Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  And moments later his prediction came true, as a nearly identical gigantic green plume rose high into the air as had happened earlier in the day whence all this madness first commenced.

  Thousands of brave warriors charged forward and slung their flaming torches, most of which landed on the beach, though at least one hundred struck water. The result was instantaneous, as the bulk of the oil, on land as well as on the surface of the lake, ignited in a terrible maelstrom.

  The burning waters themselves erupted with hundreds more monsters, but these met not helpless humans to devour, but a flaming hell that quickly set them afire to die in agony.

  A few dozen of the largest of the flaming monsters managed to break from the fiery beach, but were quickly brought down by the surrounding mobs of warriors all too eager to show their mettle to these unwelcome guests.

  One hour later and it was all done. Over ten thousand warriors from all over the world lay dead upon the fields of Thera, both noble and lowly born, master and slave, rich and poor, all joined in a free and equal brotherhood of death and blood…It was an image and thought that would never leave La’ibum’s mind for the rest of his life.

  As Kallinoros’s household emptied back onto the courtyard when they realized it was safe to do so, Goodswap seemed to appear from nowhere to place a strong hand upon La’ibum’s right shoulder.

  “Well done, future king,” Goodswap said, “though I have no medallion or brand to offer you, I’d say you have won the greatest of challenges in these blood games, eh?”

  For a second La’ibum felt the urge to smack the smirk off the trader’s face, but just as quickly his anger cooled as he realized the tall, weird man was not being facetious.

  “You foresaw all of this,” La’ibum said, “didn’t you?”

  “I interpreted many possibilities, my lord,” Goodswap said, “but in the end, it was your free will, your intentions, your actions, and your bravery that decided the final outcome.”

  “And those things,” La’ibum shuddered, “were they the minions of all evil? Is the world now safe from all darkness. Have I won us that eternal freedom?”

  “Think of this as but a warning vision of the distant future,” Goodswap said, “of a faraway apocalypse that will greatly overshadow the minor cataclysm you just experienced. And pray thanks to all your gods that you and your many offspring will be but dust whence it eventually commences.”

  “And, trader— ” La’ibum said as Oreanos dragged her father toward the two of them, shouting out in excitement, retelling the bravery of the Akkadian prince who had saved the island kingdom of Thera.

  “Please,” Goodswap cut in, “though that be my current title, I have always considered myself a salesman.”

  “Before you disappear as is your wont,” La’ibum said, “what is this distant apocalypse that mankind will one day tremble beneath?”

  Goodswap’s mouth spread wide, almost shark-like in its dimension, once again revealing perfect white teeth except for a single, missing incisor.

  “Prince La’ibum, it will be known simply as…the Sha’Daa.”

  THE SEA-SLOP THING

  by Edward Lee

  When the going gets tough, June reflected with a wince, the tough hijack a sausage from the deli counter. Indeed, it had been a hectic day at the deli, taking orders, running the slicer, tabulating the scale, etc., yet never—even during peak store hours—did Zefowitz, her boss, ever see fit to give her help. I can’t do it all myself, June often complained. Nobody in this fuckin’ shit-hole grocery store works but me! which was true. But even the worst job in the world was better than no job.

  When there was finally no line at the deli, June put up the BE BACK IN TEN MINUTES sign, secreted the aforementioned sausage under her apron, and scurried to the employee’s restrooms. Shit, I’m horny as fuck! In a moment’s time, the stall door was locked, her pants and panties were down, and the foot-long sausage was sliding quite vigorously in and out of her already-drenched womanhood. These moods hit her more often now that she’d hit forty—hormone changes, she’d read in Cosmo, the ultimate peak of the woman’s sex drive—and being stuck in the deli twelve hours a day (and with no overtime since she was “on salary”) left her little time or energy to pursue intercourse of a variety more normal than sticking sausages in herself, and even if she had the time and energy, there was not one single member of the male population of this redneck sinkhole of a town who June would touch with a ten-foot pole. Ex-cons, drunks, lifelong potheads, guys with a dozen kids from a dozen different redneck tramps, guys who hadn’t had jobs for most of their adult life, and guys with cars but who couldn’t drive due to multiple DUIs. No, thanks! was June’s resolve. I’ll stick to sausage!

