Tonight, Again: Tales of Love, Lust, and Everything in Between Copyright © 2015

by Clive Barker. All rights reserved.

Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2015 by Brandon Mahlberg. All rights reserved.

Interior illustrations Copyright © 2015 by Clive Barker. All rights reserved.

Print interior design Copyright © 2015 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

Digital Edition

ISBN

978-1-59606-695-3

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

subterraneanpress.com

For Ben Meares

Table of Contents

Tonight, Again — 1 1

I Love You — 1 3

Craw: a Fable — 1 5

Afraid — 4 1

Moved — 4 7

I Imagine You — 4 9

If the Pen is the Penis — 5 1

Touch the Rod — 5 3

Martha — 5 5

Tit — 6 7

The Freaks — 6 9

Cruelty — 7 1

Dollie — 7 3

The Collection — 8 1

What May Not Be Shown — 8 5

Two Views from a Window — 8 9

Men in the Aisles of Supermarkets — 9 5

A Blessing — 9 9

Unrequited — 105

Another Genesis — 111

Inside Out (Wasteland) — 115

I Have My Art — 117

Aurora — 119

Whistling in the Dark — 121

The Common Flesh — 123

Mr. Fred Coady Professes His

Undying Love for His Little Sylvia — 125

The Phone Call — 131

The Multitude — 137

A Monster Lies in Wait — 139

An Incident at the Nunnery — 141

The Genius of Denny Dan — 149

Tonight, Again

Tonight, again, he opens his heart, though it is more difficult every time he does so. The scar tissue is thick, and the flesh refuses to part easily. His body cavorts in the chair as he cuts at himself.

He avoids mirrors, though on occasion circumstances demand that he view himself. One of his lovers, a woman called Cassandra, said she believed he was a vampire. To prove her wrong he had her bring a mirror into the room.

“There!” he said, pointing to his reflection.

The sight was so shocking, however—his skin sallow, his body painfully thin—that he almost wished he were a vampire; as to be spared his own reflection.

And yet he never wants for lovers; never. Men and women alike press their attentions upon him. Some of them, wanting more of his company than he can provide, have attempted suicide. Some have succeeded. But what can he do? It’s as painful for him to be loved as it is for them to love him. To open his body to them, as he does, to let them kneel before him and lick his heart, as he does; this is agony. Though a surgeon he knew (one of the suicides, in fact) told him that his innards have no nerve-endings, and should not respond to the touch of a tongue, this is not his experience. He feels it. And after the lover has gone, and the wound begins to heal, he tells himself “enough, don’t do this anymore, it’s stupid.”

For a while—perhaps two days, perhaps three days—he refuses to see anyone. He draws the drapes. He sits in front of the television and heals. If the telephone rings, he doesn’t answer it. If somebody knocks on the door, he turns the volume down on the television, and waits in silence until they’ve gone.

But his resolve never lasts. After a time he gives in, and answers the phone or opens the door. He only has to hear the pain in the voice at the other end of the line, or see the need in the eyes of the person at the threshold, and he is lost.

Tonight, again, he opens his flesh and wonders if it will be the last time. Then the young man’s tongue licks his tender heart and for a wonderful moment he is glad to be alive.

I love you

And the noise of strife

Has never silenced what I feel.

I love you,

As a husband loves a wife,

As priests before the altar

Come to kneel.

I love you, and I cannot hope

For anything more sweet than this,

That at the end

Of my unfathomed life

You’re there to love me into death,

With one last tender kiss.

Craw: A Fable

At the northeast end of the orchard, close to the old stone wall which marked the perimeter of her father’s land, was Francesca’s tree. It had ceased to bear its annual bounty of purple plums three years ago, and were it not for his daughter’s pleas on its behalf, Papa Rueffert would doubtless had have one of his three sons chop it down. Indeed his foreman Arturo had warned him that the tree’s fruitlessness might be evidence of some disease it was carrying, and if left unchecked might well spread through the entire orchard.

“I’ll take the risk,” Rueffert had said. “My daughter loves that tree.”

“Daughters will be the death of me!” the foreman had snorted (he had six of his own). “They’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

Francesca could be a difficult girl, no doubt of that. She was willful, she was impertinent, and for a thirteen-year-old she was precociously interested in the matter of sex. Nor was she shy about voicing her curiosity. It was not uncommon for her to drop into conversation over dinner some question as to the anatomy of manliness which would have hushed a room full of medical students. Her mother—
a quiet, God-fearing woman—would gently tell Francesca that such enquiries were not appropriate at the dinner table, but it did little good. At last, Mama Rueffert consulted Father Kronhausen, who came up to the house one night to talk with Francesca. He intended to put the fear of God into the child, and for a little while it seemed he had succeeded. For several weeks after their chat Francesca asked no questions; instead she took to reading a great deal. Her favourite place to retreat with her books was the branches of her plum tree. There she would sit through the sultry afternoons, reading the cheap romantic novelettes she’d found hidden at the bottom of her mother’s wardrobe.

She wasn’t alone at the far end of the orchard, however. As the August days went by, she sensed that there was somebody else who liked to linger around that corner of the orchard. It was not, she thought, a man. She was plenty old enough to know what a man’s gaze felt like. This was some other presence. But what?

After a few days of wondering, she formulated a plan. She took a small mirror down to the orchard with her, and hid it in the pages of a book. When she sensed the stranger’s gaze upon her, she lifted her book up and used the mirror to scan the area around the tree. At first she saw nothing. It wasn’t until she leaned back against the branch, and casually lifted the book above her head, that she caught sight of the voyeur. There at the base of the tree, lying low in the grass, was a creature the like of which she’d never seen before. It had some of the sinuous elegance of a cat, though it was ten times the size of domestic kitty. And its head had a distinctly reptilian cast; its eyes, which looked up at her with such lazy longing, grey-green in colour. What did it want of her, she wondered? Was there hunger in that stare? Did it want to suck the meat off her bones? She thought not. There was a kind of tenderness in the way it stared up at her. When she snapped her book closed, it fled away. By the time she had clambered down the tree there was no sign of it, except for a patch of flattened grass and daisies, where it had lain.

Amongst the men who tended Papa Rueffert’s orchard there was the foreman’s father, Arturo the Elder. He had become both addled and crippled in his dotage, but he always brightened up at the sight of Francesca. Today she found him in his hut, smoking a pipeful of sweet tobacco. After a little chat she asked him, in a casual manner, if he knew any stories about the orchard. Plenty, he replied. There’d been a duel fought there once upon a time; two fine officers fighting over a noble lady. Both had been killed, and the object of their affections had become a nun. Then there’d been a year—oh, long before Francesca was born—when a cloud of butterflies such as nobody had ever seen before had descended on the trees, and there’d been so many of them that when Papa Rueffert, against Old Arturo’s advice, had fired a gun to clear them away, the fluttering of their innumerable wings had brought down two-thirds of the crop before it was fully ripe. Francesca wasn’t interested in officers or butterflies, of course, but she listened nevertheless, hoping the old man would in time alight on the mystery she’d witnessed. Finally, after several more stories, he said:

“Then there’s the Craw, which comes to the orchard now and again.”

“The Craw?” said Francesca lightly. “What’s a Craw?”

“A beast,” Old Arturo said. “It comes from the wilderness on the other side of the stone wall. They say that it survived the flood, though Noah would make no room for it in the Ark.”

“Why was that?”

“Because the Craw had no wife, so it could not procreate.”

“Why isn’t it dead by now? The flood was years ago.”

Arturo the Elder drew on his pipe, as he thought on this. “Some things live longer than others,” he replied at last. “And then, maybe having no wife was good for its constitution. I know many a strong man undone by marriage.”

Francesca giggled. Old Arturo was pleased. He leaned close to the girl. “My wife ran away with a mountebank just after Little Arturo came along. That’s why I’m still here. She would have killed me with nagging by now.”

“This Craw…”

“It’s just a story.”

“But I still want to know: if I ever met it, would it hurt me?”

“Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. Beasts are unpredictable.”

So I have to be careful, Francesca thought. I have to plan.

She was good at planning. That was something she got from her mother, who scarcely strayed out of the house without a plan.

Two days passed, and Francesca did not go down to her plum tree. On the third day, however, she went very early in the morning, before the house was up, and put her plan into action. It was strange to be in the orchard at such an early hour; beads of dew on every blade and petal, her skin prickling with the cold.

The threads of the spider’s webs that hung amongst the trees were not as fine as the line between fear and anticipation that morning. She knew that she was taking a terrible risk: that the Craw was from the wilderness beyond the stone wall, and had an uncivilized heart. But she was ready to dare whatever harm it might do, to have her curiosity satisfied.

Just as the Rueffert household was waking up—her brothers yelling and fighting as they did every morning—she slipped back into the house, and up the back stairs to her bedroom, where she pretended to be woken when her mother came knocking on the door.

The morning hours passed at a crawl. Her tutor came, and instructed her in a little French history and a little Latin grammar. Several times her attention strayed to the window, where the fruit-laden branch of a tree brushed the glass when the breeze caught it. Perhaps, she found herself thinking, this would be the last time she would ever listen to the dreary drone of her tutor’s voice. Perhaps tomorrow she’d be dead—torn limb from limb by the bestial Craw; or swallowed whole; or snatched away as women often were in the novelettes her mother read: taken by bandits or white-slavers and never seen again.

“What are you thinking about?” her tutor demanded to know. “It certainly isn’t Latin.”

“No,” she said, with a beguiling plainness. “It isn’t.”

At noon, the tutor departed. Francesca had lunch at the kitchen table, with her brothers. They were in a particularly raucous mood today, but their din didn’t bother her. She just ate to get her strength up for the afternoon, and then left them to squabble. She went upstairs to get the book she was reading, which was Gulliver’s Travels, and went down through the orchard to her tree. Her heart was thumping so hard she thought she might burst, her head filled with questions. What if the Craw had been hiding behind the wall when she’d come to the tree at dawn? What if it knew that she was up to something, and decided to pounce on her before she even reached her sanctuary? With every step she took she half-expected the creature to rush out of hiding and rake her with its claws, undoing her.

But nothing happened. The orchard was as quiet and calm as ever. The wind was still gusty enough to make the smaller branches sway, but not so strong that it carried off the birds which sat in those branches, singing out their summer songs.

Francesca put the book between her teeth, and climbed the tree. Then she settled herself down in the cradle of the branches, turned to her place in the book, and pretended to show some interest in the fourth voyage of Lemuel Gulliver. Five minutes passed; then another five, and then another five, and Francesca began to wonder if today the Craw had decided not to come.

She was just about to close her book, and climb back down the tree, when she heard a subtle rustling in the grass. Moments later she felt the familiar gaze upon her. The Craw had come after all. She had not brought her mirror to spy on it this time. She was much more direct. She simply turned over in her bower, so that she had her belly to the branch, and looked down at the ground. The Craw flattened itself against the grass, and lay absolutely still, thinking it might avoid being seen. It was indeed cannily camouflaged; on its back was a pattern that resembled the dapple of light and leaf-shadow. But Francesca saw it clearly enough: its long, lean body, its flat wide head, its yearning eyes.

She let one leg drop a little way off the branch, and let the sandal slide from her long pale foot, so that she was holding on to it with just one toe. She thought she heard the Craw sigh. She let the sandal rock gently back and forth, and then she let it slip off completely. It fell to the grass. The beast didn’t move. It clearly thought that its victim had so far not seen it. Several seconds passed. Perhaps a minute. Then Francesca laid her head down on the branches and pretended to go to sleep. She was good at this; closing her eyes until they seemed to be sealed shut, while in fact she was watching between the bars of her lashes. Another minute passed, and finally the Craw seemed to decide that it was safe to move. Keeping its head low and its belly tight to the ground, it slunk towards the tree. When it reached Francesca’s sandal it stopped, and sniffed. Not one sniff but a dozen or more, as though it was inhaling every nuance of her scent. A little tremor of excitement ran through Francesca. In her pretended sleep she pressed herself against the curve of the thick branch on which she lay, and made a little noise of contentment. This plainly reassured the Craw, for it immediately became more adventurous, lifting its head up off the ground towards Francesca’s dangling foot. She thought of her toes like five worms cast in a river by a fisherman; pink and appetizing. If the Craw snapped at them now, she’d be lost. He’d pull her down off her perch and into his mouth, which was, she could see, grotesquely large. It was all she could do not to let out a yell, and clamber up in to the highest branch of the plum tree, ’til her brothers came running to save her. But she kept her fear under control. She simply waited, while the Craw lifted its head closer, inch by tentative inch.

It sniffed her foot, as it had sniffed the sandal. She felt its hot breath on her sole. It tickled. Still pretending to be asleep, she gently drew her leg back up to the safety of her bower. The Craw, like the lured fish it had become, followed, stretching its neck as far as it would go and then putting its forepaws up against the trunk of the tree so as to get even closer to her. There was a flicker of crimson in its golden eyes, she saw, and its breath had quickened. Its nose was no longer inhaling the scents of her foot, but had moved on, past her ankle, and up the length of her shin. She drew her leg up towards her body, making the beast clamber up a little higher in pursuit of her. She had no fear of it now. Well, a little perhaps, but just enough to offer a certain piquancy to her pleasure.

The tree shook a little as the claws of its hind legs dug into the trunk. Its nose had lingered behind her knee, taking its time to savour the sweat in the creases there. But it did not investigate her thigh. Instead it went directly to the place between her legs. Her little dress had ridden up against the branch, and her underwear was pulled tight in the cleft of her body. It offered little protection against the creature’s enquiries.

