 |
|||
|
|
Emily and Oliver
My wife died today. Seven years ago, but today. She walked out the door only to be carried back in, a small wooden urn that stunk of extinguished flames. I love my wife though. Love her. Walking through the door and driving down to the shops into an unexplained tragedy. It wasn’t the impact that killed my wife you see, but the airbag. As the motor company representative told me later, with only a freckled hint of apology marking his face, the mechanism that should have deflated it couldn’t operate. As far as it was concerned, its expansion was still being impeded by some sort of obstacle. My wife – the obstacle! My wife’s pretty head, and she died with it buried in the suffocating embrace of a big white balloon. All I have left are my dreams and my daughter. Our little daughter Emily. She so reminds me of my wife. So like her in every way. I love my wife you know.
I need you to know that. More, in fact. Believe me. Believe me when I say her golden touch ignited my arteries; believe me when I say she was the dawn, every move heralding the fresh promise of a new day. Believe me when I say I sobbed her name to heaven and hell when I heard of her death. Believe me. Love is like falling flailing into a vat of wool. Love is like tripping on a perfumed paving stone. Love is like walking through a mountain headfirst. I don’t know what love is, but I love my wife. It’s very important you believe me. I would never do anything to upset her. I always wanted to please her. I always felt as if I was I a faint scratch on a clear window, barely visible to the naked eye, only apparent when a certain light at a certain angle illuminates the carved scar. She was the light and I the cut, a bare empty scrape on this world. Without my wife, I felt once again invisible, and as her ashes cooled, I found myself static, neither hot nor cold, neither gaining nor shrinking. I was indifferent to passing seasons or changing fads. Hollow to others, hollow to myself, growing hollow to my growing daughter. Some say I love my wife too much.
* * *
When she told me she was pregnant, I remember feelings of fear, of being scared that I might be only second to my wife’s affections. As the nine months passed however, an epic rush of plans and preparations, I allowed an excitement to build up that I knew would eventually take over. Details of midwives, maternity wards and mothering became as second nature to me, another part of my studies of life to be appreciated and analysed, and overall I found little to grumble about and much to anticipate in this. Our child. Mine. My wife’s.
I had never expected this to happen to me. When we met, our love was so strong that I never dreamed we would want to introduce any new element to it. That may sound odd – after all, isn’t the point of a relationship to find someone you are prepared to have children with? I’m not so sure. All I wanted was to hold my wife as we got old, with no interference from anything as I watched her wrinkle and fade. Yet one day I looked at little brown eyes, walnuts embedded in a pink pie, and I could see her mother in my child and I loved her for it.
* * *
After a death, families pull together, strengthening the ties between them in a powerful affirmation of love and loyalty, as if tightening their bonds will ward of an unforeseeable future. Emily and I were drawn together like wrapping paper towards a birthday-present. I remember in the moments after hearing of her departure praying to my wife, promising I would protect and care for Emily as I knew she would have done, that I would be there for her at all the right moments, and all the wrong ones too, when she needed me but didn’t yet know it. I had sat down on the edge of Emily’s bed, folding her fingers in a ball and cupping them in my hand. She could never hear her mother’s voice read childlike stories again. She could never again crawl in the warm nook between us in our bed and curl up during a storm. She was unable to watch learn and gain from the one woman in her life whose job it was to tell her all the things she needed to know. Emily’s wet tears clung to her reddening cheek, the tiny droplets magnifying pores and skin before gradually cascading onto her sheets and clothes. My own cries joined hers, and we sat amidst rumpled pillows and duvet, slowly sobbing away the night. Lined up against the wall, Emily’s stuffed toys watched in haunting silence, like everybody else unable to say anything to take away the pain.
* * *
One weekend, two or so years later, all glorious June sunshine and open skies like a clear conscience, I drove Emily down to the seaside. We climbed up a narrow path cut into old hills, rising higher to the top of the world. On the crest we broke out onto an idyllic panorama that locked us in deep silence. A sandy smile stretched a mile or so from the bluff we were on to another distant valley top. On the left of the beach crawled the town, on the right, the rolling waves. Boats dotted the twinkling sea like sugar on a cake and Emily and I ate up the view.
Emily sat on a grassy mound, focussing now not on the picture postcard in front of her but instead wondering at a busy spider spinning his silk in a nearby gorse bush.