  She’d previously been fantasizing of being taken hard and rough by some faceless man who was football-player-sized: six foot eight inches, three hundred and fifty pounds, all muscle, just hot and heavy right there on the deli floor. His rippled body would squash her mercilessly into the tiles as his hips hammered her loins with the endurance of a gas-powered sod pounder. June, close to smothering, would quiver through one bomb-burst orgasm after another while the faceless muscle-rack greedily pounded on, until at last the reward of his lust arrived. Given that this phantom lover was much larger than the average man in physical stature, he too was much larger than average in genital dimensions—ten inches, twelve or thereabouts, with the girth of a brawny wrist; and the volume and number of spurts of his ejaculation shared this “much-larger-than-average” trait. To be eloquent, the purse of June’s womanly pleasures was flooded with one warm, adoring gust of seed after another. To be less than eloquent, the massive phantom cock and balls filled her squirming pussy up with so much spunk, he could’ve been pumping it into her with a fireplace bellows.

  Hence, it was the recollection of this fantasy that June now summoned: standing spread-legged into the grocery store toilet stall, pants and panties at the ankles, apron jacked up, and banging a prodigious sausage fervidly in and out of her sex. The sausage was still shrink-wrapped, of course, and for those interested in minutiae, it was specifically a Dietz & Watson chorizo sweet sausage, twelve inches long. It would be appropriate to mention that June, at five feet one inch tall and ninety-five pounds, very much qualified as “petite,” but her vaginal depth did not correspond to this qualification. She knew she could take more than twelve inches but she’d never met a man close to that size. Once she’d used a fourteen-inch zucchini, and even that had not reached “rock bottom.” As for width, two inches barely cut it but would do in a pinch; two-and-a-half (about the girth of a beer bottle) was better. She’d tried three inches once (a Boar’s Head Genoa Salami) but that had been a wee bit too much. But this Dietz & Watson? At precisely two and five-eighths, it seemed made for her. Now I know the PERFECT width for me! she celebrated.

  And so horny was she that moment, and so stuffed was her head with the fantasy of being used as a fuck-dummy by a faceless giant, that on the tenth penetration of the chorizo, she came so hard she nearly fell over in the stall, and nearly shouted out loud.

  Holy motherfucking SHIT! she thought, panting, and then she hissed through her teeth, standing on tiptoes, at the delicious post-orgasmic sensation of slowly withdrawing that big honker of a sausage.

  It was just what she needed to take the edge off a tiring, thankless, and very tedious day. Much better now! She collected herself quickly, kept an ear out for the door when she washed off the sausage, then put it under her apron, and whisked back to the deli where, thankfully, no customers were waiting. She had just put the Dietz & Watson back in the front display case when she turned around—

  —and froze.

  Mr. Zefowitz was standing behind her, arms crossed over the bulbous belly that stretched his white dress shirt nearly to the point of popping its buttons.

  “Uh, hi, Mr. Zefowitz,” June said.

  “You’re fired,” Mr. Zefowitz said.

  June, not a passive personality, replied, “You can’t fire m
e! Everyone else in this store is too STUPID to run this deli!”

  “That’s true, but I can fire you and I just have.”

  “What for!” June bellowed.

  “For masturbating with store inventory,” and then he walked to the case, removed the culprit sausage, and patted one end of it into his open hand. He smiled.

  Embarrassment turned June’s face beet red but it only took a moment for that embarrassment to transform to stark-raving rage. “You fat fuckin’ pervert! You have a camera in the ladies room!”

  “Not a camera, several,” her boss remarked. “Security cameras, for your safety. Any old psycho could come in off the street, walk into there, and rape someone. Then we’d get sued, and we can’t have that, can we?”

  “Well you’re sure as shit gonna get sued now! I’m takin’ this shit to Channel 9!”

  He put the sausage back (why not? It was shrink-wrapped) curled an index finger at her, and beckoned her into the back room. “Come in here to see why that will never happen.”

  Veins beat at June’s temples. She was grinding her teeth she was so mad. She followed him into the back room, then he closed the door, and when he turned back around…

  …his penis was out of his pants.

  “Why is your dick out of your pants?” she asked, seething.

