Voices From The Other Side

by Brandon Massey

  Michael nodded and closed his eyes, hoping his bladder would hold. “Yes, sir. I came here with honor, and can take whatever you dish out. She’s worth it.”

  When he heard deep, resounding laughter coming from the old man, he peeped open his eyes, surprised to still be standing and alive.

  “So you brought me meat from Philly?”

  Michael nodded, and tossed his package forward.

  Her father caught it with one hand, sniffed it and turned up his nose. “Boy, we from cattle country. You crazy? This ain’t real beef—not like we used to out here. Corn-fed, free-range, c’mon now. I’ma hafta show you how we do out here. Git you some real barbeque.”

  “I’m sorry. Uh, listen, if you want me to go hunting tonight and bring you back something righteous, I can do that, sir.”

  Their eyes met. The old man smiled wide, and threw back his head and howled. “Whoooowee! This one got it bad. Must be the real McCoy. All right, son. I’ma give you a pass on the old ways, since we are in the new millennium. Won’t whup your ass like I oughta for laying your hands on my girl child and making her cry. Only reason I’m not is on account of she so soft on you. Begged me not to pull out a hair on your head, if you did come callin’. Umph, umph, umph. That’s still my little girl; can’t deny her anything she wants.” He whistled through his huge, yellowed teeth. “Lee Lee! Come on out here, girl, and stop making this young fool act simple on my steps!”

  Michael held his breath as a shapely female form filled the door. He held back the shudder that ran through him when he saw her. She had on a pair of cutoff jeans shorts that were gonna get him killed. He couldn’t look at the white tank top she wore without a bra—not in front of her pop. It felt like the whole yard was closing in on him, and her scent filled the spring air.

  “Hi,” she said softly. “You meet my brothers and my daddy?”

  He nodded, but kept his eyes lowered. “Yeah, and I just came to say, uh—”

  “Just spit it out,” her father ordered. “Say what you’ve gotta say before the moon comes up and I have to fucking kill you.”

  Somehow instinct had put him on his knees in the yard. He wasn’t sure how that happened, but he was looking up, she was so pretty standing on the steps behind her dad . . . and the next thing he knew, he was babbling.

  “Girl, listen, I can’t live without you. I wanna marry you, for real. Just say yes, and come back to Philly with me. I’ll take care of you and any kids we have. I got a good job. I work hard. Girl, I’m serious. Come on back, and we’ll pick out your ring.”

  He was expecting a flat-out frontal assault from three huge males, but instead they smiled, howled and went back into the house. Her daddy stayed at the door for a moment, his eyes glowing gold, but he could see a mist forming over them that brought him to his feet.

  “She reminds me so much of her mother,” the old man said in a slow, calm rumble. “That’s all I wanted to hear. Now I can go on and rest.” He glanced down at the package in his huge hand. “This Philly meat ain’t so bad, I reckon. Just different. You two younguns git.” But he looked up from the package slowly, his eyes holding Michael’s for a steady, threatening moment. “No, I ain’t lying when I tell you, if you hurt her, I’ll hunt you down. If I’m long gone and you don’t treat her right, know she got twelve brothers who will track you to the ends of the earth to hurt’cha bad. But you treat my baby right, the youngest of mine, and I’m family for life. Will help ya anyway that I can. That’s a promise. Word as my bond, old school.”

  With that, the front door closed, the moon came out of hiding, she sauntered down the steps and slipped into a form that by design would drive him wild. And he found himself running too far too fast into the nearby bushes about a mile away. She’d gone into heat, and he’d temporarily gone insane.

  I’ma tell you the truth. It can happen that fast. Snap your fingers, and your glory days are gone.

  See how I’m up here, in the suburbs, taking out the trash, right next to average-Joe humans, and driving a minivan? It don’t make sense, this thing the female kind got over us. Five kids. Can you believe it? When did that happen? Not that I don’t love ’em all, every single one. But five kids? Stair steps. All born the same time every year; every spring we swear we’re gonna be careful. But, hey, that woman is something else.

  And I don’t know what you heard, but I don’t miss a day at work—like my boy, I can’t. I’m begging Cap for overtime any chance I can make it, and I haven’t slept with another woman since my wife. Me. Me? I ask you, is there something wrong in the universe?

