Diane was staring blankly down into the grass.  An ant crawled across a mushroom.  “My mind knows that.  My body says different.  Sometimes it hits me so strong.  Like right now.” She swallowed.  “I don’t mean to embarrass you and spill my guts on your feet, but just thinking about that couple on this very spot seventy years ago…doing it in the open air… a huge dark storm gathering above.  Then a lightning bolt hits them…”

Jen chuckled uncomfortably.

“I know,” Diane smiled, “but it does grab you, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.  The analogy or whatever.  But it isn’t always thunder and lightning, Diane…sometimes it’s just a breeze.  I don’t want you to be disappointed later, and build it up now into some dynamic fantasy experience.”

“I know better than to do that,” Diane murmured softly.  When she lifted her gaze she realized Jen was watching her run her flattened palm up and down the darkly glistening dinosaur hide of the oak tree.

A rustling sound above, maybe a scurrying stirring.  Diane looked up.  A darting form.  Blur of fast-moving life.  A squirrel.  Branches shook.  A small rain of loosed drops pattered across her face.

*     *     *

The next time Diane was alone, and had her book.  She came several days a week during the remainder of that summer.  Once in a while a few boys on bikes would sail past on the paved paths and she would feel embarrassed…guilty, even, as if she’d been caught arousing herself.

In a way, she had.  And soon, she did.

She would sometimes lay the book in her lap, one hand under it, and rest her shoulders and head back against the tree with eyes closed.  She wore a halter top several times so as to feel the bark directly on her pale skin.  Once she even went around behind the giant tree, hidden from the paths, and lowered her halter to embrace the tree, its hard furrows impressing her shy soft breasts and her pimpled cheek.  Afterwards she was shaken, confused, ashamed, and didn’t do that again.

Autumn came.  She sat in the gold, let it shower her…but with the fall and the first year of college, her thoughts of David McKay and Marie Barnes had begun to dwindle like the leaves.  In the snow she came just once, and stayed under the barren tree on the skull-like mound only a few moments.  She felt nothing.

Her pimples didn’t leave, only changed location like stars with the passage of time.

She didn’t think to return to the tree until late May.

It was a humid afternoon, advance notice of summer.  The cemetery was not yet burned yellow.  The grass was long already even after last week’s trim for Memorial Day, so full of life and vitality was it.  It was especially lush in the shadows crowning the mound.

Diane stood a little apart from the tree, hugging herself.  The shade was cool, as if she were in a forest hollow.  She wore shorts and a t-shirt, and much flesh was open to the air.  She actually felt gooseflesh rise on her forearms and rubbed at it.  She neared the tree.  Reached delicately to it.

It was so cool she almost flinched.  She ran a finger lightly along inside a groove.  An ant traveled in another groove.  Diane took in long slow breaths of the mushroom-darkened air.

She turned at a faint rustling of the grass near the mammoth roots in time to see a breeze sweep gently down through it.

Diane came back with her book the next day.

*     *     *

It was dusk, eight-thirty on a July evening.

Diane had stepped out of her underpants, and trembled as she straightened, hugged her goose-bumped arms across her breasts.  She felt as if her new husband lay on their honeymoon bed watching her, smiling, patting the sheets invitingly.  But she had no husband.  She was alone.  Before her stretched the gravestones almost phosphorescent in the black-grassed gloom.

The soundless heat lightning lit the horizon, silhouetting tree-tops and the ominous silo.  It was this lightning which had inspired her to ride out here, as if it had summoned her.  With its energy.  Its power.

She was afraid…but her body crawled with hungry ants and fluttered with birds.  See? An ant had just crawled onto her bare foot…but she nervously brushed it away.

She was waiting.  She didn’t know how to make the first move—she was a virgin.

Yes you do, she argued with herself.  You’re just afraid.  You tried it before.  You know how.  You’re just afraid to go all the way.

I’m not afraid.  I want this.

She went behind the tree and hugged her nakedness to it.  She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek hard into it, so that it would leave an impression of its bark there when she moved away.  The smell of damp ancient life was so close.  An ant crawled across her lower lip but this time she let it.  A smile hesitantly blossomed.  Diane moaned a little, and nuzzled her nose into the cracked hide.  She extended her tongue and lazily drew it along a groove in the bark.  On the next stroke she probed another.  The ant crawled into her mouth.  She was a bit apprehensive but swallowed it in saliva.

A bright, silent flash made her open her eyes.

It had grown so much darker in the short time her eyes had been shut, but she could see the grass at the base of the tree swaying.  It rustled.  There was a soft, almost imperceptible rhythm to its stirrings.

Diane moaned, hooking her fingers into the bark’s grooves, watching the grass stir.

She only heard it once, and she was moaning herself when she heard it so she couldn’t be sure of the moan…

*     *     *

For her brother’s wedding, Jen had gone out of her way to fix Diane up with her cousin Richard, but Diane hadn’t made the effort to dance with him once…even after she told Diane that Richard had shyly confided in her that he found Diane cute and—she swore to God he’d actually said it—sexy.  How could Diane have been so nonchalant, and smilingly so?

Today her shadowy concerns about Diane were pulled into stark daylight.  Diane had called her up, sobbing, nearly frantic.  And here they now stood—at the foot of the mound in Pine Grove Cemetery.

The mound was yellow.  A vast plateau of a tree stump crowned it.

Diane clung to her friend’s arm.  “How could they kill it? Why?”

“It was old, Di…”

“It was alive! It was still alive! Oh god …my tree…”

“Diane, you’ve got to stop this…come on.”

Diane drew away, smiling sharply.  “I do have to stop it now, don’t I? They haven’t left me any choice.  All I had and they took it away.  But we can’t have a nasty little menage-a-trois in our pious little cemetery, can we ?”

“Diane…”

“Yeah, look at me like that.  You have a boyfriend.  A lover…”

“Don’t be jealous of me…”

“I saw them! I could actually see them the last few times, Jen…not just picture them; I saw them! And they saw me too, I’m sure.  We could have truly joined together, all three of us, I know it, but now they’ve killed them and they’ve killed me too!”

“Diane, let me help you…”

“Go away! You don’t understand!”

“Yes I do…”

“Go away, go away, go away, go away!” Diane tore up the mound and flung herself like a sacrifice across the circular altar table atop it, arms and legs spread.

Good God, thought Jen, almost terrified of her friend, even as she went up the small hill after her.  It was late afternoon and the air was dark with the threat of rain and no one knew she was alone here with Diane.

Diane’s head lifted, her round face glistening with tears but she was grinning and an ant crawled across her forehead.  “Shhh,” she grinned, “can you hear it ? Can you feel it? The throb?”

“Diane…”

“They’re alive.  It isn’t dead.  It was just an outgrowth of them but they’re still there.  Can you hear them? They never stop…it’s just that the storms bring it closer to our senses.  The storm locked them here.  I’ve tapped into it.  I want more.”

Rain started falling, big hard pellets of it.  As Diane stood the sky rumbled and Jen withdrew a step.  Eyes locked on Jen’s, Diane pulled away the elastic band that restrained her once short hair, now falling darkly to her shoulders, and then undid the buttons of her blouse.

“Want to watch?”

“I’m going for help, Diane…you need help.” Jen was so afraid of her friend now she almost hated her.

“Go away.  Leave me alone.  You don’t feel them…”

“I’ll be back, Diane.  Don’t make me bring people here and embarrass you.  I mean it…”

Thunder boomed far away, rolled heavily toward them like a surf.  Diane shrugged off her blouse; it slithered down her body to pool at her ankles.  Rain splashed her bare shoulders as she reached around behind to unhook her bra.  “You’re the one embarrassed, Jen, not me.”

Jen whirled to run, slipped, slid down the mound on her rear, smudging blackened mushrooms on the way.  She was crying now.  She hit the paved path and ran…

Once she stopped to glance back.  Just once, before she raced to her parked car and downtown to the police station.  The mound was distant, but there were no trees close by it and it loomed distinct.  And there on the pedestal tree trunk stood Diane—fully, whitely naked, almost phosphorescent in the wet dark, her pubic hair like a blotch of deep shade…a living monument, legs together and arms upraised to the heavy lowering sky…

The bolt that killed Diane had rattled the police station’s windows with its force, Jen would realize later.

*     *     *

Even years later Jen would stop at the base of the mound with her daughter in a stroller, and on occasion go so far as to climb the hill to stand and close her eyes, and gingerly feel for what Diane had said to have felt of the power rooted there, the passion impressed on the spot.  And she did come to feel something etched there, she believed in time.

Loneliness, she felt.  And sadness.

Scorpion Face

If John could see his own alternate self, on that other plane of existence in which it resides, he might name that being Scorpion Face.

This creature, smaller than John by a foot and greatly bent in addition to that, has a pale bald head twice the size of John’s and a face that shades into obsidian black.  These chitinous features look mechanical but are organic; two matching rows of articulated arms with a tail-like limb at the bottom which uncoils seemingly upon its own will to flick at the air.  Sloughing gauzy membranes like cobwebs cover its long bony hands and the back of its head in place of hair.  It wears shabby black clothes—much too small even for its tiny frame—like a tuxedo with a long forked tail.  Whenever it ventures out it wears an immense top hat.  It never goes outdoors when it goes out, however, as there is no outdoors in its dimension…only endless labyrinths, tunnels, dust-choked attics upon attics, web-cloaked basements and sub-basements.

John wakes to a clock radio that blares annoying snatches of music between lengthy discourses by smarmy D.J.s.  He opens his eyes to a gray and wordless despair, as he does every day, his only comfort being that he can hit the snooze alarm and sleep another half hour before waking again to a gray and wordless despair.

In its world, John’s doppleganger sits in a corner with its great head resting on its knees, its spindly arms wrapped around its shins.  Pain awakens it, and it scrambles out of the corner on hands and knees, glancing back over its shoulder at the long black nails which continue to extend from the walls where they meet.  The being trails the shroud of cobwebs which has formed like a cocoon around its body while it slept, the stuff of its own dreaming exhalations.  Standing, it brushes more of the webs off its arms and sides.  With jerky darting motions like those of a bird, its facial appendages clicking, the creature moves to a cracked and slanted mirror.  When it sees its reflection, it wails in a high shrieking voice, just as it does every day.

John drinks an instant coffee, showers, drives thirty minutes to work.  As he steps out of his car and looks across the lot at the squat, sprawling building bleak against the blue winter sky, he has the irrational impulse to duck back inside his car and drive away, drive anywhere, without direction, without money, to just escape in a blind and numbing panic.  Instead, he starts across the parking lot to the building’s metal side door.

Top hat on, Scorpion Face emerges from its series of small dusty rooms into a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor formed from rotting planks of wood, stretching off in either direction into seemingly limitless gloom.  As it makes its way, a walk of several hours by John’s reckoning of time, it passes off-branching hallways, and metal hatches in the ceiling and floor with ladders to other levels.  The walls change from wood into riveted plates of black metal scabbed with rust, covered in cables and hoses, turning gears and churning pistons, grease and dripping slime, and Scorpion Face has to tear its way through veils of web at times.  Finally, for the last stretch of its walk, the corridor becomes chiseled from rock, slick with mold and trickling with water, lit with far-spaced bare bulbs.  It stops at last at a door labeled with fifteen black nails driven into the wood in a circle, with a huge white moth pinned in the middle of the circle by those spikes.  The moth twitches, still alive.  The being turns the knob and lets itself into its work place.  At no time since leaving its apartment has it seen another of its kind.

John sits in a cubicle with padded partitions upon which are pinned a few snapshots of his two daughters, whom his wife has custody of.  He speaks on the phone for much of the day, but seldom to the people in the other cubicles.  Just these disembodied voices, usually angry at him because to them he is the company personified, he is that bleak sprawling building, and he tries to soothe them.  He will run a UPS trace to find out why they haven’t received their package.  He will have them credited.  He will do his best.  He logs each call he makes onto a sheet.  Usually a hundred unhappy voices a day.  He feels like a medium who can only channel the voices of furious ghosts.

Scorpion Face stands in a tiny chamber that shakes like a rickety elevator, great unseen machinery clanking and thrumming behind the metal walls.  Glass tubes criss-cross before its gaze, and it watches hordes of tiny insects crawl through these, each insect carrying a glowing orange nugget of matter like a hot glob of metal.  The little entity throws switches that close off one tube, open another, direct the insect stream here instead of there.  Occasionally steam bursts from a vent in the wall.  Once in a while a sound of rushing liquid passes beneath its feet.  Its top hat hangs from a nail in the wall, the only other decoration being four huge black snail shells stuck to the walls here and here.  Tomorrow they will have slowly repositioned themselves, but they will not have escaped this room.

At lunch, John buys a tuna sandwich from a machine and sits alone at a table to eat it and drink oily black coffee.  The lettuce in his sandwich is slippery and limp.  He finds it hard to imagine that this tuna and that coffee found their origins in living things.  From the corner of his eye he watches young office girls clustered at one table, pretty and giggling and as removed from him as the women on television.  He focuses on the Marketing supervisor, who is young and very pretty and crouches in front of the refrigerator to get something from the bottom shelf, her shirt riding up to show the taut skin of her lower back.  He pictures himself holding her waist and entering her from behind.  It’s the position he fantasizes about most, because he is made uncomfortable by the idea of a woman actually looking into his eyes during intimacy.

Scorpion Face takes one break in what by John’s perception would be sixteen hours.  It opens a cabinet, and inside finds four glass jars filled with a glowing green fluid.  It unbuttons its vest and its shirt beneath, and then slides open a tiny drawer from inside its abdomen.  Into this metal drawer it pours the contents of each jar, slowly, until the drawer is full.  It carefully slides this drawer back into its flesh, rearranges its clothing, and then replaces the small jars inside the cabinet.  It never sees who fills the jars in its absence.  It never sees any other of its kind.  They work different shifts, travel by different corridors, live and work in different rooms.  It has never seen another of its kind, and never will.

