Meggie goes back to the bed. She lies down. She knows what Mama will do next. It is the worst to come.
Quint is directed to stand in front of the old chair. Meggie cannot see Jesus anymore but that is a good thing. What is to happen is not for anyone’s eyes, especially the Savior’s. Meggie looks at her husband. His hair is gone as is the flesh of his mouth and the bulk of his nose. There is a tongue, but it is slimy and gray like an old rotted trout. The left side of his head is flattened, with the exposed brain now blackened and shimmering, reminding Meggie of a mushroom she tried to save once in a sandwich bag. The eye on the left is missing, but the right eye is wide and wet. The skin of Quint’s abdomen is swollen and it ripples like maggots have gotten inside. One hand has no fingers, but the other has three, and they grope awkwardly for the zipper of his trousers. Quint somehow knows why he has been brought upstairs.
Mama Randolph moves beside Meggie and motions for her to hoist up her dress. Meggie flinches, hesitating, and Mama slaps her. Meggie does not hesitate again.
Mama then rolls up her sleeves. She says, “Quint needs the extra stimulation to do what he has to do. Watching helps him. You know that. So be still and let me do my job.”
With the perfunctory movements of someone changing a fouled diaper, Mama coaxes the younger woman’s legs open, and parts the private folds so Quint can have a better view. Then she begins to rub Meggie’s clitoris slowly, while stroking the sensitive skin of Meggie’s inner thighs with the other hand. Meggie will not watch. She digs her fingernails into her sides until the pain sings with the rush of blood to her genitals.
“Quint, do you remember? Do you see Meggie? Her pretty dress?” says Mama. “Look Quint, now isn’t this lovely?” She leans her face into Meggie’s crotch and licks the whole length of slit. The breath from her nose is warm; the wetness of her saliva is cool. Meggie groans. Shame boils her mind and soul. Pleasure teases her body.
Quint grunts. Meggie bucks her head and shoulders and glances at him. He has opened his fly and has found his penis. It is yellowed and decaying, like a bloated fish on a riverbank. As he pulls, it rises slightly. The pre-cum is purpled.
Mama sucks gently and then with a fury, Meggie’s body arcs reflexively. Bile rushes a burning path up her throat and dribbles from the corners of her mouth. When Mama’s lips move away for a second, Meggie crashes back to the mattress. The acid rockets upward once more and Meggie gags. Mama brings her tongue to Meggie’s spot again, and then thrusts her thumb into the opening. Meggie feels the walls of her vagina gush, betraying her in her ultimate moment of revulsion and horror.
“Good girl,” Mama says matter-of-factly.
Meggie writhes on the bed, enraged tears spilling from her eyes and soaking the mattress. Mama stands up.
Quint has a line of moisture on what is left of his upper lip. One side of his mouth twitches as if it would try to grin.
Mama gestures to her son. “Come now, Quint, Meggie can’t wait for you.” Quint stares, grunts, then stumbles forward. As he passes his mother, she says, “I’d really love a granddaughter.”
Meggie turns her face away. She closes her eyes and tries to remember last summer. Days of light and shadows and swimming and play, days of work and trials and promises of forever. But all she can do is smell the creature climbing onto her. All she can do is feel the slopping of the trout-tongue on her cheek and taste the running, blackened brain matter as it drips to the edge of her lips. He burrows clumsily; his body wriggles as his knees work between her knees, and his sore-covered penis reaches like a dazed, half-dead snake for her center.
Meggie bites her tongue until it bleeds to keep from feeling the cold explosion of semen. And as if in some insane answer to it all, her vaginal walls contract suddenly in a horrific, humiliating orgasm.
It is all over quickly. Mama pulls Quint off, then gives Meggie a kiss on the forehead and tells her to stay abed for at least an hour to give the seed time to find the soil.
Alone, with the door locked and the lunch tray balanced on the smelly chair seat, Meggie lies still, her dress still hunched up. She holds her left hand in her right, pretending the right one is that of a living, breathing Quint. She puts the hand to her face and feels the tender stroking. And then she lowers the hand to her abdomen, and presses firmly. There will be a new human in there soon, if Mama has her way. There could be one already. This could be Mama’s magic moment. Meggie wishes she could know. It is not knowing if or when that brings her mind to the edge of twisting inside out.
She looks at the window. There is no breeze now, only the persistent heat. The edge of sunlight stands on the carpet stain.
“S’different,” Mama Randolph had said. “Different world now. Just adjustin’ to cold water is all. Might not wanta do it, but sometimes just can’t be helped. Gotta survive, after all.”
Meggie holds herself and closes her eyes. She wonders about the different world. She wonders if there will be a baby to grow and use the playground outside her room. And she wonders if the baby, when it comes, will be cuddly and bouncy and take after his mother.
Or if it will be stillborn, and take after its father.
I am He that Liveth and was Dead … & Have the Keys of Hell & Death
RANDY CHANDLER and T. WINTER-DAMON
“I
Randy Chandler is the author of
t. Winter-Damon was a writer and illustrator from Tucson, Arizona whose works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies. Tim passed away in 2009.
Before he became something more than human, he liked to hang out in punk joints & coffee houses like Nouveau Expresso & 90 Night — funky little clubs where young radicals & Post Beat post-hip poets & punk musicians gather for mutual ego massage or to have their philosophies styled in the latest fashion. In that previous life, Slice was an angry young poet known as “The Bard of Bones,” because he always wore his hand- tooled leather-&-bones outfit when he read his mad poetry in public. T-bones, chicken bones, porkchop bones, dog bones, cat bones (painted black), squirrel skulls, a human femur, all rattling musically as he moved about like a demented witch doctor, mouthing his bone-chilling poems & death hymns. His outfit was topped off with a spooky hoodoo headdress made of a cow’s skull & hung with chicken feet & bird feathers. He strutted his killer stuff & the tight little pussies in the audience (those with the kinkier libidos that flamed darkly to the spark of his hellcoals-&-gris-gris laden rap) would get wet & squirmy, aching for that big bone bulging beneath his loincloth. The Bard of Bones got a lot of pussy in those days.
Then came his Bloodbone Poems & his subsequent arrest on obscenity obsession with sordid sex, urban bloodbath & megaviolence. Neither did they appreciate his state-of-the-art collection of S&M, fetishist & bondage zines. Their bootheels & balled-fists-in-the-gut made that rather clear …
He was convicted, placed on probation & ordered to undergo psychiatric counseling. He enjoyed the
