The Minotauress

by Edward Lee

  "I couldn't hazard a speculation," the Writer said, "but I would like a carton of generic lights."

  "Fuck! You could at least buy Marlboros... "

  When the old crank rang up the purchase, the Writer handed him the $100 bill from the Rolls Royce guy.

  "Do I look like the fuckin' U.S. Treasury? I cain't break that!"

  Now the Writer fumbled with his ankle-wallet, and put down a twenty.

  "Shee-it." The proprietor slapped the change down on the counter.

  The Writer sighed. I come in here every week... He slid two quarters over. "And a bag, please."

  "Jesus! One dollar!"

  The Writer winced but paid nonetheless. "Have a pleasant evening."

  "A pleasant evening? You shittin' me? My hemorrhoids itch so bad I could run a fuckin' cactus through my crack!"

  The Writer took long strides out of the store, just as a half-dozen Hispanics entered. The old man could be heard in the background even after the door closed. "What is this? The fuckin' Alamo?"

  The Writer contemplated Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as he walked back to the Gilman House. How clever of the Mississippi Nobel Prize winner to title his novel from a line in Shakespeare's Macbeth. The Writer recited the ironic lines with each step back to the whorehouse: Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...

  Indeed, the "idiot's" view of the world proved the most truthful...

  The previous chorus of crickets was absent now, leaving dead-silence to hover through the night. At the front drive, he noticed Mrs. Gilman's mailbox hanging open; three long boxes were inside along with several envelopes. He gathered it all up and went inside.

  "Well, hey there, Mr. Writer!" greeted—if a bit loudly—Mrs. Gilman behind the check-in desk. "How was your nightly walk?" but naturally she pronounced the word nightly as "nat-lee."

  ""It was wonderful, Mrs. Gilman... "

  Three chunky prostitutes in lingerie stood up at the desk as well, a redhead, a blonde, and a brunette. They all had big silly grins on their faces.

  "You mean yer nightly walk home from the bar, huh, Mr. Writer?" jibed the red-head.

  "I must confess," the Writer chuckled, but only now did it occur to him that he must reek of beer-breath.

  "Probably lookin' to git lucky," said the blonde, "but the Crossroads ain't no place to git lucky. All them skanky gals they got up there?"

  The brunette batted her eyes. She would've had a great smile were it not for the missing incisor. "Right here's the place to git lucky, ‘specially fer a handsome, rich writer like you."

  The Writer sighed. "Really, I'm not that—"

  "What's all that?" Mrs. Gilman asked, pointing to the parcels under his arm.

  "Oh, the mail. I noticed the post box was full when I was walking up."

  All three of the younger girls perked up when they noticed the three long boxes under his arm. "Any'a them boxes fer me?" asked the red-head. "Or me?" added the blonde. "I'se expectin' somethin'." "Me too!" exclaimed the brunette.

  "Well, let's see," and the Writer began to read the address labels on each box. "Nyna Rhodes... "

  The red-head's hand shot up. "That's me!"

  "Anita Gonzales... "

  The brunette beamed.

  "Beatrice Mullins."

  The blonde raised her hand, bouncing up and down. The Writer distributed the boxes, then gave Mrs. Gilman the rest of the mail. "Probably just bills for you, Mrs. Gilman."

  "Like death'n taxes," but then she paused. "‘Cept I don't really pay no taxes to speak of. But I reckon I'll be payin' lots more once this Arkansas shyster gets in the White House. Kin you believe the news says he's gonna win?"

  "I'm an apolitical writer," the Writer said. "I have no opinion... "

  The blonde and red-head ran up the stairs with their boxes, excited as children who'd just been given a surprise. The brunette remained, however, opening her box at the desk. "Oh, I just so hope this is it!" she gibbered.

  The girl squealed with delight. The Writer did a double-take. The box read WONKO KITCHEN PRODUCTS: THERM-O-FRESH FOOD SAVING SYSTEM.

  "I'se gonna go use mine right now, I am!" she celebrated and scampered up the stairs.

