“You want me to?” she asked.
“She’s ready.”
“You’re sure.”
“Go on, you’ll see.”
She stepped away, stopped. “You’d better be right or you’re dead meat,” she said, then moved off.
“Don’t I know it.” Travis watched her go through the kitchen door. All he had, riding on this. Would she have the nerve to try? Or would they spar about one another as they pretended otherwise, chicken out, watch the evening’s possibilities fade? It was awfully quiet in there. Corks not popping, no plash of wine on glass, no murmur of small talk, nothing. Outside, the window-dimmed keen of sirens; inside, the beating of his heart.
He closed on the kitchen door, went in, turning right around the leather-tan shine of the fridge. His chest was thick with dread and wonder. And there they stood, corked bottle forgotten on the counter, Laura’s tight blond frame lovingly enfolded in Marcie’s embrace. Familiar kisses in murmur there before him, his wife’s yum-give-me-more under lips that still tingled at his.
Travis went to them, nice unhurried drift into female warmth that opened up to triangulate him. He kissed Laura long and deep, mirrored and modified it on Marcie’s mouth; cupped buttocks—flank of filly and mare—as the two women shared the moist secrets he’d pressed into their lips.
“Let’s go to the bedroom,” he suggested, voice husky as heated flannel.
“Honey? Shouldn’t we check on the baby?” Still shy, even now; and not a little woozy, as if the wine had found its way out of the bottle to her head.
“Not now,” he assured. “Time enough later.”
Then they moved off, riding the dream.
Aysha glowed, uncertain if she were awake or asleep. Rajib had concluded satsang quickly and she supposed she ought to feel guilt, but there was the fact of her living son, once dead and meatlike, now quick and warm, and Vish made all the rest of it inconsequential.
In the car, Rajib’s young countryman driving, she had reached past Vish’s thumbsuck to touch Rajib’s hand. Ooze of warm unguent, tingling as if irradiated. “Stay with us tonight,”
she said, “with me and Vish.” Rajib’s awareness flitted over his eyes like a long-legged fly over stagnant pond-water. Then he spoke to his driver and Aysha offered directions.
She made tea, carrying the tray in to where Vish sat, thumb in mouth, staring at his father and nodding his head to any question. The tea lay untouched in its pot, steam from the thick spout dying down. Aysha walked Vish to his bed, tucked him in, kissed him, tore herself away with the greatest reluctance.
Rajib sat precisely where she’d left him. She took his hand, clasped it palm to palm, pressing the dark back of it against her cheek—a faint sweet smel and a hint of foul. Four years rol ed back. His goodness seemed ever daunting, but he had never stopped her—and he didn’t do so now—from initiating intimacy. Aysha’s knees dimpled the sofa cushion beside him.
In the soft light of the oil lamp, he seemed almost alive.
His eyes tracked her. As she neared his face, slowly drifting in, she remembered how deep he got. Exponential.
Asymptotic. But where once there had been joys unbearable and intense, orgasms of eye and nose to presage the sexual delights to come, now the joys were darkly tinged. In his gaze was the daunt of a hurricane eye. Upon his lips, she tasted bitter forbiddenness. She pressed deeper, his cool tongue flexing in familiar response as she probed. At the taut tease of his bite, micro-struggle at jaw-hinge, Aysha withdrew, rose, took his hand, led him to her bedroom.
Beneath the accordion-shuttered window, upon the slap and sploosh of their waterbed, Travis and Laura took their new beloved first. Marcie melted under their happy chore, her hands idling nicely upon strokable flesh as they found their lingual ways into her hot spots. She gushed and she swelled—and her release, a cataclysmic upheaval of seized and frenzied womanhood, delighted Travis to the depths.
Unlike Laura, who dishragged into limpness for a time after orgasm, Marcie tigered up supercharged from hers and dove for the sweet loins of his wife. Laura’s giggle soon gave way to her yummy lip-gnawing sounds, woven with wind-howls from outside and the rattle of glass above. He gave her a deep kiss, asked her, mid-squinch, if she was having a good time, took her nostril-wheezy devour of a kiss as a positive response, and that then turned into an inhalation presaging the luff and buffet of her coming.
His ear teased him. He thought he heard the scrunch, slow and covered by woman-delight, of snow outside, almost as if someone were approaching the window. Then, shatters to scare the shit out of him, as the wood-slatted shutters angle-arced open over him like twinned jib-swings, booming right and left to let in a stinging spray of glass, abrupt waves of waspish pain carried in on unspeakable stench and winter cold.
