“Nah,” Mike said. “Not Nolan. He’s Wendi’s guy. The first guy you fuck isn’t worth it. He’s a real squirrely dude, no offense, Nolan. I’d save it for the third guy, Ryan. He’s all bulk and brains, and he knows what’s up.”
“Ryan? Okay, I will.”
“You won’t. You’re gonna be really curious when the first one comes around. But listen, you got to lay off the acid. You’re gonna have a bad trip, man, and it’s gonna scare the fuck out of you. You won’t paint for a year.”
“Bad trip? Yeah right. Sure. Can anybody tell me what’s going on here?”
“I don’t fucking know,” Wendi said. “Far as I can tell, post-coital versions of all the people I’ve had sex with are popping up after Nolan and I do it. To fuck with me, or maybe there’s some kind of lesson I’m supposed to learn, or maybe they’re just gonna run through the whole lot until it’s Nolan pops up every time we do it. That’ll be a trip, won’t it, babe? Maybe we can have a threesome.”
Nolan had never seen her quite like this, her face all red. She wiped her hand across her forehead where a couple of sweat beads had formed. Her hands were shaking so slightly that Nolan seemed to be the only one who noticed.
“It’s okay.” He pulled her to his chest. “We can figure this out.”
“I didn’t mean anything by this, Wendi. Hell, I just always thought you were hot, and we were both into it and stuff. I can leave now,” spirit Mike said.
“Can you?” Wendi and Nolan said together.
Spirit Mike shrugged. He closed his eyes and scrunched up his face. When he opened his eyes, both Mikes sighed and shook their heads.
“Sorry. I don’t think I can,” spirit Mike said.
“If you two want my place on the couch, I’ll stay in here with myself,” Mike said. “I’d love to pick my own brain. See if I can talk some sense into it.”
Wendi and Nolan curled into the couch. They were lulled to sleep by the lullaby of Mike’s doubled laughter in the next room, an echo each time.
The next night conjured up an unknown lover from the bar where Wendi spent the bulk of her time in college. The night after that, a woman Wendi had met in her psychology of sexuality class. After that, another friend Nolan had met. Her name was Cathryn. She’d always been elusive in their company. Nolan could never quite say he knew her, but there, hovering above the wet spot, her body bared for him to see, her shaggy sex hair, he felt like he was gaining a glimpse of who she really was.
They had a nice chat, the three of them. And when Wendi fell asleep, Nolan and Cathryn stayed up, immersed in a discussion of the merit of remaking Planet of the Apes. Cathryn, as it turned out, had read the book in the original French.
“I didn’t know you liked it,” Nolan said. “We could’ve been talking about this all along.”
“So we’ve met before?”
“Yeah, we’ve met. We hang out together sometimes, less frequently these days. I guess Wendi and I have kinda been wrapped up in ourselves.”
“I’m sure I understand.”
They lay there for a silent moment, Wendi’s snores drifting over from her open mouth. Drool pooled on her pillow.
“Look at her. The face only everyone could love,” said Cathryn. “Wish I would’ve known this was the last time.” She moved her hands down her body. In her faint smile Nolan could see something he’d never before considered: at one time, Cathryn must have cared for Wendi. Maybe she still did. At one point, Nolan thought, maybe everyone who meets Wendi cares for her.
“Look, Cathryn, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure thing,” she said. She was already beginning, along with the wet spot, to fade.
“How many people has Wendi slept with?”
“That’s something you have to ask her. And I think, before you do, you should figure out if it’s really important that you know.”
He scratched his head. He didn’t want her to go. “Thanks for taking such good care of her.”
“Of Wendi? She doesn’t need anyone to take care of her. She took care of me.”
Cathryn didn’t say more; her body was evaporating, and Nolan wasn’t sure she would have been able to keep speaking even if she wanted to. Nolan thought what she had said made a nice end point. He let that be the thing between them, the bond only he would remember in the light.
