by Rune Skelley
The random overlapping remarks produced a new thought cutting across them. Fin heard it as if it had been spoken by a single voice instead of a dozen.
I gotta be home by dinnertime.
I’ll come up with something
That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!
it’s just a joke.
Got an A in history last semester.
Hash browns, or a muffin?”
Bob’s desk is the dirtiest in the office.
This is clearly not what I ordered.
Find out what it will involve.
Their fruit salad even has kumquats and
Either way, be sure to let me know
Fin heard, “Gotta come up with the funniest joke in history. Or the dirtiest. Clearly it will involve kumquats either way.”
He laughed, and could tell by the glares of the line cooks that he was quite loud. With an inward note to suppress any further guffaws, Fin kept his ears unfocused just right.
The next one sounded even more distinct, incorporating lyrics from the song on the kitchen radio.
Now it seems so simple, but at the time
would never work to just have one car.
It’s hard having everybody count on you.
I was off by two.
Seriously, what are the odds of that happening?
know when to hold ’em
Strider is Aragorn, and the Evenstar is Arwen.
know when to fold ’em
I hate parallel parking.
If Buck U ever processes my application
Don’t make a big scene.
The cure for that is cutting the apron strings.
lot of freshmen experience loneliness at first.
All of which, in Fin’s head, produced the phrase, “It seems so simple, to just have everybody count off by two. The odds know when to hold ’em and the evens know when to fold ’em. Parallel processes make a cure for loneliness.”
“Most stupid ideas sound simple,” Fin said under his breath.
“You got a better plan?”
Fin nearly dropped a glass, which he couldn’t afford. It would come out of his pay.
Stephen, the biggest prima-donna on the waitstaff, was arguing with Jill, and his sarcastic whine had cut through the sonic undergrowth at just the right moment.
When his hands steadied, Fin loaded a rack of glassware into the machine. In his present condition, it was stupid to take anything he heard at face value. However freaky, the way the words lined up could be a mere coincidence, or an illusion manufactured by his compromised awareness.
Fin didn’t believe any of that. He suspected it was the Elsewhere, the Collective Id the spiders had been so pleased to tell him about.
I should test it.
“Loneliness doesn’t have to be viewed as a disease,” Fin muttered.
A swirl of sound from the dining room, like verbal jigsaw pieces, replied, “How would you know what it’s like for an only child? You have a twin.”
Shit. It knows who I am.
“His company is a lot worse than being alone, believe me.”
The response this time was built from the conversations among the cooks and waiters. “Being alone by choice is different. You don’t understand, there is no one else.”
What am I, your imaginary friend?
Fin didn’t give this question voice. Better to terminate this conversation before he got in any deeper. His experience with the Floating Wisdom was a strong lesson about the perils of talking to collective minds.
“Admit it,” the eddy of voices said. “You can’t imagine being altogether alone, forever.”
Fin turned his attention to the pots and pans that had piled up while he tried to keep up with the table service items.
The kitchen staff’s chatter stopped. The radio station miscued a commercial, producing several seconds of dead air. The dining room seemed suddenly somber as well. Fin concentrated on his work, aware the Id was fuming over his unresponsiveness.
With a crash like a bomb going off, Stephen dropped a tray of seven meals. The destruction of all the food for a large table disrupted the cooks’ lives for the foreseeable future, which led to a volley of profanity to rival anything ever uttered at sea.
No coherent remark emerged amid all the swearing, but Fin took it as a comment about himself.
He drew a steadying breath as he soaped a particularly filthy saucepan. He glanced around, knowing it made him look paranoid. How far would things escalate?
The disaster with the dropped tray restored cacophonous life to the kitchen, even waking up the radio. Fin picked up another comment from the Id.
I don’t want to know the sex of the baby.
Trig is the course that’s killing me.
I have the ticket in my wallet.
What are blintzes?
A chef salad with ranch on the side.
and everyone already had theirs on!
You are being so stupid, Gary.
He’s so preoccupied with football, I want to scream.
Man, it sucks being on call.
I can’t remember the words most of the time.
Just leave a quarter, the service sucked.
There’s no need to make that face, young man.
In the old days, you had to crank it.
get home and straighten up a little before your aunt arrives.
Relief washed the tension from Fin’s head. New topic, and it was back to talking to itself.
For the remainder of his shift, Fin tried to tune out the Id’s muttering. Now that he knew it was there, it was difficult to ignore.
*** *** ***
Severin felt refreshed, his mind awakened by an infusion of tantric power. He stared at his table, while Melissa lounged in the hammock after her lesson.
He couldn’t persuade her to reach under the sheet, but she laid on the table for sex without protest. This struck Severin as an irrational contradiction, but Melissa insisted it was perfectly logical.
“The first time you fucked me was on that table,” she said. “I survived. However, when you reached under the sheet, you lost your hand. I have no wish to lose mine.”
