With a ferocity he’d never seen in her, she threw him onto the bed and straddled him, lowering herself slowly, carefully, hotly, deliciously down onto him.
He closed his eyes. This was too good.
He looked up at her, and her eyes were closed. She was concentrating. A drop of clear fluid sparkled on the tip of her third nipple, beckoning him, tantalizing him. He touched it, then licked his finger. Oh, God, this was good.
She began to move, her inner muscles fluttering like butterflies, like birds, like bats, and then it felt as if her womb extended its lips and sucked the semen from him as through a straw. He came so hard, so fast, there was no time to relish the feeling. In one long agonizing spurt, he was finished.
She put both hands on her belly and smiled a quiet, secretive smile. She nodded. “Done,” she whispered, and rolled off him, falling into a deep sleep with one leg still thrown over his wrinkling pants.
The next day, the supernumerary nipple dried up and became little more than a little discolored lump on her rib cage.
Alexandria was pregnant.
He went to work and when he came home there was usually a home-cooked meal waiting for him. She seemed to enjoy playing house as much as he did, until his color sight faded back to black-and-white. Then he grew irritable and grumpy.
She blossomed and grew round and plump, rosy, and giggly.
He glared at her.
She laughed at him.
He counted the days. They proceeded with infuriating slowness. Nine months of black-and-white. After having color sight for so long he felt seriously handicapped. And bitter. Totally and absolutely inferior. Useless. Worthless.
She used that. She spent all his money on baby things. She seemed to favor pink, referred to the baby as “she,” and when he questioned her about it, she said that her mother had pronounced the child “the one.”
“The one?”
“Perfection,” she said.
A girl. That news was the only encouraging thing in his life, since he had no intention of giving any girl child of his to this prostitute and her weird mother.
Early one morning, after a restless night, when Alexandria’s belly was hard, swollen and veined, a knock came on the apartment door. Simon wrapped his bathrobe around himself and opened the door.
A hawkish little woman brushed past him, throwing her damp coat and wet umbrella onto his new red-and-yellow sofa that had been gray to him since the day it was delivered.
“Excuse me,” he said.
“Make tea,” she said to him, and walked directly into the bedroom.
He followed her in.
“Mama,” Alexandria said, then frowned as a contraction worked its way through her.
“Your mother?” Simon said. It was inconceivable that this lovely, soft creature could be the product of this hardened, wrinkled, gray thing with rodent teeth and glittering eyes.
“Tea,” she said again, then crossed her arms until Simon left the room.
He brought back three cups of herbal tea on a tray as another, harder contraction pulled on Alexandria.
“Want me to call the doctor? Should we be getting to a hospital?”
“No doctor,” the woman said. “No hospital. We’ll take care of this right here.” She looked at her watch. “And soon.” She pulled a bottle from her bag and poured some thick black liquid into Alexandria’s tea. “Drink up, Alexandria.” She turned back to Simon. “Leave.”
“Leave? No way. This is my child, and I’ll be here for her birth.”
“This is not your child, you ninny. This is our child. Get out of here.”
Alexandria gasped and clutched with pain.
Simon’s stomach seized. He hated to see anyone in pain, especially Alexandria.
“I have pain medication,” he said. “Alexandria, do you want something for the pain?”
“Nothing,” the woman said.
“I’m asking Alexandria,” Simon said, feeling a test of wills boiling up, and feeling equal to the task. He’d throw this old woman right through the window if he had to, and he’d take Alexandria to the hospital.
The woman stood up and faced Simon. “I’m telling you that we know better than you do how to handle this. She can have nothing for pain. Now leave this room.”
“And I’m telling you that this is my house and my child and if you aren’t a little more reasonable and considerate, I will ask you to leave.”
She stared at him.
“I’ll call the authorities,” he said.
“You don’t know what you do,” she said. “You don’t know what you do.”
“I’ve had medical training.”
“You see yourself as unworthy,” the woman said. “Therefore, you are. You endanger this child.”
Alexandria wailed.
