Hottest Blood

by Jeff Gelb

  Miller moths were monsters, and she was terrified of them. They swarmed so thickly around the lamp on her bedside stand or the hoodlight on her stove that they looked like clots of curly hair. They got stuck in her food, drowned in her coffee. They flew in her face, into her mouth, into the hole in the middle of her body, leaving everywhere the dust from their wings. The dust from their wings was poisonous. It was also what enabled them to breed.

  They were in her bed. When Charlie wasn’t there she felt them all night long, flicking against the back of her neck, kissing the insides of her thighs, crawling into her vagina.

  Finally, after three virtually sleepless nights, Melinda danced around her bedroom in a frenzy, with a rolled-up newspaper in one hand and a flyswatter in the other. She smashed every moth she saw or thought she saw, until the paper was tattered and the flyswatter was covered with pulpy wing dust and she was faint with exertion and fear. But in the end she was helpless against them. There were miller moths everywhere.

  And they would get their revenge. They would pass stories on from one generation to the next about what she’d done to their family, or tried to do, and someday when she thought she was safe at home—in the winter, say, when they weren’t supposed to be any moths—one or a dozen or a million of them would lay their eggs inside her.

  Monsters were everywhere. Great hairy things with eyes and teeth, miller moths with poisonous wings, squirmy creatures with tentacles that caught and held. All the monsters communicated with all the other monsters—the moths with the beasts, the caterpillars with the men. They spoke a language Melinda frequently understood but could not quite use herself. They talked about her. They watched her every minute of every day and night.

  Everything was a monster, monstrous and magical. Everything was family but her. Everything talked.

  “If you tell, they won’t understand.”

  “If you tell, they’ll be made at me. And at you.”

  “If you tell, you’ll get us both in big trouble.”

  “If you tell, you’ll tear our family apart.”

  “If you tell, Mindy, I’ll go to jail, and then I won’t love you anymore.”

  Charlie lay back in her arms. He was so sweet, so patient and good to her.

  He was watching her. He watched her all the time. Even when they made love he didn’t close his eyes; she’d open hers during a long, breathtaking kiss and find him looking at her, his eyes so close they didn’t look like eyes anymore but like dark pools out of which anything might rise. Even when she let him spend the night (at her place, at home, never at his, where she wouldn’t know where the monsters had bred in the night) and she woke up from her habitually fitful sleep, she knew he was watching her in his dreams. Every minute of every day and night.

  “Sometimes you’re such a little girl,” he observed. “Like when we go to the horror shows and you get so scared you have to run to the bathroom and throw up.”

  Melinda hadn’t realized he knew about that. She felt her face and neck go hot.

  “And other times,” he persisted, “you’re like a beautiful, wise old woman. No, not old—ageless. Like you’ve been alive forever. That’s how you seem when we make love.”

  “Sex is older than we are,” Melinda said. “It’s older than anybody. It’s so old and so powerful it’s like a god, or a monster. People will do anything, tell themselves anything, to make what they do all right, just so they can hold onto it for a split second.”

  She saw Charlie’s eyes widen, heard him catch his breath, saw an appendage with a searching eye and clinging membranes slither toward her as she started to say, “Love’s like that, too, you know.”

  She stopped him with a kiss. The tentacle went into her mouth, into her throat. She sucked. The hole in the middle of her body filled up with viscous whitish fluid, and she ran to the bathroom to vomit it away.

  “You’re growing up now. You’re becoming a woman.

  “Why do you treat me like this? Why do you hate me?

  “I don’t understand why you want to hurt me. We’ve been so close.

  “I don’t understand.

  “I love you.”

  Charlie sneaked up on her. They were in her bed and she was relaxing in his arms, feeling pleasantly hungry, thinking that even if that furry shadow in the corner of the ceiling was a moth it wouldn’t hurt her, that it was as afraid of her as she was of it, when Charlie said before she saw it coming, “I love you.”

  She was going to throw up. She struggled to get up, to free herself from him, but he wouldn’t let her go.