“Your mother didn’t like spiders,” I said, filling in the quiet.
“Why not?” Emily asked with all curiosity.
“Well,” I paused “some people don’t like things” I continued “You know, bugs, bumps in the night. Money. Stuff like that. Things that scare people. Like spiders” I finished.
Emily waited before answering, gazing closer at the scurrying creature. His web glittered under the sun, its parts shining like white neon tubes.
“I’m not scared of spiders,” said Emily at last. “In fact, I quite like them. I think I like all living animals. Everything. Anything that’s alive must be worth living.”
I smiled warmly at her logic – it was the kind of thing I might of said, and as much as I don’t enjoy mosquitoes, snakes or sharks, I don’t feel I can deny their right to life without thereby denying my own.
“Well, you’re mother didn’t really want to kill spiders, more to simply avoid them. You’re mum loved everything as well – especially you.”
My words trailed like vapour after a plane and I could see them condense and weigh in the air. I stared at Emily and laughed and tried to change the subject, asking about the wind, was that alive?
“Of course,” she answered immediately. “That’s where mummy lives.”
Instantly she had stopped me and dropped me back in time to the day we had scattered the ashes in a wet grey breeze. The flakes and particles of a once proud body whispered and whistled in the gusts, tugged by invisible currents that twisted them momentarily into a split-second burst of smoke that seemed to swell and evaporate in an instant. That was the last time I ever saw my wife. A faceless cloud surrendering to the eternal breath of nature. Now though I could see my daughter, and in her I could see my wife. I love my wife. And I love my daughter. I swept her up in my arms and held her.
“Yes. Yes she does. Do you want to visit her?”
Her face broke out in a child’s rash of puzzlement, pressing closer to me as I hugged her.
“How?” she timidly asked.
“Trust me,” I responded. “Lets take you into the wind. Into mummy.”
I held my arms out and her little fingers grasped my hands. I squeezed tight and rotated on the spot, swinging my daughter round like a pendulum as I spun through 360.
Emily flew through the air, brown hair unravelling, clothes flapping like sails. We turned and turned under the powerful sun, dancing across springy grass, bounding over our cushioned earth.
“You are the wind,” I shouted to her laughing screaming sunny face. She was holding her head up, staring at me with wide wide eyes as I swung her and I held her gaze as we continued to fly.
“Say hello to mummy,” I continued as loud as I could and as I stared back, hers was the face I could see; my wife’s laughing face, asking for me. A curious metamorphosis seemed to occur. There had always been a resemblance of course, but now, watching my daughter as if for the first time, it was impossible to determine where her features ended and those of my wife began. Imagine two shadows merging in the same space. Together creating one altogether more powerful entity, yet changing light and movement allows individual expressions of the hues and texture of each. Something similar had happened to Emily, so I felt I could never again look at her without wondering whose face I was looking back; hers or her mothers? My wife, my daughter and I, becoming dizzy from the spinning.
“Hello,” my daughter shouted.
“Hello,” I shouted.
“Hello,” my wife shouted.
Our movements calming like a slowing roundabout I brought Emily back to Earth. She touched down sweetly and laughed some more. Her head went back, raised toward heaven and the mouth opened revealing grinning alabaster teeth. Exuberant peals of laughter rushed past like stallions loosed from a corral through a painted white gate.
“Mummy says hello,” Emily said as her laugh faded and we turned away from the sea and began back down the hill.
“I know Emily. I said hello too.”
By my side my miniature wife stood and she stretched out her hand and once more she grabbed my hand and didn’t let go till we were at the foot of the valley.
* * *
Hiding my tremors like a faked photograph, I had tumbled over the inescapable issue of my daughter’s puberty. That she was entering it was undeniable. That I could help her was completely questionable. This then prompted the second most important change to my family. I bought my daughter a pet. A lovely English Sheep-Dog. I saw them as George and Dick or whatever the dog out of the Famous Five was called. Running through fields on hot summer days. Someone with whom she would happily spend time. Perhaps because I refused to let my wife die I was scared to let my daughter live, and I felt I had no idea what to say to her about these changes, as if her questions were hieroglyphics. I watched Emily sprout into womanhood like a beanstalk from magic beans and where necessary this ogre chopped down the mystery surrounding this growth and found himself talking of periods and pregnancies over the dinner table. This explains too I believe why I bought the dog for her, as a companion in this time of change, a confidante with whom she could share her learning’s. Does that sound naïve or odd? I don’t know. Emily was a precocious child, but also a still one, a quiet face that often got swamped amongst louder bigger bullying girls. Giving her a pet to care for was my way of giving her the opportunity to develop her personality in a way that I knew, however much she loved me, was never possible between parents and their children.
