She goes to the bathroom to remove her tampon. I smile when I hear the water running; she is washing herself. Cleanliness is next to godlessness. I spread thick layers of towels over the sheets. I care nothing about the mess, but my preparations will reassure her. When she comes to bed, a thin line of blood is already trickling down the inside of her thigh. She curses at it, but I stop her mouth with my own.
We recover the lost ground quickly. Soon she is beyond caring whether the warm wetness between her legs is blood or loveslickness. I trace patterns of fire and air upon her skin; my face is smeared with her blood and its taste, rusty and harsh, fills my throat. She is horrified, then fascinated, then careless. Her touches drive me to madness but cannot satisfy me; for kindness's sake, I let her think she has. I bludgeon her with pleasures until she cries out her surrender. I split her heart wide, mend it up, shatter it again.
When she is sated and lies drowsing under my hands, I bite her. There -- on that soft fold. She scarcely feels the pinprick of fang, the venom's rush. In moments she is still and cold. I wait while the toxin continues its work. Soon a shudder ripples across her abdomen and her womb expels the last of its precious cargo into my hands.
On my way out of the room, I pass my reflection in the mirror. I look like I am wearing warpaint. The house echoes to my wild laughter. The full moon rose hours ago. I have felt her demanding call in my marrow all evening. I mix the blood of my sacrifice with my own and paint my body. The moon adds her own potent magicks. The thin fluid begins to spin itself out in fine crimson threads. Soon I am cocooned in softness, lighter than air. I float aloft, and the power that can move an entire earth's tides has no difficulty drawing me through the ether.
I am breathless, dizzy, suspended for eons with only the slow pulse of my lust until the moon reels me in and strips me of my armor. Her passion is tempestuous, rhythmic, sometimes cruel. Teeth as jagged as mountains lay open my neck. She drinks as one long athirst in the desert, drains me without compunction or compassion.
Then it is my turn. My love bites leave dark circles on her white skin. I snuggle between her thighs and feed as one famished. I take great bites, little nibbles. Her legs tighten in a crescent about my shoulders as my passion consumes her.
When she waxes great again, we start all over. And over. And over.
*** I wake on my lawn, soaked, sticky with dried blood, some of it my own. Has only one night passed? Or a month? A year? Weakly I finger the scratches on my neck, quake with the memory of an icy touch that set my flesh aflame, of a shared, other-worldly ecstasy. Overhead, the moon is remote, noncommittal.
Back in my bedroom, I change the bloody sheets, wash myself and my bedmate, press a clean towel between her legs. She slumbers on, unnoticing. I fall exhausted into bed beside her and sleep without dreaming. My alarm scares me out of sleep into the pre-dawn darkness; it takes a few minutes to remember where I am and the events of the night. My companion wakens. We are tousled, gritty-eyed; awkward at first, then affectionate. She tuts over my paleness, apologizes for the marks her passion has left on me. Now it is my turn to smile and be noncommittal.
Her sacrifice has been such a small one. I took only that for which she had no need, what she would never miss. Yes, for me she was only a means to an end, but I gave good coin in return: pleasure to surfeit, and a restful sleep. Is my use of her so wrong? Perhaps she will remember me fondly. Perhaps she will come home with me again next month. And perhaps, someday, I will return the favor.
I must take her back to the bar to retrieve her vehicle. Outside, we bark like puppies in the dawn ice, huddle together on the front seat until the heater warms the car. I stare through the windshield to where a bloodtinged moon slides into the western haze.
Next month. I sigh. It seems such a long time to wait.
Acrobat
By Vic Winter
We twist and dip. Fly in the sky, up to the sun, defying Icarus and the lessons he learned. We are twins, moon and sun, dark and light, air and water, sharing the illusions our bodies create with the world.
Our stage is under the big top. So mundane a place to reach for the very stars in the sky. Too bright and noisy to reach the lower depths of hell. Surely.
Surely.
Our act must be illusion. Master magicians pulling the puppet strings of the ying and yang, my brother and myself. We used to settle for being our own puppeteers. Once.
