Oh, you got that gooey stuff dripping out . . . Hm, my thing was bigger and harder.
Put it in your mouth and do what she did . . . oh . . . oh . . .
How did you feel after you killed her?
I’m not sure. I woke up holding her and I thought maybe it had been a nightmare, but there was blood and she was dead.
Why did you kill her?
I don’t know. Couldn’t think of anything else to do, I guess.
What did you do then?
I ate her.
You ate her.
Well, I didn’t just eat her like she was. I wouldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be right. I baked her first.
Baked her.
Yeah. Sorta slowly. Then I ate her. It took a long time, days I guess . . . many days it seems like.
What did you do next?
I don’t exactly know. Seems like I slept a lot.
Then what?
I think I called the police.
Why did you do that?
Seemed like the right thing to do.
Do you know where you are?
Police station – some sort of jail, I guess.
You’re in a hospital.
Hospital?
Yes. And I am a doctor. Specifically, a psychiatrist.
Why would I be in a hospital? I didn’t get hurt.
The police checked your story and there’s no evidence of a crime.
What do you mean?
There was no woman’s body or . . . remains.
But I ate her.
Yes, that is what you said. But all they found were the bones and hide of a lamb.
What are you talking about . . . this is crazy . . what do you think I did with her?
There was no woman. It was all a hallucination.
Hallucination?
You made it all up in your head.
She was real. I just think about her and my thing gets all hard.
I know you believe it.
It was real . . .
Now, tell me again how you put your thing in her mouth and tickled her tonsils, then bit her nipple off . . .
Triptych
Helena Settimana
My friend Lynette and I are lying on our beds in a hotel on Lancaster Gate. We can see Hyde Park across the street with its massive, winter-naked oaks standing like wild-armed sentries. The room has red velvet drapes and gold and red flocked wallpaper. I suspect it is supposed to look sumptuous, but the effect is more like a second-rate whorehouse. It is raining outside, and I have been watching the beetle-black cabs and a mounted policeman passing along the slick street. I am telling her seriously that I will kill myself if I ever lose “it” before I am married. Lynette looks at me like I have three heads. She has dark-rimmed, cat-green eyes that open wider in disbelief, but she is too wise or too dumbstruck to say anything. I just might be the last virgin in my senior year, but it is all too much to absorb, so I vow self-death as an antidote to the roil inside me, brought on by the fact that a boy I have met on this March Break excursion has stuck his muscular tongue in my mouth and provoked a hormonal crisis. I rushed to brush my teeth, but felt helpless to brush away the throb that lingered between my legs. The feeling is potent and threatens to overwhelm. Death is a limited solution.
He is anxious to please, this boy, and anxious to advance his cause. He has unruly jet-black hair and pale, freckled, Scottish skin. He has been a figure-skater, is muscular and lean, and comes from another school, stuck on the same itinerary. Craig follows me, alternating puppyish flirtation with macho posturing. On the night after we meet we all go out to a play and in the dark he gently draws his thumb across my palm and ventures a hand on my thigh. My breath is suspended. I feel incapable of rising to my feet at the end of the first act, slick and damp. He remains seated for a while after I excuse myself to find the bathroom. My friends are watching me closely. To this day I don’t remember the name of the play.
I try to remember my vow.
He sees me to my hotel room door, where Lynette has disappeared discreetly inside. He kisses with his tongue again and ventures pressing himself, hard, into my belly. Panicked, I wiggle a goodnight, but the next day, and the next, my resolve begins to unravel in this miasma of newfound passion. Still, I allow him no room to go beyond.
On the tenth day we sit together riding the plane home. As the lights are dimmed he calls the flight attendant for a blanket, and wraps me discreetly beside him. The imaginary barrier is drawn between us and the rest of the world, and in this seclusion his hands wander to my breasts and carefully fondle me between my legs. Craig has taken my hand and guided it to him. I feel him hard the first time I have ever touched a boy, a man, there. If anyone is aware of what we are doing, it goes unchallenged and our fondling continues, unchecked. When one finger slips beneath the scalloped edges of my panties, my breath catches again. I know he can’t “go all the way”, and so I let him slide one sturdy finger inside me, opening my legs and pushing my hips onto his hand before sudden panic strikes again. The exploration ends. When we emerge from our hiding place, I feel the eyes of other passengers on us. They know! Somehow I feel triumphant.
