Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 3, Issue 2

by Emily Maguire

  She would climax. This is something that never happened when she had sex with her husband and the idea of her oncoming orgasm was unsettling. She squeezed her lips closed over his cock, yes, now that there was some thickness to it. It was indeed a cock. Even at its fully extended length it was not long enough to choke her. She breathed through her nose and sucked and reached down under her skirt to slip more of his fingers into her. The rocking of her hips increased in pace. She breathed his flesh, his cock like an air tube and she gasped at it, hoping for the first time in her life that he would come in her mouth. Even the thought of it pushed her towards the edge of her own pleasure. She took one last suck and her head snapped back, the now fully erect cock suddenly left to bob freely in his lap. Her eyes stared blindly at the ceiling before the lids squeezed tight, her cunt squeezed, her body a sudden implosion with her clitoris at the centre of her body sucking herself into its vortex. She heard a sound and it was her own guttural moan. Too late to swallow it back behind gritted teeth. Jill was dropped suddenly down into herself.

  These things she noticed: the cupcakes knocked from the table, a pastel plummet of icing sticking to the floorboards. The cock in his lap, unspent, but already beginning to shrivel back into its coy curl. His hand slick with her juices held up and slightly away from his body as if he did not want to soil his jeans with the slippery wetness of her pleasure. The startled look on his face, as if he had been suddenly thrown into the heart of a cyclone which tore his world apart, ripping through the room then leaving just as quickly.

  * * *

  The light was out at the corner of the street. The darkness was a little disorienting. Jesse looked up at the thick arms of the trees interlinked, cutting any scrap of light that might spill from a waning moon. He was suddenly twelve years old and Wayne Duncan was there in the dark waiting to waylay him. Jesse felt for his clarinet case but of course he was not twelve years old. Wayne would be a grown man, bullying his own children or someone else’s.

  Jesse hugged his jumper more tightly around him despite the mildness of the night. When Blue barked he flinched. She was resting her head comfortably on the top of the tall fence, her jowls wet and loose. Her head bobbed and she licked at the air and he knew her tail was wagging, that powerful tail thick and strong enough to set her slim hips to shimmying back and forth. Jesse stopped. He was close to her fence. He could smell the warm excited breath: earthy, meaty. Her eyes were half closed, the lids soft and heavy. He waited, watching her big tongue spill in and out of her mouth, her fine head, large as his own. He stood transfixed. Her paws scrabbled clumsily on the wood. The nails he noticed were black except for two on her left paw, which were white. This little detail touched him. He stared. She stared. The dog lifted her nose as if to point him out with it. She yipped. He stepped forward and her big mouth opened into what wasn’t a grin but looked something like one. He smiled.

  He was hard. He glanced down the street but it was empty. No neighbourly faces, no voices from his childhood. He reached out and cupped her head, surprised by the warmth of her fur, the solidity of the skull. He could have kissed her then. Her tongue stretched out towards him and licked the air near his face. He smelled her.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said, because that is what men said to dogs and perhaps there was some neighbour looking. ‘Good girl.’ And her tongue wrapped around his hand and it was large and warm and wet.

  He scurried away. There were tears and he wiped them, but it was dark and no one could see.

  * * *

  It was easier to allow Kevin to have sex with her now that she had experienced something like it with Jesse. As always, he pushed her to her knees without warning and his cock was too big, nothing like the discreet, shy little animal in Jesse’s lap. He held the back of her head and she concentrated on breathing through her nose, relaxing her jaw. When she thought about Jesse the experience with Kevin could be almost pleasurable.

  He had not even bothered to remove his suit, the jacket flapped open and the button hit her at the edge of her eyelid. She kept her eyes firmly closed and thought of Jesse and took as much of his cock into her throat as she could. Jesse had not come. This was only a slight disappointment to her because after she had recovered from the force of her orgasm he stroked her cheek and thanked her. Kevin never thanked her.

