Mighty Unclean

by Cody Goodfellow

  She got a paper to look for an apartment – she hoped the clients spoiled their new baby with all the money they’d saved keeping her in this shitty motel. Poring over the classifieds, she found and circled an interesting ad. MOTHER’S MILK: HIGHEST PRICE PAID. SOPHISTICATED CONOSSIEUR SEEKS ENTERPRISING DAIRYMAIDS.

  She turned on the TV as she set to work with the pump, settled on a Mexican talk show. For extra flare, the first row of the jeering studio audience was packed with circus freaks. An obese mongoloid cyclops thumped his chest and pawed his mate, a giggling pinhead girl, as the platinum blonde hostess harangued the caged transvestites onstage.

  Deanna stared, transfixed by their deformities, thinking of all the drugs she did before she found out. Shit, she thought, maybe you dodged a bullet. But she knew her baby was perfect.

  Her fingers absently tweaked and twisted her nipples, still engorged after six bottles. She only felt wired after masturbating, so it took two pills to knock her out and deliver her to the dream.

  Deanna could build a bridge of words pretty far across the chasm between reality and her dreams, but even with better than the standard four-cylinder brain, she only knew that she was feeding her baby, and it felt so divine as to make everything else she could do, drink, snort or smoke in this life seem like a waste of time.

  She held all that was good in the world in her arms, and it was entrusted to her to nourish and nurture it, but something had torn her away from her charge, something was coming to take her baby away—

  The phone shook her awake. She rolled over and rubbed her chest, her nipples tender and sore, her fingers wringing them as they must have done all night. Torturing herself, her body trying to drive her crazy. A forlorn little sob gargled out of her, but she bit it back, to keep herself from hearing it.

  She had to stop being stupid. She could face anything. She had gone clean when she knew she was pregnant; had not, even then, succumbed to the dumb drives of her drug-hungry flesh. A voice inside her had told her to get clean and do right by the thing inside her, even as she stole the money to scrape it out.

  “Hello?” she asked the phone, but only then remembered to pick it up.

  Sniffling breaths and a thickly accented voice from a mouth as tight and inscrutable as a Chinese finger-trap. “Deanna, I came, and there was no milk. The baby needs milk, Deanna…”

  She tried to explain, but only a strangled moan got out.

  “Deanna, you sound upset. How are you feeling?”

  She tried to speak, but her eyes and sinuses clotted up with tears, and nothing came out but a sob of, “Uh-huh… I mean… no?”

  “This is a difficult time, Deanna, and you shouldn’t be alone. You haven’t contacted your family, have you?”

  “I—” she gasped, “I’m all alone, Duh-duh-Doctor—”

  “No, you are not alone, Deanna. I’m coming over. I want to help. You let me help you, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and hung up. She drifted off, forgetting who called.

  She had to break this cycle. Hormones and pills weren’t the boss of her. She was rich and young and free. She could jump on a plane with just the clothes on her back, fly to New York and shop for a new wardrobe on 5th Avenue, go to a posh nightclub and dance alone until the finest guy in the place fell under her spell, go back to his place and fuck his brains out, get knocked up and start all over again—

  Her vagina still throbbed with dull pain, but it had to be taught a lesson. She slipped two fingers into her panties and kneaded the hood of her clit. It was dry and sore and dead as a wart to pleasure, but she licked her fingers and kneaded herself into a grudging semblance of arousal. It had to learn what it was for. I’m not just a chute for strangers to slide in and out of. I’m not a fucking farm animal!

  At last, some spark of desire kindled inside her, the merest mote of light, and she thrust herself at it, plunging three fingers into herself and throttling her clit with her thumb.

  The hot, soft hell of her womb opened up, cervix dilating down to meet the eager spears of her fingers, nails gouging divots of velvet meat out of her uterine wall. Her hand spasmed, wracked with cramps, but she twisted it further, probing the ticklish pucker of her asshole with her pinky, driving all four rigid digits into her holes like the torrent of swords in the coup de grace of a bullfight.