  “Well, it has to be for you to suck it,” he said. He pulled on in a bit, then scooped out his testicles. “And you will suck it and you’ll swallow everything that comes out of it, otherwise that security tape will be on the internet five minutes from now.”

  June stared. She was shaking, she was vibrating. Then—

  Then—

  She sighed long and despondently, got on her knees, and began to suck.

  Fuck! Shit! Piss! This was the character of June’s reflections once she got home. No fuckin’ job! How can I pay the rent! Her useless, tits-on-a-bull, deadbeat of an ex-husband would be bringing the kids home from summer camp in a week, and with the pissant child support he paid, she couldn’t even get a decent amount of groceries.

  She plopped down in the ancient arm chair, and would’ve cried if she’d been so mad. Perhaps some TV would take her mind off things.

  But no.

  The TV was broken.

  I am so screwed, and all because I just HAD to stick that sausage in my cooter…

  At least it had been a good orgasm.

  The taste of Mr. Zefowitz’s sperm still buzzed in her mouth. It’s funny how sperm tastes worse when it comes out of the dick of someone you hate. Yeck! She should’ve bitten it off, not that there was much to bite. Everything seemed to go wrong for June. Just once, she thought, just ONCE, why can’t something go right?

  Her cellphone rang, and before he answered it, she saw the text message saying that her pay-as-you-go card would expire in one day. No job, and no money to renew my card. The hits just keep on coming.

  Then she answered the phone, expecting a bill collector. “Hello?”

  “Hey, sweetheart!” a sly male voice answered. It was Fishy, probably her only friend in town. “How’s the love of my life doing today?”

  “I don’t know, Fishy. What’s his name?”

  Fishy barked laughter. Everybody called him Fishy because, well, he worked the docks and smelled like fish. “That’s my gal! Always good for a laugh. Say, you ready for some good news?”

  “Fuckin’-A yes I’m ready for some good news,” she said, ever the gentlewoman. “All I’ve had all day is bad news.”

  Fishy chuckled. “Yeah, I heard. You got canned from the deli ’cos Zefowitz caught ya stickin’ a leg of lamb in your cookie.”

  Steam may very well have shot from June’s ears. “It was a chorizo sausage, not a leg of fuckin’ lamb! And-and, it’s not true! And where did you hear that?”

  “Aw hell, damn near everyone. Whole town’s talkin’ about it.”

  Fuck! Fuck-fuck-FUCK! June thought.

  “Just don’t you worry about none’a that, Junie,” Fishy consoled. “I’se bet every dang gal in this town has stuck all kinds’a things in themselves.”

  Now she was truly close to tears. What could be worse than this? She’d have to move. Everyone would be calling her Sausage Girl. “Come on, Fishy. I thought you said you had good news.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right. You know ole Captain Kupjack, don’t ya?”

  June made a face. “Yeah. That perverted old drunk’s been trying to get in my pants since I was ten. I’m serious. Ten.”

  Fishy chuckled. “Yeah, he’s a rascal, all right. Anyway, he just pulled into the dock on his forty-two-footer.”

  “Shit,” June muttered. “I was hoping you were gonna tell me his boat sunk with him in it, that fuckin’ old crustcake diaper sniper.”

  “You’re something, Junie, you really are. Anyhow, like I was sayin’, he just pulled in, been gone two weeks. Devil Reef, I heard, and he must’ve brought back one hell of a catch ’cos he was spendin’ money like water at the bar. Picked up everyone’s tab.”

  “That scumbag skinflint never bought anyone anything. Ever,” June observed.

  “Well, he sure as hail did today, and he’s still down there buyin’ drinks. Oh, and he bought hisself a brand-new Cadillac ta boot.”

  This didn’t sound right. “Unless he brought in twenty thousand pounds of rockfish, he couldn’t make enough profit to pay off his crew and then buy a Caddie. And rockfish is out of season right now.”

  “Well, funny ya mention it, about his crew, I mean. When he left he had four fellas with him, but when he come back today, he had none. Said he dropped his crew off on Kent Island ’fore he pulled in. Ain’t no one work for him from Kent Island that I know of.”

  June’s shoulders drooped. This sounded like a run around. “Fishy, I don’t give a fuck about Kupjack, his crew, Kent Island or nothin’. All I care about is good news, and if you don’t have any, I gotta go.”

