Fist of the Spider Woman (15 page)
“Can't we just get some Kwell?” I pleaded. I was starting to whimper.
“Do you know how toxic that is!” Steph snapped. “That shit's poison, it's insecticide! Here,” she took her razor, dug it into my skin. “You have to shave it clean.” Little beads of blood formed on my pores. “Lift your leg.” She ducked beneath me to get in the folds of my labia. I spread my butt cheeks, and angled the thing around my anus. It was like she was shaving the skin away.
“Steph! You can't,” I cried. “It just hurts too much.”
“If we don't get it now we'll have to do it all over again,” she said simply. Steph was a Virgo. “Do me,” she said once my entire genital area was shorn and burning. It looked like a hunk of chicken lying in the meat case. When we were through we took toilet paper and wiped up the mounds of hair that clogged the drain, the tiny drowning crabs. The paper melted in my hand as I flung the awful mess into the toilet.
Upstairs in our small, airless room we tried to find clothes that hadn't been worn since our last laundry. I had a yellow skirt, long and flowing, that crepey, hippie material. Everything else got stuffed into trash bags. We stripped the futon. There were no laundromats in Provincetown at the time, something about the water level or the ecosystem. Normally we brought our laundry into Boston and washed it in the laundry room in the brothel, but Steph wasn't due to work again for another week, and I had quit. “You're not really going to quit,” Steph said cynically, like I was talking about smoking.
We brought our trash bags of contaminated laundry over to the wash-n-fold to be shipped out and returned clean in three days. “Make sure to use hot water,” Steph said to the lady, and she smiled a queasy little smile at us.
Of course, Steph turned the whole infestation into a giant excuse to go shopping. We needed underwear, silk underwear that would feel nice against our burning cooches. We walked into the expensive lingerie store on Commercial Street with the sales ladies who always looked like they wanted to kick us out. Every time I took a step my crotch stung like a hive of bees. Steph dropped a hundred bucks on a bunch of drawers. “We deserve it,” she said. A soft pile of panties sat on the counter, all different colours, the coolest, most tender material. Next Steph needed coconut oil, a dense jar of it, to smear on her traumatized labia.
Then we needed to have an expensive dinner at the pricey Italian restaurant, way down where Commercial Street got quiet and pretty. We ate homemade sorbetâlemon and orangeâserved in the hollowed-out skins of the appropriate fruit.
That night we laid on our futon beneath a single clean sheet.
Steph slid her hands beneath her new silk underwear and smeared her cunt with coconut oil. I did the same. It did make it feel better. “I'm going to masturbate,” Steph announced.
It seemed strange to just lie there uninvolved while this was happening, so I said, “Me too,” and rubbed the fragrant oil around my clit.
“You don't have to,” Steph said, annoyed. She always thought I was jumping her train.
In the morning we lay naked at the beach, in a tiny forest of sea grass. Every time a sand flea hopped on my body I jumped.
Steph had picked up a magnifying glass at the drugstore. She held it up to my irritated pussy and found an egg, a single fucking egg, like the tiniest glass bubble, stuck to a piece of stubble up by my butt hole. “No!” I wailed, and burst into tears again.
Some fags passed by and looked at us curiously.
“We have to get rid of it,” she said.
“I can't go through that again! I want Kwell.”
At the pay phone in the parking lot across from our building we dialled the AS K-A-NURSE hotline. The nurse said we needed Kwell. “What if we shaved the area?” Steph suggested.
The nurse said, “No, no, you need to shampoo.”
“You're just a pawn of western medicine!” Steph slammed the phone.
“The active ingredient in Kwell is flower extract,” I suggested hopefully.
The other tenants at our place looked embarrassed when they saw us in the hallway. Certainly they knew we had crabs. Steph lathered up my ass again and raked the raw skin, and it was the worst feeling you could imagine. “There can't be anything left,” I cried. Would Steph torture me? Was she that evil? She took the magnifying glass and inspected me deeply and promised that this time I was okay. We threw away the newly contaminated underwear and bought another pile. We went out to dinner at a seafood shack and ordered up a bunch of crab.