  "These girls," Mrs. Gilman said, shaking her head with a smile.

  The Writer looked hard at her. "Mrs. Gilman? Why on earth would girls such as these spend two hundred dollars apiece on those—"

  The phone rang, truncating the rest of the Writer's query.

  "Oh hi, Doris, dear! And how are you today?"

  The Writer could feel a long conversation coming so he drifted upstairs. He counted thirteen steps to the landing. What would happen if, say, tomorrow I walk up these same steps, but there are fourteen? And the next day fifteen? And sixteen the day after that?

  It must be a slow night; very few bedsprings were heard, but he did hear someone say "Who's your daddy?" but he was sure it was a woman's voice.

  He passed a door half-open, unconsciously looked in, then gaped.

  "Haa! Come on in!"

  It was Nancy, and the reason for the Writer's gape was due to the fact that Nancy was sitting hunched on her bed, one hundred percent naked. Oh, dear, he thought.

  Her perfect breasts, however badly tattooed, depended from the pose; she was leaning over painting her toenails. Every contour of her physique seemed to exist without perceptible defect. Redneck paragon... A physical pattern of excellence. Shakespeare could write a pastoral verse-sequence about her, in octosyllabic couplets...

  "How do my toesies look?" she asked, then stuck her long legs out.

  "Preeminent," the Writer droned.

  "Does... that mean good?"

  "Yes." Like slow syrup, his gaze drooled down the legs to the adorable bald triangle of creases betwixt them. Even inclined on her elbows, her stomach showed not even an inkling of a ridge.

  Though touched upon previously, it must be stated in full now that the Writer was—and had been for a number of years—a self-imposed celibate. It was the sexual angst he craved, that strange edge of need unrelieved. He knew that it's what his Muse demanded: to stare into the promise of la petite-morte only to have it sift through his fingers like so much proverbial sand. Monks did it, priests did it, even Jesus Christ did it, and the Writer figured that if he could imitate just one facet of them, then his writing would be charged by the same verity that charged their systems of faith. But even in his abstinence, however, he was allowed to look. As a Writer, he was a seeker, and hence, a seer. If the human self was the only thing that could be known and therefore verified, everything that that same self saw was verifiable as well.

  His penis swelled in his pants to the extent that it felt like a hamster that had died and entered rigor mortis.

  "So what'cha doin' tonight?" she asked, rocking her feet.

  His teeth ground as the realities bled through the ideal. The atrocious tattoos turned her into a desecrated icon. His autograph was still in plain sight above the "Smiley Face" with a nipple for a nose.

  "I was doing my Dylan Thomas imitation," he said.

  "Huh?"

  "Drinking a lot."

  She giggled. "Oh, I heard you hang out up the Crossroads." Her eyes went wide in a hopeful recollection. "I gang-banged ten fellas there once fer ten bucks a piece. Next time you're there, look fer the dark spot by the corner pocket. That's me."

  The Writer stood speechless.

  "So who's this villain yer talkin' 'bout? His name's Thomas?"

  Whuh... "Oh, no, not villain. Dylan. Dylan Thomas. I was making a quip. He was arguably the century's greatest poet in the English language—he wrote Deaths and Entrances. He was what they call a ‘biblical symbolist.'"

  Nancy's angelic face showed recognition. "I gots me a step-brother who plays cymbals—and drums, too."

  "No, no, Dylan Thomas' best verse juxtaposed the exuberance of faith in God, with the cruciality of our need to redeem ourselves for our sexual sins."

  Her peaches-and-cream ti
ts bounced when she giggled again. "Oh. I guess I'se need ta read him!"

  "But I was actually joking in my preliminary reference. He was a big drinker," the Writer explained. "I'm sure it was just an excuse for his alcoholism, but he would regularly contend no matter how much alcohol he consumed, he could prevent himself from getting drunk merely by thinking."

  "Thankin'?" the prostitute queried.

  "Yes. He believed that alcohol accelerated the quality of his creativity, so he would drink but by the force of his mind, not allow himself to get drunk." He was also an oaf and an oddball, who died from alcohol poisoning, but the Writer neglected to mention these facts.

