He had done a number on her for sure, and not just her body, but in her mind. She was mightily confused. Even now, as she thought back in fascination and revulsion at what had occurred between the two of them last night, she was slightly aroused at the actual reality of sex. Which parts had felt good, and which parts had felt bad? Even the bad parts were good, and the good parts, well, she had been raised to know that all of that was bad.
She admired her breasts in the mirror, then her ass in profile. She knew men looked at her lustfully, and she was always a bit naïve about why they did. She knew she had the same sort of profile and curves as all the underwear models and all the other sluts that posed for money on television and movies and in ads, but it had never clicked for her just how powerfully men were driven by those shapes until last night. Seeing all of the little bruises and red marks he had left on her body was curiously arousing. There were literally hundreds. Except for the ‘muffler burn’ on her neck and the teeth marks on her upper chest and shoulders, every single one of them was from his hands, each one intentional, each one created and driven by his raw desire for her.
In a way, they felt like compliments. Hundreds of dirty, sinful little compliments testifying to how excited her tits and ass had made him while he was deflowering her. And she knew that was pretty…well, she tried to not swear even in her mind, since Jesus said ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” but she knew that enjoying those painful ministrations was just pretty fucked up. And yet, that’s just how she felt. She liked it. She couldn’t change that, she could only pretend it wasn’t true and ignore it.
That was a wrong thing to do, too. Janie couldn’t win. She had made her choice knowing she was going to undergo a great change, and pay a great price, in exchange for a great good deed. She wasn’t counting on heavenly rewards, that was un-Christian, but she had thought all along that she could keep true to herself in her mind, no matter what happened to her body; and she thought, if she could just stay true to the Lord and herself in her mind, then she could find redemption again, even if it was a challenge. Even if it was a life-long struggle.
Now, she wasn’t so sure. But she did know that tomorrow was Halloween, and for some reason, Butterface got around to all the virgin boys no later than that. She sure hoped Old Pap could call her off of her Tommy Joe. She couldn’t stand the thought of him being ruined like Bobby Joe, or sitting uselessly in front of the store all day drooling into a bucket like Dumb Luther.
Suddenly she felt silly, childish, pathetic for holding out against Tommy Joe. She could save him. She could save him so easily. She could save him, and not only that, she would enjoy it. If she enjoyed it with a dirty old man like Old Pap, she would love it with her handsome, sexy sweetheart. And then she could take all the time she needed to work out her salvation, since she would be in a Godly marriage, with her good man at her side, to help her when she needed it; not just for her damnation for giving her virginity to Old Pap, but for her premarital sex with Tommy Joe. It was perfect. She felt stupid that she hadn’t just slept with him already anyhow, in ways, even though she knew it was right.
She’d just have to make sure he couldn’t actually see her body, that first time. Not marked like this. But she could arrange that with a little play acting—just pretend to be shy and modest about him seeing her the first time they did it. Have him sneak into her room late, or her sneak into his.
He could look at her all he wanted, once all these bruises and marks had faded. She wasn’t ever going to mention Old Pap to him, or her deal with the devil, as she thought of it. Especially not now. Janie had initially planned to tell him everything, and let her good intentions—and hopefully, good results—speak for her. But not now. She had enjoyed it far too much to be able to lie about it convincingly. She hadn’t even felt like herself, she felt a level of licentiousness that she had never understood was possible, much less hers.
So, like all sinful deeds, she knew that she was going to need to find a way to be with Tommy Joe under the cover of absolute darkness. And with Halloween being tomorrow, it had to be today. Maybe even, she thought, tonight…tonight or never.
“Lord, please help me,” she muttered. Then she thought about how blasphemous it must be to ask God to help you have premarital sex, regardless of how good the cause was, and she almost wept. She looked away from the mirror and went to fetch her clothing, forgetting to even do her business before she exited the restroom.
