by Stacey Longo
“Lewis, it’s wrong. Can’t you see that? It’s corrupted you.”
He’d shaken his head and looked at her sadly. “No, it’s not wrong. Why else would God have given me this gift?”
“God?” she’d said. “Are you serious, Lewis?” She’d begun to pace. “That’s your justification—God? You’ve let this…this power get to your head. It’s…it’s evil, that’s what, and you’re no better than a criminal.”
“I’m sorry you see it that way.”
“Well,” she’d said, and walked to the closet where their suitcases sat. “I won’t be a part of it.” And then she was gone.
Lewis blinked and admired the canvas before him, the palette in his left hand, the brush in his right. He smiled. No, he reasoned, it couldn’t be wrong, because it felt so right.
“Construe, imbue…I color you.”
***
The first drawing was completed and sat to the side; the second was nearly finished.
Charles’s hand moved at blurring speed, and it seemed his consciousness was split. One part of him was entirely focused on the drawing, each and every detail, however minute, perfecting the creation because this one, this very special one, meant so much. The other part of him was mostly divorced from the aspects of the drawing, as was the drawing part of him divorced from this more aware side of him, although to both the other was there, bordering on its vision.
His lips were pursed, and from the side of his mouth poked the tip of his tongue as he continued to draw. Light swishes and rasps were the only sound; there was the smell of graphite.
He thought about his mom, and how they had all been wrong. The police, his aunt, the “experts”—all wrong. He knew his mother; how could they tell him different when he knew in his gut, where instinct reigned supreme? He’d always suspected something else, and now he knew—his suspicion, which his mother had told him was fine and dandy, but alone, not enough to act on, was substantiated—and that didn’t fill him with a righteous joy or arrogant pride as he’d always thought it would. Instead, he merely felt lighter, because now in the black hours of the night, doubt could never again creep upon him.
He could be content with that.
The second drawing was complete except for one small detail he would save.
***
At the door of the Painting Room, Charles stopped. He knew he wouldn’t be able to enter through it, for it was either locked or braced. He stepped to the side, where another door had magically appeared. He twisted the knob and pulled it open, letting his first drawing drift to the floor in seesawing swings.
Once inside, he paused again, and watched Lewis work with a concentration and frenzy that matched what had just consumed him. On the canvas was a painting he guessed was half done. He was constructed from the waist up, but very incomplete. On his head was a crow pecking down at his eyes; another was perched on his shoulder and had a piece of meat from his neck in its beak. In the background was a mass of the birds flying toward him.
Charles kicked the chair out from under the original door. It clattered against the hardwood floor and echoed in the empty room. Lewis’s head snapped toward the sound. Their eyes locked.
“At first I didn’t understand it,” Charles said, his writing tablet and pencil held at his sides. “But everything in time.”
A caw from a single bird sounded outside the room, not far from the angel, and then it was followed by what sounded like thousands of birds exclaiming together in their raucous tongue.
Lewis turned at the sound of the birds, looking toward his angel of stained glass. The birds cawing grew louder and louder. It was thunderous. He studied Charles for a moment, then began to paint again.
Charles shook his head and raised his drawing tablet. He shaded in a single speck—which represented a dot of gray in the iris of an eye.
Lewis continued to paint.
“You said you wanted to see a drawing of mine.”
Across the room, the angel began to fissure at its borders. As she pulled away from the surrounding window she became three-dimensional. The stained glass flexed without cracking. First freed was her head, then her shoulders, and on downward to her feet. She stepped down into the room. Wind rushed in and tossed Charles’s hair around, but he didn’t blink an eye. The crows’ cacophony became amplified, and their erratic flying blocked the view of all beyond the window.
Lewis looked toward his angel with a face of bewilderment.
Her fiery eyes locked on his skinny frame as her crystalline robe blew to the side. She raised her huge sword with both hands.
Lewis’s palette and brush fell to his sides with his arms. He turned to Charles.
The boy turned the picture around. “Well, what do you think?”