  “Melinda, wait. Please don’t go. I love you.”

  The miller moth elongated and swelled and inserted itself into her mouth. Its poisonous dust was making her choke. It pushed its way down through her body; she felt it circling her heard, winding among her intestines, nudging the inside of her vagina, but it didn’t come out.

  “I know you’re afraid. I know somebody has hurt you. But I won’t hurt you. I love you.”

  The monster was godlike; the god was monstrous. It had a single wet eye and a bifurcated heart. She would do anything she had to do to keep it away from her, anything to make it forever her own.

  But not now. She wasn’t ready now.

  “Mindy, I love you.”

  “No no no!” She pulled away from his wet tongue, his hairy hands, his single eye. She sprang from the bed and ran, the monster who loved her stumbling after her.

  She ran down the hall, painfully aware of her nakedness, of the hairy, wounded hole in the middle of her body that wanted to be filled, that wanted to be protected from the crawling, slimy vermin that filled the world. Even as she ran she frantically considered what she might use to plug it up.

  She ran into the bathroom and slammed the door, locking it. Outside the monster panted, out of breath. “Mindy, Mindy…love…” And then it fell silent.

  She crouched on the cool tile in the corner, her head pressed against cold porcelain. It was too late to vomit. Too late to escape. Under the edge of the door, black hair was spreading toward her.

  Melinda tried to pull herself into the hole in the middle of her body, the hole in the middle of her life, the hole she had become. She knew she wouldn’t dire there, although sometimes that’s what she wanted. She hoped she wouldn’t have to eat there, that nothing would have to enter her body ever again.

  There she knew she could be the monster who never needed to love. She could be the god.

  Safe. Safe at home.

  How Deep the Taste of Love

  John Shirley

  Sid Drexel was just totally into it. He was so fucking happy it stank from him. Just coincidentally, his wife was dead.

  He was sitting in the bar of Tuffy’s, the “Hottest Little Singles Bar in the Bay Area,” and the place was jiggly with women. Some already had men talking to them, but there were women sitting in twos and threes who were only marking time with each other while they waited for a Sid Drexel to make his move.

  Drexel could barely keep himself glued to his barstool He bobbed his head to the MTV stuff coming from the hidden speakers near the big-screen TV, he chewed handfuls of twiglike pretzel sticks, and he made rude noises with his straw in the soupy dregs of his second strawberry daiquiri. He had to talk to somebody. He tried the bartender, an almost unnaturally good-looking guy with a golden tan, wearing an odd, sleeveless tuxedo. The bartender had pumped-up arms, and he moved with no wasted motion as he poured things, shook things, gave things, accepted things, wiped thing; Drexel admired the way one smooth action became another.

  “Tom Cruise’s got nothing on you,” Drexel said.

  The bartender glanced at him as he opened a glass washing machine. The look seemed to ask if Drexel was in the wrong kind of bar.

  “I mean,” Drexel hastened to explain, “that movie Cocktail—Tom Cruise played this slick bartender—”

  “Oh. Yeah. Thanks.” The bartender did a sort of glissade to the Jack Daniels bottle, sweeping it off its rack and pouring, all
in the same motion.

  “My wife’s dead,” Drexel announced, beaming at him. “I mean, it’s a shame and all. But, tell you the truth—”

  “Oh, I understand,” the bartender said. He took someone’s money for the Jack Daniels. There was a small tattoo of a star inside a toothy mouth on the bartender’s tanned forearm, Drexel saw.

  “You understand? You know what I mean? Twenty-one and a half years, my friend. You know what else?” But Drexel decided not to say it: that he had once considered killing Helen. Not too long ago, either. But it was risky. And divorce? Jeez, with his contracting business and California’s community-property laws, she’d take him for half of everything. But this way…Boom! A car accident! And none of his doing! It was so sweet and the cops had checked her car to see he hadn’t messed with the brakes or something. But he hadn’t, he really hadn’t; he’d just been lucky. And he still felt lucky.

