by Edward Lee
Sonia and Hazel stared through a pause.
Frank began to spout, “Sure, the hypothesis of non-Euclideanism is considered gimcrackery, but only because it relies on assumptions that can’t disprove Euclid’s Ten Elements and all the laws of geometry that followed them. But in our theory—well, it’s mostly Henry’s—we’ve all but proved the existence of inconstancy between stable angles, planes, and points.”
“Huh?” Hazel asked.
“He’s on a roll now,” Sonia said. “But you asked for it.”
“This inconsistency is generated by identifying certain sequences of angular degrees that, when properly aggregated, come together to form a manipulable configuration. In other words, that configuration changes without changing.”
Sonia sighed. “Frank. Enough.”
“In other words constancy and in constancy become one in the same. A forty-five degree angle can assume a state of fictility—”
“Oh, sure, we know what that means!” Sonia exclaimed.
“—and, hence, widen to forty- six degrees while the original forty-five remains constant.”
“Frank,” Sonia said, “don’t run your cell battery down.”
“But what’s the ultimate point of the theory?” Hazel asked.
“I’m glad you asked that, since lit-heads would never be able to understand without delimitating into layman’s terms. The ultimate point is essentially infi nite. What we’re talking about here is the malleability of the unmalleable, Hazel. The tenets of Non-Euclideanism have the potential to produce unlimited energy. They could transpose objects of unequal weight and mass between two points of vast distance. They could prolapse gravity. They could elevate an object the size of the Great Pyramid into outer space with an energy cost of zero. They could convert the top eighth of an inch of water in the Atlantic into enough hydrogen to provide the entire world with a decade’s worth of electricity, for nothing. ”
“Frank,” Sonia said, “We have to go now, but we’ll see you tomorrow!”
“To me it sounds like pie in the sky,” Hazel said. “It’s like cold fusion. Sure, it would be great to achieve nuclear temperatures without a nuclear source, but if it’s even possible, the initial energy expenditure would be more than the energy produced.”
“Hazel!” Frank shrilled. “You’re catching on!”
“Frank, seriously. Let me ask you something–”
Sonia groaned. “Hazel, honey, please don’t.”
“Between you, your father, and Henry Wilmarth, who’s the smartest?”
Frank didn’t hesitate. “Henry, beyond a doubt. He’s a genius.
When he was alive he understood geometric thesis better than anyone in the country.”
“So, logically, if the smartest of the trio has determined that the theory can’t work, then what’s the most rational conclusion?”
A sigh over the line. “I know, that the theory is indeed unworkable. But you don’t understand how exciting this was for us. I even called my dad and asked him what I should do.”
“What did he say?” Sonia asked with a frown.
“He told me to respect Henry’s wishes and destroy all the work. I mean, I will do that, I have to. He left me his entire estate and only asked one thing in return, I have to do it.” The cell connection drifted. “I do have to check this cottage and see what he’s got in there, that’s all. Bear with me.”
Sonia began to whine, “But, Frank, I don’t like the idea of you gallivanting around on a mountain—”
“It’s just a minor geographical summit, honey.”
“Whatever! I need you to come down now. I need you. Tonight! And you...you know what I mean...”
“This is just a wild guess,” Hazel laughed, “but I think she means oral sex, Frank.”
“Oh, ah, of course!” Frank blurted. “Believe me, honey, there’ll be plenty of that tomorrow, and plenty of the, uh, other kind once junior’s seen the light of day.”
Sonia slapped Hazel on the arm; Hazel only laughed.
“And by the way, how’s junior doing?” Frank asked.
“Kicking away as usual,” Sonia replied, rubbing her belly. “I really do think it’s going to be a boy, and one with a penchant for soccer.”
“Perfect! Look, girls, I’m going to get back to my trail-blazing, so drive safe and I’ll see you tomorrow. And have fun at the cabin. I’ll call you tonight around nine to see how it’s going.”
“Be careful up there,” Sonia pleaded once more. “And don’t forget, I love you.”
“I love you too—a shitload.”
“How romantic!” Hazel squealed.
When the farewells were finished, Sonia ended the call, a tear in her eye.