The woman whipped up the sheets and Simon saw the baby’s head crown between Alexandria’s legs.
“Get towels,” the old woman hissed. “Lots of towels.”
“Mama…”
“It’s coming,” her mother said, and pushed Simon toward the door.
He came back just as the baby’s head came out. Its little cheeks were fat and full, but dark-colored. Very dark.
“One more,” the old woman said, and with a heart-wrenching grunt from Alexandria, her mother pulled the baby out by the arm. “A girl,” she said.
Simon dropped the towels on the floor. “Does she have it?” he asked.
“She’s not breathing,” the mother said, then held the baby up by one foot.
“Make her breathe, Mama,” Alexandria begged.
“Does she have it?” Simon asked. “Let me see.”
“Get out of here,” the mother said, as she put two fingers in the baby’s mouth and wiped out something thick. She whacked the child on the butt, but there was no response.
“Let me see,” Simon said, he was too eager, too anxious, he couldn’t stand it.
The mother put her mouth over the child’s and sucked, then blew in little puffs. She listened to the chest, but there was sadness in her eyes. “There is no life,” she said, and straightened up, looking far older than she had when she walked in.
Alexandria sat up, wailing, reaching for the dead baby that was still connected to her by its umbilicus.
Simon picked up the warm, slippery little thing. Under its right nipple was another nipple, tiny but erect, and what looked like a tiny breast beneath it. He pushed on it gently with his thumb. Liquid.
He kissed the child on the forehead, on one fat little cheek, and then he put his lips to the nipple and sucked.
“No!” the mother yelled.
“No!” Alexandria screamed.
But with a little pop, it opened, and a bitter liquid gushed into his mouth and down his throat. He swallowed before he could react. It must have looked like black pus, he thought, as he winced and spit and thrust the cooling child at its mother.
Both Alexandria and the woman watched him.
He wiped his tongue on one of the towels, but the taste was oily and wouldn’t go away.
The mother slapped her moist, smelly palm against his eyes. “As thou seeist thyself,” she hissed at him.
“Worm,” Alexandria whispered.
Simon knew he was beneath contempt, and his sight faded, faded, faded.
The next time Simon awoke, he didn’t know if it was day or night. His house was absolutely silent.
He felt his eyelids. His eyes were open, but he saw nothing. He stared into nothing and wondered what had happened. He must have passed out.
Then he noticed a flickering movement out of the corner of his right eye. He sat up in bed and turned his head to the right. Something slipped past his vision. Something white?
Something in the house?
Heart pounding, he lay awake, unseeing eyes open wide, afraid, wondering.
And then he saw something right directly in front of him. It wasn’t completely dark. He wasn’t totally blind. He tried to focus on it, but it was too close, it was
too close. He waved his hands in front of his face; nothing there, he was still in his bed, but what was he seeing?
He buried the back of his head in his pillow, then threw the pillow on the floor, but that didn’t seem to help. He was still too close. It wouldn’t focus.
Then, with a force of will, he moved backward in his mind, and the object retreated.
Black shiny tunnel wall. Moist. Damp. Close. Earth. He could smell it. He could taste it.
What the fuck?
And then, as a white grub dragged a bit of a green leaf past him and the root he was hiding behind, he knew. He knew that his life had been colorless before Alexandria, and that he deserved his new sight. He had acted abysmally, sinfully, beyond all respectable behavior, but he wished she had just blinded him instead.
“As thou seeist thyself,” the old woman had said. He was a worm, always had been, always would be, and he knew exactly what that leaf tasted like. Tangy. Fresh. Like Alexandria’s elixir.
* * *
The Gift of Neptune
by Danielle Willis
How does one compose an epitaph for a mermaid?
They called her the Gift of Neptune and she gave good head. At night you could hear the dry scrape of her scales against the straw as she shifted about in her cage. I was in the cage next to her and could watch her. Her face was smooth, white and lunar with enormous black eyes and pale lips. She smelled vaguely saline and there were always flies buzzing around the desiccated bulk of her great fish’s tail. She slapped at them and moaned.