Another flurry of tremors shook her, beginning at the back of her neck and running down her spine to her fundament. The Craw let out a low moan. She pretended that the sound had half-stirred her from her sleep: made a moan of her own, and moved up the branch a little, as though looking for a more comfortable cradle. The Craw froze, but only for a second or two. Then it climbed up the tree a little further, coming after her. Just a few more inches, she knew, and she had it. All she had to do was lie still and let it come to her. That wasn’t so hard. There was a part of her that wanted the beast’s nose hard against her little slit, snuffling around like a pig. It would have plenty to sniff at down there, she knew; sometimes she was amazed at how powerful the smell of her own body could be.

She moved on up the branch; it came after her in a heartbeat. Another inch or two and it’d be perfectly positioned. It pushed against her, the moisture around its snout soaking her underwear. Very slowly she reached out along the branch to the rope that was hanging up there, concealed by the foliage. Its eyes had fluttered closed, it was in such bliss. She caught hold of the rope and pulled. The branches overhead shook as the weighted net she’d hidden up there dropped down. As it descended she scrambled on up the branch in case the Craw attacked her, but she needn’t have concerned herself. The beast was too panicked to fight back, thrashing in the net but only managing to get itself more and more entangled. She was quick, then. She started to pass lengths of rope through the mesh and around the branch, and tied them off, trapping the beast. The Craw seemed to understand very quickly that it had been outwitted, because it gave up its struggles and instead began to issue a series of plaintive moans. As it did so it used what little room it had in the trap to half-roll itself over, showing the paleness of its underbelly to Francesca.

Then—much to the girl’s utter astonishment—its despairing moans resolved themselves into words.

“Please…” it said, “…don’t hurt me…” Its voice was filled with anguish, its body shaking violently.

Francesca was astonished at the sight of its terror. But she was more astonished still by what lay fully halfway along the length of its ivory-coloured belly. The beast had been powerfully aroused by its sniffings and pressings; even its entrapment and the fear of what might happen to it now did not diminish the evidence of its arousal. Thick and wet and purple-red its phallus throbbed against its heaving belly, while glistening juice ran from the fat head.

“I’m sorry…” the Craw said.

“For what?”

“For that,” it replied, its gaze going briefly to its monstrous endowment.

“I don’t mind,” Francesca said.

“No?”

“Why should I?”

Francesca made a little smile, and at the sight of it the veins in the Craw’s phallus thickened, and a new surge of moisture ran from the head. Francesca could smell the Craw’s semen. It smelt like lightning on a dry day.

“Where do you come from?” she asked.

“From the wilderness on the other side of the wall.”

“So you are the Craw?”

“That I am. And you’re Francesca.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve heard your abominable brothers call your name. They have ugly voices. But you…I like your voice. In fact, I heard your voice before I ever laid eyes on you. I was hunting a weasel, and I chased it for a mile or more, ’til it brought me to the wall. I snatched it up and was about to tear out its throat when I heard you singing. I let the weasel go. I climbed up over the wall and saw you here. And I was afraid.”

“Why?”

“Because of a lullaby my Mama used to sing to me, all about you.”

“About me? Surely not.”

“Yes. It was about you.”

“Sing it to me.”

“Must I?”

“Yes, I insist.”

“If I sing it, will you touch me?”

“Touch you?”

“Yes. Touch me…you know where.”

“Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. Anyway you’re in no position to bargain with me. If I called my brothers now—”

“They’d kill me.”

“Indeed they would.”

“So I’ll sing,” the Craw replied.

In a thin quavering voice he sang the Craw Mammy’s Lullaby:

“Death sat in a plum tree,

“Singing her La-di-da.

“Beware her, child! Beware her, child!

“She killed your poor Papa!”

“It’s not a very happy song,” Francesca remarked. “I think if my mother sang that to me, I wouldn’t sleep very well.”

“I didn’t understand the song when I was a baby. It was only later…when I looked over the wall and saw you in the tree that I remembered it. That’s strange, isn’t it? I knew the words by heart. I simply didn’t know what they meant.”

“But I didn’t kill anybody.”

“No?”

“No. I’m just a little girl.”

“So you never knew my father?”

“Of course not. How perfectly silly!”

Francesca glanced down at the Craw’s phallus. It had not dwindled at all during this exchange. Indeed it seemed to have grown even more sizeable, the mesh of the net pressing deep into its flesh.

“Will you touch me now?” the Craw said to Francesca.

The girl considered the request for a moment. Then she reached down and delicately stroked the Craw’s tender skin, beginning close to the root of its member and moving up over the cobbles of netted flesh to the great raw head. As she came to it the beast let out a sudden noise, such as Francesca had never heard before. And an instant after it began to convulse so violently she thought it would surely burst the net. Then from the slit of its phallus came a rush of semen, which splashed against her hand like water from a spring. A second flood followed, and a third and a fourth, the sheer copiousness of its eruption almost frightening.

And still the beast made that terrible sound, like a dozen kinds of animal, all giving voice to some unbearable pain.

Francesca looked back towards the house. Somebody would probably have heard this din, she thought; nor would it be difficult to work out where it was coming from. She was right. As the torrents from the Craw finally dwindled to mere spurts, and the anguished noise it had made also died away, she heard shouts from the direction of the house.

She looked down at her prisoner, who was panting and sweaty. Should she let the beast go? If she did so wasn’t there a chance that it would slip away, over the wall, back into the wilderness? She might never see it again. She couldn’t risk that. So instead of undoing the ropes, she clambered over the Craw’s wet, stinking body, and lowered herself down to the ground. She could hear her father calling her name, and her brothers’ voices, as they all came running.

“Francesca! Francesca! What on earth’s going on?”

She did her best to put on a look of composure, and then headed down the avenue of trees to her rescuers, all of whom had come from the house armed, her father with his old army sword, her brothers with kitchen knives. When she was almost ten yards from her plum tree, she glanced back at it, and was pleased to see that the summer canopy was so heavy that it screened her captive from sight.

Her father was right in front of her now, demanding to know what was going on.

“Nothing,” she said simply.

“Well, what was that terrible sound?”

“It was an animal, I suppose,” she said. “Probably on the other side of the wall.”

“It sounded closer than that,” her father said, looking all around. The breeze had died away completely in the last few minutes. The orchard was as calm and as reassuring as a paternoster.

“I’ll look around,” said Francesca’s eldest brother, brandishing the knife Papa Rueffert used to carve the meat on Sundays.

“There’s no need…” Francesca said, “…there’s nothing here. If there was, I would have seen it.”

“You’re shaking,” her middle brother said. “Papa! She’s shaking.”

“I slipped climbing down from my tree, that’s all,” Francesca said.

“And what’s that on your hand?” her little brother said.

Francesca wiped the glistening stuff on her dress. “Cuckoo spit,” she said. “The grass is full of it.”

“Francesca…” her father said, his voice laden with threat.

“Yes, Papa?”

“What’s going on here?”

“Nothing.”

“I won’t be lied to, my girl.”

“I’m not lying.”

Her father glowered at her. “Go back to the house. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I know when you’re lying—”

He stopped in mid-sentence because his eldest son was calling him.

“Papa! Look at this!”

Francesca turned. Her brother was standing a few paces from her plum tree, brandishing the Sunday carving knife. Even from this distance Francesca could see what he was so interested in. Drops of the Craw’s semen were falling out of the tree, splashing on the grass between the roots.

“Leave him alone,” Francesca said. “He’s mine!”

This was, of course, precisely the wrong thing to say. She’d no sooner spoken than all three boys were at the tree, the eldest clambering up into the foliage.

“Papa!” Francesca implored. “Tell them to stop. Please, Papa! Tell them to stop!”

From out of the plum tree there came a cry of horror, as the eldest discovered what lay concealed in the branches.

“Jesus Christ!”

“What is it?” his younger brother demanded, as he climbed up to get a look.

“Stay out of that tree!” Papa Rueffert yelled at them, but his sons were too enraged by the sight of this abomination to obey him.

The Craw let out a pitiful din. Francesca couldn’t see what was going on up the tree, but she could guess. They were attacking her beautiful beast with their knives. She could hear the Craw gasp as the blades entered it, over and over and over.

She grabbed hold of her father. “Oh, don’t let them do this!” she cried.

“What have you been up to, child?” her father demanded.

“It’s just an animal. A poor, defenseless animal.”

“What’s it doing up in your plum tree?”

“I trapped it. Please, please, please don’t let them kill it.”

Papa Rueffert’s anger at his daughter’s deception softened when he heard the tenderness in her voice. “All right,” he said, “don’t start crying! Boys—” he called to his sons. “Let the animal alone! Do you hear me?”

He’d no sooner issued his instruction than the Craw’s agonized cries ceased.

Francesca started to run back towards the plum tree, but her father went after her, and caught hold of her arm.

“Wait, child,” he said. He strode on past her, calling up to the two boys as he went. The third, his youngest, was standing underneath the tree. There was blood on his face, which was raining down from the branches.

“I think it must be dead, Papa,” the youngest said.

Francesca let out a sob.

“Is it true?” Papa Rueffert yelled to the boys in the tree. “Is the thing dead?”

“I…think so…” the eldest replied.

“Then throw the carcass down!” Papa Rueffert said. “Let me take a look at it!”

“You morons!” Francesca yelled. “You idiotic, stupid morons!”

She tried to approach the tree, but her father told her to stay back, his voice so fierce now that she did not dare disobey him. There was a lot of noise from the tree, as the brothers cut through the net to free the body.

“Stand clear!” the eldest yelled, and a moment later the Craw’s corpse tumbled out of the branches, and dropped to the ground. Though the youths had only been up the tree a short time they had done terrible damage to the beast. The Craw was a mass of wounds, some around the head, but most on its phallus, which was barely recognizable as the splendid instrument Francesca had toyed with just a few minutes before. The sight of the creature reduced to such a state was horrible. Francesca covered her eyes, her little body wracked with sobs.

“What kind of animal is it, Papa?” she heard her youngest brother ask.

“I’m damned if I know,” Papa Rueffert replied. “But it’s surely dead.” He turned and looked back at his daughter, “I’m going to want an explanation for this, Francesca—”

“It meant no harm…” Francesca sobbed.

“No harm? A thing like that? Of course it meant harm. Stupid girl.”

As he spoke Francesca’s gaze slid past him to the body of the Craw. Her oldest brother was kicking it, a contemptuous smile on his face.

For a moment it seemed she saw a flicker of red in the Craw’s glazed eye. Surely not. The beast had been stabbed and cut open in a dozen places. How could there still be life in it? And yet—

Her brother went on kicking it. The Craw’s body rocked, its tongue lolling from its gaping mouth. The other two boys were coming to join in the game now, laughing at the sight before them.

As they did so, Francesca saw the lid of the Craw’s eyes flicker.

It was alive! It was lying in the grass, pretending to be dead, so that they’d come to it, her brothers—her witless, murderous brothers.

She had time, in between the flicker of the Craw’s eyelid and what happened next, to utter a warning. But she made no sound. She let them fall into its trap.

In a heartbeat the creature rolled over and leapt at Francesca’s middle brother, its claws—which during its dalliance with Francesca had been entirely hidden—suddenly unsheathed. They were like razors. They sliced through the youth’s flesh to his innards. He shrieked, and fell back, sprawling in the grass. The Craw was on him instantly, delivering a final, fatal blow.

As it was doing so the other boys came to their brother’s aid. The eldest—who had come from the house with the largest knife—threw himself upon the beast’s back, and drove the blade into its nape. In response to this assault the Craw did something Francesca would remember to the very end of her life. It left off its murder of the youngest, and simply stood up on its hind legs. She had never seen it in this posture before. It had either been stalking the tree, its belly to the earth, or supine. Now she witnessed another kind of beast: one which perhaps had the hope, or the dregs, of humanity in it. Her brother still clung to the Craw’s back, attempting to drive his own knife home to the hilt, but the beast walked forward, with a terrible elegance in its step, as though it were out for a Sunday stroll. Its eyes were on Francesca.

She thought, at that moment, of the lullaby the Craw had sung to her; the song of death. And then, as the words came back to her, the expression on the Craw’s face changed. Its tenderness evaporated and it suddenly threw itself back against the plum tree. There was a tremendous cracking sound, which Francesca assumed was the breaking of the tree. It was only when the Craw dropped back onto all fours that she realized her error. The sound she’d heard was that of her brother’s spine and neck cracking.

The Craw moved away from the tree, as though to display its handiwork. Francesca’s brother stood there for a moment, leaning against the trunk, as blood appeared from his crushed body. Then he fell face forward into the blood and semen-soaked grass.

All this had happened so quickly that Papa Rueffert had only now come within striking distance of the Craw. No, no, no he kept yelling; as though he might drive the horrible sights in front of him away. He swung at the Craw with his sword, but the animal neatly sidestepped him. Then, before the old man could turn to attempt a second blow, the beast went after the remaining brother. Of the three boys, this—the youngest—was the most innocent: though he’d come into the orchard with a knife, he hadn’t used it. Perhaps it was this fact that made the Craw spare his life. Instead of taking out the boy’s throat, as it could easily have done, the beast simply reached down and unmanned the youth, its claws doing such grievous damage that all trace of the boy’s sex was removed.

