by Hunter Shea
Her nipples were round and thick and a chestnut brown.
Not for the first time, Blackstone wondered if she had some Spanish blood. Definitely something exotic flowed through her veins.
Her breasts swayed as she walked to her desk. His eyes traveled south and the shock made him weak in the knees.
She was completely shaved down there!
He’d never seen anything like it, not even in magazines.
“Oh my God.”
Here he prayed, not in church the day before.
Blackstone’s heart danced, the whoosh of his pulse loud in his ears. He was still as a statue, refusing to even blink, taking in every square inch of the beyond-lovely Stacy Michaels. He felt himself harden and was grateful for the long wool coat he’d worn.
She picked up the phone, this stark-naked Venus, sitting back in her chair, legs crossed so he could no longer view the wonder between them.
“I think I’m gonna have a heart attack,” he murmured, holding on to the bitter parking meter to keep upright. “Stacy fucking Michaels.”
“What’s that?”
Again, Blackstone was startled. Whenever he wore the glasses, he was transported to another world. Could anyone blame him?
“I’m sorry?” he said to the woman dressed in a thick parka, holding two paper bags of groceries.
“My mistake,” she said with a slight scowl. “I thought you said something to me.”
She powered through the snow. He made sure not to linger on her retreating form, turning back to Stacy. Now she was typing something. He concentrated on her mahogany-tipped breasts. All of the nipples he’d ever seen in real life were varying shades of pink. This was boldly going where he had never gone before.
In a quick, painful flash, he saw something else besides her breasts. The twin mounds of perfection were replaced by something red and wet. Blackstone blinked, rubbing his eyes beneath the glasses.
When he opened them again, everything was back to normal. Well, the new normal, at least.
“What the hell was that?”
He looked at the time on the clock by the bank down the street, saw it was time to get his ass home. He took one last lingering look at Stacy before getting in the car. This would have to become a daily stop after work. It beat the hell out of sitting in a bar with Fortman and Holes.
Taking the X-ray specs off so he could drive, he yelped when he felt something tear from the side of his head.
“What the hell?”
A tiny patch of skin stuck to the arm of the glasses. He angled the rearview mirror down to inspect his head. Right next to his ear was a blood-red circle. When he touched it with a fingertip, a bolt of pain went from one side of his head to the other.
He cursed the glasses, dabbing the wound with a napkin he found in the glove compartment.
“Cheap piece of shit.”
How could the Honor & Smith Co. invest so much into the lenses and stick them in a cheapo plastic frame that was obviously shrinking? Pretty soon, he might not be able to fit them on his face, and that would be a true tragedy.
“Unless this whole thing is a mistake. There’s no way they’re selling real X-ray specs for a dollar in the back of comic books. Someone at Honor and Smith Co. really screwed up.”
Pulling away from the curb, his mind buzzed with ways to explain the fresh cut by his ear.
Chapter Eight
Brian was the first to notice the cut near his ear when he sat down to dinner.
“I think you need a Band-Aid, Dad.”
“Nah, it’s nothing. I banged my head on my locker. No biggie.”
Andrea placed his plate of spaghetti and meatballs in front of him and inspected the wound. “Brian’s right. I’m sure you didn’t clean it either.”
He so wanted to tell them to just leave it the hell alone, but he wasn’t in the mood to argue. The image of Stacy Michaels was still buzzing in his brain and he wanted to savor it.
“Eyah! Are you crazy?”
Andrea, cotton ball in hand, eyed him like he was a recalcitrant child. “That cut needs peroxide. When did you get your last tetanus shot?”
He jammed half a meatball in his mouth. “What does that matter?”
“Because I don’t need you getting lockjaw. Now hold still.”
The next couple of dabs hurt much less. She finished the job with a round bandage, the kind they used to cover corns.
“There. All better.”
Crisis averted, Brian talked nonstop about his first day back at school and all of the homework he had to catch up on and who got detention last week for peeing on Matt Winters in the boys’ room and which teacher let out a fart when she was at the blackboard, pretending it never happened despite the class breaking into uncontrollable laughter. The kid talked so rapid-fire without seeming to take a breath, Blackstone wondered if he had a hidden blowhole on the top of his head.
“Oh, and Noel was out sick today. You think I should call him later? Maybe he got my chicken pox.”
“Leave him be,” Blackstone said. “Probably has a cold and is eating soup in bed, getting waited on hand and foot.”
“You can call him,” Andrea said, nudging him under the table.
Brian’s face brightened and he finally stopped talking, tucking into his spaghetti.
By the time Blackstone was done, he had a whopper of a headache. “Think I’m gonna lie down.”
“You look pale. How hard did you hit your head? I hope you don’t have a concussion.”
“I don’t have a damn concussion,” he snapped. “My head just glanced off the edge of the locker door. Work was a bitch today and I’m just tired.”
He got up from the table, the overhead light feeling like daggers stabbing into his eyes.
“Don’t take a nap this late, or you’ll never get to sleep,” Andrea said, bringing his plate to the sink. There was a sharp edge to her tone. She didn’t appreciate his reaction, but so what? She’d live.