At home, John logs onto the internet.  He enters—stealthily and guiltily as if peering into a bedroom window—a sex-oriented chat room.  He finds a woman willing to talk dirty with him.  He suspects she is lying about her blond hair and breast size and maybe even her gender but it doesn’t really matter.  He masturbates right there at his desk, one hand on the mouse as if that is his penis.  Afterwards he feels empty, as if he is squeezing out a dollop of his soul each time, and never getting it back.  He shuts off that box and turns on the box of his TV instead, watches one obnoxious sitcom after another, cute friends and cute lovers feuding and making up.  He finds it hard to believe those actors are living beings like himself.  He likes to read in magazines about actors who are addicted to drugs, or commit suicide.

In its own series of rooms again, Scorpion Face stands before a control panel of wheels and levers, and manipulates a metal puppet inside a booth recessed in the wall.  Some of the marionette’s complex joints and multiple limbs are articulated by wires from above, and others by rods from below.  A second silhouetted spider-thing emerges from a hole in the opposite wall, commanded by whatever unseen being lives in the next apartment.  The two puppets begin to interact erotically with grinding and scraping sounds, their many limbs inter-weaving.  Particles of rust or blistered paint sift from between their frenziedly abrading forms.  They pump and thrash, scuttle entwined, and Scorpion Face watches dully enraptured, projecting its imagination inside them.  At last the puppets lie quiet, limbs and wires still tangled, and the being slumps exhausted at the controls, hands clammy as they clutch onto the wheels for support.  The other’s spider disengages itself and withdraws through a black curtain over that hole in the wall.  The lights in the puppet theater go dim.  It’s time to retire for the night…although there is no day or night here.

John sits on the edge of the bed, still in his office clothes except for his tie.  He wants to put a pistol’s barrel in his mouth and burst the top of his balding head open, a shattered chrysalis, so that his brain might fly free from its imprisoning skull, if only in brief mayfly life.  But he is too cowardly to even buy a pistol, let alone put one inside his mouth.  He rises to undress for bed.

Scorpion Face has killed itself again, as it often does.  It lies crumpled on the floor with a large black nail driven into its skull.  But it will awaken soon, curled in the corner inside a cocoon of web.  And it will shriek when it sees itself in the mirror, and realizes it is still—unendingly—alive.

Can You Pass Strother’s Love Test?

Kaylee, Taffeta, Shenandoah and Latrina felt like movie stars themselves when they were interviewed by a TV correspondent outside the theater where they had just seen the movie Sssssss, which in its re-release was currently number one at the box office.

“Shhh!” Latrina hissed at Kaylee, who was still frantically trying to load a videotape into her VCR so as to record their ephemeral celebrity.

“Hurry!” Shenandoah shrieked, hands flapping with fingers tensed into claws.

“Got it!” Kaylee cried, upping the volume with her remote and dropping to the carpet on her knees to watch.

Taffeta squealed in delight as she saw her own face on the television screen, heard herself say, “I almost cried at the end…Strother—I mean Dr.  Stoner—was only trying to bring peace to the world, by turning people into animals…just like Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr.  Moreau…”

“Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr.  Moreau,” Shenandoah was heard repeating wistfully, in a whisper of reverence.

“Well,” Taffeta went on, “except that Marlon—I mean Dr.  Moreau—was trying to bring peace into the world by turning animals into people.”

“Is Marlon one of your favorites, like Strother Martin?” asked the correspondent.

“Oh no…he was awesome in that movie, but he isn’t the same, really…”

“Why’s that?”

“Well,” Latrina responded, pushing into the frame, “he made so many movies when he was young, it’s hard to get young Marlon out of your mind.  But I’ve never seen a young Strother.”

“I wouldn’t want to,” Shenandoah said.

“I don’t like to imagine he was ever young,” Kaylee said.

“So, is Strother Martin your favorite actor of all, then?”

“Well…it’s close,” Kaylee replied, “but if you held a gun to my head…”

“Or a microphone to your mouth?”

“Yeah,” she giggled.  “I’d have to say my all-time favorite grandbabe would be Buck Druthers.”

*     *     *

Later, after the four friends had played the recording of themselves back several times, they sat in a circle on the carpet of Kaylee’s parents’ livingroom and paged through the latest issues of Teenscreen and Babe Parade.  Though they all concurred that they hated singer Spunk’s new forward-facing ponytail and the bangs at the back of her head (the rest of her skull shaved bald below those bangs), they would all be wearing their hair like that within a month.  The four fifteen-year-olds were already wearing clothing just like eighteen-year-old Spunk wore in this photo: super-small, super-tight white tee shirts with two holes cut out in the front for their bra cups to poke through, and super-baggy combat pants with open crotches covered by black mesh through which one could glimpse the alternating white flecks of their panties.

“Ooh, look!” cried Taffeta, holding up one magazine opened to a glossy full-page photo of actor Strother Martin, his long white hair uncharacteristically kempt, as Dr.  Stoner in 1973’s Sssssss.  Facing the photo was an article entitled, “Can You Pass Strother’s Love Test?”

“Yeah, read that one, bitch!” Kaylee enthused.  “This is good.”

Only stumbling over a word or two per sentence, Taffeta read aloud to her rapt audience, beginning with a few brief bio facts that mentioned Strother’s birth in Indianapolis and his role in movies such as Cool Hand Luke, from which came his most famous cinema moment, with the line, “What we have here is failure to communicate.” It was the big catch phrase right now; even the president, trying to seem hip, had used that quote in a speech this week.  (And the president was looking sort of cute himself as he seasoned.) After the introduction, Taffeta got to the test itself.

“Dee…Da…Despite Strother’s demented and ornery characters, beneath his dangerous exterior lies the gentle heart of a true grandbabe.  Do you have what it takes to make T-Bone’s heart beat for you?” The girls all knew that Strother’s nickname in life had been T-Bone.  “Answer these five questions to see…”

The friends took turn responding to questions such as, “How do you think Strother would like to spend a date with you? Would you suggest: A: Dancing with Strother all night in the clubs.  B: Swimming and sunbathing with S.  M.  at the beach.  C: Hanging out with Mr.  Wild Bunch in a video arcade.  D: Snuggling in T-Bone’s lap while he reads you a cute bedtime story.”

“Ooh!” said Latrina, at the last choice.  Like this was hard! They all selected D, and weren’t surprised to see that when the magazine was turned upside-down, they chose each answer correctly.

“Looks like he’d want all of us!” chirped Shenandoah.  “We’d have to fight over him!”

They returned to their perusal of the magazines.  Taffeta read out loud from an article on juicy Jack Elam, who was born on November 13th in 1916 in Miami, Arizona and went on to make films such as Cat Ballou and High Noon and guest on shows like Gunsmoke and Big Valley, which were in syndication again and quite popular with a new audience, as they always promised a wealth of grizzly-cheeked curmudgeons whose heady unwashed effluvium practically oozed out of the TV screen.

Latrina read from an article about Walter Brennan, born July 25th, 1894, who fought as a doughboy in “Dubbya Dubbya One” and went on to play that sexy old coot Grandpa Amos on the TV series The Real McCoys.

“Check this out, bitches!” Shenandoah gasped, after paging a little further through one of the magazines.  She carefully freed and unfolded a mini-poster from the center of the publication, held it up for all to see.  On one side was a photo of Buddy Ebsen from The Beverly Hillbillies, but the side she showed her friends featured a photo from the premier of the latest film from Buck Druthers.

*     *     *

Justin Spring despised Buck Druthers.

Justin was Kaylee’s seventeen-year-old brother, and he had a major crush on Shenandoah, with her cute spiky hair dyed electric lime green like singer Spunk had worn hers while she was dating Buck Druthers last year.  (Now Spunk was dating the Stones’ Keith Richards.) Justin hated Strother Martin.  He loathed afrobabes Scatman Crothers and Red Foxx.  But Buck Druthers brought him close to fits.  Perhaps, he thought, because Druthers was still living, whereas most of the popular grandbabes had passed away years, even decades, ago.  But his sister and her friends didn’t want to hear that.  They literally covered their ears with their palms and screeched at him angrily as he raged, “Walter Brennan is dead, Kaylee…he died in 1974, when he was eighty! Okay? I saw it on the web!”

“Shut up, bitch, it doesn’t matter!” Kaylee screamed.

“Go away, little boy!” Latrina yelled.  “You’re just jealous because you’re a tadpole and they’re…um.” She rethought her analogy.  “Because you’re a little larva and they’re like butterflies.”

“Butterflies? They’re like pterodactyls! They’re extinct! You guys are in love with rotting skeletons! Strother Martin hasn’t made a movie since 1980 because he’s dead! He’s buried in the Court of Remembrance in Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills…number G 62420!”

They knew this already.  They had some friends who had made a pilgrimage to his grave site, burning candles and clutching 8x10 glossies, though like most girls these four chose not to address the issue of his death at all.  They were aware his resurrected films were quite old.  But weren’t movies and their stars about fantasy? Did Justin really think he’d be screwing millionaire Spunk one day in his little bedroom with its posters of painted and long-haired wrestlers who looked like rock stars and rock stars who looked like wrestlers? It was what Strother represented.  Though perhaps this was why Kaylee and her friends loved Buck best, they half recognized.  Because he was still alive, out there breathing in the world right now.

“Why does it bother you so much, Justin?” Taffeta asked him, screwing up her face.

“Why? I don’t have a girlfriend, that’s why.  And at this rate, I won’t have a girlfriend until I’m impotent! And watch…by the time I’m some stinky old hobo like Buck Druthers, the fads will all change and girls like you will want to date toddlers!”

“You’re sick, Justin,” Latrina said.  “That’s why nobody wants to date you.”

“I’m sick? I’ve seen how you look at my grandfather, Latrina…and I saw you wriggling around in his lap last Christmas eve, when he was dressed up as Santa Claus.  I think even Kaylee enjoyed sitting in his lap too much…”

“You bitch!” Kaylee shrieked at her brother like a descending hawk, springing to her feet.

“Grow up,” Shenandoah told him.  “But you’re right, Justin…you’ve got a long way to go before any girl would want to go out with you.”

This final insult, coming from Shenandoah of all people, made Justin’s face flood red with embarrassment and fury, but he choked it down as best he could, turned and walked briskly out of the livingroom.  Stomped upstairs to his own room.

“Don’t cry, little baby boy!” Kaylee shouted after him, triumphantly.

*     *     *

What Justin might not admit to his sister was that he actually liked Buck Druthers’ new movie, Heart Attack, which he’d seen in the theater last week only because his best friend Jason insisted.  Druthers had played a serial killer who ate the hearts of his victims (teenage girls), pursued by a cop played by Burt Reynolds, called out of retirement to hunt the madman down.  Justin had to admit that Druthers did a fair job in it, though the gory special effects impressed him more.  Also begrudgingly, he had to admit that the guest appearance of a computer-generated Jack Elam was well achieved.  This movie was a smash, closing in on the success of Sssssss, despite Druthers’ unsavory character.  But grandbabes were expected to play wild-eyed kooks …they were often more popular for their dangerous roles than their cuddly grandpa characters.

It was the musical movies that Buck had brought into vogue that really rubbed Justin the wrong way.  Since his unexpected arrival on the scene as Julia Roberts’ lovably loony grandfather in the immensely successful Good Glory, for which he’d won an Oscar, Druthers had become a sensation and almost single-handedly brought about the grandbabe phen-omenon (aptly seized upon and relentlessly pushed by canny marketeers).  The song Druthers sang for his grandchildren in Good Glory had led to a spate of movies with greater musical opportunities, culminating most recently in a $300,000,000 remake of The Wizard of Oz in which Druthers played a scruffy and rusty Tin Woodsman alongside Jim Carrey as the Scarecrow and a computer-generated Cowardly Lion voiced by Robin Williams.  In this film, Druthers soft-shoed along the yellow brick road and sang in his characteristic, trademarked style:

“If I only had a skibeddy dibbedy dibeddy dibeddy doo! Picture me…skibeddy doo…a balcony…skabeddy skibbedy doo…”

These kinds of little interjections had been used in his Good Glory song, and his audience had not tired of them.  But songs like this in movies like that made Justin Spring want to hurl something heavy through the TV screen.  He imagined pushing the family TV over like Robert DeNiro did to his TV as the alienated and sexually frustrated cabbie in Taxi Driver, one of Justin’s favorite movies.  (Justin could quote from the movie at length, had each narrated diary entry memorized by heart.) Recently Kaylee had watched a video of DeNiro in Rocky and Bullwinkle and said the actor looked cute in it.  Justin had cringed.  DeNiro belonged to him.  The younger DeNiro of Raging Bull and The Deer Hunter.  Men of violent, decisive action.

*     *     *

Heart Attack was now the number one movie in America, and there was talk of another Oscar for Buck Druthers plus a sequel with Buck returning as the cannibalistic psycho Gustav Nife.  Furthermore, Buck would be making a public appearance at the Boyd’s Megaplex Cinemas next weekend to promote a special screening of Heart Attack on every one of the Megaplex’s twenty-four screens.  The money raised from that night’s box office would be donated to the National Heart Association.

Justin learned of the news when he heard Kaylee screaming downstairs.  Consequently, she was on the phone for hours tracking down and informing her friends, so as to make arrangements for the four of them to be there.  Justin overheard snatches of her conversations.

“Can you imagine if we get close enough to get his autograph, and touch him! Oh my God, bitch, I’ve got to wear my Buck tee shirt!”

“I’m going to wear my Buck Sucks tee shirt,” Justin said.

“Shut up, bitch,” Kaylee snarled.  “Yeah, Shen, it’s my sibling again.  Same old whining.” She moved the receiver from her ear.  “Justin, Shenandoah says you’re jealous because you’re just a seed and Buck is a flower.”

“Tell her I’m a…a tasty baked potato with sour cream and he’s this really old potato in a cupboard with all these ugly weird growths all over it.”

“She heard you.  She says to kiss her ass.”

“I wish,” he muttered to himself, stalking from the room.

*     *     *

Standing bedside the battered car his parents had bought him, parked at about the center of the Boyd’s Megaplex lot, Justin tried to imagine what the huge cinema complex would look like in several days, with limousines parked out front, perhaps huge spotlights sweeping columns of light across the bottoms of clouds.

