Swallowed By The Cracks e-Pub

by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith

  I hear her crying at night. I am not sure why she weeps, but the sound is dreadful, filled with a loss and regret that I cannot even begin to understand… I think I might have fallen asleep again, just for a moment or two. Or perhaps I retreated inside myself, to the place he cannot touch. When I open my eyes he is out there, on the other side of the box. He has probably lifted the edge of the divan to access the box – there is a door in the side where I roll in and out. I can sense his fingers tracing the pattern of the grain. If I concentrate I can hear him breathing. It is a horrible sound, like ancient, faulty bellows trying to make a draft.

  I fear that it might be time to come out.

  I hear the clasps open and wait for the side of the box to swing down, letting in the light. I am blinded for a few seconds, and unable to move. My limbs have seized up. My jaw is locked tight.

  I feel his chunky hands upon me as he guides me out of the box, clutching at my belly and breasts. I can smell whisky on his breath. The sound of his hoggish moaning and grunting is loud in my ears. The light is too much, I still cannot see beyond its sharp barrier. The wooden flap claws at my back as he drags me out and lifts me onto the bed, pawing at me with his blunt fingers. Then, unexpectedly, he steps away, still grunting, and leaves me on my back on the hard mattress. I wish I could see because I am sure that he is weeping. His footsteps retreat, much lighter than they should be, different from how they usually sound. The door closes but he does not lock it. I stare at the door for a long time, wondering if it will open again. Timber creaks as he leans against the other side of the door. I hear a voice, low and strained, but it does not belong to him. It is a woman's voice, but empty, like a machine, and the noises it makes are nowhere near words. I am frightened and confused. Why has Hilda let me out of the box? This has never happened before – she is not even allowed inside this room. I lie still for a while, waiting for my eyesight to adjust. Slowly, gradually, the light returns my vision. I see the familiar bare room, the splintered boards and grubby curtains. I rub my face with a steady hand, turning so that I am supported on one elbow.

  On the unpainted cabinet that stands by the side of the bed, there rests a gun. I stare at the gun, wondering if this is a trick, a test. The sound of traffic outside becomes louder, clearer, and for a moment I am overcome by tastes and smells that I have never experienced before. Tears soak my cheeks but I do not know why I am crying. I swing my legs off the bed, sit facing the door, and pick up the gun. It is heavy. The metal is still warm. It smells of freedom, and that scares me more than anything else I can imagine. Because he had no sons, my father taught me to shoot and hunt at an early age. This gun is nothing like the ancient Russian hunting rifle I am used to, but I think I can work out how to use it. My finger curls under the trigger guard. I am smiling. It feels unnatural. I will need to learn how to smile all over again. There is no sound now beyond the closed door. I stand, holding the gun. Then I open the door, slowly, expecting him to run at me and force me to the floor, laughing. Dusty light spills across the threshold, bathing my feet and the bottom of my shins. I can now hear Hilda crying in another room. The television is on, an American game show. Traffic passes by outside, whispering a strange message in my ear. As I step out into the hall, I catch sight of him through the living room doorframe. All I see is his thick pink arm resting on the side of a chair as he snoozes in front of the game show. The faded blue tattoos. Crumbs. The horrible little black hairs – like the thick, spiny hairs on a pig's back.

  It is easy to watch a pig die.

  After what feels like forever I take a small step forward, then a bigger one. The floorboards do not make a sound. I feel like I am floating. I have been here for seven years and the promise of freedom is the most terrifying thing I can imagine. What will I do? Where will I go? Who else will ever love me? There are so many things to consider, a buzzing swarm of thoughts threatens to overwhelm me. But I must not forget who I am, where I am from, or what has been done to me. I must never forget.

  A memory: My father says: "I know it is not easy, baba, but it is something that must be done."

  My name is Natasha Putkin. I must remember that. Names are what define us. They tell us who we are and where we are from. Sometimes they even tell us what must be done.

