Strength In Denial

Ronnie Coleman’s Hollywood Fitness and Keto Grill Yonkers—no affiliation with American professional bodybuilder and IFBB multi-title champion Ronnie Coleman; and yes, there have been lawsuits—is, in my considered opinion, the single finest bro gym north of the city, hands down, no contenders.

At Ronnie’s, you know what you’re getting, and bros like to know what they’re getting. I’m always thinking up new marketing slogan for Ronnie’s. I spend a lot of time alone.

The space was converted from a four-story, 1950s cinder-block storage warehouse, a standalone structure built into a hillside sloping down toward the Hudson. The building is as long as it is tall, as tall as it is wide, and painted gold with gold trim for no good reason whatsoever, except, perhaps, because bros love the color gold, or maybe it’s just a big, gold-colored middle-finger to everyone driving by on the Interstate.

There are no surprises at Ronnie’s, because bros don’t like surprises.

The ground floor is mostly cardio equipment—treadmills, ellipticals, steppers—with an area near the back for group fitness classes and other such CrossFit-related nonsense; who the hell has time for strengthening their core? It’s also the level with the men’s locker-room, so that whole area, appropriately, smells like muscle-milk diarrhea, a familiar odor at any gym that has achieved that critical mass of gym bros.

At Ronnie’s, no bullshit, just bros.

The rest of the place is for serious lifters only, a glorious, multilevel clusterfuck of free weights and resistance machines, perfect for any bro that has absolutely no workout plan, other than to train, and then overtrain, until something breaks. And, of course, every wall is a mirror, so no matter what direction you look, you’re admiring your pump.

But the best thing about Ronnie Coleman’s Hollywood Fitness and Keto Grill Yonkers is the bros. Not for nothing, but Ronnie’s is likely the finest assortment of bros you will ever encounter. It’s wall-to-wall bros. To move between sets is to navigate a labyrinth of fist pounds, and if you’re paying attention, every confrontation yields gems of bro-wisdom.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Josh, the roofer who works out in his dirty work boots. “If it’s an isolation exercises, drop the weight and do higher reps.” He pressed his finger into my chest. “It’s easier on your fucking joints.”

Sure Josh is aggressive, but it’s only because he cares so much. He’s a true bro. He’s also six-foot-six and build like a brick shit-house, so bros listen when he speaks.

“You want to buy some Tren?” said Scott, the strength and conditioning coach. “Not that you look like you need it, but I can get you a great deal. Shit’s for real, and it never hurts to be a little more anabolic.”

Scott’s sketchy AF, and his darkweb steroids have killed people, allegedly, but as bros go, he’s alright.

“Protein is bullshit,” said Steven, the sound engineer. “It’s a myth. It’s not real. Have you ever seen a protein molecule? Yeah, me neither. No one has.”

Steven smokes too much weed, but he’s still a solid bro, usually, but not today. Today I asked Steven to for a spot, and in the middle of my last frickin’ set of bench presses, he just ran away.

At Ronnie’s, not everything is as it seems.

I racked my weights. Steve and others were headed downstairs. Then I heard it too. Somewhere up front, past the commercial refrigerator filled with pre-workout drinks, past the check-in desk with the weird lobby boy who also cleans the toilets, someone was shouting, screaming almost. Looking down into the gallery, I saw a crowd forming near the entrance.

“It’s Paul,” said Mark the cop. “Paul’s dead. The vampire got Paul.”

I ran to join them, then pushed my way through the crowd. Beyond the glass doors, I saw gore. It was Paul, the snowboard instructor, dead in the parking lot, his head smashed in by a dumbbell, seemingly dropped from above.

What a waste of a bro!

Others push past me, each jockeying for a better view, but no one stepped outside. The gore was overwhelming. Then Mark the cop removed a gun from his gym bag and un-holstered it. We knew what he had in mind.

“Bro! Don’t!” said Anthony, the delivery driver.

“You’ll be killed,” said Clementine, the exotic dancer—not her real name.

“I have to do something,” said Mark. “I can’t just hide in here.” But as soon as he stepped outside, an industrial air-conditioning unit landed on him.

The chorus of cries that followed was painful to witness.

“Bro! No!”

“Why, bro?”

“No! Bro!”

And there was weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Apparently, this had happened before, many times, as it was explained to me, but never until now when I was present. It was the reason I hadn’t seen Kenny in a while, and Joey, and Greg. They were all dead. I struggled to get my head around it. The rest of my workout sucked. When I was done, I ran as fast as I could from the entrance to my truck.

***

On my next visit to Ronnie’s—Thursday, back and biceps—I confronted Renfield, the boy from the check-in desk. He was cleaning the toilets in the men’s locker-room.

“I can’t get up there,” said Renfield. “There’s nothing I can do.”

The door to the roof was locked, and no one had a key. It was difficult for me to understand.

“I told you already,” said Renfield, pushing past me, toilet brush in hand. “There’s no way to get up there. There’s nothing can be done about it.”

During hammer curls, I bumped into Roy, the firefighter. “The door’s locked and there’s no roof access,” said Roy, and he walked away. Just like that, our conversation was over.

During my last set of bent-over rows, I spotted Kevin, the fitness app developer. “It’s Dracula up there,” said Kevin in a whisper. “He can hear through walls.” He was unwilling to discuss it further.

After my workout I returned to the locker-room. I ran into José, the MMA fighter. “If there was somethin’ could be done about it, they’d do it,” said José. “The door to the roof is locked.”

Bros aren’t known for their problem-solving skills.

As José and I walked from the locker-room together, I decide against further conversation on the topic of Dracula, and instead José gave me an account of the tremendous health benefits he’s experienced since eliminating water from his diet. “Water’s poison, bro,” José assured me. When we reached the entrance, I paused, to prepare myself for the sprint from the entrance to my truck, but José did not pause, instead, forgetfully, mindlessly, strolling right through the doors to the parking lot, pausing only to hold the door for me. When he realized I wasn’t behind him, he looked back. Our eyes met as a forty-five pound iron plate from above compressed him into a gruesome pulp.

Despite my shock, I acted quickly, running to the door, to what was left of José, to lean out, just barely, to look up from the spot where the plate had landed. I glimpse a head looking back at me. Quickly the head pulled back from the ledge.

“I saw him,” I said softly, but already a crowd was forming around me.

“He saw him,” shouted Mike, the electrician. “He saw Dracula.”

“Tell us what he looks like,” said Karen, the fitness influencer—Karen has over 40,000 followers now on Instagram.

I had to think for moment; so many eyes were on me. “He looks like a sex offender mugshot of Mark Twain,” I said.

No one was happy with my description, so I tried again.

“He looks like my grandfather, right before he died from anal cancer.”

I could see it in their eyes, it was not the description they expected, or wanted, so I tried one last time.

“He looks like a broken old man,” I said, “defeated, gray, and unhappy.”

“Bro, that is not what Dracula is supposed to look like,” said Patrick, the manual laborer.

“I know what I saw.”

“Then your eyeballs must be broken, bro,” said Jason, the bouncer.

Are bros just stupid, or is something else going on here?

“Just tell us what you fucking saw!” screamed Tangerine, the exotic dancer, not to be confused with Clementine the exotic dancer. Tangerine then threatened me, pointing her fake nails at me as if they were knifes.

“I saw an old man that hates the world,” I said.

“Bro, be serious!”

“Seriously, bro, come on!”

“I saw a miserable old prick,” I said, “filled with sorrow and regret, pain and despair, extreme anguish, frustration, and anger. He looked like he had been weeping, and perhaps, gnashing his teeth. His wife is dead. His children don’t talk to him, or allow him to see his grand kids. He’s been thrown outside, into the darkness. It’s the fate of the wicked. The consequence of a life lived unrighteously.”

Then Michael, by far the largest, most muscular, most performance-drug-enhanced bro to ever grace Ronnie’s, picked me up by my throat and said, “Did you or did you not see Dracula… bro?”

I struggled to speak with his hands around my neck. “I saw our future,” I said. “I saw Josh and Scott, and Steven and Roy, and Clementine and Tangerine. I saw Kevin, Karen, Patrick, and Jason. I even saw Ronnie Coleman. I saw them all, in the fires of hell.”

Michael squeezed my neck harder, but still I could speak.

“I saw you and me, Michael, in the fires of hell.”

Michael squeezed my neck even harder. “Last chance,” he said. I could barely speak now.

“I saw weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Michael tossed me from the entrance. I landed on my knees on the pavement. Then Michael and others held the entrance shut so I couldn’t return. They watched through the glass, waiting for an object from above to crush me, but it never came. I ran to my truck and drove away. Fuck you Ronnie Coleman’s Hollywood Fitness and Keto Grill Yonkers.

Looking back on it now, I can find no reason that I should have been the only one to escape, no prophecy or unique circumstance to set me apart from the others. Yet no one was saved, no evil defeated, and balance was restored to nothing. I can only assume the universe needed a witness to attest to the folly of those bros that came before me, seduced by the promise of glamour muscles.

El Camino del Diablo

Fading pink daylight glowed in the rearview mirror and the nearly full moon rose beyond the mountains at the horizon. The car winding its way up the dusty road was the only movement across the vast landscape. GPS was useless so far from any cellular tower, but the email had provided simple enough directions. El Camino del Diablo was the only road off the state highway. Matt just had to follow it for another thirty miles west after Bates Well Ranch. They told me this guy Dan was eccentric when I accepted the job, but living out here in the middle of nowhere? This is crazy.

The congratulatory email he’d received a week earlier included an invitation to join several other new hires at the home of the founder and owner of Tobar Battery. Dan Tobar started the company in the sprawling emptiness of the Sonoran desert. The offices were hours away in Tucson, the manufacturing in Mexico, and his home crouched at the crest of a small mesa overlooking endless square miles of saguaro and dry brush. Matt accepted the strange invite, despite his reluctance. No ties to keep him back home in Tucson–he’d never been to a billionaire’s home before, so why not?

The rough miles jostled past until he saw the right hand turn-off onto an even narrower, bumpier dirt road. The darkness seemed to overwhelm the moonlight, as he could see only a short distance down the rutted trail. No signs or indication that this was the way, but it had to be, according to the directions; ‘Take El Camino for 32 miles past Bates Well, it is the only turnoff for miles – can’t miss.’

Can’t miss, thought Matt. 

***

Danior Tobar looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows of his living room, waiting patiently for telltale headlights flickering in the distance. He’d instructed the guests to arrive at 10:00pm, not too long after sunset.

Who’d be the first to arrive? 

The engineer? Most likely, due to a propensity for precision. The HR rep? Possibly, due to an innate need to please. Or perhaps the salesperson? The dark horse, in his view, as he’d never known a salesperson who could resist a nearly endless conversation with some poor stranger at a restaurant or gas station.

A flicker of light bounced off rock formations, as a vehicle climbed into the hills. 

Good, now we begin. A glance at the clock over the stone mantel confirmed the promptness of his guest, who would arrive a minute or two before the instructed time. Where were the others?

***

Matt stared at the massive front doors which towered imposingly over the entry. They were intricately carved with hundreds of small figures. Many were tangled in tortuous positions. He pressed the doorbell, and three chiming tones echoed from inside the home. Moments later, his examination of the carvings was interrupted as the doors opened by a tall dark-haired man wearing a crimson Victorian wing tip shirt, black blazer and pants, and black ankle boots. His ebon hair was pulled back in a shoulder length ponytail. He was powerfully built, despite appearing to be in his early sixties. Matt took note of the unusual fashion choices, but decided not to comment on it. What is he wearing? Is he going to a fancy event or something?

“Mr. Peterson? Greetings and welcome to my home.” 