Once long ago.
But my light, my life would not settle for anything less than truth in our act. Beauty in twisted muscles and death defying stunts, our bodies flying through the air.
He made the bargain and he is the one who has decided not to pay his price, but it is both of us who shall fall. I lie next to him in the darkness, knowing it is the last time. I trace his muscles, fingers finding the grooves, the hills and mountains, the little hidden corners and wide open plains of his body. I rub against him, his hip bone sharp as my shaft slides past it. Not sharp enough. No, he does not cut me and I am left still alive, still whole for these last minutes.
Whole. For these last minutes. The curtains will rise soon. Rise and rise and rise to reveal us in the rafters, poised upon the brink of falling, curled, coiled together. Any moment now the time will come. But he doesn't stop me as my mouth covers his, as I take his air as my own. I feed from him, tongue taking the nectar of his sweet mouth for my own.
I look at him, look at the way he shines, even in this darkness above the crowds. My own body disappears, but his is inexorable. Undeniable. He is the flame that I shall ever fly to, even as we plummet to our deaths. I rock harder against him, my breath catching in my throat. Death makes the slide of our bodies sweeter than they have ever been.
I break the rules and whisper in his ear. "Amo." He glares, fingers on my lips. Quiet. We must be quiet. No on must know we lie in wait, lie waiting to fling ourselves, not to heaven but to the earth, plummeting toward the ground as our bodies twist and turn and twine. Fly.
Fly.
Illusion is such a pretty thing.
We are the same, he and I. Born of the same egg, twisted together inside the same belly. We never learned to be apart, to untwine our limbs, our thoughts, our hearts.
And yet, he shines in the light. He glows while I fade. He has always been my star, my light, even as he leads me to my death and quietens my last straining word of love. Amo.
Amo, brother, even as the curtain rises. Ready or not, here we come and I am not ready. I paid the piper, I believed where he did not. My mortality tastes like his skin.
His sweet skin.
As the light hits us I decide I will not go. I will stay atop our perch and live. And, twined together as we are, he will perforce live with me.
But he leaps and what can I do but follow? There would be no point in living without him, even if our limbs were not wrapped together in an intricate pattern. We fly through the air, sailing on its currents, tumbling and twisting. Oh that it were illusion still, but we were seduced by evil's most beautiful beast, our bodies writhed upon his horns in delight, our hands joined, swallowing each other's cries. We were led to believe the illusion was reality. Our flight through the air would be real, the safety net and wires unnecessary trappings. We burned the wires together and made love next to the heat of their flames. We would be known the world over. People would flock to see us from all corners of heaven and earth.
Sweet heaven and earth. We are flying, truly flying now, sailing through the air without net, without wires, without illusion. I never knew the ground was so far down. It grows closer as we twist together, my life forever twined with his. Soon, soon the ground will have us, our illusory flight come to an end. The darkness will soon have his light, but not quite yet.
Not yet.
I watch his face, stunning, bright, joyful as he believes in the illusion that we are really flying. I am still rubbing, mouth on his skin, tasting his euphoria to drown out the taste of my own fear.
We twist again, flying closer to the ground now. Such
a pretty illusion.
He still believes, I can taste it on his lips, feel it in the heat secreted against my belly and the laughter that slides around my heart.
He believes. I know better. I know.
The Bloom
by Charlee Jacob
"All conquering are the shafts made from the Vine." Euripides His semen was purple. It smelled of wisteria blossoms and fennel seed soaked in vintage dark wine. It frightened me when I saw the first beads of it bubbling from the tip of his erection. I thought he was ill. I thought he was contaminated or that he had the plague.
That it was a trick of the circle of candles. That it was a trick of the moonlight.
That it was the twisting of my senses by the drug we'd shared.
These things I thought.