From her ignorant point of view, that made sense. The true contradiction was Severin’s quixotic tutelage in the table’s use. While he wanted to keep her in the dark, he also wanted her to explore the Elsewhere and encounter the slab. Sometimes he superfluously admonished her to keep away from the table, and other times ineffectually cajoled her to give it a try.
Frustration had led him to try drugging her. While she was out, he carted her to the table and put her left hand under the sheet. An awkward enterprise, his left arm wrapped around to hold her upright, reaching across with his right hand to guide her left, bending at the knees to duck her hand under the edge of the sheet. After all that, her hand just lay on the table, not in the Elsewhere at all.
This felt like a game he should be better at.
Using the table himself right-handed failed most of the time, and generated only disappointing trinkets otherwise. The situation drove home how deeply he depended on its answers. Without them, he made no progress at all.
The solution was to get his hand back. He’d already tried reaching into the Elsewhere with his stump. It did nothing. No regrowth of tissue, and without a means of grasping objects he gathered no artifacts.
He’d used energy from Melissa to heal over the original burn, and subsequently tried to further regenerate his flesh. So far he hadn’t noticed any difference. But that first healing worked, so the power from her sex was the type he wanted. He had to get a stronger dose.
Apply it directly to the affected area.
“Melissa,” he barked, “it’s time for your next lesson.”
Melissa put aside her trashy novel and exited the hammock, a feat she had become far more adept at.
“On the table?” She undid the top button of her sweater, and let it slide off her emaciated frame. Her ribs and hips were more prominent t
han her breasts. Most of her caloric intake came from a vineyard.
“Yes.” Severin disrobed. Melissa stretched out on the table.
“No,” Severin said, “I need to be on the bottom.” She made space for him, then straddled him and reached under to massage his genitals. Severin raised his stump and stroked the skin between her breasts, enjoying her attentions.
When she started guiding him toward her slit, he said, “Not like that.” Melissa quirked an eyebrow. “Swing around.”
Melissa rolled her eyes, but she pivoted atop Severin so her knees rested on either side of his head. He nuzzled her mons, gathering her heady aroma, and she gave his phallus a businesslike swipe with her tongue. Severin exhaled into Melissa’s pubic hair and grasped her buttock. He caressed her thigh with his left forearm. She settled her hips lower, pressing herself against his mouth. He parted her labia with the tip of his tongue as she wrapped her lips around the head of his penis.
They indulged and teased each other until Severin sensed that she hovered at the threshold of orgasm. Without letting up in his oral stimulation, he shrugged his left arm free to achieve a better angle of attack. As she drew a deep breath and tensed, he pushed the stump firmly into her vagina.
The moment was complex.
Melissa’s orgasm blossomed, even as she signaled quite clearly with her teeth that she disapproved. She bucked, and pumped her pelvis, trying to free herself and trying to get more leverage at the same time. Severin used his right arm to contain her, encircling her thigh and holding her in place as he imparted a gentle reciprocating movement to his stump.
It felt like the ecstatic bursting of ejaculation combined with the hard-edged warmth of plunging into a steaming bath. His abbreviated arm flooded with pulsating life, absorbing it from Melissa’s womb. Distantly, he knew she was still biting him.
Her climax subsided, and with it the throbbing vitality saturating Severin’s stump. She lifted her head and snarled, “Let go of me!”
Severin maintained his grip, doggedly keeping himself lodged inside her. She wrenched free and lurched off the table, nearly upending it. She spat on him and stormed over to collect her sweater. She stomped down the stairs.
Severin lay panting on the table and gazed at his left arm. He almost expected to see his hand fully restored. It wasn’t, but the shiny scar tissue of a few minutes ago was now pink, healthy skin.
*** *** ***
Melissa got into the shower.
She felt revolted and violated by what Severin had done. She soaped herself all over, three times, then let the painfully hot water distract her from her mental anguish until it ran cold.
Still shaking with rage and nausea, Melissa toweled off and put the sweater back on.
Such a transgression would not be happening again.
Her uncle thought he could put her through anything, thought she had no choice but to stay with him if she wanted to avoid being dragged into madness by the patterns.
She could break his hold on her, if she had Kyle.
Melissa retrieved a bottle of wine from the back of the linen closet and uncorked it with her teeth. It took an hour before she was calm enough to go down to the kitchen, where she could rely on finding other residents of the House.
When she entered the kitchen, the two males in green sweaters leaning against the counter stopped talking. They looked in her direction, but didn’t say hello. One of them gave a small nod. Melissa smiled, a little, not trusting her face not to distort it into a grimace.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “I’m curious about the activities here. It’s all very impressive. Does any of what you do involve medical technology?”
The young men glanced at each other, and the one who’d acknowledged Melissa said, “Yes, a little. It depends on how you define it, because there’s monitoring associated with several of the projects, even though they’re not strictly medical.” The other man nervously looked out into the hall.
“You’re Horn, right? And Free?” She hoped to put them more at ease. “I’m Melissa. I have a special request. More of a proposition really. My son is in a coma. He’s at Webster General, but I’d be happier if he were closer. I’d like to bring him here. Would someone be able to maintain his care? You could do noninvasive experiments on him. He won’t mind.”