  A wounded gasp ripped out of her. The impending orgasm teetering overhead like lightning gathering to strike her down, but then it melted away like an unanswered prayer. She worked even harder, until at last, there was lubrication in abundance. She didn’t care if it was blood.

  She had brought a child into the world just for money, she could take anything. This is what you are for—

  Her fingers touched something that was never, ever there, before. Never, except when—

  Something brushed her still, stiff fingers. Something inside her grasped them.

  Deanna yanked her hand free and screamed. She was careful when she played with herself during the pregnancy, but there was nothing like that in there—

  She rolled over and vomited all over the nightstand. Her pill bottles and People magazines washed over the edge on a pink wave with little Oxycontin icebergs in it. Her stomach rolled and heaved itself dry, but her womb rumbled and quivered like a clogged volcano. She did more than hurt herself, down there. She woke something up.

  The neon light for the Cash Fast place outside her window came on, drenching the dark in epileptic red and gold. She lay down on the bed and prayed for sleep, prayed for the dream. And this prayer, at least, someone saw fit to answer.

  She held her baby, and everything was fuzzy and heavenly white, bathed in that flattering, Vaseline-filtered light the movies used on aging actresses. She knew this moment could go on forever if she just let it, a perfect closed circuit of need and nurturing, a universe unto itself.

  The gauzy light brightened and became a substance, bandages winding around her face. She saw nothing, but felt her dream baby gnawing at her breast, felt its silky skin and stolen warmth growing heavier against her belly. Something magical was happening; her dream was birthing itself into the real world.

  This time, the hot, hidden parts of her that ruled in secret, the parts of her that knew all along what they were doing when she had seemed most out of control – those parts filled her with the blood-truth that she would never let her baby go, this time—

  When the light died out, she felt a flood of unpleasant sensations – the crinkle of stiff waxed paper beneath her, the dull ache in her joints from general anesthesia, and most of all, the mingled relief and soreness of her breasts.

  She tried to move, but she found herself restrained, pulled taut against the tattered vinyl examination table.

  If you stared hard at the spiky calligraphy on the yellowed degrees and certificates on the walls, you’d find none of them bore the name Midori Ramos.

  This was her office, just down the block from the motel. She wasn’t really a doctor, not in this country, anyway, but in the Philippines, she was some kind of highly respected surgeon.

  Deanna’s baby cooed as it drank from her.

  In the dim gray light that slanted through the blinds, she saw that she was no longer dreaming, and that the thing she suckled was indeed very real, but it was no baby.

  No human baby—

  A bloated, ghostly lamprey attached to her breast, pulsating with the rhythm of its greedily siphoning sucker-mouth. Floating in the air above her, living liquid like a jellyfish or a cloud of semen in white wine, but she could feel it rasping and throbbing and wringing the last drops of milk from her slack, flaccid teat.

  Deanna screamed and tried to roll off the table, but her body was bound too tightly to lift her hands, let alone pry off the parasite. As she struggled, the agitated thing shivered and flushed deep red like she’d shamed it, or maybe it was drinking her blood.

  She had fed this thing in her dreams, and it had grown fat on the flood of tears her breasts wept, the drainage from the amputation of he
r child. Deanna howled her throat raw, but it kept sucking at her.

  The door clicked and opened. The harsh blast of fluorescent light dispersed the lamprey. Deanna felt it compress its turgid, ethereal mass into her vagina, and the violation redoubled as she realized this was the cause of the orgasmic climax of her dreams, as the sated parasite slithered back to its lair in her womb.

  “I’ve seen this before,” Dr. Ramos said. “I am no doctor in this country, but at home, I perform most respected psychic surgery. Nobody believe me, when I try to show them.”

  Deanna fought to brake her runaway hyperventilation, tried to ask, to curse, to beg, but all she managed was, “Get… it… out of me—”

  “Every life is sacred, Miss Deanna. You did not ask to become pregnant, but the Life Force came into you. We talk about this, and you say you want to be a bearer of life. Your baby is in a better place, but this… is special.”