He thought he might go in now and see a movie by himself, but he wasn’t sure if he were really in the mood.  While he leaned there he eyed two teenage girls as they walked past him on their way to the cinema.  One of them caught him staring and looked over at him.  Justin smiled at her shyly.  She just arched an eyebrow, sneered, and looked away.  Justin watched her blue-jean gripped bottom recede, dwindle, become swallowed inside the theater where she would dream that Buck Druthers would want to eat her heart.

Buck skibeddy fucking Druthers.  He was responsible for a rise in divorces, as fathers and grandfathers left their wives of many years to take on hot little high school girls who had suddenly found the old codgers irresistible.  Young men just wanted to screw like panting dogs, Cosmopolitan advised, but older men took their time in making love (even if drugs were often needed to make it possible at all).  How was Justin going to become a seasoned lover when he wasn’t getting any practice now?

Justin drifted closer to the theater aimlessly, thinking he might purchase some snacks at least, play some video games, half-blindly buy a ticket to something with a lot of soothing gunfights, car wrecks and explosions.  But when he got close to the entrance, he was soured by the sight of a cute little redhead with her midriff bared up to the bottom of her breasts and down to the border of her pubis, holding the hand of a balding, white-haired man in a sweater that looked like it hadn’t been laundered since Dubbya Dubbya Two.  Justin turned to face a huge poster of Buck as Gustav Nife in the window, and made his hand into a gun which he pointed at that seamed face with the stubbly cheeks girls imagined scraping against their tender flesh.  His thumb fell like the hammer of the magnum his dad kept locked up in his gun cabinet.

*     *     *

Waiting in line at the Megaplex was like waiting to board a ride at Disneyland, but it only enhanced the anticipation, the intoxicating suspense shared by Kaylee, Latrina, Taffeta and Shenandoah, who had already dyed her green hair platinum blond like Spunk had it now, and was letting it grow out so she could make a forward-facing ponytail out of it.  The girls babbled excitedly, all of them having a distinctly Latino and/or African-American sound-ing accent despite their being all too Anglo.

There were indeed spotlights painting the night sky, white stretch limos and police cars and local camera crews.  The mingled sounds of the crowd lent it all a tingling atmosphere like a carnival or perhaps more like a concert.  Kaylee was visibly trembling nonstop, seized onto Shenandoah’s arm abruptly and tightly.  “What if I got close enough to grab him and kiss him, Shen?”

“Oh, man, they’d grab you and arrest you.”

“It would be worth it, bitch, and you know it!” she cackled as if drugged.  “I am going to stick my tongue down his throat!”

“I’m going to grab his sack!” Taffeta yelled.  They all squealed loudly enough to splinter glass, at that statement.

“Just think, he was actually inside one of these limos!” Latrina said as they drew closer to the building, where Buck would be sitting at a long table in the lobby with representatives of the community and the National Heart Association, to shake hands, sign autographs and accept additional contributions.  He himself had suffered a heart attack a few years ago and wore a pacemaker which pushed out his skin in a hard bump that young girls dreamed of cupping in their delicate hands, running their tongues over.

“Just think, he’s in that building right now!” Shenandoah said.  “I’m going to take one look at him in the flesh and pass out.”

“Oh my God…we’ll be through the doors any minute now,” Taffeta said, holding onto Latrina’s hand.

Kaylee craned her neck, stood on tip-toes, to get a sense of how many rows of heads still preceded them before the threshold.  Her brows knotted and she said, “Hey”…more to herself than to her girlfriends.  “That looks like Justin…”

“Justin?” Shenandoah echoed.  “What would he be doing going to see Buck Druthers? He hates him.”

“Well…I can tell he liked Heart Attack.  Maybe he wants to see the movie again.”

“Maybe he just pretends to hate Buck, but really he’s gay and in love with him!”

Kaylee had to laugh long and hard at that.

Minutes later all four girls linked hands so as not to get separated in the creeping but powerful glacier push of flesh, but mostly just to lend each other support as they cleared the threshold and entered the lobby, passing from night into a blazing light that seemed to emanate from the table obscured ahead of them.  “Oh my God, oh my God, bitches, we’re through!” Shenandoah gushed.

Kaylee smiled, but she rose on her toes again and stretched her neck to scan for that head which had looked so familiar.  Something vague had unsettled her, as if she had seen a smoky black aura around that blond head that was invisible to everyone but her.

Behind Kaylee and her friends, another group had just crossed the threshold and began to chant in unison, “Buck! Buck! Buck! Buck!” Kaylee twisted half around to look at them, a bit startled.  It was mostly girls but there were a few boyfriends, who wore frayed cardigans and flannel shirts tucked into high-waisted pants, or else flannel bathrobes with pajama pants and slippers, their hair mussed and cheeks shaded with down in place of stubble.  They reminded Kaylee of her five-year-old niece who pulled her pants down below her exposed tummy to look like Spunk.

Ahead of her, she heard another voice cry out, and she jerked to face forward again.  Because this voice had shouted, “Buck you!”

And then there was one loud blast of thunder.  Some people cheered, thinking it was a special effect.  Others screamed in horror, though these screams were almost indistinguishable from the shrieks of delight Kaylee had been hearing all along.  She would learn from the news tomorrow that even some who saw what happened would think it was all a publicity stunt, part of tonight’s entertainment.

The police converged.  Security began to urge the crowd back, and pandemonium ensued.  Kaylee would also learn tomorrow that a thirteen-year-old girl was crushed to death between the advancing and retreating ranks, she and her glossy photo of Buck Druthers trampled under a confused stampede of sneakered feet.

Kaylee would only see the blood on TV.  She would only ever see Buck Druthers on the screen, never in the flesh…as if he had never been real, after all, just a computer-generated star, like Jack Elam in his co-starring role in Heart Attack and Strother Martin starring as Don Vito Corleone in the upcoming remake of The Godfather.  She would see the (censored for television) assassination of Buck Druthers as local camera crews recorded it.  But right now, as it happened, she didn’t need to have witnessed the act to know that it was her brother Justin who had shot and killed Buck Druthers.

And though Kaylee would be horrified, enraged and embarrassed that it was her brother who had killed one of the world’s top stars, in a way she would find herself excited…and proud.  Her brother…her brother…had looked Buck Druthers in the eye.  Her brother had been spattered with the blood of Buck Druthers.  Her brother, made of the same genetic material as herself, would go down in history as the one who had put a .44 slug in and out of the skull of the man who would go on to win a second Oscar, posthumously, for his role as serial killer Gustav Nife.

She would find that her friends would soon get over their shunning of her, and come to envy her.

*     *     *

“Buck You!” towered the headline on The New York Post, The Enquirer, Newsweek, Time, People and Babe Parade.

Justin was tried as an adult…but despite the premeditated nature of his crime, he still avoided the death penalty because of his age, and because of the question of his mental state at the time of the killing.  In the courtroom he quoted some of Burt Reynolds’ lines from the movie Heart Attack, such as, “Someone has to stop that son of a bitch” and, “That monster is going down.” Justin had memorized them as he had certain lines from Taxi Driver, though in the courtroom he gave the impression not of a devout movie fan but of someone who had lost his sense of reality…proving that Justin had learned some of the skills of his favorite actor, DeNiro.

His lawyer argued that the defendant had so empathized with Reynolds’ character—and to his credit Druthers had done such an excellent job of embodying the character of Gustav Nife—that Justin Spring had thought he was ridding the world of a dangerous mass murderer.  Sympathetically, many people spoke out on the hazards of violent entertainment and its effects on impressionable young minds.

But the success of Heart Attack, and the spectacular demise of its star (which helped immeasurably to make Heart Attack the highest grossing film of all time), launched a whole string of psycho killer movies.  Some of the lead characters in these films were older men, like Buck/Gustav…though some were young kids, like Justin Spring.

Justin hadn’t been in prison for a month before he received his first fan letter.  In it, there was a Polaroid of a sixteen-year-old girl posing in her bathing suit.  The four other Polaroids of her, which showed her naked, had been confiscated by the warden.

More letters came in.  More photos, panties and curly locks of pubic hair were confiscated and stockpiled by the warden.

Justin would sit on the edge of his cot, unmolested by his respectful cell mate, and read letter after letter, stare at photo after photo of young girls (he saw how their hair and clothing styles changed over the months).  And sometimes he would find himself grinning with pride.  And sometimes he would find himself with tears of frustration in his young eyes.

Damask

“…independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death…”

–Nabokov, Ada

My interest in aborted fetuses began on Christmas Eve, which I suppose is appropriate in a way.  The eve of a remarkable birth.  When we think of Christ, it is with the double image of the newborn babe and the tortured man in extremis.  They are distinct, separate images that blur nonetheless into one another, like those 3D book and video boxes that when angled one way show this image, when tilted another show an altered variation.  Like Damask linen, with its two parallel sets of thread, that give it a different look from various angles.  Presto-change-o.  Loaves into fishes, broken water into dying whine.

I was at work when I received the email, so it was fortunate that my cubicle was along the back wall, shielded by padded partitions and a potted plant.  It was from my old buddy Dwayne, who had been my roommate in college.  An animated email Xmas card.  Oh, by the way, some people are offended by this easily typed shortening of the yuletide holiday, saying that it removes the Christ from the mas, but in fact the X is an antiquated representation of Christ, like that fish symbol people like to mutate for their bumper stickers.  So there.  Personally, I’m offended for reasons of tradition rather than of religion that every other seasonal card now says “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” rather than “Merry Christmas,” in the interest of political correctness.  You know, I once brought up Kwanza in front of some coworkers from Ghana and they’d never heard of it; one woman actually grew angry when I explained to her that it was an African celebration.  Not to her it wasn’t, she said.  She said it was just something we’d fabricated in America.   I thought that was funny; me, whiter than a cave fish, explaining Kwanza to a table full of Africans…like a missionary preaching Christianity.

This animated Happy Seasonal Yadda Yadda Greetings card started out with a colorful cartoon of Santa sliding down a chimney into a cute little scene with lumpen stockings crucified to the mantel and a tree almost as big as the potted plant that shelters my desk.  Santa smilingly dumped out his sack…and from it tumbled these scanned photographic images, that settled at the bottom of my screen.  The tinkling X-mas music was suddenly replaced by the sound of a baby crying, distorted so that it sounded like it was underwater.  It took me a few seconds to realize that these scanned colored photos were of aborted fetuses, or at least some parts thereof.

I had thought for a moment there that Dwayne was getting waaaay too mellow in his old age.  This was more like the Dwayne I knew (who while he was in school designed a web site where he would post photos of his girlfriend Damask’s sanitary napkins, documenting the progression of several of her periods; his site got more hits than his brother’s classy site dedicated to Japanese author Yukio Mishima, whose aesthetic motto was: “my heart’s leaning was for Death and Night and Blood.”).

I chuckled and wagged my head in disgusted amusement, playing the animated card over several times, wondering who I might forward it on to and coming up with no one.  I was about to delete it when I leaned in and gave the fragments of fetuses a closer look, out of sheer morbid curiosity.  I’d never seen graphic photos of aborted fetuses before, except at a fair one time when someone handed me an anti-abortion pamphlet but I tossed it in a trash basket after a moment of gazing at its gruesome cover photo, now merely a red blur to me.

There were four sections, apparently none of them coming from the same fetus, though at first they’d given the impression of being disconnected parts of a single puzzle.  There was a leg, pretty much floating by itself, raw and red as if a dog had been gnawing on it.  There was a fairly intact fetus, in that it had a head and two arms, though the body tapered off to a twist like a mermaid embryo below the waist (this picture was a little too small to see clearly).  The two most outstanding sections were of (A) a decapitated head, very well formed, though burned or melted-looking…it appeared more like the head of an infant, a baby, a child, a person, than of an embryo, a fetus, it’s all just semantics, isn’t it? (B) an unidentifiable mess/mass of torn tissue like a placenta ground under cleated shoes, a plate full of dog food or corned beef hash, bloodily red and sebaceously yellow, with this one doll limb of an arm extending out from its center.  As if that was the only part of the baby that had formed so far, reaching out into existence to pull the rest after it.

Believe it or not, but I used to be against abortion.  I know that as a man, I’m not supposed to have an opinion (though if a woman wanted to have a child of mine, even if I didn’t want it, I’d sure as hades have to pay her child support; then I’d be included in the equation) but I always used to argue, well, if it isn’t a human being, what is it in there? A shoe? A rubber chicken? Isn’t a rose bush a rose bush before the flowers bloom? A woman can do whatever she wants to her body, we’re told, but if a woman went to a surgeon (even a cosmetic one) and said I want to have my arms removed as a political protest or because my husband is an amputee freak or what have you, she would be refused, and if a woman stood on a street corner shearing her lips and the tip of her nose and her earlobes off with tinsnips, she’d be carted to a loony bin.  But, but, she can have this other body (admittedly, parasitic, dependent on her for existence, but so is a newborn) scalded in saline solution or sucked out of her in chunks because she is the master of her own body.  I find a lot of men who vehemently support abortion to be ridiculous P.C. brown noses, or else they’re just relieved that there’s another mode of birth control available to them.  Politicians make a lot of the rights of women to their bodies.  How generous of them to give women their own bodies, so that they won’t have to give them jobs that pay as well as men’s or the pinnacles of political power or seats at the World Bank.  It’s a bone, to placate them.  Here, this is yours.  You can own procreation, own your own body, play with the flesh as much as you want while we’ll play in our sandbox full of gold dust over here.  If aborted fetuses were used as fuel for submarines, tanks or automobiles then it might be another matter.

I no longer rejected the idea of abortion, calling it immoral.  No longer debated the issue, as when I’d been in my late teens, a decade ago.  It wasn’t that I no longer saw the fetus as being a human being.  It was because I saw the fetus as being a human being that I now supported abortion.  You see, that floating chewed leg there could be the leg of our neighbor who poisoned my dog Tara when I was a kid.  Aborted before he could grow up into a puppy-poisoning human being.  That mermaid embryo there could be the older kid who beat me up in front of my younger brother when we were on our way up town to buy some comic books, for no reason at all, I didn’t even know him, though in my mind I see him as being the same kid who once cut through our yard and, when I said hi to him, spit some cigarette-tasting saliva in my face.  That burned or flayed decapitated head, with its mouth open as if to swallow amniotic fluid or apple juice from a sippy cup, could be seen as being the head of my Uncle Pat who twice made me go down on him when we were visiting him and his wife down in Florida one summer.  That doll arm in its vomit puddle of half digested meat could be my X-girlfriend Sara, who cheated on me with men and women and presumably barnyard animals, extraterrestrials, a zombie Elvis and Sasquatch before dumping me for some yuppie in a more spacious cubicle than my own, roomy enough I guess for her 2.5 kids (two whole ones and one Amazing Mermaid Boy?).

