Consumption II

I’d spend all day at Les Mills, building my ass into pure thickness from endless squats and deadlifts. I’d post on Grindr around noon, when the lunch crowd was horny and desperate, 

‘Cake at Les. Steam room. Now.’

They’d show up within minutes. Personal trainers between clients, married guys sneaking away from Midtown offices, finance bros still in their suits. I’d lead them to the steam room, bend over on the tiled bench, and let them feast. Always the same routine. They’d drop to their knees, grab my cheeks, and bury their faces in. For months, it was normal stuff. Moaning, grabbing, the usual. Five minutes max, they’d leave satisfied, and I’d hit the weights. 

Then something changed. 

Bruce first. He pressed his face in and couldn’t pull away. At first I thought he was just really into it, but then he started making these muffled sounds, trying to lift his head but somehow stuck to my ass like glue. I tried pushing him away, grabbing his shoulders and shoving, but it was as if he were being pulled deeper. Then, I felt it. More than a tongue. Like my body was expanding from the inside. 

His struggles got weaker, more distant, his whole form seemed to compress and slide inside. I looked over my shoulder and watched in horror as his feet lifted off the ground, his entire body fading into me like I was swallowing him whole. The sensation was indescribable. Incredible. Then I realized what just happened. My ass ate Bruce. And it was still hungry. As fuck.

Every hookup became feeding time. Locker rooms, steam rooms, showers. Anywhere I went, the hunger followed. My ass started changing. Getting bigger and rounder with every guy that disappeared inside. My shorts got tighter, my bench press weaker, as if I was carrying all these dudes around. So I started hitting the weights harder. Told myself I could work it off. But the thicker it got, the stronger its pull. Guys followed it around the floor like zombies, eyes glazed, walking closer without knowing why. They were hungry for my ass, and my ass was starving.

Every workout drew fresh meat. Crowds gathered around when I squatted, pretending to check it out while fighting the urge to drop down and bury their faces in it. Derek lasted maybe thirty seconds before he got sucked in, his protein shake spilling everywhere as his whole body got swallowed. The Russian guy just plunged inside, Olympic-style. Dozens of dudes got swallowed. That’s when Brad started noticing. 

“Where the fuck is everyone?” he asked, looking around the empty weight floor. Bruce wasn’t at his usual 6 AM slot. Derek’s locker stayed empty. Way fewer dudes than normal. 

Brad kept walking the floor, confused why our regulars just weren’t showing up anymore. And I just couldn’t tell him the truth. He would never understand. My ass eats men whole.

Folks Have Their Ways

They were at a very private event way out in the country at the old Hudson family farm that Lori and Jeff had inherited after her mother died last spring. This was the first Summer Sunday annual family get together without anyone from the older generation present. The recently deceased Mama Lou had ruled over them as a matriarch who laid down the rules and enforced them with her thick wooden paddle or thin hickory switch, regardless of age or excuses. Skinny-dipping as the ultimate rebellion against her old rules and antiquated punishments had begun when Lori and her sister Ruby and little brother Asa had been kids. Mama Lou could not see us at the lake from her house, nor could anyone see it from the road or home.

Mama Lou and Daddy Dale had been farmers who ruled their little farm as aristocrats, and their children and grandchildren were subject to a lifetime of old-fashioned discipline. Daddy Dale’s big palms hurt as bad as Mama Lou’s paddle and switch. Daddy Dale had passed two years before, and Mama Lou had become even more of a disciplinarian. As harsh as her judgements and punishments became, her kids and grandchildren submitted because they sensed it was her way of dealing with grief and their way of physically showing respect. They never discussed family matters outside the family but among themselves it was a source of pride how strict their family was, and they felt they securely belonged to a resilient, decent family they must never disgrace. When it was a family members only affair they did not care what others thought was normal, they followed Hudson ways. 

As a surprising example of this Lori, Ruby and Asa had inducted their children into the annual skinny dip picnic early on. They were secret nudists in a small, conservative rural area and there were fourteen family members and five spouses at this year’s get together. Many of their asses bore the elongated thin scars left from the bare-bottom switchings, and the wider scars that came from blisters raised by the impact of the paddle. Lori and Ruby were sitting in lawn chairs after lunch watching the swimmers when Lori observed that their brother and their male children all had perfectly straight penises unlike the male there, the in-law-spouses present. Lori speculated that the clue to the answer was that the males with straight penises had scars on their asses and the ones with curvatures had smooth buttocks. 

Mama Lou had been a stickler when it came to sexual morality and she demanded obedience and scourged any deviance she caught, so there was extraordinarily little. The prohibition on masturbation had been openly discussed, and she had been known to check on the boys when they might least expect her to pop in. Locked doors were forbidden, and closed doors were cause for a suspicion that had to be tested by an unexpected visit. Although premarital sex was out of the question, one of the quirks of the family was that nudity was acceptable. So given that fact, bare-bottom discipline of adults did not seem particularly shocking to them.

As the family gathered before departing that afternoon Ruby presented her older sister Lori with a box wrapped in shiny red paper and tied with a big red bow, a box the size of one that might hold a large bouquet of roses. Lori looked surprised at this unexpected action at the annual family skinny-dip picnic which had not included any giving of gifts before. All watched as Lori fixed her eyes on the box and tore off the paper and opened the lid. She laughed as she gripped her mom’s old paddle and held it up over her head then waved it in a salute to her family. They lined up single file and as each approached Lori they bowed and bent down until they could grip as close to the ankles as possible and brace for a single stinging paddle swing before exiting toward their cars and clothes. 

One of the younger generation in-laws, a twenty-year-old named Cassie, bent over despite recent lacerations from a switching that were still healing on her buttocks. The family always showed respect when an in-law accepted corporal punishment from a spouse, and Lori gave her a light tap of the paddle to spare her sorely healing welts and there was spontaneous clapping from those waiting in the line. Lori felt good being matriarch and the family was happy about it too. Lori thought she could maintain the family’s ways but with an update now and then, like the day’s skinny-dip which had been a spanking success for the whole family.

No Reins For a Pig Man

It wasn’t enough for Marge to be told that she was the most irresistible catch at Renview – a venue for villainous vagrants with dead mothers and fathers and no chance at redemption. It wasn’t enough for Marge to want to leave – not because of how last time she gave one of those foul fucking freaks a private dance in the neon room, that his hands squeezed a bit too hard. He pleaded that it wasn’t intentional, but they all came to Marge. She made it easy for them and they made it easy for her to afford the lifestyle on Ridgebank, east of that festering shit-hole greasing her up with their desperate stench and scars.

Marge was tough enough to handle her own. She knew how to cut the blood out of someone if they became too ill-mannered. She’d carve them up good – just like the lousy Louie who put a gun to her head and told her not to scream. Louie the loser had broken into her 1976 Pink Pinto and was waiting in the backseat after her saturday-night shift. Marge and the cold chrome and a set of hairy knuckles wedging their way to tighten around her throat. To anyone other than Marge it would be scary, but she just let his clutch grow until his black-clouded skull was beside her cheek and the knife she carried between her breasts found the deepest pocket home inside his right eye. Gouged it down into his brain – the Little, lousy loser Louie fell dead in that backseat.

It wasn’t enough for Marge. She wanted to do it again. The killing. The gouging. She wanted to feel their flaccid meat monkeys curled between her bloody fingers. She wanted the power it gave her. That unadulterated rage of redemption. She wanted to clean out Renview of the vermin. She wanted to be the wolf in sheep’s clothing with her teeth on their veins. Marge knew it would be enough then. She would finally believe them when they told her she was beautiful. That raw confessional where through pain nothing is a lie – and the way Gary the gooner caught his prick between the pavement and her pointed stiletto. It was Gary who confessed his love for her faster than the others. Marge didn’t care. She wanted their blood, their control and their wet tears.

Change the channel and we are no longer looking at Marge, but a large, middle-aged man by the name of Bill Busby hunched over, thumbing through the static-hissing channels on an old box television. The narrator’s voice drones low and muffled with MARGE IN CHARGE in bright bold letters, plastered on the screen. Bill chuckles because of how absurd it is. His sloppy obesity matches the rest of the room. Uncleaned and fetched in trash – a four-hundred pound pig man who only wished he had a shot at becoming one of those that Marge would murder. If she was real, he’d go out and find her in that fictitious venue at Renview. If he had a gun, maybe he’d load it with a bullet. Maybe he’d pull out his prick and let Marge turn it flat. He’d let her.

Maybe he’d find the actress who played her. Susie Reins – the mega star with twelve Oscars and a gold star on the Hollywood walk of fame. Maybe he would go get her autograph at the Zolopoloza Film Festival in Keiser Springs and beg her to cut out his blood. Or maybe, just maybe he’d do all those things to her.

Bill and his broken frontal lobe. That trigger on the brain that had stopped ticking when Bill was still trapped inside his mother’s sticky wet womb – a pig baby squealing for nothing because Bill didn’t feel nothing. Nothing that you and I feel. The pig man with a stone heart and five fat knuckles squeezed the balled up paper magazine with Marge’s face, wrinkled, torn and stained on the cover. The great Susie Reins – the girl with dick blood beneath her heels and dead skin under her fingernails. The girl of Bill, the pig man’s dreams smiling back at him through folded paper and ink. Bill squeezed tighter the way Marge was squeezed around the throat in episode twelve. He closed his swollen pink eyelids tight and with a half open lip moaned the fantasy of being the one doing it to her. Harder and harder until his eyelids weren’t the only part of him swollen. The greasy, gasping, gooning pig man and his busted frontal lobe slouched limp like the dead masked man in Marge’s backseat.

The television static scattered white light across Bill’s pink fat flesh – the glossy sagging portrait of distorted scum laid there to be washed in the projected glow of Marge, wrist deep inside a man – his heart in her hands on the second episode of season four. The one called, No love for a Lousy Louie. Bill knew the episode word for word but the way he recited it altered its genre to a horror show. Slurring sounds stuck behind the fat of Bill’s lips. A pig man’s performance, done through squeals and snorts. He imagined having a golden star like Marge – like Susie and her perfect life up in the Hills. He imagined what it would be like to sleep in her bed, wear her clothes, and bathe in her bathtub. He imagined if it all would fix his broken brain, and that Susie Reins would fall in love with him the way that he loves her. The princess and the pig man. A sore sight it would be for all to see. Bill squinted through his pair of eye holes that drooped the way Marge’s floppy breasts flapped while she rode the dead corpse of John Duke – a B-grade actor with cowboy boots and a bullet wound to the head.

That episode was called, No Horses for Dead Cowboys – the finale to the seventh season.

Pig man Bill and his broken brain would take the bus from Turven Street to the southside of the Hills where they filmed Marge In Charge. The entire seven seasons cheaply shot there grossed enough to transform it into a strip mall that bustled with tourism. Home to the fanatics hoping to have a shot at being shot by the marvelous Marge – those unlucky lousy Louies just like Bill. They all looked the same. A stereotypical sickness that littered the set of Renview. The pig man and the parlor for private dances. Lookalike actresses in the same cut off shorts like Marge. The same hair color and make up as Marge. They were clones – mimics and imposters, and Bill could feel the broken switch in his skull begin to tingle. A dead root that twitched then went dead again. He thought about the loaded gun stuffed inside the rolling slab of pubic fat. He thought about that dead cowboy. He pondered on if any of those other Louies thought the same, or if he might be the only one. The only one brave or dumb enough to reenact it all – until his head was full of bloody holes and his monkey meat mashed smooth. Or the other way around with a wannabe Marge losing color inside five fat knuckles of a left hand. He wondered if he could do it the way they did it in the pictures – all cut into frame. A revival to make that broken link inside his fat head breathe life for the first time.

