Dark Passions

by Jeff Gelb

  Then I felt her hand at my groin. Initially I pushed it away, but when she grabbed at me even harder and more forcefully, I realized she was trying to reach beyond her insanity and connect with me in the only way she could still somehow manage. I sighed and slipped out of my pajamas, then laid her back on bedsheets that were soaked in tears and sweat and Lord knows what else, and we made love.

  At first I was an unwilling partner, turned off by the rank smells, the wetness of the bedsheets. But her utterly animal sexuality overtook me, and I realized I needed the release of tension that only sex could bring to me.

  But it wasn’t just sex; no, not at all. It was not just two human animals grunting and grabbing, thrusting and gasping in ecstasy. It was the only expression of our lost love we could still share.

  I wanted desperately to please her, to reach her, hoping against all hope that perhaps by making love I could bring my wife back to some semblance of sanity. That perhaps by connecting on this physical level, becoming truly one, I could somehow transfer some of my sanity through my sperm into her bloodstream and ultimately into her brain.

  I slipped inside her, gently moving back and forth, in and out. She sighed in what I could only hope was pleasure as I grabbed her breast and kneaded the soft flesh as it fell apart in my hands.

  I stared at the glistening pink blob in my hands in utter horror. Her nipple and a good third of her breast had actually fallen off her body and were now dripping gore into my own hands.

  “Oh Lord,” I shrieked as I threw the putrefying flesh to the floor and disengaged from my wife. I scrambled off the bed and backed up until I hit a wall. Alissa started crying again, and in the shadows of the room I could see her reaching out for me.

  “More,” she begged me, “ More. I need you ... inside me ... . Come inside me!”

  I gasped, tears flowing as I ran for the door, slamming it behind me, locking it with shaking fingers. I ran down the hall to my bathroom and took a long shower, standing under the blistering water, crying my eyes out.

  Just hours ago I’d fed her dinner, some kind of tasteless chicken-and-peas slop I’d managed to put together. She’d eaten a tiny portion without any emotion, which was not unexpected. She’d barely acknowledged me as I wiped the food stains from her still-pretty face. I looked in her eyes in vain for a sign that she still knew who I was, still cared for me, still wanted to live.

  And now, despite all my best efforts at maintaining a perfectly controlled environment, she’d gone through the Change, as the remaining scientists called it. She’d become one of the living dead. My wife was a zombie.

  I dressed and went to my office. At my desk, I turned on the computer, searching for any news that someone had found a magic bullet of some kind. But there was no news on any of the blogs of any progress. In fact, many of the bloggers and their sites were now dormant, and I suspected their owners and caretakers had succumbed to the disease. They too were undoubtedly now zombies, and computers would mean no more to them than the people with whom they used to correspond. But there would be no more miracles.

  The Good Lord had apparently decided to pull the plug on humanity, and it was up to us to decide how to deal with it. I looked at the computer, and all the anger I’d bottled up for the past ninety days bubbled to the surface, overflowing. I grabbed the monitor, ripping the cords out of it, disengaging its life support as it were. I flung it across the room against the far wall, where it smashed in a noisy mess.

  The whole world was a noisy mess, and I couldn’t see a reason to keep going. The only thing that meant anything to me anymore was a living-dead woman whose sobs I could still hear from the room down the hall. Her cries ripped my soul to shreds.

  I knew tomorrow I’d have to call the authorities. It was the law—I’d be incarcerated if they found I was secretly harboring a zombie. They would come for her in their hermetically sealed white spaceman suits, first pumping her with some narcotic that immediately rendered her unconscious. Then I’d have to sign some papers releasing her to them, and then they’d take her away. And then my own bonfire nightmares could start.

  I walked down the hall, unlocked her door, and entered the room. She was still crying, though whether it was from physical pain or something beyond that I could not say. I went to her side and she grabbed for me. I allowed her to touch me and then pull me to her, and I felt her cold body against the heat of mine. The place where her breast had been oozed against my own chest, but I did not turn away. I held her like that for longer than I’d held her since our son died.