When Nolan returned home from another rough work day, Wendi was lounging on the couch. Pink Floyd played over the stereo, “Wish You Were Here.” He hoped the song wasn’t relevant in regards to one of the spirits.
He pushed the empty cellophane tubes onto the floor and sank into the cushions beside her. He’d taken to trying to sleep on the couch each night, to ward off temptation, and the couch was imprinted with the shape of his body twisted in a fevered half-sleep. But every night without meaning to, he rose and stumbled back to their bed, where Wendi’s sleepy fingers massaged his scalp until it grew sore and he had to kiss her.
In his throat the words stuck like peanut butter. When he spoke they were garbled and in a voice that wasn’t his own.
“How many before me?” he asked. He hadn’t known he would ask it when the day began, but if he could see an ending in sight, he felt as if he would be able to keep himself from losing his sanity. Already, whenever he was home, he felt as if he might lose consciousness at any moment. He saw lines in his vision, symptoms of sleeplessness, of stress. After he ate dinner, he always felt a flutter in his chest, but he was too young for heart attacks. And Wendi, she’d grown quieter.
She hadn’t replied. Her fingers twitched as she stared off at one of her collages, a boat in a rocking cellophane ocean, overstuffed with people, so many that some of them had toppled into the water and were flailing limbs in an attempt to swim. She’d told him once they didn’t know how. It was an old painting, one she’d done before him.
“Four more,” she said, and he realized she’d been counting. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“No,” he said. His stomach knotted. “Of course not.”
“You think I’m a failure.” She stomped one of the paper tubes at their feet. “I can’t even afford more fucking cellophane or canvas or brushes and paint or food or even the rent this month, actually.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. My parents say I can go back home if I want.”
“You talked to your parents about moving back?”
“Is that what you want?”
“Is it what you want?”
They were only a foot or so apart on the couch, but Nolan knew he couldn’t reach out and touch her without breaking through air thick as a hundred canvases pressed together. Instead they both stared off at that damn collage, which would never have the same meaning for him again.
“It’s not what I want,” Nolan said, and the air cracked like old paint. He grabbed hold of her stiff shoulder and pulled her to his chest. “Don’t you dare go. I can take care of you for now. If you let me. Everyone needs that sometimes.”
Wendi’s body loosened. He kissed the top of her head, and she shook in his arms. “Five more,” she said. “Can you handle it?”
“They better not be better looking than me,” he said.
The next four passed without too much incident. They were people Nolan had never even met before, never heard of, in fact. It bothered him, made his stomach turn, that there could be people Wendi had slept with who had not even warranted mention, but he reminded himself that it was almost over, that she loved him now, that after him there would be only him.
Then two of them came at once, which surprised him. One wore a black leather collar around his neck with a chain that disappeared into the wet spot. The other’s hands were bound by cuffs that clinked as he struggled to elbow the other from the limelight. It looked as though, if they were to cut their mattress, they would find the chain’s end on the other side, a ghost Wendi in leather lingerie clutching it in
her fist. She asked them to shut the fuck up so she could get some sleep. They listened. It was as easy as that, though Nolan could tell by their faces that they expected to be rewarded for their silence.
“It was a phase,” she admitted over early morning sandwiches. “It’s nice, though, having two men fight over you in bed.”
“I’ll bet it is,” Nolan said. At first, Nolan’s body ached with jealousy, but once he forced himself to breathe, he felt a warmth creep into his cheeks. He was glad she had experienced that. She deserved to have two men doting, attending to her every need. Although he was glad that she no longer felt she needed that, it made her seem softer somehow, that she should have felt she needed that once, before him, and that he might have filled a hole she once wanted two men to fill.
The night that Nolan was due to arrive in all his ghostly glory, Nolan got cold feet.
“It’s just you,” she said. “I promise. What’s the matter?”
“What if I’m bad?”
“Bad how?”
“What if I look bad, weird?” Nolan turned away from her. His stomach grumbled. “Want a sandwich? I’ll make us some sandwiches.” He sat up.