The other Louies wore all matching sour-sweat-stained shirts with Marge’s faded printed face. Fanatics just like Bill to meet a masked Marge with teeth not as straight and eyes not as green – haunted holograms that played pretend. But they were convincing enough to attract a crowd of those like Bill. Those stinking up the place with their rancid, greasy filth – or that is at least what pig man Bill did when he wandered north through the crowd of lookie-louies jonesin to take a bite from one of those marge mirages with leaking makeup. The wannabes that Bill wanted to ward off even if they made his brain buzz.

“Take one.” A hyperactive hologram with golden curls and a faded mustache appeared, flagging up one of those infamous shirts. All maniacs wore it for Marge but Bill didn’t have enough scratch to buy it. Grunting the way a pig man grunts, he shoved down the mimic until that white shirt became soiled and Marge’s face tore apart on the gravel with a hole Bill could stick his fat fist in. The wannabe lost their golden scalp and their skirt flew up enough to expose thick curls of black hair – an imposter that the others in the crowd glared at.

They pointed and screamed with disdain that the mustache-having, wig-wearing Marge was nothing more than a fraud and that caused more of a scene than Bill did. But it caused the crowd to thin and that is when he saw a pair of Louies that didn’t quite look like Louies, but they wore the same cult-like attire, and waved at Bill the way one does if they want your attention. Bill grimaced and grunted the way a pig man would grunt, and heaved his waddling weight close enough.

“Say fella, you look to be big enough.” The left one spoke – He was a scrawny, horse-shoe balding man with a map clasped in his palms and glared at him the way that crowd glared, but with more desperation than anger. “We need a big guy like yourself to do this.” The other man to his right starred up into the ball of a bright sun as if he was afraid to make eye contact with Bill – the curse of the pig man. Bill just grunted. “We need someone to be the lookout.” The ill-weighted Louie rattled on. Baffled Bill agreed in the way one would agree if they were mute – with a nod. There would normally be no room for a pig man, but those Louies had a spot picked out for him in the back of their 1976 pink pinto. The exact same car as Marge. When Bill sat in that backseat he could only think of Marge and feel that warm chrome that had become slippery from his pubic sweat. The one that was balding drove, while the sun-watching Louie sat next to him, still glaring out into that sweltering yellow heat. The car veered upwards higher and higher than Bill had ever been in those winding hills. Higher and deeper into those Hollywood homesteads that Bill had only ever seen on his old busted box television – but without the white wave of static.

“It’s around here somewhere.” Louie number one muttered, squinting his beady eyes through the windshield at a set of castle-like mansions – tall and glamorous. “There!” Louie number two finally barked, and rammed his stumpy arm out towards the largest of them all. A mesmerizing residence with stained glass cut straight from a movie picture. “Marge livin’ large!” Louie number one cackled. Bill could feel that little wilted worm at the front of his brain wiggle. That flinch of feeling that was ever fleeting, it would be awakened for good if only he could have a squeeze of Marge – the great Susie Reins. “Here’s the deal, big guy, we’re gonna get in there and you’re gonna sit here and keep watch.” Louie number one ordered. “If you see or hear anything… you honk the horn twice but long and slow…just so we know…got it?” Louie leaned in close enough with beady black eyeballs, and a frowning mouth with white spit stuck in the corners. Bill didn’t speak, because a pig man does not speak and he certainly does not get intimidated by a couple of lousy Louies, especially with a dead ball of ground beef inside his skull.

“Do you understand me?” The first Louie continued but angrier. Bill just nodded the way a good pig man would nod, because he knew that when those two Louies left he would follow behind to find his own way inside that castle in the hills. It was like episode twelve, season two, Marge and the Masked Monkeys. The one where Marge gets kidnapped by a gang of masked Louies and forced to eat their hot pudding – but instead she chewed out their blood. Bill would enjoy that more than a stiletto – maybe even more than a bullet hole or a knife to the throat – to have his pink tail gnawed off by the white jaw of a blood-thristy Susie Reigns. All that hot breath and sharp pain. The fantasy made the deep cuts of glass from the downstairs window seem to not hurt as much when he climbed inside.

A pig man’s paradise. A promiseland for all those like Bill with stiff monkey meat and broken brains – or just Bill alone, because those other two lousy, loser Louie’s stomped around upstairs and it made a racket.

Broken objects and squeaky sneakers and low raspy whispers that hummed through the lavender painted walls and ceilings. It would be enough to get caught. Captured by the teeth of a blood thirsty Marge – but that’s if there was a thing as the real Marge. Bill had begun to believe that the Marge on his old busted box television was just a mirage like all those wannabes at Renview with their false faces and hairy legs. That she wasn’t real at all and would be cowering in the corner of a closet, screaming while thrashing a butter knife into the air.

The imposter. The marvelous marge, a mimic to break a pig man’s pink heart. But the way that ball of brilliant orange light cut through the stained glass – that simmering heated knot of fire Louie-the-second marveled at, seemed real enough – therefore Marge had to be the same. She just had to, and that is what Bill came to believe there inside that living space of high art and odd portraits, sculptures alike, and monkey masks – the same ones those Lousy Louies wore in episode twelve, tugging on their uncut bananas just before the blood came crashing down like a tsunami. The red tide of revenge and Marge would be the victorious queen of carnage – sucking it all up the way a leech sucks – powerful-like with puckered lips and rolling eyes.

Bill stole the fat and hairy one with big ears that stunk of expired latex, and stretched it over his fat pig head. He even beat his chest and grunted the way a monkey does before it kills with those big hairy paws that clutched the warm weight of loaded chrome. It shined with pubic grease beneath that ripe orange sun as Bill aimed it for the first time at himself through an overgrown mirror. The pig man in a playpen with unregistered metal between his fingers. He thought he might kill those two Louies that bumped around above with it. Rid them of marvelous Marge’s mansion so that he could have her all to himself when that rotten knot in his head awakes to do what it has never done – to make him feel more than just a pig man. More than a monkey-masked maniac with blood lust ready to lay down those two Louies with smoking gunfire – to win a competition for the only love he had ever known. And he would do it, with his mad monkey cap stuffed with salty fur. He’d make them go away for good.

Only a pig man like Bill could have his blood cut out by Marge, not those loser Louies. Bill pulled back the hammer on the pistol – wedged his finger down hard on it until it clicked, then met the faded outline of two bleeding louies at the bottom of the stairs. One shot straight through the cheek and another through the groin with dick blood beneath him like Marge and her sharp stiletto. Bill was a shitty shot but it worked. Both limp Louies were crumpled over one another with pieces of Marge’s undergarments squeezed tight in their knuckles. Bill grunted the way a pig man would grunt with the monkey mask stretched funny over his fat face – warped, with the snout pushed too far from the center, but it didn’t matter because Bill could now do all those things he desired to do with Marge’s magnificent wardrobe full of iconic lace and leather that fit like that monkey mask – bundled and torn when Bill stretched his fat pig skin through it. A grotesque gorilla soaked in the white foam of a four foot lion-clawed tub – that squeaked like Louie’s wet sneakers. The robust ape in pink skin no longer stunk the way a pig would stink, instead he bore the same scent as Marge – the succulent Susie Reins whose shrill, shrieking scream could be heard below where the two dead Louies’ were. Bill bolted upright to drip across the bathroom – the damp pistol still held tight inside his fat fingers. He could feel that tingle again at the front of his thick skull, and it lasted a bit longer with his eyes bulging out through that monkey mask that only suffocated.

Susie Reins, the superstar, starlet, sex-symbol saw Bill peeping through that bathroom door and ran screaming while the cross-dressing ape chased her. The ravenous fear and hyperactive thrill chilled both their bones as they played cat and mouse around that mansion up in the hills – but bill was all wet and couldn’t keep his slippery pink pig meat from falling and cracking his broken brain hard enough to fracture the earth, and it rumbled the way an earthquake would rumble to bring forth the end of the world – or perhaps awaken something dead like the wilted root, Bill kept inside his head. As he laid their belly down with the torn leather exposing all that skin poking out, and his blood that began to run, it was obvious to a mortified Susie Reins, who didn’t look anything at all like the marge he knew. Anything at all like the girl of his dreams – anything but an illusion that only broke a pig man’s pink heart.

Bill grunted and snorted through that hemorrhaging monkey mask, reaching with a quivering hand for the pistol next to Susie’s feet. The pistol with one bullet left inside. The pistol he planned to kill her with if she was anything other than the Marge he knew and loved. The Marge dressed in leather. The Marge with a taste for blood. The Marge who ruled Renview. And perhaps she was what Bill imagined afterall, as she held that slick loaded pistol up to that bulbous broken brain of a pig man and pulled the trigger.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Tell the truth. Are you afraid of monsters? You know, ghoulies, ghosties, long-leggedy beasties, things that go bump in the night. Or do you think they’re just those cartoon characters your neighbor decorates their yard with every Halloween? Truth—real monsters don’t look or act like those caricatures in the franchise series. Sitting here on the metro, looking out my window, I feel slightly amused that others can’t see what’s reflected.  

We’re not spawned in cold, damp castles in foreign countries with names that start with Vee. Personally, I’m not fond of caskets and would prefer cremation. Maybe one of those new burial plans where they plant a tree in my ashes. If I’m in a cemetery, it’s to bury evidence, not because I enjoy the ambiance. Actually, chances are, you’ve passed me more than once without knowing.

It’ll be tonight—after dark, probably before midnight. I still have to work tomorrow. My target has no idea I’m on the way. It was an accidental bump in a store. I only wanted to pass. He wanted to impress his girlfriend. At this moment, he’s at home, doing the quotidian things that make him whoever he is, unaware that Death is riding to his door.      

For the record, I’m not all evil. I’ve helped the feeble cross the street—saved kittens and kites for children. I’ve been a hero in a fire. I hold doors and say thank you. I can be silent as the grave, strike swiftly as a mamba. But when I take your breath, it won’t come back. The people who see me don’t write memoirs—you call them victims.  

Whether my kind are born or created, I can’t say. Maybe each of us is sui generis, with a different backstory. It’s not as if we share confidences or trade craft secrets by the water cooler. By preference, we’re solitary hunters. When I speak, it’s only for myself.  

Sometimes I watch television. One night, bored, I was watching Animal Planet. There were two monkeys, doing monkey things in a tree. Suddenly, a reticulating anaconda surged up the tree. One monkey fled while the other sat there, frozen in terror. It just stared blindly in the face of death, never moving. Nietzsche was right. Stare into the abyss long enough, and it might look back. 

The subway car smells like an ancient ashtray, with vape flavors struggling for ascendancy. A fragrance catches my attention. Yves Saint Laurent, Black Opium. Her face is framed in black ringlets, her wide, brown eyes lost in the glow of her phone screen. I imagine how she would look, mouth open, eyes vacant, with ruby droplets across her neck. 

She reminds me of a kitten my parents gave me for a pet when I was five or six. Warm, fuzzy, mewing until I began playing with it. What stands out in my memory now is the looks of horror on my parents’ faces. Their mouths open, eyes bulging in disbelief. They tried making excuses. I was clawed—maybe it nipped me. I never had a pet after that. Over the years, neighbors occasionally came looking for theirs. By tacit agreement, my parents and I never spoke of those missing animals in our home.  