Courtney Trouble
i work in the comfort of my delicate lace slip, a half-buttoned secretary's blouse, sheer panties, and classic black heels. my lips are slightly stained and glossy, and my eyes are dark and heavy.
i know you would appreciate these details if you were still alive.
you would have savoured them slowly as though they were your last fix. and I would indulge you, as always.
i haven't touched your flesh in forever, but my fingertips know your shape by heart. when i let loose another button, my fingers brush my nipple and it hardens immediately. i am wondering what your nipples feel like right now, safe inside your threadbare sunday dress, safe in your box under the ground. probably quite stiff.
oh, how i wish i were there with you, watching you sleep.
your face would reveal your ancestry; the softest and whitest, with flushed cheeks, still, and tiny maps of veins decorating your empty body. your lips would still taste like delicious rose essence, and even in this stiff office chair i can feel myself melting underneath them. your doll eyes are as clear as a seer's crystal ball and twice as deceiving. the thought of you so far away from me starves my brain, and i find myself lighting yet another cigarette. you are to blame for all of my current addictions, and i have no intention of letting go.
another button gone, and in my mind you appear beneath me, wearing nothing but back-seam stockings tugging gently on a garter belt and a black vintage bra taut around your ribs. you look classic, in black and white, a darling vintage pinup with blonde hair falling in your face and a look in your eyes that would kill a weaker woman.
with all the powers of my lucid dream, you are suddenly real. my left heel is dangling off my toes while you trace my foot. the shock of your hands on my skin at long last sends a sudden alarm to my crotch. your eyes wander up my touch-hungry legs, searching for the source of my new awareness. i realize how badly i need you as i suck harder and harder on my skinny cigarette. my entire body is responding to the thrill of my fantasy; your ghost has given me goose bumps.
you rest your head in my lap for a moment before placing kisses all down my thighs and calves, down to the painted red tips of my toes. bring one into your mouth, send those tender sexual shivers back up my legs, look up at me with those crystal eyes. i want you to follow my shivers with your tongue, follow the scent of your prey.
i spread my legs and slide my ass down to the very edge of my office chair. your nose is pressed up against the crotch of my panties and you let out a whimper. you need it, you're begging for it with your fucking perfect eyes, and i can't help but tease you a second longer. a giggle and a puff of smoke later and you are whispering, “please, please dear, let me touch.” you may have abandoned your flesh, sweet ghost, but i haven't.
i reach down between my legs and touch my clit. you can't take your eyes off my red nails as i start making little circles, slow and careful. watch me, girl, and when i let you, please follow. i spread my lips apart and slide a finger inside, and then i put my finger up to my mouth and replace my cigarette with the taste of my own wetness.
take my panties off for me, baby girl, pull them down with
your teeth and keep them there in your mouth. i want you to taste how wet you've already made me. you look fantastic with my panties in your mouth. you take a finger and place it right on my clit, exposed. i let out a little gaspâyour fingertips have set my nerves on fire so quick. you make perfect little circles around it, you're such a tease. put your fingers inside me; i want you under my skin where you belong. where you have always been.
push one finger in to test me out, then put the second and third in right away. push and pull me, play with me, rest your cheek on my inner thigh, and keep your eyes looking up.
my cigarette is burning down to the filter and warming my fingers. i kill the cherry and tell you to concentrate. you nod your pretty little panty-gagged face and pull your fingers out of me. my back is arched, my heels planted firmly on the ground.
you are on your knees, between my sexy chubby thighs, pressing four fingers together and pushing into my cunt. one, two, three, four; you slide in so easily, my beautiful baby girl.
you're up to your knuckles in pussy and you're really starting to work it. you get deeper and deeper, never thrusting, only pushing farther inside. god, i've needed you inside me for so long. i only feel full when you feed me, i only feel satisfied when you're holding my heart in the palm of your hand in the centre of my wet, wet cunt.
