“Yeah. A fifty-nine.”
“Whatever. He was always fiddlin’ with it. And he always made me help him—you know, stand around and watch what he was doin’ and hand him tools and stuff when he asked for them. He taught me a lot about cars, but if I didn’t do everything just right, he’d hurt me.”
“And I’ll bet you hardly ever did everything ‘just right’.”
“Nope. Never. Not even once. How on earth did you know?”
“Lucky guess. What finally happened to him?”
“Those old brakes on that old Caddy just up and failed on him one night when he was making one of his trips down the canyon road to the liquor store. Went off the edge and dropped about a hundred feet.”
“Killed?”
“Yeah, but not right away. He got tossed from the car and then the car rolled over on him. Broke his legs in about thirty places. Took awhile before anybody even realized he was missin’ and took almost an hour for the rescue squad to get to him. And they say he was screamin’ like a stuck pig the whole time.”
“Oh.”
“Something wrong?”
“Uh, no. Not really. I guess he deserved it.”
“Damn right, he did. Never made it to the hospital though. Went into shock when they rolled the car off him and he saw what was left of his legs. Died in the ambulance. But here . . . let me do this to you. Hmmmmmmm. You like that?”
“Oh, God.”
“Does that mean yes?”
“You’d better believe that means yes!”
“My boyfriend used to love this.”
“Boyfriend? Hey, now wait a minute—”
“Don’t get all uptight now. You just lie back there and relax. My ex-boyfriend. Very ex.”
“He’d better be. I’m not falling for any kind of scam here.”
“Scam? What do you mean?”
“You know—you and me get started here and your boyfriend busts in and rips me off.”
“Tommy Lee? Bust in here? Oh, hey, I don’t mean to laugh, but Tommy Lee Hampton will not be bustin’ in here or anywheres else.”
“Don’t tell me he’s dead too.”
“No-no. Tommy Lee’s still alive. Still lives right here in town, as a matter of fact. But I betcha he wishes he didn’t. And I betcha he wishes he’d been nicer to me.”
“I’ll be nice to you.”
“I hope so. Tommy and Tammy—seemed like we was made for each other, don’t it? Sometimes Tommy Lee was real nice to me. A lot of times he was real nice to me. But only when I was doin’ what he wanted me to do. Like this . . . like what I’m doin’ to you now. He taught me this and he wanted me to do it to him all the time.”
“I can see why.”
“Yeah, but he’d want me to do him in public. Or do other things. Like when we’d be driving along in the car he’d want me to—here, I’ll show you . . .”
“Oh . . . my . . . God!”
“That’s what he’d always say. But he’d want me to do it while we were drivin’ beside one of those big trucks so the driver could see us. Or alongside a Greyhound bus. Or at a stop light. Or in an elevator—I mean, who knew when it was going to stop and who’d be standing there when the doors open? I’m a real lovable girl, y’know? But I’m not that kind of a girl. Not ay-tall.”
“He sounds like a sicko.”
“I think he was. Because if I wouldn’t do it when he wanted me to, he’d get mad and then he’d get drunk, and then he’d hurt me.”
“Not another one.”
“Yeah. Can you believe it? I swear I got the absolute worst luck. He was into drugs too. Always snorting something or popping one pill or another, always trying to get me to do drugs with him. I mean, I drink some, as you know—”
“Yeah, you sure can put those margaritas away.”
“I like the salt, but drugs is just something I’m not into. And he’d get mad at me for sayin’ no—called me Nancy Reagan, can you believe it?—and hurt me something terrible.”
“Well, at least you dumped him.”
“Actually, he sort of dumped himself.”
“Found himself someone else, huh?”
“Not exactly. He took some ludes and got real drunk one night and fell asleep in bed with a cigarette. He was so drunk and downered he got burned over most of his body before he finally woke up.”
“Jesus!”
“Jesus didn’t have nothin’ to do with it—except maybe with him survivin’. Third degree burns over ninety per cent of Tommy Lee’s body, the doctors at the burn center said. They say it’s a miracle he’s still alive. If you can call what he’s doing livin’.”
“But what—?”
“Oh, there ain’t much left to him. He’s like a livin’ lump of scar tissue. Looks like he melted. Can’t walk no more. Can barely talk. Can’t move but two or three fingers on his left hand, and them just a teensie-weensie bit. Some folks that knew him say it serves him right. And that’s just what I say. In fact I do say it—right to his face—a couple of times a week when I visit him at the nursing home.”
“You . . . visit him?”
“Sure. He can’t feed himself and the nurses there are glad for any help they can get. So I come every so often and spoon feed him. Oh, does he hate it!”
“I’ll bet he does, especially after the way he treated you.”
“Oh, that’s not it. I make sure he hates it. You see, I put things in his food and make him eat it. Just yesterday I stuck a live cockroach into a big spoonful of his mashed potatoes. Forced it into his mouth and made him chew. Crunch-crunch, wiggle-wiggle, crunch-crunch. You should have seen the tears—just like a big baby. And then I—“Hey. What’s happened to you here? You’ve gone all soft on me. What’s the matter with—?
