Fist of the Spider Woman Read online

  Patty still has not closed the window. Tap, tap. Tap.

  Slug hangs down from the top of the window, suctioning his wet body, his enormous foot, to the exterior pane. There is a loud and sustained squerk as Slug navigates the windowpane at his infuriatingly slow pace. Patty stirs from her half-sleep. Two sets of tentacles probe the glass. Tap, tap. Tap.

  The incoming air is cold and moist. Patty stirs again, shivers.

  Her nipples tighten. Slug’s tentacles fidget impatiently as they work to gauge the size of the opening. The open window is not wide enough for Slug’s impressive girth, but Slug is both lubricated and stretchy. He begins the process of entering her room.

  Patty blinks.

  Slug is six feet of pure muscle struggling to get through her window. Slug is a rippling lump of skin shimmering with beads of rain on top of a more general wetness. Slug is multicoloured, translucent, eyeless, faceless, hairless. Slug’s intricate underbelly is lined with undulating muscles that tremble against the pane, excreting stickiness, excreting slime.

  Patty, torn between horror and desire, cannot bring herself to look away.

  By now Slug has pushed a quarter of his body through the window, attaching himself to the other side of the glass. He pulls himself further forward, inch by thick inch, up the glass until his full length is inside. A pause, a shudder of slick skin, before he continues. He crawls along the wall, staining it with his wet trail as he nears her bed. Hanging down, he fills her nostrils with the smell of fresh soil. His tentacles toy with her hair.

  Slug curves toward her, his back end vertical, attached to the wall, his front end suctioning itself to her shoulder, kneading her skin with his underbelly, like an introduction, like saying hello. Patty sucks in her breath.

  Hello. He twists toward her head. Soon there is mucus creeping through her hair. His front end gropes her forehead, sticky lubricant oozing into her brows, clumping her eyelashes together, choking her nasal passage with a swamp musk. She opens her mouth to breathe. He enters, gropes around, sucks on her tongue noisily with the front portion of his foot, and pushes forward until her throat closes up and rejects him. He pulls himself out with reluctance, works his way to her torso. Past her chin, along her neck, he slurps noisily, slowly, taking his time. The bedsprings bark. As he moves forward, he shoves her camisole down, the thin straps breaking, and flattens both breasts with his weight, his belly gripping and releasing her nipples rhythmically. She finds herself making soft gurgling sounds deep in her larynx. Slug gurgles in reply.

  Then he slugs himself down, less leisurely now, hugging the curves of her abdomen, his tentacles seeking her tunnel. Slowed by an unruly nest of hairs, his lubricant smooths the way, and— at last—he probes her slit, first tentative, then with force. He inches forward, nudging her thighs apart. Patty’s hands claw at the sheets. The wind rustles trees outside. The wind enters the room triumphantly, amplifying the scent of swamp that is beginning to suffocate Patty.

  Slug surges forward, stretching himself taut, easily eight feet long, digging, digging as deep as he can, the bed creaking with every insatiable thrust. Lodged inside her vulva, his front half shifts to suit her, curving back and downward. The rest of his body, resting on her torso, kneads her flesh raw. Under his weight, she struggles to further open her thighs. It is difficult— he is massive, his skin so slippery—but she needs to show him: more, please more. She wants all of him. Slug manages to pull a few more inches of his body inside, his trembling underbelly attacking her canal from all angles, speeding its tempo to frantic bursts. Faster. Harder. Her muscles tense. Faster. Harder.

  Almost. Slug gently chews the insides of her vagina, bringing her to excessive climax. Patty arches, kicks, sucks in so deep she nearly swallows her tongue.

  The room is heavy with dampness. Slug slows to a hum.

  Then he extracts himself slowly, the suction stubborn, painful to break, and rests on top of her, his underbelly engulfing her whole body in its folds.

  Slug has crushed Patty.

  Slug kisses Patty. Slug kisses Patty until Patty can’t breathe.