I sat there, that Xmas eve, staring at those red scraps on my monitor and thinking along those lines.  Imaging which sex that one might have grown up to be.  What color hair would it have had.  Had it been allowed to finish baking in life’s oven until done, might that gaping decapitated head have become some beautiful Nicole Kidman redhead whose mouth I would want to suction cup mine to?  Might the tiny arm in the pancake have formed into that of a lovely Asian woman who would use her delicate hand to slowly, slowly pull at my straining dick? Might I have wanted to run my tongue along that floating disconnected leg, meaty and full and with a prickle of calve stubble, and up into the nexus point where only a tatter of flesh existed in this unformed form? One could easily extrapolate, with a little imagination.  After all, we all start out this way.  Just as one could age the decapitated head into a Nicole Kidman, one could regress a tanned muscular leg of Britney Spears into that severed little limb, an arm of Angelina Jolie into that itsy bitsy stick arm grasping out of its primordial pool of flesh.

It isn’t that I was into pedophilia.  It wasn’t that these were bits of children or pre-children (I’ll drop that human being vs.  bits of inconsequential cells argument henceforth) that started me thinking along sexual lines.  After all, I was an odd mix of small town conservatism and free thinking beyond the conventional realm of liberalism.  I considered the photos of Jock Sturges, for instance, to be eerie pedophilia that might not be in coffee table books if he weren’t so talented with his phallic camera, and reading Lolita, The Enchanter and Ada in succession back in my college days left me more than a little creeped out and just a wee bit suspicious about Nabokov’s predilections for nymphets (I recall one photo of him as an old man significantly half-obscured under a luridly wet, dark rain slicker like a giant foreskin with a crooked smile that was creepily carnal and which hinted at the often mean-spirited intellectual smugness I had come away from him with) and doubting he would ever have gotten a publisher near these books if he weren’t so fucking brilliant.  Sure, well, I’ll admit to having found these photos and these books sensuous, in a disturbing way, and I am drawn to the disturbing or I’d never have sought such things out in the first place, but the point is, at the end of the day I wanted a fully grown, fully developed, adult woman.  Call me old fashioned.

*     *     *

Well the whole office was slacking off, ready to leave early (at noon), so I decided to send an email hello to Dwayne, who lived in California now, and ask him how he and his bride, Tamsin, a pretty blond Brit I’d never met, were doing.  I did so, then weeded through my junk mail, ignoring all the porn ads (I might peek at free samples, but I’d be damned if I was going to pay money to look at it, on my income), and just as I was about to go offline, I saw that I already had a reply from Dwayne.  I read it, fired one back, and a few minutes later he reciprocated.  We went back and forth like this for a bit:

I said: You sick fuck.  Same old Dwayne.  I’m at work, idiot! Good thing no one else saw it.  Where do you find that stuff? How’s the wife and little one doing? I wouldn’t mind meeting them one day, y’know.  Happy Kwanza, man!

And Dwayne: Ha! I knew you’d like that.  Damask sent it to me.  She designed it, in fact.  The family is fine.  You could always come out here, you know.  We’d put you up.  Say hello to your bro and your folks for me.

Me: Damask…that figures.  So she’s still in graphic arts, then.  I didn’t know you kept in touch with her.  Where is she at these days? Yeah, I’ll come to California as soon as I hit the lottery.  I’ll pass along your Hanukkah greetings to my family.

Dwayne: Damask lives in Lowell.  I’m surprised you haven’t run into her.  I wish she wouldn’t send me the occasional email, though…Tamsin has heard too many stories about her.  Happy Winter Solstice!

Me: Can you give me Damask’s email addy? I want to say hi.  Merry XXXmas!

Dwayne: Say hi, huh? Yeah…I knew you always had a thing for Damask.  Just watch out, huh? She’s a freaky little girl, man! All Hail Cthulhu!

Me: Aww, you’re just getting old.  You’re too domesticated.  And who said I had a thing for your girlfriend? By the way, any nude pictures of Tamsin you could email me? Thanks for the address.

Dwayne: Old??? Hey, you’re older than me, pal.  You turn thirty next month, am I right? And go find your own Tamsin.  Seriously…go find your own Tamsin.  She’s a treasure, dude, and hopefully not the only one.  Take care, buddy.

*     *     *

Damask agreed to meet me for lunch.  Also, she e-mailed me another example of her amusing animated greetings, this one an early 30th birthday card for me.  It was a photo of that same aborted, disembodied fetus head, but oddly taken from another angle and shown much larger, a cartoon party hat added, and its jaw worked like a Monty Python animation as it sang, “Happy Birthday To You!” in a watery voice like that drowning baby cry which accompanied the Xmas message.  She always was talented, I recalled.

Staring at that hairless, tenderized head made me perversely use my powers of extrapolation to age it into Damask herself, as best I could recall her from those college days.  The raw little scalp grew thick, crazy wild black hair that she wore like a thundercloud, and the wrinkled red flesh turned smooth and pale as a puddle of candle wax.  Big, too-big doll eyes lined and accented in too much kohl.  A mouth too small and pouty like that of an insolent child.  She was very petite, Damask, and almost could have passed for a child, really.

And yes, my friend knew me well.  I’d always been attracted to her, but too loyal to act on it.  I had been dismayed, but at the same time excited, when one time the three of us had gone to a gallery where she had a few paintings on display, and she gave my ass a quick squeeze without even meeting my eyes.

She was there at the Cuban restaurant before me, waved me to the table, stood to give me a hug, still so small even in platform shoes that I smelled the nest of curls at the top of her head.  Her wild tendriled mane of yore, snarled Medusa snakes, was gathered back more or less into a huge puffy ponytail like dirty clothes kicked under a bed.  Its color wasn’t black as I remembered it, more of a dark auburn.  She hadn’t aged much; her face was still child-like, though I saw some subtle lines in her forehead and her throat looked like a more mature woman’s.  A beguiling mix, that blend of girl and woman.  I had pictured her all in black, like in the old days, but she wore a gray T-shirt (cut short to show a tease of midriff as was the style with young girls, though at thirty she could still get away with it) and olive drab combat pants too large for her, rolled up at the cuffs.  We sat and both ordered coconut-encrusted haddock and Havana martinis.

We got to talking about our main connection, that being Dwayne.  I told Damask about his fear of Tamsin finding out that he received the occasional email message from her.  Damask snorted.  “That boring little wife of his has him so pussy whipped, it’s not funny.  She seems to think I was this evil Eve, this Pandora that came along and corrupted her pure little future hubby.  I didn’t put any kinks in him…I just helped him give them some air.  But thank God his own personal Princess Dye-job saved his soul again.  Can you believe they named their son Corey? Corey…oh my God.  Duh-wayne has gotten so old…”

“That’s what I was telling him.”

Damask lowered her head so she could look up at me with those huge black eyes from under her thick black brows.  “How about you?” she asked in a voice just as dark.  “Are you old these days, Timmy?”

“Me? I’m the poster boy for Peter Pan Syndrome.”

Damask sat back and gave a deep belly laugh that was surprising coming from her.  “Well that’s a relief.”

We each ordered a second martini and also downed a few free shot-sized samples of several new cocktails on the menu.  We had gotten to the subject of her artwork.

“Where’d you get those gross fetus photos, anyway? Online somewhere?”

Damask chuckled and sipped her drink.  “Maybe I fished them out of an abortion clinic’s dumpster, then plopped ‘em onto my scanner.”

“Eww.”

“I should take you to my studio.  Some of my art is kinda hard to describe.  But then, I’m not sure you’d understand it, Tim.”

“What? C’mon, give me some credit, Damask.  I know you.”

“Really?” She sipped again, and nonchalantly said, “Okay, then.  And as long as we’re going there we might as well fuck, huh? My studio is also my apartment, actually.”

I nodded deeply and slowly for a few moments before answering with a fearful smile, afraid she might only be joking or that I might be missing out on some new definition of fuck, “Okay.”

“Are you going to finish that?” Damask poised her fork over my last chunk of haddock, its flesh as white as her own.  When I gestured for her to go for it, she pierced the cooling flesh and popped it into her mouth.  Smiling and chewing and talking at once, she said, “I’m eating for two.”

“Two?”

“I’m pregnant.”

*     *     *

Lowell, Massachusetts is a college town with an artistic bent, site of a yearly Jack Kerouac festival.  It was where Dwayne and Damask and I had attended school together, at Lowell University.  The town has a large Asian population, and every person I glimpsed in Damask’s apartment building was Asian.  In a dingy hallway smelling of exotic foods and resonating with muffled exotic music, as if one might step into Hong Kong behind any one of those ranked doors, Damask even greeted a passing woman in the woman’s own language, which might have been Vietnamese, before unlocking one door and letting us into her flat.

“I’ll give you the grand tour,” she said, locking and chaining and bolting the door behind us.  “My roommate is on a work assignment in Boston this week.  Her name’s Phetsamone.  She’s Laotian.  Everyone calls her Simone.”

“Speaking of names,” I said, “there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you.  Damask.  Is that your given name?”

Diminutive Damask smiled up at me subtly.  Her dark overstated eyes, like some anime cartoon come alive, could be unnerving.  She said, “I had it legally changed.  The name I was born with is Florine Laliberte.  But I was adopted, so I became Florine Sewell.  My adoptive parents called me Flo and the kids in school called me Flo Sewage, so when I was fifteen my parents allowed me to change my first name to Damask.” She gave a little shrug.  “Of course, when Duh-wayne would get mad at me he’d call me Dumbass.  Simone calls me Don’task.”

“Wow…I didn’t know you were adopted.”

“Yeah.” She turned away to begin leading me on the tour.  “I was an unwanted pregnancy.”

Our tour skipped ahead to the bathroom, for starts, because I had to relieve my bladder.  On the white wall above the sink there was a spatter of rusty stains.  I pointed to this and laughed, “What is this, blood?”

“Oh…no.  I did that dying my hair.”

“Ahhh…I thought it looked redder than I remembered it.”

“Well, I’m getting white prematurely,” she muttered despondently, beginning to step out to let me do my stuff.  “It sucks getting old.”

The tour resumed.  I learned Simone had artistic interests, as well, and the walls of even the hallway and kitchen were a gallery of framed prints and photos.  Of the latter, Joel-Peter Witkin was much in evidence (his History of the White World: Venus Preferred to Christ, with its nude central figure and an apparent actual fetus crucified in the background; Abundance, with its model who was little more than a head and torso as a result of her mother trying to abort her; The Invention of Milk, with a fetus in a miniature pillory in front of a woman’s groin; Woman (Birth), a photo of an art student with her hands bound and an image of a skull above her pubic hair).  Paintings by surrealist Zdzislaw Beksinski.  H.  R.  Giger’s grayish Landscape XVIII and the red, meatier looking Landscape XIV.  Both portrayed rows of grotesque babies with closed eyes and gasping mouths, covered in a plague of blisters or tumors.  Damask said, “I know Giger might seem a little too uncool, a little too mass market, but really, who is cooler than Giger?”

“He’s still alive, right?”

“He’d better be.  One of my goals in life is to fuck him.”

I chuckled uncomfortably.  “So…um, who got you pregnant?” I joked.  “Beksinski?”

That subtle smile again.  “Someone you needn’t be concerned about.  He’s not a part of my life.”

“How far along are you? You don’t look it.”

“Not far; six weeks.  Come on.” She reached for my hand.  “My studio is next.  It’s in my bedroom.”

One might have thought that it would be the bed to which my attention would immediately fly.  Maybe it did for a microsecond at best.  I was too immediately struck by the vivid sights and subtle scents, equally unsettling, in her bedroom/art studio.

For one thing, the walls and ceiling had been painted in glossy, wet-looking, blended shades of pink and red, marbled with white and yellow.  Twisty lengths of surgical tubing had been stapled to the walls and ceiling like telephone wires and painted red or blue like veins.

Flanking the door were two framed pictures, poor in quality and apparently simply printed off the web, of an Asian man sitting down to a meal of dead fetus, cut or broken into various pieces.  In the second he was delicately nibbling on the chicken wing of a shriveled arm.  Damask, smiling, pushed close to me and explained, “That’s Zhu Yu, a Chinese performance artist.  This performance was called ‘Man-eater’, and it was part of a two-part series called ‘Infatuation on Injuries’.  The other part was called ‘Canned Human Brains’.  It’s a six month old fetus stolen from a med school.  He puked while he was eating it.”

I leaned in close, wrinkling my nose as if the underlying unpleasant smell in the room came from these images.  “Its face looks like a doll.  The way it’s smiling.”

“Ahh…well, see…some people claim it was a doll’s head, stuck on the body of a cooked duck.  But that arm looks too real, to me.  I sure hope it was real, and not a fake, or I’d have no respect for the fucker.”

As I further took in the womb with a view, I saw that the framed baby-eater was the least of its grotesqueries.  I drew closer to this display or that work in progress slowly, timid but fascinated, my heart in my throat or maybe that was bile and the oddly foul air collecting in my lungs like the vile water in those of a long-drowned man.

“Jesus, Damask,” I breathed, as the parts of several fetuses lazily spun from a mobile like an astronomical model of the planets, an astronomical model of God sundered by the Big Bang.  They were shinily lacquered so as to preserve them, but still had an atmosphere of stink emanating from them.  It may come as no surprise that these were the very parts she had used in her animated Xmas card.  The head from the birthday greeting.  I would have thought she found those images on some web site.  Never that she would have actually possessed them in the third dimension.  It was perversely like a mobile one might hang over a baby’s crib.

