61 - The Cunt Seller

"Leroy knows me too well," Latoya said, as she smirked next to her brother. "He knows I can't resist telling you about the sequel to that little story. Given his rather provocative title, I suppose we'll call this one..

THE CUNT SELLER

In the 1980s, the gay scene in Dagon's Hollow was fairly underground. Too many Moral Majority types, and while many people were in the closet, few were willing to venture out to the clubs for a drink and a hook-up. The most active group was the Community Shakespeare Club, which occasionally put on amateur theatricals in drag—and, after hours, the club served as a gathering place for everyone of that persuasion that didn't fit in.

Charles Briggs looked good in a dress. She preferred slinky green numbers, with blonde wigs, which contrasted with her dark skin and almond-shaped eyes. Charlie had been tucking since she was old enough to know how, and was better in heels and with makeup than most of the girls in her high school. University, she hoped, would be a chance for her to come out of her shell.

Instead, she found herself playing Lady Macbeth, drinking bad Canadian rye, smoking Virginia slims, and, if she was very lucky, smoking a reefer and blowing the occasional professor writing a novel about stepping out on their wife. Pickings were slim for any kind of longer-term relationship, and her mother and aunt were always bugging her about dating. They had no clue about Charlie's other life, her other persona. Who she really was, and who she wanted to be.

It was dark, one night, as Charlie staggered from the club. The dress and the wig were back in the changing room; she was buzzed and walking home in her men's clothes, thinking maybe she could trawl a bar or club on her way home. There were a couple gloryholes she knew about...but that was risking a beating if found out.

Such were her thoughts when she passed a brick-lined alley, and a voice called out in the night:

"Miss."

Charlie paused, then hated herself for it. Homophobia wasn't just real in Dagon's Hollow, it could be a ****'s sentence. Only the year before, a lesbian a little too open about her habits was found with a railroad spike driven up inside of her.

Yet Charlie looked to who had spoken, and she saw a man there, or what she took to be a man. The heavy, dark cloak hid all of his body, though he was not particularly tall. His white gloved hands were visible, but there was something wrong about that. Charlie counted, then counted again. The man had only four fingers on each hand. That twigged some ancient memory, some rhyme from childhood.

"Your face, my thane, is as a book where men my read strange matters," she recalled suddenly, from her lines in the Scottish play.

"We will speak further," the man said in reply, and beckoned Charlie closer.

Charlie licked her lips. Was this a come-on?

She took a few steps down the alley, ready to run or drop to her knees as the situation offered. The man led her into a little court, and there was a stall there. He stepped behind it, and laid out a dark cloth. On it were...things.

They looked like six-armed starfish. Not that I had ever seen a starfish, except the one time I'd snuck into the Dagon's Hollow cave on a bet, and seen the paintings on the wall there. Only they looked very much like vaginas. Some kind of fake pussy? I'd heard of drag performers wearing things like those, but these looked really real.

"See, see, our honour'd hostess! The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, which still we thank as love. Herein I teach you how you shall bid God 'ild us for your pains, and thank us for your trouble."

Charlie was too drunk to reply with the appropriate line. Her eyes were fixed on the weird things before me. The little arms squirmed.

"What...are they?" she asked.

"What you wish to be," he said. That strange voice with no discernible accent, like something out of a synthesizer. "If you are willing to pay the price."

"What price? What are you..." and she couldn't see his eyes, but she saw his gloved hands tense.

"You were born with male genitalia," he said simply. "With these, that error in sex can be corrected. Place it over your penis. The iqualoth will do the rest. Offer me that which you would pay for such merchandise."

Charles wasn't sober. Yet memories came back to her. Old tales.

"You're the Tinker Man," she said. She remembered the price. The traditional price. There was always a twist, though. A catch. You were never buying what you thought you bought. Except you were. Charles' head swam. "You want my soul. You're not—I'm not going to suddenly miss my prick, am I? Or get breast cancer or ovarian cancer, or something?"

"No disease, you have my word on that. Nor do we think you will regret it. The price, you understand, is not always for you to pay. What you offer, what we are owed, we will collect, in time, in our own way."

Which is how Charlie ended up dropping her pants in the alley. There was a hole on the other side of the starfish-vagina. A terrible burning sensation that quickly went numb as the starfish touched her cock and balls. Charlie winced as the fleshed withered, the starfish seeming to eat or dissolve them as it settled between her legs, it's tentacles burrowing beneath her dark skin. The burning continued, deep within...dizzy and suddenly nauseous, Charlie leaned against the wall and vomited.

The Tinker Man was already closing up his stall. Putting the pussies away.

Charlie pulled her pants up and staggered home. Glad her mother and aunt weren't awake in their room.

The next weeks and months brought changes. Sitting down to pee was only the start. The puffy labia was, at first, numb and with clear lines that set it apart from her natural skin. That changed in time. The line disappeared, the transition more normal. Charlie found she could feel her pussy, especially the sensitive little clit. Her flat, manly chest grew puffier, more sensitive. Even her face, her voice, became more androgynous.

It was a miracle. But not one that Charlie could hide from her mother and aunt forever.

Charlie awoke one day to a painful cramp. There was blood in her boxers, and with a blush, she realized what was happening. A period. Her first period. Nothing in her life had ever prepared her for that. She dug through the bathroom in the apartment, but if either her aunt or mother uses tampons or pads, there was no evidence of them. Only a dark bottle of chloroform. Charlie wasn't sure what that was for.

Until that night, in bed, when her mother's hand closed about her face.

"It's better if you don't fight it," Meredith said, the silver in her dark, kinky hair catching the moonlight. "Oh darling, I should have warned you about the Tinker Man..."

"Enough," Aunt Allison said, as she crawled onto the bed. My eyes widened as I saw the dark prick that stood out from her body. "I told you we'd have to take matters into our own hands if we wanted grandchildren."

Meredith looked pained a that. She took the rag away, just as Aunt Allison rubbed her big thing against my slit. I was too dazed by the chemicals to move, to fight. Sore as my pussy was from the period, it was about to hurt a hell of a lot more. Weirdly, Lady Macbeth's words came to me once more.

"Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!"

"Oh," Allison said, as she pushed her cock into my pussy. Pain lanced through Charlie, a woman's pain...the first of many. She had at last become herself, who she had meant to be. Her mother held her hand and wiped away the tears that fell from her daughter's face, finally accepting Charlie for who she was.

"You might ask yourself, what the Tinker Man meant, when he said 'What we are owed, we will collect, in time, in our own way.' He does not bargain for souls like a devil at the fishmarket. The Tinker Man works for more esoteric goals. Each sale is part of a plan, set in motion who knows how long ago, and towards an end none may guess. He profits, I think, on each transaction, but that profit comes in the form of strange sins, exquisite agonies beyond any normal currency."

So Latoya said. Before she blew out the candle, Jason asked a question:

"Have you ever seen the Tinker Man?"

Leroy and Latoya glanced at each other, then said together: "Yes."

Then she blew out the candle, and the world grew darker.