“He’ll be fine,” Hazel assured. “Men pushing forty get on an adventure kick. Don’t worry.”
“Fuck adventure,” Sonia made the rare profanity. “He shouldn’t be climbing mountains and mucking about in the woods. There’s snakes, for God’s sake.”
“Don’t worry! If a snake comes along, Frank’ll bore it to death motor-mouthing about geometry,” Hazel offered.
That got a smile out of Sonia.
“And since you won’t be with him tonight,” Hazel added without thinking, “I’ve got a three-set of vibrating love-clips, if you want to borrow them. They’re great. ” She grinned. “I’ll even put them on for you.”
Sonia laughed, astonished. “Hazel, please...Just drive...”
Two hours later, the turnpikes’ monotonous panorama of asphalt, concrete, and flurries of cars had lapse-dissolved into one of plush foliage, hundred-foot-tall trees, and shaded, curving forest roads. Everything was so deliriously green that Hazel had to catch her breath. I need to get out of the city more, she thought. She’d never been the outdoorsy type but suddenly being in the midst of all this wildlife, she felt bereft, as though she’d been missing out on something important for so long.
“It’s so beautiful,” Sonia observed, eyes wide on the scenery pouring past her window. “And it’s so cool we’re driving on a road called the Daniel Webster Highway.”
“Only English majors could appreciate that,” Hazel remarked. “But Benet’s story still pisses me off.”
“Why? It’s a wonderful story!”
Hazel flapped her hand. “It’s a ripoff of Washington Irving’s ‘The Devil and Tom Walker.’”
“It’s a variation on a theme, Hazel. Not plagiarism.”
“And the asshole wins the Pulitzer!”
“If it’s a ripoff of Irving, dear, then Irving’s tale is a ripoff of Goethe.”
“In which case, Goethe’s Faust was a ripoff of Christopher Marlowe, so there.”
“Fitzgerald said it best, I’m afraid. ‘Minor writers borrow, great writers steal.’”
Hazel’s eyes thinned. “You sure that was Fitzgerald and not Wodehouse? Or—no!—Samuel Johnson.”
“Who cares? We’re almost there!”
Once they passed the turnoff for Laconia, they veered down a wooden fork and suddenly felt as though the forest were swallowing them. First they passed a deer-crossing sign, then another sign read, WELCOME TO BOSSET’S WAY. POPULATION: TOO FEW TO COUNT.
“I love it!” Sonia exclaimed.
“Yeah, and get a load of this place...”
Hazel slowed to an idle by a long, single-storied tavern constructed from planks of withered timber. The place seemed shoved back into the forest. BOSSET’S WAY WOODLAND TAVERN, read a rickety sign. Mostly pickup trucks filled the dirt-paved lot. As they looked on, an older pickup truck with odd rounded fenders parked, and from it stepped an imposing man well-over six feet. Shaggy, cropped brown hair crowned a head which sat on shoulders that seemed a yard wide; muscles bulged through a sweat-streaked gray T-shirt, and tight, faded jeans looked about to split from the pillar-like legs that filled them.
“I guess that’s what you call a woodsman,” Sonia commented.
“Would you look at that Paul-Bunyan-looking muscle-rack!” Hazel enthused. “I’d
do him in a heartbeat! ”
Sonia looked outraged. “He’s literally twice your size, Hazel. He’d split you in two.”
“Shit. I’d take his business till he couldn’t see straight. He’d be crawling home to his mommy, I’d fuck him so hard...”
“Hazel, sometimes you really are too crude. You talk like a guy. And, besides, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’ve got a boyfriend.”
Hazel smirked. “He’s a casual boyfriend. I’m not married, you know–” She winked. “Or engaged.”
“Well maybe you should be. It might clean up your mouth and your mind. Honestly, you talk about sex more than any woman I’ve ever met. You absolutely dwell on it, and it’s not healthy.”
You think I don’t know that? Hazel thought in a sudden despair. I’m NOT healthy. And my only cure is YOU...” Hey, I’m allowed to daydream, aren’t I? And don’t tell me you don’t.”
“I don’t need to. I’ve very into Frank. He’s everything I’ve ever wanted sexually.”
