Honey is Sweeter than Blood

by Jeffrey Thomas

  HONEY IS SWEETER THAN BLOOD

  Jeffrey Thomas

  First Digital Edition

  February 2010

  Darkside Digital

  A Horror Mall Company

  P.O. Box 338

  North Webster, IN 46555

  www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital

  Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood © 2010, 2004 by Jeffrey Thomas

  Cover Artwork © 2010, 2004 by Alan M. Clark

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood

  “ . . . for me eroticism must always be ugly, the aesthetic always divine, and death beautiful.”

  –Salvador Dali

  In leaning forward, practically sprawling her chest upon her desk in the lazy body english of a teenager, the new girl caused her shirt to ride up and her black stretch pants to be tugged low in back, exposing a sort of gaping wound of bare skin. She was studying some papers inches from her nose, and Justin paused from sorting more papers into their various wire baskets behind her to eye the temp’s back surreptitiously. Generally he liked very pale skin; this girl had the plastic pink tan of a Barbie doll. But he could easily forgive her for that, all things considered. Because besides the generous portion of secretive body flesh she presented, he could also see her underwear. With the current fashion being shirts that revealed midriff and pants slung low on the hips, he often caught delicious glimpses of a bit of indigo briefs here, a sliver of burgundy briefs there. (Just the elastic waistbands of these underpants, but knowing that they were such intimate articles was intoxicating.) But on this girl, because of her posture and because her choice of undergarments was daring, he was witness to something even more tantalizing. The girl wore black thong briefs; he could see the entire waistband and the beginning of the narrow center strip before it was blocked by the rim of her pants. Therefore, he could also see the tops of both buttocks; taut, curving skin. The black strap would be just wide enough to cover the furrow that bisected them…was perhaps even tucked intimately into that dark fissure.

  From that point on, Justin went out of his way to file work into the baskets as often as he could, without letting it build up first. Sometimes he’d walk into her aisle just to file a single sheet. The girl had a pretty enough face, in a kind of slack-mouthed flat-eyed way, but he now took note of her body with a keener interest. She had heavy breasts and wore tight sweaters. She had broadish shoulders and nicely rounded thighs. She never spoke to him, and he never spoke to her, though he caught her looking at him with the faintest trace of wariness, once in a while, as though her animal instincts detected his stealthy appraisal.

  At home, he would sit in front of his computer and masturbate to the images of womenwho were fully naked. All of their secret skin on display. (But then it didn’t seem so secret anymore.) Cupping their own breasts, spreading themselves open. And yet, he might end up glazing his eyes and recalling that window of flesh he had seen at work, more exciting for being a tease, a peek through a for-bidden doorway.

  Justin fixated on that image for several weeks. His focus never varied much from it. Even though he took in her breasts, her legs when he could, it was always that flash of back that he ached for. Some men, he reflected, dwelled on women’s rears. His focus was narrower still—just a part of a rear, a crescent moon, he joked to himself. He was fully aware of the way in which his erotic aesthetic narrowed itself in a kind of tunnel vision. But for Justin, it made the pleasure all the more intense, compacted, as when a star collapses to a fraction of its former size and ends up weighing so much more…

  But after several weeks, the girl was gone, her stint as a temporary come to an end, and Justin’s focus began to drift.

  * * *

  He found the painting—and first met Kristen—in the same week. Both on the Internet.

  He had always liked Dali, but he might never have chanced upon the painting had it not been so long and gray a Saturday, had he not been numbly wandering the web for so many hours that even the porn sites bored him. He looked at a few of Dali’s paintings, admired them briskly without really dwelling on any of their remarkable details, was about to surf the next wave of his boredom when he saw a thumbnail of a Dali piece whose caption identified it as a study for Honey Is Sweeter than Blood. Intriguing title. He clicked the cursor on the miniature version to call up the larger view to be had.

