Visible Woman

“You were that kid with the boner. Back in high school, right? Freshman biology?”

Lying on the lounge chair by the pool at the Ardent Gardens Mobile Home Court rec center, you’re looking up at whoever it is speaking to you. The sun, directly behind her, blinds you. You can make out that it’s a woman because the crotch of her bikini is right at eye level. The camel toe makes it official.

“You’re that guy, right?”

You shade your eyes. Now you can make out the face. Which is—your science teacher, Mrs. Nicks. From high school. Like from fifteen years ago. Holy shit. You didn’t realize you were fixating on your former science teacher’s vagina.

You remember Mrs. Nicks as a slender, serious woman, maybe in her early thirties back then, with tortoise shell glasses and a smoker’s voice. She kept her wild, curly brown hair cut in a loose, jaw-length bob, went bare-legged in belted shirt-dresses, and wore penny loafers without socks. Seeing her in a skimpy two-piece swimsuit is somehow unnatural.

She’s standing over you, running a towel over her hair, the water droplets dancing off your chest.

There’s a little bit more to her now than you remember, but not much.

“The boner kid? Every class. That whole semester. Right?”

Of course it’s you. How could you forget? You’ve still got the scars on your psyche. But you had no idea Mrs. Nicks ever noticed.

You give her a cocked grin. “Freshman year is still a blur,” you say. Which is not in the least bit true. It’s crystal clear and still fresh enough to make you cringe every time you think of it.

That whole year, you could not get your mind off sex. Freshman Biology was the absolute worst. Mrs. Nicks kept a model on her desk at the front of the classroom, a transparent figure of a naked woman with the skeleton and all the organs visible through the clear plastic skin. Your seat assignment put you right in front of it.

At one time or another, you imagined every girl in your class displayed naked, full-sized as a transparent plastic figure.

By the time class ended, you had a huge hard-on. Every time. It felt enormous. And not in a good way.

When the bell rang, you hunched over in your seat until everyone else left the room so they wouldn’t see, wouldn’t laugh at you. If a couple of the girls hung around by the door, you wouldn’t move. Better to be late for the next class than have everyone talking about the useless boner you always got in biology.

“Kevin, right? Kevin Winchell?”  She’s holding out a beer to you.

“Mrs. Nicks?”

“Ms. now. Mister Nicks gone bye-bye.”  She waggled fingers of farewell with the hand holding the beer. “I’m back to Waxworth. I’m surprised you don’t remember.”

You don’t remember, but you say you do, making noises about old wounds or something. You’re not fully here. You’re back slogging around in the sludge of despicable memories.

“You might have missed it. But it felt like everyone was making jokes about us.”

She waggles the beer, drops of condensation hitting the crotch of your swim trunks. Like she’s aiming. It’s cold on your folded-up pecker. So you take it.

“That boner of yours kept me sane. Least I can do is buy you a beer.”

She stretches out on the lounge chair next to yours, crossing her legs at the ankles, then takes a pull from her own beer.

There’s a faint whiff of something familiar and you realize it’s the same fragrance she always wore in the classroom. Something ferocious is stirring in that dark cave of memory.

You realize she’s been talking, and all you’ve done is stare at the texture of her thigh.

“—like, do I come right out and thank you for having a hard-on in my class?”

You’re not listening closely. Your science teacher, in a wet swimsuit, is talking about your penis.

“Feels odd bringing it up, but we’re both adults, right? Some of us a lot longer than others.” She leans over the arm of the lounge chair and dips her sunglasses to look at you. “You don’t mind me talking about your penis, do you?”

“Not at all,” you say, because you don’t want to come off as a dipshit prude, even as you stare in on the freckled bosom in her swimsuit top spilling toward you.

She re-sets her sunglasses and settles back on the lounger. “I didn’t think so, but you know how it is. Old habits, I guess.”

Old habits sound okay right now.

“At first, I assumed it was one of the girls in class.”

You’re about to say you can’t recall any of the girls in that class but she keeps on talking before you can lie to her.

“I tried playing Sherlock and catch who you were watching,” she said, “then I realized. Every time I looked? You were watching me.”

Which you were. You were terrified she’d stop the class and make you go see the nurse or something. You’d have to walk out of the classroom with that boner of yours leading the way.

“If my marriage wasn’t breaking up, I’d have reported it to the assistant principal and let the office handle it. But. That asshole Frank was fucking the girls’ P.E. teacher. You may not remember her.”

“Miss Gantz?”

“Miss Gantz. She always smelled great. Like she was sweating Giorgio or whatever it was she was wearing. Made me feel like shit.”

She takes a pull at her beer, quenching a fire not quite dead.

“But—there you were, with your little pecker all hard in my class, watching me. For that, I am grateful.”  She salutes again with her beer. “Good thing you weren’t eighteen.”

You chuff a laugh, non-committal, leaving it there.

“What was going on in that overheated adolescent brain of yours? Like, was I naked? Right there in class?”

It makes you feel bad how she’s built up this idea about you and your boner. As far as you recall, she never got a turn on your fervid mental merry-go-round. She wasn’t the one keeping your adolescent brain sautéed for the entire hour.

“Some days, I’d be so depressed. Then I’d come into class, and there you’d be with that super erection aimed right at me.”

Again, you laugh, like something shared. But really. Who imagines their science teacher naked?

“I couldn’t think what to do about it. Can you imagine? Frank is fucking Miss Gantz and I’m going to the office to report an unauthorized boner in my class.”

She laughs. You laugh. It does sound ridiculous.

“So I let it go. Besides. It was an emotional pick-me-up.”

She swirls the last of her beer and knocks it back.

“Seriously. Between us. The age difference didn’t bother you?”

You give her an embarrassed smile and a shrug, but she waits for you to speak.

You don’t want to spoil her own fantasy, something that’s sustained her through a really tough time, the way she tells it. So you decide you can do her a small favor. You can recall one of your fantasies and fit her into it. For old times’ sake.

“Okay,” you say, “there was this one. Kind of regular. We’d be naked, and totally see-through. Skin and muscle would be transparent and the organs totally visible.”

“Kind of creepy.”

Creepy is good. Discourage her curiosity.

“Well,” you say to her, “I was looking at the plastic model on the desk all class period. So. No, it didn’t seem creepy at the time.”

“Where were we? What did you have us doing?”

“Up on the desk. As I pushed in—slowly—I could see everything inside. How all the innards shifted around to make room for my—penis—”

“Innards? Is that a technical term?”

You laugh but keep going. “I could see through the skin and muscles enough to make out the reproductive parts, the nerves, the blood vessels. I could watch how my prick slid in and out, in and out, going faster and faster. All the parts started getting warm, so warm they’d glow. Then we’d lock together to let me come. I could see the way it spread through the abdomen, the legs. I didn’t have a good grasp of where semen went exactly, so I imagined it spreading like ink in water, going everywhere. I’d keep going until I was done. Then, we’d relax. I’d pull out and all the organs and muscles would close around the tunnel I’d created.”

She seemed to go slack, staring straight ahead.

“Wow,” she said.

You wonder if you overdid it.

She swings herself upright and says, “Come on, I want you to have something.”

You overdid it.

She slips into her wrap, throws the towel over her shoulder, then grabs you by the hand.

You’re worried you’ve turned yourself into the magic dick of her fairy tale fantasy. You have serious doubts about conjuring the boner she remembers so well.

But you follow her. You imagine the neighbors watching as you leave the pool, her leading you past the other mobile homes to her own double-wide, hidden behind dwarf orange trees and a leafy trellis.

Inside, her place is cluttered but well-kept. There’s no sign she shares it with anyone.

She offers you another beer, which you take. A good excuse if you can’t get hard for her.

She disappears into the back, the bedroom probably. Were you supposed to follow?

You shouldn’t have told her that story. But you did. So—that makes it your fault she’s thinking the way she is. You should at least show her you’re not grossed out by the idea.

You will your dick to rise, and give yourself a few quick rubs to help it along. It does, and you’re grateful.

She comes out from the back, carrying a large box of what look like toys.

She notices immediately. “Is that what I think it is?”

Is she being funny? She’s a fucking science teacher. Or are you about to make a total fool of yourself?

She puts the box on the table, watching you, watching your hard-on.

You’re confused. She seems to be waiting on you. Whose turn is it?

She steps closer to you. “Did you mean to do that?”

Must be your turn. You’re not sure what should happen next. Maybe you’re supposed to offer a kiss. You lean in but she flinches aside.

You straighten up. You can feel your cheeks brighten, to a glowing stoplight red. You retreat, but she hooks her finger in the waistband of your swim trunks.

“This,” she says, “could turn out to be weirder than either of us imagine.”

You’d flee, which she seems to sense, and tugs you closer. She squats down, settling on her heels and slides your swim trunks down to your ankles, helping you step out of them. She takes you into her mouth, wetting you thoroughly. With a kiss of the tip to signal she’s done, she stands up, steps out of her bikini bottoms, kicking them away from under her feet. She turns her back to you and bends herself over the dining table, guiding you in from behind.

Your ambivalence hasn’t melted your hard-on, but does give you a fine balance of insensitivity and hardness that forces you to work toward the climax, which right now seems a long, long way off. Like your elevator is stuck on the second floor. It feels good, but not good enough to speed things along. You realize she’s working right along with you, vocalizing, arms stretched out, gripping the edge of the table. You’ve got her by the hips, concentrating on how it feels, trying to raise the elevator.

Not wanting her to get bored, you wet your finger and reach around to find her button. That seems to unlock something.

Pretty soon the table’s shaking, you’re shaking, she’s shaking, the entire mobile home is shaking on its blocks, and then she lets loose with a howl and she reaches back, grabbing hold of you, clamping you to her. Then you’re rising, like a mortar on the 4th of July. You’re up on your toes. You explode. She’s got you by the buttocks and you can’t draw out, even as you spasm with the contractions, a shot gun racked and fired, racked and fired, until the spasms lessen, leaving you drained.

When you can’t seem to give any more, she lets go of you and rests her head on her arms. She is sighing, regaining control of her breathing.

You pop out, making a mess on the carpet.

You offer an “oops.”  You’re not sure why.

Boning your high school science teacher wasn’t high on your life’s achievements list. Now it is.

After a moment she pushes herself up from the table, first one arm, then the other, to rest on her elbows.

She ducks her head to look back at you. “Damn,” she says.

She straightens up and moves past you to get her cigarettes. She lights up, takes a long drag. Then looks down at the glistening trail you left running along her thigh.

She leans against the little breakfast bar and says, “We’re a mess, aren’t we?”

You aren’t sure if that means hygienically or spiritually.

“You know,” she says as she draws on her cigarette, rolls the smoke around in her mouth and blows a stream to the ceiling. “I only meant for you to have that model of the visible woman as a thank you for getting me through very bad time,” she says, taking another drag, “but shit that was worth the wait.”

Your cock still spasms, unwilling to surrender the field just yet.

She reaches out with her foot and flexes her toe on the underside of your crank.

“Would it be greedy to ask if you have another one of those in you? Since you’re here?”

There’s only one way to find out.

If Cormac McCarthy Wrote the Grasshopper and the Ants

In the warm days of summer, Grasshopper woke from a bad drunk after crashing in an empty Lone Star beer can. He munched a clover leaf in an attempt to clear his head but it was no good so he picked up his fiddle. He was halfway through his warmup exercises when he saw a line of ants, each straining under fallen seeds and dried fruit six-times their weight.

Oy, what are you doing? Grasshopper asked.

Storing food for the winter, the first of two ants, struggling with an acorn, said. He wiped his brow with his five legs, the sixth being lost in a bar fight in Abilene. Summer isn’t going last forever, you know, the second ant said and the two resumed their journey.

Grasshopper picked up his fiddle. The conversation caused him a great deal of cognitive dissonance. He worried that he should prepare for winter but the ants were drones, who wouldn’t understand passion if it bit them on the thorax. Besides, he’d just about mastered the chords for The Devil Went Down to Georgia. He began to play and a centipede stopped to listen.