  Jesse was kind, and his cock shrivelled in his lap and he put it away. She thought maybe it was because she was not beautiful, but he picked up a cupcake and bit into it and said that the cupcake tasted the way he experienced her, soft and sweet and almost too beautiful to eat. It made her wince a little to hear him say it like that, almost a cliché. It was the kind of thing you expected characters in movies to say and perhaps it was just an excuse for the loss of his erection but she forgave him for it and when she sunk her teeth into another of the cupcakes she felt quite beautiful, light and iced and perfect.

  Now with Kevin pushing his too-large cock into her mouth she imagined it was Jesse, his penis suddenly grown longer in his lust for her and for the first time in years she was content to have his fingers tangled in her hair and even the pain of it could be seen as pleasure as long as he didn’t speak and she made sure she did not open her eyes. She would make Jesse come as he had not come that first time with the cupcakes. She would make him lose himself in the pleasures of her flesh. She would bear the pain of it, the choking gush of semen, the sharp ripping of hair pulled out of her skull. All this she would take for the delight she would feel in knowing that the shy boy next door had come in her mouth and she had swallowed it. She recommitted to the task.

  Kevin was not Jesse. He pushed her off his cock and held her against the kitchen bench, unbuckling his belt. His trousers fell to his ankles and she breathed in garlic and vanilla, a distressing combination, her cheek pressed too hard against the stone surface, his hand still tangled in her hair, his elbow pushing painfully in the small of her back. He was fumbling with her skirt, hiking it up, pulling aside her knickers. The elastic caught at the edge of her cunt as he thrust into her, a chafing. She would be sore tomorrow, but she always was when her husband had sex on her, in her. She felt like she took no part in it.

  It still hurt when he took his cock out of her cunt and thrust it into her arse. She wondered if she would ever become looser with practice. The thing didn’t fit and there was no lubrication. Her cunt was never wet and the transferral from one orifice to another meant only a new site for her pain. She clung to the edge of the table and squeezed her eyes tight shut.

  It would end. Till it was over she would think about Jesse, about his tiny soft curl of flesh getting harder as she sucked at it, his full, quite girlish lips pressing down on the pale pink icing. The taste of vanilla in his kiss. All of this a distraction.

  You should leave him. Jesse stroking her hair, picking the tears off her lower eyelid as if they were strange insects, letting her sorrow leak off his finger and down his delicate wrist. She waited for him to say I will take you away from him. But of course he didn’t. And Jill knew it wasn’t going to be like a romance novel. If this was ever going to end she would have to orchestrate the escape herself.

  Kevin leaned heavily over onto her back and she felt his hips thrust more deeply. She winced. It hurt but it was good that he was getting quicker. He was going to come. She felt him scramble for purchase, her hair tugged as he released it and reached for the edge of the bench. Three last heavy thrusts and she felt his cock throbbing in her arse. He was pumping his semen into her and she felt every pulse and the sudden heat of the liquid filling her and trickling out and over her still tender cunt. It was over at least and he lost interest as soon as the deed was done. He pulled out quickly. She would be torn there. Old wounds reopened. She couldn’t help but suck in her breath with the pain and, ridiculously, he apologised, pulling her dress down, restoring her modesty, now, finally.

  He handed her some tissues and she reached down and pressed them between her cheeks. He was peering into the pots on the stove, snuffling like a hungry
animal, not a pig but perhaps a boar, something rough and wild and dangerous.

  ‘Osso bucco,’ he said. ‘Awesome.’ And he turned then and wandered off down the corridor to change into his tracksuit pants and a t-shirt. Jill kicked the bin open with the foot pedal and deposited the soiled tissues inside.

  * * *

  He made the cut quickly. The doll had been expensive, $6000. He had saved for a long time to buy it. Something physical, he imagined, would stop the roll of fantasies that accompanied his furtive masturbation. He could concentrate on the heat of the rubber and the physical sensation of the anatomically correct vagina around his cock. There was even an arse hole and, horribly, an orifice in her face. He could not face her, of course, or have her face anywhere near him, but bent over in front of him he had tried both holes, one tighter than the other, both sometimes enough to distract him from her human form. Even if he removed the legs and could not reattach them he could still use her in some way. His $6000 would not go to waste.