“Hey, where’re you goin’? We were just starting to have some fun . . . Hey, don’t leave . . . Hey, Bob, what’d I do wrong? . . . What’d I say? . . . Bob! Come back and—
“I swear . . . I just don’t understand men.”
Splatter Me an Angel
James Kisner
Very little of Jim Kisner’s writing is categorizable. None is remotely standard fare. If a publisher offered him enough to write a novel combining the countless icons of horror, he’d accept it, none too happily—then reoriginate the vampire, the manmade monster, the werewolf, and the child-in-peril and end-of-the-world themes (plus a few more) in such fresh ways that readers new to horror would forever after remain convinced that James Kisner created them all. His ‘Voice” in the novels Earthblood, Zombie House, Strands, Poison Pen, Night Glow, and the upcoming The Quagmire is also fresh—the sassiest in-your-face style this genre has heard in years.
Dark Harvest has recognized the unmistakable talents of this droll Elvira and Linnea Quigley admirer and contracted to make Kisnerfiction a third of Night Visions 9.
An early Masques tale of Kisner, “The Litter,” has been reprinted so often and in so many forms that Jim needed something really different—strong—to top it. After furiously writing four stories in a week, he let me read them for MIV. Half jumped out at me snarling, going for the throat, simultaneously turning playful as a puppy.
This one, with the unforgettable title, was my favorite of all four.
The angels came that morning for Ed.
He was lying face-down on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood and vomit, waiting for them.
Before he walked down the tunnel towards the light, he asked the angels for a little time to think things over. The angels told him time was meaningless now. He could have as much as he wanted.
Ed thanked the angels.
He began to think.
Why am I here? was his primary thought. Then he remembered:
It was summer, perhaps a couple of years ago. Years were mere blips in his consciousness as he considered time past. Micro-blips. He could view a year in a microsecond. A nanosecond. Whatever increments smaller than that he could not comprehend.
But it wasn’t much more than a couple of years; he
was sure of that.
He saw a woman getting down from the bus, as he sat on a bench watching. Her legs were clad in dark nylon, her knees covered by a swaying dress which the wind threatened to whip up around her thighs. That didn’t happen, no matter how hard Ed wished for it.
He was between women at the time. Actually, he had not been between any woman for a long time. His luck with the ladies was never too great. He had two failed marriages to confirm that, plus a less than exciting dating life. He spent a great deal of time in the bar on 32nd Street, a semi-respectable joint called Lou’s Diamond Bar, where women came in frequently.
Mostly, the women patrons ignored Ed, though he was not unattractive. He had dark hair, a strong, square chin and dressed neatly, and he was only thirty-five. Maybe he was just too ordinary. Perhaps he lacked charisma. Or maybe it was because he wanted a woman so much that his desperation kept them away. Or maybe he just didn’t know the right moves; he often observed other men who seemed to have a different woman every night. Some of these guys were butt-ugly and had foul habits. Ed couldn’t figure out their secret.
There had to be a secret.
Being in a womanless state, as could be expected, honed Ed’s desire for women to a fine edge, to the brink of a vast despair which seemed more awesome with each passing day. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could endure.
So he watched them.
As the woman now in his sights finished her descent from the bus and walked, high-heeled, down the boulevard, prim and precious, Ed suddenly was filled with a revelation:
Women are disposable.
His mind almost caved in on itself as the underlying meaning of that concept rushed in to fill the spaces between his beleaguered brain cells. It was a concept, Ed quickly grasped, that could change the face of the world, and Ed had thought of it on his own, right there in the middle of the afternoon, while watching women get on and off the busses.
It was a concept destined to jerk him up out of the funk in which he languished.
Women being disposable, he didn’t need to consider them human beings any longer. He didn’t need to consider them at all.
With this revelation simmering in his mind, Ed’s life changed entirely.
So many women walked the streets, just going from one place to another, probably not contemplating sex.
Ed would sit in the bar, waiting for them to approach him. And as soon as he had realized they were disposable, he found that many more women came to him, as if they wanted to be used like tissues. As if they were content to be mere depositories for Ed’s teeming sperm.
Ed treated them like dirt. He made them do nasty things. He made them squeal like pigs. He cursed them for whores. He pissed on them. He refused to wear condoms.
They loved it.
For once in his life, Ed had all the women he needed; more than enough. It was like—when he was sitting in a bar, just smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer—like they sensed his disdain for them. His indifference was like a magnet.
After a while, Ed even grew tired of women, eventually developing a mild distaste for the opposite sex. He swore off women for a couple of weeks.
They still flocked to him, offering to buy him drinks, offering to give him blow jobs right there in the bar, offering to do threesomes with other women, giving him autographed pornographic pictures of themselves.
Ed fended them off. He blew smoke rings of disgust in their direction. He quaffed beer and belched loudly to ward them off. He stopped bathing and shaving.
Nothing kept them away. But Ed refused to participate.
The magical purpose of the universe which Ed had absorbed in that single instant on the bench kept asserting itself, however:
Women are disposable; use them.
Ed stayed away from Lou’s for a few days and returned to sitting on the bench at the end of the day, watching women getting on and off the bus.