  It might have been minutes or it could have been hours later when I got up and smashed open the naileddown bedroom windows with the butt end of a lamp, allowing fresh air to circulate through the room for the first time in months. I kissed the tears from her eyes as I carried her shivering body into the bathroom. Where my hands held her weight, I could feel them literally sinking into her flesh, where her muscles and organs caressed my fingers and oozed their mysterious fluids into my pores.

  I placed her naked body into the bathtub and turned on the warm water. I disrobed, stepped into the tub, and lay next to her. In a fairy-tale past now all but forgotten, we’d used this oversized tub many times to make love, our wet bodies slipping and sliding against, in, and out of each other. Now, in the soft glow of the moonlight, I could see fingernails and other body parts and flesh floating in the warm water. I felt no pulse from her, but I could hear her breathing, her body defying all logic as it decomposed while remaining semifunctional, at least on some subatomic level. I held her tightly until I felt myself drifting off to much-welcomed sleep.

  In my dream, Derek, Alissa, and I were at a park, having a picnic. The day was bright with the warmth of the summer sun, and I could smell fresh flowers in bloom all around me. Derek and Alissa were playing tag and laughing. Their laughter was contagious, and I joined in, absently wondering why my laughter was punctuated with sobs and tears.

  Even in my dream I realized laughter was a sound I had not heard for many months, and the strangeness of that sound woke me up. I blinked as I came back to the present.

  I looked at the tub. Virtually an entire layer of Alissa’s skin had seemingly slid off her body, now floating in pieces in the tub all around me. I smiled through my tears as I held her against me, feeling the inner muscular structure of her back against my fingers as I slowly ran my hands up and down her back. She sighed, or some such sound escaped what was left of her lips, and I kissed her, long and hard. As her remaining teeth hit mine, I was surprised to feel one of my teeth loosening and then falling out of my mouth.

  So it had started.

  I kissed her with greater intensity and felt her come to life, or a semblance of it anyway, as she once again grabbed at my manhood with hands that were now more bone and sinew than flesh. The effect was breathtakingly erotic, as she rubbed me, pushing my foreskin up and down, up and down, until I felt the skin of my penis split apart in her hands.

  “Quickly,” I whispered into my wife’s ear, “put me inside you. I want to be inside you. I want to come with you one last time.”

  I felt her guide me into her moist vagina, and I closed my eyes, remembering all the times we had shared this exact intimacy in this tub. Then it was pink with bubble bath; now it was red with our mixed blood, as the life juices of my own decomposing body were melding with Alissa’s in one last erotic painting.

  My penis slid into her vagina, and I started slowly pushing in and out. Without the foreskin, the effect was maddeningly intoxicating, and it didn’t take even a minute before I screamed in pleasure and felt what remained of my life force pumping into her.

  I stayed inside my wife, slowly moving in and out, back and forth, until I felt my entire penis crack apart. I disengaged, leaving an intimate piece of myself inside her.

  I felt no pain. In fact, all feeling was starting to slide away from me, like fading memories of a long-lost life.

  Alissa was completely still, perhaps already dead, perhaps just somehow enjoy
ing the afterglow of the last orgasm we would ever share.

  In the dim recesses of what remained of my brain, I knew they’d come for us in the next day or two. Some colleague would report me missing, and they’d find us here, or what was left of us. I just hoped when they did, there wouldn’t be enough left to identify which body part belonged to which person.

  I had connected with my wife one last time, and this time was for all eternity.

  But now it was time to go back to sleep and return to that picnic, and the sunshine, the smells, and especially the laughter of my family.

  What Scares You

  David J. Schow

  Loneliness scares me. There, I’ve admitted it. Not being alone—that’s something else entirely. If you can’t enjoy your own company, why expect anyone else to? Isolation doesn’t scare me. But the impingement of loneliness, which always leads to some form of despair, remains a scary thing.