Then, before Papa Rueffert could come after it, the Craw ran to the wall, scrambled up over it, and was gone, back into the wilderness.

A search was made, of course. Fifty men on horseback and a hundred dogs went out into the hills to bring the monster to judgement. They followed the trail of the Craw’s blood from the wall of Rueffert’s orchard for fully ten miles. They then came to a stream, where—to judge by the mess on the stones—the beast had bathed itself. But there was no trail on the opposite bank; nor could the dogs pick up any scent. The Craw had escaped.

The two Rueffert brothers were buried three days later, and for several days following it seemed they would be joined in the grave by their wounded sibling. But he was a strong youth, and with the help of prayer and good nursing he survived.

Francesca admitted everything, and was severely punished. Not by her father, who was so grief-stricken by the death of his sons he barely knew his own name, but by her mother, who became unrepentantly brutal towards her. A year later Papa Rueffert died, confessing to Father Kronhausen that he had no wish to live, now that he had no hope of any heir, except by his corrupted daughter.

After his demise a steady and inevitable process of general decay set in. Despite the mildness of his manner Papa Rueffert had kept a firm hand on his business dealings. Now that he was gone, things fell apart. The labourers grew lazy. Arturo the Younger, who’d always been overly fond of wine, became a drunkard. The grass grew tall between the plum trees; birds feasted on the ripened fruit, so often it was spoiled before it was picked. Francesca’s mother did her best to keep her eye on things, but she was not liked by the labourers, and the work simply didn’t get done. Even the wall that marked the divide between the orchard and the wilderness fell into a state of disrepair, and over the years the wilderness steadily reclaimed the fruitful order of the orchard for itself. The plum trees, used to being pruned and tended, died one by one, the last one perishing six years after Francesca had met the Craw. A kind of golden age had passed away. The labourers went to find jobs in other provinces; Arturo followed his father Old Arturo into the ground. Mama Rueffert locked herself up in the house with her gelded son, and lived out her years never again seeing the sun.

As for Francesca, who carried the weight of the whole tragedy like a stone, she married at the age of nineteen, and left her mother’s house for another country. Her marriage did not proceed well. The man she’d wed was a wretched fellow, a gambler and a philanderer. She left him after four years, and for the next decade of her life wandered Europe. At last, in Vienna, she met a man who loved her better than she had expected to be loved, and she married him. She gave birth to three children. They were all fractious babies, who were not easily laid down at night. But she never soothed them with lullabies. Instead she let them cry themselves to sleep, as over the years she had learned to do.

Afraid

After six and a half weeks of passion, during which her suspicions about Vigo had multiplied, Marianne caught him, standing in the shower beneath a torrent of ice-cold water, breathing out a gilded mist. His eyes were closed. When he opened them, finally, and slid his lazy gaze in her direction, his eyes were black from end to end.

“Come back here,” he said as he pursued her through the little apartment to the front door, his wet feet slapping on the bare boards. “Give me a chance—”

She fumbled with the lock. But it refused to open; or else her hands refused to turn the key. She cursed them for betraying her. Had they been so blissful, touching him, was that it? So happy about him, they wouldn’t now conspire with her to escape him?

He was close to her. Close enough to grab her if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He kept a respectful distance, until at last she gave up attempting the lock, and turned back to face him.

“What are you?” she demanded.

“What does it matter?” he said. Then more gently: “If you want to go, then this is the time to do it.”

He glanced past her, at the door. She heard the key turn in the lock. Heard the door swing open, and press against her back.

“Go on,” he said. “I won’t hold you. But Marianne, listen to me. If you choose to stay…you stay forever.”

A chill draught came in from the corridor, and his body turned to gooseflesh. His nipples hardened; his belly grew taut as he shuddered. Sometimes, when she’d had her head against his stomach, she thought she’d seen waves of iridescence there in his skin, passing down towards his groin, the rhythms quickening as she aroused him. She’d dismissed this as an illusion. Now she knew otherwise.

“Make up your mind,” he said, “I’m getting cold.”

“Don’t bully me,” she replied. She was reassured by the open door. She could leave if she wanted to, in a heartbeat. Slip away into the corridor; down the stairs, into the street and away. “First,” she said, “I want to know what I’ve been sleeping with all this time.”

“Me,” he said, with a little smile.

“But you didn’t show me everything.”

“That comes later,” Vigo replied. “But we’ll get there. If I could get there with anybody, it’d be you.”

He spread his arms, as if presenting his nakedness to her. The exquisite ease of him; the deftness of his features, the silk of his belly-hair, the elegance of his feet. His skin was so responsive to her touch she could write on it with her nail. Indeed he’d encouraged her to do so. Invited her more than once to decorate him with her graffiti. There were traces still on his shoulders of where she’d clutched him during their last coupling. If she looked closely she’d thought she’d find a thumb-print there, a palm-print; evidence of her complicity.

How could she ever claim she’d not known his otherness, when he’d lifted her to such ecstasies? She’d known. She’d known.

“Well?” he said.

“I’m afraid.”

“Of what? Not of me. Come on, Marianne. This is me. This is Vigo. I’m your dancer, remember?”

He began to move as he spoke. It was as though he heard some music she could not hear. And as always when he danced he began to get hard. She never tired of watching him. The miraculous fluidity of his hips, the subtle play of sinews across his chest and shoulders as he raised his arms, hands catching at the air. Sometimes the music he heard became frenzied, and his feet followed suit. He would stamp and gyrate, his erection slapping against his thighs, back and forth. Sometimes the silent rhythm slowed, and he would become dreamy, swaying like seaweed in the pull of some melodious tide.

That was how it was now. He was inviting her back to bed, where those liquid hips would press their freight into her, and the dance would continue, hour upon hour, sometimes so slow they were barely moving, sometimes convulsive, bruising, insane.

Watching him, she remembered how his touch felt, and wanted it again. Wanted him to cup her breasts in his hands and bathe them with his tongue. Wanted him to soothe her thighs with his palms, while he tenderly plucked at the lips of her pussy.

Then, when hot and wet from his tongue and hands she wanted his cock in her, easing in, slowly, slowly—

“So…” she said. “What if I tell you I’m not afraid? What then? Will you show me what you are?”

“You have to choose first,” he replied. “Tell me you want to stay. Tell me you’ll love me whatever I am, and I’ll show you. Or if you can’t…” He stopped dancing; his whole body was suddenly in mourning at the thought he was expressing. “If you can’t…then go on your way, and never look back. Pretend we never even looked at one another.”

She glanced past him, thinking on this. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the woman she’d been before she met him. It wasn’t that she didn’t have ambitions for what she might become if she were to go on alone. She liked the world. But liking wasn’t enough.

She returned her gaze to him.

“All right…” she said.

He frowned. “What are you choosing?” he said.

“I want to see.”

“There’s no going back,” he reminded her.

“I know.”

He moved his hands over his body, his fingers grazing his lips, then going down to the middle of his chest, thence to his navel, and down again, to the head of his cock. She followed his motion. Saw the sharpness of his teeth, waiting behind his lips. Saw honey sweat on his chest, beads of it, decorating him. Saw the iridescence on his belly, moving just beneath the skin, down and down and down. And saw where it was going, where it was gathering. Its bright force assembling at the root of him, and then rising up his cock, to where his hands held court.

Before it broke from him, and unknitted him in its riot, there was a moment when she was afraid as she’d never been afraid before, knowing that all paths but one had been sacrificed with this choice.

Then, without moving, he was leaping against her, and the heat of his devotion burned her fear away.

“This is love,” she thought, and, pushing lightly at the door, closed it against the world.

Moved

To say that the world touches each of us differently is a banality. But proof of that fact, in the particular, can be something more.

For instance: in London, five years ago, I knew an admirable fellow from Texas. His name was Jim. One day, a bitter day in mid-winter, the wind was high, and gusting against the window so that the frames rattled. He seemed unnerved. I asked him why. He said he hated the sound of the wind. That it reminded him of his childhood, of the emptiness of his state, and the sky above it. That was why he had a flat in the busy heart of London; he only had to step out of his front door and turn two corners to be in a crowd.

For me, the wind has absolutely the opposite effect. I was born on a street too filled with people; there was nowhere to look for mystery and for solitude. But when the wind came down the river, smelling of the sea, when the wind whistled in the chimney and stirred the embers in the grate, when the wind came and lifted me along as I went to school, I imagined me faraway and that the gusts might pick me up and take me there.

Jim and I, sitting listening to the wind. One sound; two worlds.

I Imagine You

Sometimes it was a glare, sometimes it was a test, sometimes it was arousing, sometimes it was agony. Sometimes, especially towards the end, it was all of these, and that was like nothing either of them had ever felt.

I imagine you, he wrote (this was in fourth month) dressed in my clothes—

That was the beginning of the end in a way. A relatively innocent fantasy, especially given how baroque things had become at times. She’d written to him imagining his rape at the hands of lunatics, detailing the agonies of multiple penetration, his face spattered with spunk and spit, his asshole bleeding. A few days later he’d offered her an image of herself martyred, with knives and liquid lard.

Imagination, the thing that had drawn them together, would also be their undoing.

If the pen is the penis,

As wisdom may claim,

Am I wasting children

When writing my name?;

(Or is it more likely,

As people may think

That lives may be made

With a usage of ink?)

Touch the rod,

Divining waters:

From this spring

Come sons,

Come daughters.

Silk and bliss

From this, from this.

Save your slaughters,

Touch the rod.

Martha

Martha heard a cry, a solid cry, that made the bone of her skull shake. She went to her father, and said:

“I hear this crying sound, Father.”

Her father looked up from his accounting of the day’s labours.

“I hear nothing,” he said.

“But it makes my breasts tingle.”

“Don’t talk that way!” her father said.

“And my belly—”

“I said, don’t talk that way!” her father replied. He got up from his table and came over to her. “I will not have indecency in this house, do you hear me?”

“But it’s the truth,” Martha said. “I—”

Her father slapped her, a thumping blow from which she reeled, tears pouring from her eyes.

“If I ever hear you talking in the obscene fashion again,” he said, “I will throw you out of the house. Do you understand me?”

Martha said nothing.

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?” her father demanded, raising his hand as though to strike her again. She flinched. “Get out of here, you filthy girl.”

Martha went up to the bathroom and washed the tears from her face. But she felt so hot, so sickeningly hot. She undressed herself, and took a palmful of water, splashing it up between her legs. It offered her a moment’s relief, but only a moment. Then the heat came again, more powerful than ever. She sobbed; and saw that the water all around her thighs was boiling away, as though it had been splashed on a hot stove. She heard it hissing; she felt a wave of steam rising up against her face. She looked up at herself. She was shocked to see how she looked: her face flushed, her hair plastered against her brow. She gasped at the sight of herself. What was happening to her? She was afraid. But she was also excited.

“Martha?”

Her mother was calling her from downstairs. “Martha, will you come down and help, please?”

There was dinner to prepare, and the family was large. It would take Martha and her mother several hours to do all that had to be done. She did what she could to make herself more presentable: splashed water up onto her face to soothe her burning cheeks, dried her body. As she was doing so, she could not help but touch her breasts, which were tiny nubs of things. Still, they felt curiously tender today; she could not ever remember having such feeling in them as she had right now. She rubbed them. The sensation pleased her. She rubbed them a little harder, catching sight of herself in the mirror as she did so. Her hand went back down between her legs, and oh it felt good to touch herself. Oh, very good, though her fingers were cold in the groove between her legs.

Suddenly, her mother was beating the door: “MARTHA! Martha! What on earth are you doing, girl?”

She couldn’t bring herself to speak, at first. She was afraid that the sound which escaped her would betray her pleasure.

“Martha?”

Her mother rattled the handle.

“I asked you what you were doing in there, girl?”

“…yes…” she managed weakly.

“Are you sick, child?”

“…no…”

“Then open this door.”

“I’m coming down.”

“I said: open this door.” The handle shook. The door rattled on its hinges. Her mother was a strong woman.

Hurriedly, Martha pulled on her clothes, but she was only half dressed when her mother shoved the door so hard that the little bolt came away from the wood, and the door was thrown open. There was a curious expression on her mother’s face. It wasn’t anger exactly (she knew what her mother’s anger looked like all too well), but then nor was it revulsion, quite, not puzzlement.

She caught hold of Martha’s arm, and shook her. “What in God’s name are you up to, child?” she said. “Look at the state of you.” She lifted Martha’s blouse. The girl had not been quick enough to put on her underwear. It was still around her ankles. With unerring accuracy, her mother’s hand went to Martha’s groin, and touched her.

“Have you been touching yourself down there?” she demanded.

“No, Mother…”

The woman shook her. “Don’t lie to me!”

“No, I…”

“Sit yourself down.”

“Please, Momma…”

Her mother pushed her down onto the edge of the bath. “Show me.”

“Momma…”

“You heard me! Show me!”

Reluctantly, Martha spread her legs. Her mother put her hand down there. She withdrew it quickly, as though she’d been stung. There was the distinct smell of burning skin. The woman retreated from her towards the door. “How…many…times have I told you…?” she said softly; but the thought, the words of the instruction were already fading away as she spoke them. “You…had better…get dressed,” she said, “and come down to help me in the kitchen.”

It was Friday, and the family tradition, forged at a time when their faith had been more important than it was now, was always to eat fish on a Friday. There were six of them, including her three brothers; three small fish between the family, and one larger fish baked for Father, with extra garlic.

