“Mrs. Holmes was spotted here (thwap), here (thwap), and here (big thwap),” the man said. He was square-jawed and steely-eyed. “You men notice where she’s headed?”
Everyone grumbled a yes like they were in church with their heads bowed muttering amen.
“That’s right,” he said. “The Grand Canyon. We can let her be, then zoom in with helicopters, pick her off.”
“Hold on,” said John. “That’s my wife you’re talking about.”
“Don’t be a chump for love,” said the sergeant. “We have a public nuisance on our hands. And I aim to wash it off. With steel slugs of civic soap.”
“Have you no heart, man?”
“I have a duty to all Americans. That, über alles.”
Everyone grumbled yeah, yeah.
John grabbed the pointer. “Listen, men, I know Sally as well as anyone. I can reason with her, persuade her to stop destroying erect edifices.”
“She’s a monster!”
“She’s my wife!!!!!”
He put it so strongly, the other cops relented.
The sergeant rested a hand on John’s shoulder. John knew he wasn’t a bad man. Just a jerk.
“Time to get you to the Grand Canyon,” he said.
And it was.
Baxter loomed at the edges of the drive-in. The film splashed up there, from his honed sensors, he supposed was some dark and scary thing. Good. Made it easier for him to claim victims.
Black night, black screen, black cover.
He liked the juicy females, the ones the crewcut boys liquefied with their fingers, squirming out of clothing as easily as out of their virginity.
In the back row a Dodge rocked. He could tell it was a Dodge because his tip traced the chrome letters. Baxter tasted unwashed car, skimmed through the window crack, and dove for the couple in the back seat. He hated boy-taste, but (just as he’d saved the best for last over dinner as a boy) he absorbed the boyfriend first, while he muffled the screams of the half-dressed dolly. Then he turned his all to savoring dessert.
She was mere appetizer, a speared shrimp.
Sally Holmes’ sweetness lay on the wind, and Baxter’s drool slathered his pathway toward her. In his future, he sensed a deep wide all-engulfing hole.
* * *
Sally recognized it of course. She and John on their honeymoon had spent time here, had gone down on donkeys.
The Grand Canyon.
Then it had felt like love.
Now it felt like home.
Oblivious to the gaping miniatures scurrying about at her feet, she unpinned the diaperlike loincloth whose taut clutch vexed her, dropped it, and started her long descent to the bottom where the river was.
One weird-eyed maniac feasted his eyes on her, as she lowered her nude body over the rim. She jiggled her boobs at him, then took a deep breath and blew him, midst debris and rubble, back toward the panicked masses. Lustily, she laughed. Then the rim rose above her skull and she was on her way, night’s gravid moon lighting rock and brush along the trail.
The local police tracked her with binoculars and with telescopes, relaying her whereabouts to John at the lowest point of the canyon.
When he came upon her, she was reclining, buck naked, near the river. She was obscene. She was beautiful. His shame, under his pants, grew hard. His wife’s hand was on her womanhood, stirring it like she stirred cake batter in her Betty Crocker apron. Her deep throaty moans echoed in the vast rocky gorge.
“Sally,” he shouted. She didn’t hear him. He yelled her name over and over until he grew hoarse.
Then she noticed him. A look of desire burned in her eyes.
“John,” she intoned, a deep throbbing need there.
“My dear darling,” he mourned, “they say there may be an antidote, they say—”
She grabbed him, not hard, but firm as one might grab a kitten or gerbil. “Fuck antidotes,” she said in rumbles of husky thunder. “I like being big.”
He chided her for her crude language, but she merely laughed, booming, like the genie in The Thief of Baghdad.
Then she brought him within whiffing distance of her womanhood. He recognized the morning-after manhood stink (but writ large and overpowering) before his bath.
“Make like a statue,” she ordered. “Rigidify.”
Before he could ask her why, he found out why.
