UnCommon Bodies: A Collection of Oddities, Survivors, and Other Impossibilities (UnCommon Anthologies Book 1)

by Michael Harris Cohen

  Whereas the prettiest, cleanest girls get to work in the West End, spending their days in the finest bawdyhouses, counting their earnings in shillings and pounds, the worn-out bunters of Cable Street count the sale of their flesh in pence, or enough gin to get drunk on. This is the last stop before inevitable debility and the workhouse. There is no place worse.

  Repulsed by the rampant immorality of this iniquitous quarter, Lizzie walks quickly, acknowledging no-one. Afraid of what she might find within, she locates the address on the letters and steps inside a rundown tenement where single rooms are let to all and sundry—bad characters and all.

  Upon making a few inquiries, she's directed up a rickety wooden staircase cluttered with rag-clad children. On the third floor, she knocks on a wonky, tobacco-stained door and strains to listen for a reply, the air thick with the din of crying babies, wailing women, and the execrations of angry, drunken men.

  "Who is it?" a soft, groggy voice calls out from the other side. "It ain't rent day."

  Lizzie hesitates, unsure of how to introduce herself. "You don't know me," she says at last. "But I have something what belongs to you."

  No reply.

  "You knew a woman called Mary Jane," Lizzie forges on. "She lived in Miller's Court...was murdered last year."

  That proves sufficiently rousing, and Lizzie waits with bated breath as bare feet pitter patter across the wooden floor in the room beyond, followed by the click of the latch.

  The door opens a crack and a dark-haired woman peeks out, her brow puckered with a frown. "Who are you?"

  "My name's Lizzie." The teen beams a warm smile. "Are you Kate?"

  The frown deepens.

  Lizzie opens her mouth to say more, but the woman—undoubtedly Kate—grabs her by the arm and drags her into the smoky, candlelit room beyond, slamming the door behind her.

  "You were a friend of Mary Jane's?" she asks, almost accusingly.

  "No..." Lizzie backs out of Kate's reach and bumps into a washstand, the basin filled with stagnant, dirty water. "I live there. In Miller's Court," she explains. "I rent the room where...well, where it happened."

  "What brought you to me?" Kate's tone doesn't soften.

  "I was cleaning the place up...or trying to." Lizzie pulls the bound stack of envelopes from the deep pocket in her dress. "I found these..."

  Kate snatches them from her. "You read them?" Her jaw tightens.

  "It's all right. You needn't be ashamed." Lizzie supposes the reason for her tetchiness. "I've got a cousin what's that way inclined, and I don't see as there's anything wrong in it."

  Kate holds the letters to her chest. "I guarantee she ain't nothing like me." She turns from the door, retreating to a slanted table on the other side of the narrow, windowless room.

  Evidently, Lizzie's knock woke her from a deep sleep. She's wearing only her underclothes: cotton stockings, chemise, and corset. Her hair's tousled and disheveled, spilling from a loose braid and tumbling over her shoulders. Her eyes are puffy and dark, yesterday's eye powder still smeared on the lids, smudged onto her cheeks. She could be in her twenties, but she looks older. Still, she's a fine-looking woman. She has well-formed, healthy curves. Her bust is full, bulging from the confines of her corset, and her legs...long, shapely legs.

  "Do you really sleep there?" Kate spins around, catching her staring.

  "In the very bed." Lizzie nods.

  "Why?" Tears prick Kate's eyes, her mood subdued, anger and annoyance dissipated. "Why would you live in that place? However can you bear it?"

  "I can't afford nowhere else." Lizzie hangs her head, stealing a furtive glance at more of Kate's undergarments strung up to dry on a curtain wire across the ceiling. "The landlord gived it me cheap 'cause no-one else would take it on." She fishes in her pocket for the coin purse. "I also found these." She empties the coins into her palm. "It didn't feel right to keep 'em, and I thought, since you was her friend, she'd want you to make use of it."

  Kate accepts the meager offering. Their hands graze as Lizzie turns the coin into her palm, and much to the teen's surprise, Kate's hands are soft. They're not the hands of a woman who's ever done any hard labor, and her nails are neat, buffed and colored a pearly pink.

  "Would you like something to drink?" Kate dumps the coins on a shoddily-constructed mantel above a disused hearth and sets about looking for booze. "Help yourself to a seat."

