Honey is Sweeter than Blood (12 page)

I knew, as I lifted the work of art from the box, my hands trembling so badly that I feared I would drop it, that Damask had finally had her first partial birth abortion.  Or, rather, more delicately worded, her first “Intact D&E”.

I had already learned long before then that Damask had indeed moved from Lowell.  I haven’t looked very hard for her, but I did ask Dwayne if he knew where she was, and he swears he hasn’t heard from her, either.  I have received no calls, no emails.  Though I wonder if at least she might send me an Xmas card, either fondly or perversely, this year.

There was only a note in the box with the gift of artwork.  And it only said:
You know that I always name my artwork, Tim.  But I’ll let you name this one.   —D.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t sob at first, holding the thing.  That I didn’t come close to phoning the police.  But ultimately, I didn’t.  Ultimately, I’ve come to regard this flesh collage as Damask’s most beautiful piece of work.  Her masterpiece.

She had lacquered this creation, to better preserve it for posterity.  I think, too, that she must have freeze-dried it or drained it of its fluids, somehow, because it has a dark, withered, mummified look.  The wings of pigeons are securely sewn onto its back.  My little angel.  It was a female.  I held it to my chest as I sobbed, as if to rock it, as if to comfort it.

I took it to bed with me that first night.  But I don’t think I kissed it, traced its leathery hard figure with wrinkles fossilized into fissures, oiled and scented with patchouli, until several nights had passed.

I’m not an artist; my imagination isn’t as refined as hers.

For lack of a better title, I’ve named the work of art
Damask
.

Afterword: My Sexual Exploits

“A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.”

–Thomas Hardy

I like to believe I’m known for an often personal writing style, subject matter that finds its origins in my own experiences or at least in my own emotions.  Other writers of fiction, cleaving close to that word
fiction
, might argue that it is better not to approach one’s work in a blatantly autobiographical fashion.  They would say that a less subjective perspective resonates with more readers.  I certainly wouldn’t suggest that every story should be about one’s own life, somewhat fictionalized, or we wouldn’t have a male, middle-aged Thomas Hardy creating a female, teenaged character named Tess.  (
Although
, Maupassant said, “Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.”) If every fiction were auto-biographical, every horror story would be about a slightly overweight dork who wears heavy metal t-shirts and can’t get laid to save his life…instead of being about superhuman serial killers who defile and dismember the beauties who won’t date said dork.  :) And yet, I don’t feel that highly personal stories amount to nothing more than self-indulgent exercises in harvesting lint from one’s navel.  One can dig much deeper than that, and bring up the darkest, rawest of matter.  No less an author than Tolstoy said, “One ought to write only when one leaves a piece of one’s flesh in the inkpot each time one dips one’s pen.” But you may be more familiar with the adage, “Write what you know.”

Well, I know sex.

This following bit of personal history may in fact enlighten you as to why I occasionally write erotic horror, why I choose certain themes, how my past has shaped me as a person and an artist (which to me cannot be separated).  When writing, I prefer not to collaborate.  Not with another author, not with an overly zealous editor whose red pen is his dick, not with the public’s expectations.  But in sex, it is generally best to collaborate with another…and my first collaborator was a young woman I met while working at Underwood Farms warehouse in my home town of Eastborough, Massachusetts.

Underwood Farms are a local chain of convenience stores, and at the warehouse orders are picked for transport to said stores.  In addition, there is a large bakery section where bread and doughnuts are made, and a soda plant where inferior brands of carbonated beverages are concocted.  I made minimum wage in the beverage plant, operating a machine called, ominously and futuristically, the palletizer.  :-o Boxes of soda bottles would march up a conveyor to the top of my looming machine, which would be loaded inside with wooden pallets the way an automatic pistol is fed a clip of bullets.  At the top of the machine I would organize the boxes of soda into a layer to be lowered onto the next pallet.  After so many layers of boxes were stacked atop each other, the pallet would then be ejected noisily onto another belt, to be carried off by a fork-lift.  It was utterly depressing.  One time a maintenance worker was inside my machine repairing it, and in aiding him, I hit the wrong button.  The blades that would slide the boxes onto the next pallet began to move forward.  Luckily I was quick enough to hit the button again.  The maintenance worker kindly acted as if I hadn’t almost severed his head.

One of my coworkers was a college student working for the summer, named Kelly.  Kelly was a seemingly shy, scholarly sort with thick glasses and short blond hair in child-like bangs.  She was pretty in an unassuming way, with a curvy body and breasts as large as breasts can get before they might be considered freakish.  : P Because she was so young, they were high and proud and seemed to contradict her meek and mild aspect, a carnal presence swelling within her body, pressing to burst free.  It may be unfair to stereotype a woman as being sexually adventurous simply because her mammary glands are over-developed, but it happens that in Kelly’s case it was true.  I summoned up the nerve at last (I’m rather shy, and bespectacled, myself) to ask her out.  She declined, explaining that she had a boyfriend, but I could tell she was flattered.  Flattery turned to flirtation.  The next thing I knew, flirtation turned to fornication…of which I had dreamed so long, bashfulness having denied me.  I let Kelly steer me.  She had more to lose than I did, and I didn’t want to pressure her.  And, more importantly, she was experienced where I was not.

