What I'm About to be Reading

By Lisabet Sarai

I'm writing this on the 31st of March. Tomorrow morning, I will be embarking on a lengthy journey, from my home in Asia to the east coast of the United States. Optimistically, this means about 20 hours in the air, not to mention waiting time, transfers and so on. If all goes according to schedule, I'll arrive at my hotel in New York about 26 hours after I leave my apartment.

Lengthy plane flights aren't much fun, but living half a world away from my family and many of my friends, I've learned to endure them. One of the best ways to make the time fly (so to speak) is to lose oneself in an engrossing book. For a trip like this, I tend to prefer one long novel rather than several shorter books. I'm not likely to get bored (I'll be too exhausted), and I don't have to use up valuable carry-on luggage space with multiple volumes. The book should be something with a lot of plot, something that doesn't demand too much intellectual effort but which has enough excitement to keep me awake. (I don’t like to read ebooks on a plane. I get a headache.)

In preparation for this particular voyage, I bought a copy of A Game of Thrones, the first book in George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire saga. I don't watch TV, so this is going to be mostly new to me. Everything I've heard about the book and the series sounds promising, though. Three dimensional characters, intriguing cultures, a touch of magic, and lots of action. (Sex too, I gather...) And the novel fits my external criteria; it's nearly 800 pages long, yet not too heavy.

Fantasy—if it's well-written and original—has always been one of my favorite genres. In high school, I was totally enthralled by Tolkein's Middle Earth. I knew it inside and out. I even did my senior English thesis on that fictional world.

I note that the book I discussed during our last "what are you reading" cycle (Winter's Tale) could also be categorized as a fantasy, as would the other book I mentioned in that post, John Crowley's Little Big. And I recall that on one of my most enjoyable (well, least aversive, at least!) plane trips in recent years, I read Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, another fat (650+ pages), juicy fantasy full of creative ideas.

I'm hopeful that The Game of Thrones will be equally good. It's actually quite rare for me to explicitly purchase a brand new paperback book. In fact, I tried to find a copy in several used bookshops, without success, though I did find some of the later volumes in the series. It occurred to me that this scarcity might indicate that readers wanted to hold on to their volumes, perhaps to read again. A good omen?

Wish me luck! I won't be back until the third week in April. I'll catch up on comments then.

Oh, and for the trip home, I have Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. A nice, meaty 900 pages!

The Red Dress

by Jean Roberta

Everyone who was raised female knows that men can be dangerous, and that going out on a date could mean never coming home. Yes, I know that Not All Men Are Like That, but any woman can be targeted, and women who get killed are 100% dead. Women who survive to report being abused in any way are suspect: why didn't they know what they were in for? If it was really that bad, why are they still alive?

This is the dark side of social interaction between women and men, known as the gateway to Romance.

Native (indigenous) women in Canada are so much more likely to go missing and (sometimes) to be found dead that a social movement has formed to raise awareness of the data and to honour the names of specific women. Here in Saskatchewan, one of the prairie provinces, 20% of the population is of native descent, and a whopping 59% of women who go missing are native. Contrary to widespread belief, most of them are not sex workers.

Images of red dresses, usually in outdoor settings, dramatize the absence of the women and girls who have gone missing.



By now, there have been several red dress art exhibits in various cities, mostly on the prairies. As far as I know, the first one was in Edmonton, Alberta.

Here is a news item:

In a stand of barren trees in Edmonton's Alberta Avenue neighbourhood, 40 red dresses have been suspended from shorn branches and left to sway silently in the street.

The dresses — which encircle a bare, uncovered teepee — are meant to represent Canada's missing and murdered aboriginal women, says Lori Calkins, the artist behind the new outdoor art installation on the corner of 92nd Street and 118th Avenue.

"Each of the dresses represents about 30 missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls, and their families," said Calkins during a Monday morning interview on Edmonton AM.

Calkins, a Métis woman and Anglican priest, says the dresses are meant to act as a striking reminder of the ongoing epidemic, and an act of reconciliation.

