Cubesville

Focus your audio. Unhook your ears, Clyde. Stand by while I pad your skull. I don’t know how much of this is for real—I only heard it secondhand myself. But the fella who told it to me was creeped out—that much is for sure. I was late to the picture, and it’s a good thing I was cause nobody who was there was ever seen again—christmas cancelled—except for Socrates, and like I said, he got all buggy from it. Fuse blown, permanent.

I was heading out to the Flats. We used to play out there, break out like the measles. It was a good place cause it was all lunar and crazy and you could get away from the cubes. Salt Lake was squaresville. Strictly Podunk. But the Flats was berries.

So, like I was saying, I’m on the way out there on my scoot, amped up on airplane glue in the early brights, figuring the scene would still be going. I see something out on that salty psychocolor horizon, a fire ant on a cocaina sand dune, way out there on the salt checkerboard, squares as far as you could see, and that one spider out there, like, crawling.

I motor down there, a bit twitchy, wondering what’s up. As I get closer I can see it’s one of us. You can tell from a distance. Dark clothes, and that freaky aura. Turns out it’s Socrates. Normally his claws are pretty sharp, but I scoot up and he’s all wigged out. Out there in the salt among the glass puddles, biscuit snatchers clutching at his kneecaps, and some kind of yellowy goop on his sleeves and his shirt and his shoes and the backs of his hands. He gets spouty, in snatches, all out of order, but this is the sense I make out of it, some of it his words, some of it mine. Hope you got a lot of room in your ears.

It started out a dig same as anything else, out there on bennies and glue, bongos and bonfires, maryjane. Bikes and hotrods chrome and candy-apple-everything, resting out there on the salt cubes.

Willard read one of his poems. Yeah, I wasn’t there to hear it, but, I’ve heard Will often enough and he’s all

Cat with a spider for a heart

The man in a wheelchair of hypodermic needles

Spider spins a web in the frame of an hourglass

So there they are, all sitting around their fires and getting sweaty and slimy and smelly in their sleeping bags, rods and cones and mushrooms, or listening to Willard with his beat king’s jive and the racket coming from sax and bongos and axe. Swapping yarns and manifestoes and smoke and body fluids. Cosmic goo. Firelight fireflies trailing up into the night.

Then someone sees these orange lights in the sky. Casual like, like what’s that? Moving snarly orange against the purple night. Like, cool, pretty. What is that? Three lines squiggle and spark forward and backward. Mostly forward, closer. Some kind of crazy sputnik up there. And then they aren’t lines but dots. And then they aren’t dots, but these glowing spheres. Then they’re not glowing, but chrome, chromium, as the sun starts to eyeball that gang of gawking beats from the horizon.

Like it’s xmas, three silver spheres hanging in the sky. Ezekiel’s chariot. The comrades are starting to freak maybe a little. And one of the things lowers itself down, quiet like, real slow. So now there’s this big globe sitting on the salt like a chromium planet, not a dent on it, just a dark line down the middle, a groove. This thing is a slinky piece of homework. Sharp enough to shave. Nobody moves for a second, except maybe to stand up, step back a step, shuffle, eyeball each other, smoking ciggies. They tilt their heads. Is the thing, making a noise? Like, a whirring horror-flick sinewave. An inside out clanging. Bounce bounce bounce bounce clunk.

And then…something blasts out the top of it. Orange lightning. Blurts up all squiggly, jaggles around in the air for a while, wiggles out in different directions, a hypnogogic jellyfish, just spurting around, all sloppy. Then it sort of settles down. It has something in mind. It starts to, like, sniff around, first seven-eight tentacles, then more like just one, curly-queuing and doubling back. It sniffs at the crowded beats, who are now really getting freaked, but too freaked to make for it. This sparkly meat hook right in their faces, checking out one comrade and then another. After a few tics it gets bored with the humanoids and turns mostly to the hot rods and bikes arrayed all helter skelter on the salt, chrome green and exhaust pipes and spokes. It checks em out real close, then it stops to focus on one—Ben’s flatblack t-bucket. It looks at it like it got a bad smell. Then it, like, stomps it, squashing it a little and sending small parts tinkling off in willy nilly directions. Ben, he like, gasps. Then the x-ray sort of sparks and buzzes all up and down, from tip to where it’s extending out of the silver xmas ball. It inserts, what, a hypo needle maybe, into the t-bucket, and Ben’s Ford turns blue orange, then sort of melts and explodes itself inside out.

