My God, Smith thought. This is my wife.
He’d lain her out naked across the bed. Her nipples looked like bruises now, and her skin—every inch of which he’d once caressed in love—glittered pastily beneath the gelid sweat of death.
My… wife…
The bivalving scalpel flashed in his hand.
I’m autopsying my wife.
Smith took a heavy breath. Then he began to cut.
“Jeannie! Don’t go near that!” Smith shouted. He clambered clumsily after her down the wooded hill, careful of stumps and roots hidden under leaves. Whatever that thing was in the ravine—A keg? he wondered. A drum?—it just looked… nasty. It wasn’t supposed to be there, and he didn’t want his daughter touching it. “Jeannie!” he shouted once more.
Jeannie gladly pretended not to hear these heated commands of her father, as would most 7-year-olds. Instead she nimbly wended through branches and brush, and descended into the ravine.
The thicket crunched beneath Smith’s plodding feet. Two decades of a pack of Parliments a day reminded him how out of shape he was. Some doctor, but at least his patients couldn’t accuse him of hypocrisies. He loped ahead, gasping, and raised his arms to shield himself from the spiny branches that seemed determined to thwart his progress. Smith was a liberal; he was also an over-reactor. He remembered any number of headlines detailing his worst ecological fears. WAYNESVILLE CANCER RATES FOUND TO BE THREE TIMES HIGHER THAN NATIONAL AVERAGE. A.A. COUNTY FINED MILLIONS FOR SECRETLY PUMPING UNTREATED SEWAGE INTO BAY. BROCK CLIFFS NUCLEAR WASTE WATER SEEPS INTO RESERVOIR. And so on. Smith, as a father, felt legitimately paranoid of the faux pas of this new age of progress. Just nights ago he’d read in the Post about containers of toxic waste that had fallen off a truck near an Edgewood elementary school. Some teenagers had opened one of the containers, and had died in hours. Then there was that town up north, an entire community evacuated when cable TV diggers had uncovered a secretly buried consignment of binary waste products, compliments of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. The stuff had been there twenty years. No wonder the town’s miscarriage and birth defect rates had been so high…
What a world, Smith considered.
And this thing in the ravine, it looked like a chemical drum of some sort, with bright red stripes like a warning. Smith had spotted it from the back porch with his binoculars. Bird watching, he always told Marie. Oh, that’s nice, dear, she’d said once. It’s wonderful that you haven’t lost interest in your childhood hobbies. This was partly true at any rate; Smith had indeed been an avid bird-watcher as a child. The only thing he watched now, however, was that Donna Whatshername next door, the neighbor’s kid. On days she didn’t have classes at the community college, she’d lie out in her backyard, to work on her tan. What she also worked on was Smith’s libido. Jeeeeeeesus Christ! he must’ve thought a million times, focusing the Bushnell 7x12s. It astounded him, the level to which modern swimwear had reverted. Bikinis these days made the ones Marie had worn years ago look like winter parkas. Smith had a funny feeling that Donna Whatshername knew he was watching her. The poses seemed staged, lewd, nearly masturbatory. Too often the girl would untie her top and idly roll toward Smith’s gaze, her eyes closed as if sleepy. Donna was, to put it eloquently, well-possessed of an ample mammarian carriage, or, in Smith’s less eloquent consensus: Good Christ and Lord Almighty, that is one humdinger of a rack of milk wagons!
All of which had fairly little to do with the bizarre white drum that sat not 100 hundred yards beyond his property line. He’d been focusing up, the usual ritual upon coming home from work, while Marie prepared dinner. Donna sauntered across her own yard as if on cue, all long tan legs, curvy contours, and… mammarian carriage. “Jeeeeeeesus Christ!” Smith muttered, the binoculars close to welded to his eyes. “She ain’t wearing a bikini, she’s wearing dental floss.”
“What’s that, dear?”
Smith jerked the Bushnells quickly toward the woods. Marie had come out onto the patio, looking domestic as ever in her fuzzy slippers, lilac sundress, and calico apron.
“A black-throated blue warbler,” Smith feigned enthusiasm. “A female too. You can tell by the pink spot on each wing. They’re rare for this area.”
“Oh, that’s nice, dear.” Her broad, pretty face shifted in a blink of fuddlement. “I could have sworn you said something about dental floss… Anyway, dinner’ll be ready in ten minutes. Have you seen Jeannie?”