“No, not Jesus.  If I used the second coming of Christ for my art, I think people would really disapprove.”

I faced her.  “So that joke about you stealing them from a clinic dumpster…”

“I can’t reveal my sources just yet.” Smiling again, like a cat or a sphinx, and maybe La Gioconda had had some very dark secret that had compelled a half terrified, half intrigued da Vinci to capture it.

Encased in a greenish block of Lucite like a chunk of amber—a science class display, sitting on a window sill so the sun could glow through it—was a fetus like a shrimp skinned of its translucent shell.  I picked up the heavy block and Damask said, “I got that while we were still in school.  It’s an embryo at six weeks, like the one in me.  About an inch long; that’s why I’m not showing.  It already has a face and the spine is closed, but its hands are more like flippers, still.” She pointed all of this out to me like a teacher smug with their knowledge.

Inside an open-faced wooden box hanging on one wall was a very large horseshoe crab, belly facing outward, with another disembodied fetus head affixed to the animal’s underside, just below its cluster of legs, as if it had been revealed by dissection to be growing inside…or be partly digested there.  Pinned below the crab, to either side of its tail, which ultimately extended through a hole in the bottom of the box, were the desiccated remains of two pigeons, facing each other like heralding angels.

“Is this the only theme you’re interested in?” I asked, taking in her Midwives of the Invertebrate, as she’d dubbed it.

“I’m a woman.  This is what society expects of us, right? To be preoccupied with childbirth? So I’m preoccupied with childbirth, like a good little breeder.”

Realizing I still had it in my hand, I started to set down the Lucite block, then hesitated when I realized it had originally been resting upon an old photograph lying on the window sill.  The photo, with its faded colors, showed a woman holding a baby in her arms.  I knew the woman had to be either Damask’s birth mother, or her adoptive mother, but the baby was a zero, cut out of the photo with an exacto knife.  Damask urged me to go ahead and rest the block on top of the picture.  She explained, “I call that piece I Am a Paperweight.”

I drifted to a work bench along one wall where there lay a skull of an infant, its plates not fused yet and no teeth in the upper jaw, looking like the remains of some space alien.  I was reminded of my cousin’s baby as a newborn; in a certain light I had seen the top of its head subtly pulsing in that soft spot.  She had spray painted the tiny skull a glossy red and it was drying on a newspaper.  She demonstrated how a thin candle would emerge through that hole in the top of the skull when this candle holder was finished.

“Do you sell these things?”

“Yeah.  Of course.”

“Where do you find your clients?”

“On the web.  Through street talk, word of mouth.  I have my connections.”

“It’s like your own little museum in here,” I said.  “You could charge people money to come in and look around.”

“I do, in fact,” she told me.  “And aren’t you the lucky one, to have the free tour?”

I faced her again.  Behind her I saw a small refrigerator like one might have in a dorm.  I had noticed the stink in the room was stronger near it.  Sitting on top of the fridge was a glass jar filled with formaldehyde, inside of which like some old-time carnival “pickled punk” was a medical school fetus, maybe even a full term baby, with nails driven all through its head and limbs and torso like that Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies might have looked when delivered in a chainsaw C-section.

“Your voice is trembly,” Damask purred.  “Do you disapprove of my work? Or are you just wondering when we get to the fucking part?”

“I don’t…I don’t think I disapprove.  It’s just…you know, not what one sees in the average art gallery.”

“I should hope not.  Art is so castrated.  People are so terrified of their own bodies, and everything that comes out of it.  Sweat, mucus, pus, blood, earwax, snot, puke, piss, shit, placenta, and this.” She swept her arm.  “I guess we hate ourselves, huh? Is that a good thing? What’s more healthy…being in contempt of ourselves, or embracing it like I do?”

“I like your art,” I stammered.

“Do you really?” She drew closer to me again, slowly, as if stalking me through the half-obscuring tall grass of my half-sickened lust.  “Or do you just like me?”

“You’re one and the same.”

“Yes,” she hissed, eyes glassy as if she had lacquered them as well, to preserve her artistic vision before it could decompose.  “Yes, Tim.  I am my art.  Exactly.  I think you do understand…”

At last, I focused on the bed at the nucleus of the room, and its sheets were red satin as if it were a giant afterbirth and soon we were two conjoined twins lying whitely against it.  The mobile twirled hypnotically above us, a scarlet constellation.

“Harder,” she grunted, her body folded double beneath me, her legs bent back so that her knees almost pressed against her delicate breasts, her feet resting on my shoulders as if in stirrups.  She was grimacing, her fingers knotted in my hair.  “Slam it into me.  Hammer it into me…”

Propped over her, I trembled with strain but was driven on by the lurid sloshing/slapping/smacking sound of our pelvises impacting.  The smell of our sweat and her musky juices blended with the effluvium of death.  “I’m afraid I might hurt your baby,” I gasped.

“I want you to,” she panted.  “I want your cock to hit her in the head.  I want you to fuck her, too.  Fuck her in the womb…”

*     *     *

At work, Dwayne e-mailed me the latest photos of Tamsin and Corey.  The little boy was straw-haired like his mother, both with cheery sun-squinted smiles.  I noticed Dwayne’s hair was thinning, and he had a bit of a paunch, so I teased him about that in my reply, and added: I met up with Damask, and had lunch with her.  She showed me her art.  But before I sent the message, I erased that last sentence.  As if I were afraid to let it be known even to a friend that I had seen what could only be illegal.

Dwayne replied: If you even think about screwing her, man, double bag your unit.  The last thing you need is some disease.  You do know she’s a prostitute, don’t you?

I sat staring at my screen, rain thumping the ground outside the window behind me, trickling down the long narrow pane in living rivulets like immense spermatozoa.  Was Dwayne jealous? Afraid Damask and I would do what we had already done? Or could he be telling the truth?

What do you mean, a prostitute? Says who?

Dwayne: I heard it from Greg; can’t remember where he heard it.  But she’s as much as told me herself.  She glosses it up, says it’s all part of some performance art, but you can call it anything you want.  Fucking for money is prostitution.  Watch out for her, man.  She wanted to drink my blood while we were screwing.  Seriously, she wouldn’t let up about it.  I let her cut me once with a scalpel, and it was freaky.

You can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it, too, though, I electronically retorted.

He didn’t reply to that one.

*     *     *

I wanted to see Damask again.  That night, of the very same day I had exchanged emails with Dwayne.  I wanted to ask her, in as delicate a way as possible, about what Dwayne had accused her of.  If it angered her, I could put the blame on him.  “See what Dwayne is saying about you?” But more than that…I just wanted to climb onto that red-sheeted placenta of a bed again, in that room with its womb walls and its smell of sex and death.

But on the phone, she sounded very dour, terse, which made me timid.  I think she was stoned, too.  She grumbled, “Simone isn’t back from Boston…she was supposed to come back this morning.  I can’t reach her on her cell.”

“I’m sure she’s all right,” I offered meekly.

“You are, huh? I’m glad you’re sure.  I’ve been trying to reach her for hours.  I think I’m going to go to Boston tonight to find her…”

“Um, I could come with you,” I offered.  “To help.”

She snorted an unpleasant little laugh.  “Thanks, but I’ll look for her myself.  Call me tomorrow.”

“Okay.  So…”

But she hung up before I could stammer anything else.

*     *     *

For five excruciating, long dull days—days in which I wondered how I had ever made it through eight hours of mind-numbing work without Damask in my life—from home at night and even from work during the afternoon, I tried to reach Damask on the phone, but she didn’t pick up or return the messages I left on her machine.  I knew she wasn’t away; when I left a new message on her answering machine, there were no beeps of previously recorded messages by me which she hadn’t got to yet.  She had listened to them.  She was blowing me off; it was as simple as that.  She had had her fun, and maybe I wasn’t fun enough, and now I was discarded.  Angry, hurt, fragile and ashamed, I was tempted to drive over there after work unannounced, but when I sent her an email from the coffin of my cubicle—from which I was liberated each night like a vampire reborn—she at last gave me a response.  We sent a flurry of messages back and forth, practically in real time.

Me: I was worried.  Where were you? In Boston with Simone?

Damask: Phetsamone is dead.  She died in childbirth.  I’ve been bringing her stuff to her family.  Haven’t exactly been in the mood for socializing.  Sorry.

Me: Oh my God, Dam, I’m so sorry.  That’s terrible! I didn’t know women still died in childbirth.  Is there anything I can do for you?

Her: Like what? I’ll see you on the weekend.  Come over Saturday around one.  I have an art project to finish up this week, and I’m feeling under the weather.

Me: I understand.  You must really miss her.  Oh God, I’m so sorry.  I wish I could have met her.  :-(

Her: You’d have liked Fat-simone.  I called her that sometimes, cause she had that cute round Laotian face.  She was too sweet for this world.  By the way, if you ever use an emoticon again I’ll stomp on your throat.

Me: Sorry.  Jeez…I didn’t know Simone was pregnant, too.  Funny that you both were.

Her: Now neither of us are.  I had an abortion yesterday.  See you on Saturday.

I sat dumbly staring into my monitor, as if hypnotized by the flashy banner ad at the top of the screen advertising a hair treatment for balding men …inanely, I thought of Dwayne.  I didn’t know what to write back to her.  Ultimately, I didn’t write anything.  I couldn’t say, “I’m sorry”—could I? It wasn’t a miscarriage.  I couldn’t say, “Congratulations.” Or even, “Oh.  An abortion.  So how do you feel?” She’d already said she felt under the weather.  The word “abortion” has such impact in our culture.  It’s a word that makes you want to lower your voice when you utter it, lest one or another of its advocates or detractors prick their ears and clench their fists.  The fact was that no matter how common abortion obviously was, I had never known a person before, personally, at least to my knowledge, who had had one.  The fact was that I knew very little about it at all.

Damask had said the word so matter-of-factly.  As if she’d told me she’d had her teeth cleaned.  I knew it was her way.  Hipper than hip, cooler than cool, unfazed by life, seen it all.  Still, I pictured that mobile with its doll-like parts hovering, slowly rotating, like the thoughts in my head.  I was nearly able to smell that miniature, mysteriously unopened refrigerator in one corner of her large bedroom.  And that was when I suspected that I was beginning to understand Damask and her art—which again were one and the same thing—a little bit better.

*     *     *

Saturday at one o’clock promptly, not a minute too early or too late, afraid to stir her into ill temper, I knocked and immediately the door opened like a theater curtain parting to reveal Damask standing in the threshold like an insane twelve-year-old dressed or undressed for Halloween.  Had anyone else been walking along the hallway at that moment, one of her Asian neighbors, they would have seen Damask boldly framed in that threshold wearing nothing but black stockings, black garter belt, black high heels that didn’t add much to her height, black pubic hair, long black gloves up past her elbows, and a black plastic mask like Zorro’s that obscured only the area above her nose and mouth.  These scant black strokes against her white flesh, calligraphy on paper, only made it seem to luminesce in contrast, to glow through the translucent membranes of her stockings.  Behind her, I saw and smelled patchouli scented candles, the apartment otherwise dark.

“Welcome,” she said softly, murkily, “to my performance of Cupid’s Caress.”

“Cupid’s…”

“Every one of my performance pieces are named, sir.  Each is its own entity, like a painting, or a sculpture.  How fortunate you are, sir, to be experiencing this artwork tonight.  Many people have paid large sums to do the same.”

“I…appreciate it,” I said, trying not to smile smugly, crudely, or be too obvious as I took in her nipples, which she had painted black with the same lipstick she wore on her small haughty sneer of a pout.  I wanted her to see me as a connoisseur.  Patron of the arts.

“Come in, sir.”

“Of course…”

As we went through the darkened livingroom I couldn’t tell how much of its decor was missing now that Simone was gone.  We went straight to the bedroom, where undulating candlelight across the folds of the satin sheets made the bed look like a rippling pond of blood.  Damask instructed me to undress, and to lie back on the bed.  I did so, uncritical of her artist’s technique thus far.  My cock felt heavy across my belly, but at the same time eerily vulnerable in the flickering gloom.

And then she began to lightly caress me, beginning with the sole of one foot.  The caress was a bit rough, however, raspy.  When her touch made its way slowly up my leg, I could see why.  Even in the dusk of the room.  In her gloved right hand, Damask held the disembodied arm of a fetus, dried to a mummy-like rubbery hardness.  The tiny limb was raking me more than caressing me, despite its undeveloped nails, as Damask drew it up the inside of my thigh…

I flinched when she traced the limb across my balls, then up the shaft of my penis, as if to map its veins.  Those veins seemed to grow even more full with blood, if that were possible.  The little hand, dark as a monkey’s, like a shaman’s totem, a paintbrush, the touch of her psyche, now traced the rim of my glans.  One finger teased into the hole at its tip, drawing out a single sugar-water tear of pre-ejaculate.

Cupid’s caresses ventured through my pubic hair, briefly snagging in it.  Into and out of my navel.  Across my nipples.  Into the thatches of my underarms, slowly, agonizingly, up my throat.  Around my lips, circling, circling.  And then, at last, between them…where I sucked on the thing, gladly, while Damask’s other black hand, invisible in the nearly black room, as if it had been severed, the touch of a ghost, closed around my member and brought me to shuddering climax.

*     *     *

In a Chinese robe, black with a colorful dragon raging across the back, that back turned to me, Damask began brewing us some coffee in the kitchen by candlelight.  I was toweling off from a shower.

“You’ve done this with many other people, you said,” I dared to state, rather than ask.

“Tim.  Don’t cheapen my art with jealousy.”

“I just…”

“I told you.  They pay.  I gave you a private exhibition.  That should mean something to you.”

“It does.  I told you…I appreciate it.”

“Then don’t get childish about it.”

She got milk from the little fridge, too quickly for me to see anything much inside there.  Just a glimpse of stacks of airtight plastic containers, with cheerily colored lids.

Again, I summoned up my courage, and managed to say, “I want to see more.”