Marcie’s back welled crimson under triangles of glass. Laura was screaming, trying to gain her balance on the waterbed, trying to cast off the cracked glaze that coated her torso. But then invader-stench hooked Travis’s nose, and through the misted ache of his unblinded eye, he saw the jag-torso’d dead woman crawl through the window to lay claim to their lives.
Aysha undressed. She unwrapped her lover beside her bed, oil-lit dark skin oily and cool beneath her fingers, his clothing slick with savory-smelling unguent. Decades of hatha yoga had slimmed and toned his body, reminding her always, and especially now, of Jesus on the cross.
“I’ve missed you, Rajib,” she said softly.
“It is good to be with you,” came his reply.
She put her arms around him, standing there, and felt his hands lightly slat above the small of her back. White skin to brown, blond hair to black. Lovely naked embrace, full body.
He was soft below where she remembered whippet hardness, thin sickle of dogtail roused. Her fondling did nothing. She fell to her knees, kissing a quiescent chest and abdomen, no breath there, just aromatic sheens of ooze like ancient spices preserving a corpse. Dark pubic wire. The small retired wrinkle of Rajib’s penis. Aysha took it in like a second tongue, all of it, bathing it with saliva but to no avail. It had a subtle sweetness about it, like salt-sweet taffy, and the tip oozed drops of liquid manna, rolled like honeyed wine on her tongue before sliding down her throat.
“No blood,” Rajib said, resting his hands on her bare shoulders. “No hardening. Lie down. And I will pleasure you.”
She obeyed, settling on the cool blanket and watching the dark form of her husband part her thighs with bonelike steady hands, blessing her womanhood with his eyes. Lower he went, half on the bed, half off, until his lips touched her labia and his nose and forehead settled into a beloved pattern of duck and rise. She watched him as the feelings began, connecting with his eyes as in the old days, but in them, there cowered that dead thing she’d first noticed on the stage. It gleamed in oil-light. It thrilled, mingled there with his kindness. No breath on her yoni, no coming up for air, just movement and steady rise, soft sly tongue on her clitoris, then teeth, something new, upper teeth to lower trapping the wet nub, slick of cool tongue traveling to and fro, but the stiff enamel pressure crossed the line from pleasure to pain.
“No teeth,” she said. He had taken her hands, as in the past, holding them at her sides, gentling her fingers.
Something sharp in his eyes. He eased off. His brow rose abruptly and she saw mustache and lip and teeth above the curl of her private hair. And then, like a rot weiler let loose, he lunged in and down. His hands closed on her hands, kept closing, crushing bone against bone. Bites of outrage ravaged her sex. Frantic with struggle, she tried her best to escape him, but it was useless: he was strong beyond mortal strength and his black locks flew hither and yon, all glistening with blood. Fear frenzied her, and in the midst of her frenzy she felt her bladder let go inside her red-runnered belly. A bloody gush of urine fountained against his face, awash over eyes which did not blink.
“No teeth,” she said.
At once he eased off. Tongue again played slickly at her sex, its nub tip-tormented b
y tonguetip. Rajib’s dead eyes shone a dark bloodlight of awareness across the heave and roll of her body. So tender did his corpse-hands move upon her palms and fingers, and with such love, that Aysha felt his touch travel to her nipples, tighten them, a pure twin lick of love unstinting.
Haloed shadows lapped in an array of grays on the ceiling glow, one barely substantial nimbus bobbing like a projection of Rajib’s spirit. Focus rose to that nimbus, its rhythm, as each sensual wavecrash tumbled quicker upon the last, and again, and yet quicker, until there was nothing to do but yield up into the lovely god-glow with heart and mind and soul.
Feathering down, she gathered him up to lie upon her, naked brown corpse more caring than any living lover she’d ever had. His long dark locks tickled her shoulders. And though he slabbed upon her, no arhythmic answer to her in-out of breath, the dance of consciousness in his eyes made her cadaveric embrace all right, nothing freakish about it nor anything perverse: What, after all, animated her from moment to moment? And what distinguished her from him but breath and blood and rates of decay?
Outside, a siren screamed by. Its passing made Aysha aware of the distant weave of sirens in every direction, a thick blanket now, once tentative and threadbare.
“It’s starting,” he said, emotion unreadable as ever. “It seems that I have come too late.”
She hugged him fiercely, suddenly afraid, wishing her touch could do for him what he had done for their son. In her dead lover’s arms, she wept.
Their screams mingled, Marcie’s and Laura’s and his.