  “Maybe it’s the dance training,” the bartender said, with narcissism glazing his eyes. He looked at Drexel. “The reason I can do the Tom Cruise behind the bar.”

  “You’re a dancer?”

  “Why you think so many ladies here? To see you?” A crooked grin said he meant no offense. He nodded toward the small, circular, tinsel-curtained stage. “Male dancers for the ladies. My bar shift ends in twenty minutes. Five dancers in all.”

  “Oh.” Thud. There it was. The ladies were here to see guys undulating their muscle tone on the stage. “And I got to leave?”

  “In twenty minutes it becomes ladies only. But come back after showtime.” He winked. “At eleven.” He drifted over to talk to a tall, busty blond woman with skin that looked faintly blue in this light. The bartender looked directly at Drexel, then back at the blond.

  Eleven, he’d said. Eleven? Drexel’d be half in the bag by the, or half asleep. He had to get something going with someone. Helen was in the ground a month now, he had given himself a week’s vacation, he had plenty of money, he had that pricey Mercedes convertible that Helen had bitched about, and he had his looks. Okay, sure, his face was sagging around the edges, and he had that pattern-baldness thing, but he was still a good-looking guy…Maybe he should have had his teeth cleaned.

  Don’t worry about it, he told himself. Just—go for it. Life is short. And Helen had been very particular. Everything had to be just so when she did it. Except for a couple of whores watching the clock the whole time, and Billy Jane dots in her parents’ garage, Helen had a corner on Drexel’s sexual experience. And Helen was not into…exploring. You read those magazines—Forum, things like that; people wrote in all kinds of letters about every damn kinky thing in the book. Like there was nothing weird about it, in particular. Like it was okay. But Helen wouldn’t even talk about it, let alone…

  “Excuse me. Is this seat taken?” It was the blonde.

  No, came the reply in Drexel’s head, is yours? But he was savvy enough to say, instead, “Nope. Have a seat.” She was damn good-looking. Smooth skin—still looking blue-black—beautifully Asiatic eyes, the shape of her face maybe Hispanic, some kind of foxy crossbreed. The hair looked like a wig, but so what? And those tits. God. She sat with her shoulders thrown back, chest jutting in her tight cream-colored sweater. It was sewn with black beads in an odd pattern he almost recognized but knew he’d never seen. He didn’t spend much time looking at the beads. Her breasts were almost too magnificent to be real. Then, too, she had that wig. And she was tall. Maybe…

  He looked at her closer. Some kind of transsexual?

  He looked at her neck, her lips, her cheekbones. No way: This was a woman.

  She looked frankly back at him. “Aren’t you going to offer? I mean, here’s the first guy I’ve met all night I’d like to buy me a drink, and he’s the only one not offering.”

  “Oh—well, shit, I mean—yeah! Bartender! Hey, pal, anything this lady wants…I’ll have another…right.”

  She said her name was Sindra. She had some kind of slight accent he couldn’t place, maybe Middle Eastern. She sat very quietly, but he had a feeling she was just bursting with something inside, like him. We’re two of a kind.

  He prided himself on his sense of humor, so he tried telling her a joke. The bartender listened in, wiping the bar. The only one that’d come to mind was: “So this guy comes into a bar with a frog growing out of his forehead! A whole, life frog! And the bartender says, ‘Hey buddy, how’d the hell that happen?’ And the frog says, ‘I dunno, it started out as a wart on my butt.’” She stared at him for a moment; he seemed to have startled her, somehow. She and the bartender exchanged looks.

  Then she laughed politely. “Do you believe in omens, Sid?”

  “Hm?” Drexel shrugged. “Sure. I hope it’s a lucky omen, whatever it is. Say, pal, can I get another? Right.”

  He got only halfway through his daiquiri before an amplified voice interrupted the MTV T&A to announce that the men had to leave in five minutes for the ladies only show. The ladies clapped and whooped.

  “Well hell. I guess you’re waiting for the show, huh, Sindra?” Drexel asked. He thought that was a pretty smooth segue.