“You do, huh?” She turned to face me, the black lipstick now only a smudged shadow staining her mouth.  The mask was gone.  “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She directed her gaze in a profile toward a candle guttering atop the stove beside her.  Seemed to lose herself in its tiny hot core.  Moments melted away, then she said distantly, “I don’t like being alive.  But I don’t have the courage to be dead.  I wouldn’t want to hurt my foster parents that way, I guess.  Even if they have more or less disowned me these days.  Like Dwayne did.  Everybody but Simone.”

“I won’t disown you,” I breathed.

She chuckled lightly, as if bitterly amused.  “We’ll see.” She faced me again.  “Simone loved me.  She died for me.  She died for my art.”

This didn’t shock me as much as either of us seemed to think it would, though I did feel a cold trickling like ice cream down the inside of my sternum.  I knew that to betray horror at this revelation, this confirmation, would only put her on the defensive.  And then I might lose her, this rare nocturnal butterfly, midnight black and torn like rags or clouds.  But it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to betray horror.  In a way, I didn’t feel horror so much as I felt touched by Simone’s love, her dedication to her friend’s—her lover’s—vision.  This admiration was mixed with more jealousy, however.  I tried not to let that show, either.

“She wasn’t the only one making the…the…” I began.  But I faltered, trailed off.

“The clay for my art.  No.  We both did.”

“Are all these…” I gestured in the direction of the bedroom.

“No, they aren’t all from me, or from her.  Some of them I got through my connections.  From schools.  From clinics.  Just trash that no one misses.”

“But…aren’t you afraid of what you might do to your body? Of ending up like Simone? You can’t be going to a legitimate abortion clinic.  Not if…not if they’re letting you keep them…”

“Childbirth is even riskier, isn’t it? Going full term? Even more destructive to the body.  This abortion I had last week was only a menstrual extraction, as they call it.  The tissue is very soft.  When they suck it out it’s like a puree.” She poured and handed me a mug of coffee, after first adding some milk to it.  “I’ve had every kind, except for a partial birth abortion.  That’s what Simone was having, this last time.”

“How many…” I started wispily.

“How many have I had? Or how many kinds of abortion are there? Let’s see, in the first trimester—that’s ten weeks—they suck it out with a hollow tube with a sharp edge.  This doo-hickey is like thirty times more powerful than a vacuum cleaner.  It sucks the thing out, then the sharp edge is used to cut the placenta out of the uterus wall…

“At four months, I’ve had a prostaglandin injection to stimulate premature labor, with contractions so violent they crush the fetus, though sometimes they’re still born alive.  They come out whole.  This one can be dangerous to the mom.  I’m not sure if legit abortionists use it anymore…

“I’ve also had saline amniocentesis.  That’s salt poisoning, to you.  The fetus breathes and swallows this shit and dies in about an hour from vasodilatation, edema, (she was counting off on her small fingers with their black painted nails) congestion, hemorrhage, and shock.  Premature labor delivers an intact but extinguished fetus the next day.  Abortionists call them ‘candy apple babies’ ‘cause they can come out all red from being burnt…”

“How do they kill them the way Simone had it done?” I regretted using the word “kill”, but Damask seemed to overlook it.

“Partial birth.  They like to call it ‘Intact D&E’, which sounds nice and benign.  What happens is the abortionist pulls the baby entirely out feet first, but leaves the head inside.  Then he punctures the base of the skull with scissors, puts a catheter in the wound, sucks out the brain which collapses the skull like a balloon and voila—out pops the immaculate misconception.”

“How far into the pregnancy do they do that one?”

“Up to four weeks short of birth.”

I had all I could do to keep from gasping.  A coworker of mine had given birth to a premature baby much younger than that.  One pound at birth, but he was a solid little kid of six now that she’d brought into the office one time.  “Is that legal?” I asked, hopefully in a perfectly calm voice.

“Yeah.  I read recently about a woman who used a partial birth abortion to terminate a pregnancy because her baby was having seizures.  It seemed to her to be the more humane fate for the thing.  And who else can judge that, huh? She’s the one who had to carry the thing, would have to care for it, watch it suffer this physical condition…”

I nodded, not willing to voice an opinion.  Not willing to even take on an opinion.  It seemed beyond my grasp, my abilities, to do so.  No wonder those men I often thought of as brown-nosers would rather leave it to the women to decide such matters alone.

“It sounds gross, huh? But so does a mastectomy, if you read about it.  Open heart surgery.  But that stuff can save your life, as violent as it seems, right? You want to see something ghastly? Watch someone getting a face lift some time.  And you know what’s also ugly to hear the details of? A six-year-old kid beaten to death by a father who never really wanted him.  A teenage girl knocked up by her stinking drunken step-dad.  A woman getting impregnated by some worthless waste of DNA rapist who should have been aborted himself.  That stuff is unpleasant when you get the gory details of it, too, isn’t it?”

She was getting worked up.  Defensive.  Maybe she had seen the surprise in my expression.  I tried to gently steer her back to her friend.  “So Simone…Simone was that far along.”

“Yeah.  Farther than I ever took it.” She blew the steam off her black coffee.  “Guess I didn’t want the stretch marks.”

I nodded again, which seemed to be the best response, and sipped at my coffee thoughtfully or thoughtlessly.  “Did Dwayne…did he ever know about you doing this, for your art?”

“No.  I never told him.  But I was pregnant from him, the first time I did it.” She smiled widely, so that I could see her teeth.  Usually her smiles barely stretched her sealed lips.  “He was seeing Tamsin then, too.  Bet she wouldn’t be happy about that, his perfect little Princess Die.   So…little Corey wasn’t his first.”

I nodded.  I said nothing.  I sipped my coffee.  I was horrified.  I was fascinated.  I wanted her again.

*     *     *

Over the passing weeks I tormented myself with cinematic images of Damask inching that mummified, magical monkey’s paw along the quivering, sweaty body of some fat, wealthy, balding patron of the arts.  I tortured myself by imagining Damask and the now inadvertently aborted Phetsamone erotically entwined, whispering the secret language of women into each other’s hot kiln.  But the sweeter tortures kept me enthralled.  Damask was a walking museum of wonders, the whole of the Smithsonian’s attics and basements locked up in her head, every thought and dream, fantasy and fear labeled in a jar of cloudy formaldehyde.

I was a lucky man, you see; a privileged soul.  Because Damask treated me to more of the performances that I knew other patrons were paying thousands of dollars for.

In the piece called Ultrasound, Damask had taken a rubbery toy-like figure out of a large jar filled with alcohol, worm out of the tequila bottle, kept in a closet I was not allowed to open.  She had placed this creature against her belly, and then held it in place by tightly twining clear plastic cling wrap around her middle.  Shiny, like a window of glass letting me view the mystery inside her.  Her skin through this plastic felt hard and smooth like plastic itself.  And I palpated the fetus through this membrane, with my hands, and then with my lips.  Damask had recovered enough from her most recent abortion that I could penetrate her again, and when I lay atop her, the fetus was snugly sandwiched between us as if we were both pregnant with it.

For the piece entitled Dressing Up in Mommy’s Clothes, Damask stood motionless in one corner of the room, a scalpel in her right hand, nude except for one black stocking.  The other stocking had been filled almost to the brim with all of the contents of the plastic containers from her miniature fridge.  Like an Xmas stocking, lumpen with exciting, unknown treasures.  Then the open end of the stocking had been tightly bunched and sealed like the end of a huge sausage.

The smell was terrible, with my nose pressed right against the coarse translucent black and my tongue traveling along its length, so awful that several times I actually retched.   My cock was engorged with gore as the stocking was engorged with soft, near-boneless flesh.  I sucked on the end that would have been toes.  And at last, Damask came forward wordlessly with her sharp blade and made a small incision in the stocking.  I knew what I was to do.  I slipped my tongue into this hole, holding my breath, exploring the moist heart of the fruit beneath its bruised skin.  And then I inserted my aching penis into this rough-lipped orifice, and lay atop the stocking, though not with all my weight for fear of bursting it (as it was there was a trickle of fluid that seeped and wept out), and I pumped myself into this icon, staring at Damask in her corner one minute, then down at the shapes that shifted inside the nylon skin, imagining (or not) that I saw small faces and limbs pressing against the material, then sinking again like water nymphs to be replaced by other forms as my cock stirred the half-liquid interior, interior of a womb, interior of a mind as if I fucked Damask in her brain, interior of a dream, of a conch whistling the song of amniotic seas, and my live sperm was disseminated throughout, blended within, and I don’t know if it were part of the performance or if Damask had given herself over to her own passion, but I saw her right hand working at her vagina, and for a moment I was alarmed that she had inserted the scalpel inside herself, but then I noticed it glittering near the candle on the work bench beside her.

Lying back on the bed, spent, I watched her return the contents of the stocking to the various brightly-lidded containers, wondering how much sperm had swum and died in those stews before mine had been added.  I saw Damask hold up a few large morsels, older and gamier, sniff them, even gag once herself, then drop them into a trash bag.  She would need more clay for her art soon, I knew, and I didn’t doubt that without Phetsamone it would be harder to harvest it in quantities.  I imagined she would need to get in touch with her contacts at the abortion factories and medical schools again.

*     *     *

Not all our sex was part of her art.  In fact, she would grow angry if I confused the two.  I never really lost my temper with her, for fear of her darker temper, but even at my angriest I never accused her of prostitution as I had originally thought to do.  I didn’t see it that way, anymore, any more than she did.  Though I always made sure I never met or saw any of her patrons, male or female.

One night I lay on my belly with her thighs pressed against the sides of my skull, like an infant straining to be unborn, assimilated back into its place of origin, crowning in reverse.  My tongue played in brush strokes painting the steamy tropical darkness, and in my ardor I would take breaths and gasp, “I want to eat a fetus right out of you, Dam        …I want to eat one right out of you…”

I could hear the small pouty smile in her voice as she purred, up there, “Maybe you will…”

I submerged again.  Came gasping back up for air again.  “I want to go down on you when you have your next period,” I enthused.  “I want to eat the blood out of you.  I want to smear my face in it   …”

“You can do that, when my periods come back.  But I missed my last period, love.” And she stroked my head as she cooed this.

Slowly I lifted my slicked face to gaze up along her milky body, to contact those black eyes glowing like beacons at its end, the empty windows of a house at the end of a moonlit path.

“You’re pregnant again?” I whispered.

She smiled.

I lifted my head a little higher.  “From one of your…patrons?”

Still that little smile.  “No,” she said at last.  “I’ve only done Cupid’s Caress lately.  And two of the four were women, anyway.”

I sat up full on the edge of the bed.  “Is it mine, Damask?”

“Yes, love.  Aren’t you happy? Aren’t you proud…knowing that you’re giving to my art the way Simone did? That you’ll be a physical part of it?”

I rose from the bed, wandered to her work bench, smelled the patchouli scent rising from one of the candles as I stood over it.  My cock bobbed heavily in the air but was starting to nod off drunkenly, deflating so ridiculously that I could almost hear the air hissing out.

“You should have asked me what I thought about that,” I murmured, finally.

“What?” She sat up on the edge of the bed herself.  “What the hell is this?”

“I just think…that we should have been in agreement on a thing like this, from the start.”

“You know my art, Tim.  You know where it comes from.”

“Not all of it comes from you.”

“I thought you’d be honored,” she hissed.  “Jesus, where is this coming from? Huh? Would you rather I got pregnant from one of my patrons?”

“Yes.  I would.”

“And that would be so different?”

Meekly, without looking at her, afraid of her, I said, “Yes.  Somehow that’s different.”

“I see.  Somehow that’s okay.  But your fetus is different, huh? Yours is sacred.  I know, Timmy! We can have a child together! We can name him Corey!”

“Damask,” I groaned.  “It’s not that I’m against aborting it…”

“What, then?”

“I just don’t want you…doing things to it.”

“You don’t have to have anything to do with it, then.  I’ll keep it away from you.  I’ll keep it for the patrons.”

“You don’t understand.  I don’t want you to do anything with it.”

“Look!” she snarled, on her bare feet now.  “I’m not going to waste a perfectly good abortion.”

“Don’t I have any say in this?” I bravely managed.  But this question was what really fanned her fire.

“No, you don’t! You spit on my gift, Tim.  You spit on my love.  You just wanted to get laid, all this time.  You only love me because you love fucking.  And you want me to be this passive fuckee, and you want me to give birth, like we’re nice little domesticated sheep with no brains and no free will.  Nature doesn’t rule me and you sure as hell don’t rule me!”

I dared to look at her seething eyes.  “I told you, I’m not asking you to give birth to it.  I just don’t want you to use it…”

“What you want.  It’s always what the man wants.  You know what? You only wanted me because you’re scared of women.  It was your safe way of playing with fire.  And you’ll play with me, but at the end of the day it’s a safe little cow of a wife like Tamsin that you want.  I knew you’d reject me, Tim.  It was inevitable.  You denied it, but I saw it all along.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Get out!” she screeched, so loudly that I knew her neighbors could hear us through the walls.  Not that they hadn’t heard our cries of a different sort before.

Now that I saw I was losing her, had probably already lost her, I managed to crank up my courage.  Nothing left to lose.  I said, “Damask…I don’t want you doing anything to that fetus, other than abort it.  If you do…I’ll call the police.”

For a moment, time stood still in the universe, a hovering black void between swings of the pendulum, the darkness between stars, the darkness in her gaze, too furious to even show anger.  Calmly, more frightening than before, she said, “How can you prove what I might do to some unborn fetus, Tim? Abortion is legal.  Are you going to say, ‘I think my girlfriend is going to do something awful to my fetus that we both want aborted?’”

“Yes, I will say that.  Then I’ll take them here, to show them what I mean.”

“You’d do that? Even if it implicated yourself?”

“I’m not the artist, Damask.  I didn’t make this stuff.  I didn’t have the abortions.”

She smiled.  It made me shudder.  “I see.  Now you disown all my art that you supposedly appreciated so much.  Well, you bring the police here, Tim.  Not that they could do much to me, anyway…but I won’t be here anymore.  I’ll take my work somewhere else.  I’ll do it tonight, before you can get a search warrant.  I have money in the bank.  My patrons have paid me well.  At least they appreciate me.  They’ll seek me out wherever I settle, and I’ll make new ones besides.”