~~~
Old Pap spat tobacco juice onto the floor of the cabin, then puffed on his pipe. The smoke hung in the air heavily, adding to the artificial plane that covered the room several feet above the floor. The old man’s eyes wandered back to the sofa, where JimBob’s dead body still lay, exposed, pale, and starting to get stiff, his mouth and eyes both wide-open.
It didn’t bother him much, but JimBob had been the best of the three at least. Bobby Joe was the one always spunkin around the fishin’ hole, and Tommy Joe was just everything he didn’t like in a young man. Good-looking, strong, cocky, know it all young son of a bitch.
Now JimBob, he was the only one of the three that ever had any potential to be worth a shit, at least to Old Pap’s way of looking at things. He wasn’t too smart for his own good like Tommy Joe, and he wasn’t a fat little rotten shit like Bobby Joe. He could’ve been normal, living peaceable and quiet on his family farm. And hell—even if he had a passel of kids with that pretty little sister of his, well, nobody would make much of a fuss about it. Not around these parts. He wasn’t the first, and he wouldn’t be the last.
But all in all, he didn’t much care. He reckoned they were all three pretty much up Shit Creek soon’s he told them about Butterface, but that’s what they get for trompin around his fishin’ hole, and muckin it up and scarin all the fish away and jizzin right into the water where they shoulda knowed the fishes was gonna eat it. God dammit, it pissed him off all over again, thinking about all the fishes he ate that surely had some-a Bobby Joe’s got damn cream in ‘em.
It was just starting to get light out. He’d been sitting in this old rocking chair for about two pipes worth now, maybe half an hour, when he noticed movement in the thick, cloudy layer at eye level.
When he felt the familiar warmness, he spat again, then said, “Hello, you evil slut. Bout God damn time you got here, I got somethin fer ya.” He reached his empty hand up to the chest pocket in his overalls, pulled out the rag, and held it up, creating new swirls in the plane of smoke.
Good. You’ve been slacking of late.
“Now you want to understand. Tain’t as easy as it used t’be. I got to rely more on mah wits now’days, I cain’t just talk ‘em out of it if’n I get a little too…manly like, forceful, or what have you.”
I have no interest in your excuses. How you deal with the other apes is your concern.
“Now y’see that? All these years and you jist keep on-a actin like a bitch to me. How long I gotta bring you this h’yere virgin blood right out the twat, and drop your name to these slow-bloomin boys afore you shows me a little ree-spect?”
You’ve barely begun to serve me. Do I not invigorate you from time to time?
“Yup. Yup. Ah’ll be a hundred-six years old tomorrah, and ah don’t feel no worse than I did when I was forty, though I look it. But I got a favor t’ask all the same. ‘N if’n y’ask me, ah think you owe me least a little somethin.”
The swirling cloud of smoke gained a red tint, and while he knew this usually signaled her anger, he nonetheless felt her amusement as well when he heard her answer in his head:
Name your favor and I shall consider it.
He took a long drag on his pipe before he spoke. “This’n here,” he said holding up the rag again, “Ah thank ah wanna keep ‘er a while. See like I said, I had to use my wits. So I promised her I can git you t’lay off her young feller Tommy Joe.”
I have told you I have no interest in how you deal with the other apes. Your entire planet is just a distractio
n for me. Do you care what one insect says to another?
“No, ah reckon I don’t. But could y’at least layoff Tommy Joe, so she thinks I kept my end-a the deal?”
Do you even understand why your planet is a distraction for me?
His balance was gone; he was flailing, falling, plummeting into a black void
(of stars and swirling, gaseous clouds, full of explosions and twinkling lights)
“Now jist hold on a minute, hold on now, don’t start a-mussin me up with alla these damn visions again!”
and a deeper blackness than he could ever have imagined as the backdrop, and then
(massive as it moves past him, sending his tiny, frail body tumbling in its wake, soundless in the vacuum and nonetheless deafening him with its roar)
he realizes that all the deepest blackness, all of the space, the nearly infinite expanse in which he is falling is merely the tip of her finger as her universe-sized eye closes in on him, and his resistance fades to nothing as he loses track of himself,
I’ll take that
and she takes the rag from his hand, and takes the blood from it, and turns the blood back into purity
and the giant thing that swept past him and sent him tumbling, she grabs that swimmer by the tail, that one out of thousands and thousands of sperm she gathered from Billy Joe, and places it into the purity
and he screams, somehow, some last flicker of obstinacy rising into his throat, “This ain’t funny no more!”
