The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine

by Krissy Kneen

  So. No pornographic literature. No Mandy. No sex.

  ‘No sex,’ she said aloud and slipped the ring back on her finger. ‘I take up my promise of abstinence once more. I return to my state of ignorance to ensure the safety of the world.’

  The band seemed too tight; she must have put on a bit of weight in Paris. All the croissants and creamy sauces and come. She vowed to start a diet today. She would get back into her girlish shape. She would starve herself of sex and sweets. She would return to her regime of powders and moisturisers. She had become sloppy with her self-care, forgetting to wear makeup, forgetting to match her underwear, forgetting to behave decently, in the way a nice young woman should.

  She extended the handle of her suitcase, and dragged it clumsily behind her in the direction of home.

  Her mother and father were the same. Her house was as it had been. She stood in the doorway in the hug of them, the familiar musk of their skin, her mother’s sweet perfume, her father’s aftershave. The soap that they had used for years as a family. Nothing had changed. She felt a wave of relief. She could become their baby again.

  She extracted herself from the smother of their love and picked up her suitcase. If she concentrated very hard on the here and now she could begin to forget the image of her parents rattling in a sex dungeon. She could pretend that she was not forged from original sin. She could, perhaps, see her own parents once more as nature intended: sexless, wholesome, chaste.

  ‘Oh, darling, we missed you so much. We’re so glad you’re home.’

  Holly nodded, tears brimming in her eyes. ‘Me too.’ She walked towards the staircase as she had done almost every day of her life before leaving for Paris.

  The man in the alleyway had been alive the last time Holly climbed these stairs, that terrible eye still in a head that smiled at his wife. Able to defecate like anyone else, without an eyeball corking his bum. Nick had been searching still, and safe; still mercifully free from meeting her.

  She was relieved to be in a house from a more innocent time. She climbed the stairs and she was climbing backwards, back past the orgy with its entangled limbs and indistinguishable groans and bodily fluids, back past Mary-Ann, past Nick, past book club and Mandy and her first glance at a novel by James Salter.

  She got to the top of the stairs and yes, it was a simpler world that she was moving into. A chaste world, a time of abstinence and longing. A time of aching in her heart and a cold, unfulfilled sensation in her loins. Well, maybe Jack had been the only possible answer after all. Maybe she should forgive his transgressions, since she had so many of her own to forgive now.

  She heaved her suitcase onto the bed and unclipped it. The leather notebook was still there on the top of the pile of neatly folded clothes. She had thought for a moment that her fantasy of a return to childhood would make Wilhelm Reich and Nick and the experiments with orgone cease to exist. But here was the book, and beside it a huge ivory dildo. Carved figures frolicked on its surface, men chasing women who chased men, pricks hard, breasts bouncing and above them a row of glowing objects, the rays of their light dripping onto the shoulders of the sex-crazed crowd. Where the rays touched the skin there was smoke, and in some cases flames carved into the surface of the dildo.

  She picked up the book and sniffed at the soft leather and she could still smell the faint scent of burning. She opened the cover. How to make an orgone battery. She felt a slight tremor, like an earthquake beginning to split a fault line in the earth.

  She snapped the book closed.

  The trembling stopped. She should burn Nick’s book. She should make a fire and burn it. That was the only safe solution.

  ‘Back?’

  Holly flinched and dropped the book suddenly.

  ‘How strange. For some reason I thought you would stay in Paris forever.’

  She turned to see him standing in the door to her bedroom. Michael, just as she remembered him. Attractively grey at the temples, immaculately dressed.

  ‘Welcome home.’ He stepped into her room, took her face between his hands, pressed his lips to her forehead. She wondered if he could smell transgression on her skin. If he did he said nothing about it.

  Holly clutched the notebook more tightly.

  ‘Oh. Hello, Michael.’ She refused to remember him with his mask on and his cock out.

  ‘Are you here for dinner?’ he asked. ‘Mussels in broth.’

  ‘You’re staying for dinner?’

  ‘I’m cooking it.’ He grinned a little shyly and stepped back a pace, leaving a cautious distance between them. ‘Actually I live here now.’

  Holly looked quickly around her room, the posters on the wall, a glow in the dark yoyo, a plastic doll, stuffed toys lined up on the windowsill. Nothing had been moved.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he touched her arm reassuringly. ‘Not here, god no. I would never take your room.’

  He took her hand gently and led her out of her room and down the corridor to her parents’ room. It was a shock to see some stranger open their door without permission. They were so careful about their privacy. Holly had been taught to knock and wait patiently. But Michael just threw the door wide and ushered her in.