* * *
I walked into Battersea Dog’s Home, past the counter at the front, where I explained my needs to a matronly woman as if I was going to a sauna looking for light relief. She quizzed me on my motives, filling me in on the basic priorities, rationalities and brutalities that went into the management of such an institution. Two months per dog, eight lonely weeks to persuade someone like me that they were my best friend. I was placed in the capable hands of Georgette, a horribly caring Glaswegian with buckteeth and bad taste in trainers.
In the compound, the tearing sound of countless barks mingled into an abject roar of canine grief.
“You get used to it,” Georgette said.
I hadn’t asked but I imagine enough other people did.
“What about the ones you kill?” I asked, curious.
“Ooh, you get used to that too. Rub their belly, whisper in their ear, they don’t notice a thing.”
Her motherly attitude griefed me. Having to have Georgette as your last contact before death struck me as an upsettingly cheerful way to go.
“Take me to the ones who die. Take me to those who you kill tomorrow.” I virtually ordered it of this poor vet whom I had just met.
“You’re their saviour?” she asked, her Glasgow accent covering the sarcasm that surely lay millimetres below the surface.
“I…just…want…to help.”
Georgette pointed to a row of cages, sitting at the back, under a thin window that let light cascade in, showing up the floating hair and scum detritus of two hundred dying dogs. A damp fur smell sat in the air like an unburied bone, and I paraded up and down the line-up fingers clenching nostrils.
There was one there. One black and white puppy that stood out as a pedigree in this turd's gallery. Raggedy black hair spiraling into knots, bendy thin legs that he was tripping over, a growl on his face like a perturbed shopkeeper given the wrong change. He would do. He could bring some peaceful harmony into our home, giving us a focus to blunt any sharp words or thoughts. He would do. Trapped in a plastic cage I transported him home, hoping he might be my daughter’s salvation.
* * *
Emily greeted the puppy like a twin, rolling it onto the floor and dropping down suddenly to be at his level. She ran her hands through his chess board coat and smiled at him. The dog growled uncertainly back, and then licked her face in a saliva wave. Emily jumped up off the ground and ran speedily around in a circle, before crashing into me and hugging my legs.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
I really don’t like praise or congratulations, but to see her so elated made me weak. As weak as seeing my wife happy.
“That’s OK Emily. He’s yours. Now, you’ve got to look after him,” I said. He padded to her feet, curling around her shoes. Emily squealed in delight, and he looked up, hesitant at this odd noise.
“Yes, yes of course I will. What’s his name?”
This last comment was directed to my eyes, and I gazed back uncertainly, uncertain like the dog of what my new master required of me.
“That’s for you to decide Emily. Call him what you will…”
Emily span and ran back to the dog, grabbing his mane and twisting playing with him.
“Oliver. His name is Oliver.”
And so it was. And to this day I have no idea why.
* * *
Emily was obviously awakening to her sexuality; becoming self-aware of her promise. Her mother and I had never hid from her, showing our nakedness in a natural and open way that was reminiscent of sleeping under the stars. With no partner however, these exposures had disappeared like a drying riverbed. Now however, I was witnessing their return, but in a totally unexpected guise. It was my daughter who was alive and free, not in her nakedness, but in her naturalness. In her discussions about sex and puberty, she was as honest and candid as a bank statement. It was clear she was an independent spirit, a young girl with most certainly her own thoughts and most obviously her own rules. As a conjurer she would lay her ideas on the table, dealing wisdom like it was a cheap card trick. Her chatter and flare would lie open in the space between us and remind me forever of only one person, dragging me kicking and screaming a million miles back, to a time when my wife ruled the earth and my daughter was an age yet to come. And then I would smile and laugh and pretend I had been listening to what she was saying and try not to think of how much she reminded me of her. I knew that in the yearning voids of my heart, where sun and sound rarely arrived, there would be no second coming. My personal glory had mushroomed and been harvested – no new life would grow here. I do love my wife too much. I love my daughter too.
