Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Exequy

By Brewt.Blacklist

April-May 2015

HE OPENED his eyes, and it made no difference. He still couldn’t see. He tried to move, and there was very limited motion available to him. He was laid out, stretched, even, but couldn’t bring his hands up without running into walls…without running into…into…god, what was underneath him?

It was difficult to breathe; the air was close and stuffy and at the moment it was hot. He coughed: the air he forced out of his lungs was forced right back onto his own face. But his feet were cold, and god damn it, why was he naked? He had never slept naked in his life, and he felt awful, and there wasn’t any room in what must have been all these confounded blankets to do anything. It was like he had been mummified, and the sky above him had solidified and had fallen.

It moved. Whatever he was laying on was warm and soft and squishy with peculiar lumpy spots and it moved underneath him. He was laying on something and he nearly jumped out of his skin, his skin that was out and exposed in this cramped expanse, and it was…it was…Christ-fuck, it was grabbing him! Something came up from whatever hell there was below him on both sides and grabbed him. It latched on and he screamed; he had never been so startled, so alarmed in all his life, and there were snakes and monsters and tentacles and all manner of grisly things in there with him in the dark and somewhere over his screeching and crying over being grabbed—no, touched, only touched, not torn apart or ripped to shreds or sliced open or bitten or even bone-crunched, only touched by something that came up from underneath him—there…there was…there was chattering. Whatever it was that was touching him was doing it over and over, holding him and releasing him, and there was an eerie squirming going on below him and fuck, those weren’t monster-sounds, it was…it was a voice.

A-a person.

There was someone in there with him; wherever the hell there or here or whatever was. He panted and heaved and cringed and the—hands?—closed around him on various places on him, on muscles and bones and ticklish spots and they were moving, they were moving up on him, reaching for what was making so god damn much noise on him, his shoulders, his neck, god-fuck, there was a hand over his mouth, fingers were patting his lips, and the chattering, the illogical oration that was coming up from underneath him that had no sense in it whatsoever, the-the voice was serene and repeating itself, and it would be only an idiot that wouldn’t know that it was telling him to calm down; it harkened back to his mother, putting her arms around him when he was young and had skinned his knee or had run into something like a wall that had appeared out of nowhere, or how he had gotten hit by a tree branch that his friend had pulled back in front of him while they were playing tag, laughing until the strike, running away scared because he had actually gotten hurt, and he was crying, he could always count on his mother’s hands to be there when he cried, petting him…and the unknown hands he had on him now were gentle and soothing and it worked just like his mother’s response did to his frightful-just-frightful fated injuries he so regularly came home with from playing so hard, so long ago. It worked then, it worked now, world without end, amen.

He stopped shouting, at least, and was down to gasping and swearing and flinching because there wasn’t any room in there, and wherever he was, there was someone in there with him, underneath him, and his own hands managed to squeeze down to his sides, tentatively reaching down beneath him, and he made contact. He touched something, some…one, and it was the shock of skin that was awaiting him, and whoever it was that was in there with him was only wearing bare flesh, too, and he couldn’t recognize a word of what they were saying.

Of what she was saying. It was a woman’s voice. He thrashed his head back and forth in the dark, to try to see what was underneath him, who was underneath him, and it was just as dark below as it was above and around, and it was like he was floating but he couldn’t move very much; the utter blackness was dizzying. His hands felt around and found soft spots and confirmed that wherever he was, in this dark cramped tight little closet, there was someone else in there with him, and it was definitely a woman. It felt nothing like a man. She felt nothing like a man.

He tried to speak; his own voice boomed out vile profanities in the deep, deep dim, and the woman, the woman under him stopped moving, stopped squirming, and then she rattled on in incomprehensible phonemes and vowels he had no chance of mimicking, interleaved with consonances that only vaguely resembled the assemblages of language that he knew, that he had grown up with, and he had no idea whatsoever as to what she was saying.

He twisted his shoulder around, digging it into whoever was underneath him, and their—her—noise escalated, and it took a couple tries before he figured it out. That he was hurting her. His reaction to turn and face whoever was speaking to him despite the perfect impenetrability of her vernacular, even in the dark, had a consequence, and that it wasn’t any good for her. It couldn’t have been any good anyway, because he was laying on her, and she had to have been sustaining his weight for however the hell long he or she or they had been in there, and where were they, and how the fuck do they get out.

Panic set in for true and he tried to push up which got the incognizable expressions coming up from below to ramp up—not to mention getting the fragile hands to give up on the almost-pleasantries of holding him and petting him and take up swatting him—which did nothing to relax him, and he had to ride this most worthless of emotions out by himself, despite obtuse company whose interests in having him hush back down became lost, apocryphal, folklore. He had bigger fish to fry: he had to get out of here. Had to. Had to go now, right god damn now. Whatever he was in was sturdy, dense, serious, and it wouldn’t budge, and he threw everything he had against it. To no avail. He couldn’t bring his knees up, to really get some decent leverage going because there just wasn’t enough room to do that, and he didn’t know what to do. He felt helpless, like an infant at birth or something. As the futilities of his situation became more and more apparent, with him tensing up every muscle he had almost to the breaking point, somewhere in there, after some appalling eternity of high-strung damnation, some insistent something finally receded and turned around inside him and got the adrenaline to ease off. Rationality was again reborn within him, calling on him to settle the fuck down, to try to think his way out of all this as it became plain as day he was not going to be able to force his way out. He hated that realization, but every effort he made re-amplified it, and he began to accept it as truth.

Truth that fucking hurt. He apologized, first to himself, then to his situation—as if that would help—and then to whoever was whimpering beneath him, and his sentiments all fell dead on the spot. Impotent, as it were. Despite how feeble and destitute he felt, he was still going to have to do something, not say something.

He had no power here; he was dead weight on top of whoever was underneath him. As it became obvious that she was strained to even breathe, some echo of humanity told him to get off her, to relieve her of the fossil-inducing pressure he just had to be bearing down on her, and their first real moment of communication after The Big Panic occurred. He leaned over, toward one side of her. There was barely enough room for one of them in there, in wherever there or here or whatever this was—let alone two—but she pulled away from him, pressing herself over to the side, the other side, the one that was away from the shoulder he was bearing down, and he didn’t exactly slide off of her, but there was an inch or two of leeway along one edge, and he pried himself down into it. He got his shoulder down onto something hard, something that wasn’t squishy, and he jerked and twitched until his weight was by and large off of her, and onto whatever flat and chilly surface was underneath her.

She gasped and panted and chattered on in her inane speakings, and as soon as he got one shoulder down, he started to spiral around and compress himself as he tried to turn himself over, pulling his elbows in, curling and coiling and attempting a horizontal pirouette in a place that had less capacity than a shoebox. She pulled back onto what seemed to be the opposite wall, and she made complaintive noises as he torqued his way around to face her. There wasn’t room for that; they couldn’t be on their sides, facing each other as their confinement was narrower than it was tall. They were pressed against each other in impossible ways—shit, that didn’t work—and they had to change everything back to the way it was, just so they could breathe, with him on top of her, only this time, he was going to be facing her, and that…that had to be better, it just had to be, please, and with grunts and groans and squeaks and squawks they got through it, they got through the Great Turning, and he put his hand over onto her and pulled on her so she could worm her way back below him so he could get his arms around her and wedge his elbows underneath her and hold at least some of his weight up off her.

She started crying—that sound he understood—but she did as he wanted and got underneath him and he pressed himself up as far as he could in their little hovel to keep as much of himself off her as he could, and it wasn’t much, but it was something, and he felt her hands come up toward the side of his face, fumbling and poking along the way until her hand was resting on his cheek, with some words that he decided had to be some kind of thanks. Thanks for getting off of her, as little as he could do that. It had to be and in fact, was better than being crushed constantly with him facing up. It didn’t even occur to either one of them to put her on top of him, and by the time it eventually did, when he finally had more time to think about things, way on down the road somewhere, it was not just too late, but double-too-late.

No matter; they could start in on their relationship now.

He tried to ask her if she knew what was going on, where they were, who she was, how can they get out of here, how did they get in here, and she understood none of it. Her responses were disjunct and wholly alien. He tried again, to the same nonsensical feedback. He swore and he shouted and she shouted back in tones that conveyed that he wasn’t the only one frustrated here—at least she was some kind of human—and he went through his interrogation again. And again, peppered with more blasphemy. And yet again after that, still getting nowhere.

As if this all wasn’t hard enough. This was worse than being alone.

He had even tried to ask her her name, simplifying his inquiries down to something everyone could figure out—even stupid people—starting at the very beginning, telling her his own, becoming louder and louder with his repetitions until he was bellowing, the sheer force of his roar pressing her down into the floor, over and over until she repeated the word of power that one gives to another, to offer to someone as the first gesture of good will, to allow them to call on one with authority and understanding, the word that would cut right through crowds into one’s very soul, with the idea that they will not abuse it under the guise of trust, that they will not weaponize one’s own name that their mother gave them. Assuming, of course, he could get it across to her, and for all the world, it seemed that he did. She said it…er, something like it. It dumbfounded him, and he stopped dead, silent, cold. Something got through. He couldn’t see her crossing her eyebrows, and she couldn’t see the relief he had on his face that he had gotten something across to her, although she could hear him breathe through his nose, and she said a word that could have passed as his name in some undiscovered country a time or two before she changed the phonetics to something he had never heard the likes of before, repeating it over and over, interjecting his name from time to time, gentle in her pronunciations, cooing almost, and she finally lunged her head up, touching his chest with it as she said his name, then somehow thrusting her chest up as far as she could toward his head with the word she had been interjecting, and he loosened up and almost fell onto her breast, yanking his head back up at the surprise of the contact with her softness, nearly knocking himself out on the ceiling, and their second piece of understanding came about, and communication was born.

Flynn.

Saliki. At least, that was a close as he could get.

Hi.

He had no idea what she said after that. It could have been sawubona, or dobry dzień, or geia sas, nyob zoo, zdravo, or even āyaubaeāvana; it wouldn’t have made a whit of difference. It all sounded the same to him: Martian.

