The Legend of Sonny Williams

You’d have to be as old as I am to remember when a very menacing looking boxer named Sonny Liston knocked out Floyd Patterson in the first round to snatch away his heavyweight crown. He followed up with another first-round knockout of Patterson in a rematch.

His next fight was with a young challenger whose ego appeared to tower far above his own formidable boxing skills. Sonny Liston was a heavy favorite not only to beat Cassius Clay, but to completely demolish him as he had done Patterson. 

As you may know, Clay outboxed Liston, knocking him out in the eighth round. He would soon change his name to Mohammed Ali, and to reign as the heavyweight champion for much of his career.

But this isn’t a story about boxing. Sonny Williams was not a boxer: He was a lover. As so many of us back in the sixties and early seventies used to chant, “Make love – not war!”

But before he gained some measure of fame, if you tried to envisage what Sonny Williams looked like, you might have pictured a tall muscular black man. In a way, it was that image that indirectly gave him his start in a long and happy film career. 

Can you remember the1969 movie, Putney Swope? From time to time, Sonny Williams is mentioned, but he doesn’t actually appear in the flesh until the very end of the movie. 

He turned out to be not at all what you might have expected.  A very pale five-foot-four balding white man with a longish beard, thick glasses, and a very shy manner, he appeared completely naked, except for a raincoat. Whatever else you might have said, he was no Sonny Liston.

Without uttering a word, he opened his raincoat, fully exposing himself.  Within weeks, his acting talents would be in great demand.

***

No one could have guessed that this cameo would mark the beginning of a long career in cinema for Sonny Williams. He would become an instant porno star.

Conventional porn movies back in the 1970s were essentially ten- or fifteen-minute sexual encounters, either between a heterosexual couple, or two women. There were, of course, porno movies for gay men, which were shown in different theaters. 

Some porno filmmaker must have seen Sonny in Putney Swope, perhaps glancing at his massive schlong (Yiddish for very large penis). And so, a porn star was born.

Sonny had not recently cultivated the Talmudic scholar look. Brought up in an orthodox family in Brooklyn’s Borough Park, he faithfully attended Yeshiva all the way through high school. His name back then was Perry Gewirtz

But after moving out of his parents’ house and ending up on Manhattan’s Lower Eastside, he quickly drifted away from the faith. He began eating traif (non-kosher food) and was soon dating shiksas (gentile women).

At first, he returned to Borough Park on weekends to spend the sabbath with his family. But since his social life centered on weekends, those visits became less and less frequent. His parents and his brothers and sisters knew better than to try to talk him out of his disappointing lifestyle, hoping that he would soon come to his senses.

***

Immediately after he had been “discovered,” Sonny was put to work. He could not believe that he was actually being paid for doing what he gladly would have done for nothing. But don’t get the wrong idea. You won’t get rich being paid twenty-five dollars for each cum shot. 

Now, some women could have made a small fortune using that pay scale. But for Sonny, who often took home over a hundred dollars for a day’s work, that was a lot of money for a guy living in a seventy-dollar-a-month-apartment in a tenement on East 5th Street off Second Avenue. 

Sonny’s downstairs neighbor and closest friend was a very affable guy named Marshall Anker, who had long been an aspiring actor. Clearly jealous of Sonny’s success, he was always talking about the roles he was “up for.”

For weeks before an audition to play W.C. Fields in some movie that never saw the light of day, Marshall went around imitating Fields. But almost everyone who heard him thought he was just drunk, or perhaps insane.

Then, out of the blue, Marshall was cast as the sheriff in Last House on the Left, an exploitation horror film that was a commercial success. It would be his only movie role. 

Marshall also envied Sonny for all the women he scored with – on the movie set and off. As small as Sonny was, Marshall was large. About six-three, with a big pot belly, he cut quite a figure walking along Second Avenue. 

One night, he did get lucky. He met Marsha Handelsman, the three-hundred-pound poetess. They had both gotten drunk at a party, and as Marshall walked her home, his hopes were high. 

She lived on the top floor of a five-story walk-up. But she was too drunk to climb the stairs. She said, “If you can carry me upstairs, you can fuck me.”

Did he manage to carry her up four flights? Yes! Did he have his way with her? Here, the story gets somewhat muddled. All he could remember was that he had to visit a chiropractor for months until he recovered.

***

Sonny and Marshall, along with another six or eight kindred spirits, would often party together. If you invited one of them to a party you were having, it went without saying that the whole bunch of them would show up.

I lived on Norfolk Street, about ten blocks from Sonny and Marshall. When their entourage arrived, they all started eating and drinking as though there were no tomorrow. Marshall even stuffed potato chips in his pockets, perhaps out of food insecurity. Sonny was too busy eyeing the women, none of whom seemed to know about his exploits on the silver screen. 

Marshall, on the other hand, talked almost nonstop about his career in film, although that didn’t appear to impress the young women he was hitting on. Still, he was happy to be at the party, where at least there was some infinitesimal chance that he might get lucky.

About two am, a contingent of us headed down to Chinatown. Obviously, the pretzels, potato chips, cheese, salami, and onion soup dip I had put out were just the appetizers. 

Down the block from me, Sonny and Marshall found an abandoned baby stroller. Sonny hopped in and Marshall pushed him all the way to Canal and Mott Streets. 

They were quite a sight, and passersby often stopped to stare at the two of them. Both bearded and disreputable looking, they must have been taken for a demented father and his severely retarded bearded son. 

***

Sonny loved his work so much that many times, he and his partner would keep going at it even after the allotted filming time had passed. The director, who had been about to yell “Cut!” just signaled the cameraman to keep shooting. 

At first, the director thought Sonny was just trying to make more money, but he soon realized this was truly a labor of love. Look at it from Sonny’s perspective: Going to work was like going out on a great date. And not only did it cost him absolutely nothing, but they even paid him.

Soon he was truly a porn star. But he never let it go to his head. He knew, of course, that all good things must come to an end, so why not make hay while the sun was still shining?

People would approach him on the street and ask for his autograph, or to be in a photo with them. Once, a very attractive woman came up to him and asked him exactly how big it was.

He lived just around the corner, so he took her up to his apartment. They spent the rest of the day in bed. Then, she apologized and starting dressed. She needed to get home to make dinner for her husband and children. 

***

By the time he was in his late forties, Sonny’s career as a porn star was clearly coming to and end. He decided that maybe a change of scenery would be nice, so he moved into a larger living space. He found a very reasonably priced storefront on East 9th Street just off Second Avenue. 

It was long and narrow, with a big glass window at the front. People could see in, but he hung curtains a few feet from the window. When his friends visited for the first time, they often thought it was a used bookstore. Except that less than half the books were on bookshelves. The rest were in piles on the floor.

Once, I asked him why he needed so many books. “You realize that you could not read all these books in ten lifetimes.”

He smiled.

“So why do you need so many?” I persisted.

“For reference.”

I just looked at him. Nearly all of the books were fiction. 

When I thought about that exchange years later, I realized that maybe he was beginning to lose it.

One evening, when my girlfriend and I came by to take Sonny to dinner, we saw a woman in the store. She didn’t say anything, and Sonny didn’t bother to introduce her. 

Who knows? Maybe she was a rare book buyer.

At dinner, Sonny didn’t mention her. But he must have trusted her, because he left her alone in his apartment.

***

Sonny had two tabby cats who enjoyed sunning themselves in the store window especially during the winter months. But this created problems with some of the passersby who knocked on the door, demanding to know if the cats were trapped in the small space they occupied.

Sonny grew tired of explaining that the cats were fine, so he taped a huge sign in his window that read: The cats love the warming rays of the sun. They are where they are entirely voluntarily.”

Not only did the sign actually work, but people came by just to look at it. The East Village Other even ran a series of photographs of the cats sunning themselves just below Sonny’s sign.

Although most of the people who viewed porno movies were reticent about ever mentioning this to even their closest friends, occasionally people would stop Sonny on the street to ask for his autograph. Marshall suggested that he sell his signed photos for ten or fifteen dollars apiece, but Sonny absolutely refused to do so. 

“It would be as if I were prostituting myself!” he declared.

“Excuse me!” replied Marshall. “But isn’t that what you were doing in all those pornographic flicks you made?”

“Not at all! What I did, I did for my own pleasure… And of course for my partners’ pleasure as well.”

“Yeah, well I wouldn’t have minded pleasuring a few of those women myself!”

***

The last time I would see Sonny alive was when I took him to dinner on his fifty-first birthday. He told me that he was vey worried about Marshall’s health, and that he had been urging him to see a doctor. 

“He can barely make it up the stairs to his apartment, and he is constantly wheezing.”

When my girlfriend and I went back to Sonny’s storefront, the same woman was there. This time she was much more friendly, although in a very negative sort of way. 

“Can you believe the way he lives like this? Books all over the place. I told him a million times to just throw the whole lot of them in the garbage.”

She went on like this for at least ten minutes. Sonny had disappeared to a small cleared area in the back of the apartment, and as soon as we could disengage ourselves, we followed him to the back of the apartment.

Sonny put a finger to his lips, signaling us to whisper. He confessed that the woman just turned up on his doorstep one afternoon and never left.

“You mean she’s a squatter in your apartment?” I asked.

“I guess so.”

“Why don’t you throw her out?”

“I don’t know where she would go.”

“Sonny, that’s her problem,” said my girlfriend.

“Maybe, but it would be on my conscience.”

***

Just a month later, Sonny died suddenly from a severe stroke. I later learned that he had had a series of mini strokes months before that, but like Marshall, he never went to a doctor. 

There were over a hundred mourners at his funeral. Conspicuously absent was Marshall, who had just gone into a nursing home. Most of us were aging hippies, neighbors, a whole contingent of current and former porno actors and actresses, and a few of his relatives.

His older brother, Ben, who remained an orthodox Jew, gave a wonderful eulogy. I sill remember his line, “Sonny wanted to make it small in the movies.”

That really summed him up. Unlike so many aspiring actors, Sonny never wanted to be a great movie star. He just wanted to have a really good time. Very few people truly love their work. Whatever else might be said about Sonny Williams, no one could deny that he was happy in his work. And yes, he did indeed make it small in the movies. 

Bedtime Story

After I adjust the pillows on the sofa to make room, I tell the kids to turn their games off and come cuddle up next to me and leave a space for Mom. 

I’m gonna read you a story.

Awwww, Da-ad!

You’ll love it. It’s about the first time your Mom fucked me with her ass.

The kids rush right over. It’s a good story, Dad, but don’t you know any others? Ben says. We’ve heard it like nine times.

I ignore him. Bets? You gonna join us?

She comes in, wiping her hands on a tea towel, and settles in next to Lacey. 

OK, here goes. Your Mom and I had been talking about it. We had agreed we had waited long enough. Are you sure? I asked, and she said, I want to give you what you want.

It was like standing outside St. Peter’s, after the flight, the train from the airport, after dragging my backpack up four flights to the marble room, after the slow, touchy fucking to the sound of bells beyond the window, barking dogs, kids squealing, all of it a weirdly celebratory chorus to our manic pursuit of union, all of it prelude to the grand finale, holy grail, visit to the greatest apse in the world. 

We were going to do it. Or, rather, she had invited me to fuck her ass. 

YOLO, right? she said, us so tangled in Roman sheets we might never escape. 

We were like athletes, nightly practice at the other thing, pretty relaxed now, pretty sure of the playing field, what was off limits, what wasn’t. I was always very oral, and turns out, she was waiting to be extremely grateful. I hear there are guys who can’t imagine eating a woman, their woman, and it leaves me slack-jawed. 

Dumb-ass, get down! You do not know what you are missing, motherfucker.

I never expressed any overriding desire to take my poker down that last mile, but my index digit made passing reference to her rosebud. Maybe last mile isn’t the best way to think of it. Isn’t that the execution walk? Stick with that metaphor, and I will be thinking, Who’s gonna die tonight, and I sure hope it ain’t either one of us, or all this anticipated bliss will be for …. Well, the word that came to mind there was way too close to the subject at hand.

I guess she sensed a curiosity about that port of entry on my part. So she offered. I sure wasn’t going to say, Nah, I don’t think you really want to so let’s pass on that, some things are best left unexplored, what if it turns out you really love it, what if you realized you’ve lived to the age of 47 and could have been stuffing your butt all these years for levels of ecstasy few humans ever achieve? And now we finally get there, and you tip off the deep end into profound despair and regret about opportunities lost? What if? 

Me thinking, Lost with whom?

Talk about a mixed message.

