Aaaiiieee

flower-print dress that made her look pregnant with a Shetland pony, Walt thought. Then he thought of the centaur, and other mythological beings. Gods, goddesses, wonders with the bodies of humans mixed with those of other creatures. Marvels…

At the moment, they were not laughing and chatting comfortably as they had in the diner. Walt had begun telling Betty Ann about his parents, and the two of them were grim, did not look at each other.

“They were both drunks,” Walt told her. “They’d both pass out, and my sister Louise and I had to make our own supper. When there was food enough in the house to cook. They both had other lovers, too. So one day my father came home—my sister and I were outside playing…we didn’t see it…not until afterwards—my father came home and found my mother with her latest boyfriend. And he was jealous. And he shot her with a shotgun. And then the boyfriend. And then himself.”

“I’m so sorry,” Betty Ann told him softly, not looking up from the pavement. She had her left arm cradled under her veiled twin, to help support its weight as she walked.

“The state sent my sister and I to two different foster homes. We were eight years old. And we’ve never been together again.”

Betty Ann came to a stop and looked at him, forcing him to do the same. The emotion in her face was earnest, and painful to him. “But you’re a private eye!” she protested. “You could find her now!”

“It’s too late,” he muttered.

“But…”

“I did find her. I saw her…I watched her. She’s married now, has kids. She looks happy. I couldn’t talk to her. I left her alone. She’s happy now.” Walt returned his gaze to the sidewalk, and resumed walking. Betty Ann fell in beside him again.

When they were outside the “museum” (a couple going inside pointed to Betty Ann’s bulging dress and whispered to each other), Walt swallowed a slug of saliva and asked, “Could I take you to a movie some time?”

“I don’t like to go out in public too much, Walt,” she told him gently.

“I understand…” He was unhappily ready to give up on it at that moment.

“You want to come visit me tonight? After I’m done?” She gestured to the windows above the museum. “I live up here. We could talk some more. Have a drink.”

Walt’s mood lifted. He smiled again, and once more they shook hands. Once more the warm press of their contrasting flesh.

“What time?” he asked.

*     *     *

Music murmured dark and smoky from the phonograph in Betty Ann’s flat, one floor up from the Five-In-One show. She poured Walt a whiskey. He had removed his fedora and wrinkled jacket, and had left his gun at home with his camera.

Walt sipped, sighed at the painful warmth, laid his drink aside. He spread his arms. “Care to dance?”

Betty Ann, hiding her bathing suit and twin beneath her flowered tent of a dress again, spread her hands above the ungainly shape that was covered like a corpse under a sheet. “Sally sort of gets in the way.”

“Wait,” Walt said, and moved around in back of Betty Ann. She started to turn to face him but he held her shoulders in place. Then, he embraced her softly from behind, resting his hands on her waist above where her hips flared. She put her hands over his, and they began to slide back and forth as one—or as three—to the murky melancholy music.

“This is nice,” Betty Ann said.

“Yes.” Walt drew her closer against his front. “This is nice,” he repeated, close to her ear, so finely and perfectly formed.

Her full bottom pressed against his front, and soon he began to grow hard against it. His erection ached to lie in its inviting dark cleft, the thin but imprisoning layers of their clothing preventing it.

Walt bent his head to her neck, and kissed her brown skin there. It was as warm as her hand had been. She reached up one of her hands, and laid it upon his cheek.

Walt then turned the woman around to face him, impulsively, passionately. He embraced her from the front, but a bit to one side, the twin between them as if to keep them apart. Still, he got his arms around her. Locked his mouth to hers. They exchanged tongues, and still swayed to the music.

After several minutes of this, Walt kneading her left breast through her clothing as they kissed, he stepped back from her and began to bunch up her dress. But Betty Ann took his hands gently. Her face looked pained.

“I’ve seen it,” Walt reassured her. “Remember? I’m not afraid. I’m not disgusted.”

“It’s all people ever see,” she whispered, her voice husky with emotion. “It’s like I’m the one who never got to live…”

“I’ve seen her already,” Walt repeated. “Now I want to see the rest of you…”

Slowly, Betty Ann’s hands slipped away from his. Slowly, he raised her dress up over her head. It caught a moment, snagged on one of Sally’s legs. Betty Ann quickly reached to untangle it.

Again, the white bathing suit-like outfit, as startling against her skin as her teeth when she smiled. She wasn’t smiling now—still looked timid, afraid—but he could feel the heat uncoiling off her skin, coming in slow panting waves from her slightly open mouth.

He removed her top. His lips and tongue brought her nipples, almost black against her dark skin, to a hardness so exciting he had all he could do not to bite down on them. His hands ran across her smooth shoulders, and then drifted down to find the edge of her outfit’s bottom portion. He began to skin it from her. His forearm nudged against the swell of Sally’s body. They both ignored it. They backed as one toward the sofa in her tiny living room.

Atop Betty Ann on the sofa now, Walt hastily unbuttoned his shirt and unzipped his trousers with one hand. She helped him by pulling off his white shirt and pushing his trousers down his legs with her toes. She helped him further by taking his engorged cock in hand and nuzzling its head against her lower lips, which parted to admit it. He fed himself long and deep into her, inside her where it was moist already and so wonderfully, tropically hot in contrast to the cold awaiting them outside her little apartment.

Sally brushed against his side as he moved rhythmically inside Betty Ann, his body at a slight angle atop her. They both disregarded the intrusive contact as best they could.

*     *     *

Walt came to see her nearly every day, as his work permitted. He did not pay her, as Ed/Edna’s lovers did; he offered to help Betty Ann, but learned she made a whole lot more money than he did, and had bought her parents a nice home and sent her brothers and a cousin to college.

Every time he visited her, they had a drink or two. Most times they danced. And always, they ended up in her bed.

After the first several awkward times, in which he had done all he could to minimize contact with Sally, Walt began to be less concerned about it. He would lie more directly across Betty Ann, Sally pressed up fully against his side as if growing out of him instead, and he would even rest his hand on the parasitic twin’s rounded ball of a body—as smooth as Betty Ann’s own curved flesh—while pumping in and out of his lover. On the fourth time they made love, things became so impassioned—both of them sheened in sweat, Betty Ann’s legs hooked over his calves, her soles pale and toes clenched—that Walt took hold of one of one of Sally’s legs at the knee where the limb began its tapering and held onto it as he cried out in climax.

Ever the love-making, but marriage never came up. Marriage would be unthinkable to the world outside these close walls. Not so much because of the half-dead, half-buried sister depending from Betty Ann’s body, but because of her color. One time only she mentioned it. With her head resting on his bare arm, she mused quietly, “I can never be married like my parents. Like my brother Sam. I can’t live like they do. Sally won’t let me. We’re stuck together in every way, Sally and me.” And she had laughed sadly. Walt had, too. But he hadn’t contradicted her.

One night when he stayed over, as he increasingly did, they listened to the ocean’s wintry ghosts wail through the chasms and ravines of the city beyond these windows. Sheets pooled sweaty around them, a bottle glowing ambery on the floor. Walt was kissing the soft swell of Betty Ann’s belly, pressing his lips into her navel where the mysterious link to another human being had been long ago severed. She ran her fingers absent-mindedly through his bristling short hair.

His lips moved from her belly to the greater swell of Sally. “Hi, Sally,” he purred playfully, to attract Betty