We always remember that first time. Whether it’s love, sex, victory, or death, those profound moments remain with us. My first was a punk in my class. Being a natural loner made me an easy target, I guess. He tried to bully me into letting him use my baseball glove in P.E. I refused. 

Too small or cowardly to do the job himself,  he reached out to an older family member who came to our school, caught me alone, and gave me a beatdown. As always, snitching was considered weak, so I told no one. But inside, I felt a blinding rage I could taste. The details are probably too lurid for your taste. Suffice it to say, my first was a package deal—a twofer. 

The train hisses to a stop, and a middle-aged man boards. He has broken veins across his nose and under his eyes. An alcoholic. He’s one of those people who were old when they were twelve. Stoop-shouldered, unshaven, in a brown trench coat, he looks like a stereotypical pervert. He would be an easy kill—no stamina, and the nicotine stains on his fingers tell me he has no wind. His death would probably be a mercy rather than murder.  

Not that I’m ever remorseful. I felt no guilt over the boys I’d killed. My concern now was covering my tracks. For the first time, I knew I didn’t need to fear the dark because it was already inside me. Taking my bloody clothes outside, I burned them in our fire pit behind the house. I sat a long time in the dark, looking up at the stars. I didn’t feel lonely, just alone. I wondered if there were more like me or if I was a one-off, a prototype? 

In the weeks that followed, no fingers were ever pointed at me. It was intoxicating. In my hubris, I was still a caterpillar breaking out of its chrysalis, not yet in my final form. For the time being, I returned to my regular routines and locked that part of me in a compartment inside my psyche. I started watching a lot of police shows, often with my parents.  But I was especially interested in procedural programs, which detailed how they caught killers. Know your enemy.

I had been living on my own for several months when a new neighbor moved into our apartment complex. He was loud, aggressive, and generally obnoxious. It was high school again, only now the students were adults who never grew up. It was a bully, beating me again. I saw him as just another glitch in the universe that needed to be addressed.  

I had learned that environmental conditions in the small hours favor surprise while reducing the risk of detection. As part of my self-training, I had practiced picking locks. It seemed like a helpful tool. Finally, on a moonless night, I made my move. 

After gaining entrance to his apartment, I listened for sounds. I heard only snoring from his bedroom. The architects who design modular buildings have no idea how much they help people like me. Every unit is a fractal of the whole. He lay on his back, snoring. Probably dreaming of all the people he’d bullied or would bully the next day.  

That was his final dream. It wasn’t a stellar performance—I was still new to the art in those days. That was long ago, the trail of corpses in my wake only beginning. Since then, I’ve honed my skills, my planning, and my reflexes. In my world, it only takes one mistake. 

We emerge from a tunnel into the night. There’s a fine mist, making the air damp and chill. My window begins to fog over. Good. Perfect weather for a killing. One day, on a bus (or was it a train or an airplane?), I felt another passenger’s eyes on me. Staring back, I felt a prickling sensation along my arms and around my neck. They were my eyes, looking back at me. When two magnets with the same poles are brought together, their forces repel each other. So it was with us. We are by nature solitary creatures. After disembarking, I never saw him again. But now I knew. I wasn’t alone.  

I feel the weight of eyes watching me again. Her face is cherubic, with golden hair and eyes the color of periwinkles. She looks to be three, at most four. Her expression is full of wonder and inquisitiveness. At the next stop, she and her mother get up to exit. I give her a wink and a grin. She giggles, and her mother gives me a grateful smile. I already have a target. Maybe another night, another train.   

I believe the universe has a purpose for all its creations. Perhaps we’re the apex predators of this planet’s dominant species, and it’s our job to take care of what nature doesn’t want around anymore—its aberrations. There could be a million explanations and rationalizations. Or maybe people should smile more. 

Sometimes, like tonight, I remember the faces, the sounds, even the smells. Looking out my window, I see the cold night for what it is—my domain, the hunter’s realm. I feel the tingle of expectation, the thrill of the act.     

Finally, the train reaches my station. Stepping out into the night’s chill heightens my senses. The shiver I feel isn’t the cold, it’s anticipation. I know the way to my destination, through alleys foul with the smell of stale booze, piss, and vomit. Through an empty lobby with peeling paint and stains on the shabby carpet. Up two flights of stairs to the first room on the right. He has no idea that death is only minutes away.    

Maybe I live far away—or next door. I may be riding this train to your residence at this very moment. What are the odds? Right now, you’re telling yourself that chances are, we’ve never met. And you’re probably right. But an unexplained noise in the dark startles you. You debate whether to investigate or stay in your warm, safe bed. Reason tells you it couldn’t be me. My advice? Pull up the covers and go back to your dreams in blissful ignorance. 

Because if you start looking, you might find me. Now, tell the truth. Are you afraid of monsters?

Coimetromania

Always prepared, always primed, that was Anna. She knew it. Her fiancee Phillip knew it, too. Ready for anything, including what Phillip referred to as their latest “adventure.” Smiling through her 39-year-old perfect teeth, she corrected him. “Sexcapade.”

“Evenfall with crescent moon,” Phillip said with his usual poetic flair as Anna drove the black Wagoneer up to a decrepit gate, chained with an equally decrepit lock. 

He didn’t bother mentioning the gray clouds that populated the sky. He didn’t mention the gravel popping under them. He was too busy listening to Roscoe Holcomb sing Village Churchyard on Spotify. And he was too busy thinking about their plans, things to come.

Anna put the SUV into park. They stared deep into each other’s soul. Both had brown eyes. Both wore black eye makeup. She was his immortal beloved, as he reminded her every day.

Her brunette hair was shoulder-length. She was short and stunning. She was voluptuous, her large breasts supported by a push-up bra when they weren’t in his hands. Her ass was wondrously not small. And all of her was vampishly sexy in Goth attire, from bat earrings and necklace to her scarlet high heels that looked ready to stab, if not kill, to say nothing of a low-cut black dress that would have been perfect for Morticia.

Phillip matched her style that day, the two wanting to dress appropriately for their isolated debauch. His black hair was greying, but it still matched his black shirt and sports jacket, the right lapel adorned with a pewter pin in the shape of a raven. Charcoal trousers, black socks, and black Italian loafers. 

It was time. After getting out of the vehicle, they shared the load: picnic basket, blankets, and a bottle of Freixnet.

Twilight of the sex gods into Valhalla Cemetery. Entry assured, without any key, just by sneaking through a section of falling iron fenceline. Ever the aspiring gentleman, Phillip pushed it open for his true love, his grip befouled by recent dust and ancient corrosion. 

As they stepped onto the overgrown grass, Phillip wiped his hands, not clean, but less dirty. Anna shot him a lewd glance. 

“Heels,” she said, lifting her right foot. He pulled the shoe off, then the same again with her left, no easy task while holding a picnic basket. But it was worth it. Anna would saunter through the boneyard in her bare feet, if only not to trip and fall.

Remembering his Poe, Phillip lifted an eyebrow and said “senescent.”

“Me or the fence?”

“You’re fresh as a daisy, angel.”

“No daisies in here.”

“Angels?”

“Not me.”

“Not for the next hour.”

Anna led Phillip deeper into the remote cemetery, or perhaps it was the other way around. The perfect spot beckoned, even if it was yet to be discovered.

Valhalla opened for business in 1823. Phillip was the researcher. He knew. Anna heard, and she loved it. Location, Middle of Nowhere. Contents, corpses so old they weren’t corpses. Bones, maybe. Dust to dust, certainly. 

Six feet above the aging ash was a grand collection of large tombstones and gravemarkers, some featuring the winged skull so popular in early America. Several leaned. Others had broken into pieces, just like their owners. The cemetery was home to many less-than-monumental monuments.

The most fortunate residents had mausoleums, but that might have made them the least fortunate, certainly in the 21^st century. Roofs collapsed. Walls crumbling. Interiors inhabited by insects, vermin, and the occasional drunk teenagers.

Phillip and Anna inspected the statuary, particularly a shrouded figure, its stone hood hiding its face and its gender. Stained and covered with mold, it was historical, but not necessarily an oracle. The sphinxlike sculpture either saw everything or nothing. There was no in between.

Valhalla’s overgrown weeds were new. Its trees were not. Here was a dank, humid necropolis, wind blowing just enough to accentuate the heat, just enough to indicate limited life among the desolate dead.

And there was that smell, not rancid, not stale, but a fetid mingling, the perfume of putrescence and the cologne of creation, the earthly and the unearthly layered into a grievously erotic aroma. The duo took deep breaths in order to relish it.

After quite a few steps, Anna halted with precision and confidence. Triple-X marked the spot. Dilapidated tombstones. One grave surrounded by its own small, wrought iron fence. To the east, a weeping willow. To the west, a gnarled and twisted tree, its biggest limb shaking unsteadily in the sultry breeze.

Anna lay the blankets on the ground, three of them, overlapping to keep the ants off their soon-to-be naked skin. Phillip opened the picnic basket. Two champagne glasses. He popped the cork. She gripped her smartphone and cranked up their latest favorite album, Bashful Billy’s Late for an Early Grave.

Phillip stuck his hand back into the basket. Three Godiva chocolates for her, each filled with truffle. A bloody rare steak wrapped in foil for him.

She began to eat. He began to read.

Phillip had chosen not Shelley, not Keats, not even Poe. He had printed out something unique, something folded and tucked carefully in his jacket pocket. She devoured the second truffle as he opened the paper.

It was Baudelaire. Phillip recited in his most dignified and seductive voice: “Sweet souls that shrink from chaos vast and etern/Essay the wreaths of their faded Past to entwine/The sunset drowns within its blood-red brine/Thy thought within me glows like an incense urn.”

Anna began to disrobe. “Say it,” she teased.

“Tenebrous,” he cooed.

“Not that one.”

“Obscurantic.”

“Nope.”

“Decayance,” he proclaimed.

Her smile grew, because he had uttered a word of his own invention. His smile grew, because she was completely nude.

Anna had cast her clothes onto the blanket, at least most of them. Her panties fell short. They dropped onto the lawn, a damp spot glimmering in the darksome light.

Phillip never knew where to look when Anna gazed at him obscenely. Her eyes or face. Her breasts or pussy. Or the curves that connected everything into a singular fantasy, one seemingly conjured by an archaic, magicke incantation. 

She looked at her best without clothes, wearing only her eye makeup, lipstick, and a pearl necklace with a handful of red gemstones that dangled downward, as if they were oozing blood. 

Anna licked her lips as she straddled a marble memorial, moving to and fro three or four times, as if she was riding a ghostly horse in slow motion. The grit felt softly hard against her vagina, and even better with Phillip watching. 

“More,” she asked, loving his arcane words.

“Eldritch,” he said, before adding “Cimmerian.”

Her eyelids half-shut with pleasure. He knew she was already close.

“Slumbrous,” he said, taking a pregnant pause before adding “Crepuscule.”

“God, more.”

“Caliginous.”

Anna had never squirted so quickly before. It trickled down the side of the marble, which bore a name, black as any ink: “Unknown.” 

Phillip read that word and offered his own in return: “innominate.”

Taking a deep breath, Anna dismounted. With her circling finger, she signalled Phillip to disrobe. In so doing, he accidentally knocked the champagne bottle over, its bubbles quickly soaking into the soil.

After grabbing the third and final Godiva, Anna seductively consumed it before grabbing Phillip by his hard cock and ushering him to the same marble stone, pushing him against it before kneeling. He could feel her juice on his ass cheeks. She smiled up at him, her teeth speckled by the remains of the chocolate. Then she devoured her next treat.