  It was a new bed, that was the first thing she noticed, a huge king-sized four-poster. The pale curtains trailed gently in a slight breeze from the open windows and the bright Brisbane light scoured the shadows from the room. The room was spotlessly clean, as she would have expected. Her mother’s dressing table pressed against one wall. Blue vials touched by a wisp of light, and a little stand for jewellery in the shape of a tree. To the right side of her mother’s table was a wooden roll-top desk, a masculine antique with the whiskery trappings of a gentleman resting on it. She recognised the ivory-coloured hairbrush she had given her father for his birthday several years ago.

  On the other side of her mother’s dresser was another table, unfamiliar. A sleek modern vanity with a large mirror reflecting all the accoutrements on it, the razor, shaving brush, hair gel, a glass bristling with pens and pencils and a notebook beside it.

  ‘You live here now?’

  Michael nodded. ‘We would have told you if…Well, your parents thought you might be upset. I thought you would be fine with it. I told them not to underestimate you. Still, polyandry is a little difficult to explain, I suppose. There are so few examples to use as illustration.’ He indicated his vanity, the large wooden bed.

  Holly turned and walked quickly out of the room. Her parents’ room: Michael’s room. The chaste normalcy of Brisbane now hanging slightly askew.

  ‘Will you be in for dinner?’ Michael asked her again. She turned to see his clear intelligent eyes trained on her.

  ‘Yes,’ said Holly. ‘I suppose I will.’ And then she shut her bedroom door in his face, put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes.

  When Holly was sure Michael had gone she picked up Reich’s notebook from the bed. She was exhausted. A man was dead in a back alley, Nick was missing and all this was just the tip of an iceberg in which a hundred thousand corpses were frozen by the grief of all their friends and relatives and lovers. All of it connected by the wiggly lines in Wilhelm Reich’s diagrams, the wiggly lines that originated from the vulva of a woman who looked
like her. The wiggly lines that came down from the UFOs. EAs, they were called in Reich’s notebook, Energy Alpha, but whatever you called them they were still UFOs—which, despite the events in the alleyway, she was pretty sure she didn’t believe in—and the wiggly lines were still orgone—which she had no choice but to believe in. Orgone tying every death to every life, flesh decaying or pulsing with sexual pleasure, children becoming lovers becoming parents becoming mulch and earth and grass and trees and weather and sadness and joy and children.

  She didn’t want to think about it any longer. She picked up her phone, brought up Jennifer’s contact, added Rachel, and Becca. The sweet innocent children of her abstinent youth.

  ‘I am back,’ she wrote. ‘I would love to see you.’ She pressed send.

  She ran a bath and sat in it and it was only when she had sunk up to her chin in bubbles that she could exhale. The phone buzzed. She reached for it, dripping sweet-scented foam.

  Jennifer had replied. Welcome home. Meet us at Jamie’s Espresso Bar in the Valley. Tomorrow. 11:00.

  She submerged herself and gazed up towards the air above but all she could see was bubbles and pure white rose-scented light.

  Eat Me

  by LINDA JAIVIN

  Steam escaped the slightly parted shells of the mussels. Scraps of onion clung to the stark black lips, slices of parsley, all this bathing in the blood of juicy fresh tomatoes. It was a sensual feast for the eye as much as for the tongue. Holly watched her father manoeuvre the tongs in the large white bowl, saw the mussels drip their vivid soup across the white tablecloth, staining it the colour of blood. He ladled mussels into her mother’s bowl, into Holly’s own. She heard the clack of them as they settled. She looked down into the little black slits to see the plump of flesh inside.

  ‘Here’s to you, Holly.’ Michael was raising his glass, clicking it against hers.

  ‘Yes,’ her father joined them in the toast. ‘To our extraordinary child. We have always known you were special.’

  Her mother reached over the debris on the table, clasped her wrist, squeezed it.

  ‘From the moment we saw your genitals so swollen and oversized.’

  ‘And the colour,’ her father tutted, ‘The colour nature reserves for crayfish, crabs, tropical violets, hothouse flowers.’

  Holly winced. She felt her cheeks becoming flushed. She tried to swallow the mussel that she had been chewing. She was suddenly uncomfortably aware of its cuntish shape and flavour. She coughed.

  ‘To Holly!’ Michael almost shouted her name and gulped at his champagne. ‘And her incredible adventure.’

  Holly took a sizable mouthful from her own glass. She knew her cheeks were bright red. She had never heard the story of her birth. It was odd for her parents to speak so intimately in front of a stranger.

  But of course he wasn’t a stranger.

  Holly dipped her spoon into her mussel broth. She didn’t want to follow that train of thought back to its natural conclusion. She heard a click as her father prised a shell apart, inserted his fork, plucked out the briny flesh.

  ‘Did you know,’ said Michael, licking his fingers before fumbling in his bowl. She watched him grab a mussel between his fingers, crack the shell open and scoop the flesh out with his bare hands. ‘Did you know that female mussels frown at monogamy? The very idea of one sexual partner is anathema to all molluscs.’ He popped the curl of flesh into his mouth, chewed slowly, swallowed. He slipped the tips of his fingers into his mouth, reached into his bowl for another.

