Sixty-Five Stirrup Iron Road

by Keene, Brian

  Nicci’s attitude stalled. She hadn’t known that things could change websites like that. But an instant later, the wrath sprang back. “Then what about the cum in my mouth? I can’t believe a guy could jerk off in his sister’s mouth while she was asleep!”

  Sam had been sipping his soda just as Nicci had made this elucidation. He spat the soda all over the wall like the old Johnny Carson Spit Gag.

  “Whuh-what?” he exclaimed.

  “Don’t try to lie your way out of it. I know damn well what you did. You got all boned-up looking at that smut, and then you snuck upstairs and beat off in my mouth and all over me. You can’t deny it, Sam. There’s nobody else in the house. So you damn well better apologize, and while you’re at it, get your shit together.”

  Sam was wiping soda off himself when he replied, “First, let me remind you that I do have my shit together. I have a job. I have a car. I pay the rent, I pay the bills, and I pay for the food. You don’t do shit, except sit around and watch TV, sleep, and eat the food that I pay for—”

  “I’m looking for a job!” she countered, but seriously, it was a weak attempt to vindicate herself. The only practical place to work was the mall, and, well, her name was mud there.

  “You ain’t looked for dick,” Sam said, “and speaking of dick, the only thing you seem to have any ability to do is—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “You can’t even hold a job selling corn dogs! Only a loser gets fired from a corn-dog stand.”

  “I didn’t get fired! I got let go.”

  “Yeah, let go, because you were deep-throating every swinging dick in the fuckin’ mall.” Sam raised a snide finger. “So my point is? I have my shit together. You don’t. And I gotta tell ya, Nicci, you must really have some kind of mental defect to actually think that I would—what?—sneak into your room and jerk off on you?”

  “And in my mouth!”

  “Right. I didn’t know that sucking dick killed brain cells, but I guess it fuckin’ does.”

  Nicci had had enough. Sam always did this: threw the mistakes of her past in her face while acting like he was Mr. Responsible. There was only one way to prove her accusation, so …she simply did it.

  Nicci pulled open her robe and unabashedly exposed her bare breasts, belly, and pubis.

  Sam’s eyes bugged and he spat more soda onto the wall. “Are you crazy? I’m your brother! You don’t flash your tits and box to your own brother!”

  “Yeah? Well just explain this, you fuckin’ liar!” Then Nicci drew her finger along the tacky remnants of the sperm that Sam had so bounteously pumped on her.

  Only …

  “Explain what? That your tits are sagging and you’re only twenty-five years old?”

  The insult didn’t register, only the impact of Nicci’s befuddlement and even outrage. Not the outrage of being ejaculated on, the outrage of the contradiction: where she knew there had been sperm, there was no sperm now. What the—what the fuck? Her hands desperately ran up and down her breasts and abdomen, and there was nothing. No moisture, no stickiness, nothing, and when she felt inside her robe for signs of moisture … nothing. This is impossible! In her experience as, well, a head-queen, Nicci had learned a thing or two about, well, cum. It didn’t evaporate like water. It didn’t just go away. There was always something that remained, a faint, gluey viscosity or a heavy dampness, and if it had dried completely there was always the telltale crustiness—which some girls called “leftovers!”—but not here, not now. Nicci’s fruitless and embarrassing inspection of herself revealed no material evidence of what she knew had been all over her only minutes ago. She was as “sperm-free” as if she’d just taken a shower, and—

  Come to think of it …

  —that snotty gross-out aftertaste, which always seemed to last for hours, was now nonexistent in her mouth.

  Nicci’s face turned beet red. She hauled her robe closed. “Holy shit, Sam, it-it-it … must’ve been …”

  “Yeah, Einstein, it must’ve been a dream, and you got no reason calling me sick in the head when you’re the one who’s dreaming about getting a yap-full of her brother’s nut. Now go back to bed, ya ditz. And think about looking for a job tomorrow.”

  Nicci’s eyes fluttered. “Sam, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. It’s just that I could’ve sworn—”

  “Go back to bed!”

