“Daisy, Paolo is staying in the guesthouse until the end of summer,” Violet said to her sister’s retreating back.
“The guesthouse? I thought I saw Simon bringing in suitcases. Welcome.”
Daisy’s welcome was cold. Yes, there was a definite hostility toward me. She did not want me in the guesthouse, at supper or anywhere near her family, and she made no effort to hide her displeasure.
“Daisy has difficulty warming to folks. Sometimes she seems so rude, but she’ll come around. I’ve sat you next to her for supper,” Violet said.
The rest of July, including the fourth, went by in a blur. The Parks women had a million and one changes to make to their wills. I had to confer with attorneys on the main land and travel to Montpelier, the state capital, to go over land grants, of all things. Whenever I returned to the Parks’s estate, I fell into bed and dreamed of the sisters.
Daphne—August
“We’ll be shutting the house soon. It’s too bad that you cannot come with us. We tried to bring your grandfather with us when we first met him, but he was too fragile,” Daphne said one particularly hot August morning. She was the youngest and strangest of the Parks women. She made the most unusual statements. Her sisters often stopped her or corrected something she’d said. It was as if she were still extremely young or mentally challenged, and said whatever popped into her mind. Yet, she had to be in her early fifties.
Even with the outside temperature in the mid-nineties, she wore a sweater and a scarf. She loved wool clothing and could never get warm. Daphne was the only one whose hands looked like those of a very elderly woman. Hers were bony, blue-veined, with knurled knuckles that resembled withered branches. While her mother and sisters seemed to be smooth, with soft edges, she was sharp and harsh. She almost always wore gloves. I never dreamed about the youngest daughter.
Her voice, while quiet like her mother’s and Rose’s, seemed strained, as if she were not used to speaking. None of this warned me of my fate. I blindly went about the business of the Parks women, finalizing their affairs, as well as closing escrow on Grandfather’s house and getting ready to move back to New York.
Paolo—September
“We have enjoyed this summer. It’s time to leave. We will be back next year. I’m sure that we will be pleased with the attorney that you’ve found for us. Now, what’s his name?” Mrs. Lily Parks asked on Labor Day. She and I were seated on the side of the porch overlooking the water. The wind had come up, and there was a slight chill in the air.
“Raymond Gonzales. He’s new to the Island, but I’ve checked his credentials. He’s single, thirty-five and plans on making Thorne Island his home. I’m sure that he will be an excellent representative for you and your daughters.”
“We thank you for your time and energy. My daughters and I have enjoyed you immensely. I think that Daphne may like Mr. Gonzales.” That’s when I noticed it: The color of the grass seemed to have changed, and the cottage where I’d spent the last three months suddenly looked overgrown. It was as if fall had descended overnight.
Simon walked up the path and onto the porch.
“Is it time for the planting?” he asked. I noticed the spade and pick in his hand.
“Yes, we have to leave tomorrow, and we need to ensure that everything is in order for our departure,” Mrs. Lily Parks replied. “Paolo, have a cup of tea.” She poured the brown liquid into an earthen cup. It was the first cup I’d seen that wasn’t fine bone china.
“I don’t really feel like tea. I have to pack,” I replied.
“Pack? Oh, dear. I’m afraid that you will have to remain here. It’s much too late for you to leave now. Besides, Daphne needs you to introduce her to Mr. Gonzales.”
“Daphne? She’s barely spoken to me. If she has any additional information for Gonzales, she will have to send it to me, because I’m leaving in the morning.”
“Simon?” Mrs. Lily Parks looked over at her handyman and nodded.
It happened so quickly that I was unable to react. I was slumped down in the wicker chair that I had claimed as mine. My back was to the lake. Simon swung the spade and hit me in the back of my head. I fell down to the porch floor. I hit with such force that I thought my neck was broken. I was unable to move my arms or legs.
“Here, Paolo, drink this tea. It will make you feel better.” Mrs. Lily Parks kneeled over me. Her suddenly dry, rough hand brushed my face as she poured the tea into my mouth. She seemed to age before my eyes.
I didn’t feel a thing, not even a headache. The next that I knew, I was here, in the ground, looking up at the sky as a ladybug crawled past, then a green garden snake. They were nearly at eye level. Simon was correct—I had nothing to fear from them. I tried to look around, but my feet and ankles were buried in the earth. I was in the garden. There was nothing left of the rose bush but thorns. The spring and summer flowers had disappeared just like the Parks women. Gone to seed. I tried to look around, but my thin body bent in the wind.
It rained, and I got soaked. I heard someone approaching. It was Simon.
“Good, you’re taking root well. I told them that you were strong. I told them that you would replenish the garden. It is difficult to find someone who can give to all the flowers, but you were outstanding. Do you have any human memory left? I doubt it. You are now what is called Agrimonia eupatoria, a common weed. Most folks don’t know that some of the flowers cannot renew and become beautiful without the common weed. Without you, some flowers would perish. The Parks needed you, and I made sure you were available, as have been others like you. You are the strongest. The other young men lasted only one winter, but you have your grandfather’s genes and will last a very long time. He was too old to help in the garden, but he was invaluable during the summer. He never understood his contribution to the Parks Family. The cottage will protect you, and I will take care of you, see you and make sure that you are ready for spring. Remember, when we first met, I told you that I always talk to the plants and weeds in my very special garden.” He smiled, and turned up the dirt near my roots.
