Some nights he cruised the chat rooms back on the Net, hoping to stumble across Nat. He suspected Nat had given up, or was going under a different screen name. Once or twice he thought Nat was there, hiding behind a new persona, toying with him. But if it was the case, Nat never let on. After a while Sammy simply let go and stopped looking. But he always knew that he’d been tested, right at the confluence of technology and the flesh, and he’d failed.
Some nights Sammy dreamed of ghosts on the Net, but on waking the dreams made no sense. There are no ghosts of ghosts, he thought. He often considered going to Pinkland and deleting all the music and the pictures and the books. But he never did, even though it hurt him to think of Pinkland unvisited, untenanted, and echoing strangely on the Net forever.
Closer to God
Heather Corinna
They say she came because she heard the singing, say she heard’t o’er the cliff on the edge of the Beeks’ field, right down under the waves. They say none of us saw her for what she were.
What they say, isn’t right, but they’ll never know’t – I saw what she were, and Alan saw what she were, and I saw the both of them and did naught to stop’t, didn’t say a word, couldn’t even whisper, wouldn’t dare. I’ve sat here outside the church now, each day of 20, watching John carve her face into the pew as they asked him to, and never said a word, not even to tell how her cheeks were a bit more round, nose a bit more sharp, lip more full. Never will to none but myself, not even save God, not even to ask for forgiveness.
Asking the empty air instead that she chose not Alan, but myself, and knowing for all of’t, I’d not be forgiven if any knew. I cannot ask God for forgiveness, cannot bear to step foot in that church, knowing myself a traitor, and knowing what I know of perhaps angels, perhaps demons. I cannot be sure, still.
But I can be sure I saw what she were the minute she showed up here, on that Sunday morning, the choir with their faces scrubbed clean and voices sweet. ’Twasn’t a soul in town that’d come to church, past ten, but sure as the sunrise, that door opened at half-past and in she came. As a girl, I’d buried myself in books and Bibles, studied the paintings of demons and angels, and never had a doubt in my mind which be which until she came to church at half-past ten that day. She’d slid in right behind me, in the very last pew. Usually, I’d be further up in the rows, but that morning we’d had the tail of a storm that knocked down one solid wall of the barn, and we’d had sheep spread out o’er our hills like a pox.
But you couldn’t have missed her coming in, not if you were as close to her as I were. Not if you knew. John and me’d spent half a morning out in the rain, but the smell of salt and sea was nowhere near to as strong on me as ’twere on her. When you’re a child, first learning to swim, and you’ve no sense of when to breathe and when not to, the water gets up in your nose and your throat, the taste of salt near to fills your veins it’s so strong, and that’s how the scent of her were.
I tried not to stare, less from courtesy than from the matter of being in church and’t being Sunday, but it were of no use. Her hair was knotted and damp, but the colour of acorns in fall, her blue eyes bright against the pale white of her skin. She was wrapped in only a blanket, and naught else, and that was hard to ignore, to be certain.
But clearer than day – or than a girl near bare in church who wore the sea instead of her best frock – was that her eyes were on young Alan the moment she came in and sat herself down. Now, Alan was hard to ignore, I confess’t. I myself have been drawn to him now and again, but he is, or he’d been, the brother of my eldest friend, and having known him since we were small, even a glance too long felt a bit strange, like staring at a brother. But he does – did – have the sweetest voice of any in the choir, the voice boys have before they get gruff, sweeter than any girl can sing. You could close your eyes when the choir sang and listen to none but Alan – his voice sailed out o’er all of the others, higher and clearer. Closer to God, I truly feel ’twas. Closer to God, even in light of all that happened, and forgive me for thinking so much as to know what God is, to speak such blasphemy, but ’tis the only way I can describe’t.
And that day, whether ’twere just his glad spirit – or whether ’twas because she came – ’twas Alan were the angel, and he sounded more lovely than any angel could have, even in dreams.
I heard her behind me weeping, quiet, like a child would weep that didn’t want none to know her sorrow. She wept as the choir finished and, when the sermon were done, Alan walked right to her and took her hand, and they stood like that for a good time.