Martha had cleaned and prepared the fish every Friday since she was nine, which was three years ago. Hundreds of fish, beheaded and slit and gutted and washed, their skin shed and rubbed with salt, herbs and butter. But today the thought revolted her; it made her sick to her stomach to see the entrails of the fish, grey and brown, spilling out. There were eggs in the fish, and the feel of them popping between her fingers was simply too much. She rushed out of the kitchen, with her mother calling after her, demanding to know what she was doing. She went into the yard and was sick, though most of it was just retching, because she hadn’t been hungry in the last few days.

“I can’t finish…” she told her mother. “…I feel ill…”

Much to her surprise, her mother didn’t challenge her. She simply shrugged and returned inside. Martha waited until the nausea subsided. Sometimes she looked up at the house. At the sky. At the trees, and the road. None of it meant anything to her; her mind was a blank.

At last, her mother called her in for dinner. She didn’t want to go. It was almost dark now, and she was happier sitting in the half-light, she knew, than she would be inside. Her brothers would be noisy, her father would try to subdue them, and if he didn’t succeed he’d yell. Dinner would then be eaten in silence, except for the scraping of forks and knives on the white plates.

So she didn’t go in. For five minutes or so, she entertained the notion that she was going to be left alone, but at last her father came to the kitchen door, his silhouette black against the light of the kitchen, and demanded that she come in. The power in his voice made her compliant. In she went. But she couldn’t eat. She couldn’t even raise her fork. She kept thinking of the fish eggs, spilling out; of the cold guts, spilling out. And then, at the back of her head, she was also thinking of what she’d felt in the bathroom. Of the heat inside her, so different from the fish, the eggs, this dinner, congealing on the plate in front of her.

“May I be excused?” she asked her father.

“No you may not,” he said. “You stay until we’ve all finished. And sit still! What’s wrong with you, squirming around all the time?”

She did her best to sit still, but she could feel such strange things happening in her. The heat between her legs now starting again. It hurt, but it excited her too. Doing her best not to attract her father’s attention, she opened her legs a little. She felt the fire pressing to come out of her. She imagined it. She saw her legs beneath the table. She saw the place between her legs, getting brighter: a slit of fire. She saw it running out of her, a tiny trickle, blazing as it ran.

But now, to her horror, she found she couldn’t stop it. The flow got stronger. She saw it in her mind’s eye running out onto the carpet under her chair, burning it. Her little body started to shake. The fire flowed more strongly still; she felt it splashing up against the insides of her thighs. Frederick, one of her brothers, looked up from his plate, grunting.

“What is it, boy?”

“Something…on my leg…” Frederick replied. He started to lift the tablecloth.

In her mind’s eye she saw the fire come out at him in a blaze. She saw him raise his hands to ward it off, but he was too slow. It engulfed him, entirely. He toppled backwards, as the flames caught hold of him, and burned him up.

“Now what, Martha?”

She looked at her father, who was staring at her in fury. Her gaze went to Frederick, who had returned to eating his fish.

I’m going crazy, she thought, and got up from the table.

“Where do you think you’re going?” her father said.

“William, leave her—”

“Be quiet!”

She heard her father’s cutlery against the plate as he put down knife and fork, then he came after her. She ran, thinking she could retreat up the stairs. But she felt suddenly dizzy in the hallway, and in the time it took her to make sense of where she was, he had hold of her. He was not a violent man, but he had a way of making her feel so inconsequential that she wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

“Come here, Martha,” he said.

She turned reluctantly to face him. The heat between her legs was mounting again; she could feel it rising.

“My life is hard enough,” her father said, “without your little dramas making it more difficult. Do you understand me?”

She could smell the fish and garlic on his breath; she hated him at that moment, with all her heart. His lazy, doleful face, the joyless voice that sounded like stones dragging over stones.

“I asked you a question,” he said. “Do you understand me?”

She looked at him and nodded.

“I’m sick of your complaining and sour faces. And I want no more of it.”

That was an end to the exchange. There were others, no doubt, not that night but other nights, when her father lost his temper with her, but she doesn’t remember them. She remembers only this one, on the night she first felt the fire.

Is she crazy now? Perhaps, though she doesn’t feel crazy. When she looks around at other people in the world she sees insanity. For her own part, she feels quite sane.

She approaches the home. It’s night; the glow of the fire is thrown up against the walls of the house. She sits in the yard. The fire flows from her. When it flows too far, she calls it back to her, and it comes, like a child. That, in a sense, is what she’s come to show her father: his grandchild. Perhaps, yes, the spectacle will horrify him, but so be it. He is dying, she has heard. If he doesn’t see his grandchild now, then he’ll never see it.

She goes in, and up the stairs. People recognize her and hurry away. Did they know that she was coming? She knows what they say behind their hands: Poor Mad Martha; the lunatic woman.

He is lying in his bed, attended by a doctor. She knows the man by sight; she’s seen him on the street.

“Be quick,” he tells Martha. “Say your goodbyes and leave.”

“I want to be alone with him.”

The doctor concedes to this. He leaves her with her father.

“Can you hear me?” she says to the old man.

“Yes…”

“Here…” she says. And she brings the fire up out of her groin to show him. It is a terrible moment. She sees the horror on his face: the terror, even, that she has brought this thing here, under his roof.

“Get out!” he says.

The fire gets bigger. She starts to coax it back towards her, but she didn’t expect to be so confounded by her father’s presence, and it gets away from her. It leaps up towards the ceiling, and forms a fantastic fiery vault over his bed. He stares up at it—his face lit from the blaze—in terror, like a man caught beneath a piece of toppling masonry, certain he’ll be crushed.

He cries out; the fire starts to fall towards the bed. She makes a great effort to call it to her, and it comes. “I’m sorry,” she stammers, “I’m sorry—”

The doctor has entered. What has he seen? Something, surely.

His gaze goes past her to the bed; she looks his way, and to her horror discovers that her father is gasping, like a fish, shiny bubbles of blood spilling from his nose. The doctor pushes her aside. He calls for help.

She doesn’t wait. She starts down the darkened stairs, listening to the chaos going on above. Her father’s terrible gasping. The doctor shouting orders.

As she gets to the ninth stair (the stair with the creak) she feels the fire erupt in her again. She lets out a terrible sob. It rises around her, so vast and so powerful it carries her out into the night.

Just before dawn, with body laid out, and all that can be done for the night, done; the doctor gone; the stars gone; Martha’s brother Frederick, who was the only one who ever laughed with her, goes to the window. He has drunk two glasses of brandy since his father’s death; he is light-headed. And tired with the effort of thinking of what will happen now; now that the old man’s dead. His eyes surely betray him. That can’t be Martha he sees, coming into the yard, hanging under a fiery form, like something that came out of the heart of a furnace. Yes it is. It is. Her body is bluish and cold, her mouth utters a sad sound. She is joined with the creature, at the hip. It is a lewd sight. The creature brings her close to the house. She looks up at her brother, in the window. Then, with that same piteous expression on her face, she allows her captor, or her consort, to carry her away. Frederick goes down into the yard. The vision has disappeared. Nor is there any sign of it having passed this way. No scorch marks on the ground. No smell of burning. Nothing a material man might agree was evidence of it having been here. He is pleased to believe he was deluded and returns into the safety of the house until daylight.

Tit

I have a preoccupation--it almost amounts to a fixation—with the breast, in both sexes. I could write at length about the nuances of the breast: its variations, its complexities; its heft. I am amused by it; yes, even in the singular, as the needs of language require that I describe it here. I have enjoyed the particular beauty of women who have lost one of their breasts to accident or to surgery. The mascetomodee, if there is such a word: She is a glory unto herself.

The breast of the virgin, small and budding: this is beautiful. The breast of the mother, filled with milk; this is surpassingly beautiful. The breast of the woman given over to pleasure, who spends great periods of time at her toilet bathing her bosom, pondering it, rouging the nipples; this is a joy, of course. The breast of the whore, which is likely bruised a little, marked by the teeth of over-excited customers; a spectacle, no question. And then, after the menopause, where the breast passes its ripeness, but gains heft, perhaps, or starts to sink back against the body, this is quite lovely too. It is no longer functional, in the strictest sense. It must be rediscovered; adorned, teased, made new as an object of tender veneration.

Finally, the purse. In old age, the breast as a ghost. This is my favorite form, because it is the most neglected. I have kissed such sacs for hours on end, tugging on the nipples like a suckling, as though I might with sufficient teasing, call forth a stream of old maid’s milk.

The Freaks

He imagines himself amongst the freaks. He imagines himself their willing prisoner, his normality, in such company, visible. They mock him. They make him go naked so as to laugh at the symmetry of his limbs, at the straightness of his back, at his very ordinariness.

They are not mundane. Though they are made of flesh and blood, though the hair on the chin of the woman who leads them is coarse, and the stink of the donkey-man like a blow, they partake, these people, of the condition of angels. They are rare. They come with messages from another place.

That’s why he likes to be with them. To let them use him, to let them mock him. He feels, in their company, as though the miraculous is pressing against him.

Cruelty

I knew an ardent Communist once

(a theatre director, actually;

back in the days before the Wall fell,

and the only way to be employed

in certain quarters

was to be to the Left of Lenin)

who could only achieve

any kind of sexual arousal

when beneath the heels

of a mock-Fräulein

dressed in something Nazified.

Sometimes nature is even crueler than politics.

Dollie

Ellie was fifteen that year, and it was the unhappiest year of her life. Her mother had died in the early spring, worn out by having too many babies, and loving them; by hard work, by the hopelessness of everything. The sky here was so big, and the dirt so dark, and though sometimes there were kind warm rains out of that sky, and sometimes the dirt gave up a little crop of potatoes, life was as hard for the family as life could be.

Towards the end, Ellie’s mother had started to talk about how life had been back in Virginia, before they came out West. How fine the people were, and how gentle the air. Ellie didn’t remember much of this. She’d been a tiny baby when they’d left. All she knew was Wisconsin: the bitter, bitter winters, the wasting summers. She knew how to write, a little; read, a little; but not enough to understand the family Bible, which was the only book in the house. There was nothing else to occupy her mind. Her only plaything was a wooden doll, which her father had made on her sixth birthday. Over the years she’d lost the crude features that her father had painted on her little head; she was just a naked shape.

After her mother’s death, Ellie's life became even harder for Ellie. She had to keep house in her mother’s stead, cooking for her brothers and her two younger sisters and her father, doing her best to make what little food could be grown or hunted to feed six hungry mouths. She was neither happy nor sad most of the time. She had no expectation for her life.

One day, her father said: “That doll of yours. Get rid of it.”

“Why, Papa?”

“You’re not a child anymore. Get rid of it.”

She feared her father when he was cross, so she did as she was instructed. She told him she’d put the doll in the fire, but this was not the truth. She went down to the river, to a little strand of old oaks where she’d played as a child, and she hid Dollie in a hole between the roots.

The next year, there was a man from Boston called Jack Matthews, who asked to marry her. She didn’t like him very much, but it was a chance to get away from the house, and maybe begin a better life.

She married Jack Matthews in the summer, and he took her back east. Barely a week passed before she began to see a side of him he’d hidden from her. He didn’t want a wife, he wanted a servant, and when she didn’t jump to it fast enough for him, he became violent. She wasn’t a weeper; she took his abuse in silence, and only shed a tear when his back was turned. In bed, he was virtually useless, for which he also blamed her, finding further reason for violence. But what was she to do? There was nobody to turn to for help. She had no money of her own, and she was very far from home. And even supposing she’d upped and left, to try and make her way back to Wisconsin: what awaited her there if she made it? More days of dirt and sky? Better, she thought, to endure her husband. Perhaps he’d mellow as the years went on. Perhaps she’d even learn to love him a little.

But life didn’t get any better. They went from town to town, and he’d get a job for a while, she’d do some laundering, and there’d be a few weeks of calm. Then things, for one reason or another, would start to fall apart. He’d get in a fight and be fired, or they’d have to move on because he owed somebody money after a night of gambling. Sometimes she wanted to kill him. She even thought of ways to do it, while she laundered. A pillow over his face while he was in a drunken stupor; or poison in his coffee. Would God blame her so much if she ridded the world of Jack Matthews? Surely not. But the plans never came to anything. However much she hated him—and she hated him to her marrow—she couldn’t bring herself to kill him.

The only pleasure in her life came from an unlikely source. She often laundered the bed-linen that came out of whore houses (which was the lowliest form of a lowly profession), and through her coming and going to these disreputable places, she got to know some of the women. Though she had neither the looks nor the confidence to do what they did, she had much in common with them, not least a deep contempt for the opposite sex. Many, like her, had seen life out in the wilderness, and had fled from it. And most would not have cared to return to the life they’d left. To be sure, whoring was no great pleasure to them, but even a modest bordello provided its little luxuries—clean linen, perfume soap, sometimes a fancy gown—which they would never have had out on the frontier.

She learned to laugh with these women: she learned to voice her rage at the stupidity of men. She learned a great deal else, besides, that she would have blushed to admit. She had never known, for instance, that often women pleasured themselves (and sometimes one another); nor that there were devices made for such pleasurings. Toys made of polished wood shaped like a man’s sex, but more reliably hard. One of the women she met had quite a little collection of these things, including one carved from the tusk of an elephant, which she said was the best, because it was so silky smooth. One night, she offered to show Ellie how she used it to best effect, and Ellie sat and watched while the woman gave her what would turn out to be the most important lesson of her life.