The buzzing white-orange tentacle thing starts to get pissy then, moving to another hot rod and another, then to a bike, blasting them and turning them fiery blue and orange and white and exploding them all over the salt, melting them, insiding them out. This goes on for a while, some of the beatnoids now turning tail and running. Sparky noises and explosions and parts flying and bouncing and metal sizzling and leaking, until it looks like there are no hot rods left. The squiggly raygun thing checks out all it did, like, pleased, swelling up like a poisoned pooch. But then one tentacle seems to catch a whiff that some of the comrades are escaping, running for all they’re worth—which aint much—as far and as fast as they can get from the glowing squid and all its nasty higgledly piggedly explosions.

The thing stretches out an orange tendon, elongatory, thinning, toward Joan, who’s huffing and puffing and swinging her arms, tight black pants and fuzz black sweater, glancing back all freaky from time to time. So this orange sputtery buzz chases her down, not going much faster than she is, and she lets rip a scream and starts pulling with all she’s got. In the end the thing sort of hauls back and pokes at her like a needle, and that’s all for her. Scratched from the big race. Turned her inside out, was what Socrates said—sputtered something about scattered little slimy bits.

Then the thing moves on—to Newman, and Jukie, and then Phillipa, and all the other beats who are in a state of mind what which they can run. Stops everyone in their skinny tracks. Socrates had a hard time talking about it, eyes shiny. Wasn’t pretty.

Then, dig the chromey globe thing. This platform slides out, slow like, even though there’s no crease for it to slide out from. Parallel with the ground, mostly. And now there’s this opening. It’s hard to get a sense of scale—the sphere is big.

Something—a bunch of somethings—start to squiggle down the ramp, like rats from a ship. The comrades are glazzing, getting spoogy now. Whatever these things are, they reach the end of the ramp—which isn’t really a ramp cause it doesn’t touch the ground—and walk right off it to plop on the salt. The beats back away in little half steps. One of the things patters up close to Socrates. It’s a blob of eyeball spheres—twelve, thirteen—with multi-colored irises, and lotsa rubbery grey tentacles curling out.

As all this is going on they hear a motor turn. So, there’s a hot rod that wasn’t exploded, and Milt is in there, trying to get it started. He’s got it going, he’s jockeying forward and back among the busted up parts and melted chassis. But it’s like the fiery tentacle thing hears it too, and it aint pleased. Not to trip you out too heavy with details, but, in sum, the thing fries Milt up together with his wheels, melting metal and burning old Milt and mangling the whole mess together.

Meanwhile the little squirrelly eyeball things are running around, getting closer to the bugged out beats. Scared like. The beats try to get skinny, peer around themselves.

Then Krebs, he pulls out a pistol. He’s a nickel rat, a two-bit porch climber, so nobody’s surprised he’s got a piece. Thing about Krebs is—a little aside—I’ve never seen him blink. Like, blink his eyes. You gotta blink right? Moisten your glazzies? But this cat, I never seen him blink.

So anyhow, Krebs starts taking potshots at the globey thing. The bullets just bounce off, ricocheting siren song silver streaks across the cubist flats. I’d like to say they don’t leave a dent on that chromium globule, but the truth of it is is—they do. Tiny dents on its shiny white surface.

And the little eyeball rodents, now they’re ganging up on people, attacking. Thing is though, these things aint that tough. People squash them under foot, under fist. Krebs shoots at them. They never seem to die, but they do lose the ability to ambulate, so they just wiggle around plastered in place by that yellowy goo. But Jeannie, she’s in shock. She aint fighting back like the other dopeniks, and a handful of these eyebally creepy crawly octopi got her by the scruff, by the collar, by the sleeve, by the hair, and they’re dragging her back toward that silver ball, toward the ramp what’s sticking out of it.