  He would learn later that it was an early work, Dali only about twenty, and certain details in the painting put Justin in mind of Joan Miro’s organic little squiggles. But there were some less abstracted details as well. Strewn along a kind of desert horizon were a huge disembodied head resting on its cheek (blood vessels of the scalp exposed and eyes blissfully shut: a dreamer), a rotting donkey carcass (with distinct testicles), and in the center foreground, a woman’s body lying on its side. Its feet, hands and head had been chopped off, apparently, and were missing. Blood from the neck and wrist stumps appeared to be collecting in an odd-shaped trench.

  The painting was utterly compelling, utterly mysterious. Really, beyond interpretation, in Justin’s opinion. But its impact was no less profound for that. Indeed, perhaps more profound because of it.

  He right-clicked his mouse on the image, saving it to his personal documents. Then, when he viewed it there, he could use a magnifying tool to enlarge certain portions of the artwork. Specifically, that dismembered corpse. Though, in studying it, it really didn’t seem like a dead thing to him, despite the spurting gore. It had a lush vitality to it which in a way the lively bright blood personified. After all, the figure’s contours were still so ripe and sensual. The shapely shoulder, the high globular breasts, the smooth swell of belly, the full and rounded hip where it curved into bottom. This hacked beautiful creature might have posed for the Venus de Milo.

  Justin imagined himself into the painting. He heard the flies buzzing around the donkey carcass, smelled its decaying stench. But he knelt by the woman on that barren dream plain, and rested his hand on her thigh as he listened to the soothing running brook sound of the blood that gurgled from her neck. More lovely than the gentlest voice cooing avowals of love.

  Justin realized that his left hand was rubbing his crotch through his jeans. Unashamed, he unzipped and freed himself, stroked himself to fullness as he imagined himself lying down behind the woman, cupping himself to her back in the position cozy couples called “making spoons.” In his mind’s eye, he improved upon Dali’s piece in one way. His dismembered woman wore black thong panties.

  * * *

  On their first live date, Justin took Kristen to a big noisy Hollywood thriller about a serial killer and the dedicated female cop who defeated him, and then to dinner at a pub-style steak house. He ordered a smallish steak. He didn’t want to feel heavy and impacted, in case they ended up going to bed together, though he didn’t think it likely. Still, Kristen seemed very open, very funny in a cynical, sharp-tongued way. She was twenty-eight, divorced with no kids, to Justin’s thirty and never married. She was pretty enough, he supposed, with her black hair cut short in a sophisticated way. Her black clothing was stylishly baggy so he couldn’t tell much about her body, but she wasn’t too thin. He didn’t care for thin-thin (women who had ribs like the rotting donkey in Dali’s painting) and flat little asses. He had the artist’s love of the lush, the ripe. One of Dali’s own obsessions, he had read, was a woman’s nicely-shaped posterior. The bottoms of his sister Ana Maria and later his wife Gala had embodied his aesthetic. Funny, Justin thou
ght as he chewed, trying to gauge Kristen’s chest as she sawed her hunk of cow, how much great art had come from the sheer lusty pleasure of simulating girl flesh with the caress of a brush.

  They had a mutual love of art; it was one of the first things they chatted about when they met through the online personal ads for singles. Even now, Kristen was going on about her favorite artists like Picasso. Except for some of Picasso’s earlier work like the hyper-curvy, overly-plush subject of his Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, Justin didn’t care for Picasso’s women. Too sharp, pointy, unfriendly to the touch.

  The subject moved on to Kristen’s ex. She cut him up into smaller pieces than her beef, masticating them with a bitter smile. “Mike wouldn’t know an Andre Masson from a Boris Vallejo,” she said. “Really…the guy reads comic books. Oh, I’m sorry—graphic novels. He loves those nice misogynistic Japanese mangas. All those little school girls getting raped by gigantic tentacles and all that good shit.”

  “My ex-girlfriend wasn’t into art at all, either,” Justin said. He was a bit more quiet and reserved than Kristen, but he thought he was doing okay tonight.

  “So what happened to her?” Kristen asked.

  Justin’s fork hovered in the air, short of his mouth. “What…happened to her? Nothing happened to her.”