(blinding, burning, oh shit)
and even his uneducated mind realizes that he is at ground zero for a new Big Bang…the unveiling of the new universe, created entirely by this being that they so arrogantly and trivially called Butterface…as if she were just a boogeyman, a scary story, a local legend…
(disintegrating, instantaneous combustion, nothing is left of him save a memory in Butterface’s mind, and so she recreates him to show him again…)
The one “eye” of hers that he can comprehend, the one that more than fills his field of vision in the background of everything when he can almost see infinity,
looks at him
And then the finger-thing, not so much a finger as a tendril of some kind of stuff beyond understanding, a tentacle, an appendage, something there’s no word for, something his mind can’t quite grasp so it considers it a finger—it takes more purity from the rag, and he’s buffeted yet again and sent spinning madly as she calls silently
and another sperm approaches at her summons, and she again uses it to create yet another Big Bang, another new universe, a plaything for her, an idle dalliance, and again Old Pap is consumed in the inconceivable heat and fury of a new Big Bang, and again she recreates him to witness her do it again, and again, and again…
Do you understand how pathetic your hundred years is to me?
He was back in the old rocking chair again, his pipe still smoldering as if he had been absent no more than a moment. It had felt like hours. His entire body was wracked with echoes of the pain he experienced with each new collision of purity and seed that she had shown him. His mouth was dry to the point of cracking, and he fell to the floor in a fetal position, sobbing like a child as his mind and body started to break.
I was ancient before your universe was created. I will exist forever after your universe is gone.
“Ah’m sorry,” he whimpered.
I compliment you with the term “ape.” All you are, all any of you are, are insects, when I even deign to notice you.
“Ah’m so sorry, forgive me, forgive me…please…”
Of course I forgive you. You’ve always been a special insect to me.
He felt something familiar; a presence appearing, a sense of cohesion that meant that she was there, in some sort of tangible form.
He also heard something familiar: the tinny, scratchy sound of an old Victrola record player. Enico Caruso, singing the Celeste Aida, his mother’s favorite—the one he always hated the most.
Old Pap tried to look up at her through his blubbering, but all was confusion. He could see her perfect outline, but only momentarily, and then visions of his spinning free-fall in space superimposed on the cabin, threatening to take over his thoughts. Then he was being sucked into her, into her feminine tunnel, spinning faster as her vagina opened into a galactic abyss into which seed the size of solar systems fell and bounced off the walls, crushing him over and over.
Then for one crystallized moment, one eternal glimpse, she revealed her face to him, as he foolishly believed he had negotiated out of long ago.
Nothing else could ever exist.
Not anymore. No thoughts could ever again take hold in his mind, all of his neural circuits were instantaneously overloaded, cooked by the mere hint of an insight of her true nature—no human brain could ever contain even a shadow of a copy of what she really was, but she held him there by her gaze anyway. For a while.
A while for Her, not him.
And after what was, to him, a literal eternity, he finally, finally, was allowed to die. She simply pulled that the strings that bound him to reality, and he slid apart into a trillion finely diced cubes of primal dirt—just an indistinguishable patch of dust amongst the detritus on the cabin floor.
~~~
“I know it’s Saturday night, but don’t borrow the truck, just pretend we ain’t goin out, then sneak on over here like normal. And don’t bring a flashlight this time neither, daddy’s gonna be watchin. Why’d you have to go on and lie bout them rats up in your barn anyway?” she whispered into her cell phone. “No, don’t answer that, I know your maw’s probably looking right over your shoulder.”