  «-ô-»

  About S. G. Browne

  S. G. Browne grew up in Northern California and graduated from the University of the Pacific before moving to Hollywood, where he worked for several years doing post-production for the Disney Studios. Eventually, he moved to Santa Cruz to wait tables and write books.

  He is the author of Breathers and Fated, both dark comedies and social satires with a supernatural or fantastic slant. Breathers, his debut novel, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist that has also been optioned for film by Fox Searchlight Pictures. His third novel, Lucky Bastard, is slated for release in 2012.

  He currently lives in San Francisco.

  You can visit him online at www.sgbrowne.com.

  Dream Girls

  By S. G. Browne

  I never expected to be lounging in a hammock in my back yard, drinking a cold Corona while my ex-wife power washed the house in a black Spandex mesh underwired teddy with matching thong underwear. Then again, I never expected to have sex with six different women in one day.

  Every time I have sex with another woman, I wonder if it's real, if I'm just dreaming the life of the ancient gods of Olympus, attended by my own versions of Athena and Hera and Aphrodite. Then my disbelief explodes in an orgasm as real as the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.

  I am forty-five years old and having the best sex of my life.

  I finish my beer and reach out to set it down, but before the empty bottle can touch the flagstone, it's plucked out of my hand and replaced with a new, cold Corona with a lime. When I glance up, my ex-wife is walking away with my empty beer bottle, the thong displaying her miraculous ass.

  Even with the technology that makes it possible for her to look so good, it's amazing that after eight years of marriage and another seven since the divorce, my ex-wife looks exactly the way I remember her when she was twenty-seven.

  I, on the other hand, look every bit like my four and a half decades. According to the averages, I've got another sixty years to go before I vacate my body and it gets carted off to the composting home, which is really more of a factory than a home. But semantics are a big thing when you're trying to make everyone feel more comfortable about death, even when seven in ten people live to see one hundred.

  Of course, if I didn't smoke half-a-pack a day and go through a case of beer every week, I'd be looking at a good chance of becoming a centenarian. Fortunately, the third of my vices isn't likely to shorten my life. At least not directly. Hell, anything in excess can lead to complications, but we're talking about sexual obsession here, not drug addiction. And it's not like I'm breaking any laws.

  Still, that doesn't prevent the American Fundamentalists and other religious groups from making a big fuss in Washington. I don't know what they expect the government to do. It's not like the President or Congress plan on installing sex monitors in everyone's bedrooms. Orwell got a number of things right, but telescreens and the Thought Police weren't some of them – not to mention the year. Hell, he missed that by nearly a century.

  Sex is another thing Orwell got wrong about the future. In Orwell's 1984, intercourse was an afterthought at best – a secret, pleasureless act that seemed to have no place in society other than for procreation. But as we approach the cusp of the twenty-second century, sex is in the spotlight, celebrated and commercialized, packaged for no other reason than pleasure. And the pinnacle of that pleasure, the height of hedonism, arrived with the introduction of Dream Girls.

  Now I'll be the first to admit that the political and social uproar surrounding Dream Girls isn't without merit. After all, it's not often a co
nsumer product brings up issues of slavery, prostitution, invasion of privacy, and first amendment rights, but I've always been in favor of letting the people choose their poison. Society is bound to collapse sooner or later, whether internally or from an asteroid like the one that brought the dinosaur's party to a premature end, so why stop everyone from having some fun while they're here?

  You ask me, people take life too damn seriously. They need to spend less time worrying about what's right and wrong and more time relaxing and drinking a nice, cold beer.

  I take several long pulls from my Corona while my ex-wife power washes sun-baked bird shit off the siding above the dining room window, leaving white discolorations. I realize too late I should have grabbed some paint at the hardware store, but I figure I can pick it up tomorrow morning and have Debbie touch up the siding after she finishes re-staining the deck.