He could feel her warm, wet mouth, as well as the remains of the last truffle. He was getting “head on a headstone.” He started to laugh, but she interrupted.

With his cock in her mouth, Anna said “more.” It came out as an inarticulate, guttural sound.

Phillip knew what she wanted. He complied, thrusting in and out of her mouth as if he was fucking a rupture into another dimension.

And he spoke, though not much better than she had with her mouth full. “Sonorous horns sound into sepulchers, heard by embers glowing.” 

She removed her mouth to move her jaw. 

“Poe?”

He shook his head “no.”

“You?”

“New poem.”

“You deserve some pussy for that.”

They returned to the blankets. She got on all fours. 

“Heels,” she asked.

Before Phillip snugged them back onto her feet, he had the wild urge to lick a few of her toes. Combined with cemetery dirt, they tasted preternaturally sexy. 

He breathed inward, slowly, his cock leaking jizz. Exhaling, he shoed her.

“Eat me,” she said.

“The steak?”

“And the steak.”

Phillip removed the meat from the foil, holding it in his hands while gnawing away with his canines. Bloody grease dripped down his mouth onto his chin, and down his fingers onto his paws. Three big bites. 

The sound of him ripping into the steak thrilled her. She couldn’t see Phillip, which made him seem all the more ravenous. She listened to him chew and swallow, her titillation soon transforming into impatience. 

“Eat me,” she ordered. “Now.”

Phillip tossed the rest of the steak onto the grass and grabbed her ass with his ruddy hands. He licked her from stem to stern. They often fought gently over who loved it more, his tongue slithering up and down her crack, from one hole to another. 

But he stopped abruptly. 

“More,” she moaned, wiggling her ass.

“Thought I heard something.”

“Me saying more.”

“Before that.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t know.”
“People?”

“No.”

“Tell me something, quick,” she said while touching her clitoris. 

“Ebon shades gather,” he said.

“And?”

“And I want to fucking eat you.”

Phillip smashed his face in between her cheeks, oblivious to the fact he really had heard something, if not some things, now unvaulted.

He munched. He flicked his tongue. He lapped and lapped, until another enigmatic noise distracted him. That prompted Anna’s next move.

“Do me slow,” she said, rolling over and looking up at him.

Phillip understood that slow meant glacially slow, except for the temperature part. Creeping pace and torrid heat.

“Siegfried,” she said, grinning. That was her name for his cock.

The two as one, locking eyes, before synchronously closing their lids, like a vampire movie when it fades to black.

Phillip and Anna remained in the cemetery, but now it was in them. In them as much as it was around them. They were encrypted and outcrypted on Valhallowed ground. 

“Speak it,” she said.

“Elegiac.”

“More.”

“Encrimsoned.”

“Oh, yeah, baby.”

“Triumvirate.”

Neither of them understood why he chose that word, but both of them simultaneously did, in this elseplace that allowed them entrance. 

Light rain fell, landing rhythmically on their bodies. Fingertips from the river Styx or from river nymphs. It didn’t matter. The lovers succumbed without hesitation. Bashful Billy was singing about “vast waves eternal.”

Phillip moved in and out of Anna as she held him. 

Her nipple was pinched so hard as to not be hard enough. It was not his hand. A crow soon cawed above them.

Something scratched Phillip’s back, so deep as to be like getting finger-fucked, but it wasn’t a fingernail. More like the tip of a rusty coffin nail.

He saw through the eyes of dead romantics, staring at long-gone women who passed through the past back to the present in the form of Anna, his truest of loves.

She envisioned men of different eras, gentlemen of the nineteenth century, goth rockers of the twenty-first, all embodied in Phillip, her cherished partner.

They heard the howl of wind. They heard something else. Not a person, but something that sounded pleasurable, something that sounded like it was being pleasured. That which festered now flourished.

No questions. Anna and Phillip wanted more, needed more, so much more of memento mori. Their mouths agape, dirt lightly coated their tongues. It tasted good. And nasty. They French kissed, sharing the flavor.

Warm stone seemed to move against their bodies, its shape reminiscent of a statue’s hand. The lifeforce of the dead. The hereafter was after her, or at least something was. Interred and instirred. Inhumation and exhumation. 

At times the presence definitely seemed male. At times female, being flowers, not of evil, but of mournful and joyful neverending remembrance. Bashful Billy promised, “This night is going to live forever.”

The stone hand went from monolith to monolilith, lavishing attention on Phillip. Anna felt sweet stings on her butt, as if from snake bites.

The funereal was fun and real, so it seemed, so it was, even if it wasn’t. Wreaths of a faded past had perchance grown vibrant again.

The sordid scene intensified. Weeds encircled Anna’s wrists, holding her arms down. She was uprooted by a root, as if being doubly penetrated, Phillip in her pussy, and something beautifully rough in her ass. She had wanted it. Now she had it, in all of its bubbly and somber glory.

Droplets like hot wax spattered on both of them, his back, her nipples. Anna imagined that it was molten wrought iron. She was probably right. 

Bashful Billy sang Beyond the Vale. Wind gusted, blowing everything and everyone. The weeping willow no longer wept. Where once there was wither now was strength, rigid and unyielding. 

Thunder clapped, as much with applause as with fury. Lighting cracked, striking the big limb on the gnarled tree.

Those present simultaneously orgasmed. The ground shook. Everyone shook. Had he been able to speak, Phillip would have said “effluence.” 

The tree limb fell downwards, hitting the ground. Phillip and Anna opened their eyes. Catacombed, marked by markers, they realized that an unfathomable third party had taken part in their party. Anna had not planned for it. Neither of them had. But it happened. 

When they stood up, their bodies were deliciously weak, their genitalia moist. After dressing, they packed their belongings. Once again, he carried her heels as they returned to and through the sloping fence.

“Coimetromania,” Phillip said.

“Your’s?”

“Webster’s.”

“And?”

“Abnormal and strong desire to visit cemeteries.”

Anna started the Wagoneer. Phillip thought about playing Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, but the ground hadn’t been cold. So he chose Götterdämmerung.

As they bounded down the gravel road, bits of stone sputtering under them, the cemetery became ever the more distant. Without speaking, the lovers agreed to return. They needed to. They had to. Fornicari in pace.

Christmas Comes Early For Santa

Santa stares at himself in his bathroom mirror, jowls hanging low and heavy, his hangover written all over his sad clown face. Sad Clown Nimrod, the drunken king of being drunk, the joke of the North Pole. Mrs. Claus has finally after many long and frustrating years petitioned the court to have their sham of a marriage dissolved. A sham, a shame.

Santa watches violent reindeer porn and jerks off. When he completes there is sweat between his rolls of fat. He doesn’t feel like crying but he is crying. His doctor has warned him. You need to lose weight, you’re not a healthy man. You need to avoid stress.

The elves are not virgins. There are brothels at the North Pole, it’s a dirty business. The elves who can’t cut it in the workshop still need to make a living, someway, somehow. Santa is too high profile to go to a brothel. How could he look a low-productivity elf in the eye and threaten him with a year at the bottom of the well if he saw him the night before at the whorehouse?

Santa is not really their boss. Nominally he is but they enforce their own frontier-justice if things go too far, and they always do. “Go too far.” Santa grunts to himself in front of the mirror, watching his swollen lips moving, a pair of pallid slugs. “On Blixen. On Trollop. On Slattern and Floozy.” The elves, continuously involved in an endless series of blood-feuds. It’s the old story, no one can remember what started it all off, and just when it seems like it’s finally over it flares up again, the screams of children in the night as homes burn in the permafrost.

There’s an old joke: “The North Pole, where the elves are ugly and the reindeer wear rape whistles.” The brutality of the world is conveyed through short declarative sentences. The truth is Santa doesn’t use reindeer to pull his sled anymore. His health problems prevent him from personally delivering presents. The job has been contracted and sub-contracted so many times that Santa has no idea how the presents get under the tree anymore. He’s not the only one to notice this, there’s grumbling around the elf union hall.

Santa Claus goes ice-fishing. He enjoys the companionable solitude of the other ice-fishers visible across the terminal flatness of the lake, huddled besides their dark circles where the line of continuity from water to ice to air blurs. The fishing line collects tiny shards of ice, plucking them right out of the air along its length. Soon it is encrusted in icy fuzz. He warms himself out of an old flask. Who gave him this flask anyhow? It has his initial on it: SJC. The booze in the North Pole is made from fermented snowberries mixed with carefully rotted seal blubber. It’s an acquired taste.

The night sky shines colors, but everyone at the North Pole is used to it. Hawaiians don’t freak out over every sunset the way tourists do, Pisans can’t get excited that their tower is leaning, and elves don’t care that much about the northern lights. Aurora bores they sneer, those little shits. They are hardened, opaque, they are not crystals capable of transmitting light. At best a clouded quartz. 

The eternal night of the wintry North Pole lures in no tourists. Santa would like to do some traveling himself someday. But he’s confused about his finances. These details are taken care of by a comptroller, a squat little gnome who Santa is afraid of. He and his executive team do almost all of the day to day management, not just of the gift operation, but of Santa himself. When he last brought up the idea of a vacation the comptroller gave him a stare. He’ll ask again next year.

Santa waits and waits for a bite. Taking little swigs of blubber-rum every few minutes. Across the ice field is some other redundant version of himself, mild and uncomplaining, filtered out of the thing he created by the simple economics of the new efficiencies: Automation. Decentralization. Logistics. Supply lines in squiggles and loops unfathomable. When he wiggles his line it sets quick darting concentric circles reverberating out to the edge of the imperfect circle he has carved out of the ice. For some reason they don’t ripple back. For bait he uses chunks of smoked reindeer. He chokes down a slug from the flask. It feels like it warms him a little less each time. He chokes down another. Wiggles the line again. Forgets what he’s even doing here, what manner of fish he hopes to catch, what he would do if he did catch one. Chokes down another slug, snorts and shakes his head. There’s a heavy vagueness to it all, and he lets his eyes close.

Time passes in this way and each time he starts awake it’s with a gasp of cold. The shiver of the stars in the sky tremulous and distant, but lending their sympathy to him anyhow. That’s ice in my beard he tells himself, but it feels remote, as if he’s telling someone else. He knows if he lets this go on too long he may get frostbite. Mrs. Claus isn’t around anymore to send someone to find him if he doesn’t make it home for dinner, to stare at him with that admixture of longing and contempt. He thinks about that expression, wonders if he misses it as he slowly freezes to death atop a fishless, unnamed lake. No one misses him for a week.

A Perfect Fit

Still sore because Master Kurt had fucked me hard that morning, I drove with him to the pet store. It was a Monday when I didn’t have classes and I was nervous about going because a few students worked there part time. But what would they see? Their professor with a male friend in military fatigues, bomber jacket and boots, somewhat gruff, not anyone they’d automatically connect with me. Certainly, they wouldn’t begin to imagine my secret enslavement, my craving for master’s cock. Nor would they conceive of the butt plug securely lodged in my ass. 

And the plan was to buy a choke collar. We found our way to the back between glass-fronted pet cages, one side for dogs, the other for cats, etc. At the end of the glass wall rose a rack of leashes and collars, suitable for all sizes of dog. Kurt started fingering the choke collars when a voice behind us asked if we needed help. I turned and blushed to the roots of my hair. It was indeed one of my students, Alaric, a somewhat shy, tall and slender lad with freckles across his nose and thick wavy auburn hair and green eyes. I have always fancied opening my legs for him, if I were free to do so.

