Onscreen, Fenny Boyle’s digital clone, as convincing as technology could make him, knelt and (the kids fake-wretched again) bobbed, coming up with a dripping grin of brownish gunk and saying, “Mmmmm, tastes great!!!”
Passing it off as true wasn’t as important as convincing voters it was a plausible scenario- that was what the game was about.
Pim’s other mom burst into view, naked as well but with fewer welts. She pumped Altoona’s hand, her lobes right out there in plain sight. “How ya doin’?”
As urbane as Altoona prided herself in being, she was always startled to see Britt Franken’s left lobe exposed like that, wet with recent chewing.
But she liked Britt a lot.
There was plenty of heart behind her hard-edged exterior, and no room for bullshit.
Not waiting for Altoona’s reply, Britt opened the hall closet, her reach stretching the blue-veined backs of her thighs and lifting her right foot off the carpet. When she turned, two items were squat-towered in her hands, a yearbook and a dated Futterware container, the orange-lidded kind that had been popular when Pim and Altoona were in grade school.
“ For shit’s sake, Britt, you gotta see this! ” More a command than a suggestion.
“ In a minute, you smelly heap of sewage,” said Britt, her last phrase dropped way low and delivered with a grin in Altoona’s direction.
Britt’s hands worked at the lid.
“He loved me then. Kent Bodeen and Mimsie Chesk were chosen our year, pretty much nothing-people nobody in the class gave a damn about, so it worked out pretty well. The Frankenburger in there,” Britt indicated the TV room, “kept looking over at them once they were draped out for all to see. He kept talking strategy, talking about the hunks of flesh he’d go after. His hands, when he wasn’t fondling me, drifted to his cleaver. ‘Just slice off something good,’ I told him, ‘something our kids can be proud of.’ And when midnight struck, my fella dove straight in and got us some upper lip and the tip of, I’m not fooling now no not a bit, Mimsie’s left earlobe.”
Sure enough, as the lid drew back, a hefty lobe, shrunken in the process of being preserved and capped at the stump like a rabbit’s foot, lay there in all its glory. It may or may not have been a lefty. But right or left, the possibility that he had slashed through to hack off a dead student’s lobebag, claimed the coveted tip, and not kept it himself, spoke volumes about their puppy love.
“Wow!” said Altoona.
Britt nodded. “Don’t it just beat all?”
Upstairs a door slammed.
“ Hey, little miss fat fuck, my lefty’s throbbing and my whip hand’s getting real itchy. ” Deadly warning.
“ All right, all right. Gotta go. You two chickies have a swell time.” She shrugged at the blood-smeared yearbook in her hands, resealed the Futterware, replaced both items in the closet, and buttocked off out of sight.
“Pretty sorry excuse, ain’t she?”
Altoona turned to her descending date.
The pain having at last subsided in her crotch, Pim’s sexy slink was back. She wore fishnet stockings, a tight black killer dress that ended a hand’s breadth above her knees, and a face whose frail wounded wince burned deep in Altoona’s heart.
“Your mom’s not all that bad.”
Scrunch about the eyes: “Give me a break.” A cleaver dangled beside the Futterware on Pim’s hip.
“Uh, sure, sweets,” said Altoona.
“On second thought, give me a hug.”
Leather brushed against leather as Pim cozied into her arms and angled up, engulfing in sweet lip-warmth Altoona’s friendship lobe.
People said the lobes weren’t connected. But she’d be damned if, every time her girlfriend’s mouth closed on her right lobe, she didn’t feel heat tingle in the left.
“You’re walking just fine, hon.”
Pim shrugged. “I took longer to heal than you, I guess. Last night helped.”
Altoona remembered wet slides of niobium cathedraling at either side of her mouth as she softly dug for the love nub between. “Yum. You were okay a week ago, from what I could see.”
“Yeah, possibly. But I didn’t want to tear anything before Cabrille checked me out one last time.”
Altoona laughed. “She was really coming on to us.”
“Again!” Eyes wide for emphasis.
“Right.”
“Cabrille’s good. You can tell when she touches you, when she slips the needle in and explains how to clean the piercings and put on the Polysporin. But man, the way she looked at us that night…”
“Yeah, it was pretty sick.”
Altoona had held Pim, comforted her, wiping drops of sweat from her brow, and knowing as the woman proceeded upward-left right, left right, like a saleswoman threading bootlace-that she would be next.
Cabrille, thirty miles away in Topeka, showed, even that night, a glimmer of interest beyond professionalism. But years and a life (Altoona suspected) too weird to contemplate had put the bag-breasted, crow-footed piercer beyond the reach of desire.
Besides, she was a woman, and a female threesome was illegal, not to mention yucky even to contemplate.
“She must’ve thought we were pervies.”
“Yeah,” Altoona said, “or potential ones.”
“Some folks don’t listen,” said Pim, taking Altoona’s hand and leading her out into the cool quiet night. “I told her about Condor and Blayne, how we thought their mouths were way cool when they showed up all swollen and pus-y from Christmas break.”
“ They sure took a razzing.”
“Kids and teachers both.” Pimlico opened the passenger door. “But folks changed their tune when everything healed up and Blayne started to work his zipper, slow and idle, right there in history class.”
Altoona settled behind the wheel. “He kissed me, you know.”
“The heck he did.” Pim peered over to test her. “Oh bullshit! You’re such a bullshitter!”
“He did! ”
“Yeah, right.” She slid closer. “Was it like this?” Pim’s feisty bod overlaid hers, her fingers up under Altoona’s lobes, her lips coming down to pillow against her mouth.
Pim broke the kiss, smiling, her right hand drifting down to grope Altoona’s leather-mounded left breast.
“More metal in it,” said Altoona. “More tentative, but real sexy. We were between classes.”
“The fuck he kissed you. Did he really?”
“You’ll see.” She fired up the rattletrap, giving it extra pedal to make to vroom. “I wanted to surprise you. They’re in a receptive mood. I got ’em horny for the big fourway.”
“ Both of ’em? Oh bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!” She hit the seat with the flat of her hand. “Come on Altoona, I don’t like it when you tease.”
“It’s not a tease. We set it up. During the search for the dead couple, in the costume shop behind the stage. All you’ve gotta do is bring along your enthusiasm and your killer bod.”
Pim countered with a renewed volley of bullshits, but it was clear she was starting to buy in. Altoona hoped Blayne had been able to persuade Condor, and that what both she and Pim longed for might begin tonight.
She flashed again upon their piercer, on Cabrille’s calculated ramblings about the delights of female threesomes. No, they weren’t pervies by that standard, but Altoona guessed more than a few prudish eyebrows would be raised-and the law brought thundering down-were word to leak that a foursome was in the offing amongst those who had bought big-time into the zipper craze.
Well fuck ’em, she thought, zooming backward into the street from the driveway. Love was love, whatever shape it took. Praise be to God for a world that could produce Pimlico, and praise abounding for the possibility of digging their talons into two super guys like Condor Plasch and Blayne Coom, brilliant, weird, dark, brooding sons
