Sex Talk

“Are you imaging being her or what?” demanded my wife. “How would you put it in your fuck-book?”

“I--I-- aren’t there more important things right now?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Robert, “but if we remain angry at you we can push the fear from our mind. Or we can feel better imaging you really getting what you want: that fascination with control as a woman you seem to have.”

“And what is it with you wanting my big tits?” added Miss Gilda.

“I’m not answering that,” I said, as I got up and asked the chef, a large, burly, mustached man to use the phone.

“Don’t turn into a woman and let him impregnate you,” my wife said, in a loud, angry, teasing voice. I ignored her, and dialed the Coxs. The number, of course, was easy to find, as the phonebook for that town was very thin indeed, and contained several towns in the immediate area. Cox, Llorena and Lilly-Anne, they were listed as. Like Robert and Roman, I mused, they might as well have been two people. If the whole thing unfolded in a novel, especially in one like the horrendous horror book by Lich, they would either turn out to have been one person the whole time, or have already been collapsed by the author into one character. But this, I reminded myself, was real life, and not something fictional at all, no matter how strange and like a story this all seemed. My real life had become much stranger than any Lich novel, and at least as strange as that erotic diary I kept while in Nevermore.

Llorena Cox answered my call. I asked her to come quickly, and informed her it had something to do with the house.

“I’ll get Lily,” she said. “We’ll be there in twenty minutes.” I hung up and went over to rejoin my friends, who were still trying to prevent the terror of the past day from invading their minds by incessantly discussing the book of sex stories they had discovered.

“What would they do if they found out he wanted to be one them?” asked Miss Gilda.

“And pregnant, too,” added my wife. “Can you imagine?”

“I just don’t know how he can be sleeping with both of us and still so horny,” said Miss Gilda.

“You were sleeping with others, too” I pointed out.

“Well, with each other because you made us,” said my wife. I was about to reply, something about her choice to have sex with the other males in the household when my english muffin arrived. I bit into it. I felt sick. I looked at all the food everyone else was eating and it made me feel sicker, especially the wave of fumes from Miss Gilda’s hot scrambled eggs.

“We should talk about something else.”

“Or we could be silent,” offered Robert. we all seemed to agree, because we each picked at our meals slowly, in absolute silence. Only the sound of the record filled the cafe, the snoring of the chef, waiting for more customers, and the scratching away of Charlene’s nails on scratch-off lottery tickets could be heard. I picked at the muffin, even going as far as to use a knife and fork to pick it apart, so I would eat more slowly, as we waited for the officers to show up and help us with the problem that loomed before us, the problem that we would not talk about, the problem that encouraged us to prefer silence to planning: the house at Nevermore.

I ate my english muffin, carefully spreading butter around the muffin-mush. Miss GIlda ate her eggs, which smelled to me, as all eggs smell, like something intended to make a person sicker, like something that has never in the history of the world been cooked to completion-- especially in a diner. My wife ate a small, green salad, with what might have once (if one stretched their imagination to the peak of the possible) indeed been fresh lettuce and tomatoes. She drowned it all in bleu cheese, further creating a sick stink at the table that did nothing to settle my uneasiness. Robert and Roman both ordered steak and eggs. They requested the eggs be fried, over medium, and each gave exactly the same instructions about what over-medium meant, informing us that most diners get it wrong. It was hard, now, to see any difference between them. It was very hard, indeed, for me to look at them, especially after having performed as I had for them. I tried to think of this as fulfilling my fantasy, but even that did not help: there is a thin line between the fantasy and reality, and what seems like fun and worthwhile in the land of dreams is not always what must happen in the real world. That is why we often confine our worst ideas in the realm of the fictional: this is one reason we read-- to keep that darkness out of the world and only exorcise it through letting it play out in our heads.

As I thought about that method of reading, I thought back to what the spirit had said. It had mentioned The Emperor of Nothing, a book which I seemed to recall had been mentioned before. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I thought about asking the group, but I truly feared that if I broke our moratorium on speaking they would renew their attacks on me with regards to the book of stories I had written while in my dollhouse-induced delirium at Nevermore.

I was still picking at my mashed up muffin when the officers walked in. Strangely enough, Lily Cox was indeed pregnant. She looked almost like I had described her in my book. I looked at my compatriots and found that they, too, were in shock. The Coxs saw our astonishment, and registered it as something slightly different than we had meant it.