Not that it mattered. It wasn’t like they were going to be involved in any philosophical discourses or theological debates, or even find themselves at an elegant garden party on the beach at dusk, needing to call out from across the well-appointed and charmingly decorated grounds, waving at each other to get the other’s attention from the middle of endless throngs of angels, smiling and snaking their ways through the crowds with foo foo drinks in their hands, relieved to find each other at last, familiar old friends seeing each other for the first time in a long time, not since…well, you know, and by golly, were they ever bless-ed to be here. Much better circumstances. Hi, how are you, I’m fine, you, I’ve been good, thank you, give me a hug, screw that, give me a kiss. How’s the wife. How’s your husband. Kids. Business. Seen any good movies. God, it’s good to see you again; you look great. So do you. I’ve missed you, yeah, me, too. Hey listen, I gotta run, we should maybe get together again, soon, yes, excellent. I’m not kidding when I say I’ve missed you, don’t be a stranger. Call me, I would like that. Do you have my number, sure. Bye. Bye. Best to everyone.

No, none of that was happening in here. Not one of those kinds of niceties or manners or social graces had any bearing on anything in this…chamber. He ran out of things to say in a hurry to the woman he was trapped in here with, and after she prattled off in her opaque puzzling gibberish what just had to be the equivalent of her grilling him about their situation, it all came back to the same thing. They were in here together, wherever here was, with no way to communicate, pressed up against each other tighter and more intimately than any lover at least Flynn had ever been with, and they had no way out. The unconditional darkness loomed even harder with no end in sight.

They…they were…they weren’t going to get out.

They had been buried alive together, and they were going to die together, and there wasn’t going to be a reason for it that either of them could share with each other that the other would penetrate any semblance of truth about. And after the long silent night of what little future they had together made its relentless worthless point yet again—fucking persistent destiny—it was Flynn that started crying.

He shuddered and he heaved and he bore some weight down onto his doom-companion, and she patted him. Their third communiqué—the big one: The Comprehension and Acceptance—happened without any fanfare, and there was nothing either of them could do about it or even say to each other, even if they could translate each other’s silly words which didn’t matter anyway. Not toward meaning or reality or the problems at hand. Saliki joined him in his tears, and they cried each other out. Their desperations rose and dissipated, with small struggles against the sides of the ossuary sapping some more strength from both of them that they had no way to replenish.

The depression hit, and it hit hard on Flynn. All the regrets of his life played through, and he called out that he was sorry to the powers and authorities that put him here, to the ones that had warned him, over and over, that he was getting paid enough, which of course wasn’t enough, not for how he wanted things to be for the people he loved, and how he didn’t listen and how he was wrong and how he knew and understood that he took way more than he should have anyway and god, he was such an idiot, he would give it back, really, all of it, hell, more, and after he’d gotten everything out of his system, he wondered what kind of hideous sin that Saliki had been declared so incontrovertibly guilty of as to earn this kind of terrifying punishment with him.

###

IT WAS like she was from another planet. All his rantings and name callings and confessions were obviously lost on her, but something in her got that they were in this together, by hooks and crooks and detestable circumstances, and that he needed a comfort, a comfort she could provide, even in here—friends to the end, after all—and she jostled around a little.

Flynn froze solid. This, this he understood. Understanding of the Fourth Kind. Her knees had parted as little as they could, as far as they could reach inside this miniature hell, and his own hips fell down toward the bottom of the coffin—just a hair—and he…he was…he was between her legs. He felt her spine undulate beneath him, a slow waveform crawling up the middle of her body, and it spread out and bounced around inside her as she rolled her hips toward him, swiveling her asshole up toward him so she could present her…her…her p-pussy to him and her neck craned up the mere inches to him, and her impenetrable lips were up on his neck, and she was kissing him.

Saliki grew up first in the tomb and was making the best of an incredibly bad situation, suggesting a coarse and crude methodology that they could get a miniscule amount more free range in their inseparability and perhaps a way to console each other to boot. Flynn’s first reaction was that no, he couldn’t, it was too close to…to…hell, it was infidelity and he had a family to go home to. Besides, his wife wouldn’t possibly approve of him being so ungentlemanly toward another woman even if he was stuck in a sarcophagus with her, n-naked, in the dark, expecting to die anyway, and the little whore persisted.

Flynn tried to say "n-no," and she might have said something that could have passed for "yes" in some other dialect, and his resistances and head-bumping retreats did nothing to stop her from putting her hands up on his face, gentle and persistent, trying to pull him down toward her, the way things should be done on doorsteps at night at the end of a lovely evening at maybe the movies after a nice dinner and even going out for dessert later, making it clear in no uncertain terms that she wanted the kiss and that he wasn’t forcing his way onto her at all, no doubt followed by the cliché of "Would you maybe want to come in for a drink," which would lead him to have to or maybe get to wait there on the couch while she slipped into something more comfortable. He could almost feel the coy smile Saliki just had to have that would have conveyed that this sort of advance would be welcome—if he could even see it on her face, to say nothing about whether or not he was even interested in instigating this sort of…of…affair with her—and that this was not something she would have to take a shower over afterwards, to try to clear herself of the nasty feelings of being violated and taken advantage of. Not that it helped move things along for him. There were rules as to how all this should work, rules that he had followed with his wife, end to end. Rules with benefits.

And benefit he had; my god. That first kiss led to…things beyond his wildest dreams. At least, then.

Except, it wasn’t a kiss Saliki wanted, she wanted to go all the way right now and to skip that whole courtship ritual, and Flynn couldn’t quite see his way clear to doing that yet. It was too soon, way too soon. He hardly knew her.

Besides, what kind of a woman was it that—when faced with the infinite—could retreat back into something so…so base? It was the most ludicrous, ill-advised, irrelevant and futile thing he had ever considered. They had far more important things to work on.

She blathered on in what must have passed for pillow talk wherever she came from, making obscene promises he didn’t need to know the specifics of that the gists of were as clear as day, what with her cooing and all the minute motions she made around the bottom of him that only had one meaning. You, me, here, now. And he fought, he resisted, he waged war within himself on how fucking wrong it was to even consider making love to a woman at times like this, let alone a woman he had no concept of what she even looked like, that he had nothing in common with whatsoever save a rather dire circumstance, that he was nonetheless pressed hard up against, head to toe.

Especially there in the middle. They already had silently worked out how to breathe together, and as hard a Flynn’s heart was beating, Saliki’s was matching it, beat for beat, albeit for different reasons. Of that he was sure. Flynn’s eyes fluttered in the dark. Not that he could perceive a difference between having them opened and having them closed. He suffered and he languished as he tried to figure out just how he was going to be decent and respectable and…and prudent in here. Especially considering how his ability to tell her what he thought and how he felt was so damn limited.

Now, his penis didn’t care about the moral crisis he was having, it didn’t care about the crimes he had committed or his extraordinarily short future he had laid out before him, no, his cock did what cocks should do in times like these, and stretched out toward the woman, the woman who had the right opinion, as far as his cock was concerned. She writhed and got her hands somehow down in between them, and she found him. She found the part of him that commanded so much of his attention when it was his wife lying beside him on the cool clean sheets of their enormous bed at home, where the moonlight would be pouring in through the window after it was quiet because the kids had finally gone to sleep, after a long hard day at work followed by a flirt-filled evening, as his beloved made the silent calls to his body and his sex and his love with her own lithe and tempting curves, with the inviting undulations she wrought as she slept, dreaming as she so often confessed that she dreamt about, about him and her, making love, having sex, f-fucking, with her enthusiastically doing whatever it took to get his penis, his hardon, his most worthy cock inside her body wherever she could entice him into, god, she loved that, throwing her lips and her pussy and especially her ass at him, night after night, time after time, day in and day out, god, she loved him, cuddling up to him whenever they were in bed together, keeping her hand on his manhood whenever it wasn’t inside her, there inside the boxers he slept in, as it was her job and her privilege and her obligation to hold him like that whenever she would wake up from her luscious reveries and find her hand wasn’t already engaged in her duty, fondling him and caressing him into an erection, making him long and hard and needy, drawing up and inspiring desire in him as he slept until she nodded back off towards her siren-activities that he would have to wake her back up from because he himself had just awakened from thoughts and dreams that involved him and her and what they could be doing that would be much better than merely sleeping together, in bed, at night, in the dark, that she would smile for him for—"oh, god, oh, my fucking god, yes"—waking her up to do this very thing with her, what a lovely surprise, she’d been waiting for him, thinking about him, hoping beyond hope that he still wanted to do this quiet intimate thing that still brought him joy, that he still desired to have happen with her even after all these years, that he still found her attractive and indeed divine, and she would move in ways that confirmed to him that she wanted him, and his traitorous dick didn’t care that it wasn’t with the woman he had made vows to in front of their parents and all their friends, no, that wasn’t who was in this snug little container with him now, on this night of all endless pitch-black nights, that here in this micro-jail wasn’t the mother of his children he was to be faithful toward, that he had done such a good job of being a good husband for, providing for her, keeping her safe, always coming home to her to put his arms around her and kiss her and tell her that he loved her, despite all the super-obscene temptations he had thrown up against him every god damn day, no, the desires and agendas of where he changed size and shape into something useful for erotic purposes for the bride of his youth came about anyway for…for this…for this stranger, even though it was wrong.

Cocks and pussies don’t care about right and wrong, about social convention, about morality or romance or weddings or faithfulness or death do us part. They care about fucking. He had only just met Saliki, and here she was, trying to fuck him in the dark, on their first date, in a stone crate that was getting colder by the minute, and she wanted him to do it now, before it was too late.

She wanted him. Or at least her pussy wanted his cock.

Impossible.

They were going to die together, and she wanted to fuck him. She wanted to live with him, and be his woman for their last few hours on earth, here where there were only impossibilities left for both of them, and…and…his wife and his kids would never know, now would they, they would never know what had actually happened to him even though they knew what could happen—perhaps not the specifics but in general—because they knew the risks he was taking by taking the money, and they were going to have to run if it wasn’t too late for them like it was for him.