His host invited Matt inside with a sweep of his hand, leading to a spacious, dimly lit foyer beyond.

“Hi Mr. Tobar, pleased to meet you.” He extended his hand in greeting. Tobar glanced at it, remaining motionless, and returned his gaze to the younger man’s face.

“Call me Dan, please, and may I call you Matthew? I’m sorry but I don’t shake hands. I find it…unpleasant.” He led his guest inside.

“Matt’s fine, Mr. Tobar. Quite a place you have here. Bit far from anywhere, isn’t it?” He examined the minimalist interior, although that would have been luxurious compared to this large stone-floored home, with its jumble of angular concrete, glass, and imposing double front doors. No furniture, no art on the walls, no television, or books. It was a blank slate. “Did you just move in or something? Looks like your stuff hasn’t been delivered yet.”

“I prefer to live ascetically. I don’t usually tolerate company and a spartan lifestyle suits me.” His smooth voice carried a trace of a rough accent, buried beneath a cultured veneer.

Tobar led the way from the living room to what could have been a kitchen. The room had a long stainless-steel sink, expansive barren black stone counters, and unadorned gray metal cabinets on the wall. It looked more like an operating room than where a meal or even a cup of coffee would be prepared. A severe wooden table and four stark gray metal chairs, the only furniture Matt saw, were in front of modern French-style doors overlooking the moonlit landscape.

“Please, sit down,” he said. 

Matt took a seat, watching as his host surveyed the silver-bathed desert. Clouds drifted across the sky and somewhere coyotes howled. “Do you hear them? Creatures of the night.” Tobar shifted his eyes to meet Matt’s. “What songs they sing.”

Songs? Matt wondered. The predatory howls sent shivers down his spine. This guy is a little weird.

“Why did you ask me to come all the way out here, Dan? To be honest, this is all a little strange for me.”

“I asked you, and two others, to be my guests. I want to meet my new employees. I’ve heard you are a very skilled engineer. As you may have guessed, I do not much enjoy the company of people, so I asked you to come where I am most comfortable. I thank you for honoring my request.” Tobar tilted his head slightly, as something appeared to catch his attention. “Ah—another guest is arriving. Please, wait here.”

***

A solitary gas pump stood beside the parched dirt road that disappeared into the shimmering distance in either direction. Nearby, a sun-bleached wood building slumped in the heat. The sign over the door simply read ‘Store and Gas’ in faded, peeling red paint. 

The weathered wood door opened, revealing a tall silhouette contrasting against the glare of the sweltering desert beyond. A little bell above the entry tinkled as a tall man stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He was surprised that it wasn’t much cooler in the dim interior of the roadside store.

“Evening, son. You lost?” The old man behind the counter looked intently into the traveler’s eyes, waiting for a reply.

“Hi! I don’t think so. This is El Camino La Diablo, right?” The tall man brushed his hands across his expensive Oxford shirt, wiping at any road dust that may have settled on the short walk from the car to the store. The tie, left behind on the passenger seat.

“Del. But yep, that it is. Only damned road out here, so kinda narrows your options. Don’t get too many people out here, figured you was a lost tourist from the city.” 

The tall man looked at the old proprietor. He seemed to be about eighty, with a scraggly gray beard and wore a dusty old sweater, despite the heat inside the cramped store.

“What makes you think I’m from ‘the city’?” he asked, with a big smile.

“Son, there ain’t but two kinds a’ people out in this desert—those of us with sand in our veins, and the rest a’ ya that got blood in yours. You got a nice city vee-hicle,” he nodded at the unblemished late-model luxury car outside the window, “you got nice city clothes that don’t got a single worn thread on ‘em, and you ain’t got any weather in your face or work in your hands.” He leaned back, his wrinkled and veiny hands propping him against the wooden counter.

“Wow. You’re a good judge of people, buddy. I’m Bill, by the way,” he took two steps towards the old man, his hand extended for a shake. The proprietor didn’t move.

“‘Bill By The Way’, I don’t shake hands, never know what you’ll catch. You need gas or food or water?”

Bill kept his bright smile on, assessing the store. A beverage case displayed cold bottles of water and soft drinks. The counter had various sundries and goods. Bill saw that everything had a fine layer of road dust, and nothing looked like it had been stocked in the recent past, if not longer. I’m not going to get a cappuccino in this place, that’s for sure, he chuckled to himself.

“No, sir, I’m good. Just wanted to make sure I’m on the right route. No GPS out here, you know?” Looking around, he wondered if the old guy even knew what GPS was.

“I can’t tell you if yer on the right path, that’s ‘tween you and Him.”

This old guy might be a little touched by the heat, thought Bill. “Ha,” he said instead, “you’re funny. I like that!”

“Bill By The Way’, lemme tell ya something…this desert here, it’s an honest place. It don’t like falseness. In fact, falseness is the most dangerous thing in this desert. It ain’t snakes or coyotes or pumas, it’s what ain’t real. This place knows the difference ‘tween a porch-cat and a puma, and it don’t take kindly to one that don’t know which one it is.”

Bill was taken aback by this…threat? Brushing it off as the musings of a weird and probably not-all-there octogenarian, he turned to leave.

“Hey, son. I think I offended you. Take a bottle a’ water, on me. And whatever you do out here, don’t be false.”

“I’m good, thanks. You take it easy, mister.” Bill went out the door, the little bell ringing softly behind him. The evening heat and light still hit like a blast furnace, as he quickly got back into his car and cranked the A/C. Driving away, he looked back in the rearview mirror at the little shack of a store.

***

Lily Kasirye fiddled with the cell phone that was in the holder on the dashboard. No bars. Great, no music and I still must have a couple hours to go. Why does he have to be out here? Her mood had steadily soured as she traveled further and further from the comforts of civilization. The temp display showed 99℉ outside, as it had for the last hour or so. Lily clicked the A/C fan up one more notch and checked her face again in the mirror. The dusty road rolled past, shadows from the cacti lengthening in the late afternoon and pooling in depressions in the desert. A structure of some kind appeared far down the road, off to the side a short way. Oh thank God, I really need to pee, she thought. All this bouncing from this terrible road is really getting to me. Next time, get the small iced coffee!

She parked her little hybrid next to the ramshackle building with the sign over the door, praying there was a bathroom inside. A bell rang softly as she entered, her eyes trying to adjust to the gloomy interior. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her long black hair, the plastic frames clinking against the beads in her cornrows. Lily noticed the old man behind the counter, staring at her. Here we go. Her neck hairs rose, from anticipation of what she expected this codger to be like, and from too many experiences with men like him.

“Hi, excuse me–is there a restroom?” Lily smiled at him, nicely. Be nice, be nice.

“Rest room? Naw, we don’t have one a’ them. But there’s plenty of desert so knock yerself out, young lady. You another city type lost out here? At least the second one I seen today.”

“Lost? I think I’m on the only road out here. Camino del Diablo.” She looked around at the store, hoping he was just teasing her, but she didn’t see any door for a bathroom or for any other room at all. The place was tiny, and cramped with shelves full of what looked like long-forgotten relics from years gone by.

“That it is, missy. El Camino del Diablo. You know what that means in English?” he didn’t wait for a reply, “means ‘The Devil’s Highway.’” He let that hang in the air.

“Oh, yeah. OK. So really, no bathroom?” She was not looking forward to relieving herself behind some rock or brush.

“Really, no. Look, go out behind the store, there ain’t nothin’ or no one around for miles. I’ll be right here, mindin’ the store.”

Lily nodded, not sure if she had any choice. It was that or try to make it to this Tobar’s place but that was at least another hour down the rugged road. She couldn’t drive much more than thirty miles per hour due to the ruts, rocks, and bumps. Resigned to the pleasures of outdoor bodily functions, she pulled the door open and went back into the sweltering desert.

***

Matt heard the chimes ring out three times, thankful that someone else was now there. This house, with its sprawling emptiness and the vaguely unsettling mannerisms of his host, made him uneasy.

What kind of person doesn’t even have a couch?

Voices echoed across the distant house, and in a moment Dan Tobar entered the kitchen with another guest. A tall, well-dressed man, with a big, almost goofy smile followed him, and strode towards Matt.

“Bill MacNeil, allow me to introduce Matt Peterson, our new engineer. Matt, this is Bill, our newest salesman.” 

Nice-to-meet-you’s and handshakes were exchanged. Bill eyed the room, evaluating the surroundings. This Tobar fella is one odd son of a bitch.

“Dan, you got one hell of a place out here. Looks like you could use an interior decorator, though, am I right?” he laughed and slapped Matt on the shoulder, giving him a wink. Matt returned a polite smile. Tobar watched, silently, no expression on his face. “So, is this it or are we expecting more company, cuz’ right now it doesn’t look like much of a party.” Bill flashed his practiced thousand-watt smile at Dan, hoping that he could find some way to break the ice.

“My interior is as I prefer. And yes, one more guest will be joining us, shortly I expect.” Tobar’s mirthless dark eyes focused on Bill’s. “She is nearing, even as we speak.”

Matt noticed their host’s head tilt as it had earlier, and without a word to his guests, he left them in the bleak kitchen. Matt and Bill exchanged glances, and Bill shrugged his shoulders.

“What do you think?” asked Bill.

“This is certainly different. I have never seen a house so…dead,” Matt whispered the last word.

“You got that right, buddy!” Bill took a closer look at the kitchen, and walked over to what had to be the refrigerator. Large stainless-steel double doors fronted the industrial style unit. He reached for a handle and at that moment, Tobar interrupted him.

“Gentlemen,” announced Tobar, as he shot Bill a look. Bill moved away from the fridge, feeling like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “This is Miss Lily Kasirye, our newest HR representative. Lily, welcome to my dwelling, and allow me to introduce you.” He did, and then stood aside, watching.

Lily looked at the two other guests. Bill, the salesperson, appeared to be in his early forties, friendly looking and composed. The engineer looked a few years older, very ordinary without any sense of style or personality. Nice, but bland. She wasn’t sure why she’d decided to accept the invitation now that she was there. Everyone else was at least ten years her senior, and she was the only woman, and the only one who didn’t look like they ate only unseasoned, bland food.

“Forgive me, I have forgotten my manners,” Tobar said, “ but you all must be hungry and thirsty from your journeys. I have taken the liberty of having a light repast prepared for your arrival. Please, allow me to serve.” He directed them to the uncomfortable chairs around the table, which had three place-settings laid, and pulled out a seat for Lily. She smiled politely as she sat down.

“Won’t you be joining us, Dan?” Bill inquired, as he pulled out his own chair.

“I have already enjoyed my sustenance. I apologize, but I follow a very different schedule than people.” From a warming oven, he pulled out three food-laden plates with his bare hands and carried them over to the table, setting one before each guest. Matt had been silently observing, and cautiously reached out for his plate. “Careful,” Tobar interjected, “the plates are very hot. I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

Lily looked at her plate, which had the identical meal as her companions. A large and very rare looking steak of some kind had center-stage on the plate, covered with a thick reddish sauce. Beside it, something resembling polenta was carefully heaped next to stewed cabbage.

“Um, Mr. Tobar…Dan, I’m sorry but I can’t eat this. I’m a vegetarian,” she pushed the plate away from her, pulling her fingertips away quickly from the hot plate.

“Vegetarian?” he scoffed. “There is no such thing. That is a construct of this modern world, of people who deny what they are. When one is hungry enough, one will consume…anything. Eat or don’t eat, it matters not. This is what I offer. Do you choose to offend your host?”

