-Mimi?
-Fiona?
-You’re not fooling anyone.
-Fiona?
-You know what I mean.
-Fi………………………?
-You and Roger. You two are in love with this poison malice crud.
-Yes … but … but we always make up.
-So it seems. It’s still awfully boring. Why can’t you guys wait till you get home to bicker and bitch?
-Fiona!
-What?!
-I don’t know.
Mimi blots the one remaining tear from an eyelash and blows her nose.
A loud, plaintive squawk.
-I’m still half of a mind that you should consider leaving him.
-Never. Never. Never!
-Why not, Mimi?
Mimi giggles, frowns, her pretty face settling finally, serious and blank as stone.
-Great sex.
Fiona shrugs.
-That’s a good enough reason, I guess. So, are you ready to rejoin the boys?
-Tell me, why is it you two are still even together? It doesn’t seem that you agree on anything. Politics, books, religion. Christ, you don’t even share the same taste in ale. Is it true love, then, Roger?
Roger, still pouting, looks down the table at Puss.
Roger frowns, chuckles, his brutal face settling finally, blank and serious as stone.
-Great sex, he says.
Puss purses his lips, nodding, nodding, and deeply, suddenly jealous.
Mimi and Fiona emerge into the golden, too-bright sunlight.
Fiona’s lips are moving. In quick whisper. Into Mimi’s ear.
-That story you told me once. About your first encounter with Roger. Is it really true?
Mimi blushes instant crimson, covers her mouth with fluttering fingers. Even the twin dimples in her shoulders, pale in the stain of onrushing flush. She nods her head up and down. Hysterically affirmative.
-Not a soul! Fiona? You promised!
Fiona crosses herself and moues a silent ‘yes’.
-Our secret, Mimi. Oh … and Roger’s of course.
Fiona whoops and cackles. And lies. She can’t resist. She’s going to tell Puss. What Mimi told her. She’ll tell him, yes. Tonight. She hasn’t a clue what she’s doing. Fiona plays with fire.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Random or serial?
Street maps have gone up on the wall, crime scene photos columned in between, close-ups of wounds laid side by side. For each victim, a single sheet of fill-in-the-boxes.
Then everyone sits back.
Stares.
Scratches their heads.
Every once in a while someone gets up and walks to the wall. Leaning in, nose inches from this or that exhibit.
They are all looking for the same thing. But superstition puts a kibosh on the naming of it just yet.
Pattern.
Absence of pattern.
Pattern.
Absence of pattern.
Blue pushpins for the victims.
(A)– at the base of a fire-escape, alley off Hortense. (B) – apartment building boiler room, corner of Bledsoe and Scotus. (C) – public phone booth, thirty feet north of Angel Park Bridge. A to B to C forming a rough triangle. Victims D, E, F, and G have all fallen within the inverted underlined ‘V’.
Sgt. Emma Glass turns to the room, silently follows the design with her capped marker. Any takers?
Lt. Jocko Pitt murmurs something that no one can make out.
Sgt. Sandy Prieto officially breaks the silence.
-Is that it? The Pattern?
Captain Allenby, nursing a toothache that reduces him to babytalk, growls and frowns.
-Kweenkydeenk. Juzz uh kweenkydeenk.
Fool, the others may think, without letting gesture give them away. Mon Capitaine Homicide, dosing himself out of his invalid wife’s private pharmacy.
Prieto gets the loss, Emma’s tip-tap tease that of bait-dangler, not bait-nibbler. Though even those who should know better can’t seem to see beyond her cream and scarlet fog, can’t seem to read her seriously. Too pretty, for starters.
And now Allenby’s up and out of his borrowed swivel chair and Phase B begins its plod.
-Luten Pid, geb bad onstree. Tabe Glz wiboo. Peewedoh, spwit vixems by odds end edens. Drest avoo, bing me sumampers.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Puss’s photograph lies on the floor. Peter’s hands are either side of it. He’s doing push-ups. As though in training for some Olympiad of love. Peter is a sentimentalist. It is agony not to know the redhead’s name. He must, he shall, he will. Wring it from Puss. Peter’s pestle suffers no such romantic quibbles. It is stiff as a broom handle. It bulges against the cloth of his bikini undershorts. His testicles feel frostbit. Numb, swollen, except for tiny surging flames of pain every time his nose sinks inches above what Simon cruelly calls: The Lips Of The Untouchable Mousepit.
Simon sits on the floor, gazing out the glass doors of the balcony. At the sky. Nothing’s happening up there. Apart from that spooky cloud. He gulps dry sherry from a Biedermeyer beer stein. He turns and watches his friend’s exertions. And chuts, shaking his head.