“I just need some aspirin.”
“Hey Dad, you want me to get your drink and stuff when WKRP in Cincinnati comes on?”
“We’ll see.”
Blackstone lumbered up the stairs, chewed two aspirin and slumped onto his bed.
Nothing comes for free, he thought, lying in the dark. You didn’t think you could see Stacy Michaels nude as the day she was born and not have the universe find a way to make you suffer, did you?
No matter. It had been worth it.
* * *
He woke up the next day feeling fine. Even the cut on his head had healed remarkably well. He could barely even see it.
Though he could see the shriveled bit of flesh on the X-ray specs. He scraped it off with his thumbnail while he was in the bathroom getting ready for work. Blackstone realized he was hiding the glasses the way he smuggled issues of Hustler. Oh, but this was so much better than what was in the pages of the smutty mag.
Again, right after work, he parked outside the real-estate office. Today, before her underwear faded from view, Stacy Michaels wore red satin panties and a matching bra. He was almost sorry to see them dissolve.
Almost.
At one point, she walked over to Munson’s desk to show him something. When he stood up, the man’s hairy, flaccid cock came into full view. Blackstone turned his head away so fast, he nearly gave himself whiplash.
When he did, he found himself looking at a matronly woman in her late fifties pushing a metal cart filled with bags. This time, there was no slow fade of her clothes. She walked toward him fully exposed in horrid clarity. What was under those layers of clothes was as far from the pages of Hustler as his ass was from the rings of Saturn.
“Oh, Jesus,” he barked, holding up his hand to block the view. Except he could see through his hand, catching a brief glimpse of bones, and still not miss an inch of the woman’s rippling body.
He bent over, shutting his eyes tight, hearing her mutter something unpleasant about him as she wheeled past.
“If you only
knew, lady,” he said, though too softly for her to hear.
Still hunched over, he opened his eyes. The concrete sidewalk liquefied until he could see the sewer tunnel underneath his feet.
Closing his eyes again, he straightened up, hoping that when he opened them again, Stacy would have moved away from Munson. He couldn’t take another cock shot.
Opening them slowly, he let out a vaporous sigh of relief. Stacy was alone in the office for the moment, standing while on the phone in all her full-frontal splendor.
“Now that’s more like it.”
Because of the cold, Main Street was relatively empty, so he wasn’t too worried about talking out loud to himself.
Then his vision went blurry, and two seconds later it refocused, except in place of Stacy’s amazing body was a skeleton moving around the desk, lungs pulsating under the rib cage, heart hammering away, a stomach that seemed suspended in midair sitting squat over twisty intestines.
Stacy’s eyeballs were gone, replaced by dark sockets where things squirmed.
Blackstone shouted something, moving away from his car until his back hit the plate-glass window of the travel agency.
He turned his head skyward, seeing nothing but slate-gray clouds. In a flash, he pierced the clouds, seeing the hidden, unbroken blue skies.
What had just happened?
Blackstone couldn’t get his heart rate to settle down. Someone tapped on the window behind him. He didn’t turn around, afraid of what he’d see. So he jumped in his car and sped away, slicing down Main Street, blowing through the red light.
When he went to take the glasses off, his fingers slipped free. The glasses remained on his face as if they’d been glued on.
As he drove, he could see through the thick steel of the cars down to the grinding pistons, passengers nothing more than sitting medical-school skeletons. It was like driving through a house of horrors. All that was missing were recorded shrieks and moans.
Although he was supplying his share of moaning.
His eyes felt like someone had squirted lemon juice in them. His head pounded. The arms of the glasses dug deeper into his temples with each passing second. No matter how hard he tugged on them, they wouldn’t come off. Cursing and punching the dashboard, he drove without knowing where he was going.
He finally stopped at the front of the abandoned school on the edge of town. PS 27 had been left to rot after they found toxic levels of asbestos all throughout the entire prewar building. It had been big news when the kids were evacuated as if the place were on fire. It took the Department of Education weeks to assign the students to different schools.
Engine idling, he used both hands to try and rip the glasses free. They wouldn’t budge. All it did was stretch the skin of his nose, cheeks, and temples to very painful limits.
“Get . . . the fuck . . . off of me!”
Yanking again, he stopped cold when he heard a tearing sound. It was a warning that if he applied one more pound of pressure, he was going to be very, very sorry.
He sat in the car breathing heavily, face throbbing, eyes watering and his head feeling as if that asshole woodpecker had been trapped inside. An acidic burp singed his throat. Vomit was close behind. He opened the door, spilling his breakfast and lunch all over the cracked asphalt.
To his revulsion, a crow landed by the vomit, head cocking inquisitively.
“Don’t eat that,” he pleaded, getting back in the car.
The sleek black body disappeared. In its place was a skittering mass of bones and pulp. It pecked at the chunks of his tuna sandwich. He groaned, eyes closed, trying not to throw up again.
With his eyes shut tightly, he tried again to remove the X-ray specs. It was as if the crummy plastic had melted onto his face. Was there some kind of industrial adhesive that had seeped from the cheap glasses onto his skin? That had to be it.
