Honey is Sweeter than Blood Read online

  “Here’s a cool one,” he muttered, leaning over her shoulder to open up the next picture in his gallery, Hans Bellmer’s weirdly conjoined The Doll.

  “Oh, now here’s the ultimate woman!” Kristen laughed. “Jeesh, she can give birth out of both ends, even. They should genetically engineer a whole bunch of these things, raise them on a farm,” she joked. She elbowed Justin lightly in the ribs and grinned up at him. “You’re a kinky bastard, aren’t you, Just?”

  He smiled bashfully, gave a shrug.

  She curled her hand in his shirt front. He shuddered as her fingers slipped behind the buttons to brush his bare skin. “Are you showing me this stuff to try to turn me on?”

  “I…” He didn’t know. Part of him desperately wanted to get her into his bed. After all, hadn’t he prepared carefully for just such a possibility? Wasn’t his bed even now in readiness?

  And yet, he was also terrified. Of her hands, like the one inside his shirt, its sharp nails playfully raking him as if to threaten him with disembowelment, or worse, castration.

  Kristen rose up from her chair. Her arms snaked around him and she pressed him into her. When they kissed, her full breasts flattened their bulk against him, and he courageously willed his hands to reach behind her and squeeze her ample bottom. Yes…these sensations…her curves, her body, her veiled secret flesh…helped him side-step his doubts, his fears. These magical parts of her that she so took for granted…that she scratched, that she washed, that she could look at any time she wanted to…but for him, so charged with mystery, with enigma, with terrifying power…

  He broke his mouth from hers and whispered, “I want to show you what I’ve done with my bedroom.”

  * * *

  “Wow…you are kinky, aren’t you?” Kristen purred, smiling. She looked at the bed again. It was a deep dark void like outer space without the stars. Slithery black satin sheets gleaming with purplish/bluish highlights. She added, “It’s a bit tacky, in a way…but I like it.”

  Justin’s grin felt stapled at the corners as he stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders, her nice and meaty upper arms. He was glad that her hair was so short; he was able to admire, to kiss and nuzzle the bare nape of her neck. He in turn purred, “I have some other interesting ideas, if you’re game…”

  “Hm?” she turned toward him, and he saw she was already unbuttoning her shirt front. “Sounds intriguing. But…” and her playful flirtation flickered with a touch of seriousness “…I’m not into pain, Just.”

  “No,” he said. “Neither am I. But…” he stammered, averted his eyes “…would you let me tie your hands and feet to the bed posts?”

  “Are you serious?” Her expression flickered again.

  “Well…”

  “Not the first time, Just. I mean, I know you but I don’t know you, you know?”

  He snorted a strained little laugh. “Sure. I’m sorry. I don’t want to play all our games in one night.”

  “Right,” she reassured him, taking his hands and putting them on her breasts, now covered only by the lacy filigrees of her teal-colored bra. “So what else do you have in mind?”

  * * *

  Justin stood at the side of the bed, the black satin sheets slippery and wet-feeling against his bare legs. He was naked and his erection swung out in front of him like a dowsing rod. He was slowly stroking it in one hand. Before him on the bed lay a figure with skin the way he liked it, flawlessly pallid, a landscape of snow-covered gentle hills, and a dark mysterious forest near its center that the snow hadn’t touched. A faint musk wafted from it, agonizing him with his desire to explore it and lose himself forever in it. A few dark dots of moles, some minor cellulite dimples and irregularities, but insignificant details; he admired their naturalism, their honesty. He was relieved there were no tattoos, no pierced nipples or navel. Such delicate membranes as those rose-pink nipples should not be desecrated.

  That said, the figure on the bed had no head, hands or feet.

  Kristen’s solid, shapely arms were spread-eagled out to her sides. As were her plumpish, silky-skinned thighs. Though her thighs were not, her shins were shiny, as it was with women’s legs. One of those beguiling mysteries of the female form.