  “Hold up there, little girl! Don’t let your titties get tied in a knot,” Fishy said. “Lemme git to the best part. So when I was in the bar drinkin’ on Kupjack, he slams like his tenth shot of Wild Turkey and he come to me and say, ‘I need my boat painted, inside and out, and there ain’t no painters in this town worth of pinch of dog shit, not one, ’cept June.’”

  “Bullshit,” June said. “Last time I saw that stewed old perv, he pinched my butt, so I told him if he was the last man on earth and I was hornier than a jackal in heat, I’d hang myself before I’d fuck him, and if he ever touched me again, I’d cut his dick off and use it for fish bait.”

  “Wow,” Fishy laughed, “that’s sure sendin’ a message! But I’m serious. He knows you and I are friends, so he tells me to tell you he wants to hire you to paint his boat, and if you agree he’ll give me a hundred dollars for a finder’s fee.”

  June winced. “Are you shitting me?”

  “Ain’t nothin’ but the truth, hon, and I sure could use that C-note.”

  “Well, you can forget it. I wouldn’t work for that creepy two-bit little-girl’s-bicycle-seat-sniffing old crock for any amount of money,” and she took a sip of the cold, two-day-old coffee sitting next to her: the last coffee in the house.

  “It’s a two-month job, Junie, and he’ll pay fifty bucks an hour, cash, daily.”

  June spat the fetid coffee in a wide spray across the room, where it dotted her velvet Elvis portrait. “Tell him I’ll take the job!” she gagged. Drunken fat old pervert or not, that much money would solve all of June’s problems for the next year!

  “Be crazy not to,” Fishy said. “Just you meet Captain Kupjack tomorrow mornin’ at the dockyard.”

  “You can bet your ass, Fishy! Thanks!”

  When she hung up, she squealed in proverbial glee. Fifty bucks an hour! Finally, something GOOD happened to me!

  Good, indeed. And perhaps too good to be true…

  Bright and early next morning, June walked briskly through the dockyard, whistling, for some reason, the theme for Sponge Bob. She’d been a boat painter f
or several years but quit after that time someone had dropped a Mickey into her iced tea. She didn’t know what had happened to her in the four hours she was unconscious, but her anus hurt for days. Was probably Kupjack, the dirty prick, she thought. Even so, for fifty an hour? She’d just have to keep a close eye on anything she drank.

  Wow, came the next thought. She was approaching Kupjack’s slip when she spied a brand-new gold-colored Cadillac Seville. The gold paint job looked tacky but still, That’s probably sixty grand! Kupjack must’ve leased it, wants people to think he’s a high roller.

  “Thar she is!” cracked a hoarse voice. Did June smell whiskey breath even at this distance? The disheveled, pear-shaped man leaned against the railing of his ancient piece-of-shit dock-shed-turned-office. Kupjack was as broken down as the shed, and as old. His distended liver made his stomach stick out like a woman nine months pregnant, and the big bushy Talibanish beard covered a huge pink face that was benchmarked by a warped nose akin to a rotten strawberry. Lastly, and most ridiculously, he wore a crooked, white captain’s hat with a life preserver on it.

  Then he rubbed his crotch through his canvas overalls.

  Great, June thought. “Fishy said you had work for me.”

  “Aw, yeah,” the old man crackled. “Just come back from Dunedin Reef with a hold full of crackjaw eel, done sold the lot to the Japs for top dollar.”

  “I heard it was Devil’s Reef. And crackjaw eel? Isn’t that freshwater eel?”

  When Kupjack hitched in a pause, his man-tits jiggled. “Well, no, we passed Devil’s Reef, I mean, and you’re right, it were hagfish eel. I always confuse ’em see? Ugly buggers all look the same…I mean the eel, not the Japs. Then I drop my crew off St. Mary’s Island, where I meet up with the Jap fish broker.”

  “I heard you dropped your crew off at Kent Island,” June said.

  This second challenge gave the fat drunk a jolt of annoyance. “Well, you done heard wrong, little lady, and that ain’t neither here or there, and, yeah, I got work for ya. I need my boat painted inside and out, every square inch. Fifty bucks an hour, and it’ll likely last all summer.”