Stupefying Stories: March 2015

by Eric Juneau

  Whatever was under that jean skirt was hungry—and not in a kinky good way either.

  “Oh, a strong one.” She squeezed her arms around his windpipe until he saw stars. “I like you best.”

  Her scent crawled up his nose and into his head like all the sexy goodness in the world rolled up into one. He stopped struggling. The heaviness against his back expanded, wrapping him up, his skin tingling.

  Neil sighed. The warmth covered his chest and climbed over his shoulders. He leaned his forehead against the door, watching the rain slip down the windows.

  Missy shrieked. Reaching over his shoulders, she clawed at the window. Crystal stood on the front porch, staring Neil dead in the eye.

  Neil looked down. Delicate petals of creamy flesh, big as pizza boxes, folded over his body, wrapping around his legs and curving up between his legs like pink-veined armor. The petals squeezed his body from neck to ankle, warm and pulsing.

  Neil hollered. And hollered.

  Missy planted her arms against the door and shoved, throwing her weight so she toppled Neil over. Using her arms, Missy scuttled away from the door, dragging Neil and his fleshy cocoon with her. No more useful than dead things, her legs flopped on either side of Neil’s hips with her skin squeaking against the floorboards, skirt hiked up around her waist.

  He yelled to high heaven, calling for Justin and Jesus and his mama, but it wasn’t no good. Swishing him one way then another, she pulled him right back into her bedroom.

  “I’ll give you whatever you want.” Neil tried to remember how people got out of hostage situations on TV. “Money. My truck. Sex favors. Anything.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “Your mama taught you right.”

  The air mattress strained under their weight. Beads of sweat rolled off his forehead. Maybe she was going to cook him with her outer parts before digesting him with her innards.

  A clear liquid oozed between the smooth flesh. The stench made Neil gag—half-eaten roadkill smelled better. The liquid squished out around Neil’s neck, burning his skin.

  Storm winds wailed past the windows. Neil wriggled his hand into his pocket.

  “What are you doing?” Missy asked.

  “Just getting comfy, s’all.”

  His fingers found the knife. He worked it out of his pocket. Neil dug his fingernail into the groove on the blade and flipped it open.

  Her upper body tensed. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Liar,” she hissed.

  The petals unfolded, opening from the outside in. The knife slipped in his grip. He fought to hold on until the last flap of pink flesh opened.

  “Give it to me.” She held out her hand.

  “Yes’m.” Neil jammed the knife into the pulpy surface under him. The air mattress popped, a whoosh of air filling his face with her stink.

  She screeched, all those petals flapping and flailing. Neil rolled away. She yanked at the knife.

  The ooze made him slip when he tried to stand but he crawled fast as he could to the hallway. She came after him—a wild, alien mess of hungry female.

  Neil flung the front door open. Rain pelted his skin, lessening the burn.

  Missy hollered.

  Neil leaped off the porch, hurdling the puddle below the bottom step. He sprawled in the muddy grass.

  Missy smoothed her skirt in the doorway, a trickle of blood on her left leg.

  “That how you treat a lady?” she asked.

  “Yup.” Neil braced for her attack.

  “C’mon back,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

  Rain bounced off the concrete porch, but still she didn’t come for him.

  Neil sucked on his teeth. “Why don’t you come and get me?”

  “Neil.” His name swelled into a warm, gooey sound. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “Yup.” He grinned. “Didn’t think so.”

  Neil jogged toward the porch and its wide puddle. He jumped two-footed into the puddle. Missy hissed and jumped back, smacking the droplets off. Red welts dotted her arms and legs.

  “Yeah, don’t think I’ll be coming back in.” Neil scratched the back of his head. “Now where’s Justin?”

  She licked her lips.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said. But he could still feel those sticky petals wrapped around his hips.

  Neil wanted to smash his knuckles through her face. He wanted to run her over with his truck, throw her off a bridge, tape a bomb on her and blow her up.