  Carefully, Justin moved onto the bed, as if afraid to awaken a sleeper. He straddled the star-shaped figure, positioned himself over it. His chin was still slick from his lips and nose having only a minute before been buried in the dark copse. Now, he guided another part of himself toward that region. And in. His shaft slid deeper, deeper, through the moist veils of the flesh, as if it had entered into another plane, another dimension, a realm of dream and “convulsive beauty”, as Breton had dubbed it, a place only a Dali could envision.

  Propping himself above the unmoving body, Justin pumped so slowly, so luxuriously into it, staring at the breasts, spread and flattened out because their owner lay on her back, staring down at where he was sunk to his very base in that dark thatch, staring at the neck where it ended in blackness.

  He heard a shuddery little exhalation or a moan from Kristen’s invisible lips. He smelled cigarettes on her wafting warm breath. He tried to ignore it. He tried to ignore the wet glisten he saw of one of her eyes through the tight black mesh across her face.

  As he pumped, he felt a dry touch upon his back. “No!” he husked almost desperately, the contact all but shattering his near hypnotic state. He tried to make his tone less urgent. “Please, Kristen…don’t touch me…not yet…”

  He felt her hand withdraw. Sensed the reluctance in the motion. Again she extended her pure white arm across the field of black sheets, which pooled under her like dark blood. The black lace glove she wore made her hand disappear, as much as was possible, against that expanse of black satin.

  He hadn’t had to have the gloves made. But he had had black lace coverings made for her feet, that were a cross between a sock and a slipper. And he had had a black lace mask made for her, which covered the whole of her head. Though she could breathe through its web-like weave, there were no holes for her eyes, nose or mouth. The lights were low. It was a nearly convincing effect. With the additional benefit of Justin’s ample imagination, it was a very gratifying effect.

  He started to moan more deeply, to pump more and more quickly and aggressively. The bed began rocking like a black ocean. In the emptiness where her head should have been, Justin heard Kristen moan through her mask as well. In her own mounting ardor, she drew up her legs and hooked them over the backs of Justin’s calves.

  “No,” he rasped, “Jesus, Kristen, please!” In one fluid movement, as though the slippery sheets aided him, he was out of her and sitting on the edge of the bed, lowering his forehead into his palms, his flushed heart jackhammering.

  “Oh, Just, come on,” Kristen sighed, sitting up beside him. She peeled the caul-like black membrane off her face, but left on the gloves and stockings. “I’ve been playing along…it’s been fun…but don’t get like this about it.”

  “I’m just…” he began. But he didn’t know what he meant to add to that.

  “You’re self-conscious because you’re em-barrassed to be revealing your fantasies to me. That’s natural…fantasies are very private and personal things. I’m proud you trust me to share yours with me.” She obviously noticed his fading member, because she slid off the bed and knelt between his knees, and took it in hand. “Come on, baby, let’s get you back in the mood, huh?”

  Justin looked down at the top of Kristen’s head, her black hair, as she took him into her mouth. He saw that she had white hairs at the top of her head where she was graying prematurely. She obviously dyed her hair black to hide them. He almost put his hands on that head to hold her at his groin, but couldn’t bring himself to touch it. And yet he was inside it. He was on her tongue. That saliva-slicked steamy-hot chamber from which the voice issued. Teeth raked along his shaft…

  He pushed her off him. She fell backwards but was able to catch herself from falling all the way onto her back. Justin had bol
ted to his feet, his penis flopping weakly.

  “Fuck this,” Kristen hissed under her breath, jolting to her feet and turning away from him. “I was only trying to help you, asshole. See how many other girls you can find off the web that will be so patient with your fucked-up games…”

  “Kristen…”

  She whirled to blaze her cold eyes at him, to bare those raking sharp animal teeth at him, like the ribs in the donkey’s split belly. Jabbed a finger at him. “You pushed me, motherfucker! Do you know how many guys never get head at all from their girlfriends or their wives? And you push me off like that? No, sorry, I’m not into physical abuse, thanks …” She swept past him, snatched up her teal briefs, put them on in brusque, awkward, utterly non-sexual movements. The same ugly fast motions in harnessing herself into her bra.