  Slug is in her nostrils and mouth. Slug’s mucus drips down her throat and fills her lungs. Slug’s mucus fills her body. Patty is drenched in Slug, stuck in him, inextricable. Her eyes are slimed shut, her hair slimed into new skin. Her face is slimed into an amorphous blob. Patty tries to move, but Slug’s weight prevents her. She chokes a little, learning how to breathe again.

  His work done, Slug releases her and crawls up onto the wall behind her. He creeps back over to the window and perches there, his head turning toward her, his tentacles dancing. He emits a gurgle. It seems to mean Come With Me.

  Though she cannot see the limbs that are no longer there, Patty understands that her body has changed. She rolls onto her belly, finding that she can feel where she is with two sets of tentacles attached to what used to be her face. She tries to talk but can only gurgle back.

  Slug nods; he understands.

  Patty follows Slug through the trees behind her apartment building, their slime smoothing them over wet leaves and limp twigs, over thin gravel, the occasional rotting pine cone, until they come to a heavy dampness under a half-fallen tree trunk. Slug turns back and nudges her playfully, his tentacles fondling hers. Then he leads her up the trunk and out onto one of its outstretched limbs. There they mate, Slug showing her how to wrap around his length as he wraps around hers, so that they are like DNA strands, like corkscrews, hanging down from the limb on one rope of slime. It is easy, like love, this full-body writhing. For a long while they are content to lick each other, lapping up one another’s slime and producing more in its place.

  This is the wettest Patty has ever been. Her body is in full tremble, every pore of her skin secreting slime, every nerve channelling excitement.

  Suddenly she feels a new sensation: her cock is beginning to protrude translucent from her mantle to wrap around Slug’s protruding cock, its sensitivity heightened with every tingle of the wind. Like their bodies, their cocks writhe around each other until they are inextricably intertwined. Then their cocks begin to expand, throbbing and massive, together forming an intricate flower that dangles down from their hanging bodies.

  Patty and Slug tighten their embrace further and further still, in sync with their pulsating cocks. Tighter, tighter, tighter; their cocks throb, begging for release. Finally they ejaculate, each fertilizing the other in an extended climax that stops time and thought.

  Patty is dizzy. Patty is exhausted. But Patty has more work to do.

  Because slugs’ cocks often get stuck together after mating, the chewing off of one or both cocks is sometimes called for, and because slugs are hermaphrodites, this is totally not a big deal. Because Slug’s cock is stuck in Patty’s cock, Patty must begin to chew it away, being careful not to chew off her own cock in the process. As Patty gently chews, Slug writhes around her body and gurgles in pleasure, in pain. When she is done, Slug drops down and sprawls on the leaf-matted forest ground for a moment, recovering. Then he creeps away.

  Now Patty is alone, dangling precariously from the tree limb.

  She tries swinging herself over to the trunk but, fatigued, cannot build momentum. Like her lover has done, she allows herself to fall from the rope of slime to the soft ground. Though the fall is not long, the impact stings her still hypersensitive skin.

  Here Patty rests. What will Patty do next?

  Patty will leave the forest. She will creep back to her home.

  She will creep back to her bed. But her home can no longer be her home, she knows, for there the air is dry. She must go where the air is moist.

  Postulation on the Violent Works of the Marquis de Sade

  Elizabeth Bachinsky

  “I am said to have a hard heart, a very bad one indeed; but is that fault really mine? or is it not rather from Nature we have our vices as well as our perfections?”

  —Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom

  Marquis, right now, a woman in Toron
to

  is pushing a length of pipe into a man

  who is paying her to hate him. It’s a strange

  appropriation to finance a woman’s hatred,

  but it’s also hard work to put a pipe inside

  a man. After he’s left her bachelor apartment,

  she’ll roll her drop sheet back and hose it down

  in the tub. She’ll peel away her tall plastic

  boots and rub her calves. Her shoulders

  and her jaw will be sore. She’ll take a bath

  and, afterwards, she’ll make a pot of soup

  and eat it while she watches HBO.

