Kill Marguerite and Other Stories (5 page)

Marguerite sits down in a huff. She has misspelled “sauna.”

Now is Caty's chance. If Caty spells “sauna” correctly, and the word after that correctly too, she will win the school spelling bee and move on to the county bee, her next achievable life goal. She can do this. She's going to do this.

She leans forward into the mic and opens her mouth to spell.

“Sauna. S-A-U—”

A whoosh sounds behind her. Caty spins to find Marguerite brandishing an executioner's double-bladed ax. What! Caty springs to action, jumping back against the podium and trying to activate her rocket pack—but she can't find the power switch under her hooded sweatshirt. Frantic, she scrambles behind the podium. Marguerite approaches from the other side while Ellie rallies the crowd: “Kill Caty! Kill Caty!” The entire middle school population, Caty excluded, roars as one.

Caty tries to yank off her sweatshirt but shit, now it's stuck around her head, just like in the locker room when she tries to change lightning-fast and ends up twisted and—focus! Focus! She pulls the sweatshirt off, only to feel several hands groping for the straps of her jetpack. No! She one-eighties, kicks a leg out and trips all three enemy combatants. But behind them, hundreds of other students are amassing, seconds away from eliminating her in any number of gruesome ways.

Jet away, Caty! Get the heck out of there! Caty is groping for the ON switch when Marguerite shouts close in her ear.

“Die, you fatso! Lose some weight, get a boyfriend, and die!” She raises the ax.

Not fair, Caty thinks as it catches her neck. So not fair.

GAME OVER.

SLUG

Patty will ask her date to walk her to the door. Patty will play I'm Frightened and Scared to be Alone in the Deep Dark Night. Of course he will accompany her, despite the drizzle. He will be happy to. Delighted. Then Patty will push him up against the door so that he's straddling the doorknob, so it's pressing into his asscrack, and shove his shoulders back, hard, and suck his tongue, hard, and rub his crotch, hard, and push his arms up and over his head and hold them there so that he is her prisoner. It is a good thing she wore her bitch boots tonight. It is a good thing she dressed prepared. She will take out her pocketknife and flip up the knife part and she will tickle him with the blade, slowly, deliberately, while he is still clothed, and she will increase pressure as she moves the knife down from his sternum to his pelvis. His stomach will retract involuntarily. She will press into it more. The flat side of the blade. This is foreplay, pre-foreplay.

She will unlock the door, swing it wide, and step back, return to I'm Frightened and squeak, It Looks Like There Could Be a Burglar. Won't You Please Check? I'm So Scared. He will play along, say It Would Be My Pleasure to Check for the Burglar. Stay Behind Me. Stay Close. And he will grab her wrist firmly and push her behind him, stroking her wrist suggestively. It will be nice.

Patty's date works hard to clear his throat. The first try miserably fails. He tries again, succeeds, changes the car radio to smooth jazz. Unbearable. Patty uncrosses, then recrosses her legs, begins to clench and unclench her thighs under her plain black skirt.

Patty is a wicked schoolgirl with an SM fetish. Underneath her plain black skirt is a honking big strap-on (she makes a note to self: purchase harness and dildo, a formidable dildo). At her command he will get on his hands and knees and enjoy the rug burn, you pathetic motherfucker. Patty is a vicious cunt in bondage gear, with a whip and not afraid to use it, slave. Patty likes to be tied up, chained up with needles through her nipples, getting burned to bloodblack with cigarettes and branding irons. Patty enjoys biting and being bitten, hard, like starved vampires. She also enjoys: bestiality; triple, quadruple penetration; and feverish, drugged-up sex parties. Sex parties have lots of drugs. What kinds of drugs will Patty's sex party have? Patty is in the middle of being gangbanged, which means violence and overwhelming numbers of cocks at once. Patty is the one with the cock, and she is making him eat it, swallow it, gag.

“You're not giving me much to go on,” he says.

He has been talking all this time.

