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  Redhead this chick was, but she looked like a shaved vulture down there. Still, he stood there until her head flopped sideways—as a result of any number of her current injuries—before he moved forward, allowing his muscles to unclench. Fuck the audio now, what’s the point?

  Leaving the goggles on, he turned her around, unpeeled her from her robe, removed his left glove to feel inside her. She felt like a shaved vulture too—not that he had any experience with them, but he could only imagine them all bumpy and wrinkled. Before he lost steam, he unrolled the contractor bag, sliced it open efficiently (thank you multi tool) revealing more surface area, and positioned it in the center of the floor—away from the glass. He flipped her onto the plastic, bent her over like a rag doll and spent some quality time. Yes he used a condom—3 in fact—he wasn’t going to stuff ‘em with dope and swallow ‘em thank-you-very-much. After the back, he figured fuck this vulture shit. He wanted to see her black nipples (well dark green in this light) staring at him like Christabel. And then once more with feeling; he wanted her tongue, but he got too overzealous and felt her bite down convulsively as her gag reflex kicked in right as he climaxed. Luckily, she didn’t draw blood. Those were latex condoms after all. He used the bacterial wipes and bleach in all her orifices, regardless.

  He decided both breasts would be perfect for his collection. Usually he took either a hand or a breast, but she was a different case—not entirely special since she pretty much killed herself from whatever she had swallowed. Her pulse had stopped somewhere between him tying off his last condom and him slicing into her first breast—so he wanted to be a little daring. In his collection, he only had 3 heads, 4 hands (all left, he was partial to them, being a South Paw himself), one foot, even an upper portion of a left thigh and no less than 14 breasts, either left or right (he was non-discriminatory when he came to what he thought were a woman’s prized possessions). However, he did not have a complete pair of titties in his entire museum.

  Clean up was quickly done. Slipping a pair of creamery breasts —a whole and unseparated pair that reminded him of the chicken his mom used to spend hours cleaning— into zip baggies that he had removed and then replaced back in his amazing pockets was much easier than humping home an entire woman in a bag. Circumspectly, he rolled her onto the floor, face down, and folded up the contractor bag, making sure not to spill a drop. He placed it inside a garbage bag he had found beneath the sink. His little black-light didn’t show so much as a jizz spot or a blood splatter. He knew he was good. He had learned from the best, after all.

  In his museum, back in the now, he placed the bell jar over the new pair, resolving to make the decision about how to keep them looking supple and sumptuous for his collection come morning. They’d keep until then. It was a temperature controlled museum and he was fucking exhausted. Acquisitions were always much more involved than most folks would think.

  Untying his bandanna and running his fingers through his neat black hair, he felt an upwelling that really brought tears to his eyes. As clichéd as it sounds—he felt complete. Turning around, he watched the pearlescent female shapes huddled together in the center of the room, waiting to see the new acquisition push her bathrobed way to the front of the throng. Striding to where they congested into a writhing knot, he could not help but add a little bounce to his step. Sure enough, she was there, gripping a blood stained, striped towel in her left hand, holding her robe closed with her right. The one drawback of this situation—her hair was no longer red. None of theirs were. They all had the same flaccid shade of opaque, not quite gray, not quite white, which made him think of tracing paper and dead sea animals.

  But this baby was no Lucite containment system—it was pure, crystal. His father had commissioned a master craftsman from Waterford when the old man decided to begin training his son in this field. The old man was the one that started this collection, but the son turned it into a museum. Having a hefty background in ritualized magic, the old man didn’t need a containment system per se since the entire basement was its own containment system, but he liked the idea of a large crystal dome as the focal point of the space. Using everything from crystals to runes to salt to shriveled goats’ testicles, the old guy had this place tighter than a seahorse’s asshole. The old man didn’t mind the spirits milling around down there since they were staying down there. The old man, staying true to the paranormal side of their craft kept materialistic keepsakes as a way of binding the spirits in place. The dome was just an affectation, really, but it did provide a kind of anchor for everything else. The old man’s collection had 27 bracelets, 12 wedding rings, 2 cameos, a delicate gold and silver brooch in the shape of a leaf, a pair of ruby stilettos, and a turquoise hatpin.