“No, I don’t mean to offend you, but…”

“Hey, Lily, if you’d like, I’ll trade you my…grits, for your steak. OK?” Bill flashed his big smile at her, hoping she’d accept and they could move past this uncomfortable moment. She nodded and the big man stabbed her piece of meat with his fork and piled it on his plate. He pushed his polenta onto her plate, and let out a hearty laugh. “There, everyone’s good now, right Dan?”

Throughout this exchange, Matt had been gently prodding the steak on his own plate, and taking small tastes of each item. He was hungry, and despite the very undercooked state of the meat, it tasted quite delicious. “Thanks, Dan. This is all really tasty. Is there anything to drink?”

Tobar produced three glasses from a cabinet, and then a bottle of wine. He opened the bottle and poured a generous amount for each, setting the glasses before his guests.

“This is a Sereksiya, from the country of my ancestors. Enjoy.” The wine had a pale red color, and smelled like sour cherries. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I will leave you to dine in peace. I will return later.” Tobar bowed very slightly from his waist, and slowly backed away from the table a few steps before turning and leaving them alone.

They all looked at each other, trying to sort the wide range of feelings, from awkwardness, to anger, to…fear?

“What the fuck was that all about?” Lily stood up from the table, pointing at the food. “There is no such thing,” she mimicked. Her anger was getting the better of her, and she made a snap decision. “I’m leaving. Fuck this. Nice meeting you both, but I do not need this bullshit, not even for this job.”

Bill stood up.

“Now hold on, hold on. Yeah, that was insensitive and, well, downright rude, but can you really just walk away from this job? Matt, you know what I mean, right buddy?”

Matt shrugged and looked at Lily. “I can’t say I blame you, and I don’t know how much they’re paying you, but I’d think twice about just ‘up and leaving’,” he replied. He took another forkful of food, and washed it down with some of the wine.

“Well neither of you know what it’s like to be a Black woman. I know when I’m being fucked with. If you were smart, you’d both get out of here too.” She grabbed her clutch off of the table, and walked away. Bill and Matt looked at each, both wondering the same thing; What the hell was going on?

***

Danior Tobar was fuming, mostly at himself. These unpredictable fools! He’d planned everything, and somehow overlooked the possibility of one of his guests being a vegetarian. The very idea of that offended him to his core. When Lily stormed out, he of course had heard the entire conversation and was awaiting her in the large gravel driveway fronting the four-car garage. Lily bristled when she saw Tobar standing before her on the walkway to the driveway, and it took her a moment to see the cars behind him. All three of their vehicles were upside down, tires up like overturned turtles. She looked at the cars, and backed away from Tobar slowly before turning and running back into the dark, cold structure of his home. Matt and Bill heard her yelling for them and they rushed towards the sound of her voice, the three of them nearly colliding in the entryway. Past them, beyond the wide open front door, Tobar stood silently glaring at them, his dark eyes like black holes in his face.

“What’s the matter, Lily?” Bill looked from her tear streaked face out towards the unsettling man outside.

“The cars…he did something to them, they’re all on their roofs!”

“That’s impossible,” Matt said, mainly to himself. “How could that be?” He approached Tobar. “What’s she talking about? Did something happen to our cars?”

Tobar fixed his black eyes on Matt, turned his head towards the driveway and simply extended one hand in that direction, gesturing for Matt to proceed. Matt rounded the slight bend that curved to the garage and driveway, the cars coming into view. Just as Lily described. Each on its roof somehow, improbable but real. 

Tobar laughed bitterly.

“You fools! I invite you to my home, to offer you a rare and exquisite opportunity, and you behave like frightened sheep.”

Matt, Bill, and Lily were speaking all at once, confusion and fear on their faces.

Tobar’s voice deepened suddenly, “SILENCE!” he commanded, his voice seemingly inside their heads.

Matt’s body went rigid, arms at his side, as he obeyed the overwhelming force of Tobar’s order. Bill and Lily stilled, eyes wide with a mix of confusion and fear, unable to move or speak. Tobar approached, his countenance radiating focused rage. He traced one long fingernail across Lily’s face, flicking it against her cheek. A thin crimson line opened, a trickle of blood joining the wet traces of tears.

“You, yes, I think you. I wasn’t sure at first, but your insolence has persuaded me, and there is something intriguing, I must admit, about tasting you. I have never had the pleasure of someone’s sustenance who abstains from flesh.” He circled Lily, looking at her from head to toe, appraisingly, a spark of hunger flaring in his deep black eyes. 

Tobar turned to look directly in Matt’s eyes, a slow predatory grin spreading and revealing sharp yellowed teeth. Despite his panic, Matt was surprised that he hadn’t noticed those long dagger-sharp teeth before.

“My engineer,” Tobar said softly, grasping Matt’s head in both of his powerful, long nailed hands. “I had hoped we could come to a logical arrangement, with your scientific mind and understanding of the nature of things. I am a creature of God, yes? Just like all of you. Some of us are made as wolves, some as sheep. Now you know what you are. There is a truth in this that you can’t deny.” Tobar pulled Matt’s head forward with startling speed, and sank his wicked fangs deeply in Matt’s neck. Bones crunched, blood sprayed from the wound, covering Bill and Lily. Tobar drank for a moment, then casually tossed the body across the room. It thudded wetly against the concrete, limbs splayed brokenly.

He turned to Bill. A strong odor became apparent. Bill had shit himself. Tobar chuckled.

“My salesman, it seems you have ruined your tacky but expensive trousers. I don’t mind, though. Your fear accentuates my desire, my hunger. For such a big man, you may be the weakest of my guests.” Tobar padded behind Bill, and in an instant dug his claw-like fingers into Bill’s neck, twisting and pulling Bill’s head from it. The body fell to the floor, the severed neck fountaining red. Tobar held the decapitated head over himself, drizzling the spilling blood into his mouth. Rivulets of blood painted Tobar’s face like warpaint. He held the head by the hair, and forcefully threw it against a wall. It crunched with a fleshy smacking sound, falling to the floor.

“They were nothing but useless fools. That is what happens to people like them. But you, Lily, I have higher expectations for you. Do you want to join your new found friends, here on my floors and walls, or do you want to work for me? Speak!” 

Lily felt the hold on her release. She wanted to scream, to run, to explode like a nuclear bomb from the terror and gore around her. She couldn’t do anything but shiver in fear, looking from corpse to corpse and back at the thing who killed them. Thoughts flashed across her brain. What is he? How is this happening? He’s going to kill me!

“I…I…what do you want from me?” she stammered. Her panicked eyes continued to dart from gruesome vision to vision, the entire world seemed bathed in blood, and the smell of death and excrement made her vomit.

“What I want is for you to be my emissary. I need a new one, and the three of you were invited here to audition for it. From time to time, it becomes necessary for me to…retire…my emissaries. They have a, shall we say, limited period of use.”

“I don’t understand,” she sobbed.

Tobar sighed, as though disappointed with having to explain a simple thing to a child yet again.

“Emissary! An agent. I need one to handle certain business matters that, due to my nature, I am unable to attend to personally. In return, my emissary is afforded certain privileges. A life of luxury, for one. A very long life. And yes—as I can see you are asking the question to yourself—I will feed on you, making you mine in a very special manner.” Tobar circled Lily, running his long fingers through her long cornrows. She couldn’t stop shaking and sobbing. “I need your decision. Please don’t disappoint me.”

Her life was over. If she agreed, she’d become in thrall to him, and would never have the life she’d worked so hard for. Never have the family she’d always pictured, with the ‘American-dream’ home and lifestyle she’d been sold. Never see her mother, her friends, or anyone or anything that she’d choose for herself. A life of servitude to evil. She thought of her heritage, and the generations of ancestors who’d lived as slaves to other monsters. She felt her fear subsiding as her anger and pride rose up in defiance. She knew what her answer was, and she laughed at him.

Duck Fever 

“Fuck a duck,” people say. Well, if you are going to fuck a duck, then you must fuck Donald in the butt. Ducks have but one hole. A cloaca – one orifice fits all. Shit, piss, fuck, pass an egg.

Once – at Green Lake – saw a dance line of sixteen mallards (yes, I counted) gang-raping a female in the cattails up by the north shore. There was a lot of quacking. All from the males. The hen looked too exhausted to make a sound. A drake would mount her, where she hunkered in the muck. Finished, he would waddle off, desultorily quacking, to rejoin the line at the back. 

Could not believe my eyes. They were going to fuck this poor duck to death. Shouldn’t I call someone? Did Attenborough have a hotline? Or would Jane Goodall be a better choice, over that stuffed scientific shirt? But would Goodall give a fuck about one lousy little gang-raped duck way off in Seattle Washing Ton?

Could I get a jogger or a baby stroller to lend a hand in breaking this up? Would not look good if proceeded alone. People think I was stomping ducks; run over and stomp me. Bottom line: Nobody gave a damn about Daisy’s bottom. Or dignity. Or her raped and ruined psyche. Say nothing of the bent over backwards Samaritan deep down in my own trashy soul. 

I sighed. Shook my head at my shoes. Then shrugged. Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, fuck ‘em. 

I stepped to the back of the line. Prayed to my inner Jesus that, when my turn came, I would indeed stoop, cradle her in my arms. Dash off with Daisy to the safety of a back booth in a nearby Aurora Avenue cocktail lounge. Order peanuts and gin martinis. Nurse us both back to health. 

For, you see, on the long ten minute walk, pressing her warmth against my chest, I would soon, perforce, with her into an alley duck. There to jam my own end in. I was a sick man, having caught the fever from those sixteen drakes so full of self-congratulatory quacks. Only a gulp or two of poison could start me on the road to recovery. 

I would beg her, in the dark of the booth, now we were lovers, to join me in my basement efficiency, just a bus ride down 45^th to University. We could suckle each other back to sanity, over the crazy wild taste of homemade – with Thai hot peppers – Mandarin Duck. 

I would show her my new bought-online baster, before the wringing, the plucking, the gutting, the roasting, the sixteen further tweaks needed to bring both Daisy and my hungry self to perfection. 

Surely she would understand her paramount importance to the ceremony? 

When my turn at last comes, I behold for one lusty moment the quivering being at my feet. Then the eyes close. Somebody (probably me) tears off my clothes, and I sprint nude the three mile circumference of the lake, screaming at the getting-off-work swelling crowd of joggers, mothers, fathers, cyclists, rollerbladers, snotty kids and speed-walkers: 

“Does anybody mind the universe, and all its multiples, are raping our minds?” 

I leave you, as I roll over to sleep on the cot in my cell, the above cautionary tale; wiggling, perhaps, your own mind like the tail of a deceived duck, leaving the pearls he or she, at a distance, mistook for popcorn.