  Not that I would, don’t need to go there, my life is complicated enough. And Lawd knows, my wife is beyond compare. And no sister better be off the chain enough to mess with her either. What, and be calling the house for me? Never happen. Y’all know my wife is crazy, right? Leisa is deep. They seem to know not to fool with her, even the baddest of sisters. Shoot, I don’t even trip with her like that. She gets a look, and even the kids back off her. She was raised by twelve brothers, can fight like a she-demon, and Daddy Williams don’t play. Girlfriend has told my sons more than once that she might eat her young. We don’t mess with her. But, if I ever have a girl, that’s when you gonna see me act ridiculous. Good thing boys run hard in both our families.

  All I wanna know is, when did I become like my father? Chained to the fence? The brother used to be a playa. He was the one, da man. Then, he got married. Now here I am, on a short choker chain like he was. It ain’t right.

  But, for all the daily drama . . . on those rare nights when the moon is full . . . Aw, man, I love my wife. Natural instinct. That’s my boo.

  Lord of All That Glitters

  Anthony Beal

  Tahseen finds the loft-style studio’s only windowsill sooty yet cool beneath her backside. That anyone was leasing any part of this warehouse-district four-story was news to her. Local legendry that still surrounds the place and its past as a crematorium had hurt its market desirability as well as that of neighboring addresses, and had kept it largely untenanted for years. Tahseen stretches, arching her bare, sticky back, supposing that perhaps some truth lies in the adage about time healing all wounds. God knows she needs it to be true, after her unexpected performance here tonight.

  The night steals a taste of moist skin, its humid breezes lapping reverently at her tender nipples and still-tingling sex. Across the room, the door to the refrigerator where Myles chills beer for visitors hangs open, and Myles, a sinewy masterpiece of angled cinnamon, stands relishing the coolness therein. “A five-minute break,” he’d promised her hours ago; then they’d continue the photo shoot. Five orgasms later, the camera lies as forgotten as the clothes she wore here. Phantoms of her photographer’s hands frolic over her arcs. Myles licks Tahseen’s payment from his lips.

  “Delight Your Man With Nude, Sensual You,” read the classified ad that lured her here. Tahseen lounges ravaged and sticky, imagining her lover’s eyes as he peruses the personalized erotic pictorial that will be her gift to him, every page featuring her Burmese mystique, each picture’s thousand words speaking of unabashed lust. On those weekends when his band tours out of town, these photos taken tonight will remind her Andrew that one-night stands make poor substitutes for what exotica awaits his return. They’ll testify to Tahseen’s devotion to a fiancé she didn’t think of once while Myles was inside her.

  “Whore,” the night whispers to Tahseen, demanding explanation for the taste spicing her tongue, the flavor of the naked man standing halfway inside the refrigerator. Clutching her cardamom-colored shoulders, Tahseen laments her indiscretions tonight. She thinks of Andrew and wants to die. She watches Myles stalk toward her and wants to live.

  Accustomed by the benefits of trim ankles, taut buttocks and shimmering black hair to propositions from the lusting populace both male and female alike, she wonders what has compelled her to forego typical casual flirtation for infidelity with this man after rejecting countless others. She wonders what makes her already want
him inside her again.

  More than twenty minutes have passed without a word between them. Myles sweeps cottony, cocoa-colored dreadlocks away from his ruggedly hewn face, stepping over emptied Trojan packages and spent condoms, to hand Tahseen an opened bottle of lager. He holds the bottle just below his waist, near the glossy, espresso column of his cock. Tahseen’s hand brushes the taut muscle, lingering as she receives his offering. Draining their bottles in silence, they stare down the accusing night sky as if watching for the arrival of angels come to Hell’s Kitchen to punish their abandon.

  Tahseen finds herself sweating despite the cooling night. Restless hunger licks her between the thighs, leaving her feverish, starving to fuck again. Squeezed between Myles, her hard-muscled Adonis, and thoughts of Andrew, she contemplates the loaded glare of the moon as Myles’s fingers thread through her hair. If there be angels seeking to punish her indiscretions this night, then let them come. Let them arrive to find her every orifice anointed with Myles’s seed.

  Enough rest, declares her full-body shiver. Tahseen’s knees kiss the floorboards. Her molestations claim his firmness. Myles groans, and stiffens as she swallows him.