  "Just by thankin'," Nancy uttered amazed.

  "Oh, yes. The human mind is quite a powerful thing, the sheer force of will."

  "But'cha know?" Her face lit up. "I'se kin do somethin' with my mind! Wanna see?"

  All those beers were finally sinking in. The Writer was wobbling a bit in place. "Uh, well, I really should be go—"

  "Just you watch!" she advised, and adjusted her pose. She leaned up on her arms, and parted her creamy thighs with her knees bent over the bed's edge. "Watch my titties'n cunny... "

  Well, I know what titties are, the Writer thought. And I presume that "cunny" is a vaginal reference... "Um, sure."

  Nancy closed her eyes and leaned her head back. A delectable pink tongue glazed her lips, and she began taking slow, deep breaths though her nose. She was obviously concentrating on something with great focus. The trim stomach moved slowly in and out and, next, she was moaning ever so lightly.

  The Writer's gaze switched from her breasts to her crotch, then back to her breasts. And what breasts they are, he had to note. His drunkenness began to struggle with his stubborn celibacy, as his loins began to percolate quite like a coffee pot. His gaze fixed on the nipples, pink as her tongue and roughly the size of silver dollars but then—

  Hmm...

  The nipples began to increase in size, a fascinating transformation, like a dried sponge dropped in water, until they'd grown to a circumference of the bottom of a soup can. Even the breasts themselves seemed to gain girth, blood vessels presumably dilating by the command of her brain. Could he even see the gentle blue ghost-lines of veins pumping more blood into the coveted tissue? My God, the Writer thought. And not only did the areolae grow in circumference; they also grew in depth, until they stuck out like pink macaroons.

  And when the Writer looked between her legs—

  Gracious!

  The pea-sized clitoris has transmogrified into a drunkard's nose.

  "There!" Nancy celebrated. "How ya like that?"

  "You are woman not only of description-defying beauty, but one also of applaudable talent."

  She unconsciously tweezed her papillas, which were now the size of those mini-marshmallows, strawberry-flavored, of course. "And I'se done it just by thankin.'"

  "Proof of the mind's power, indeed," but the Writer had to keep wincing away from the tumid attributes.

  She grinned coyly. "Wanna know whats I was thankin' 'bout?"

  "Uh, well... "

  "I was thankin' 'bout you fistin' my cunny'n jerkin' yer peter off on my stomach, I was. Then just rubbin' all that warm cum all over my skin... "

  "My, oh my... "

  Now her bare foot trailed up the inside of the Writer's leg, and suddenly the toes were wriggling like an old Magic-Fingers over his crotch. The Writer felt his penis urp up an instantaneous effusion of pre-ejaculatory fluid.

  "It's a real slow night," she pointed out. "And I ain't got another trick fer another half hour... "

  The Writer knew an embarrassing wet spot was surely forming against his pants. He stepped back, careful not to stagger. "Really, I must be going."

  "Aw, yeah," she said, disheartened. "Guess ya gots to git back to work on yer book—"

  "Yes, yes, but have a good n—" and before he could bid her a good night, a side-glance showed him something familiar on her dresser.

  It was a Therm-O-Fresh Food Saving System.

  Very slowly, the Writer's gaze lolled back to the young prostitute. "Hey, Nancy. Why do you have that Therm-O-Fresh machine?"

  "Aw, we'se all have one," she told him, nonchalant. "They're fer—" but then, of course, the phone rang.

  The Writer groaned.

  "Oh, hi, Grandma," Nancy said cheerily into the phone. "Naw, kind'a slow tonight, only had three tricks so far, and two of 'em were blowjobs. But then there was this one fella comes in sometimes'n pays me fifty ta put it in my backside... Oh, yeah, but you'n ma was right—this is a great way ta make a livin'. I'se so happy I took yer advice."

  The Writer retreated from the room and closed the door.

