Her companion had counseled her to eat, but she would not eat. He came to her apartment bearing gifts: a shapely thigh, a breast fulsome with milk, a smoky, musky phallus; but she merely measured off frugal doses of her blood with a syringe and dispensed them gingerly into the plastic tops of cough syrup bottles, marked off in tablespoons. In the gray, silken evenings they sat comfortably on her couch and sipped in companionable silence. She asked whether her blood did not give him the hungers, but that, he said, was what he liked it for. Disrobing with supple tact, her considerate companion displayed the sliced planes of his buttocks, the half-moons where his torso had been spooned out like a melon. She inquired why it was their fellows had so far declined with gratitude the offering of her own parts. “You're still such a virgin, little one,” said her loyal companion. She pinned him with sharp eyes. “The flesh eaten still on the living body,” he told her, “there is the union.” “Your finger, our host, my hymen?” she asked. “Fellatios, my sweet,” lisped her companion. She eyed the swell of his forearm with avarice, the muscles coiled in knots under his slippery shirt. “Not me, my darling,” he said, and lifted his remaining finger to tick-tock through the air in drowsy admonishment. “You make your own way; then you come home.”
She turned and looked full into the stutter of the camera of her colleague. He berated her. “That's not spontaneous!” He insisted that the project set for the class was for the photographer to be the hunter, and the subject the prey. That made it edgy. “Oh,” she said, “you're not hunting; you're farming. Picking off creatures grazing at pasture, dull in contemplation.” She struck a candid pose, lips slightly agape, eyes askew, her expression garbled, transparent and opaque, like a muddy pond. He was discontent. If she stalked the camera, he reasoned, if she had him in her sights, while he had her in his, that skewed the terms of the assignment. “True,” she conceded, “that's not hunting,” she said; “that's war.” He snapped her picture. “Caught you!” her new colleague crowed. “Let's eat,” she proposed. She had forgotten to pack a meal, so he accompanied her through the lunch line, selecting a Charlotte of Bavarian creme and ladyfingers, while she consumed a Manwich.
She escorted her exquisite companion to the city bay where they sat on the dock, shoes off and pants rolled to the knees, smiling at the disparity of their feet in the water, hers crumpled and dented and damp from her pumps, his slender, prosthetic, dove-gray. The bats in the twilight were reckless and extraordinary; the seagulls had hidden themselves but called out fierce and lonesome, like the whistles of locomotives on the track of the tremulous far horizon. They had purchased small waxed envelopes of sweet, crispy nuts. She swallowed hers nearly whole, while he chewed his bites minutely and spat them out in neat piles on the gravel shore.
Her companion was wistful. The fine engraving of his face looked stony and the quizzical glances and debonair moues by which she knew him seemed painful to execute. She reached in experiment to probe the softness of his cheek and he winced, a tremor of delectable fineness and subtlety.
“Melancholy,” her companion apologized, “a disease not commonly recognized as having its origins in exposure to freshness of air. I am so little accustomed to the pathos of the junction of the land and the sea.”
He was sorrowful, wondering, his chin tucked into the refuge of his collar, his cowlick sprouting in the salt spray like that of a small boy.
“Don't,” he chastised her, “feel maternal. You can't imagine the monsters in those deeps. That is so much more dangerous.”
“More dangerous than this?”
“There's little danger here.”
“Is our safety so assured?”
“Au contraire.” He was amused again, his mouth twisting and curling to savor the joke. “It's our downfall that's reliable.”
She was comforted. She wedged herself against him, and he allowed this, though she could feel the warmth on her shoulder where a suture on his breast had wrenched open with the nesting of her weight. The bats were sucked upward into the sky, caught by the magnetic pull of the stars, and the mosquitoes rushed in, enveloping the happy couple, and falling in quivering piles to the dock, all around them.
She woke at the first stain of sunlight on the face of the sky and slithered to the floor to enter her stretches. They came more easily now that her muscles were drained and limp and she laid her cheek between her legs against the floorboards and sniffed the old gasoline smell of the paint; the gamy traces of her footsteps; a cloying, pulpy odor of breakfast in the apartment below. In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth, tilting her chin back to cup the toothpaste in her mouth, staring down her nose at the mirror. This gave her an accusing look. She made a kind, understanding face that returned to her as a nauseous leer. She giggled. In the shower she ran the water so hot it nearly melted the glue that held her skin to her substructure. Her flesh slipped dangerously over its ligaments. “Oops,” she said.
