by Unknown
“I can’t … he’s dropping too fast,” yelled Giovinco in desperation. “Jesus Christ … I’m going to lose him!”
Rossini cursed in disgust, turning to Moyer; in his left hand he held the forceps. “Take this from me.”
Moyer hesitated, staring at the revolting creature as it struggled to escape.
“Move it, man! I have to stop that bleeding!”
Rossini held the forceps out for Moyer to take, and as he did, out of the corner of his eye he saw Lipinski rushing toward with a clear plastic bag of blood. Then she was falling, slipping on the wet red tiles, colliding into him. The impact knocked him back. His arm shot up, releasing the forceps high into the air. The unit of blood fell and burst like a water balloon. The forceps clattered next to it.
“Get another unit,” gasped Rossini to the other nurse, helping Lipinski to her feet. Everything around him seemed to be moving.
And now there was screaming.
The thing from Jonathan Lynch’s skull had fallen through the air and—like a slapstick scene from an obscene comedy—landed directly on Moyer’s cheek, flattening itself and instantaneously burrowing its razor mouth into his flesh.
“Get it off me,” screeched the young resident, ripping his surgical mask off and clawing at his face with mindless dread.
“Stop it!” Robbin cried.
“I can’t get it off! It stuck something in me!”
Lipinski ran to help him, but Moyer violently pushed her away. He pulled off a scalpel from the instrument tray and began to flay at his cheek. A shower of blood ran down the side of his face as he sliced his cheek, and the creature, into scarlet ribbons.
And as he hacked away, he kept screaming: “IT’S GOING FOR MY BRAIN!”
“Stop him,” shouted Rossini, motioning to the students.
Two of the young males rushed forward and grappled with Moyer from behind. Lipinski sprang forward again, reaching for his arm. The dead thing dripped off his face in damp pieces, along with chunks of his own flesh.
“Stop it, Joe!” shouted Lipinski. “It’s dead! You killed it!”
“It’s still on me! I can feel it crawling inside my head!”
Another student joined the little scrub nurse and together they wrestled the scalpel from his hand. The second he was disarmed, Moyer went limp and collapsed to the floor.
“Get him out of here,” said Rossini, fighting the maelstrom of insanity that was brewing in his head. “Doctor?”
Rossini looked up. Giovinco was standing next to him, perfectly still. “I lost him.”
“No!”
Rossini lunged for Giovinco. Fiercely, he grabbed the lapels of the man’s white lab coat and almost lifted him off the ground.
“It wasn’t my fault,” croaked Giovinco, feebly trying to stare the older man down.
“Doctor Rossini!” shouted Nurse Lipinski. “The patient is gone!”
Rossini stared bitterly at the cowed anesthesiologist, a rational portion of his mind trying to gain a foothold in the ocean of blind rage that had swept him away. He had done battle with his old arch-enemy—death—and he had lost again. Yet his pride would not accept that. He had to show them that he could overcome defeat. Had to prove to himself that he was more than just a skilled mechanic, that he truly did understand that unknown spark of life that was housed in the brain. He could make miracles happen, he was certain.
He released Giovinco and returned to the table. “Coagulator,” he called. He waited with his right hand outstretched. The spritzing blood from Lynch’s torn arteries had been reduced to a faint trickle.
“Doctor, he’s dead. There’s nothing you can do.”
“Coagulator.”
Lipinski handed him the instrument without further comment.
Rossini looked in the lens. After a few minutes, he began to cry.
The creature had laid eggs—a mound of larvae concealed in a gaping cavity below the cerebellum. Some of the eggs were partially hatched, and he could see, quite clearly, the tiny reptilian heads snapping blindly at the airy space around them, longing to be fed.
10
It was dark when Angela returned from the hospital. She parked her car in the garage and entered through the kitchen door. Simon, their affable cat, rushed to greet her, brushing against her ankles. She crouched down and patted the animal, gently lifting him to her cheek. “Just us now,” she said, and the cat purred.