  It was like cutting through flesh, only, of course, there was no bone at the centre of it. The heavy rubber pulled away, the same lurid skin-pink all the way down to the centre of each calf. When he had both the legs off he tried not to look at her as a vaguely human form. Sometimes during sex he glanced down and she was a woman. His friends from work, his sister, his mother. He would, of course, have to stop, put her back into the box she had come in. Leave her in the cupboard till she returned to what she was, an object, a clever simulation.

  Jesse couldn’t quite figure it. He had never been particularly good at puzzles. For some reason he had thought that it would be a simple matter of turning the legs around and reattaching them. There was something about the bend, a dog-leg. That is why they call it that, he supposed, an extra bend, unexpectedly doubling back. Still, if he were to put the leg on backwards from here then the foot would need to come off. He would need to reattach it somehow. He had bought joints from the hardware store. The plan was to burrow a tunnel though the rubber, wire them on. He had bought three kinds of joints and extras of each kind just in case something went wrong. He was pulling apart a $6000 toy, after all; a few hundred more might be throwing good money after bad, but something had to be done.

  It was not passable, not even barely and at one point Jesse had put his tools down, poured himself a cup of tea and put his head in his hands. He just sat there feeling the steam dampen his forehead. It was the monster created by Frankenstein, held together by wire, riddled with holes, the rubber scarred and cut into.

  It was only when Jesse dealt with the fur that he realised he had an erection. The fur on its own did little for him. He liked the softness as much as anyone would. He rubbed his hand across it and there was some pleasure but not of a sexual nature. The erection sprang from the process of gluing the fur onto the redesigned legs of the animal. It was an animal now. He held the thing at a crouch, facing away. The head was still too awful for him to look at for any length of time. He had chosen the more expensive eyes from the online catalogue, the lifelike ones, yellow like a cat’s eyes. These eyes in a human face. He turned the thing away and it was better, the arch of the hips was fine, and the legs, now that he had the curve of them right, the foot cut back to a little paw. He cut the fur in long strips and the smell of the glue made him a little dizzy. You could barely see the splice. The fur was long and rather shaggy and it covered the joins. Of course he wanted to shave it back eventually. He wanted her to be more like Blue, short silky black fur, and he would need to make a tail. A rope covered in fur. He could picture it and it would do. A rope of fur.

  His cock rose in his lap.

  His hands shook as he picked up the stiff-bristled brush and painted her rump. Should he take the fur right up to the opening? He had to picture a real dog to know the answer to this. The real dog. Blue. He smelt her. That excited damp fur smell, truffles. It was not exactly the same scent as truffle oil but it was just as earthy. He had read once that an experienced truffle farmer could pick the subtle differences between the types just by the scent. He imagined he could smell her and know her even blindfolded and in a room filled with pups. It was insane. He was insane. What he felt was the kind of thing that poets would write about. He recognized the sentiment from pop songs, romance novels, ads for luxury cars. What he felt was new to him and yet he knew it before it even entered his heart. It was a cliché of a feeling, the beating heart, the sweaty palms, the daydreams and the real dreams and the sleeplessness, the wide awake ache of it. He knew the poets would call this emotion love.

  He pressed the strip of fur close to the orifice. Later he would use the electric shaver to sculpt the edges. He pressed it with his hand and held it there, his finger curled over the edge of the fur, touching the rubber at the point where the bright pink inward curl began, just like the flesh of a woman, a cunt, just like the unnameable place under the excitedly whipping tail. His finger crept inside. One finger disappearing past the fur, slipping into the body of this almost-Blue. A jet of saliva shot out into his mouth. His tongue twitched. No one was watching. There was no need for the sudden wave of guilt. Whatever happened in the privacy of his own home would be okay. An old concept, but a good one.

