by Krissy Kneen
The Story of the Eye
by GEORGES BATAILLE
He chased her. She could hear his heavy shoes cracking against the pavement. She didn’t dare turn to see that he was gaining on her. She ran and ran and ran, and Bataille and Reich and the huge ivory tusk of a dildo spurred her on, thumping her so hard on the rump that she was sure she would soon be as red and bruised as Apollinaire’s spanked heroines, as rent and bloodied as O herself. She ran down streets and avenues, fended her way across jammed traffic, leaped over cobblestones, grazed past lovers and loners and turned finally into a tiny street that went nowhere.
She had run out the last of the sunlight and here she was, abandoned to the dead end of darkness. There was nothing in this alley but shut-tight doors and dropped rubbish. The blind unapologetic wall of a building barring her way.
Holly turned finally. The thin man rounded the corner. The lit cigarette was still between his lips but she watched as he slowly plucked it from his mouth and crushed the burning end against the pavement. Beads hung glittering in a window next to her, the shop door locked and bolted, a metal grille pulled down and padlocked over the window. There was nowhere for her to run.
Holly felt her sorrow building. She knew she was about to cry, she felt the tight pain of her distress welling up. She knelt down in a corner of the street with her shoulders wedged between two brick-faced walls and held her handbag to her chest like armour. The man walked slowly, carefully towards her.
She opened her mouth, thinking a sob was about to escape her. Instead, a strange humming sound emerged. It seemed to echo up from out of her, vibrating her teeth and continuing to resonate down the alleyway. She closed her lips but it was still there, a shrill and piercing sound, climbing higher and higher in pitch. The very cobblestones vibrated with it.
And then she saw a bubble, small as a child might blow through an innocent pipe. The bubble escaped from under her skirt, a tiny glowing globe of air, blue and bright. She watched as it rose up into the sky. One bubble, then a second, larger bubble, then more and more. She felt the bubbles stretching her labia. They were the size of golf, no, bigger now, tennis balls, and Holly braced herself. She was screaming but it was not her scream, it was the shrill siren erupting, louder now, from her own mouth as she gave birth to a bubble the size of a medicine ball and watched it rise out of her vulva, pulsing with light, climbing towards the stars.
The stars above her looked too bright. The stars echoed the pulse of the sound, the pulse of the glowing bubbles. It was impossible to tell which were stars and which were her own ectoplasmic emissions. The lights seemed to be coming nearer. Lowering themselves into the alley. They weren’t stars at all. Holly suddenly remembered Nick’s notebook: Dangers: Alien/Government. We are under attack. MUST BE MORE CAUTIOUS.
Holly shook her head slowly. Aliens. Really?
The thin man looked up too. He took one hesitant step backwards, then another. He turned then and seemed about to run away.
A beam of light escaped from one of the lights. It pierced the darkness, lit up the man’s overcoat as if it were burning with a terrible blue flame. He fell, he writhed, the overcoat sizzled and disintegrated. His shirt was bright with the light and he tore at it as if it was burning his skin. His pants glowed. The man pulled frantically at the zip and wriggled out of them. He lay, naked, luminous, caught in the steady ray of light. His eyes were round and becoming rounder, wider. His cock stood straight and hard and glowing bright.
Holly watched as the eyes turned over in their sockets and then, suddenly were gone. There was nothing but darkness in his head and he stared at her with those horrible blank spaces till she thought she could stand it no more. At that moment his cheeks became concave, his face seemed to crumple in on itself. His cock swelled and began to pulse, a fountain of blue sprayed from it in huge spurts that arced into the air falling back onto his mouth. His hips lifted, he spasmed, he reached down with hands that were claws and spread the cheeks of his arse. There at the place beneath his scrotum, where only darkness should have been, there was a single bright and startled eye.
Holly pressed her handbag over her face. She didn’t want to see him looking out from his own arse, seeing her, knowing she had done this to him.
‘Stop it!’
The humming stopped so suddenly she thought she had become deaf.
The light faded.
Holly looked up to see the glowing lights retreating, hiding themselves among the stars.
‘What are you?’ she shouted up into the sky, and then, when there was no answer, ‘What have you done?’
She stared at the deflated corpse of her attacker, twisted into an inhuman sculpture of himself, feet turned the wrong way, stomach caved in, and all of him covered by a spray of glowing white jism. Even the tower of cock was beginning to deflate.
‘What have I done?’ she said. ‘What am I? Some kind of monster?’
The eye in the arse glared back, unblinking.
She stood, and realised in an instant that she would have to walk past the corpse to escape the alleyway. She sidled past, pressing her back to the closed shopfronts. She closed her eyes as she passed him, but there, in the darkness behind her lids, was the image of him, stiff and cold and geysering his semen into the air, his cheeks pulled wide and, in that secret other orifice, a round and staring human eye.
PART 3
Virtue, however beautiful, becomes the worst of all attitudes when it is found to be too feeble to contend with vice.