She will smear his forehead with menstrual blood, then slice a line in his lower abdomen and rub her face in his blood and guts. And shit. Shit will be smeared everywhere. She will hang him upside down, ankles chained together and thighs caked with shit. She will leave him there with her formidable dildo in his asshole and slashes in his heels so he cannot walk when she unties him. She will be ruthless and loyal. After she slashes his heels, she will check in with a Baby, Are You Okay? Tell
Me You're Okay, and take out his gag so he can say so. Then she will shove the gag back down his throat, kneel before him and masturbate where he can see her, inches from his nose and mouth.

Patty shrugs, smiles lazily over at him, lost in her dreaming.

His tongue in her mouth is slithery and warm, then a lifeless slab of muscle to her weak response. Fumbling and finally dead. Retracted. Suck.

Patty clenches and unclenches her thighs, faster, faster, until she is done.

When she is done, she thanks him, they should do it again sometime.

Then she slams the car door and hurries through the rain to her apartment building, stepping on a slug that's sprawled out to suck in the moisture. Ugh. That squishes. She scrapes the slug-guts off on the doorstep and lets herself inside.

In the kitchen, Patty grabs a used glass and fills it with filtered water. Gulps it down. Stands there with her fingers on her lips, thinking he wasn't so bad. She could have been nicer. She could have tried harder. Made something happen. But what had he looked like? She remembers the nervous gurgling in particular. The meek way he cleared his throat. The tapping on the steering wheel, anxious, impatient.

She had made him impatient. That's funny. She had had an effect. He probably would've been too safe in bed, anyway. He would've wanted her to act like a girl.

Everyone is always too safe. Probably. What do normal people do?

They take off their shoes and makeup, and go to bed.
Patty takes off her shoes and makeup and goes to bed. Patty has not closed her window, despite the drizzle, which has now turned to rain. There is a lot of rain. It is raining hard. The rain is hard. Hard rain. Getting harder. The rain is getting harder and harder until it is too hard for anyone to handle.

Patty close the window! Patty close the window!

But Patty does not close the window.

Once, a long while ago, Patty was in love, with a man she met online. He had responded to an ad, or she had responded to his, and they had had a feverish exchange in which each had confessed her or his own and encouraged one another's perversities. He wrote every morning; she responded dutifully before retiring for the night. In their emails, they would each describe her or his every desire in obsessive detail, carefully crafting fetish after fetish with the intent to elicit the most violent desire and intrigue from her or his reader. For Patty, masturbation had never been so good.

After a time, they began to write erotic stories for each other. Patty wrote rottingdonquix a story after Story of O, in which O grew a cock and turned the tables on her Master, reducing him to the most obsequious and pathetic of slaves. Rottingdonquix responded with a story inspired, she found out later, by Masoch, in which his Venus was not so much wearing furs as she was covered in fur, for she was a vampiric werewolf who feverishly desired to suck the blood from the narrator's cock. Patty had written him another story, in which Bataille's bull's eye is passed back and forth from orifice to orifice until finally, in the midst of passionate intercourse, it bursts in the protagonist's throbbing cunt. He wrote back with an
overwrought masturbation fantasy revolving around an onyx engagement ring. Upon reading it, she experienced the strong stench of rotten eggs, and could not bring herself to reply.

Weeks passed.

One day, missing the thrill of rottingdonquix's emails, Patty wrote him with the suggestion that they meet in person. He agreed.

He was fat, and ugly. She left with a sneer on her face.

That was the end of love.

Patty is in her bed masturbating. She has tied her date up with fishing line that cuts into his skin, leaves blood blisters pooling subcutaneous. She does the same with his cock, which is always fully erect, engorged even, then kneels in front of him, makes eye contact, and extracts her tongue slowly, torturously, until the tip just touches the head of it. He moans behind his gag. Saliva gets stuck in his throat and he tries to clear it, takes two tries, three, is perpetually clearing his throat. Patty's tongue has not moved from its tentative perch on the tip of his cock. Then she lurches forward to wrap it around the head while grabbing the ends of the fishing line with her hand and tugging, gently, gently, until he comes. He comes five more times as she frees his cock from the fishing line.