“It doesn’t have to be like this…”

“But it has to be the way you want it, right? Go now, little Timmy.  Leave.  Go talk about me with your friend Duh-wayne.  Go find yourself a nice little lobotomized Tamsin.”

“Damask…”

“Go!” she shrieked, startling me, and I saw she had taken up the scalpel that lay on her work bench.  But instead of brandishing it toward me, she pressed the blade to her own abdomen below the navel.  “Go before I abort your baby right here and now.  I will do it, too…you know me, even if you don’t love me.  It will be my last great performance, Tim, my masterpiece.  Just give me a second to think of a name for it.” She always named her works of art.  I saw a bead of blood as dark as ink begin to wind down her marble skin from where the blade touched her.

I began to get dressed as quickly as I could.  I did know her.  I did know that she meant it.

She held the blade there until I backed to the door.  That was how I left her.  I’ve never seen her since.  From across the room, and in its too-intimate murk, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw tears in her eyes.  I wouldn’t have imagined that to be possible, but I like to believe it was.  I felt sorry for her, but I didn’t dare say it.  I knew that she would then eviscerate herself for sure.  Damask didn’t want to be pitied.  She wanted to be both loved and loathed at once.

*     *     *

It was nearly eight months later that I received the package from UPS.

It was left in my front hall, on the carpet, and I stood staring down at it, afraid to touch it as if it might explode, when I saw the familiar handwriting on the label.  I was afraid what the carrier might have thought with that box stinking up the inside of his truck…though it didn’t smell, of course.  When at last I opened the box on my kitchen table, I saw that the contents had been carefully wrapped in a plastic trash bag with lots of twisty white packing popcorn like an army of ghostly embryos to considerately prevent the gift from being damaged in transit.

I knew, as I lifted the work of art from the box, my hands trembling so badly that I feared I would drop it, that Damask had finally had her first partial birth abortion.  Or, rather, more delicately worded, her first “Intact D&E”.

I had already learned long before then that Damask had indeed moved from Lowell.  I haven’t looked very hard for her, but I did ask Dwayne if he knew where she was, and he swears he hasn’t heard from her, either.  I have received no calls, no emails.  Though I wonder if at least she might send me an Xmas card, either fondly or perversely, this year.

There was only a note in the box with the gift of artwork.  And it only said: You know that I always name my artwork, Tim.  But I’ll let you name this one.   —D.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t sob at first, holding the thing.  That I didn’t come close to phoning the police.  But ultimately, I didn’t.  Ultimately, I’ve come to regard this flesh collage as Damask’s most beautiful piece of work.  Her masterpiece.

She had lacquered this creation, to better preserve it for posterity.  I think, too, that she must have freeze-dried it or drained it of its fluids, somehow, because it has a dark, withered, mummified look.  The wings of pigeons are securely sewn onto its back.  My little angel.  It was a female.  I held it to my chest as I sobbed, as if to rock it, as if to comfort it.

I took it to bed with me that first night.  But I don’t think I kissed it, traced its leathery hard figure with wrinkles fossilized into fissures, oiled and scented with patchouli, until several nights had passed.

I’m not an artist; my imagination isn’t as refined as hers.

For lack of a better title, I’ve named the work of art Damask.

Afterword: My Sexual Exploits

“A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.”

–Thomas Hardy

I like to believe I’m known for an often personal writing style, subject matter that finds its origins in my own experiences or at least in my own emotions.  Other writers of fiction, cleaving close to that word fiction, might argue that it is better not to approach one’s work in a blatantly autobiographical fashion.  They would say that a less subjective perspective resonates with more readers.  I certainly wouldn’t suggest that every story should be about one’s own life, somewhat fictionalized, or we wouldn’t have a male, middle-aged Thomas Hardy creating a female, teenaged character named Tess.  (Although, Maupassant said, “Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.”) If every fiction were auto-biographical, every horror story would be about a slightly overweight dork who wears heavy metal t-shirts and can’t get laid to save his life…instead of being about superhuman serial killers who defile and dismember the beauties who won’t date said dork.  :) And yet, I don’t feel that highly personal stories amount to nothing more than self-indulgent exercises in harvesting lint from one’s navel.  One can dig much deeper than that, and bring up the darkest, rawest of matter.  No less an author than Tolstoy said, “One ought to write only when one leaves a piece of one’s flesh in the inkpot each time one dips one’s pen.” But you may be more familiar with the adage, “Write what you know.”

Well, I know sex.

This following bit of personal history may in fact enlighten you as to why I occasionally write erotic horror, why I choose certain themes, how my past has shaped me as a person and an artist (which to me cannot be separated).  When writing, I prefer not to collaborate.  Not with another author, not with an overly zealous editor whose red pen is his dick, not with the public’s expectations.  But in sex, it is generally best to collaborate with another…and my first collaborator was a young woman I met while working at Underwood Farms warehouse in my home town of Eastborough, Massachusetts.

Underwood Farms are a local chain of convenience stores, and at the warehouse orders are picked for transport to said stores.  In addition, there is a large bakery section where bread and doughnuts are made, and a soda plant where inferior brands of carbonated beverages are concocted.  I made minimum wage in the beverage plant, operating a machine called, ominously and futuristically, the palletizer.  :-o Boxes of soda bottles would march up a conveyor to the top of my looming machine, which would be loaded inside with wooden pallets the way an automatic pistol is fed a clip of bullets.  At the top of the machine I would organize the boxes of soda into a layer to be lowered onto the next pallet.  After so many layers of boxes were stacked atop each other, the pallet would then be ejected noisily onto another belt, to be carried off by a fork-lift.  It was utterly depressing.  One time a maintenance worker was inside my machine repairing it, and in aiding him, I hit the wrong button.  The blades that would slide the boxes onto the next pallet began to move forward.  Luckily I was quick enough to hit the button again.  The maintenance worker kindly acted as if I hadn’t almost severed his head.

One of my coworkers was a college student working for the summer, named Kelly.  Kelly was a seemingly shy, scholarly sort with thick glasses and short blond hair in child-like bangs.  She was pretty in an unassuming way, with a curvy body and breasts as large as breasts can get before they might be considered freakish.  : P Because she was so young, they were high and proud and seemed to contradict her meek and mild aspect, a carnal presence swelling within her body, pressing to burst free.  It may be unfair to stereotype a woman as being sexually adventurous simply because her mammary glands are over-developed, but it happens that in Kelly’s case it was true.  I summoned up the nerve at last (I’m rather shy, and bespectacled, myself) to ask her out.  She declined, explaining that she had a boyfriend, but I could tell she was flattered.  Flattery turned to flirtation.  The next thing I knew, flirtation turned to fornication…of which I had dreamed so long, bashfulness having denied me.  I let Kelly steer me.  She had more to lose than I did, and I didn’t want to pressure her.  And, more importantly, she was experienced where I was not.

The first time we had sex, it was in my bedroom in my parents’ house.  We went for hours (so long that certain top forty songs on the radio were played again).  Unfortunately, I was far too nervous to climax, but at least I wasn’t impotent, and Kelly was left satisfied by the experience.  I was sullen, bitter, for days; not at her, but at myself.  Embarrassed, ashamed.  I was a failure.  My dick had stayed hard but my self esteem was flaccid.  She took pity on me and only days later, while both her parents weren’t home, we fucked at her house.  The previous time, we had tried different things to get me to come.  Doggie style (she looked afraid for a moment, wondering which socket I meant to plug into).  She went down on me though I was slick with her juices.  She talked dirty to me.  All to no avail.  But in her own bedroom, things became even more creative.

There, Kelly asked me if I wanted to see her really naked.  And then she took hold of both sides of her mouth, stretched it so wide I thought the skin would tear, and slipped her bald red head through that widened hole like a fruit with its peel pulled away.

Kelly continued to widen the hole of her elastic mouth, stretching it so that it allowed her shoulders to pass through it.  She worked her skin down her entire body, revealing more and more of her bright crimson muscles, furrowed and striated and marbled with yellow and white sinew, fat, ligaments, her eyes still gleaming seductively in that raw, blood-colored face.  In fact, she put her glasses back on.

Her breasts were still huge, but now they had these remarkable grooved textures, as did her curved belly, her thighs, her buttocks.  My fingers explored her anew.  Though she had become terrifying, she was also profoundly beautiful, in a way more so than with her flesh on.  It was the ultimate striptease, more intimate even than the first, and I couldn’t wait to probe myself deep into that boldly revealed anatomy.

Her nerves were more exposed, so she moaned and groaned with discomfort as I moved atop her, but the pain also brought her pleasure.  How we experimented that night.  At one point, she had me go on all fours while she thrashed my rump with the legs of her loose suit of skin.  She also used her skin to bind me to her bed posts, by knotting the limp sleeves of her arms around both my wrists, so that she might ride atop me.  At one point, to win laughter from her, I fucked the shed hide on the bed while she watched, and then I stood up and thrust my cock through one of its mask-like eye holes, from the inside.  (She in turn teased me at the end of our love-making by at first slipping into her skin so that it faced backwards.  I moved behind her—she seemed to flinch again, nervous that I might try to enter her anally; she could flay herself but anal sex was a whole other thing—and I kissed the bare muscles of the back of her head through her gaping rubbery lips.)

While we were still screwing, her exposed blood vessels broke easily, and both our skins became sticky with a film of blood until I began to resemble her.  She had put a rubber sheet down on her bed first, however, to protect her mattress so her parents wouldn’t find out what she was up to.  She told me her boyfriend liked sex this way, and that spoiled the mood for me a bit.  But at last, I was able to climax, my pumping member streaked with her gore…

I began to fall in love with Kelly, and couldn’t accept that this was only a dalliance for her.  She left work soon after our two physical encounters, returned to school and her boyfriend there.  We had a telephone conversation that ended with us both in tears.  We wrote each other for about a year, and I visited her once at her college, but it was over.  I entered into one of the most depressed periods of my life, obsessed over literary suicides such as Yukio Mishima and Anne Sexton.  But somehow I survived those dark days, and tried to turn it into something positive.  I had lost my cursed virginity at last.  And if Kelly had found me desirable, surely someone else would, sooner or later.

But after Kelly and before my wife, things got a bit lonely again.  Loneliness can breed ugliness: rape, prison sex, child molestation, the ravishing of barnyard beasts.  Don’t get me wrong; I cherish solitude; it’s the soil my creativity takes seed in.  But as Thomas Mann said, “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry.  But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”

One afternoon, I ventured into the cellar of my family home to look in on our fetus, which we had named Celia (maybe because she had the brand name SuperCell tattooed on her head).  We had had a brief power outage the night before, during a lightning storm, and my father had asked me to check to see if Celia was okay.  Sometimes we neglected to look in on her, and I guess it had been a while, because cobwebs connected her massive, boneless head to the ceiling, this gauzy veil backlit with a bare bulb so that it glowed like a corona.  I took up a broom and swept the webs off her, baby-talking to her as I did so, as I might to one of my mother’s cats.  Of course, she sat there in her bath unmoving, her totally black, shark-like eyes unblinking.

We’d had Celia for nearly twenty years, at that time.  You could hold her in your hand, when we first got her, but even then she was already an effective live battery supplying electricity to both the upper and lower apartments in our great old Victorian house.  Over those two decades she had grown, but she hadn’t aged; that is to say, she was still a fetus, but a much larger one.  Almost my height, if you stretched her out, though much of that was due to that immense translucent globe of her head.  Her body itself, thin and with limbs folded close as if she floated in a mother’s womb (or the amniotic tank in which she had been grown at the SuperCell plant), was about the size of a twelve-year-old’s.  The SuperCell tattoo was gray now and cracked, splitting, having spread apart as she grew.  The circular, blue plastic tub she sat in (strapped to a contoured seat made from the same plastic) contained the proper level of nutrient solution, I noted, and the burbling of the fluid told me the pump was circulating it properly.  About every three months we replaced the fluid to keep it fresh, which was critical, as Celia absorbed it as her sole nourishment.  A dead spider and a few drowned moths were buoyed on the agitated surface, so I scooped them out.  Everything seemed fine.  The two power cables plugged into ports in Celia’s head were secure, I determined.  Fat veins on her head pulsated, throbbed, as she mindlessly fed energy into our household.  Good old dependable Celia.  If I stood just right, I could see that bare bulb glowing dimly right through her balloon-like head, silhouetting thousands of dark veins as thick as snakes or as fine as lace, like an aerial map of a great city.  It made me think of the three titanic fetuses, each as big as Godzilla, that lay underneath New York City.

Well, I think you realize where this is going.  As I looked into the tank at Celia’s delicate pink body, those slender slippery-smooth limbs, her hairless slit (I saw the water bubble once as it either expelled waste or air into her bath), the loneliness stirred in me like a device energized by Celia’s brainless brain waves.  From the ugly gray chrysalis of loneliness, lust unfolded its mutant scarlet wings.

I reached into the bath, just touching her, feeling her at first.  I felt uncomfortable about it initially, I admit, but she was twenty years old, despite what I said earlier about her having no age, and legally she wasn’t considered a human.  I had all this pent-up sperm inside me, and I’m not the one who invented this insistent reproductive instinct.  So with my free hand, I unzipped and began stroking myself.  But even fingering her wasn’t enough, ultimately, as my lust beat its wings into a hazy red blur.  I ended up spreading a plastic tarp on the floor of that dusty, low-ceilinged, cobwebbed cellar, unstrapping Celia from her chair, lifting her carefully out of the bath (soaking my clothes in the process), and laying her down (being cautious not to disconnect the cables from the sockets in her forehead).

Praying to God my father or brother Scott wouldn’t come down into the basement looking for me, I pushed down my jeans and lay atop the giant fetus.  It was a tight fit, and at first I wasn’t sure if I’d make it all the way inside, but there was enough of a gelatinous quality to her nutrient bath to lubricate things a bit.  And so I propped myself above Celia and looked down at where I was buried inside her, churning rhythmically.  Her small, claw-like hands were cocked in the air, and bounced with my increasing thrusts but did not move to either stop me or to caress me.  They didn’t move any more than her eyes did, though her tiny mouth worked silently like that of a fish, perhaps simply in the act of breathing.  Several times I thought I heard the barest sigh of a breath from her lips, in fact.  But I didn’t delude myself into thinking it was born of pleasure.  I doubt she even acknowledged my existence, except—at most—as a kind of pressure, from within and without.

