Let's Swing

by Piquette Fontaine

  Shock was the only feature on Shana’s face.

  “What? You didn’t know homeless people jerk off?” Nate had a hardy laugh and gave her a light punch on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry hun, insurance covers the whole repair and even the tow truck to get it to the shop. Of course I doubt Suze is going to feel too good driving around in the car that some freak soiled with his blood.”

  “Yeah, freak is right.”

  Chapter Six

  June in Cleveland was an easy time. The wind from Lake Erie provided good reprieve from the balmy late afternoon heat and lighting at night lent a romantic, sporadic glow on the people sipping beer on porches. The warm nights would bring people out of their houses, which was both good and bad. Good if those people were the neighborly types who wanted to chat about the progress of this or that plant in the garden. Bad if they were the meth-smoking, child-beating types who brought their paranoid quarreling out to air for the entirety of an unwitting block to gain a quick, thorough education on. Kids from those families were usually the ones to whack mailboxes with a bat, or nail a squirrel’s tail into the soil on their patchy, yellowed front lawn.

  It was a boy from one such family, Benjamin Henderson, eleven years old, 54 inches and about 80 pounds, who went missing in early May. He and his two brothers were seen running around the block on the first sunny, spring day of the year (April was a month that flooded a great number of Northern Ohio basements), trying to catch birds with a fishing net. Their sister, Toby, was cutting a circle into the earth with a kitchen knife, as deep as its circumference could be transcribed. When she could cut no deeper, she left it be and went inside. The parents were nowhere to be found that day.

  After Benjamin’s two brothers reported in a panic to a neighbor that their brother had gone missing, there was no answer to a neighbor’s knocks on the Henderson family door. That neighbor was Suze, and she returned to her house to ask the Henderson boys, who she had supplied with some cookies and carrots, if their parents were home. The older one shrugged, divulging that the parents don’t take kindly to knocking since only policemen knock. When Suze tried calling, the youngest warned that “Mom only picks up during emergencies. She don’t like talking on her phone because it’s tapped.” By this point, the police had arrived and indeed they were knocking on the Henderson’s door, trying desperately to gain some insight from the meth heads as to where their boy might be.

  Benjamin did not return. A body of about 54 inches and 65 pounds was found in one of the Metroparks near a more industrial zone. Its stomach was blown open, as is typical of corpses after more than 10 days. Gas accumulates in the abdomen, and liquid flows from the body cavity out of that rupture.

  What chilled Suze and Nate the most was the fact that the Hendersons were barely affected. They buried the boy in a cheap plastic coffin, and once he was in the ground, life down the block seemed to go on as usual. Toby continued carving shapes into the family’s destitute property, the boys continued running around wreaking havoc. The only discernible change was that the Henderson parents became more paranoid, and that their early morning meth sessions would culminate with wailing, wallpaper shivering wailing every few days. Horror metathesizes in a manner so subtle yet profound in those who deny it.

  “How would you protect Luke from something like that?” Shana was doing her best to keep up with Suze, who was admittedly one hell of a power walker.

  Suze’s arms swung like motorized pendulums with one-pound dumbbells in each of her hands. “Well, you can live in fear or you can feel secure with the knowledge that you do the best you can to keep you and your family safe. You’ve gotta expect the unexpected and account for what you can expect. Can’t live your life wondering about what may be.”

  “Shit Suze. You get that from the Bible? Sounds a little Eastern to me.”

  “Eastern? Hindu and Buddhism, those are cults of Lucifer! Don’t you dare.” The dumbbells were swinging with more determination, and Shana speculated that Suze’s veins were not bulging from the intense workout alone.

  They walked until they reached the corner that the abandoned Chad’s Chug Pub sits on. They took a breather.

  “Been thinking about Tom.” Shana’s sheepish tone betrayed precisely what she had been thinking. Suze remained silent while stretching her quads, letting her sister take whatever moments she needed to think.