“Great, but you fantasize sometimes, for Pete’s sake. Everybody does.”
Sonia reluctantly tilted her head. “Well, of course, sometimes, sure. But not very often.”
“Thank you.”
Next, they both noticed another sign: FRESH FISH, MUSSELS, GAME - THURSDAY NIGHT - FISH-FED PORK ALL-U-CAN-EAT!“Fish-fed pork?” Hazel questioned. “That sounds interesting.”
Sonia winced and mouthed Yuck.
“There’s your regional cuisine,” Hazel said, “but that’s fine with me. I like trying new things.”
“Hazel, they’ve probably got moose on the menu!”
“Like it or not,” Hazel insisted, “we’re going to be eating in that place soon. We’d be silly not to just for the sake of sensibility.”
“Whatever you say,” Sonia murmured, but then she looked for some reassurance into her purse and smiled at a box of Pop Tarts.
BOSSET’S WAY LANE, read the next sign. Sonia was following the Mapquest directions when she blurted, “Take a left here!”
A slight incline took them deeper into the woods, then the road gave over to runneled dirt. After pulling round a deeply shaded cul-de-sac, Hazel stopped.
They both stared at a dark-planked cabin. Its slat-shingled roof slanted sharply upward. Crude wooden shutters flanked painfully narrow windows, while darker wooden planks comprised the front door. Most of the edifice had been overcome by ivy and the rearward trees, to the extent that it seemed an outgrowth of the woods, that or a foreign object it wished to expel.
“Is that it?” Hazel asked, puzzled.
Sonia pointed to a cumbersome metal mailbox. WILMARTH, H., it read in hardware-store stick-on letters. “I guess this is the place.”
Hazel excitedly jumped out of the car. In spite of the shade, a dense humidity enveloped her. Aside from above the cul-de-sac, no sky was visible due to the tree-cover, and most of the trees—white pine, she thought—were at least a hundred feet high. Only from one precise vantage point could she actually see beyond the all-pervading trees: a narrow lane over open space that followed the property’s slight inclination and showed a wedge of open fields, the edge of a significant lake, and what looked like it might be a town.
“Oh my God, it’s so hot and muggy!” Sonia moaned when she struggled out.
“It’s like a rain-forest effect,” Hazel supposed. She offered Sonia a hand. “All these trees are so high and close together they seal out any breezes. The summer heat makes the moisture condense and rise, but it’s got no place to go.” But Hazel didn’t mind a bit. To her—being a life-long New Englander—heat and humidity was a treat after the nine months per year of cold weather. It made her feel vibrant, prickling with youth.
Sonia pointed in horror. “And what-what-WHAT...is that? ”
“I haven’t seen one of those since Girl Scouts!” Hazel delighted of the narrow shack off to the cabin’s side.
“That’s not a—”
“It’s a good old fashioned outhouse, Sonia. With all our education, with all our intelligence, our college degrees, our sophistication, and our quest for knowledge, this is what it’s all led to. We get to shit in a hole in the ground.”
“Oh my God...”
“And that must be the runoff from the spring,” Hazel noted of the obtrusive lengths of gutter-pipe which branched out of the cabin’s foundation; they veered into a small ravine at the wood’s edge. “There’s probably a storage keg or spring barrel inside. Tubing behind the house leads from the spring to the house, and the overflow runs down the gutter into the woods. Even in the winter, the water won’t freeze ‘cos it’s always moving.”
“Peachy!” Sonia snapped, still appalled by the outhouse.
“And now that I think of it...” Hazel began to approach the outhouse. Was it so old it was actually leaning? “After three hours on the road, this girl’s got to take a mean tinkle.”
“So do I , but-but...not in there! ”
“I didn’t know you were such a princess,” Hazel chuckled and swung open the latrine’s wooden door.
Not too bad. She expected more of an odor, but then she remembered how little this receptacle had been used. Frank had only been here a few days, and before that there’d only been Henry Wilmarth off and on. She eyed the crude hole cut in the wooden bench that sufficed for a toilet seat. Mostly...dead man’s shit down there, came the coarse thought. The door swung shut, leaving only a malformed beam of light coming in through the cliched, sickle-moon-shaped hole in the wall. She dropped her shorts and sat down, waited a moment, then her bladder began to void. She listened, and her brow popped up at the lengthy string of seconds that ticked by before she heard the stream finally hit bottom.
