Kill Marguerite and Other Stories (6 page)

The room is heavy with dampness. Slug slows to a hum. Then he extracts himself slowly, the suction stubborn, painful to break, and rests on top of her, his underbelly engulfing her whole body in its folds.

Slug has crushed Patty. Patty has died.

Slug kisses Patty. Slug kisses Patty until Patty can't breathe. Slug is in her nostrils and in her mouth. Slug's
mucous drips down her throat and fills her lungs. Slug's mucous fills her body.

Patty is drenched in Slug. Her eyes are slimed shut, her hair slimed into new skin. Her face is slimed into an amorphous blob. Patty tries to move, but Slug's weight prevents her. She chokes a little, learning how to breathe again.

His work done, Slug releases her and crawls onto the wall behind her. He creeps back over to the window and perches, his head turned towards her, his tentacles dancing. He emits a gurgle. It seems to mean Come With Me.

Though she cannot see the limbs that are no longer there, Patty understands that her body has changed. She rolls onto her belly, finding that she can feel where she is with two sets of tentacles attached to what used to be her face. She tries to talk but can only gurgle back.

Slug nods: he understands.

Patty follows Slug through the trees behind her building, their slime smoothing them over wet leaves and limp twigs, over thin gravel, the occasional rotting pine cone, until they come to a heavy dampness under a half-fallen tree trunk. Slug turns back and nudges her playfully, his tentacles fondling hers. Then he leads her up the trunk and out onto one of its outstretched limbs. There they mate, Slug showing her how to wrap around his length as he wraps around hers, so that they are a DNA strand, a corkscrew, hanging down from the limb on one rope of slime. It is easy, like love, this full-body writhing. For a long while they are content to lick each other, lapping up one another's slime and producing more in its place.

This is the wettest Patty has ever been. Her body is in full tremble, every pore of her skin secreting slime, every nerve channeling excitement.

Suddenly she feels a new sensation: her cock is beginning to protrude translucent from her mantle to wrap around Slug's protruding cock, its sensitivity heightened with every fondle of the wind. Like their bodies, their cocks writhe around each other until they are intertwined. Then their cocks begin to expand, throbbing and massive, together forming an intricate flower that dangles down from their hanging bodies.

Patty and Slug tighten their embrace further and further still, in sync with their pulsating cocks. Tighter, tighter, tighter; their cocks throb, begging for release. Finally they ejaculate, each fertilizing the other in an extended excessive climax that ends all time and thought.

Patty is dizzy. Patty is exhausted. Patty has more work to do.

Because Slug's cock is stuck in Patty's cock, Patty must begin to chew it away, being careful not to chew off her own cock in the process. As Patty gently chews, Slug writhes around her body and gurgles in pleasure, in pain. When she is done, Slug drops down and sprawls on the leaf-matted forest ground for a moment, recovering. Then he creeps away.

Now Patty is alone, dangling precariously from the tree limb. She tries swinging herself over to the trunk but, fatigued, cannot build momentum. Like her lover, she allows herself to fall from the rope of slime to the soft ground. Though the fall is not long, the impact stings. Her skin, she supposes, is still sensitive.

Here Patty rests. What will Patty do next?

DIONYSUS

Age matters little for immortals. When I met Dionysus, I was twenty-four. She was old.

We met at an after-hours club. She caught my eye or I caught hers. Her eyes were glittery and wise. She came over and laughed. I felt good.

When Dionysus laughs, it's an all-devouring laugh, as though she is swallowing you down. It's a fearless, monstrous laugh. You must trust her to hack you back up.

Around bars and in streets, in alleys, Dionysus swirls, administering the night. She blurs the edges of people, her own borders smeared.

I tend to maintain myself. So we were in love.

*

When Zeus killed her mother, Dionysus was still in the womb. Zeus killed Semele by showing her all of himself. He sewed Dionysus into his thigh.

Zeus is a god of gods. He has also birthed a child from his head.

Dionysus has failed to live up. She serves the carnival more than she rules it. Her people command her, texting and calling, insisting she show until she does.

“I don't want to go,” she'd complain, tossing the phone down and stretching in bed. “It's so much work. I'd rather stay here with you.” She'd yawn, rub my back. She'd cough up mucus and swirl it in her mouth, chewing before gulping back down.