  His fingers were livid when he put them into his mouth again, as if he had dipped them into her chest and pulled out her own heart.

  ‘The females are greedy for sperm. Have you seen bukkake videos?’

  Holly shook her head violently. She had never heard the word and could only imagine the depravities it might entail. Images flashed into her mind, trawled from memories she was trying so hard to forget, limbs, raised mouths opening, bodies spasming, come geysering up in a great pearly arc.

  ‘Well, the simple mussel would put any bukkake session to shame. The males, the mussel men—’

  Her mother snorted with laughter, hid her mouth behind her tomato-covered fingers.

  ‘The muscly boys shoot their sperm into the tide. The ocean is a sex aid. The sperm is gently washed into the wide mouths of the mussel girls. Sperm of a hundred men sucked into their frilly gills. Can you imagine it, Holly? Sperm of a hundred men. The delicate subtlety of flavours. The sweetly blended soup of love.’

  Holly stood up suddenly, rattling the table. The bowl of mussels slopped over and puddled on the table in front of her. She took a step back as the spill of red spread across the white linen.

  ‘Holly,’ her father said, his voice heavy with concern, ‘is something wrong?’

  ‘I feel ill.’

  ‘Oh, not a bad shellfish, I hope. They seemed so fresh. I can’t believe—’

  Holly cut her mother off mid-sentence. ‘Jet lag. I think. I am more tired than sick, really.’

  ‘Poor love,’ said Michael. ‘We promise to be quiet tonight.’

  Holly looked down at the mess on the table in front of her.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about your plate, sweetheart.’ Her father stood and wiped his hands on his napkin. ‘Michael does that. He likes us to make him do the housework.’

  Holly didn’t know what to say. She took a tentative step away from the table.

  ‘Do you want me to tuck you in?’ asked her father. ‘Read you a story? You used to love us reading aloud to you when you were a little girl.’

  ‘No!’ She sounded shrill, panicked. ‘No thank you, Dad.’

  ‘OK. Sleep well, then. And welcome home, my dearest girl.’

  Yes, a chorus, all mouths shining with the juice of the soup as they chanted a goodnight chord.

  Holly fled upstairs. She closed the door firmly behind her. She climbed under the covers. The light was off and yet there was a glow. A blue glow. Holly pressed her eyes tight shut and pulled the blanket up over her head.

  The Butcher

  by ALINA REYES

  Jamie’s Espresso Bar was all shiny metal surfaces. At a high bench stretched out along the bar young men with impressive beards sipped long blacks and glanced at the pretty young girls in the reach of mirror. It was a strange place for Jennifer to choose. The four of them had often sipped champagne at Cru Bar across the road but they had never met at Jamie’s. There was an edge to the place, the music was odd, electronic, arrhythmic. The girl behind the counter wore thick tortoiseshell glasses, her hair tied roughly back in a ponytail. Her expensive black jeans were stained with chocolate and floury handprints. Holly noticed a heart-shaped tattoo peeking out from the edge of her lacy sleeve.

  The Angels were perched at the very corner of the bar. Jennifer was nipped into a silver shift, her high sandals glinting like metal between her toes. Holly noticed that her toenails were gilt and glittering. It was the first time she had seen Jennifer since she’d stumbled across the beast with two backs. She was struck now by the girl’s beauty, pure and sharp like the blade of a knife. She felt the pain of it cutt
ing her chest.

  Holly smiled tentatively. She ordered a skinny cappuccino from the waitress and moved down past the bearded men to where her friends lounged by the bar. All eyes were on her. She felt the eyes of the men following her. One of them sniffed as she passed. She knew she smelled faintly of electrical fire no matter how much perfume she doused herself with.

  Her friends didn’t seem to notice. Jennifer leaped up off her stool and hugged her, rocking back and forth. Her long fine hair crackled with static as Holly was smothered in it. Holly breathed in, but she could smell something damp and pungent under the sweet scent of shampoo. Could it be the now-familiar scent of ejaculate?

  She pulled away from the hug. Holly studied the blonde silky strands for any signs of stickiness but there was nothing to see. Jennifer looked as clean and wholesome as a debutante.

  Becca pushed Jennifer aside and wrapped her arms around Holly. She kissed her cheek, held her chin between the fingers of her right hand and Holly was treated for a moment to a briny perfume. Cunt, she thought. This hand has recently touched cunt.

  Holly took a step away from the girls. She was mistaken. There was nothing as innocent as this vision of loveliness. She held her fist out towards them, her abstinence ring glinting in the light from the low-hanging lamps.

  ‘Oh,’ Jennifer frowned, ‘I forgot. You’ve been away. You haven’t heard.’ She held up her left hand and wriggled her fingers. ‘I took it off. We all took them off.’