  His entire groin throbbed. How many years had it been since he'd masturbated? I cannot, I MUST NOT allow myself to succumb to primitivistic lust! he ordered himself. In order to be the best writer I CAN be, I must deprive myself of this volition-stealing vice, just as Salvador Dali accelerated his creative visions by depriving himself of sleep... There was too much stimulus around here, all these pretty prostitutes. I don't need to see any more of them tonight.

  Just as he would enter his room, the plush blonde from downstairs exited the adjacent room with a look of need on her face. Grapefruit breasts sat in fishnet bra-cups like dainty hammocks.

  "Beatrice, isn't it?" the Writer recalled.

  "Yeah, but see me'n Anita gotta share a room'n right now she's got a trick. You mind if I use yer bathroom?"

  What could he say? It won't take long... "Of course, Beatrice. Come right in."

  He watched the white rump bounce in see-through, black panties, and when she turned, the dark tuft of pubic hair was all-too-apparent, poofing out the sheer material of the front.

  She giggled. "You kin watch if'n ya want," and then she strode briskly into the bathroom.

  There was no logical reason to want to watch a woman go to the bathroom; nevertheless, the Writer—much to his displeasure—was hijacked by the primitive male curiosity that was probably a mental mechanism similar to that which causes people to peer at car wrecks or dead animals in the road. After a few moments of deliberation, and as delicately as possible, the Writer stepped into the bathroom.

  What is— he began.

  Beatrice was not sitting on the toilet as one might expect. Instead, she lay on the floor, and jutted her shapely legs in the air in order to slip off her panties. And she'd brought something with her, but the Writer had been too busy visually assaying her physique to take note of that fact.

  She'd brought her Therm-O-Fresh Food Storage System.

  Just the unit itself, not the bags or jars. And she'd already taken the liberty of plugging it into the outlet where the Writer kept his electric toothbrush.

  "A gal kin save a lot'a money with one'a these," she said, on her back and with her legs widely spread. She'd already liberally lubricated her vulva as well as the machine's vacuum tube with saliva, and now, as she explained, she gingerly worked the tube into her vagina. "Most all'a us got one now. See, whenevers we'se a week late on our period, nine times out'a ten"—of course, she'd pronounced the word times as "tams"—"it means we'se knocked up, so's we use the machine ta git 'em out ‘fore they git too big. Ya git 'em early and I'se swear they ain't no bigger'n a popcorn kernel—ya know—before ya pop it. Mrs. Gilman showed us hows ta do it—only tricky part is ya gots ta git the tube right up inta this special place called a—dang—I'se cain't remember. She called it a servo? Or was it a servik—"

  Outraged, the Writer offered, "Your cervical canal?"

  "Yeah!" she beamed. "That's it! Ya gots ta git the tube up in that'n then push a little," and all the while her fingers manipulated the tube until—

  "Uhh! I gots it!"

  The Writer watched appalled, face sagging, as Beatrice turned on the Therm-O-Fresh vacuum machine. It hummed like a old-style aquarium pump, then seemed to admit a faint whine as if encountering resistence, and then—

  "There!" she announc
ed.

  In an eye's wink, the tube filled with blood. Beatrice turned the machine off, extracted the tube, and got up.

  The Writer's face continued to sag in uncomprehending horror. The girl detached the other end of the tube, then held it over the sink. When the tube failed to empty, she blew into its clean end and—

  splat!

  —something jettisoned into the sink, along with a modest spatter of blood.

  "There it is. See?" She plucked something tiny up with her fingers and placed it in her palm. The Writer only ventured a second's glance, saw something like a blood clot with a disturbing configuration. A human spitball, he thought.

  "Costs a lot less than goin' to a doctor," the blonde continued, "and it sure beats the hail out'a the hanger. And best part of all is it don't hurt none... "

  The Writer gasped at a well of blood running down her thigh.

  "Aw, that ain't nothin'," she assured. "The bleedin' stops right away. I'll just stick ta blowjobs'n ass-fuckin' tonight, and I'll'se be good as new tomorrow." She flapped her hand into the toilet, flushed it, rinsed the sink out, and then gathered up the machine. "Some'a the gals keep theirs—"