Two years went by. The nomadic life continued for Ellie and Jack, a by now predictable pattern of arrival, hard labour, violence and quick departure. As her husband’s state of mind slowly deteriorated, thanks to drink and innumerable beatings, his abuse of Ellie escalated. But—though the women she knew advised countless times to part from Jack before he killed her—Ellie couldn’t bring herself to leave him. He was pathetic, yes; but he was all she had in the world.

Then, one night, after Jack had been particularly brutal, she had a strange dream. She was back in Wisconsin, standing on the doorstep of the cabin, and she heard a voice calling to her. It was a sweet, familiar voice, but it was neither that of a man or a woman. She went out looking for whoever it was who was calling her, and the journey led her down to the river. Now, as she walked beneath the ancient trees that drooped their summer boughs towards the water, she knew who was calling her. Her dream-self knelt down beneath the oldest of the oaks, and she dug between the roots. There in the dark earth was Dollie. As her fingertips grazed the familiar form, she heard, somewhere close by, the sound of somebody gasping for breath. It was a horrid, desperate sound. She glanced back over her shoulder for a moment but she could see nothing, so she returned to the business of unearthing Dollie. But the choking sound got louder and louder, and she began to feel some force buffeting her.

“Let me alone!” she said.

The din just grew worse, the buffeting stronger. The dream began to recede. Dollie fell out of her fingers, back into the ground.

And suddenly she was awake, and the bed was shaking, and Jack was jerking around, with his hands to his throat. She got up out of bed. It was just about dawn. There was enough light to see his agony: the way his body thrashed, and his eyes starting from their sockets in terror. There were flecks of spittle around his mouth, and a dark patch at his groin where he’d voided himself.

She did nothing. He seemed to see her there, watching him in this terrible state, but she wasn’t sure. The seizure, or whatever it was, had such a grip on him that eventually it threw him off the bed, and he died there, on the floor before her, with the stink of his bowels and bladder rising from him.

She took virtually nothing with her. She just left, without saying a word to anyone. Who was she going to tell? And who would care anyway? Perhaps God had had some use for her husband: but if so, then He was the only one.

It took her seven weeks to get to Wisconsin, and almost every night she heard Dollie’s voice in her dreams. Had she not done so, she would not have gone.

When she got back she found the cabin deserted. There was still some furniture, but the few possessions the family had owned—a kettle, some pots and pans, a broom, and so on—had gone. She slept on the floor that night, and the next day went around the neighbourhood to find out what had happened to everyone. They’d moved away to Oregon, she was told, about three months before. Nobody had an address, of course, because the travellers hadn’t known where they were going. She never saw any of them again; or even heard news of them.

Folks were kind to her. They supplied her with the bare essentials so that she could get settled back into the cabin, and that’s what she did. A few people said she could come and live in town, but she didn’t want that. She’d live alone, she said, and see how it suited her.

As it turned out, it suited her very well. She got herself a job at the feed store in town, and that made her enough money to fix up the cabin, and put food on the table.

For company she had Dollie. She’d gone down to the river the day after she arrived, and her doll was there, where she’d hidden her years before. A little damp from being hidden in the earth, of course, but she dried out quite nicely. One night, sitting by the window watching the sun go down, a queer little thought came into her head. The next day she bought a whittling knife in town and set about refashioning Dollie so that her company might be more pleasurable. She didn’t hurry; this was a job she wanted to do just right. Off came the arms and the legs; off came the ears, and all but a tiny nub of nose. The body she thinned out a little, but not too much. A sense of fullness was important, her friend the whore had instructed. She put some little furrows here and there, just to add some spice to the sensation. Then, sitting peacefully in a rocking chair (which had been her only concession to luxury) she hoisted up her skirts, and had a little party with Dollie. It was perfectly grand.

She lived to be eighty-nine, and never had any other person, man or woman, under her roof for company, right to the end. Nor, she would have said, needed any.

The Collection

When did I start collecting? Oh, now you’re asking. Truth is, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a few photographs of the male appendage. Ha! Funny the number of words there are for it. I remember reading somewhere there were more words for a man’s wotzit than for any other thing on the face of the earth. I don’t know where I read it. But I remember thinking, well I’m really in on something important, with my collection.

Yes. Yes you’d think something so private would be…well, private. Ha. Yah. Private. Yeah. But…that’s the paradoxical thing. They’re called privates but they’re not. I bet that thing about the number of words is true about photographs too. Oh, I know you’d think the likeliest subject for a photograph would be…I don’t know, a sunset. But, no. It’s the old appendage, isn’t it? No question. It stands to reason. Ha. Daft thing to say. Stands to reason. But the fact is you got a lot of men with, you know, more or less average appendages, still think of them like it’s their favorite child, you know? And they want to have a record of what it looked like when it stood up, you know, perfectly straight, with one eye on Heaven. Because we all see that there’ll be a time when that don’t happen any more. When it doesn’t snap to attention. When it just hangs there, even if it was a really big one. Come to think of it, especially if it was a really big one. So I’ve never had to—what’s the word?—coerce any one of my owners. Not a one. No, nor paid so much as a shilling to take a photograph.

I think the truth is dicks like the air. They don’t like to be cooped up. Left in the dark. They get claustrophobic, don’t they? So you say to the owner, hey do you want to let the Big Boy out and play and he comes. Course you do get some of the owners who get a bit embarrassed.

Especially if they’ve got one that’s a bit too quick to stand up. And then they think. I’m thinking they’re queer or whatever you say now days. Homo. Shit-lifter. But they get over it when I tell ’em this is for posterity. I say usually, you know, I’m not interested in anything more than having yours in my collections. It’s important work.

See, I read somewhere that the sexes are getting more alike. As we evolve we’re less manly. So I think dicks are going to be like something nobody has anymore, in the future. We’re going to look back and say: So, that’s what they looked like? And me, I’ll be dead and forgotten, we’ll all be dead and forgotten, but my pictures, they’re going to be like fossils you know. They’re going to be something valuable.

Altogether, at the last count, I have seventeen thousand three hundred different dicks in the collection. And of course I’ve got pictures taken from all sorts of angles, of really interesting ones. I didn’t take all those photographs myself. I don’t know how many are mine. I suppose I could do a count. A head count; ha, ha! Because I always know which one I took. They bear a certain…I don’t know, I just always know. But I never bothered. I suppose I might, one of these days.

Now what about you? You going to join the collection? Don’t be shy now. It’s really easy. I’ve done it so many times. Come on. All right, so it isn’t as big as the really big ones, but you know what? There’s always somebody with a bigger one, and there’s always someone with a littler one. Me, I’ve got a little one. I don’t care. There’s littler still. I’ve seen ’em. Really, really little ones. Micro penis. I got pictures of those too. And you know, sometimes they can be really…pretty. Like flowers. Like little flowers.

What May

Not Be Shown

It's always what may not be shown that shows the most. Forbidden words are always the most eloquent.

On the shores of Lake Turkana, to go out in public with your foreskin peeled back is an obscenity. In certain cities of the East, a woman may not show her face. Take a picture of your three-year-old in the bath, and people look at you oddly these days.

It changes all the time. In one age, the breast may be shown, but nothing below the navel. In another, the cunt but not the cock. Or the cock, as long as it’s not hard. Or hard, but not fully hard. Or fully hard, but not seeping.

In Pompeii, the guide, for a few extra lire, will show you the whore houses, with their peeling frescoes. A man weighs his enormous meat on a scale; a woman seeks refuge on the lap of another, as a whip is laid on her bare back. In the Reading Room of the British Library, you may order up the pornography of an earlier age, as long as you prove your intentions towards it are honorable; that is, you agree that it will mean nothing to you. In any American city, if you know where to look, who to ask, you can always buy the sight of somebody else’s intercourse. But none of this must be public. It must be done in whispers. It must be locked away where the women and children will not see it. We must pretend, as we go about the daily streets, that we know nothing about it, nor do we care to know. If any of this comes up in conversation, we will change the subject, or—in more sophisticated circles—we’ll greet it with a weary sigh: as if to say, how passé, to be aroused; how adolescent.

Only the slaughterhouse and the mortuary have any approximate power: we do not care to know how we came to be on the plate, or how we will look when we are removed from it. But of course the forbidden sight here shows both. The lovers, sapped by the agonies of desire, lie like felled animals on the slimy bed, their eyes glassy. It has raw, red shape, this ecstasy. It brings blood and tears.

Is it any wonder it’s put out of sight? Where’s the dignity in that? The stench of a lover’s room is pleasant only to those who carried it. To the rest of us, it’s too close to flatulence. And look at those who make an occupation of it! Look at how they end up, the whores and the hustlers. Gutter and dumpster; that’s where they end up. The Devil doesn’t take them anymore. They kill themselves, with drink or pills to keep themselves from seeing their holes seeping.

Two Views

from a Window

There she is! Oh God, there she is! My angel. Why me.”

“Shut up, for God’s sake! You don’t even know her name.”

“She’s perfection.”

“Come away from the window.”

“I wish she’d look this way.”

“And see us spying on her?”

“Oh she’d be very happy about that.”

“She’s going to have company. She’s washing her armpits.”

“Why do you people hate your own stink so much? It’s perfectly—”

“Here he comes! Oh God, here he comes!”

“Oh it’s him again. The one with the greasy hair.”

“What does she see in him?”

“Speaking of stink…he’s been handling meat.”

“He’s a common butcher!”

“Lamb’s liver. Kidneys. Oh my Lord. What I wouldn’t give to have a bowl of raw kidneys.”

“He doesn’t know how to treat a woman like her.”

“Swimming in blood. Perfect.”

“If I were in his shoes I’d write poems to her. I’d uncover the secrets of my soul.”

“He’s undressing her…”

“Oh God! Why doesn’t she protest, at least a little?”

“It’s hot. She’s feeling horny. And she’s not the only one.”

“Look at those breasts.”

“I’m looking.”

“I’d give anything to be over there, touching those breasts! Rolling those nipples between my fingers! It breaks my heart—”

“So come away—”

“—to see that brute with his fat, red fingers, pawing at her.”

“I wonder if they’ll do it doggie fashion, like they did on Monday?”

“He’s sucking on her titties!”

“I can see.”

“He’s lifting her skirt.”

“Oh my Lord, smell that cunt! Thank God she didn’t wash down there! Ruff!”

“Hush!”

“I said be quiet, boy! Oh no, he’s looking this way!”

“Don’t panic. Just stay still.”

“Maybe if I just stay absolutely still…”

“Sometimes I think you don’t listen to a word I say.”

“Anyway, what does he care? Just a dog and a cripple sitting in a dark room.”

“He’s looking away.”

“He’s got better things to do, the lucky bastard.”

“And down goes the skirt! No underwear. Does her husband know she doesn’t wear underwear?”

“She’s unbuttoning his pants. She’s getting out his meat—”

“It is impressive, you’ve got to give him that. God was generous with him in the dick department. There’s a whiff of cheese from under the foreskin.”

“She’s going down on her knees—”

“Brave girl.”

“I can’t look at this. I can’t. Seeing her abase herself this way, it’s more than a man can take!”

“If it’s so terrible why have you got a lump in your pants?”

“She’s skinning it back. Oh God!”

“I thought you couldn’t look at this.”

“She doesn’t like it very much.”

“You could have fooled me. Look at her titties standing on end.”

“She’s revolted.”

“In your dreams. She loves every stinky inch of him. And you know I don’t blame her. I think he’s rather fine, in a sluggish sort of way. It’s not that I’m a homo—”

“She’s gagging on him.”

“—but you learn to take pleasure where you can find it. I could be quite happy licking out her arse-hole or cleaning up his balls. A good stink is a good stink. I don’t give a damn. As a pup I used to get hard when the wind came from the brewery.”

“Maybe he’ll just spunk down her throat and get it over with.”

“That’d be a waste.”

“I’d like to see him ashamed of himself. Skulking away with his cheeks burning.”

“Speaking of burning cheeks…”

“Oh no. Not that.”

“I love this part. The little yelps she makes when he spanks her. There he goes. Throwing her over his knee.”

“Oh that’s a nice view. Look at that! The sun on her buttocks. And that tight brown arse-hole of hers. You know you were right; from this angle she is perfection.”

“That was hard! Look at the mark he’s made. Oh, and again! And again! That’s it. Beat her, the bitch! The whore!”

“They can hear this in the street surely.”

“And again! And again! Now in the cleft! Oh, that’s cruel.”

“She’s awash. Look at her snatch dripping.”

“That’s enough now. You’ll make her weep.”

“He’s stopping. He’s stroking her hair. Oh lovely. I know how that feels. Right behind the ears.”

“Finally, he kisses her. God, I would have treated her better than that. I would have covered her in kisses by now.”

“You’re a strange old coot, you know. One minute you want her beaten black and blue, the next—”

“Look at how she trembles. She’s like a frightened bird.”

“Bird? With an arse like that?”

“That’s it. Kiss her. Tenderly.”

“You don’t know whether you love her or hate her, do you? You sit here at the window day after day wondering if she’s going to appear; wondering if you’re going to get to see her titties. Doting on her. But for being so beautiful. You know what she’d do if she knew we were watching? She’s have you locked up and me put down. We’re dirty old dogs, both of us…”

“Oh, he’s putting it in her.”

“Finally…”

“Slowly, boy…very, very slowly. Give her a little time to get used to it.”