Here I am, the keeper of the dreams of flowers, waiting for their return in the spring.
Good ’Nough to Eat
Rickey Windell George
“You know what they say about black men, about the size . . .”
Things people say that “we know” are mostly true
“You can never have too much of a good thing . . .”
Things people say that “we know” are mostly false
It was every man’s dream, but it was Kelly’s very real nightmare. It felt like sleepwalking, staggering onto the stage with the head on his shoulders light and spinning, while the other bulged in its too-small pouch, bouncing heavily upon his every stride. And then Kelly was washed in liquid-red luminescence. The spotlights found him, the heat like a thousand pinpricks making his pores bleed sweat.
He could feel the tremble in the pine flooring of the stage beneath his bare feet, and it wasn’t the music. He could feel the charge in the air between the audience and himself, and he knew that their attention belonged to him.
Life had shown him that everyone had an appetite for his big dick; it made some eyes dance with mad circles of desire, while other eyes flipped somersaults of envy. It was always the topic of conversation:
“Is it true what they say . . . ?”
And for Kelly there was nothing truer.
“Man, you walk like you got a weight between your legs.”
And he did walk funny—it was quite a load.
“I can see it right through your pants. I’ll give you ten bucks to take it out.”
And though he felt cheap doing it, when he needed the money he’d unzip his fly, and what waited on the other side was like the shit inside Pandora’s box. You could never predict the reaction a person would have to it, just that there would be an intense one.
The female patrons of Silvia’s were no exception.
At every angle, women were coming out of their seats, b
umping and grinding and pushing and shoving to get the best view. The audience had been rowdy to begin with, jockeying for the attentions of the other members of the Male Review, but before Kelly they’d become a feeding-pool full of big-black-and-beautiful bad-mamma sharks. They were circling for Kelly now, scenting the enormous treat that was buoyed by his loincloth. And Kelly could feel their treat between his legs, like the anchor it had always been, dragging him down.
It was every man’s dream, but all that adoration and worship had never felt like love—it was only appetite. And the reactions to that special something about Kelly were often self-destructive and violent.
Tonight, every pair of lips—facial or otherwise—was moist for a taste, and every pair of eyes met his stare full of hunger.
Tonight, in the front row, more than just one woman was running her tongue across the edges of the bared cutters of her teeth; and tonight, for the first time in a very long while, Kelly was afraid.
It had not been so much like dreaming awake a few hours earlier.
Kelly’s balls had been aching again as he shoved through his creaking front door, slamming it so fiercely that dust-rain came down from the cracked ceiling. Asbestos dust powdered his face, while larger chunks of peeling paint—like heavy yellow snowflakes—tumbled, landing in the top of his ’fro.
The place was practically falling down around him, but none of that mattered.
What mattered was getting out of his pants—not his clothes, but just his pants. Swinging down the worn leather satchel that was riding his shoulder, he hit his belt buckle hard, unhitching it, tugging the leather, whipping it loose from the loops with a swish of cut air. Even before the discarded belt thumped the floor, he was ripping at his zipper feverishly, bringing it down and over the familiar bulge with a loud raspberry sound.
Then he was bunching his trousers down his thighs, into a wad around his ankles that already he was kicking to be free of; and while his still-boot-bound feet kicked for freedom, his hands were on a mission also, sliding down the elastic band of his underwear.
His boots came off in the knot of fabric around his feet.
His ragged Fruit of the Looms, moth-bitten and aged off-white, joined the tossed-about mess of would-be-worn-again things on the floor, but begged for the trash.
And there, bare-legged and sweater-topped, Kelly stood with the long, limp sausage of his penis resting across one palm, while the fingers of his free hand massaged his stinging yam sack. He was what some people referred to as “a shower,” which was to say that he was big when flaccid, long and thick enough to show all his promise even when soft. “Growers,” on the other hand, were small when soft, but might balloon a great deal more than their shower counterparts when it was time to stand at attention.
Kelly was a shower, better than a half-foot strong all day every day, and thick too; but Kelly was also a grower, as there was another half-foot of him still in hiding.
Let it hide, he thought as he felt the slight tingle rising from the working of his fingers in the nest surrounding his scrotum. God, just let it hide, and let the ache stop. And then his eyes fell hungrily upon the broken-down recliner in the far corner of the living room, and his weary legs began walking in the direction of the La-Z-Boy that he’d found on the side of the street, some rich person’s garbage. The springs and gears that at one time closed it were ruined, but Kelly’s thought today was the same as when he’d fetched two of his buddies to help him drag it back to his place: What was a recliner for, if not for layin’ back?
And there, he flounced his two hundred and twenty pounds down.
Through the fabric he could feel a spring threatening to jab him in the ass, but that spring bluffed every day.
“Babe,” he called into the depths of the apartment, his voice seeming to make the clouds of dust motes dance in the slices of light coming in through the small, grimy windows. “Babe, I need my . . .”