-That way madness lies, Simon says.
Peter pauses in his push-ups, arms at full extension. His hair is plastered to his forehead and cheeks. A drop of sweat falls onto the underside of the girl’s lifted thigh. It sizzles with a cold mercurial hiss. He’s breathing hard. But not from exhaustion. He resumes his rapid up and down, his lips quivering around a mantra of lust.
-I must I will I SHALL have her I must I will I SHALL have her I must I will I SHALL have her …
Simon pours himself some more sherry and returns to his watch. A single cloud in the sky. It’s been there since morning. Purple, black at heart, moving slowly, stealthily, just behind the sun.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Posh is as posh does. Having taken the useless statements of a dozen neighborhood liars, Emma Glass is treating herself to Jocko Pitt’s gutter torment. He despises restaurants such as this. Their ferns, their polish, their fashion-plate employees, their pry-pry-prices. Squalid diners with ratty pool tables, stained with the afterhour juices of slut waitresses. That’s more like it. Cold meatballs eaten from the can, nude in front of the open fridge. With such things he feels at home. Like Panzers in Poland the noise of the cappuccino machine drowns out the impotence of his apology.
-You’re better looking than most detectives. I’ll control myself in the future. Sorry.
Emma twists her mouth into a nordic smile and ignores him.
Over three years past and still the bitch won’t let him live it down. Sure it was a mistake. No justification. No denying it. At the time however, it seemed like the right, the only, the perfect thing to do. After all, what more victimless crime than the screwing of a corpse?
****************
The corpse which he had ardently begun to love those three years past was that of a young college student, thrown from her moped in a collision with a speeding postal van. Massive internal injuries. Only the slightest of abrasions. The odd angle in which her head was resting the only clue that her neck was broken.
Jocko gives his permission to the gauche, if competent, morgue-attendant, whose missed first his lunch and now his dinner, whose stomach growls like an angry hedgetrimmer.
-Bon appetite, Jocko says, as the door closes with a sucked softness.
He switches off the overhead banks of fluorescent light. With sweaty palms he gropes his way through utter darkness. Groping towards the dead girl’s slab. His head holds an image. From before the lights went out. Her sleeping face. Iodine scent. Pout of smudged lipstick. The thin white sheet. Neatly, professionally folded along her collar bone. The firm, youthful mounds of her inexperienced breasts. The soft knobs of her spread knees. The promise of five minutes of paradise. And no harm done. He unbuckles. In a low, strangled voice he reassures her that he’ll treat her well. He begins his assault. And then. Split second of blindness. Of light. And in the doorway.
Emma Glass.
Watching.
Staring.
Seeing him doing what he can no longer imagine doing.
He tops the dead girl. Viciously. Her cold white body, shuddering in his arms. Her skin clammed with his cold sweat. The room echoes with his negative scream.
Emma.
Watches.
Fascinated.
He splutters his milk in Death’s chill wasteland.
*******************
And Emma’s eyes.
-The cappuccino here is excellent, she says.
And looks through him with ferocious calm.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Gwendolyn shares a slice of rhubarb pie with Gwendolyn Junior. Her dark-eyed cocker spaniel. Flatpawed on the kitchen table, Junior is all slather and swallow and endless tongue. Slather, swallow, tongue tongue tongue. His eyes deep pools of inexhaustible love. The telephone cries in the hallway.
-Tekel tekel mene upharsin.
Nebuchadnezzar didn’t get it but she will. In the jubilant expanse of her flat, Gwendolyn’s Hummel figurines rattle in porcelain cadence.
-Don’t spoil your appetite, dear, Gwendolyn teases cocker.
Junior buries his muzzle in pie. He waits upon his mistress’ return. Uncertainty dogs his dog world as dog time wags its patient tail. She’s back. He allows his ears to be flippered and caressed but he knows her heart isn’t in it.
-Oh Gwenju, she sighs.
She opens a cabinet above the sink and begins to assemble her midmorning whisky.
-You remember Belinda, don’t you? My beautiful, beautiful baby. That terrible accident on her moped? How we cried for weeks, for months? She’s come back to us, Gwenju! I knew her voice the moment I picked up the telephone. She’s coming home for the holidays. After three long years. She’s coming home. And do you know what, Gwenju?
No, Gwenju doesn’t know.
-Belinda says we are to be grandparents!
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Churl skulks through the rectal foliage of Evangeline Park. His bruiseblood cloud squints down upon his stalking with the simmering affection of a loyal vassal. Churl emerges through a wall of poison oak, to snarl happy at pockets of dun-colored foam disfiguring the surface of Tinkerbell’s pond. He smiles at the rompings of the schoolchildren opposite. The goody-goody doves recognize him and take flight. Not daring to look back. Lest he be …
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Puss burns.