  This story probably isn’t what you wanted to hear when you came in. You were in the market for a fine little fright; I know that—some little backsnap in the tail to make you smack your forehead and go Oh wow—never saw that coming. A digestible kind of unease. A black midnight snack. But if I’m to be completely honest with you, I won’t do that stunt; it’s too much like being a party robot that flawlessly replicates the same trick every time you push the button or slap a coin into the slot. No.

  Nor will I spiel off bullshit (or endure yours) until you “allow” me to fuck you. Before tonight, things might have gone differently, more like the long yawn you call seduction. Now, when I think of seduction, I think of what happened to me on the most basic level, and it still frightens me, because it forced me to stand alone. It infected me with a dread that never goes away. Being startled is not being scared. Being genuinely afraid is quite different. No wonder sane people choose the former, when it comes to safe risk.

  When I think of what you call seduction, all I can see are parasites eating each other to death.

  Since you won’t let me escape without talking, I’ll instead tell you the story of Niall Otheringame, who succeeded in scaring me with the things he said. When I met him, I was flat on my back in a puddle of beer, watching an enormous boot swoop down to smash my face. I saw Clarity that night too. No, don’t roll your eyes—Clarity is a name: Niall’s female half. But that’s jumping ahead of the story.

  About forty mostly sleepless hours following my latest and final “discussion” (so-called) about “our relationship” (double wince) with the notably blond and usually perceptive Giselle—you probably know that whole bitter drill, am I right?—I forced myself back into a nearly forgotten pattern and decided to visit a lounge called the Back 40, having just turned forty myself. Numerical symmetry insisted. I pretended to ignore the sharky, trolling atmosphere of the place and lied to myself that I was just going for a drink or two, pretending my eyes were not laser targeted for fresh females, pretending there was not a whole universe of new people to engage and bodies to newly unwrap.

  I pretended I was a normal human, when in fact I was an alien from some planet of misanthropes, observing Earth mating culture and finding it lacking, sad, futile. I smiled at strangers, thinking of that oldie about the smell of desperation. I smiled once too often and wound up on the floor facing the boot heel of a bald behemoth in a leather vest. I had smiled at the wrong blonde, and now Ook the Caveman was going to mulch my skull.

  I should have taken that as a warning. A sign that I should not be in this place at this time. When such thoughts occur, it is usually too late for thinking beings to benefit from them, like the French notion of staircase wit—you know, l’esprit de l’escalier—thinking of the right rejoinder too late? A lot of people don’t know that expression was coined by a guy named Denis Diderot, a freethinker and encyclopedist who advanced a very early version of the theory of natural selection in the mid-1700s. Never mind. The strong prevail. I was about to get my head crushed as proof.

  Ook withdrew. I missed it. I was too busy shutting my eyes and reconsidering prayer. Bracing for impact and calculating hospital costs. Completely pathetic, am I right?

  When I opened my eyes, I saw Ook talking to a man in a white topcoat. Ook was easily a foot and a half taller, but he wore a penitential expression akin to that of a chastised child. The gentleman in the topcoat smiled and spoke in a low, even voice. I could not hear what he said, but whatever it was, it humanized my assailant, who seemed mildly confused. I thought the man had Ook in some sort of nerve grab, squeezing his armpit hard enough to immobilize him, but no, that wasn’t it.

  The big man nodded in understanding and helped me up off the deck. “Sorry, dude,” was all he said, and he melted back into the bustle of the Friday night bar biz. When I saw him half an hour later, he was sitting by himself and weeping.

  Great, now I was obligated to a benefactor. Swell. I know that makes me an ingrate, but it was what I really, truly thought at the moment. But people rarely say what they’re thinking, and that was kind of the lesson of the entire evening.

  The man in the topcoat wore a tailored three-piece suit. He had modest pattern baldness and a smile full of dentures. Paternal, with interestingly wrinkled hands. Now he was smiling at me. He introduced himself as Niall Otheringame and idly added that the rescue for which I complimented him was nothing, really.

  Great, I’ve managed to attract an old fag, I thought. Swell. He sees a semen mouthwash followed by an asshole-widening. Outstanding.