  Instead, he stood on her front lawn with raindrops dripping off his nose.

  He glanced sideways. Crystal stared at him like she was expecting him to pull some superhero act.

  Rain soaked, Neil trotted back to his truck and grabbed a gas can in either hand.

  Missy stood in the doorway, her red mouth popping open when Neil doused her front porch in gasoline.

  “Better shut your pie-hole,” he said. “Gonna catch flies.”

  The front door slammed shut. Neil whistled through his teeth and shook his head.

  Crystal waved her arms, motioning around back. Neil dropped the can and ran, wet clothes slapping against his arms and legs.

  Missy trotted across the backyard under a rainbow striped golf umbrella.

  Neil let loose every good cuss he knew. Another fifteen feet and Missy’d be in the woods where the sycamores blocked most of the rain.

  Neil was a big fan of rain today.

  Glancing over her shoulder, Missy smiled, blew Neil a little kiss. No way was Neil fast enough to reach her in time.

  Crystal morphed out of the rain between Missy and the tree line.

  And Crystal looked downright pissed.

  Missy hesitated. Red welts streaked her legs. She hissed and tried to go around, but Crystal slipped in front of her.

  Neil tackled Missy from behind. Umbrella spokes jammed in his back as they both hit the ground.

  Missy flailed in the muddy grass. Blotches sprang up across her neck and arms, her eyes wide.

  “Still like me best?” Neil straddled her waist. But the petals were unfolding, her skirt rucking up against the back of his legs. “Aw, shi—”

  The petals wrapped around Neil’s legs.

  Missy gave him a dimpled smile. Neil grew lightheaded as all his blood went due south. The neck of her shirt had twisted open and Neil could see her chest rising and falling, tempting him to dive on in.

  He leaned in to kiss her. She sighed, her breath sweet as hot apple cobbler.

  Neil slapped himself on the forehead. The sting brought him to his senses. He tried to pull away, cold rain splattering off his face.

  Crystal stood beside him. She pointed at the oozing sores on Missy’s puckered lips. Foul smoke poured off Missy’s face like a cross between a fog machine and a clogged septic tank.

  Neil gagged and sat up.

  Without Neil to shield her, raindrops pounded Missy. She screeched and squirmed, the water boiling her up.

  Her muscles quivered, her breath coming in watery snatches. Finally she laid still. Neil rolled off. Missy’s bare legs splayed outward, her unfolded alien parts bothering him in a way he couldn’t explain.

  Neil tugged the skirt down over her scalded thighs. He sat back on his heels and shook his head, rain sliding off his forehead into his eyes.

  Missy’s eyes bulged in their sockets like white ping-pong balls in a scalded red face.

  Crystal flickered in the drizzle. Neil reckoned he was going to miss her.

  “Tell Justin he owes me one in the next life, all right?”

  Crystal grinned and flipped Neil the bird.

  “I’ll miss you. Both of you.” he said. “‘Sides, you’re right badass for a ghost.”

  Neil tried to peck a kiss on her cheek. It felt like kissing a lawn sprinkler, but hey, he’d take what he could get.

  Anna Yeatts is a fantasy and slipstream writer living in North Carolina with a houseful of pets, wildling children, and an incredibly supportive husband. Her short
fiction has appeared in Suddenly Lost in Words, Mslexia, and Spark: A Creative Anthology among others. Anna is the publisher of Flash Fiction Online (www.flashfictiononline.com) and can be found at annayeatts.com.

  EMISSARY

  By Matthew Lavin

  THE DESERT WAS COOL THAT NIGHT and the moon shone on all in attendance, some from tribes halfway up the dry river. All gathered around the expectant mother or in groups of kin outside the mother’s tent. They were drawn close by the presence of the gods, the three quiet sentinels that stood like tall blue statues in hard lacquered skin just outside the tent.