Puss is on fire.
Puss is very upset.
He’s in love.
He needs to get laid.
In love.
With Fiona.
He’s read his Freud.
He fiddles with his camera, knowing.
This is what he aims at her.
A dreary, sorry substitute.
She’s watering a dwarf ivy.
Serial plant-killer.
She’s relaxed.
Unaware.
And topless.
Fiona has just finished telling him the story of ‘Mimi and Roger’s first encounter’.
The story took longer in the telling than either reason or titillation could account for.
Because Fiona couldn’t stop laughing.
She didn’t seem to notice.
That he wasn’t.
Laughing.
She’s kept her pants on for the duration.
But bounces obliviously, gloriously topless.
Puss is in pain.
His imagination will be the death of him.
Or her.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
Mimi arrives at the party a mere three hours late. Her handsome, alcoholic boyfriend passed out in the back seat. Mimi’s anger at having gotten lost vanishes in a relief of carnival, festival, a veritable carnal festschrift. The ocean’s nearby roar can’t begin to compete with the rock and roll distorting from the speakers, ranged in random quintet along the boundaries of the bungalow beachhouse. Though ‘bungalow’, ‘beachhouse’ beg the less-than-beggarly villa forth into decadent reality.
Mimi, although she is the stranger at the banquet, is mad about fun. She rouses her boyfriend. With a tickle. A fingernail gouge against the unplushed tremble of his nostrils. A well-timed obscenity.
He zombies after her along the gravel drive, ankle-deep in confetti and cigarette butts. Drawn olfactory towards the bungalow’s boozy heart.
The party is a bust. An opiate and paranoid mob scene. Mimi makes herself at home.
Several bottles and two visits to the bathroom later she leans against a wall, her boyfriend propped beside her, making conversation. She with herself. He with his familiar hallucinations. Mimi sways her caucasian hips to a music she has no use for. Fun’s hard work. They are flanked by equally floating unknowns. With whom they presumably share hordes in common. If they could only curb the slurring. Get past the dumb animal sounds. And spit it out.
Outside, it’s raining lightly. For God only knows how long. Years ago, perhaps. And now it’s gone abruptly heavy. It’s brought a date. All flash and noise. The booze and dope make it easy to ignore. Apart from the screamers on the lawn. Pretending they’re Druids as an excuse to get naked and dripping and wet. Mimi considers joining them. But three steps in any direction is the most she trusts herself to manage. So she continues her butt-flounced little hipshake. Her boyfriend appears to be speaking in tongues. Slurring, mumbling in tongues, rather. He also seems to have shrunk about a foot in height, to gravity’s grip in slow surrender.
Mimi feels it building.
In the soles of her feet.
Her ankles.
Creeping buglike up the backs of her knees, rounding the smooth heat of the insides of her thighs, gnawing lilliputians, luddites hammering their ant-farm cudgels, swarming thousand-footed the beachhead of her g-string.
It arrives.
It comes.
It’s here.
The Great Big
Crash Of
Of what?
Armageddon’s simultaneous orgasm, that’s what.
Lightning, thunder. Frying the circuits, foxing the fuses, plunging the party into the black. The more sober members of both genders have sufficient wits to shriek the prerequisite interval before hushing themselves into that other hush. Of rain on roof.
-Don’t panic, a quiet voice says.
So calm. The voice of a real take-charge guy. Only it’s a woman. The hostess? Mimi wonders. She’s no idea, not having met her yet, nor seen her pointed out in the previous hours.
-I’ll try and find some candles, another voice says.
-And flashlights, adds a third, getting in on the action.
Mimi’s seen too many disaster movies to either panic or go Girl Scout. Notwithstanding such conflicted wisdom she takes one, two, three tentative steps into darkness. Visibility nil. Even a cat would lurch clumsy. A slumping, thumping noise behind her. Like a bag of soiled laundry tumped into the dull swallow of a chute. Mimi’s sense of adventure is in arch escalation. Under cover of darkness, oh yes.
She wants to blow her boyfriend. Mimi turns and slowly goes down on her knees. She inches back in the direction of the wall. Like a toddler on a leash. Somewhere near, the sweet strangled smell of sick. Mimi ignores it, crabbing across the hardwood floor.
To the west the screamers are fading to a low-slung bovine moan. To the east, both stratospheric and lowland, the searchers for light are thrashing down steps, caroming off walls, cartwheeling over ill-placed furniture, buttheading their own shadows.