Fart of Darkness

I got there and the cartel guy’s been put in a room with this dwarf who gets off wearing tutus and ballet slippers to strike poses in the bathroom when he thinks nobody’s looking but there’s cameras so we know dude is a freak. Cartel has juice so ballet freak gets transferred to isolation where he can babble to himself in peace, if not the total darkness of cold storage. The unit is run by this obese dude called Big Panda who’s always pissed off at the ward baseball team. It’s nobody’s actual fault they’re all disabled, half of them wearing adult diapers outside their pants the other half missing knees and elbows due either to grave defect or occult injury. Quit drooling on the ping-pong table Big Panda yells but they’re all wasted on the invert-crystal Cartel gets smuggled in through the kitchen stashed in cases of frozen fish sticks. Everybody knows. Nobody cares. It’s a literal fucking free-for-all. They’re fucking in the corners, the crapper, the bushes, in the broom closets real fast go go go! like robotic rabbits. Trailing sex grime like a gastric oil slick in their wobbly wake. Even squirrels from way up in the trees scamper in on the action. Big Panda ambles home to his den of miscreant offspring at the zoo habitat and quaffs 2-liter green plastic bottles of Mountain Dew just to keep sane. He’s a loner and secretly deals in black market dark web skeletal remains of assassinated politicos. Working on a deal in the deep night of the DRC for blood piglet gallstones. Coupled with a primordial urge to spew rhetoric he keeps it bottled up inside where it festers and rots. Which in turn he takes out on the ball team who parenthetically are his most loyal foot soldiers. He stations them about the premises strategically where their disgusting, perverse behavior won’t necessarily be construed as spying. Chaplain Baby Abe, intent on usurping Big Panda and his crew of degenerate delinquents, is on call 24/7 and a huge pain in Big Panda’s ass. Baby Abe, suspicious by nature, quaking with calcified righteousness, parks in the control room, wide baby blues fixed on the array of video screen monitors, poised to pounce on the slightest misdeed. ‘Tis a cloying atmosphere fraught with hypertension. Nobody trusts anybody.  Hate is shared democratically. Pharmaceuticals rage in the collective bloodstream. I take notes surreptitiously, shivering and fetal in the staff head. Somebody’s been fucking in here. The stench of skunk bud and fermented apricots along with trace elements of potassium nitrate… Bells clanging over intercom fuzz… I sense a distinct covert outsourcing of white shit… bones ground to a fine powder… nasal expectorate refined into vape juice… Telepathic cell flirtation. Baby Abe is so sure of his rapacious hunch he’s prepared to offer up his nubile fiancé as a tribute to his convictions: Have at ‘er my brethren he growls, ivory white neck pulsating against the 4-time consecutive Super Bowl losing Buffalo Bills lanyard he wears supertight like a hangman’s noose. Looks like a case of relapse boys, barks Big Panda, strap that treacherous weasel to yon gurney and wheel ‘im away, will ya? Cartel chilling in lotus practicing levitation in the Suzuki Garden amidst Artesian bottled-water fountains and river rocks painted with slogans such as: Use Me Like a Hammer and I Saved a Window Today. The ping-pong tables turn after each resident inmate feeding, vapor rises in genderless clouds while threats to the minority population are waylaid with legislation of additional officious regulations. Commensurate with revisionist theories of inclusive order. 

All in all, an epic shit show. Cartel, shaved head shining with extract of bull elephant musth, smiles at his trophies… lolling atop sharpened pikes… severed heads of pubescent sex-workers… Smoke tendrils eking out of weepy eyeholes…

Little Miss Bendy Hips

Fresh out of the shower after her six-mile morning run, Serenity wiped the mirror free of steam and eyed her naked form in the bathroom mirror. “Not bad,” she muttered, turning this way and that, studying her raised glutes and sculpted thighs. “Nowhere near as tight or as uplifted as I used to be, but looking great for forty-eight,” she continued, her hands roaming over her small, perky tits and hardened nipples.  

She pawed at her developing six-pack, her pussy giving off a slight tingle as her fingers probed her tensed stomach muscles and the rock-hard area around her pubic bone. She giggled, catching a glimpse of glistening beads of water on her pussy lips, and had to stop from inserting digits inside herself. 

Getting in shape has made me a hornier minx, she thought. Look good, feel good. That was her motto. Her mantra. 

Serenity lifted her arms up, elbows in line with her shoulders. She flexed her biceps and then triceps. “Shoulders and arms are coming along, Serenity girl, and I’m going to look in tiptop shape for my Christmas holiday to Tinseltown Island.”

With a smile, she turned from the mirror and grabbed a towel off the heated radiator, wrapping her body in its soft cosiness. She knocked the bathroom light off and crossed the landing to her bedroom, where she dried herself and tossed the damp towel onto her bed. 

“I’ll leave my hair dry naturally,” she said, looking out the window as dawn broke. “It’s going to be another glorious day—morning yoga in the garden, methinks. See if I can finally get my face between my legs.” She giggled. “Don’t want a man. Won’t need a man.”

Serenity rolled out her yoga mat and lay on it, smashing in 100 press-ups and 200 sit-ups, feeling her shoulders and core burn. 

“Fuck yes,” she said, not a sweat or breath broken. She hopped to her feet, going to her chest of drawers. “Commando?” She smiled at the thought of how her yoga trousers rubbing against her pussy made her feel. 

Serenity bit her lower lip, dug her stretching gear out of a drawer, and slipped into the flimsy trousers and sports bra. She turned to the window, the curtains wide open, hoping someone out there had had a good, perverted looked at her nude form. With any luck, Melissa saw me, the dirty cow.

With a laugh, Serenity spun around, catching an eyeful of her tightly wrapped, curvelicious bod in the tall mirror behind her bedroom door. “You fucking rockstar,” she said, leaving her room. 

Down in the kitchen, she made herself a protein shake and downed it, then grabbed a bottle of ice-cold water from the fridge. She headed towards the back door, ready to get her stretch on, and halted. Damn, I forgot my yoga mat. 

She returned to her bedroom to fetch the workout mat, grabbing a hand towel while she was there, and made her way outside into the garden. Serenity then dropped everything onto the ground. She unrolled her mat, placing the towel and chilled bottle of water close to hand. 

Serenity performed a few basic standing stretches to warm the body back up, beginning with side and front bends. She then moved on to rotating the neck in one direction and then the other, finishing off by revolving the shoulders and swivelling the hips. 

That should do it, she thought, knowing the rest of her had gotten a good limbering up after the exertion of her run and body-weighted exercises. 

Now, do I follow a yoga workout by the YouTube, Kama Sutra sex queen Kim Low, or do my own thing? she wondered. Monday, I worked the lower body, Tuesday the top, and Wednesday I did a mix. I’ve also practiced the self-eating pussy pose twice, as recommended by Low. Fuck it—once more won’t harm, and I’m so close to being able to probe my own lettuce with my tongue!   

A fresh tingle assaulted her privates, the rub of her yoga pants already having their effect on Serenity as she took a few deep breaths to still and clear her mind. 

“Empty the head of all thoughts,” she said aloud, stopping the slight tremble that rattled its way through her body. “Breathe, Serenity.”

Once she’d practiced her inhales and exhales, calming herself, she began: Warrior pose. Down dog position. Back bends. Body twists. Hip openers. Lower back practices.

When she felt comfortable and loose, Serenity sat with her legs crossed, knees stacked, and began the ‘oral sex’ pose. 

Maybe I should have left the yoga trousers off, she thought, bending forward, inching her face closer to her groin. A smile played across her lips as her nose brushed against cloth. The thin scent of her lady garden mixed with sweat wafted up her nostrils. Damn, I’m so much nearer than I was Monday, she continued to muse, her head now bent at an extreme angle, her neck and shoulders beginning to burn. I should hold it here, no deeper. I shouldn’t be feeling pain . . . But I’m so close. Just a bit more pushing and—

“Ow!” she cried as something popped in her lower back.

Serenity’s muscles contracted, sending her into a series of painful spasms.

Her body locked into place.

“Shit. Shit! I can’t mo – Ow!” 

Breathe, she reminded herself, repeating Low’s soothing instructions. Relax, and the body will soften. 

Tears rolled down her face, realisation setting in, as she sat there for minutes on end without change. 

Feels like the pain is getting worse!

She began to rock back and forth, trying to loosen up. If I could just get my head—fuck!

Searing pain whizzed down her spine, into her buttocks. 

Oh God. “Help. Help!”

She lost her balance, toppling backwards, stuck on her back like a turtle on its shell. 

She cried out as a hamstring pinged and a hip exploded. Fresh tears flooded down her face, her throat drying out to the consistency of sand. The sun, now high in the sky, sizzled her skin, turning her paradise into a death trap.   

Breathe, babe, please! she told herself. If I can just push the pain out of my head and roll onto my front, I’ll be able to use my hands to claw myself up to the house. Once inside, I’ll be able to use the phone. 

“Okay,” she said. “One.” Serenity took in a lungful of air, letting it out slowly. “Two.” This is going to sting. “Thr—”

“Well, well, well, what do we have here?”

Serenity froze. The voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere near her back gate.

“If it isn’t Little Miss Bendy Hips, with her teeny tiny tits and arse that resembles two boiled eggs in a hankey,” the person went on. “Stuck? It’s a good thing I was watching then, isn’t it?”

An ear-piercing laugh haunted Serenity’s eardrums. The cackle of the perverted, she thought, trying to get a look at who was talking to her. But she didn’t need to see him to know it wasLechy Lee, the twisted neighbourhood fuck who’d been caught stealing numerous amounts of knickers off clotheslines in the area. Her gut dropped. And I’m at his fucking mercy . . .

She gagged as the image of his lank, greasy hair and grubby, half-chewed fingernails popped into her mind. “He always smells like dried come,” she’d overhead Melissa say a while back. “Stinks worse than wet dog to boot.”

“Lee, please call for an ambulance. I’m in total agony. One of my hips have blown out, and my hamstring, and—”

“Oh, I’m going to help, all right. Think you’re pretty clever though, don’t you? Flaunting your naked body in your windows for the whole world to see, asking for it.”

“What? No, it’s not like that! And you shouldn’t be fucking spying, you creepy perv.”

“Bitches like you love it. The attention. The desire you make everyone feel.”

“Lee, please – I’m begging you!”

“If I help, what’ll I get in return?” He paused, and she imagined him rubbing his hardening cock. “A blowie? Hand job? Will you let me come deep inside you?”

“Oh, you gross fucker.”

“Well, if that’s how you feel, maybe I’ll leave you to it?”

Shit. She needed assistance, and fast. I’m going to have to cut a deal with him.She gagged again, thinking about the dried come comment Melissa had made, wondering if his underwear were encrusted with it. Breathe, she thought, conjuring the face and exuberant voice of her YouTube idol. “Okay, okay. I’ll . . . I’ll suck it for you. How’s that? I’ll even drink your load!” 

“Hmm, I don’t know. Are you only saying that so I help you?” 

“It’s a good offer, Lee. The best you’ll ever get.”

“Maybe.” 

“Come on, man—I can’t move, and the agony I’m in is overbearing.”

“I’m thinking, Serenity. Don’t get yourself twisted in a bunch,” he said, snickering.

Jesus Christ, what a fucking lose— 

Her thought derailed as a new pain racked her, her scalp on fire.

Lee had a handful of her hair wrapped around his fist. “Do you know what? No deal, bitch. I’m going to have my way with you. Do as I please, and then return you in your stuck state. I’ll deny everything. Hell, you may even die out in your garden.”

“What? No! Lee, please! You can’t—Argh!”

Serenity bawled as she was dragged along by her locks, her leggings and tufts of mane yanking free.

He manoeuvred her through her garden gate and into the alleyway, towards his own back garden. 

“Oh, Serenity. We’re going to have so much fun!”

Lee opened the gate to the rear of his home, ripped her into his space, and kicked the wooden door closed behind him.   

Mourning Wood

A transition. That’s what Ralphie needed. A change. Sweet relief from trash women and bad times. But a Christian girl was not exactly what he had in mind as he tore across the winding back-country road that evening. 

The steering wheel of the Porsche 911 Turbo jerked hard right as if in protest to the uneven gravel road that met the front gate of the abandoned summer camp. Ralphie slammed the brakes, skidding to a stop just short of the weathered faux-Indian totem. He’d almost missed it and bit it at the same time. 

The sign read CAMP MORNING WOOD in sloppily painted brush print. This was the place. 

But would this be the girl? Ralphie committed to taking a break from the dating apps. That was until he found Georgiana’s profile. 

Most of the women Ralphie met on the apps were transactional, temporary. They liked to play Simon says in the evening and twenty questions in the morning. “What are you doing today? Are you hungry? Do you want to get breakfast? What are your plans for the weekend? Well, when will I see you again, huh?” 