MARQUIS DE SADE
Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue
Fear of Flying
by ERICA JONG
Holly stepped out of her shoes. She took her watch off, put it in a plastic tray with the shoes and passed it to the security guy. She stepped towards the metal archway in her stockinged feet. There were sparks. The fluorescent lights flickered. She paused. Her handbag was trundling towards the X-ray machine.
‘Come,’ said the guard. ‘Come, come.’
She stepped towards him. The lights flickered again, the machine sparked. The terminal was thrown into darkness and she heard the guard tut: ‘Merde!’ Then, to Holly, ‘Stupid machines. Ridiculous, no?’
She nodded. The emergency lighting flicked on, a pale blue glow just bright enough to see by. The guard nodded to her and she stepped towards him, lifting her arms and feeling his fingers smoothing her clothing down, tracing the shape of her waist, her hips, her thighs, moving forward to cup her breasts, lingering just a moment too long. She felt herself succumbing to the lure of seduction, her loins throbbed in spite of herself. The emergency lighting flickered, plunging them suddenly into darkness. The guard tweaked her left nipple and Holly stepped quickly away.
‘The power company is a problem, no? Should be fired, these bosses?’ The lights stuttered on again and Holly frowned. ‘Your bag, mam’selle. Have a very nice flight.’
She took her bag and walked quickly towards the gate. Her hands were shaking. Her boarding pass, clasped tightly, was damp with sweat. If Nick was here he would have told her what to do. She would be safe in his arms and free from the burden of decisions.
The ache of grief inside her was as bright and full as any orgasm. She curled herself into an uncomfortable plastic seat and waited for boa
rding to be called. A man in an expensive blue suit ambled past, staring, looking at the sweep of her crossed legs. She pulled her skirt down over her knees. There was a simmering about her skin, a luminescence. She rubbed at her thigh, but it wasn’t a surface discolouration. It was an inner glow, pale blue. She lowered her face to avoid eye contact. She longed for her mother’s sweet tea, her father’s macaroni cheese, her childhood bed cluttered with soft toys. She wanted to go back to a simpler time, and she could. She would step onto this plane and it would all be behind her. Brisbane. Smaller city, simpler folk.
There was a call over the loudspeaker. Something in French, and then the words repeated in English. Her flight. She reached for her handbag and the contents spilled onto the floor. Her lipstick and her perfume and her toothbrush and the leather-bound notebook. She reached for it. She felt the flinch of static between the cover and her fingers. The source of the power contained within the pages. She zipped it tightly into her handbag and joined the gathering queue.
The hostess said something in French. Holly shook her head.
‘English? Your seat back, mam’selle. It must be in the upright position for take-off.’
Holly pressed the button and felt herself lurch forward.
‘And your seatbelt, low and tight, s’il vous plait.’
Holly looked down into her lap. Her seatbelt was fastened. ‘I don’t know—’ But the hostess bent forward and rested her hands in Holly’s lap. She took the end of the seatbelt and pulled the strap till Holly felt her legs uncomfortably restricted. She remembered Anne-Marie from Story of O, her instructions with ropes and knots, her brandings, her piercings. The hostess rested her fingers in Holly’s lap, just a little too close to her delta of Venus.
‘I will return whenever you press this little button.’ She gestured at the call button, her other hand slipping closer to the little button in Holly’s lap. Holly noticed how bright the woman’s white dress seemed, as if lit from within by her own ghostly light. She pressed her knees together but that just inflamed her lust. She thought of Nick. How much she missed him. How afraid she was for him, trapped, caught, secreted away by government spies. She remembered her own spy, kneeling in the alleyway, the white fountain of his come raining down on his already dead open mouth.
The hostess finally let go of her thigh. She stepped back, cocked her head to one side. She had a straight blonde bob with a severe fringe, framing a face that was all peaches and cream. She was beautiful, wholesome, desirable. ‘My name is Kasia,’ she said brightly. ‘I will make your trip as pleasurable as I can.’
Holly was relieved when she was gone. She looked towards the man beside her for the very first time. He was older, grey-haired, sweet-looking. A lovely old man. She was grateful for this. She smiled at him and he smiled back. She watched his eyes travel the length of her, lingering for a moment on her breasts. She had worn a high-necked dress the colour of fresh snow, and his eyes seemed to burn through it. She felt suddenly naked. She opened the inflight magazine and crossed her arms over her chest.
The lights dimmed for take-off and the entire plane was plunged into darkness except for seat 15C. Holly pressed the magazine into her lap, but the glow from her skin could not be suppressed. She fumbled in the seat pocket for the emergency information card and rested that over the magazine; she reached for the leather-bound notebook as a third layer and, finally, the glow from her seat became muted.
Too late. The old man in the seat beside her was staring into her crotch. She felt the sudden forward motion of the plane press her back into her seat. She gripped the armrests tightly. And as Holly and her fellow passengers accelerated up and into the void, she felt the creep of trembling fingers, up and under the edge of her skirt.
The old man in 15B was touching her leg, his eyes firmly directed at her groin. He seemed transfixed. The seatbelt sign was illuminated and she was trapped. Holly felt his finger at the edge of her knickers. She felt it worming its palsied way up and under the elastic. She reached out to grab the old man’s wrist. She leaned towards him, confronted by a complicated-looking hearing aid, and aimed her words carefully into the machine at the side of his head.
