Удушье (Choke)

on your face. The two of you shar­ing ends of your fat hot slider, you could be on the cover of some paperback bodice-ripper. I tell her, 'Oh, baby, cleave thy flesh unto mine. Oh yeah, cleave for me, baby.'

Eighteenth-century dirty talk.

Their teacher, her name's Amanda or Allison or Amy. Some name with a vowel in it.

Just keep asking yourself: 'What would Jesus not do?'

Now in front of her class, with my hands good and black, I stick the pincers back into the fire, then wiggle two of my black fingers at the kids, international sign language for come closer.

The kids in the back push the ones in the front. The ones in the front look around, and one kid calls out, 'Miss Lacey?'

A shadow in the window means Miss Lacey's watching, but the minute I look at her she ducks out of sight.

I motion to the kids, closer. The old rhyme about Georgie Porgie, I tell them, is really about England's King George the Fourth, who could just never get enough.

'Enough what?' a kid says.

And I say, 'Ask your teacher.'

Miss Lacey continues to lurk.

I say, 'You like the fire I got here?' and nod at the flames. 'Well, people need to clean the chimney all the time, only the chimneys are really small inside and they run all over the place, so people used to force little boys to climb up in them and scrape the insides.'

And since this was such a tight place, I tell them, the boys would get stuck if they wore any clothes.

'So just like Santa Claus ...' I say, 'they climbed up the chimney...' I say, and lift a hot poker from the fire, 'naked.'

I spit on the red end of the poker and the spit sizzles, loud, in the quiet room.

'And you know how they died?' I say. 'Anybody?'

No hands go up.

I say, 'You know what a scrotum is?'

Nobody says yes or even nods, so I tell them, 'Ask Miss Lacey.'

Our special morning in the smokehouse, Miss Lacey was bobbing on my dog with a good mouthful of spit. Then we were sucking tongues, sweating hard and trading drool, and she pulled back for a good look at me. In the dim smoky light, those big fake plastic hams were hanging all around us. She's just swamped and riding my hand, hard, and breathing between each word. She wipes her mouth and asks me if I have any protection.

'It's cool,' I tell her. 'It's 1734, remember? Fifty percent of all children died at birth.'

She puffs a limp strand of hair off her face and says, 'That's not what I mean.'

I lick her right up the middle of her chest, up her throat, and then stretch my mouth around her ear. Still jacking her with my swamped fingers, I say, 'So, you have any evil afflictions I should know about?'

She's pulling me apart behind and wets a finger in her mouth, and says, 'I believe in protecting myself.'

And I go, 'That's cool.'

I say, 'I could get canned for this,' and roll a rubber down my dog.

She worms her wet finger up my pucker and slaps my ass with her other hand and says, 'How do you think I feel?'