  Her mouth is a womb. Her mouth is an awesome cherry-peel machine reverently wringing forth the sacrament from her lord of licentiousness. His fingers winding her hair into handles, the growing urgency in his thrusts, his furtive oaths wafting away like blue bubbles into the night set Tahseen’s skin burning. Bathed in pheromone-laced fucksweat, her brow glistens, feeling scorched with her efforts.

  Tahseen’s vision swims as Myles’ pearlescent tide swells. Washed beyond coherence by his frothing eruption, Tahseen can only grunt her assent as Myles sinks to his knees behind her, presses his chest against her back and impales her anew.

  Myles is speaking to her, firing incomprehensible words, the understanding of which her senses insist on deflecting. A strange kind of vertigo has reduced him to a caramel-colored blob. He feels heavy, a slick and burning weight forcing air from her lungs, further bathing her in the pheromone of his sweat and saliva. She smiles through the searing pain assailing her skin as his softening penis withdraws from her anus. Strangely, her unsated feeling lingers. Her thoughts and memories of Andrew do not.

  “Thanks, sugar,” she would hear, were she capable of understanding. “You’re the first meal I’ve had in weeks. And you were absolutely delicious, without a doubt. You saved my life.” Could she see straight, Tahseen would notice something different and discomfiting about his teeth. Inebriated by the bioelectrical emissions he’s spent all evening drinking from her orgasms, Myles stands, lifting her along. It is time he finished immortalizing her as his advertisement promised.

  The affronted scream of aged gears summoned to action splits the evening’s calm as Myles leads her to the elevator cage that carried her to his fourth-floor studio. Tahseen is contented enough to follow wherever he may take her. She doesn’t even realize that neither she nor Myles have dressed. It feels too good to be nude right now. His arms around her as the elevator descends to a destination he has not yet shared with her, his lips creeping along her neck feel too good, too right for her to concern herself with asking questions to which answers are surely forthcoming.

  “The time has come for a little confession on my part, baby. I confess that I tend to fall in love with all my subjects,” the creature wearing Myles’ skin says, leading Tahseen nude into the larger of two rooms leading from that black-painted brick one that has served as their fucknest all evening. He says it smiling, that bashful, indicted smile from whence all Tahseen’s infidelities sprang; the one that makes him look so unspeakably fuckable. If only she could see it now. She might find herself galvanized by a different set of inclinations, could she view the explosion of crescent-shaped needles currently replacing the pearly whites of which she’d been so enamored upon first meeting him.

  “I love my work. Positioning each subject for my cameras, lining up the shots, choosing the props, the backdrops. And please, believe me when I tell you that I sincerely love each lady. Each lady is my passion when she’s here, just as you are my passion tonight,” he goes on. “When I have them here on their knees, on their backs, in my mouth, I make them glow, and for those few moments, they’re mine. You are mine. The hard part is having to smile graciously and give you all back to your boyfriends and husbands once a shoot is done.”

  The brick-walled room they enter is low ceilinged and cozy. Its hardwood flooring is lacquered to a bloodlike hue. Three rows of ivory shelves deck all but one of its four walls, and luxurious blue velvet drapes each of these. Spaced along these velvet-festooned shelves, diamonds of varying shapes and sizes wink at Myles and Tahseen in the meager lighting, not that her eyes are obeying her demands that they focus enough to discern her surroundings. A miniature inscribed gold plate is set before each gem, not that the plates are visible to Tahseen’s severely dilated pupils. An expansive and aged-looking iron door is the only adornment reserved for the room’s fourth wall, which is composed entirely of firebricks.

  The steel sliding tray behind the iron door opening unassisted by anything except Myles’ telekinetic direction is human-sized, reinforced to support up to four hundred eighty pounds. Myles hefts Tahseen in his arms and places her upon it. Even as the notion of some wrongness unfolding here breaks upon her, Tahseen’s limbs feel too heavy to lift. Even if she could grasp the danger of her situation as more than a fleeting flash skirting the periphery of her mind, she could offer no resistance. The sedative contained in the sweat and saliva of the creature she knows only as “Myles” has anesthetized her too efficiently for her to object to being entombed in bricks.

  “You’ll glow, too, precious,” Myles tells Tahseen, smiling reassuringly with his newer, sharper teeth as he slides her into the gravelike enclosure built into his wall and bolts the iron door closed.