  Lizzie would, but there isn't one. For lack of anywhere else to alight, she perches on the edge of the bed, the palliasse sagging under her weight. She hopes there's no vermin. Shifting uneasily, she watches Kate work her way through one abandoned liquor bottle after the next, in search of one that isn't empty. Upon finding some rum at the very back of her ramshackle cupboard, she spits in two cups, gives them a perfunctory wipe with a bit of old linen, and pours two generous measures.

  "God bless you for being so sweet." She hands one cup to Lizzie and sinks onto the bed beside her. "Ain't many as would've sought me out the way you did."

  "It was the proper thing." Lizzie picks a dead ant out of her drink. "It means one less risk you have to take tonight at least."

  Kate regards her carefully, one eyebrow cocked. "Concerned for my safety, are you?"

  Lizzie shrugs. "Don't it put a fright in you?" She nurses her cup, disinclined to drink from it. "Working the way you do, what with Jack n'all."

  "What other way is there?"

  That's the truth of it, and Lizzie knows it. Since coming to London, she's tried to make her way as a flower seller, but London has thus far proved to be a wild and untamable beast.

  Nevertheless, "Aintchu afeared of him? What he did to your friend..."

  "Friends," Kate corrects her. "I knew them all in varying degrees, for we were of the same sort." She downs her rum. "He found out what they were. That's why he chose them."

  "Sapphists," Lizzie supposes, having inferred as much from the letters.

  "Not all of us." Kate shakes her head, staring into her empty cup, longing for the materialization of more rum.

  "What, then?" Lizzie fails to fathom what else could possibly trigger such hatred and violence. "How is he provoked into such madness?"

  "I ain't sure of the proper name for it, but I can show you." Kate places her cup on the floor and reaches for Lizzie's hand, drawing it up, under her chemise and between her parted thighs before any objection can be made.

  Her firm grip prevents Lizzie from recoiling, and the teen gasps as her reluctant fingers make contact with Kate's core, feeling first the lubricious furrow, then higher. Where she knows there ought to be the seat of a woman's pleasure, there is a protrusion. A lump. Something soft and fleshy obtruding from her groin at the apex of her slit, sprouting from a dense thicket of pubic curls.

  "This is why he cuts them." Kate loosens her hold. "He cuts all trace of it away, then he takes their wombs—the very essence of their femininity. When he's done with them, they're nothing. Not man or woman. Only flesh."

  Thinking it to be some hideous deformity, Lizzie wraps her fingers around the thing, examining its shape. At first, it fits snugly in her palm, but under her continued ministrations, it begins to swell. It gains length and thickness, stiffens, and her breath catches in her throat.

  Panicked, she wrests her hand free and scoots to the end of the bed, her back pressed to the footboard. "Whatever is it?!"

  "Do you wish to see?" Kate pinches the hem of her chemise between her fingers and lifts it up, revealing a perfect replica of the virile member. "It's all right to be curious. Plenty people are."

  "Oh, lummy..." Lizzie gulps down her rum and edges closer, her eyes riveted to Kate's peculiar anatomy. "I ain't never seen such a thing." She ducks down for a better look, her hot breath arousing the sensitive flesh of those parts.

  "I'm sorry." Kate pulls her chemise back into place, covering her priapus as it rises to full rigidity. "I ain't that well in control of it."

  "Why does it do that?" Lizzie keeps her eyes pinned to the bulge in Kate
's lap.

  "Because you're beautiful."

  Intrigued beyond all logic and reason, Lizzie teases Kate's chemise up again, rucking it over her belly and fully exposing her southern regions. "It gets such a swelling." She admires the length and girth of the thing and wraps her hand around it once more, feeling it at full stiffness. "So hard n'all."

  "Ain't you never felt a prick before?" Kate reclines, letting her feel where she may.

  Lizzie shakes her head. "My mam says men ain't nuthin' but trouble, and that I'd best avoid the nuisance their pricks so often cause to a girl."

  "Good job I ain't a man, then." Kate smirks. "Do you want to see more of me?" Without waiting for an answer, she strips off her corset and chemise, unveiling her ample charms and allowing Lizzie to feast on her nudity. "Explore me if you wish." She lies down, availing her body to Lizzie's inquisitive touches.

  And what a body it is! Womanly in every regard...excepting one.

