“I need you, Peter,” the Chet-figure said. Its penis stiffened, grew erect. “I want you.”
Fighting back tears, Peter squeezed the trigger. The gun roared, bucking in his hands.
Eyes wide with shock, the Chet-figure stumbled backward, a gaping hole in its stomach. No blood flowed from the wound. It was empty inside, hollow, a void waiting to be filled.
Hands clutched to its wound, the Chet-figure slumped down beside the bed. As it did, its features flickered, popping in and out like a television set with faulty reception. One instant it was Chet, healthy, tanned and muscular, the next a scrawny, pale, sexless creature with a smooth, hairless head, twin slashes for a nose, a lampreylike mouth lined with saw-edged teeth, and large, pain-filled violet eyes.
Shaking from the effort, the strain showing on its face, the creature erected the Chet-facade once again. Raising its head, a hurt look on its face, it peered up at Peter. “I love you,” it croaked. “Hold me, Peter. I don’t want to die alone.”
Tears streaming down his face, Peter raised the gun, aiming it at the ruggedly handsome face he had once secretly desired. “You don’t know what love is,” he said.
Then he pulled the trigger.
* * *
—And the Horses Hiss at Midnight
by A. R. Morlan
“Sure you’ve heard of that one,” Mona the Tattooed Girl told me as she slipped her vine-covered fingers into my shirtfront. In the busy near-silence of the approaching nightfall, I heard one of the buttons give way and softly roll off into the trampled grass behind the midway, the sound all but lost in the swell of crickets and the distant tire-kisses on the highway far beyond.
Tracing the swell of one halter-trapped breast with my left hand, as my right wound around her bat-and-vine-encircled waist, I whispered once again, “No, I’ve never heard of snakes hiding in carousel horses…”
Another of my shirt buttons was liberated from the surrounding fabric before Mona replied, “But they do… it’s only the people who don’t believe who say it’s untrue. The people who don’t dare believe”—another pair of fingers sliding down my chest, another button rolling off to be forever lost in the litter-flecked grass—“and the people who are afraid to believe…”
“Why would they hide in wood?” My right hand slid downward, to her needle-embroidered belt with the navel buckle, lingering at that delicate indentation before seeking the softer, far deeper indentation below.
Mona’s lips brushed against my chest a moment before she spoke against my skin. “Not in the wood itself… they hide in the cracks in the wood, the places hidden by the shadows and contours of the horse’s surface… places you don’t normally look. But just because they aren’t seen, doesn’t mean they aren’t there.” The last was almost muffled by my own quickly rising chest. My breath was coming in hitches. I let my hand wander across her back to fumble with the knotted ties of her halter as I asked her, “But why be there if no one sees them? What’s the point in living just to hide?”
The Tattooed Girl’s eyes glittered in the almost-full moonlight; her lipstick shone near-black against her small white teeth as she stared at me in the darkness. “What’s the point— That’s like saying what’s the point in me getting all of these”—she used her button-popping hand to point to her embellished breasts and flatly decorated torso—“if I don’t walk around all but naked all the time… which I don’t” she added defensively, and for a moment, I feared I’d lost my chance with her, the chance I’d been all but praying for since I’d first seen her earlier that evening, standing on her small stage in the Fabulous Freaks tent on the midway.
The “Freaks” part may have been something of a misnomer; the best this carnival could come up with was the ubiquitous Headless Woman sitting light bulb-surmounted in her wooden chair, the parabolic mirror which hid her head almost flawlessly set up and lit, along with a merely anorexic-looking Thin Man and mediocre sword-swallower (he used no sword thicker than a good-sized shish kebab holder). But “Fabulous” more than applied to the spotlit Mona the Tattooed Girl. I thought, upon seeing her, that the word should’ve been forever reserved for her alone.