You hear about that lady bug? the centipede asked after Grasshopper completed Venus in Furs.

No, what happened?

She choked to death on some moldy rye, the centipede said.

That’s horrible! Grasshopper suppressed a grin. 

The tragedy reinforced his world view. Finally, he had an argument to shut those stodgy ants up. There was no point in preparing for winter because the food would spoil anyway. He played a few chords of the Ode to Joy and left to enlist Bullfrog’s help.

***

Bloody diarrhea! Projectile vomiting! Fever! Dehydration! Electrolyte loss! These are the dangers of old food, Bullfrog croaked at sunrise. The insects paid so much attention that he croaked his message three times a day.

The ants argued that May flies and June bugs died from natural causes but no one listened.  As a fresh-food advocate, Grasshopper’s career skyrocketed and he kicked back some of his profits to Bullfrog. At each sold-out concert, he played the theme from Schindler’s List in memory of the dead. And the groupies! Dozens of lady bugs lined up outside his dressing room eager for a few minutes of inspiration. Then he received his highest honor, an invitation to play at the High Council of Cockroaches.

***

We must act to prevent food poisoning. The head cockroach wobbled his greasy antennae. Play us a tune while we confer.

Grasshopper played Schindler while the cockroaches traded political favors.

A decision has been made, the head cockroach concluded. In the interest of saving lives, all stored food shall be banned under penalty of death. He turned to Grasshopper. As a reward for your civic virtue, I present you with this medal. Another cockroach whispered in his ear. What? We gave the medal to an assassin bug? A hum. As a reward from your civic virtue, I present you with this stale cracker.

***

Wasps fanned out across the land to confiscate stored food and stung anyone withholding. Being wasps, they stung many who turned in their food as well. Innocent and guilty alike died, gut stung, bloated, begging for water, and their carapaces withering under the brutal sun. In celebration, Grasshopper held a victory concert. Accompanied by a chorus of crickets, he played REM’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It to an audience of beetles, millipedes, earwigs, butterflies, and water striders.

***

When the hard frost came, the ants were first to go, a small mercy, really. At least, they didn’t live to witness the depravity their neighbors sunk into.  After weeks of hunger a mob of stink bugs gathered to raise a stink outside Grasshopper’s home.

You betrayed us!

What will our larvae eat now?

Grasshopper muscled through the crowd and ran to Bullfrog.

We have to tell everybody that it’s the ants’ fault, Grasshopper said.

What do you mean we? Bullfrog shot out his tongue and ate Grasshopper. It was a tasty appetizer but a growing frog needs protein so he turned to cannibalism. The tadpoles, tree frogs, and leopard frogs lasted through mid-December. Then Bullfrog died wracked with guilt and suffered eternal damnation as an entrée in a French restaurant. Each night a chef amputated Bullfrog’s legs and fried them in butter. They grew back the next morning to return on that night’s menu.

The other insects starved. Their bellies swelled, they grew weak, and had trouble concentrating until they hallucinated and died. Only cockroaches survived, fat and happy living off the food they’d confiscated from the others.

A toast to that fiddler who brought us this bounty! The head cockroach raised a glass of honey seized from bees who were by now dead. I couldn’t have thought of a better scam, myself. What was his name, again? No one remembered. Well, screw him, then. Let’s have another round of drinks.

Civil Sex

Commentator: If ladies were only ladies, and gentlemen, still gentlemen, this is how it would play out…

She is luxuriating in her bed as he approaches, coming from his bedroom.

He: May I join you?

She: You have only to ask, love.

He: I would further request–

She: I thought you’d never ask. Of course.

He: I’m having trouble. It’s a little tight down there.

She: Don’t worry. I’ll provide some liquidity.

He: It’s working. With a bit of a push, I’ll be in.

She: There. I think you’ve got it.

He: There, I’m in. Oh, the gates of heaven have sprung for me.

She: I knew you’d succeed.

He: It’s warm.

She: I’m sure that’s the way you like it.

He: Ah! The squash of unwashed don’t know what they’re missing.

She: Now, that I’ve got you by your nether parts, it’s a thrill.

He: No. I don’t mind it a bit. This is bliss.

Commentator: And that’s how it’s done among the upper classes.

Alibi

An urgent knock came to the front door of my apartment just as I finished giving Private Ernesto Salazar the best blowjob of his life.

Holy shit, Salazar exclaimed sitting up from his prone position at the center of my bed. He helped me up from a position on my knees. That was the best blowjob of my life!

As a second knock sounded, I ran to the bathroom, my new breasts bouncing. I caught my reflection and smiled. Bouncing breasts were new to me. Of course, I also frowned when I noticed my worthless penis. Whatever, I muttered.

Wiping Pvt Salazar’s cum from my lips, I pulled on a floor-length silk kimono and turned for the door.

Police! Open up. Urgent but not demanding.

I noticed a nervous look on Salazar’s face, as to why I could not guess, and I motioned him to stay in the bedroom.

I’m AWOL, he whispered.

Of course, you are. I shook my head and left him cowering.

At the door I took a breath, synched my kimono tighter, and turned the knob. Two police officers in cheap suits turned to face me. One – tall, young, slender, very attractive – smiled, almost apologetically and with a hint of curiosity. The other – short, overweight, older, balding – held no expression. Both look up, noted my height, my breasts, and my lack of make-up.

Good morning, the short, round cop said, Ma’am. He said it more as a statement than pleasantry. When sitting I could nominally pass, especially with the new boobs, but standing? Forget it. Too fucking tall.

Ma’am? Really? I pulled the door wide. Honey, fucking please.

The tall, handsome cop, stifled a chuckle.

How can I help you two at this unwieldy hour?

Can we come inside? Old Detective asked.

Certainly. Pardon the mess and my freaked-out friend in the bedroom.

Friend? Young Detective asked.

Casual acquaintance, you know how it is, don’t you? I looked directly at Officer Handsome Big Bulge and he smiled, nodded at me, then crossed the threshold into my living room. Old Detective followed. Pvt Ernesto Salazar shuffled around in the bedroom, finally going into the bathroom and shutting the door.

I’m Detective Murphy and this is Detective Callahan, Old Detective gestured to Young Detective, to whom I looked at directly with great curiosity.

Please tell me your first name is Harry. I asked.

It is.

No fucking way. I put a hand to my mouth and laughed in utter delight. Sorry to curse, but that’s lovely.

My parents were fans.

So, it seems.

Can I see your gun? I surprised both of them with the question.

Detective Callahan coughed once. An odd reaction, I thought, but immediately understood his confusion. Double entendre intentional.

Your registered firearm, Detective Callahan. I am hoping for a 44 magnum. Eight-inch barrel, of course.

Of course, but no. I carry a Glock 19.

Bummer. Does your weapon have an eight-inch barrel.

Naw. It’s kind of average.

Average is good.

Is it?

Can be.

Um…what the fuck are you talking about, Callahan? Detective Murphy flush with confusion and a degree of impatience snapped. Callahan sheepishly shrugged. I pondered, a moment, Callahan’s barrel length.

So, Miss…?

Oh…yes. Sorry. I’m Jacklyn, Jacklyn Henry.

Jacklyn, Detective Murphy said. I immediately recognized the tone and that he didn’t quite accept me as a Jacklyn, even with expensive, near perfect manmade breasts, facial feminization, and ten years of HRT. Fuck my height.

Well despite your confusion, I am Jacklyn. I may have started as Jack a lifetime ago, but here I am, honey. My temper flared. Three inches short of 100% woman. I moved my hand to the opening of my robe and gestured as if to flash them my little 3” penis. Detective Murphy put a hand up and looked away, Detective Callahan stared at me expectantly. I took note.

No…no ma’am. Completely do not care. Your business. Murphy had blanched red in the face and I let a bemused smile drift across my face. I pulled my hand away from the robe opening and crossed my arms.

So, what’s the deal, gentlemen?

Do you recognize the name Anthony Paul? Detective Callahan asked.

Of course, he lives downstairs by the laundry room. Nice guy, very private but we chat from time to time.

Would you say you knew him well? Callahan said.

Well? No. I mean, if we saw each other we talked. Nothing more, really.

About? Murphy chimed in.

I don’t know. Anything, you know? Things going on. Current events. Weather. You know? Whatever came to mind. I took a few steps forward, suddenly curious and increasingly concerned. Tony and I knew each other well enough to help each other out. When I had a surgery, he would be my ride to and from, and then would care for me post-op. I took care of his cat, Lulu, when he traveled somewhere overnight. We never shared a romantic interest in one another, although we fucked on occasion. I needed a friend more than a relationship. I could count my friends on one hand.

Where were you earlier this morning, around 2 am?

I was here, Detective Callahan. In my bedroom.

Where you alone?

No, the man making all the noise in the bathroom was here. We just got back from a bar and were…you know.

Ma’am? Detective Murphy said.

Please don’t call me ma’am. Really. I finally sat in an overstuffed chair and carefully crossed my legs. I sighed. I think you can guess what we were doing.

Yes…um…yes, Murphy coughed out.

Do you want to ask him? Of course, you do. Ernesto, come out here please. Neither detective objected.

It took a second but Ernesto popped out of the bedroom. The police asked him his name and address, which he stuttered out.

Honey, these officers…

Detectives.

Detectives want to know where I was last night around two am? And they don’t care if you are AWOL or not.

Pvt Ernesto Salazar nodded in acknowledgement, then pondered his response, blushed at the recollection and shyly looked at his feet.

Honey, you actually have to say it out loud.

He looked up, his eyes wide and fearful, but like a true marine, he spoke the truth when asked by authorities. Well, most marines. We were fucking. 

There you go, gentlemen. I crossed and recrossed my legs, ala Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Callahan caught a glimpse and grinned like a schoolboy seeing pussy the first time. We were fucking.

Callahan and Murphy traded glances. Callahan then looked at me with a bit of a twinkle in his eye. I returned the look. And Murphy just sat there trying to unswallow his tongue. Pvt Ernesto Salazar stayed silent.

And I have receipts. The tab at the bar, the Uber receipt. You can go there if you want and ask the bartender, Danny. We know each other. No way you can forget a 6’5” tranny, now can you? Flicks on University.

Callahan scribbled a note and said: I know it.

I was hoping, I purred.

Another look. Another twinkle.

So really, fellas. What the fuck? I’m guessing Tony’s dead or something?

Why would you say that?

Enough cop shows. I feigned a hyper masculine voice. We’re canvassing the area, asking all the neighbors, looking for clues. Shit like that.

Detective Callahan closed his notebook and leaned back on the couch. He crossed and uncrossed his legs and I shivered. I felt certain he had an eight-inch barrel on his weapon.

Wow, very perceptive, Jacklyn. Callahan said, and I liked the way he said my name, in his rich baritone voice. Goosebumps littered across my arms. I shivered. The room felt warm and cold at the same time.

Thanks, honey. I tried to contain my attraction but seemed to be failing.

Seriously, that is what we are doing. They found Anthony…Tony out behind the apartment building about an hour ago, deceased.

Deceased? As in murdered?

Seemingly. Murphy wanted to remain evasive so as to not give anything away that they might already know but then Callahan blurted out, gunshot to back of the head.

I sat down quickly, tears welled in my eyes. We were fuckbuddies, and I loved him, and I denied to myself that we were in a relationship. 

Callahan stood and moved in front of me, crouching down and taking my hand.

Are you going to be okay?

Yes, I’ll be fine. Just a bit of a shock.

Pvt Ernesto Salazar broke the silence by asking to be dismissed. Murphy waved him off and he quickly rushed from my apartment.

Call me, I murmured after the door shut, then laughed quietly. Story of my life.

Bar scene’s like that, Callahan said somberly.

Murphy cleared his throat.

I think we’re done here.

Detective Murphy lit out of the front door nearly as fast as Pvt Ernesto Salazar. Callahan stood up and offered me his hand, which I took. The difference in our height made me laugh.

You are a tall woman.

I am. It’s unfortunate sometimes.

Only sometimes.

Yes.

Can I get your number?

You have it? Didn’t you ask earlier.