So, now we were stepping it up. I didn’t want her to know, but I was terrified. After all this anticipation, what if I biffed it? I didn’t want her to think I didn’t care, that it didn’t turn me on, that it maybe even grossed me out. I wanted her to enjoy it, too, and if she didn’t, I wanted her to lie to me that she did, because if she cried out in pain, that would shut down my boner faster than a goathead in a road bike tire.

I would be lying if I said the thought had never crossed my mind. It was one of a couple of possibilities, although we spent most of our time on the one, and not the other, which is how we got kids. Duh. 

Make no mistakes, she liked pussy sex and I did, too, but in the back of our minds, always lurking there beneath a streetlight with a fedora slung low over its eyes, her ass curled a finger my way.

Psst, hey, buddy, wanna try something … different?

It was all so mysterious, right? Like a roadside -OTEL, with a locked room at the end of the walkway. You could book a new, clean Holiday Inn Express, but no. You had to stop and visit Mr. Bates. 

Cobwebs between the windows and the drapes, but you want it. You want past the door, to the musty, dusty inside. Ask the manager. 

Nope, we don’t rent that room.

Not because it’s reserved, or booked to someone else. Just that it’s permanently off limits. Which makes it all the more a curiosity, all the more alluring. Sin is about denial. If somebody named Pope doesn’t want you going there, you can quickly slip into obsession about how you need to book passage. 

Now, on my knees, her on hers, I was in it. She had me in it. I expected to see gift wrap and ribbon by the wayside.

Wow, this is cool, I thought, even as I also thought, but … maybe not as good as the other place, the neighbor, the girl next door.

Went there. Did that. Not sure what all the fuss is about, but for my money, I’ll stick with the way god intended for us to get it on. As if I’ll ever know what she actually intended. Just making this shit up as I go along. Just glad your Mom is the sharing type.

I let the last line hang in the air, maybe room for questions. Nothing. Then I look around. Everybody has collapsed into me, sound asleep. One by one, I carry them to bed. Even Bets. After lights out, I lie in the dark, bummed. Either I need a new story. Or a new audience.  

The Great Turd of Babylon

It fell from the sky and landed in the center of town.

Everyone could tell it was shit. The smell alone made that clear.

It was too big too have fallen from the ass of man or bird or elephant. After investigation of the turd, prodding with sticks and much debate it was agreed it must have come from the gods – all or one of them that had recently eaten a big dinner.

Since the source was divine the turd needed to be protected. A wall was built around it. The wall evolved over years, through add-ons and public works projects, into a temple, the Great Shrine of the Turd. 

This was in the early years of the town, before it became a city.

The temple continued to grow, as did its fame and the number of pilgrims who came to take a whiff of heaven. A second story was added. Then a third. The temple towered above the date trees.

Centuries passed before the odor dissipated. Once the stink was gone, and the turd had broken down into a pile of mud, the population began to forget why the temple had been built and to what purpose. New legends grew and became myths woven into local religion and culture.

Pilgrims still visited out of habit. It was something you did. Mom had done it and grandpa and grandma and generations of sandalled and barefoot ancestors before them. It was tradition after all. 

Besides the garden was nice. It grew at the center of the temple where the ceiling was open to the sky. All kind of flowers and fruit trees blossomed there. The priests had to water the plants every day, it was a hot climate after all, but they never had to add fertilizer. That was the miracle of the thing. The big draw. That undying garden in the desert, inside the ancient temple, hidden away in the old section of town, between the goat market and the used camel lot.

The entry fee was reasonable. Offerings of any size were also welcome, whether feathered or scaled or covered with fur.

For a small piece of copper or a chicken egg local artists will, with charcoal on a piece of broken pottery, draw a picture for a pious visitor. A keep sake. The pilgrim, with a big smile, and the garden behind. Something to put on the mantelpiece when they get back to the village. Something to show the grandkids and great grandkids. 

The temple is a must see when you visit the city. It says so on all the guide stelae. Good for the economy too. Check out the food stalls in the area while you are there. You can taste local delicacies straight off the hoof with lentils on the side for a reasonable price. There are discounts if you get you hand stamped at the temple.

On rare days when a priest or acolyte leave the temple their bodies are covered in sheep skins. When asked why, they can’t give a full answer. The reasons are lost in the past, wrapped up now in the current mysteries, which don’t make a lot of sense when you think about them. The best response you will get from a priest is along the lines of ‘in case something falls from the sky.” Makes sense really if you know the whole story. Who wants to get shit on them? Even if it is holy.

Children of the Porn

The stage behind her was set with fluffy pink bedding, string lighting, and a combination of glass and rubber penises molded from both human and mythological creatures, large (some really large) and small, the small ones not getting much action lately. No one wanted to see realistic, normal-sized cocks anymore. Bigger was better for business. She snorted in the resin-heavy line of coke that some guy had given her the other night—guys were always throwing drugs at her—and then yelled at her roommate Ashley who was as basic and forgettable as they come to turn down that awful country music and proceeded with her Only Fans “teaser” video. Her skills had become almost Spielbergian, always the perfect angle and perfect lighting to accentuate every contour of her youthful and perfect self. 

“I’ll see you—” She puckered up her plump lips, swollen and sore from multiple injections, and blew a kiss to the camera. “—later.”  She stepped back and flipped around, her ass sculpted from a million hip-thrusts bouncing perfectly before hitting End, leaving her thirty-thousand and growing fans wanting more, always more.

Ashlea with an A—not with a Y like her loser roommate—started with the basic posts: tight skirt pics, bikini pics, ass pics from the gym mirror, and then moved onto slightly more provocative pics involving panties or lack thereof, the natural progression for the hot girls of Instagram. She always had an attention-grabbing ass that made men of all ages want her and women hate her, so the @Asslea handle was only fitting. Her Insta-fame grew, and she quickly became an influencer, aka: ass model, for the most popular and hot brands of fitness wear and spandex that leave nothing to the imagination, every crevice, every line, every lasered-smooth underlying surface exposed. You would see her anus through the stretched-thin material, but it was bleached. No one likes a brown asshole. That is so 2020. 

Ninety-nine percent of her followers weren’t exactly the ideal customer base for LUX Leggings or Roar Underwear; they’d only buy the products if she could prove she had worn them evidenced by her sweat, maybe some piss, or vaginal discharge, something they could smell or lick while they jack off. But that didn’t matter. “Likes” and comments were gold—scratch that—platinum, and Ashlea’s sparkle could be seen from outer space. 

Ashlea pulled her heels on, checked for “likes,” took a bump, scrolled through the incoming comments, took another bump and swallowed a couple prescription pills she borrowed from her roommate. She wasn’t sure what they were, but something was better than nothing. She summoned an Uber, and texted Becca back an “On my way bitch” with a crazy-faced emoji that symbolized just how wild and super busy her faux-celebrity life was.

The Uber arrived, and she climbed in the car that smelled like some weird incense or flavored vape. She watched the “likes” climb and scrolled through the growing comments from her followers complimenting her ass, the words—perfect, snack, delicious—dominating the page. She had once turned the comments off after getting annoyed by “all these men” trying to hit on her which she made very apparent by lashing out on all her social media platforms in a sort of I-hate-being-so-beautiful-and-desired campaign of posts. She followed that up with her I-don’t-spend-hours-a-week-doing-squats-and-hipthrusts-for-you-creeps campaign. After about a week, and a net loss of around a thousand followers and a heaping of self-worth, she turned the comments back on. Then she started an Only Fans page, tips welcomed and encouraged, Cash App preferred.

The Uber stopped. “Um, ma’am,” the driver said, looking back at Ashlea who was buried in her phone. “Ma’am,” he said a second time, more assertively.

Ashlea’s display went dark. 

“We’re here,” he said.

Ashlea swallowed down more resin from that coke she got from that guy, and what was his name, again? John or Jacob, something J? She looked out, seeing that she wasn’t at all where she needed to be. She looked at the driver through the rearview, noticing him for the first time. “Um—” She sucked the back of her teeth. “No . . . We aren’t.”

“They have the road blocked off. This is as far as we can go.”

This Uber guy was annoyingly overweight and breathing heavily. Ashlea sighed loudly, rolled her eyes, and got out of the car, shutting the door, putting a barrier between perfection and the miserable lump of grossness in the driver seat. She headed in the direction of The Strip, the newest and most prestigious club in a city full of new and prestigious clubs, her iPhone display spotlighting her goddess-like facial features and artificially voluptuous lips. Honks and whistles flew at her, but went unnoticed, only irrelevant background noise as she walked and scrolled, walked and scrolled.

In the past hour, she had gained thirty-three more followers and had received more comments than she could keep up with. Nothing could stop her, especially when she bounced her ass in slow-motion. Could you blame them? She thought. I’d fuck me. 

“Excuse me.”

Ashlea looked up to a policeman who was inches from her face. She could smell his after shave. There were several other cops and whoever these other uniformed people running around were, red and blue lights lighting up the sky.

“This is a crime scene,” the officer said.

“Goddamn it,” Ashlea rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously.”

“Look, you don’t understand. I’ve got to get over there,” Ashlea said, pointing through the police and ambulance and yellow tape.

“Sorry. Can’t let you through. There’s been another homicide.”

Ashlea shook her head and looked off, noticing a bloody sheet covering a body on a stretcher. Where the head should’ve been was a lumpy pile of mashed potatoes loaded with shattered skull and pulsated brains and mucous. 

She snorted in frustration. “Look. I don’t care about a fucking homma—whatever you called it. People are expecting me.”

The officer who was in his forties—probably one of her paying fans, Ashlea thought—smiled, obviously about to let the hottest thing on the street go wherever she needed to go. 

“Ma’am,” he said. “You’re going to have to go around.”

She looked back at the cause of this total bullshit and shook her head at the bloody body that lay under the once-white sheet. Selfish fucker.

“Ughh,” she said, giving this officer who could only dream of slipping his middle-aged, sour dick into something as perfect and young as her a look of total death. 

A car full of hot college guys pulled up. “Hey, babe,” the one from the passenger seat with fluffy hair and stunning blue eyes said. “Where you going?”

Ashlea turned back to the officer and smirked before saying, “You had your chance.” She walked toward the car full of strange boys and flexed her ass with each step, giving the officer something to regret the rest of his life.

The officer just shook his head. “Psycho bitch.”

Ashlea climbed into the back of the black BMW, sandwiched between two okay-looking guys. The guy she wanted with the great hair and piercing light blue eyes was in the front. 

The driver looked back through the rearview. “Where we going?”

“Where do you think?” Ashlea said, the only choice for a hot girl like her was obvious. When they didn’t answer, she said, “The Strip . . . obviously. I couldn’t get through because of all that bullshit. I mean . . . who gets murdered on a Saturday night in the middle of downtown?” 

The guys laughed. 

“Yeah,” said the hot guy from the passenger seat. “The nerve. So . . . what’s your story?”

“What’s my story?”

“Yeah,” he said. “What do you do?”

“I’m an influencer.”

He nodded and smirked. “Aren’t we all?”

Ashlea didn’t know how to respond, like the air was just sucked from her lungs. Her cheeks warmed and that damned resin hit her throat again, and what the fuck kind of bunk coke was that? The car seemed to shrink some; all of a sudden there wasn’t enough leg room.“Um, no.” She composed herself. “Not everyone is an influencer,” she said, unconvincingly.

“No, no. It’s cool. Influencing is cool.” He turned back toward her. “If you’ve got an ass . . .” He was about to say something else but shifted gears. “I do a little influencing of my own.”

“Really.” Ashlea wondered what brands he worked with but then felt the urge for another bump, and not of that shit she had on her. “Do y’all have any coke?” She suddenly got upset with herself for getting into their car without this knowledge. Let’s hope to fuck they do.

The guys all smiled, seemingly pleased by her question.

“Well,” the guy next to her said as he fished a baggie of white powder from his pocket and held it up, displaying it to everyone. “Since you asked.”

They parked and took turns snorting the powder that was much, much better than that trash she got from whoever that loser was the other night, before walking up to The Strip where the muscular, bearded door guy quickly waved Ashlea and her new friends in, avoiding the line of about fifteen not-thems. 

Ashlea’s friend Becca came up, tall and lean, long dark hair, jeans practically painted on her fit ass, sexy as fuck. 

“Heyyy,” Becca said.

“Heyyy,” Ashlea said.

Ashlea noticed the boys salivating over her friend, practically fucking her with their eyes, so to steal some of the attention back, she grabbed Becca’s ass, pulled her close, and started dancing to whatever song was playing. Becca didn’t deserve a solo performance. Ashlea wouldn’t allow it.