Spread-wing bats flapped with each languid exhalation and inhalation, all but flitting from bloody thorn to moon-kissed leaf. Kudzu vines seemed to grow upon her red-tipped fingers, winding and spreading over and around her knuckles, growing more dense by the second. The arabesques encircling her arms and neck crept up onto the bare sides of her head, touching the roots of her shaggy dyed-blond mohawk before winding upon themselves and snake-trailing down her spine, down to the low-slung waistband of her high-cut shorts. Sylphids and shaggy satyrs chased each other down and around her thighs, around each rose-touched knee, and spiraled down her calves to her flatly braceleted ankles. Below the links of yellow gold sunk into her flesh, branching thinner chains of ink and imagination, leading down to her red-tipped toes. Only her face was free of permanent embellishment; her kohl-lined green eyes and glittering carmine lips had been decorated by her own hand. But the color in her cheeks which bloomed and flushed when she read my silently mouthed Will you make love to me? was perhaps the most wonderful, thrilling adornment on her entire ornamented body…
And more wonderful still, she was waiting for average, unadorned me after the carny wound down, after the wooden carousel horses did their last prance and canter before resting still and frozen in the moonlight. Taking my sweating, naked-looking fingers in her own cool vine-wound ones, she led me to a place of undisturbed grass and near-silence, her long mythic legs scissoring beside me… but before we could undress, before the promised lovemaking could begin, she’d whispered a strange thing about the horses, and the hidden snakes—
Hoping to recapture her ardor, or whatever it was that made an exquisite being like her blush and then mouth “Yes” to my request for sex (was it my use of the word “love” that had swayed her, or did she find my mundane exterior somehow exotic in its ordinariness?), I reached up and caressed the smooth side of her head, then moved my fingers and thumb close to her eyes, her lips, and said, “All right, all right, so they live to hide… maybe they want to, or like to?”
That brought back her smile, made her dancing eyes glitter. “Yesss,” she said in a rush of warm air against my gently probing fingers, “that’s what they like best of all… the coming out after hiding…” Closing her eyes until her lashes cast fluttery crescents across her upper cheeks, she reached behind her and undid her halter ties herself, but allowed me the honor and pleasure of removing the twin triangles of black fabric. Revealed in the moonlight, her nipples and breasts cast small shadows on her flesh; both fleshy protrusions were decorated right up to the very tips of the nipples with petal after layered petal—each breast was a fullblown chrysanthemum surrounded by curling rings of leaves.
Closing my eyes for a moment, I could almost feel the individual petals beneath my delicately tracing fingers, but Mona reached up and thumbed both my eyes open, then let her forefingers linger on my temples. Rubbing them gently, she whispered, “Time for botany later… they wait until they’re being ridden, before coming out, y’know,” she went on dreamily, as she moved her hands down my cheeks and neck, her flesh gliding smoothly, like slick leaves, until she’d reached my chest, and nipples.
Circling my flesh with her thumbs, Mona shifted slightly below me as if trying to squirm out of her cutoffs without touching them with her hands, as she went on in that same lazy yet succinct voice, “It’s best when there’s a child, or a woman on the horse… that’s when the snakes slither out of the cracks, one by one, and inch by inch, and when there’s a little bit of silence between the notes of the carousel, they start to hiss… maybe one at first, then a couple of them, hiss hiss… and while they’re doing that, they undulate, maybe touching the rider’s calf, or a kneecap… whatever’s exposed, whatever’s unsuspecting—”
Finally taking her nonverbal hint, I reached down and began to undo the buttons under the fly of her cutoffs, wanting
to pop the buttons off as she had done to me, but still afraid to be so rough, so obvious. This was her place, her world, and I didn’t know who might come running should she cry out or worse.