* * *
Emily developed in the company of Oliver, collecting a power and dynamic as if she was pcking them off a tree, and I watched as she climbed up towards womanhood, and I watched as her body grew into the firm temple that was my wife’s.
“You’re mother should have been here to see this,” I said.
“To see what?”
“You. You’re…You. She would of wanted to be here”
“She’s dead Dad. She’d want to be here to watch you trip over your own feet rather than…”
Both of us let our sentences dissolve like unfinished equations and Emily began to clear the plates away. I stared at the buttered toast and boiling kettle and thought what a dull thing domestic life was without anyone to share it with. Leaving for work after these morning thoughts always left me aroused and frustrated, like a lightening rod on a clear day. My urges were still present, but their outlet was nullified by my mental block. The still-life reality of my dead wife turned me only toward the two-dimensional models of Mr. Paul Raymond Publications…and towards incestuous thoughts of my daughter.
* * *
Hungry, on the train home after work, I turned over the conversations I had just had, turning them over like a damp stone in my mind. A plaintiff passenger was singing a foreign song of far-away loneliness, and the growls of my churning stomach united with him in an exotic angry soundtrack, full of loss and un-fulfillment. It seemed fitting accompaniment to my thoughts of foul sadness and melancholy. In the pub after work, from where I had just come, the talk was all of sex and romance, of who likes who and why. I felt divorced from these entertainments, like a planet on a very slow orbit around the sun, only rarely coming into contact with other bodies. This universal emptiness was hard to bear, difficult to accept, especially when one has been loved as I have. When one has loved as I have. These thoughts played out over the silver tracks, reverberating in my eardrums. Yet they came back differently, altered from emptiness to emotion. In the small of my skull ‘I had loved’ was replaced with ‘I can love’ and a tearing light of pride broke through my eyes.
Not since the death had I felt such heat and I lazed cloudily in its wake. This new climate was unlike any other ever experience, its dazzling solorific energy coming not from thoughts of my wife but instead from my daughter my sun. The thought of her radiance, her beauty, flicked through my body like a million switches all turned on at once. And in a second, the light traveled a year and I realized this was so very wrong. My 15-year-old daughter. Probably sitting at home with Oliver watching teatime TV and dreaming up more romantic advice for me to follow blindly. My 15-year-old daughter? I’m coming home fantasizing about her? My heart murmured in condemnation and my wife stared at me disapprovingly and I stared back and Emily stared at me enticingly.
* * *
Looking in the bathroom mirror later that evening, my face became transparent, obscured by feeling and fantasy. Instead of my own reflection, I saw another, more perfect visage appear. Emily. My daughter’s face. No, my wife’s face. My wife’s face. But however much I tried to make to her face stay, all I could really see was Emily’s. Her face painted in the glass, glorious technicolor so vivid I could almost touch her. I can almost feel her. Whatever lens I’m looking through pulls back and I see she is there, the only one for me. She’s posing for my greedy eye, naked and flesh and fresh in a summer breeze spiralling into my eye and up to my nervous system. I can touch her, I can feel her. The silken rub of nubile skin pulled over still forming fleshy tissue, like lush verdant grass carpeting a gradually rising island. My daughter. I shouldn’t be thinking this. That’s not my daughter, that’s my wife. My wife is dead. I can never embrace her again. This is the next best thing. This is my daughter. God help me. Her buds, small and sweet and coloured like meringues. Her hair, growing like spring, a winding garden path down to her unopened gate.
I want to fuck my daughter. I’m dreaming about fucking my daughter. No, not my daughter, but my wife, but my daughter’s face keeps appearing like… Maybe I do just want to fuck my daughter? The princess in the mirror laughs and advances and reaches out and my balls flop over the edge of the sink and I’m tugging at my dick and I’m imagining the sun on her flat back, her hips buckling against me as I take her on the edge of a pool. Her arse is high in the air and my hand is on her head tearing her hair like a leash and I’m dunking her head in the water as I slide in her sticky mess. I pull her up and she coughs and chokes and laughs and I dunk her again and again and she laughs and I fill her and fuck her and fuck her and fill her and as I explode I pull her head up to laugh for the last time and she is dead.