  Kristen barked a loud laugh. “Jesus, I didn’t mean to suggest you buried her somewhere. I mean, who dumped who? Where’s she at now?”

  “She left me,” Justin replied softly.

  Kristen nodded. When he didn’t elaborate she shrugged and scooped up some rice pilaf. “Well, Mike left me, too. For some little cubicle trash he works with. She doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together but she’s oh-so-cute, and that’s all that counts.”

  “It’s hard,” he said. “To be rejected.” He sawed at his steak and mused aloud. “But it’s hard to be in a relationship, too. The fighting. The ugliness.” He stopped, realizing that this was not a favorable turn of conversation, and he looked up to smile unevenly. “But what are the options?” he said, making a joke of it.

  * * *

  At the mall, seated at a tiny, sticky table in the coffee shop, Justin gazed out through the window and played a little game with himself. Of the next five women who walked by him (from left to right only), he had to pick the one he would most want to take to bed. He grew dismayed when the first three were, respectively, an elderly Asian woman, a middle-aged Indian woman, and an obese African-American woman. But there was an attractive younger African-American woman, a daughter perhaps, walking with her. Yet number five was the winner: a very attractive young mother pushing a baby stroller. As if to further accommodate him, she even sat on the bench directly opposite his window and dug in the baby’s tote for a bottle. His elbow on the table, Justin subtly raised his hand to block off the woman’s feet from his view, so that her shapely legs—bared by shorts—ended at the ankles. Keeping her feet covered with his lower two fingers, he spread his hand so that his upper two fingers blocked off her head. He couldn’t do anything to mask her busied hands.

  He admired her abbreviated form. The smooth, pale legs…pale as if bloodless. Her breasts pushing plump against her T-shirt. It was a classical artistic subject, wasn’t it? The female form unencumbered by head, full limbs, those hands and feet that were so tricky to get right. One of Justin’s favorite art pieces was Hans Bellmer’s sculpture The Doll, which had a legless set of hips growing out of the top of a mirrored set of hips, so that the creature possessed two bald vaginas but no head. Just rounded stubs for its four legs. A creature that one could fuck and suck at the same time, Justin had joked to himself.

  He finished his coffee, set down his paper cup, rotated it clockwise five full turns (he could judge this by the seam along its side, which when he finished had to be on the right). He had a thing about the number five, doing or touching things five times. He was an intelligent man; he realized it was an obsessive compulsive disorder. Oh well…that was him. Didn’t make him crazy, did it? As Dali himself had said, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad!”

  * * *

  On their second date, Justin and Kristen played it casual and had lunch over at her sister’s house, then lounged about into the evening watching TV. Kristen wore blue jeans this time and Justin decided she had a very commendable ass—on the large side, but that was fine with him. Actually, though, her sister had a nicer shape. When she would come in and out of the room or briefly sit with them, he would prop his elbow on the sofa’s arm and slyly block off her feet or her head. Cover a hand so that her shapely forearm tapered to a cleanly shorn wrist.

  When he began to doze he decided it was time to leave. Kristen seemed a bit disappointed, he thought, but when she walked him out to his car she took him by the arm and drew him close for a goodnight kiss on the lips. She lingered a bit, and even slithered her tongue into his mouth. Its parasitic intrusion both excited and repulsed him. Justin did his best to reciprocate, and he supposed he did well because when they slipped apart she was smiling at him mischievously.

  “Next time we should watch TV at your house,” she all but purred.

  Justin’s guts rolled over one another. He felt an initial rush of blood into his penis. “Sure,” he managed to get out. But he was trembling now. It seemed to belong to another lifetime, having his ex-girlfriend inside his house. As though it had been someone else who had been inside her body, touched and smelled and kissed her secret flesh.

  He waved from his car as he drove off. And returned to his house in a very charged state. He powered up his computer immediately. Considered sending Kristen a message complimenting her on her kiss, instead went to look at the collection of photos he had lifted off the web and stored in his documents folder.