  Lizzie ventures nearer and continues her investigation of Kate's priapic appendage. Awed by its weight, she flops it onto Kate's stomach and tiptoes her fingers up the shaft, counting the inches. She arrives at eight. Eight inches of firm, throbbing flesh, topped with a smooth, bulbous head.

  "Are they all quite so big?"

  "Not a bit." Kate laughs. "I'm generously proportioned. Some I've seen ain't no bigger than your little finger." She waggles her pinky in Lizzie's face.

  Amused to think that Kate should be distinctly better endowed than many men, Lizzie swirls her fingertip around the fat crown, committing the sight of it to memory, lest she should never again have the opportunity to indulge in such erotic larks. In fact, she's so set on harnessing as much enjoyment out of this encounter as possible that when a single droplet of anticipation beads on the tip, she scoops it onto her finger and sucks it into her mouth.

  That proves too much. Immediately self-conscious, her cheeks grow hot and she turns away. Alarmed by the force of her own precipitously revealed lusts, her cunt pulsing between her thighs, she shuffles to the side of the bed, ashamed that she should've behaved so lewdly.

  "I feels all queer."

  Kate nestles up behind her, diagnosing the problem directly. "Do you want to fuck?" she whispers, her breath tickling Lizzie's neck.

  "I ain't never..." Lizzie whimpers, her head swimming.

  "But do you want to?"

  "I promised my mam I wouldn't." Lizzie swallows hard, determined to retain the last of her rapidly evaporating morals. "Not before marriage. It's a sin."

  "If I were a man, perhaps." Kate eases up Lizzie's skirts inch by inch, tugging them over her knees. "But I ain't." She glides her hand up Lizzie's leg. "What sin can there be between two women?" She forces her way between the teen's tightly clamped thighs and fumbles through the opening in her split drawers, finding her treasure saturated with unrealized desire. "And you do want it ever so badly."

  "It's so wicked," Lizzie mewls, doing nothing whatever to stop her wandering hand. "I'll be going straight to hell if I let you have the first of me. I know I will."

  "This is hell, darling." Kate tickles her fingers over the hardened nub atop Lizzie's needy sex, making her quiver. "All the devils are here among us. We must snatch our pleasure where we can, before it's too late."

  Rendered insensible by Kate's digital attentions, Lizzie surrenders herself. Kate's roving hands soon divest her of the layers: bodice, skirts, petticoat, camisole, corset, chemise, and drawers. Left in nothing but her white cotton stockings, she accepts Kate's kisses and caresses everywhere from her neck to her rump, delighting in the titillation.

  Wound up to such a pitch that she then loses all sense of modesty, she rolls onto her side and crushes their bodies together, trapping Kate's priapus between them. Flinging a leg over Kate's hip, she draws herself tighter and grinds on the turgid instrument, generating a delicious friction until their bellies become slippery and wet. Perplexed by this sudden change in sensation, she peers down, surprised to see a profusion of mucilaginous goop oozing from the engorged pipe.

  "It's leaking."

  "I need to come." Kate guides Lizzie's hand to her erection. "Help me." She wraps the teen's fingers around the shaft, showing her how to move. "I'm so close."

  Close to what? Lizzie isn't sure, but she wants to find out. She fists Kate's well-lubricated organ with clumsy enthusiasm, her hand gliding smoothly up and down the slick flesh, her pace increasing as Kate's breathing quickens.

  "That's it," Kate encourages her. "Just a little more..."

  Not a minute later, her hips flex and she bucks into Lizzie's hand, her priapus erupting with volcanic force.

  Startled by several bursts of hot fluid spurting onto her stomach and breasts, Lizzie squeals. "You don't half make a mess with it!" She giggles, rolling onto her back, her semenalized torso shimmering in the candlelight. "Wherever does it all come from?"

  "Damned if I know, but it aches to be released." Kate takes a moment to recover, then plucks a towel from the washing line above their heads and wipes her thick, creamy deposit off Lizzie's body. "It causes such a discomfort when it ain't tended to."

  Her interest in the thing not yet abated, Lizzie glances at Kate's appendage, disappointed to find it withering. "The swelling's gone." She pouts.

  "For a while." Kate discards the towel and wriggles between Lizzie's legs. "Until I'm stirred to passion again." She explores the teen's hitherto untouched body.

  "How long might that be?" Impatience creeps into Lizzie's voice.