  “No wonder your last girlfriend dumped you,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.

  He watched her face as she said this. Sneering lips peeled back. Snarling lips. She had a broad face and her head suddenly looked disproportionately large for her body. When she faced him again it seemed to swim at him, hugely.

  “What did you do to her to make her leave you, Justin? This? Or did you tie her hands and feet to the bed posts and…and I don’t even wanna imagine.”

  Justin remembered the slap across his face. Tasting his own blood. He remembered wanting, in a flash of red light, to taste hers in turn…to swallow gallons of it and vomit them back onto her rent and sundered flesh…but instead standing there numbly, immobilized, and listening to her shoes clack, clack, clack toward the door. She the tough female cop, he the serial killer defeated even before he could begin.

  “You have the balls to want to tie me up…to ask me to put on this freaky shit…to push me on the fucking floor…and you won’t even talk to me now?” she raged, her twisted countenance looming into his vision again. He flinched and blinked as if afraid to be sprayed with spittle, and kept his eyes averted.

  She finished dressing. Headed for the door. Looked back. “Goodbye, Justin,” she said tightly.

  “Goodbye,” he whispered, not looking up. He listened to her heavy tread across his apartment. Diminishing. Gone…

  …out of this dimension, back into another. Back behind the monitor’s glass. Back behind the TV’s screen. Back onto the glossy magazine page. Back into pixel, into ink, into brush strokes on a painting. Back to the desert dream plain.

  Justin slipped into his bathrobe. He picked up the black nets she had worn over her head, her hands and feet, folded them neatly away into a drawer. His face expressionless. No tears. He drifted wraith-like into his livingroom and seated himself before his computer.

  As was his habit, he spun the mouse in five clockwise rotations on his mouse pad while he waited for his computer to boot up.

  He started his Photoshop program. Pulled into it his photo of the pretty blond woman smiling into the camera, fully naked, a torso with the barest nubs for limbs.

  Using the art program’s airbrush and cloning features, he was able to quite convincingly remove the woman’s head completely.

  A Puppet Show For No Oneor, The Story of Tristan and Isolde

  Act One: The Discarded Kingdom

  The borders of the kingdom are the borders of the galaxy, and the universe beyond is a hugeness of steel giants that hurtle past in gleaming streams by day, and by night they are fewer but their unblinking eyes blaze light like twin comets, and each giant is larger than the palace of Isolde the Beautiful.

  The kingdom is contained by a web of rust that stretches high into the heavens, its links interlaced with bushes and branches, vines and seed pods, rattling brown in winter like the hands of dead infants groping through a cemetery fence. The many trees imprisoned within this enclosure soar even higher, and help to obscure the kingdom from the world beyond the rusted web. This plot of land has been thus portioned off for decades, and the people of the town outside do not know or even question who owns it. Perhaps it is part of the land owned by an old mill next door which was at one time converted into a plastic molding company but has since been divided into smaller spaces for offices, a print shop and a shoe store. One could easily fit a twin of the old brick mill into this fenced-off strip of land, but nothing has ever been built here. Not by the people of the outer town, in any case, who walk or bicycle or drive past every day, tossing over the fence a discarded coffee cup or gum wrapper, soda can, full bag of trash. Their parents and grandparents might have thrown their refuse over that fence, sending it thumping and tumbling into another realm silently and secretly conterminous with their own. Of course they suspect that there is furtive life down in that hollowed spot, which dips below street level like a foundation into which no building was ever socketed, but they do not fathom its nature. If they were to pause to imagine it at all, which they do not, their speculations would end at the squirrels and birds and many insects which do indeed thrive within the apparently vacant lot, but which do not represent its only citizens.