“No!” I’d heard myself shout, not sure why, and slapped my hand to my face just as quick, humiliated I’d shouted in church.
But not a soul’d heard me. Catherine – my closest friend and Alan’s sister, as I said – and their folk all went to her, fawning ov’r her, worried for her sad state, and wrapped her up like a parcel with them before I could even catch my breath.
Did they not see? I’m not one for superstition, never have been, and anyone’ll tell you I’m a sensible girl, always have been, but she – she wasn’t one of us. She wasn’t anything I’d seen before and was everything I feared I never would see, and I wanted no one else to have her. I wanted her for my own, and I wanted for her never to have appeared all at once.
Were a handful of Sundays came and went just like that: she’d slip in late, and Alan would sing to the heavens, better and better each time, and she would weep and fill my breath with salt and sea and sorrow, and something else I cannot name for want of’t.
But one Sunday, she didn’t come. Alan didn’t come neither, and then – then – they knew. But I’d known the night before, and I wept with the rest of them, not saying a word, because though they wept out of sadness for losing Alan, I wept out of jealousy.
I wept for not having an angel’s voice and the young boy’s rosy cheeks that brought him, not myself, to her favour.
Most of all, I’d wept out of shame, feeling my own cheeks burn and turn ashen at thoughts of what I’d seen – or what I’d done, I’ll never be certain – the night before. And the shame in knowing there weren’t nothing I wouldn’t do to do’t again.
I’d gone to see Catherine, the sleep still in the corners of my eyes. Though’t were early, I’d been trying to finish some mending and had broken my last good needle, and Catherine and I had many times rapped on one another’s doors for this thing or that, neither of us being heavy sleepers.
But then I’d heard him, passing the cliff, sweet as a lark, singing high and soft. I wasn’t at all sure’t wasn’t myself daydreaming, and so I’d climbed down a bit, looking, and there he were. There he were standing on the low rocks, tide high, singing to the waves.
Singing to her.
She came out of the waves like an angel, and curled herself upon the cliff at Alan’s feet, eyes full of tears or full of salt, I well couldn’t say.
I sat still as a stone as I watched Alan halt his tune and kneel down to her, as she took his face in her hands and covered’t with her lips, and wrapped her shiny arms round him, pulling the wet clothes from his body, and oh, his eyes glittered like glass, they did.
I tried to turn my face for shame, knowing he were but a boy, but the sight of the ebbing moon o’er his skin, sleek as a selkie, and the roundness of his backside in the dim dawn light pulled my eyes to the scene and wouldn’t be letting them go. But he was little to behold in comparison to the sight of her.
’Twere as if she wasn’t of the waves, but were the waves herself. I’d swear to’t there were more than one of her, but I couldn’t say for certain; could only say her lips and arms and tail – that glittering tail of a million bright jewels! – were on him like a thousand currents, all’t once. She washed o’er his face, then the smooth swell of his boy’s chest, brushing her breasts o’er him, their buds redder than any rose I’d ever seen and there were music to’t, too. The crash of water on stone, and then his sighs, high and clear, and her pretty laughter – so loud I we
re sure all the town’d come running at any moment.
But they could not have heard, for none came. None came as she wrapped her mouth o’er his tall rod and suckled’t, milking the thing until cream and water ran down her chin, and I watched dazed – silently cursing myself, for no good Christian woman’d sit and watch such things – but I couldn’t move from my place, I was drawn to the scores of arms and limbs from beneath the water covering the boy.
The longer I watched, the more I felt a heat inside me that made me itch and hunger, and the more I watched, the more’t seemed that I wasn’t watching the creature – or creatures, as’t seemed there were many – moving o’er Alan, but moving o’er myself.
My nose were full of salt, but I could feel those cold arms, and sodden hair moving o’er me, a thousand mouths on my lips, my breasts, o’er my stomach and in the cavern between my legs. I could feel the coarse sting of icy spray on my face, and the crags piercing my back, but I could not move, stricken as sure as if I’d been hit by a thunderbolt.