About the author:
Anthony Bell lives in Washington State. His favorites include ice cream and motorcycles.
The Iron Maiden
by Eric Dimbleby
The teeth gripped deep into the flesh as he tugged on the contraption. It became further entrenched with this action, counteracting his attempt at resolution with a deeper resolve. He slowed his breathing, careful not to pass out. His face had turned stark white. If he lost consciousness, then all would be lost. The blood was pooling down there and he fought with every ounce of will he had not to look at what had become of him. He thought of a bear trap, with its horrific iron teeth. A bear trap seemed a welcome substitute.
Somewhere in the world, Doctor Hannah Powers was smiling.
***
Jimmy Grant was not a rapist.
Sure, he committed his silver tongue to a surplus of convincing when it came to his female conquests, of which there were hundreds. When called upon, he got pushy...but never abusive. Sometimes all a trashy broad needed was to have her earlobe pinched between his thumb and forefinger, to keep her in place long enough to whisper in her ear canal, “Listen, bitch. It’s you and me tonight, no questions asked. You make me happy, and I’ll tell all your friends you ain’t the slut they think you are.” And the woman (though more often than not, she was too young to be labeled as a woman) would generally succumb to his might, a prequel to the abused wife she would one day become. Most of them, Jimmy was convinced, liked that sort of assertiveness. Some of them, as the old adage went, were asking for it.
But never rape. “But what about that chick Tammy, the one that said she was a stripper? We all knew she was lying. Pretty sure that was rape,” his best friend Hank the Shank would point out one morning over lukewarm eggs and bacon at their favorite diner called, affectionately by locals, The Morning After Swill.
“That’s not rape, you dipshit. She was a stripper, so it ain’t rape. I threw her ten bucks after,” Jimmy would reply, sneering while the big blue vein on his forehead poked out, an all-telling indicator that he was on the verge of popping Hank the Shank on the soft side of the head with his clenched fist. Jimmy had a violent streak in him that he generally kept at bay, but one could never say when or how his Mr. Hyde would be unleashed upon those who surrounded him.
He was violent and quite aggressive.
But Jimmy Grant was not a rapist.
Just like Kiki Malone was not a whore.
Kiki was born in the back of a Camaro on a hot summer night, her mother so drunk on whiskey that she barely remembered the two hour labor. As it turned out, Kiki had lost her virginity in the back of that very same Camaro thirteen years later, though the vehicle was coated with rust and smelled of warm spilled beer by that point in time. Where her mother had once spread her legs and popped a massive piece of meat free of her womb, Kiki had done the very same, but in the reverse direction.
By her fifteenth birthday, Kiki had slept with nearly a quarter of the boys in her class. Forty-five in total, and still counting. By her graduation day, she had toiled with the loins of more than two hundred boys, men (including one very lucky physics teacher), and even a couple of her pillow-fighting girlfriends. She had stayed mostly free of disease. Though she had been promi
scuous with her love-making, she was always safe and forever cautious. The last thing in the world she would have ever wanted was a child to load her down and decimate her blossoming life. She desired a college education and a bright future that involved a tall handsome man with perfect teeth and a job that required him to wear a sexy three-piece suit. When she wanted something, she would have it. Being a young unwed mother would stunt that progression.
Kiki Malone was not a whore. And in the summer that followed her graduation, Kiki had declared to herself, while studying her pouting red lips and flowing dark hair in the mirror, that she was going to be a good girl from now on, that she would only touch the man she loved, and only that Prince Charming, wherever he may be, would ever lay his grimy hands upon her again. She was a woman reborn, and most definitely not the whorish dumpster that the world had foolishly taken her for. It was time to come out again, a reinvigorated debutante. People would respect and admire her. Eventually.
And so it could only be called fate that Jimmy Grant would meet Kiki Malone at a night club in the second week of July, their skin collectively perspiring as they danced close, but not too-close, grinding into each other’s bodies in a seductive ancient ritual that neither could explain or interpret. Jimmy was three years older than Kiki, but her reputation preceded her in leaps and bounds and backyard slurps.