She chuckled at an absurd notion: as she sat there, a hand reached up from the waste pit and cupped her pubis. Then another notion: she looked down into the pie-wedge between her legs and saw a face gazing raptly upward...
Idiotic! she thought, laughing to herself.
But it didn’t take long for these fleeting notions to trigger something else: fantasies. Not typical fantasies.
Hazel’s fantasies—
—with a great Crack! the outhouse door is torn from its hinges. You freeze where you sit, staring up in horror at the enormous silhouette now standing in the doorway. When your jaw drops to scream, your breath stays in your chest and no sound comes out. It’s a wide-shouldered, column-legged man with shaggy hair who’s stepped in as you remain sitting helplessly with your shorts down. The man from the tavern! you realize. The one Sonia had called the “woodsman,” because that’s what he looks like: a mass of sculptured human muscle and dense brawn, so tall he has to duck to enter. His intent is clearly premeditated, for his penis is already out of his opened jeans—limp but lengthy, and fat—hanging there like a raw pork loin. When he sees the fear in your eyes, the penis begins to fill with blood and rise in increments. When you try to lunge past him—
Thunk!
—his ham-hock-sized fist snatches you by the hair and bangs the side of your head against the wall. The heavy, head-spinning daze drops you to the floor. Your feet are lifted up and your shorts are pulled off. Then you hear another Crack! and when your vision clears, you notice that this behemoth has torn the “bench” out of its mounts, nails and all, leaving a rectangular hole full of malodorous darkness. His hand grabs your hair again and hauls you to your knees.
Finally, he speaks, in a voice like wet mush. “Do everything I tell you or I’ll dislocate your hips and drop you down there. You’ll die in shit, which is what you deserve.” Fingers fat as hot dogs pluck the tiny cross around your neck and snap it off.
Dizzy, you gaze up. The violence has hardened his penis to something the length and width of a cucumber, with a maroon glans like a baby apple. The tiny piss-slit shimmers with drool.
“Open my pants and pull out my nuts.”
Your hands shake, reaching forward, then dig in...Oh my God, you think as you lift the scrotum out...
It’s no
t human, it can’t be. In the sun-threaded darkness, you see that you’re holding a hot, fleshy mass that is not characterized by two testes; instead it’s more like a bunch of grapes sheathed by skin. Each individual “grape” is easily discerned beneath the vein-webbed covering.
All the while, the stout, slightly lopsided erection throbs in your face.
“Put lots of spit on my cock,” the slopping-like voice orders next.
You make the mistake of saying, “Whuh—what?” and the human monster works his fingers to either side of your trachea. You shudder on your knees, tongue sticking out; it seems like he’s trying to wretch out your throat, and what’s worse is the ease with which he’s doing so.
At last, you hack, “I’ll do it! I’ll do anything you say!”
The fingers retreat and all at once you’re leaning forward, spewing saliva all over his cock.
“More. On the knob.”
Your fear, by now, has sucked so much gummy sweat through your pores. You’re stifled by the heat, and terrified because it’s so difficult to summon saliva. You suck frantically at the insides of your cheeks, and just as his hand moves back to your throat, you’re able to release a sufficient amount of spit on the corona.
There is no hesitation when his hands hook under your clammy armpits and you’re lifted of the floor. Your back slams against the wall.
The slush-voice: “Pull your knees up.”
You obey the order instantly, and an instant after that his spit-slickened, fl abbergastingly large cock bumps into the egress of your sex, then pushes. You feel the channel spread so wide it hurts. When the erection slips in to its entire length, your teeth clack together. Your vagina has easily accommodated many large penises but never—never—one this large.
“Are you scared?” he gushes.
“Yes!” you sob.
“But you really like this. This is what you really want. An ungodly cunt like you?”
The cock drags in and out of you as his pelvis pumps with a machine-like rhythm. It begets a wet clicking sound. You swear you can feel the end of it up about where your navel is.