No, that was your friend. 

I provided Detective Callahan my number and slowly closed the door as I watch Detective Handsome Big Bulge walk away.

After I locked the door, I swooned, thinking of Callahan, then fell somber when I thought about dead Tony.

I kept most of my details to myself. The cops didn’t need any help from me. Tony sold drugs, pure, uncut cocaine. He kept a very low profile, no one in the complex knew, except for me. And Tony provided what he called, samples, to me at no charge. When I had the urge. The previous night he provided three glassine button bags stuffed full of samples, something to start the engine before hitting the clubs in Hillcrest. I gave Tony the best blowjob of his life and that would be the last time I saw him. By the time Pvt Ernesto Salazar rolled up on me I had burned through most of the coke and fell into a mood of depravity, much to Salazar’s enjoyment. 

Tony had enemies for sure, but I never thought they’d kill him. The cartel that supported his trade protected him. If someone took him out, there would be a price to pay. Unsanctioned hits were frowned upon by Tony’s keepers. Whoever pulled the trigger on Tony, probably had been given his own bullet. Detective Murphy and sweet, sweet 8-inch Barrel Callahan would make no arrest.

***

When I heard the toilet flush, I opened my eyes and smiled. Detective “Confirmed 8-inch Barrel” Callahan padded naked back to my bed and crawled in. He leaned across my body and kissed me. His hand swept under the blanket and cupped my right breast.

They are perfect.

Thank you. Money well spent.

He kissed me again, mouth open, tongue darting, but my mood had not met up with his. I pulled away.

How’s the investigation going?

About your neighbor?

Yeah, Tony.

Closed.

Oh. It’s only been a week. I mean cops on TV solve a murder in an hour, so a week feels like forever.

We don’t close as many as you might think.

For real.

I spun off the bed and padded naked across the wood floor to the bathroom and sat on the toilet. I purposely left the door wide open to be nasty, and peed. Unlike Detective Callahan I washed my hands then pulled on my floor-length silk kimono.

So, we found another body a day after Tony. We think he’s the perp.

Really?

Yeah. The gun he had matched to the gun used on Tony.

Crazy.

I got back into bed and snuggled into sexy detective.

Should we go to breakfast, Callahan asked.

Oh my God yes. A breakfast date? I need to call my mother.

What?

Nothing, honey. Get your ass dressed before you change your mind.

Gooner’s Brood

Lucas shuffled to the end of his rusty parallel bars, his legs sore, and settled into his wheelchair. He rolled himself along the carpet, forming deep ruts that made forward motion harder as the wheels sank deeper. Eventually, he reached the computer.

A stab of disgusted passed through his body, but it wasn’t enough to stop him.

He pulled his sweatpants down, groped around the floor for his recently washed tube sock. Then he set it over his erect penis, where it rested like an obscene tea cozy.Quickly he put his right hand on the mouse and pulled up the bookmarked page for “Pregnant White Trash Sluts.” There were thumbnails for all the girls, each with a still image gallery and a link to a video library available only after signing up for a membership.  

There was Pam, wearing a red nightie frilled with black lacework, sitting on the edge of a waterbed covered in a leopard print comforter. Her freckles stood out against her pale, sallow skin, and the droop of her dark eyes gave her a drug-dazed look. It shamed him to admit it even to himself, but her appearance turned him on, some form of fentanyl (or meth) chic.

Then there was Tammie, wearing a red, white, and blue bikini, emerging from an aboveground pool limned with seaweed-green scum, her plump belly swollen and water-slicked. Her bright blond hair was up in tight pigtails that only added to the barely-legal effect given by her shiny braces.   

His erection grew stronger so that the sock danced, the shame and self-loathing moving over him now in tidal waves. 

From somewhere upstairs came a sound, the metallic slap of the mailman dropping letters through the front door’s brass slot.

Lucas jolted upright in the wheelchair, so that his spine burnt and nettles pinpricked his otherwise numb legs. He took deep breaths—one after another—just like the shrink in rehab had taught him. Eventually the rhythm of his breathing calmed him and he returned his attention to the screen.

There was Deb, his favorite. 

She stood naked, with her belly swollen and ripe, as perfectly globular as a Rand McNally globe, sneering at the men watching from the darkness of the internet.  

Die, she seemed to broadcast to Lucas with her hard, dark stare. Die, she said, to all the men in the world, including the one who’d taken the photo and the one who’d knocked her up. 

Lucas’s penis seized in the sock, spasming, the pleasure intensified by the coarse cotton rubbing against the organ’s sensitive skin. 

Suddenly he felt a tug from his groin, different from the muscular contraction of orgasm. He looked down, at an image impossible to process. 

It was the size of a doll, red with blackish markings on its skin, like tandoori chicken left too long in a clay oven. Phallic coils of leathery hair snaked from the top of its shrunken head, the mane sprouting wildly and shining like tiny tangled whip thongs. 

It braced itself between his legs, its little claws digging into the tender, pale flesh of his thighs. Its movements were subtle, more of breathing than anything else, but there could be no mistake. This was not a statue; it was either alive or some strange remote-controlled toy. 

The thought hit him—mortifying—that the thing might house a webcam, that someone was seeing him here: in his wheelchair, with a sock on his penis.

The creature snarled, baring sharp white teeth that shined like polished ivory. Embarrassment gave way to fear and Lucas was only too aware of how close its rodentlike teeth were to his unprotected genitals. 

In one swift motion the thing yanked the sock from the top of his penis, and tied its end into a knot. Then it draped the sock over its shoulder, looking like a hobo with a bindle, long-accustomed to its weight and treasuring the contents.

Lucas found his voice, used it to scream, reaching a near glass-shattering pitch.  

The creature hopped down from his pallid thighs, then skittered quickly away, taking the stairs, ignoring the wheelchair lift. 

There was the sound of its sharp-nailed feet mincing over hardwood, followed by a metallic shink as it slid through the mail slot, out onto the street.

Lucas looked around the room, down at his penis, now cold and exposed, weeping a last couple drops of semen from the bluish lips of the head.

 It hadn’t been real. It had been a hallucination, brought on by the car crash, compounded by the months he’d spent holed up here in the dark.

Time to take a break from the computer.

He moved to touch the mouse with his sweating hand, x-ed out the window displaying Pregnant White Trash Sluts. Then he depressed the power button, holding it down until Deb disappeared, replaced by an unlighted screen, its glass reflecting the pathetic tableau of him, alone in the basement. 

***

At last, the initial shock of seeing that evil idol wore off enough for him to move again. His first act was to take a long-overdue shower, then change into clean clothes. He next planned to break down the stack of greasy cardboard pizza boxes and take them to the dumpster.

He was halfway through the task when the doorbell rang. The wiring was somewhat faulty, and what started as a traditional dingdong tapered off into a wheeze, like strains from a dying music box.   

“Coming,” Lucas said, and wiped the oily cheese residue onto his pantlegs. He cursed under his breath once, remembering only after his fingers touched his legs that he’d just changed clothes.

He walked to the door, gripped the cold brass knob with a greasy hand, and put his eye to the keyhole. The fisheye glass revealed the impossible: an attractive woman on his threshold. She had deep brown eyes and dark brown hair, done in tight cornrows that vividly showed the whiteness of her scalp. Usually cornrows didn’t work on white girls. This time, however, they did, highlighting her hard-edged beauty. 

Lucas snapped the bolt and pulled the chain down. The woman drew back, holding her arms crossed over her front so that the pale mounds of her prodigious breasts bulged from her pink velour top.

She caught him looking, zipped her top up, and scowled. “Still horny, huh?” She shook her head. 

“Huh?” he asked, dumbly. Then it hit him. “Deb from Pregnant White Trash S—”

She slapped him in the face, hard.

 A white flash went off behind his eyes, and then she was in the apartment with him. She closed the door behind her and shifted the strap of her brown leather purse from one arm to the other.

Lucas watched her, rubbing his stinging jaw.

Still scowling, the young woman looked from the couch to his chair. “Which one of these two pieces of furniture has less of your nut on it?”

“Neither,” he said, the word out of his mouth before he could form a thought, or make a protest. “I mean, I use a sock.”

Her sneer curved into a smile, and she flashed him a gap-toothed grin. The gap, like the cornrows, was something that didn’t always work on a female face, but did on hers. “I know you use a sock,” she said, taking her place on the edge of the couch. “I’ve got it.”

She set her purse on top of the glass coffee table covered in a film of soda pop stains. Cleaning the table was going to be his next move after he finished folding the pizza boxes. 

“I mean,” she said, digging in her purse, “he’s got it.”

“Who?” Lucas asked. 

She pulled something out of her purse. It was a little doll, a tchotchke that looked to be carved from ebon wood and stained with some natural dark red dye. He had hair like pronged penises, though they were made of raffia fiber rather than living leather. And the teeth which had so terrified Lucas now looked to be made from sharpened bamboo slivers rather than polished ivory.

“You recognize him?” She tapped the little fetish, grinning.

“I thought it was a dream.” Lucas, without thinking, took his place on the soft recliner, settling into the deep impression he’d left there sitting and staring at nothing.

“My name isn’t Deb,” she said. “It’s Shoshana. I just took that name for the website.”

“Okay…Shoshana.” 

“And you should be ashamed of yourself. You think me and other girls want to be put in that position when we do those videos? Our backs are against the wall when we finally say ‘yes.’ We’re not your fantasy. We’re flesh and blood women with responsibilities, kids with deadbeat dads who aren’t in the picture anymore. We have addictions, issues. And you prey on us. Now I’m going to prey on you.” She stroked the tapering phallic coils bursting from the totem’s little wooden head, then her eyes drifted toward Lucas’s lap.  

Lucas looked down where she stared. The erection formerly contained by his underwear had slipped free of his boxers, presenting a more obvious puptent near the fly.

“Ugh,” she said, swallowing as if to keep the coursing bile from becoming upchuck.  “I’m glad I’m not a man. It must be hell to think with your dicks. The guys at Cheetah’s are pathetic. Doing relay races to the ATM for one more table dance.”

Lucas pointed at the little man on the table. “Sounds like you don’t need him to prey on men.” 

She tilted her head, looking at Lucas rather than through him for the first time. “Cheetah’s is a dump. Bunch of dollar generals in there waving around singles and barking orders.” She teased the little toy’s hair, working each strand individually like a stylist. “And sure this is about the money, but more than that, it’s about revenge on all you perverts, making you claim some responsibility, watching you squirm.”  

She looked back down at the little carved totem. “I got it from this crazy goth girl at work.” She petted the gorgon-headed toy it as if it were a lapdog needful of constant doting.  “This cool ass wiccan chick. She said it could bring me good fortune. I didn’t believe her.” She shook her head, as if regretting her previous lack of faith. “I even forgot all about it, til she slit her wrists a couple months back and we had to clean out her locker. And then I found it, and remembered what she told me. I tried it, and whaddya know, it worked.” 

She picked the doll up, set it back in her purse. Then she stood, breathing a sigh of relief now that she was almost free of this apartment’s musky confines. “Come on.” She slung her leather purse strap over her shoulder again. 

“Where are you going?” he asked, watching her but not moving.

“We’re going,” she said, opening the front door. “To see your son.” 

***

Lucas stabbed the ground with his crutches, limping down the apartment corridor, trailing Shoshana by several paces. 

“Slow down,” he said.

 “I’ve already petitioned Hamilton County Jobs and Family Services, Child Support Division to get some of your bloodwork from the hospital just to confirm the kid is yours. That’s if you want to deny paternity when they come knocking on your door.”

He didn’t say anything, just continued working the crutches to catch up, panting and sweating now. This was the most exercise he’d had in weeks.

“I’m guessing you’re double-dipping with social security disability, too, aren’t you?” She reached the door and pulled it open. Cold, crisp morning air entered the hallway, freezing the sweat on his body, making him shiver. 

“How much of that half-million do you still have?” she asked.

“Shh!” he hissed, moving so fast now that his armpits screamed with pain from the recoil of his crutches. “Keep it down! I don’t want anyone knowing I have money.”