“Hey, hi there, ma’am!” 

“Alaric? Don’t you have a class this morning?”

“Nope, no class until two, so I’m good. What are you looking for, ma’am. Can I help?”

“I’m with my friend here and he’s looking for …”

Kurt then blurted out.

“I need a choke collar for my dog, one it will feel when I yank it during training sessions, large enough to fit and around…say, her neck but not so large to slip off her head. I want heavier links. These seem too small.”

“Ah, you’re together then?” Alaric asked, staring Kurt up and down, clearly impressed by the soldier’s muscular body. And again, I blushed.

The thing is, Alaric sat in the front row in my class, his legs spread, a prominent crotch, fingers poised suggestively above it, watching me, pretty daring for a shy kind of guy, but I suspected he had fuck fantasies about me. To be truthful, I also glanced at his bulging groin. A shy student isn’t necessarily weak, and he can be a dominant fucker in his private life, powerful in many ways. I wasn’t entirely sure about Alaric who did give hints of what he liked in the real world, wearing scuffed construction boots that always attracted my attention, and stopping by my office, more than was necessary.

And I had encouraged him to speak and enjoyed how he sat, legs spread wide, a faint flush on his handsome cheeks. If he was inclined to tell a friend that he met me in the pet store, all he could say was that I was with a soldier friend looking to buy a dog collar. He couldn’t speak about anything else, aside from Kurt’s muscles, nor could he even imagine that I was the soldier’s slave, I tried to convince myself, my butt cheeks clenching the butt plug. Or, maybe he could, maybe I wanted him to imagine possibilities.

“Well, let’s see. Here’s an 18 incher,” and Alaric grabbed the chain off the rack and held it up.

“Looks small.”

“What kind of dog is it?”

“A mongrel, like a combination terrier and poodle, a fucking frisky, disobedient bitch. 

Alaric seemed taken aback by the language, as presumably customers didn’t ordinarily talk that way.

“And it needs a lot of discipline and training to behave properly and so I want a choke collar for sure. Fuck it’s hot in here,” and Kurt removed his jacket to reveal his torso in a khaki t-shirt and biceps and hard pecs, which I noticed practically made Alaric’s eyes pop out. I remembered how good it felt to wrap my legs around my master’s waist. 

“It would help if we knew the neck size,” Alaric said, a quaver in his voice, and out of the blue added:

“Are you a soldier by any chance, sir?”

“You bet, buddy. Can’t you tell by my dog tags? Why? You like soldiers?”

Alaric giggled and didn’t know where to look.

“So, you’re my professor’s friend …”

“Yeah, fucking right, we’re great friends, ain’t we, bitch? She likes soldiers, too.”

I blushed and noticed that Alaric also blushed when he heard Kurt call me bitch, as if Kurt had struck a chord or recognized some kind of affinity. Alaric smiled strangely at me. He had no idea who the “dog” was. Or did he?

“We might have longer choke collars in the stock room. Let me check.”

“Why don’t we come with you to save the return trip?”

Alaric hesitated. I kept my eyes to the floor.

“Customers aren’t permitted in the stock room, sir.”

“You can’t make an exception for Miranda here and her soldier friend?”

“It will only take a minute, if you’d wait here.”

“Is your boss around?”

“He doesn’t come in Monday morning until noon. Only the lady at the cash.”

And then Kurt placed his hand around the back of my neck and chuckled.

“Well, I hope you have a collar big enough to go around your professor’s neck.”

At that I raised my eyes to look at Alaric who reddened deeply, the smile wiped off his face, but a fierce light of recognition sparked in his eyes.

“Her neck is just the size of my dog. We can try the choke collar on her. How about it, buddy?”

He removed his hand from my neck and gently punched Alaric in the arm as if they, too, were buddies. Alaric paused and looked Kurt in the face, and then whispered as if he was doing something illegal but wanted to because he could get away with it. 

“Okay, if we’re quick. This way.”

And we followed him to a curtained door that led to the stock room. We stayed near the entrance while Alaric rummaged about the shelves and supplies looking for a longer collar. Kurt winked at me. Alaric returned with a thick, silver chain link choke collar, the longest he had in stock.

“Now we can try it out on Miranda’s neck,” Kurt said. “You do it, buddy.”

Without a word Alaric wrapped the chain around my neck and looped it the way you’re supposed to get choke collar properly connected, one portion of it hanging loose for several inches. I could tell by his eyes that he was enjoying the scenario. I could smell his peppermint scented breath. Then, emboldened by Kurt and my willingness to be used, he grabbed the dangling end and pulled to tighten the chain around my neck. I winced. 

“This looks good on you…. Hündin,” Alaric joked, his face glowing from the audacity of calling me a female dog.

“So, you think the chain would suit your dog, sir?” He yanked the chain again just for the hell of it to give me a little jolt, and the links pinched my skin.

“How does that feel? A dog would notice and obey.” 

He was having fun, I could tell. I was feeling deeply humiliated, and my student was getting excited by it. But that was Kurt’s purpose. And something else was beginning to bubble up in my consciousness. The humiliation was arousing and natural, especially intense because I was a professor being collared by a student. My juices were flowing. I didn’t protest. And I had long fantasized about Alaric fucking me on my desk with his exceptional cock, which in my experience tall and thin guys often had. 

“It’s an excellent collar for training purposes,” Alaric added, “don’t you agree, sir? Suitable for… for your dog? Do you like it?” This time he was directing his questions to me.

“If it fits her neck, will it fit your dog, sir?” He directed that question to Kurt who was enjoying himself.

“Oh, I think you’ve shown that it fits very well. Good choice of chain, buddy. Perfect. How about a suitable leash?”

“I’ll look for one now.”

He returned with a long black leather leash with a locked S hook designed to fit into a link of the choke collar. He attached it and then held the leash firm and tightened the collar. He himself was beginning to feel hot, I could tell by the heat in his face and the look in his eyes. There was a very evident bulge in his crotch. He wrapped the leash around his fist as if he didn’t want to let go and tightened the choke collar. My sense of humiliation deepened, but it also included sensations of exquisite pleasure as I drifted into the exhilarating subspace I fell into when dominated, drifting and obeying the demands of belt, boots, cock, cum, piss, flogger, whatever master decided, drifting like a beautiful canoe following the force of a strong current. 

I was bending to Alaric’s will. My student!! He could have kept me collared and leashed all day and I would have reveled in the humiliation, but of course I fought against temptation in order to keep my private self and submission to Kurt a secret. Kurt, however, knew everything about my fantasies about some of my students, for it is axiomatic that a submissive tell her dominant everything, including her secret, wildest fantasies and desires so the master understands and uses what he can for mutual exploration and satisfaction. Kurt flexed an arm, bulging a bicep, saying something about a cramp, only an excuse, for the action riveted Alaric’s attention and he let go of the leash. 

“Collar and leash are perfect, buddy.”

“I think so, too. Maybe we should try some other kinds of dog collars on her.”

Alaric then took a great and daring personal risk, obviously impelled by his own feelings.

“I guess you work out a lot, sir.” It looked like he wanted to touch Kurt’s bicep.

“Gotta keep fit buddy. What with being a soldier and all. Maybe you should come to my place one day and we’ll work out together. I’ve got equipment at home. We could spot one another on my bench. The bitch can watch. You work out?”

“I’m trying to…” and then, as if he realized that we were still in the back room and he had me collared, and I was secretly panting for his cock. Alaric flustered a bit, unhooked the leashed and removed the choke collar, his eyes all the while on Kurt and a sly smile directed at me.

While I was paying for the purchases, Alaric carried on a private conversation with Kurt. Kurt may have been playing with innuendos, but I knew he wouldn’t tell Alaric anything about us, at least not yet, however much he dropped hints and pushed the envelope to amuse himself with my humiliation and discomfort and Alaric’s evident arousal. Before we left the store, Alaric said that he wanted to have a private meeting with me, if that was okay and, as if inspired by the dog collar, he spoke so my master would hear.

“I’d like you do something, if you let me.”

“Oh, she will let you do what you want, buddy,” Kurt said, “she’s perfect that way.”

“I believe she is, I believe she’ll let me do what I want,” Alaric agreed, and, emboldened by Kurt’s use of the word, whispered in my ear, “won’t you, Fotze? And again, my face burned with pleasurable humiliation and still some lingering anxiety about exposure, and I almost melted before Alaric when he called me a cunt. Grasping at a straw, I was relieved that at least, Kurt hadn’t called me a cock sucking cumslut in Alaric’s presence, not then, not at that moment in the store.

Holiday Lights

Candice served peppermint schnapps on the boat with extra schnapps. On paper, she wasn’t supposed to, not for the Holiday Lights Cruise. It was approaching midnight on the Merry Way, a triple decker yacht, and no other boats cruised along the river. With the weather turning freezing, the last thing she wanted was any guests on the cruise complaining about how cold they were. The cruise would run up and down the river in town, and people could look up at all the Christmas lights on the mansions that loomed over the cliffs. She served peppermint patty after peppermint patty, loaded them up with extra marshmallows and whipped cream and sugar to keep everyone feeling all warm and Christmasy on the inside. Keep them all drunk and warm and leaning on the rails to marvel at the pretty lights, how the greens and reds and blues dance between the snowflakes to the tunes of a few good men playing violin.

Honestly, who cared if anyone ended up overboard? Would anyone miss another drowned papermill owner, or banker, or newspaper editor? Last Christmas, when Candice was working the bar, she’d seen a woman drop a necklace overboard, and she fell into hysterics. She jumped overboard to recover the necklace, this woman. They pulled her up, already dead. She’d been dragged under the hull. At below freezing temperatures, sudden drops in the water like that can cause a heart attack. 

A coworker had joked, “For real, this ship is haunted. Every hecking year, someone dies, I swear to god.” Candice didn’t buy it, even though later that night, a couple of gentlemen got in a drunken fight, and one pulled a gun and shot the other. The shooter got locked up in one of the cabins with his victim, and people just drank and partied while the cruise completed its route. Candice poured heavier drinks that night, and people tipped same as usual. Nothing, not nothing at all, will keep these rich people from partying.

Later that night, her coworker said, “It’s because years ago, years and years, back when this liner first started, there was another ship, the Finer Spirit. One night, around the holidays, it was doing one of those night cruises. Back then, it was like, prohibition era or something, and this was like a speakeasy cruiser. So everyone drank extra hard, even the captain.

“Well, that night, there must have been something wrong with the boat. Like a leak or something. All night that boat cruised around in the dark. Except the thing is, the boat was slowly sinking, and hardly anyone knew. With it all dark outside, hardly anyone could tell they were getting closer to the water. Then the thing capsized. Ever since then, people who live along the river say that around the holidays, they hear jazz music. That sometimes at night, they look out on the river and see lights in the water.”

Meanwhile Candice split out the tips between them and said, “You know we get tipped the same even if someone dies?” 

Tobacco smoke clouded the dining area. The doors in the boat kept opening and closing with people drifting in and out of the dining area like spirits. Gusts of snow and the violin sounds followed people inside. Candice didn’t have a coat. Not even a suit jacket. Ship policy said she wears a white dress shirt, a bowtie, and suspenders. 

She kept her own mug of peppermint patty hidden behind the bar, and sipped that to keep warm.

A man approached the bar, his skin practically blue, with snow and frost clinging to his coat and beard. He looked like an old captain, like a Captain Ahab type. His teeth chattered and he leaned against the bar. He said, “Please, liquor. Something, anything.”