“I’m bored with this. Rub my belly.”

“Get down, boy!”

“Oh come on.”

“I’m concentrating. Get down!”

“Mean bastard.”

“Oh, it’s in her all the way. I wonder how that feels. To have your balls banging against her arse. Wonderful. Wonderful.”

“Now you be careful. You’re getting too excited.”

“To feel a cunt gripping your—oh Jesus! Oh, Oh, I’m going to make a mess of myself! Oh…no…”

“I warned you.”

“Damn…”

“Still, it’s impressive. Seventy-four years old and he can still come without touching himself.”

“…damn…damn…”

“Now comes the guilt.”

“What was I thinking? Spying like this.”

“He’ll go wash himself and tell God he’ll try harder next time. Say a prayer. Then tomorrow, he’ll be back, sitting here in his wheelchair—”

“Come away, boy! Did you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you. And yes, I’m coming. So’s she, by the sound of it. Oh yes, there she goes! One of these days her husband’s going to walk in on her and somebody’s going to go out of the window…”

“Lord, forgive me I beseech you, for my weakness…”

“Now that’s something to look forward to. The butcher going arse over elbow into the street, stark naked.”

“I’ll try harder to resist, Lord…”

“What a fucking life. Still, I mustn’t complain. At least I’ll have his soiled underwear to sleep on tonight. Ah, bliss!”

Men in the aisles of supermarkets,

Looking for fresh vegetables suitable for insertion;

Men in the aisles of hardware stores,

Looking for innocent household objects to use to clamp their nipples, or bind their balls;

Men in pews of churches,

Too hard to get up for their prayers,

For fear that the result of enumerating their sins be all too visible;

Men on the street, walking up and down,

Up and down;

Catching one another’s eyes,

Holding the stares of men holding the hands of their wives, their girlfriends, their children;

Men in the stalls of public toilets

Hurriedly unzipping one another,

Desperate for the touch of a foreign hand upon their bellies, their thighs,

And all that stands in between;

Men in the corridors of their dreams,

On all fours in the supermarket,

Howling like dogs,

Bound to the door of the hardware store, being touched by every other man who enters,

In the church pressing their faces through the screen of the confessional,

Kissing the sobbing father;

Men in the street, looking for others who are dreaming the same dream,

Hoping for a breath of forbidden love,

Before their lives wake them,

And they must go on without the rough kisses of other lonely conformists.

A Blessing

Hardy hadn't always been interested in what he laughingly called ‘sexual archeology.’ His early discipline had been medieval researches, his focus on the influence of Moorish designs on Northern European churches. But he’d had a revelation, every bit as extraordinary as Paul’s on the road to Damascus, and after it he did not look back.

It had happened in Ireland, eight years ago. He’d been making a tour of the churches in County Cork—doing what was rather mechanical work (measurements, calculations) when, one summer day, he’d given himself permission to relax his work schedule and enjoy the place a little. Never a man without a hip-flask (a tradition instigated by his father), he sat back under the old sycamore that shaded one corner of the churchyard, sipped a draw of Irish whiskey and thought to doze awhile. But as the whiskey took effect, he found his gaze going up the gutters and saw something around the base of the roof: carved stubby, crabbed figures designed so that the rainwater would pass through them. But, oh, they were obscene. Each figure was carved so that he or she presented their genitals in the most graphic manner, legs spread. The women had fat, voluptuous breasts and vast, gaping vaginas, the lips of which they pulled apart so that the hole was large enough to contain their hands. The men were being equally brutal with their penises, holding them with both hands as though in some last onanistic spasm. Centuries of erosion had removed any sculptural sophistication from these pieces—if they’d ever possessed any, which Hardy doubted—but there was no doubting the humorous crudity of the work.

He walked around the church. There were seventeen gutter pieces. And right above the front door of the church, under the shadow of the eaves, the most extraordinary piece of all. A carved representation of the coital act, permanently rendered as some kind of Edenic scene. In the middle of the design a tree, in which a serpentine form was draped. To the left of the tree a woman, carved as unflattering as the pieces on the gutter: a cartoon of a female, in truth, with balloon breasts, a vestigial face and a gaping cunt. Into that cunt, the Adam to this Eve, who was so burdened by the immensity of his cock he seemed almost withered by the effort of his erection, was pressing the head of his member.

Hardy was astonished. Right there, three feet above the heads of the good Christian folk who assembled here for mass every Sunday, who brought their babies to be baptized, their unions to be blessed, and their dead to be commended to Heaven, was an unashamedly graphic rendering of the sexual act. ‘Did the congregation even see it?’ he wondered, as they entered, Sunday after Sunday. He assumed not. Or if they saw it, they assumed their interpretation of the crude forms on the wall were incorrect, and that if they pointed out what they were seeing they’d be told in no uncertain fashion that they had dirty minds.

He drank a little more whiskey, and then he sat under the sycamore tree and did something he hadn’t done for a very long time. There, under the open sky, he masturbated.

Any form of sex is wonderful in the open air; the presence of sky and wind and the smell of the earth or the sea, reminds us of how primal the act actually is. In the confines of a bedroom, the act becomes artificial, rehearsed. Outside, it is raw.

This is particularly true of masturbation, which is the secret vice, the deed we are ashamed to confess as adults, because it seems to admit a childish delight in pleasure for its own sake, without connection to the deeper calls of union with another. (This is a crock of shit, of course. All sex is childish, at its best. All delights in pleasure for its own sake. The call to union is mere religion.)

But to the many-fingered pleasure, as enacted outside: for the male it has many simple virtues. The hint of exhibitionism (if the only witnesses are birds and worms, it’s still evidence); the sensual delights of the breeze against the flesh of the penis-head, on the topography of the scrotum; the lack of confinement, of fear the bed will creak or the semen stain the sofa.

This is not even the stuff of pornography. It has no stigma; it does not violate taboo; it has no dramatic value; it tells no tale. That, too, of course, is a virtue. But it means the act and its joys are often left uncelebrated.

There in the churchyard of St. Mary’s in Cannon, under a tree that had been growing since America was still wilderness, Chuck Hardy unzipped his pants and toyed with himself like a thirteen-year-old who’d just got hold of a copy of an erotic magazine; and while he toyed he thought about the images in the gutters—the erotic excesses that gaped and pranced and stood engorged around the eaves of St. Mary’s. And there in his arousal, as men can sometimes be, he realized that he had a subject, a labour of love that would give him purpose, that would make sense in the senseless academic world. He would not have to let his studies go to hell. He would be that luckiest of men: someone whose private obsessions and public life intersected.

In that fine frame of mind, he brought himself to a climax, which was, not coincidentally, a gusher of adolescent fury—such as he had not produced in a decade or more. Five, six, seven white spurts, thrown up into the air by the spasms in his scrotum, and spattering down again on his tanned belly; another three smaller spurts which pushed out of his cock-head and oozed down his fist. A last, thick spasm, and it was over. He threw his head back and lay there in the cool grass, looking up at the shifting canopy of leaves, at the calm sky between the leaves, and laughed to himself. How strange the world was; how perfectly, gloriously strange.

Unrequited

Six months after the men in army uniform appeared at the door, and told her he was dead, she still felt him there with her, sometimes. It was eerie. She’d be going about some perfectly ordinary business—washing cutlery, watering her cacti, feeding the cat—and she’d feel his breath against the back of her neck, or his hands slipping around her waist. Her heart would quicken. Sometimes a yelp would escape her.

Nor was this the worst of it. On several occasions her imagination took a more sexual turn, and she found herself remembering with uncanny accuracy the way he manipulated her when he wanted to get her into bed. The subtle rhythm of his hips against hers, his hands moving up her back to cradle her head, the way his mouth felt when he was speaking tender words against her neck.

She had learned, over the years, not to resist him; he could be vicious when he was denied what he wanted. It was easier, she’d discovered, simply to let him do what he wanted to do, though his tenderness invariably disappeared once he knew he had her where he wanted her.

He had not been a sophisticated lover, by any means. Nor, when she’d once tried to coax him into treating her with more delicacy, had he liked the implicit criticism. That night he’d been willfully brutish: he’d slapped the fat length of his erection against her labia like a teasing punishment. She’d been sore for a week.

So why, when he’d given her so little joy, did her body remember her dead soldier so well? Why did she find herself standing at the sink imagining his fingers tweaking her nipples, or reaching between her legs? It was pitiful. She didn’t need a man that much. Any man; but especially him.

Then the dream, one Saturday night. He was pursuing her through trees; the ground underfoot bright red, as if blood-soaked. He called after her in the darkness, but there was something wrong with his voice: it sounded curiously breathy, as though he were playing some kind of game to scare her.

At last, she could run no further. Down she went, on the wet earth, and he was upon her, picking her up in his arms.

What had he become, in this dream-wood? Something almost feline: pricked ears and whiskers, a wide horrid mouth. His skin was motley; smooth in places, furry in others, stained yellow and black and red.

Powerless to resist him, she did in the dream as she’d done in life, and let him have his way. He was strong. He lifted her up off the ground, and impaled her, letting her head drop back towards the bloody dirt. His tail lashed her buttocks; he fucked her like an animal.

There was no pleasure in it; nor pain either. She was simply his object for a time; a convenient hole for the night, or some part of the night. When he was done he let her go, and she dropped down into the muck. He stood over her for a moment, straddling her.

She saw the dwindling thing between his legs, and the emptied sac against which it hung. It was stranger to her, in that moment, than his reconfigured face; a cluster of alien forms, devoid of significance.

When she woke up, the cat was sitting at the bottom of the bed. She would not go near it for the next two days.

After that, things got worse. The “visitations”, as she’d come to think of them, became more frequent. And now they weren’t limited to the house. He came to find her in public places. She’d feel his hand slipping into hers as she walked along the street, or seem to sense his gaze on her as she paid for groceries at the supermarket. Once, alone in an elevator, he came crashing against her with such force that she was thrown to the ground; on another occasion she felt him driving his dry fingers into her anus, so hard that she cried out in pain.

She talked with only one or two people about what was happening to her. One of them, taking very seriously the idea that she might be haunted, asked her if she’d kept any of his belongings. Yes she had, she confessed. There were a few items of clothing she hadn’t been able to sort through yet. Do so, the friend suggested. The dead, left wandering, often use objects that they owned in life to orient themselves.

“Suppose I’m that object?” she said to him.

“Don’t be silly,” came the reply. “He didn’t own you.”

She went home, and strengthening herself against the duty with several stiff drinks, set to work.

There were three jackets, an old pair of pants, some shirts. She searched the pockets before she threw them away. There wasn’t much to find. Some ticket stubs, a few scraps of paper with numbers on them, and occasionally a name too; a key; some age-hardened candies. There was only one item over which she paused for a moment. An envelope, on which he’d written, in his familiar scrawl:

All global violence begins with unrequited love.

This wasn’t something he’d thought up; he’d never been so articulate. But plainly wherever he’d come by the quote, it had meant enough to him that he’d bothered to write it down.

She sat and cried. Old tears, floods of them, tears she should have cried months before, and hadn’t. Tears for herself, in part; that she’d wasted so much time on him, and was now alone again. Tears for the final dispatch of his clothes; the last things that smelled of him, that carried the dust of his skin in their weave, a drop of blood from his freshly shaved neck on the collar. And tears for him, thinking of his scrawling that preposterous quote on an envelope, as he tried, perhaps, to make sense of himself in the cruel pattern of things.

He didn’t come to her again. Perhaps it was the weeping that had exorcised him, perhaps it was the removal of his clothes. She didn’t much care about the how or why of it. He was gone, and that was all that mattered.

One night, however, perhaps a week after she’d thrown away the clothes, she dreamed again of the red wood. She was perfectly aware she was dreaming this time, perfectly in command of herself. There was no flight, no terror, no rape. She was walking, she thought, in a place that her soldier had created: some place of battle, where the dead had soaked the earth with their blood.

She waited for him, as though to test the fact of his exorcism. He did not come in any form.

When she woke the morning news was bad. The war in the East had begun again. She made a silent pact with herself: that she would never again fall in love with a man in a uniform. Or if she did she would requite him so well he would lose his appetite for soldiering.

Another Genesis

Eve precedes Eden. Contrary to Genesis, she is not knitted from a rib. The Book simply has no room for the truth, which is this: a wandering woman, out to see the world, comes to a walled garden with her love, a serpent, following behind.

In the spirit of the moment, she answers the call of the garden’s occupant, a lonely man, one Adam. They do the deed in the heat of the afternoon.

The serpent seethes. He is by nature monogamous, and had planned that from his union with this woman a race of things might rise more auspicious than either parent. Sleek, fearless children who could chance themselves against the sky, in time.

Now his dream is spoiled. He watches the lovers fuck and sleep, then sulks in an apple tree. There God sees him, and is inspired. Needing to justify His keeping Woman from this place, the Lord invents a story to frighten his creature when he wakes. Adam stirs, and God begins his lie. Outraged by what he hears, the serpent protests, but the Lord is swift. He whispers something, and the snake’s tongue is summarily slit.

Eve sees the thing she loved writhing in the grass, blood rushing from its mouth, and rails against the Lord. What kind of Creation is this, she demands to know, that condones such suffering? Adam joins in the complaint, and God—too proud to admit that this deception has outrun its purpose—drives them both out into the naked world.

The serpent follows, but, seeing that Eve cannot bear to look at him, takes another road, and winds away.

