Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “Let’s kill them all then, right now, you and me, come on, I’ll take the,” Nathan’s joking around was cut off.

  “Goddammit,” the Governor burst out with, then caught himself as he could feel the crowds’ eyes rotate and bob toward him like a globe compass shoehorned in the skull of some piratical trophy-kill both eyeing and genuflecting to the captain of the black ship as he pounded his map desk; the hull and ballast both moved by direction of the helmsman, or maybe the wind and a wave.

  “Dammit,” the Governor said, this time he removed the ‘God’ from the insult and lowered his voice, “I have spent my life over-reacting and therefore preparing for the eventual evil that has only, merely, a 1% chance of happening; and I can assure you that if we don’t catch these brigands up in our mountains, these media and judicial carrion eaters will be on my liver each morning anew, until the election next year.”

  He would not run next year, in 2038, as he was already in his second set of two 4-year terms -separated in 2026 to 2030 e.v. by that idiot Polis- but he wanted to place his Lieutenant Governor in his stead, seamlessly, he thought. Continuity was everything, he thought.

  The executive was still pointing at his guests with his hand and champagne flute outstretched like a statue of Columbus or Nathan Bedford Forrest marking both the way, and the obstacles in the fore.

  “I follow orders, and I do it with bravura even a little élan vital , but sir, I must resist -as you should- the temptation to micro-manage our assets in the field. These are capable men, they can handle this. Let them do their job and you continue to do yours, and -if this is not too forward of me to say- let me do mine. Now, did you want to meet Miss Ranchettal?” Nathan’s sentence ended like a foot fall.

  The Governor feigned confusion, as if he did not know exactly who Nathan meant by this parlor trick of asking who the Governor had meant when the inquiry first came out and now blithely announcing that he in fact knew her name. But the executive dropped the charade and said, “no,” and walked straight toward her leaving Nathan drinking his champagne .

  His girls, of whom he had been thinking all night, were taking turns mingling with guests and decompressing upstairs in their quarters. Harrissa was looking lithe and awkward in her long dress and her skin was ruddy and over-powdered to hide the blemishes that came from her use of methamphetamine and birth control pills. Rachel was upstairs in her black skirt with black boots and knee highs that left four inches between her socks and the hem of her dress. She had black bangs and black eyes and she too was heavily make-uped to hide a complexion rough -from Lyme disease she had insisted- as she sat in front of her mirror.

  Harrissa bragged about her beau , overtly and girlishly and almost sincerely as she truly did find him the most sexy and brilliant of men. But, she had this other side that barely waited for the first side to turn away in order to show itself; she could be said to contain both sides on one side of the coin.

  She was like a person with no memory of who she was before a new mood hit her, she had no history within her own mind. This made for a labile and mercurial woman, which might explain why she was willing to be one of two girls in love -publicly- with the Governor of the state of Colorado. Not that this was what he was when she fell in love with him, back then he was a business man, an entrepreneur of some sort she had gleaned from their conversations 20 years ago when she was just 20 and standing 5 feet 3 inches tall, a full 11 inches below his brow.

  She had been to his lab, but she had the feeling that he gave her the nickel tour, not the one the people he thought smart might get.

  He brayed about being honest, but he hid more things than a family of squirrel in autumn , she had thought; and she had only one way to get even with that kind of thing in that kind of man. He was too large, rich and smart; but she could be pretty and alluring and small, and thus she would have any man she wanted. Not that she wanted these other men, I mean they were handsome enough and all that, but what she wanted was him, for herself . And since she couldn’t have that, she wanted the next best thing; the thing any man could relate to, the thing Nietzsche, she thought, had said was for women alone: revenge.

  She loved it when he read to them, her and Rachel in bed, as she grew sleepy and ideas moved in and around her head. She did not always mind Rachel’s presence, she liked the bounty of love it brought. She was cloyed on it, a surfeit of amorous and paternal love both; he was - she admitted- too much man for merely one girl. She rebuked herself for being both insufficient for him and for being too selfish to allow him what he needed without this hidden, and not so hidden, pique.

  When the campaign had started, they had all sat down and talked and he had said that if she couldn’t handle the pressure, the invigilation -god, she thought, she loved that word , the words he used made her giggle with pleasure, the way a girl will laugh as new tastes swarm on the tongue, new smells thread like straight laces up the nose and into the brain- but he had said that if they couldn’t handle the circus he would understand and drop the bid.

  God, she hated niggers , she then thought, like a breeze out of nowhere or someone flicking on a light when one is asleep. She had been lost in thought when she had just seen one in the mansion with his funny glasses, round like that cartoon rat, trying to act like he was civilized, she thought; and just then her inamorato arrived and clasped her by the shoulder like a big alpha chimpanzee.

  She was smiling at some woman who was talking and felt the paw on her smooth, bare shoulder and knew it was his; who else would have the temerity to touch the Governor’s girl , one of his girls as he always said -in public and in interviews and the like, much to the consternation of big alpha gals on TV and the muted glee of small women watching at home and to the labored breathing of men everywhere- who but he would have the balls to touch one of his girls on the shoulder in public? she thought with pride.