I scream when I come, screaming with anguish and disgust and exhilaration. I vomit into the porcelain bowel before me, the bile and effluence of my rotting stomach thundering out and around in the basin, mixing with my opal semen in a concocted garbage of waste and scum. Has any man ever been as shameful as me, to masturbate over the choking sex of their daughter? To dream an impossible unforgivable dream? God make me pay for my actions. God, turn me into a dog. A filthy, shit-eating scummy dog. I turn to face my punishment, and everything fades to grey.
* * *
When I awoke, Emily looked at me, looking with more love and tenderness than I have ever seen before. What was she seeing now that wasn’t there before? I felt as if she was looking through my frail skin, past acne-scarred cheeks and apologetic lips into a new, never-before seen visage.
I made to speak, but for some reason the words caught in my throat. I pushed and pushed trying to force my thoughts to free themselves from their oesophageal prison and into the calm air between us.
“There, there,” she was saying. Oh my blessed daughter, Emily. Why do no sounds exhale from me apart from muffled whines and coughs? I must have been in an accident. My daughter has saved me. I am saved.
“There, there,” she continues, stroking my hair. Such affection from her, I never believed possible. My daughter Emily. Her small hands, English-white and thin like an albino spider caressing the nape of my neck, rubbing me, touching me, feeling me.
“There there Oliver, there there”.
I’ve only once run cold, been so stilled by another’s words that my temperature plummeted my heart ices and my mind freezes. That time? I was very young, younger than I ever felt before, hurt by a look and stopped by her words. I forget what they are now. It’s not important. These words though…that name. That's not my name. That is our dog’s name. Our mangy dog I rescued from death.
I try to get up and fall and flail like a newborn. With a mothers’ concern does Emily hug my stomach, holding me solid as I trip and trail on the carpet. I look down where my hands should be. My trusty hands. People know their hands. They, to use a cliché, know them like the back of their hand. Hands do not change. Hands are not matted black hair with protruding claws, joined on inelegant furry legs, bending like pipe cleaners. These are not my hands. I am looking at paws. Horrible, spread wide paws scrambling for balance.
“There, there”
I look over my shoulder, twisting my head like a freak show attraction. I can see down the path of my back – my haired, mangled back, ending in two bent awkward legs ending in two more paws.
I fall to the floor, legs buckling underneath, and chest collapsing onto solid ground. I am my own dog. My pet. As soon as this awareness kicks in, so do the changes. Extended senses swamped me.
Needles by the million plunged into skin, breaking flesh and tearing bone. My body stretched and pulled in opposite directions. The hairs on my shoulder blades spread and run across me, a garden of fur feeding at an impossible rate. Fingers and toes were lanced as claws un-embedded themselves from long dormant crevices and gripped weakly. My mouth leaks and drooled ferociously as sharp canines sprouted from human milk teeth.
An intense tingling train rushes into my ears, getting louder, louder, pounding and breaking in the side of my head. I am blinded by the noise as this ghost-train screeched to a halt in my eardrum and called ‘All Change’, and after it goes I can hear the taps dripping upstairs and the postman walking up next-door’s path and a car reversing three streets away. All these clashing sounds, please, stop, ringing in my ears like a funeral chime.
My perception fragments; clarity and detail became impossible to ignore. I saw the cracks in the leather armchairs, the chips in the ceramic, the grooves in the vinyl, all the little elements of distortion and decay that we spend so long seeking to ignore. Such improvements however had nothing on the paramount change to my sense of smell that occurred as the mutation took over my mind after having so changed my body. Odour. Odour everywhere. In the carpet, under the chair, from the kitchen, the bathroom, the lawn outside. A million scents and smells coming at all directions. Closing my eyes offered no protection, no respite from the damp forest smell of the paper pictures on the wall, from the burnt plastic whiff of the blue-tack behind it, from the sweatshop stink of the Taiwanese telly. No respite from the fragile smell of my daughter. She smelled like my wife, only my wife never smelt like this. This was…deeper. Much, much deeper. There was her husky odour, but magnified, blown up like it had been bottled by a mad scientist and manufactured beyond belief. I could tell the potent shards of sweat and mingled heather and flowers that merged into her unique aroma. I could feel my wife’s pheromones grab me and envelop me and I murmured and whimpered and my daughter hugged me tighter and closer and there was a new smell in the air.
Sticky, sweet, promising. The smell of sex and sexual excitement. Strong and intense and promising. My daughter’s swelling vagina, breathing, exhaling the sickly scent in rhythmic pulses that bewildered and confused me. She held me deeply, and wrapped her arms around me burying face in fur and I started to feel afraid.