Pushing on his chest, Wendi sent him toppling back into the sheets. “Hush,” she said, lifting the shirt off his head. “Everything’s going to be okay. We’re at the end now.” She unbuttoned his pants, pulled his underwear over his penis, which sprung out like a jack-in-a-box. She began with her lips, and when they were through they watched as Nolan, two years younger, materialized. His naked body was indeed thin and pale, but only in that ghostly way they all had been. Compared to the spirit, the real Nolan seemed tan and bulky.
“I look weird,” Nolan said.
“Scared shitless,” Wendi said. “I intimidated you.”
“Still do.” Nolan stood from bed and circled the spirit Nolan, whose eyes had yet to adjust to the new light. He squinted down at them, curled into his own naked body.
“Another stress dream,” spirit Nolan said, sighing. “What are you going to do to me now?”
“We’re not going to do anything to you.” Wendi smiled, reached out her hand to touch the spirit, but it went right through the mist. “We’ve got ghosts, right, and we’re at the end here. You’re the last of them.”
“I didn’t think about this before,” Nolan said, “but how am I here, in spirit form? I thought these spirits manifested as they were the last time you had sex with them. This is very clearly one of the first.”
“The third,” spirit Nolan said. “I’ve slept with her three times, not counting these dreams.”
“It’s not a dream,” Wendi said. “I remember that time. It was the last time you ever acted like this around me. After the third time, we had that fight, I cried on your shoulder. You were you after that.”
Nolan remembered too the hot warmth of Wendi, her red face, that first rare time he had seen inside of her. Spirit Nolan glanced her way, then looked back to Nolan. “She makes me so nervous,” he said.
“I can hear you,” she said.
“But you’re not real,” spirit Nolan said. “So it doesn’t really matter.”
“I think this might work better without me.” Wendi slipped on her big blue robe.
“I’m not a dream,” Nolan said. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked up through himself into the ceiling above, where the ceiling fan spun cool air down onto his bare body. “I’m you in a few years.”
“Fine. Say I accept that. We’re still with Wendi?”
“We’re still with her,” Nolan said. “There was never any other way.”
“Does she love us?”
Nolan said nothing. He didn’t have to.
“Is she worth it?” spirit Nolan asked.
At first he didn’t speak, didn’t want to cheapen the answer. But spirit Nolan looked so eager, so curious, and he felt that if he didn’t say something, he would never really know if he meant what he’d been thinking. “Yes,” Nolan said. “She is.”
The next day Nolan came home from work with a plastic bag from the pharmacy. At work his boss had mentioned that he seemed much better, even complimented him on his smile. When Wendi saw the bag, she twisted her lips into a skeptical scowl.
“I don’t want to keep meeting myself,” he said. “I don’t want to take the chance. I just want to have sex with you, and have that be the end of it.”
“Those pills don’t work,” she said. “They’re just a scam.”
“I didn’t get pills.” From the bag he pulled a bright purple hairdryer. Wendi laughed and made a lewd gesture with her hips. They ran into the bedroom, the hairdryer trailing behind them. They did it with the hairdryer between them, waiting, already plugged in. They turned it on and held the heat on each other’s bellies. They laughed until it burned. They let the noise cover their words, not the words Nolan had always imagined sex would be full of, but different words, better words because they were true—ow, wait, oh, don’t you dare come I’m not ready yet. He felt like because they could talk, because they could be so informal with one another in such raw moments as these, they must be close, even if there were parts of Wendi she could never show him, parts of her he could only guess at, they had more than parts. The spirits, maybe they came back because they felt that, because they wanted to remind her of the pieces she had traded in. Maybe they were jealous, too.
Once they had fallen apart and their breath steadied, their bodies back to room temperature, down from the heat that lit them up like Christmas, they pointed the hairdryer at the wet spot and switched it on. They saw a faint spiritly outline trying to force its way up and out, but they kept the hairdryer on until the spot vanished.