She had recently treated herself to a French press and, swaddled luxuriously in her old pink robe, she tipped in the beans she'd ground the night before, and punished them with water at a rapid boil. Setting the egg timer to four-and-a-half minutes, she dressed for work: leggings, slacks, two cardigans. She relaxed at the table with granola and berries, slapping back the unfurled and flapping wings of the newspaper. A merry little robin perched on her windowsill, stabbing with its beak at its reflection in the pane.
At work she attacked the keys of her calculator with especial vivacity, tapping her rhythm into the brain of her new colleague. She broke a light sweat, and several pencil leads. The chalky scent of her perspiration, buoyed on a cloud of lily-pale eau de toilette, made its way across the aisle. Her hair was hectic with static. She kept her best three-quarters profile toward the door of her cubicle, and never looked round.
Her colleague invited her to an after-work aperitif. He had a Bloody Mary; she enjoyed a Cinzano. His photography course was finished; he would move on to sculpture in just a few weeks. He displayed the final array of photographs on the tabletop. There she was, blinking, flinching in all her poses. “You see,” he chortled, “it was better when you didn't know I was taking them. You came at the camera,” he said, gesticulating, “in a flurry of fear. It was kinder, after all, to take you unaware.” She concurred with her new colleague.
He fell asleep with the lights on. If the patchwork of her body, the scars of old decay, the faint sifting and rattling sounds of shriveled things within her, had worried him, he hadn't shown it, and she would now require the illumination for precision. She had discovered that the area least sensitive to touch was likely to be the back of the shoulders. She inserted the point just above his scapula, turning the flat of the blade parallel to his skin, and cut two sides of a small triangle. Without completing the figure, she lifted the flap, hovering above him in an unwieldy posture, propped on her knuckles, and chewed the skin. She was careful not to sever it, as she did not want to have to cut another piece. The living, she noted, did not have as much taste as the dead. He was tough and elastic. And she could feel the muscles shrinking away from the grind of her teeth. When she had at last reduced the flesh to a small, spongy lump, sticky but bloodless, she yanked it off—he snorted slightly—dropped it in the trash can, wrapped in a tissue; drank a glass of water in the crackling light of the bathroom; dabbed on a touch of lipstick; and locked the door behind her as she went.
She had never eaten so well in her life. They brought her sweet, sticky rice; curried cauliflower delirious with coconut milk; jungles of spaghetti, mired in Alfredo sauce; pinto-bean chili black with molasses. For a long time she would not touch meat, not trusting the source, but then they began to carry in animals roasted whole: a suckling pig, turned on a spit; an infant lamb in a roasting pan, its hooves tucked in trustingly; turkeys spilling out oysters; crabs crusted in ethereal salt; and these she felt safe in consuming. She promised she would sit very still, so they cuffed her only by one foot; and she kept her word, burrowed in somnolent complacence in her featherbed, in an e
ndless drowse, basting herself for her banquet. She was stupefied, seduced, but she knew herself to be tempting, was confident their mouths would water for her. She waited, and every day she grew more ardent.
She had little idea of the passage of time, and when the temperature in her cell began to rise she wondered if summer was finally upon them and if they were saving her, perhaps, for a midsummer feast. The intensification of the heat was, however, accompanied by great commotion in the hall, by the repeated jostling of doors and the thumping of wheels over uneven ground, by the smell of outdoors, lichen and bark and wood sap, and finally, it came to her, a far-away rushing sound, a flickering, hissing, panting growl, like the anger of the surf.
To her beautiful companion, who came every day to see her, she said, “Something is not right.”
Her companion asked if she was weary of waiting. He had lost his nose, and his face, always a ravishment, was now even more moving to her, a stately ruin sliding down the cliff of his skull to the sea beneath. She denied his imputation. She was eager, she said, but not weary. She would do whatever was necessary to be most pleasing to the company. “Only,” she said, “they have built a fire.”