“Too late.” She was smirking, but at least held the door open for him.

He walked out into the daylight with her, squinting against the sun, blinded by its disinfecting glow. 

Her heels clacked against the sidewalk as she moved. She was wearing tight designer jeans with the label name stitched in gemstones on the seat of the pants. As she walked, her apple-shaped bottom switched left and right with a throbbing, musical rhythm.

Lucas cinched the crutches beneath his right armpit, and hopped after Shoshana on one leg until he came up alongside her.

“Where’s the kid?”

“I left him in the park.” She pointed across the street, at the small green island enclosed by concrete curbing and shrouded with oak trees. A sandbox and rusty jungle gym were its only kid-friendly accoutrements. 

“You just left him there?!”

“He’s not like other kids,” she said, as if that explained, or excused it.

“What about…” Lucas trailed off, tried again. “What about the kid you were pregnant with on the Pregnant White—”

“Say the website’s whole name out loud again and I’ll slap seven shades of shit out of you.” 

There was a beep then, as the little red man on the crosswalk sign turned white. 

“Hop, gooner,” she said, walking ahead of him, her high, bluejeaned booty still making music through its motion.

“What’s a gooner?”  

Morning traffic was light, only a dandelion-yellow VW Bug and a rusted blue Ford pickup truck stopped at the intersection.

 “A gooner,” she said, voice slightly muffled by the wind, “is loser who’s hopelessly addicted to porn and doesn’t even feel bad about it.” 

“I feel bad about it. I haven’t even looked at porn for weeks.” 

“I guess what happened with me taught you a lesson.”

“That’s part of it,” Lucas said. 

They had made it across the street. Near the base of a tree’s mossy trunk, in the middle of the park, stood a small boy. 

***

Lucas stopped, unable to move forward. Even at this distance the boy looked hideously white, pale as if exsanguinated of blood and filled with embalming fluid. There was a liquidous bulge to his skin, like a water balloon filled to bursting, which only furthered the impression of him being brimful of formaldehyde.

“I put foundation on its face,” Shoshana said. “It looked too weird without it.”

“It?” Lucas crutched his way a little closer, stabbing the grass still slick with morning dew. “That’s our son.”

“I miscarried my son, and my worthless wannabe rockstar boyfriend dipped while I was going through contractions at the hospital.” She pointed at the child, still unmoving and impossibly pale beneath the tree. “That over there is something the homunculus conjured after I said the words asking for great fortune, and added my blood to your sperm.”

Lucas gagged. 

“My menstrual blood,” she added, in the hopes that his misogynist’s disgust caused him to throw up. 

When he had recovered, he looked back over at the boy standing by the tree. 

“Go say hello to your son. Hop to it, gooner.”

He crutched the final stretch of the way toward the boy without protesting the slur. He didn’t care about her anymore. There was only the strange child before him.

“Hey,” Lucas said, softly, approaching as if he were nearing an oft-abused feral cat.

The wind picked up, tousling the strands of the boy’s blonde hair, fine as cornsilk. 

The foundation Shoshana had applied made the child at least halfway presentable when viewed from a distance. Up this close, a blue webwork of pulsing veins visibly striated beneath the skin, squirming like worms, giving the boy the impression of not being sickly, but alien. 

The eyes were spaced too far apart and had no focus. Even worse, they didn’t blink, and the sclera were bloodshot, limned with a red compliment to go with the blue webwork of veins undulating beneath the skin. 

Lucas cleared his throat, spoke. “My name is Lucas Milton.”

The boy’s unblinking eyes roved toward Lucas, staring blanky. 

Lucas held a smile on his face, feeling awkward, but not quite awkward enough to cease smiling.

The boy opened his mouth, the lips full and dark purple, swollen as if bruised after a fight. His teeth were sharp and small like those of a baby shark, serrated like a saw’s, as if he had teethed himself on a whetstone.

The voice came then, not quite forming words, but bearing sounds on wet bubbles. Then there was a low animal moan, a keening of something young and sensitive with its foot caught in a sharp-jawed trap. 

“Daddy?” It widened its pale, noodlelike arms, also wormed with blue veins, waiting for Lucas to accept its limpid embrace.

Lucas tried to go forward to hug it. Couldn’t. He turned around. Shoshana was still several feet away, leaning on a wooden bench’s back. 

“I can’t,” Lucas said, eyes tearing, beseeching and broken. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Shoshanna. I just can’t.”

She switched her purse from one arm to the other. “It took me a month to learn to say those words Bry wrote down. I had to go online and look up Sanskrit pronunciations. I blew a linguist in the champagne room so he wouldn’t charge me for the phonetic translation. You can make a little effort here.”

“DADDY!” 

The thing started quickly toward him, its arms fully extended, unblinking eyes wide, hungering for its father’s attention.

“No.” Lucas hefted his right crutch, swung and caught the thing on the side of its head. The veins erupted beneath the skin, filling the subcutaneous space between soft endoskeleton and softer flesh with warm blood, finally lending it a touch of color.

It fell down, landing in a soft pile of brown mulch. 

“You hit your son!”

“He’s not my son!” Lucas’s shout resounded through the park like a rifle shot, silencing the bolder birds in the trees and sending the more timid ones flying skyward. 

“DADDY!” The boy rolled over onto his belly, got up to his knees. He regained his feet and resumed walking toward Lucas, as if he had no memory of his previous rejection at his father’s hands. 

Blood flowed fast and freely from his ears as if from a faucet on full bore, a strange cranial stigmata.

Lucas backed up, hopping awkwardly, dancing on one foot while flailing with the right crutch. “Get away! Get back!”

“DADDY!!!!”

There was a questioning, wounded lilt in its single word, as if it felt abandoned, much as Lucas and his mother had been abandoned by his father. But Lucas had to be imagining it. There was no variation in its vocal cadence, any more than there was variance in the unblinking fixity of its dead stare.

Regardless of how it said the word, if it said itone more time, he would be forced—

“DADDY!!!”

Lucas swung the crutch again, and again connected with the thing’s head. 

Only this time the head exploded in a shower of dark blood that flew upward in a bursting fountain before descending in a warm, red rain. The blood splashed Shoshana, hitting her full in the face, staining her eyes and putting the taste of menses fluid and sperm on her lips. 

“You motherfucker!” she shouted, dabbing at her stained face with her fingertips. “I’ll get you for this!”

Lucas hopped away on one leg, his remaining crutch squeaking pitifully as he worked it hard on the dewy sod, back in the direction of his apartment building.   

Home, where everything made more sense. 

“I’ve got your other crutch, gooner!”

The sounds of his gusty hyperventilation echoed, louder in his ears than her screams. Louder still, though, was the memory of the single word the boy had learned, said probably without understanding its meaning, or what memories it recalled for Lucas.

DADDY!

***

After getting home, he slammed the front door, bolted it, and fixed the chain. He pulled the curtains down and closed the slatted Venetian blinds, and used a screwdriver to disable the doorbell. Then he turned out all the lights and sat in the living room, in darkness and silence, amid the detritus of stacked pizza boxes thick with coagulated cheese.

He had no plans except to make his sleep dreamless, which he accomplished by downing cherry-flavored Nyquil until the room began to spin, then finally somersault.

When he awoke, still dizzy—now sick—he had long, scrofulous stubble on his chin and a neckbeard rough as Brillo pad. 

He didn’t have time to wonder how long he had been out. 

There was the thunk of pebbles hitting the balcony’s glass door, one after another, in methodical succession, as if whoever was throwing them did it to keep time.

He stood, donned his mildewy bathrobe, and walked to the balcony door. He slid the glass door aside and walked outside, looked down.

Shoshanna stood on the grass, wearing a powder blue Adidas sweatsuit with white vertical piping up the arms and legs. The crown of the sweatsuit’s hood was up but dented so she looked like some beguine in a weird holy order. Someone or something stood directly behind her, but because it was hidden by her form he couldn’t see it. 

Still, he could guess what it was, who it was.

“You could have tried the door,” he said. “You might break a window this way.”

“Broken window’s the least of your problems. Besides, I tried the doorbell.”

Through the haze of sleep he had some foggy half-memory of having disabled the doorbell. “You could have knocked.”

“I did that, too. I thought you might have been dead. I decided to come back one last time, and it paid off.” She pointed up at him, the evidence of her persistence. “Nice to see you again, baby killer.”

“Baby killer!?” He moved to the edge of the balcony, gripped the cold iron railing. “You’re the one who called it an ‘it’!” He was suddenly conscious of how ridiculous he sounded, how ridiculous he looked in his bathrobe.

“That’s what you call us when we have abortions, right? Of your babies. What do you call a guy who beats his own son to death with a crutch?”

There was no way of answering a question that insanely rhetorical, but he was preparing to try anyway, when she turned from him.

As she turned, her blue beguine’s cowl fell, exposing her headful of tautly pulled cornrows. “Someone’s here to see you.”

Lucas looked down toward it, him, whatever, the conflicting knot of emotions tied too tightly within him to separate one from the other. He was relieved to discover he wasn’t a murderer—“baby killer”—equally disheartened to discover he hadn’t killed it. 

Him. 

Whatever. 

Lucas placed his hands over his face. He cupped his eyes as if he were a baby lacking object permanence, who only needed to hide from a sight to make it disappear. But when he lowered his palms and looked again, mother and son were still standing there, looking up at him. 

“Here,” Shoshana said, softly. She took the child’s hand in hers, showing a maternal warmth she lacked the other day in the park, a warmth of which he hadn’t thought her capable.

The pale-faced boy wore a fitted Cincinnati Reds hat, new and with an unbent bill, the white on the “C” still as impossibly bright as the first toothpaste from a fresh tube. The hat gave the face enough shadow to soften the unblinking gaze and blue veins crawling beneath the translucent skin.  

He almost looked human, real. 

Shoshana held his hand loosely, playing with each of the fingers one at a time. “He reconstituted about an hour after you busted him like a water balloon.” She patted the boy on his narrow shoulder, as if to test the sturdiness of this, his second incarnation. “I can remake him as fast as you can break him.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to ‘break him’ again if I wanted to…” And he did want to. Or at least a part of him did. 

“If I come to your door, you going to open up for us?” 

“No,” Lucas said, and sighed. “I’ll come down to you.”

“Good,” she said, “because he wants to go the park. Don’t you, Lucas Junior?”

Lucas watched as the boy touched the front of his jacket. Its green parachute silk made him look more like a tiny militiaman than a little leaguer. The boy moved his fragile fingers—white as bone China—over the jacket’s silver zipper, separating the teeth with one quick zip. He reached inside, and when the hand emerged, it was sheathed in a Wilson’s genuine leather baseball mitt. The glove glowed with a fresh coat of liniment, as badly in need of breaking in as the hat. 

Shoshanna (who’d apparently thought of everything) pulled a white baseball from the right pocket of her sweatsuit jacket. She held it by the poppy-red seams, as if ready to pitch a forkball.

“Play catch with us, Daddy!” 

Lucas averted his eyes so Junior wouldn’t see the tears. When he trusted himself to speak again, he shouted, using the practiced tone of a father barking encouraging words to his son standing on the baseball diamond. It was a voice and they were words he had always wanted to hear his own father shouting. 

“Coming, son!” 

Alternative to Plowing

My wife Judith and I nestled in our bed at the end of a laboriously fruitful day of toiling in the field. Despite her modest age of 23 years old, she could still find the energy to arouse me in the most youthful of ways. We were always sure to keep quiet during our recreation as to not awaken our children or the neighbors of Plymouth Rock. I could sense she was feeling rather frisky when she whispered in my ear with the mousy voice I desired, “I want to make you squirm Jedediah.” Her words were provocative as if she were tempting the Lord above with flirtatious hymnals. Admittedly, I was exhausted from the day, however, my body presented itself for the occasion. My little Jedediah stood shrouded by the blanket that we shared in our straw bed as if to praise the heavens above. Judith’s calloused hand traced their way down my tanned and rigid abdominal muscles as she sought to introduce herself to my flesh.