Becca was also an influencer and had an Only Fans account but not nearly as many subscribers as Ashlea, which she attributed mainly to not caring about it or posting enough to grow her following, and just not feeling the need for all that attention. But Ashlea knew that was total bullshit and that Becca had a great ass but not an ass worthy of stardom like her own. Becca may be able to pull off ten thousand followers, she thought, but not thirty thousand. No way.

The guys, mainly the driver of the BMW who was named Frank, bought several rounds of drinks. They went down and more followed, mixed in with quick bumps of coke. Ashlea was hot but feeling good from the combination of uppers, downers, whatever those prescription pills are her roommate left out. The booming bass from the music sent vibrating pulses of warmth through her body. More drinks came. The guys’ eyes were eager and excited as they watched these two beautiful young women dance, check their phones, type responses, tongue each other, and speak loudly about how sexual they were and how all men wanted to fuck them. Sex is power when you’re young and fucking flawless. The guys did not argue this.

Becca kept forcing herself on the hot guy with the piercing eyes who was called Brandon—hot name for a hot guy—so Ashlea moved in and reclaimed her territory by grabbing his crotch. He’ll do, she thought. She brought his mouth to hers. The tip of her tongue gently danced with his, which felt electric, before she pulled back and said, “Don’t go anywhere.” She smiled her infamous pageant-winning smile and walked toward the restroom, the floor like an ocean, the music pounding deep into her. A guy nudged her shoulder hard.

“Hey, asshole,” she said. “Watch it.” 

He kept walking, obviously too intimidated by her to turn and look or apologize.

She made it into the restroom, and there were about twenty other women crowded in there. Fuck. She pulled out her phone and noticed the “likes” and comments from her teaser post beginning to fade. A stall opened and she rushed in, cutting off the others who had been waiting.

“Hey, bitch. We were waiting.”

“I’ll only be a second. Rude.” Ashlea pulled her panties down below her skirt and sat down letting the stream of warm urine pour from her. She positioned her camera just right, capturing her black Roar panties around her ankles and the awesome heels—Chamandi brand—and her Gucci bag, around two-thousand dollars in all sent to her for free to model. She went through the filters and uploaded the pic with the caption: Don’t my Roar panties and Gucci bag look good with my Chamandi heels? Make sure to tune in tonight if you want to see more. Hashtag. Hashtag. Hashtag.

She came out expecting angry eyes, but no one noticed. As she walked out of the overcrowded restroom full of what she thought of as sixes and sevens, none of them in the same league as her, she felt a dribble of pee between her legs and realized she didn’t wipe. Fuck it. 

The coke had her wired up, her heart racing like the Kentucky Derby, banging against her chest cavity, trying to escape. The too many shots of booze and her lame roommate’s crazy pills had the walls and everyone inside of them swaying back and forth. She focused as best she could through the churning crowd to the bar, looking for Brandon’s piercing eyes looking back at her, but he was nowhere. Neither was Becca, that fucking bitch. She pushed her way back to her spot at the bar where only VIPs are supposed to hang and wondered who the fuck these other losers were crowding her. She flagged down the bartender. Over the music and crowd, she said, “Did my friends leave?”

The bartender looked at her incredulously. “Who?”

“Becca . . . and the guys I was with.”

He shook his head in quick short back-and-forth movements as he toweled a glass clean. “I’m not sure. Sorry.” He walked off.

It was then Ashlea realized she was holding a drink she didn’t remember ordering, the condensation like ice on her hands. 

The floor began moving more beneath her in waves, and this retched song that was so last year drilled into both sides of her temples as everything started closing in around her, constricting. She leaned on the sticky bar and tried flagging down the bartender who saw her and quickly turned away, mouthing something to the manager. They both glanced over and then eyed each other with some weird look, and what the fuck was going on? Struggling to catch her breath—the air thin and depleted—she left her drink and swam through the blurry crowd of people that melded together like dancing water colors, all eyes on her. She walked out, the muggy, warm night air hitting her. She looked around, unable to focus. The towering buildings and continuous stream of people coming and going was overwhelming. Breathe, Ashlea. Breathe. She finally spotted an Uber parked along the curb. She stumbled over on heavy, weak legs and climbed in.

“Where to?”

***

Ashlea woke to the pounding on her door—bang, bang, bang. 

“Ashlea,” her roommate said. “Your mom has been calling non-stop.”

Ashlea rolled over and squinted her eyes, focusing through the blinding sun that must’ve been absorbing the Earth or at least her room, her head throbbing. The pink walls and fluffy blankets looked no sexier than Pepto Bismol in this lighting which made her want to vomit. It took her eyes a moment to focus enough to read the clock. 2:45 p.m.? Holy fuck.

“Ashlea, call your mom.”

“Yes, yes. I hear you.” She reached for her phone, tensing up from the raw, sore feeling coming from her ass. There was a beer bottle sitting on the nightstand she was afraid to touch. She wasn’t sure what her fans asked for last night—she couldn’t remember anything; it was all a blur—but she had her suspicions. You’ve got to stay creative to stay relevant in this world and to give your fans what they want. Requests are welcomed. Pain sells.

On her phone were several missed calls and texts from her mother.

Mom: Are you ok?

Mom: Where are you?

Mom: Text me back! I’m worried about you!

Mom: Ashley, call me

Ashlea snickered a little at the misspelling of her name—even her mom couldn’t spell it right—and really didn’t feel like dealing with her mom trying to be all parental and concerned and stuff. She hated it when she got that way. It was very unbecoming.

Ashlea deleted the texts and went into her Only Fans account, expecting at least one hundred new followers and a blossoming pay day on her Cash App. She looked at the number of followers that . . . had gone down by eight? What the fuck?

She ran through what she could remember of last night, the hot guy Brandon, and got more upset thinking about that bitch Becca kidnapping him. She’s such a slut. But it wasn’t surprising. The Becca’s of the world were like skinny vultures, ready to tear into the scraps left by much hotter women at any chance they got, doing anything to get noticed by men. Pathetic.

Ashlea took a bubble bath and got ready, applying her MAC makeup and concealer, trying to hide the dark circles that were a byproduct of last night and the many nights before. Even not at her best, she was still hotter than ninety-nine percent of the women in this city, still a ten.

She turned on the lighting and equipment and spread her skirt, showing her new pair of Coco thong panties, promising her loyal fans a real treat later. If they wanted more, which they always did, she’d give them more.

“Aren’t these Coco thong—” she said the word “thong” as slowly and sexy as possible. “—panties to die for? Stay tuned, tonight. You won’t want to miss the show.” She blew a kiss through her unnaturally full lips and hit End. She hadn’t put much thought into what she was going to do, never did. Her fans usually led the way with a dangling carrot of potential tips, the largest players having the most influence.

She swallowed down the two pills her roommate must’ve accidentally left out on the counter—thanks, bitch—with a swig of Grey Goose and Ubered to Rock and Roll, the best and most expensive sushi bar in town, snorting the rest of the trash coke she had gotten from whoever that guy was, she couldn’t remember.

She walked in. Everyone turned, their eyes glued to her as she scrolled through the “likes” and comments from her teaser post. 

“Can you fit a one-liter up there?” one of her sicko followers posted. Creep.

She scrolled and stopped.

“I want to see you bleed.”

She shook her head and sighed, turning the display off, and there he was: Brandon. Looking hot as ever, his hair a messy masterpiece, his eyes more crystal than the night before. He pretended to not notice her walk in—the too cool act—which was kind of cute in a boyish way. She walked up next to him and leaned on the bar, her hotness commanding attention. When he didn’t say Hi, Ashlea made the first move.

“Brandon.”

“Uh, yeah.” He turned to her with a confused look on his face. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”

Ashlea snorted a small laugh. “Um, yeah.” She looked into those fantastic eyes of his, smiled, refreshing his memory, but his face didn’t change. “Ashlea, silly.”

He smacked and twisted his mouth in thought. “I’m sorry. Drawing blanks.”

She hated to do this, like REALLY FUCKING HATED it. “Becca’s friend.”

His confusion turned to a half grin. “Oh . . . Becca’s friend. Sure. Everyone knows Becca.”

Ashlea wasn’t sure what game he was playing, but his cuteness was wearing off. The bartender brought him his tab which he signed to close out. Staring down at his ticket, he said, “Your friend is quite the screamer.” The bartender came back up and he and Brandon laughed about something as they did that cool fist bump thing that guys did. He faced Ashlea, smiled, and walked from the bar. 

Ashlea felt her heart racing, and it got hard to breathe, and what the fuck is going on? She turned on her phone—her crutch—and noticed several outgoing messages to Becca she didn’t remember sending and that Becca hadn’t texted her back. She gasped for air that was thinning by the second and felt dizzy, the restaurant and everyone inside it beginning to spin around her. She raced toward the restroom and splashed cold water on her face. Staring into the mirror and gripping onto either side of the porcelain sink, thinking about Brandon giving her the cold shoulder and Becca not responding and losing eight fucking followers despite shoving a fucking beer bottle up her asshole, her frustration growing and growing until it came out in a screeching, guttural yell that lasted for several seconds. Her phone beeped.

Mom: Ashley, call me. I’m worried about you.

Another beep.

Mom: Do I need to come up there?

Another beep.

Mom: Please tell me you’re taking your medication!

Medication? Um, yeah mom. If coke was prescribed, sure. Has everyone gone fucking crazy?

The door swung open.

“Is everything alright?” some guy asked.

Ashlea caught her breath and tried to compose herself as the guy said something to her.

“What?” Ashlea said.

“You need to leave,” he said.

Ashlea gave this loser server guy the stare of death and walked briskly past him. Her legs felt heavy on the ocean floor as she walked toward the exit. She felt everyone’s stares. She tried her hardest not to look, but the smiles on these people were wider than their faces, everyone of them like demonic clowns at a circus. A laughter grew around her, amplified and more hollow than anything human. She couldn’t breathe and . . . everything went white, all sounds muffled into one static hum.

***

Ashlea woke up in the back seat of some car, the driver pushing on her.

“Lady, we’re here.”

She looked out at the night surrounding her apartment building and wondered how she got there. Her head was throbbing.

“Twelve dollars,” the driver said.

“Oh,” she said, a déjà vu suddenly washing over her. This driver—this car—she’s seen both before. She pulled out her wallet from her Gucci bag and her Amex from her wallet, handed it to the driver.

“Ashley,” he said, reading from the card.

“With an A at the end,” Ashlea said.

“What?” the driver asked. “Looks like a Y to me.” He handed the card back to her.

Ashlea looked the card over and of course, they misspelled her name. Is Ashlea with an A really that fucking hard to spell?

“Thank you,” the all-too familiar driver said.

Ashlea pulled on the handle, but the door was locked.

“Um, the door’s locked?”

The driver just stared at her flatly for a moment, before unlocking the door and saying, “Sorry.”

Ashlea opened the door and got out, her mind already moved on from the déjà vu and eyes already deep in her phone. The driver rolled down the passenger side window, leaned over, and said, “Don’t forget to lock your door. There’s some sicko around, butchering people. They found two more bodies tonight.”

Ashlea’s eyes didn’t move from her phone, like she didn’t hear him at all.

“He likes to see young women bleed,” he said. 

Still no response.

“I want to see you bleed.”

“I’m sorry,” Ashlea said, totally uninterested. “Two more what?” Her eyes didn’t leave the bright phone display.

The driver just shook his head and rolled up the window, pulling the black BMW from the curb and driving away.

Ashlea suddenly realized who the driver was. It was Frank, Brandon’s friend, from the other night. Did he not recognize me? she wondered. Surely he had to have, right? I’m not one to go unnoticed, especially in this skirt. There’s no way. What the fuck is happening, right now? She felt her chest and face warming and her heart beating faster. Looking up at the stairs that led to her apartment, it seemed like they went on forever. She trudged her way up, one heavy step at a time, and tried steadying her shaky hand enough to insert the key and unlock her front door. After several missed attempts, the key finally found its target, and the knob turned. The door opened and a foul odor punched her in the face.

“Ew . . . what the fuck?” She walked in, fanning her nose, and turned on the lights seeing her apartment that looked like one of those fucking homeless encampments, with bottles, garbage, and clothes strewn about. “Ashley!” 

There was no answer as it appeared her boring and apparently gross roommate was out. Yuck. She walked into her room and closed the door on that awful smell, lighting up her phone and reading through the comments, stopping at one.

“I want to see you bleed.” 