Muffled flesh. Shoots of liquid falling everywhere. Arm and elbow flying, warm buttock, wet red hair matted about fingerfucked cuntmouth, hands hot and gone, waterbed slap under greenhouse coziness and the ecstatic shouts of love newborn. They settled down slowly, in a heap, a wild tea party, un-Poppinsesque, bumping the ceiling in an ecstatic display of belly-laughter before parachuting downward.
Sirens whiffled in the distance.
“A restless night,” said Laura.
“With any luck!” said Marcie, fruity alto laughter on the follow-up.
“Wow,” offered Travis, mind-blown. “Wow, wow, double wow!”
“Articulate as always.”
“Where have we been all our lives?” he wondered.
“Um,” said Marcie, “on our way here?”
“I guess.”
Laura surprised him: “I love you guys a whole heap.”
“Same here.” Gratitude in their neighbor’s voice.
“And I love the fuck out of you two.”
Quick Marcie: “As long as you also fuck the love out of us as frequently and as diligently as you can.”
“Oh, Jesus in heaven, what have we here!” He thought then of the baby. “We ought to check on Jenny.”
Laura groaned. “I guess I’d better. No need for you two to get out of bed.”
“No, I mean I want all three of us to go.” He warmed to the idea. “No clothing, just as we are, hugged through the apartment, shushing one another into Jenny’s room, and peeking into the bassinet. I want to hold you close. I’d like to touch your beautiful naked flanks under moonlight, as Jenny sleeps below.”
They grumbled, but they acquiesced.
The air in the baby’s room was warm and close, but it concentrated his daughter’s perfect smell and that was one virtue in it at least. She looked the perfect angel lying there.
Travis reared back at the pungency of the stench, an oh-no alarming in his head. “My baby,” Laura gasped, then rushed in. Marcie followed and Travis came after, praying it wasn’t what he feared.
Laura lifted the limp child in her arms, a wet bundle of laundry. Travis snapped on the overhead: no blinkback of light from the baby, not even a brief squeeze of closed eyelids.
He saw the reddish froth at Jenny’s nostrils and mouth. From the floor, the space heater roared obscenely.
“Quick,” said Marcie. “The changing table.” Box of tissues, whip-whip-whip, wiping the froth away, gentle but quick.
Then Laura’s mouth came down upon her child’s.
Travis felt helpless, paralyzed. Standing beside his wife, he steadied the baby’s forehead, useless gesture but something.
It was cold and dead. He saw the tiny fingers with their blue-tinged nails. His head swelled in the bad heat of the room.
Abruptly, near where his hands held dead temples, the baby’s eyes flew open; and her mouth lit into Laura’s face like a weasel-toothed hair-clipper plowing out of control, gone from his hands. Up her cheek the mouth pranced, path of red gouge gurgling Laura’s screams. There by the table he and Marcie tried to wrestle her away, waltzing absurdly against the table edge as if it were crucial that they not drift too far from it.
Behind them, the window imploded jags of winter night upon them, an angled torrent of glass filling the air, and then, in plain sight behind his lovers, a young dead woman dragged herself over jagged shards, white red-zipped torso snagging there but coming on anyway, bringing in hordes of stenched dead in her wake. His dead infant unlatched from Laura and dove for him like screaming hell, the bright air no barrier to its bloody-mouthed leap.
What the fuck is happening here, was the thought that spun in his brain as the side of his face lit up, what the fucking blue blazes is happening here?
Perfection. Things had come together just as he had hoped they would. Jenny, sleeping peacefully below in her bassinet, held a lifetime’s promise beneath those precious eyelids. After ages of lust for his upstairs neighbor, he had enjoyed her and found her overwhelmingly more sensuous than his most detailed jag-fant of her. And there wasn’t, no not in the slightest, an iota of jealousy—if anything, he found an amazingly complementary desire—in Laura.
A snap at Jenny’s window. He veered his head.
“What, silly?” Laura said.
“That sound startled me.” A tracery of white webbing made the pane appear fractured.
“Just sub-zero stuff.”
But he unhugged them and crossed the warm rug and off on cold floorboards in the moonlit room, peering out upon the smooth blue drifts in the alley, the windowless brick facade over yonder. Utter peace. Marcie, drifting behind him, swept to his left, gentling a hand on his shoulder, a thigh hot against his thigh. “What’s out there?”
“Not a thing, sweet love. Just deep freeze and a lot of sleeping souls.” Even the sirens had stopped.