Mimi’s face collides with flannel. She giggles. Rubs her nose against it. Rests her cheek upon it. The silent conch of an unattended crotch. As her fingers expert pick and pluck she lifts her face to the blind warmth of air and whispers.
-I wanna play.
The fly’s undone and cat’s out of the bag. Heavy as a paperweight, soft and sparse-furred as a cunny’s tum, the spongy opulent twins fill her lifted waiting hand. Mimi squeezes lightly, then heels her palm to push slow up. Just the way her boyfriend likes it. The hardening baton pulses against her forehead, the crown collared in the cool fringe of her bangs. Royalist clay swollen into firmly monstrous shape by moonlight’s venereal monsoon. Ridiculous and sexy as a Ukrainian sausage laid horizontal on an oval plinth of ivory. Funny, Mimi thinks to herself, she could have sworn he’d been wearing underpants when she skipped from the shower days ago. With her other hand Mimi strokes the fat worm, daintily removes it from its place of repose and repositions herself. She works her cheeks. Fills her mouth with spit. Parts her lips. Flutters her eager tongue. Inhales deeply. And begins to gorge.
What follows, in Mimi’s modest telling, is the standard three and a half minutes of lubricious polyrhythmic absorptive pressure, skimming skillfully down upon its goal of drenching crescendo.
One part propellant tongue. One part slipridged exquisite throat. One part hydraulic vacuum pump.
The indispensable trinity of her signature juggernaut blowjob.
Another funny thing.
Which Mimi, the ice-minded, notes.
She’s never heard the noise of her boyfriend mewling when he floods her head. Though he claims she makes him ‘howl’. The reason is simple enough. When he’s on the unplugged verge he grabs her by the ears. Silencing the world. Except for the tick-tock-tickety-tock of her brain. And the 4/4 thud of his spitshine worm.
Perhaps it’s the booze?
The 2.5 post passes.
And the 4.0.
Rounding the corner to the fifth minute, the shaft wildly slippery in its hot froth of saliva, Mimi gets the surprise of her life.
Above her, a groan like the Lusitania going down, juddering on the edge of glassy breakage. And a bursting dollop of crème brut insults the roof of her mouth. She disengages. Takes a second shot on the chin. Laughing, almost losing her balance, Mimi upstrokes her finishing of him. The third and final gout is a high flyer. Over her left shoulder. Splattering audibly the floor behind her. Smiling ear to ear, Mimi swallows and squeezes the messy finale to a slow pulse over her fingers, sliming her from thumbnail to wristwatch.
-Here we go! a chirpy voice intrudes from behind.
Accompanied by the shocked beam of a flashlight.
Illuminating a muscled, hirsute abdomen.
That of the recently pillaged.
In Mimi’s grip the dripping tulip wilts.
She follows the rise of the golden circle.
Looks up.
Into the eyes of a perfect stranger.
-Oops, Mimi says, and wipes her fingers on the cuff of Roger’s pants.
The light, prudish and discrete, shifts away. Rests briefly on the fetal form of Mimi’s boyfriend, snoring softly in a pool of vomit.
One bottle later Mimi and Roger stagger down the front steps arm in arm, giddy at the prospect of Roger’s soon to be repaid debt.
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
)(
(Postcard II)
Smut as tragedy.
Slop and slur of bright colors, unnatural enough to make a magpie wince, skirling its rapacity towards something less vulgar.
The target audience knows itself by names other than its loved ones might choose: ‘defenders of the faith’, ‘free-worlders’, ‘our boys in khaki’.
The postcard has a title: Bangalore Whore.
What is she, the girl in the picture?
Twelve?
Eleven years old?
The heavy makeup only serves to emphasize this is a child.
Prolonged examination almost leads to a fatal conclusion.
That the wide, heartstopping smile is genuine.
The girl’s head is slightly turned.
To what effect?
The hiding of a bruise, a brand, some demonic birthmark?
There are words on the snug-fitting tee shirt, tight across her flat chest.
Is it a language she can read?
Hot pink and canary yellow letters.
‘There’s A Party In My Mouth ….. Wanna Come?’
This language or that, can she even read?
Her lifted knees rest on the margins of the photograph’s frame.
And where her exposed genitals should be is air.
For someone (twice-removed sadist? principled postal clerk?) has neatly carved out an ‘O’, a perfect circle worth of Giotto.
Rendering the verso message encrypted, classified, almost Sapphic.
Dear Princess of Sorrows,
Alas, it is a_______n we have
resolved on,_______r kin from
lust after_________kingship!
Far bette___________tarashtra’s
men, wit______________, should
slay me________________sisting and
weapon
So sp________________n Arjuna’s
char________________ld of war,
and________________ows,
fo________________row.
____________________ul song?
__________________a Chance