Flynn prayed. He prayed to the only god, er, goddess he believed in:

"Run, baby, run. Run hard, because they are going to look for you. Hard. Forgive me; forgive me for a fucking lot of fucking things, especially for…for…for fucking…" And he was lost.

Saliki responded with gobbledygook. And the universal motions of desire.

The fact that he wasn’t alone here, here in some grave some place that he was never going to get out of should have made him positively suicidal, but somehow, it got the god he forsook and forswore all those years ago after his mother died to stop by and say "Hi—hey, listen: Glory Be—could be worse, you know…"

It most certainly could have been.

Saliki couldn’t see the smile on his face, all she could do was perceive how his cock got a little harder when she started, and then he shrank, and she fell back down in despair onto the floor of their living, er, dying space, ready to give up all hope until his hips moved, and rolled, and he slid what he could of his cock between her legs, readjusting himself into the angles and geometries and trajectories of lovers, and her breath caught and she reached in between them, forcing her hand down there from out of nowhere, finding him and being enchanted with what she found—at least, his wife always was—and she directed his cock to where she wanted it, where she wanted it more than anything else in the world.

Aside from, of course, getting out of the god damn box. Which wasn’t going to happen. And if that was the way it was, then she was going to fuck him, and he was going to fuck her, and they were going to have to just learn to live with that. It wasn’t like they had anything else to do.

At least, that’s what Flynn convinced himself of, struggling against their compressive area and his conscience as he succeeded in doing what needed to be done. He managed to breach her; he got his cock inside this woman and it could have been any woman on earth and he would have done it, and she was hot and she was wet and she was warm and she smelled delicious and she gasped out in sounds that transcended the ridiculousnesses of linguistics on how she wanted him inside of her, and he now wanted that more than anything else in the world, too—save the impossibility of freedom—and he could call upon his faith to render up an illusion and make it that it was his wife he was screwing, and not some foreigner, and neither of them, neither his beloved nor his sudden settler mistress, who wasn’t even a local girl at all, would know any different.

He most certainly did not want his wife to actually be in here with him. He wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but if he was going to have the pleasant fuckable company of someone to take with him to hell, then it might as well be someone he doesn’t know, doesn’t care for, someone he couldn’t even get to know. Of all the ways to go, this might not be so bad. There was a freedom to dying that stripped away some things that had bothered him his whole life, not unlike the discovery of the benefits of anonymity of the internet to those who would be fearful of saying what they really thought or how they really felt to people they actually knew and lived with and loved in real life, and there were flat-out some things he still had to do before he gave up the ghost.

Now he laid him down to fuck, he prayed the lord this slut to fuck, if he should die before he wake, he prayed the lord this fuck she’d take.

He groaned as he thrust, and it may have been nothing more than how they were squished up in this place, but god-fuck, she was tight, and her pussy compressed itself around him and practically pinched on his cock hard enough that she actually stretched him out as he pulled back, which did wonders for his erection, and he bulldozed his way into her again, and then again, and then yet again after that, and he discovered that he was annoyed that her fingers were still there between them, scratching on the top of his dick as he slid in and out of her the bare centimeters he could move until somewhere he remembered that women sometimes needed that, they needed to be able to play with themselves when they fucked, and he didn’t begrudge her for doing that—his wife never did it, sure, no, and so there a slight crinkle to the illusion that it was maybe the woman he loved that he was giving the business to as he progressed towards his inevitable demise in this murky catacomb and not how instead it really maybe was some other outlander bitch that he was cheating on his wife with that…that he…that he didn’t exactly need permission for any more, now, did he—and aside from a negligible pause, he didn’t let it stop him or even slow him down, because there would be no point to complain, to try to explain to the randy little slut that she wasn’t doing it right, because they didn’t have time, no, not now, now they had to fuck, they had to fuck themselves and each other to death, to god damn death, as there was a sandglass that was running out, a clock that was ticking, an expiration and use-by date that was fast and unavoidably approaching. And so he punched her cunt with his cock, getting her to sigh the breathless and seductive sigh of assent and resignation to the idea that she was getting fucked, and that it was alright, hell, everything was alright now, with him driving hard and harder and then even harder yet after that, desperate, focused, honed not right on in on the hypothesis that he wasn’t there to get out of there alive, no, don’t be childish, that’s not going to happen any more than winning the lottery or going to space or getting to fuck a-a pornstar, an other-worldly mouth-watering woman with incredible legs who works at some men’s magazine someplace who writes dirty stories on the sly about how she likes it rough and filthy and in truth has no limits as to what she would allow for and participate in for the right guy, an honest-to-god real live fucking sex slave, an absolute gutter slut who would crawl naked before him and his friends and suck cock and lick ass all the live long god damn day long not to mention how much she would completely love it if he would hit her in front of strangers and friends and family and god and everybody, letting him mark her with the signs of abuse that should land his ass in jail that she would save him from by defending those most beautiful marks on her most succulent and exquisite body as being something she asked him to do to her, and that it all works out wonderfully because she gave herself to him, body and soul, and besides, he wanted to do that sort of shit to her so it was alright because he fucking owned her, that that was what she was put on this fucking planet for, that strain and wounds and burns and agonies and the god damn fucking tortures of the damned were things she not only wanted but needed him-specifically-him to wreak onto her for her own god damn personal fucking reasons that she doesn’t want to talk about, "no, that doesn’t help, just do it, motherfucker, do unto me what I deserve" every time he would ask and she would go out of her god damn way to change the subject and beg him for every bit of injury and damage and suffering he could throw down on her, so he could make her prove herself to him, oh, how she craved that, she wanted that, she needed that, she actually lived and breathed and prayed to be able to stand back up and get back into position every fucking time he knocked her down as it was the only thing she had convinced herself she was good for, telling him when he asks if she was alright that he needs to quit fucking asking her that because she fucking likes it when it fucking hurts because she was one of them god damn masochists, a paintoy, an utterly submissive slampig, a fucktoy he could do anything to, and how it would be her deepest honor in life to be enthusiastically obedient to his slightest whims no matter how vile or filthy or perverted they were, the worse, the better, Christ-fuck, those kinds of women didn’t exist, not on earth, not really, they were a god damn myth, and besides, of all the guys in the fucking world, he was the one guy who was not the right guy, god damn it, and Flynn had to shake his head to clear his mind of that little distraction so he could get back to thinking about was how now he was there to fuck while he had the chance, and as his cock went in and then out and then back into this cunt’s cunt again, he never felt so alive before in his life, and it dawned on him that, assuming that for some abstruse unknowable reason they failed to kill each other by coitus and they somehow survived this first go-round, that this could maybe happen again, and it maybe didn’t matter if or when or how often he fucked her, and it sure as hell made no difference as to how he did it or if he even hurt her a little in the process, now did it, no, he was with her and only her in their own cozy little compartment together, and he couldn’t care less about her obscure speeches anyway if she didn’t like something or wanted something weird, and he could fuck her as much and as hard as he wanted to, because what was she going to be able to do about it anyway, and he felt empowered like he had never felt empowered before, not even at home, with the remarkable woman he had inadvertently left. Or was taken away from. Or however that worked.

Besides. Saliki wanted him to have his way with her. She didn’t need vocabulary to get that across.

What’s more, he didn’t have to cater to her or her dainty little orgasm like he did at home, no, this whore was here for him to fuck as he saw fit, as he pleased, and she could just take care of herself as she was so clearly capable of, and here, in the living marginalia of his own death, he felt all the urges he had suppressed at the behest of all the ethical and proper and virtuous women he ever knew all his life bubble up and spring forth and surprise him with just how bad he really did want to hurt the little slut, to take some of his problems out on her, and…and it…and it wouldn’t matter if he did, now would it. There was a light in his head in the dark, calm, bright, and he could imagine that Saliki was not just a woman, no, but that she was a staggeringly attractive woman, a drop fucking dead gorgeous woman, radiant, exotic, the kind of woman that other women would hate for being so god damn pure and perfect, that other men would wish it was them trapped in a box with her forever, free to fuck as they saw fit, and it only took another god-forsaken moment of hesitation to get over whatever reluctance he had left, to banish crazy-ass notions of right and wrong, and to let the possibilities of what could lay before him in his finalities in this old world to just go right on ahead and have free reign, and he excommunicated the theories of consequence he had been besieged with throughout his entire mediocre existence as he got his hand out from underneath her and onto her breast, onto her nice fat flawless tits that he could do whatever he wanted to for the rest of his life, and he wanted to feel her, to maul her, to hold her just right to get a reaction from her, something that didn’t involve eye rolls or annoyances like so many little virgin whores he had been with in years gone by had responded to his little liberties being taken at inappropriate times, hell’s bells, that wasn’t even on the table, now was it, no, not any fucking more, and Christ-shit, reluctances and privacies were not even a concern at this point, by fucking god, and now here he had the opportunity to induce much more into this little cunt than how he had to restrain himself in his obligations to bring about the sharp and focused inhales his wife would have when the charge would reliably succeed at surging from under his hand as he rolled her ever-erect round yon nipple around in his palm, barely touching her sublime and graceful breast, to fire longing and passion down between her smooth and luxurious and ever-eager-to-open legs as she would get excited in ways he would get to—er, have to—cater to, no, he ran out of reasons not to do what he wanted to do to this little slut right here, right god damn now, on the end of her finespun little nipple and oh, to pinch, to squeeze the ever loving shit out of the stretch just beneath the end of her nub, driving his fingernails in the very way his bitch-wife wouldn’t let him do because it hurt, and how she didn’t like that, and how she was here for pleasure, not pain, god, making underhanded threats and promises of what would or rather wouldn’t happen if he continued to treat her in such a shameful way, and how that he should instead be nice to her and he would end up licking her pussy tender and mild for hours on end to redeem himself from being so bad, and now, now he didn’t have to be like that any more, did he, and he wanted to do that, he wanted to do that before he died, he wanted to hurt a woman while he was fucking her, squeezing so hard his fingers had to be turning red and then white with all the pressure he bore down on her, and Saliki gasped and she keened and she vibrated and she started speaking in tongues as her whole body shook as he fucked her, as he fucked her and he hurt her, and she didn’t fight back or argue or even complain, no, she did the impossible, she went with it, she let him do what he had wanted to do his entire god damn life, and a miracle happened, right there, in the tomb, and she cried out, and he felt her clench up on his cock like she had a vise between her legs and she quivered up and down and back up again on the shaft of his raging erection as he made himself at home within her, plunging himself relentlessly in and out of her, and Flynn cried out, "holy fucking Christ, where have you been all my fucking life, bitch," and she solidified before she came and she came hard and she released and Flynn was astonished to find himself getting wet in a way he had never been wettened before and he had another secret fantasy come true in that he got a woman to squirt, he could never get his wife to do that no matter what he did to her, and…and this…and this slut did it, she just went right on ahead and fucking did it right there at their own funeral, she god damn fucking came so fucking god damn hard that she performed female ejaculation f-for him because he fucked her and he hurt her, and he wanted that again and he yanked her nipple around, the one he had such a fearsome grip on, practically tearing it the fuck off by the way he twisted one way and then the other so god damn hard, as hard as he fucking could, and she inhaled half the air they had to live on and she fucking came again immediately and she drenched him with torrents of fuck and he loved it and he jackhammered his way into her and it took seconds for him to achieve grace, too. Which made her come yet again after that.