But there’s a hitch because the ramp—not really a ramp, per se—doesn’t touch the ground, so the eyeball buggers can’t drag her up it. The spaceship, cause that’s what it is, I guess, lurches up into the air and then down, crashing in the salt, gonging out hollow, making halfassed bonking attempts to get the ramp and the ground lined up right. Once it veers way diagonally left-right and Bug Phillips gets crushed under the thing. Ripe for the lilies. Socrates got choked up over that. Bug was a good guy, straight from the fridge.

Finally they—whoever’s driving—get the ramp lined up, but the opening the eyeball conglomerations came out of isn’t big enough for humanoids, so the eyeball things try to drag them through, screaming, like big beatnik pegs through a small hole. And all the while, thither and hither, there’s this battle going on between the eyeball rats and the beats. The eyeballs, crushed all over the place, writhing around, tentacly, seem to be losing, slated for crashville.

Then—tune me in—the second sphere makes an appearance. It descends from that dark and scary sky and cronks and bonks and settles on the salt. First it sits there. Then there’s that noise again, a sideways busted sax. It’s accompanied this time by a hole opening up, aligned trippy with the ground, tilted away from the staring, fighting, screaming beats. A big hole this time, like you could walk through standing up, and then some.

This part here—just telling you—this is where it starts to get freaky. Up jumps the devil, and something starts to like, excrete from the big hole. Transparent blue and tobacco jello, and there’s this…stuff in there. Don’t know what. It glip glops out, spreading and burping and plopping, shiny and droopy, swum through with prehistoric dragonfly nymphs, with cubist spiders, with cephalopod hearts and transparent steel bones, something out of some paisley cave.

It oozes and spurts out of that hole, toward the tripped out dopeniks, who are like, now what. It’s strictly horrorshow, surgical waste galumphing out and spreading, but—here’s the thing—it aint fast. The beats can outrun it, and so they peel off in all directions. The blob, it spurts toward them, but it’s like frustrated, too slow. The quarry’s getting away. But what happens then is, it starts to grow legs. Big angular thorny centipede legs, germinating and worming out, wriggling, anatomically configurating. So now it can drag itself along, spurt and puddle forward, sections of it almost running, dragging the rest behind, still drooling out and stretching.

The thing aint efficient, but it’s picked up some speed, and the beats, glancing back, huff and puff as best they can. It’s catching up. It slips and slithers right up to Gina, slowest of the bunch, and sorta plops onto her back and pulls her—screaming and wriggling arms and underpinnings—off her feet. She’s stuck there, like a fly on paper.

The thing creeps and crawls toward Mayfield, grabs him too, and Velvet, and Oscar, and one beat and another. The blob’s barely faster than the screaming comrades, and the whole proceeding takes a while, but eventually it’s accumulated all of them, except for Socrates, who somehow outruns it.

The thing stops short, backs up a bit, glares at Socrates—and Socrates glares back, just out of reach. The blob sort of shrugs almost, then rolls and plops and drags itself back to the ship. It sucks itself back in through that aperture, like backwards toothpaste—together with the shrieking, squirming beats.

The hole closes up behind them, and everything’s all quietlike for a bit, Socrates the only one left to see it. Then there’s a noise. An upside down creak, a screechy compressed explosion, and one of the globes, the one from where the eyeball spiders came, shoots back up into space. Split. No-tomorrow style.

Then the other globe starts making noise. A slithery crank, an ugly backfire, and then it takes off too. The silver ball gets smaller, passes that third chromey sphere, the one what never came down, then it’s an orange dot, then an orange line, and then it’s gone, with the blob. With all the beats. With the whole cookie factory.

Socrates stares up at the third sphere, which hangs there, maybe staring down at him. Wound up like an eight-day clock. The way he tells it, Socrates starts to howl at it: Take me. This place is cubesville.

And sitting here on the salt, covered in that yellow goop, after bumping his gums, telling me the whole story in chunks and ugly disjointed pustules, he starts screaming about it again, right here in front of me. Take me. This place is cubesville. Take me. Over and over. This place is cubesville.

Daddy, Daddy, Candy Eater

A woman she’d never met had been the one to name her Candy.

