The House

by Edward Lee

  "Put the other two in," she breathed.

  Oh, well. Leonard complied, as he had always tried to be an accommodating person. But Esther proved even more accommodating—in a different sense, of course—when she next requested: "Put your whole hand in now, and make a fist..."

  Leonard's lips sputtered when he exhaled. "My whole fist? Won't that hurt?"

  "Just do it!"

  Leonard did it, even to his own amazement. Esther's sex tightly swallowed his entire fist, churning around it like a spasmodic sac.

  "Shove it in and out! Hard!"

  Leonard gulped. In and out, then, his arm locomoted. Soon his hand was buried three inches past the wrist.

  "Twist your fist around too! Jesus! Don't you know how to fist-fuck?"

  "Well, no," Leonard ashamedly admitted. But I'm learning. Now his fist plunged back and forth, revolving at the same time. When he looked up, Esther's cheeks billowed. Her face puffed hot-pink, her eyes narrowed to white slivers. Then a series of shrieks accompanied a series of vaginal clenches which hurt Leonard's hand in the process. Then she finished off, a gruff noise belting from her throat "Oh-oh-oh-ooooooooooooooo! Yeah-shit-fuckin'-A!"

  Leonard guessed that about said it all. When she'd settled down she looked at him through a sated smile and—pop!—quickly flexed her pelvic and abdominal muscles to eject Leonard's hand. But Leonard's heart surged when he noticed her hands...

  "Your hands! My God, what's wrong!"

  She unfolded herself to a slouched sitting position, looked at her hands, and frowned. Blood welled up plenteously in each palm, dripping onto the couch, and her feet, too, bled profusely from non-existent wounds.

  "Oh, dammit! Happens every time. I get the stigs whenever I come good."

  This alarming event didn't seem to bother her in the least. She pulled her stockings back up over her bloody feet, rebuttoned her dress, and wiped her bloody hands off on her sides.

  "Look, I'm really sorry about the mess."

  Leonard stared. "That's...quite all right."

  "I mean, I'll clean it up. Where's the kitchen? I'll get some wet rags."

  "No no no no no," Leonard replied at bit too hastily. Your grandfather's pig is in the kitchen, and it's dead. Two drug addicts beat it to death because it ate their heroin, but that's...another story. "I'll get it cleaned up in a jiff," he said instead.

  She got up and he escorted her to the door. "I better get back now before they get wise." Then she kissed Leonard right on the lips, inadvertently smearing blood on his Van der Graaf Generator shirt. "You're a nice guy...and a great fist fucker!"

  "Uh, thanks," Leonard responded to the compliment.

  She smiled sheepishly as she retied her white bonnet, badging it with blood.

  "Isn't, uh, isn't your grandfather going to be mad?"

  "Mad about what?" she asked.

  "Well, uh, you've got blood all over yourself."

  "Oh, that? Naw, he'll think I had a visitation." She kissed him briefly once more, then laughed. "I'll tell him I got fucked by a seraph! 'Bye!"

  She scurried out into the night and disappeared almost as if on wings.

  Almost like a seraph.

  ««—»»

  Leonard didn't even bother trying to clean up the blood. It's not like it was a big deal. If she thought this little bit of blood was a mess, she should see the back rooms. The event of his bizarre sexual encounter with Esther—not to mention her sequent evidence of stigmata—was quickly brushed aside by Leonard's attention. He had something far more important to tend to right now, didn't he?

  The pig lay as he'd left it: dead on the kitchen floor. This came now as a curious note in itself. He even wondered why he hadn't questioned it beforehand. On every occasion in the past, whenever Rocco brought up a farm animal for a movie, the animal was transported from New Jersey in one of those two-wheeled animal trailers connected to a ball-hitch on the back of the Deville. Yet the pig, Leonard knew, was brought in the back seat, and it never occurred to him how unlikely it would be that two mafiosoes would drive all the way from Trenton with a pig in the back seat. Of course not—they'd merely stolen the pig from the nearby religious settlement, knowing previously that said settlement raised pigs. So how angry could Rocco be when he learned that the pig was dead? It's not his pig. Be that as it may, he still had to dispose of the animal; true it only died an hour ago, but by Friday? He couldn't have it rotting there on the floor. Gotta bury it, came Leonard's first decision. Gotta bury Arnold. But before he even thought to lean over and drag it outside—

  "Wait a minute!"