The candles all blew out and the lights all came on in Flynn’s head, and the heavenly hosts sang hallelujah. Holy fucking night.

They used up more oxygen as they came down, and as completely under him as she was, she was all over him. Kissing him and hugging him and carrying on about how god damn good that was—that just had to be what she was saying, it just had to be. He had nothing left in him, he was empty, he had turned himself inside-out and had been reborn, and some darkness he had left over from some other life came out of left field and met up with the darkness he was in, and he fell asleep, listening to his name being incanted with some other absurd and pointless words that he had no need to know the exact meaning of, because he knew, oh fuck-Christ-right-there-in-the-virgin-yeah, he knew what mattered about them, and he was grateful to a god he hadn’t spoken to in years as he drifted off and had to smile and laugh a little about having something to bring up at Thanksgiving that he wasn’t quite sure how to explain among polite company.

###

FLYNN DREAMT. He dreamt of running in fields, of being out—naked, of course…scandalous—in the open, of flying, of swimming in vast warm and glassy-smooth oceans, all the dreams one has while sleeping confined in a full body-cast, no, in a body bag, in the lurking shadows of ruination with a resplendent woman one has just fucked the ever-loving daylights out of on the sly and gotten away with it, a dazzling woman one has just actually physically hurt and gotten away with it, a perfectly amazing woman who had her own needs fulfilled in ways one could never imagine that managed to involve the most put-down and contemptible needs one has had their entire life, ones one couldn’t even admit to their own wife that they even had, it was the dream of dreams wrapped up in dreams that one would dream of waking up from to find one’s self back in their own enormous bed on cool clean sheets there with one’s own angelic and bewitching wife who had decided that she loved her husband enough to bring in a cup of coffee to leave there on the nightstand for him to find while she crawled back under the covers to gently wake him up with a blowjob that would go on for days. Those kinds of lazy bones dreams.

From on that kind of night. The kind in which Flynn would wake up and roll over and put his arm around her, and cup his hand up onto his wife’s breast that was magnetic to glances and gazes and hands and lips and she would nestle back up against him, and hold deathly still as he ever-so-gently squeezed on her magnificent breasts, and play with her nipple the way that she so dearly loved for him to do, becoming aroused with the delicate scent a woman has when she thinks of sex and puts herself in the middle of it all, wanting it to happen and to happen to her, when she feels the need for a penis, an erection, a cock inside her vagina, her pussy, her cunt, thrusting in and out of her in the most simple straight-forward of sexual intercourses in the missionary-position, screwing, making love, fucking, fucking, "oh dear god, Flynn, please fuck me, please, please," and she would moan and warp and weave around over until she had to turn to him and barely touch him to bring him around and up and over her to nestle down in between her legs and so they could bring themselves together to be as one as some book once said was the way it should be between a man and his wife, one inside the other, never refusing each other except to pray, to pray to re-engage with each other the way men and women are supposed to engage with each other, knowing each other always, being fruitful, multiplying, one times one equals one, with his lips finding their way back down toward her fragile and hypersensitive breasts so he could draw her nipple into his mouth and get her back to arch, making her inhale a hiss as he nibbled and licked, thrusting her bosoms up to him, the very ones she so very much loved for him to see when she would take it into her head to flash him unexpectedly during the day, out in the world someplace while they were out shopping or nabbing a bite to eat, not caring if anyone else saw because the important thing was that he did, Flynn did, and he would see her smile with the devilish grin she would get just before she would expose herself to him, arcing around, bending over and laughing as she teased and propositioned and bantered with him, enticing him to chase her, squealing as he inevitably caught her before she would let him kiss her and throw her hands up above her head, out of the way, out of his way so he could get his hand back under her top, her shirt, confirming once again she wasn’t wearing a bra, and hold her there as he poured himself into her mouth, getting her to shiver with lust, to writhe and cross her legs to exert some outrageous pressure on herself until he slid his hand down, down from under her blouse, down over the top of her jeans, and her legs wouldn’t merely part a little, they would fall open wide, and she would thrust what she hid there between her legs into his hand and moan in his mouth, moan the kind of moan that said that if he wanted to take her now, here, wherever they were out in the world, she would let him do that, god yes, she would throw her clothes away and fuck him right here, right god damn now, letting whoever was looking get mortally embarrassed by the mere fact that they were seeing and knowing and invading their private moment of love that she would be deliriously happy to show the whole god damn world what it was all about, fuck them all and their little judgments about how she should love her husband, with whoever it was that was spying on them ending up walking away and blushing, praying that these two, Flynn and his ever-slutty wife, would instead have the decency to spare the public of the scandal and hurry home and close the door to their room and lock their children out before they started to make love, the kind of love that lovers languish about, over and over, ecstatic in each other’s arms, with Flynn’s cock constantly inside his wife, in her mouth, in her pussy, in her delicious and inviting ass, drawing yet one more rapturous orgasm out of one, then the other, then the first again, over and over, as it was in the beginning, as it was and ever shall be.

The kind of night that they had had after he had done what he shouldn’t have, and he had gone so far out of his way to convince her it was alright, that he had been careful, that no one would know, and it took a while but by the time dessert came around she trusted him and gave in to what he had done and she was overjoyed in a way he had never seen before. She was thrilled that they could finally do some things they had always wanted to do: travel, get some things they desperately needed, things they needed for the kids, for each other, for the house, and suddenly he could see it in her eyes. The look she had before they got married was there again and it was back, it was back in spades and he never wanted her to look at him any other way again—save the overwhelming and beatific expression she got when she came—when she would let him see her fancy and hope and wish for bright and comfortable futures, the look that said that she secretly did believe for true in a happily ever after with him, and for a while, she was a little girl, and a princess who loved her daddy, and at the same, she was his wife and his lover who was most satisfied to live out her life as his very own personal whore, loving him and desiring him and having faith in him again, and that was the night he never wanted to end.

It was that night that he was reliving there, stirring in his compact mortality there with Saliki, and he couldn’t make heads nor tails as to why it reeked so bad there, there on the beach, suddenly back there on his honeymoon again with his wife and now this other woman who was stunning and ravishing in a way his wife wasn’t, she was a different kind of delightful, ethereal, alluring, and it was alright, the two women liked each other in impossible ways, and they found each other attractive and they weren’t in competition at all, no, they both were there for him, and their exquisite submissive smiles were for him as they took each other’s dresses off and presented each other to him, angels hand in hand with foo foo drinks in their others as they crossed the sands over to him, naked, and he was going to get to have both of them, here, now, with one of them guiding his cock into the various bodily orifices of the other before they would change places, with the one’s lips and hands caressing and kissing whatever was between his legs not to mention wherever his cock went into on the other before they would switch places, back and forth, for days, no, weeks at a time, making a show for him how much they loved him by loving and sharing whatever came out of him with each other, mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, giggling and promising him that they would love him forever, teaching and learning from each other how the extremes of agony and ecstasy were one and the same, and how they both could endure in utter bliss all he could do to drive them over whatever edge of anguish or languish or excruciation or overwhelming orgasmic mind-erasing heaven was on deck for today, and he shifted and wiggled a little in there, and he expected it to be clear and bright when he wrenched his eyes open and that there would be seagulls cawing in three-four time and waves crashing and a breeze, a refreshing breeze of real air coming up off the somehow-glassy-smooth ocean and there wasn’t any of that.

It was dark, still oppressively dark, and he was still there, blind as a bat, still there in the fucking nightmare to end all nightmares, god damn it, in this dank and scurrilous casket under some unhallowed ground, laying on top of this woman he hardly knew but knew biblically now, and it was hard enough to breathe before, but now, now, it stank so noxiously sour and spoiled in there that he wanted to—no, had to—throw up and so he did. It wasn’t like he could stop.

Not that it made anything any better. He brought up the last of his last meal and there was nowhere for it to go but down, onto her, onto her face—there wasn’t anywhere else—and it woke her up, it woke Saliki up and now the gloom was filled with vomit and shit and piss and him and her and why the hell couldn’t they just both go ahead and fucking die.

She started yelling at him, and he yelled back, and they both thrashed about to try to get away from the stench, from the slime, from each other, and there was nowhere to go, no way to move that didn’t keep Flynn right there on top of Saliki, with his hips and his crotch firmly planted in between her legs, pressed directly up against her vagina and the human waste that was beneath her and it was awful and disgusting and…and…he froze. He froze solid.

All except a few petrifying inches of him.