  It was all his new stuff. The stuff he’d gathered since he’d first found himself so taken with, so connected to, Dali’s Honey Is Sweeter than Blood.

  Before computers, he might have cut these figures out of centerfolds. Snipped off their hands and feet, their heads. But he could do that more neatly in his Photoshop program. In his private gallery, Sports Illustrated bikini models lounged on sand with bloodless, scarless nubs at the ends of their wrists and ankles, and he had carefully airbrushed away the hair that fell upon their shoulders, since they no longer had heads.

  In other pictures, for a bit of variety, he had fashioned raw bloody wounds instead, so that these supermodels, TV and movie stars, and fully naked women from the porn sites looked like so many carcasses processed and hung up in a butcher’s shop.

  He had even found a few photos of actual amputees. One woman was missing her left leg above the knee and stood disrobed in front of a fireplace. He didn’t like her very obviously enhanced breasts, though—too synthetic. Her dimpled stump was much more natural and appealing. And then there was a pretty blond woman smiling at the camera who had no arms and no legs at all…her stumps barely cleared her shoulders and her hips. They seemed scarred at the ends; if she’d been in an accident, how could the rest of her be so smooth, flawless? Justin imagined some madman breaking into her house to lop off her limbs but sadistically leaving her alive. Who had taken this picture? A boyfriend? A husband? He must have to spoon feed her. Wipe her ass for her. Dress her. Undress her. Carry her to bed…

  Justin was grunting very softly now as he stared at her, tugging at his turgid cock.

  But he began to feel self-conscious about her eyes on him. Smiling at the camera. Hard white teeth like bone. Clear sharp eyes like teeth. He grew embarrassed. He took a sticky post-it note from a pad on his desk, and pasted it to the monitor to block off her face. Did her husband ever want to cover her face, so she wouldn’t stare at him while he was inside her, impatient for him to finish? Did he ever want to muffle her mouth so she wouldn’t demand to be carried to the car, driven to the mall, pushed in her wheelchair, whining, complaining, criticizing, judging, rejecting him even while she remained with him? Did her husband ever want to make her incompleteness complete�
�by taking an axe, and raising it above that pretty pale throat?

  * * *

  “She’s the perfect woman, huh?” Kristen joked, referring to the figure lying on the sand in Honey Is Sweeter than Blood. She was inside Justin’s house, sitting before his computer. He had wanted her to see this painting. He hovered very close by, however, in case he needed to dissuade her from looking further into his gallery on her own.

  “Perfect woman?” he echoed.

  “Sure. No head. No nagging. Just the essentials. What every man wants. The human blow-up doll.”

  Justin remembered the quadruple amputee he’d fantasized about last night. Yes. No hands to touch him. He would do the touching. His girlfriend had once slapped him across the face and split his lower lip. No legs to walk away, to storm out the door. No mouth to yell. To call you names. No hard eyes to loathe you.

  “This is amazing considering how young he was,” Kristen went on. “Yeesh—gross donkey.” Its ribbed belly was split wide open like a vagina full of teeth.

  “Mm,” Justin grunted absent-mindedly. He was trying not to breathe in the smell of her hair, just below his own head as he lingered at her shoulder. Her breath smelled of cigarettes. He hated that. They had kissed again, this time in greeting. He hadn’t liked the warm smell of the air that she expelled through her nostrils.

  Yes, he mused, the woman in the painting was lovely, a simplified form, its symmetry abstracted, refined. In addition to the inviting orifices of vagina and anus, there were now the raw red wounds at the wrists and ankles, at the end of that lovely neck. One, two, three, four, five tapered red stems. He had a thing for the number five. A star made of flesh. He would like to walk across that dream sand right now and actually spread the body out into a star, arms and legs wide. He was growing hard as he pictured it.

  The women whose pictures he had collected off the Internet previously had been his willing sex partners as well. Though they had hands, they couldn’t push him away. They wore smiles and never frowned. They were like exotic spiders mounted under glass, for him to admire without fear of being stung and poisoned. But now…his new collection…so much better…their forms so improved upon. He felt like an artist himself, now.