  Unlike his father, he got pretty easily bored with collecting mere mementos. He didn’t mind taking them now and again. He did like burying his nose or his cock in a woman’s panties—not with her in them, of course, so he usually took a pair from each case. His way took a little more finesse, but—together, the museum now housed more than 60 spirits, all cuddled up to each other at the center of the room under that crystal dome. Even though he had picked up where his old man had left off, literally—adding to wards, adding a few crystals, even adding a pair of baboon’s nuts nailed to the wall—why should he allow these women to roam around down there? They were there for his enjoyment. Hell, the Bronx Zoo didn’t open the cages and allow the exhibits free reign, so why should he? Besides, he liked the fierce tangle of them there at the room’s center. It got his blood pumping.

  After emptying his pockets of his used condoms and wound up contractor bag, his stomach rumbled and he longed for a good shower. In an inside pocket, he found with his fingertips the nearly forgotten broken shard from the wineglass he had stepped on. Thankfully, he didn’t cut himself since he had had the presence of mind to wrap it in one of the antibacterial wipes he had used. Once his disposals were done and neatly wound into a small bundle he’d take outside to the incinerator, he came back into the center of the room.

  Touching his hands to his breast, his lips, and his forehead, he bid his collection a good night before heading upstairs. There was a six-pack of Blue Moons in the fridge to celebrate and he was damned tired, after all.

  Concerning the Storm

  “I’m not sure what it was,” Cassie’s voice was coarse, her head felt like a punching bag that had been emptied of its stuffing, and her eye felt sandy, all tears long since used up. Her ear rung with such a fury that it was hard to distinguish the high beeps and occasional squeal from her heart monitors. She was able to turn her head a bit more today, not easily, but enough to see the partly shrouded form in the bed across the darkened hospital room. The lights above her husband’s bed were off, but the green glow from the myriad machines and monitors he was attached to gave him a strange phosphorescence that made Cassie’s stomach quiver.

  “I have no idea what that fucking thing was, or where it came from...”

  “You expect us to believe your story? How do we know you didn’t just forget the gas on? Lit a cigarette and decide to torch your husband,” pausing to tap tap tap an open notebook with a shiny silver pen, “your husband Daniel and those fine old folks living downstairs.” The man in the cheap black suit snapped the notebook shut with a crack and continued tapping his silver pen on his knee.

  For the past 45 minutes, since Cassie opened her eye— for the first time in more than 2 days, he had told her— the man in the cheap black suit had been questioning her about the night of the storm. She told him plainly what had happened, or what she thought had happened, and he told her simply that she was a bullshit artist. She had laughed hollowly at him. Her dad used to call her and her baby brother bullshit artists, especially when he came home to find all his accounting papers confiscated as necessary components in their backyard starship endeavors. Dad never believed her when she told him those were the only pages that were good enough for the Captain’s Log. Bullshit artist.