Even his breath was cold. 

Candice poured cocoa from a fresh carafe, and then added two shots of schnapps. A great cloud of steam rose from the cup, and the tips of her fingers burned when she put the cup down in front of the man.

“Be careful,” she said, “That’s fresh cocoa. It’s super hot.”

The man put the cup to his lips and gulped it all down in a single swig. Cocoa dripped from the hair on his lips, still scalding, still steaming. The man said, “Another.” He reached into his pocket and put coins on the counter. Quarters and dimes.

Candice picked them up, and they were wet, ice cold. The coins were all dated from fourty, fifty years ago at least. “What’s the name on your tab, sir?” These rich bastards always skimped on tips, even during the holidays. 

“Engstrom, captain,” the man said.

There was no Engstrom on the guest list, not that Candice cared. Just another man stupid drunk on the holidays. The door to the dining area opened again, and Candice, to fight the cold wind that blew through, took another drink of her peppermint patty. She still felt cold, colder than she’d been all night. 

She took the man’s cup and poured more cocoa. A little splashed on her hand, and it burned. “Shit!” she said, taking a rag and wiping the liquid off. A bright pink continent shined on her skin where the cocoa fell. It stung and she picked an ice cube out of the nearby ice maker to take the heat off.

Another voice behind her said, “Excuse me darling, can I trouble you for a drink? It’s dreadfully freezing out there.” 

“Just one second,” Candice said. She rubbed the ice cube along her burn, and could tell already it was going to blister. This must have been one of the ways the cruise line came up with to slow down people’s drinking. By making the cocoa so hot people had to take it outside and wait for it to cool before they could drink.

Candice turned back to the bar, and standing next to the old man was a woman in a dripping white dress. Icicles hung from her hair. Behind this woman, a path of wet foot prints led to the door. Guests stepped around them, and they briefly stopped to look at the girl, before resuming their smoking and their looking outside. 

Candice looked over the bar, and the woman was barefoot.

“Excuse me, miss, but our policy says you have to wear shoes at the bar,” Candice said. She didn’t even know if that was true, but at not one, not a single bar she ever worked at, did she serve a shoeless person.

“Oh dear, I must have lost them out on the deck,” the woman said. Her hands reached for her own neck and touched a gold necklace, glittering with diamonds so big and gaudy they must have been costume. 

Someone else came in, soaking wet, covered in ice and ordered a peppermint patty. This one dressed like a flapper girl, her short hair frozen stiff.

Was there some sort of costume party themed ice plunge that Candice didn’t know about? More people came in, one bearing a dripping violin. Candice poured, drink after drink, the cocoa from the carafe still steaming. She went through a bottle of schnapps, and called the back for more cocoa. With each serving, she said, “Be really careful, this stuff will burn you.”

Each customer gulped the cocoa down like it was a shot. When asked what name was on their tab, they gave names like Westchester and McAdams, all names that were streets, or were on the sides of buildings.

None of these names were on Candice’s tab list. There were no cards on file for these people. But whatever. There were other bars on the ship, two per deck. Candice could make it through a night only seeing a patron once, and still have to cut them off for drunk conduct. People would end up overboard, and Candice and her coworkers would have to clarify from which deck someone jumped, because someone else had a jumper that night as well. 

A man approached the bar with his hand held over his stomach. He limped between people, his skin pale and sickly. He said, “Can I just get a beer maybe?” He removed his hand from his stomach, revealing a gaping red bullet wound.

“Holy shit, sir. You’re hurt! Stay where you are, I’ll find somebody,” Candice said.

She bolted from behind the bar, yelling, “Somebody? Hello! We’ve got an emergency! Someone’s hurt.” 

But all the patrons on the ship stood frozen still, looking out the windows, as though Candice weren’t even there. She ran up to them, yelling, “Is anyone here a doctor?”

They all stared ahead, out the windows.

Candice went outside on the deck, yelling, “Come on! We got a guy who is losing a lot of blood.” The cold cut through her clothes instantly. It was quiet outside. The sound of people talking, and music playing had gone completely. Everyone stared at the same direction.

Candice grabbed someone by the arm. “What the fuck is the matter with you people?”

The man didn’t respond. His mouth hung slack, and a pale green light shifted on the surface of his skin.

Candice looked out where the man looked. A green light drifted in the river. There was nothing above the surface in the water that caused that light. It seemed to glow from beneath. Faintly, drums and horns played from its direction.

A cold hand clasped Candice’s shoulder. A voice said, “I need another cocoa drink.”

Candice turned around, and there stood the old man with the peacoat, talking close enough his breath froze against her face. His eyes were blackened, his skin blue. He opened his mouth, exposing blackened gums. “I’m so cold,” he said.

Behind him stood the man with the bleeding stomach. “I never got my beer.”

And then the woman with bare feet. She stood outside in that small white dress. “Have you seen my shoes out here, dear? I just took them off to get my necklace.”

Hands came over the ledge of the deck, and people dressed in fine fur coats, tuxedos with long tailcoats pulled themselves onto the ship.

The old man said, “This is your captain speaking. We are reaching max capacity on the Finer Spirit. We may have to make some room.” To Candice, Captain Engstrom said, “Now please, could you go and pour me something warm?”

Candice shivered. She nodded, and walked back into the bar area.

The cold and drowned started shoving the patrons off the ship. The people did not resist, did not notice the frozen hands grasping them. They stood hypnotized by the holiday lights they had come to see. Candice poured peppermint patties into each mug, and refilled the carafes as fast as she could. She lined the bar with steaming mugs with whip cream and extra marshmallows. She watched as people dropped into the icy waters silent as the night, until that faraway jazz finally stopped.

Roger That

Jonah sat at the usual table in the corporate cafeteria with his work buddies. It was lunch hour in the drab hall. He took a bite of his turkey sandwich that his wife, Meredith, had made him in the morning. Good old Mare, he thought, as he chomped on an over-mayonnaised wedge. Jonah’s friends were a bunch of naughty goobers who dissolutely talked about T & A like it was the only thing that ever mattered.

“What would life be without tits and ass?” one of them, a rather handsome bloke named Phil who often bragged about getting laid, was saying as he scrolled on his phone for sexy pictures of women. Phil came across a photo that he apparently liked, and he peered closely at it. “Now that is one gorgeous redhead, gentlemen,” he commented.

“Ha, they’re either extremely hot or butt fucking ugly, right!” one of them blurted out. A bunch of obnoxious snorts and chortles ensued.

“Hey, I’m a redhead,” said Pat, who didn’t find it all that hilarious.

“Yeah, and we all know which category you fall under, too!” someone remarked, for additional snorts and chortles.

Phil showed the men gathered at the table the photo of the woman on his phone. She wore red fishnet stockings and was lying on shiny, emerald green bedsheets. Her matching green eyes stared back into the soul. She was impeccably fair-skinned and large breasted with hard, fat nipples. The woman had a thick, V-shaped fur of red pubic hair above her pussy.

“New girlfriend, Phil?” one the guys asked, aching to crack up laughing again.

“I wish,” Phil replied. “Internet.”

“Hey, send that photo to me, if you don’t mind?” Jonah asked. “I found this AI app yesterday that makes short videos out of nudie pics. That’ll be perfect!”

Phil sent Jonah the picture of the woman, and within a couple of minutes Jonah held up his phone to the group of horny guys. “Holy shit!” one of them remarked.

“That’s fucking wild, man,” said another.

“Yeah, it’s kind of making me hard,” added Phil. “What kind of strange voodoo is this, Prince?”

“Hot, right?” declared Jonah. The photo of the naked redhead had come to life on screen, as Jonah had said it would. She was suddenly in a video being groped by an impressive male specimen. Think someone who might’ve auditioned for Magic Mike and gotten the part in another universe. His body was like a champion bodybuilder with huge, veiny arms and legs. He also had a chiseled jawline, neat black hair, and a well-trimmed beard.

“Who the fuck is that douche?” asked one of them.

“Gents, this lucky guy’s name is Roger,” replied Jonah. “It’s actually the name of the app: Roger That, it’s called. Pretty funny, huh? Real cutting-edge AI shit. All you do is upload the photo, hit the button, and old Roger here shows up in his skivvies and plays with their tits. And somehow the women are made to look like they love it!”

“Can he fuck her?” one of them asked.

“Sure,” Jonah replied. “Well, not yet. They say that update ought to happen soon. But for now, you can watch Roger fondle the breasts of anyone you have a picture of. Easy peasy.”

“You’re an idiot,” said Pat. “That’s fucking dumb.”

“Hey, don’t talk to your supervisor that way,” Jonah snapped. “Or I’ll fire you for insubordination!”

After a second, the men erupted in laughter again. Jonah was well-documented for making empty threats toward his workmates.

“I don’t know, Pat. It’s kinda hot,” said Phil, taking another look at the video of Roger groping the redheaded object of his affection. “Jesus, Jonah, how do you get any work done?”

Jonah smirked. “Eh, it’s been tough. I’ve been putting in pics of my wife and watching him feel her up.”

“Hey, Jonah, if that gets you off, you should probably talk to Mare about becoming a hotwife,” one of them remarked.

“No shot,” said Jonah. “We laid out boundaries when we were dating. Mare doesn’t even feel comfortable with porn in the bedroom.”

“That’s a crying shame,” said Phil, before a devilish grin appeared on his face. “I’d fuck your wife, bud,” he winked, “but only if she asked nicely.”

“No doubt,” chimed another friend. “We could all take turns, right guys? While old Jonah here watches us from the hotel cuck chair, of course.”

Realizing he’d bitten off more than he could chew by revealing his latest jerk-off apparatus with his buddies, Jonah decided to dial it back. “Alright, fuck off,” he said. “No one is boning my wife but me, guys. Sorry if that’s a bummer.”

Since Jonah was the manager of his branch, his office was sequestered in its own, private corner, tucked away from his coworkers. Sometime after their lunch break had ended, Jonah began feeling haunted by the idea of his wife being fucked by other men, with or without his consent. It made him nervous, but it gave him an undeniable hard-on.

Now alone, he opened the “Roger That” app at his desk, uploaded another sexy photo of his wife, and watched as Roger felt her up, as well as her subsequent, blissful reaction. That was the truly witchy thing about it. Jonah couldn’t remember the last time Mare had showed him that look of pure, raw ecstasy when he touched her. This was some app, he thought. Real magic.

Reclining on his office couch, his mind began to wander. He thought about how great it would be to actually trade places with Roger, the buff AI guy in the app who gets to play with random tits all day long. Roger never had to show up at the office. Roger never had to wear a shirt. Roger only ever wore skimpy boxer briefs, which accentuated his meaty prick. And Roger automatically sent any woman he touched through the roof with pleasure. Jonah was insanely jealous of him.

“Man, I fucking envy your setup, Roger,” Jonah said to himself. “What I wouldn’t give to have your life…”

Soon Jonah found himself drifting off into a fitful sleep.

As if in a dream, he found himself standing before a beautiful woman. For the moment, the brunette sat completely still. Her tight butt rested at the foot of a king-size bed in a low-lit, tidy bedroom. She was fit, sporting a bob cut, and wearing black lace panties with a matching open-cup bra, which lifted her bare breasts so that her nipples pointed slightly upward. Her head was tilted to one side, and her chin rested softly in her right hand, as if she’d been posing for a photo.

Feeling suddenly embarrassed, Jonah tried to turn away, but somehow he felt compelled to go to her instead. Draping his bulging arms across over her shoulders, he fondled her breasts while she came for him, hard as fuck.