  The facts reeled like a list in his mind.

  1) I'm starving.

  2) The girls are starving.

  3) And we've essentially been starving for months.

  4) Rocco never brings enough food.

  5) The only food we have in the house now is dog food.

  But...

  6) Right now I'm looking at a perfectly good cornfed pig!

  7) I must be STUPID!

  Indeed. Why eat dog food when he had 150 pounds of USDA-choice pork right here at his feet?

  Leonard got a knife. Leonard got the ax out of the tool shed. Leonard hefted the pig up onto the kitchen table. Leonard turned on the oven.

  Then Leonard began to cut.

  ««—»»

  It took all night but the night seemed to zip by with Leonard now in a role as The Happy Butcher. He had watched his father rend pigs countless times, and had helped out just as many. Arnold was skinned lickety-split with a sharp knife, and the "gutpile" was just as easily—though quite a bit more malodorously—removed and discarded into a previously excavated hole in the back yard. The hooves and, alas, Arnold's head were quick to follow. Certainly wielding a wood-chopping ax in place of typical bandsaws presented some difficulty, but Leonard found that the make-shift implement sufficed just fine. He did most of the quartering out on the back patio behind the hedges; the dogs watched him with keen interest, and Leonard, now the generous meat-supplier, tossed them raw scraps for which their enthusiasm was plain. Next, he retreated back inside and trimmed the pig's parts of excess fat. The exemplary hams, flanks, shanks, and shoulders were dropped into a great bucket of salted water where they would be left for several days to cure. The rest was trimmed and parted further and stowed in the refrigerator. Purveying the bacon was the hardest part as this entailed meticulous trimming of the muscle-meat covering the ribs and appropriately slicing the area of flesh that connected this—namely, the abdominal wall. As Leonard commenced with this very critical task—he really liked bacon—he'd previously placed one large, choice loin section, or "eyecut," into the oven, sprinkled it with salt and chopped wild onions from the yard, then hooded it with foil and baked it at 350 degrees for an hour and a half.

  He paced the kitchen, wringing his hands. In no time the house's fetor of blood, excrement, vomitus, and horror was overwhelmed by an aroma that could only be described as heaven-sent. This caused Leonard to salivate to the extent of outright drooling. And when dinnertime arrived, Leonard audibly giggled aloud, and when he pulled that sizzling loin out of the oven and set it on the table, he got an erection as turgid as if Esther the tainted Epiphanite were soliciting his sex drive with her feet.

  He ate the entire loin, and some time later sat back exhausted, gorged, and grinning.

  ««—»»

  He dreamed he was standing on a decorated stage before a cheering audience of at least a thousand strong. A man in a tux who looked like Bob Barker before he became absolutely ancient held a shining golden trophy in one hand and a microphone in the other, and his amplified voice boomed out: "And now, in the category of Best First Film, the winner is...The Confessor by Leonard D'arava!" Leonard wept standing up, his heart and soul and spirit blooming. Esther the Epiphanite was there cheering him on, and so were Sissy and Snowdrop—naked, of course—and the hostess from the Widow's Walk, and Leonard's dead father, and Rocco and Knuckles, and even George from D Block. "Yaaaaay!" Esther sq
uealed, blood pouring forth from her outstretched hands. "Good goin', kid," Rocco said. "I'm proud of you, son," his father said. "Ah'll beat myseff off wiff my hand affa I woke yo' ass," George said. The applause rocked the awards hall. Balloons dropped en masse from the vast dome ceiling, and then came the pop-pop-pop-pop! of the press and their cannonade of flashbulbs. Leonard basked in it all. This is for me, all for me! came the incredulous thought. All these people are cheering...for ME! Then the Bob Barker clone turned, veering a dentured grin, and that's when the slow-mo began. Inch by inch, step by step 48 frames-per-second step, Leonard traversed the stage. His smile felt like his entire face, and slower still time seemed to lapse when Bob Barker extended the glimmering trophy toward the winner. Leonard's own hand reached out and grabbed it. It felt warm, brilliant, and somehow shimmering with energy, and once it was securely in his grasp, Leonard truly realized that this was his golden hour and the event which would spell the first day of a career marked with the acclaim he deserved. It was euphoria and triumph that flowed in his veins now, not mere blood. Leonard, indeed, was the Winner!