After her mother passed, a father she’d always loathed had tasted the candy, often.

She wrote Candace on her job application but her real name stuck. She was Candy to the office, especially to the men, and those men sampled the candy, too.

McMillan, Murphy and Collins, attorneys at law, enjoyed candy. Candy endured, not enjoyed, the attention, the gifts, the flowers, the sex. Every man who penetrated her smelled like her father, tasted like his cigarettes and beer, reeked of his sweat.

Candy murmured lies and pocketed the cash. Each month she examined her brokerage statement and thought to herself, “I’m a slut but a rich one at least. Thanks, Daddy…”

Mr. Gregory Solomon, Vice President of Finance, took her to dinner, a show and then to bed. On her way out, he patted her on the rump and put an envelope into her hand. She kissed his bald head, fondled him a last time and started for home.

Candy never spent the night with the candy eaters. Her father, now a decrepit old man, needed her help bathing, shitting, and eating. He still loved candy, but just the chocolate kind these days.

Candy stopped in a convenience store and bought a box of chocolate cherries, her father’s favorite. The clerk commented on how much of it she bought. Candy smiled her sweet little smile at him while she paid.

Pulling into the driveway, Candy killed the engine and walked up the front steps of her house, reminding herself to take out the trash bin before she went to bed. Damned thing was overflowing with candy boxes already.

Once inside, she flipped on a light and made her way into the kitchen. Rummaging under the sink, she came up with some goggles and an industrial painter’s mask. Tucking the chocolate cherries under her arm, she closed the cabinet door, clacked off in her heels, and descended the stairs to the basement.

She unbolted the door at their bottom.

Even with the mask and goggles, the sharp tang of urine, feces, vomit and decay was enough to nearly overwhelm her.

Her father lay in a puddle of his own waste, chained to the opposite wall. Dozens of empty chocolate boxes littered the filthy floor all around him.

“Look Dad, I brought you dinner,” Candy said, tossing it just beyond reach of his pustulous, skeletal fingers.

Death By Committee

McCloud walks slowly into the bar, not limping, but the effort it takes is clear on his face. He slides into a seat with a grunt from way down in his throat. The bartender approaches.

‘Double bourbon, neat,’ says McCloud, settling onto his elbows.

The barman goes to pour his drink and he grimaces as he reaches into his jacket. When his hand reappears, it is holding a wallet and dripping splotches of red onto the bar.

‘Your hand’s bleeding,’ says the barman, waiting for his payment.

This gets the attention of the young man sitting a few stools down. McCloud throws a twenty on the bar and stuffs his wallet back inside his jacket. When he does, the young man to his right sees his shirt, soaked scarlet with fresh blood.

‘Jesus, what happened to you?’ asks the young man.

The barman turns to have a look and McCloud puts the whiskey away in one.

‘Give me another and keep ’em coming.’

The barman pours another drink. McCloud touches a couple of fingers to his belly and they come away bloody. He turns to the young man.

‘It’s a long story kid,’ he says, ‘not sure I’ve got enough time to tell it.’

He reaches around to his back, pulls a gun from his belt, and lays it on the bar.

‘Hold on a minute.’ It was Paul, chiming in as usual. ‘I thought you said we weren’t allowed to have guns,’ he said to Graham.

‘He doesn’t actually use it. It’s just a prop,’ I said.

‘Aye, but I wanted to have a gun in mine, but I left it out because they said no guns.’

‘Or sex,’ said Julianne, as if this was helpful addition to the conversation. There were murmurs of agreement from the rest of the group, who apparently felt the same way.

‘He is right, Ian,’ said Graham, who was supposed to be running the thing. ‘We agreed that for this exercise we wouldn’t have any stories involving guns.’

‘Or sex,’ added Julianne again.

‘Yeah I know that,’ I said, trying my hardest to ignore the silly bitch, ‘but the gun isn’t important. He doesn’t even use it in the story.’

‘Well then I would suggest it’s not necessary to mention the gun,’ said Graham. ‘Remember that old rule – if there’s a bomb in the first act, it should go off by the third.’