  “You were thinking about silverware,” he said. “Just before. That’s the first intriguing thought I’ve encountered all week. I’d like to hear more.”

  I’m afraid I made a ridiculous face. “Silver—?”

  “Flatware,” he said. “Knives, forks, spoons. You were trying to explain it to that young lady at the bar when her escort interceded. I fear he thought it was some sort of pickup line, you see?”

  Oh, right. I once invented this perverse notion that people were largely the same, divisible into the three major kinds of eating utensils. It was an adequate rap to displace anything like genuine conversation. I was unenthusiastically explaining it to the cleavage of the nowvanished blond lady, already knowing it was the same as talking modern art to a throw rug. For the benefit of Mr. Otheringame, who had done me a kindness, I reeled off the story.

  At length. I should have just shut up.

  “You know that expression about how someone was ‘born with a silver spoon in their mouth’?” I began, feeling guilty for having refined my story to a speech. “Well, I’ll tell you something: everyone is born with a spoon in their mouth, and sometimes it’s silver, and sometimes it’s wood. Sometimes it’s golden or platinum; imagine a black diamond spoon. But it doesn’t mean the individual is spoonish per se. Some of them are born with spatulas in their mouths, or shovels. Or, considering their sloth and girth, ladles. Soft, plastic ladles, molded in urethane so as not to harm or impede the delivery of double shares. You know which people are spoonish, and which are soup-spoonish. Think about it.”

  “‘Spoonid,’” said Niall Otheringame with an indulgent smile.

  “You are what you eat with. You know knivish people are aggro, direct, and all the adjectives—sharp, edgy, keen, pointed—all say the same thing. Handle with care. Forkish people try to have it both ways. They can say one thing and mean, or do, another. They have lots of utility. Politicians and actors enjoy forkishness. Sometimes they are knives or spoons masquerading as forks, or those multipurpose tools that deploy from a Swiss Army knife.

  “It is very important for knifely people to make love as though they are attacking one another. They strop themselves to sharpness on others. Fork people service themselves while appearing to service others. And you already know about spooning.

  “Look at a fork. Now look at a human hand. Add an opposable thumb—intelligence—and there you are. It is important to remember that you can take out a human eye with a knife, a fork, or a spoon. Or a chopstick, for that matter. The only operative differ
ences are in degree of efficiency, level of sadism or pain, and available time. Spoons can kill, and frequently do. Do not underestimate the spoon. Spoons can clean up what knives or forks leave in their haste. Think of Dr. Frankenstein as a fork, his monster as a knife, and Igor as a spoon, and you can figure out most human relationships.

  “Life is a meal. Knives, forks, and spoons are useless without the concept of consumption, and humans consume each other in order to amass what is called ‘a life.’ They chew each other up, spit out the bits they dislike, pick and choose, refine their appetites. They snack, gorge, and starve. Bulemics and gourmands all use the same basic tools; it’s all a matter of desires, objectives, and tastes.

  “Roll the idea around on your palate. Knivish people, forkish people, spoonish people. Spoons secretly want to be knives. Forks pretend to be spoons. Everyone wants to be something else, and a lot of furious biological activity is devoted toward presenting a personality that may have admirable aspects of all three, with no downside. In truth, there is no such person. But that doesn’t stop them from trying to be silverware.”

  I took a long drink to signal my break. Niall Otheringame had paid polite attention. Around us, the patrons of Back 40 continued to swarm, but now it was as if we were inside our own hermetic bubble.

  “Now, that’s amusing,” he said. “You see? Much better than sitting in a bar, boring each other to death with chitchat. Better to say what is on your mind than erode your audience with business, politics, or religion.”

  “What people mean when they chat you up and say ‘What’s your story?’ and you tell them what you do to earn money.”

  “Exactly. I give not a tinker’s damn what people do for money. There is no rational point to discussing politics—none. About religion I care even less. All that”—Niall Otheringame groped the air for an appropriate word—“noise pollution about some invisible skygod.”