I hold him at arm’s length. My parents love him, adore him, trust him. They retire and leave us alone one night. He succeeds in putting his cock in my mouth. Weeks later he tells my friends, in front of me, that we are getting married but we will live together first. He hasn’t mentioned this to me. It is the beginning of the end. I can’t imagine settling for one man right now when this wicked new world is waiting to be discovered. I find I have a cruel heart. Just to make sure, I fuck the next guy I meet.
I’m still alive.
Leigh is standing beside the window in a cheap hotel room in Victoria. He has carried my luggage in from the curb and up two flights of stairs. I was not anticipating the Ritz, but perhaps something more on the measure of the hotel by the park. This is closer to a flophouse and is fortunately only a stopgap until I can find an acceptable room of my own. The hotel seems to crawl with the dregs of London: whores and pimps and pushers. I wonder how I am mixed in with them, and remind myself that it is only a temporary thing and that lodging here, unlike home, is exorbitant. I am a poor student and I did not book this part ahead. The heater hangs askew on the wall, broken wires dripping out, the victim of a previous tenant. The door is missing from the wardrobe, and extra linens are tossed carelessly inside. I don’t want to look closely at them.
I have put aside my life to be here – to see if this is the man I want for keeps. I am now being dragged slowly into this sagging, creaking bed, stripped of my clothing, jewellery, underthings. For a while I feel as if I have come home and I collapse under his weight, grateful for the warmth and familiarity of his body. He smells good, his mouth burns on me, his teeth rake the fine surface of my skin. I finger the crucifix around his neck and bend, push up into him.
The whores are fighting in the street. It’s distracting me from coming. Eventually, Leigh sidles to the window to watch the show. He’s blue-grey-black-and-white-TV-coloured in the streetlight, bronze lined with silver. He seems distant. When he sees the management toss an unpaying visitor out into the road, he hastily dresses and leaves with a promise to return in the morning.
Early in the morning, he comes to my room and takes his sweet everlovin’ time pulling the rings from my fingers, then the blouse, the slacks, the snappy bits of bra and panty off me, and lays me down tender as you like, and rubs all of the red marks out of my skin. He makes me cry out and whisper, “I love you,” and when he has finished he gets this sad look on his face and says, “I’m sorry,” and “It’s over,” and walks out, just like that – out into the dirty street. He told me that he has reconciled with his wife. Suddenly I see I am at home in this place after all.
From a phone box in the road I call Mireille in Islington and ride the train underground, walk the warren of alleys and roads that lead to her basement flat, and cry at her door as if bereft of life.
His wife. I can’t
believe it.
Mireille is good at serving tea and sympathy to me but is merciless with Leigh and pronounces a hex upon his cock for good measure. This makes me laugh a bit.
She says, “He will never be the same after this, but what does not kill you will make you stronger, and you will be very powerful indeed.” I am giggling and hiccoughing sobs at the same time.
I’ve been dreaming every time I sleep. Mireille tries to rub the red marks out of my eyes, after I tell her about the rotten heel. Mireille kisses my swollen eyelids, my mouth, down the side of my neck, draws me backwards into her body with arms that are deceptively strong. I am paralyzed with shock, then eased by resignation, then loosened by desire. The glossy dark hair that curled out from under her cotton shorts shocked me into arousal – so did the hair that peeked from under her arms. Weak, weak, I feel weak. She says, “How could he make you feel bad, how could he? He deserves to be shot.”
I find myself propped like a broken doll on her hand, desperately twisting my leather-brown, nubby nipples while she moans over the three fingers I had managed to slip inside that sopping mouth.
The sound of my breath caught in the air sounds rasping, ragged. It hangs in the dark like frozen vapour emitted on a winter’s night: small crystals of ice colliding. The noise is shattering in the tiny room. I am afraid that if I look on the floor I will see bits of my orgasm lying in jagged pieces: an A here, an O there. Curls of Gs and fragments of Fs. I fear we’ll waken the neighbours. The sound has brought me to consciousness: my insides clasping frantically, the sharp images in my mind are shredded by wakefulness. I resolve not to panic.