She went through the daily routine of switching on lights, feeding Simon, checking the mail. Over a cup of tea, she sat in the kitchen, her weary legs propped on a chair. The mail was mostly for Jonathan (as usual). After finishing her tea, she gathered his mail and placed it on his desk in the first floor den. Just as if he would be coming home from some book promotion tour to go through it.
In bed, later, she lay with her eyes open and Simon curled at her feet, exhausted to the point where she could not sleep. The empty bed seemed enormous, the house hollow. Sleep was out of the question. She left the bedroom and went back down to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of wine. Deciding that the cool night air would help her sleep, she stepped out into the quiet autumn night.
She wanted desperately to cry, but every emotion had been wrung out of her. She was as dry as the desert.
The glass of wine went quickly and she was about to return to the kitchen for a refill when a shadow at the edge of the driveway coalesced into a human shape that stood, stiff and tall, in the full rays of the moon.
The man in black nodded his head and she thought she heard her name called. Fear rose like boiling water, scalding every nerve in her body. For a moment the pale, nebulous face took on the shape and lines of Jonathan. But then it changed, like a whisper, to other faces—her lover’s, Rossini’s, finally her own face, trembling and scared.
“Who are you?” she managed to ask, not really wanting to know.
The silent black shape nodded once more, tipping his hat. The face returned to a pale, expressionless mask.
The man in black turned away from her and started walking down the driveway, toward the twinkling lights of the city.
LOVE DOLL: A FABLE
Joe R. Lansdale
Moving right along, we continue to consider the notion that a short story can be a marvelous metaphor for larger concerns. But let’s make the additional observation that nothing can add a little hot sauce to your basic metaphor any better than equal amounts of humor and satire. East Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale has known this for a long while now; and that’s one of the reasons he’s considered such an excellent craftsman of the short fiction form. His latest contribution to Borderlands explores the territory of such diverse writers as—believe it or not—Donald Barthelme and Joe Bob Briggs.
I buy a plastic love doll because I want something to fuck that I don’t have to talk to. Right on the box it says Love Doll. I take her home and blow her up. She looks pretty and sexy and innocent.
I fuck her. I sit with her on the couch and watch TV and put an arm around her plastic shoulders and hold my dick with my other hand.
I fuck her some more. In the morning I let the air out of her and fold her up and put her in a drawer.
When I come home from work at night, I give her a blow job and she is full and stiff again. I take her into the bedroom and fuck her. I watch TV with my arm around her, one hand on my dick.
This goes on for a while.
I start to talk to the doll. I never wanted to talk to a woman, but I talk to the doll. I name her Madge. I had a dog named Madge that I liked.
I stop letting the air out of her in the mornings. I leave her in bed. I fix breakfast on a tray, enough for two. I come in and eat beside her on the bed. There’s plenty of food left when I stop and get ready for work.
When I come home the tray is where it was and the doll is gone. There’s no food left on the tray.
I find Madge in the shower. She smiles at me when I slide the shower door back.
“I was going to clean up for you,” she said.
“Be sexy. I’m sorry the house isn’t clean and dinner isn’t ready. It won’t happen again.”
I get in the shower with her. We have sex and soap each other. We dry off and go to bed and have sex again. We lie in bed and talk afterward. She talks some about girl things. She talks about me mostly. She has good things to say about my sexual prowess. We have sex again.
Next day she drives me to work, picks me up at the end of the day. All the fellas are jealous when they see her, she’s such a good-looking piece.
She always looks nice. Wears frilly things, short skirts. For bop-around she wears tight sweaters and T-shirts and jeans. She smells good. She puts her hands on me a lot. The house is clean when I get home. Dinner is ready in a jiffy.
A year passes. Quite happily. Life couldn’t be better. Lots of sex. A clean house. Food when I need it. Conversation. She tells me I’m a real man when I mount her, that she needs me, calls me her stallion, makes good noises beneath me and scratches at my back, she makes a la-la-la noise when she comes. She likes my muscles, the scruffiness of my beard. We watch movies on the couch, my arm around her. She holds my dick in her hand. When I tell her to, she gives me a blow job while I watch the movie. She always swallows my load.