I would have liked to befriend her but she was mortally afraid of me, as were the other freaks. They called me the Thorned Rose and I gave dangerous head. Men would dare each other to have me go down on them and I would make a halfhearted attempt to be gentle but did not always succeed. My mouth was cold and sharp and I raked in more business as a spectacle than as a whore. No other traveling curiosity show had a genuine vampire, despite which fact they treated me quite miserably and treated her even worse. Freaks were freaks, no matter how rare or valuable. We were always sick, underfed, and jostled over miles of rough terrain every day so that inbred peasants could poke sticks at us through the bars of our cages or fuck us for a few coins extra.
We were fantastic and dismal and none more so than she. She cried and swore to herself in her strange tongue and huddled in a corner of her cage, clutching her moth-eaten rag of a shawl around her bare torso. They sometimes beat her for her modesty, and would pull the shawl off during exhibition hours and splash water on her to make her scales glisten. She coughed bloody phlegm and her nose ran constantly.
I watched her. My ribs being pelted with dirt clods, I would let my eyes wander over to her. My mouth full of some yokel’s cock, I would stare at her and imagine her life underwater, grin at my tormenters and imagine them drowned. Sometimes, seeing her in the same position, I would bite down and cause much screaming and merriment, after which the owner would beat the piss out of me.
The owner’s name was Graf and he was a very stupid white man with no teeth. Since he couldn’t chew, all he ate was a thin, lumpy gruel that made him ill-tempered and flatulent, and since he was a sadistic bastard, he made everyone else eat it as well. His wife cooked it up in foul-smelling vats and slopped it in congealed gray ladlefuls into the rude wooden bowls for which he constantly reminded us to be grateful. “I could have you eating out of troughs like pigs,” he’d say as he sauntered along the shabby row of cages, “so count yourselves fortunate.” He knew I lived entirely on rat blood but saw to it that I got my portion anyway, just so he could shriek at me for dumping it through the privy hole when I thought he wasn’t looking. I often fantasized about ripping his throat out.
His wife was a frail, straw-colored wench of a woman who was dying of something or other. They had an idiot albino son he planned to use as soon as the wife was safely in her grave. He would torment her with this eventuality whenever she was too sick to fix him his gruel. The boy was harmless enough, but had the rather repulsive habit of constantly stretching his penis until it looked as though he were going to pull it out by the roots, at which point he would let it snap back. The noise it made always reduced him to hysterical giggling. Graf beat him savagely whenever his wife wasn’t looking.
The only thing that made my existence halfway tolerable was having the cage next to the Gift of Neptune. I would lie there in my filthy straw cursing the fact that I frightened her and that I couldn’t speak her language. She was the only genuine nonhuman freak in the show. Graf had acquired her in a scabby little coastal hamlet littered with fish heads and the bleached bones of sea serpents. Two pulpy-faced sailors pulled her in flopping in a net, her scales glistening blue-and-green in the sunlight. They’d thrown in a wine barrel of salt water as part of the bargain, but Graf abandoned it by the side of the road after a few days because it leaked. She deteriorated quickly after that. Her scales dried out and turned the color of calluses, and she lapsed into a state of semiconscious delirium. Despite this, she was easily the most popular exhibit of the lot of us.
The other freaks were an unremarkable assortment of dwarves, hunchbacks, pinheads, harelips, and other genetic prodigies common in those days of poor medicine and rampant inbreeding. What made this particular freak show unique was that it doubled as a whorehouse. Men have always been willing to fuck anything with an orifice and never was this trait more pronounced than amongst the brain-damaged peasantry of medieval Europe. After a hard day of toiling in the wheat fields of some equally brain-damaged noble, there was nothing the average serf would rather do than down a couple pints of ale and go have some cross-eyed microcephalic with a wooden leg give him a blow job.