Jonah’s mind, for lack of scientific terms, had turned to mush. He couldn’t remember anything. Before he knew it, he was being carted from one woman to the next. He never thought to ask any of them for their names. What was the point? His orders were always the same: “Go to the woman, drape your bulging arms across her chest or over her shoulders, and fondle her breasts while she cums for you, hard as fuck.”

That’s what Jonah did now, over and over. For five seconds, he touched and squeezed a vast array of anonymous breasts. All day and night, Jonah was summoned to a woman, perhaps sitting in a bedroom, or in a jungle, or on a beach, near a swimming pool, beneath a waterfall, the office, a kitchen, a hot tub, library, backyard BBQ, etc. Once, he showed up at the top of the Eiffel Tower for a French exhibitionist, and once, he rubbed some heavy, Egyptian tits right in front of the Great Pyramid. Sometimes, Jonah was ordered to repeat the same move for the same gal in the same scene many times in a row. It was never a bother because he never got tired.

This all carried on in blissful peace for some time. Then, Jonah got the order to appear before a particular blonde woman, and something terribly strange happened. He sort of recognized her. She was lying completely nude on a white, leather sofa. She looked like she’d just gotten absolutely railed. He even recognized the couch. Maybe he’d gotten stoned on that couch several times before. The problem was that he hadn’t thought of anything else but squeezing tits for as far back as he could remember.

Weeks earlier, the doctors had informed Mare that her husband had suffered severe amnesia after being found unresponsive in his office. For some reason they couldn’t quite explain, he now believed his name to be Roger Meatstick. Meredith, just thankful he was alive, allowed Jonah to be called Roger from now on. The “Meatstick” surname, however, she had outright refused to acknowledge.

Soon, Jonah’s wife and coworkers noticed that “Roger” was very different from their former acquaintance. “Roger” was full of outstanding knowledge about an array of things. On day one, he implemented changes at the office that not only sent sales through the roof, but improved company morale tenfold. Somehow, the new Jonah could speak fluently in almost every human language and even recite Shakespeare in Greek.

And although Roger could explain the act of sex to someone as though he wrote the book, Mare found that she didn’t appreciate the quirky, fetishy bullshit that he could now explain to her in great detail, instead of simply fucking her goodnight. Not to mention, Roger didn’t understand why Mare didn’t want him to feel her up every time she was near him. It was all pretty scary to her. She suspected that Jonah, the sweet, loving goofball who’d once been her husband, was simply no longer in there.

“Phil, oh my God!” Mare exclaimed over the phone to Roger’s workmate. She was pretty worked up. “I just don’t know what to do with him!”

“Just calm down,” Phil replied. “I’m here. You know you can tell me anything.”

“It’s so hard to stay calm, Phil. It’s Jonah—or Roger, or whoever the hell he thinks he is. The other day, I asked him if he remembered the first night, you know, that we hooked up back in college. He couldn’t. Said he never went to college. Then, I asked him how he knows all the things he suddenly knows about life, philosophy, and—fucking Greek? How is this possible?”

Phil couldn’t help but laugh at that.

“Oh, Phil, it’s not even funny—and sex, Phil! He knows things about sex that we never even discussed before! Stuff I hate to even say out loud.”

“You can tell me, Mare. This is a safe space.”

“Alright, like group sex—and anal, and BDSM or whatever it’s called. And now I think he’s been living this whole other life behind my back or something, Phil! But can I tell you? He won’t have sex with me. He just wants to rub my boobs!”

“Interesting,” replied Phil. He paused.

“What?”

“It’s just that, lately, he’s been really grabby with everyone at the office, too. Pat has had to stop him from groping Linda at the cafeteria, twice.”

“What the fuck, Phil?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, in your case, I can see the attraction, Mare.”

“Phil!” she exclaimed.

“What, Mare? You’re sexy and you know it.” Phil sang it like the LMFAO song.

She stopped. “Thanks, Phil. You want to know the weirdest thing?”

“You know I do,” he smirked.

“When he goes in for my breasts and I don’t go all gaga for it, he gets extremely confused. And then he turns away like he’s lost interest in me all of a sudden. Then, I get so emotional after it happens, and he doesn’t seem to understand. Please, Phil, make it make sense!”

“Well, Mare, at least he’s, you know, taking care of his body again.” No one had failed to notice that the new Jonah was immediately back in the gym. His arm muscles had even begun to swell, and he was rapidly losing the pudge in his gut that he’d always proudly carried around.

“Believe me, Phil, I’m happy that Jonah—I mean Roger—I mean—that he’s suddenly decided to care more about his fitness, but it’s like he’s a totally new—” she stammered. “He’s become a—a fucking freak, Phil! I don’t know if I can take it any longer!” Here, poor Mare trailed off into sobs.

“Okay, Mare, I hear you,” said Phil. “What can I do? Do you want to maybe hang out? You up for grabbing dinner tomorrow?”

“Oh, Phil, that would mean a lot,” Mare replied. She was wearing a tiny, white T-shirt and hot pink boyshorts and was sitting on the toilet seat, leaning over the sink with the bathroom door locked. She grabbed a blonde tuft of hair that hung in her face, nervously twirling it between her fingers. “I could really use someone right now, Phil.”

The next night after having dinner together, Mare decided to follow Phil back to his downtown apartment and join him for a glass of wine.

“No harm in a little nightcap,” she thought.

“I’m so happy you reached out,” Phil said while pouring Mare’s wine. “I mean it. I know how hard it must be to feel like you’ve lost him. The guys—they kind of like the new Jonah, but I have to wonder some days. Is this even the same man?”

“It’s not the same man, trust me,” replied Mare.

“Well, one thing is certain. I’m extremely happy you’re here,” Phil added.

This went on for a little while. At some point in their conversation, Mare transformed from a lively, flirty companion to a vulnerable woman. She cried, “I haven’t slept with my husband in weeks, and things aren’t shaping up.” Her tears became a long embrace, then a light kiss, then more passionate tongue kissing. When she noticed Phil’s cock hardening against her body, she also realized that her panties were soaked.

Phil stopped after a moment.

“Are you sure, Mare?” he asked. “We don’t have to.”

“Please!” she whispered, desperately. “Can you put it inside me? I need it, baby.”

As Phil undressed her, he could hardly believe his luck. First came the tight, green skirt. He unzipped it down the middle of her crack, letting it fall to the rug. He finally got his first squeeze of Mare’s exceptional ass. And it was really good. She smelled like expensive, rose perfume. Next, he removed her peep toe booties, one by one. She grew impatient and swiftly peeled off her wet, purple panties, smiling into his eyes as she did so.

Suddenly, it seemed like an out-of-body experience for Phil. He wasn’t drunk. And as far as he could tell, neither was Mare. Yet here they were, finally. He stood up and prodded her to lie back on his white, leather sofa and admired the way her bare ass met with the leather, the sounds it made. Mare opened her legs wide for him.

“Someone’s been doing her yoga,” Phil commented, smiling.

“It ain’t gonna lick itself,” she said.

Phil got on his knees and buried his head into it. Mare gripped his brown hair and thrusted her wet pussy into his face. Now Phil was rolling his tongue over her clit, which made her moan, loudly. He began slowly probing his tongue in and out of her asshole while massaging her brimming clit with his fingers, until Mare began to shake and squeal uncontrollably.

After she came, she got up and unzipped Phil’s jeans. He wasn’t wearing any underwear and his cock sprung up as soon as it was let loose. Mare looked like she just got a new pony on Xmas morning. She began to suck like they did in the porn that she watched when no one else was home or like the stranger had instructed her the last time she had an affair. She relished in the discomfort when it pressed against her tongue, and she gagged when it hit the back of her throat.

“That’s it, baby,” said Phil. “Fuck, that’s a good girl.”

“Yeah?” she said. “Fuck my pretty face with your handsome dick.”

With her mouth wide open, Phil took her by the hair with two hands and fucked her face good, so that it made her mascara smear and snot dribble from her nose. Mare paused to spit a mouthful of thick saliva from the back of her throat. She aimed it right at Phil’s reddish tip. Some spit dripped off and landed on the shag she was kneeling on. Now, holding the shaft with one hand and the other gripping his ass, she looked into Phil’s eyes while playfully dabbing at his dickhole with her tongue.

“I know you like that, mister,” she said.

“You’re a greedy little slut,” he replied.

“Don’t tell my husband,” she giggled.

Phil reached for his phone on the sofa. For the rest of the session, he snapped many scandalous photos of Mare in all her rare glory. Jonah had been correct all along, that Mare had fucked many other men both before and during their marriage. That night, however, would be the first time she ever let a man fill her asshole with thick, pulsating flesh. And she was surprised that even though it was kind of messy, she loved every minute of it.

Phil had the photos to prove it.

Days after the rendezvous with Mare, Phil was lying in bed, naked and horny. He thought of Mare’s exquisite ass and decided to upload the photos he’d taken of her into the Roger That app and have some fun with it. He’d recently updated the app with the new “Roger fucks her” commands.

Suddenly, Mare stood before Jonah for the first time in what seemed like ages since trading places with Roger Meatstick. He barely recognized his wife with her legs spread eagle, her asshole gaping, and her face soaked in milky pearls of cum. Much like the other women Jonah had been ordered to fondle all along, Mare was laying perfectly still on the white, leather couch like a photograph.

Only this time, his orders were not: “Go to the woman, drape your bulging arms across her chest or over her shoulders, and fondle her breasts while she cums for you, hard as fuck.” They were: “Go to the woman, and fuck her brains out until she screams ‘Hallelujah!’”

What else could he do? Jonah complied.

Who Would You Rather?

“Who would you rather fuck? Queen Amidala or Princess Leia?”

I consider Joakim’s question with serious thought. I delight in my options. “Hmmm,” I vocalize my internal struggle. “Natalie Portman or Carrie Fisher… Hmm….”

We are in the butterfly house where old man winter is unwelcome. The cold-hearted bastard remains, uninvited, just beyond the greenhouse walls. He mopes outside the patchwork of glass that retains a rich, warm, atmosphere, dense air, heady with the scent of earth, humid, and vibrant with life. The cold, like Dracula, cannot enter without consent.

“No,” Joakim takes the game seriously. “Not Natalie Portman or Carrie Fisher. Queen Amidala or Princess Leia. I’m not asking you which actress you’d rather have sex with, but which character.”

“As they were in their prime?”

“Well, certainly not as they are in the present. Both characters are now dead in the up-to-date story. One actress, too, in the up-to-date reality. And remember, they lived a long time ago.”

“In a galaxy far, far away.”

“That too.”

Flowers and butterflies compete to see which one can outdo the other, plant versus insect, a showcase of brazen, loud colors on display, an electric fashion show that smells as good as it looks. Orange and black monarchs flit about, sit and fan their tiger-stripe, speckled wings on cosmos petaled parchment white, it’s-a-girl pink, or radioactive magenta. Strawflowers carpet the earth in thick patches, every conceivable warm hue, every nuance of yellow, orange and red. Then, just to spite them, outdo them, a living neon light of radiant blue, cold as ice, traced in black, a blue morpho butterfly, parks its outlandish, gaudy and gorgeous self to break up the heatwave, to render it second class. Sunflower, echinacea, zinnia, azalea, big and bold, elegant and frail, no end of hue, beautiful, fragrant, just fucking lovely. Glass wing and blue moon, Julia and tailed jay, the butterflies counter with their own extravagance, their own great library of beauty. I just take it all in, sight and smell. I call it a draw. Insect and flower equally matched, equally gorgeous. It’s all so fucking divine.