The first time we had sex, it was in my bedroom in my parents’ house.  We went for hours (so long that certain top forty songs on the radio were played again).  Unfortunately, I was far too nervous to climax, but at least I wasn’t impotent, and Kelly was left satisfied by the experience.  I was sullen, bitter, for days; not at her, but at myself.  Embarrassed, ashamed.  I was a failure.  My dick had stayed hard but my self esteem was flaccid.  She took pity on me and only days later, while both her parents weren’t home, we fucked at her house.  The previous time, we had tried different things to get me to come.  Doggie style (she looked afraid for a moment, wondering which socket I meant to plug into).  She went down on me though I was slick with her juices.  She talked dirty to me.  All to no avail.  But in her own bedroom, things became even more creative.

There, Kelly asked me if I wanted to see her
really
 naked.  And then she took hold of both sides of her mouth, stretched it so wide I thought the skin would tear, and slipped her bald red head through that widened hole like a fruit with its peel pulled away.

Kelly continued to widen the hole of her elastic mouth, stretching it so that it allowed her shoulders to pass through it.  She worked her skin down her entire body, revealing more and more of her bright crimson muscles, furrowed and striated and marbled with yellow and white sinew, fat, ligaments, her eyes still gleaming seductively in that raw, blood-colored face.  In fact, she put her glasses back on.

Her breasts were still huge, but now they had these remarkable grooved textures, as did her curved belly, her thighs, her buttocks.  My fingers explored her anew.  Though she had become terrifying, she was also profoundly beautiful, in a way more so than with her flesh on.  It was the ultimate striptease, more intimate even than the first, and I couldn’t wait to probe myself deep into that boldly revealed anatomy.

Her nerves were more exposed, so she moaned and groaned with discomfort as I moved atop her, but the pain also brought her pleasure.  How we experimented that night.  At one point, she had me go on all fours while she thrashed my rump with the legs of her loose suit of skin.  She also used her skin to bind me to her bed posts, by knotting the limp sleeves of her arms around both my wrists, so that she might ride atop me.  At one point, to win laughter from her, I fucked the shed hide on the bed while she watched, and then I stood up and thrust my cock through one of its mask-like eye holes, from the inside.  (She in turn teased me at the end of our love-making by at first slipping into her skin so that it faced backwards.  I moved behind her—she seemed to flinch again, nervous that I might try to enter her anally; she could flay herself but anal sex was a whole other thing—and I kissed the bare muscles of the back of her head through her gaping rubbery lips.)

While we were still screwing, her exposed blood vessels broke easily, and both our skins became sticky with a film of blood until I began to resemble her.  She had put a rubber sheet down on her bed first, however, to protect her mattress so her parents wouldn’t find out what she was up to.  She told me her boyfriend liked sex this way, and that spoiled the mood for me a bit.  But at last, I was able to climax, my pumping member streaked with her gore…

I began to fall in love with Kelly, and couldn’t accept that this was only a dalliance for her.  She left work soon after our two physical encounters, returned to school and her boyfriend there.  We had a telephone conversation that ended with us both in tears.  We wrote each other for about a year, and I visited her once at her college, but it was over.  I entered into one of the most depressed periods of my life, obsessed over literary suicides such as Yukio Mishima and Anne Sexton.  But somehow I survived those dark days, and tried to turn it into something positive.  I had lost my cursed virginity at last.  And if Kelly had found me desirable, surely someone else would, sooner or later.

But after Kelly and before my wife, things got a bit lonely again.  Loneliness can breed ugliness: rape, prison sex, child molestation, the ravishing of barnyard beasts.  Don’t get me wrong; I cherish solitude; it’s the soil my creativity takes seed in.  But as Thomas Mann said, “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry.  But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”

One afternoon, I ventured into the cellar of my family home to look in on our fetus, which we had named Celia (maybe because she had the brand name
SuperCell
 tattooed on her head).  We had had a brief power outage the night before, during a lightning storm, and my father had asked me to check to see if Celia was okay.  Sometimes we neglected to look in on her, and I guess it had been a while, because cobwebs connected her massive, boneless head to the ceiling, this gauzy veil backlit with a bare bulb so that it glowed like a corona.  I took up a broom and swept the webs off her, baby-talking to her as I did so, as I might to one of my mother’s cats.  Of course, she sat there in her bath unmoving, her totally black, shark-like eyes unblinking.