A few inches that—despite how utterly sickening it was—had decided all on their lonesome without his permission that they had somewhere to go, somewhere to be, something to do, and he couldn’t help it, this wasn’t what he wanted, not now, shit, erections and hardons are supposed to come about when it is nice, when it’s clean, when it’s clear that something pleasant was about to happen and not in the middle of excrement under trying circumstances under duress and pressure and his cock persisted in how that doesn’t make any difference at all, now does it, this has to be able to work under the worst conditions, too, now doesn’t it, fuck pleasant, fuck clean, fuck nice, and look, it’s happening, it’s happening right god damn now, see, you can fuck in shit, that is how fucking assfucking works and you god damn well know it, you’ve done it before, you’ll do it again, you shove your cock right on into where you god damn well know someone shits from and what, you just hope that they won’t get any poo on your dick, don’t be stupid, because you god damn fucking well know that you will put your cock all the way into their fucking little fuckable assholes and you don’t even need to know anything about them, man or woman, boy or girl, an ass is an ass is an ass, and you will splatter and spurt and splash and spew semen inside their fucking assholes right on up into their shit and who knows, maybe you’ll be pounding so hard and so long that you’ll force some of their shit right on back down into your urethra, and you have someone else’s shit there inside your own cock, lining it, filling it, packing it, you’ll be ravaging your-fucking-self with someone else’s shit, twisting its way into you that way, cock-in-shit, shit-in-cock, god, does it get any dirtier than that, and afterwards, no matter how revulsed you are at the idea, it won’t be long at all before you will put your hand onto your precious cock and rub on it hard and long in the hopes that it will make you feel good again even after it has been in someone else’s ass, because you’ve done it, you’ve done it before, you’ll do it again, fuck, you’re going to do it now, shitfucker, and you can fuck in pain, just you fucking wait, you will fuck no matter how much it fucking hurts, you have no idea what’s coming, asshole, you’ll see, you can fuck when everything is awful and disgusting because that’s all you have to do from now on, Flynn, is fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck your way out of here, that’ll work, fuck the little bitch, fuck her to death, fuck yourself to god damn death, fuck all the live long day, fuck-fuck-fuck, fuck you, fuck everything you ever knew, fuck everything you ever believed in, fuck, and it was like it was singing to him, Jesus god damn fucking Christ, his cock was taunting him, nagging him, singing to him, fuck her in the morning when you feel the darkness rising, fuck her in the evening ‘cause she fucked you through the day, and in the in-between times when you feel the fuck-need rising, remember that she’ll fuck you and she promises to stay, and he hated that he was getting hard, there in the mess, in all the pollution of their minimal world, of their very souls, there in the dwindling foul air supply, with a woman that was mad at him, mad at him for waking her up in such a horrendous way, mad at him for being there at all, furious with him for having the audacity to even be thinking of sex at a time like this, let alone trying to actually fucking do it, and she was screaming, and he managed to snap a hand out from under her, and he hitched it up between them, and he thrust it up and he hit her on the jaw, on the face, and it didn’t make her stop with her pande-fucking-monium for more than a second, and he didn’t care.

He had another way to attack her, and he took it. It only called for inches. Which he had at his disposal.

He just wanted her to shut up. He even growled that idea out to her, for all the good it did. He didn’t mean to barf on her, and he suspected—no, knew—that she was the one who had shit in there, in their home, in their fucking death-bed, and it didn’t matter that she didn’t want to do it or couldn’t help it or that she was even human, a-a person that was scared and unhappy and uncomfortable and miserable, at least as miserable as he was, and that none of this was her fault any more than it was his fault either, fuck-Christ-fuck-Christ-fuck-Christ-fuck, he just wanted her to quit making so god damn much fucking commotion, and he forced his way into her.

There where she had welcomed him some untold aeon ago. He fancied rolling her over, or turning her around, and taking her in other ways, other fashions, but that was simply not to be. Geometry and physics enforced a morality that he longed to be free of. He would have to settle for remembering the fairy tales of doggie-style or reverse cowgirl or even standing up with his trophy wife bent over and presenting her own ass to him, looking over her shoulder to him, full of lust, full of smoke, full of unholy heat and need, fully clothed in the alley outside in the warm seductive rain after their most fabulous dinner on the night of their good fortune, with her turned around to face the back wall of the restaurant, there by the garbage cans, hiking her scandalously short skirt up to reveal she wasn’t wearing any underwear at all, not even a thong, and she set in on for real to be begging him to take her like this, to take her now, to take her god damn fucking ass, that she wanted him to, "right here, right now, fuck me, Flynn, c’mon do it, I can’t wait any more, I need your fucking cock in my god damn fucking fuckable ass, you motherfucking bastard," which was her favorite way to say what she wanted and how she liked to start off a typical evening at home even if they weren’t out on a romantic date in which they would do this most cherished thing she wanted more than anything else in the whole wide world because it was so fucking hot, so filthy and indecent and wrong, his wife was an ass slut, an ass whore, she liked it dirty and messy, it made her happy to be penetrated where she shit and that was the only time she would let him hurt her, that was the only time he could get away with it, she would let him shove his cock into her asshole even if it hurt or maybe because it did, he didn’t know, she liked having her ass hurt from getting fucked and fucked so god damn hard that she could feel it and remember it for days afterwards, and she would resist him, she would clench up so his cock would bend over as he tried to get inside her as he would push and push hard-so-hard, "Jesus Christ you are god damn fucking tight, honey," and she would smile and wiggle over her entire body and wrap her hands back around behind her, around him and pull on him, pull on his back or his ass or wherever she could reach to direct his cock toward her, toward her ass, and she would call him a dirty buggerer and a filthy assfucker and swear at him to rile him up, to get him to throw his pants down around his ankles to let his cock all the way out of his clothes, so his erection could bob and dangle and dance out there in the rain, knowing god damn fucking well he was going to fuck her here, now, in her god damn fucking fuckable ass, shortening his breath and focusing hard on his hardon to get him to where any god damn way he could get into her was what was im-fucking-portant here, and she would taunt him and revile him about whether he was man enough to take what was his, her ass was his, his to fuck whenever he wanted, and she wanted him to engage in anal sex with her way more than he did but it was a special night and for whatever fucked up reason it made her feel special to be defiled like this, he wanted her to feel special, with her crying out and bearing down on him as he scraped his way into her tight-tight-tight asshole, pulling out and driving back, making her groan, fucking her, fucking his wife, taking her as if she were a man, sodomizing the most rapturous and innocent mother of his children out in public where they could get caught, and she would reliably come instantly like this, each and every time, and when she has had her fun a time or two he would whirl her roughly around as he was about to expend himself to have her kneel down so he could rip open the top of her dress because he wanted to see her sumptuous and superb tits as she took him into her mouth with the body-temperature water pouring down out of God’s own sky over both of them, dripping off her nose and nipples and ruining her hair, the little slut looking up at him with love and adoration and out-and-out glory, his pulsing cock long and hard and needy enough to reach into the back of her throat, getting him to lose control and grab her head over how fucking god damn fucking good that felt, my god, the power, the god damn fucking power, and he was tangling his fingers into her matted and soaked hair and holding her there so he could fuck her mouth, sliding his hardon in through her desperately sucking lips all the way in, right on up as far as he could get into her, making her breathe through his pubic hair, fucking her mouth as though it were her pussy or better yet her ass, getting her to gag and choke and make noises that were mixed in the desperation she had for what he was about to do with the discomfort over yet another obscene intrusion she was going through that she was so perfectly willing to go through in her ever-faithful loyalty to his cock and how she would still stay there, right there, worshiping him and devoting herself to him and his bless-ed erection, concerned with his ecstasy as a woman should god damn well be, eagerly keeping the very head of his cock buried in her throat so she could deliberately involuntarily contract and release and con-fucking-vulse around him in ways she couldn’t help or control in her own bid for survival and giving until he lost his own composure and control and mastery of the situation and shot his wad, blew his load, he came in her fucking fuckable face, with her being anxious for him to bawl out his feelings of just how fucking good this was, so he could feel her mouth and lips and whole face grin hard around him and absorb him and all that he was right on down inside her, sucking his fucking cock harder than was humanly possible, with him staying there and spurting and splashing and splattering inside her lips despite his desire to pull out and paint his beautiful nigger wife white, until he stopped pulsing, stopped filling her mouth up full with his seed, his semen, lifting her up to stand before him so she could look up, making sure he knew and understood and could see her swallow his sperm down with an absolute fire of delight in her eyes, taking her time as though it were im-fucking-portant to get this part right, just like she went so god damn far out of her fucking way to make sure every other part of her never-less-than-spectacular cocksucking was just right, just the way he liked it, messy, committed, assuring him that this was something she would do again and again and yet again after that, that she couldn’t possibly do it enough for him, keeping her mouth on his dick in the car, gently suckling on him the whole way home so she could get him hard and long and ready to go again after they got into the house, clawing at each other’s clothes all the way up into the bedroom, locking the door, going at it all god damn night long, with her swearing on all she held dear how she would continue to suck his cock and fuck his brains out every god damn day for the rest of their lives just like she always had, Jesus, Flynn missed his wife, and with him now mourning the loss of oaths and ways and means of how all he could get his cock into a woman, the very stories of which had passed into legend, but…hey…fucking-fucking. Cock in cunt. Dick in pussy. Penis in vagina, in the missionary position, the very way God intended, the most favored approach of rapists so they could look into their victims eyes and drink in their fear and defeat and surrender which, okay, he had a small shortcoming toward right now, but still, that—that was something he could do something about with this other slut. Right here, right now.

He shoved his cock into Saliki’s cunt, and he fucked her. She protested. Of that, he was sure, and it didn’t matter. Her hands found their way out from wherever the hell they had been hiding up onto his chest and she pushed, she jabbed, she swatted, she tweaked his nipples and it made no difference whatsoever: there was nowhere for him to go. As much as he wanted to get up off of her, to stand up and walk away from all this, from her, from fate, he couldn’t, try as he might, he just fucking couldn’t, and he went instead with the other direction as it was the only other choice. Down. Into her. Back out a sliver’s breadth, then back into her again. He grunted as he thrust and she tried to get out from under him and she couldn’t, try as she might, and he fucked her. She yammered on, so he hit her on the jaw again, which got her to seize up on him, which got him to quit moving for a second as he felt something he had never felt the likes of before. And he wanted to feel it again: he made it happen. Then he made it happen again, and hitting her proved as reliable in inducing an effect on his dick as his own good right hand, and it shut her the fuck up, and so it was that he set out to take care of some business. He wasn’t so much fucking her or raping her or violating her as he was using her to masturbate with. Her cunt contracted around his cock when he hit her, and he went ahead and raped her and violated her and fucked her anyway. It was kind of like a bonus.