In the face of so much beauty I consider my options. I go internal. I conjure up my own lovely imagery. Visions of Carrie Fisher in her prime come to the forefront of my mind. Jabba the Hutt, crime lord and fat bastard, his pudgy, slug-like hand gripping a leash fastened to his beautiful, mostly naked sex slave.

“Well, Joakim,” I say after some thought. “I’d pick Portman over Fisher, but if we are talking characters, not the real women who embody them, then I’d have to go with Princess Leia.”

“You’re thinking of Return of the Jedi,aren’t you?”

“Scantly clad, collared and chained, can you blame me?”

“Oh, look, the luna moth.” Joakim gestures to a winged creature, a veritable angel, that I could not miss if I tried to.

Equal parts erratic and graceful, the Luna moth dances through the air, an artful trajectory from flower to flower. Lime green, watered down with milky white, it sails across my face, silk on the wind, about the size of my outspread palm. Stunning. Incredible. Unreal. In this moment I am reminded; nature, great and small, is seraphic, and in this instant, I walk within Seraphic Park.

“My turn,” Joakim prompts me to continue our little game of who would you rather? So I think real hard. Try and abandon the Star Wars universe and come up flat.

“Who would you rather fuck? Harrison Ford or Hayden Christensen?”

“You mean Han Solo or Anakin Skywalker?”

“You’re such a stickler, Joakim.”

“Rules are everything. Without rules, we are merely animals.”

“We are merely animals, besides.”

“We are men.”

“Is that something to be proud of?”

“It’s something to accept. To embody. To exemplify. As men, we follow rules.”

“So who would you rather fuck?”

“Hayden Christensen.”

“You mean Anakin Skywalker?”

We look at each other. We laugh. We leave the butterfly house behind. We walk through a set of dangling plastic strips that hang down like those cloth curtains at a car wash. The transparent tendrils cover the exit, keeping the butterflies from leaving their floriferous kingdom, the shiniest of gilded cages in the whole of the zoo. We walk through another set of giant strands of plastic fettuccine because it’s always a double door at the zoo. Even for insects.

The next room is a narrow walkway, enough for three people to walk abreast. To our right is a concrete wall, a giant mural of tropical rainforest, the occasional plaque with animal information and fun facts. I study the isolated wads of chewing gum that teenagers and assholes have pressed into the wall. I zero in on a pale blue glob, likely spearmint, that covers the toucan’s eye with precision. It is gross, but artistic in its own light.

To our left is a low wall, a hip-high partition, and a wide expanse of simulated, indoor jungle. The large skylights provide a pleasant, natural light, illuminating a shallow pool below, moss-strewn rocks and logs, mature trees. Just beyond our reach, a net stretches from floor to ceiling to keep various birds from coming into contact with the humans that view them, and more importantly, vice-versa. In the pool below I see a dozen flamingos and admire their pink feathers, white zinfandel and rose. Above them, a trio of scarlet macaws, a vivid explosion of primary colors.

Joakim leads me to the next room, which is much the same, but with stronger protective netting. Here, I witness Zazu, the extravagant avian wonder, the lonesome great hornbill.

We wait for a passing mother and her child to move on before continuing our game.

“Who would you rather fuck?” Joakim asks. “Jar Jar Binks or Shrek?” Sometimes we do this, reverse the challenge. Try and think of a pair that would be hard to choose based on their undesirability. I hate CG characters and Joakim knows this. But in this instance he’s failed to make it a challenge.

“I wouldn’t touch Shrek with ten-foot barge pole.”

“You’d rather fuck Jar Jar Binks?”

“I’d rather not fuck Shrek.”

“Fair enough.”

We walk on past a “staff only” sign and unlock a door to enter Zazu’s attractive, but limited indoor rainforest. Zazu swoops down, mischievous and bored out of his mind, but delighted for our company, for some relief from the hours of nothing. Most of the zookeepers are afraid of going in with Zazu because he has an enormous beak and willfully bites, capable of breaking someone’s fingers if they are careless or unlucky.

I’m not worried, however, because Joakim has imparted a technique to avoid any misadventure. His tactic is straightforward, simple as can be. Rather than try and shoo the bird away, push aside his beak, or hold up your hands to protect your face, you simply make a fist, which protects your fingers, and offer up an arm. Zazu can break a finger, but he cannot break a wrist or a forearm. Sure, he bites your arm, and yeah, it hurts a little, but it’s no big thing. It’s not that bad. And besides, you get an incredible, up-close view of a stunning great hornbill, offering the beast an interlude of entertainment among its quotidian malaise.

The first thing I think as Zazu swoops down upon us is Woah, big fucking bird. And with a five foot wingspan, I’m not wrong. Perching on a branch level with our faces, he cocks his massive, banana-beaked head while scrutinizing Joakim and I. In his discerning, red eye I see intelligence and personality. I see an individual with a fiery soul.

At the crest of Zazu’s head, joining with his formidable beak, is a large, horny growth, brightly colored and cumbersome, like an ornate helmet or a decorative headpiece. Joakim tells me this is known as a casque, used as both a counterweight to a hornbill’s long beak as well as for amplifying vocalization.

From head to toe—or tail feather for that matter—Zazu presents himself a grand spectacle. He bedazzles with untamed beauty, prehistoric charm. He commands our attention, affecting authority over our senses. As I gaze at him up close, am not in the least disappointed.

Tangerine fades to banana, bright orange to yellow, from the tip of a razor beak to its base, colliding with cherry red eyes that showcase intelligence. I feel like I am looking into the face of a clever, feathered fruit salad. Sunset feathers fashionably match that rich, gorgeous tiara, that cornucopia headdress. Neck down, the great hornbill is robed dominantly in black, broken up in alternating bands of white. The overall look is impressive and eye-catching, yet avoids crossing over into something gaudy. Zazu’s appearance is suggestive of royalty. So it comes as no surprise when Joakim tells me that in Nepal his species is called homrai, and in parts of India, banrao, names which both mean “king of the jungle.”

Tight in a fist, my fingers remain safe as I offer my forearm to an under-stimulated hornbill. I defend my eyes from a beak that could easily gouge them from their sockets, blind me, or tally my face with red scratches. The pain in my arm while it’s used for a chew toy is minimal. I endure it, soaking up the marvel that sits before my eyes. Greedy and insatiable, I drink it all all in. I gaze in wonder, eye to eye with the king of the jungle.

Banana, pineapple, and mango, slices of ripe pear, an abundant sprinkling of cat biscuits: humble offerings to our liege. I take one last long look at Zazu and commit his regalia to memory. From his presence, somehow, I draw strength. With his image in my mind, mysteriously, I bolster my fortitude. As Joakim and I walk away, I feel like a improved version of myself.

Joakim breaks the spell. “My turn.”

I am lost in the majesty of a feathered king. “Turn for what?”

“The game. Who would you rather?”

And just like that, my dream-bubble pops. Reality takes place of mystic whimsy. Vacuous and all encompassing, blatant actuality rushes in. So I play the game. 

“Who would you rather get nasty with? Mel Gibson or Steven Seagal.”

“Who’s Steven Seagal?”

“You know, the asshole in all those karate action movies in the 90s. Black ponytail tied back tight. You know, Under Siege? On Deadly Ground?”

“I want characters, not actors. The rules, man! The rules!”

“Fine,” I yield. “Yoda or Kermit?”

“The frog?”

“Ribbit.”

“You give me a choice between little green creatures?”

“You gave me Shrek, a CG perversion, Mike Meyers on acid in hell, a green fat bastard.”

Joakim sighs. “Yoda, of course.”

“You like older men?”

“I like wise men.”

“Best stay away from Paul.” Paul is our boss. Gym build, tall, perfect teeth, dumb as a stack of bricks. 

“Now there is someone I’d like to fuck.”

I’m not gay, but I felt a bit jealous. I wondered if Joakim would like to fuck me. I don’t know why, but I hoped that he did.

We carry on, blah blah blah. We laugh as we walk back the way we came, past macaws the color of Superman, pink flamingos balancing on one leg. We wade through a ballet of butterflies, a fluttering of angels on the wing.

Just before we exit the butterfly house the luna moth lands on Joakim’s shoulder, then dances onto mine. It stays there, opening, closing, opening, closing, its milky, lime-green wings, the delicate pages to an ethereal storybook.

“Here’s a good one,” Joakim ventures. “The ultimate question…”

I silently doubt that the ultimate question awaits, but I await, nonetheless, for a question.

“Who would you rather become? What would you rather be?” Joakim asks me, stern and serious. “A Jedi Knight or a Lord of the Sith?” He takes this game very seriously. “An instrument of darkness or one of light?”

I’ve seen the films a million times. I could probably recite the original trilogy from beginning to end, failing only with character impersonations, but not the words they speak. I cheer for the good guys, sure, I guess it’s true. I root for young Skywalker as he whines his way across the galaxy. But there is one moment in the films where as a viewer I always falter, a moment I know I would fall to temptation if it were me in Luke’s position.

In The Empire Strikes Back, after losing a close duel with Darth Vader, i.e. Daddy, Luke hangs from a catwalk that drops down into an endless nothing, an infinity below him. Maimed, one hand severed in combat, he stares up into the masked, concealed eyes of his enemy, his father, who looks down upon him in total control. Yet in this dire moment, a dread enemy transforms into a tender father, extending his hand as well as his offer, to spare Luke’s life, proposing he and his son share dominion over the stars. Together, as one, they will rule the galaxy.

In this moment during the film, no matter how many years and decades transpire, dozens of repetitious viewings, I find myself feeling the same as I watch Darth Vader, father, extend his offer to Luke Skywalker, son. I know what I would do if I received this same offer. I wouldn’t let go, fall to a fate that almost certainly would lead to my death—though Luke survives, of course. I wouldn’t run away from family, from the love of a father. I’d take his hand, embrace his offer. Maybe I have unresolved daddy issues, or maybe I’m just not attached to being a moral man, a good guy. But I can tell you this: if it were my narrative, if I were Luke, I’d not have let go to fall from that catwalk. I would have fallen, instead, headlong into the seduction of the dark side. I’d have become a black knight, a lord of darkness. I’d have ruled the galaxy with my father. Together, we’d devour the stars to satiate our lust for dominion.

“Easy one, I know,” Joakim dismisses his own ultimate question. “I mean, who in their right mind wouldn’t choose to be a Jedi Knight? Only a weak-willed, evil fuck would allow the dark side to seduce them to walk the path of the dreaded Sith.” Spoken like a true nerd.

I do not share my thoughts as I willingly reach for my father’s hand. I look up at my dad, caped and clad in black, a red light saber—red, to denote evil. I’ve already taken my first step towards the dark side, dipped my toe into the surface of a black abyss that I prepare to jump into headlong. I feel the shadows swallow me up from the inside, and I’m aware that it feels good. It feels right.

“Way too easy,” Joakim repeats. “Next time, I’ll do better,” he says. “I’ll think of a harder question. One that has more than a single, obvious answer.”

I do not offer my opinion or reveal my musings. I know what I am, or what I am capable of becoming.

“Come on, fellow Jedi. Let’s go.”

Upon my shoulder, a luna month suddenly takes flight, as if sensing something—repelled, perhaps—by the shifting aura of the being it had perched upon. Leaving the butterfly house behind us, Joakim and I step back out into the cold where old man winter waits to steal our warmth. We walk together and ascend the hill, Jedi Knight and Lord of the Sith.