Honey is Sweeter than Blood Page 11

  * * *

  Not all our sex was part of her art. In fact, she would grow angry if I confused the two. I never really lost my temper with her, for fear of her darker temper, but even at my angriest I never accused her of prostitution as I had originally thought to do. I didn’t see it that way, anymore, any more than she did. Though I always made sure I never met or saw any of her patrons, male or female.

  One night I lay on my belly with her thighs pressed against the sides of my skull, like an infant straining to be unborn, assimilated back into its place of origin, crowning in reverse. My tongue played in brush strokes painting the steamy tropical darkness, and in my ardor I would take breaths and gasp, “I want to eat a fetus right out of you, Dam …I want to eat one right out of you…”

  I could hear the small pouty smile in her voice as she purred, up there, “Maybe you will…”

  I submerged again. Came gasping back up for air again. “I want to go down on you when you have your next period,” I enthused. “I want to eat the blood out of you. I want to smear my face in it …”

  “You can do that, when my periods come back. But I missed my last period, love.” And she stroked my head as she cooed this.

  Slowly I lifted my slicked face to gaze up along her milky body, to contact those black eyes glowing like beacons at its end, the empty windows of a house at the end of a moonlit path.

  “You’re pregnant again?” I whispered.

  She smiled.

  I lifted my head a little higher. “From one of your…patrons?”

  Still that little smile. “No,” she said at last. “I’ve only done Cupid’s Caress lately. And two of the four were women, anyway.”

  I sat up full on the edge of the bed. “Is it mine, Damask?”

  “Yes, love. Aren’t you happy? Aren’t you proud…knowing that you’re giving to my art the way Simone did? That you’ll be a physical part of it?”

  I rose from the bed, wandered to her work bench, smelled the patchouli scent rising from one of the candles as I stood over it. My cock bobbed heavily in the air but was starting to nod off drunkenly, deflating so ridiculously that I could almost hear the air hissing out.

  “You should have asked me what I thought about that,” I murmured, finally.

  “What?” She sat up on the edge of the bed herself. “What the hell is this?”

  “I just think…that we should have been in agreement on a thing like this, from the start.”

  “You know my art, Tim. You know where it comes from.”

  “Not all of it comes from you.”

  “I thought you’d be honored,” she hissed. “Jesus, where is this coming from? Huh? Would you rather I got pregnant from one of my patrons?”

  “Yes. I would.”

  “And that would be so different?”

  Meekly, without looking at her, afraid of her, I said, “Yes. Somehow that’s different.”

  “I see. Somehow that’s okay. But your fetus is different, huh? Yours is sacred. I know, Timmy! We can have a child together! We can name him Corey!”

  “Damask,” I groaned. “It’s not that I’m against aborting it…”

  “What, then?”

  “I just don’t want you…doing things to it.”

  “You don’t have to have anything to do with it, then. I’ll keep it away from you. I’ll keep it for the patrons.”

  “You don’t understand. I don’t want you to do anything with it.”

  “Look!” she snarled, on her bare feet now. “I’m not going to waste a perfectly good abortion.”

  “Don’t I have any say in this?” I bravely managed. But this question was what really fanned her fire.

  “No, you don’t! You spit on my gift, Tim. You spit on my love. You just wanted to get laid, all this time. You only love me because you love fucking. And you want me to be this passive fuckee, and you want me to give birth, like we’re nice little domesticated sheep with no brains and no free will. Nature doesn’t rule me and you sure as hell don’t rule me!”

  I dared to look at her seething eyes. “I told you, I’m not asking you to give birth to it. I just don’t want you to use it…”

  “What you want. It’s always what the man wants. You know what? You only wanted me because you’re scared of women. It was your safe way of playing with fire. And you’ll play with me, but at the end of the day it’s a safe little cow of a wife like Tamsin that you want. I knew you’d reject me, Tim. It was inevitable. You denied it, but I saw it all along.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “Get out!” she screeched, so loudly that I knew her neighbors could hear us through the walls. Not that they hadn’t heard our cries of a different sort before.