We’d had Celia for nearly twenty years, at that time.  You could hold her in your hand, when we first got her, but even then she was already an effective live battery supplying electricity to both the upper and lower apartments in our great old Victorian house.  Over those two decades she had grown, but she hadn’t aged; that is to say, she was still a fetus, but a much larger one.  Almost my height, if you stretched her out, though much of that was due to that immense translucent globe of her head.  Her body itself, thin and with limbs folded close as if she floated in a mother’s womb (or the amniotic tank in which she had been grown at the
SuperCell
plant), was about the size of a twelve-year-old’s.  The
SuperCell
 tattoo was gray now and cracked, splitting, having spread apart as she grew.  The circular, blue plastic tub she sat in (strapped to a contoured seat made from the same plastic) contained the proper level of nutrient solution, I noted, and the burbling of the fluid told me the pump was circulating it properly.  About every three months we replaced the fluid to keep it fresh, which was critical, as Celia absorbed it as her sole nourishment.  A dead spider and a few drowned moths were buoyed on the agitated surface, so I scooped them out.  Everything seemed fine.  The two power cables plugged into ports in Celia’s head were secure, I determined.  Fat veins on her head pulsated, throbbed, as she mindlessly fed energy into our household.  Good old dependable Celia.  If I stood just right, I could see that bare bulb glowing dimly right through her balloon-like head, silhouetting thousands of dark veins as thick as snakes or as fine as lace, like an aerial map of a great city.  It made me think of the three titanic fetuses, each as big as Godzilla, that lay underneath New York City.

Well, I think you realize where this is going.  As I looked into the tank at Celia’s delicate pink body, those slender slippery-smooth limbs, her hairless slit (I saw the water bubble once as it either expelled waste or air into her bath), the loneliness stirred in me like a device energized by Celia’s brainless brain waves.  From the ugly gray chrysalis of loneliness, lust unfolded its mutant scarlet wings.

I reached into the bath, just touching her, feeling her at first.  I felt uncomfortable about it initially, I admit, but she
was
 twenty years old, despite what I said earlier about her having no age, and legally she wasn’t considered a human.  I had all this pent-up sperm inside me, and I’m not the one who invented this insistent reproductive instinct.  So with my free hand, I unzipped and began stroking myself.  But even fingering her wasn’t enough, ultimately, as my lust beat its wings into a hazy red blur.  I ended up spreading a plastic tarp on the floor of that dusty, low-ceilinged, cobwebbed cellar, unstrapping Celia from her chair, lifting her carefully out of the bath (soaking my clothes in the process), and laying her down (being cautious not to disconnect the cables from the sockets in her forehead).

Praying to God my father or brother Scott wouldn’t come down into the basement looking for me, I pushed down my jeans and lay atop the giant fetus.  It was a tight fit, and at first I wasn’t sure if I’d make it all the way inside, but there was enough of a gelatinous quality to her nutrient bath to lubricate things a bit.  And so I propped myself above Celia and looked down at where I was buried inside her, churning rhythmically.  Her small, claw-like hands were cocked in the air, and bounced with my increasing thrusts but did not move to either stop me or to caress me.  They didn’t move any more than her eyes did, though her tiny mouth worked silently like that of a fish, perhaps simply in the act of breathing.  Several times I thought I heard the barest sigh of a breath from her lips, in fact.  But I didn’t delude myself into thinking it was born of pleasure.  I doubt she even acknowledged my existence, except—at most—as a kind of pressure, from within and without.

Well, I came pretty hard, and rested heavily on her afterward, quite satisfied, before lowering her back into the gurgling bath.  I wondered how her brain waves might have responded to the experience, especially when I finally returned upstairs.  I had changed my wet clothes before reporting to my father that Celia was just fine.  He asked me if I were sure, because there had been a power surge about fifteen minutes ago and a bulb had shattered in one of the livingroom’s lamps.

Celia helped me through that lonely period.  For about a year, I think I visited her twice a week.  Sometimes more.  I became so aroused on our third date that I actually french kissed her deeply, something I had felt a little too odd doing the first couple of times.  To liven things up, as time went on, to keep things interesting, I mailed away for articles of lingerie.  Frilly crotchless panties, sexy little bras (though Celia had no breasts, not even nipples, just as she had no navel).  Despite the petiteness of her legs, I was able to get black nylons for her.  I would have to dry her with a bath towel before I dressed her up.  I was able to have intercourse with her orally, but she didn’t have an anus.  Luckily she had nostrils; the last thing I wanted to do was suffocate the poor thing.  I never wanted to cause her discomfort, so I never spanked her or anything.  In fact, I was quite tender with her; I whispered in her half-formed ear when I was making love to her (did I say love?).  Sometimes I painted her slack mouth with lipstick.