Horn and Free exchanged another look, and Melissa thought she’d played her card too quickly. With a shrug, the two turned back to her and said, “Sure,” in perfect unison.
“Wonderful, thank you.”
At the sink she ran herself a glass of water, drank it, and ran another, while thinking about how to accomplish the transfer. She would have to go along to sign him out. She’d need clothing, shoes at least, and she’d need to cope with the patterns on the ten-minute drive. Knowing the sanctuary of Kyle awaited should make it a survivable journey.
She turned to face the men, who had resumed their earlier conversation. They stopped again and looked at her.
“If one of you knows where there might be a pair of shoes I could borrow, we can go right now.”
“I think we need time to set up a room for him,” Free said, “and I’d like to run the idea past Marsh. Could we plan on doing this tomorrow, or early next week?”
“I think I can get you some shoes, though,” Horn put in.
Melissa nodded. The trio agreed to firm up their plans the next day, and she set out for the stairs. Returning to her uncle’s domain galled her, but she had no other option. She could loiter in the kitchen, or watch the enormous television in the living room, but she was in his house no matter what.
Now that her shock had passed, Melissa could see today’s incident was no more degrading than any of what she and Severin got up to on a typical day. It had been unexpected, and disturbing. The fact that he tricked her into it meant he knew she wouldn’t comply willingly, which made it rape. All the same, she spent much of a typical day having drunken intercourse with her mother’s brother, so who was she to pass judgment?
She focused her mind on the upcoming ordeal of leaving the House. She wouldn’t be driving, so she could shut her eyes. Sounds and bumps in the road would be a problem, but by shutting out visual signals, she would remove the majority of troublesome sensory input. Messages could be carried in other kinds of sensation, though.
Severin had brought her another kind of sensation.
Memory of those cataclysmic moments flooded out the present, and Melissa stopped so she wouldn’t tumble down the steps. A moan tried to force its way out, and she quaked with the strain of holding it back, of keeping her posture dignified as her loins again filled with electricity.
Even as she tried to fend off these recollections, she discovered a message buried within her erotic panic. Two lines of force crisscrossed under the House, energizing Severin’s table as a portal into another dimension. Her uncle was only injured because of his own pride, his abuse of the table’s power. She need have no fear of reaching under the sheet.
For once, Severin’s habit of calling their assignation a ‘lesson’ hadn’t been a lie.
Melissa took shelter in the small room next to the attic stairs to compose herself. She didn’t want to learn more about her dark ‘gift!’ She wanted to rid herself of it completely. Instead, her only choices were to suffer in ignorance or let Severin defile her so she could attain understanding. She would never be free, either way.
Wiping her nose on her sleeve, she resolved to at least make sure all future incest was on her own terms. He would be keeping that stump to himself.
*** *** ***
Both hands shoved in his pockets, Fin stared adoringly at the display of pens and mechanical pencils. Rook trusted his stationery lust to hold him spellbound long enough for her to accomplish her mission.
“Hey.” She tried to sound casual. “I’m gonna find the bathroom. Don’t run off with any Walmartians while I’m gone.”
He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I promise not to fall prey to the seductive wiles of anyone in a
blue vest.”
Rook gave him a second to become hypnotized by the office supplies again.
Health and Beauty was a quick walk away. The feminine products all clustered together in one aisle. Rook tossed a box of tampons into her basket along with KY, yeast infection cream, a pregnancy test, and a douche.
Wending her way through the store, Rook pocketed one of the items. She left her basket on a bench and entered the ladies’ room.
Alone in the stall, Rook pulled the pregnancy test out of her pocket and stared at it. Her stomach clenched. The directions were absurdly simple, but Rook read them through twice.
Pee on the stick. Wait three minutes. I should be able to handle that.
She knew from experience this could be messy, so she wrapped her hand in a protective wad of toilet paper.
Once the stick was saturated, Rook stuck it back in the box and did her best to clean her hands. This would be a long three minutes.
An exhausted-sounding woman with three small children came into the bathroom. One of the kids was crying and the woman ignored it. She tried to get the one named Crystal to use the potty, which involved much haranguing. Rook squeezed her eyes closed and tried to banish the visions of her future.
One minute.
If she was pregnant, the only good news was it couldn’t be Marcus’s. She’d had her period right before her first date with Fin. It was actually the main factor in the scheduling of said date.
Because she was apparently incapable of being anything other than an unfaithful slut.
She might not be pregnant. Her cycle was always erratic, which was why she tracked it on her Mac. She’d gone three months between periods before. With Kyle plaguing her dreams for the past 69 nights, she’d been super stressed. That could be the entire explanation.
Two minutes.
Probably wishful thinking.
She’d had a lot of unprotected sex. A whole fucking lot. For the entire fortnight in the bomb shelter when pretty much all she and Fin did was fuck, the thought of protection never entered her mind. Not even once. She’d been so fucking stupid.