  And that Nicci did, more confused than she could ever remember being.

  ***

  But the next night was worse. Nicci lay naked atop the mattress, asleep but shuddering. Part of her consciousness felt tethered to her, but as hard as she tried, she could not wake up or open her eyes or make even direct movement of her arms and legs. And along with this black paralysis came a notion that was impossible to dispel: that she was not alone in the room.

  She sensed someone standing at the bedside looking down. The “someone” had to be Sam, it had to be, because even in her distressed slumber, Nicci knew there was no one else in the house. She tried to reach up and to the right, to touch him, to feel some evidence of his physical presence and therefore validate that she was not really dreaming, but her arm lay still like a dummy’s limb. Only her fingers twitched.

  She smelled something awful. It was a faint smell but so indescribably appalling that her stomach muscles began to heave, and as something rushed up, she knew she was about to vomit.

  Instead …

  Something hit her in the face like a bucket of hot, chunky soup, and at once it was not Nicci who was vomiting, it was someone else. Vomiting, yes, right in her face, and with such force and volume she knew now that this had to be a dream, a nightmare, because no one could throw up this much. The previous faint odor was now replaced by a stench that had to be worse than excrement, urine, pus-stained bandages, and the effluence at the bottom of a meat-market dumpster on the hottest day of summer, all mixed up together in one big goulash of horror. Oatmeal from hell might be one allusion to draw. The expulsion was accompanied by a mine-shaft-deep basso warble akin to, “Arg-a-lar-gur-lar-gur-larrrrrrrr …” amid an under-sound like wet concrete pouring. Nicci convulsed in the abominable inundation, one gust, two, three, and a fourth as long as the first three combined.

  Heaving breath, she spat out that which had entered her mouth and was then vomiting herself, only to realize that her hips were bucking like electrodes attached to a frog’s legs and the reason for the bucking was due to some organic object wriggling abruptly up and into her vagina. When she tried to open her eyes she was unable, and likewise she found herself absolutely incapable of screaming, for she knew now beyond all reckoning that none of this could be sloughed off as mere dream. And she knew this too: Someone’s putting his hand all the way up my pussy, and it’s not Sam!

  It couldn’t be, for Sam didn’t have hands more than a foot long, and they weren’t bump-covered, and they weren’t slimy. And all the way up this impossible hand went until she felt seemingly joint-less fingers frolicking in her reproductive canal. Then—

  Shhhhhhhhhhhh-ULP!

  —the “hand” was withdrawn, like a boot pulled out of mud. Just as inexplicably as everything else was that this horrific violation of her privates left her … stimulated. She felt her sex juicing. She felt her nipples harden. And most outrageous of all was Nicci’s next observation, that she wanted that stimulation repeated. She still could not move or open her eyes but at last she was able to croak out a few words.

  “Pluh-please, do it again! Stick it in again!”

  Nicci’s request would not be honored. What she got instead was—

  “Arg-a-lar-gur-lar-gur-larrrrrrrr—”

  —more vomit.

  But not in her face this time. This time—

  Holy fuck—no!

  —directly into her mouth. What must have been its left hand pushed down on her forehead, and what must have been the right pushed down on her chin. Thus, the latter gesture cranked her mouth open, which, in her paresis, she could not in a million years close. Eve
n in the madness, in the sheer impossible consternation, Nicci supposed she knew what was coming next:

  Lips like an open wound sealed against her mouth and—

  “Arg-a-lar-gur-lar-gur-larrrrrrrr!”

  —this burglar, this person, this thing—whatever it was—wasted no time introducing the “oatmeal from hell” into her mouth. It was so much that Nicci grimly realized that as the vomit was forced down her throat, she would surely choke to death on it, which left her two choices. One, she could do just that, drown in vomit and kiss the world good-bye, or two—

  Gotta swallow …

  Indeed, there was only one way to evacuate all that vomit, and that was to ingest it, and ingest it Nicci did, cleverly timing her technique. When one gust blew into her mouth, she paused, swallowed, and then prepared for the next. The lip-lock maintained itself through more than a couple of gusts, and when it was over, Nicci lay twitching on the bed like in the throes of a mild electrocution, and now she sported a little potbelly from all she’d swallowed.