  She and Robbie got Dad
back when they discovered, secreted at the back of the topmost drawer on dad’s roll-top desk, a gag-gift from one of dad’s work buddies: a rubber stamp that said Bullshit. Cassie and Robbie spent one rainy summer afternoon happily stamping Bullshit all over dad’s desk folders and book-keeping pads. Cassie still had that stamp. It was part of a masterful plan of retribution on their landlords— hers and Danny’s. She and her husband Danny had been planning on moving for maybe the last 5 years, but couldn’t find the means. But, the week before the storm, things were finally moving into position. They had actually been packing while looking for a new place, hoping to move by the end of the year. Since they fucking hated their landlords, they had cooked up a nice little revenge for years of putting up with the utter nonsense of having their landlords’ aged parental units living downstairs— one of whom had some form of dementia that granted her cosmic permission to shit in the front hallway, fling her half full Meals On Wheels trays (or her dirty diapers) out the front window, and pound on Cassie’s front door at 3am. After packing up a mess of photos and books from the bedroom and clearing wall space, Cassie started weeding through her stash of art supplies from when she had taught Daycare. The master plan hinged on a rather large pot of glow-in-the-dark finger paint. Danny, ever the artist, had watered it down to the proper consistency with which they happily used to anoint the Bullshit stamp. They both got plastered on a jug of sweet red wine while stamping Bullshit all over the bedroom. Danny began creating a massive octopoid creature comprised of hundreds of individual Bullshit stamps— sort of like those Seurat dot paintings with the Parisians looking at the Seine and the ladies with their bustles and their parasols. Cassie had branched out on her own. She painted rude phrases— no curses but just utter childishness like poop, turd burglar and flatulence in letters almost 2 feet high. They had planned on replacing the overhead crappola bulb with a black light when they moved.

  But that wasn’t happening now. No one would see their glow-in-the-dark masterwork. For fuck’s sake, the bedroom was gone. Mostly.

  Cassie laughed again at this no-doubt government employed bullshit artist tap tap tapping his fucking pen. She knew someone like him wouldn’t be able to appreciate the nuance of painting rude words in phosphorescent paint. The dickhead in the cheap black suit was sitting just beyond her direct line of sight. He knew she couldn’t turn her head to the right quite yet because of the bandage swaddling the ruined side of her face and where her right ear had been. So, the bastard sat on her right side, far back in the darkened room. She couldn’t see him properly, just the impression of him and the glint off his fucking pen.

  The only bit of light was the strip of neon over Cassie’s bed that flickered every 5 minutes exactly. It was in and of itself a torture. Cassie’s right eye was bandaged and she couldn’t make out the features of his face, except that he was a middle-aged clean-shaven white guy. She couldn’t tell his hair color because he wore what looked like a fedora. This dude had watched way too much sci-fi. If he had worn sunglasses she would have happily called him Mr. Smith just for shits and giggles. When she had opened her eye, he had been sitting there, tapping his silver pen, occasionally scribbling notes. He never introduced himself or said why he was there— other than to discover the “truth” about the storm.

  “So, I blew up my husband—”

  “Is that a confession, Mrs. Sinclair?”

  “Let me finish you fucking turd.”

  “Now, now. Language.”

  “Language my ass. Who the fuck are you, man? I’ve been in a fucking coma for like 2 days. My head was ripped open. My house was ripped open. My husband lost his fucking legs and yeah, those old fuckers downstairs weren’t anywhere to be found. My cats are MIA and you’re accusing me of, what? Turning into God-fucking-zilla and exploding my house by improperly lighting my stove? Tell me genius, how come the house is still standing? How come neither my husband nor I have burns? How can there be a gas explosion with NO FUCKING FIRE?”

  “Do I need to ask Nurse Jones to come in and give you something to calm you, Mrs. Sinclair? We wouldn’t want that, would we? After all, as you say, you’ve been asleep for some time. Would you want to be put to sleep, again? So soon?” He stopped tapping his pen as he spoke, uncrossed his leg, and sat back further into the shadows of the room. Cassie then noticed that for a hospital, it was quiet, it was dark, and it had no odor.

  For the entire time he had been probing her about the storm, there were no sounds beyond the closed door to the room. The curtains to the window had been drawn closed. There was no light from beneath either door or curtain— and no sound. Cassie had spent a day and a half in the hospital maybe two years back after she had complications after a routine fibroid surgery. She remembered three things about the hospital: the noise, the smell, and the light. Even at 3am the lights in the hall had stared at her through the open door, under the door when it was shut, through the cheap window curtains, from above the bed. When one light was turned off, another seemed to go on. And it was noisy, a constant drone of loud speakers and loud talkers and beeps and moans and screams and I’m here to check your blood pressure, give you medication, check your IV. The only thing missing had been the whine of jet engines and three-year-olds. There were also the persistent smells, the nauseating, cloying, enveloping, startling, suffocating smells of disinfectant, iodine, piss, shit, blood, and death. As cliché as it sounded and as much as Cassie didn’t want to believe it, death did have a smell and no amount of disinfecting citrus cleanser would eradicate it.