Death and begetting have begun.

Later, of course, she dreams of him. Usually when the moon brings blood. In the days of their courtship, the serpent would drink from her, she remembers, lifting his scaly head to nuzzle the place between her legs, and coax her flow into his pink throat. But what was once an idyll is now a terror. She teaches her children that she was once almost devoured by a snake. The generations will magnify her fear.

For his part, the serpent takes himself under a rock, and lives out an age celibate, believing, even at the last, that his lady will come and take him from his loneliness; that all will be healed between them.

When he hears from a locust, lately returned from decimating a crop, that Eve, the sower of that crop, is dead, he ties himself into a knot of grief, and suffocates.

Inside Out (Wasteland)

You can't know, man."

I supposed I couldn’t know; this one of many things, in an unknowable world. The longer the list becomes, the more there is to envy, the less there is to fear. What lies beyond us are experiences we might be destroyed by. Sometimes, within the same moment. As this, perhaps, this performance of miracle which I could only witness, as it were, from the outside.

Though he would be inside out, of course; so perhaps this is a variant of wonderland; the roles reversed. In and out interchangeable.

“You can’t know what it feels like.”

“Let me see.”

“Later maybe.”

I asked around. He wasn’t lying about what he could do. He was, depending on who you talked to, “A whore from way back,” “a nice guy with a beautiful butt,” “a very special fellow,” or simply, and this most tellingly, “That dude.”

He’d come up the hard way, by all accounts, been a thin, unloved man, who had found that his ass was especially accommodating. He could take whatever men wanted to give in the way of cocks and toys; then hands, then fists and arms; then two fists, then two fists and two arms.

Then—

“The rose.”

It had happened quite without warning, apparently. An astonishment, grotesque and beautiful. Lying in a bed one night, having taken all that anyone could give him, he’d simply flowered.

Later, came. He was a little high, but I was higher. Anxious, I suppose: to see something like this. I always loved the spectacle of the body, especially when it became outlandish. The milk-squirting tits of a black Mama in Chicago; the pussy that could pick up billiard balls; the man with one arm, who came if his stump was kissed.

He undressed completely. He lay on the bed.

“Touch me,” he said.

I rubbed his back. He told me my hands were cold. Then he got on all fours and began to play with his butt-hole. It wasn’t the first time it had been touched tonight, I guessed. But it was the first time tonight it had flowered. Inside out it went, bright red and wet, like something you’d see at the zoo. He asked me to kiss it. I said no. He laughed, and was still laughing when I left the room.

In my Art

I have but

one fear:

that we will

fail to be

fearless.

Aurora

Aurora is getting fucked in the dirt again, giving up her puppy-fat body to the boys who come looking for her every day, or every other day, to drive her out somewhere they won’t be seen, and do it to her. Sometimes it’s the beach, sometimes it’s a field, sometimes they don’t make it as far as the beach or a field but park the car in a darkened street, and do her in the back. They pile out of the car and take turns, the strongest first. By time the runt of the gang has fucked her, they’ve all smoked, had a beer, talked about what a whore she is, and they’re ready to start again.

So it goes on, maybe three rounds for everyone, and she just lies there while they come and go, the scabs on her nipples haven’t even healed from the last time they chewed on her. Sometimes they bleed. Sometimes she gets slapped around a little.

Aurora was her father’s princess, until she was twelve. But her father loved somebody more; a woman whose car he fixed. He went away with her, and never came back. Now she lets the boys come and take her out in the car, and when they bring her home (sometimes they dump her, and she has to walk), she sits in her room and thinks about her father coming to hold her, and rock her, and touch her the way he used to touch her. But she knows she will never see him again, and when she catches sight of herself in the mirror, she’s glad.

Whistling

in the Dark

The gynecologist only whistles when he touches her. She finds it suspicious that he’s so quietly professional when he talks to her, so scrubbed and intent as he puts on his gloves and invites her up onto the table, into the stirrups. Then when his fingers investigate her body, out of nowhere comes this breezy whistling, as though he’s out strolling with his dog.

On the advice of friends she changes gynecologists. But the silence of the next man is more troubling than the musical accompaniment, and after two visits to the silent one, she returns, not without a certain guilty pleasure, to the whistler’s stirrups.

The Common Flesh

From a common hole, both sister and brother came. The cock inflates from the fleshiness that describe its bounds. It is a perimeter, grown ambitious. The cunt knows itself at an earlier age; it fantasticates its forms, yes, but from the beginning it knows the wisdom of being ready to receive. The male, protruding, insistent, grows into a terrible containment, the island of his soul has a jetty like a prick, but he dare not allow anyone to land there.

Still, death comes to heal, at last. Unmakes the man and woman alike, and lets them fall into themselves, collapsing back into the space from which they were made.

Mr. Fred Coady

Professes His

Undying Love for

His Little Sylvia

Sure, I fell in love with her right then and there. There was no disguising it. A minute in her presence, I was her slave, and I stayed that way pretty much for the next thirty years. Even after she divorced me—all the terrible grief she gave me then—I still would have taken her back in a heartbeat.

“Why? I’ll tell you why. Because she was the most perfectly beautiful little piece of humanity I’d ever laid my eyes on, that’s why.

“It was strange at the beginning, sure. When we were courtin’, you know; it took some getting used to. She was this tiny creature, twenty-eight inches tall, and I was a lummox; six foot two in my bare feet. People used to look at the two of us together and they’d laugh, right in our faces. I got into more fights at the beginning…broken arms, cracked ribs. The thing was, she was such a peaceable soul, she hated to see me fightin’. So after I got my nose broken in Detroit, and I saw how upset she got about that, I promised I’d never fight again, and I pretty much kept my word on it.

“I kept my word about the sex too. Never had any problem being faithful. A one-woman guy. Thirty years of marriage—actually thirty-one—and I never once strayed. I don’t think Sylvia did either, until the last year or two. And then it was only because that bastard was such a fancy-talker. I was never much of a talker myself. I didn’t like the high life, either. I liked to sit home with her; maybe read a book, play with the kids.

“Sure, we had kids. The doctors said it’d be dangerous for her, but she wanted them so badly, and so did I, so we thought we’d give it a shot. She had four, easy as pie. They were all as big as her by the time they were in kindergarten.

“Now you’re wonderin’, aren’t you? Everybody does. Everybody wonders about our life in the sack, but nobody’s ever got the balls to ask me about it. Well seeing as I’m too drunk to care, and you bought the drinks, I’ll tell you. Remember me saying how my little Sylvia was perfect? Well she was. You saw her naked, it was like she stepped out of Playboy. She had nice titties. I could take ’em in my mouth whole, the whole thing, suck it up. She loved that. It was the same down there. She was perfect. I’d been with quite a few women before I got married, so I had something to compare her with. Let me tell you…she had the prettiest little cunt you ever saw. Pink and tight.

“At first, I was nervous of hurtin’ her. We used to laugh, ’cause my dick, when I’m really hard, is nine and a half inches. That’s a third of her height. But she liked to fuck. Oh yessir. She liked it more than any other woman I ever met. And she wouldn’t put up with no excuses. Any time of the day or night, she’d just get naked, and waggle her tits at me. I’d lie down and she’d sit on it.

“I was amazed at first, but she took almost all of it in her, as long as she was nice and wet. Oh, it was nice, having her on my lap like that. She couldn’t suck me, of course. Her mouth was too small. But she used to like to lick the head, and she would make me bust a nut doin’ that. Then she’d drink it all up. Better than a steak, she’d say. She didn’t have no shame about what she liked…

“So that was my little Sylvia. She was a miracle. Really, she was. A miracle.

“When she left me, I married again. Just to fill the void, really. Stupid. Her name was Lorraine, and she was five foot six. It didn’t work, of course, I felt oppressed. You can’t sit an ordinary woman in the crook of your arm, you know? It’s just not the same.

“That lasted about a year. Then we decided to call it quits. No hard feelings. It just wasn’t working. I went off to Toledo, looking for Sylvia, because that was where I’d heard she was living.

“I arrived on a Sunday. She died on the Monday night. So I got there just in time, really. I thank God for that. She’d got cancer. She was riddled with it. Lungs, throat, brain. She was in a coma when I got to the hospital. They said to me: it’s no use talking to her, she’s too far gone, she doesn’t know you’re here. But she knew. I held her hand, and told her I loved her, and that I’d see her on the other side. We’d talked a lot about that over the years. We were both believers. We had faith, you know, we’d see each other again in Heaven.

“When she died I was alone with her. I picked her up—oh, she was so tiny—and I held her for a long time. I called her all those names, you know, those names you only use between the two of you. My little itsy-bitsy, my darlin’ doll. Skittibop. I used to call her Skittibop. I don’t know where that came from.

“She’s buried in Toledo. I’ve been back there two or three times since she passed, but I don’t think I’ll go again. It’s a long trip for an old man. Anyway, she’s not there, is she? She’s in heaven, waiting for me.

“You know what I wonder? You’re going to think I’m dumb, but…what the hell, I’ve told you everything else. When I see her in heaven, is she still going to be my little Sylvia, or are we all goin’ to be the same size? I mean, she had a soul—let me tell you, that woman had a soul—bigger than yours and mine put together. So…maybe if we’re all souls up there I’m going to be the little one, huh? I’m going to be sitting in the crook of her arm. That’d be nice, sittin’ in the crook of her arm. That’d be perfect.”

The Phone Call

Why did you smile?"

“When?”

“When I was talking to you: why did you smile?”

“Christ, you call me up in the middle of the night—”

“It’s eleven-thirty.”

“I go to bed early.”

“Oh, did I wake you?”

“No.”

“But you’re ready for bed?”

“I don’t see what business that is of yours, professor.”

“Call me Chuck. Are you dressed for bed?” His voice dropped an octave as he asked her this.

“As it happens, yes,” she said, her voice betraying some of the astonishment she felt that she’d answered such an impertinent question. She already knew what he was going to say next.

“What are you wearing?”

“Is this a dirty phone call…”

“Hank,” he prompted.

“…Hank?”

“Why? Do you want it to be?”

“Is it?”

“Why did you smile?”

“When?”

“When I was talking about phallic symbols.”

“Oh. Because of something you said.”

“What?”

“Rocket ship.”

“What’s funny about that?”

“It’s a child’s word. Rocket Ship. I don’t think you’re a very worldly man, and that amused me.”

“I’m not a child.”

“I realize that.”

“No, really. I’m not a child. Just because I use a word that doesn’t seem very sophisticated, I…”

“You’re not a child. I understand.”

“So. What are you wearing?”

“My robe.”

“Silk?”

“Terrycloth.”

“And underneath?”

“Nothing.”

“You sleep naked. You don’t seem like the type.”

“There’s a type?”

“Of women who sleep naked? Yes.”

“You speak from long experience.”

He was silent a moment. “I’ve known…plenty of women, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“And there’s a type, of woman you’ve known, who sleeps naked.”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t seem like that type?”

“No.”

“I seem…more uptight?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“But that’s what you mean. And you misread me. I’m not uptight at all. It’s just that I don’t know how Douglas likes his people to present themselves, and it’s a good job, which I don’t want to lose.”

“I see.”

“So, goodnight, Hank.”

“Wait—”

“I’m tired.”

“Just a minute more.”

“—and I’ve got an early—”

“One minute. That’s all. One.”

“What then?”

There was a silence.

“You have a minute. You’re wasting it.” The silence went on. “Say whatever’s on your mind.”

“Well… I’d like you to do something for me.”

“Oh.”

“I’d like you to touch yourself. Down between your legs. Put your finger deep inside yourself.” Another silence. “Give yourself pleasure. Will you do that for me?”

Now it was she who was silent for a time. Then she said: “What makes you think I’m not doing that already?” and put down the phone.

The Multitude

He felt the insects all over him: his shaft, the head, the slit of his head, his balls, his perineum, down between the crack of his buttocks, seething over his asshole. The whole region of his groin was alive, his cock a solid column of beetles.

He was, needless to say, hard as an unmilked adolescent, and he looked down at himself with a kind of horrified amazement; to see his cock so much larger than it had even been before. Like a hallucination of himself, wild and beautiful to look at.

The sensation? It was as if the area had been skinned, and every nerve was exposed, every barbed leg, every carapace, every antennae that moved against him was a new point of stimulation. He didn’t move. He just stayed there on the floor facing the cracked wall, while the flood of creatures out of the hole continued.

Some were spreading out across his thighs now and up over his belly. Every once in a while—though in fact very rarely, given the sheer number of insects—one would bite him. The small sharp pain only added to his pleasure. By degrees, the number of bites grew; this he supposed was because of the numbers of insects. They were fighting against themselves, he could see, and the plainest causality of their argument was the territory they were fighting over, which was to say, his genitals, his thighs, his belly, his asshole.

In fact, there were territorial wars breaking out now; factions forming, there before him. He was in a kind of elevated place, as he viewed this, being both the contested ground and as if he were a god watching from a high vantage point the vagaries of battle.

His body was shaking with pleasure, an experience he was not very familiar with. Pleasure had never come in great abundance to him. He assumed that he simply wasn’t wired for it in the way others were. Now he knew that was wrong. There was nothing that his body needed but the right form of stimulation, and by God he’d found it. He liked the bites around his cock-head the best; they were what made him afraid he was simply going to lose control and come. What a waste that would be! He wanted this to go on for hours; he had nothing to do; just lie back and be pleasured by the multitude.