  “He hasn’t called or texted once since I’ve been here.” Shana let herself be distracted by the old fashioned neon signs affixed to the shuttered tavern’s windows. “Called him once and it sounded like there were people over. Said he’d call back and...”

  Suze continued her silence, listening.

  “I don’t think this is me being needy, right?”

  Suze hugged her sister, an especially warm hug given the physical activity. “You know why you feel, and you’ll know what’s right when you figure it out.” When she pulled away, Shana wiped a tear with her sleeve. They continued their walk, and by chance, destiny, our other, they passed there hallowed graveyard.

  Shana stared into it the entire time, and when Suze shouted, “Shana!” after realizing she had not been listening to her tale of consumer injustice at the frozen yogurt store, Shana returned a vacant look with eyes wide open. Not a blink even tickled her lids.

  “You’re not thinking of that vampire are you?”

  Shana resumed her gaze at the graveyard.

  “He is undead! Leave your teenage infatuations with anti-Christiandom to the past! That creature just wanted to drink your blood and drag you into his purgatorial eternity.” Suze started mumbling prayers and performing the stations of the cross with a dumbbell. The second they stepped a block away from the cemetery, Shana’s trance was broken. All of her energy was sapped, and she dragged behind a fury-fueled Suze the entire way home.

  Dinner was fairly quiet, aside from chatter between Luke and Nate over whether red cars were cooler than green cars. Luke choose green and Nate could not disagree more. “You’ll see when you’re older, kiddo, the girls love red cars.”

  “But green is the color of slime!”

  Suze glared at Shana from time to time.

  That night, Shana awoke in some patch of grass between “Franklin Hale, 1833—1900” and “Mamie Hale, 1841—1900.”

  In the distance, through the space in the wrought iron fence, she could make out what looked like Suze’s sedan. Something about it was not right though, and in her hypnopompic daze she could not pinpoint exactly what was off. Like little Luke in search of his Guava Pops, Shana found her body moving towards Baker’s mausoleum. Even if she had heard that stranger’s shuffling behind her, that repeated stomp of one foot and drag of the other, it would have filled her with no dread. Perhaps her internal compass aligned to the globe’s magnetic poles, as her orientation to the cemetery’s geography was nearly instant.

  Keen navigation made for a short trek, and she stood within feet of Baker’s stone abode. This was the first time that hesitation braced her, and her abdomen started to churn steadily. With studied steps she moved towards the mausoleum, peering around with slow rotations of her neck. There was nothing in the graveyard that night but many corpses and her own live body.

  A slab of stone sealed the mausoleum shut. The sight of it made Shana feel puny. A size 6 girl pushing against a slab of rich like that, it seemed impossible she’d make a dent. But driven by some deep determination welling up from a mysterious place within herself, she gave it a push. Nothing. Immediately she tried again, this time with more resolve, and got it to budge.

  Adjusting her body in various positions, using everything from her hands to her shoulder to her back to push, she made it budge more and more. The mechanical howl in the distance fell deaf on her ears. The short scrapes that the slab made against its frame were the sole sound that Shana cared about. When that revving grumble grew closer, ever closer, she thought it some creation of her own mind, the great energy that flowed out of her and into this door made sonic.

  As th
e slab popped open, light enveloped her and Shana froze. A figure practically fell out of the pickup truck which currently had its nose pointed directly at the mausoleum, and Shana, for lack of better impulse, ran inside. She tried to push the slab shut, but it required that same energy and time as when she opened it. The figure slipped through with ease, agility. Panic blinded the prey to her pursuant’s face and form. She found herself grabbed, pinned to the wall.

  And then nothing. The cold, bony hands left her shoulders, but she felt the imprint of long, thin fingers. She saw battered work boots, jeans smeared with black grease. She saw flannel weathered by years of wear, under it the outline of a barrel chest and gently bulging arms. The neck was sinewy, the jaw stubbly as if not shaved in ten days. His eyes peered into hers and Shana felt bony, freezing fingers touch her cheek, guiding with the lightest suggestion his head towards hers.