  This place seemed completely devoid of all that. But yet here she was... and there was Danny hooked up to more machines then she could count.

  “Where am I? What kind of place is this?”

  “Now, Mrs. Sinclair, you’re in your local hospital. Where do you think you are, the local mini mart?” He chuckled a dry rattling laugh that made the back of her hair quiver.

  “But where are the nurses? The other patients? The fucking street noise outside, man? There’s nothing here but you and me—”

  “You’re getting yourself needlessly agitated, Mrs. Sinclair. Remember, you can’t move your head properly. You’re missing an ear. There is noise, I assure you.”

  “But there’s no smell—there’s nothing here just you and me and my stump of a husband there—”

  “Calm yourself or I’ll be forced to ring Nurse Jones. You’ve been under heavy medication and if you can move your left arm since your right side is pretty, well, mashed, you’ll note the bandages are covering just about everything but your mouth and left eyeball. You’ve truly messed yourself up, Mrs. Sinclair. Can we pause a moment to take stock of what exactly happened?”

  Cassie then noticed his voice had a slight twist to it, an accent that she couldn’t place. Not American. Almost Brit, but not quite. He couldn’t be an FBI agent unless he was an American, right?

  “First tell me who you are, Mr. Man. FBI? CIA? FEMA? ASPCA?”

  “Ha ha. You know full well the CIA cannot operate on American soil and ASPCA, ha. No.” He sat forward quickly and in one seemingly fluid motion, he clipped his pen to the outside of the small notebook, palmed the notebook, laced his fingers together, rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his steepled fore fingers and thumb.

  He moved in a way that made Cassie nauseated to watch. She figured it was the meds, or her ravaged eyesight.

  “So where are you from? I’ll go through it all again, just give me something man. Who are you? Where are you from? I mean, you’re not British. What are you Afrikaner?”

  “Good ear. Most Americans unfortunately think I’m from Australia or, heavens forbid, New Zealand. I am, shall we say, far from home? My family did live for a time in Johannesburg.”

  “What do I call you? I can’t keep calling you man or Mr. Man, can I? How about dickhead?”

  “Now now, Mrs. Sinclair. We were getting somewhere there. You simply need to remember that I am working with your authorities to discover the nature of this situation—”
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br />   This time Cassie cut him off with a growl that quickly turned into a yell: “Fucking give me something. What do I call you? Have the fucking decency or I will call you Mr. Dicky Dickhead Afrikaner Dick from Johannesdick Fuck you cocksucker and you won’t get another fucking thing out of me.”

  Shouting hurt but Cassie felt a release. Her mother had always chastised her about using foul language, especially since Cassie was a teacher. But, as she told mom, she had to make up for lost time. Not being able to use the curseratory arts in the classroom, Cassie had to do it as much as possible outside the halls of learning. Besides, Cassie had had an awesome mentor in the art of cursing. Especially since Cassie’s mom used curses liberally throughout her own periomenopausal years, during Cassie’s childhood. Cassie’s mother played with foul language the way Shakespeare played with poetry— always trying to come up with a better insult, a better way of calling someone a cocksucker. It was a family joke. Cassie fondly remembered one holiday her and her mom singing the words “Mother fucker” to the music of “Father Christmas” from the 1971 musical Scrooge.

  “Call me Mr. Pink.”

  “Fucking seriously? Tarantino fan, huh? Whodathunkit. Okay fine. Whatever the fuck.” Cassie closed her eye and tried to push the ghost of Danny’s screams out of her mind.

  Mr. Pink sat back again, opened his notebook and clicked his pen several times. “And we come back to the beginning, again, please. When did you first hear about the storm?”