I watched each thin finger weave in and out of every warm crevice, each snakelike tongue dart and lap hungrily and my ears were filled with the sweetest music; sighs upon sighs, as the angels do sing in Heaven so was the sound on that cliff.
I looked for Alan from behind my closed eyes, but I could not open them again, dizzy as I were, and then I felt’t upon me – a wild pulsing deep in my belly, and my own heartbeat rang loud in my ears as a drum. Lips pulled at my breasts as the mouths between my legs locked on some hidden place there, nearly drawing my breath from my lungs as’t coaxed the heat full from me. I felt I would scream from the intensity of’t, but the only cry I heard was Alan’s as I floated apart from myself, limbs light as feathers, and I shuddering like a child with the fever.
And then’t stopped, as quickly as a dream when you wake up sudden, and ’twas none but me on that cliff, silent and cold, with none but the sound of the waves.
And Alan’s voice soft beneath them, carried by laughter. And me, alone, red with shame and green with jealousy, for I was left behind.
They say she came because she heard the singing, say she heard’t o’er the cliff on the edge of the Beeks’ field, right down under the waves. They say none of us saw her for what she were, as she sat in that last pew but every Sunday, blanket o’er her legs, they say that even Alan didn’t see until ’twas too late. They say – now, they say — that surely ’twas a curse upon us, but if ’twere, then I am a heathen, for how I long for those demons again. Some few say ’twere a blessing, but if that be so, I ha’been passed o’er for heaven by the angels themselves. In any event, I cannot step into church again, knowing I be either scorned by angels, or am in thrall with devils. They say I am simply too heavy with grief about Alan. What they say ’tisn’t right, but they’ll never know’t.
They say to John to carve her face into the last pew, so as to warn others that might come that we know of them, and will not be fooled again. I say naught a thing – but watch as he carves her beautiful face, hoping they come again, and mistake’t instead for a welcome, and I spend my Sundays instead on the cliffs, learning to sing, closer to God.
The Notebooks of Gatling Wessex
Larry Tritten
Volume I
Where pornography ends and literary merit begins is a question that has long vexed scholars of literary erotica. It can be answered graphically with several pages from The Notebooks of Gatling Wessex, the work of a self-avowed pornographer who has written about sex with an intensity and poetry that would rank him as a great writer in any other field. Wessex’s career has been distinguished by an extraordinary level of craftsmanship. From the ambitious searching of early novels such as A Legend in His Own Pants and Knee-Deep in Nectar through the mature perversity of middle-period novels such as Blondes in Brass Brassieres, Pig-Iron Panties and Galvanized Garter Belts and Slaves of the House of Pancakes to the experimental boldness of Post-Holocaust Proctologist and Corgi and Bess, his work has always illuminated sexuality with literary deftness. Here, for the scholar of eroticism – or the merely horny readers – is a selection from his recently published notebooks.
Stray Thoughts
• Extrasensory perversion – “Don’t come in my mind!”
• What does it say on the bottom of a Coke bottle on Lesbos? USE OTHER END.
• Woman raped by ghost, impregnated with ectogism.
• Ambition – To be the 50-Foot Woman’s gynaecologist.
• Poetic fetish – Eating food left on plates in cafeterias by beautiful women.
• Some women are born to greatness, others have it thrust into them.
• Dream – In Museum of Modern Art, he enters candlelit room labelled MÉNAGE À TROIS in which two people are making love on a couch.
Scenes
“Ouch!” he gasped.
“Relax,” she whispered. Her tongue made its debut below his waist. It seemed as if a mouthful of hummingbirds had been released upon his shaft. He watched wide-eyed, then narrow-eyed, and then with his eyes squeezed shut but his mind’s eye resuming the view as her tongue whirled, swirled, skipped, skittered and flickered across the pulsing catwalk of his cock. As the sensation sweetened, the nerves in his cock began a tactile tinkling, like wind chimes in a sirocco. His buttocks oscillated. Her nostrils flared. She suckled him with vivid passion and, as he watched, her mouth became a churning vortex into which he feared he might be drawn and vanish, cock first. In the meantime, time froze solid, then a few aeons thawed slowly, one at a time; and the next thing he knew, he was climaxing with a series of sensations like high hurdles leaped against a driving wind, and she was making a sound like a somnolent turkey backed into a table fan.