Hit, hit, hit, fuck, fuck, fuck, he could use her to jerk off like he was doing when his mother caught him and she scolded him and derided him and was angry with him and was going to teach him a lesson, and after an interminable stare-down with both of them trembling and out of breath but for different reasons, him lying on his bed, the covers off, his legs spread all the way out to the edges, shaking, completely naked, holding his hands over his crotch but then moving them aside because it didn’t make any difference any more, now did it, she’d seen his cock, she’d seen his boner, she’d seen what he was doing with it, and he had to own up to it, be a man, fuck. She stood at the foot of the bed, furious, so mad she couldn’t have even known what she was doing as she did the impossible: she took her clothes off and spat at him to finish what he was doing and he couldn’t believe what she had just done, fuck-Christ-himself, his own drop-dead gorgeous mother was standing in front of him, stark fucking naked and she put her hands behind her back so they weren’t in his way and he could get a good solid steady unwavering look at her and he took the opportunity to see what she looked like under her clothes, what she hid there that was so god damn important for him not to see, and he gawked at her tits and blinked and trailed his gaze down her stomach and he had to lift his head up so he could see what she had down there, down there between her legs where he knew women didn’t have any kind of a cock like he and all his friends did, but he had never seen it before, and his eyes went wide and he mouth fell opened a little and he licked his lips, and she did even more impossible things. She adjusted her stance so he could see better, sneering out her contempt at her son, her son that she loved, her lips shuddering in silence, and she rolled her hips and swiveled her asshole forward and spread her legs so he could actually see his own motherfucking mother’s p-pussy, shit-fuck-Christ-on-the-cross, and her chest heaved and her breathing was noisy and her boobs jostled around with a waveform going up and down her stomach and she was alive as she stood there before him, letting him look, and he stared and he misunderstood the lesson she was trying to get across to him and so he did what he was told, it was what she wanted, wasn’t it, she just said so, and he did it, he did it, he masturbated with his mother standing in front of him, naked, fuck God-Christ, it was like he’d been thrown off a cliff and could fly, he was as naked as she was, the way it should be, mother and son, naked together, and she was available to him and he could reach his hand up and touch her and her face tensed up and her head shook and he pulled his hand back, back to what he was doing, back between his own legs, and she stood there, scowling and watching his hand quiver against himself, rubbing his dick, bringing his erection back in spades, and he spread his legs even wider so she could see what he was doing, so she could see his asshole pulse and his balls quiver and his hand blur as it moved up and down his cock, pressing harder and harder until his back lurched and he froze up and yanked his hand out of the way so she could see, so his mother could see his cock throb and dance in the air the last split second before he came, and he came, he came, he came, he fucking came, he splattered himself with semen, his sperm spurted up out of the end of his cock and flew through the air and landed all the way up on his chest, and his jaw fell open and he inhaled a gasp and god fucking damn if she didn’t, too, and his cock still had more to splash himself with and he groaned and his chest heaved and his whole body undulated with a waveform he had no control over and he looked at his own mother with smoke and unholy fire and lust and he wanted her to walk around the bed, right on up to him and smile and lean over and kiss him and tell him he was a good boy and kiss him again only longer before she put her hand down there, between his legs, on his very own cock, by motherfucking god he wanted his mother to put her hand on his dick, his cock, his throbbing boner, his hardon and finish his hand job and get the last few drops of semen to spew into her hand and then hold him, hold him there with reverence and love and adoration as some other woman would do for him every night they lived together in an enormous bed someday and…and then…and then he wanted her to bend over and lick up what he had done for her more than anything else in the whole fucking world, it was for her that he did it, he jerked off every god damn day thinking about his own mother and her tits and her snatch and her butt just like he had been doing for years before she had burst through his unlocked door only this time she stayed and she watched him jerk off and she told him to do it and he did, she was there, she was actually fucking there and she was naked and he never wanted her to put her god damn clothes on again for the rest of her life and he wanted to fuck her, by fucking god, he wanted to motherfucking fuck his own motherfuckable mother and he wanted to do it right god damn now and again later and then tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that for as long as they both shall live and when he was finished and tried to say something but only could get a grunt and a groan out, her lips scrunched up and she snatched her clothes up off the floor and barked out from the door, turning back to menace him, "just you wait until your father gets home," and she stormed out of the room, slamming the door. He had never been so scared in all his life. He was terrified of what his father would do when he got home, and it bothered him now how he couldn’t remember what it was his father did, if he threw him out of the house, bellowing at him to never come back, calling him a pervert, a sinner, no son of his, or if he came up to his room, with Flynn cowering under the covers, putting his fatherly hand down gently on his son with whom he had always been well-pleased, not hitting him or swearing at him or crunching bones at all but still making him jump right on out of his skin with a squawk, and when he so tearfully looked up at his father, his father boomed out some laughter and commended his son on such a good idea, on doing that there, on jerking off, masturbating, pleasuring himself, wanking in front of his mother and what’s more, getting her to take her clothes off, too, understanding that completely, as she is such an attractive woman, quite the looker, and saying "would you like to do it again, now, yes now, right fucking now," and offering to join him, and they called his mother in and his father told her to take her clothes off and she hesitated once, just once and he slapped her and yelled at her to do what she was fucking told, and she did it, she cried but she did it, she fucking did it, she took off her clothes again and she stood there staring straight off into space or somewhere, losing some part of her self she would never get back as his father took down his pants and Flynn took down his boxers and they put their hands onto themselves, nodding at each other once before they looked back at Flynn’s mother, who was palpitating and trembling with undeniable and involuntary waveforms crossing her body, making her undulate in seductive ways as she stood there before the men in her family, not quite believing this was happening, with them stretching their own cocks out until they were long and hard, rubbing on themselves and panting with their cocks pulsing all the way back down to their assholes, with Flynn’s father taking the lead and calling Flynn’s mother the most awful words for women, encouraging Flynn to take it up, too, going back and forth with the words, making her quiver with their pronunciations that affected her in ways Flynn had never imagined before, changing her right before his very eyes, from a mother who ruled the roost to a mother that was ruled, with her husband promising her that those very words would become her names after that, and that the men in her life now expected her to respond to the words pussy and bitch and cunt and whore and slut and slave and slampig and cocksucker and asslicker and fuckwad by taking her clothes off immediately, without looking around or hesitating in the slightest and presenting herself to whichever one of them called her whichever word they used wherever they were, here at home, out in the world in front of whoever happened to be there, no matter who it was, strangers, friends, her own fucking family, and that she would be expected to kneel down, naked, offering up her mouth and her hands and her cunt and her asshole to the cocks of her men until they spurted and splashed and splattered his mother with semen that she would have to wipe up off of herself no matter where it landed and lick her hand, getting what they had given her into her mouth and making a good show of how much she liked it, how much she fucking loved getting the semen of her husband and the sperm of her son into her mouth, asking what else she could do for them and then doing that, too, no matter what it was, and from then on, they did it every day after that, and Flynn’s father called it "painting her white," and Flynn loved that and did it several times a day, coming home for lunch just to bring his cock out for his mother to service, spewing sperm onto her in places it would be difficult for her to reach just so he could laugh at her efforts to do what her husband said, and after school he would bring his friends over and she would perform for all of them, offering snacks and drinks and to crawl naked around the room, sucking cock and playing with herself until it was time for all of them to go home, when Flynn’s father would come home from a long hard day at work and ask her how her day was and what she did and she would have to report that she sucked Flynn’s friends’ cocks and he would shake his head and say "tsk tsk" and tell her that she deserved to be punished for being such a slut, and she would hang her head, nodding, and say "yes, yes I am, I am such a god damn fucking slut, do unto me, my husband, exactly what I deserve," and she would crawl over her husband’s lap and he would spank her until the tears flowed and she would have to get up and make dinner, naked, with her bottom or maybe her tits completely fire-engine red, coming back for more if it faded in the slightest little bit throughout the evening, every night, having to suck both her husband’s and her son’s cock every god damn night, as many times as they could get it up, fucking them both to sleep every night and then crawling under the covers to wake them in the morning with a blowjob before they went off to go to work or to school, and on weekends, well, on weekends, Flynn’s father had all his friends or even his or his wife’s relatives over, and they would show Flynn everything one could do to a woman, with cocks and hands and assholes and belts and whips and canes and candles and needles and nettles and ropes and sawhorses and crosses, telling him to go ahead and jerk off all he wanted to, telling him that hell, he’s done it his entire life, even before he was born, while he was still inside his motherfucking mother, and she nodded and said that yes, it was exactly like that, and what’s more, she could tell when he was masturbating inside her, and…and it…and it made her want to play with herself because she was such a sick fuck, mother and child masturbating at the same time, one inside the other, and how the idea of her son playing with himself even now makes her want to fuck in ways she has no choice about and she never gets to do it anywhere near enough and so she has to play with herself, rubbing her own fingers on her own clit and that that is what she does all day, every day when he was at school and so the men all laugh at her and tell her to just go ahead and do that, to do that now, to make herself come, and she wouldn’t even hesitate as she would do it. Flynn watched his mother masturbate while she watched him masturbate, and she begged him to let her come when she was ready and for weeks on end, he went right on ahead and sanctioned for her to go ahead and do exactly that and she cried out her orgasm for him every god damn day and she would make a spectacle of herself until one day he wondered what would happen if he didn’t give her permission and so he denied her, he told her no, she couldn’t come, but she had to keep on doing what she was doing, working herself up, and she groaned and she whined but she did what she was told and kept going at herself until she was even more desperate, and she pleaded with him in a pathetic voice to "please please please let me come" and his father said "no, tell her no, son, see what happens," and so Flynn did as his father said and forbade his mother from coming and she went insane and began to make offers, offers of what she would do if they would let her come, "please, have mercy on a slut," and they both laughed at her and said "no" some more and the offers got more and more outlandish until she said that she would fuck everyone Flynn knew, man or woman, boy or girl, for money if he wanted, and Flynn’s father said "Dogs, too," and she said "Oh my fucking god, yes," and Flynn and his father winked at each other and said, together, in unison, "Not enough," and she cried out that she would crawl from house to house, door to door, naked, and she would suck everyone in town off until they couldn’t do it any more and that she needed to be punished for being such a god damn whore for even thinking such a thing and they should cane her tits and her pussy and her ass and whip her feet and her hands and her face until she couldn’t walk or crawl or even move without wincing in excruciating pain and they should brand her, they should cut her, they should burn her, and she…she would…she would drink piss, too, if he wanted to see her do that, and so Flynn smirked and said "yeah, sure, go ahead, have an orgasm, mom, but just one, just a little one, and then bring your fucking little fuckable mouth over here and make god damn good on your god damn promise," and that was what happened and she earned a new name, and it was "pisswhore," and it wasn’t too long after that that she also became known as "shitlicker," and Flynn never used a bathroom again for as long as he lived at home and Flynn and his father fucked and tortured and humiliated the ever loving shit out of his mother all the live long day and it happened exactly like that all the time until Flynn left home to marry his slut-wife after such an honorable courtship, and whenever he would take his wife home with him, he and his father would stand both women up before them while they jerked off and then had them suck them both off, cumswapping everything that came out of both Flynn and his father, and then they would have the girls fuck them off to oblivion, with both women putting on a lesbian dyke show complete with both of them double fisting each other at the same time so the men could get aroused again, over and over and yet over again after that, for the entire visit, until they got to the part where they would just have to start in to torture the women so they could get hard again, because Flynn and his father had been fucked dry, and both Flynn’s mother and his wife held on to each other for dear life as they both got simultaneously whipped and caned and burned and pierced by Flynn and his father, and they would scream and scream again and scream yet again after that and then scream into each other’s mouths some more as they poured themselves into each other the whole time and he couldn’t remember which way it really went, whether he actually had masturbated in front of his mother or he didn’t, if his father threw him out or he didn’t, if he fucked his mother with all his friends or he didn’t, if he had participated in family-wide and city-wide orgies or he didn’t, if he tortured the fucking Christ out of his mother and his wife with his father or if he didn’t, and as it turned out, it really didn’t matter any more, now anyway, did it.