  She turned and smiled and then returned to the woman -looking her in the eye too much- revealing a kind of oddness to her insincerity, the kind that almost tricks us all into thinking she’s rapt, overwhelmed with awe and fealty and passion for which ever one of us is in her menagerie, her snow globe she rattles and lets settle in waves.

  There was one, maybe two, ways to get even with Boyd Sou, the CEO of Praxis LLC and Governor of Colorado in 2037. He could not be beat up or killed, he was too tough and too heavily guarded for that; too paranoid, even, especially, on the lookout for plots within the palace. He couldn’t be made poor, fired from some job, and she couldn’t take away any of his friends, as he had none. His employees were loyal due to the work they were doing, they found it so interesting, she had surmised, that they couldn’t work anywhere else, and of course, he paid them more than anywhere else; so they had their cake and could eat it too.

  No, he was vulnerable the only way an alpha male is vulnerable: his reputation and what a cuckolding would do to it.

  She could have her cock and eat it too, too , she thought with a grin, turning back to him as he stood behind her with that big ape hand on her, his capacious chest, hemmed in by his bespoke linen suit, backing her like some wall along the southern border that the politicians were finally starting to build. Jesus, she thought, this city -more than most- was like a piñata that had burst and wetbacks were showering the lawn like Tootsie Rolls and Cheeba Chews . She smiled again at her own metaphors. She had eaten two of the edibles an hour before the party and between them and the Adderall, she was stoned and tweeking like some motorhead and pothead combined on one side of an all-head coin.

  Her pussy was still wet from the pounding he had given the two of them, ass to ass, each girl on all fours, on the executive bed, a half hour before they all needed to get dressed. She and Rachel had showered together; he had remodeled the bathroom immediately after being elected, and now it was large enough -he had taken space from the bedroom- to contain a shower 5 by 5 by 5. All three of them could fit, but he usually just watched as they splashed around like little baby chimps and he smiled so big it seemed -to her- li
ke it was maybe one of the two things in the entire cosmos that was real.

  In fact, she now noticed, she was sore; he had no flexibility in that part of him that was for sure , she thought; not that he had much give or take anywhere in him, she appended to her initial idea.

  He was the kind of man a woman wanted when she was ovulating; masculine and mean and made up of DNA you wanted for your son no matter the costs. But the pill had made men such as he more and more rare. She had read the statistics on testosterone and the birth control pill and that no girls ovulated hardly at all any more , she mused.

  She adjust her legs and hips to try to relieve some of the soreness of her abused little thing. She watched her conversation partner’s face move slightly in sympathy with her it seemed. Harrissa could manipulate people so easily, she barely noticed the results.

  Nobody ever talks about pussy size, she thought, it’s always dick size . It’s just one of the ways girls get away with and benefit from this disproportionate treatment between the sexes.

  Girls with average or large pussies -and this was most girls- were totally let off the hook; they never had to answer for it, it never came up in scientific studies, or jokes or genuine discussions of relative merits, the germane merit, of girls. A guy had to deal with it incessantly, from his own mind and the mind of others, it was instantiated in the science of sex , she marveled at this hypocrisy.

  Nobody measured pussy size, not Kinsley or anyone. And yet it was just as valid a discussion as penis size , she thought; she winced a bit now as her own uterine walls ached, and her clit and labia still swollen, pushed uncomfortably against their tiny underwear. At least it is cotton, she told herself, a rayon or some other poly blend would be killing me about now .

  Of course, she admitted, she thought it was a useful and fair metric because she was small down there, small everywhere . Like Boyd said, you watch , the smart man thinks intelligence is most important, but the strong man thinks the smart man -if he’s smart- better watch out .

  She giggled, as she thought of his aphorisms, he was so clever , and his stories could keep her enthralled for hours and hours; she would forget about her anger and those other men -the brutes and mere boys- and she could genuinely love her man; he also made additions and additions inside her heart and her lungs and her head.

  Plus, she insisted, she was prettier than Rachel, although Rachel photographed better than her . What was that quality ? she mused. How can a person objectively less attractive look better in a photograph which was ostensibly -she had just learned that word from Boyd- in which ostensibly , she continued, the camera was objective itself ?

  She shrugged, thinking of it, and Boyd let his hand rise and fall on this movement of her shoulder and stared and listened to this woman Harrissa was speaking with, or rather listening to, and wondered if maybe that slight rise & fall was a sign that she wanted him off of her. He never liked to force himself on women, and this often made him more deferential than they wanted. He had failed to notice that women like being manhandled more than just when it is approved of or asked for explicitly. They want it rough often when they say they do not, despite the PC propaganda of the feminist Left, she thought. But to come out and say they want it that way is to ruin it; the whole point is that it is both taboo and a surprise. Women wanted subtlety, and men wanted to be told. But to tell a man you want subtly is to miss the whole point, she lamented in her head.