Mireille rolls over, nuzzling her face into the pillow. What can I say? I feel different, new – not exactly fixed. It is too soon for that.
I think I shall never return.
The woman sprawled on the settee is staring at Jack. She looks like a young Melina Mercouri – brassy dyed-blonde hair with black roots and a single eyebrow. I look away. If the one we find looks like a Greek, it had better be like Irene Papas – my idea of a goddess. Jack is looking the other way at this leggy sylph of a thing with golden-brown hair and a dimple that makes her look a bit like Kirk Douglas, if Douglas were a woman and a delicate, skinny one at that. The dimple drops her eyes – not her, either.
It’s a dare. He’s got me teetering into this place on dangerous heels. I’m still madly in love. It’s our tenth anniversary, and all he wants is to live his fantasy at last. We have been together so long that in the moment it seems not only safe, but exciting. I am to find an agreeable partner, ignoring the boys on the way. Jack is an adventurer, though he likes me all to himself.
In the end I spy a golden gazelle of a girl sitting in a dark corner, watching. She has a purple slash of a mouth. Jack presses himself into my ass before sending me off to broach the topic. I buy her a drink, light her cigarette, drop a strap off my shoulder, swing my pointed shoe with studied non-chalance, brush her arm as if by accident. Then she says, “Are you coming on to me?” and I have to tell her yes, and wait for her eyes to shutter, but they burn instead with a kind of smoky light and it is OK. We sit in the shadows, her skirt hiked a bit, my hand exploring the juncture of her legs. She pushes herself on my hand, her purple mouth open. She says her name is Amira. She is Kenyan and speaks with a trilling, exotic timbre to her clipped colonial English.
Jack appears like an apparition, his cock veiled in the linen of his trousers. I whisper the invitation to her and wait again for her to say no, but her mouth opens in a tiny O and she nods. Jack calls for our coats and leads us to the curb, hails a cab. I watch the furtive glances of the driver in the rear-view mirror as we sit flanking our new friend, probing hands on her thighs, teeth on her neck, tongues in her ears. She massages Jack’s cock, and a stain begins to bleed through the fabric of his pants. I am so hot that I am out of body.
He pays the driver, who looks a little bit disappointed at our departure. Our hotel is a good one this time, decorated in dark wood and forest green, brass, Chinese vases. Amira is like a miracle shining naked on the bed. I’ve gently parted her lips, pulled the mouth of her sex open. She is tidy, neat, her hair trimmed, her lips understated – the colour of aubergine. I wonder if she has been clipped a bit, but it’s hard to tell. Seawater oozes from her pink interior.
I think of Mireille’s strong arms as I pull her back into my body, laying her on top of me, stroking her blackberry nipples, brushing her belly while Jack searches for her teeny clit with his tongue. She rolls off me and offers her ass to him, pulling intently on my breast, nuzzling down into the thatch between my legs.
He fucks her. This is not exactly in the plan, at least not the one he shared with me. I’m aroused, overcome, transported by this fantasy into one of my own. I am nowhere, I am everywhere, I am he, and I am she. I inhabit their bodies and think and feel for them, make them do my bidding. She’s so tiny – narrow and almost adolescent-looking – vulnerable. I offer help: help to hold her down, to spread her legs, to penetrate her. I never feel what she feels, only what he feels as she twists and moans and flails narrow avian arms and legs while he buries himself into her with force. His cock, shiny with latex and juice, is thicker than her wrist and he holds her over his lap, facing me, making sure I see as she jerks like a meat marionette on him. When they come I come too, my hand cramming my quivering hole. Jack is staring me in the eye. He whispers, “I’m the luckiest man in the world.”
He may be right.
Pinkland
Graham Joyce
The two had been ethereal lovers for almost six months before Nat admitted to Sammy she was a woman. Sammy had to go out of the room just to, well, fan the face, draw breath, squat down and mull over the irony of it. When Sammy got it together to squeeze an inflating skull back into the room Nat was still waiting for some kind of a response. Winking, as it were.