“Yup that’s exactly right,” Tommy Joe answered. “Except it was a possum I saw, I thought I told you. But you know how them things go.” Nobody in the Barnett clan had, or was ever likely to have in the future, any kind of technology as complicated and advanced as a cell phone. Tommy Joe and herself were both old enough to remember when they had an ancient, wall-mounted rotary phone. At least now they had push buttons, but it meant he was continually being eavesdropped upon.
“Yeah, I sure do sweetie,” she said. She looked around her out of habitual caution, but she was at the end of the driveway, sitting on the tailgate of her dad’s truck. Nobody was nearby. “I just want tonight to be really special for ya, that’s all. And for me too,” she added quickly and quietly.
“Oh, okay, I guess I’ll…see you at church then, sweetie.”
She giggled at his silly attempt to cover up. “That’s right,” she said, then added strongly, “I love you Tommy Joe.”
“Mhmm, yup, same here. Bye-bye.”
That ornery cuss would never say it back. Dang it, that silly turd.
She smiled at herself. She wasn’t automatically thinking dirty, like she had been earlier that day, and almost all day. She was starting to “think clean” again. Thinkin’ clean, like a Christian woman ought.
In spite of all that, she still planned to fuck the livin shit out of Tommy Joe Barnett tonight. And the best part was, after old Pap, she knew she’d be able to accommodate Tommy Joe’s nice, not-so-big-after-all cock with considerable ease. It was still sinful, but at least she understood that it might be fun, and she got used to it. She hadn’t exactly been able to participate very much, that first time.
Luckily, the little dress she had been wearing yesterday covered most of the marks on her torso, chest, and back. She had one hickey-mark on her neck on the left side, but luckily no one noticed her come in when she got home, so she just rushed upstairs to her room and changed into something with a higher neckline.
Since then, the day had drug on endlessly. She knew Tommy Joe was still at work, and she wanted to take some time to try to do something about the marks. She bathed, soaking in the deliciously hot water, considering every single skin-care product that she or her mother owned once she realized most of them weren’t going away. She couldn’t decide on anything that she thought would really h
elp, so she used some aloe gel before she got dressed, then tried to match the color of the skin on her neck with any kind of cover-up that was in the medicine cabinet or mom’s makeup bag. She hoped it was close, but she knew it wasn’t. It wouldn’t stand any close scrutiny, but it would probably help mask it in the poorly lit barn.
So in the end, all Janie had done all day was putter around the house and wait for Tommy Joe to be done working, so she could call him and warn him not to drive or bring his flashlight. She couldn’t think of anything else to say to him, but she knew she needed to talk to him, at least to hear his voice. She needed to know for sure that he had survived the night.
Naturally, she spent a good part of the day beating herself up for being so selfish, and so small minded, and so…so damn holy that she might have put her Tommy Joe in danger. And not eternal danger like she was always worried about before—real danger, danger from real evil and danger for his life. Janie suspected that she’d blame herself for that forever, even if everything worked out. She hoped nothing was going to come of it.
She did have faith though, and she was not going to believe that the Lord would have let her go through what she had if Butterface had already gotten Tommy Joe last night. She just believed that Tommy Joe woke up normal, got up and had breakfast, and went to work just like any other day once most of the harvest was in, even the Saturday before Halloween. Considering all the Barnetts had out yet was a bunch of soybeans and their little pumpkin patch, she knew his Daddy wouldn’t be needing him this weekend.
Her parents finally settled down in front of the TV for the night, which was how they ended every night. From the time dinner dishes were done until the news over at 11:30, Daddy was in his chair and Mama was in hers, Daddy with his PBR and Mother with her crocheting, watching whatever was on the conservative news channel. Sometimes Daddy would notice something come rushing out the door with a shotgun, especially if the dog started going off, but usually they were stuck to their seats until one or both of them had dozed off. Then whichever one was awake would get the other one to bed. Janie doubted either one had ever been awake past midnight in the whole time she had been alive.
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