And then, before he could finish, Sheila slunk through the doorway that connected the living room to the kitchen. She was stark-naked sex, sweat-shined caramel flesh, gripping a glass of water in her left hand and a bottle of Bayer aspirin in the right, with what looked like a black shoelace wound around her wrist.
“You’re home,” she said. “I been thinkin’ ’bout you all day.”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he grumbled, his eyes prying themselves away from the heavy globes of her breasts, the dark arrowhead nipples. Flipping his stare out the window, he gazed past the rusted iron railings of the fire escape and into the orange light of desolation. “They ain’t hiring for shit.”
“Oh, baby.” It was her sweet voice then. “My hopes are up, but not for that.”
Kelly’s eyes were on Sheila again, on the way her stare was fixed upon his groin, the way her tongue kept wetting and rewetting her lips. “There’s an eviction notice on the door,” he said.
Her head shook. “Not anymore. I took it down this morning.”
“Okay, so there’s an eviction notice somewhere in this goddamned, overpriced roach motel.”
“Yup,” she agreed with a nod, and then sauntered toward him, revealing through the click-click of her steps that she was wearing heels—stilettos, more than three inches high—and nothing else. “I know you need your aspirin.”
“Yeah, my nuts are killing me.” Kelly’s eyes rolled. “Been walkin’ this good-for-nothing asphalt all day, just one step from begging, tryin’ to keep my head up.”
“Well, I got an hour before I gotta be at Roy’s,” Sheila said.
Kelly nodded, taking the pill bottle from her, throwing way more than the recommended dose down his gullet as he tossed back his head. And after draining the glass of water in three gulps, he was spreading his legs for Sheila to stand between his knees, he was holding her round, firm ass in the expansive grip of his hands, and he was growing.
She could not take her eyes away from the magic of it.
She could not help but smile at its beauty.
And then she was on her knees in front of him, winding the thick shoelace tight around the base of his penis and his scrotum.
One loop . . .
It took a lot of blood to fill the foot-long snake.
Two loops . . .
Left to its own devices, it could take a while to become fully excited; and even once full and so very heavy and sweet, there was so much of it to manage that it might lose some of its rigidity.
Three loops, four . . .
The noose, however, would keep that beautiful dick tight, would keep it right. On the seventh loop, Sheila tied her cock-noose with a fancy Girl Scout knot, a reminder that where she’d grown up, there’d been parks and picnics, and grassy backyards, Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts, and even now she could go home to daddy.
“How’m I gonna get that loose?”
“You’re not,” she breathed through a grin. “You’re all mine ’til I say otherwise.” And then Sheila’s head was descending, mouth gaped in preparation, in anticipation. It was, she had said more than once, the most unbelievably sexy penis she’d ever seen on a man; and when her lips sealed around it, jaws stretched to their limit, mouth absolutely full, there was no doubt in Kelly’s mind that she meant those words. Feeling was believing.
The weight of him melted like chocolate under steam.
Expertly she traced the dome of his glans, tickling under the ridge of his very pronounced and bulbous helmet with her tongue, and his body came alive with the charge of her hunger for him. It felt so incredibly good that the ache in his sack grew dim, his brain forgetting how to process the pain in light of so much pleasure. The weight of three months of overdue rent dissolved as a sheen of sweat swept his body in a tide, and washed in all that heat, he began shrugging off his sweater and the T-shirt beneath it.
Only half of him could be consumed—there wasn’t room enough inside Sheila’s mouth, inside her head, for the rest. To reach those other blessed inches, she worked him like a harmonica, lapping his delicious flavor up and
down the pole, tracing the great bulging arteries that stood out along his shaft all the way into the bush of his pubic nest, wherein she found warm eggs, also ripe for her mouth.
Throwing back his head, Kelly enjoyed the service.
He didn’t buck his hips about, as instinct wanted him to; he’d learned not to over the years. When his organ was being serviced, it was best for him to be still. Though his eyes might be closed, a mental eye was always open—he was never fully relaxed. The measure of the tool made it impossible for him to have reckless sex.
If he were reckless, someone would damn near get choked.
If he was reckless, there might be blood.
If he was reckless, “hurts so good” could turn to “hurts so bad” very easily.
Kelly had been over at Josh’s house having beers earlier in the week, trying to get his mind off his money problems. He’d been in his friend’s bathroom relieving himself of the excess Heineken he’d drunk when the words “Jesus, man, you’re fuckin’ huge” had reached his ears.
The door had been cracked, and a hazel eye was pressed to the sliver—an ash-blonde eyebrow, a bit of a matching bang above that.
“Shit, can’t a man piss?” Still holding himself, Kelly had angled toward the door, moving to bump it shut with a shoulder. But the spatter of his urine stream across the floor made him turn back to the toilet, and the action served only to present a momentary profile of his glorious endowment. The spying eye had bulged to fill the opening between door and jamb.
“You know me, K, I’m not a homo. It’s just, shit, man, why didn’t I get a dick like that?”
“‘Cause you’re a white boy.”
Voices From The Other Side Page 23