  He leaned closer, pressed his cheek against her rump, breathed in. The scent of glue overpowered the tang of rubber and the vague musk of fur. Some people sniffed this for the high. He couldn’t be sure if this swoon was caused by the sudden rush of fumes but he felt the surge of his climax coming as his tongue flicked out. His tongue inside her. His tongue inside Blue.

  He pressed down on his penis with the palm of his hand. The brush was still clutched between his fingers and he knew that the wet glue would flick onto his jeans but in that moment he didn’t care. He convulsed. He felt his cock pulse in his lap, the semen jetting violently into the denim. He made a sound and the grunt was lost inside her vagina, the cunt of his Blue. He breathed in, falteringly. The scent of glue. The glue began to dry on his jeans. It would stiffen there. He would always know where it had come from. He would always remember this time, the first time when the thing became dog, if only for a moment. Blue became real.

  * * *

  She was howling. Jesse opened his eyes. He was curled around the real doll, flesh to fur. The thing had taken his body heat and it felt oddly alive against his skin. She howled again and it was not the doll, of course, how could a doll howl? It was outside on the street, a deep descant, a real howl. Blue.

  Jesse knelt on the bed and peered out the window. The streetlight had not yet been fixed. There was moonlight on the ground like confetti. The world looked like a party had just occurred. Jesse felt tired, as if he would be the one to clean it all up eventually.

  Her howling made him very sad. He lay back down and held the pillow over his head. His doll was warm. It should be a comfort. He put his arms around her. He stroked her face. This was the only part of her that needed attention. It needed to be adjusted. It needed the teeth shaped and inserted. The nose had to be extended, he just wasn’t sure how he would do this. Then it would be done. She was almost a dog now. He hushed her. Somewhere out in the night Blue, the real Blue, was howling.

  ‘Shh, shh,’ he said. ‘It’s okay,’ He knew she was not real but the sound of his own voice was a comfort for him.

  He only became aware of the other sound after the howling had disappeared. It was a low weeping, a human sound. Distressing, but not nearly as distressing as the howling had been. He knew how insane this would sound if he said it out loud. He sucked at his lower lip.

  It was coming from next door. Jill. He hugged the doll closer. His cheeks flushed with the memory of their last meeting. Since then he had avoided her, coming home at odd times, opening the door more quietly even than usual. Now he closed his eyes and listened to her soft weeping. The walls were thin. It was almost as if she were in the room with him.

  Her husband had hurt her again. He was certain of this. He often heard the whole thing from beginning to end. He was rough with her. O
nce he had seen five dark bruises tattooed onto her wrist. The heavy-handed husband. He clasped his hands around the doll. This was the only way, the safest way, the path of no harm.

  ‘Shh,’ he said.‘Shhh.’

  * * *

  The thing was a sculpture and at first Jill thought it was a simple convex shape. She liked the texture, which seemed to be velour, a convex furry shape of a blue so deep it was more than blue. She moved from one side of the shape to another and was surprised enough to stop, take a step closer, one more step and she would set off the alarms that were set to stop the public from touching the art. Not convex. It was concave. Not velour either but a surface so mat that it looked like it would have the texture of felt but perhaps it would feel as plain and smooth as a tabletop. She took a step to her left and the shape disappeared altogether. It was only a flat blue circle, eating light. Another step and the circle hidden at the heart of the piece reappeared, swelling out of the work like a breast. It was distinctly sexual. Even the colour was exactly the colour that sex would be, sex with Jesse, she adjusted her assessment. Sex with Kevin was more like the other work, the work she had come to see, the line drawings, colourless, filled with cocks and cunts because those were the words he had for it, full of fucking. Kevin was all about fucking. Sex with Jesse she decided would be several things at once, textured and matt and blue and lightless, convex, concave, a slippery mess of sensations that all together became a gentle mystery.