  Although, she countered as she turned back to one thought previous, Boyd takes wonderful photos of me, I look as I truly do when he is in charge of the lens. Rachel has professionals photograph her; this is different entirely . She thought of Rachel upstairs pouting, with resting bitch face as usual, and wondered if her little pussy was sore too. She liked licking it, Rachel had great Ph , Harrissa thought; this was another thing that girls were oblivious to. Their bodies had a natural Ph, and this affected the taste of their feminine juices. Rachel with her odd vegan diet -how Boyd put up with that was one of God’s three great mysteries- had made her taste like candy though ; Harrissa could lap that up for hours and thus easily ignore the scowl on Rachel’s face.

  “I have a sweet tooth,” she said -all-of-a-sudden- aloud and in a burst, as the conversation had to make room for such a non-sequitur . The woman paused and nodded and then finished her own sentence.

  There is something, she thought now, about have your man inside of you while your tongue is inside his other girlfriend, it’s like some circuit you were both never meant to complete and yet were also somehow meant to comprehend . It felt natural and taboo -and not sexually taboo as the prudes would envision- but taboo in the sense that if not for one’s own body, Harrissa’s body, the look that must pass between Rachel and Boyd, as they stared at each other from either side of Harrissa, would not be possible; that this look was energized, powered, completed by the fuse that was her in between was what made it all so odd.

  Her pussy on him, her tongue in Rachel’s sweet pink, and their -Boyd’s and Rachel’s- eyes like two klieg lights pointed at each other over Harrissa’s back like the Nuremburg rallies with all that pagan malice and pride and ancient yet most-modern power. The circuit was what interested her, she thought, not just one or another side of the equations that people liked to solve for some integer .

  Hitler was not some integer, he was one function in an equation that included the Jew, the German public and each of them as individuals -both corrupt and righteous- and inside a larger logarithm of phenomena that nobody, and she thought, nobody, wanted to admit to. That she had just thought of the Fuhrer looming above their ménage et trois was not seen as odd at all by her. She thought laterally, and the equator of this earth was long and Germany and France did share a border, she thought.

  She had read on some website connected with the guy Boyd had -well, what would you say Boyd had done to or for this man? Well, anyway, that guy, the one who had killed all those people, he had -according to the newspapers- been involved with some cult back in the day . So, she had googled Zendik and found all manner of things buried out there in the hinterlands of the public discourse. And these Zendik’s believed that the Jews had been psychically asking for it; and Harrissa, despite her lack of animus toward Jews, had found the idea plausible at least.

  She then imagined there was a map on her back, her spine, revealed by her lack of body fat, like the continental divide. Maybe each of them -her beau and his & her own lover, she thought- each took one side, he the Western slope, Miss Rachel the East, and they scoured it for signs of Blax’s Jacks .

  Boyd was obsessed, and she had no doubt that he enlisted her black magick to help locate and destroy this group of piratical bastards -his phrase- and if sexual congress was the only way to effect this, then he’d gladly go over the legislative branch’s head and solve the problem himself by any means necessary. She liked the idea of such things being done to and by her here in the city while feral animals were caught in traps up and out in the mountains and forest.

  She liked the idea of helping him catch them; at least partly because she wanted to see this madman Blax and his Jacks, she imagined them all wild and strange and with flames in their eye sockets and snow on their brows, precariously balanced, in danger of snuffing those fires out. She could see big black birds flying up there, she could see trees as tall as buildings, and she thought now of riding on the back of his motorcycle downtown, the skyscrapers looming, so large, their lights -distributed above her randomly- that almost made up for the absence of stars in the Ciudad’s sky.

  They rode so fast and aggressively, he jammed that bike through the streets and between cars as the protective detail tried to keep up in their black SUVs. She would grin at them if they pulled up beside them at a light; their only luck in catching up. Boyd ignored them, but she smiled and smiled at them as if this was all a big game. Of course, it was, but nobody thought that but her. They in their suits and armored cars and holstered .40 cals and carbines and body armor in back with the GSDs, and Boyd in his missi
on to be free of their tailing with his own .45acp on his hip and his insides all sloshing around.

  The civilians in cars had to suffer like all civilians do in wars between martial and serious men. But modern first-world civilians suffer in their own little way. They had their banal commutes interrupted for reasons that seemed -and were- both unnatural and unjust. The police and secret service had tools to change lights from red to green and the reverse, so cars would get a green light and just begin lazily only to have one of the SUVs trip their little machines and the light would go red; the civilians, incredulous, would stop and their hands would go up in what might look -to the uninitiated- like an offering of prayer.

  But it was invariably a curse the public man uttered in their cages; a blind curse to the gods of modern society; the exact opposite of the gods that might have once listened or be open to propitiations and offerings of offal and small children with heads half shorn of their hair.

  Harrissa laughed when they did this, now that she understood what was happening. She was confused for many months about this fact that their lights always seemed green, and the perpendicular traffic incessantly sitting at an aggravating halt. She first suspected God, she was a natural observer of patterns, like all women and children, but her man was a scientist and rationalist and so she had to at least entertain the notion that there was a rational explanation for it. And this time, there was: it was this little box -given to ambulance drivers and cops- that they all had that could commandeer the hue of the traffic lights.

  She was amazed as if someone had shown her the device that could make a young girl’s dog come back to life; or snuff out -and make disappear- her hated brother’s hated friend who leered at her when she was just 10 years old in a manner she did not -100%- enjoy.