One night we’re laying in bed and she says, “I think maybe I should go to school.”
“What for?” I ask.
“To bring in more money. We could buy some things”
“I make enough money.”
“I know. You’re a hard-working man. But I want to help.”
“You help enough. You be here for me at night, keep the house clean and the meals ready. That’s a woman’s place.”
“Whatever you want, dear.”
But she doesn’t mean it. It comes up now and again, her going to school. Finally I think, so what? She goes off to school. The house isn’t quite so clean. The meals aren’t always ready on time. I drive myself to work. Some nights she doesn’t feel like sex. I jack off in the bathroom a lot. We sit on the couch and watch movies. She sits on one end, I sit on the other. We wear our clothes. I have a beer in one hand, the remote control in the other. We argue about little things. She doesn’t like the way I spend my money.
She gets a degree. She gets a job in business. She wears suits. The bop-around stuff she wears is less tight. She doesn’t wear makeup or perfume around the house. She keeps her hands to herself. No kissing goodbye and hello anymore. We have sex less. When we have it, she seems distracted. She doesn’t call me her King, her Big Man like she used to. After sex she’ll sometimes stay up late reading books by people called Sartre or Camus. She’s writing something she calls a business manifesto. She sits at the typewriter for hours. She goes to business parties, and I go with her, but I can tell they think I’m boring. I don’t know what they’re talking about. They talk about business and books and ideas. I hear Madge say a woman has to make her own way in the world. That she shouldn’t depend on a man, even if she has one. Thing to do is to be your own person. She tells a man that. Guy in a three-piece blue suit with hairspray on his hair. He agrees with her. I feel sick.
I tell her so in the car on the way home. She calls me a prick. We don’t fuck that night.
I watch a lot of movies alone. She yells from the bedroom for me to turn them down, and why don’t I watch something else other than car chase movies, and why don’t I read a book, even a stupid one?
I feel small these days. I go to the store and look at the love dolls. They all look so sexy and innocent. I think I might buy one, but find I can’t. I don’t feel man enough. I can’t control the one I have. I get a new one, she might change, too. Course, a new one I could let the air out of when I finished fucking her, never let her have a day alone full blown.
I go home. Madge is there. She’s writing her book. I get angry. I tell her I’ve been patient long enough. I’m the man around here. I tell her to stop that typing, get her clothes off, and get in bed and grab her ankles. I’m going to fuck her unconscious.
She laughs. “You skinny, little, stupid pencil-dick, you couldn’t fuck a gnat unconscious. You’re about as manly as a Kotex.”
I feel as if I’ve been hit in the face with a fist. I go into the bedroom and close the door. I sit on the edge of the bed. I can hear her typing in there. I get up and go over to the dresser and open the bottom drawer. I take off all my clothes and find the air spigot on the head of my dick and pull it open and listen to the air go out of me. I crumple into the open drawer, and lay there like a used prophylactic.
An hour or so later the typing stops. I hear her come into the room. She looks in the drawer. No expression. I try to say something manly, but nothing will come. I have no air and no voice. She moves away.
I hear the water running while she takes a shower. She comes out naked. I can see her pubic hair above me. I note how firm and full of air her thighs are. She opens the top drawer. She takes out panties. She puts them on. She goes away. I hear her sit on the bed. She dials the phone. She tells someone to come on over, that her thing with me is finished.
Time passes. The doorbell rings. Madge gets up and goes past me. I get a glimpse of her, her hair combed out long and pretty, a robe on.
I hear her laugh in the other room. She comes back with a man. As they go by the drawer I see it’s the man in the business suit from the party. I hear them sit on the bed. They laugh a lot. She says something rude about me and my sexual abilities. I can tell she has his dick out of his pants because they’re laughing about something. I realize they’re laughing about sex. He’s making fun of his equipment. I never like being laughed at when it’s about sex. I don’t like being laughed at all, especially by a woman.