“Naw,” Smith replied, never veering his gaze from the scape of the woods. “She’s probably watching those Star Trek reruns, as usual. Either that or she’s in her room playing with her Kirk and Spock dolls.”
Marie disappeared back to the kitchen, leaving Smith slightly asweat. Be careful, you idiot. Yes, he’d have to be more careful than this. He felt no shame in his frequent voyeurisms—Looking’s not cheating, he rationalized. It wasn’t like he was having sex with Donna, was it? He was merely reveling in the visual appreciation of her womanhood. What was wrong with that? This was no different than bird watching, espying pretty things in nature, celebrating them. Donna Dental Floss was a rare black-throated blue warbler and nothing more.
But, boy, oh boy, a thought seeped. What I wouldn’t give to—
The most adulterous images betrayed him. Smith humping the foxy coed hell for leather right there in the grass, his eyes crossed. Dog-style, missionary, her feet pinned back behind her ears—it didn’t matter—redepositing one allotment of his semen after the next—
Stop it! he commanded himself. Don’t be a cad!
But cad or not, just as Smith would turn the binoculars back to the bikini-clad human masterpiece in the next yard, he caught one last glimpse of the wood’s descent, and he noticed the—
“What the hell—”
—white, red-striped drum.
“—is that?”
The drum sat half-buried in the ravine, and that’s when Smith dropped the Bushnells and bolted, for it wasn’t only the white drum that he’d seen, but also his 7-year-old silken haired daughter eagerly ambling toward it.
“Stay AWAY from that! Smith’s voice cracked through the dense green woods. Jeannie glanced up, and froze. Terror bloomed in the big, bright-blue eyes. Curiosity incarnate had been caught; Daddy the Destroyer was here.
“One more step, young lady, and you lose your dolls for a week,” Smith threatened from the edge of the dried ravine.
“But, Daddy—”
“For a month,” he embellished. “Now step away from that thing. It’s dangerous. It’s dirty.”
“No it’s not, Daddy,” the little girl replied. “It’s—
“If you don’t do as you’re told, missy, it’s no more Star Trek. Forever.”
This horrifying consequence reflected an even deeper terror in Jeannie’s shining child-eyes. She paused, peering at the white drum, then backed off. She ascended the ravine’s thatchy slope while Smith himself went down. “Stay there,” he said, pointing a stern finger.
“But why is it dirty, Daddy?”
“It just is,” came his articulate response. He plodded toward the cryptic keg. How can you explain something like this to a 7-year-old? Well, you see, honey, some really bad man decided to dump this drum of tumor-accelerating, carcinogenic, ganglionic-response-inhibiting and probably irradiated toxic effluvium in our back yard because he was too lazy to dispose of it properly. And it’s dirty, dirty stuff, and that means if you get near it your orbital lobes will turn into giant coaxial metastatic masses by the time you’re out of college, and your ovaries’ll be glowing like a pair of fucking Christmas tree lights. “It’s dirty, honey,” he replied instead. “It’s like dog poo. You don’t want to get near it.”
Her little face looked cruxed. “But you’re getting near it.”
Smith frowned, choosing a long fallen limb. “That’s because I’m a grownup, and grownups are allowed. But little girls aren’t.”
“That’s dumb, Daddy,” came Jeannie’s haughty response.
Precocious, Smith thought. The drum, he saw now, had no writing on it, just the bright-scarlet stripes, which made sense. If you’re going to dump hazardous waste illegally, you don’t leave your name and address. And he was sure now that’s what it was. The drum sat on its side as if dropped. At once Smith noticed a meaty scent…
Like rotten pork, he thought. His nostrils cringed. Or like that cadaver the county cops brought in last summer. It had ripened in the heat for days, hidden beneath humid hay bales. Cooking.
The drum’s rim appeared crimped, offering a small egress. Smith poked the branch into it and pushed. “Aw, shit!” he exclaimed and leapt back. The lid popped off, emptying a gush of black, lumpy sludge into the ravine’s craw. Smith could’ve vomited. The stuff stank worse than a fish market dumpster in high summer.