“—and maybe at first they think it’s a bug, or some part of their clothes that’s loose and flapping, but then, when the snake’s little tongue does that slow flicker and snap-back, then the rider knows… and then the rider hears the hissing for what it is, but the ride is going ‘round, y’know? It can’t stop… there’s no emergency brake on a merry-go-round,” she added with this little chuckle that never reached her staring eyes. Mona waited until my fingers had freed the last of the buttons before wrapping both arms around my back and whispering in my ear, “So the rider just goes ‘round and ‘round, while the snakes slither up and around their little knees and feet, hissing and waving, enjoying the ride… and all the rider can do is grab hold of the pole and scream against the music… and the ride goes so fast, no one else can see the snakes… ‘specially not the other people on the ride, the ones whose snakes are hiding for now—”
Hitching my fingers into her waistband, I waited until Mona arched her back slightly before tugging down the shorts. Once they were past her hips, her knees, she wiggled until they could be kicked off her body with her lower legs… and as she was busy freeing herself of the cutoffs, she relaxed her grip on my body just enough so that I could get a good moonlit look at what was tattooed beneath the place where her shorts had been—
That she was bare down there was a given; hadn’t she told me earlier that she was going to get rid of her mohawk, add more snaking swirls and geometric designs on her very skull? But I had to blink my eyes a few times to register what I saw tattooed on and around her gently mounded mons and swollen labia—the second set of carmine lips and sharply outlined, tattoo-crosshatch-shadowed teeth surrounding her lower set of lips, the colored twin curve of the faux carmine-inked lips glistening, as if she’d just licked them moist. I reached down to probe and caress that second waiting mouth, but what I felt only confused me more. The lips seemed to pucker against my flesh, as if to kiss my fingertips, while just beneath them I felt the hardness and rounded smoothness of teeth—some of them sharply pointed. I longed to probe deeper, to touch her hidden depths and moist inner pools, but to do so, I’d have to risk passing those teeth. Something as dangerous as it was unexpected… yet something enticing, because it was so out of the ordinary.
I started to speak, to question, but Mona shook her head, the thick swath of silvery curls in the middle rippling against the grassy ground under her skull. “Ride’s started,” she whispered, “No emergency brake, remember?” Wrapping her legs around me, trapping my swelling organ against my undershorts, Mona snaked her right arm down my back and dug her thumb under my waistband until she could pull my jeans and underwear down close to my hips, then lower… and she hugged me against her as the snap and zipper let go, and the last of the entrapping, protective fabric pulled free of my lower body. She was hissing in my ear, “I won’t bite it off… but don’t be surprised if you feel a tiny pinch down there… remember the snakes, how they love to flick their tongues. And the snakes only come out when the ride’s going ‘round, so be ready to get off once the music’s over…”
I could have left her then, before it began, but no other ride at this carnival promised so much, even as it so openly threatened me. Even the horses with their hidden snakes seemed tame in comparison with what Mona was offering me, and me alone—
—and so as she pulled me closer and deeper, I felt a brief, slick hardness as I slid into her. The ridges of the longest, sharpest teeth barely grazed my incoming flesh, but true to her word, those teeth never bore down on me. She began to hum softly, a lilting drone that swelled in my ear… and I never got to ask her what the consequences of lingering too long in that tightly warm elastic-walled mouth might be once that melody reached its unexpected end, for the ride had indeed begun, and since there was no stopping, I felt compelled to keep up my own dizzying rhythm while my own lips explored her face and breasts, even as her nether lips explored and sucked deeply on my own imprisoned flesh.
Perhaps she sensed the throbbing in my lower back, a pain barely perceptible through my steadily growing orgasmic haze. Perhaps she sensed the gradual slowing up of the rhythm between us, a union of motion matched to her melodious murmuring. Perhaps… she sensed that the snakes longed to be hidden once more. Pushing me up and safely out of her, she abruptly stopped the song, just as I felt a teasing, yet definite nip close to the base of my now slippery organ (accompanied by a deep sucking pull on the pinched flesh). The heretofore melody-masked sound of crickets and highway movement came flooding back against my eardrums. Like a snake shedding its skin, my member shrank and rested as if satisfied against my now-dangling testicles. A glistening black pearl-like drop of blood welled up from the spot where I’d been bitten. Ride’s over, time to get off. And like the stilled-in-motion carousel horses, Mona’s sated set of faux tattooed lips grew flatter and less detailed as they and the teeth below sank back into a pool of inky color and detail against her still moist flesh. Soon only a fine dribble of her own saliva-like juices remained near the natural pucker of her labial lips, as if waiting for a good-bye kiss…
I don’t know if she comprehended my last caresses, my last lingering, tongue-probing kisses above and below; only by the slight rise and fall of her nightmare-bloom bedecked rib cage and breasts could I tell she was even alive. Her flushed eyelids were closed, but whether she slept or whether she was merely reliving recent pleasures, recent meals, in the darkened confines of her mind, I could not tell. She was just silent.