  "Not long," Kate assures her, prying apart the folds of her sex. "Not if you let me kiss you." She admires the carmine slit, the entrance to Lizzie's body obstructed by a pink membranous barrier.

  "Ain't I already let you kiss me?"

  "Not like this." Kate dips her head between Lizzie's spread thighs.

  The hot lashes of her tongue come as a surprise. Lizzie howls at the ceiling, her sex engulfed in heat, Kate's soft mouth kissing and licking, her tongue probing.

  "Whatever are you about?!" She grips fistfuls of the bed sheets. "I ain't never known of a person to do such a dirty, filthy thing! You mustn't..."

  The protest dies on her lips. Ever so gradually, a pressure builds in her abdomen and she begins to shake, her first orgasm coming upon her hard and fast, her voluptuous moans mounting in frequency and intensity until, fearing she might have a fit, she wails at the ceiling and convulses against Kate's mouth, her insides in spasms.

  In the wake of her paroxysm, all the tension in her body dissipates. Her thighs relax, opening wider in full submission to pleasure, and she looks down, thrilled to see Kate's anatomy wholly restored. The straining instrument is mightily swollen and jabbing at her mound, the tip glistening with a fresh sheen of pearly excitement.

  Sensing her want, Kate scoots forward, nudging the head of her weeping lance through Lizzie's plump folds and embedding it in her core, its progress halted by her intact hymen.

  Feeling a twinge, her maidenhead stretching to accommodate the intrusion, a frown creases Lizzie's brow. "Will it hurt?"

  "It might a little." Kate lays her hands on Lizzie's hips, preparing to thrust forward. "But only at first. Any discomfort will soon pass."

  "Is it...safe?" The frown sticks.

  Kate nods. "I shan't wet inside."

  Her concerns suitably assuaged by that promise, Lizzie closes her eyes and holds her breath, preparing for pain, then Kate gives one firm shove. She lodges the bulbous head of her priapus completely within Lizzie's virgin body, obliterating her hymen, and at the moment of defloration, Lizzie stifles a yelp. Then it's over.

  Kate plunges up her tight channel, fully impaling her. "How does it feel?" She hilts herself, her movements languid and unhurried, drawing out their pleasure. "Do you like it?"

  Incapable of words, Lizzie clutches at Kate's back, urging her on, moaning with every upstroke, but their first coupling isn't destined to last. In just a few minutes, Kate's rhythm falters. There's a strained look on her face, almost pained
, as if she's holding something back—which she is—and she starts to withdraw.

  "I must stop."

  "Don't." Lizzie grips her rump, pulling her deeper. "I'm nearly coming." She encourages Kate to resume her operations. "Have your spend in me."

  Groaning with need, Kate remains embedded. "Are you sure, love?"

  Ignorant of the dangers, Lizzie nods. "You ain't no man. What harm could there be in it?"

  Ah, what harm indeed! Kate moves harder and faster, driving herself toward completion, her thrusts becoming ever more frantic, her inevitable crisis soon brought on by the exquisite tightening of Lizzie's climaxing sex, each contraction milking her priapus, delivering her libation deep into Lizzie's unprotected womb.

  During the course of the afternoon and early evening, Kate and Lizzie are inspired to incorporate their bodies twice more, both couplings concluding with Lizzie receiving Kate's abundant and potent spendings inside her fertile body, the unsheathed tip of Kate's lance pressed firmly against the gateway to her womb. When finally sated—the starch well and truly gone from Kate's mighty organ, all attempts to rouse it resulting in failure—they fall asleep in each other's arms.

  Later, waking in the small hours of the night, Lizzie rolls over to her bedmate, hoping that some rest will have had a rejuvenating effect on her parts, but Kate is nowhere to be found. Instead, there's a note left on her pillow.

  Must work. Back soon.

  Thinking it the natural course of things, Lizzie pushes away her paranoid fears and tries to go back to sleep. She fails. Nightmarish thoughts keep her awake, and just before dawn, she rises with the intent to hunt Kate down and drag her back to bed.

  As she sits up, a torrent of Kate's milky sediment responds to gravity and evacuates her body, trickling down her thighs. Stupidly, she hadn't thought to wash. Before their second poke, Kate had confessed that she was more than capable of doing damage equal to that of any man, but by that time, Lizzie was too hot cunted to care.