He gaped at it a moment, his handkerchief to his face. The sludge looked coagulated, like gravy that hadn’t evened. Large bubbles rose from the surface of the spill, percolating, and the stench thickened. Thank God the creek had long-since dried up, otherwise the stream would be hauling this gunk away right now. Smith felt momentarily weird, staring at the crisp, popping bubbles. His sweat rushed—the mass of ichor seemed to waft shifts of heat.
“Come on.” Smith huffed back up the hillock and led Jeannie away from the ravine. He took long strides, yanking her by the hand. Boy, this pisses me off, he fumed. I’ve got a kid for God’s sake. Some chemical company asshole dumps this crap near kids? Yeah, what a world.
“I saw a falling star, Daddy,” Jeannie remarked as they headed back to Smith’s cedar-shingled Colonial. It cost 150k, in a nice cul-de-sac. Smith worked hard for it, and for everything to keep his family comfortable, and then some thoughtless creep pulls a stunt like this. Word gets around and the whole community could go to hell. Smith envisioned the headlines. TOXIC WASTE DUMPED IN STORYBOOK TOWN. PROPERTY VALUES PLUMMET. Assholes, he thought. “What did you say, honey?”
“But it wasn’t really a star,” she enlivened on. “It was that drum. I saw it last night.”
“You saw Star Trek last night is what you saw, miss.” Kids, Smith thought. Then they were back at the house, back to normality. “Dinner’s ready,” he said. “Don’t forget to wash your hands.”
He’d reported the incident to the police anonymously; he didn’t need a slew of questions. With my luck they’ll think I had something to do with it. Smith reasoned that whoever had dumped the sludge had brought it down the old logging road on the other side of the treebelt, and that’s what the authorities would conclude.
That night he slept fitfully, dragged in and out of chasms of dreams. He never had bad dreams; his job had cauterized him since med school. Smith was the county coroner, and after so many years of autopsying human grotesqueries atop his Aimsworth pitch-tilt powerdrain morgue table, he could eat a tuna on rye with one hand and fish through gunshot intestinal vaults with the other. No big deal. Tonight, however, towlines of nightmares hauled him through rank mind-muck visions the likes of which his slumber had never before offered up. “She’s eating, Daddy, she’s eating! Isn’t Mommy pretty when she eats?” Jeannie smiled in her Care Bear pajamas, gazing down into the nighted ravine. Meanwhile, Smith’s wife knelt naked at the opened drum. With enthusiasm, she plucked lumps out of the stinking black spillage and sucked them off her fingers. Moonlight shimmered through the trees, a tinseled vertigo. Jeannie’s eyes shined wide as brand-new silver dollars. “Eat, Mommy, eat. I’d eat too but I’m too little.” Smith wanted to puke in the dream. Yeah, bend over and let ’er rip. It was not an easy thing to watch your extremely inhibited wife eat lumps of chemical shit out of a bubbling, odorous mass of toxic waste. No, this was not an easy thing to watch at all. “Oh, it tastes simply scrumptious, dear,” Marie remarked. “You really should try some.” No thanks, hon. That stuff’s probably not on the Atkins’ Diet. “Daddy can’t eat that,” Jeannie was quick to relate, which relieved Smith in his dream-paresis. He seemed to be lashed to a tree, forced to watch this disgusting play of nightmare in his boxer shorts. “The Mother,” Jeannie kept chanting from the hillock’s edge. “The Mother, the Mother.” Freud would shit in his pants if he could see this dream, Smith managed to muse. He fairly understood the psychology of dreams: eroto-societal symbolism, sex-death links, and all that. But— Sex-sludge links? he wondered. What did this scenario say about himself? It came as no surprise when, next, Donna, the lissome neighbor of the dental floss bikinis, traipsed down into the hot ravine. She too was buck naked, and she wasted no time in joining Marie’s putrid smorgasbord. “Donna can eat too,” Jeannie rejoiced. “It’s only Daddy who can’t eat, not here.” The dream seemed to peel Smith’s eyelids off; Freud’s manifestos forced him to watch. Good God, he thought, aghast. Donna and Marie openly caressed themselves in the lump-laden bilge. They were kissing! “Here,” Marie invited. She passed a lump, about the size of a walnut, from her own mouth into Donna’s. “More,” Donna panted. Good God, Smith thought again. Would somebody PLEASE wake me up! Marie, lying back in the black scum, had placed more of the lopsided lumps up and down her belly and betwixt her breasts, for Donna to eat off. “Your husband’s got a hard one for me,” Donna commented between morsels. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Marie laughed back, caressing herself in the slime. “He comes way too fast, and he’s not very big. Sort of like one of those little breakfast links.” They cackled at this remark, like witches breathing helium. Smith fumed in spite of his revulsion. Breakfast link, huh? “God, this stuff is really boss,” Donna delighted. Soon, when she and Smith’s wife had sufficiently filled their bellies, they focused their appetites on each other. Smith was sweating. This was like the lesbian porno flicks they’d shown at his bachelor party, only they hadn’t included curdled toxic sludge in the production. Donna and Marie slithered over one another in the muck, beslicking their bodies. They shined like black human lacquer. “Isn’t this great, Daddy?” Jeannie inquired, clapping with glee in the moonlight. No, Smith thought. This is not great. “Oooo,” Marie cooed. “You do it so much better than my husband.” Smith frowned. Donna’s face, amid a sound quite similar to that of a big, hungry dog tearing into a pile of Alpo, busied itself between Marie’s spread legs…
Smith didn’t know how much more of this he could take. Aw, it’s only a dream, he dismissed. “You’ll have to eat too, Daddy,” his daughter informed him again. “But not here, not at the Mother’s.” What the hell are you talking about, you little imp! Smith thought in a burst of frustration. But then Marie and Donna were drifting up the ravine’s slope. Giggling, they took Smith away from the tree and lay him down paralyzed into the sludge. “Not too much,” Marie warned as her hands roved her husband’s rather flabby chest. “I told you, he comes real fast.” Smith frowned again. When he glanced past his burgeoning belly, he noted that Donna was fellating him, and via a considerable level of proficiency. The coed stopped a moment, disengaging her mouth long enough to chuckle and remark, “You’re right, Marie, it is like a breakfast link!” This infuriated Smith further. What, a guy’s gotta have a leg of lamb between his legs to keep a woman happy? Christ. “He’s close, you better get on him now,” Donna suggested. The sludge crackled as Marie prepared to mount him. But then it was Smith’s daughter’s face that bulged forward, warped in cherubic youth like a fisheye lens. “No!” the demanding little voice echoed. “Daddy’s not ready yet! Daddy has to visit the Father!”
Smith spent the next day at work hungover. At least that’s what it felt like, a bezeled drill bit spinning through the pulp of his brain. He’d stopped drinking years ago; he’d opened too many Parke-Davis cadaver bags full of too many mangled drunk drivers, and he’d histologized too many swollen, sclerotic livers too many times. Yet his head pounded all day. Splinters raged behind his eyes.
The dream, he kept thinking. The nightmare.
He saw the heinous black wads everywhere: in the autoclave, in the chromatograph receptacle, on the flat top of the Vision Series blood analyzer and in the morgue table’s stainless steel runoff gutters. He even saw them in the Polar Water bottle, and in his lunch…
But only for an instant.
When he blinked, they were gone.
Backwash, that was all. The nightmare had wrung him out. Get your act together, Smith. He’d bungled two y-sections already today, and had to jink the autopsy reports. Thank God Smith’s clients could tell no tales. He hadn’t been so off the mark in years.
Eventually he dismissed the dream as frivolity, just a lewd mindstage of fear and guilt. Fear that a drum of chemical waste had been dumped behind his house, and guilt from his voyeurism. He felt much better about the whole thing when he called home that afternoon. “The police were out back earlier,” Marie related, “and then some cars with EPA seals came. They took the drum away in a big truck. It was like a movie, men in gas masks and white rubber suits were poking around. They sprayed some kind of foam all around the ravine and left notices in everybody’s mailbox saying that the area is safe and there’s nothing to worry about.” This news relieved Smith fully. The white drum was gone now, and its black spillage decontaminated. End of story.
But not end of headache.
When Smith drove home, he spotted Donna walking away from the bus stop. “Need a lift?” he offered.
“Sure, thanks,” she replied and slid into Smith’s big Buick. Her blond head cocked, though, and she peered at him. “Are you all right, Mr. Smith? You look, like, oh, I don’t know, like you’re all tensed up or something.”
Mr. Smith. Christ, she makes me feel like a dinosaur. “I’ve had a rip-roaring headache all day, that’s all.”
“Well, wait, put the car in park,” she oddly suggested.