“I say that man is innately sensual,” Colander said, unzipping his pants and waggling his fingers with comical vulgarity at his hostess across the crowded room as he spoke, “that as long as he has an appendage, he’ll look for vacancies to fill; and as long as he has access to an orifice, he’ll look to its tenancy. After all, nature abhors a vacuum . . .” He left the sentence resonating in our minds and, as if to demonstrate his point, drew a throbbing erection into view and soared off in its wake toward the nearest blonde.
During the 60th second of their lovemaking and with the 120th stroke of his phallus (each one embellished by a stylish sideways twist on the backstroke), Karen had an orgasm so powerful that she felt totally subsidiary to it, which meant, she supposed, that the orgasm had really had her – she was its, its clearly subservient and spectacularly sentient servant; and then, all at once, the neural whirlpool into which her senses spun her became more chaotic as another and continuing orgasm jerked and jolted her this way and that, reminding her of the clunky banging of an unruly washing machine’s rotator near the end of a spin-dry cycle. Yet she herself was no more dry than monsoon earth – she was in a briny sweat, and all of her vulvar musculature was vividly wet with interior leakage, like the inside of a pink submarine whose seams are beginning to burst inwards from skilful depth-charging.
“Say it,” she said.
“I want you,” he gurgled.
“On your knees, litter brain,” she cannonaded. He was there at once, and she extended one leg, the sole of her leather boot directly at his lips. She had been to the theatre, and the bottom of the boot was brindled with dried cola syrup, a single jujube bonded to its surface, the ruby candy crushed and blackened from her walk through the slums.
As his affenpinscher might, he tugged at the candy with his teeth and would have had it, too, if a sudden Charley horse hadn’t seized her, spasming her leg and throwing her to the floor, where she went through a series of thrashing convulsions, massaging and hammering at her leg frantically until the pain slowly dissipated.
“Time out,” she whimpered, and he knew the mood had been lost.
“Who’s your favorite analyst?” she asked.
“Rank,” he said, smiling. “Otto Rank. Who’s yours?”
“Horney,” she said, returning his smil
e. “Karen Horney.”
“Rank,” he mused.
“And Horney,” she grinned.
They gave each other a nosebleed in their rush to fuck.
In the Cimmerian darkness, he would have to find her by the scent alone, that was the game; and in a 40-room chateau, it would not necessarily be easy – yet the moment it began, his olfactory nerves were tingling with the distant bouquet of her sex, that ineffable fragrance of burnt sugar, shellfish buffets and storm-flagellated dahlias when the winds bore away and a pale gilding of sunlight brightened them. The molecules of smell seeming to sparkle in his nose like the effervescent bubbles of a carbonated drink, he was virtually drawn along by his nose, and he found her finally on the second floor in a bedroom, supine and ready, the hot magnet of her redolence pulling his face into the palpy shoals of her cloven vulva with a soft adhesive bunting of lips and chin; and it was in that glorious moment that he sprained his tongue yearning for her cervix, for his tongue was, alas, somewhat shorter than any other part of himself with which he had also failed to touch the gossamer bottom, the ultimate oyster with its apocalyptic pearl just beyond reach in the sodden abyss of the cozy chasm.
“Oh, wow,” she gasped in the aftermath, her face ashen, cunt rumpled, her eyes bluer by a shade. “Where’d you learn to give head like that?”
He grinned. “Took lessons,” he said. “From a lesbian yogi. She could tumble a hassock with her tongue. Why? Ya like it?” But he was already talking to a corpse.
Novella had a penchant for duplex sex (as she called it): taking one penis into her mouth while another impaled her vaginally or anally. She’d come a long way, she thought, since those virginal days when her sex had been like a studio apartment visited only by a familiar thumb or forefinger, which loved the ambience and stayed for hours on end.
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