Like a diver just before splitting the silent water, he took a breath. That saved him. Into warm gooshy hugs of pudding he was thrust, splooshing about in smooth dark pulsings that brought cows’ udders to mind. It was divine and it was terrifying. Just when he knew his lungs would burst, Sally unencunted him, frotting his forehead against a ruddy nub (what was that thing?), above which curled riots of coarse straw abruptly thatched. Then—and by the grace of God he could sense when, so he could gulp a goopy breath—she’d plunge him back inside her, twisting him and turning him like an agitator in a washing machine, like an orange half being brutally juiced.
But abruptly he was out, laid on the ground, chilling in the night air. He blinked his stuck eyelids open. And saw—
oh God he wanted to shit—a gigantic tongue throbbing not six feet away, bloated, bloody, spilling icky rivulets of drool down its unclean sides.
Baxter cared not a lick for the jerk. He’d served as—what did whores call it?—a dildo for Baxter’s bitch.
But now the bitch had Baxter to satisfy her.
And satisfy her he would.
Tasting more sandstone powder as he rolled on, Baxter leaned against her massive thigh, slurped at her perineum, caught her spillage where it dripped, slowly slalomed his tip up the swollen slit of her excitation toward her sweet hillock of delight.
But she seized him, shoved him in. She embraced him like any animal, and he embraced the opportunity to thrust as deep as he could, elongating, conforming himself to her inner shape, vibrating, throbbing, shuddering, as he moved inward. A tiny bit of him, where she had disembodied him, jazzed at her womanhood.
But the rest was inside, not yet releasing his devouring fluid.
Time enough, in orgasm, to make her die. He filled her, pulsating against her walls, sweeping beyond the cervix into the uterus itself, filling it like a plum-passioned fetus, poised to wail in ecstasy like a sweaty trumpeter nailing a string of high notes.
She was coming.
And, oh god, she was squeezing.
He flexed, but it did no good. She was crushing him.
He tried to release the killing fluid. Got some out, felt the beginnings of meld.
But it was too tight. Too fugging tight.
Trapped.
He fluttered.
He died.
Sally tightened in orgasm. Boulders shook loose at her screams. Her husband, with his hands up to his ears, looked like a drooled-upon letter T.
But the golden tongue she’d had to have was releasing venom, was stuck inside, even as she shuddered in ecstasy. It stung her center. She felt the life squeezed off there first, even as her final orgasm played out. The hurt bled outward from her womb, attacking kidneys, pancreas, islets of Lagerhans, on and on.
Lights winked out all over her body.
“I’m dying,” she gasped.
“Oh no,” said the pipsqueak. “Honey, that can’t be.”
She tried to expel the inert tongue like unfertilized tissue, tried to yank it out. No go. It stuck there like a wasp’s barb, sinking its killing force deeper with every breath.
Her lungs felt the slash of cut glass. Her heart.
“Goodbye, John,” she gasped.
“I’ll never forget you,” he screamed. “Nobody will.”
The thing that had killed her pooched out of her like a melting strawberry popsicle, dripping crimson gush along her buttocks and onto the earth. It looked like a wilted poinsettia clasped in a clutching infant’s hand.
At the height of the terrible display, she had glowed pink: the same pink as in the lab that fateful day. John had felt a warmth beyond embarras
sment along his front but mostly in his manhood.
“Bury me deep.” Sally’s eyes grew fuzzy.
John did a hasty calculation. “I’ll bury you well,” he said.
He was hard. To his astonishment he didn’t feel any shame.
Not only was he hard. He was thick and long, much longer, much thicker than ever in his life. He felt the blunt bludgeon through his trousers. A fucking spade handle stood there.
Crude language had suddenly become okay. In fact it was a decided turn-on. His bulb-head throbbed.
Thoughts of conjunction soared in his head. Thoughts of people watching him score with lots of chicks, sticking his tool in places it had never dreamt of going before.
“Kiss me, John.”
He approached her lips, thinking to peck them. Then she inhaled suddenly and he was a hotdog snug in two soggy bun-halves. But a moment later, her death, huge and final and thick with shadows, flooded out upon a slow exhalation and he fell, body-kissed, cock-kissed, to the earth.
Still erect, he picked himself up.
Sally had left him memories.
He patted his pants.
And she’d left him this.
And this would guide him henceforth on his solitary way.
HOLY FAST, HOLY FEAST
The Voice: And what is the greatest wonder?