“Why?”
She slid right next to him, smiling. “I’ll rub your temples.”
Smith blushed. “Uh, well, uh, you know—I’m kind of like, you know… Married.”
Donna laughed lackadaisically. “Mr. Smith, letting a girl rub your temples isn’t exactly what I’d call being unfaithful.”
Smith considered this, trying hard not to stare at Donna’s cut-offs and orange halter. Well, uh, yeah, she’s right. What’s the harm in letting her rub my temples… Smith pulled over, put the Buick in park. “Uh, okay,” he said.
“Turn this way, lean back a little,” the 19-year-old directed. “That’s it, that’s good.”
Smith leaned back against Donna’s formidable bosom, while her thumbs gently massaged his temples. Her breasts felt like firm, plush cushions against his shoulder blades.
Smith’s eyes closed on their own. He struggled to make petty conversation. “So, uh, Donna, tell me. How’s college?”
“Great,” she replied. Rubbing. Rubbing. “How’s bird watching?”
Smith gulped. “Uh, uh, great. I saw a black-throated blue, uh, warbler yesterday.”
“Mmmmm,” she said. Did she chuckle too? Rubbing, still rubbing, she went on, “That’s wild about that drum of chemicals they found, isn’t it?”
Rubbing. Rubbing.
“Uh, yeah,” Smith fairly moaned. “Wild.”
Her deft thumbs continued to knead Smith’s aching temples. Christ, I’m getting hard, he noted of the swelling at his groin. He felt lazed back into the sweetest dream…
Her blond hair smelled lovely, like herbs and soap. Then her lips came very close to Smith’s ear and she whispered: “Does that feel good, Mr. Smith?”
“Yes,” Smith moaned.
“Hmmmm?”
“Yeeeeees.
Her lips moved closer, the hot breath caressing his ear. “Has Mr. Smith been a good boy? Hmmm?”
Aw, Jesus…, Smith thought. He felt as paralyzed as he’d felt in the nightmare.
“Hmmm? You can tell Donna, can’t you? Has Mr. Smith been a good boy?”
“Uh, uh, uh…”
Her thumbs were like mainlines of opium to his brain. Her breath seemed to lick his neck.
“Be a good boy now and tell Donna that you’re ready, okay, baby? Are you ready? Have you been a good boy?”
By now Smith could not offer a verbal reply. He moaned some more, and he may have whined. But—
Donna reclined the power seat. As Smith descended, he saw that the coed had removed her orange halter, and his recognition of this fact dripped like slow molasses in his head. Holy Jesus to fargin’ Pete, what a rack of milk wagons…
And indeed they were: large, perfectly symmetrical orbs of flesh, with pert pink nipples.
“Let’s get you primed, Mr. Smith,” she suggested, giggling. “Let’s get this pump good and primed.” And with that statement, her hands began to caress his crotch. “Yeah, we’re gonna get Mr. Smith all boned up, because Mr. Smith’s been a good boy, hasn’t he?”
Smith raised no objection whatsoever when, a moment later, she pulled his pants and boxers to his knees. Her fingers caged his testicles, and her mouth went south…
Smith wanted to shout: No! Don’t do that! I’m a married man, and I love my wife, and I WILL NOT be unfaithful to her. So you just stop that right now! In reality, though, he uttered no such thing, electing instead to just lie back and let her proceed. And indeed she did proceed, with hair-raising expertise. “Mmmmm,” she kept moaning in her throat. “Mmmmmmmm.” The hot, frictive sensation made him feel electrified: her mouth was a 220-volt wall socket, and Smith’s penis was the plug. Her firm-as-grapefruits breasts prodded his thigh as she maintained the slow, excruciating ministration. At one point, Smith gazed down over his paunch, and she gazed up, desisting long enough to remark of his 4-inch erection, “Oh Mr. Smith, it’s just so-so—so… big!”
Smith made a stiff face, recalling the nightmare. No, it’s not. It’s a breakfast link, remember? And he could’ve sworn that, when she’d made this comment, there’d been an undue hilarity in her eyes. Look at me, he thought, self-disgusted. I’m a successful 39-year-old man, with a great career, a great wife, a great kid—a great life. And what am I doing? I’m getting a blowjob from a blonde teenage sexpot in the front seat of a Buick Regal. Yet despite this acknowledgement, he was helpless to do anything about it. He was risking everything, wasn’t he? If he got caught, he would lose everything he cherished, everything he’d worked so hard for. But Donna was a seductress, a sex-siren. Smith felt that he’d be unable to pull away from this even with a gun to his head. All he could do was simply submit to this harrowing, absolutely mind-wringing oral mastery of hers…
And just before Smith would ejaculate—
She stopped.