Ralphie would drop them as soon as he’d got what he wanted: some attention, a partner for the evening, and an ego boost. 

But Georgiana was different: religious, conservative, sweet. She went to church every Sunday. Visited the sick. Participated in the bake sales. And she was pretty as Hell. 

Maybe Ralphie could be different too. At least he thought so. 

Georgiana had even come close to marriage, poor thing, but the groom-to-be somehow got himself murdered. 

The big M: murder. And the other big M: marriage. Ralphie scarcely could tell which was scarier. 

He wanted to inquire further but figured it would be better to wait for the date. 

So here he was at the abandoned summer camp where Georgiana had suggested they meet. Maybe she was into nature sex? But that didn’t jive with the image of a girl who loved Jesus so. 

Ralphie continued down the worn dirt road in the foggy moonlight until he arrived at the camp proper. Dried brush, fallen tree limbs, and the collected detritus of years covered every patch of ground. Aged buildings, bent, wood-paneled, with broken glass and crumbled chimneys, slumped down as if being called back to the earth. 

There was another car parked just ahead, at the edge of the lake. That must have been Georgiana’s. 

Ralphie thought he was hallucinating as he cast his gaze forward and caught first glimpse of the figure walking through the fog. He was expecting a mild-mannered woman in a floral print dress with a Bible in her hand. 

The red leather miniskirt and tiny black tube top did not match the picture Ralphie had formed in his head. Nor the commando boots and fishnet stockings. 

Was this the right person? 

As they met, and embraced, she planted a chaste kiss on Ralphie’s cheek. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Georgiana.” 

Ralphie had dated many women who wore skimpy outfits, but this was almost theatrically overdone, right up to the thick glittery makeup, dizzying perfume, and elaborate coiffure. 

As they walked, each step brought Ralphie further from surprise and into confusion. While Georgiana may have been dressed like a lady of the evening, she spoke with a lilted, almost dainty tone that contrasted the style of dress. 

“I gotta admit,” Ralphie said, “you’re not exactly what I was expecting. I imagined you’d be a little more…churchy.” 

“We’re not in church, hon. You should relax a little.” 

He tried to relax as they walked, their conversation meandering. They passed the dilapidated mess hall, where hungry campers once scarfed down countless servings of franks, beans, and sloppy joes. Along the way, an old telephone box lay crushed, as though a fist had smashed through it. Nearby, a rusted wheelchair sat vacant in a cluster of overgrown vines. Whatever had happened here, it felt more like a war zone than a summer camp. 

“So you were engaged,” Ralphie said. “But your fiance, he was murdered. How did it happen? If you don’t mind me asking. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” 

“It’s OK,” she said. “Dan was a county deputy. Out on a call. It happened here at the summer camp just six months ago.” 

Ralphie felt his heart rate instantly jump. Maybe Georgiana had a predilection for the macabre. Or, maybe she was simply batty? Mourning can do strange things to people. 

She continued. “Some teenagers were getting into foolishness. Screaming, hollering, carrying on. But Dan, he thought it was a prank or something. Big idiot. I miss him so much.” 

“What happened?” 

“They found him hanging from a tree. Throat slashed. And the others were dead too. Strangled, hung, beaten, chopped up, hacked up, raw meat.” 

Ralphie reflexively reached for his perfectly unslashed throat. 

“They never found who did it,” she said. “But I think I know. I think I know.” 

“Who?” Ralphie’s eyes grew wider and redder. 

“Dan was lazy. He didn’t pay attention. Men are lazy like that sometimes. You know what I mean? Mentally lazy, not thinking ahead. Not seeing what’s around the corner. Or they have a devilish streak that gets them into trouble. And that can make things come out. Bad things can come out of the darkness.” 

Ralphie studied Georgiana’s face: a pale white, ghostly face that shimmered in the silvery moonlight. His hand found hers. He could feel her fingernails, firm but not too sharp, as she squeezed his hand in return. 

“Do you like my outfit?” she asked. “You haven’t said much about it.” 

Ralphie nodded. “Um. Yes. It’s very nice.” 

Georgiana tugged at Ralphie’s hand and led him down the hill to the edge of a pond. The lunar map above reflected off the still water. If that map led anywhere it could only be to trouble. 

But that was the kind of trouble Ralphie liked. He pulled Georgiana toward him by the waist. She rested her head against his chest. 

It was easy, much easier than Ralphie ever had with a woman. Too easy. 

“It’s dark,” she said. “Isn’t it dark? It gets dark so fast this time of year.” 

Ralphie could detect the quaver in Georgiana’s voice. Her petite frame shook with apparent anxiety. 

“Yes,” Ralphie said. “But why are you talking like that? Why are you shaking?” 

“It’s cold. I’d like you to hold me, tighter, and warm me.” 

Ralphie assented. Of course it was cold. She barely had any clothes on. 

“Hey,” he said. “Why did you want to meet me here? Why are you dressed like a stripper?” 

“Does it turn you on? Do you like bad girls?” 

“I like you.” 

And that was it. As if his words flipped a hidden switch. Georgiana planted her lips against Ralphie’s. 

“I love you so,” she said. 

The declaration caught Ralphie by surprise. Her voice was monotone, without emotional inflection. 

From behind, in a stand of dense shrubs, a twig snapped. The sound was thick and choked, like a bone breaking in a clump of cotton. 

Ralphie spun around. “What was that? Did you hear that?” 

“It was nothing,” Georgiana said. She forced Ralphie’s hands against her breasts. 

“Just a second,” Ralphie said. I heard something.“ 

The air tingled with a static charge. 

“It was probably just a rabbit,” Georgiana said. “Lie down beside me.” 

Ralphie brought his attention back to the present moment. Georgiana’s strange insistence, her gentle petting, it all excited him, despite his reservations. 

But it was so much as it always was. Ralphie had yearned for a change, something different. This was turning out to be more of the same. 

Nevertheless, his excitement grew, beyond his control now. The atmosphere seemed to tingle in tandem with the agitated swelling of passion—like a pressure drop before a rainstorm. 

Ralphie took Georgiana to the ground, and she assented to be taken—all too willingly. 

They fondled in the dark for what felt like ten minutes or so. Until Ralphie had to stop and rest his tired lips. 

A rustling sound, a thumping of booted feet, and the crushing of dry leaves, once again fractured Ralphie’s attention. 

“Now what the hell was that?” Ralphie said. “You had to have heard that.” 

Ralphie hopped to his feet and pulled his pants up. 

“We’re not alone,” Ralphie said. 

He could hear the groaning from the bushes nearby. “Gruh,” it said. “Gruuugh.” And the heavy breathing. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Georgiana said. She rushed to Ralphie’s side and threw her arms around his shirtless waist. “We need to do this to draw him out!” 

“Draw who out? What are you talking about?!” 

Right at that moment the hulking figure the size of a bull emerged. It grabbed Ralphie by the throat, lifting him several feet above the ground with the power of one bare, gnarly hand. It was difficult to make out the ragged features in the dark, but the intruder was clearly a man with inhuman strength. He wore a battered coverall, a utility belt full of edged weapons, and a dirty white mask—devoid of all human expression—that seemed burnt into the flesh of his face. 

Ralphie struggled in vain to free himself from the grasp of the monster. Thrashed from side to side like a rag doll, he could feel consciousness seeping away from him. A sensation like floating down a dark hallway. 

Was this what it felt like to die? 

Not quite. Ralphie felt a shock through his head, saw a blinding flash of light. He reached out and found the reassuring solidity of the ground. 

He looked up and saw the creature reel forward. From behind, Georgia had managed to plant an ax in the shoulder. 

She released the ax from the split clavicle, heaved it up, and cracked it down through the skull. A spray of ooze and sticky blood splattered against Ralphie’s face. 

By instinct—for no conscious thought was possible—Ralphie grabbed a hunting knife from the utility belt and stabbed it several times into the creature’s eyes and throat. 

At some length, the subdued beast collapsed in a heap. Ralphie and Georgiana fell together in exhaustion. 

“What was that?” Ralphie said. “Is that the thing that killed your fiance?” 

Georgiana nodded. 

Ralphie helped her to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” 

They made their way back up the hill, Georgiana trailing the bloody ax behind. 

“You were right,” Ralphie said. “You were right about bad things coming out of the dark. I didn’t realize how right you were. Did you know that was going to happen?” 

“That’s why I brought you here.” 

A scraping sound from behind signaled to Ralphie that the nightmare wasn’t over yet. The lurking creature erupted again, standing at full height, like a bear observing its prey before tearing its flesh apart. 

Georgiana deftly spun on her back heel, and executed a 360 turn, bearing the ax in a perfect blue-flash arc that severed the monstrous head from the terrible bulk. The head flipped up, sending spurts of purple, smoky blood in all directions, before smacking to the ground. 

It was all over in a matter of minutes. 

As they walked back to the cars, Ralphie felt his hands shaking from the adrenaline dump. From Georgiana, there was a surprising serenity. 

“What the hell happened back there?” Ralphie asked. 

“I’m sorry to have deceived you,” Georgiana said. “The demon requires action to bring it about. Deviousness. Deviancy. Things like that. It feeds on lust.” 

“Is it dead?” 

“I hope so.” 

The other question floated at the periphery. Ralphie didn’t dare to ask until Georgiana was inside her car, starting up the engine. 

“Will I see you again?” he finally asked. 

Georgiana smiled. “I’ll be in church tomorrow.” 

Porcelain

Anna looked like a Victoria’s Secret angel and one of the porcelain dolls of his mother’s china cabinet, and a very fuckable renaissance angel, Mike thought, as he saw the young, petite woman walk into the bar. 

She had long blonde hair, with a slight curl, and a curvaceous body that was clearly designed for him, Mike Peters specifically, to pick up and fuck against a wall with his vigorous, robust, 6’3 body and 8 inch cock. 

A fucktoy, he thought, stiffening in his business casual khakis, to be used by anyone, but also specifically for him. (Anna and Mike had been introduced at an alternative lifestyle mixer by a mutual friend.) 

Anna was 5’2, and slender, which meant that Mike could pick her up and do whatever he wanted with her, which was very attractive. Mike already loved that Anna was so much smaller than him. Like a sickly deer, grazing at the edge of the meadow, ready to be destroyed by him, a ravenous alpha wolf. 

“Hello.” Anna sat down next to him at the bar. Pencil skirt. White block heels. She smelled like a woman. Musk, iris, violet. He tutted to himself. This girl was playing at being an adult. “How was your day? We just finished up a project at my job.”  

“Oh, fine. The usual. Nothing I want to talk about on dates” (Mike had yelled at the department’s administrative assistant for not giving the PDF attachments specific names, and had gotten a light talking to from HR regarding the incident with the graphic designer.) “Did you say you were in school?”

“No, I’ve been working for a while.” She looked at him with her big innocent blue eyes.

“So young.” 

She smiled. “I’m friends with Crystal, you know. You can’t be that much older, can you?” 

Mike was 42. “What will you be drinking tonight?” 

“Oh, whatever, a whisky sour, a rose.” 

The bartender came, and carded Anna, to Mike’s pleasure. Mike then ordered Anna a Dirty Shirley Temple, winking at her. Anna nodded at him, with a nervous smile.

Anna had fragile ankles, Mike saw, porcelain doll ankles, bony, and clearly paper white (like her face, white as a sheet) under Anna’s stockings. He thought about how easy it would be to grip her narrow bones in his big hairy hands, his bludgeoning fingers snaking around her, making it impossible for her to escape, like a helpless maiden in a Victorian movie, casting him as the virile, powerful man. 