She took in a deep breath, slid her skirt down to her ankles and stepped out, cranked the lighting and equipment, positioned her fluffy pink blanket just right, and got ready to entertain. She started with standard dildo penetration, but the tips weren’t coming in.

She typed: Well, what do y’all want to see? Biggest bidder wins.

The responses began rolling in. I want to see you bleed. I want to see you bleed. I want to see you bleed. I want to see you bleed.

They kept coming, a relentless assault.

You’ve got to stay creative to stay relevant in this world and to give your fans what they wanted. Pain sells.

She typed: Hold tight. I’ll be right back. 

She walked from her room and returned a few moments later, sitting back in the golden position for her fans where every pore of her flawless self was illuminated perfectly by the lighting. She looked into the camera and held up the large knife for her fans to see, turning it this way and that way. The tips started coming in. She placed the knife at her throat and smiled that mischievous, cute, sexy smile that only she could pull off. More tips poured in. She winked and slid the sharp edge across her throat, a clean slice that stung like fire and then ice, before a flood of warmth poured over her chest. As her throat filled with venomous cotton, she saw her dull, basic roommate through the reflection on the screen as she watched the relentless tips and comments rolling in. She smiled until her eyes went hazy and everything went dark. 

Supreme Delight

“This is delicious!” Markos exclaimed, finishing swallowing his bite and smiling.

Through the cameras, Irina, the supervisor of the scientific study, closely monitored him from the next room, recording each of his reactions and comments on a sheet of paper.

Markos Panteli, the twelfth volunteer of the day, moved his arms and hands in the air, performing maneuvers and gestures that reflected his simulated activity, leaning gently on his swivel chair, wearing his virtual reality headset. For Markos, everything he was experiencing was as real as the bunion on his left big toe, which had been bothering him for six months.

“I’m glad you like the shrimp cocktail,” Irina told him through her microphone. “Why don’t you try the asparagus tart? Everyone agrees it’s a delicacy.”

“I don’t like asparagus. But if you say so, precious, I’ll give you a chance,” Markos said, dipping his spoon into the tart and popping a piece into his mouth.

He savored it for a moment and swallowed it, along with a sip of white wine.

“Not bad! I’m going to have to reconsider my opinion on asparagus.”

“I’ll ask you to moderate your alcohol consumption, Markos. We don’t want you to end up getting drunk.”

“But it’s virtual alcohol!”

“But your brain doesn’t know. The effect is very similar to that of real alcohol. Produces the same euphoria and disinhibition as physical wine.”

“Okay. I will keep that in mind in the future.”

Markos gulped down what was left of his glass. Without hesitation, he filled it again. Irina winced, looking at him on her monitor.

On the wall opposite Markos a huge virtual screen was being projected, from end to end, with a pleasant scene of a calm sea ebbing foamy waves on a tropical beach, with lush palm trees and a sun looming on the horizon. The sound of the waves gently lapping was relaxing.

“Won’t you select some music, Markos? You can choose from more than a million musical themes. Stretch your right hand and select the genre you prefer: classical, techno, blues, tango, jazz, rock, pop . . .”

“Carmina Burana. I would like to listen to Carmina Burana while I continue eating.”

Immediately, Carl Orff’s vibrant cantata began to play, with his powerful O Fortuna, adding to the sound of the ocean waves. Markos began to wave his hands as if conducting an orchestra with two batons. Irina noticed that his brain waves associated with pleasure were amplifying and achieving noticeable peaks.

The haptic effectors that lined the chair stimulated his entire body with vibrations in accordance with the moments of greatest intensity of the cantata, making the virtual experience superlatively irresistible.

Markos virtually got up from his seat and walked around the banquet table, serving himself delicacies on a large plate: mustard roast beef, mushroom cheese omelet, turkey stuffed with spinach and caramelized cherries, salmon with blue cheese, Beluga caviar. Then he returned to his place, which he had never really left, and began to eat with relish.

“There is no rush, Markos. We will not remove any food from the table. You have all the time you want for the test.”

Markos ignored the comment and continued to eat at full speed, interspersing bits of bread and sips of wine between bites. Irina kept recording everything down to the smallest detail.

After an hour of feasting, Markos leaned back in his chair, patted his belly, and smiled.

“I know I didn’t really swallow anything and my stomach is still as empty as when I walked in here, but my brain has never been so delighted. Well said, delighted? With delight.”

“Yes. That is the precise word: delight.”

Markos looked up and down the banquet hall and did not find what he was looking for.

“Can’t one smoke here?”

“Whatever you want. Brown or blonde tobacco, Cuban cigars?”

“I’d smoke a joint of marijuana. It relaxes me, especially after eating.”

Then a very beautiful girl appeared, dressed in suggestive clothes, with a small silver tray on which she carried some marijuana cigarettes and a solid gold lighter.

“Wow! This is great service! The idea of the Playboy model girl is great! Again, what was your name?”

“Irina. My name is Irina Sotnikova. I told you when you walked into the room.”

“Well done, Irina.”

“No, it was not my idea. Your brain inserts its wishes along with those offered by the program. The waitress would be your ideal girl, at least to serve you after the banquet.”

The beautiful girl smiled and pouted sensually.

“She can do whatever I want?”

“Anything you want. I am not going to blush. I’ve seen it all in this job.”

Markos took a marijuana cigarette and lit it. He took a few puffs, with pleasure, and looked at the girl, who was looking at him expectantly.

“Do you want one too?”

He lit another joint and handed it to the girl, who laid the tray on the table, leaned one leg on it, and began to smoke with obvious pleasure.

After a few minutes in which they both enjoyed the cannabis session, Markos put down his cigarette and motioned for the girl to come over to him.

“What’s your name, pretty?”

“Whatever you want to call me. I’m all yours.”

Markos thought of the name Greta. He had always wanted a girlfriend named Greta.

“Greta. I want you to be Greta.”

She pulled her bodice over her shoulders, smiled provocatively, and threw herself at him with determination. Markos felt the warmth of her lips, of her firm tongue, of her saliva, mixed with his, which still had traces of shrimp, asparagus, wine and cannabis.

Before he could even think about it, Greta unzipped his pants and extracted his hot and stiff cock, immediately shoving it into her mouth and starting to suck it. Markos began to moan and then to scream with pleasure.

Suddenly, Greta produced a stiletto from under her clothes and showed it to Markos, brandishing it mischievously.

“I know you like a little dose of masochism, my dear boy.”

“Now I don’t want to play those games, precious. Once . . .”

“Everything ended badly, once. I can rummage through your memory, my love. But this time, you are going to enjoy it like never before.”

Then, she began to perform small stabs around Markos genitalia, producing tiny bleeding wounds. She bent down and began to lick the blood that was slowly oozing out.

“Stop it! It’s no longer a pleasant thing!”

“Stop it, Greta, stop it! I order you to stop!” Irina exclaimed through the microphone.

Greta looked at the camera and smirked. He continued with his sado ritual.

Irina jumped from her post, opened the door that connected the two rooms and threw herself on the seat where Markos was writhing in pain. She could not see Greta because she was not connected to the simulation. When she was manually disconnecting Markos from the system, Irina felt a twinge of pain in her back. Horrified, she noticed the expression of pleasure on Markos’s face, as he finished plunging the knife he had hidden during the test into her back.

“My dear Irina, this time everything went well. The previous time, my victim got away at the last minute. Greta could not hold her. Now, between the two of us, we caught you. This, my darling, is the supreme delight.”

Irina Sotnikova collapsed lifelessly on the body of Markos Panteli, who could not stop laughing like crazy.

Rat’s Ass

A white van pulled up to the gate of the Curran-Fromhold Correction Facility, the pink and pastel hell on Street Road in Northeast Philadelphia. On the side of the van was the city’s seal and the words “Sheriff’s Office.”

“What do we got today?” asked the guard at the gate.

“Holdovers for trial,” said the Sheriff’s deputy at the wheel while two other deputies looked on, one from the front, and one further back in the van.  The cargo was a mishmash of society not yet in orange jump suits, making their arrival from Police Department cells where arrests were stored temporarily. The prisoners were dressed in various combinations of civilian wear ranging from blue jeans and t-shirts to pajamas and a vomit covered business suit.  All were cuffed at wrists and ankles and chained to their seats. Locked wire mesh cages further kept them from taking a walk.

The manifest and other paperwork was reviewed by the guard and handed back. He nodded to another guard in a white hut. The guard in the hut pushed a button, noting for the record on a computer the date and time the gate was opened. The van drove inside the network of ten foot high cyclone fences topped with concertina wire. The van stopped again at another gate complete with guards. The process was repeated. From there van headed to the designated unloading zone. 

Other prison guards met the van. The Sheriff’s deputies and the guard in charge went over the manifest. The prisoners seat-cages were unlocked as were the chains to the seats. The wrist and ankle cuffs stayed on the prisoners as they were marched out of the van and into the courtyard. A deputy and a guard both did body counts. Signatures were placed on the appropriate forms. The van left with its deputies. The prison guards marched their new guests inside a building for processing.

Rules were read off. Photos and fingerprints were taken. Prisoners were led to private areas for strip searches and body cavity checks.  All went relatively smoothly until the processing line reached a thin disheveled man in his late twenties.  Processing slowed. Latex gloves and surgical masks were procedure. Even with gloves and masks, the guards were reluctant to touch this fellow, but they did their jobs.

The man was ordered to undress but seemed to have difficulty accomplishing the task. He seemed only capable of wobbling on his feet, as if he was dancing to a tune only he could hear.  Guards assisted with rough speed. Lice and fleas jumped off the prisoner’s body and clothing. His clothes reeked of urine and worse, but were put in a resealable plastic bag for recording and storage.

“Where did they find him?” a guard asked.

“Kensington Avenue, near Allegheny.”

Nothing more needed to be said. Kensington and Allegheny, better known as K and A, was the heroin capital of the east coast, the first big stop off of I-95 after coming ashore in Florida. Once a rough and tumble home to factories and warehouses, known for producing hit men and burglars, Kensington had degenerated further.  The factories and warehouses had closed decades ago. Poverty and gangs were rampant. The area was known around the world from YouTube videos of homeless addicts living on the streets under the Frankford Elevated, sleeping on sidewalks, in doorways, vacant lots, abandoned churches, and “Needle Park”, a grassy area in from of the local branch of the public library.

The prisoner’s arms, legs, even his neck was scarred from needles. Visions of heroin laced with Fentanyl and Xylazine ran through the minds of the guards.

“What was he picked up for?”

“Alleged robbery, resisting arrest and assault on a police officer.”

“Great. Help me spread his legs.”

A greased and gloved finger was poked into the man’s anus to search for contraband. Corrections Officer William Curry, the guard with this choice duty wiggled his finger around inside the prisoner. Drugs, cellphones, weapons got smuggled into prison in the back trunk. All was going smoothly except for the grunts from the prisoner and the finger duty guard’s desire to wretch. 

“Shit,” Curry shouted, pulling out his hand. He wasn’t referring to the residue smeared on the prisoner’s ass or on the latex glove.  “Something bit me.”

“A bug?”

“Bigger than that.”

Curry looked at his finger. The latex was punctured and blood was seeping out.

“That looks like an animal bite.”

“I’m filing an injury on duty report. I need to see a doc right away. God knows what I could get from this guy.”

Reports were filed. A sergeant and a lieutenant came by to take note of the injury and the prisoner’s ass. The prisoner stood naked all the while, legs spread, facing the wall, gently bouncing up and down.  A captain and deputy warden were consulted. A plan of action was determined. The prisoner was dragged to a shower and hosed down. Afterwards he was rushed to the medical section.

The prisoner was manacled face down on a gurney by a pair of guards, with his legs spread. The guards stood watch while a contracted doctor used a tongue depressor and a penlight to study the man’s asshole.  Any incredulity the doctor had about the initial report faded when he saw two small eyes looking back at him along with whiskers, nose and teeth.

“He’s got a rat in his ass,” Dr. Braddle said, not quite believing it himself,

“How is that possible?” asked Lynette Marsh, one of the guards.

“I don’t know,” said Dr. Braddle. “I’ve heard of cockroaches climbing into people’s ears, and other body openings. Usually happens when folks are sleeping. We use tweezers and a solution rinse to get them out. I’ve never heard of anything like that with rats before. Where was this guy found?”

“Kensington. On the street I believe,” said Marsh

Dr. Braddle looked at the prisoner’s arms and then his legs, feet and neck.

“Plenty of needle marks. I’m guessing he’s a homeless junkie.” 

