Touched
Touched
TOUCHED
I was not obliged to stay longer, not by Edith (a stupid name for a girl—too old fashioned) nor by my drunkenness, which happened with alarming frequency those days and was cured by stumbling for hours and on occasion evacuating the contents of my stomach.
Edith was the last (being the hostess) and thereby felt obliged to serve me endless cups of coffee. I stayed not because I was drunk but because I thought it would be nice to be in contact with some soft female tenderness; something a man like me doesn’t often have.
I thought I was the only one trying, I hadn’t seen that she had been drinking water for the last half of the ‘soirée‘ as she would call it. There must have been something to it otherwise she wouldn’t have caressed my hand as she pushed it away—repeatedly. When I look back on it now after all that has happened I realize that it was fate sliding my hand across the table.
As my flirting continued, and she offered me more and more coffee, tension wound the spring of destiny and I was shocked to find myself reaching for her chin and surprisingly, completely sober.
I looked at her and she looked back as if she were a lamb, innocent and pure (although I knew she wasn’t). We were completely unaware of what was to unfold.
I took her there on the floor and at first it was I who was thrusting, forcing her to open so I could place my seed deep inside of her, then at the apex of our heat a red hot lance penetrated me from behind, passing through me and into her. My hips were no longer controlled by me, it burned as it passed through me and at the same time a cold like nothing on earth rose up my spine and my upper torso shook as if in seizure then an evil seed like a lump of cold dead passed through me to spike her deeply. We screamed in unison, primal and then it was over.
Sophie
Sophie
Sophie
Sophie spoke up; “What’s going on here? Why is Frank leaving?” I realized I was staring at her, I looked down at my coffee as memories of the past continued to drift through my head.
“Something very special happened, a long time ago.” I closed my eyes. I could feel her staring at me. “You need to know, or at least;” I paused, unsure if I could tell her or not. “or at least you need to hear it.” Now I wasn’t sure at all, an arm, surly she would think I had gone crazy, or was playing some kind of game.
“You’re the third, no the fourth person to know about this, and I think probably the last. At least I hope the last.” I stared into my cup deeper, trying to find the bottom. I kept my eyes focused in the cup as I lifted it to drink. If I just keep drinking I won’t have to tell anybody anything. I swallowed little bits, trying to conserve it as long as possible. What if she freaks out, what if she calls the police? I could feel my hand shaking the cup, rattling it against my teeth. What if… who would believe her, the police? And if she freaks out, then we know how she would take it. I guess. I put the cup down, following it with my eyes. This time I could see the bottom, and maybe that helped me to focus.
“Look, you can choose to believe me or not, but I have to tell you from the beginning, in my own way. One day when I was walking home, you see I used to walk home from work, because I was close, I mean I was close to work, well not that close, but I liked to walk.
There was this field, a path really, it was there that I found, well, that I found a…a… a severed arm.” I so wanted to glance up into her eyes, just a quick glance, to tell me if she was still listening. Even a glance in her direction, just to see if she was still there, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to continue the story. My heart began to pound in my chest. My neck started to cramp out of fear, I half expected her to hit me with a chair or something.
“It wasn’t like your typical severed arm, I mean, like you might find on tv or something, that is, it had all of the fingers, uhm, it was about the right size, well, for a typical arm, but I mean how many people find arms, and severed ones at that, just lying beside the trail? How the hell was I to know what one was supposed to look like?” I looked up to face her, angry that she would just stand there to judge me for what I did. She was turned to the side, and didn’t know I had looked up. I knew I had to finish it.
“Anyhow, like I said it wasn’t bent or bruised, or real hard looking like stone, or too soft or moldy or something like that. It was just, well, it just drew me toward it, somehow. I mean, I said it was normal, well mostly, except for the fact that it was normal.
I mean when you find a severed arm in the brush, you expect it to be bruised or cold or hard looking, like rigor mortis, you know, like they show in the movies, but this one was surprisingly, nothing like that.
I mean it was perfect. It looked like someone was just walking along and well, their arm fell off. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not stupid, and I don’t have some morbid fascination with body parts. I mean, I know I should have been shocked, but somehow the shock and of course the revulsion that I should have felt was minor in comparison to my curiosity.
Red Apple – ecdysis
Red Apple
Red Apple
The Apple version 1
Written by Bret Mann,
cover graphic by Dan Courtice
(for the audio version) Narrated by Bret Mann
I’m not sure what happened yesterday, i mean, how could i know? But as per usual I was late to do a job because I was farting around on the computer—Facebook and so on, and I was also catching up on bills which was a good thing.
I had gone from being apathetic about everything in my life to being energized to get on with it. It helped that I had to pay bills to the government and so on but… So I guess I finally kicked my ass enough so that I would get some of this stuff done. Anyway, Monday morning, I had things to drop off here and there, had to pick-up a machine and so on. I was heading over to drop off a door for a wood burner, I passed by a road and I mean, right now there’s tons of apples on the ground all over the place, but it was weird, because when you have a tree that drops its apples the owner’s don’t really care and you know, maybe they pick up some of the apples but there’s usually lots of apples on the road, and as i drove by—i mean the apple was so red and it was a perfect combination of greenish-red, nice bright shiny red like, I had this vision of the red of the Apple in—I mean there was green on it too so it wasn’t really like the fairy tales—but it was.
It just looked so perfect and it was all by itself, there were no other apples squished on the road and there should have been, there should have been some that fell out, that got run over by cars, but there wasn’t—there was just this one apple sitting on the road all by itself.
As I drove past it I thought I could pick it up to have it for lunch, after all it looked perfect but I don’t know what—I mean I drove back and I picked it up and it was so perfect—I just I kept staring at it, it was, I didn’t even look up to see if it was an apple tree that it had fallen from, and now I think maybe it must have fell off a truck but I know it didn’t because somebody put it there, somebody had to have put it there, or something, somebody, I don’t know what they were thinking but anyway, I picked it up and put it on my dash along with all the other crap I’ve got there, and I drove on to my next stop, I kept staring at this apple all the time to the point of almost running off the road, I mean, but that’s not hard with my car it kind of wanders all over the road and needs lots of repairs but anyway, so I went and I dropped off the wood burner door and then I went and I picked up the jackhammer and I dropped some more things off at a friend’s place.
So I’m driving to go do my job and I was taken over by this urge to just eat this apple, like eat it now, I just had to have it, I just, there was something about it that made—it drew me to it, I needed to have it inside of me I needed it to be a part of me—it was like I was missing something—I don’t know if you’ve ever been in love, but if the person dies, or the person goes away or the person says they don’t want to be with you anymore and you just have this incredible feeling of emptiness, something that needs to be filled and I know it’s crazy it’s just an apple sitting on the road it wasn’t a big deal and… But then it was an apple that was sitting on my dash and I was thinking of how crazy it was, and all the stories of Cinderella, Snow White or whoever the hell it was.