  Now that I saw I was losing her, had probably already lost her, I managed to crank up my courage. Nothing left to lose. I said, “Damask…I don’t want you doing anything to that fetus, other than abort it. If you do…I’ll call the police.”

  For a moment, time stood still in the universe, a hovering black void between swings of the pendulum, the darkness between stars, the darkness in her gaze, too furious to even show anger. Calmly, more frightening than before, she said, “How can you prove what I might do to some unborn fetus, Tim? Abortion is legal. Are you going to say, ‘I think my girlfriend is going to do something awful to my fetus that we both want aborted?’”

  “Yes, I will say that. Then I’ll take them here, to show them what I mean.”

  “You’d do that? Even if it implicated yourself?”

  “I’m not the artist, Damask. I didn’t make this stuff. I didn’t have the abortions.”

  She smiled. It made me shudder. “I see. Now you disown all my art that you supposedly appreciated so much. Well, you bring the police here, Tim. Not that they could do much to me, anyway…but I won’t be here anymore. I’ll take my work somewhere else. I’ll do it tonight, before you can get a search warrant. I have money in the bank. My patrons have paid me well. At least they appreciate me. They’ll seek me out wherever I settle, and I’ll make new ones besides.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like this…”

  “But it has to be the way you want it, right? Go now, little Timmy. Leave. Go talk about me with your friend Duh-wayne. Go find yourself a nice little lobotomized Tamsin.”

  “Damask…”

  “Go!” she shrieked, startling me, and I saw she had taken up the scalpel that lay on her work bench. But instead of brandishing it toward me, she pressed the blade to her own abdomen below the navel. “Go before I abort your baby right here and now. I will do it, too…you know me, even if you don’t love me. It will be my last great performance, Tim, my masterpiece. Just give me a second to think of a name for it.” She always named her works of art. I saw a bead of blood as dark as ink begin to wind down her marble skin from where the blade touched her.

  I began to get dressed as quickly as I could. I did know her. I did know that she meant it.

  She held the blade there until I backed to the door. That was how I left her. I’ve never seen her since. From across the room, and in its too-intimate murk, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw tears in her eyes. I wouldn’t have imagined that to be possible, but I like to believe it was. I felt sorry for her, but I didn’t dare say it. I knew that she would then eviscerate herself for sure. Damask didn’t want to be pitied. She wanted to be both loved and loathed at once.

  * * *

  It was nearly eight months later that I received the package from UPS.

  It was left in my front hall, on the carpet, and I stood staring down at it, afraid to touch it as if it might explode, when I saw the familiar handwriting on the label. I was afraid what the carrier might have thought with that box stinking up the inside of his truck…though it didn’t smell, of course. When at last I opened the box on my kitchen table, I saw that the contents had been carefully wrapped in a plastic trash bag with lots of twisty white packing popcorn like an army of ghostly embryos to considerately prevent the gift from being damaged
in transit.

  I knew, as I lifted the work of art from the box, my hands trembling so badly that I feared I would drop it, that Damask had finally had her first partial birth abortion. Or, rather, more delicately worded, her first “Intact D&E”.

  I had already learned long before then that Damask had indeed moved from Lowell. I haven’t looked very hard for her, but I did ask Dwayne if he knew where she was, and he swears he hasn’t heard from her, either. I have received no calls, no emails. Though I wonder if at least she might send me an Xmas card, either fondly or perversely, this year.

  There was only a note in the box with the gift of artwork. And it only said: You know that I always name my artwork, Tim. But I’ll let you name this one. —D.

  I would be lying if I said I didn’t sob at first, holding the thing. That I didn’t come close to phoning the police. But ultimately, I didn’t. Ultimately, I’ve come to regard this flesh collage as Damask’s most beautiful piece of work. Her masterpiece.