“I think he is,” said Marsh.

“I hear there’s maybe four or five hundred homeless junkies in that neighborhood sleeping all over the place. They set up tent cities. The police move them and they just pop up again a few blocks away.”

“That sounds right,”  said the other guard, named, Stephen Cienkowski.  “They’re out of it half the time, brain damaged from horse tranquilizer.  It’s a real mess in Kensington. I grew up in Port Richmond, right next to it. Some say Port Richmond is part of Kensington, but that ain’t so. We used to get the overflow and still do. It was always a rough area, but it was nowhere as bad as it is today. Addicts, robberies, gang killings. There used to be a lot of churches on the avenue. “’I’d say one out of every five is abandoned now.”

“This is just a hypothesis,” said Dr. Braddle. “But I’m guessing our prisoner may have been sleeping, or nodding, in an alley or vacant lot. A rat crawled in his pants, or maybe he didn’t have his pants on at the time and rat climbed right in. Our prisoner didn’t notice the rat had made his ass into a hidey-hole. He still may not be aware of it. He seems out of it.”

“How will you get it out?” asked Nurse Grundy, who was helping with curing the problem child. 

“I’m not sure Alice. I may have to experiment a bit. I can’t imagine a big rat fitting in there. It must be a young one, not full size. One way or the other we’ll get it out. Maybe we can tempt it out with food. I’m reluctant to try an enema. The rat might chew its way further in to escape the chemicals. If I can’t lure it out, it will have to extracted surgically. I can’t do surgery here. The prison’s medical ward doesn’t have the right equipment. If we can’t get it out the prisoner will need to be sent to a hospital.”

After some thought, and consultation with the plumbing shop at the prison, Dr. Braddle came up with a plan. The prisoner was sedated and chained spread eagle, face down, on a bed.  A wide plastic tube was taped to the prisoner’s asshole. The tube fed into a cage where tasty morsels from the prison cafeteria were sprinkled. Video cameras were set up so the asshole and cage could be watched from another room if necessary, and so the action could be recorded. A half hour passed.  The rat did not stick its head out.

“It may be living off the prisoner’s innards or undigested food in the rectum and large intestine,” the doctor speculated.

Nurse Grundy had an idea. “If the rat eats what comes through the digestive system, and the prisoner is hooked on a whole bunch of nasty shit, maybe the rat is addicted too.”

“So you suggest we might try a different type of lure?”

“Maybe.”

It took some negotiation with the DA’s office, the police and the warden, but a few hours later and guard came to the medical dispensary with a box labeled “evidence.” Inside the box was a smidgen of brown, fairly pure Mexican dope.  It was just a few grams in an envelope, plenty to get a rat high.

The envelope was set in the cage. Additional taped was placed around the tube connected to the prisoner’s asshole to make sure it was secure. Then the wait began.

After a half hour movement was detected around the asshole. Puckering and bubbling, then a snout appeared. The nose twitched and sniffed, then disappeared back inside the prisoner’s ass.

“Maybe if we turn down the lights?” suggested one of the guards.

Curtains were drawn. All the lights in that section of the medical ward were turned off except for one on the other side of a divider. This left barely enough light to see what was happening. They waited. And waited. Almost an hour into their vigil the rat’s nose reappeared, sticking from the prisoner’s asshole like a big dingleberry or a rotting hemorrhoid.  The rat sniffed the air. Slowly, very slowly, it emerged from the prisoner’s asshole, then raced down the tube into the cage. The rat was too engrossed with sniffing, rolling in, and chewing the brown to notice the cage door dropping shut.

“I’m glad that’s over,” said Cienkowski. “This is the craziest overtime I’ve ever earned.”

“It does sound like something on the Maury Lowpitch show,” said Dr. Braddle. “But we all witnessed it. I may write a paper on this case and send it to a medical journal. This is the first case of ‘Rat’s Ass’ I’ve heard of.”

The prisoner began to moan.

“Maybe he smells the brown?” suggested Marsh.

“I don’t know,” said Braddle. “Lets see what’s going on.”

The prisoner’s asshole began to pucker. Another rat showed its head.

“He must have a whole nest in there!”

“Maybe we should call Rodent Control,” Cienkowski joked. 

Dr. Braddle looked at the guard.  

“I wish we could,” he said. “This will be like delivering sextuplets.”

A collective sigh went through the room. It had been a long day. It was going to be a long night.

The Pizzaman’s Tip

Mark drove to Charing Cross for the fifth time today. Or maybe the fourth, some of these deliveries blurred together after a while. He patted the thermal bag on the passenger seat, feeling the warmth of the three pizzas through the nylon fabric, and used his other hand to steer.

His little Toyota compact stood out in this neighborhood, where the cars and houses were huge. SUVs with extended cabs and gas-hungry Humvees took up space in the massive gravel driveways fronting the McMansions. The houses had gargantuan cathedral ceilings with lunette windows over their entryways through which he could see bauble-filled chandeliers.

He steered and glanced at the bronze house numbers pegged to the dressed stone mailboxes fronting the McMansions. 

His phone rang, the cell rumbling from beneath the thermal bag where he’d accidentally left it. He reached with his right hand, and spotting the delivery address, steered into the driveway with his left. 

He parked behind a gunmetal grey Mercedes Jeep and hit the “Talk” button on the phone. “Pizza Man, extraordinaire.” 

“Markie.” 

Breni. Breni with the brown hair and black eyes, Breni who he’d known since high-school. Who, for some reason, was his girlfriend. It was a common complaint that girls who deserved better sometimes got stuck with losers, or even sought them out. Thankfully he was her loser.

“What can I do for you, madame?”

“Can you stop at Quik Stop on the way home?”

“Diet Pepsi and a National Enquirer?” He kept the phone cupped between ear and shoulder to free his hands to get the pizza bag.

“Don’t say it,” she said. 

“I didn’t.”

“It was in your voice.” 

He sighed. Everyone had their thing, their escape. He liked edible weed and computer games; she followed the trials of men who killed their wives. They came together for sex, having that much in common, which was enough. On top of which there was some overlap in the music they liked, but that was icing on the cake.

“I’ll pick it up,” he said, and slid the thermal bag’s silk-lined sling over his shoulder.

“Thanks baye.”

“You’re welcome.” He demonstrated skill in finding an unorthodox, hands-free way to turn his cellphone off by scrunching his ear against his shoulder, then slowly leaned down and dropped it onto his car seat.

After that he grabbed the two liter of Pepsi with his right hand, closed the car door with his hip, and walked up the flagstone path to the housefront.

Glazed leaded panes of bullseye glass were sashed in rectangular windows to the left and right of the oaken door. The windows were red and cast off a deep ruby light that reminded him of stained glass in a church. Not that he’d been in a while. 

He grabbed the brass knocker sitting in the snarling maw of the bronze lion, knocked twice. Then he stood back and waited, listening to the serene sounds of an afternoon in the leafy suburbs. Crickets chirped from their hiding in the rosebushes while an air-conditioner steadily droned, dueling with the whine of an automatic pool cleaner making underwater circuits from deep end to shallow.

The front door of the house opened inward, waking him from the dream. A woman stood there. “Oh, the pizza!” She beamed, her catlike eyes not so much widening as stretching so that the porcelain-white skin of her cheekbones drew taut as a drumhead. She was pretty, with an elongated neck and a grace to her motions that made him think of a ballet dancer. “Come in!”

He stopped on the door’s threshold, the traction treads of his nonstick shoe caught in limbo, half on the rattan Welcome mat of the porch, half on the parqueted hardwood in the entryway. 

She looked back at him, half-turned, arching an eyebrow. “Can you put it on the table in the dining room?” She pointed to an unseen table, her voice echoing through the cavernous foyer.

We can’t come in. He wanted to say it but couldn’t. Something about being a stickler for policy, here and now, embarrassed the hell out of him. It’s not like she was going to rob him. Her house cost more than he’d earn in a lifetime at Pizza Shack, and he was a foot taller than her and a good fifty pounds heavier. If anything, she should have been reticent to let a sweaty-shaggy nerd like him into her house.

“I don’t bite,” she said, stifling the vicarious embarrassment she felt for him.

Maybe…? 

Nah.

He stifled the stupid, cliched porno plot every pizzaman spun in his mind (or for the other employees, if he could convincingly lie), and stepped into the house. 

The door closed behind him without his so much as brushing it with his hip. He tried to turn, felt the cold barrels pressed flush against his occipital lobe. “She might not bite.” A man’s voice, deep but quavering, tough but cornered. “But I shoot.” 

Mark stood there, holding the two liter of pop in one hand, the beads of cold condensation making the skin of his palm throb, the strap of the thermal bag slung over his shoulder beginning to ache. So far he had managed not to piss his pants, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold out.

“Forget the dining room. Let’s go into the living room,” the voice with the gun to his head said.

Mark obeyed. The steel of the over-under barrels chilled his scalp where they pushed, probing so that the skin on the back of his skull started to burn and his hairs bristled, stinging as if pulled in a tussle.

***

The dude wore a tanktop that showed off arms rippling with wiry muscle that visibly writhed beneath the tattoos of dragons and Vikings shagreening him like scaled armor. The faded India ink of the tats against the pale skin on his arms contrasted with his complexion, a pissy yellow tinge that infected even the sclera of his eyes. He guided Mark into the living room and told him to get on the couch, then passed off guard duties to his girlfriend (if that’s what she was) while he went to do something else. 

She stood across from Mark, a revolver with a checked grip in her right hand. She held the gun casually, the crosshairs and barrel vaguely trained in his direction. On the floor in front of the leather couch where Mark sat, a middle aged woman with blond hair streaked with grey strands lay with her arms bound behind her and her mouth duct taped.

The woman moaned gently, struggled on the Persian rug until she had wedged herself beneath the glass coffee table piled high with hardcover books filled with famous artworks.

A razor-thin plasma screen TV hung lodged in the far wall above a fireplace made of dressed river stones. On the mantlepiece were family photos, a girl and her mother (the woman on the ground) in matching straw hats and sun dresses at some fair, their cheeks painted with bright sunflowers. In another picture both woman and child were on the deck of a sailboat where a man in a white Polo shirt and wraparound Oakley sunglasses held them close to his paunch. The fat cushioning his body only half-hid the hard contours of a former athlete’s body, his biceps those of a sculler, his calves like grapefruits. 

“Alright,” the dude in the tanktop said, coming back into the living room. He apparently trusted his girl to cover Mark with the revolver, for his shotgun was nowhere to be seen. Instead of the shottie, he held a device in his hands that looked like a Walkman cocooned in duct tape, with threads of shoestring dangling that gave it the look of a toy meant to keep a housecat busy. 

Maybe it was a tattoo gun? 

Mark didn’t have any more time to study it, as the guy was sliding the threaded loop of shoestring around his neck, settling the makeshift necklace as carefully as if it were a diamond pendant given to a lover.

The man stood back to study his handiwork, then stared at Mark. “You recognize me?” His eyes were ariot with fear and violence, the wings of his nostrils red from a recent sniffing. He cocked his head to the side. He expected an answer, and soon.

The woman moaned from the ground again. The guy broke eye contact with Mark to shoot her a dirty look, as if she could see it with her face down.

Mark looked up, confused, not sure how to stare the guy in the eyes without it coming off as insolent, even though he’d been told to do it.

“No,” Mark said, lying. He’d seen the dude on one of those Most Wanted programs they played before the block of Court TV that sustained Breni’s psychosexual bloodlust. This guy was no clean-cut ladies’ man with the deceptive pedigree of a Ted Bundy, nor the smug cocksure swagger of wife-killer Scott Peterson. He was Ro Bosman, aka Robot. A meth dealer whose twenty year sentence became a date with Old Sparky after he’d killed two guards with a homemade bomb while being transferred from fed pen to a secure hospital to undergo emergency dialysis. 

Robot nodded, seeming to accept Mark’s answer. He scratched his scalp, showing a tweaker’s diligence in using his fingernails to abrade a spot on his bullet-shaped head. Then he pointed at Mark’s little necklace. “Don’t touch that thing. You try to take it off, you’re going to get a drywall nail shot through your throat with more PSI’s behind it than an industrial pressure washer. It’ll probably bust through your chin and skewer your tongue to the roof of your mouth.”

The girl laughed. Mark’s heart did things in his chest.