  “Actually, no,” Sindra said, adding gravely, “no, I’m…waiting for you, I think. I need someone to live out some dreams with. Tonight.”

  He felt his ground churn with blood. “Yeah? Man, I’ve been waiting for someone like you for…” And it all came tumbling out. She listened, nodding, as they put on their coats and—without ever having to discuss it—walked out to the parking lot to his car. On the way out, Drexel absently noticed the bartender up on stage, half nude, throwing his muscles suggestively around, and she didn’t even glance at the guy, not once, and the bartender gave them a long look that might have been a kind of resentment.

  “I understand exactly what you’ve been going through,” she told Drexel, holding his gaze with hers as they stood by the white convertible, in the monoxide velvet of the warm Indian summer night.

  He hadn’t noticed, in the bar, how golden her eyes were. Golden—or almost lemon-colored.

  “I was in the same position—in more ways than one—with my husband of many years,” Sindra said. “He would try nothing new. And sex is like a continent. A tropical continent. It must be explored to be appreciated. Don’t you agree?”

  “Hey, listen, I…okay, maybe it sounds like one of those things that’s just…that everyone…that’s…what’s the word?”

  “Trite? Cliché?”

  “Right! Trite, like, but Sindra, I couldn’t agree more. I am just totally there with you.”

  He hadn’t gotten to his forties without knowing when something was too good to be true. If some guy wanted to pay you three times the rate to build something that was too easy to build, it was always too good to be true. The mob was covering up something, or there was some other hassle behind it.

  And he knew Sindra was too good to be true. Women like her just didn’t come at you this easily.

  “Don’t they?” Sindra said.

  “What?” He did a double take.

  “I can see it in your expression. You don’t trust me. ‘People don’t do this sort of thing.’ There are some one-night stands, but women who…well…”

  “Women as good-looking as you don’t offer to, you know, uh…”

  “Fulfill a man’s every fantasy within minutes of meeting him?” She smiled. “I didn’t offer that.”

  “Oh. Right. I, uh—”

  “But you’re right: I was going to. I still am.”

  “Uh, is there, I mean—”

  “No charge. Unless you cost something.”

  He laughed. “Hey—for you, it’s free.”

  They both enjoyed that. He was having one motherfucker of a good time. He really was.

  “How would you know if things like this never happen?” Sindra asked. “Living with your Helen, you’d be out of circulation. But you must have heard about it happening to other people.” She was slightly hunched down in her seat to keep her wig out of the wind steaming over the top of
the convertible.

  They were tooling down the 580 toward the turn-off that’d take them into Beverly Hills, where Sindra lived. Drexel replied, “I’ve heard of people having encounters like that, but you always figure those stories are bullshit.”

  “No. It’s simply…rare. Rare that it comes true. See, it only comes true for special people, who are into special things. And those people are rare. They’re select. A kind of sexual elite. And they’re carefully selected.”

  “You selected me? Like you’ve been watching me?”

  She hesitated. “No. No, but—I have a special instinct for these things. That’s why they send me.”

  His hands got sweaty on the steering wheel. “They?”

  “Here’s the exit…”

  He took it, mechanically. “You said they?”

  “Perhaps I should have said we. You did say you wanted to experiment. To really live. Go into some new directions. Why don’t we talk about it frankly? You can tell me: What sorts of things did you want to try?”

  “Uh…well…” Could he really tell her?

  “Tell you what: I’ll go first. Turn right at the next light. Best get in the right lane. That’s it. I’m into being tied up with my own panties, given golden showers, then covered in fragrant oil and gang-fucked. Among other things.”

  If he’d been in a cartoon, his lower jaw would have bounced on his lap. Which would have been kinky itself, considering his hard-on.

  “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head in admiration. “‘Among other things’? I really—I admire that. How you can just come out and talk about that and…and not only talk about it. This is great. I always wanted to…well, lots of stuff. Two girls. And being…being spanked by two girls. And they make me do things. Then I spank them. And make them do things.”