  She had lacquered this creation, to better preserve it for posterity. I think, too, that she must have freeze-dried it or drained it of its fluids, somehow, because it has a dark, withered, mummified look. The wings of pigeons are securely sewn onto its back. My little angel. It was a female. I held it to my chest as I sobbed, as if to rock it, as if to comfort it.

  I took it to bed with me that first night. But I don’t think I kissed it, traced its leathery hard figure with wrinkles fossilized into fissures, oiled and scented with patchouli, until several nights had passed.

  I’m not an artist; my imagination isn’t as refined as hers.

  For lack of a better title, I’ve named the work of art Damask.

  Afterword: My Sexual Exploits

  “A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.”

  –Thomas Hardy

  I like to believe I’m known for an often personal writing style, subject matter that finds its origins in my own experiences or at least in my own emotions. Other writers of fiction, cleaving close to that word fiction, might argue that it is better not to approach one’s work in a blatantly autobiographical fashion. They would say that a less subjective perspective resonates with more readers. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that every story should be about one’s own life, somewhat fictionalized, or we wouldn’t have a male, middle-aged Thomas Hardy creating a female, teenaged character named Tess. (Although, Maupassant said, “Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.”) If every fiction were auto-biographical, every horror story would be about a slightly overweight dork who wears heavy metal t-shirts and can’t get laid to save his life…instead of being about superhuman serial killers who defile and dismember the beauties who won’t date said dork. :) And yet, I don’t feel that highly personal stories amount to nothing more than self-indulgent exercises in harvesting lint from one’s navel. One can dig much deeper than that, and bring up the darkest, rawest of matter. No less an author than Tolstoy said, “One ought to write only when one leaves a piece of one’s flesh in the inkpot each time one dips one’s pen.” But you may be more familiar with the adage, “Write what you know.”

  Well, I know sex.

  This following bit of personal history may in fact enlighten you as to why I occasionally write erotic horror, why I choose certain themes, how my past has shaped me as a person and an artist (which to me cannot be separated). When writing, I prefer not to collaborate. Not with another author, not with an overly zealous editor whose red pen is his dick, not with the public’s expectations. But in sex, it is generally best to collaborate with another…and my first collaborator was a young woman I met while working at Underwood Farms warehouse in my home town of Eastborough, Massachusetts.

  Underwood Farms are a local chain of convenience stores, and at the warehouse orders are picked for transport to said stores. In addition, there is a large bakery section where bread and doughnuts are made, and a soda plant where inferior brands of carbonated beverages are concocted. I made minimum wage in the beverage plant, operating a machine called, ominously and futuristically, the palletizer. :-o Boxes of soda bottles would march up a conveyor to the top of my looming machine, which would be loaded inside with wooden pallets the way an automatic pistol is fed a clip of bullets. At the top of the machine I would organize the boxes of soda into a layer to be lowered onto the next pallet. After so many layers of boxes were stacked atop each other, the pallet would then be ejected noisily onto another belt, to be carried off by a fork-lift. It was utterly depressing. One time a maintenance worker was inside my machine repairing it, and in aiding him, I hit the wrong button. The blades that would slide the boxes onto the next pallet began to move forward. Luckily I was quick enough to hit the button again. The maintenance worker kindly acted as if I hadn’t almost severed his head.

  One of my coworkers was a college student working for the summer, named Kelly. Kelly was a seemingly shy, scholarly sort with thick glasses and short blond hair in child-like bangs. She was pretty in an unassuming way, with a curvy body and breasts as large as breasts can get before they might be considered freakish. : P Because she was so young, they were high and proud and seemed to contradict her meek and mild aspect, a carnal presence swelling within her body, pressing to burst free. It may be unfair to stereotype a woman as being sexually adventurous simply because her mammary glands are over-developed, but it happens that in Kelly’s case it was true. I summoned up the nerve at last (I’m rather shy, and bespectacled, myself) to ask her out. She declined, explaining that she had a boyfriend, but I could tell she was flattered. Flattery turned to flirtation. The next thing I knew, flirtation turned to fornication…of which I had dreamed so long, bashfulness having denied me. I let Kelly steer me. She had more to lose than I did, and I didn’t want to pressure her. And, more importantly, she was experienced where I was not.