“Relax,” Robot said, as if it were that easy. “Jostle it a little and you’re fine. I’m just saying don’t try to take it off.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I’m getting to that.” Robot winced, as if ignoring an order broadcast to him by one of the many voices in his head. “You’re in a network of one now.” He pointed to the wings of the house beyond the living room. “I got the webcam working on the computer over there. You got a little spy cam on your necklace that links up to my computer remotely.” He grinned, showing a mouthful of teeth uneven and jagged as rock candy. “I got two years’ experience working in the fed pen’s call center, and I’m hella PC-literate for a con who ain’t even got his GED.” He cheesed ear-to-ear. “So make sure to smile for me when you’re out there, because you’ll be on camera the whole time.”

Maybe he saw doubt in Mark’s eyes (though there was nothing but fear), for he cocked his head again and the point of his hawklike nose seemingly became even sharper as he stared. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m just bullshitting to make sure you stay on your p’s and q’s out there.”

Out where?

“Test me,” Robot said, and tapped his temple with a finger. “Test me like those two pigs did.”

Mark didn’t move, make a noise.

“Are we clear thus far?” Robot leaned down, lowering his head patiently, almost politely, inclining his ear to Mark as if trying to accommodate a shy kid who didn’t want to speak out loud in class.

“Yes,” Mark said.

“Good.” 

Robot walked around the couch where Mark sat, past the woman still moaning face-down on the floor. He returned shortly with the pizzas, held out the nylon sling of the thermal bag as if dispatching Mark on a delivery. “Do you know where Alliance Bank is?”

Mark thought, but Robot spoke, breaking Mark’s concentration. “You should know this. It’s on Cheswick, near the Publix.”  

“Kroger,” Mark said, not so much correcting him as adjusting directions under breath.

“Right,” Robot said. “You’re going to go in there, say you have an order for Ty Banks.”

“Ty Banks,” Mark said, nodding.

“Mmm!” A moan pressed against the duct tape secured to the mouth of the woman on the ground, and the girl who’d answered the door walked over to her prone form. “Shut up, you fat cow of a cunt!” Mark had barely understood the words, the string of insults latticed together so tightly as it came out of the girl’s mouth. She wiped her saliva-flecked lips with the back of her wrist. “You knew what we were doing!” The girl leaned down to the woman, lifted the revolver above her head and then brought it down with a meaty clonk that made Mark wince. 

“Alright, Katie,” Robot said.

“Some of this is your fault!” Katie shouted. Her words must have been directed not at Robot, but at the woman on the ground, for there was another thud (along with a stomach churning crunch). What had been a moan tapered into a soft unintelligible whimper, carried on whatever air escaped the woman’s nose. 

Katie stood back up, exhaling as if a great burden had lifted from her shoulders. Robot watched Mark with those mesmeric blue eyes, eyes that had held Mark as rapt as the shotgun had, if not moreso. “Mr. Banks is going to take you into his office. He’s going to take the pizzas from you and fill your bag with something. You are to bring that bag back to me.”

“Bring it right back here.” Katie pointed the snub nose of her revolver at the blood-soaked living room floor.

“If you do that,” Robot said, “I’ll take the nail bomb from around your neck. And you’ll live.” He pointed toward the Persian carpet where the woman whimpered and bled, no longer shimmying or struggling with her duct tape bonds. “She’ll live, too. Probably,” he added, and shot Katie the stink eye. He tried to take a deep breath but got interrupted by a shuddering that convulsed him. “You understand?”

Mark nodded, thought of Breni, the warmth of their bed, the glow of the TV, of his computer, those raspberry gummi edibles waiting for him on the end table, his space rock playlist.

Make it home, his brain said, survive.

“Okay,” Robot said, and smiled. “Go deliver those pizzas.”

Mark stood up from the couch, slowly, holding out his arm for the thermal bag. Katie turned from her sneering sentry over the whimpering lady at her feet, trained her revolver on him, less casually now than when she covered him before.

Robot handed Mark the bag, reached into his pocket, and came up with a flip phone. “Take this, too.” 

Mark accepted the prepaid Flintstone phone in hand. 

“I call and you don’t answer it…” Robot dug in the pocket of his khaki cargo shorts, rummaged around and emerged holding a lint-covered RC monster truck controller. “Your medulla oblongata’s a shish kebob, and it’s closed curtains for that silly bitch crying on the floor.” He licked his lips, his tongue coming out deftly like a lizard’s trying to suck up a fly. “Best believe that’s gospel.”

Mark swallowed, didn’t speak. Then he turned toward the door with the pizzas held in his arms. He felt the old dread familiar warmth blooming in his pants, the wetness radiating out from his crotch and spilling down the front of his blue Dockers. Just like when he’d been a kid and woke up in the night during sleepovers, mortified, to discover a warm puddle shaped like a lost continent soaking through the nonrubber mattress. He shuffled forward, hot nettles prickling his skin as the pee finally trickled along his leg, getting caught in the hairs of his shin where it stung and its grot scent became obvious.

He felt like crying, but held back, bit his lip, refusing to add tears to the shame he already felt. 

“Don’t worry,” the voice at his back said. “It happens to a lot of people when they get a gun pointed at them.”

Katie giggled, her birdlike titter almost cheerful, except that it tapered to a dumb, stoner-ish guffaw, and then died in a sere cackle. The hair rose on the back of Mark’s neck, and the thought flashed through his brain, blinking unbidden and quickly as a camera’s flashbulb: Drop the bag, go rushing for them. Charge them both. Make them shoot you.…

But he didn’t turn around and charge them. Instead he sucked it up, drawing in a deep breath that ended in a long sigh before he opened the door and headed out into the hot day once again. Time to deliver the three double pepperoni, parmesan-dusted flatbread crusts with extra cheese to Alliance Bank on Cheswick. 

He closed the door behind him as he left.  

Only as he reached his car did he realized he’d forgotten the two liter.

***

The bank anchored the corner of an office park disguised as an English village. Mark never had reason to come here before, but always looked over whenever his deliveries took him past it. The half-Tudor buildings with their pitched brown roofs and faux wattle and daub fronts always made him feel like a knight in a fantasy riding his steed past a quaint hamlet where peaceful elves dwelled.

He pulled into a parking space out front, beneath a linden tree, its heart-shaped leaves dappled with sunlight. Why the hell did today have to be a beautiful day?

His cellphone rang from the passenger seat but he didn’t even glance down. The only cellphone that mattered now was the flip phone in his pocket.

He got out of the car, happy at least to discover the stain had dried on his pants, though it gave off an ammoniac reek and his thighs stung from the acidity. If he didn’t hop in the shower soon, he’d get a rash. 

Mark slipped the pizza bag’s sling over his collarbone, got out of the car, closed the door.

He tried whistling, pursed his lips to force a couple bars of random music out just to work off the nerves. But his mouth lacked the spit, and his teeth were chattering. He bit down, walked forward, taking the rustic wooden footbridge over a lilypad-crowded pond that carried him into Alliance.

The lobby was cool, the floor a honey-colored stone that made it feel more like a grotto than a bank. A burgundy crush velvet rope linked between golden stanchions, describing a path for customers to take on their way up to one of three windows. It was a hell of a lot different than his bank, which had grey loop carpet floors and was awash in harsh fluorescent light coming from fixtures in the popcorn ceiling. 

Only one person stood in line, a slim middle-aged woman in a checked pencil skirt and sleeveless pebble grey blouse that showed off tanned, athletic shoulders. The line at his bank was usually a wending snake, consisting mostly of day laborers in Carhart jackets and muddy boots, people on SSI who wore sweatpants and flipflops to cash their checks.

“May I help you?” The voice belonged to a frosty teller with cat-eyed tortoise shell glasses and a snubby nose, eyes fixed in a contemptuous squint as if she could smell him all the way from behind the counter. 

“Order for Ty Banks.” He smiled and lifted the bag.

“Pizza?” The nose scrunched and the eyes squinted harder, her face, quizzical at rest, now somewhere between confused and offended. “One moment.”

He watched her walk around the counter, lift a heavy hinged blonde wood divider that let her come out into the lobby. Her box heels clicked hard on the stone floor, producing a snappy echo that traveled loud and hard through the otherwise-silent chamber. She veered off to the right, to a room with a door made of black lacquered wood and walls made of glass and steel supports, like a display case for a postmodern art piece.

Mark could see the man through the glass curtain, seated behind a walnut desk. The man hunched forward so that the sunlight streaming through the slits of the Venetian blinds over the window behind him hit his bald spot and gave it the look of a golden halo.

The woman stood before the man’s desk, looking apologetic as she spoke and gestured toward Mark out in the lobby. Ty Banks nodded, pointed a Monte Blanc pen toward his door. She nodded once, turned, opened the door to the office, searched out Mark’s eyes and stared at him. 

“Mr. Banks will see you.”

“Thank you.” Mark lowered his head, a deferent little bow, but in doing so his chin almost touched the little box dangling from the necklace. His heart started as if he’d awakened from a summer idyl on a picnic blanket to find a deadly spider crawling on his sternum. It took everything in him not to freak out and slap the thing away.

Mark walked forward, carrying the pizza into the man’s office. 

Mr. Banks looked up from the desk where he sat twirling his expensive pen. He was a little doughier than the already pampered athlete gone to seed who’d stood on the sailboat with his wife and daughter, but it was the guy from the mantlepiece photo.

The little girl in the photo… Mark hadn’t seen her at the house. Maybe she was out of town. Or still at school, and would be home soon. He had to hurry.

“Close the door,” Mr. Banks said. 

Mark did.

“Sit down.” Mr. Banks pointed to the seat opposite him.

Mark sat, a head taller than when usually seated in a chair due to this one being overstuffed with horsehair that groaned beneath the chocolate-toned leather. The pizzas remained in the bag, on his lap, warm now instead of hot.

“I’m sorry you got mixed up in this.” Mr. Banks shook his head, less as if expressing regret than as if he had Parkinson’s and was in the middle of a fit. Maybe he was cracking. Mark would have sympathized with him, except he was the one with the bomb around his throat.

“S’ okay,” Mark said, barely able to force himself to mutter that much. 

“I’m taking what’s left of the two million for myself, though. You can go back and tell that little meth-cooking skinhead I said that.”

Mark shook his head. The details of this deal, or double-cross, or whatever the hell it was, were still foggy to him.

Mr. Banks lifted an alligator-skinned suitcase from beneath his desk. He undid the bronze hasps, flipped open the top and displayed the contents to Mark. “I’m the one who put it through a hard wash already. If they’d spent the money, it would have gotten traced.” 

Mark stared inside at the creamy stacked hundred dollar bills, still bound in their Federal Reserve wrappers, a compact and condensed green and white dream in a box. “Besides,” Mr. Banks said, flipping the lid closed and securing the hasps with a loud snap. “A skinhead covered in tattoos is not going to be able to get through customs with more than ten g’s undeclared. What’s he going to tell them?” He smirked. “That his investments panned out?”

 He stood, said, “It was my fault for getting involved with that little white trash slut in the first place.” He finally stopped shaking his head nervously, adjusted the Windsor knot of his blue worsted tie. “It was just bad luck and bad timing that her boy Houdinied his way out of the cuffs again when he did, came home and found out we were together. We were getting ready to celebrate with daquiris on the lido deck.” 

Mark’s grandparents were cruise-happy Sunbelt types, so he knew what a lido deck was. 

“But now I’m riding off into the sunset on my own.” Mr. Banks walked around the desk, the suitcase dangling in his right hand, trailing a whiff of something that smelled of expensive aftershave, maybe saddle leather.  

“Wait.” Mark spun around in the chair, watched the man move toward the door.

“I’m leaving.” 

Mr. Banks had said it as if he were just done with work for the day, rather than leaving his office with a briefcase filled with money, as if he weren’t leaving his wife, throwing her to the proverbial wolves. Leaving Mark at the mercy of the nail pointed straight for his throat, ready to pop from the little charm around his neck with enough force to pierce a two-by-four.

“Your wife,” Mark tried.

Mr. Banks paused, hand on the doorknob. He shrugged. “She’s got to make the bed she slept in.” He pulled the door open. “You want to see the photos? I could give them to you. You could upload them online. ‘Revenge porn,’ I think the kids call it. Not that I’m racist, but that he’s black means I’ve been suffering the cuckold jokes now here for a while.”

“But-”

Mark got no more out. The cellphone rang in his pocket, a tinny, tacky song that sounded like an eight-bit videogame. He wanted to stand up, follow the man and the money out, but if he didn’t answer the phone—the nail.

“Hello?”

“Does he have the money?” Robot’s breath came in shallow, ragged gulps. He sounded as if he’d just gone for a run, or maybe gotten into a fight with Katie. 