‘Omit needless words,’ said Richard, like he was some fucking literary sage, rather than just a bald, boring cunt quoting Strunk at a writing group. If Richard omitted needless words he’d never speak again. I looked around at the blank faces, waiting for my reply, and drinking this shit up. Some of them were taking notes.

McCloud finishes off his second and sits slumped, staring at the bottom of his glass. He looks at his watch.

‘Another?’ asks the barman.

‘Why not,’ says McCloud. The young guy beside him takes a swig of beer and waits patiently.

‘Okay then, what I meant is that the gun is important, but only in setting up the character,’ I said. ‘There is no gunfight, it’s just something he’s carrying. If the gun itself was the issue, then maybe his hat is also an issue.’

‘Is he wearing a hat?’ asked Paul, frowning. Everyone checked their copies of manuscript I printed for them.

‘I don’t think you mentioned him wearing a hat, Ian,’ said Graham.

McCloud reaches up and pats the top of his own head. No hat.

‘Musta got shot off in that gunfight I was in,’ he says, grinning in spite of his pain.

Everyone agrees that there was no mention of a hat in the opening. ‘Okay so he’s not wearing a hat!’ I said, ‘I was just making a point.’

‘I think the character description needs a lot more work. I can’t picture him at all,’ said Julianne.

‘I actually did picture him with a hat,’ said Stephen, and everyone ignored him but me.

‘Forget about the hat!’ I half-shouted. ‘What he looks like doesn’t matter that much.’

‘Actually you can give a lot of character information with the physical description,’ said Richard. ‘The guy is obviously involved in crime in some way, so maybe you could convey that in how he is dressed. Like a gangster, maybe.’

‘That’s why I mentioned the gun,’ I said.

‘But we did say no guns,’ said Graham.

‘Or sex!’ said Julianne.

‘What if we take out the gun and put the hat in?’ Graham went on.

‘What do you call those hats the gangsters used to wear?’ asked Paul.

‘Stetsons,’ answered Richard.

‘Yes, see, this is good,’ said Graham, uncapping his pen. ‘Take out the gun and have him lay his Stetson on the bar,’ he said, scribbling on his copy.

McCloud looks in surprise at the hat sitting where his gun used to be. He puts the hat on his head.

‘What do you think?’ he asks the barman.

‘Not as much use as a gun.’

McCloud sighs in agreement, takes the hat off, and tosses it away.

‘Okay so we agree that the hat can replace the gun?’ said Graham, looking around the room. They’re all nodding like cattle. I think about the other stories I’ve had to sit and listen to. Every one about an affair, or a marriage falling apart, or a marriage falling apart because of an affair. These people learned to write by watching soap operas. I once tried learning how not to write by watching a soap opera and didn’t even make it through for the educational benefit.

‘I never agreed to that,’ I said.

‘Kill your darlings,’ said Richard, always with a helpful quote. Pompous fucking prick.

‘I think the hat is better,’ said Julianne, ‘The gun is too symbolic. Too phallic.’ Julianne’s story had been about a woman’s husband leaving her for another man, and she thinks everything is a fucking phallic symbol. I decided to fuck with her a little bit.

‘That’s nothing, wait till I get to the part with the dildo,’ I told her, looking very serious.

‘We said no sex!’

‘Oh it’s not a sex scene, technically. The woman in the story almost gets caught diddling herself with a dildo up her ass but she hides it in McCloud’s underwear drawer. It’s an allegory for male rape and female empowerment.’ Everyone considered this silently.

‘That’s amazing,’ said Julianne, and she was being sincere. I don’t know why I bothered. At the last meeting, she told someone he had an Oedipal complex.

‘Again, Ian, it seems like this story has a lot of material we agreed we wouldn’t use. The point of this exercise was to come up with a story that didn’t rely on sex or violence to keep the reader interested,’ said Graham.

‘Well if I can’t write about people fucking or killing each other, what should I write about? People just sitting around talking?’

‘Sure. Stories like that can be very interesting.’

‘Bullshit. No one would read a story like that,’ I said.

McCloud is slumped over the bar, blood pooling on the floor around his barstool. The young guy lifts McCloud’s arm and lets it drop, lifelessly, back onto the bar.