“There, there. Who’s a good doggie?”
My daughter, her fresh body producing powerful unseen forces, gripping me like I once wanted to rip her.
“Mmmmm, doggie, you know what I want, don’t you?”
I could feel the beginnings of a canine erection build below the surface, and I wished hands for paws so I could tear myself to pieces.
“Come on Olly, come on baby. Come to Emmy, come in Emmy…”
Her quiet voice burnt like magnesium, rushing through my veins, drowning my heart in equal measures of lust and revulsion.
I can’t believe my daughter is doing this.
“Oooooh, doggie, aren’t you a big doggie?”.
The hand of my daughter snaked under my coat and clasped my rising animal instinct. She swallowed it with her fingers, caressing up and down and along as my panicking mind released itself in barks and growls.
“You like that, don’t you Olly? Yes you do, yes you do! And you know what I like don’t you?”
She slipped her free hand down inside her skirt. Her slight hand was now trailing expressively along her leg, frictioning against the soft fur in the last nape of her legs. Her free hand continued to shape me; she was leaning back now, her left foot up, resting on the arm of the blue sofa in which she reclined. I stood between her legs looking away from her, whimpering and occasionally turning to see what I could see. And when I did look back, I could see her smiling.
The fragrance, which had first so stopped and startled me, now hung gloriously in the air like an erotic incense stick, permeating cloth and cold air with sincere smellable emotion. She looked so luscious, like a peeled fruit, its juices glistening, its flesh tender and exposed.
Rotating away from me, knees fell in front of sofa, stomach flattened over the seats, hands pushed down in giving cushions and face buried itself in the upright join of seat and back. Whilst Emily was so moving, she was calling me, calling me someone else’s name, painful like high-heels on steel stone. I can’t deny my excitement though, a secret thrill starting to leap in my heart like lost balloon. She slapped her buttock impatiently, and the blow caused oscillating ripples to spread across her cheek like a pebble fallen in a pond. My daughter. Demanding my body. Opening hers up for me, ordering me into action. My wife used to do that to. I love my daughter.
I scampered onto the sofa, and her. My two front paws land next to her hands, the flop of my stomach fell onto her back. My back legs dangled between hers, resting on nothing, and my dog phallus was swaying gently nowhere. I wriggled and pushed down further on my fore legs, placing weight on them to begin a series of short jabs with my hindquarters, aiming to dagger my way into her. It was hot and burning in there, and my new fleshy tool was enveloped in a sensual humid bath of juice and flesh. Through the rough fur of my belly her latent temperature warmed me like a radiator, thawing me of doubt and worry. It reminded me of my wife, of her un-coolable ardor, and as I thrust and thrust I watched her face in my mind and the cries I heard were distorted from those of an adolescent into a mature woman's. They took a fuller, deeper timbre, the squeals switching seductively into moans, urging me on with increased resolution into the reddening nub of my daughter. My wife.
My length grew harder and longer, reaching more painfully into her crevice, and I marveled at the strength and domination. I laughed and the sounds came out as coughs and barks and Emily spread her legs wider and let me push in deeper.
"Yes Mr. Dog, yes Oliver! Yes"
Her words meant nothing to me; I knew that the expressions I heard were those of her mother, calling louder for me to come inside her.
And at that point when my bursting frustration was about to flood my daughter my wife, the sound of a key in the front door changed everything. Crashing back to me came fears of answering the door, of bad news lurking in the empty spaces outside. Once more, I was powerless to stop them walking inside, and in sweating terror did I listen to the approaching conflict. Emily was too engaged in absorbing my prick to hear anything, but she immediately noticed my slowing. The fragile human senses were developed only enough to recognize when something was wrong, and I wished there was something I could do to stop it.
"Olly, what is it Olly? Why are you stopping?"
The questions were a catalyst to me, a spark to my dynamite, and I pushed away one last time knowing I had to finish what I had started. In the hall, the strange figure stumbled and hesitated, and in those seconds I saw my wife more clearly than ever and was rewarded with triumphant, gushing hot evaporation into her.
"Yes, yes" she cried, and I gasped and growled and the door to the living room swung open and I walked in.