What the hell are you doing! Smith wanted to bellow. Why on earth had she stopped? Her eyes beseeched him, the sultry face in the frame of fragrant blond hair rose upward. “You’ve been a good boy, right, Mr. Smith? You’re ready, right?”
Smith, infuriated, gasped at the ludicrous question, pointing to his indisputably erect member. “For God’s sake, doesn’t it look like I’m ready?” his voice grated.
She papped his nose with a finger. “That’s not what I mean, Mr. Smith.” Her lips played at his ear. “What I mean is… are you ready?”
The word dropped like a stone in his head.
Ready.
Are you ready?
Smith’s memory ticked. The nightmare. Jeannie—
What had Jeannie said in the nightmare?
Something about being… ready?
Yes—
Donna’s preeminent breasts vised his face. Her fingers weaved through his hair. “Oh, Mr. Smith,” she whispered. “Please tell me that you’ve been a good boy. Please… tell me that you’re ready.”
Ready? Yeah, I was ready, all right, you teasing, fickle bitch, Smith thought, driving the Buick home. How much more ready could he have been? Cock-tease! Evil cunning slut! She’d brought him to the brink, then left him hanging like clothes on a line. She primed my pump, that’s for sure—
Then she’d left. Smith, incredulous, had stared after her as she’d opened the car door, gotten out, and walked away, leaving him with his pants at his knees and his unslaked erection bobbing in his lap. Women are such evil bitches, he glumly thought. Cock-teasing, evil fickle little harlots…
His headache raged when he arrived home. Jeannie lay before the TV in the family room, her little ankles crossed in the air. She raptly watched Star Trek reruns. “They stole Spock’s brain, Daddy!” she fretted upon his entrance. Tough luck for Spock, Smith thought. He remembered the episode. “Don’t worry, honey. I think Bones will save the day,” he consoled. How about taking my brain—along with this fucking headache! “I hope they catch the slobs who dumped that crap,” Smith griped to his wife, who tended to dinner at the Jenn-Air range. “I mean, Christ, couldn’t they have dumped it in Jersey like everyone else?” “I’m sure they’ll catch them, dear,” Marie assured. “So why don’t you just relax?” When Smith sat down at the table, Marie came around to rub his temples.
“No bird-watching tonight, dear?”
“Naw,” Smith said, swallowing his guilt like a lump of phlegm.
“How’s that headache?”
“It’s—” Then Smith paused. He hadn’t told her of his headache, had he? “How did you know I had a headache?”
“Honey—” Rubbing. Rubbing. “You told me this afternoon.”
“This afternoon?” Smith questioned.
“This afternoon when you called me. Remember? You called me to ask if anyone had come about the drum, and I told you the police were here, and the EPA men—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Smith said. “I remember. Sorry, this headache’s killing me. I’m just out of it today.”
Out of it was putting it lightly. And Marie’s affection, her sheer care for him, made Smith feel even worse now. Fifteen minutes ago I was letting a blond coed suck my dick, and she didn’t even do it long enough for me to come… What was wrong with him? The gifts of his life couldn’t be more plain. His loving wife, his lovely little girl, his home. All right, so Marie would never make the cover of Swimwear Illustrated. Her breasts, not nearly as large as Donna’s, had a bit of droop to them now, and she was getting a trifle wide in the caboose department. But— She’d stuck with him through thick and thin. She’d given him a beautiful daughter and a beautiful life. She was real, and her love was real. How could anything else matter? The girl next door was just something pretty, a bird in a sense, a black-throated blue warbler no more real to Smith than the August centerfold of Penthouse.
At once his guilt fell down on him, like a mineshaft cave-in.
“Marie?” he peeped.
“Yes, dear?” Rubbing. Rubbing. “What is it?”
Smith was suddenly close to tears. “I-I-I…”
“Honey? What is it?”
My God, Smith realized. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” Marie said.
“No, no, I mean…” But what did he mean? “I mean, like, I really love you.”