But… what was there to say, or to ask? I doubted she’d answer any of my questions, even if she could. Even if she knew, telling would only spoil her dark, exotic magic for me. Like probing tiny cracks and crevices of the carousel horses for hidden snakes before the music and the motion began… or like pulling aside her clothing before she’d mouthed that magical “Yes” of assent. To have done that would’ve spoiled the surprise, ruined that pleasure which comes with the gradual revelation after hiding and hinting. I could never ask her which came first, the snakes with their teasing tongues, or the tattooed lips and barely grazing teeth, for both were as intertwined as they were unique, one forming the echo to the other’s sound, or the shadow to the form… Enough that she’d shared her own hidden “snakes” with me… and had asked so little in payment for the ride.
I gathered up my clothes and threw them on, alternately peeking at her supine form and quickly looking elsewhere. Beyond, the rest of the carnies were busy taking apart the rides, the booths, and talking softly among themselves. None of them noticed me (or if they did, they knew better than to acknowledge my unoffical presence, perhaps remembering Mona’s other rides, and other riders) as I darted, buttonless shirt flapping, through the last remainders of the midway, a rider perhaps too ordinary for comment despite what Mona had revealed—and done—to me.
The bite on my now-covered flesh still stung almost pleasantly with each step, even though I still seemed to be unchanged. I wondered if one of the carnies would come to fetch Mona from her sated slumber before morning came, provided someone had noticed us out there. But as I passed the carousel, its painted mounts air-suspended, hooved legs caught in midarc, I realized that my passing in Mona’s domain hadn’t gone entirely unnoticed—nor had my small payment for the ride left me unaltered, or ordinary:
Emerging from its hiding place for one daring, riderless second, a snake hissed at me from one of the suspended horses…
* * *
Elixir
by Elizabeth Engstrom
Having been born with defective cones in the retinas of his eyes, Simon could not tell what color the prostitute’s garter belt was, only that it was one of those tear-away kinds. It gave a satisfying amount of resistance before the Velcro ripped apart and he held the bit of cloth in his hands. He unhooked her hose, then pushed her breasts out of the top of her bra and
suckled them.
She felt so good to him.
Her skin was young and tight, smooth and flawless.
He flipped her over onto her belly and brought her hips up to him and rubbed against her. He liked the way her loose breasts filled his hands.
“What’s this?” he asked as his fingers found a lump on her ribcage, inches under her right breast.
“Nothing,” she said, and she jerked from under that touch.
The last thing Simon needed was a lumpy prostitute. He felt his magnificent erection deflate. He turned her over and held her down with one hand. It was a definite lump.
“It’s nothing,” she whined, but he held her still to feel it. He’d gone to medical school for two years before they found out he was subnormal, could only see black and white, and invited him to take up some other profession. The veterinary school had no problem with his disability, but he had never been able to quench his thirst for human anatomy and human medicine.
God, he wished he could have a normal life, normal sex with a normal girlfriend. No. Not him. He had to pay for his sex. Always had, always would. And what did it get him? Lumps.
He touched it and it hardened.
She bucked under him, trying to throw him off. “Leave it alone,” she said.
He took a tighter grip on her, noticing with wry humor that his erection was coming back. He didn’t know if it was the anomaly or the wrestling that did it. He held her still and palpated the lump. It grew and became hard.
“It’s a nipple,” he whispered, and his erection thrummed. He slid inside her, gratified by the little sigh that escaped her. Then he moved slowly, one hand fingering one fine young breast, one hand toying with the odd little nipple. Life was indeed grand.
Love in Vein Page 30