This, they knew, would be something they did now, like rolling on the condom, like how Nolan would begin each night with his tongue—he was a gentleman after all—and they would find a way to make it work for them. In some ways they already had.
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: http://www.bonniejostufflebeam.com.
/non-fiction
James Patrick Kelly holds a special place in our hearts here at Mothership Zeta. He’s not only a multiple-award winning author, but also a dedicated teacher who does not put on kid gloves in the workshop—he tells students exactly how and why a piece is (or isn’t) working. It’s that kind of professional laser-vision and “expert path” feedback that new writers can learn deeply from. We are proud to offer Jim’s knowledge here and in future issues of Mothership. Learn from Jim, write great work, and send it to us during our next open submissions cycle. In this article, Jim discusses the best ways to write sex into fiction. You can see more examples of this in practice in Jim’s latest publication in July’s Fantasy & Science Fiction— the three-flash “Oneness: A Triptych.”
The Story Doctor is (In)
By James Patrick Kelly
When Editorial Goddess Mur Lafferty asked me to write a column for Mothership Zeta, I thought I’d like to try something that hadn’t been done before. I blurted out a half-baked idea about celebrating the craft of the stories in this fine publication. I teach a lot and have spent a considerable fraction of my career helping aspiring writers achieve their dreams—mostly by workshopping manuscripts. I’m of the story doctor persuasion when it comes to critiques. When I see problems, I don’t just point them out, I suggest surgical remedies. Of course, the stories here in Mothership Zeta are well polished and thus no longer need revision. But by highlighting some of what these talented authors have done right, I hope to enhance your appreciation of what they’ve accomplished. Oh, an
d maybe going forward I can help those who are considering sending Mur stories to find solutions to some of fiction’s most vexing problems.
Which brings us to the story at hand, “Sleeping With Spirits” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam. Lots of writers attempt to write about sex, but few do it as adroitly as Bonnie has done here. Of course, there are all kinds of sex stories. There’s porn, of course, and its literary cousin, erotica. Romance is obsessed with sex, even when it discreetly shuts the door to the bedroom. But the fantastic genres? Historically, not so much. In fact, back in the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, writers in our genre weren’t allowed to show people making love. That changed—slowly—in the fifties and sixties; many credit Phillip Jose Farmer’s 1952 story “The Lovers” with breaking the taboo of onscreen sex and beginning the liberation of science fiction and fantasy. I remember getting editorial pushback as a new writer in the 80s about what I could show and what I couldn’t. But in some way the censors were doing us writers a favor, because writing about sex is hard and doing it badly is a sure way to throw a reader out of a story. So here are some dos and don’ts you can glean from this sexy story.
Don’t use euphemisms—do call parts what they are. In the second paragraph we discover that there will be penises in this story and a bit later on we read of “the wet spot.” When writing about sex, language is important not only to help the reader understand what’s happening but also to set the tone. Bonnie could have chosen to use every day slang for body parts, but then this sweet story might have read too rough. Note that she isn’t afraid to write fuck, but she uses this complicated word as a swear or intensifier and never to describe the act of making love.
Don’t abuse metaphor and simile and never venture into the produce section—do invoke all five senses. Describing primary and secondary sexual characteristics as like fruits and vegetables is not—trust me on this—a good idea. Transparent prose should be the default when it comes to writing about sex. If you’re wondering how the writer holds her reader’s interest with one hand tied behind her back, remember—we’re talking about sex here! A writer has to go out of her way to bore a reader on this subject. But look at how Bonnie gets some lovely literary effects into this story: “He remembered that she tasted like winter, the goosebumps on her arms.” Or how about this: “Wendi’s hand over his jeans, her fingers on his lips. The buzz of his skin when she kissed the hair below his bellybutton.” Sensual details, especially those which invoke the off-senses of taste, touch, and smell, will bring a scene to life much more effectively than breasts heavy as ripe cantaloupes.
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