  If I could afford it I'd get another pair of hands to help her, but I don't earn enough money to become a triad. Unless you take home at least six figures a year, you're best bet to have a threesome is to troll the nearest college campus.

  I finish off most of the second Corona and close my eyes, rocking softly in the hammock, lulled by the white noise from the power washer, my thoughts drifting into dream sequences from my college years. When I open my eyes, my ex-wife is gone, the power washer silent. At first I'm annoyed. Then Ashley Allen, the hot little blonde who lived across from me my junior year in college, appears with another Corona, wearing nothing but a smile and looking just as good as she did twenty-four years ago.

  She hands me my beer, then climbs into the hammock with me and unzips my shorts without a word. I lean back and the Corona slips out of my hand, the bottle shattering on the flagstone in an explosion of foam.

  You ask any warm-blooded, heterosexual male to name one sexual fantasy, and he's apt to reply that he'd like to have sex with two women at the same time – preferably attractive ones with nice bodies and no inhibitions. Maybe throw in a giant Twister mat and a couple of gallons of baby oil. You ask that same warm-blooded male if he'd like to have sex with a different woman every night for the rest of his life with no commitments, no complications, and no consequences, and he's likely to ask where he can sign up.

  In spite of society's attempts to alter or influence our behavior, heterosexual men are genetically wired to have sex with as many women as possible. Spread our seed. Ensure the propagation of our DNA. We're like those rhesus monkeys in that experiment where they put a male monkey in a cage with a female monkey and then let them go at it until the male monkey rolls over and starts snoring. Then they take out the female monkey and replace her with another female. She taps the male on the shoulder, he perks up and says "Hey, you're new," and they go at it until he once more grows bored with her company. Then she gets replaced.

  It goes on like this for hours, a revolving door of female monkeys.

  Switch. Fuck. Repeat.

  It's a regular primate porno.

  Human men aren't much different. Given the opportunity and a free pass from any unwanted emotional entanglements, we'd have sex with as many women as possible. Marriage is an unnatural hindrance to our intended purpose.

  So we cheat.

  We watch on-line porn.

  We masturbate to fantasies of other women.

  Monogamy doesn't stand a chance when it's up against millions of years of genetic code.

  But with the rigorous morals of American society chained to its Puritan heritage, we've had to unload buckets of cash and act like gentlemen just to get a piece of ass. Either that or we've had to risk the specter of AIDS in the back room of some dingy hotel with an overused prostitute.

  Dream Girls changed all that.

  For what men used to have to spend on an engagement ring for a lifetime of commitment to one woman, we can now make a down payment on a lifetime of sex with every woman we ever wanted to sleep with, make love to, hump, fuck, bang, nail, or screw.

  No commitments. No complications. No consequences.

  The technology is pretty simple – a combination of human and alien DNA with a high speed internal processor that makes the Pentium XXXII seem like the computer equivalent of a snail. The human DNA provides the form, appearance, and feel of a woman, while the internal central processing unit gives the body sentience. The alien DNA is responsible for the rapid growth during the cloning process, allowing the Dream Girl to be manufactured in as little as four weeks. The alien DNA is also what allows the Dream Girl to morph into any woman the man desires her to be.

  A porn star. A supermodel. Your ex-wife.

  All it takes is a physical or mental image and the Dream Girl's CPU can convert the image into reality. Masturbation and fantasizing have become as outdated as analog. The fantasy is real and attainable, only a thought away.

  I look up and watch Ashley, her naked twenty-year-old body so firm and smooth that I can barely maintain my stamina. It doesn't help that she's going at me with the unbridled enthusiasm of a young woman.

  Initially, the CPU didn't have a regulator to prevent the Dream Girl from morphing into teenagers or adolescent girls, leading to charges of child pornography, but those problems have been ironed out – though in some states you can still have sex with a seventeen-year-old with her consent, which isn't much of a problem considering you own her.