We have recently initiated a cruel trick on the Lord by having relations without the intent of procreating. The scandalous act committed, the sin in the eyes of God, seemingly introduced passion beyond our mandatory commitments that came with the covenant of marriage. Once, on an occasion before this, I conducted the promiscuous act, and as I arrived toward completion, I exited Judith and jizzed in her Puritan blonde hair. Standing over her as a leader in the community and in the bedroom, we exalted glory for the deed. My seed eventually washed away from her curls due to the typical sweat and elements endured over the course of a few physically active days of work. We would giggle at each other over dinner with our little secret. It seemed as if tonight was destined to be a repeat of our extra-marital conduct.

Judith caressed my neck and whispered passionate praise as if I were the Messiah. “Oh Jedediah,” she said, “I want to taste your fruit and milk you as if you were one of the dairy cows outside.” I was electric. Her boldness always froze me, but I eventually found the strength to contribute. “Judith, do you take me to be your lawfully wedded boy toy?” To which she nodded approvingly. She paused with her strokes as she had a defined eureka moment. I opened my eyes slowly and met hers glowing wide with excitement. I had not seen her filled with this much enthusiasm since we boarded the Mayflower. Instead of moving her hands below the sheet, she descended entirely into the cottoned abyss that was our bed. Confused, I asked “What the heck do you think you are doing?” She hummed along in attraction to my cursing as she mischievously smiled and drifted into the dark realm. We descended into hedonism together.

At first, I was unsure what I felt. I pondered which lips she was using for my penetration. I stared at the wood beamed ceiling of our cottage as the ecstasy and confusion overtook my body. It felt wet but not as wet as typical intercourse. I concluded she must be using her mouth by the uninterrupted sounds of slurping and swallowing that were emitted from the sheet tent she was operating in. I was twice over a Pilgrim in a strange land. This must be a sin. There is no way this was normal, but then again, as animalistic as it felt, I had never seen a farm animal do what Judith was doing. I peeped down at the sheet to strengthen my imagination of what she might be attempting. My theory was confirmed as I could make out a fabric sphere bob vertically by candlelight. “Who is this devil in our bed? Do I tell our preacher about this? Should I beg for forgiveness?” All these thoughts stirred as she labored away in the late hours of the night. My back was arched and my legs tingled as if they were losing circulation. “Am I experiencing heavenly comfort or is this a measure of devotion I am not physically prepared for?”

The climax came after what felt like a fortnight. I was impressed that I was still riddled with a boner despite my neuroses. As I felt the familiar release build to the point of externalization, I reached down and tapped Judith on the top of her head. Her hair was damp with condensation and the entire under sheet was elevated with body heat. I shot my ropes into her mouth. I could not imagine the sensation she must have felt as she gulped and gasped at my relief. After enough time passed, she crawled back up my body, shamefully avoiding my eyes and asked, “Dear Jedediah, did you not enjoy my gift?”

I sat with the question momentarily before responding, “Why I do believe that might be the highest form of pleasure to be found on Earth!”

Judith finally made eye contact with me and confidently said, “I do not understand then, you laid dormant and became mute. Not even a smile upon my return to your side. I worry you have become ashamed of my heathen activities.”

Wanting to smooth over any insecurities she may have held, I told her, “Judith, I love you baby. I will eat the forbidden fruit with you any day.”

“Good. We are stuck together, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” She teased.

I watched her roll over to extinguish the candle that illuminated our quarters. “Judith, I hope you forgive me for not kissing you goodnight. Your mouth just had my seed in it. I hope you understand.”

She giggled and told me, “All is forgiven.”

For the remainder of the night, I stared deeply toward the heavens while my deeply slumbering wife lay beside me. My torment was brought on by the affliction this possessed creature drug into our marital life. I could not get passed the guilt of sin we had committed. I had been led astray by lust. Even if she was my wife, this was Sodom and Gomorrah level treason against Thee. I am at odds with God or my Family. Earth was temporary, Heaven was forever I decided. In the morning I will report her to the Plymouth Rock authorities to be hanged on grounds that she is a witch conducting the devil’s work. Till death do we part, dear Judith. 

Duet

The violins were dueling. 

Soaring to great heights before plunging back to earth in a magnificent swirl of notes and patterns, each vying for his attention. Truly a glorious duet. 

Felix Chapuys felt the old familiar stirring in his chest, not unlike those early days of marital bliss when he was young and invincible and full of boundless optimism. As it was, music had been his only solace since his young bride and unborn child had been mercilessly snuffed out by a runaway conveyance in the thoroughfare, some twenty years before. 

It was a fate that still filled him with anger and disgust at his creator. A being so callous as to rip away Felix’s own heart while also filling his soul with sublime music. God was a horribly cruel master, indeed.

Chapuys twisted the simple gold band he still wore on his left hand around and around as the strings rose together into glorious climax, ripping him to pieces all over again. The violins seemed to know all the secrets of his heart, the confusion of his broken mind. They filled Chapuys with an intense and mournful longing, the past melding seamlessly into the present as the concerto played on and on.

A final, deep unison note pierced the air before slowly, exquisitely fading away. Silent tears fell in tracks down his face, as they always did at the concerto’s conclusion. Chapuys took a moment to savor that first, blissful moment of quiet as the last tone dissipated, returning the room to its usual, colorless state. 

Felix knew if he could, he would play the music in an endless loop, winding the battered old phonograph again and again until his arm gave out from sheer exhaustion. The concerto had to be earned. 

It demanded to be admired and cherished by someone who was deserving in every way; an eager student who would follow its divine instruction. Chapuys worked tirelessly to be worthy, pushing himself to the very edge in order to live within the music and pass on this knowledge. Inspired, he vowed to do it this very night.

With a determined sigh, Felix Chapuys caressed the skull a final time before gently returning it to its rightful place among the others. Turning away from his masterpiece, he smiled at a job well done.

Felix could feel a kindred spirit, a strange presence watching him from a great distance, already learning. Satisfied, he checked to make sure his blade was sufficiently sharp, before straightening his cravat and making himself ready for the long night ahead. 

***

Lucas backed away from the exhibit as the song ended. 

It was old people music, but Lucas didn’t mind. He may be two months away from his tenth birthday, but his mom always said he had an “old soul,” whatever that meant. The figure’s movements were so lifelike, he swore it smiled at him. It was eerie watching it methodically stroke the plastic skull as the music got louder and louder. The whole thing gave Lucas the creeps and a strange feeling of excitement at the same time. 

The man was one of those animatronic thingies. Lucas could hear the clicks and whirls as it sat dancing around in its chair but the face is what really got to him. It was lined and expressive, different emotions playing out across a wax-like surface. Curiosity getting the better of him, Lucas went over to the large plaque directly beneath the exhibit and began to read.

“Felix H. Chapuys, 1842-1902, was a notorious American serial killer in the late nineteenth century. He is credited for killing at least thirty women over a span of  two decades. It is said that he was driven by intense anger at the tragic loss of his young wife, Julia, who was run over by a Hansom Cab in the early 1880s. Julia was seven months pregnant. Chapuys was a great lover of the arts and music, carving up his victims while listening to his favorite musical selections on a hand-cranked phonograph. On the night he was caught, a “Concerto for 2 Violins in A minor, Op. 3, No. 8” by Vivaldi, had just finished playing as he was surprised by local authorities. The skulls of his many victims were carefully cleaned and stacked in the bedroom, the body of his latest mark still laid out upon a table, awaiting further dissection. He’d already boiled the skin from her head as they kicked the door in and shot him dead, thus ending his reign of terror.” 

Lucas turned his gaze to the headless mannequin lying on the table, goose flesh breaking out all over his body. They really were going for a realistic effect here. Bright red pieces glistened under the lights, fake gore and offal spilling over onto the floor. He could hear the display gearing up for another go as the crank on the old-fashioned music box began to spin. Unable to tear himself away, he hesitated. It was well past lunchtime and his mother would be looking for him.

He risked a final look back, feeling the whirs of the strange technology humming in anticipation, and saw a random tear fall down the killer’s face. A fresh jolt of fear sent him running away from the waxed figure and his crazy, hypnotic music. The opening notes of the concerto rang out once again through the “Hall of Killers” as Lucas desperately searched for the exit. 

A stray thought popped into his head as he hurried past the displays of Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, H.H. Holmes and John Wayne Gacy. It came out of nowhere, in a deep, fervent voice that wasn’t his own. This single, relentless thought would return to Lucas many times in the years to come, taunting him, driving him, igniting his imagination. A lonely, almost ten-year-old boy desperately searching for meaning who found a sudden, inexplicable appreciation for classical music. 

As Lucas burst through Wax Museum doors, he had no idea what any of this meant, but it would all make perfect sense to him in due time. The world would also come to know it, walking past Chapuys to where Lucas’ own likeness would one day stand, the maestro and student entwined forever in blood-drenched infamy. Truly a glorious duet.

The violins were dueling.

Psychoneuroses, Part 4

It was tough improvisational shit he’d sold to Aleister; it was shamanic: coming on strong. Even flea-ridden mongrels like Aleister weren’t guaranteed to handle deep funk action like this gear. Piggy peered into Aleister’s mince pies for reassurance. The bitch seemed cool. Joyfully, Pigsty drifted away; a trackless spore in a hot, humid dusk. Meanwhile, Cecil continued to push his luck, displaying a barbaric propinquity toward taking the piss. Using grotty rhetoric, the pawky manner in which he mockingly depicted community values threw a shitty spanner into the central mechanism of society’s psychical economy; devaluing core theories at the very heart of its exchange rate. Self-proclaimed Royalty; do me a favour! Cecil was simply out for what he could lay his grubby paws on. He couldn’t give a tuppeny-toss about all the fools deluded enough to idolise him. In bygone days, human behaviour mirrored unimpeachable elders, folk trusted digestible rules, and felt safe under the protection of pedagogical politicians hoving flinty principles like Thomas More, or James Ramsay MacDonald; gentlemen of integrity, sinew and fibre, who stood or fell on ancient fundamentals. Ab immemorabili, more martial, but equally legendary leaders flourished: Thor and Odin, brass-balled hairy guys who led from the front; demigods, content, nay eager, to share, even their dying energies, with a beloved natural environment. From those vanished golden-ages onwards, subsequent hero-less governments had been as corrupt as Narnia in winter. Aleister’s revelatory thinking swayed toward regicide, because organically (apart from that soggy-knickered Granny-shagging stuff) Fagan was spot on: any demagogue, quasi-prophet, or tin-pot opportunist seeking to subordinate our painstakingly patch-worked communities had to be dissuaded in the most brutal fashion- lest we poor people suffer. To be ill-governed under heavy manners is to be inspected, spied upon, directed, law driven, regulated, preached at, controlled, censored, and/or bummed by creatures that have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so. 

For example, The Queen of England safeguards sovereignty for a cadet branch of the haunted house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha; landed gentry poncing off successive populations of the British Isles like a bejewelled tapeworm since 1840. Her Majesty possesses arbitrary powers of pleasure over star-struck subjects, and takes the preposterous title of Supreme Governor on Earth of the Church of England. How mad’s that? Because structurally, amid the white-hot foundry of Christ’s notional Kingdom, there is no private property, no operationally leased airspace above buildings, or on rooftops, capped with newfangled mobile phone aerials; no pride and precedence, absolutely no commercialised motive, and no reward save love. Ah, love. Today schoolchildren are groomed from the age of four; force-fed fairytales daily, stuffed full of ornamental gibberish, and unwise additions, dreamed up by the unintelligently devout, concocting a miasma which paraphrases the lifecycle of a mysterious first-century Palestinian Jew: stuff and nonsense that kiddies must fit onto the same mental map as the lifecycle of a hungry caterpillar (to which, oddly, it bears a striking resemblance). A diabolical cult of the individual surrounds Queen Elizabeth (whose face as designed by Arnold Machin, appears on all legal currency and postage stamps); leeching it large in magnificent palaces with stunning gardens, she’s amassed a vast private fortune, becoming in fact, the richest witch in the world. What on God’s green earth does Fagan see in her? Her every public relations action, no matter how banal, is lauded by a crass, fawning, sycophantic media; dark forces choreograph accompanying, pro-royalist demon-strations. Lurking behind Blighty’s stylised figurehead, a voracious clique of parasitic castrators rule a decerebrated majority, who scribble the traditional mark of inutile illiteracy by one of three names twice a decade (although some unlucky blighters from outside the portcullis, beyond the motte-and-bailey, are procured by palace security chiefs for the dubious privilege of being humped by princes, whilst sky-high on drugs). 