Yudhishthira: Day by day, hour by hour, death strikes, and yet we live as though we will never die. That is the greatest wonder.
—The Mahabharata
Baby Jenny’s last breath was a quiet one. Sealed in her space-heated radiatored bedroom, wrapped and swaddled inside a pale-yellow bassinet, the three-month old preemie lay buried beneath a miasma of ammonia. Bowel and bladder had emptied hours ago, excremental bacteria colluding with tinkle, one neglected diaper wick white-lipped out to soak her sleepsuit and blanket her snuffled nose in deadly gas. Her limbs were listless. A long wrinkled thumb lay by one cheek, too far, too detached to move closer. Its nail bed and those of her curled fingers were tinged blue, as were her lips, sleep-sucking the sour nipple of a ghost breast, then quiescing, falling dormant, faint indraw and outflow of breath simply dropping off.
A cold gust of wind rattled the ground-floor window, but double-reinforced glass kept the Montreal winter out. A scatter of spicular snow swirled against it like tossed sand, then fell restless to the stone sill outside. Once more. And again.
Two minutes later, Jenny’s daddy eased open her door and reared back at the rankness of the smell.
* * *
Travis eased open the door. The air in here was warm and close as always, but one good thing about that, Travis supposed, was that it concentrated the sweet baby smell of his daughter. He loved holding Jenny high on his chest so that he could caress her smooth pink cheeks with his nose. Now, as Laura followed him in and wrapped an arm about his waist, he contented himself with leaning over to watch his baby girl’s tiny nostrils ride the pulse of life, the odor of crushed rose-petals sweetening the air about her.
“She’s so beautiful,” Laura said.
“Like her mother,” said Travis, and Laura gave him a squeeze. Divorcing Carol, painful as the process had been for them both, and signing on as associate professor with McGill’s Computer Science department, had been the wisest decisions he’d ever made. Never in the two decades since his first visit to Montreal had he felt so vividly alive. And now, with Laura so passionate and bright by his side and baby Jenny shining her marvelous light into his life, a sense of all-encompassing, all-infusing vitality filled him brimful with joy.
“Maybe I should give Marcie a call.” Fret-voice.
“She’ll be here,” said Travis, glancing at his watch.
“Seven-twenty. She’s never late.”
“I haven’t seen her in three days. Have you?”
“No, but that’s not—”
“What if something happened to her? She lives alone upstairs. Brings home those strange men since Pierre got booted out. Poor guy. I really thought he was the one.”
“We’re the one. You and I could make her very happy, and both of you know it.”
“Shhh, you’ll wake Jenny. You’re such a tease. Come on, let’s get our coats.” Kissing a fingertip, Laura laid it lightly against the slumbering baby’s cheek.
Travis closed the door softly after them. Laura gave him a hug and he brought her in for a deep slurpy kiss, an ever-renewed appreciation for her stifling smothering lips and tongue. Luscious lips, luscious labia to match, juicy as a warm ripe peach. He kissed her earlobe, swept inside her ear, made her moan. Tenderly, jokingly, he whispered, “Fucking you was the best thing I ever did.”
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Laura said, laughter in her voice. Travis was halfway to hard now and he knew his wife was dripping. “Maybe,” she said, “we ought to try it again right now.”
“Love to, but Marcie’ll be here any moment and we’ll be late for the swami.” Carol had been an icicle. Laura was an oven, twenty-six and Canadian-hot, with the lovely sexual openness he’d known in Montreal from so many young women in the early seventies. He’d attended satsang then offered by Shyam and Satchitananda; she’d spent a month or two in Apadravya’s makeshift ashram four years ago before the guru closed it down and returned to India. Computers and holy men had been the commonality that had brought him and Laura together into initial conversation. And now the swami, falsely rumored dead, had returned for one evening to begin an American tour, Laura’s chance to renew an old tie and Travis’s to experience the master in person.
Laura brought his hand up under her skirt, guided his thumb, coaxed it under the thigh-elastic of her panties so that, to the knuckle, it sank into the moist clench of her vulva and grew slick. “Fuck the swami, and fuck Marcie,” she said, gyrating on his thumb.