“He’s got it,” Mark said. He didn’t add that Mr. Banks was walking out of here with the dough, striding across the lobby, greeting his tellers with a charismatic smile and a small wave that worked on them like a spell.

“Good. Bring it back here. Now. Then—”

A gun clapped from within the phone, an echoless crack that made Mark flinch, caused the pendant dangling around his neck to wave back and forth, wiggle. The box holding the nail groaned, releasing a slow, hissing sound, like the sizzle of a firecracker’s wick before it reached the gunpowder-packed part. “Shit.” He didn’t recognize the voice as his own, nor had he planned to say anything. The words just spilled out. His hands grew clammy and his heart thrummed. 

A blast roared from the phone, this one louder, much easier to hear than the last one even though Mark no longer had the phone next to his ear.

“We needed a hostage, you dumb bitch!”

Katie said something indistinct, her protest punctuated with another three claps, short and staccato, ending whatever argument there was, leaving only silence. 

Then a last pop, somewhat anticlimactic, rang out from the phone. 

It shamed him, but relief passed through Mark in waves.

He looked down at his necklace. 

He stood, slowly, holding the pizza in his hands, and walked out into the lobby. 

The woman with the cat eye glasses seemed to have forgotten he was in Mr. Banks’ office even though she’d led him there. She broke off her conversation with another teller, a thin-featured woman with honey-colored hair in a tight bun and an explosion of sandy freckles on her face.

“Yes?”

“I need you to call the police,” he said, as calmly as he could. “There’s a bomb around my neck.”

Her look of slight annoyance morphed into something else, not quite surprise, more like the snarl of a lioness cornered in a den where she slept with her cubs and the hunter had intruded. “You’ll never get away with it, you little loser.”

The loser part hurt so much that he missed the implication of the whole sentence in which the insult had been embedded. But it was sinking in. And then it sank, all the way.

“Oh shit,” he said. Then, “No, it’s not mine.”

“He’s got a bomb!” Her voice rang out through the lobby.

Instinctively, Mark lifted the pizzas out of the thermal bag, gripping the cardboard already greasy from where the cheese had soaked through in spots. “I’m just a pizzaman.” And a damn good one, too. For he could feel the residual warmth coming from the pepperoni, parmesan-dusted flatbreads with extra cheese. 

Still warm. His only screwup was leaving the two liter at the Banks’ Residence. He deserved a tip. 

Then the sibilant hiss coming from the locket around his neck whined, replaced finally with a groan that ended in a plosive pop.

Gyges Ring

His name does not matter. His mother named him Stephen George Bailey. She called him Stephen when he was young, after his father, who had died when he was one year old. As he grew, and they grew apart, she began calling him George, and in the few very good times Georgie.

Possession was just something that he did. He had been doing it before he could remember, maybe before he could talk. He could not say. But all through his childhood he took dogs and cats and played with them. It was glorious to run as a dog. Inside a bird, he could soar and climb. He could swoop through the air and dive at the earth and glide and land on a branch with tiny bird claws.

He saw what the bird saw, felt what it felt; he was the bird. But he did not have to think about the motor movements. He moved as he would as a human, and the bird body responded. It was as if he inhabited the bird, inheriting its experience and skill in flight, without having to think. He controlled the bird. He was the bird. 

As he got older he realized that possession required line of sight. The bird he possessed had to be in view of his body. When he possessed another, his own body would lay limp, eyes closed. As long as the bird remained in a line of possible sight he had possession. But if it flew out of sight, too far away, or behind a building, or some such, he would drop out, his awareness returning to his own body and the bird would fly away.

He was nine when he finally dull-wittedly realized that possession was not a skill shared by all. He had always been behind in school. Every report card came with the comment, “Needs improvement”. He had just assumed everyone could possess. There was no trigger moment of insight. It just came slowly to him one day that he alone had this ability.

Around that same time there was a quarrel at a birthday party. He wasn’t really friends with the other children. He didn’t really have any friends. He had been invited as part of a group sweep, a proud parent’s presumption that every child in the school class must be a friend. He was not a friend. He didn’t really care. But the cake was good and they served lasagna. He took the gift that his mother had bought for him to bring. 

In the afternoon, as the party wound down, several of the kids splashed about in a wading pool in the backyard. George lay on a lounger. The sun felt good. The food and cake made him a bit tired. His mother was careful with his diet and he was unaccustomed to sugars and carbohydrates.

A bigger boy had been bullying some of the other children in the wading pool. He was splashing them and he used a bucket to dump water on one boys head. The smaller boy looked at the bigger bully and left the pool. The other children followed – they were friends of the smaller boy. The bully found himself alone in the pool. 

He had a moment of frustration before he found a new game. He filled the bucket with cold water and took a few steps to where George lay on the lounger. He suppressed a giggle as he approached and dumped the bucket on George.

George reacted with shock. The water wasn’t very cold but it was unexpected. His arms snapped inward, and his knees bent, and for a moment he sat upright. If it had been part of a game he had been playing it might have been fun. But he opened his eyes to see the bigger boy laughing, standing over him.

Across the yard the family dog, a black Labrador, had been sleeping in the sun. Bongo was an older dog and very good with kids. Earlier they had been tormenting him as kids will do. Bongo had stood it all with good grace and things had settled down. Bongo loved his family and they loved him and he was even popular with the neighbors.

The bigger bully stood laughing over George. His fat belly shook like a bowlful of jelly. Although only nine, the bully had flabby b-cup-sized pectorals. His round face was chubby with blubber. He had eaten two servings of lasagna and three pieces of cake. His laugh was unpleasant and mocking, a combination of a donkey’s bray and a girlish giggle. He had no friends. 

After reacting, George had laid back again and closed his eyes. He lay motionless. The bully was frustrated. They weren’t supposed to do that. He hated being ignored. He would show this little twerp. No one noticed when Bongo stood on all fours and began walking across the yard.

The bully was still laughing but it was dying off. This wasn’t any fun if the other kids wouldn’t play. Why wouldn’t they be his friends? His laugh had evolved to sound almost as suppressed sobs. He was biting his lip, frustrated again, thinking about getting another bucket of water when Bongo bit his right hand. 

The older dog had the element of surprise and was far stronger than the young bully. He pulled the boy off his feet, and then Bongo was on him. The boys hand was red with blood as he started screaming. The other children started crying and screaming and moving away, as George lay on the lounger.

The bully was blubbering, helpless under the dog. Bongo bit his face, a nasty wound that would leave a lifetime scar. The father of the birthday boy was running across the yard, shouting, “Bongo! Bongo, stop!” The dog’s nose was an inch above the little bully’s face, and Bongo was growling. Then Bongo tore out his throat, and the bully bled to death long before the ambulance arrived.

At fifteen George was still friendless. He didn’t care. He sat apart on the bleachers. He was tall and thin and pasty white. He had a light dappling of acne on his face and an owlish look from the thick black glasses that his mother had hoped would improve his school grades. He had not a single friend. In a few weeks he would turn sixteen. His mother would take him to Aces diner, as every year, and he would eat pancakes and sausage, same as always.

It was cheerleader tryout. Many of the other groups were friends and boyfriends of the girls down on the track. Some were family, mothers and brothers. There were small and large groups, some cheering, some wolf whistling, but only one person sat entirely alone. 

Others knew to avoid George. It was an unstated understanding. Nobody liked him. He was bad news. Creepy. People were happy to stay away. George didn’t care at all. He almost lay on the bleachers, the only lone person there, far from any others. The sun was warm and he had a half smile on his face.

Second from the end in the line of tryouts was Heather Langley. She had just turned fifteen. She had straight long blonde hair and blue eyes. She was athletic and tanned and the sun reflected like a nimbus in her hair as she tossed her head about. She was an A grade student, on the swim team and in the chess and debating clubs. 

She wanted to be a cheerleader, but really didn’t care much. She was mostly at the tryout to support her friends. She wanted them to achieve something that for her was far too easy. And so she waved her bright pom poms, and whooped cheers, and led her circle in enthusiasm. The other girls smiled, same old Heather, a natural leader caring for those under her. Up on the bleachers George’s eyes had closed and his bony body gone limp.

Much later that night Heather woke in the hospital ward and somehow slipped from the restraints on the gurney. She threw a chair repeatedly against the window, until it smashed out. A nurse responding to the noise entered the room just in time to see Heather jump through the window, hospital gown fluttering in the night. She fell nine stories from the psychiatric ward onto the roof of the emergency department and died on impact.

She had been committed after her striptease at the tryout. She had quickly undressed and run naked around the field. She had done somersaults and cartwheels, and when the stunned crowd had recovered enough to try to restrain her, she had resisted and evaded and begged someone to fuck her. And then, whatever it was had passed, and she had been confused. She remembered all that had happened, she said she couldn’t stop herself, and she collapsed in racking tears.

When George was seventeen his mother had started talking to him about college. This was unrealistic. His grades were poor and he had never shown any interest in school. But she was motivated by desperation. Hers was a survival instinct, a need to distance herself from whatever her son had become, to try to recover…something.

All such talk ended after the day she attacked him. She had been trying again to engage him in future plans. At first he had ignored her. Then he told her to shut up. She heard the desperation in her own voice: “George, please…”

“Leave me alone, you stupid cow, I’m going to take a nap.”

He closed his eyes. His lip curled in a slight sneer and she had had enough. She fell on him, pounding him with fists. She punched him. She did not know how to punch but she punched him. He did not resist or fight back. He lay limply. She did not feel in control of herself, but it felt good. It felt good to strike him. And then she stopped.

After that, all he need do is allude to her beating and she was paralyzed with guilt. She had beaten her own son, attacking him while he slept. He had not resisted. She had beaten him and liked it.

At twenty-two, George was a boutique hit-man. His identity was unknown to all. Jobs were arranged remotely, using a series of Internet servers, newspaper ads and offshore accounts, that kept him cocooned in anonymity. His going rate for a job was half a million dollars, although that quickly climbed based on complications. He had been considering raising his rate. He and his mother each occupied the penthouse apartment of a thirteen story apartment called the “Overlook”. They lived separate lives, although he had a key to her apartment. 

The reverse was not true. He admitted her only on invitation, and she had no desire for his company. He paid her expenses and gave her a generous allowance and they lived separate lives. Instead, he spent much of his time with high-priced call girls. Food and dry goods were delivered as needed. George rarely left the apartment. There was no need. He ate the finest foods, slept in sumptuous splendor, and enjoyed immense creature comfort.

The girls were more affordable since he had offered yearly rates. In the meantime, they walked about naked, serving his whims. They didn’t need names. He liked telling them what to do, and demanding that they perform menial tasks for his entertainment. He liked seeing the little dog collars padlocked about their necks, each with a little nameplate, “Property of George”. He called them by number, currently “five” and “seven”. “Six” had quit prematurely. They didn’t like him, and he didn’t really like them, but they were nice decorations.

When he grew bored, he would venture onto the balcony and look down onto the plaza. The Overlook was on the edge of the business district and his balcony faced a busy open area. At first he had gone to the quarry, but he disliked the risk. Now, a condition of the hit was that the subject somehow be lured to the plaza. From there it was easy.

Once George had them, he had them. He could take his time, play with them. The plaza was at the corner of two busy main roads. Many heavy trucks passed through making deliveries. A tram ran down one of the roads. There was always ample opportunity for a tragic traffic death. But a hit didn’t always mean death. Sometimes disgrace or confession was all that was sought, a signed itinerary of criminal activities or simply humiliating conduct. George had stripped a federal prosecutor naked and had him crawl around on the plaza, barking like a dog, until the authorities took him away.

One time, the request had been to remove a senior official in the Catholic Church. Three had described a scene in a Denzel Washington movie about demonic possession. George had purchased the movie and decided that the scene was perfect. He had tormented the man for an hour, pretending to be a demon hopping from person to person. Mission accomplished. The man retired the following week.

The plaza was his playground. He stared down from his Overlook and his balcony was his throne where he sat dictating and determining the fate of any little ants who crawled and crossed the land below. Sometimes he toyed with people, simply for his own fun. But harming others was too easy. Sometimes he would confound expectations, causing a business man to empty his wallet into a homeless persons trembling hands. The plaza was his playground, and when paid, his killing field.

Six had challenged him. She was a petite blonde who had never adjusted to the job. Physically she reminded him of Heather Langley, the suicide who never had time for him. But Heather had been tall and six was not. He liked women silent and submissive, talking only when spoken to but six had challenged and even defied him. She thought her college degree mattered. He had mistakenly slightly confided in her. She had talked about Plato and something called the Republic and a ring of invisibility that would make a “man like a God among men”. It sounded good to George, but her face darkened as she described it. 