Marie’s voice seemed to grow hot. Her fingers meandered at his temples. “Why don’t you show me?” she whispered.
Fuck dinner, Smith concluded. He led Marie by the hand up the stairs, to the bedroom. He slowly stripped her, reveling at the vision of her body, pale skin and cellulite and crooked teeth and all. “Make love to me, darling,” she hotly breathed. She lay back on the bed, parting her thighs. And what she said next absolutely shocked him, for Marie had never been one to talk dirty.
“I want your cock in my pussy, darling. I want you to stick your cock all the way up my pussy and come in me.”
The words alone nearly made Smith come, the words in addition to Donna’s previous attentions. Yeah, she primed my pump, all right. But to hell with her. I have a loving wife. I have a real woman…
“Stick your cock in me right up to the balls and come, you big beautiful fucking love-machine. Squirt all that wonderful jizz right up into my little honey hole.”
Smith was dizzied. He lay atop her and obliged. At once her hand slithered around and massaged his buttocks. “Come, baby, come,” she breathed. “Come in my pussy, darling…”
Aw, shit! Smith was going to come, all right. Quite expeditiously. He tried to stave it off, think about baseball, Mantle’s 500th homer, which Smith had seen with his dad, Marris breaking Ruth’s record, and Catfish Hunter’s first 20-win season. Boy, could the Catfish throw a spitter!
But it didn’t work. How could it? This was love, not childhood baseball memories.
After a strenuous, sweat-popping five seconds, Smith ejaculated, exhaling like a busted raft. Marie moaned with each pulse, wrapping her legs about his back.
“Oh, honey,” Smith nearly wept into the crook of her neck. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”
And what a cruel ripoff this was. Smith generally lasted at least half a minute. Punishment, he thought; his guilt continued to assail him. Yes, the universe was punishing him for being with Donna, decimating his already less-than-impressive endurance.
“I’m so sorry, Marie…”
Her warm hand played over his scalp. “That’s all right, dear. I… I know.”
Smith’s heart skipped a beat. She knows? he thought in sheer terror. She knows about Donna?
But then he simmered down. No, no, she didn’t know about that. How could she? She merely meant that she understood Smith’s problem with premature ejaculation. She was so understanding, so considerate. What a woman, Smith realized, as drenched in shame as he was sweat. But—
Yes!
There was something he could do for her, wasn’t there?
Smith slithered down…
“Oooo, sweetheart,” Marie cooed lewdly. “You know exactly what I want, you dirty little sex-muffin.”
Yeah, Smith thought. Here was this wonderful, warm, passionate woman who’d offered herself solely for Smith’s pleasure. Now he would return the gesture.
Yeah.
Her white thighs opened before his face like a newspaper. Her fingers raked his hair, while her own hair—her private hair—tickled around Smith’s mouth. Suddenly he felt bent on something, frantic in the taste of her. Compelled. Driven.
“That’s it, sweetheart, that so good,” she breathed. “You do it so good, you big love-tongue, you…”
The synchronicity of Smith’s tongue against her pleasure quickened in increments; he chased her squirming hips across the bed. Smith kissed, licked, lapped—
“So good, sweetheart—”
Kissed, licked, lapped.
“So good, so good, such a—”
Kissed, licked, lapped.
“—good good boy.”
Smith’s eyes bulged. A good boy?
Hadn’t Donna said the exact same thing…
But before he could even reckon such a coincidence, Marie seemed to gasp, and her body seemed to… tremor.
Smith’s mouth remained locked at her sex when the septic stench rose. Marie gasped again, then her hips twitched, then—
Holy motherfucking SHIT!
Several hard, steady dolphin spurts of the stinking black sludge shot into his mouth. He wedged away in shock, paused to bend over and vomit, and when he raised his head again, a final pulse of sludge jettisoned right in his face.
Over the rise of her breasts, Marie’s eyes fixed on him.
“You didn’t, did you?” she gargled.
Smith stared, frozen in disgust.
Marie craned her neck further, her face wavering. “You weren’t ready, were you?” she gushed. It sounded like an accusation. “Goddamn you, you were supposed to be ready…”
Then her eyes rolled up white, and her head fell back.