  I haven't had sex with anyone under eighteen yet. And I never had sex with Ashley either during or after college, but she's as hungry and insatiable as I imagined she would be. And with a body less than half my age, I can't imagine anything better than getting fucked in a hammock by a twenty year old blonde. But occasionally during sex, my mind wanders to potential possibilities, so by the time she comes, Ashley has morphed into the nineteen-year-old brunette who works behind the counter at the local Starbucks.

  In the six months I've owned my Dream Girl, I've had sex with one-hundred-and-twenty-seven different women. Sometimes they're women I've found in electronic issues of Playboy, Penthouse, and other soft core porn magazines. Other times they're women I see on the street or at the local pub or in the market squeezing vegetables. My personal favorite is the eighteen-year-old sister of a girl I dated after college.

  Like any other technology that transforms society, the Dream Girl has led to numerous legislation and lawsuits ranging from state pornography statutes to civil rights. The ACLU has fought a class-action case, so far unsuccessfully, claiming invasion of privacy on several counts – including unlawful impersonation of an individual and having sex with a clone of a woman without the woman's consent.

  Personally, I think the lawsuit is pretty specious. After all, men have been invading women's privacy for centuries with their imaginations – undressing them with their minds, visualizing them naked with their legs spread or on their hands and knees, fucking a fantasy. Dream Girls just takes the fantasy one step further.

  In addition to the legal battles, there have been countless philosophical debates. Are Dream Girls human? Do they have rights? Can they vote? Is the technology moral? Is it legalized prostitution? Is it legalized slavery? The list goes on and on.

  If you ask me, the answer to the first question is a resounding no. They're not human. They weren't created from a human sperm and egg, and instead of a brain they have a highly advanced computer. They weren't technically born, therefore, they don't have a soul. They're a commercial product, nothing more, and I don't recall a commercial product ever having any rights. As for the last two arguments, hell, if you want to get technical, marriage is legalized prostitution. And I've known my fair share of men and women who've felt trapped by their marriage, enslaved by the responsibilities of being a spouse or a parent.

  Not surprisingly, Dream Girls has taken the brunt of the blame for the steady decline in marriages and rapid increase in divorces. A lot of people, mostly conservatives, think society is on
the path to corruption and destruction and they want the government to intervene for the sake of the country. But asking the government to outlaw Dream Girls is like asking Henry Frankenstein to kill his monster.

  Contrary to what the general public was led to believe for the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of this one, Marilyn Monroe was the prototype of what would eventually become the Dream Girl. Norma Jean Mortenson may have been born in Los Angeles, CA, in June of 1926, but the technology that allowed John F. Kennedy to have his alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe was born in a lab in Area 51 in the early 1950's, several years after the Roswell incident.

  I won't go into how long it took the feds to develop the technology and how many failures they encountered along the way, but by the time Kennedy took office in 1961, they had a prototype ready to test. I don't think they intended to test it in such a high profile place as the Oval Office, but apparently they didn't have much of a choice. Kennedy managed to learn of the new toy the government had created and wanted to try it out.

  For a while, everything went smoothly. Kennedy was able to have his public affair with Marilyn, then bang the clone in the Oval Office. The problem was, the Marilyn clone had too much free will and became a liability. It didn't help that the real Marilyn stumbled upon her doppelganger after JFK's birthday in May of 1962, so both Marilyns had to be terminated. JFK wasn't happy about it and threatened to go public.

  The rest, as they say, is history.

  Like I said, although Orwell was off the mark more often than not, he got a few things right. Even back in the middle of the twentieth century, Big Brother was alive and well.

  Once I'm finished with her, the cute little Starbucks barista climbs out of the hammock and saunters away toward the house, her ass shifting back and forth hypnotically. Sometimes I feel like I've been hypnotized, suggestively guided by the brain between my legs, compelled to act without any freedom of choice. But when you're at the mercy of a legal and glorious addiction, one that provides immense physical pleasure and exceeds any sexual fantasy you've ever imagined, it's kind of hard to find the motivation to quit.