When he missed Saliki’s jaw and hit her somewhere less effective, failing to send the rampaging jolt around his penis he was so looking forward to, she exploded in cryptic text and it didn’t make a whit a difference to the plan. To his plan. He was here, with her, and he was going to get her to shut the fuck up, and he was going to fuck her because that was all there was to do in there—in this fucking hell that had exactly one benefit to it—until he fucking died, and she could just deal with it.

Granted, he liked her better when she was cooperative. No matter. He was in this god-forsaken shithole, and he was going to have his way with her, and that was the way things were going to be until the end of the fucking world. There wasn’t a god damn thing she was going to be able to do about it, and the rest of the world sure as shit didn’t care. Not any more. What happens in graves, stays in graves. Besides, her petty little resistances didn’t call upon his humanity, his mercy, his respect, no, they drove him into barbarity, into brutality, into cruelty, back into the caves, where women had no rights, weren’t citizens at all or even valued that much and for god’s sakes, they were in no way seen as people or lovers or wives or even sluts or bitches, but as objects. Cunts. As things that were there to stick your cock into. To make do things for you. To en-fucking-slave.

Glory be to the fuck hole, and to the cock, and to the holy whore. As we fucked in the beginning, we will fuck and ever shall fuck. Fuck without end. Ah-ah-fuck, ah-ah-fuck.

When he came, he was so mad at her, he moved his hand around, back to the nipple that had been so cooperative and welcoming previously, and he pushed it into her chest, and he pushed on her hard there, digging his thumb down onto her ribcage, and he bore his entire weight on her there, and she stopped yelling, she stopped shouting, she stopped accusing him of a crime he would never have to stand trial for or go to jail for, but she struggled and she was afraid in an entirely different way, one that had self-preservation in it somewhere, and he liked that, he loved how she squeezed around his well-spent dick in her blind panic and it had the proper effect and set another boner up to start happening right away, and he was instantly addicted to having this kind of power, and he wanted more, he wanted more, and he bounced on her as she wailed and tensed up until he felt something give way underneath his hand, and he heard a crack, and whatever screaming she had been doing before paled compared to the shriek she let forth.

Somehow, she shrank. She compressed just a little against the floor they were on, just a hair, just a smidge, there under his thumb, and she suddenly had trouble breathing—as if it wasn’t hard enough in their little pleasure palace—and she wheezed and she flailed and started yakking quickly, quietly, saying the same thing over and over, and that, that got his attention.

He realized she was praying.

No, singing.

He recognized the song…to the father, and to the son, and to the holy fucking ghost. Her words were wrong, all wrong, all god damn wrong, but after the third time she rasped through it, his fury had fled and he was out of breath and something from his childhood called to him to join her. He used to sing this in church, standing next to his long-sainted mother, who would beam and radiate praise and worship and…honor down to him that she invited him to join her in, time and time again, that he would always give into her on as he tried to bungle around to match the notes and the words, and Flynn and Saliki found something else from some other woman’s mausoleum to communicate about. Not that it made the slightest difference, and it sure as hell didn’t make anything any better. Not now.

He had hurt her before, before when they were having sex-glorious-sex, but that was just in a little way, a way she seemed to like, but now, now, now he had hurt her much harder in the middle of his…his…rape…and she was paying a heavy price for his rage, his despair, and his weight. His enormous weight that he couldn’t keep off of her, not enough to give her any kind of reprieve, and Flynn had never been so scared in all his life.

He couldn’t fix what he had done.

Running his hands over what little he could on her and trying to soothe her didn’t help. Not one little bit.

His mother’s face fell somewhere out there in eternity.

Flynn listened to his bedside-deadside-companion use his name, over and over, in tears, with some other foreign words that for some reason made him think of something a gospel writer had said about some of the last words in some of the last moments of some god his mother believed in had said on earth, and what he said among criminals and soldiers and people who gloated and were looking forward to watching to watch him die horribly on what was to become a symbol of some church—his mother’s church—and how it was all true even here, in a fucking hole in the ground, and how he didn’t know what he did or was doing or had done and had no way to do what was needed, and he was ashamed.

He called out to the powers and authorities for mercy, to please come, to please come and take her and save her and it made the same amount of difference that all the other pitiful admonitions did, and they were still there together, just Saliki and Flynn, in their dark burial, and they both cried for reasons that were the same but different, and they both definitely wanted the same things. All the same things. Some things they definitely could never now have, and some things—one in particular—they were just going to have to wait a while longer for. It hadn’t been hard enough. Yet.

Togetherness totally sucked, and the god they sang to had nothing else to say to either of them.

###

THE DIFFERENCE between the dreams that Flynn had and the horror of being awake was that—unlike the crypt he shared with his succubus—for the longest time, his dreams had light in them. Light and longitude and freedom and spectacular flights of fantasy. No clothes, of course. Old movies replayed, there were fabulous dinners and dates and foo foo drinks, and oh, dear lord, sex-constant-sex happened in the light, in the very daylight in front of god and everybody. Days were relived with ever-delightful ever-more-scandalous embellishments, whole days that were both good and bad, and even the worst of them were better than what he had to wake up to.

But eventually, the light faded in his imagination, with only occasional flashes of blinding brilliance, and what was waiting for him when he closed his eyes began to bear a striking resemblance to what was waiting for him when he opened them, and it all became dark and cold and rancid and squirmy and it got to where he couldn’t tell the difference between being awake and being asleep, and he could no longer tell if he was dream-fucking or real-fucking, which his death-mate no longer resisted him on in either universe, and the epoch it took for that difference to even be a concern quit mattering, too. He quite convinced himself of his prowess at being able to get the woman he had at his disposal to orgasm regardless of circumstance or truth, and that she had forgiven him as their Lord and God had suggested was such a good idea in general once upon a time. In truth, what else was there for her to do? Well, there was one thing: the wave-like motions of his hips was nearly constant, and was met as he wished a woman would respond to him when his cock was permanently inside her—welcoming: as what else was there to do?—and erections came and went as they do in circumstances such as these, and she did as he asked and moved in conjunction with him for as long as she could, coughing in his face, moaning, crying.

Flynn woke up—or, not; it was hard to say—to find that Saliki had fallen silent and still at some juncture an unfathomably long time ago. He grieved for as long as he could when he first noticed it, not really quite remembering when it was that she wasn’t like this, all calm and somehow bright, and the bitterness he felt reminded him that it really wasn’t his fault they were together and what happened to her was going to happen to him, too, and he let her go and fell back into doing the only thing left that there was to do in there. He didn’t think she’d mind, and he gradually got to where he wasn’t even sure if she had ever moved in her tiny little ever-seductive ways or spoke in her funny-sounding jargon. He even forgot that she had been angry or receptive to him and his thoughts or whatever, and he simply went on with his wet dreams, awake or not. When he would get hungry, which was one of the odder scenarios he would conjure up from time to time, he would simply visualize chewing and swallowing and the hunger went away. He lost his sense of smell, not that it made him feel any less putrid.

The hallucinations set in and overall, they disturbed him—especially when Saliki would tell him stories he’d never heard the likes of before, stories he understood—and he would occasionally experience uncanny sounds and abstract colors and temperature changes and there was an especially vivid mirage or two among all the phantasms he entertained. Ones that felt and worked completely differently from all the other blurry visions he had been living with, playing in his mind over and over, ad infinitum.

He was in a bed, a real bed, by himself, of all things, with cool clean sheets and dim lights casting luminous shadows on the pale green walls, and he could hear voices speaking, in words he swore he could interpret, and he wondered in downright awe at how imaginative he was and how his fantasies had turned to working on things he didn’t remember in the slightest. He couldn’t exactly move, but he wasn’t exactly restrained or even crammed, either. It was completely strange.

"Ah. I’m glad to see you’re awake. Gave us quite a scare there; thought we were going to lose you." He didn’t recognize the voice, and the ghostly amphitheater whirled.

He groaned and had trouble forming words, real words. He might have said something in some long-forgotten relic of Saliki-speak. Shapes floated around him.