He was not even mildly aroused by the sight of a tightly-clad thigh in nylon, the thrust of a pair of aerodynamically superb breasts, the perfectly pert embouchure of pouting crimson lips, or the glitter in the eyes of the most sparkling blonde.
Life had become dull.
Repetitive.
Redundant.
With knowledge had come the responsibility of knowing. Some things, once learned, could not be pushed aside; they festered forever in the mind, like the multiplication tables, or one’s Social Security number, or like an embarrassing moment from childhood.
With responsibility also came duty. Duty demanded that a man who had knowledge make use of it.
But, Ed reasoned with himself, he was not content. That women were disposable had been the most staggering revelation of his life so far, but, like anything of a revelatory nature, its novelty had worn off. You could only get saved once; you could only lose your virginity once; you could only grasp a particular staggering concept once.
Ed realized the underlying problem. There were too many things that you could do only one time. The second time was always different; so was the third, the fourth, and, so on, until the end.
Never, Ed thought, do anything for the first time.
Days passed. A discontented Ed spent most of his spare time feeling sorry for himself, sitting on the bench. Sometimes he sat there late into the evening, until the busses stopped running. People in the street would pass by him, regard him with scorn or pity, as if he were a vagrant, then go on.
Ed ignored them.
He was in stasis. He was, in fact, ignoring the universe.
Then one night, an angel appeared, floating just a few feet above the ground.
Ed yawned.
“I have come,” the angel said, “to show you The Way.”
Ed barely moved his eyes. He could see the angel well enough. It had an epicene, fey look about it. Its wings were so obviously for effect and not function. Its long white robe was so obviously part of the stereotype, as was the musical voice.
“I have no religion,” Ed said.
“Even as I manifest before you?”
“An angel? Give me a break. If Pm going to go crazy, I think a bug-eyed monster would be more in order. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know what a bug-eyed monster is,” the angel said in its lyrical, all-too-soothing voice.
“I get a dumb angel on top of it all. Why don’t you go away? Send me a devil instead.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Goodness is boring. You should know that. That’s why people don’t believe in angels any more. They’d rather believe in bad things. Bad things you can understand. Good things are just plain unnoteworthy. Try to sell newspapers with good news and you’ll go broke.”
“May I tell you, Ed, that you are quite eloquent?” The angel’s tone was mellifluous, genuinely admiring.
“Thank you.”
“Your eloquence is born of despair, I realize—the despair that comes from contemplating the nature of the universe—but, still, I have to commend you for it.”
“Now that you’ve admired my eloquence, would you please go away and let me suffer in peace?”
“I can’t. I have to show you The Way.” The angel pronounced the last two words with inspired emphasis.
“The way to what?”
“I hesitate to say ‘salvation,’ because that doesn’t interest you.”
“Too true, bud, or, sister.”
The angel didn’t flinch; nor did it reveal its sex as Ed hoped it might. Instead, it shook its head. “You’re a hard case.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“You need another revelation, perhaps?”
“What would you offer? Some kind of namby-pamby, goody-two-shoes philosophy? Is that what you’re peddling?”
“No. Of course not. I wouldn’t insult your intelligence.”
“Well, I guess I can take another revelation. Why not?”
“You’re a troubled man. You need something to live by.”
“Well, shoot!”
“What d
o you mean?”
“Give me the revelation.”
The angel fluttered a few inches higher, so it could look down upon Ed with its painfully obvious beatitude. It seemed to be thinking.
Ed couldn’t help but cast his gaze upward now. He was merely trying to look up the angel’s gown. But, strain as he might, he could see nothing; not even pubic hair. He tried to hide his disappointment by making his face receptive-looking to the angel. After all, the angel did promise to give him a revelation.
Finally, the angel waved its hands, causing a shaft of golden light to fall on Ed from out of the night sky.
“Women,” the angel said, “are prey
As the angel floated away, Ed’s brain had intercourse with itself. The right half humped the left half and vice-versa. The two hemispheres did a sixty-nine, throbbing in Ed’s skull with cerebral lust. Had he heard the angel right?
Women are prey?
What kind of revelation was that? He compared it to his former revelation.
It made sense.
If women were disposable, then they were not only prey, but the perfect prey. Indeed, the first revelation was almost the same as this one; Ed had merely misinterpreted it.
He arose from the bench and walked home, his brain still engaging in lewd acts, while he mulled over the phantasmagorical scope of the revelation.
It gave life a new meaning.
It gave death a new meaning.
It gave Ed a new purpose.
The next day, he returned to Lou’s bar.
Less than five minutes after Ed sat down, he was approached by a tall black woman with a bustline that resembled the twin turbines of a science fiction vehicle. She looked like she might be diesel-powered. Her hair was streaked with purple and orange and she had eight earrings in each ear.
“Hi,” she said, taking the cigarette from between Ed’s fingers and inserting it between her thickly-rouged full lips. Her lips were like two disparate beasts, like animated, imaginary things that could perform feats no real lips could. They wrapped around the end of Ed’s cigarette so lusciously and with such accompanying movement that Ed was reminded of a tornado.
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