‘I think he’s dead,’ he says.

‘Shit,’ says the barman, ‘get me his wallet. He still owes for the last two.’

Imported from Addis Ababa

“Mommy, LOOK at THE MONKEY! He’s PLAYING with HIS —”

The little girl was going to say “pee-pee” until her embarrassed and shocked mother muffled her mouth and whisked her toward the concession booth for some cotton candy; her daughter loved the stuff, maybe the fluffy confection would erase the monkey’s abominable acts from her impressionable young mind…

But the mother was definitely in the minority; everybody else outside the cage was eating it up, a bunch of wide-eyed, salivating animals, pointing and cackling as the Gelada baboon jacked off for their weekend entertainment, pumping its big ding-dong with two hands, up and down, faster and faster and—

SPLOOOOGGGEEESPPPLUUUUURRRRTTTT!!!

“Whoa, man, get a LOAD of that LOAD!”

“SCREW the LOAD! Look at the COCK on that THING!”

“That CRAZY APE must’ve JIZZED a GALLON!”

Balls fully purged, the baboon flashed its hideous fanged grin before giving his audience the finger…

“Well, FUCK YOU TOO, you damned MONKEY!”

“UP yours, ya FILTHY APE!”

Somewhat reluctantly, the riotous crowd moved on, ambling toward the next zoological attraction as the baboon yawned and scratched his dirty pink ass.

***

“Okay, okay, Harry, pipe down. It’s coming, buddy…”

The zoo closed for the evening as the zookeeper, crate of field corn balanced on his shoulder, unlocked the cage. Harry was starving, screeching and dashing from corner to corner as his handler stepped inside. The zookeeper knelt, opened the crate, and tossed the green ears onto the concrete floor, one after another.

While Harry munched, the zookeeper plucked a fresh Roi-Tan from his shirt pocket and lit up, smoking, reflecting…

“—don’t smell like monkey shit either.”

“Baby, please, you know I can’t help that. I’m a zookeeper, after—”

“And he never COMES first! I mean, NEVER! He can FUCK for HOURS!”

“He’s a lot younger than I am.”

“You got that right!”

Jessica, the zookeeper thought, watching Harry’s gnashing fangs.

She had been one hell of a lay. They had met in the express lane at Mac’s supermarket where she worked as a checkout girl; he had forgotten the spicy mustard and she had been a good sport, dispatching a pimply-faced bagboy to fetch it, sparing him the hassle of returning to the crowded aisles.

That simple act of courtesy had touched him, infusing the zookeeper with a rare jolt of confidence; they’d chatted while the kid hunted for the mustard, and by the time he’d returned, the zookeeper had Jessica’s digits tucked in his shirt pocket alongside his ever-present Roi-Tan.

Thus began the best sex of the zookeeper’s life…

Jessica could never get enough.

And nothing was off limits.

She liked it doggy-style, cowgirl, reverse-cowgirl, old-fashioned missionary, every which way two people could fornicate. No hole or sequence of penetration was prohibited; she was especially fond of ass-to-mouth, introducing the relatively inexperienced zookeeper to the practice. Even now, he got a hard-on every time he used the ATM, each bittersweet transaction reminding him of Jessica’s desertion.

The heartless whore had left him for an eighteen-year-old produce clerk named Maurice. According to Jessica, Maurice could stand on one foot and juggle three coconuts. Also, Maurice had a twelve-inch cock and testicles the size of lemons.

Presently, Harry screeched for more food. Puffing on his cigar, the zookeeper tossed the remainder of the corn in his direction.

The plan was to go back to his apartment, swill just enough beer and smoke just enough dope to lower his inhibitions and/or fear of capture, and then procure Jessica as she finished her shift at nine. The zookeeper had been stalking her for weeks; he knew Jessica’s schedule backwards and forwards. Maurice worked days, so he wouldn’t be there; he would be back at her place, puffing on a jay, priming his twelve-inch pole and big nuts.

Sorry, Maurice, but there’ll be no nooky tonight.

Not for you, anyway…

The zookeeper watched as Harry attacked the corn.