They talked about work, and the outer technicalities of kink, for a while, Mike talking at length about the leatherwork convention he was going to. Mike’s phone buzzed. An email from work – the administrative assistant had put in her two weeks. He snorted, and ordered another drink. 

Anna didn’t drink as much as Mike would have liked, but she made an affirmative noise when Mike suggested they go for a walk, and to his pleasure she appeared uncomfortable walking in her heels after a few blocks. 

“Won’t you come in for some tea?” Mike asked. 

Anna looked Mike up and down, as if appraising him. (Anna was, in her head, doing internal calculus as if the man would be worth the trouble – supposedly, he was very good in bed, but Anna was increasingly imagining Mike had only strictly technical abilities. Crystal would be annoyed if Anna did not have a glowing review of Mike, but Crystal had not gotten laid in the normie world for several years.) 

“Do you have oolong?” 

Mike grinned his alpha wolf predator grin, and imagined her porcelain skin shattering into pieces, breaking under his fists and feet. (He did not have oolong tea.)

***

The first thing Mike noticed, when Anna’s hands were on his massive eight inch cock, were how cold her hands were. They were bony and fragile, the way Mike liked his women’s hands, easily snappable in theory, but Anna’s hands were almost purple, and like ice, like she’d stuck her hands in a snowbank before jerking him off. He shuddered.

Anna looked up, stopping mid stroke, her Princess Elsa grip on the downside of the shaft.

“What’s up?” 

Mike shuddered. “Your hands are very cold.” 

“Oh, right, sorry, should we stop?” 

“Use your mouth.” 

He wanted to throw her off, force her down, mouth fuck her, but Crystal had taken him to a few workshops, and that was disapproved of without asking. “I want to fuck your slutty little mouth.” 

Anna looked up at him, blinking a few times, he imagined with a slutty, innocent, college-girl sultry act, but was actually with disbelief. 

“Um.”

She was actually wondering how far he would go, how much he would say to an acquaintance he’d been match-made with. “Give me a second.” She gave him a few instructions, and rolled her neck around a few times on her shoulders. There was an audible crack. 

Anna’s mouth was warm and wet, thank god, although Mike half expected it to be just as frozen as her hands. For the briefest second, Mike sat back and enjoyed it, enjoyed this tiny woman sucking him off, his hands over her hand, as if he were pushing her down on it (he had been strictly informed not to.) As if he were overtaking her, destroying her, undoing her, with spit and cum dripping down her pretty top and tights… 

Anna stopped and rolled her neck again. “Oral is really rough on my neck.” She said. “I just can’t do it like I used to, honestly.” 

“Used to?” 

“I’m not a teenager anymore.” She laughed, more to herself than him. “Unless you want to venmo me the chiropractor copay for tomorrow. I get so tight and it’s like my back turns into this spider of pain and I can barely work…” 

Mike exhaled. Fragile little fuckdolls were not supposed to have cold hands. Fragile little fuckdolls were not supposed to go to chiropractors. Fuckdolls were supposed to be tiny, perfect, and able to take any physical assault 42 year old men deemed appropriate for sexual acts and not ask for copays to be venmo’d afterwards. Christ, a fuckdoll was supposed to be the parent’s insurance problem, not his. Fuckdolls weren’t even supposed to know what insurance was. 

“Let’s just fuck.” 

“Can you get me off first?” 

Mike performed his high technical performance of clit rubbing with a mixture of lube and a high powered vibrator, with a rote routine he’d gotten down. He had some dirty talk, but Anna had actually asked him to stop talking. 

The fucking was fine, once they’d gotten to it, although Anna had complained about the positions several times, and eventually insisted on a sensible, efficient method that felt best for her, and certainly did not flower herself open to his maximum cock-coverage preferences. To Mike’s great disappointment, while Anna was slender, she had some weight and muscles somewhere, and was not actually a person-sized fleshlight that he could pick up on his cock and spin around to his every whim. Anna’s cunt was as warm as her mouth, but to Mike, her cunt might as well have been covered in frost, for all that it catered to him. 

He was close. He thrust harder, like he was going to impale her, and she made a very unsexy sound. 

“Ow, dude, that hurts.” 

“I’m close.”

He remembered the workshop at the kink convention. People got angry about unwanted pain during sex. This would result in hysterical tattooed women writing angry blog posts about him. then he wouldn’t be as popular at alternative lifestyle parties, he pulled out. “I’ll finish myself off.” 

“Okay.” 

She sat up, to Mike’s eyes with frigid, priggish thirst, but to another’s eyes would be watching with a glazed spectator glance, the way someone watches an old man argue with a bus driver at nine in the morning. 

As Mike came, he had the strangest thought, about the time he broke his mother’s china cabinet when he was a teenager. It had been an accident, and yet, after the act had been done, he’d taken such a pleasure in crushing the doll’s faces under his boots, shattering the delicately crafted faces, shards crunching and cracking and breaking. His mother had been heartbroken. She’d never collected dolls after that. It gave him a certain pleasure, the same way he’d been elated when she’d dropped out of grad school, to keep an eye on him and his little sister, after the fire happened. 

***

Mike got a light talking-to, the next day about work, about the administrative assistant quitting. 

“You can’t just treat the support staff like they’re disposable,” The HR girl told him. “We’re trying to reduce turnover, I’m sure this one won’t leave a glassdoor review, because it was her first job, but the next one might.” 

Mike snorted. $15 an hour was disposable. “Of course.” 

He found himself in a thrift store on his break, drawn to the ceramics aisle. He found a small porcelain doll, with blonde hair and a vaguely sultry air. He bought it, and took it to the parking lot, and stomped on it until it was nothing but powder. 

Mistress of Graves

Jordan Kingfisher bent over the drinking fountain, her head swimming with the latest discoveries she’d made at the HP Lovecraft archives at Brown University. Her long, thick black hair–which she often described as “Jewish grandmother hair”–flowed down her back. Clad in a hoody with a pattern of interlocking diamonds down the back and the logo of the post-punk band Puke Graveyard down the front, Jordan very much wanted to share her findings with the shy boy who lived on her dorm floor. 

At the same time, there was something about him that put her off. Something uncanny.

She wiped the back of her mouth, turned around in her tunnel vision way and nearly plowed right into the shy boy in question.

“Ross!” she blurted out. He blushed crimson when he looked into her dark brown eyes. She had that effect on both sexes, stunning them with her nearly alarming beauty. 

“I was actually going to…to…Facebook you” he finally managed after struggling to find his words. 

She smiled and reached out to pat his shoulder. She realized that at this moment they both felt awkward.

“But you’re right down the hall from me,” she said. A flood of relief poured through her. She looked again at him and something clicked in her head. He wasn’t actually that bad looking. He looked like a cousin of hers that she had only seen once at her Bat Mitzvah before his parents had taken him to live on a kibbutz in Israel. A few months later he’d been killed in a bombing raid by Hammas.

“That’s true,” he said. “But it’s complicated. Involves…those equations Professor Eldritch described as ‘esoteric’ in his Kabbalah seminar. I think I saw you there.”

“Yup, that was me,” she said. “Eldritch is a fascinating man. Well, maybe we should sit down and have a coffee like normal, civilized people instead of standing here blocking traffic.” She apologized as a hurrying freshman clutching an armful of books tripped and sprawled on his back in the hallway like a Franz Kafka bug, even though technically he was just a klutz and his accident had nothing to do with her.

“Sounds good,” said shy boy.

She knew if it were up to shy boy, he would actually just sink down into his argyle socks and then vanish further until he was a pair of scuttling claws, so Jordan took the lead. Adjusting her crammed backpack on her shoulders, and wincing slightly at the pulled muscle from an old tennis injury, she guided them both to a table at O’ Malley’s, a cafe franchise in the Brown student union.

They had been sitting down interlocking eyes and vision like Russian dolls in a quantum field before she realized that they hadn’t ordered any beverages. “Could you…could you please get me a medium latte, and whatever you would like? I hope this is enough.” She fished a folded, inked ten dollar bill out of her Surprise Pussy purse.

“Are you sure? That’s very kind of you,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it. My aunt sent me a care package and some surplus funds. She knows how I tend to buy books with whatever money I make at the library…she’s very generous that way.” She looked up, realizing he was frozen in front of her.

“Is there anything wrong?” she asked.

“Yes and no,” he said. He hesitated. “You remember that one slide Eldiritch showed in his PowerPoint, the one that looked like a red eye, only…”

“It was a three star system. Algol. Or ‘All Ghoul,’ as he likes to call it. Corny.” She snort-laughed, feeling like a dork.

“That’s funny!” he said. “Well, I’m going to get those drinks for us.” He took the crumpled bill from her and headed towards the back of the line. It was right after noon and classes were letting out. 

“Those who surrender their souls to Her will dwell in eternal darkness,” came a distorted voice somewhere out of range.

She looked up and saw that a man with a megaphone was surrounded by campus security. He was wearing an optical yellow vinyl jacket and had a deranged look in his eyes.

Then she heard the scream.

His scream. 

Her vision shuddered forward. In the shock of the moment, she could see herself as though filmed from above. Then she was moving in slow motion, rippling fractals of her body tearing away from her.

Slowly, ever so slowly, her legs made of melting sludge, she made her way to the periphery of the security guard huddle. 

Ross Green was lying still on the ground, her ten dollar bill clutched in his skinny hand. Some kind of viscous fluid was leaking out of his ear.

Within a foot of his body was a pamphlet. Adrenaline coursing through her body, Jordan understood the pamphlet to be something the religious fanatic had been distributing. As if in a trance, she bent down and picked it up.

She couldn’t make heads or tails of it at first. The photo on the cover was a blurred reproduction of a turn of the century print of one of the entrance ways to the Paris catacombs. When she looked at the photo more carefully, she realized that embedded within that picture was another–the outline of a woman. 

“She’s the mistress of graves!” screamed the fanatic suddenly, tearing free of the security guards. He came right up to her. His eyes were imploring.

“Do not heed her call!” he said. “She will drag you to hell. Your soul will be trapped in an astral prison of her own devising, and darkness will abide in you forever.”

“That’s fucking ridiculous,” she said indignantly. Her logical brain was shooting through possibilities for what had just occurred. “And I hope you didn’t have anything to do with…” she knelt down and felt for Ross’s pulse. It was thready, but he was still there.

At that moment Ross rose shakily to his feet, and the security guards reclaimed the crazy man. “I’m so sorry,” said one of the guards, whom she recognized from the Federal Hill shopping center where she went to indulge her fetish for rare Puke Graveyard 12 inch sides. “He’s obviously off his meds, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” said Ross. “I hope he’s going to be ok.”

Although Jordan knew very little about shy boy, his compassion for other misfits was something she admired about him. She had internalized her mother’s judgmentalism and was much more harsh.

The security guards marched the fanatic away.

“What’s that you’re holding?” asked Ross.

Jordan handed him the pamphlet. He peered at it through his Coke bottle lenses. 

“That’s the Mistress of Graves,” he said, flatly. When Jordan looked into his eyes, they were whirling discs, like something out of a 1950s science fiction film. 

“Who is the Mistress of Graves?” she asked.

“Never…ask that question.”

She snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Wake up,” she said irritably. “I asked you a question.”

“Never ask…that question.”

Suddenly her brain categorized its contents. She flashed on Algol, the star pair with a companion, and then a black mass began to play in her head as though it had been shot into her skull with a beam gun. Bloody, nude acolytes masturbated themselves and one another. On a jade table a young girl was bound and gagged. A priestess was intoning strange chants in a language Jordan had never heard before in her life. It felt more like a binary code, a series of dots and dashes. She felt a strange surge in her groin…fucking wet is more like it. Her pussy burned with desire and flash points of carnal pleasure spread through every cell of her body.