Ready, Smith thought. His face dripped. Madness. The silence gaped at him as he tried to bring her back. No pulse. No breath. He straddled her. One, two, three, four, five, his thoughts counted off in CPR. With each downward thrust, more black slime eddied from each orifice. Popping black bubbles frothed at her lips, ears, and nostrils. Then the truth slapped him in the face as hard as the insanity of this entire situation:
“She’s dead,” he whispered.
It was too much, too fast. All rationale escaped him; his psyche felt stuffed, like a Szechuan squid stuffed to bursting. Marie seemed to be on the verge of bursting too. Movement churned beneath her pale, dead belly. Revulsion, shock, etc. cut Smith’s spiritual tether, leaving only his objective remains: Smith the Coroner, Smith the Man Who Autopsies Dead People For a Living. It was impulse now, in this moment of intractable impossibility. He went for his old med school bag in the closet, and his old CMS knife set.
Thoughts swarmed but he didn’t really hear them. The sharp bivalving blade flashed. “Aw, God,” he muttered, cutting. “Aw, no.” The incision stretched as he drew the gleaming blade from hip to hip, exuding a goulash of black lumps. She was a doll stuffed with beans. Out they poured as Smith watched, slow black lava sliding over the sides of the bed.
Lumps, he thought. The drum. The sludge.
The lumps began to dissolve, reverting to thin dark slime, upon their exposure to the air. They crackled, sputtering. The stench rose like steam from a corpse-pit.
Lumps, he thought. My wife.
Dead lumps.
I wasn’t a good boy. I wasn’t ready.
The door swung open behind him. The thin shadow played across the floor. “Oh, Daddy, now look what you’ve done!” sniped the irritated little voice of his daughter. “You weren’t ready, were you?”
“No,” Smith muttered, thinking of the dream. “No, I wasn’t. I’m sorry. I wasn’t… ready.”
“Daddy!” She scowled at him, arms crossed in her flannel pajamas. “You’ve been a bad boy.”
“I—I know.”
“Come on,” she huffed. Her little hand led him from the bedroom, down the quiet stairs, and outside. Crickets trilled. Legions of fireflies shifted their tiny lights against a sultry evening. Smith, naked, enslimed, followed Jeannie down the hill behind his house.
The woods, he thought. The ravine. But hadn’t Marie said that they’d taken the drum away?
“Hurry, Daddy!”
Branches scratched his face and chest but he didn’t feel it. Dappled moonlight lit their progress; the forest was a labyrinth. With each step came more and more of some throbbing revelation, like Marie’s abdominal wall before Smith had riven it open, and like the throbbing headache.
The ravine lay empty, save for crusts of the decontaminant foam they’d sprayed. Jeannie had to constantly wait up for him, like the time he’d taken her to the mall to see Santa. But it was not Santa that awaited him now. Smith could feel it, drawing on his brain, calling him…
The Father, came the strange thought.
“You were supposed to visit the Father first, Daddy. But you didn’t. And that’s why the Mother’s babies died in Mommy.”
“Yes,” Smith droned.
A hundred yards past the ravine Smith could see it. A drum, identical to the first, save that it was black instead of white. Black and white, Smith thought. Yin and Yang. Mother and Father.
He gazed down.
Male and female.
Smith knelt before the drum. Its lid came unsealed at his touch—a wet pop! and a sucking sound. Into his naked lap poured a slew of squirming white bilge. Smith grinned. He ran his hands through the meaty-smelling muck, fascinated. Between his fingers wriggled the fresh white collops, the seed of the Father…
“It’s still not too late, Daddy.”
Yeah, sure, Smith thought. Of course!
The moonlight raged.
Jeannie nodded.
Smith put his face into the lumpen white slop, and began to eat.
Jeannie lay on the carpet before the tv, her chin in her little hands. Star Trek was her favorite show. Thank God Bones had put Spock’s brain back in last night.
Upstairs, Smith thrilled. “I don’t believe it.”
“What, dear?”
“A black-throated blue warbler. Wow.” Ah, well. He set down the binoculars and lay next to Donna in bed. It wouldn’t be long now. She kissed him and smiled. Smith smiled too, and gently stroked the great gravid belly beneath the nightgown. It was bloated and lovely, stretched pinprick tight, and so warm.
He put his ear to it and listened. He could hear them in there.
Donna fell asleep in his arms. Smith stroked the precious belly. He couldn’t wait to see what came out.