Genital Grinder

really starting to show. Drunkenness is imperfect in explaining away all discrepancies.

The noise wasn’t the kicking, though, because you wouldn’t have been able to hear even Pele in the womb. This was more . . . wet, like food slipping through a soggy paper plate and clumping on the floor. Something else, too, though . . . a tearing sound. Not paper, though. It’s also something wet.

No, this isn’t rigor mortis. I can’t think of a single detached and perfectly rational scientific term for whatever the hell this could be. I know she’s dead, but I feel at least part of her quivering against me. I’ve joked with friends about gnawing my own arm off to get away from cuddling with a woman; this almost seems like a preferable option to the mystery alternative.

I need the light right now. Something like this doesn’t happen when sunlight is bleeding through the drapes, it’s an unwritten rule. I can feel the shape of bedside lamp, but the switch is beyond reach. There doesn’t seem to be anything but the lamp and her clock, which is only a clock. No radio. I’d turn that on just to drown out the noise, but all I’ve managed to do is set the alarm to go off at 9:48. If I’m still here when it goes off, I’m certain I won’t be alive to hear it.

The wet noises have gotten louder, more intense. Why the hell was a pregnant woman haunting a singles bar? She’d have a better chance of me paying her rent than committing to a long-term relationship the father wouldn’t give her.

Something wet just dotted my stomach. A pool of it is spreading on me, and it’s really pouring out now. It’s escaping her, and I’m sure it is blood.

A lot of blood.

I’m thrashing under her again, this time to really get out from beneath. There is definitely a hole in her stomach. Its slick edges are being ground against me like a new sexual orifice, and more of its contents are sluicing out. This, along with the still-present nausea of too much drink, just caused me to vomit. Depending on the trajectory, most probably ended up in her hair and down her back. The slickness of her blood and . . . tissue, I’m guessing . . . has formed a rivulet that is streaking to my groin. Despite the lubrication of all this leakage, I’m making no progress in freeing myself. My left arm still hasn’t regained all its feeling; it is dead weight of pins and needles. The circulation has been stemmed the arm won’t move I can’t move it.

Another sound, but I recognize it as me screaming as loud as I can given the weight on me. I’m not even loud enough to be heard in her surely well-stocked kitchen, much less the next house over. It occurs to me that maybe this is all just a vivid hallucination from a lack of oxygen, but the relief of this feels too false to be of any comfort.

Between these cries is the sloshing of the juices as I weakly try to capsize her.

Sloshing, then the dripping and pouring as they rush out. The tearing sounds have probably continued throughout all of this, but at some point I became more aware of my panic than its cause.

Something new—an indentation on my stomach, something probing the area with very slippery digits. I’m feeling faint. All my blood is collecting in my head. Unconsciousness now would be nothing short of a blessing. I’m almost there.

I hear and feel the hole in her stomach suddenly tear across, like an artist angrily ripping a page from his sketchbook. More things are pushing on me, inquisitive, moist. Tiny fingers? And something else—bigger, but softer, like cartilage. I think it’s a nose. There is a sharper prodding sliding just below that.

The chin.

Between the nose and the chin, a warm absence opening wider.

That would be the mouth.

The last impossibility of this ridiculous night—it already has teeth, and very good teeth at that.

The tearing has momentarily ceased, and I hope when it starts again in about two seconds I’m not awake to tell you what happens ne—

“I’m telling you,” Greg said to Von, “it’s Sarah Pensie.”

Von shook his head, not believing it for a second. Sarah Pensie—who graduated two years ahead of Von and three years before Greg dropped out— had moved to Hollywood to become a star and wound up discovering her true calling in life: the go-to girl for “butt stuff” in the adult film industry, known as “Lolita Ream.” It was rumored that she did specialty porn in addition to the mainstream stuff Von had actually seen, and supposedly her biggest underground hit was called Anal Halfpipe, wherein she gave a burly truck-driver an enema. The ejected suds were then used to wash out her slut-filthy mouth.

Therefore, it was rather unlikely that the corpse prone on tarp in Von’s basement—an eleven hour drive from the P.O. box for her fan club—was Sarah Pensie. They hadn’t stripped her just yet, probably because they couldn’t believe she was there (whoever she was).

It had been an otherwise routine night for them. They’d spent the usual ninety minutes rooting through the dumpster outside the gynecological clinic searching for discarded latex gloves and sanitary napkins. Homeward bound and playing a game of their own creation—“I Wonder Whose Cooze?”—they’d found the woman splattered on Sherman Avenue (and a few pieces here and there on Bowling Boulevard).

A hit-and-run, probably. Figuring that police probably hadn’t been notified yet, Von and Greg quickly loaded her up into the truck-bed and peeled out for home. They now examined her on blue canvas under the fluorescent lights of Von’s basement.

Her left eyeball dangled precariously on a cheekbone peeking through her skin, a stringy optic nerve straining to hold on. Her nose hooked unnaturally to the right, which made Von think she could advertise for that breakfast cereal with the dumbass bird—Toucan Sam, he remembered—if the dried cluster of blood and snot was wiped away. The right eye was completely gone, probably still on Bowling Boulevard. A few brain fragments dangled from the socket. Her limbs were contorted in a fashion more suitable for broken toothpicks than arms or legs. Her white novelty shirt reading BUILT TO LAST was all but obscured by smears of blood, and the story with her jeans wasn’t all that different. She’d either vomited just before or right at the moment of impact, undigested debris and bile testifying to a Mexican dinner. She probably should have been slamming a Slim-Fast shake, because the bitch was well on her the way to maximum density. They had broken a mean sweat lugging her to the truck bed on Sherman, so Von sure hoped she thought about the plight of her pallbearers when she made out her will.

Von now let himself dare to believe this was all for real. He couldn’t begin to fathom what altruistic gesture he might have made for the universe to reward him with a gift like this—free puss, for the love of God, left out for any takers like a suave leather couch at curbside trash pick up . . . a suave leather couch you could cornhole—but he’d gladly accept it with his warmest regards. Short of Ed McMahon dropping by to hand him a check for a million bucks, he realized this might be the luckiest day of his life. Fixing on the ruined body, he savored the moment a few beats longer, even while melancholy at the possibility that after tonight nothing may ever compare to this. It even seemed almost wrong on some strange metaphysical level to get down to the business of actually defiling her, but he recognized this for the craziness it was. He wasn’t delusional . . . this dead woman was getting shot full of his ball sauce, thank you very much.

They stripped her down. Their hands were soon sticky not only from the blood but from pushing in a few lengths of small intestine and miscellaneous vital organs spilling through a tear in her belly like detritus through a burst trash bag. Von was more than happy to let Greg single-handedly remove her underwear. About every excretion and fluid possible had turned her panties into multiple Rorschach tests. He winced a little when Greg held them up, the perineal area carrying some added weight. What Von didn’t know was that Greg hadn’t lost his janitorial job at Bartok General Hospital due to downsizing, like he’d said. No, security had filmed him creeping into the coma ward and consuming whatever he found in colostomy bags. Lightning struck twice soon after, Greg once more “downsized” for lapping up reproductive fluid from the rubber sheets of mental patients. If Von had seen Busted on the Job 7 and 8 on Fox, he would have known the sickening truth.