“And now you children of my father’s flock, the stochastic moment arrives to realise the implicatures and insurmountable powers of conviction.” Cecil trumpeted forth mesmerising messages: “…there can be no life without injustice, no living creature can live and thrive without destroying another existing organism. Behavioural battles between one’s instinctual reflexes and conditioned roles, brings painful confusion upon one’s soul! Please yourself people, groove as you feel, follow your nature, let’s all remain real. Come! Gather now; conceive infinity as it actually is.”

Slyly Cecil produced his spellbinding lantern (a theatrical prop billed as a ‘sovereign cognitive apparatus’ over promotional posters dotted around the West End) and proceeded with a phantasmagorical exhibition of suggestive images; projections fraught with terrified mini-mammals, punctuated at intervals by uglier scenes where he performed bestial deeds on an array of plastic inflatables. This cynosure of spectator heed revealed hedgehogs and multicoloured shrews, pulling processional carriages under the yoke of fantastical homorphous creatures (bipedal figures that bore antlers or pointy things akin to mountain goats). All manner of inventive pictures were grotesquely distorted, conjuring up kaleidoscopic sequences of emotional and spiritual depravity, eating into and becoming ever more pressing upon the mindset of an audience agog. Tension grew, lewd ladies cried out in ecstasy, for stark was Cecil’s power. Gross manifestations emanating from CCG’s ingenious implement of lurid exposure formed a veneered pictorial mimicry of humanity, laced with vermin, smut, scatology; painting an eerie irreligious triptych, echoing mediæval exemplars of Judgment Day. Alternative cabaret disguised excavations into evils. Serving no teleological purpose, lionising deceit, and betrayal; highlighting people’s worst traits, Cecil triggered anxieties, disinterring a primordial adversarial fear of ‘others’. FOMO spread across vast ranging horizons. Thatcher’s atavism had won; employing rubrici branded: what’s in it for me? His contemporaries were no longer willing to curb sensory whims and fancies. En masse shunning personal responsibility, compromise and sobriety; wholeheartedly subscribing to brain-worms, sleight of hand, and cheap tricks that Cecil used to corner TGI Friday’s kippered meat market. Afternoon bled into evening; febrile scuffles broke out amongst rebarbative white niggers in the foyer. Aleister espied Piggy’s sudoriferous armpits milling amidst the best of them; late arrivals, as incompetent as they were brutal: an irruption of non-thinking easily divisible boot boys, disaccustomed to harmonious mingling at an after-office-hours soirée. A transitive section of stage-struck punters crowding the auditorium were, by contrast, smitten by Cecil’s spectacle to the point of sensualism. Aleister could feel a collective craving to edge closer to Cecil’s enthralling contraption. Cecil had turned them on big time. He’d spit roasted the lot of them by talking dirty. Now they were ready to bend over and retake it where the sun doesn’t shine. Aleister guessed that promises of requited lust were genuinely scarce fodder for most heavily taxed, hard-working citizens, and now, thanks to Cecil’s adept salesmanship, easy virtue had become a big issue of the upmost primary significance. The gloating horny figure of Curious Cecil Gruff (who jarringly reminded him of his absentee father) pandered to illicit desires, playing upon biblical guilt’s and weaknesses; beseeching volunteers to feast upon the pabulum of his wicked craft. Only a soupçon of sanity survived; it belonged to venerable Aleister, would-be guardian of an adamantine anus, thus not a man to die of ignorance. 

Proper leaders, heterodox ones who care about citizens, set the correct tone, they regulate an equitable agenda -called meritocracy- there’s no inheritance, and the right people are elevated as a direct result of their worth to society from a pool of stakeholders, not just to-the-manor-born usurpers. Direct democracies draw people together: promoting mutual respect, forbearance, and shared faith; not knobbing domesticated animals, or abusing feeble folk in the way Cecil encouraged. His ghastly vision was no better than some dreadful divorced, single, or separated shag-fest, where a winner-takes-all in a cold, friendless, windswept coliseum of malice, mistrust and paedophilia. Deciphering the nuclear consequences of undiluted iniquities free-flowing through this pantomime’s rudderless, ale-house intelligence, Aleister corroborated his heart for battle by swigging the dregs of his pint. Picking up Piggy’s abandoned shillelagh, Aleister tried to get at CCG ‘of the many gross improprieties’ but was hindered in his quest by profane powers. The fluctuating phalange of punters, seduced into chaotic tumult, prevented Aleister from marching unto war. An obsequious horde serried together in anticipation of Cecile’s grand slam finale: a human wave of pheromones, wafting sweat, semen, vaginal secretions, breast milk and urine; women bared their mammaries, whilst grown men chewed on leather belts and tapered cork butt-plugs. “Seekers of saliva hear me well, and duly obey my command! Bend your knees in supplication to erotic plasticity, shaped and finely tuned by the true might of passion” yelled Cecil during his rhapsodical rodomontade “…now hold hands and circle me, o relinquishers of the stoical void.”

Aleister wished to scream aloud in his eagerness to halt Cecil in his cloven tracks, yet was lost for words as an ominous shadow menacingly upstaged any notion of gaining attention. A teeny maelstrom of pastel hues appeared, pullulating into a racy nimbus over Cecil’s brightly painted, carnival style headdress, spraying out across the mosh pit like an expansive roman candle; showering mere mortals with star-spangled fairy cum. As the dust settled, an awesome three-dimensional monstrosity superimposed itself onto Cecil’s spot on the thrust stage, endowing momentary invisibility upon tonight’s barnstorming artiste: this gossamer Luciferian countenance, with an erect filamentous appendage sprouting from its brow, totally stole the show. “What does he do for an encore? Shag minors!” Fagan’s gravelly voice startled Aleister, conveying the impetus required to aim a well-deserved haymaker at Cecil, striking his target so hard that Piggy’s knotty walking stick snapped in twain. Before one could utter ‘hocus-pocus’, the garishly tinted bounder vanished in an acrid puff of smoke. Accusatively, a stranger demanded: “What the fuck are you doing, you nutter?” Bunches of bug-eyed Muppets stared daggers at him; they may have purchased council houses, but none had the Aristotle to confront Aleister mano a mano. In panic they pointed at him with large foam fingers. Poltroon bastards the lot of them, yet their consensus was remorseless. Aleister just couldn’t get a grip on what was occurring. He was so out of synch with the picture, it wasn’t funny. Was he the guilty party? Is that why spars blanked him? Fagan had seemed contrite, and other acquaintances had given him short-shrift. Someone could’ve warned him if he was edging off the rails & out-of-fashion. Now, who would visit him in clink- young Conservatives? Not a chance. Aleister could no longer handle this level of peer group rejection. At his feet lay CCG, at last bloody well mute; sprawled across the stage in fancy dress, shards of his technicolour Woolworth’s porch lantern scattered across the deck. A resident ship of fools was about to up anchor and mutiny, so he needed to scarper. He swivelled swiftly, nutted some character on the schnozzle, then was on his toes out into Leicester Square (the pungent stench of refuse contorted his expression); it was full of mad dogs with ticks, stretching muscles in his lower jaw as he roared back at them. He howled ripe obscenities, growling like a giant wolf from some Norse saga stuck in his head since the infants. His stature increased until all else appeared to shatter in his wake. As he raced through the green, hundreds of pigeons took flight in unison as if they were all tiny rockets; ICBMs, part of a first strike initiative aimed at destroying our planet. Blindly happy, in the depths of their ignorance, the population deserved mutually assured destruction: liars and cheats every last jack. Look! There’s the Devil. Where? There. How do you know? Listen my friend, the light from that bulb up there in the white asbestos Artex ceiling hit the Devil, and bounced off onto my retina; quantities of microscopic sensory things miraculously tingled in my mind. It was them telling my brain cells, no? What? You’re imagining things; you’re rather gonzo aren’t you? Am I bollox. 

Sprinting through Coventry Street and beyond into Haymarket, Aleister visualised that resistance was pure futility. A Route Master 12 fast approached, its number symbolising cosmic order; he braced himself to sacrifice the prospect of a virtuous life, to the mirage of a high-minded death. The omnibus hit him so hard it felt as if a fireball had exploded inside his hairless chest; he could hardly breathe. A massive bout of haemoptysis started to fill the airways of both lungs. Coughing, Aleister slowly drowned in his own blood. Energy dissipated from his being, his peripheral vision occluded; other senses seemed to operate autonomously, all of their own accord. As the world revolved around him, up above he noticed Fagan’s drunken face leering down. “Life ain’t fair Aleister, not for you or me leastways. Sadly, the likes of us see, across this big bad globe, we’re suffered: solely to be exploited. Even my mate Trestle-table the filth was fucked over. They dropped him like a hot potato when they discovered he was bent. Truth is- he was disposable see? His corruptible tendencies had gone undetected during routine security screenings, then, right on cue, the OB terminated his career: after twenty-nine frigging years! Oh well, every guttersnipe knows that manmade hierarchies are about princes and whipping boys, winners and losers, punishments or rewards. Still, you done good son. You realised we can’t let insolent twats like Cecil Gruff take liberties, and that he had it coming. I’d have done the same matey; only you beat me to it. Those yuppie wankers lapped it up like powdered pussies. As if Cecil was the greyhound’s undercarriage or some kind of fucking Sumerian deity. And the English working classes, this lost generation of uncivilised souls, socially engineered straight out of barbarism and direct into decadence, fought amongst them-selves as usual. Fuck ‘em. Still you got him; the means justify the ends OK. Now stay calm mate, I’ve brought a tasty reward; in recognition of your fortitude. Nothing styptic I’m afraid.” After chortling and wobbling a bit, Fagan gradually genuflected; holding tightly onto Aleister’s hand. With due care and attention, he produced a small wet pink object from his torn hip pocket. “Ere me now, I extracted Cecil’s sesquipedalian tongue. I’d have tampered with his greasy orifice had the opportunity knocked, but you know, been there done that.” 

This tribute, delivered in a final act of innocent albeit demented compassion, soothed Aleister; as death engulfed him, his last selfless wish was that his lifetime on magna mater’s terrestrial sphere, hadn’t been spent entirely in vain. And if a repository for his immaterial soul had indeed been preordained, he hoped that his crushed body would at least, as a rite of passage, be reincorporated into the cycle of life as sustenance for stray dogs, urban badgers, jackals, and foraging swine, if not fed to eagles, birds of the heavens or fishes in the deep blue sea. Regrettably, he feared his cadaver would be clinically dismembered. Selected organs would be legitimately employed by scientists involved in pathological research, others reaped purely for profit; sold abroad illegally, by un-Hippocratic medical practitioners trading corpus components. Boiled in water that’s been saturated with numerous herbs containing tannins, black-market shrunken scrotums thus preserved, are proudly worn as amulets by handmaidens of Hanbi, going about their murky duties. Deconsecrating screaming infants, innocent babes in arms, wrenched from impoverished families; torturing impuissant souls dredged from the substratum of an intercontinental social pyramid, to harvest adrenaline glands for adrenochrome, at the behest of an ancient and illuminated order of orgiastic priests. This is wisdom.