  There was but one oddity, well two, actually. When he reached out to claim the prize, the hand which took it could not have been his own. It was a broad, firm, strong hand, like a lumberer's or a mason's. Leonard had skinny pasty geek hands in real life, but that was okay, this was a dream, and it was the best dream of his life, and he certainly wasn't going to spoil its glow by questioning the morphology of his fucking hands.

  But there was something else, too, even more queer.

  The hands were green.

  ««—»»

  "Cooooooooooooooome annnnnnnnnnnnnnd get it!"

  Leonard clanged the "meal chime" with a barbecue fork, the metal kitchen table leg having to suffice for the bell. Leonard felt unbelievably refreshed; in fact, he couldn't remember when he'd felt this good. First, the satisfying—if not a trifle odd—orgasm with Esther, then a bellyful of choice pork loin, and then, to top it all off, a wonderful dream. (Well, except for the green hands. Leonard, something of a symbolist, tried to apply a meaning to the rot-green hands of the otherwise perfect dream but could come up with nothing. But...so what? Dreams could be stupid sometimes!) Bacon sizzled delectably on the skillet. Eggs and biscuits would've been the perfect accompaniment but, well, you can't have everything. He fairly loped through the house to Sissy and Snowdrop's room, stuck his head in, and announced quite loudly: "Rise and shine, girls! Another day of beauty and wonder has dawned!"

  A few guttural murmurs, and the blanched figures on the box spring twisted around. Leonard jerked open the fly-specked curtains. "Good morning sunshine!"

  "Ugh! Fuck you!" Snowdrop returned Leonard's cheerful greeting.

  Sissy squinted up, shielding her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something but suddenly hitched and hiccupped a few belts of bile onto the floor.

  "Come on, up, up, up and at 'em!"

  "I need junk," Sissy croaked.

  "I gotta take a bang bad, Leonard!" Snowdrop added.

  "Gimme gimme!"

  "All the heroin's gone," Leonard pointed out, his good humor unassailed. "You two chipmunks used it up last night, but—hark! I've got something better!"

  That poked some life into them. They scrabbled up, shuffling after Leonard as he breezed back to the kitchen.

  "What'cha got! What'cha got!" Sissy insisted.

  "Maybe he's got some coke!" Snowdrop thrilled.

  "Or some crystal meth!"

  "Nope," Leonard proclaimed when they stopped in the kitchen entry. "I've got something better than any of that." He extended his hand to the table. "Food! Real food!"

  "Ugh! Fuck you!" Snowdrop spat.

  Sissy pouted, her tiny fists clenched at her sides, her sucked-dry face full of indignation. "You DICK! What are we going to do what that shit?"

  Leonard smirked. He was not generally prone to anger. On the table sat a virtual pile of hot, crisp bacon; Leonard had fried up an entire slab. He would've thought they'd be more grateful than this. "You're going to eat it," he answered. "Last night while you girls were shooting heroin I was in here butchering the pig and slaving over a hot stove."

  Sissy continued with her rant. "I ain't eatin' that shit! I want junk!"

  "Yeah!" Snowdrop again. They were ganging up on him. "Get us more junk, you pussy!"

  Leonard realized full well that he was no macho man. He was a nice guy all in all, and he'd always tried to be. He'd always been taught to treat others as he would want to be treated himself. But in this day and age? All a "nice guy" was was a sucker, a pushover.

  "I wouldn't eat this shit with a dog's mouth, you skinny wimp motherfucker!" Snowdrop yelled.

  "Fuck yeah!" Sissy blurted. "If I eat this shit, I'll chuck it all up in your wimp face! Now get us some junk, you dick!"