Her faithful companion assented to this conjecture. “A very large one,” he said, “they began it in the dining hall, with the banquet-table, and they have been piling wood on for days.”
“I thought,” she faltered, “that I was not to have been slaughtered first.”
Her companion considered the suave line of his shoe. He tugged sadly at the scraps of his earlobe. At last he said, “You are not held to be quite delicious enough for that.”
“No?” she said.
“Lamentably not,” said her doting companion. “I consider it a piece of great foolishness.”
“You would have eaten me alive?” she beseeched him.
“Oh,” said her companion, “I fear it must be acknowledged that I would not have been able to eat you at all.”
Blackout curtains covered the windows, but she could hear the hammering of the rain against the glass, like a mob of useless fists. “Please help me,” she said.
Her loving companion held her hands between the butts of his wrists. He smiled down at her. “I can't help you,” he said, “but I won't hinder you.” And then he took his leave.
She heaved her body from the bed to the floor. The manacle, she discovered, could slide some distance up her leg, but could not be made by any contortion to allow her foot to slip through. Bending her leg at the knee, she grasped her toes with both hands, and stretched forward. The skin at her ankle was tender, and she was not prepared for the juice that shot out and battered the back of her throat in an insistent stream. After her long recumbence, the muscle was creamy and fine. She nibbled all around, using her nails to tear at the meat on the far opposite side of the limb, and flexed her jaw for the bone. But this shattered in her mouth, releasing a puff of powder that mingled unpleasantly with the red paste of the marrow. With the elimination of the foot, the manacle clanked to the ground. Staunching the bleeding took time, however, and she endured this impatiently. At last she was able to lurch to the door of her cell, and propping her body against the wall, to heave it open.
The guests were garlanding the dining-hall fire with armfuls of flowers; burning petals drifted in the air. The thin crystal flutes they held glowed with the champagne inside them, like pale coals. The long limbs of the women waved gracefully in greeting; the men bobbed their heads at her with rough affection. Her own companion was not among them. Across the room, beside the door, the eyes of the manservant were black in the black smoke. She hobbled in his direction. At this movement, a cry went up, and the guests began applauding. The champagne slapped the sides of the flutes in cheerful chimes and the celebration lashed across the room, and all the company danced in a great spiral, like a whirlpool sucking through the house. The eyes of the guests were brilliant, adoring; their faces were tilted up, innocent, anticipatory, as if to be kissed. Their delirium raised a dazzling bright wind in the hall: she breathed it in: odorless; swallowed it: tasteless; trapped it in her lungs, where it disappeared, weightless. She stood on her leg and observed the guests as, fingers interlaced, hair tangled together, their breaths muddling in each other's mouths, their exultant cries in each other's ears, they danced and danced. She saw that in an instant the floor would collapse beneath the force of their joy and their affection for her.
Micaela Morrissette is a senior editor of the journal Conjunctions, where her stories have appeared. A fiction reviewer for Jacket and Rain Taxi, she is also the editor of a symposium of multimedia works investigating the poet John Ashbery's domestic environments. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and has been reprinted in Best American Fantasy. At present, she's collaborating with visual artist Joshua Pelletier on a mythology of the Rat King. A native of West Virginia, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
* * *
PURR
by Michael Bishop
I am not, in the argot of inveterate townhouse dwellers and desperate soccer moms, a cat person. But when I call on Paige, I feign a curmudgeonly tolerance of the fat miaower who shares her flat. After all, I hope to leave with Paige on my arm and to return after fajitas and a fandango to the carnal remuneration for which my courtship charade functions as lead-in. There ain't no such thing as a no-strings smooch, as a frat brother of mine used to put it, and the dude knew whereof he spake.
At the door, Paige greets me with a glancing buss to the mouth and two admonishing pats to the lapels of my cranberry-colored leather coat. “Roland, Roland, you're twenty minutes early, you goof.”
Visible over her shoulder in the galley doorway stands the incontinent thirty-five-pound feline whom she dotes on with a self-mocking adoration that I deplore. Swishing his flag-like tail, the tom regards me with his spooky emerald peepers, almost appraisingly. A recent Cassandra Wilson CD plays provocatively in the background.