That’s it, buddy. Eat it all. You’re going to need your strength for later…

He waited until Harry swallowed the very last morsel before pulling the tranquilizer gun from his belt. The darts were loaded with just enough azaperone to knock Harry out for a few hours. Sedation was necessary. Otherwise, the perpetually-horny baboon was liable to jack-off three or four times before he could do the job…

And that just wouldn’t do. Harry had to be at fullpotency for this.

“Sorry, Harry,” the zookeeper said, aiming the gun, “but you’ll thank me later.”

Then he squeezed the trigger.

***

Sitting behind the wheel of his twenty-seven-year-old Pontiac Fiero, the zookeeper’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the wheel. In homage to Ted Bundy, he had removed the passenger seat, affording him a nice flat surface in which to transport his human parcel to the zoo.

In deference to paying customers, Mac’s employees parked on the far fringes of the lot, a good distance from the store proper, so that’s where the zookeeper had parked, right beside Jessica’s royal blue Sunbird.

“SizeDOES matter!”

“Please—”

“And he’s HUNG like a GORILLA!”

“Baby—”

“And another thing!”

“Don’t—”

“He AIN’T been CUT!”

“You actually like—”

“I love me some UNCUT COCK!”

Each and every heated argument came flooding back, slashing the inside of his brain like knives. Then he saw her…

He hadn’t been waiting more than a few minutes before Jessica appeared. She was still wearing her bright red smock. With much pep in her step, she waltzed across the smooth asphalt of the parking lot.

Eager for Maurice’s cock, the zookeeper thought.

Well, baby, I’m afraid I have some bad news…

When Jessica spotted the zookeeper’s car, she stopped in her tracks, a split-second freeze in which she may or may not have considered turning around and returning to the safety of the store. But she didn’t retreat. She shook her head in dismay and kept right on walking as her ex waited.

The zookeeper didn’t emerge until Jessica was unlocking her door, popping up like a demented jack-in-the-box, leering at her over the Sunbird’s roof.

“Don’t you ever come to my job again—”

He brought up the tranquilizer gun, leveling it at her head.

“Unless you want a dart in the eyeball,” the zookeeper said, “I suggest you shut the fuck up and come with me.”

She started to mouth off until he cocked his gun, and that’s all it took to convince her that he wasn’t fooling around. The zookeeper stepped behind her as she reached the passenger side of his car, opening the door like a true gentleman.

He then whacked her in the back of the head, knocking her unconscious as he pushed her in, rushed around to the driver’s side, fired up the Fiero and hauled ass back to the zoo.

***

The enclosure’s overhead lights rendered the tableau a sickly yellow. Wielding a water hose, Roi-Tan jutting from his mouth, the zookeeper stood in the corner of the cage, eyes glazed over with malevolent wonder as he took in and admired the scene.

Hands cuffed behind her back, a naked and groggy Jessica was sprawled out on the concrete. She had begun to revive, but was still not fully aware of her predicament just yet. As for Harry, was just about fully woken up, the azaperone having finally relinquished its potent grip.

Unable to delay any longer, the zookeeper activated the hose and blasted Jessica in the face. She coughed and sputtered, whipping her wet head around, slinging water in all directions as Harry ambled around her.

“LOOK ALIVE, KIDS! RISE AND SHINE! IT’S PARTY TIME!”

Then he sprayed Harry right in the kisser, and that sealed it. Baring his fangs, screeching and flailing his gangly arms, the baboon kicked into gear.

Jessica’s eyes bulged like Texas grapefruits—

“OH, MY GOD! NOOOOO! PLEASE, GOD, NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Her terror seemed to have an aphrodisiac effect on Harry. His cock sprang to life, swelling and pointing the way as he approached his new mate. The dart still buried in his flank did little to diminish his agility; in fact, he hardly even seemed aware of its presence.

“THAT’S IT, HARRY! GO GET IT, BOY! TAP THAT NASTY POONTANG!”

Jessica’s bowels cut loose then, spewing shit beneath her squirming, kicking form. But Harry didn’t care as he mounted her from behind.

He liked some stink with his pink.