  Baker kissed the outside of her lips. Shana froze, breathing in short spurts. She looked up at him, his ageless face, trying to comprehend his timeless being, his soft kiss. He did it again, and this time Shana opened her mouth a bit. They touched the most part of their lips together, and licked them away slowly.

  Baker guided her to the slab, on top of which he slept, and laid her down. Some incantation was muttered under his breath, and he began to undo his flannel shirt. Pale skin was pulled taught against his quietly defined musculature. Shana was entranced by the way his biceps moved up and down over the bend inside his elbow as he wrangled the opened shirt off his body. She pulled him down onto his stone podium, and their maws merged into one wet form inside of which tongues lanced like puppies playing in the grass.

  The cold fingers against the lower side of her breasts, and quickly get nipple, made Shana gasp, then exhale all that her lungs contained. She could feel the corpse-stiff phallus against the inside of her leg and was taken by a craving that left her dumb.

  “I want you to reach up and slip my panties off me.” The long, chilly fingers found the waist of the cotton drawers, the types that Shana would slip into four comfortable sleep. He slowly pulled down the front, making sure to stimulate that sacred spot at the top of her vagina’s crest before he grabbed the panties from each hip and dragged them down as she raised her hips to assist. When she rested her butt against the sleeping pedestal, it was engulfed by that same sense-robbing chill. In this moment, Shana felt fully taken.

  Baker started to position his cold, dead cock and she said, “No.” She rolled over on a hip facing away from him and started to touch herself. Once her hand was sufficiently wet, she reached behind her and stroked the vampire, moistening the pipe that he would lay. Preparing, he crawled up on the pedestal next to her and positioned her thighs in his benefit. His cock, slick with her juices, rubbed against her buttock and he slid in as slowly as a train pulling out of a station. The sensation reduced her, it felt, to a blob of matter.

  He whispered in her ear, “Remember my promise?” as he gave three slow, shallow thrusts. Shana did. She bit her lip during the fourth slow, shallow thrust. She shook her head in feeble protest through the fifth and sixth slow, shallow thrusts. That frozen rod drained her of all intelligent faculties. He opened his mouth and positioned his bite during the seventh and eighth shallow thrusts. The ninth was infinitely deep, which felt to Shana that he was sliding in endlessly, all the way into the pit of her being. She let out a moan which shook the walls of the stone den.

  TO BE CONTINUED

  Sailor’s Menage

  Chapter One

  “Come on dear,” Michael said. The middle-aged man was looking flustered, and the few hairs that remained on his bald head were standing up in a wispy manner, ruffled by the manic morning. He was waiting at the threshold of the door while his wife, Cindy, was dragging a case down the stairs. She was fifteen years younger than him and whenever anyone saw them on the street they passed silent judgment, for Michael was a successful banker and as such many people assumed that the curvaceous blonde had married him purely for his money, but that wasn’t the entire truth. Of course being successful had attracted her to him at first, but she was genuinely drawn to his warmth and kindness. She’d had a troubled past with a lot of deadbeat boyfriends, and it seemed that the only way to escape that particular cycle was to change things up completely.

  Of course, it didn’t happen that easily and she was forced to basically sacrifice a number of friends and her family when they didn’t approve because of the age difference, so when they eventually tied the knot it was a much small ceremony than Cindy had originally envisaged. And for the most part their life had been fine and fun, but over the past year or so Michael had been getting more and more withdrawn. Work was taking up much of his time, as it always had, and Cindy had prepared for that, but even when he was with her it was like he was somewhere else, and their sex life had suffered as a result. It had been months since he had even made a move on her. When they had made love it was on Cindy’s insistence, and Michael was putting in minimal effort. She didn’t know whether his libido was fading due to age or whether there was something else going on, and the worst part was that whenever she tried to bring it up he merely dismissed that there was even a problem.

  So Cindy decided that they were going to go on a trip in the hope that it would kick-start their relationship, and since she had never been on a cruise before she decided that that was what she was going to do, because she figured that on a boat eventually he would get bored and would have to confront their problems.