Well, I came pretty hard, and rested heavily on her afterward, quite satisfied, before lowering her back into the gurgling bath.  I wondered how her brain waves might have responded to the experience, especially when I finally returned upstairs.  I had changed my wet clothes before reporting to my father that Celia was just fine.  He asked me if I were sure, because there had been a power surge about fifteen minutes ago and a bulb had shattered in one of the livingroom’s lamps.

Celia helped me through that lonely period.  For about a year, I think I visited her twice a week.  Sometimes more.  I became so aroused on our third date that I actually french kissed her deeply, something I had felt a little too odd doing the first couple of times.  To liven things up, as time went on, to keep things interesting, I mailed away for articles of lingerie.  Frilly crotchless panties, sexy little bras (though Celia had no breasts, not even nipples, just as she had no navel).  Despite the petiteness of her legs, I was able to get black nylons for her.  I would have to dry her with a bath towel before I dressed her up.  I was able to have intercourse with her orally, but she didn’t have an anus.  Luckily she had nostrils; the last thing I wanted to do was suffocate the poor thing.  I never wanted to cause her discomfort, so I never spanked her or anything.  In fact, I was quite tender with her; I whispered in her half-formed ear when I was making love to her (did I say love?).  Sometimes I painted her slack mouth with lipstick.

Perhaps it was for the best, the way things ended.  I needed to move on.  But I cried, the day I ventured into the basement and found Celia slumped sideways in her tub, her head already mottled a bruised purplish/black, her upper body the same, but the rest of her, submerged in her bath, gone as white as paper, the skin sloughing off and floating as shreds of tissue.  The bath fluid was not burbling.  The circulation unit had run down.  Damn it! I had been down to see her only three days earlier.  The energy she had generated before her death was still in the house’s system, hadn’t been depleted yet, so we hadn’t realized anything was amiss.  I cursed myself for not looking in on her every single day…

I didn’t dare move close enough to stroke her head, but I wanted to.  The smell was gagging me.

I felt guilty, wondered if it were something I had done inadvertently, but later my father confirmed that it had simply been the circulator blowing out, starving Celia’s hungry cells, as if her (external) blood had gone rotten.  She had been weak, he went on, vulnerable, for being so old.  No one else cried for her; my father just cursed at the expense.  And he bought a new power cell for the house…but a more updated version, like you probably have.  It was little more than a blob, as if Celia’s head had been cut off and her face removed.  A fleshy pulsing ball, in a new red tub with a new circulator.  Needless to say, I never lifted it out of its tank to rest it on the floor.  Not even a mouth to use, and no legs for those sexy black stockings, which I’ve kept sentimentally to this day.

Shortly after losing Celia, I had another brief fling with a coworker at Rosen Paper, the print shop I worked for (and still do, though it was bought out by a large corporation about six years ago).  What good is being around these people day in and day out if you can’t fuck some of them? After Kelly, I was determined not to get all worked up and suicidal again…I would take what I could and be thankful for it.  That was easier said than done, because I didn’t just want a sex partner, but a real relationship.  Still, I went into my next affair bravely and a bit wiser.

This young lady worked in the typesetting department.  For the sake of anonymity, I’ll change her name (because I still work with her).  And since I am free to give her any name I like, why don’t I call her…oh, Madonna?

Madonna was married, but like Kelly was dissatisfied, or just greedy for greater sensation, a few thrills.  For the longest time I simply ogled her; she had a heart-breakingly sensual body, and almost unnervingly feline movements.  Make that leonine; she was one tough girl.  These days she’s lost a lot of weight, but I think she’s too skinny now, too bony.  I hate that.  And she waxes her eyebrows into these thin, unnatural lines lately, which I really detest.  When I first met her it was 1984, and she had a nice cuddly soft sexy layer of baby fat, and her eyebrows were very full, dark, accenting her eyes, as was the fashion in the ’80s and I really, really miss that.  God I love those Brooke Shields/Helena Bonham Carter/even Frida Kahlo brows.  Women these days want to look like drag queens trying to look like women.  :(

Well, Madonna had them at that time, thank God, and she was more of a natural looking blond than the platinum blond she is now (another thing I hate).  I would just sit at my light table (I was a paste up artist, a dead art these days, like chiseling hieroglyphics or illuminating manuscripts) and stare at her bare midriff all day long.  That single black eye would squint at me, as if winking back at me slyly.  I think it was her navel’s lusty, secretive gaze that informed Madonna of my hankering for her.  One night after work (we were on second shift at the time), some of us were around in back of the plant drinking beers and Madonna offered to drive me home (I usually rode to and from with my friend Rick).  I think my other friends knew what was going to happen, and me, I just couldn’t believe my good luck.  {:^)

We fucked in her car like two people wrestling each other to the death.  We were so slicked in sweat it was like fucking Celia again on that drenched tarp on the floor…except for the big, big difference that Madonna fucked me back.  After that night, we did it everywhere.  In the dark room, where film and contact prints were loaded into the processor.  In the night-dewed grass behind the building.  In my apartment (I had my own apartment by now, above my parents’, in the old family house).  Not at her place…Sean would have gone off the deep end if he had ever caught me.

Well, they ended up divorcing later on, anyway, though luckily I was never found out.  And fortunately, I never fell in love with Madonna despite my immense physical attraction to her.  I knew she was way out of my league.  But she was good to me, didn’t just use me as a boy toy; actually invited me onto the set to watch the making of her Papa Don’t Preach video (and though I said I don’t like her hair platinum, I did in fact like her hair platinum but cut very short during that period).  God, that had to be her hottest video; I was salivating in the sidelines and that night we were screaming like tortured people when we came.

Once in a while we still go out drinking on a Friday night, but with other coworker friends joining along.  Our affair sort of fizzled out at the same time her marriage did; Madonna tried to focus all her energies on saving her relationship with Sean but by then it was too late.  She’s learned to typeset on the new Mac system that was introduced when that big corporation bought Rosen out, and she still makes her videos and the occasional movie on weekends.  It’s great when you can remain friendly after an affair, especially when you have to see each other every day.  I’m grateful for the fun we had, and it did a lot for my self esteem.  But it was for the best that it ended when it did, because in 1986 there was a new worker at Rosen, and she would become my wife.

In need of a girlfriend as I was, I took note of every new female employee at Rosen…and Rose stood out all the more when I heard her voice one day and realized she was deaf.  She obviously took note of me, as well; we both asked our coworkers to find out about the other.  While I was still trying to summon the courage to introduce myself to her, she introduced herself to me.  Encouraged by her interest, I asked her out…and to my delight she accepted.

On an early date, Rose and I were strolling through a local cemetery (my mother used to take us kids there for picnics, so graveyards are like parks to me, sometimes melancholy but never morbid) when she asked me if she could be my girlfriend.  After years of trying so hard, fretting and obsessing, just when I felt ready to give up altogether, my partner seemed to come seeking me out.  We had our first kiss in that boneyard, as if to mock the rotting lips beneath us with our youth and the future that had just opened ahead of us.

Rose is dark-haired, with nice full eyebrows and let’s just say she isn’t bony, though I’ve always found her body cute and lately she’s lost over forty pounds and is looking really good, and that’s after fourteen years of marriage at this writing.  But there were a few things I had to get past, besides her deafness, in the beginning.  A number of her deaf friends have more than one physical challenge…some are crippled to a greater or lesser extent, for example.  But not only have I grown accustomed to Rose’s physical unconformities, I’ve come to quite enjoy them.

Even before the early date when we first went to bed (it was my birthday; a very considerate present), I knew about her nipples.  Poor girl; she could no more hide them than she could her deafness, despite wearing a bra, and always a heavy sweater over her shirt or blouse.  I would see the twitching movement of her breasts, like twin sleepers tossing under their covers in the throes of a shared nightmare.  Some have mocked her for it…though I’m sure a lot of men have found these movements enticing, as they tried to visualize what her unique breasts looked like uncovered.

When I found out, it was still a shock despite her having explained her problem to me.  Out of both Rose’s aureoles sprouts a small hand, the size of a newborn infant’s, the nails so delicate they are almost nonexistent (though I’ve helped her trim them lest she scratch me, as gingerly as I would trim my son’s nails when he was a baby).  These hands are very soft, and a pinker color than Rose’s pretty alabaster flesh; the same color of the aureoles.  In the palm of each hand grows a nipple, and these become erect in the normal way.  My son, in fact, was able to feed from them, though Rose would swat the hands gently if they squeezed Colin’s nose.  They’ve squeezed mine more than once.  ; )

Their frenetic movement is involuntary, and often occurs even when Rose is sleeping, as if translating her dreams.  In fact, they appear to be using a sign language.  But it isn’t the ASL (American Sign Language) Rose uses.  No one has ever been able to decipher it as a language (oh, once in a while we’ve seen a certain word mixed in with the gibberish, just as you’ll produce a simple word or two if you bang long enough on a keyboard with your eyes closed).  The same situation occurs with the mandible-like limbs that grow from either side of her genitals.

That was the other thing.  I had seen the subtle squirming in her pants before, another embarrass-ment for poor Rose.  The movement became more pronounced, agitated and excited it would seem, through her underpants when she first undressed for me.  When I saw her fully naked, those praying mantis-like limbs pawing madly at the air to either side of her vagina, with dark pubic hair growing halfway up to their tiny elbows, I found them both ghastly but oddly exciting.  They seemed to want to communicate Rose’s desires to me in a secret code.  And when I ultimately entered inside her body, they scrabbled at my belly, but didn’t scratch it or cause much discomfort.  And when I went down on her, those two insect-like projections seemed to clutch at and stroke my face.

She’s been told she could have the hands removed from her breasts, and more easily, those strange digits from around her vagina, but she’s refused.  She wouldn’t want to be made hearing, either.  She’s proud of her culture and of who she is.  And I’m glad, because I like her as she is just fine, too.

Much as I love to flirt at work, and I once kissed yet another coworker when I was drunk (Rose forgave me when I confessed), I have had no other sexual partners for these past fifteen years.  But as I make this erotic confession and record, I am really finding myself more and more stimulated, almost to an unbearable extent.  Rose is sleeping as I write this.  I could wake her up, but I realize I’m feeling very intimate with you.  After all, I’ve been telling you all this very candid stuff.  And you’ve been listening.  Do I flatter myself to think you might find my experiences titillating? That you might find me titillating? I only know that I’m feeling increasingly drawn to you.  I’m feeling that I want to take our intimacy even further.  It won’t be cheating on Rose if it’s my words that caress you, will it? After all, she can’t hear them anyway (I know that was a mean joke).  Is it infidelity, if I seduce you with these printed symbols that my single hunt-and-peck typing finger thrusts into existence with a steady, ardent rhythm?

Even now, you feel this finger of mine tracing a gentle line down your throat.  I just saw you swallow nervously.  Don’t be tense.  There…I soothe your trembling throat with soft kisses.  As my tongue traces the seashell channels of your ear, my hands slide behind you to squeeze your ass.  Can you feel my breath quickening against your neck? I step back, and undo your zipper, slide your pants down your legs.  I turn you around, and urge you to lie down on the sofa on which you were sitting whilst reading this book.  I lie upon your back now, and you feel the head of my rigid arrow nudge against your shy little anus that seems to clench tighter like a wincing eye.  But I persist against your nervous wriggling; believe me, I wouldn’t rape you, but I know you want this…that you are only being a little timid, because this is our first time.  I press in deeper, deeper, until I am entirely inside you and I kiss you on the back of the neck before I begin pounding myself into you, harder, harder, my abdomen slapping your ass, until we both come with cries like gulls soaring high above a churning ocean and I fold atop you, spent, and pant hotly against the nape of your neck.

Thank you, I gasp huskily.

I know you feel uneasy, I know I rushed things, but I’m sorry.  And I truly am extremely grateful.  I do hope you’ll look on this as a positive experience.  After all, although I don’t seek collaboration when writing, as I mentioned earlier, you have helped me to put a fitting end on this afterword.

Perhaps you’re a bit embarrassed, to have become part of my book.  Please forgive me…but as John Donne said,

“I am two fools, I know

For loving, and for saying so

In whining Poetry.”

You may close these covers now, my love.

About The Author

Jeffrey Thomas is the creator of the popular Punktown universe, in which he has set the novels Blue War, Deadstock, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, and Monstrocity, and the short story collections Punktown, Punktown: Shades Of Grey (with Scott Thomas) and Voices From Punktown. His Hades series includes the novel Letters From Hades, the sequel The Fall Of Hades, and the collection Voices From Hades. His Delirium Books titles have included Terror Incognita, Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood, Aaaiiieee!!!, Thirteen Specimens and Ugly Heaven, Beautiful Hell (with Carlton Mellick III). Other notable books from Thomas are the novel Boneland, the original A Nightmare Of Elm Street novel The Dream Dealers, and the Cthulhu Mythos collection Unholy Dimensions. Thomas lives in Massachusetts with his gorgeous wife Hong, adorable daughter Jade, and handsome son Colin.

Table of Contents

Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood

A Puppet Show For No One or, The Story of Tristan and Isolde

Act One: The Discarded Kingdom

Act Two: The Spiked Brain

Act Three: The Beautiful

Act Four: Turn Away, Children

Act Five: The White Hand

Act Six: Wounded

Act Seven: The White Flag

Act Eight: Inanimated

Clouds and Rain

Impressions

Scorpion Face

Can You Pass Strother’s Love Test?

Damask

Afterword: My Sexual Exploits

About The Author

Table of Contents

Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood

A Puppet Show For No One or, The Story of Tristan and Isolde

Act One: The Discarded Kingdom

Act Two: The Spiked Brain

Act Three: The Beautiful

Act Four: Turn Away, Children

Act Five: The White Hand

Act Six: Wounded

Act Seven: The White Flag

Act Eight: Inanimated

Clouds and Rain

Impressions

Scorpion Face

Can You Pass Strother’s Love Test?

Damask

Afterword: My Sexual Exploits

About The Author