They moved with the music, beasts looming in the dark, each with a different set of motives. Kiki sought to prove what a good girl she was while Jimmy sought to prove what a bad boy he was. Kiki had glitter strategically dabbed on her face so as to stand out among the droves. Jimmy had honed in on her from afar, having wanted to add her feather to his cap for quite some time.
“I know you,” Jimmy insisted with a cocky growl, his eyes boring holes through the deliciously short and beautiful tramp who had come to be known in their circles of friends as The Village Bicycle. She had never heard the moniker spoken aloud, but knew of its existence. All the more reason to prove them all wrong.
“No, you don’t know me,” she replied with a hint of soft seduction. Though she had promised herself to abstinence, and to God, there was still a playful side to her personality that simply screamed for the boys to lust after her and awaken in cold sweats when she meandered through their horny dreams. “You don’t know me at all,” she added in an attempt to portray herself as mysterious. Two thirds of their game was the thrill of potential success, or potential failure.
Jimmy laughed out loud, raising his voice to speak over the thumping droning house music that pervaded every inch of the darkened crowded dance floor of happy ants and bustling maggots, “You’re Kiki Malone. Just about every asshole in this joint’s heard of Kiki. I know your sister. So...”
Sighing, Kiki replied, “My sister’s the whore. That ain’t me, kid. Not anymore. Go barkin’ up somebody else’s tree.” She moved her body in a swivel to distance herself from the aggressive groping hands and eyes of the slimy-lipped boy. She knew his name, for he had “dated” her sister two years earlier. It had ended with a violent argument and a black eye in the parking lot of a taco joint, soon after her sister Leyla had privately sought out an abortion of Jimmy’s unborn child. He had been angry about the incident, and rightfully so, but had forgotten all about it by the next day. Like Kiki’s reputation, Jimmy’s preceded him with an equal dominance.
“You callin’ me kid? You better watch that pretty mouth,” Jimmy half-threatened, biting at his lip as he pulled Kiki in close to him. She could not escape his grip, and so resorted to the only viable move she had, to plant her face upon his and further the tug-of-war of seduction.
They drank each other long and hard, and then proceeded to do the same with a bottle of gin at the bar, until they were both spinning from both unbridled lust and escalating blood alcohol levels. “I’m gonna take you out some night.” Jimmy had put forth a pathetic attempt to insert romance into their sloppy evening. She had laughed and slurred something incoherent to herself, not realizing that the night he was referring to was this very night. The good girl in Kiki drowned at the bottom of the gin bottle.
***
By the time they were in Jimmy’s machismo-laden car, he had already copped several feels at her protruding chest, though she had smacked him away with a stern warning. “I’m promised to my future,” she had mumbled and burped, partially drunk from the oxygen-deprived night club. “I’m promised to God,” she blurted, barely able to keep her vision affixed upon him. What had started as one Jimmy had turned into three Jimmies.
“Take off your shirt,” Jimmy stated with a forceful tone, though he had already torn away her shirt and bra by the time he had spoken those words, one step ahead of his darting gin-soaked tongue. She looked down at herself and realized this fact, though she was too mentally orbital to retaliate against his advances. She shook her head from side to side, trying to cast the drunkenness from her mind and body like a wet dog drying itself after a swim.
“Leave me alone, Jimmy Grant!” She made no real concerted effort to resist, her mind toggling back and forth between her promises of chastity and her penetrating lust for young male flesh, particularly of men who were poorly prescribed to her. “Rape,” she mumbled, shaking her dark hair from side to side again, as Jimmy eyed her breasts and grunted like a lawless caveman. He would have what he needed.
Her skirt slid down to her knees with ease and Jimmy discovered no barrier, in the way of underwear, to his ultimate desire. His vision blurred at the site of that goal, but he proceeded anyway.
“Please, stop that. I’m a good girl now,” she meandered, but offered nothing in her physical movements that backed up this defensive intention. Jimmy Grant moaned as he entered her sanctuary, pulling back and then...pain.