Laura joined them, her hands like tickling lilies at their waists, her hip-lyre at their buttocks. Saying not a word, she kissed his left shoulder and rested her cheek there, hairfall a new tickle. Travis, replete with peace and contentment, raised a hand to the window, benedictive gesture, felt the wall of cold air an inch away, touched a palmpress to the surface frost, drew away. Marvelous, how thin the barrier was between unsurvivability and a perfect moment. He was grateful, beyond gratitude, to be standing on this side of that barrier, safe, loved, an heir to such bounty as he’d never known could exist on this earth.
It happened when he kissed Marcie’s cheek. A sudden insuck of breath, the pulling tight of soft flat belly at his right palm where it lay above her Brillo-flare of red private hair. He swerved up to look, caught a glimpse of blue-puffed flesh, but was buffeted by the cold coming in on a shatter of glass, nothing there, a flicker of dream, everything there, too sudden the assault, the rag-wrapped gnarled knuckles smashing through triangling glass to lay claim to his life. Flat pane onto empty alley. A flying mass of forced shards and the influx of stench and bodies and hands and mouths coming in too fast to react to. His wife reaching under his cleft to brush against his balls, feeling his prick stiffen in response. The insuck of air filled with slashes of glass and a naked woman—scored at torso like a zipper of guts—diving in to kiss a visegrip chaw deep into his turned cheek. “Let’s go back to bed,” Marcie wantoned into his ear, as, giddying upon a peak of ecstasy, he gazed at a zigzag of bricks over yonder. His legs failed him under the flying assault of his attacker, her arms impossibly strong, her
face fastened to his where it bit and tore. Beneath his attempts to scream, his eyes caught Laura, pinned under a half-formed male monstrosity, whose huge meaty hand boned into her breast and ripped it up and away like a flesh balloon filled with pudding, its mouth its goal as Laura screamed and resisted him without effect. Baby Jenny gave a tiny cry of protest, then fell silent, and Travis shared a smile with his lovers. “She’s okay, I think,” he said, “and I bet the three of us could find something nice to do in the other room.” A vision of hunger flickered at the window, nothing, the startle of an eyeblink, emptiness out there. “Help me,” Marcie shouted, but he couldn’t turn and a winterfall of cold air and meat gone way bad assaulted his senses as hands gripped one leg and raised it up to a mouth, and a dead tongue brushed the toes of his other foot. Not a sound outside. The sharded air screamed with sirens, police and ambulance, firetrucks and air attack, a doomsday medley of wails at each other’s throats in a threnody of pain. The women dropped to their knees, backed Travis’s butt onto the cold sill, mouthed at his shaft with teasing warm wet lips and tongue, while his shoulderblades touched and shied away from the flat frosty pane of glass.
Smash to either side and a give as if it’d been open all this time, tumbling backward, then yanked by brute force through and back into an alley full of subway-packed shuffling forms.
They tugged him down onto the rug and one impaled herself on him while the other pussied at his face, Laura’s taste, and from above came the sounds of kissing as Marcie pistoned about his penis, and his tongue did a new-angled, newfangled dance at clit and labia. The woman bit and tore mercilessly at his jaw, and the pain of teeth closing on foot and thigh lit up his head and forced his muscles to the straining point. But then a shambleman loomed up and arrowed down into his belly, a clutch there like food poisoning cramping him up, but from the outside. And it got worse and worse, not subsiding for a breather, but attacking deeper and with pain unending.
Laura came, burrowing and rocking at his mouth so that for a spell he couldn’t breathe, but then he maneuvered his nose in time for Marcie’s climax—Laura having fingered her clit where he and Marcie groined together—and he shot his seed deep into her, his moans muted by the wet luff of Laura’s cunt. He died there on that rug, red bleed on gray, grave-soiled tufts of fabric. They collapsed upon him, laughing at the freeing licentiousness of their hearts, doubled femininity asquirm where it most mattered. Rising, swim of the room into his ken, he watched Laura feeding the baby to Marcie and the others. Its bawling had torn free of siren scowl, but now ripped down into stillness. He kissed their hands and whispered “I love you” into Marcie’s then Laura’s ear, then left Jenny’s room with them, softly closing the door while blowing his sleeping girl a kiss. Bladder and bowel gave way then in the overheated room, but it would be four hours too late before the door again opened. And he went, ravenous, for the smashed window, dragging himself across the shards of glass, watching indifferently one arm slice open like dark gristled meat detaching from chicken wing, lunging away from the window-shattered warmth and on into the unending hunger of a long winter’s night.
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