Had he been more introspective he might have realized that six had lied during the brief interview, for some reason to secure the position. But introspection was not George’s forte and for her own reasons six had played him. He had had no choice but to send her away, and of course she wouldn’t be coming back. No matter; he was pleased with the current furniture.

One day when he was playing he jumped into a middle-aged man. George had no sinister intent, that time. He was bored. He would make the fellow dance a jig or maybe skip across the plaza, and then move on. But the moment he inhabited the man he was shoved back out again. He tried again and this time he couldn’t even get in. This was new. This had not happened before.

On impulse George stood and looked over the balcony. Usually he used a railing mounted camera that could zoom and swivel to find his targets. This allowed him to play his game even inside when it rained. Line of sight worked even through a camera. But this experience had been so shocking that he stood and looked down, only to see the man looking back up at him.

The distance was too great but George knew that they had made eye contact. He felt a wave of hatred and rage rise from the man, so powerful it staggered him. This was followed by bleak and black despair and for a moment his foot rose, as he started to climb over the railing to fall to his death. The man in the plaza was not a little dot to be stopped moving, not a life to be traded for twenty thousand pounds, he was something else, something more. For the first time in his life George felt real fear. 

He wanted to confide in another, to seek counsel, but there was no one. His mother? She despised him. He did not consider one of the women in his life. They did not matter, they were not people. It was around this time that he finally realized that when furniture left his employ, he could save a great deal of money with an alternate retirement. A lawyer? He could afford the best – but weren’t they required to report crimes? Did he even commit crimes? 

On his twenty-third birthday his mother had a catered meal, pancakes and sausage. Ace’s had closed last year, first for renovations and then forever. He had not seen his mother in some time. He rarely left his apartment and she rarely stayed in hers. She had been generally good to him throughout his life, and mistreating her was a boundary he was not yet willing to cross.

He knocked at five oh three pm. She answered immediately and admitted him. She was cool and distant but not unfriendly. He was the same. Neither attempted small talk. He sat and she served the meal from the oven where she had kept it warm. He missed Ace’s. But he ate heartily while she picked at her food. He had intended to eat and leave, but once seated, the combination of familiar and new made him pause.

She cleared the dishes, poured herself another coffee, offered him one which he declined, then sat back down. They looked at each other, seemingly strangers, and neither found recognition in each other’s eyes. She looked down at her coffee and quietly said, “Georgie, Georgie, Georgie…”

He looked questioningly at her.

“Yes, mother?”

“You were given a gift, Georgie…a rare and special gift, given to few. And look what you have done with it.” 

She paused. She straightened up, looked up and made eye contact. She had a determined expression he had not seen before.

“It’s my fault. I failed you, George. I needed to guide you, teach you, and I failed you. I’m very sorry about that. I let you down.” She paused again. “I don’t know the nature of your gift, George. I can guess, and I would be close, but I don’t know the details. I should have talked to you, but you were so young, Steve had just died, and…time just got away from me. I was busy working, and I hurt so much, Georgie, and I let you down, and I am so sorry.” 

He was about to speak but she gestured him quiet.

“You’ve killed people, Georgie.”

“Mother, people die every day.”

“All the more reason not to kill more.”

She looked off into space and spoke again.

“The firstborn of every female in my family is given a gift. You didn’t know, did you? You didn’t know that I have a gift, did you? You never suspected. And my gift is the gift of certainty and doubt, and when your father died, I doubted that I was strong enough, I accidentally used my gift on myself, and it has taken me a long time to recover.”

She fixed him with eye contact.

“You have killed people. I birthed you. We have killed people. Our gifts…are for the good of all. They are a privilege, Georgie, a privilege. I am certain you need to be stopped. I completely doubt you will be able to use your gift again. You don’t have a gift. Everything you ever thought you did was delusion. People have died around you, just plain bad luck.”

He felt it within himself, something breaking, as something disappeared from him. Was it a levee bursting, and waters of power rushing away, or instead a steel plate, hammered and bolted over the bleak hole from whence his gift came? It did not matter, he felt it slipping away, vanishing in a few seconds.

“Mother, no!”

But it was already gone.

“Happy Birthday, Georgie, welcome to the rest of your life.”

Let’s Play Doctor

“Okay, I’ll be the patient.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Why do you—?”

“I misspoke. What are your symptoms?”

“Sorry, doctor. I have this burning sensation.”

“I’ll need more information.”

“I was going to tell you. It’s like a flickering flame surrounded by gauze.”

“Gauze?”

“Achy gauze.”

“A flickering flame surrounded by achy gauze. A big flame? Like the pasta burner on one of those expensive gas stoves?”

“More like a Bic lighter.”

“A half-teaspoon of bicarbonate—”

“Lower than that.”

“Here?”

“Lower.”

“Hmm. This will require a physical examination.”

“Okay.”

“Call my office and make an appointment.”

“I was hoping for something a little sooner.”

“If there’s a cancellation, I could squeeze—”

“Actually, this is feeling more urgent.”

“It’s not the sort of thing you want to go to the emergency room for. I could do a preliminary examination now. Remove your clothing.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

“Here’s something right off the bat. Your breasts are really small.”

“I know.”

“At what age did you begin to develop?”

“Twelve.”

“And at what age did you reach full development?”

“Twelve.”

“Any sensitivity issues?”

“The right one is slightly more erotic.”

“May I?”

“Please.”

“I concur. The right nipple—”

“Perks right up.”

“Moving on, I’ll need you to lay back and spread your legs.”

“Okay.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm?”

“There’s another hole back there.”

“Back where?”

“You can’t see it. If this was a regular examination room, I’d have the equipment to show you.”

“Is it serious?”

“It’s going to require probing.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Not with the proper precautions.”

“First, do no harm.”

“What?”

“It’s the Hippocratic Oath.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“I’ll just take this glob of Vaseline—”

“No rubber glove?”

“Four years of college, four years of medical school, three years of residency and you’re giving me advice?”

“Sorry.”

“Here goes.”

“Ah.”

“Feels normal. Your left nipple perked up, by the way.”

“Will your examination include any other openings down there?”

“Yes. But I don’t want to remove this probe just yet.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

“Hmm. Two sets of lips.”

“I had no idea.”

“Yes, many women are astonishingly ill-informed.”

“Everything look okay?”

“So far so good. You’re opening up quite nicely.”

“That flame’s getting bigger.”

“This may require direct stimulation.”

“I tried that already.”

“And?”

“Worked for a while, but it came back.”

“This may be more serious than I thought.”

“Is there any hope?”

“Possibly. But when you come in for your appointment I’ll need to probe some more with the appropriate equipment.”

“Is that a probe in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

“I could improvise.”

“I must warn you, doctor. I thrash around a lot.”

“Then you must be restrained. Sorry.”

“Drat.”

“Rope would be best. Is that a four-poster in the bedroom?”

“No, but we could pretend.”

“What fun would that be?”

Circulation

“As you know, I’ve always been invisible, and that’s how I like it. Maybe it was because my father worked at a nuclear facility. Maybe it was because my mother was a witch.  My back story doesn’t matter. What matters is I’ve adapted quite well to my state of non-being, and have come to relish the privacy it provides. The problem is, I have compulsions, and when I have these compulsions, my blood becomes visible. My entire circulatory system can be seen and it remains visible until my desires are satisfied. That is why these compulsions cannot be resisted. I know I should have told you, but I’m sure you understand it’s a bit of an embarrassment.

“What are these compulsions, you ask? I wish it were something as simple as counting all the cracks in the sidewalk, or as mundane as knocking the hats off people I passed in the street. No, my veins and arteries will be visible to anyone in my proximity until I take a life. I have to kill. I discovered this almost by accident. The first time it happened, I was standing on a street corner reading a man’s text messages over his shoulder. He had been cheating on his wife, and it was quite maddening, seeing him speak disparagingly of his wife to his mistress. I wished him dead.  Suddenly, a child standing behind me shrieked. Then the woman whose hand she was holding shrieked. The adulterous husband turned around, and he shrieked too. I was perplexed as to the cause of all this shrieking until I looked down and saw my hands. They seemed to be composed of a multitude of red and blue threads, floating about in the breeze as I lifted my arm. The man came at me, fists raised, and in my panic I pushed him. He stumbled back into the street where he was dispatched by a school bus, his blood splattering on my calves as the bus carried the rest of him away. Instantly, I was invisible again. 

“I spent the next few years roaming about, working my job as a telemarketer by day and killing by night, my rage fueled by the sound of a thousand groggy voices suggesting I should go to hell. It wasn’t the ideal existence, but I was happy enough. Then came Robert Doverman, a private detective hired by the family of one of my victims.  He tracked me relentlessly, seeming to have no problem accepting that the man he pursued was invisible. Amazingly, he just took it for granted that such things were possible, making me wonder what kind of other cases he’d been working on. 

“He finally caught up to me last night. I was wearing the clothes I’d bought at the thrift store to cover my pulsating veins—I didn’t like spending a lot since I would be leaving the clothes behind once I was again invisible—when I came upon a man sitting alone on a park bench. I crept up behind him, ready to bash his head in with the hammer in my pocket, when I noticed he was unusually still. It was then I saw the cardboard tubes between the ends of his coat sleeves and the gloved hands taped to the newspaper. It was a trap! I started to tear off my clothes, figuring a mass of veins and arteries would make a less appealing target, when a bullet tore into my shoulder. Doverman was taking no chances. Another bullet whizzed past my head as I dashed off toward the woods at the end of the park, frantically working at the buttons of my shirt. 

“I got the shirt and pants off, but blood, visible blood, streamed out of my shoulder, painting my arm red. That would be a problem even if I could erase my circulatory system with another murder, but I couldn’t think about that. I had to concentrate on getting to the woods ahead of Doverman. In the dark, surrounded by the branches and vines, I might have a chance. Reaching the line of trees, I dove onto the ground and crawled off to the right, pausing to catch my breath behind an oak. Doverman came crashing into the woods a few seconds later running past me.  I knew it wouldn’t be long before he thought to backtrack and track me by the trail of blood.

“I remembered there was a stream that ran through a clearing often frequented by campers and I sprinted toward it, pressing hard against the hole in my shoulder with my right hand while my left arm dangled uselessly at my side. I was bleeding more now, from the shot wound as well as from the countless tears the branches had made in my flesh as I plowed through the brush. That stream was my only hope! 

“As I reached the clearing, I could see the light from a campfire.  There were only two of them, a teenage couple snuggling on a blanket before the fire.  If I had a knife, I could have slit their throats and become invisible again before they could make a sound. The hammer might have worked if I hadn’t dropped it back by the dummy on the bench. I looked around for a stout branch, but didn’t see anything heavy enough I could be certain would do the job with one quick blow to each of them. If I had to make more than one stroke killing the boy, the girl would certainly scream, bringing the detective down on me before I could reach the water. I would have to sneak past them. I crept to the far end of the clearing and dashed across, making it about halfway before stepping in a rut and falling on my face. I must have grunted when I hit because a second later the girl was screaming. In the glare of the fire it must have seemed like vines were sprouting from the earth to take the shape of a man as I rose. 

“Run!” I shouted, hoping they would make enough noise to confuse Doverman. Maybe he would end up chasing them instead. The girl seemed willing to obey, but the idiot boy took out his phone and held it up to record me. Can you believe it?”

***

“Kids today are morons,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.  

“Anyway, Andre that’s how I got the phone. I was so angry! I rushed at them and strangled the boy while the girl ran off.”

“The detective didn’t catch up to you?” asked Andre.

“Of course he did. He’s standing over me now. He was nice enough to let me call you to say goodbye. He’s really not a bad guy. Smokes too much though. He might have caught me sooner if he paid more attention to his health.”

“What’s he going to do with you?” 

“Nothing. I’m done. Bleeding out. Soon I’ll be invisible forever.”

“Can I speak to the detective?” Andre asked. The soon to be invisible man handed Doverman the phone.

“Yeah?” Doverman asked.

“What are you going to do with him?” Andre asked. “I assume you won’t just leave him there.”

“You’re his pal,” Doverman said. “You figure it out. Just be sure to come and get him soon. We can’t have invisible corpses stinking up public property.”

“That might be a problem,” Andre said. “In about an hour my bones will turn to jelly and I’ll be a shapeless blob for the next few days. It’s a condition I got from my father.”

Doverman hung up and headed back to his car for a shovel, cursing all the way.