  “Yes yes, I’m coming,” she said, and the suitcase bumped down the final few steps.

  “Do you really need to take that many clothes?” he asked, “we’re going to be cutting it close,” he said glancing at his watch anxiously.

  “Don’t worry about that they’re hardly going to leave without us. And yes I need this many clothes. We are going to be seeing the same people over and over again, and I’m not going to let them think that I only have one outfit.” Michael rolled his eyes at this and then carried the bags out to the waiting cab. Cindy followed soon after, and ignored the widened eyes of the driver as he saw the two of them.

  “I’m looking forward to this,” she said brightly. Michael huffed and stared out of the window. Cindy pouted.

  “You could at least look a little excited,” she said, and folded her arms.

  “You know I’ve got a lot of work on at the moment. I shouldn’t be taking a week off work. They need me there.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine without you. It’s a massive company with thousands of employees, no offense but you’re only one man, I’m sure that it will chug along in your absence. Besides, aren’t you looking forward to spending some time with me? We haven’t been on a trip since that weekend upstate, and you were on your phone for most of that anyway.”

  “We were closing a big deal,” he said, raising his tone defensively.

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, I’m just saying that it would be nice if you actually seemed excited about going away together. It’s supposed to be romantic, I mean, can you imagine what it’ll be like standing out on deck at night, watching the stars drift by over our heads.”

  “It’ll be damned cold, that’s for sure,” he said. Cindy shook her head.

  “Fine, maybe we should just turn around and you can go back to work and I can just read for the whole weekend and we can do our usual routine of not speaking properly, is that what you really want? Do you even want to be married to me anymore?” she said venomously, spitting out her words. She slumped back in her seat as the frustration became too much for her. The city whizzed by outside, and the driver glanced in the rear view mirror, although he shifted his eyes away quickly when he caught Michael’s glance.

  “Cindy,” Michael said in a hushed whisper, “not now, you’re causing a scene.”

  “Oh yes, and we’d hate for that to happen wouldn’t we. God forbid anyone would actually see that there’s a spark of passion between us. I’m tired of this Michael, she said, turning her head to
face him. When he looked at her he saw that she seemed to have aged many years. Instead of the bright smile she usually wore her face was lined with worry and there were soft bags hanging under her blue eyes, and the sparkle in those eyes had diminished slightly. And Michael felt within himself the wilting of a flower, for her knew that he was the cause of this change in her countenance, and he hated to be the death of her spirit.

  “If all you’re going to do is complain instead of enjoy a week with me then maybe this was a mistake and we want different things. I guess people were right, maybe we should have thought harder about things when we first got together.” She sounded resigned, and both their hearts fell through their chests as she gave voice to the concerns that neither of them wanted to hear.

  “Are you saying you don’t love me anymore?” Michael asked.

  “I don’t know, that’s the problem. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore, not even myself. Do you know how hard that is for me? I thought we were perfect but I look at us and I think is this what I really want? Are people jealous of what we have? I want to be the couple everyone looks at because they’re jealous of how happy we are, not because their curious about whether I’m digging for gold and you’re just having a mid-life crisis. It’s not fair.”

  “You know neither of those things is true,” Michael said. He shifted his body to face her and placed a hand on her lap, but she drew hers away. Tears started welling in her eyes and she turned towards the window.

  “If you promise me that you’re going to give this a go then we can go on this trip and see how things stand by the end of it but I can’t continue going on like this Michael, I just can’t. It’s not want I want from a marriage and it’s not what I want from love.”

  The taxi rolled on towards the docks as the married couple continued to sit in silence. The driver put on the radio and music filled the cab, but Cindy and Michael were consumed with their own doubts. Both of them wanted to speak but they were afraid of saying the wrong thing and causing further damage to their relationship, but for Cindy it was all too much and she couldn’t stand any more posturing and denials. She was going to go on this trip one way or the other, even if it meant that it would be the last trip she and Michael took as a couple.