Patty does not come, because Patty's fantasy is dumb. Mindless SM drivel. Patty can do better.

She tries again.

Patty is masturbating. Patty grows a cock and it extends, fully engorged and throbbing with sensation. Patty's cock extends and extends, quivering in the air it is exposed in, then slowly curves backward and into her cunt. Patty's cock tentatively probes her cunt before
beginning to fuck it, first leisurely, then hard, pummeling it in sync with the hard rain outside.

Patty's cock and Patty's cunt come at the same time.

Patty comes.

Patty drifts off.

Patty still has not closed the window.

Tap, tap. Tap.

Slug hangs down from the top of the window, suctioning his wet body, his enormous foot, to the exterior pane. There is a loud and sustained squerk as Slug navigates the window pane at his infuriatingly slow pace.

Patty stirs from her half-sleep.

Two sets of tentacles probe the glass.

Tap, tap.

Tap.

The incoming air is cold and moist. Patty stirs again, shivers. Her nipples tighten.

Slug's tentacles fidget impatiently as they work to gauge the size of the opening. The open window is not wide enough for Slug's impressive girth, but Slug is both lubricated and stretchy. He begins the process of entering her room.

Patty blinks.

Slug is six feet of pure muscle struggling to get through her window. Slug is a rippling lump of skin shimmering with beads of rain on top of a more general wetness. Slug is multicolored, translucent skin, eyeless, faceless, hairless. Slug's intricate underbelly is lined with undulating muscles that tremble against the pane, excreting stickiness, excreting slime.

Patty, torn between horror and desire, cannot bring herself to look away.

By now Slug has pushed a quarter of his body through the window, attaching himself to the other side of the glass. He pulls himself farther forward, inch by thick inch, up the glass until his full length is inside. A pause, a shudder of slick skin, before he continues. He crawls along the wall, staining it with his wet trail as he nears her bed. Hanging down, he fills her nostrils with the smell of fresh soil. His tentacles toy with her hair.

Slug curves toward her, his back end vertical, attached to the wall, his front end suctioning itself to her shoulder, kneading her skin with his underbelly: like an introduction, like saying hello.

Patty sucks in her breath.

Hello.

He twists toward her head. Soon there is mucous creeping through her hair. His front end gropes her forehead, sticky lubricant oozing into her brows, clumping her eyelashes together, choking her nasal passage with a swamp musk. She opens her mouth to breathe. He enters, gropes around, sucks on her tongue noisily with the front portion of his foot, and pushes forward until her throat closes up and rejects him. He pulls himself out, with reluctance; works his way to her torso. Past her chin, along her neck, he slurps noisily, slowly, taking his time. The bedsprings bark. As he moves forward, he shoves her camisole down, the thin straps breaking, and flattens both breasts with his weight, his belly gripping and releasing her nipples rhythmically. She finds herself making soft gurgling sounds deep in her larynx. Slug gurgles Slug's reply.

Then he slugs himself down, less leisurely now, hugging the curves of her abdomen, his tentacles seeking her tunnel. Slowed by an unruly nest of hairs, his lubricant smooths the way, and—at last—he probes her slit, first tentative, then with force. He inches forward, nudging her thighs apart.

Patty's hands claw at the sheets. The wind rustles trees outside. The wind enters the room triumphantly, amplifying the scent of swamp that is beginning to suffocate Patty.

Slug surges forward, stretching himself taut, easily eight feet long, digging, digging as deep as he can, the bed creaking with every insatiable thrust. Lodged inside her vulva, his front half shifts to suit her, curving back and downward. The rest of his body, resting on her torso, kneads her flesh raw. Under his weight, she struggles to further open her thighs. It is difficult—he is massive, his skin so slippery—but she needs to show him: more, please more. She wants all of him. Slug manages to pull a few more inches of his body inside, his trembling underbelly attacking her canal from all angles, speeding its tempo to frantic bursts. Faster. Harder. Her muscles tense. Faster. Harder. Almost. Slug gently chews the insides of her cervix, bringing her to excessive climax. Patty arches, kicks, sucks in so deep she nearly swallows her tongue.