  What’s her transgression, or for that matter,

  his? His torture’s self-imposed; she’ll spend time

  in Venice for her holidays, get more time

  off than a Safeway clerk will ever have.

  It’s too easy to call her a victim

  and he her oppressor. His pleasure

  and her commerce are entwined.

  Perhaps it’s preferable they marry

  so she’ll no longer require a paycheque,

  but an allowance? This ain’t the fifties,

  man, though we’ve still got that atom bomb.

  Imagine! That tool exists which, as you say,

  “could so assail the sun to snatch it from

  the universe and use that star to burn the world.”

  My terror is terror’s ubiquity.

  War: it’s not murder, it’s industry

  and a pretty swell career besides.

  Think of those sitting on death row

  who await appointments with machines,

  their last sensation that of a needle’s

  prick in the vein or a hand to secure

  their restraints. It’s no sweet sexual game

  for the inmate or for the soldier who

  might never know their killer’s face but who

  can put death on their calendar like a

  holiday. There is difference between

  what is real and what is fantasy.

  Marquis, I see you in your cell;

  it’s cozy, despite the racket in the streets—

  all around you, papers and books spread

  open like mouths to mouth your fiction.

  Outside, the revolution raves while you

  have every comfort a man could desire

  but freedom, yet there’s more—even freedom

  is a curse for you. Bourgeois, your own find

  you reprehensible, and yet you are far

  from a man of the people. Where does one

  live when one fits nowhere but in fiction

  and insanity? Even today

  that’s what we call our in-betweens: insane.

  We give them lithium and bus passes and hope

  they melt into the crowd. I think that, in my time,

  you may have loved as you desired. That one

  for whom your whip made passage through

  the night? She lives, anticipates her agony

  one blow at a time—and how she wears her stripes!

  Such is the nature of our theatre, to paint

  the coward’s face with bravery, the bold pallid

  with fear.

  Further Postulation on the Violent Works of the Marquis de Sade

  Elizabeth Bachinsky

  “My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.”

  — Marquis de Sade, Juliette

  It’s true, I loathe what you would have me love

  and, in my loathing, goad your glee the more.

  Marquis, my heart, the heart you’d have me have

  takes pleasure from such crime there is no salve

  to soothe it. Would you have me spell the gore?

  It’s true, I loathe what you would have me love.

  Perhaps you’d like to know that, though we’ve lived

  in such different times, there is no end to terror,

  Marquis. My heart, the heart you’d have me have

  erased, still quickens. Half the planet starves,

  while half the planet fattens; we murder whores.

  I can’t help loathe what you would have me love:

  a vision of the world so dark I’d crave

  to be beaten so as not to see the stars.

  Marquis, my heart, the heart you’d have me have

  must never find its voice. We are not slaves

  to vice as kindled wood is slave to fire.

  Here is truth. I loathe what you would have me love,

  Marquis. My heart can’t be the heart you’d have me have.

  Conspiracy of Fuckers

  Nomy Lamm

  “I feel it pressing in on me, this web of fear, trying to own my heart, my sex, my identity …” My fingers bang on the typewriter keys, pressing out the urgency of the moment. This is the introduction to the ninth issue of my zine, Conspiracy of Fuckers. It’s been almost a year since the last issue came out, and I’ve been promising a new one for at least six months. I fear that this kind of writing could get me arrested in this era of surveillance and dictatorship, but I refuse to be silenced. I refuse to let go of what I see as my reality.

  Ring! The phone cuts into my reverie.

  I should be expecting it, but my heart jumps into my throat and my hands flutter in the air around my chest, my space interrupted. I want to assume that this is a government agent, wanting to derail me from the important manifesto I’m writing. I laugh at myself for taking myself so seriously, and then I get mad at myself for laughing. It is serious. I don’t know if what I write will ever change anything, but I have to do it to survive. It’s all connected.