Standing framed in the entrance was me, but me as I had never seen myself. All my life I had only ever seen bits of me. My hands. My lower chest and legs. Occasionally the edge of my shoulder. But never all at once, except in mirrors where things were reversed and odd and I was never really sure it was me anyway. Now I stood colossus and I realized what a slight man I really was. Yet were those really my eyes? Did I really stare at the world with such contempt, as if it were a piece of shit at a child's tea party? And as I realized whose eyes I was staring at, the blows came crashing in.
Two dog eyes were watching back, two dog eyes sitting in front of a dog mind in my human body. A jealous dog body that didn't want to see me enjoying what was his. The first punch detonated in my rib cage like a torpedo, bruising and breaking and sinking me. A flurry of fists came quickly, those furled fingers crashing in until I slipped off Emily's back.
"No. No daddy, I'm sorry daddy, no!" Emily cried in despair.
But I, he, didn't say a word, and My diminishing rod was wrenched out of her, watery liquid of life still pumping like a pregnant fountain. Collapsing on the floor, I advanced and began to kick myself, beating myself into a scarred, scared lump that bled temperamentally on the carpet. Emily made to get up but I, he, pushed her hard back onto the sofa. She fell and screamed, a girls cry, and I wondered in dismay how I ever saw my wife in her teenage face.
With one final foot to my jowls I left myself a sodden broken pile of shame and misery in the corner, limp semen still venting itself from my broken body like pus from a squeezed spot. I watched myself turn away, realizing I was not worth any more effort. Instead, the dog-mind in man-body walked the short space to my daughter, creeping into the sofa like a trying-to-be lost remote control. I watched as it slowly undid the buckle of my belt and let my trousers fall to the floor, a revolting smile scarring what was once my face like an open grave.
"Daddy, I'm sorry daddy,” Emily cried, wet tears slipping down her face like miniature fireworks.
He didn't say anything.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. It’s not your fault. I thought.
It reached out to touch her and she turned her face into the cushion in fear and as it moved away the palm flattened and slapped her cheek. The graze stung and resounded in the air like a burst tyre. The chimera tugged my boxer shorts down, hands grappling awkwardly with the unfamiliar pile of clothing building up around feet. I could see my penis thud like a drum, taught and ready to hammer out a beat, and I watched as he tore my daughters legs apart and squeezed in between shaking knees. Those hands glid up her soft legs, rubbing harder and harder, and at the skinny waist of my daughter my rough caressing stopped, and instead she was held hard, a vice trapping her wriggling form.
“Daddy, daddy, I’m sorry” she said slowly to my uncomprehending face.
As I constricted and miniaturized in the corner I watched my daughter expand. Her limbs took on new length as she stretched her legs out far and high, raising them over my rocking back. Her arms, from being bent double by her side grew like vines until they wrapped themselves around my neck. Her cries, which had been full of despair, seemed to mutate into full-bodied passion, so that whilst the words stayed the same their meaning changed beyond all comprehension, and in my head all I could hear was the blurring merger of vowels and consonants like some untranslatable language.
“Daddy, daggy, doggy.”
I tried to look away, but the savage attack left me in too much pain to move, and I was forced to watch myself fuck my daughter again and again and again. Eventually I stopped thrusting and withdrew. I turned, and saw myself in the corner once more, and became angry with myself for watching, and again my own body beat me, my dog’s angry orders dictating my own body’s movements. Emily sat on the sofa glowing and sobbing in equal measure. Once more a foot was aimed for my head, and for the second time in two days I passed out.
* * *
And this is where I woke. In a concrete catacomb, lit only by a thin strip of light above my head. We have one hour of afraid daylight before buildings and orbits take it away again. I’m not surprised the sun was scared to shine here – I’d come here once before, and until now never contemplated returning. The dog’s home. The dog’s final home. I am surrounded by yapping beasts that recognize me as an intruder despite my appearance. They turn on me, held back only by the fishnet wiring that protects me, shouting and accusing me. They can smell the man in me, and the daughter on me. They hate me. They loathe me. I crawl in the corner, sipping from my bowel, taking the last sips I may ever have. My wife died today. Seven years ago today. Now it is my day to die. Eight weeks have I paraded myself before potential owners, praying to be taken into the bosom of another family, but something is always wrong. Too old, too black, too white, too scary, too scared. Not lovable enough. Soon Georgette, the over-involved Glaswegian vet, will rub my belly and I will pass out for the last time. Some say I love my wife too much.
The End
|
|
|