A monster lies in wait in me,

A stew of wounds and misery,

But fiercer still in life and limb,

The me that lies in wait in him.

An Incident

at the Nunnery

Having broken down the convent door with hammers, the four men went in search of Sister Barbara, complaining that her exhortations to heaven had kept them up at night, and that they were sick to death of her railing against the pleasures of the flesh. The leader of this quartet was a handsome fellow, dressed in grey, his close companion a brute of a man, more monster than human, who kept the nuns at bay with casual swipes of his hand.

Sister Barbara, it should be explained, had seen a vision of Christ the previous spring, and had, at His instruction, retreated to the convent’s bell tower. There she had been exposed to the fierce heat of the summer days, and to the bitter cold of the nights. But despite her suffering, she had kept a ceaseless vigil, inspired to spread (by means of shouted prayers and warnings) the word of the Lord. She could see much from her tower that appalled her. Fornication in the orchard; lewd dancing on the hill; a company of raucous clowns in the town square. Oh, the horrors that would come of this, she warned. The earth would shake, and gape like the very maw of Hell. The sinners would be swallowed up, the fornicators and the dancers and the clowns, swallowed.

She was still preaching in this very manner when she was brought down by the men, and carried out into the orchard. Occasionally she bit and kicked her abductors, drawing blood and blackening eyes.

But they weren’t about to let her go. Out between the trees they took her, despite the Mother Abbess begging that the woman not be harmed.

“We’ve had all we can take of your Sister Barbara,” said the man in grey, handing his portion of the struggling nun over to his brutish partner so as to address the Mother. “We’re going to put an end to her din.”

The Mother Abbess, who was an old and saintly woman, went down on her knees and caught hold of the man’s foot. The Sisters were quite appalled at the spectacle; several hid their eyes, certain they were about to see the beloved Abbess martyred.

“Sir,” the Mother Abbess said, “I am an old woman. I like my peace and quiet. And I will confess that sometimes I’ve wondered why God has chosen to make Sister Barbara so…voluble. But sir, her prayers were inspired by a vision of Christ.”

At the mention of Christ, the man dropped down on his haunches, and caught hold of the Mother Abbess. One of the nuns fainted in terror.

“Good lady,” said the man in grey, “I’ve heard all about Sister Barbara’s vision. She’s given us chapter and verse, night after night, about the loveliness of Christ. About how He pierced her breast with his gaze. How He parted her lips and filled her mouth with inspiration. I know it all.” He started to lift the Mother Abbess to her feet. “And I never want to hear another word.”

Then, to the astonishment of all, he laid his rough face against the Mother Abbess’ lavender cheek, and kissed her. “Please…” he said. “Take your novices into the chapel, and if it soothes your souls, pray. I have business to do with Sister Barbara.”

“Oh, you terrible man,” the Mother Abbess said. “You cannot imagine the agonies you will suffer for this.”

“If it’s any worse than being preached to by that poor demented bitch,” the man said, “I’ll be very surprised. Now go. All of you! Shoo!”

The women retreated. A few went into the chapel, and knelt down to pray, exhorted by Sister Ignatius to raise their voices so that poor Barbara might hear them as she went to her death. But there were several other nuns—mostly women who’d been close to Barbara before her vision—who went to peepholes in the walls to see what befell the Sister. It looked likely to be more horrible than even the most morbid of them had suspected. There, under the cherry trees, the men had made a little fire, and were heating a pot on it.

“Liquid lead,” said one of the women. “They mean to make her drink liquid lead.”

“I think it’s sulphur,” said another of the sisters. “They mean to burn out her eyes.”

But the Mother Abbess told them to shush their nonsense. “I don’t smell lead or sulphur,” she said. “I smell molasses.”

Sister Barbara was still praying, very loudly, and she continued to do so while the men stripped her. The watching women were all in their secret heavens waiting for the next phase of this drama: the moment when the four men unbuttoned themselves.

Naked now, but still struggling, still ranting, Sister Barbara was laid on the ground. Then her legs were lifted into the air, and parted. The witnesses waited, with baited breaths. Sister Barbara’s violators pressed her thighs down against her body, bending her double and exposing her intimate parts to their scrutiny. In the cherry trees, the birds sang blithely, indifferent to the atrocity occurring beneath them.

The man in grey now instructed one of his thugs to bring the pot from the fire. He had it set down beside the struggling nun. Then, from a bag laid nearby, he had another of them bring a large ladle. Before he took it, he put his fingers into the pot. Either what it contained was merely warm, or else he was immune to suffering, because he did not pull his fingers out, but rather twirled them around, like a cook making certain the soup was properly stirred. Then he took the ladle from his companion, and dipped it into the pot.

Every witness held her breath. Perhaps even now God would intervene. Lightning out of a clear sky, to strike the monster down; or the earth gaping, as Sister Barbara had warned it would.

But no; nothing. The ladle was dipped in the pot, and conveyed between Sister Barbara’s spread thighs.

The poor martyred woman was held too fast to move an inch. All she could do was pray, and that so loudly the birds were drowned out.

The man in grey upended the ladle, and a slow rivulet of dark, glutinous fluid ran into the gaping cleft of Sister Barbara’s body.

Her prayers faltered. Her violator emptied the ladle. Then he returned it to the pot, dipped again, and again raised it, gazing down at his victim as he did so. The contents of the ladle were once more emptied into the woman’s body. Her prayers had faded entirely now. And her struggles, such as were visible, had ceased. The men were no longer struggling to hold her in place.

A third ladleful of whatever the pot held was poured into her. This time the man in grey was more playful, drizzling the contents of the ladle over her thighs as a child might drizzle honey on bread. Through their spy holes, the women knew that something uncanny had happened, because a moan escaped the throat of Sister Barbara; a soft and lovely sound.

The man now tossed his ladle aside, and stood up. He must have given some instruction to the others, because they let go of their captive, and stood back. Sister Barbara didn’t move. She simply remained in the position in which they’d held her, legs spread. Once the men had retreated, it was possible for the witnesses to see the state of her body. The place between her thighs—that most secret place which had been so cruelly uncovered – was like a wide-necked jug.

Three ladlefuls of glistening stuff were brimming there, the excess running down the cleft of her buttocks.

“I think we’ve seen quite enough,” the Mother Abbess said, in her severest tones. The women left off their witnessing, and went into the chapel, to join the others. There were prayers, hymns, and some self-flagellation from the ever-devout Sister Ignatius.

Perhaps an hour later, Sister Barbara returned from the orchard. She’d left her habit, or the torn remains of it, on the ground; she was quite naked. She was also completely silent, her gaze slow, her lips not very far from smiling. The Mother Abbess instructed that three of the sisters take her into the washhouse and scrub her thoroughly. This was done, though all three later reported that their efforts were uncalled for. There was not a single drop of the fluid that had been used to silence Sister Barbara on her body. Nor in it, either, for by the instruction of Mother Abbess her intimate parts were examined for any harm that might have been done to them. Sister Barbara conceded to the examination without a murmur, only remarking, in a dreamy fashion, that there was nothing to find. She’s been licked clean, she said.

Need it be said that she did not return to the bell tower? She lived instead a quietly meditative life, in the convent. But the following spring she forsook her vows and went out into the world. She was never seen again.

Nor were the four men who’d abducted her, though on her deathbed the Mother Abbess confessed that she’d known the man in grey somewhat, in her youth. He came out of the infernal place, she said, to tempt the souls of innocent women. He had a tooth too sweet for this bitter world; aye, and a tongue, too.

Her confessor was astonished to hear this remark.

What do you know of this creature’s tongue? he had asked the Mother Abbess. But the good woman had passed away, her hand touching the place on her cheek where once she’d been kissed.

The Genius

of Denny Dan

One conversation with Denny, who is the closest I know to a true, I would even say sublimely, perverted man, and nothing in the world is safe to be viewed, smelled, or touched. Everything has now some sexual quality, some sexual possibility. He has at some point in his life, put the most convenient of objects of the world, at least those without a pulse, to use. Obviously the clothespins, the rubber boots, the dog leash, the garden hose. But the cornflakes? A copy of the Complete Works of Racine?

The first time I met Denny, he was deep in a conversation with a member of the Medical Faculty about how long a cucumber should be cooked before it was used for anal stimulation. I take that back, it was not a conversation. Denny was seeking an opinion from this poor man, who was simply staring at him in mute panic, while Denny supplied both sides of the debate. “If it’s overcooked it goes too much, doesn’t it? And your ass-muscles don’t have anything to grip onto. Do you think that’s bad for the ass? I mean, it’s not much fun. But you think it does any damage? I mean, I know if it’s not cooked well enough you can do yourself some harm. I mean, particularly if you’re really ambitious, you know? Ideally, I suppose it’s al dente, like spaghetti: Just crisp enough to have something to bite down on, but soft enough to give you a nice slithery feeling.”

I, like the faculty member, was listening to this in a kind of trance. When the fellow left—I should say, retreated—I asked Denny if he’d done all that deliberately. To which Denny replied—without, I swear, a trace of irony:

“Did all what?”

There was nothing he wouldn’t talk about, nothing he wouldn’t try. He loved women, and thoroughly enjoyed fucking them, though not, he said, as much as he enjoyed fucking, or being fucked by, men. “With women,” he opined, “you’re more likely to end sort of having to be a man. Most women don’t want you to be anything.”

I vaguely saw where this was going, but I knew I didn’t have to worry. Denny was going to cross every “t” and dot every “i” for me. “With a man, though, you don’t know do you? I mean, you could end up drilling his arse and spitting in his face—which I do love—or be flat on your back with your fanny doing an interpretation of a goldfish. I mean…it’s all on the cards, isn’t it? Well, I suppose it isn’t with you. You don’t like getting fucked, do you?”

“I…I never tried it.”

“I know,” he said, suddenly almost paternal, “it’s a primal thing. Shit. And you think at first, oh that’s disgusting. But you know what?”

“What?”

“It is. But it’s wonderful. So you get over the disgusting part and you thank God that he put a hole down there.”

“Is there anything you won’t do?”

“Well, yes. I mean…children and the dead.”

“Animals?”

“Probably.”

“Probably yes or probably no.”

“Probably probably.”

But as I said, his gift, his genius perhaps, was this eroticizing capacity. When you’d been talking with Denny for a little while everything seemed to take on new meaning, and that’s a rare skill. To be able to make somebody think about the world in a completely different way; that’s very rare. Of course that wasn’t his intention. He was just looking for things that would stimulate him. Nowadays (this was twenty years ago) he’d probably be diagnosed with a case of sex addiction, and be in counseling and on medication. But back then people didn’t know what to do with him. He was simply, notoriously, himself. A force not of nature, but of glorious unnaturalness.

His other great love was history, which he taught for a while at Oxford before being obliged to leave after an unfortunate incident in which he’d passed out while giving an address to an assembly of visiting professors, and was discovered when his tie was loosened and his shirt unbuttoned, to be wearing a rubber French maid’s outfit under his tweeds. It had been a little too tight, and he’d fainted. He never understood why the authorities at Oxford had made such a song and dance about it.

“They’re all hypocrites,” he said, and would offer chapter and verse on the peccadilloes of some of his fellow lecturers, including a very leftist professor who, according to Denny, could not get an erection unless he was being beaten by a girl in an S.S. uniform. “And this man starts pontificating about my little experiment in rubber as though he was the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s not very much I find obscene, but that…that I find obscene.”

“Why didn’t you blow the whistle on him?”

“Because I’m not going to start that kind of mudslinging, it’s petty. Anyway, I’m glad I’m out. I’m going to Paris and write my book and to hell with Oxford.”

He knew Foucault, a little; and admired him. Long before Foucault really came out, Denny was predicting it. “You’ve got to have the courage of your perversions,” he’d say. “Once you’ve made it all public—once everybody knows the worst you’ve ever done—they’ve got nothing over you. You’re free. You can get on with living. No shame. No apologies.”

This was the closest he ever got to a philosophy. I often wonder how much influence he had on Foucault, who found so much inspiration in his journey into the light. All that stuff about the honesty of the bathhouse, the revelation of the sling and the ecstasies of the submissive; that sounds like it might have been seeded by Denny.

Foucault, of course, died of the plague. Denny survived it, which is startling, given his prodigious appetite for experiment, but that’s what happened. He abandoned his book after eleven drafts, because he said the story kept changing, which may seem odd for a history book; but it was Denny’s history, and that, inevitably, was a law unto itself. Like Denny’s kitchen, like Denny’s world. It was a moveable feat.

He moved to India in the early nineties, to study under a Tantric master. He was probably sixty when he went. We never heard from him again, which he told us all—his friends, I mean—we should take as a very good sign, if it happened.

“It means I’ve achieved some kind of perfectly blissful continuous orgasm, and can’t remember who the hell I am.”

There was one game he had that now and again I still remember, and when I do—whatever the circumstances—I invariably end up playing it. You don’t need another player. You don’t need to speak, or even move. You just sit and look at the room you’re in and wonder what you would do with the objects in that room to get sexual pleasure. The less promising the object, of course, the more satisfying it is when you work out some way to put it to erotic purpose. In this game, there are no limitations on the nature of the activity. It can be any shade of perversion: bondage, flagellation, old-fashioned masochism. Just as long as you’re a little more awake to the world when you finish than when you started, then you won. It’s even more fun if you say what you’re thinking out loud, but we can’t all be Denny Dan.