  Schlucking sounds signaled the trespasser’s departure, and a second later, Nicci could open her eyes and move. Her molester’s exit switched off the paralysis. Hot, reeking vomit slid lava-like down her chest when she leaned up, gagging and dizzy from the sensation of all that upchuck sloshing around in her belly. The chunks and particles seemed to locomote with deliberateness, as if each piece possessed a motility of its own. Most of her power of reason, and her power of speculation, was kept far away from her volition. She knew only one thing: I will prove this to Sam! I will show him I’m not crazy and I’m not dreaming! How could he deny it when he saw the evidence for himself? What could he say? That the blanket of evil-smelling puke was her imagination?

  Yeah, I’ll show that smart-ass fucker!

  Nicci then rushed out of the bedroom and down the stairs, belly sloshing and vomit pouring off her. “Sam! Come out! I just got thrown up on!”

  Her progress ushered her down, down the dim hall at whose end she saw the light beneath the door. “Sam! Forget about your fuckin’ porn and come out here!”

  THUMP!

  In the next instant, Nicci’s butt was on the floor. She’d fallen hard, and it seemed that she’d stepped on something she hadn’t noticed. She’d slipped, and it felt like something slick and mushy that she’d slipped on, like a banana peel. Nearly senseless now, she kneed herself forward, leaned, and pushed open the door to the den. This action threw an ample wedge of bright fluorescent light across half the hallway, and she beheld the object on which she’d slipped and fallen. It was no banana peel; instead, it was a penis and a pair of testicles in a scrotum, not cut but torqued off the victim’s groin.

  The victim, of course, was Sam, and it was at this point that Nicci lost consciousness, never noticing that the blanket of vomit that had covered her none too long ago was now completely gone, and gone too was the potbelly caused by ingestion of said vomit.

  The police would find the rest of Sam all over the house: his face, scalp, and ears in the den; hands and feet in the living room; and the rest in varying stages of separation in other places. Exactly where hardly mattered. The county medical examiner, however, would cite that the victim had been “physically dismantled via a mode of incalculable violence, the nature of which I am as yet unable to determine.”

  Preposterously, Nicci was suspected with more than a small amount of judicial vigor, but she was never charged due to her passing of a battery of polygraphs, an MRI lie-detection test, and several psychiatric evaluations. When asked if she had murdered her brother, her answer of “No” registered as truth on the machine, and when asked if she knew who did, a same result registered by her answer of, “I’m not sure, but I think it was a monster.” She was then determined to be incompetent to stand trial and next became a guest of the state department of mental health’s “locked dormitory unit.”

  So that was it for Nicci.

  And what of the house at Sixty-Five Stirrup Iron Road, in which all this mayhem had occurred?

  It would not be inhabited again until—

  * * *

  Chapter One - Edward Lee and J.F. Gonzalez

  Ten Years Later

  Arrianne looked faintly awestruck out the back window. She could see the centuried trees, the quaint stone fence lining the road that marked the yard’s end, and the sloping grasslands beyond. Birds frolicked as they hunted for worms, butterflies gently roved, and a young deer meandered along the fence. And at the bottom of the grassland’s decline: the lake.

  The scene was idyllic, and Arrianne realized she’d never felt more content in her life. I’m so glad Chuck found this wonderful house and property, she told herself. The city was starting to make me feel ancient, but now …

  She felt wonderful.

  So wonderful, in fact, that an undeniable arousal began to tingle through her bosom, down her belly, and to her—

  The door clunked open, and in walked her husband, a big carryout bag from Leroy Selman’s under one arm and something else under the other, a long box printed with the words Keene Industries, LTD.

  “Let me help,” she said and rushed over.

  “I got it,” Chuck said. On his face was that almost constant look of self-satisfaction.