Pain with a capital P.
“What the fuck,” he mumbled as he tried to pull away from Kiki. She vomited upon her bare shoulder, her eyes rolling back in her head as she gagged on chunks of her earlier consumed dinner of carrots and blackened Cajun chicken. Jimmy lunged away from her vomit splash and was free of that initial snagging pain that he had felt inside of her. “Drunk ass whore.” A very immediate notion that filled his head was that something had come free of Kiki when he moved away from her. He had heard of the female condoms, but had never actually seen one. He figured that Kiki was most likely the last broad on the planet to employ something with that kind of forethought. She was the kind of girl who took care of her problems afterward, at clinics, just like her sister had done.
Plodding on to the seat beside her, cussing at Kiki for evacuating her stomach in his vehicle, he looked down at his bare lap to see what had come free of her, that which was still clinging to him like a snapper turtle.
Clutched to his penis was a long clear funnel made of vulcanized rubber. He studied it for a moment, focusing one of his drunken eyes on it. “What the hell is this shit, huh?” he asked Kiki, who was moaning between vomit-covered lips, ready to blow a second geyser of gin and dinner. Without a second thought on the matter, he grabbed at the alien device and pulled.
Gunshots of vicious screaming pain shot through every last blood vessel of his engorged “meat javelin”, as he had once called it, and Jimmy’s eyes watered. And so he grabbed the device a second time. It felt like a leech, long pricks of teeth digging into the sensitive flesh that he so treasured. When he attempted removal, the teeth seemed to dig in deeper, so much was quickly apparent. “What the fuck is this?” he calmly asked of Kiki, who had now passed out on to the seat, face first, in a pool of her own upchuck.
“I told you. I ain’t no whore. I’m God’s lover, now,” she said with a sloppy slur as her face lolled to one side and fell deeper into the pool of spew that she had given oral birth to.
“What the fuck did you do to me, bitch?” he screamed in a voice of panic, tugging on his Chinese-Penis-Trap one more time, the spiky prongs burrowing deeper again, as with each offering of resistance. He reflexively punched Kiki in the back of the head, but she gave no suitable response. Sh
e was utterly sloshed. He punched her a second time, what some of his expert friends might have called a Donkey Punch, but again she didn’t respond. It angered him that she was so absent from the terror that was afflicting him, that which she had put into motion with her diseased pink hole. He stared at the device, surveying it for an easy method of removal. He found nothing but pain and permanence.
When he saw a droplet of blood at the base, his panic level escalated tenfold.
He dialed Hank the Shank on his cell phone, who was still inside the club trying to lock down his evening’s sexual conquest. When Hank answered, Jimmy spoke softly, “Brother... I need you to look at something for me. Right fucking now.” He bit back his tears, fearful that his longtime comrade would judge him for such sissy behavior.
***
In the year 2008, a doctor by the name of Hannah Powers conducted extensive research in several regions of the southern half of Africa in an attempt to pinpoint the most prominent social causes of the AIDS epidemic. In her very brief study, which lasted less than a year, she confirmed her previous belief that one in five cases was a direct result of rape. It existed in every dark corner of every public venue, behind closed doors and in clandestine alleyways. It was everywhere, but the women were too frightened to speak of the subject aloud, for fear of further sexual aggression against them. Doctor Hannah Powers proposed to a medical industrialist a method to combat this overwhelming scourge of forceful sexual deviance.
It was rumored among many African females, that Hannah Powers interviewed, that there was a regular practice employed by women, that which involved the careful (and more often than not, the complete lack of care) insertion of razor blades into their vaginas. The resultant effect, if it did not cause damage to the woman by its mere placement, was that a rapist would be sliced to bits by his unwelcome penetration. This was especially practiced by younger females just coming into their womanhood, wanting so very much to preserve their sexual sanctity. This concept fueled the ideas behind her propositioned design for combating the machinations of the primordial alpha male.