***

Psychoneuroses, Part 1

Psychoneuroses, Part 3

Manny’s extended family (a loud bunch of perfidious, po-faced, holier-than-thou, hypocritical wheeler-dealers) started as mozzle and brocha speculators who struck lucky. Establishing a London variety business during Soho’s vaudeville era, they grafted to nourish a lucrative customer base, and thereby curry favour with potential backers, to whom they pitched investment opportunities via a network of far-reaching, transterritorial transcultural channels of communication. Backed to the hilt, during World War Two they were able to boast, like the Windmill Theatre, ‘we never close’. Embroidered into the red-light districts’ bohemian tradition as a cool metonym for emancipation, as the swinging sixties dawned, the Klein’s (alongside competing cut-price facsimiles) were on hand to cash in. The K-mob became synonymous with navigating censorship and regulation, as parliament tacitly sanctioned Soho’s erotic cabaret boom: customers were obliged to pay fees, and join clubs as members an hour before admission. Thereafter, mischievous neo-Rabelaisian entertainment was permitted under law. By enthusiastically promoting liberation, lies and ersatz rebellion from the tight closets of inhibition, pimping-up revue bars and befriending the repressed, Manny’s family had won renown and favour. Alack, plebeian popularity doesn’t pay utility bills; hence, the bottom line means being admired ain’t worth bupkis. Not ones to rest on their laurels, the Klein’s remained sharp enough to excise flagging old comrades: dropping en route the functional mantle they’d worn as pansexual rights activists. Conversely, having cornered London’s hardcore porn cinema market, freedoms now required paying for; every customer was appreciated, no matter how rancorous. Or, as pontificated by Manny to Aleister (on his final relapse, just a few nights prior to his sacramental inauguration at West End Great Synagogue), over last-order beers in the French House: ‘’…you see collectively, we understand the technicalities of this world intimately. No one else has the beginnings of a clue. Without shame, we pretentiously relish explaining our expertly authorised view of what’s unfolding, as designed by our powerful clients; on whose behalf we issue whiny rejections whenever any dissenting voice speaks out. It’s all smoke and mirrors, obvs. History’s been knockabout fun up until now. If the truth be known, we’re deployed as an integral module, part of our masters’ ultimate authority toolkit, arranged to control public narratives, perpetuate obedience; keeping society suppressed by dint of cultural supervision.’’ Once again, Aleister had been well over the eight, so the lion’s share of Manny’s self-promotional spiel went in one ear, and out the other. Currently coming down around high noon (as per his custom on Freya’s day), in preparation for a critical night out ahead, Aleister was practically sat upright on the wagon. Thusly, temporarily, conflicted clouds cleared; turbid illusion cleaved, and momentarily, lucidity was suffered to intromit with his feelings.

“Manny! I ain’t seen you for ages you old bender, how’s it hanging?”

“Chambré to tepid, mon ami.”

“Tell me about it. I thought we were forecast to be basking under a hot sun regular now the ozone’s been depleted.”

“Don’t even go there, the climate’s one thing about this city which will never change.”

“True. What’s happening?”

“Man, I’m busy boyo. I’ve acquired all of Uncle Moses’ clip joints, peep shows, pop up massage parlours, along with his Swollen Gash™ topless kink kiosks; and I’m developing an avant-garde nightspot. We’re naming it ‘A Symphony of Expensive Contradictions.’ It’ll be the nuts.’’

“Whoa! That’s some itinerary.’’

“Well its business feller, not casual soul-laundering. However, there are perquisites; for one, it keeps me engaged in absorbing hobbies: know what I mean? How about you rude boy: still riding psychotherapy hobbyhorses, or solving trolley problems?”

‘’I weigh a person’s worth not by financial assets, but in their quotient of individuality, if that’s what you ridicule. But no, my intermittent disposable income doesn’t afford ongoing clinical indulgences, so I’m stuck with the difficulty of destiny over the ease of narrative. Left to independently question and challenge, the un-intellectual human condition homo-sapiens blindly follow, sans patronage.’’

‘’Splendide mendax on a shoestring; blimey, that’s more of a rivka, than a brifka. Stand on me Ally Bally; it takes a real trouper to admit that they’re badly cast in a revocable tragedy. I warned you already. There’s no future in poverty; crying over unremittingly bleak situations, without scope for cognitive entertainments.’’

‘’There’s a marathon of drudgery involved in signing-on for a pittance; however I keep faith in Raimundo Pato, theatrical agent extraordinaire.’’

‘’Charing Cross Ray’s looking after you, is he? Well, good luck with that schnip! What are you doing in between working days?’’

“Laxing dude: spending too much hard-earned money.”

“Splendid stuff, we must hook up- your shout of course.”

Immanuel K, with his costermongers’ God complex, was no more than a wide boy: too reliant on the dark arts of vice, hype and spin to foster credibility; Aleister had no intention of flyting with him, so he allowed Manny’s barbed comments to slide. They’d grown apart to loathe one another, but in the great scheme of things, this upshot was a bagatelle. Both chaps smiled courteously. Their enforced separation had plainly contributed to stifle a candid conversation. Bored, Manny’s morose minders shuffled; distrait, staring vaguely at some passing object. Halted, as if frozen; yet still, life’s frenzied momentum raced through muscular, bondage clobber-clad bodies: causing each tit weight to jangle nervously, like flies in a spider’s web. “Totally: it’ll be a mercy mission, won’t it? You’re working too hard.”

“Better to live as a blazing meteor, than die old gracefully.” Manny replied, and with a smirk added ‘’It’s a distraction, innit? The divine, as manifested within the universe, is my guiding light.’’

“But mate, apart from cavorting with toy-boys, to what purpose? Or don’t you care?’’

“I’m occupying my atoms so intensely; they’ll refuse to leave me. Life’s one big party dude, and that’s purpose enough for me.”

“Yeah, right cock, but like, what’s the end product?”

Through bored amber eyes; distrustful, assessing, imperious, Immanuel fixed a vulturine gaze on his dishevelled interlocutor. “Does God’s vengeance end? I think not brother. Historical consciousness keeps mutating: suck it up. Relinquish your neurotic orientation to sew loose hems; trust me. Anyway, let’s groove on, because it’s time to move on.”

‘’Wicked, I’ve got places to go, people to meet; sayonara Special K.’’

What’s that bustling atom malarkey all about? The impulse of an elementally active person to act is so strong, that it stultifies them from acquiring knowledge for the sake of apprehension. Just how did Manny Klein intend to blaze brightly in his dotage? And whatever happened to grace, friendship, honour, and serenity? Aleister was confused. Having acted intuitively all his life, he now found it nigh on impossible to think straight; psychological experiences steadily degenerated, visceral doubts multiplied. Much of this deterioration was a result of his disastrous addiction to adulterated angel dust. Assuming Aleister had once cherished continuity and cohesion, his life was now, in contrast, an ungovernable slide show of no fixed time span. Maddeningly, Aleister couldn’t fathom who was operating the projector, or where to find an emergency exit; some heartless tummler was evidently savouring a jape at his expense, and whomsoever it was, must pay. At the comedy club Aleister and Piggy (his anosmic dealer), snorted lines chopped up in the bog; sharing a splash of toilet humour and doing the Spanish fly deal, before Pigman was called out to strut his stuff. Wired, Aleister parked up at the bar where he met Fagan, langered on Nelson Eddy’s earned from his morning’s collar (running around Seven Dials for film production companies). The thin, delicate-looking figure with close-cropped hair that had stood in the dock a year before was a changed man: quietly confident, having bulked up in the prison gym. Mickey wore his unwashed hair in a ponytail, tied back with a blue ribbon; sporting stone-washed 501s, and a baggy white t-shirt bearing the slogan Frankie Says Relax in big black letters. On stage Piggy was first up (plying his Lorcán the Lovable Leprechaun shtick), but died horribly. Even Fagan heckled; stitching his mate up by intermittently screaming ‘Cobblers!’ By contrast, Aleister continued to feel awkward in the heaving venue; it burdened him with its fuggy claustrophobia, making him feel unusually aggressive. Worse still, the next act waiting in the wings was some gauche twerp named Curious Cecil Gruff; a wretchedly conceited squirt, artfully half concealing what appeared to be some type of magic lantern. The coy way in which Cecil postured bothered Aleister no end. Who did he think he was? Jack the fucking biscuit? These ultra-negative first impressions combined into a kind of supranatural sensorium, retained, or rather translated by a wounded hunter-gatherer within, multigenerational memories, and random imagination. Sensing his spars discomfort, Piggy ambled across, hoping to rub balsam over Aleister’s storm-tossed forehead. Piggy respected Aleister’s honest independence, but all the paranoid instability worried and depressed him. “Whatcha think: the big time, or late night Channel Five material?”

“Magic Pigsty, absurdly optimistic as always buddy; don’t give up your day job. How about this dodgy Cecil chap- you know him?”

“No; nor does anyone else. I bumped into him in the green room earlier. Curiously, he confessed to being a failed conceptual artist, but gruffly stressed he’d learned his lessons, and nowadays stands before us as the self-proclaimed king of multivalent comedy.”

“FFS Pigster, Equity shouldn’t hand out union cards to the likes of Cecil. His sorts tout angular collisions, rough ragged edges, raising voices of wrack and ruin. Amoral disorder oughtn’t to be assimilated into the federation of performing arts. Cecil’s idea of merrymaking is a monstrous anomaly, and best omitted. Look, I know this sounds Radio Rental, but I’ve witnessed Cecil’s repertory of treachery erenow, in my previous Mesopotamian existence; around the time a great famine gripped people in Babylonia, and settlers from Uruk conspired with Šamaš-šuma-ukin to plot evil.”

‘’Have a word.’’ Enough! Piggy’s clients were prone to puerile enunciations, so he remained silent, sipping maraschino via ruby red lips; just about every situation is sanable. As far as Pigsty was concerned, each chap’s concept of sub-consciousness was an extraordinary piece of storytelling, trying to present ways in which structural systems have explanatory force- simultaneously unknown, yet effectively present. The key question remained: what the dickens did Cecil represent to Aleister? Piggy gave him a gentle squeeze on his inside leg, and smiled. Piggy was a flirt, a proper card; a doughty lemon squeezer. Aleister was glad of Piggy’s playful company; it steadied him. Equanimity calmed Aleister, fending off eternal verities tampering with his mneme; carefully turning around to wholly admire Piggy’s glabrous countenance, possessed of soigné parity to Parian marble, he responded: “Your round innit geez?”

***

Psychoneuroses, Part 4

Psychoneuroses, Part 2

After old Mrs Fagan died, her singleton son grew increasingly obsessed by the notion of a wholly exposed, crudely infibulated woman as head of state; it agitated and aroused him in equal measure. What otiose limp-wristed protection was afforded Her Majesty, by the tightly-wrapped Prince Regent? Fagan ceremoniously placed QE2 on the same questionable pedestal as his own mother; a trophy for vile men, offering little or no emotional support to their booty. Mickey envisaged Elizabeth Regina mounted posteriorly, and forcefully fist-fingered, before being brutally sausaged Greek style; crass libidinous fantasies deranged remaining particles of sense, rendering him unsure whether to fuck or fight his Glücksburgian adversary. Forever a romantic, when push came to shove, inspired by Ken Russell’s audacious Women in Love, Fagan settled on stripping-off for a tipsy bout of Japanese-style wrestling amid the firelight of the Duke of Dunedin’s bedchamber. National press reports stated that Fagan was gallantly tackled by dapper footman Phil McCavity (since retired), a queer chap who was oddly reticent concerning his personal involvement in the drama. London Lighthouse carers insist that McCavity wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Fagan would though: hissing loudly, a noble savage; lightly polished by interchanging moody goods on behalf of antiquarian operations down Camden Passage market, whose traders were enamoured by the cut of his jib. It was a ragtag and bobtail cash-in-hand confederation, but he’d been earning a few quid at the time, so it was right mauve him rocking the sloop, what with three million unemployed. Directly preceding his iconic faux pas Fagan had inadvertently violated an Islington Council byelaw. Tipped-off, Housing Association policy and procedure staff complained about his grunting pet (it transgressed his tenancy agreement); Fagan swore blind he didn’t harbour one, although a particularly cynical girl-next-door insisted she investigate. Behold! No fish or fowl, while Mickey, without a trace of embarrassment, boasted that the theriomorphic-like din resulted from his beasting a string of high-maintenance erotopathic lovers. Not one to be duped, the nosey neighbour insisted she put his explanation to task; so doggy-style, Mickey howled like mad, banging her so hard he got a ruddy nosebleed (earning himself the sobriquet Rudolph). Still unsatisfied, the dopey tart opted to sue him for noise pollution via the Borough Council’s pro-feminist local authorities. 