  She always joked that he looked like Mitt Romney. “Thanks,” he said once, “and I may look like him, but I feel about as old as his father,” this being part of the way they both jested about getting older, and the settling of the years upon them, and how it seemed to happen without their ever realizing it.

  She took the carry-out bag and put it on the counter. The intoxicating aroma of smoked ribs filled the kitchen.

  “I know how you love Selman’s ribs,” he said, and then set the much-heavier parcel on the counter as well.

  “Yes, I do, but I guess you don’t know how hard I’ve been trying to diet.”

  “Diet-schmiet. It’s Saturday.”

  Arrianne gently laughed at the dismissal. Oh, well. I guess I can restart the diet tomorrow. She changed the subject to get her mind off the food. “Did you get the traps?”

  “Sure did,” he said. He placed down a smaller bag he’d brought in. “Got four of them.”

  “The kind that doesn’t kill them, right?”

  “Of course! What do I look like? Vlad the Impaler of Rodents?”

  This relieved Arrianne, a lifelong animal lover. Rats, sure, but mice and chipmunks? She couldn’t abide the thought of using poison or the typical spring-traps that killed them, so Chuck agreed to buy humane traps, the kind that seized the animals alive, and then they could be let go somewhere far away from the house. Winter was coming, and half the rooms in the house weren’t getting heat. They’d actually seen the chipmunks venturing out at night, and during the day they heard them scampering back and forth in the overhead ducts.

  “I was talking to the guy at Home Depot,” Chuck told her—now he was opening the big box. “He said trapping them won’t solve the problem. It’s not the chipmunks themselves that are blocking the airflow, it’s their nesting material.”

  Arrianne paused on the remark. “That never occurred to me. Guess we’ll have to get a heating and air-conditioning technician to get rid of the nests, huh?”

  “That would cost a fortune, and you know how those shylocks are. Probably charges $75 an hour and you can bet he’ll take his sweet time finding the nests. So … I figure we can cut that service fee way down by locating the nests ourselves.”

  Arrianne looked puzzled. “How do we do that?”

  “We do it … with this!” and by then, Chuck had opened the box. “A Keene Model 4A Boroscopic Conduit Inspection System, also known as a video snake!”

  Arrianne looked at the contraption Chuck had pulled out of the box with a sense of wonder. In a way it looked like a taser gun with a long black cable that came out of what should be the barrel. On what would have been the rear of the unit was a video screen just above the grip. Chuck held the thing, grinning like a little kid.

 
“You feed this in the air ducts,” he said, his left hand moving along the black cable, “and you can see what’s up there with the screen. The cable has a fifteen-foot reach.”

  “And if you find the ducts blocked with a nest, how do you get it out?”

  “Easy. With this!” Chuck reached into the box and pulled out another contraption. This one Arrianne recognized. It was what plumbers call a snake.

  “You’re gonna use a plumber’s snake to remove chipmunk nests from the air ducts?”

  “Sure. One of us can use the Boroscope to keep our sight on it while the other cleans the nest out with the snake.”

  Arrianne couldn’t help but voice her next concern. “What if there’s chipmunk babies in there? Won’t this kill them?”

  “What else can we do?”

  Arrianne didn’t have an answer for that. She picked up the bag from Selman’s and took it to the kitchen. She began to get plates out of the cupboard as Chuck placed the snake and the Boroscope back in the box.

  “Look, I know how you feel about animals,” Chuck began. “We’ll be really careful about this, I promise.”

  Arrianne began dishing up plates for their dinner. The ribs smelled wonderful. She sighed, looking over at Chuck. “I know, and I appreciate your concern, but …”

  “I know it’s been a while,” Chuck said. He approached the kitchen’s island where Arrianne was getting their plates together—Chuck had picked up smoked ribs, coleslaw, baked potatoes, and macaroni and cheese. “And I know that what happened to Teddy was terrible, but—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Arrianne said.

  Chuck stopped. He looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry. It’s just that …”

  Arrianne finished dishing out the plates. She looked at him, trying to contain her emotions. She took a deep breath. “I know it’s been hard, but really, I’m doing better.”

  “Are you? Really?”