I asked myself, what do you really know about him? We'd met only moments before at Fig's. The Place Of Spirits it said below the name on the door. They didn't serve alcoholic beverages inside. It wasn't intended as a pun. They had a little menu card threaded on one side with slender white lace, cream letters on an embossed background. The patron made his choice:
The Petals Of Ecstasy
The Stamen Of Power
The Bud Of Genius
The Blossom Of Becoming
The Seeds Of Love The Pollen Of Dreams
"Fig's", my ex-lover David whispered over the phone.
"A new bar?" I muttered, surprised he'd called at all. We'd broken up seven months ago.
"Not a bar. A club," he corrected me, his voice hoarse, hard to hear. "Unusual." He said this last word giving slow but accented attention to every syllable as if each were a separate word in an invocation to Eros. "Where is this place then?" I asked him, faking some annoyance but secretly intrigued. Why would he share this with me? When I'd left him as he'd pleaded with me to stay, he'd been stricken. I'd thought he'd never get over it. Perhaps he was hoping I would come so that he would be able to see me again. Convince himself that I looked as lonely as he sounded.
"It's at the south end of the city, at the very edge before everything grows wild," he replied gratingly. "And, Michael... they have a strict dress code. You have to wear a white silk shirt. Michael? Silk." The last word was sibilant, the 'k' exhaled until the phone receiver vibrated in my hand.
I snorted. Silk? "What for?" "They won't let you in without a silk shirt. Like the places that insist on black tie, only different." Was that a tiny muffled giggle on his end?
"I don't own any silk," I argued.
"Buy it. It'll be worth it. You'll get every inch of your measure at Fig's," David whispered and hung up.
David had always been so melodramatic. I chuckled, sure I knew what he meant by that closing comment. What could I do after a weird build-up like that? And if I were to see him again, would it be so bad? After all, I was lonely. I hadn't left David for another man, but because my relationship with him had grown so confining, so boring. I'd tried everything to liven things up beyond my standard moderate vampirism: vaudeville black mass, bondage, even artful sadism. What did he do with his scars now, I wondered. His marks from the whip, the serrated half-moons on his buttocks where I'd bitten and he'd writhed in the strange pleasure of crossing bleeding thresholds? How did he explain the runes burned into his papery foreskin that only became legible when he was erect?
How did he tell a new lover of these things we'd done? Assuming that he had a new lover. If he did, was the new lover a monster like me? He would have to be, for weak men like David needed guidance, impetus, managing. They begged you to make them yours, make them suffer as they deserved, own them like slaves. Devour them in ruthless bits. In the end, however, the tables turned. They wouldn't let you go.
It was easy to find another monster like me. Even one as I was who went for blood, making lovers swoon in the illusion of being held by a force from beyond the grave. Monsters who weren't shaped like mincing pseudo-Draculas but had modeled themselves more after the genuine impaler: a warrior and a hellraiser. Who knew the truth: that blood was only flavor. It was the act of taking it which was the real power.
What was hard was finding the truly compliant masochist. A passive devotee who would work to pay for his dominant lover's expensive fang-implants. Better than any letting-blade edge. And for the bank account draining (and riskily illegal) steroids which gave their master that hint of superhuman, supernatural strength. As David had done for me.
Maybe one more fling with him, an evening of dining on the meat of his slim hairlessness (carefully shaved and slowly plucked) and the dusky buttermilk of his emission. Not that I would suck him of course. That was his job. But I could smell it from behind him as it shot forth onto the opposite wall, running down the glossy eggshell latex like melting vanilla ice cream.
As for his shit, that was always fragrant, earthy but verdant because he was a complete vegetarian. This abstinence from all carnal ingestion also made his blood more palatable. I wouldn't tolerate sourness in the blood.
It annoyed me that I'd not already heard of this Fig's. Usually when a new and deliciously outré place opened up for our kind, the word was all around within a night. But I'd not heard of it from my friends nor overheard it at any of the places I frequented.
Were people deliberately keeping it from me? It was a joke, the white silk thing. It must be. It was probably David's way of taking me down a peg or two. Humiliating me in front of strangers. He would be there with another man who was dog hairy and hung with razors. David would introduce me as his former amour and Hairy Dog would guffaw. This dandy? Well, I'd take back my boy and show him some true degradation until he wept in my arms for forgiveness.