  The first time we had sex, it was in my bedroom in my parents’ house. We went for hours (so long that certain top forty songs on the radio were played again). Unfortunately, I was far too nervous to climax, but at least I wasn’t impotent, and Kelly was left satisfied by the experience. I was sullen, bitter, for days; not at her, but at myself. Embarrassed, ashamed. I was a failure. My dick had stayed hard but my self esteem was flaccid. She took pity on me and only days later, while both her parents weren’t home, we fucked at her house. The previous time, we had tried different things to get me to come. Doggie style (she looked afraid for a moment, wondering which socket I meant to plug into). She went down on me though I was slick with her juices. She talked dirty to me. All to no avail. But in her own bedroom, things became even more creative.

  There, Kelly asked me if I wanted to see her really naked. And then she took hold of both sides of her mouth, stretched it so wide I thought the skin would tear, and slipped her bald red head through that widened hole like a fruit with its peel pulled away.

  Kelly continued to widen the hole of her elastic mouth, stretching it so that it allowed her shoulders to pass through it. She worked her skin down her entire body, revealing more and more of her bright crimson muscles, furrowed and striated and marbled with yellow and white sinew, fat, ligaments, her eyes still gleaming seductively in that raw, blood-colored face. In fact, she put her glasses back on.

  Her breasts were still huge, but now they had these remarkable grooved textures, as did her curved belly, her thighs, her buttocks. My fingers explored her anew. Though she had become terrifying, she was also profoundly beautiful, in a way more so than with her flesh on. It was the ultimate striptease, more intimate even than the first, and I couldn’t wait to probe myself deep into that boldly revealed anatomy.

  Her nerves were more exposed, so she moaned and groaned with discomfort as I moved atop her, but the pain also brought her pleasure. How we experimented that night. At one point, she had me go on all fours while she thrashed my rump with the legs of her loose suit of skin. She
also used her skin to bind me to her bed posts, by knotting the limp sleeves of her arms around both my wrists, so that she might ride atop me. At one point, to win laughter from her, I fucked the shed hide on the bed while she watched, and then I stood up and thrust my cock through one of its mask-like eye holes, from the inside. (She in turn teased me at the end of our love-making by at first slipping into her skin so that it faced backwards. I moved behind her—she seemed to flinch again, nervous that I might try to enter her anally; she could flay herself but anal sex was a whole other thing—and I kissed the bare muscles of the back of her head through her gaping rubbery lips.)

  While we were still screwing, her exposed blood vessels broke easily, and both our skins became sticky with a film of blood until I began to resemble her. She had put a rubber sheet down on her bed first, however, to protect her mattress so her parents wouldn’t find out what she was up to. She told me her boyfriend liked sex this way, and that spoiled the mood for me a bit. But at last, I was able to climax, my pumping member streaked with her gore…

  I began to fall in love with Kelly, and couldn’t accept that this was only a dalliance for her. She left work soon after our two physical encounters, returned to school and her boyfriend there. We had a telephone conversation that ended with us both in tears. We wrote each other for about a year, and I visited her once at her college, but it was over. I entered into one of the most depressed periods of my life, obsessed over literary suicides such as Yukio Mishima and Anne Sexton. But somehow I survived those dark days, and tried to turn it into something positive. I had lost my cursed virginity at last. And if Kelly had found me desirable, surely someone else would, sooner or later.

  But after Kelly and before my wife, things got a bit lonely again. Loneliness can breed ugliness: rape, prison sex, child molestation, the ravishing of barnyard beasts. Don’t get me wrong; I cherish solitude; it’s the soil my creativity takes seed in. But as Thomas Mann said, “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”