  A people at war for generations stood side by side, but no harm had befallen a man, woman or child for the five days since the arrival of the gods, even as more and more fell in to witness this strange visitation. The priest saw the weapons of all around him, bludgeons and blades of every deadly denomination. Most were metal, but some were wood and other softer materials, wondrous and varied, all dredged up from the land below the mountain in a splendor of unnatural color and shape.

  When the midwife, Jann, brought the child forth, roseate and squalling, the priest could see that he was born without deformity. He said a silent prayer for that and looked to the three still forms. He cut a lock of hair from his own head with the small knife he carried and placed it at the feet of the gods. The priest looked long into the dark place where their eyes should be, but knew there would be no sign to indicate their acceptance of this oblation, and indeed, they remained unmoved.

  The mother held her newborn. Terror was written in her eyes like some ancient glyph. Jann handed the priest a rough-spun blanket, which he took, and bringing the child to his chest, he whispered the name he had found for him in the child’s ear that the gods might never know it, Alix.

  Now that the child was born, he wondered what the gods might do. Why had they come, now, for this birth? Would they take the child from him? Would they take the mother, or even him? He feared what may come if the people here had displeased them and wondered if perhaps they already had.

  When he was only a child himself he had seen the gods descend from the hills in the black of night, like some low-hanging storm cloud sweeping in from the horizon. They had passed through this very village, cutting down all in their path. Some had fallen to the ground, untouched, shaking and losing their blood from their eyes, noses, and mouths. Others were grasped and pulled apart in sections to be cast aside like offal. Most men hid, and some just laid down where they were with their faces pressed to the earth and their eyes closed tight. One man had raised his hand to them and burst into a red cloud from his navel upward, leaving his legs kicking a wild circle in the dirt.

  The gods turned to leave, back unto their secret place beneath the sea, perhaps. A journey so dry and distant, that the life of any man, should they follow into the places the gods had taken for their own, would be marked, as the scoring found on a palover tree where beetles had hatched.

  The priest brought the child back to his mother and saw that her terror had turned to hot tears. She smiled wide and true and hopeful. “The gods favor this child,” she said.

  Her smile seemed to him like the rending of some impregnable thing, as though the ground itself had split its hard and dry maw to reveal soft pink skin that would burn and die in the sun, and he cried with her then.

  “They do,” he said.

  He could see that the men and women of the tribes were beginning their journey back up the dry river in the bright night, but it was the departing gods that he watched the longest, walking as they were, like men, one foot and then the next.

  When they were lost to sight, he prayed.

  ¤

  When Alix had reached thirteen years, the priest led him into the desert to retrieve his weapon from the dark below. They walked side by side in the hot morning, clad for travel in loose, light garments and head coverings. The priest carried a long spine from the skeleton of a cactus in his hand, and had tied a bit of red cloth to its tip to indicate the holy passage of these two votaries. Even so, the boy was afraid.

  “Won’t the tribes take us, traveling alone in the open?” he asked.

  The priest shook his head. “All boys must make this journey into manhood. The gods will it, and all men know.” He looked at Alix and still saw worry in his brow. He stopped and got down on one knee. “Alix, we are just one small boy and an old man. If you saw us walking past our village, would you do us harm?”

  The boy looked at him with great solemnity. “If we were the men who took mother, or the men who killed Rand…yes.”

  The priest put his free hand to the boy’s head and patted his dark hair. “But we are not, and even those men made this journey. The will of a man may be dark, or his needs at odds with yours. We may never understand why men work evil in this world…” The priest held the boy’s shoulder then. “We may never even understand such thoughts that come to our minds.”

  The boy lowered his eyes at that and the priest nodded.

  “The will of the gods is sacred, as is this journey. We are pilgrims, Alix, and we must travel in faith.”

  The priest stood and they continued in silence. They traveled for two days, stopping in the shade of rock overhangs or hills at midday. They walked in the evening and before the sun was up to avoid the worst of the heat. They shivered in the cold of night. The sun painted the landscape in reds at morning and evening, moving from brown, to tan, to white, and back again across the days.