“Bloody Hell, ma’am, what’s he doing ‘ere?” A shrill alarm was sent ringing around the City of Westminster by HRM’s flummoxed chambermaids, given the screaming abdabs, having stumbled over Mickey, supposedly supping from a carafe of half-inched Californian riesling. How exciting! Let’s face it; Fagan was in no fit state to endure the resulting ordeal. That very morning he’d been involved in a heart-rending family squabble over the ownership of a second-hand cut-and-shut motor, aspirated a leaded lungful of mouth-siphoned four-star petrol, and for reasons best known to his-self, was masquerading as Rudolf Hess. No sober assessment of his condition would have adjudged him capable of scaling spiky railings, climbing burglar-proof drainpipes, or least of all, leaping from roof-to-roof like an orang-utan. Tell me, just how conveniently did Fagan elude Buck House’s 24/7 security? And what precisely defined his shady, sadomasochistic relationship with wrinkly Prince Philip? Whose bruised sphincter, rumour had it, was treated by that venal, royally benighted arse specialist Dr. David Croft: famed as an entrepreneurial quack pioneering the high-specification production of platinum ring-holes, for celebrity coke addicts. In a futuristic John DeLorean world of powdered cocaine-cum-cosmetics, malleable monogrammed DDC rectal accessories were the last word in reassurance, for syringe users, aiming to keep bugles clean, and septa intact. Word-on-the-street was, that the grand old iron Duke had been corn-holed and felched, until his puce tuchus resembled the sort of swollen Jack and Danny seen hanging agape behind a West African baboon during Guinea-Bissau’s rainy season. Of course, it was a cover up; although Fagan confessed to several prison psychiatrists, that he’d toasted better genitals. So, whisper from that whatever tenuous conclusions you fancy. The Old Bailey certainly did. 

“You are not ‘ere to see ze peeping show I ‘ope?” Brigitte smiled ear to ear as her sultry French accent wafted back into his mind; triggering an amatory frisson that stirred his loins. Momentarily intimidated, he rose to leave without tipping; laughing off her dolorous suspicions that he was tuned into videos featuring adult content, and the rest (obscene publications, showcasing teenage call girls absconded from foster care- running away from Oldham social services). On the hoof, Aleister nonchalantly cased the joint -eye eye- wandering past replica nude statues (including Auguste Rodin’s Le Baiser), and a grandiose art nouveau mirror. He cast a bitchy moue at his faltering baroque reflection- begging the question: did he resemble an unbalanced pervert? If so, he’d best buy a pick-me-up. Aleister daren’t appear unhinged or worse (creepy) in Heaven- his preferred destination. There geezers dress to impress, by camping themselves up a class; competition is bristly stiff inside that grand celestial residence, where a kiss without a moustache is like an egg without salt. Yuk! 

Opportunely Piggy, now his dealer, was due live on stage at the Divine Comedy Store’s Friday matinee; he was odds-on to hold a few banging party tricks up his ropey sleeve to loosen Brigitte’s resolve. K-I-D, mum’s the word. Aleister decided to procure something special to slip into mademoiselle’s café latte, in the course of a future assignation. Shame he needed to date rape her, as he didn’t consider himself a misogynist. Aleister liked ladies well enough; not the wicked ones who found him wanting, but he balked at his latent notions of punishing, hurting, or damaging them. However, he failed to see women as equals, soul sisters, or trustworthy friends. Through his grimy doors of perception, the second sex represented objects of desire; dolly birds, some of whom he’d been able to train up & domineer for while. Brigitte possessed several serviceable aspects sweet enough to buoy his horribly warped tri-sexual mind. If only she could button her quivering lip, and turn an amenably blind eye to his eccentric affairs of the flesh; he may even propose to her: anything to leave a lump in her throat. Strolling along Gerrard Street he chewed a chunk of Peking duck, formally deciding that he could never endure monogamy on account of his innate needs, to wit: bimbo’s, priapic saunas, peppercorn rent boys, Qabalistic weekends, ritualistic blood drinking sessions etcetera; hobbies of a type so essential for a relaxed middle age. But young Brigitte, despite her femme fatale façade, was, in Aleister’s estimation, well-nigh prim and proper. Add assertive female to practicing Roman Catholic, teetotal or, (God forbid) virginal, and who needs it? He wanted desperately to love and be worshipfully adored in return; the problem was, where to start? Aleister reckoned the glorious day was fast approaching when he would subscribe to a competitively priced Filipina marriage agency; a flourishing Oriental avenue of commercial intimacy: open to post-prime Occidental bachelors, widowers, and/or divorcées. Perhaps it was one instance of a missed opportunity, where those innumerable, inscrutable Chinese have erred? Granted, tiddlywinks constitute rising stars within our rough tough adaptable species: fitted to survive amongst strangers as segregated immigrants, or, thanks to Beijing’s mushrooming economic leverage, to lead a global mercantile system; but in eugenic terms, they’re junk people. Spawned from a passé imperial culture, informed by screeds of dynastic court archives; traditionally square looking, and businesslike. Not at all to Aleister’s flighty, eclectic taste; the source of which remained a mystery. 

Aleister supposed that his sartorial bent toward dépêche mode was rooted in the days of Pearly Spencer, and tragic second-order observations founded while orbiting creation on his very own lonely planet. During Aleister’s junior year three, Pearly earmarked his old lady on one of her excursions to Brent Cross shopping centre. A haunted, milky-white escapee from Northern Ireland’s sectarian troubles, Pearly was employed as a liveried bouncer in Mothercare; incendiary eye-candy with access to the retail facility’s inner sanctum. Giggling, they’d eagerly disappear together through a doorway signposted ‘staff only’, to fornicate behind a clutch of industrial wheelie bins (positioned in a designated waste storage area, along a poorly lit service corridor). Abandoned, snivelling wee Aleister was left traipsing around the well-stocked mall. Unsupervised, pressing against laminated glass exteriors fronting interchangeable shops; mixed-brand department stores, fashionable clothing boutiques, electrical retailers, on-trend accessory vendors, or luxury goods emporiums hosting award-winning Provençal face cream concessions: whichever. Aleister stared inside like a piqued Martian. Exhilarated by the non-stop abundant varieties of FMCG, but deflated by consumerisms inconsequentiality, Aleister grew up to conceptualise existence as a shaggy-dog story. Defiantly, he recollected window-shopping as a fond childhood memory, his mother’s carnality not so much; or her wuthering post-coital gawp from hooded eyes that neither knew, nor cared, about the developmental damage being done. In time, trips to Hendon’s materialistic funfair petered out; perpetually liquored up, Pearly lost his clip-on neck tie, his job, and his studio flat on Childs Hill. Ultimately, Aleister’s mother’s girlish infatuation withered as Pearly metamorphosed, into an impotent homeless mendicant, lumbered with untreatable cirrhosis; sleeping with rats in shop entrances down Kilburn High Road.

Looking up, Aleister was struck by dyspepsia, and another blast from the past. Across the pedestrianisation stood Immanuel Klein, a player who purported to abhor all things ci-devant. He hadn’t changed: a buzz fed through the grapevine asserted that he was still a cunt. Aleister and Manny first met as high school boys selling imported designer schmutter across two local trading Lanes (Leather and Petticoat), working for Lillian Skry & Ronnie ‘The Knocker’ Zucker, whose Uncle Joe Arzi’s influence reigned supreme over Camden’s, and Tower Hamlets’ licensing systems; controlling market inspectors, and subletting stalls. Manny fell in love with couture stock, and in due course became a right fashion victim; philosophising on the topic with all the brio of an art-house radical (a radical wanker naturally). During his late teens he’d formed Futurist Punx, a heavy rocking four-piece musical combo that extolled beauty in strife. They jumped into bed with louring Brigadier Robert d’Alby, a scary ex-forces cove turned small-time impresario for fledgling voices panegyrising insubordination. A genuine brute, the cigar-smoking brigadier was pretty mixed up. Possessed of archetypal officer baggage, viz., horse-haired duelling scars, pent-up aggression, institutionalised homophobia; mindless desires to assault anyone, or anything deemed officially dishonourable, on behalf of manly ideals. Manny insisted the end justified macho means, opining that d’Alby’s intriguing personality compelled exertion. A complex egg: BRd seemed to seek a noble form into which he could pour his volcanic energy. An accomplished cubist; he and his easels simply disappeared one day, never to return. Without the insensate brigadier at the tiller, Manny’s ensemble petered out. Aleister recollected a few trite lines from their one and only 7” single entitled Post-minimalist Self-Portrait: “We shall sing of the thrill of danger/Flying fist-fuck up the arse/Courage, movement, hard rebellion/Sniffing glue, in Regent’s Park.” It was pompous tosh really. Thank you! 

The Brig booked Futurist Punx on a tragic tour of shite gigs, at workman’s clubs spanning the London Boroughs of Camden, Westminster, and Brent; awkwardly on the bill alongside traditional Irish ballads: Dubliner’s tribute bands for the most part. Manny boasted that he and his conjoint collaborateurs were waking punters from feverish hypersomnia; he glorified cruelty, thuggery, seven drunken nights, and wild injustice, but shat himself and ran for his life after being glassed while exiting the ladies lavatories in Cricklewood’s Production Village. After that moment of self-discovery Manny gave up on being a front man, and segued back into the supporting cast of his family’s extensive business interests. As part of a tribal initiation ceremony, Manny solemnly swore not to fraternise with former associates hailing from families or enterprises unrelated and/or unaffiliated to the Klein’s expanding empire for a complete lunar year. Manny kept his promise for the most part, only lapsing in a couple of lunations; first up, tripping on brown blotters during a summer’s twilight, over a Hampstead Heath night-swimming weekend. Under the influence, Manny confessed to Aleister that perceiving himself as an expendable, landless, fungible itinerant, in a suicidal stratified society feverishly cannibalising greed, fear, and malignant narcissism, had brought him to his senses. He accepted he couldn’t survive alone in Cuntish Town: that listless dive, peopled by dawdling vagabonds. Aspirational London’s galaxy of burnt-out wannabees, where genuine pretending passes as an adequate mode of existence, and lowbrow participants are deceptively orchestrated on behalf of ruling élites (for the sorry sake of fading public-minded perceptions) by arch-facilitators, activating media-managed biases to foment prejudicial egodystonic sensitivities. Recounting that he’d pursued a safety-in-numbers logic, and joined a mercenary gang; strategically allying himself through his bloodline to Albion’s Premier Grand Masonic Lodge: an institution that aggregated supernumerary groups of abominable opinion formers. As a party to which, his tribe pretended under warrant, to present pragmatic balanced solutions to travails faced by ordinary folk tholing their humdrum lives. Adding in peroration, that he’d lost all his honest, salt-of-the-earth mates; but out of necessity, he’d changed. Manny petitioned for righteous understanding, and forgiveness; appeals that were rejected by Aleister, who couldn’t, and wouldn’t confer his imprimatur. Nowadays, made-man Manny weltered amidst an orgy of sensual gratification, surrounded by heavies togged up in black leather, rubber, and shiny PVC. They were his disciples; hook, line, and sinker. Body harnesses, panic snaps, and meat tenderisers eradicated any notion of revolt. Their overseer, whom Manny jocularly dubbed Jack the Rimmer, a hefty mouth-breathing automaton, was responsive to his masters needs alone. Kept firmly in check by a remote-controlled erection trainer, and subdued by double-bar nipple clips, Jack’s enjoinders were slurred due to a fetish for adjustable velvet tongue gags, but he dealt severely with backchat or obstinacy within the ranks: lashing out with his customised sauna whip, that, along with a latex executioner’s mask, constituted his vestments of office, and tools of domination.

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Psychoneuroses, Part 3