  “Hello?”

  “Okay, I have one for you, he’s a real nice man. His name is Hugh Billings, he’s going to call you because he can’t let his wife hear the phone ring.” It’s the dispatcher for Gentle Tones, the phone-sex company I work for. The most low-tech dinosaur of an operation, they actually have us call the clients instead of connecting us through a computer system. I work for them only because they don’t ask for social security numbers, so I don’t have to report my wages. I’m not even sure the dispatcher knows my real name; she always calls me Desiree, the alias I use with the callers.

  “I’m not really cool with you giving out my home phone number,” I tell the dispatcher.

  “Well, I could give the call to another girl, but this guy is a regular and he could be a good one for you. Are you sure you want to miss out on it? You might not get another call tonight.” She’s so manipulative.

  “Fine, fine.” I hang up and wait for the phone to ring, pounding out the next piece of my manifesto. “We dare not hope to change our misfortune, instead clinging to the hope of feeling something, anything more than what we are told is real …”

  The phone rings.

  “Hello?” My voice jumps up half an octave with a little bit of that sleepy gravel I use to make myself sound sexy.

  “Heya,” I’m greeted by a lilting condescension, hushed, like he’s hiding in the basement. “How are you tonight?”

  “Mm, I’m good,” I purr.

  “I bet you’re a bad girl,” he sputters, and I giggle. “Are you a bad girl?”

  “Yeah, I’m a bad little girl.”

  “Uhhh, I thought so.” I can feel him stroking himself with this thought. “I bet you’re so young, you don’t even have any hair on your pussy. I bet you’re touching that little bald pussy right now.”

  “Mm, you’re right, I am,” I giggle, secretly rolling my eyes.

  “How young?”

  “Hmm?”

  “How young are you?”

  “Eleven?” I won’t go younger than that.

  “Oooh, you’re so bad,” he chides. Slap, slap, slap, I hear in the background. “I can just picture you in your room on the bed playing with that little pussy.”

&
nbsp; “You wanna watch me play with it?” Despite myself, I reach down and start to touch myself My clit is fat and hard, sticking out like a little cock head. I rub it and suck in my breath, moaning for him.

  “I love watching you through the door, just slightly open, just a crack. You’re lying on your pink canopy bed, you don’t know I’m watching you. Oh, you’re just so cute, touching yourself.

  Can you feel it? Do you feel my eyes on you?”

  “Mmm, yeah.” I feel myself start to space out to avoid the fear that invades my body at the thought of being watched. The shades are down, but I know there are cracks that someone could see through if they wanted to. I look around the room, orienting myself to the familiar things around me. The blue velvet couch.

  The pink metal typewriter. My cane, leaning against the radiator. The metal brace I strap around my knee to keep it from popping out of joint. I don’t look toward the windows.

  “Oh, my little girl.” I can hear him collapsing in on himself, his voice going far away. “I’m watching you. I can see you. Such a dirty little slut. I love watching my baby girl touch herself.”

  “Oh, daddy,” the word slips out so easy and simple. “I want your big hard cock. I want you in my pussy.”

  He moans. “I knew it. Daddy’s little slut. Showing off for daddy, you’re such a bad girl. I should punish you for turning me on like this.”

  “Oh, daddy, don’t hurt me, I didn’t mean it.”

  “I’m gonna teach you a lesson, you little slut.”

  I wish I could type without him hearing me. I feel words bursting out of me. Resistance: “You can try to force it out of me, but you can’t touch my power. Me and my girlfriends, my comrades, my people, we are going to bring this shit-hole patriarchy down.

  We are going to align ourselves with the animals and trees and the wind, and after your sorry, self-hating shell of an excuse for a person implodes, we will be here, living in the sunlight and dancing in the dirt.”

  “Spread those little legs.”