The bathrobe flies across the room and lands in the drawer on top of me and everything is dark. I hear the bedsprings squeak. They squeak for hours. They talk while they screw. After a while they stop talking. He grunts like a hog. She sings like a lark. Afterward I hear them talking. He asks her if she came. She says only a little. He says let me help you. I can’t be sure, but I think he’s doing something to her with his hand. I can’t believe it. She doesn’t seem to mind this at all.
I hear her sing again, this time louder than ever. Then they talk again. She tells him she never really came for me, that she always faked it. That I was a lousy fuck. That I didn’t care if she came. That I got on and did it and got off.
A little air caught at the top of my head floats down and out of my open mouth.
They talk some more. They don’t talk about him. She doesn’t talk girl things. They talk about ideas. Politics. History. The office. Movies—films they call them—and books.
In the middle of the night the robe is lifted off of me. It’s Madge. She’s down on her knees looking in the drawer. She smiles at me. She picks me up and folds me gently. She has a box with her. It’s the box she came in. The one that says Love Doll on it. The words Love Doll have been marked through with a magic marker and Fuck Toy has been written in above it. She puts me in the box and seals the lid and puts me back in the drawer and closes it.
APATHETIC FLESH
Darren O. Godfrey
Another way a story can become part of the Borderlands canon is if it is truly disturbing. Provocative, innovative, stylish, and stuff like that are all good, but it is the occasional story that really bothers you on some elemental level that’s most rare. After reading thousands of submissions, believe me—I know of what I speak on this. That’s why “Apathetic Flesh” is the next thing you’ll read. I finished it and couldn’t get some of its more central images out of my mind. Darren Godfrey is a new writer from Pocatello, Idaho; he’s thirty years old, married, and has a strong dislike for professional wrestling. The story which follows is his first appearance in a major anthology, and if this thing doesn’t get you by the short hairs, I don’t know—maybe you ain’t got any.
If you were to stop and think about it, you wouldn’t really be able to say why it is you watch these films; though, as a child, you enjoyed being frightened,
and some of the movies did that; and as a teenager you enjoyed being shocked (and perhaps a little revolted) and the “splatter” films fit that bill nicely. But now, at an ancient and creaking twenty-seven years of age, the movies—horror, splatter, or otherwise—no longer seem to have any effect on you. Nil.
But still you watch them, every one.
And think about it is something you never do anyway, so, tonight, you merely chew stale popcorn and gawk at the silver screen where the lead zombie (nicknamed Harley) effortlessly tears a young woman’s head from her quivering white shoulders, delicately tongues one of her eyeballs, sucks it from its socket. Harley chews it, apparently savoring the taste, and the only discomfort you feel is the rock-hard lump against the small of your back, a special feature of all the seats in the Chief Theater. No point in moving. So you don’t.
Until it’s over (completely over; every last credit read and recorded in your junkshop mind), at which time you stand and brush salt and popcorn bits from your jeans.
“Well, that was fun,” you say to no one as you step into the aisle and make for the glowing green EXIT.
Outside, the air is somewhat cooler than you expected it to be. You gaze up at the clouds gathering fast in the night sky and wish you’d brought along a jacket. You walk.
Midway across the gloomy parking lot a hump of shadow swells in your peripheral vision. It extends, detaches itself from the side of a parked car, and speaks in a well-mannered voice: “Sir, did you enjoy the film?”
Your feet stop dead in their tracks. You think of your home, a mere three blocks away, and you wonder if you can outrun this person; then you suddenly realize that this shadow is only a child; a young boy with a stocking cap pulled tightly down over his ears.
You say, “Sure. It was great,” and walk passively on. You hear the shadow-child follow you.
“I very much wanted to see it,” he informs your back, “but they would not let me in. They said that I am underage.”