‘My cunt is dangerous,’ she whispered, enunciating each word crisply. ‘My juices are acid. They will burn your finger down to the bone. My nipples are arc welders. My labia snaps shut like a rat-trap. It will snap off your cock like a dry twig. Do not mess with me, m’sieur. I am a carefully tuned instrument of sexual violence. I am a deadly fucking machine.’
She felt the man’s finger hesitate. Felt it tremble on her thigh. She tried not to imagine what it would be like to have a parkinsonian tremble applied to her clitoris. She tried to think of him as nothing more than someone’s adored grandpa. Toothless, weak, gentle, kind. The hand retreated. She saw him panting and hoped that the stress of her aggression wouldn’t induce heart failure. But by the time the aircraft levelled out, he seemed to have forgotten about her. His mouth fell open, his breathing became heavy. His hand wavered innocently on his own bony knee.
She picked the leather notebook off her lap and opened it at random. A diagram. A woman, her thighs spread, her mouth open, rays of energy erupting from her cunt. Her teeth sharp like knives. Her eyes a solid dark smear of black ink. Surrounding her were mountains of bodies, men and women, their limbs severed, their orifices gushing, their faces racked by ecstasy into howling masks. The plane began to shudder. She felt her chair rattling. The pressure began to build in the cabin. Her ears ached. Sound became muted, the lights flickered on and off. Someone screamed. She saw Kasia stumble down the aisle and fall, clinging to a large man in a business-class seat. There was a thud as the oxygen masks fell and swayed within reach of the passengers.
Holly shut the book. With a soft hiss the plane returned to balance. Her ears popped, the lights softened. Kasia hoisted herself back up onto her serviceable heels and walked quickly to the front of the plane.
The intercom crackled and a male voice said something in French. The passengers laughed, hugged each other and shifted, relieved, in their seats. Then Kasia’s voice, light and breezy over the intercom. ‘We apologise for the fright. We hit some unanticipated turbulence. A problem with our instruments but I assure you this is rectified. The staff will now come and fix your masks back into position. There is nothing to be concerned about.’
Holly slipped Wilhelm Reich’s leather-bound book cautiously back into the seat pocket. She would not open it again. She would not open her legs even a millimetre. She would not think about sex at all. There is a kind of squid that returns, when it is attacked, to its juvenile state. She would learn this trick. She would be a butterfly folding its wings and climbing back into its casing, a chicken returning to the egg.
When the hostess made her way down the aisle, pushing each of the masks back up into its compartment, Holly pressed her knees firmly together once more. Kasia pushed her mask up, snapped the compartment closed, and looked down into Holly’s lap. Her eyes glazed over as she reached down. She smoothed Holly’s skirt with trembling fingers.
‘You don’t want to do that,’ Holly told her. ‘I am dangerous. I am a bomb.’
‘Yes,’ said the hostess. ‘You are the bomb.’
‘Get me a blanket, please.’
The hostess reluctantly let go of her knee and reached for a blanket in the overhead locker. She
tore it open using her teeth and Holly glimpsed a flash of tongue. She felt her resolve waning and turned her face upward; the hostess leaned towards her, her lips parting.
Nick. She thought of Nick. Poor Nick. Holly was the cause. She was the reason he had been taken. And the dead man in the alley—she was dangerous. She needed to be shut up tight, locked away somewhere where she couldn’t cause any more damage. She thought of de Sade scribbling away in his cell, using his own blood for ink. Not even the most terrible prison could quell the pornographic imagination. Sex words were powerful. Sex stories were so dangerous they could crash a plane, they could tear a man apart, they could imprison her lover and threaten everything she held dear.
Holly snatched the blanket from Kasia’s fingers. She pressed it over her lap. ‘Move away from me now,’ she said, ‘for your own good. Move away.’
Kasia stepped back into the aisle. She shook her head and her golden bob swung prettily back and forth. ‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘You are indeed the bomb.’
The Misfortunes of Virtue
by MARQUIS DE SADE
Holly’s ring was where she’d left it. She had thought it must be lost forever, abandoned in the riot of mint and dill and oregano, but there it was: glinting, caught up in the branches of the kaffir lime. She felt the sting of a sharp spike cutting her finger as she reached for it. The blood dripped into her palm and she watched the slow trickle, as if her body was weeping even when her eyes were dry.
There was a moment of temptation. The telephone booth stood bright and empty. She could make her way down the stairs…But of course the moment she saw Mandy she would lose her resolve. She had to promise to avoid the place. She had to take up her vow of abstinence. Sex—Holly’s sex—was a dangerous, powerful thing. She couldn’t let her sex loose on the world ever again. Even in sleep, the unblinking eye haunted her, staring from its place in the rectum of the corpse, drenched by the fountain of glowing semen. She would wake, gasping, and reach for Nick, but of course he was no longer there. He was gone and she was to blame. For all the terrible changes that had crept out from these inflammatory books she had been stuffing herself with and into the innocent, unsuspecting world.