But that was only half the problem. With his head thrown back against the seat, he opened his eyes, peering right through the Buick’s roof to the cloudy sky and beyond.
What the hell was he going to tell Andrea when he came home with sunglasses on? When he slept with them?
And how was he going to able to look at his wife and son when their insides were laid out before him, looking more like walking nightmares than his family?
Chapter Nine
Andrea was busy in the kitchen when he got home. The skeletal image of his wife stepped into the doorway when she heard him come in. He felt his bile rise at the sight of entrails, juices flowing in her digestive tract, blood whooshing in her veins and arteries.
Swallowing hard, he said, “Where’s Brian?”
“Upstairs doing his homework,” she said with her skeleton mouth. It reminded him a little of that Sinbad movie where he had to swordfight all those skeletons. Except this wasn’t the least bit amusing.
He dared to touch her arm, expecting to feel the squish of exposed meat and warm, sharp bone. Thank God she at least felt normal. He walked her into the kitchen.
“You can take your glasses off, you know,” she said. “Or does your eye hurt again?”
Blackstone had to turn away just to get a merciful break from that awful face. Gritting his teeth, he looked back to her, staring at empty orbital sockets.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” He kept his voice low. He didn’t want Brian to overhear this.
“What do you mean?” Andrea flopped a tea towel over her shoulder.
“The problem is . . . I can’t get them off.”
He heard her laugh, though there was nothing in her ghastly appearance that gave any sign she was smiling.
“I told you those things were too small for your head, Marty. Here, let me try.”
Before he could stop her, she gripped the arms and pulled. His head craned forward, his nose almost touching where hers should be. He choked back a gag.
“Ow!”
He staggered back.
“They really are stuck,” she said, coming toward him. It took all of his self-control not to coil away. He had to keep reminding himself that this was Andrea, his wife, the woman who had turned him on so much just a few nights ago that he’d blown his load twice.
“Don’t you think I know that?”
He reached into the fridge and saw only freestanding liquids, the containers invisible to him now. He grabbed what he hoped was a can of Schaefer, pulled the top off and chugged it down before reaching for another.
“What happened? I don’t understand. How can sunglasses get stuck on your head like that? It makes no sense.”
Swallowing back half of the second beer, he said, “I think maybe whatever glue they used to put them together leaked out. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
As if being able to see right through your skin makes perfect sense, he thought, wondering if he needed to add some scotch to the mix tonight.
“We have to get you to the emergency room. I’m sure they have something that can dissolve the glue.”
He shook his head. “You know how much an emergency-room visit costs? Not a chance.”
Andrea had to go to the stove to turn the flame down on the three pots of food she had been cooking. He was grateful for the space between them, even though he could still see more of her than he’d ever wanted.
“I’ll go see Doc Herbert tomorrow.”
“You can’t go to work like that.”
He snorted. “No kidding. I’ll have to take a sick day. First time in five years. They can’t give me any flack for that.”
That also meant he’d miss the big union meeting. Suddenly, it no longer seemed so important.
Andrea sighed, leaning against the counter. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
If it was just about the glasses stuck to his face, he’d be inclined to laugh too. There was no way he could tell her the rest. She’d think he’d lost his marbles.
“I’ll be all right. Not sure how comfortable I’ll be sleeping in these damn things.”
&nbs
p; Although, if he drank enough, that should be an easy problem to fix.
When Andrea hugged him, he stiffened for a moment. Sucking up his revulsion, he wrapped his arms around her, even going so far as to kiss her grinning teeth, feeling but not seeing lips.
Just keep drinking, he said to himself.
“What do we tell Brian?” Andrea asked.
“We laugh it off and just tell him they got accidentally glued on. He’ll be fine. If he seems upset, I’ll just talk about Star Wars and derail him.”
“What about Star Wars?”
Brian waltzed into the kitchen, sniffed the pot of boiling potatoes, poured a glass of water from the tap and sat in his chair.
The sight of his little fleshless boy nearly made Blackstone scream.
Instead, he said, “Your mother and I were just wondering when the next movie will come out.”
Brian proceeded to talk about rumors of the sequel, never once mentioning the X-ray specs, even while they ate. Blackstone finished all of the Schaefer in the fridge by the end of the night, polishing off enough Johnnie Walker later to pass out in his lounge chair, away from Andrea. There hadn’t been enough alcohol in the house to get him to sleep next to a pile of bones and exposed organs.
* * *
“So, what seems to be the problem, other than the hangover you’re hiding behind those sunglasses?”
Dr. Herbert had been the family quack for the past ten years. Pushing sixty, the corpulent but practical doctor had come to a few poker nights over the years and discounted his charges every now and then when he knew times were tough at the factory. Blackstone liked him a lot, though not like this, with his guts in full view, food being digested by sloshing fluids.
And he was partially right. He did have a whopper of a hangover.
“It’s the sunglasses that are the problem,” he said, fresh strip of sterile paper crinkling as he shifted on the examining table. “I can’t get the damn things off.”
“Now, that’s a new one. And I thought I’d seen it all.”
The doctor reached into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes with his bony hand. “You mind?”
“No. Go ahead.”