  Act Two: The Spiked Brain

  Tristan raises his face from where it was pressed for many hours into the dry dirt beneath the strata of dead and decaying leaves; it will be easier to soak traces of life-giving chemicals or oil into his pores when spring returns and the earth gets damp and spongy. He jerks himself to his feet, his movements quick and bird-like, darting looks around him at the graying dusk as he becomes active once again. His head is that of a very old jester doll with its stuffed cloth body long rotted away; even his bifurcated belled hat and the cottony inside of his skull are gone, leaving a hollow into which he once inserted a plump and thorny green chestnut which has since gone brown as a sea urchin. His skin is cracked and partially blackened, but his eyes are bright, nose aquiline, his smile brave if his lips are no longer red. Before he was fully sentient, others made him a body of sticks and small metal bits wired together into articulate joints, and his clothing is black tatters that stream from his arms like lacerated wings.

  He is in his tiny chamber hidden within a large heap of dead and fallen branches toward the back corner of the kingdom, and stoops to follow a twisting, scratching passageway through a barbed maze of twigs like brittle, grasping fingers. The tangle of branches which makes up the palace of King Mark has been fortified and combined with scrap metal and rain-warped cardboard, garbage bag plastic and ceiling tiles, tinfoil and hubcaps, and he passes other rooms and even tunnels that descend into subterranean levels before he enters the throne room of the King.

  King Mark sits on a block of wood from which nails protrude, his hands resting on green glass telephone pole transformers. His head is that of a military doll with realistic hair and beard which have been shaped with rusty razors so that he has an intellectual receding hairline and neat goatee. He has a plastic scar on his cheek. Most of his original body is intact, though his feet are missing and he walks by spearing his stumps into the soil.

  Jerkily and silently, Tristan approaches the King and bows. When he rises, the King’s assistant, who has a spindly scarecrow body like Tristan’s but without a covering of clothing, and whose head is the denuded skull of a squirrel, traces intricate lines and patterns into the dirt floor while the King’s arms wave and thrash and clack against each other in a complex sign language. Tristan nods in understanding. He is to cross the kingdom, and go to the far-flung palace of Isolde the Beautiful at its further edge. There, he is to make known to the beauty the love of the King, and Tristan is to bring her back here.

  Bowing again, Tristan is dismissed, and makes his way through the thorny palace so as to exit it and venture into the evening, which blackens as if the very air mildews.

  Act Three: The Beautiful

  No animals attack Tristan along his journey (one time he was savaged by a raccoon, but he was rescued by comrades who speared it, and afterwards they all lay in its blood to soak it into their pores). He hunkers down sometimes when the steel giants pass the rusted fence, their lights weaving and plunging through the massive tree trunks
around him. The air roars with their passage, as if they are planets racing by. He picks his way like a scrabbling insect over branches and through matted leaves, flicking his head with its unmoving eyes this way and that.

  At last, looming before him is another palace of debris and detritus, flotsam and jetsam, discard and decay. He crouches through the entrance of the palace, and is stopped by twin guards who are connected by red and green wires running from two halves of the opened and dissected transistor radio which composes their torsos. He is admitted, and allowed to duck under their conjoining wires so as to proceed into the heart of the woven nest.

  A loping guide that is a shed cicada husk lashed to three plastic drinking straws for stilt-like legs leads Tristan through halls of soggy cardboard across which whisk millipedes and silverfish. They pass an open nursery in which infants sleep in beds fashioned from styrofoam hamburger containers, stuffed with leaves, twine and cotton. A curious head pops up from one of these nests; it is a red Christmas bulb tapered like the glans of a penis, which turns to watch the pair go by.

  The guide leaves Tristan at the outside of the chamber of the princess Isolde. She swivels her head to face him as he enters.

  She is, as they have heard in his palace, beautiful. Her head is that of a small porcelain doll with delicately painted eyes and lips, most of the paint still intact though her pure glossy skin is spider-webbed with fine cracks. Her hair is a weave of dried flowers, white cotton, and delicate twigs blended into a poignant bouquet. Her finely-formed and articulated body of metal, wood and smooth glass is hinted at through the ragged white muslin that enshrouds it. Her hands are of pink plastic from a less ancient doll, and Tristan aches at their dainty loveliness, instantly imagines them caressing his jutting crescent moon of a face.