"You know, Flynn, we do want it back."

Flynn’s eyes started fluttering, and when he would close them, it got dark, and when they would open, it was light, actually bright, which was entirely opposite from how he just knew the world once worked. And that voice. That was a voice he had heard something like before. Dark and gravely. Full of sin and dirt and menace.

"I’ve already called your beautiful wife, and told her that…we found you. She’s been powerful worried, and I’m sure that she will comfort you no end in the coming days; she’s on her way. Now I’ll let you two get caught up and all, but you are going to have to tell her to give it back. All of it."

Flynn croaked; he had thoughts that were hard enough to coagulate, let alone express.

"Oh, well, let’s just say that Saliki’s husband didn’t learn his lesson the first time. A mistake I know you won’t make, as I cannot imagine you wanting your lovely bride to have any more in common with that fucking little mail order cunt-whore than your dick." An eternal pause of light and whirring and machine sounds transpired; it was dizzying. "Are we clear?"

Despite all the haze and the mud, and the utter incongruity with getting to actually breathe real air again, air that wasn’t abhorrent and rotten, Flynn had never been so clear on anything in his entire life.

His wife, though, being warned by prophecy, had a different idea, and she ran. She ran and she ran hard and she ran long until they inevitably caught her, and Flynn ended up having to explain things to her when she woke up underneath him, behind him, as is the way of these things. Er, got to explain. He explained everything as well as he could until he couldn’t say anything any more, and his apologies made the same difference they always did, as did the endless arguments about The Second Comprehension and Acceptance, not to mention the topics of just what there was to do in there with all their spare time. She seemed to have issues with that, which he thought was odd, as she was, after all, his wife. His incredibly slutty wife. Or, so he thought. This was turning out to be worse than being with someone he had no common tongue with. No matter. At some point, he quit paying attention to the nonsensical sounds his one-time goddess made that may or may not have been protests, or complaints, or whatever—he couldn’t tell and frankly, couldn’t care less any more—and went back to the matters at hand; world without end. Now he laid her down to fuck, he prayed the Lord shut this slut up, if she should die while he would fuck, he prayed the Lord fuck this slut up. She eventually came around to his way of seeing things: after she got quiet, when it finally occurred to him that things might have been better if she had been on top. Reverse cowgirl, even. She might have even liked being fucked to death like that.

###

COME THANKSGIVING, things were running exceptionally smoothly in the syndicate. The very notion of skimming off the top had been largely forgotten, the clandestine and notoriously illegal profits from modern-day slavery and super-obscene pornography were at an all-time high, and discipline problems were virtually non-existent. If a command came down from the top, it was executed. No questions asked. Lest something abominable and extraordinarily personal got added to legend.

So when Saliki’s husband was told to exhume the bodies, the very mythological object-lessons that maintained the finespun order they all lived by, that some new and belligerent staff members had expressed doubts as to their very existence, he was filled with the usual uncanny dread one would have at such an unpleasant chore, and no question whatsoever as to whether or not he would do as he was told. It smelled at least as awful as he expected when he lifted the lid—if not worse—and the fresh young men who were helping him fled at the sight, quaking, no longer heretics but now true believers all. No matter; he still had a job to do, a heinous responsibility to take care of.

He could not even begin to imagine his surprise when he found no trace of Flynn’s wife in the vault. Which was most worrisome to him, as he was the one who caught her when she ran and had put her in there himself when she proved…defiant. Under orders, of course. He was quite sure he couldn’t explain this, and it bothered him. Immensely.

All of which was downright laughable compared to his utter astonishment when Flynn opened his eyes, famished, full of tales. Horrible tales that would not go over well in polite company.

And as it was before the Sanhedrin of old, Lazarus was not allowed to long testify about the miracles and mercies of our Lord and Savior and their tendencies to undermine the powers and authorities of sin and gravely menace, nor about whatever the hell hell was like, and certainly not even much more than a word or two about where the fuck the god damn money was—being the obstinate bastard he was—and Flynn and Saliki’s husband ended up getting to spend considerably more time together, getting better acquainted. For different reasons, obviously. Although, the pleasantries of "Hi, how are you, I’m fine, thanks, how are you," did not manage to come up in their discourse. Which could, arguably, be attributed to the lack of charming decorations and sand, as opposed to some kind of generalized communication problem. There might have been some anger issues.

Flynn got the opportunity to test his reverse cowgirl—er, cowboy—theories. Needless to say, much to his dismay, he was disappointed in the results; he was not as enthused about forced butt fucking like this as he maybe thought he once was. The Third Great Turning proved a considerable challenge during the conjoined life sentences he shared with his new prison cell-mate, and he had to wait until Saliki’s husband went quiet to work on it, to get everything back to how it was in the beginning before he could find his way back onto the beach where The Resurrection happened in shifts, at least until the manna and the foo foo drinks ran out, and he had to go back to defying his mother with his own good right hand the way he did when he was back in his room, utterly and completely alone at last, masturbating all the live long day as he did every god damn day he was alive, waiting to be born-reborn-die-whatever, and it was so that he finally truly got around to going about things the way it really was in the beginning, and after he had fucked himself dry a time or two, The Lord stopped by to see how he was doing.

"So what you been up to?"

"Oh, uh, nothing much. Jerking off."

"Hey, you know, you used to do this, all the way back even before you were born, waiting to come out of your mother’s womb."

"For true?"

"Oh, god yes. You know, I used to do it, too, when I was inside…never mind." There was a pause. "Long story."

"Whatever. So, why is it then, that when I was so happily masturbating along in my sainted mother’s uterus, you didn’t make so I could impregnate her a little more while I was in there, to make myself a sister so she could suck my cock so I didn’t have to work so hard while I was waiting around with nothing better to do?"

"Oh, come on, lazy bones. There’s enough of you all as it is."

"Uh huh. So tell me: is what I’m doing here really a sin?"

"I just don’t know why it is you people fail to understand that whenever you rub one out, lo, I am there with you always, sucking your cocks and licking your cunts in the form of your own good right hands. I mean, look: if your own god damn fucking God isn’t concerned with your ecstasy, then who is?"

"Oh, come on." There was another pause. "That’s not what they tell us, you know."

"Yeah, I know. A lot of things got garbled up in translation. Language barrier of some kind; I don’t understand it. You do know that the First Commandment was supposed to be ‘Thou shalt fuck thyselves and each other to god damn fucking death’, don’t you?"

"Really."

"Uh huh, really, and I must say, you’re doing a bang up job of that in here, by the way. Thou art my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased."

"Gee, thanks…uh…Dad. You do know that’s kind of gay."

"What is?"

"The idea of you sucking me off while I’m jerking off."

"Maybe. I don’t know that I care, and you’re certainly not one to talk, not after what’s-his-name. Do you want I should send my mom in? She’s a pretty amazing cocksucker. Honestly spectacular, if the truth be told. She likes it messy. And oh, my god, is she ever a looker. Drop fucking dead fucking fuckable gorgeous."

"I can well imagine. Hey, you wouldn’t want to get me out of all this, would you?"

"Gee, like I haven’t already done that, and look. Here you still are."

"I s’pose." Flynn sighed.

"As it was in the beginni—"

"—Please don’t sing. And for god’s sakes, especially not that. Isn’t that enormously vain?"

"Sorry." There was an eternal pause, full of quiet. "Maybe I should see about what I can do to get this on this list, too: ‘Be ye buried alive with one another, so that thou shalt find thy way back unto Me…’."

"Not that I’m trying to tell you your business, here, God, but I really don’t know how well that would go over."

"I s’pose not. Just a thought." The Lord sighed. "So, are you going to get to it, then? Finish fucking yourself to death, like you did all the others?"

"Oh, right." Flynn went back to the matters at hand, and the Lord watched, and helped, and approved.

"Can I ask you something else?"

"Sure."

"Will I get to fuck angels when I get there? You know, in heaven? Or hell, or whatever it is that’s after this?"

The Lord laughed. "Oh, right. Like I could stop you."

And so it was that Flynn finished up as he started, splattering and splashing and spurting on himself, fucking himself back to the oblivion he had tried to fuck himself out of in some ancient bygone era, in the belly of Leviathan. As is now and ever shall be, Amen.

###

HIS ALMOST-mother woke up in bed, a real bed, by herself, of all things, with cool clean sheets and dim lights casting luminous shadows on the pale green walls. She felt…empty. Her husband came around the side, leaned over and kissed her, smiled, and put his hand on her without any kind of inappropriate liberty, hoping to be a comfort to her. He asked her if she was alright, and she said no.

"Thought we were going to lose you."

"You should be so lucky. It’s what I would most certainly deserve."

"Don’t say that."

"I’m sorry I lost him. It was a boy this time, right?"

"Actually, it was twins. A boy and a girl."

"Oh, god. Can you forgive me?"

"There’s nothing to forgive. We just have to let them go."

"I think we’re getting too good at letting them go."

"They were simply not going to make it. Doctors said he lasted longer than she did."

"Oh, don’t tell me that."

"Sorry. These things happen; you know that. We can and we will try again. It’s still important to me. Is it still to you?"

"Of course."

"When you’re ready."

"Not right away, if you don’t mind. I could use a vacation."

"Where would you like to go?

"Where else? The beach."

"If you wish. You deserve it; you’ve—arguably—had a rough day. I love you, you know."

"I’ve heard tale tell…I love you, too. I had the strangest dream. A nightmare, really. Dreadful."

"Might have been the anesthesia."

"Maybe. But if we ever do succeed? I want to name him Flynn, if it’s a boy. And…Saliki, if it’s a girl."

"What an odd name."

"Long story." The couple sat together and grieved as long as they could, crying each other out as they had so many times before, holding each other tight. "Can I ask you something?" she asked when she could compose herself.

"Of course."

"Can we start going to church again?"

"If you would like, yes. Which one?"

"One that still sings hymns."

"You know I can’t sing worth a darn."

"Would you try for me? Bungle around to match the notes and the words as best as you can, and stand by me and hold my hand?"

"I can imagine worse things. And nothing better." Her husband smiled and laughed a little. "Glory be."

###