my muscles are squeezing around you, pulsing like my heartbeats, just for you. my head is thrown back over the back of my chair, and i know the neighbours can hear my praise for you, my skilled apprentice. i feel as though i am about to melt around your wrist when you pause and command my attention with your eyes. i could overdose on those looks, for sure. without saying a word, without asking or needing permission, you spit my panties from your mouth and smile up at me. your hand stays still inside me as you bite my thighs. you bite hard enough to pull blood to the surface without breaking the skin. i am all shivers for you, my nipples hard as ice and pointing toward the sky, my
face flushed, my body on the brink of climaxâheld prisoner in that delicate moment before explosion.
look up again and tell me you love me, baby girl, until i die. you know the recipe, you've mastered the spell. finish me off so that i may sleep in your arms forever, and wake from this dream that tortures my reality.
you follow a trail of bites home to my clit. you pull my clit up inside your mouth and suck on it as though i have a dick, and your fist enters me completely, finally filling me up. i let out the sweetest moans. you have my world in your hand. my ass lifts off the chair and my cunt pulls you so deep inside me it hurts. i am coming, spilling all over your hand, between your fingers, under your nails, down your wrist, in your sweet mouth, up your nose. my cunt won't let you go, i want you inside me forever, baby girl. you belong here.
instead, you disappear from the floor between my shaking thighs, and i find myself alone in my office, the computer light glowing off the slick sheen of sweat across my tits. i look at my own hand, drenched in come, and lick my fingers, wishing i was tasting myself on you. what would you do with me now, i wonder?
you're a phantom of desire, and you haunt me always. my lover, my wife, my best friend. where are you right now? what are you dreaming of under those soft eyelids, in that hot cave? i wish my screams were loud enough to wake you.
Kestrel Barnes
Queerspawn, that's what we are: me and Paul and Castor and baby Carling. Born and raised by dykes; we are one of the ways the Lesbian Nation reproduces itself. But some of us were also born of shark, some of us study sharks, some hunt for sharks and subdue themâall of us are scarred by shark. And we know that some dykes are sharks. They move through the world in human form, but they are sharks, no less.
My Mama studied sharks; basking sharks, great strong gentle sea creatures that raise their young in matriarchal groups. Sort of like some dykes do. I read that in my Mama's field journal.
She was a marine biologist, a scientist who did her shark research in our backyard ocean.
“Just the facts, Ma'am,” my Baba would tease her as she danced Mama around our kitchen, Paul and Castor balancing on her boots, me clutching her neck, all of us with our arms around one another, all of us together. We lived in an old summerhouse perched on an outcrop of rock overlooking the deepwater channel at Spencer Pass, way up in the fog-blown northwest rainforest. There were only a few houses scattered along the Pass, most of them inhabited by the coastal Native people who lived there long before Mama and Baba had moved there when the twins were small and I was still an unborn spawnling.
They'd met at a women's shelter in the Big SmokeâBaba was a support worker, Mama a grad student and a client. “Theory meets reality,” they joked, though I never really knew who was supposed to be one or the other.
“Your Mama saved me,” Baba always insisted, but it was Baba who stood down the man who hurt Mama and sent him away from us forever. Baba believed then that justice conquers violence. I now know that justice doesn't exist in nature or for those not bound by law, and sometimes not even for those who are.
“Anyway, Baba is our dad, our real dad,” Paul always told me.
Baba took care of us while Mama studied. When I was almost three, Mama was immersed in her field studies of the basking sharks that fed near the beaches and coves of our stormy coast. She started catching glimpses of another creature that summer, something that was not supposed to exist in our waters, an interloper or anomaly of nature. Something that couldn't be real, except that it was.
It's an oceanic white tip shark,
she'd written after weeks of observation and research:
May 28âBasking shark neonatal carcass washed up on Cripple Creek spit. Flesh wounds consistent with large predator attack (orca? shark?).
June 2âM-pod orcas sounding and hunting off Home Bay siteâobserved shark dorsal fin in midst (blue/grey, white striped dorsal). Orca pod agitated, observed from 14:40 hrs until 15:05 hrs. No further shark dorsal fin sighted.
June 5 âSpencer Pass channel 19:25 hrs. Observed mature sea lion being followed by white striped dorsal fin (shark?). Sea lion yanked below surface at 19:27 hrs.