  Nourished by Tahseen’s energies, Myles is strong once again. Strong enough to ably wield the gifts granted to his species centuries ago. Myles concentrates, murmurs in that dead language that has served him for over a century. Tahseen’s scream is a scarring thing that rouses tears to his eyes as spontaneous flames that burn hotter than the most efficient crematorium engulf her.

  It occurs to Myles hours later as his mental energies clean out the tomblike space that even her ashes are beautiful. The dead language he speaks as he works extracts carbon from those ashes. No matter how often he commands it, the sight of human detritus shifting and parting and rearranging itself unassisted by his hands always offers him an impressive spectacle. The ageless creature in his skin spends more than an hour working to compress the roiling globule of carbon that forms between his splayed fingertips, crushing, shaping it beyond human capability, visiting hundreds of pounds of telekinetic pressure per square centimeter upon it. Though exhausted, though washed in sweat, the creature soon draws Myles’ cheeks wide with its sated grin.

  He will not keep the photos he took of Tahseen tonight for keepsakes. They will burn, as do those of all his subjects, as do the subjects themselves. What remembrance could ever compare with the diamond that embodies each woman’s feminine essence, the jewel created by the sheer force of his will and sorcery? The gemstone created this night from what precious carbon existed in his latest love is no mere memento of Tahseen. The gemstone upon which the creature known to so many women only as “Myles” places a longing kiss is Tahseen—what greater tribute than this could ever honor the woman?

  Myles places Tahseen upon the highest shelf at his back. She will rest there, between diamonds bearing the respective nameplates of “Lisa” and “Angelique.” Tomorrow, he will fashion a nameplate bearing the name of his collection’s most recent acquisition. Tonight however, exhaustion has left him capable of little except sleep.

  “Giving my ladies back to lovers who underappreciate them has always been the most difficult, most loathsome part of what I do,” Myles ruminates, as if explaining himself to his newest acquisition. “So you see, I’ve simply stoppe
d giving them back. But here, you’ll glow. Here, you, Tahseen, are immortal. Just like me.”

  Sparse light winks across the surface of the diamond that had been Tahseen. Myles, accepting this as all the affirmation he should ever need, winks back.

  Leviathan

  Christopher Chambers

  LEVIATHAN, n. 1. An enormous aquatic animal described by Job in the Bible (see BEHEMOTH, K RAKKEN). 2. A demon spawned in a man’s own mind and fed by his own misdeeds and failings, thusly allowing him to wax blameless for his own torment.

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  The Portuguese brig Maria Gômes was Yankee-built and brand spanking new, having slid down the ways at Baltimore Towne in March 1754. At full canvass, she could slice the water like a razor through supple flesh. But not on this night, so black and moonless. The wind was dead. Weeds enmeshed the ship’s keel from bow to rudder, there atop a floating mat of vegetation in the Atlantic Ocean three hundred miles wide, six hundred miles long. The Sargasso Sea.

  Not a man wanted to be on deck in that murk, in the stillness, in the unnerving quiet. Yet not a man wanted to be below decks either, as a wicked stench permeated every beam. And below decks it was never quiet; each crewman slept with wax plugged in his ears as a buffer against the wails, coughs, whimpers and curses oozing from the cargo hold.

  A loud splash off the starboard side and accompanying swell broke the moribund calm. The starboard lookout couldn’t discern a damn thing. Another whale perhaps? Cows and calves swam near the sargassum weed, but never into it. Only humans made that blunder, and the mistake was compounded over the past few years as more Portuguese, British, Dutch and Spanish ships tacked the westerly trade winds from Africa’s Gulf of Guinea to Brail, then north to the Caribbean. The Sargasso Sea swallowed two schooners and another fast brig that year of 1754 alone. But the appetite for the cargo those ships and the Maria Gômes carried was voracious in Bahía, Havana, Port Royal, Barbados and the British Carolina and Virginia colonies. Greed trumped common sense. Just before the wind abandoned them, the Maria Gômes’ crew spotted a whale carcass floating belly-up in the weeds. Hunks of meat had been ripped out of its head and tail. Purplish, circular wounds pocked what was left; each was the diameter of a grog cup. Tiger sharks or orca did it, the sailing master reckoned. Yes, tiger sharks or orca—but didn’t they chase only calves? This was a full-grown cow, a thirty-footer.