“Get you a drink,” Paige says. “I'll finish dressing.”
“I'm not thirsty. And you look dressed to me.” I try to slide my hand into the front of her dressing-gown.
Paige grabs my wrist. “You'd think I look dressed in a Band-Aid.” And she leads me to a forest-green leatherette lounger with a baton-operated footrest. “Sit, Roland. Fifteen minutes. Then we'll paint the town.”
“Fifteen means thirty,” I tell her.
She shoves me down and, levering the footrest upward under my calves, gives me a glimpse of cleavage. “Fifteen means just that. Sit. Relax. Listen to Cassandra. Dream a little dream of me.”
Clearly, Paige has Cassandra mixed up with Mama Cass. Meanwhile, her overweight grey-and-white tom—which she long ago saddled with the moniker G.K. Grimalkin—advances toward me like a puffer in a crosscurrent. He appears on his last fins, a feline fugu full of a toxin that makes his breath go before him like sardine-cannery fumes. He's as wide as a geriatric sea lion and more pitiful in his decrepitude than a quadriplegic octopus.
Even more pathetic is the fact that he likes me. He has always liked me. His purr, with which he preens and wheedles, has the husky subaqueous burr of a broken torpedo propeller. G.K. purrs as he approaches. He painfully hoists his squat forelimbs, scrabbles at the footrest, and hangs there gazing lovingly up the Himalayan slope of my legs and chest. I give him back my best disapproving Mount Rushmore visage, stern and granitic, but it dissuades him no better than would a filet of mahi-mahi.
“He's so cute he kills me,” Paige says.
“He's such a chub he can't get up here. Thank God.”
“Now, now.” And to G.K.: “Poor widdle Gwimawkin. Jwus wed me wif you onto wuv-we Wowand's wab.”
“No,” I tell her. “Don't.”
But she translates her baby talk into action and lifts poor little G.K. onto “lovely Roland's lap,” where he settles like a cannonball wrapped in the ashen pelage of penicillin mold. He cranks his broken-propeller purr up into a drone punctuated by sleep-apnea gaps and raspy near silences.
/> “Well, aren't you the pair?” Paige pats my arm, scratches G.K.'s bowl-sized dome, and heads for her room. “So long for now, boys: Be sweet.” When she's gone, G.K. and I eye each other like moony freshmen at separate tables in a high-school cafeteria, although I am the less moony of the two. The engine in G.K.'s throat runs at its highest hiccup-accented setting, and his eyes lower nictitating membranes through which his squinting green irises peer with eerie steadfastness.
“Sold!” I bark, startling the tom. “My imperishable soul for the return of my lap: the immediate return!”
G.K. crooks me a Cheshire-cat grin and closes his eyes. He does not hop down, being unfit for hopping, but neither does he flop to the floor like a pile of sodden rags.
No, he kneads my thighs. Through my trousers, he kneads my tautening flesh as a biscuit maker would work a ball of dough, clenching and unclenching his manicured claws to the clunky music of his deafening purr.
“Cut that out,” I tell him. “Knock off the one-note commentary.”
So G.K. briefly regards me—through smugly slit eyes—before ratcheting up both the rhythm of his kneadiness and the volume of his purr. He rolls more Rs than Long John Silver. He digs me deeper than Dizzy Gillespie: burr and purr, delve and dig, a cross-sensual litany of aural tactility. Catch and release. Clench and unclench. Squeeze and snag. Grasp and let go. It doesn't hurt, and the accompaniment, G.K.'s enigmatic throaty motor, has a mesmerizing effect just this side of soporific. You're getting sleepy, the purr implies. You're sifting and drifting, floating and boating, descending into and through your body to a sublevel of Lethe you've never visited before.
O, yes, I can sense that darn cat sinking into me, inter-molecularizing with my very blood and being. . . .
“Roland!” Paige's voice summons me back from somewhere, but not for long; after all, G.K. refuses even to pause, either with his paws or his hypnotic bronchial bleating, which soothes because its persistent loudness overwhelms the rest of my somatic sensorium, with the result that the deeper he digs the deeper into this nerve-laving misty la-la-land my quasi-conscious avatar descends, synapse over synapse.
Weird Tales, Volume 352 Page 11