  "You got more, we know you do!"

  "Give it to us! Or we'll kill your skinny ass just like we did that fuckin' pig!"

  Something quite out of character happened then. Leonard's Happy Country Kitchen—in an amount of time that it takes one to snap his or her fingers—turned into...a Charnel House.

  Leonard rammed his fist into Sissy's cheek so hard all of the rotten teeth flew out of her mouth.

  "I've been a nice guy too long."

  Leonard punched Snowdrop in the face even harder, so hard in fact that her right eyeball fell out of its socket where it hung to her cheek by a cord.

  "Won't eat my fresh, home-cooked bacon with a dog's mouth, huh?"

  Sissy was on the floor now, on hands and knees. Ropes of blood hung from her mouth. Leonard stepped on her back and stomped down hard. The impact of her abdomen to the floor caused a spurtle of bile to jet from her mouth. Her spine cracked in the process.

  "Skinny wimp motherfucker, huh?"

  "No Leonard no!" Snowdrop pleaded, backing up with her dirty palms showing. Her right eyeball bobbed on her cheek.

  "Yes Leonard yes," Leonard replied and approached her. From the cutting room he could hear the radio, and it seemed delightfully appropriate: Iggy Pop groaning "All aboard for funtime..." Leonard grabbed Snowdrop's skinny neck and squeezed. He squeezed so hard she couldn't even gag. Her face turned pink, then blue, then something close to black. From her eye socket, blood poured. Leonard curiously stuck a finger in there, heard a thin bone crack, then he wriggled his finger in her brain. She was clearly quite dead, yet he held her up off her feet for some time. Her tongue—fat now in its post-mortal edema—stuck out comically from between her pressed lips. Leonard leaned forward as if to kiss her. But he didn't kiss her. He clamped his teeth on her fat tongue, bit if off, and—

  "Pluuuuey!"

  —spat in back into her face.

  While this was going on, by the way, Leonard was only seeing red, so to speak. He did not calculate the motivation for his deeds, nor did it occur to him that what he was doing to these poor, unfortunate drug addicts totally defied the sense of morality and good will he tried to live his life by. Equally, he did not question the oddity of newfound strength and the vigor of several serial-killers all rolled up into one. Instead, he just kept tearing ass. He revolved Snowdrop's head round and round and round until her neck looked like a pale cinnamon twist. Eventually it detached and fell into his lap. He pulled the depending eye away, severing the optical cord, and then picked up the bitten off tongue and inserted it into the socket. Now she was sticking her tongue out at him through her eye! It was a neat effect. He calmly carried the headless body out back and—"Soup's on, doggies!"—threw it into the dog pen. The dogs barked in jumping, saliva-flying glee, and they ate with voracity.

  When he meandered back into the house—whistling "Domino" by the Cramps—he found that Sissy had managed to crawl most of the way to the front door, dragging her dead legs behind her.

  "Why you little dickens!"

  She shot out a shriek, then hastened her progress, thumping forward ever faster on her palms. Thump-thump-thump-thump... It was quite a measure of determination. "And ju
st where do you think you're going, Miss Priss?" Leonard coyly asked. "Want to go for a stroll outside? Here, let me help you." He opened the front door and gestured to the bright sunlit yard with his hand. She cast one terrified glance up at his grinning face, shrieked again, then just kept thumping. "You know," he said, "it troubles me to see a woman in extreme travail. And I think I can relieve some of your burden!" Leonard dashed off only to return a moment later with the big wood-chopping ax. "Let's get rid of some of that dead weight, huh?"

  THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

  Three swipes was all it took to cut her body in half. Amazingly, if only for a moment, Sissy seemed to not recognize this, and the front half of her body thumped even more quickly forward, leaving a wake of scrawny innards and blood. Leonard watched in revel as everything from the waist up dragged itself out the front door, where it stalled and then died a moment later. Everything from the waist down, of course, remained in the living room: two skinny legs joined to a skinny buttocks.

  Leonard flipped the legs and ass over. To his surprise, he discovered that all this killing and mayhem had made him horny, so, as if to conform to this new and sudden change in his personality, Leonard—