  Only hysteria gave her the strength to speak. “I don’t… want it in me! Get it out, get it out—”

  Dr. Ramos’s tiny hand stroked the dome of Deanna’s belly, even as it seemed, once more, to swell. “Life wants to live, Miss Deanna. It fills all the cracks in the earth, large and small, for its own glorious purpose. Where there is shelter and food, there is life. Even in us, yes, especially, for where is there safer shelter?

  “There are worlds inside us, and food of a kind unique in all of nature.” With a soothing touch softer than moonlight, Dr. Ramos caressed her heart and head. Deanna felt her runaway pulse slow, and the short-circuited sparks of her thoughts settled into a torpid brownout.

  “If the food and warmth inside us can foster a world of lower life, what kind of life could thrive on the heat of our thoughts, our emotions? All hate, all love, all wishes and dread and dreams, come out of us like waste heat, like sweat and milk and soil. These living things are as fleeting as the food they crave, born and breeding and dying in hours and days, invisible to us, as they must be, for their sake and ours.”

  “I— I saw it,” Deanna started, but Dr. Ramos pinched her lips shut, and continued.

  “In Manila, I see a lady who lived on the street whose baby died, and nursed a baby no one else could see, and they called her crazy. But when they tried to take her to hospital, they saw the ‘ghost-baby’ in her arms. The crowd killed them both.”

  Dr. Ramos touched Deanna’s face, knobby knuckles and stubby fingers that looked all the more improper for their slavishly manicured and sensibly glossed nails. “I wanted nothing more than to be a mother, Miss Deanna, but I was born into wrong body. I knew it could never happen, that nothing on earth could make my body become what I was inside. I would never know the kind of joy you saw only as a curse, but in my longing, I became a mother, of sorts, as well.”

  Dr. Ramos lifted the front of Deanna’s gown. Her hand became a blade and slid, without friction or effort, into Deanna’s gut.

  It was a repulsive parlor trick, yet Deanna felt the insane violation of the tiny hand groping through her until it seized on something that was not her, that clutched Deanna’s vitals in its desperation as Dr. Ramos began to draw it out.

  It slithered between her fingers, but it kept coming and coming out of the hole Dr. Ramos bored into her. It writhed in and out of her, wafting up on the stale stirrings of the air, spilling out like smoke from burning plastic, mute witness to the vastness of the void inside her. It wound round and round Midori Ramos’s arm, an eel eating itself, but even to Deanna’s fear-widened eyes, it was little more than a shimmering shadow, an unborn ghost that would never yield detail to closer study.

  Now, Deanna at last understood the odd, eager smile that Dr. Ramos always had for her. It was a mask of admiration and hope, but mostly envy.

  She let the thing squirm off her hand and retract like a molested octopus back into Deanna’s womb. “The milk of my soul is sour. I can almost give it true life, but not flesh. In you, it found a home.”

  “Get it out of me!”

  “When it has finished gestating, we will see. No specimen has ever been brought this far, so who knows what we will discover? When they give the species a name, I think it only fitting that it be my name, since you care only for money.”

  Deanna subsided in her bonds; and if something in her mind finally snapped, it was a welcome reprieve, and all she lost was a skin that no longer fit. If this was what Deanna was meant to be, then she could still prove Midori Ramos wrong.

  Dr. Ramos went to the freezer and took out several bottles, dropped one into a silo that swung into place, like a hamster feeder, above Deanna’s face. Golden droplets of milk – her own – drizzled into her mouth. “We see what refining your diet does, shall we?”

  Deanna eagerly gulped it down.

  Her child would thrive and grow in the security of her womb. It would come out to be loved and to feed on her tears of joy, and then go back inside her, where no one could ever hurt it or take it away…

  She would be a good mother, and her baby would be perfect.

  Love To Give

  By Cody Goodfellow

  ou want to know about my victims. That’s what you keep asking, and that’s why I haven’t answered. Semantics are important to the accused, you should know that. If you had asked about my mates, my women, or my lovers, you might have gotten a different answer, but we’ll never get anywhere if you keep calling them victims.