And then the images and sounds and psychic invasion left her head as quickly as they had entered. 

Ross smiled shyly. “Oh fuck, that was weird. I thought I’d lost you for a second.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Jordan, trying desperately to stop the flying golden filaments in her brain. “What were you saying just now about the…what was it…the Mistress of Graves?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said. And sounded like he meant it.

“Do you want to go into town…” they both began to speak at once, their words tumbling over one another. So many impressions surged between them. They had much to discuss. Inhibitions to shed. Dances to dance. 

On their way out the door, Ross dropped the pamphlet on the floor. 

The Mistress of Graves stared up at the parade of Brown students. She was smiling a black and terrible smile. Her lips parted and her tongue flickered out.

After a journey of millenia across light years, she was back on earth, and ready once more to spike humanity on a sacrificial pole.

Sole Survivor

The catkin flowers on the low-hanging branches of a centuries-old pecan tree tickle the back of Hugh Albertson’s neck as he frantically scans the ground underneath them. The old flashlight with a brittle red exterior casts a dim orange glow that flickers erratically every few seconds. It’s already hot in eastern North Carolina even though it’s only early May. Gnats and mosquitos swarm around the faint beam, creating a vortex manufactured with tiny buzzing exoskeletons. Despite this, the way the pecan tree’s frilly, long, green flowers bounce individually across his cheek and scalp transport him back to that day.

***

It was during a family reunion at his great-aunt Bonnie’s farmhouse in the spring of nineteen-eighty-five. A month before, she had deep-pile, harvest-gold-colored carpet installed throughout. To Hugh’s five-year-old self, the softness of the fibers was an invitation to slide across the floor on his chest like a penguin. Even the stairs had been carpeted. He tackled those and kept sliding through the upstairs hallway, then underneath the guest bed.

Great-aunt Bonnie owned a calico cat who, for years, had used the underside of this bed’s boxspring as her secret domain. The feline’s sharp claws had shredded the fabric leaving it hanging in his young face, as the catkin flowers do now. 

The door opened. 

The thick wood concealed by the new carpet groaned with an antique sigh. It was his older cousin Amelia. He could tell by her shoes. They were open-toe, leather sandals. Her toenails had been meticulously painted a pink that was not dissimilar to that of Pepto Bismal. Hugh kept quiet, observing like a spy. 

For a while, she sat on the edge of the bed. Her bare legs dangled over the side, as she kicked them anxiously. Each time one foot came down, her Achilles tendon was mere inches from young Hugh’s face. Intrigued, he kept quiet. 

Minutes later, Hugh recognized the stride of another cousin, Kelvin. He didn’t know their ages, just that they were teenagers, which meant they were not quite adults, but a lot closer than he was. 

For some reason, Kelvin is barefoot. His feet were tan because he wore flip-flops from Saint Patrick’s Day to Halloween. Hugh could see the v-shaped white streaks left over from them, accented by dark toe hair. 

Neither spoke. Whatever was happening had already been agreed upon beforehand. Amelia stood to face Kelvin, who was quite a bit taller. Hugh sees that they’re close enough that her knees are touching his shins. 

Suddenly, Amelia turned around so that her pink toenails were so close that Hugh could see the streaks left over from the tiny brush used to apply the polish. Her feet grew further apart and cousin Kelvin’s shorts were around his ankles. 

Noises came from both of them that Hugh had never heard before. The bed creaked from the weight of Amelia’s torso being moved back and forth as Kelvin bumped into her repeatedly for reasons Hugh didn’t understand.

This excited his brain, sending numbing sparks underneath Hugh’s skin that gave way to a warm sensation in each extremity. Without hesitation, Hugh scooched forward and placed one of his tiny hands onto each of Cousin Amelia’s nearly bare feet. She flinched slightly but didn’t stop. Instead, she slid her sandals off as the peculiar dance continued, letting little Hugh hold her bare feet until both his cousins released moaning sighs. Kelvin left first, leaving Amelia sitting on the bed, putting her sandals back on.

“Hugh, I know it’s you. If you tell anyone what just happened, I’ll kill your mama.”

As she walked away, Hugh sobbed, facedown into the carpet.

***

Hugh didn’t think about what happened much afterward. At thirteen, though, when most of the other boys looked girls up and down, Hugh was only looking down. This realization, ironically occurred in winter. At school, Hugh stared at the girls’ cold-weather shoes, imagining their bare feet. In the spring, he became mesmerized by the appearance of open-toed shoes on the girls in his classes. His yearning was so overwhelming that Hugh’s grades noticeably dropped. They took a sharp upturn when he learned there was a field of medicine just for feet, podiatry. Why not? He had always excelled in biology.  

The years clicked past. Hugh kept his desires a secret, satisfying himself alone with women’s shoe catalogs. After three years at UNC, he’d never been with a woman, let alone even been on a date. But, during his junior year that changed when Hugh met a freshman girl who became unexpectedly infatuated with him. Eventually, Hugh confessed his desires to her. She found the idea repellant but said yes and began allowing him to lick her feet prior to intercourse. 

Around this time, Hugh received a phone call from his mother concerning Cousin, Amelia. She had died at only thirty-four. He hadn’t seen her since he was little, so Hugh was flabbergasted when he found himself sobbing on the other end of the line. The pathologist said in his report that Amelia had died of a heart attack brought on by methamphetamine abuse. 

During his senior year, Hugh began to contemplate what Amelia’s body now looked like inside her coffin. How had she changed in the past year? These thoughts instantly aroused him. Hugh wanted to feel the tepid, dead flesh of her feet between his teeth.

One evening, not long after, when Hugh and his partner were becoming intimate, he began to lick her sweaty, unwashed feet, only to be startled by a horrible, high-pitched scream. It took a few seconds to process that he was the reason. Hugh had sunk his teeth deep into the arch of the unfortunate young woman’s left foot. She hurried back to her dorm, never reporting the incident out of embarrassment. He’d never see her again. 

Hugh graduated with honors and went on to study podiatry at Kent State. 

***

By the time he turned thirty-four, Hugh had been practicing podiatric medicine for four years back home in Raleigh, a forty-minute drive to his great-aunt Bonnie’s house, where it all began.

During the ensuing years, Hugh never had another girlfriend. The realization he was now the same age as his cousin when she died set something off inside of him. An urge grew. He didn’t have to kill them himself, just read the obituary section of small regional newspapers.  

Hugh traded in his Honda Civic for a black Dodge Ram pickup with four-wheel drive, in case he lost traction on the grass backing down to a fresh gravesite. His goal was to find a recently buried young woman located in a remote cemetery. He would dig up his first corpse later that year.

Hugh hadn’t done any kind of physical labor since his teen years, making the excavation take longer than expected. He opened the casket with a crowbar, exposing the body of a young woman of nineteen who died due to an unexplained cardiac arrest.

She was a brunette girl with sharp features, in a stiff white dress. Because the body was only displayed from the waist up, she already had bare feet. As not to make noise, Hugh didn’t bring anything mechanical to excise them. He used a surgical-grade bone saw to make through-cuts directly above the ankles. Yellowish embalming fluid leaked out of her body and onto the lining of the coffin. The vapors burned Hugh’s eyes. He placed each foot in its own freezer bag and put them in a small Igloo cooler filled with ice, storing it on the floorboard of his truck directly behind the driver’s seat. With the casket closed Hugh’s euphoria wained. He began to sense his muscles screaming from the effort he had exerted. But the task of returning the dirt remained. This chore wasn’t optional. Hugh had to cover his tracks.  

At home, when Hugh opened the bag, the gray, dead feet still reeked of a sharp chemical smell. He used a large syringe to push water through the veins of each, flushing the remaining liquid out and down the bathtub drain. 

After thoroughly drying both, Hugh laid them out on a cutting board. The right foot, he stored in a vacuum-sealed freezer bag using a Food Saver his mother gifted him but he rarely used. Once it’s tucked away in the back of the freezer, Hugh held up the girl’s left foot to inspect it with admiration.

“Almost like hers,” he whispered aloud. 

Hugh rummaged around underneath his bathroom sink looking for a bottle of nail polish. It’s the exact same garish pink his cousin Amelia wore on that fateful day. He had purchased it years ago on a lark when it caught his eye in a drug store. Hugh shook the old bottle vigorously. The small BB inside rattled the clumpy mixture back to life. After the initial light coating, he let the paint dry, then applied a second with the precision you’d expect from someone who performed delicate surgeries weekly.

Task completed, Hugh escorted his prize to the bedroom. Unlike the rest of the house, which had bare oak floors, his bedroom was outfitted with deep-pile, harvest-gold carpet. It was reminiscent of his great-aunt Bonnie’s house circa nineteen-eighty-five. The bed was king-size and sat on a custom-made, tall bedframe.  

Naked, he crawled underneath after gently laying the dismembered left foot on the floor next to the edge of the bed. At first, he oriented the foot as Amelia’s were on that day, pink toes toward him. While entranced, Hugh began pleasuring himself. Soon, he found himself picking the dismembered appendage up and sinking his teeth across the inside arch. He gnawed the ragged skin, feeling the delicate bones underneath as they ground between his teeth. Salivating like Pavlov’s dog, Hugh turned to his side and made a deposit onto an already crispy patch of carpet. 

Finished, Hugh stored the left foot in the refrigerator to keep it fresh. Over the next two weeks, he performed the same ritual several times a day, often leaving gaps in his appointment book, which allowed him to return home to do so. 

When the foot began to rot, Hugh put in a call to a friend from Kent State. Carl was a veterinary student at the same time Hugh studied podiatry. Outside of class, one of his hobbies was osteology. Carl collected dead animals. He stripped off their flesh and articulated the remaining skeletons to be displayed and used as teaching models. The process required the use of Dermestid beetles. They slowly pick through each morsel of putrid flesh until only bone remains. Carl shipped a box with about one hundred of these little critters to Hugh’s doorstep.

The setup was easy, a ten-gallon fish tank with wood chips in the bottom. Hugh placed it up in his basement with a heat lamp to keep them warm. The process was slow at first, but once the beetle colony grew, flesh vanished at a clip. When it was finished, Hugh soaked the bones in hydrogen peroxide for a week to whiten them. With tips from his university acquaintance, Hugh was able to perfectly articulate the young woman’s foot using wire, and small springs. 

He flagrantly kept it on his desk at work. Though, being that he’s a podiatrist, it didn’t look out of place. Ethically acquired human bones can legally be purchased in the United States. Usually by universities and garden variety eccentrics. Two months passed before Hugh began feeling the urge again. He defrosted the girl’s right foot overnight in his refrigerator. 

Once he got a whiff of dead flesh, two more weeks of mania set in, which manifested repeatedly under Hugh’s bed. Inevitably, the rot began to take hold. Once the smell shifted from fresh death to putridity, their flesh became useless sexually. Hugh articulated it and the foot joined its twin on his desk. 

He knew that the urge would return, likely within a few months. Hugh was determined to judiciously prepare instead of acting impulsively. In the interim, he joined a gym, in hopes of not wearing out as quickly while digging in the future. 

A month later, Hugh began shopping through the obituary section. Another month passed before he found a suitable candidate, buried in a small graveyard near Castalia. Two days later, Hugh dug up the body of the newly deceased girl and removed his dead quarry. Now that he was physically stronger and more confident, the process took much less time. 

This cycle continued for two years. Every two months, a body meeting the correct requirements appeared. 

***

Today, Hugh has an entire shelf in his office dedicated to eight pairs of articulated feet and counting. He intends for it to grow, but his winning streak inevitably comes to an end.