“So don't go. We could...” In truth, all we did was watch television.

“Come with me,” she whined, wrapping her legs around mine. “Then I won't have to stay out so late.”

In the final month of Dionysus' incubation, Zeus' jealous wife tried beating the fetus dead with an urn. While Zeus and Hera fucked their make-up fuck, Dionysus moved inside her father's thigh.

In an act the physics of which I don't understand, Zeus birthed Dionysus in the bed he shared with Hera. I imagine he unthreaded the thread that attached Dionysus to his thigh. Possibly, contractions and labor occurred.

Upon her release into the world, Dionysus scrambled over to suck the breast of her father's wife. She sucked with mighty, toothless gums. Hera, delirious, came.

Dionysus crawled from Hera's empty breast. She seized Hera's glass of wine. Dionysus drank, and drank.

“You know I don't like seeing you drunk,” I said, pulling away. When she swirled around bars and streets, she forgot about me. It hurt.

She snorted. “What do you mean? I'm always drunk. I could use a beer right now. Just kidding. Ha. No, I'm not.” She might stand on the bed and do her inebriated court jester routine. If I didn't laugh, she'd do a grotesque striptease. If I didn't laugh at that, she'd straddle me and make stupid faces. For a time, withholding laughter was my most effective power ploy. This worked until she resorted to merciless, profoundly unfair tickling.

*

Things became smeared. I had to keep reminding myself that Dionysus could live off of coffee and cigarettes and alcohol. I couldn't. Dionysus could bike through red traffic lights, yipping, without fear. That didn't mean I should follow her.

Dionysus could also bike home drunk and take a spill, a mistake even a god could make. Then she'd really need me.

She might need me to pick her up in a cab, for instance. She might need me to know where she lived. She might have lost her keys again; she might need me to break down the door. She might be so upset by the damage, she'd need me to get the broom. She might whisk the wood shards this way and that; she might need me to make her stop. She might threaten to throw a punch at me then, her eyeballs shivering in their sockets. She might need me to go over it all the next day. She might need me to describe it and laugh.

*

Maybe her glory would have killed me, I think sometimes. If she'd shown it. Maybe I'll call her. Then I reread her last text: her pee smells like Southern Comfort, and am I ever going to talk to her again?

Our last night involved me showing up at a bar to escort her home. She wouldn't leave. Her people were egging her on.

“Stop it, stop it,” she pushed me away. “You're no fun. I want to have
fun
,” she slurred, head rolling around on her neck. “I could
die
tomorrow.” She flicked at me as if
it would make me go away, then walked unsteadily to the bar.

She'd already been cut off, I guess, so she was taking people's drinks right out of their hands. I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her away. I felt like her parent. I felt like a security guard. I felt dangerously, violently angry. We swayed and scrambled like a disoriented crab. Outside she started crying. “Stop yelling, stop yelling,” she yelled. I stopped. She grabbed my t-shirt and pulled me in toward her. I softened. She pulled up my shirt so it formed a bowl. Then she puked in it.

TOMATO HEART

It was a cool day for July, a healthy breeze keeping the heat at bay, and I had immersed myself in a matrix of tomato vines, breathing in the vine-ripe aroma and enjoying the yellow-to-red rainbow of garden fruit, when I saw a man several yards away. Silhouetted by the sun, he looked like an emaciated Giacometti, until I took a few steps forward; with the sun no longer swallowing him, he was just tall, nothing special. I watched him reach up, yank off a tomato, and chomp into it with authority, the juice squirting out upon impact and leaking down his chin with a vengeance.

He shifted and saw me. He offered me a bite.

I accepted. It was a fireball of a tomato, delicious, its tang flooding our mouths and trickling from our lips down to our chins, tickling our necks, tingeing our white T-shirts pink at the collars. It could have been just another tomato on a vine, stuck there round and shiny, swelling, waiting to be plucked and eaten, with brothers and sisters just as ripe, just as ample. But this tomato was extraordinary. I'd never tasted anything so rich. The stranger and I surveyed each other coolly as we chomped, and I felt the beginning of something, I didn't know what exactly, take root in my body.