The only one of us that didn’t have to whore in a cage was the dwarf Gustav. He had begun his stay at the freak show as part of the perennial “Bugger a Dwarf” exhibit, but soon endeared himself to Graf by poking his fellows’ eyes out with a fork. Since Gustav could also juggle and tell lewd stories, Graf made him his personal assistant. He was the bane of my existence, always squeezing his fat turnip of a face between the bars of my cage and hissing “Rat-Catcher Rat-Catcher” in a piercing falsetto whine that never failed to curdle my innards. Once I lobbed my bowl at his head and bloodied his nose. Of course he went screaming to Graf, but the broken bones were well worth the satisfaction of watching the wretched creature do a stubby-legged jig clutching his nose and howling an accompaniment. There was very little else available in the way of entertainment.
In the end, the Gift of Neptune no longer flinched when I reached through the bars of her cage to stroke her hair while she conversed with herself through lips that cracked and bled with her incessant raving. I brushed my fingers across her mouth for a taste of her blood, which was oily and rancid and made me so ill I lay trembling in my filthy straw hallucinating swollen fish bloating belly-up in chamber pots, only dimly aware of the rats scurrying across my legs and the hateful dwarf prodding my legs with his sharpened stick, shrilling threats to report me to Graf if I did not immediately rouse myself and dispatch the emboldened rodents. I was too far gone to show any evidence of pain, so after a while the revolting little pustule grew weary of me and went to torment the carrion hound. I could hear it snarling while the dream fish burst and overflowed the chamber pots with their brilliant intestines.
I woke to the dry rattle of the Gift of Neptune’s breathing. She was lying on her stomach with her tail twisted at a strange angle beneath her, as if she had tried to shift positions and collapsed halfway through the endeavor. I struggled to my hands and knees and crawled over to the partition between our cages, reached through and took hold of her crescent-shaped tail fin. It cracked in my grip and came away in brittle, iridescent flakes as I pulled her straight. She was still raving to herself but now her voice was gone and her lips writhed in silence, the corners of her mouth caked with dried blood. I remembered the taste of it and nearly retched.
Seeing me awake, the dwarf scuttled over.
“You’ve been slacking
long enough,” he squeaked. “We’ll be overrun if you keep this up. Aren’t you hungry? Look, there’s a fat one now.”
“Where?”
“Eating out of your bowl. Are you blind?”
“I don’t see it. Show me where it is, I’m famished.”
“Stupid leech, must I do your work for you?”
He thrust his arm through the bars to point it out and I seized him by his hair and held him in place while I slit his throat with my nails. I caught a few spurts in my mouth before I unfastened his key belt and unlocked my cage and the Gift of Neptune’s. A great pounding and bellowing went up along the row. I tossed the key belt to the werewolf, then gathered the Gift of Neptune up in my arms and hurried to the clearing where the horses were tethered. We rode off into the forest on Grafs prize dapple mare, the shouts and curses growing dim behind us.
After we put what I thought was a safe distance between ourselves and the freak show, I slowed the mare to a walk. Although her flanks were lathered with foam, she fought being reined in. Her eyes rolled with fear and she shied at the slightest crackle in the underbrush.
Presently we came to a shallow stream, which we followed for a few miles until it turned into a pool. I laid the Gift of Neptune in the shallows and let the water wash over her. She floated listlessly just below the surface, the frilled slits beneath her ears pulsing feebly.
* * *
From Hunger
by Wape Allen Sallee
“Hurt me,” I told her. “Rip the skin open at my temples.”
“You’ll still kill me,” she said.
“Yes.” I agreed. “But it will be easier if you tear my skin now.”
That’s how many of the conversations with my victim began. It ended with the moaning.
My moaning, because I was into s&m big time.
Or so I thought. Until I met Veda Daanse.
Then it was a whole new skin game.
One of the better points about being a vampire is that I get to fly around naked. When I was alive, before I met the girl with the smile from dark nowhere, it got to be that the only way I could get myself into a state of sexual arousal was if I or my partner—real or on glossy magazine print—had been in a state of public exhibition. That usually did the trick, but if I still couldn’t get it hard, I had to cause myself some pain and discomfort, yet come short of self-mutilation.
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