“I’d take you up on half your proposition,” he joked, but Laura had his belt undone and his zipper down and was tugging on his pants and briefs so that they fell to his knees and he sprang into the warm and eager caress of her hands.
Heaven’s sakes! They must not have locked the front door nor heard Marcie’s knock, for suddenly it flew open and there she stood, legs apart, in boots and bustier and crotchless panties, a riot of red hair bushed below and a double sweep above, crimson-tinted and silken-smooth and curled in twin licks about her upjutting nipples. “Well, well,” she said, fists on hips, whip handle like a braided blacksnake erect in her right hand, “what yummies have we here?”
* * *
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Laura said, laughter in her voice.
She took his hand, about to say something else when they heard the stairs to the second-floor apartments creak and a clumsy someone stagger into the hallway.
“It’s Marcie,” he ventured.
“Doesn’t sound like her.” She broke away. “I’d know her footsteps anywhere. More like a slow-moving cripple, somebody with a bum leg, that sound.”
Whoever it was stopped outside the door. There were fingernail scrapings swirling chest-high. Then the handle jump-rattled once-twice as if it were being sharply yanked upward, and when that stopped, muffled fists cottoned upon the door like distant booms of cannon fire.
“What the hell—?”
Laura laughed. “Remember Halloween a year ago? Her and Pierre coming down to get us for the costume party at Place des Arts?”
He relaxed. Flashed back upon him. “They pulled the same shit: lumbering and giggling, playing ghoul’n’zombie even after we opened the door, wrestling us to the rug.”
“Precisely, though it’s kinda morbid with Pierre gone and no giggling.” Laura gave him a look. “Get the coats, honey. I’ll let her in and give her some kind of hell for isolating herself three whole days.”
Travis agreed. He was just at the hall closet, ready to tug it open and unhanger their long heavy fake-otterfur coats, when Laura said, “Okay, Marcie, you sick puppy of a neighbor,”
and pulled open the door.
The sight struck him and then th
e smell, a subliminal skirl of stench curled around the doorframe moments before and now fully bloomed into a gut-wrenching skunk-and-offal stew.
It was Marcie, and yet it couldn’t be: Her yellow terrycloth robe hung loose and open like old drapes yanked back from a window onto hell. Above the bloat and sewage of her flesh, the eyes in her creamed face were dead egg-yolk eyes, and yet they moved, swimming sentient yolks in colloidal pus. Her hair hugged like wet parentheses about her head, and her hands lifted (they lifted, unspeakable act) seemingly to wrench at the draped strands. One found its foul bell-pull, but the other shot out and grabbed at Laura, gripping its puffy fingers at her nape and pulling her off-balance toward a gaping maw.
“No!” he said, no air behind it. He was as paralyzed as Laura had been, half hero, half coward, and completely a shock in the shape of a man. By the time he made up his mind to move, the bloated Marcie’s teeth had scraped deep gouges in Laura’s face, nose and mouth crammed inside the creature’s jaws, her hands pushing without effect against dead breasts, her eyes a horse’s eyes in terror all teary and looking back at him. Her muffled screams grew louder and clearer as Marcie’s jaws closed and pulled and yanked away her skull-cover, front teeth crunching and crumbling into the moist chew. As Travis came on, the blood-soaked thing worked bits of his wife’s face into its cheeks, let cheek-flesh hang loose from its mouth like pizza toppings, but (surprising strength) grabbed the hand he raised to it and stuffed it gullet-deep, coming down, breaking skin and bone, turning spattered egg-yolk eyes on him as, no longer heroic, he tried to free his flesh from the mangling vise and yelled louder and more ineffectual than he’d ever done in any nightmare.
Through his pain, he saw Madame Robichaux, groceries in hand and oblivious to what was going on, fumble her key into the inner door by the mailboxes.
“Must be Marcie,” ventured Travis.
“Not her usual spry step,” his wife observed.
“Losing a lover takes a lot out of anyone,” he said, and, as if in affirmation, Marcie’s familiar rap sounded, but slower and less sprightly than usual. “I’ll get it,” he said. “Bring the coats, okay?”
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