  All I can tell you is that you don’t know about all of them, not by a long shot. I tried to keep records, at first – to be responsible, to keep control – but you know, don’t you, how these things get out of hand?

  You don’t believe me, but you want to hear, because you want to know where all my “victims” are. Even I don’t know that, but I do want to talk. I want you to understand. I’m not sorry for what I did. The Life Force will not be denied, right?

  Last year, my doctor told me I had a year to live, at the outside. Nothing they could culture or incubate, nothing environmental, nothing they could identify in my genes; just a simple, systemic failure. I hadn’t told them about my father, and I didn’t know, yet, about myself. The doctor gave me brochures for hospices, and a company that froze sperm.

  ««—»»

  Mom and Dad found each other late in life. Dad wasn’t much help on the facts of reproduction. “First time I saw your Mom, I knew, and she put her hand in mine, and the rest is history.” Whenever I pressed him to explain, he would only say, “We are blessed people, son. We don’t need to debase ourselves and cast our seed like other folks. Find a woman pure of heart who loves you for yourself, and everything else will fall into place.”

  I never saw either of them naked; I don’t think they did, either. I never saw them kiss, except when they blew them from across the room. I took a lot of kidding from my few friends about their sleeping arrangements. Separate twin beds, like brother and sister, with a lacy curtain hanging between them.

  Dad died when I was twelve, a precipitous six-month decline and fall that I always thought was cancer. Mom never elaborated on Dad’s vague dismissal of the birds and the bees.

  I was twenty-two when she succumbed to a stroke. After college, I still lived in my old room, and still got carded at R-rated movies. Puberty had struck only a glancing blow, but my attitude towards women matured without any of the glandular contortions that plagued my peers. By then, I had no friends. Left behind by nature, I was even more cruelly isolated by society, but it didn’t get me down.

  There’s nothing of note between their deaths and the day I learned of my own appointment with fate. I lived, I worked, and I waited, until the day my urine came out the color of coffee, with the faint odor of ammonia.

  The test results came as a shock. Right there in the doctor’s office, I wept. I itched and burned all over. I broke out in cold sweat like my whole body was crying. The doctor excused himself and left me dripping hot, snotty tears on the crinkly paper of the examination table.

  I suddenly realized that whatever was supposed to happen in my life
to make it worthwhile was not coming, and I hadn’t even known, until then, that I’d expected anything.

  For the first time in my life, I thought about girls. (Women, I mean – I never have been a pervert, even at the end, so far as I know.) I thought about all the mysteries of love and sex and parenting that I’d never know, and I didn’t care if they heard me in the next room.

  A nurse came in and put an arm around me, offered me a Kleenex and said some nice things that I didn’t hear. I had paid her no mind as I came into the office, but she was something else again, in that moment. Her cinnamon brown hair hung lank around her face, stricken by an ill-advised perm. Her wideset hazel eyes had flecks of gold that sparked like she had been crying, too. Her sad Italian smile made me picture her as the subject of a Mannerist portrait of Mary Magdalene washing my feet. The deep cushion of her breasts was a welcome pressure on my side, transmitting a secret heat and sleepy calm through her faded blue scrubs.

  I did not even know I was doing it, when I made her my first.

  You don’t really want to understand, and I don’t blame you. You think of it as rape, what I did, but if a rape occurred, it was invisible to all but God.

  The nurse – her name was Cynthia – took my clammy hand and eased me off the end of the table, so the sweat-blotted paper stuck to my legs. She peeled it off, balled it up and dumped it in the medical waste bin by the door, opened the door to let me out. I apologized for my behavior and left the office.

  Did I leave something out? Did the sordid details of my first and favorite conquest leave you cold? Is it really outrage that makes you so hot to dissect every slap and tickle, or just good old-fashioned lechery?

  Dad was right. We are truly blessed people.

  ««—»»

  The war of the sexes doesn’t cease when one combatant surrenders and lies prone for the other; it enters an invisible arena, where no quarter is given to love or beauty, and all engagements are to the death.