***

  It’s been six months since Hugh’s last ‘excavation’ as he’s begun calling them. But faced with waning choices, Hugh considers the unthinkable. What if he made the woman dead instead of waiting? Acquiring a pre-deceased specimen of such a young age who isn’t riddled with disease or mangled in an accident is nearly impossible. Perhaps they’d be in larger population areas, but he can’t risk operating outside of very rural graveyards. If fate has stopped giving him what he needs, Hugh will take what he feels owed.

Dating websites would leave a trail. Instead, on weekends, Hugh begins frequenting local bars. The physical transition of his body from the past two years of fitness training has garnered plenty of women’s attention. However, it has to be the right woman. 

For another six months, Hugh populates the same singles bars, biding his time and getting a feel for it. Then, one Saturday night, in stumbles a perfect specimen. The spitting image of his deceased cousin, Amelia. She’s wearing open-toe sandals, toenails painted the same Pepto-pink. Hugh’s heart begins pounding so hard that his carotid arteries visibly pulse on both sides of his neck. This is his opportunity. She’s utterly plastered. 

Hugh begins planning his approach. But there’s no need. She makes uncomfortably long eye contact with him as she clumsily makes her way to his booth, where he’s sitting alone drinking a domestic beer. Without talking, she slides herself onto the bench seat, right next to him, hemming Hugh in between her and the wall. 

“Hey babe,” she says slurring, “Don’t you want to buy me a drink?”

“I reckon I can manage that. Just let me up and I’ll head over to the bar and pick up whatever you want.”

She slides her hand down the inside of Hugh’s thigh, making him jump with nervous energy.

“Thanks, sugar,” she says as she awkwardly moves aside. 

Standing next to the table, Hugh says, “I almost forgot to ask what you’d like?”

“I want a gin and tonic,” she says slurring. 

On his way back from the bar, Hugh empties a white powder he prepared ahead of time into the icy highball glass, mixing it with the tiny straw the bartender left in the drink.

Instead of returning to the same bench seat as her, Hugh sits on the other side of the booth. 

He drinks in tense silence as this intoxicated woman slides off her shoes under the table and begins running her feet up and down his legs. 

Coyly she looks at Hugh and asks, “Do you like that?”

“Yes,” he replies stiffly.

“If you want, I’ll let you suck my toes,” she says, sliding a foot toward his groin.

This goes on for another fifteen minutes, as Hugh finishes his beer. 

“I’m ready to go, if you are, big man,” she says, flirtatiously.

He approaches the bar and cashes out his tab, all the while, thoughts of her blood smeared across his shiny bone saw parade through Hugh’s mind.

Wobbly legs carry the pair out to Hugh’s Dodge Ram. 

“I think I’ve had too much to drink. I don’t know if I can … if I can drive,” Hugh mumbles.

“Don’t worry, baby. I can.”

“Are you sure?” Hugh says disoriented.

“Just give me directions, and I’ll get us there.”

“Okay,” he says staggering even more.

Buckled into the front passenger seat of his truck, the overwhelming urge to sleep presses down upon him.

“I forgot to ask,” Hugh says, “what’s your name?”

“My name is Amelia,” the woman says, seemly far less intoxicated than a few minutes before. 

Those are the last words Hugh hears before darkness envelopes him. 

***

Hugh wakes up, face down in the grass, his nose inches away from the young woman’s pink toenails. 

“Not so alluring now, are they? You’re probably a bit confused at the moment. You downed an entire beer full of Rohypnol.”

“What?”  

You know, roofies. The date rape drug. It’s the same thing you put in my gin and tonic. The one I didn’t touch. But you were too distracted to notice. In fact, I haven’t had a single drink all night.” 

As Hugh orients himself, he realizes his hands are cuffed behind his back and chained to ankle irons. Fear runs through his veins, cold like alcohol evaporating off bare skin.

“What do you want?” Hugh says, tension straining his voice.    

“I’ve been watching you for some time now. Do you think it’s a coincidence that such perfect specimens continued to line up? No, Hugh. The bones of those women you so intricately articulated are my trophies, not yours. Each of them I plied with copious amounts of liquor. After making love, I injected an overdose of insulin beneath one of their large toenails. Each was assumed to have died of unspecified cardiac events brought on by excessive alcohol consumption.”

“Where am I?”

“The old Battleboro cemetery. The place you dug up the fourth girl.”

“Let me go,” Hugh says, “We can work together.”

“Oh, we already have. My mother told me about you. I was conceived that day at great-aunt Bonnie’s back in nineteen-eighty-five. The child of incest. It would seem sociopathy runs thick in our blood, doubly so in mine.”

“Amelia never had a child.”

“That you knew of. The shame of a teenage pregnancy brought on by cousin-fucking was too much for my grandmother to bear. She sent my mom away, and I was adopted after my birth. It wasn’t until I turned eighteen that I tracked down my biological mother. My adoptive parents named me after her. I suppose they felt that I should keep a small piece of Amelia with me.”

“What you do want?” Hugh cries.

“To watch you suffer and take back what’s mine.”

“The feet?”

“All seven sets.”

“There are eight.”

“The first girl wasn’t mine, just happenstance. But, when I saw what you did, digging up that young girl’s body, the thought of possessing what you had taken worked its way into my mind like a sliver of wood jammed under a fingernail. Had I taken my victim’s feet myself, before they were buried, each would have been investigated as murders. No. I let you do the hard work.”

“I have money. I can⸺”

“I don’t care. Not everything is for sale, Hugh.”

“If they arrest me, they’re going to also connect the murders to you.”

“I took the liberty of leaving vials of insulin in your refrigerator, fresh needles, as well as the ones I used on each girl, which contain traces of their DNA. After leaving the bar, we visited your office and I took what was mine. The police have already been tipped off. You are going to be caught.”

“What about the first girl? She belongs to me.”

“The pieces of her feet have been scattered around the graveyard. I’m going to put a key in your hand. Get free and you can go looking. There’s probably less than an hour remaining. I left a note in your handwriting begging the police to stop you. All you can do now is collect your bones and run.”

“Why shouldn’t I just run?”

“Because I know you won’t leave her. These girls were your only company and solace. Believe me, I understand. But every game must have a winner.”

Amelia drops an old, red, plastic flashlight in front of Hugh’s face.

After placing the key in his left hand, she sarcastically says, “Good luck,” and walks off into the night.

Hugh flops around, having a fit trying to work the key into the hole of the right cuff. For several minutes it’s just out of reach but eventually, he gets it to slide into place. Hugh turns it, releasing his right hand. This causes the chain connecting the handcuffs to his legs to fall away. It doesn’t take much effort to free his left hand, and then each ankle. 

Frantically, Hugh examines the ground under the old-growth pecan trees. Piece by piece, he collects the errant bones, keeping track until he’s missing only one, the second metatarsal of the right foot. Scanning erratically, his flashlight beam glances across the trunk of one of the large trees. Leaning up against it is the younger Amelia. 

“It took you long enough. Is this what you’re looking for?” she says, holding the bone between the pointer and middle finger of her right hand.

Hugh’s confidence grows. He’s taller and stronger.

Walking toward Amelia, Hugh shouts, “Give it back, you cunt!”

“Come get it,” she taunts.

Hugh charges, running at her with full force. Amelia turns the bone around, exposing an end that has been cut on the bias and sharpened. Just as Hugh reaches her, she punches him in the face, driving the bone through his left eye, causing him to fall onto his back, screaming in pain. Without hesitation, she stomps the bone further into his skull with her right foot, still clad in open-toe shoes.

Amelia doesn’t stop. Her feet slam onto his face over and over, bloodying him until each of Hugh’s breaths manifests a gurgle. Then there’s quiet.  

A demented grin paints itself across Amelia’s face as she sees herself reflected in the stainless steel blade of Hugh’s bone saw. She gets to work, forcing the blade through the tender skin just above his left ankle, then grinding into bone. The serrated stainless steel makes short work of it. Then she repeats the act, taking his right foot as well. With her prizes in hand, Amelia leaves Hugh where he fell. 

After hoisting herself into his truck, she drives off just as a line of blue lights comes into view through distant foliage. As Amelia accelerates onto Highway Ninety-Five via the Gold Rock exit, she cannot help but pull out Hugh’s left foot and grind it between her sharp teeth.

The Doom Hippies Vs. Harvard

“What appears to be the problem?” Jade McKenna peered through horned-rim glasses at the body pile up. “I thought we had trained the Final Dogs to eat the bodies…”

She paused and dabbed at her face. Something was wrong, Something was very wrong.

It had all begun with the addition of The Doom Hippies, a collection of dark satire by Alex S. Johnson, to the collection at the Widener Library. The author had donated the book and added a sigil written in his own blood as well as an embedded curse. Subsequently, havoc spread through Harvard like snaking fingers of Mandelbrot juice. The entire student body was infected. Green juices poured copiously from genitalia. Minds were at first subtly inflamed, then engorged, with phallic juts bursting through foreheads and spearing dead babies through stained class widows. Eyes crackled with emerald fire like icicles stored in the dendrites of Notre Dame cathedral as it walked to and fro in an ever-widening circle of chaos stars. 

“I actually did no such thing,” Johnson said in her right ear. “And frankly, it’s Craig Thomas’s fault. It’s on him. He was so enthusiastic to get the book from me, especially after he read the product description on amazon. I think it was the story ‘Vampussy’ that did it.”

“Granted, yes, it was probably…that story, or maybe it was his story ‘Walpurgisnatch’ that Kari Lee Krome put him up to.”

“But ‘Walpurgisnatch” isn’t in The Doom Hippies,” Johnson reminded her. “It’s in the forthcoming sequel, The Doom Hippies III: Cancelled and Deleted Tales. The one you’ve got in your hand right now.”

McKenna reached out as though her hand was on a spring attachment and swatted Johnson’s busy ghost like a mosquito.

“Get away from me, you Haunto-Fiction motherfucker. You’re as bad as Jordan Gallader. Lots of you ghosts have been swarming the Harvard hive mind  of late.”

“Bitch, I ain’t dead yet.”

“So you’re undead. Honestly, it doesn’t matter to my busty curvy sexy Sadie self in the slightest. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going back to my porno librarian job.” She said all this in a husky voice while passing her hands over her D cups.

Johnson’s engorged astral cock spurted white hot jissom on the dendrites of Berlin in the 70s, when a coke-addled David Bowie had fled the grim scene that spawned the Thin White Duke. McKenna smeared her ivory fine tuned hands through his spunk on purpose at first, then down her face, then down her titties, finally resting on a bust of Phallus constructed in absentia around a wire sculpture invoked by Dr. Anton Shreck as he constructed Lemmy Kilmister’s hot body double in 5.0 Dolby stereo.

“I’m so horny right now,” whispered Johnson directly into McKenna’s sordid, depraved cunt. “I’m horny for you, I’m horny for posterity, I’m horny for fame, I’m excited to be here, I’m wanting more and more and more of the wonderful cool blue neon fire of possessing the hive mind, as the final king and reigning champeen at the bittersuites to Succubi…fire…fire…fire is cool.”

“Whatever,” said McKenna. “Me for some o’ that gore candy and animal tranqs.” She thrust the ubiquitous copy of The Doom Hippies away from her, the one that so many redeemed Catholic schoolgirls had used to emancipate themselves from their inhibitions, and glanced at herself in the male gaze mirror of Johnson’s erotic obsessions. She was bound to a wheel with a bit gag in her mouth, blood dripping down her body. She felt objectified in the most wonderful and liberating way.

The Widener Library’s cum-crusted copy of honorary Dr. Johnson’s dark satire monsterpiece grew stilts and a hedgerow of soft parades, beginning its epic trek across the Himalayas in an attempt to replicate itself at the foundation of reality.