>Still want to meet?< Nat was asking.
Hair on fire, fingers atremble, Sammy typed >Yes, of course I’ll meet you. Why wouldn’t I?<
A woman! A woman! Sammy knew some of the dangers involved in conducting a relationship on the Net. Truthfulness was the first casualty in any sustained campaign. You meet someone in a chat room, establish a few details and move breezily on to other things. Nat (Natalie? Nathaniel?) had simply typed in abbreviated style: male, 31, single in answer to early questions. One always predicts, suspects and occasionally encourages dissembling along the way – hell, thought Sammy, that’s what modern communication is all about, isn’t it? – but after six months of spinning out a serious electronic mating game Sammy felt comfortable in the knowledge of who and what was vibrating the other end of the line.
Wrongo! Double-double wrongo!
What the hell had Nat been playing at? All that wasted time webflirting and chatting about music, yeah, check it out; and films, catch this, catch that; and what’s your favourite drink, say daiquiri to conjure enigma. But Nat had made Sammy laugh out loud when he – drat, she – had said pre-coital cocoa. This was all long before their first nervous, faltering Internet kiss.
According to Nat, Sammy was a natural. A linguist.
>A cunning linguist you be.< Nat typed.
>Slippery slidey tongue.< Sammy tapped back. >Moist, hot, furry, slidey, slightly saline, semen-bearing . . .<
>Stop stop stop!< Nat replied that first time. >You’re making me hot, and I haven’t been hot in . . . < The cursor faltered, winking, > . . . in ages.<
And then the new ages, endless hours logged on constructing their own website home together, dubbed Pinkland; carefully choosing the decor, nouveau naturally, Nat; filling it with favourite books, nothing post-modern, also Nat; installing works of art, anything abstract, Sammy. Building a life together, all while Sammy squirmed, typed, and double-entendred towards getting Nat naked, before finally abandoning broad hints altogether:
>Nude. Naked. Stripped. Buff. In the skin. Peeled. To the pink.<
Which, after all was what an Internet relationship was all abou
t. Flesh. It became conditional upon creating Pinkland that clothes should be discarded at the virtual door, consigned to a decorously described heap. Sammy, at least, was always faithfully nude at the keyboard.
Then without preamble one day Nat produced the silver handcuffs. >See how they wink in the indigo light? Slip your hands behind your back, darling. That’s good. Don’t you love that icy breath of cold, cold steel, the intimate clink and click of chain and catch? Now, don’t squeal. I’m going to fuck you savagely from behind.<
And Nat had done exactly that. In retrospect, and now that Nat had confessed to being a woman, Sammy failed to see what pleasure that afforded, and felt abused by the fact that Nat couldn’t do it in restricted time. (Sammy and Nat never referred to real time. Was not time on the Net real? Was not their relationship between real people? Not as if, they both agreed, the Net was a dream or anything.)
But now Sammy had agreed to meet Nat to confront her at the Orbit Café in South Kensington. Sammy wanted to gloat, to study minutely Nat’s response. Natalie, you see, having made her own confession, still thought Sammy was a man.
Sammy certainly didn’t go along to denounce her or anything. They had lied to each other, that was all it amounted to. Each deception – of pretending to be a man – was neutralized in turn by the other’s deception of pretending to be a man. No one had any right to be furious. Or aggrieved. Or to feel cheated. Or anything.
Favouring a feminine, clinging satin skirt and wearing a nimbus of flowery perfume, Sammy deliberately arrived half an hour early, taking up position. It was a dead-hour zone. The place glowed with amber light and the smoky loneliness of mid-afternoon. A few couples leaned together and two single men sat alone, one at the bar and one at a shadowy table. Sammy was already having second thoughts.
Supposedly a drinker of Brandy Alexanders, Sammy hadn’t got a clue what they tasted like, didn’t drink alcohol as a rule, and so ordered a cola. Three-quarters of an hour later Nat still hadn’t showed up. Sammy began to nurse suspicions about the two single men. Maybe Nat had lied, was a man after all, had got there in advance, to get the drop.
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