The savor of David's peculiar rust and salt still lingered, slickly in my saliva. After all this time. I had no trouble finding the place. It was the last establishment at the very end of Dover Street. Just as civilization terminated and the forest began. Most cities petered out in a straggle of seedy convenience stores begging to be robbed and cheap motels with roaches and peep holes. But this wasn't true of our city. The boundaries were clear between where people lived and where the wild was.
It was an odd looking place. Low door, high flat roof, no neon. I must admit that I have never seen stained glass windows in a tarpaper shack before. There was no asphalt parking lot, just a crunchy drive of crushed red brick. With the illumination from various headlights and from the colored windows it looked like a choppy sea of chum, awaiting a shark frenzy.
I entered, self-consciously fingering the pearl buttons on my white silk cuffs. Nasty stuff, silk. It glides like grease, as does every surreptitious animal that is to be mistrusted. It tickled over my arms and I rubbed them until static popped. But I had compromised. I wore leather pants. And an icy tank beneath of hoary chain metal. It scratched and chafed over my nipples, clanked over my heart. I'd made it myself and it had taken a lot of pinch-fingered hours.
The bouncer at the door glanced at me, cursory over the duds. He smiled thinly at the shirt he knew I hated. His own looked more ridiculous on him. It was open-throated, actually open all the way down across his huge gut. Coquette smooth over a sumo wrestler.
Men sat at thrift store tables in an assortment of mismatched chairs. Some sat in groups, few were solitary, all wore white silk. The groups conversed in low tones. I looked about for David, curious as to whether he would shed tears when he saw me. I remembered how hoarse he'd sounded over the phone, had not even recognized who it was until he told me. It was as if his throat hurt or he had a cold or had been gargling with ground glass.
He wasn't there. Then he came up to me. I couldn't believe that I hadn't noticed this one when I first looked over the place. He was the only man not in white. He wore instead tight gold trousers and no shirt. The bulge in gilt was outlined to every nuance of testicular ellipse and curvilineal bulb. It wasn't intended as subtle. The pants might as well have been a single coating of paint.
His chest was slender to a fault, oiled until each belly ripple and sinuous bend of barely rounded
muscle gleamed. His dark hair fell well past his shoulders in curls so symmetrical they might have been chains. Around his head he wore a wreath of intertwining vines.
Through the gold... the hair there also pressed with the taut heads of precise ringlets. I smiled. How bacchanalian. Well, it wasn't so uncommon to find people costumed in public these days. But I found it too theatrical unless it was leather, chain and needles. And I have never been interested in the caprices of my lovers which ran contrary to my own. I might have turned away from him completely had he not been literally the most beautiful person I'd ever seen.
Now, the chain mail tapped against my chest as my heart beat faster. It caught and ticked the weave of the silk. Let it ruin, I decided. I'd never wear it again.
"This is your first time," he said, and I assumed that he meant your first time here.
I nodded curtly.
"Are you Fig?" I asked, feeling the accentuated snarl on the 'F'. Meaning, of course, are you the Fig? "I am the host here." He smiled, revealing even teeth so white and strong that they might have been carved from Italian marble. "Will you join me?" He gestured to a table under one of the windows. The wood was roughhewn, stained in broad dark patches.
I looked up at the scene depicted in the window above me. It was mythological, shepherds in Greek skirts sitting drunkenly among a flock of grazing sheep, toasting one another with earthenware jugs. Was this where Dionysus had taken the inspiration for his outfit?
"I'm Michael," I grunted as I sat opposite him. I tried to sound gruff but I couldn't take my eyes from him. If ever there was the original pure model of artistic androgyny, he was it. His lips were full, a plum bow between which one earnest arrow might be placed for firing. My arrow, held there, moved along the strings, primed by the friction.
I twitched, aware that the others in the room were frowning at me. Some with petulant wistfulness, some with unabashed jealousy.
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