I love tomatoes. His name was Paul.

On our first date we went to Mama Mia's, a Ninth Street hole in the wall. Paul's idea. They knew him there. I imagine he wanted to impress me with his capacity for making quaint friends like Guillermo and Estelle, the septuagenarian owners of the place. They embraced him heartily and gave me an affectionate once-over with eyebrows raised, I believe in impressed approval. At the time, I was charmed: He likes elderly Italians. He is perfect.

We had just fallen into the rhythm of a smooth tête-à-tête when our salads were served, striking us silent with their opulence: a generous array of sliced tomatoes arranged upon rippling leaves of romaine with grated mozzarella sprinkled on top. O! And a creamy Italian sauce to die for. I looked at Paul and smiled. Paul smiled back. My heart bubbled with joy as I plinked a tomato slice into my mouth and chewed. I looked at him chewing on his tomato slice as he looked at me chewing on my tomato slice, and I knew this relationship would last.

He had felt it, too, he said many months later, when we remembered with fondness that first date, the first of many such dates, many such tomato-filled salads followed by traditional Italian dishes and slow walks along the river. He was a talker, oh yes, fond of sweeping declarations and eloquent with his hands; our favorite topics were gentrification, environmental racism, urban art, and tomatoes. I love tomatoes. Since the day we met so gloriously amidst the tomato vines at the farm, we had been back to Mama Mia's twenty times at least, enough for Guillermo and Estelle to know us and give us dessert on the house from time to time, usually when we were arguing, which naturally became more frequent as time wore on.

He took me back to Mama Mia's to propose. Not marriage, but a partnership. A committed partnership. Guillermo brought out our salads, and Paul brought up that first date, that moment when we had gazed at each other with forks mid-air and plinked tomato slices into our mouths simultaneously. He claimed to have known right then, right there, that we would make it. We would commit to one another, grow old together. Darling, he said, will you be my life partner?

I looked down at my salad. He had jumped the gun a little, I thought. I didn't want to think of such things; I wanted to plink a tomato slice into my mouth and savor its garden flesh. But looking at him looking at me like that, my heart surprised me, thumping like it wanted out, like it wanted to jump right out of my chest and nestle inside his. Our hearts would grow old together. We were in love.

So I looked up and said, yes, darling, yes, I will. Paul let out a huge breath and reached for my hand. We clutched each other's hands and smiled, our eyes glistening, then kissed each other lightly over the table. I was glad then that I hadn't started in on the Male Answer Syndrome baiting, a game I'd picked up from one of our femarchist friends and grown fond of over the course of our relationship. Paul might have reneged, which, by the way, should be pronounced with a soft ‘g' because it sounds better and more appropriate that way. Paul always rejected my pronunciation-as-use theories of language. I have to get them in when he's not listening.

That night we had a long bout of polite sex and then we went to sleep. When I woke up, it was early morning, and my chest was rattling noisily. Something felt wrong inside me. I was numb on one side, and my chest was
swelling visibly, as though my rib cage was expanding. I must be having a heart attack, I thought. Exciting, and highly unusual for a woman my age—but I have always been special. Then I started coughing uncontrollably, so hard I feared I'd hurl up my esophagus. That was when Paul woke up, alarmed, and started whacking me on the back, saying are you all right, darling, are you all right, and, should I call the hospital, darling, I'm calling the hospital. He made for the phone. I batted his arm away.

By that point, the skin between my breasts had begun itching uncontrollably, and I couldn't help but scratch. I scratched and scratched, digging deep with my fingernails until, abruptly, I tore through my skin—it wasn't painful so much as relieving. As I peeled my skin back, groaning, I felt something push at my rib cage from within. I thought, my god, I must have a tumor between my breasts, now a heart attack is one thing but cancer is just not allowed. And that's when it happened; I don't know how. My heart burst out of my chest. It popped through its arterial fence, it surged through my lungs and my rib cage, and ejected itself through various nervous tissues and muscle fibers with a final rip through the hole I had made in my skin. There it stopped, my heart, still attached to its arteries and veins, but exposed and sagging between my breasts like some kind of unwieldy necklace. Chestlace? If you will.