  The following morning they crested a hill and came upon a great valley that descended to the horizon. Stretched across its median there lay a mountain on its side, the exposed bottom face of it jutting impossibly high. This high face was dark and pocked, like some enormity of living rock that had been cast to earth and ravaged at its underbelly. In the north could be seen the place from which the mountain was riven, stretching like a black and shadowy gash across the distance.

  The boy caught his breath and the priest nodded.

  They walked into the valley and saw eagles drifting around the heights of the mountain. They came upon a wide and firm gray road, cracked in places and blackened in others. The boy stopped for a moment to feel it with his hands.

  “What is this?” the boy asked.

  “The old works of men,” the priest said.

  “Men lived here once?”

  “Yes, long ago, but the gods banished them from this place. You will see more soon.”

  They journeyed on the old road, traveling into the shadow of the impossible peak, until they came to a huge gap in the earth that burrowed into its base. There were old scraps of cloth tied to sticks and branches, like the one the priest carried now. The priest wedged his into the earth, near the others. They set their bundles down and the priest started a fire from a stack of old wood that they found outside the entrance. The priest tied a rag to the end of a stick and dipped it in a clay jar that he had also found in this place. He set it in the fire until it burned and handed it to Alix.

  “You will need this to see below,” he said.

  The boy looked awestruck. “What do I do?”

  The priest studied him for a moment. “You will travel below. The path is clear and you will come to the place where the gods have left the means by which we defend ourselves from each other. You must take a weapon for yourself and then return.”

  The boy looked into the hole in the ground. “How will I know what to take?”

  “It is for you to choose. I cannot guide you in that.”

  The boy nodded.

  “There is more,” the priest said. “You will see many things below. This place is a monument to men’s curiosity, but you must take nothing from this place but what weapon you would hold with you for the rest of your life. All else is forbidden to us by the gods.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  The priest had brought every boy child of the village to this place since he was young and each time he found he must relearn the way to explain. Their purpose here was for the weapon, but it was
the knowledge Alix sought that truly made this the journey into manhood. As the priest before him had taught him, now must he teach this boy.

  “Long ago, when this place was still whole and men dwelt here, they made many wondrous things, but these things did not avail them when the gods came, and they will not avail us now. Do you understand?”

  Alix shook his head and the priest sat down by the fire.

  “Did you know that men once believed in other gods?” the priest asked, though he knew the answer.

  Alix shook his head once more.

  “It’s true. They worshipped many gods, but they made their gods in their own image, and when the gods came from the sky, men did not recognize them, and they sought to cast the gods out. They failed and were destroyed for it, for what is the will of man next to that of the gods?” The priest stoked the fire. “This is what you will find in the dark below, the works of man’s faith unto itself.” The priest looked again into the boy’s dark eyes. “Now do you understand?”

  The boy just stared at him with his mouth open.

  “Go quickly, before your fire dies,” the priest said.

  Alix hesitated for a moment and looked from the gap into the earth to the priest and back again, but he moved to leave. In time, the priest lost sight of the boy’s fire and he turned his attention back to the fire he tended. He watched the shadow of the peak grow outward into the desert and listened to the popping of the wood. He thought about the night Alix was born, how he had stared into the eyeless faces of the gods, but soon enough, the boy returned. His eyes were wide and he held the dead torch. The priest wondered if he had traveled far in darkness.

  “Well?” the priest asked.

  Alix held forth an angled piece of black metal, too big for his small hands.

  “Why did you choose this one?”

  The boy shrugged his shoulders. “It’s like it’s meant to fit your hand.”

  The priest came over to inspect it with him. “Do you see here how your finger should fit inside this loop?” he asked.

  The boy nodded. “I like it.” He pulled the thin metal bar that dangled in the loop, making a small snapping sound of metal on metal. The boy reversed it in his hand and held the handle out like a hammer. “Like this?”