"We hope that people will see that there are hundreds of indigenous women and girls that have gone missing or have been murdered in this country," Calkins said. "Indigenous women are not being valued and that needs to change."

In the entrance area of the Ad-Hum (Administration-Humanities) Building in the university where I teach in the capital city of Regina, Saskatchewan (just to the east of Alberta), there is a red dress made of tissue paper with pale wings suspended above the back. It's a project made by students in an art class. I find it incredibly moving.

My spouse Mirtha (who has a visible amount of native -- Mapuche -- blood from Chile) and I are currently rehearsing for a performance of the Vagina Monologues that we take part in every year, organized by a young native woman. Most of the performers are native. We always wear red and black for the final performance/reading. This year, we will also bring red dresses to be strung on a line behind us on the stage. The dresses will look like a kind of silent chorus, or audience.

Over the years, I've learned the names of native women who have been sexually assaulted and killed in this town: Elaine Flowers. Jewelle Judith Gambler. Pamela George. There is the young transgender woman who lived with us temporarily as a foster child, then went missing after she moved out. There have been women who stayed in the shelter where Mirtha worked, who were later tracked down by the men they were escaping.

A white male federal politician created a little media firestorm by saying something that many of us already knew: much of the violence against native women comes from native men. This doesn't cancel out the combination of racism and sexism that motivates white men (and possibly "men of colour" who are not native). When I hear that someone I know (or a close friend or relative of someone I know) has gone missing, I don't care who dunnit as much as I want 1) the victim to be found alive, and 2) the perpetrator to be found and locked up, whoever it is.

Mirtha doesn't like to go anywhere alone if that can be avoided. I comfort myself with the thought that she is too old to attract predators, most of whom seem to hunt for juicy young women between puberty and age 30. Still, I would feel more comfortable if she went everywhere in a suit of armor, and had the legal right to carry an arsenal of deadly weapons.

The relatively new, Liberal federal government of Canada (widely represented by a photogenic couple, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Gregoire) has promised a national enquiry into missing and murdered indigenous girls and women. We shall see. A few suspects have been arrested, and that looks promising.

Besides an alarming number of girls and women, the other thing missing from this situation is a confession by even one of the perpetrators. They don't say what they did, or why they did it. In most cases, the assailants are never identified, let alone convicted.

As a writer, I would like to understand the mindsets of people who are much different from me, but the consciousness of these guys is a mountain I haven't been able to climb. I feel it's important for me to understand them, even if I'm not their favourite prey myself. As I walk down a street in a prairie town, I could be brushing past a man who recently burned the clothes he was wearing when he dismembered a young woman and disposed of the remains. Did her existence offend him so much? Did he hate her for giving him a hard-on? If he thought of her as part of the local wildlife, equivalent to a coyote or a gopher, why not just leave her alone?

There is a theory that the "darkest," most harmful desires exist in all of us. I'm not convinced of that, but I would like to understand why things happen. I can sense a murder mystery taking shape in the back of my mind.

From The Wound

By Annabeth Leong

I normally like to write nonfiction for The Grip, but I can't resist the opportunity to talk about what I'm working on now. I never do that normally—I don't share unpublished things, and I don't share unfinished things.

I'm working on a book exploring the dark side of BDSM. For me, all too many BDSM romances bring up memories of my own abusive BDSM relationship—my intro to the lifestyle. I've spent years learning better than I knew back then, trying to sort out what I want and need out of BDSM, struggling with my history of trauma and how that plays into kinky desires. I have trouble with all the ingenues in books out there, all the characters being initiated in relative isolation by their masters, all the ways subs are told in stories not to ask questions. I wanted to write something about characters exploring things in a more sophisticated way, within a community the way you can in real life.

I first got the idea for this book a couple of years ago. I was thinking about what relationships might be interesting in BDSM aside from romances. I wondered if it would be possible to center a friendship. So that's what this book is about. It's got sex, but the central relationship is between two friends trying to work out a way to participate in BDSM that is satisfying and safe for them.

I revived it, though, after chatting on Twitter with Xan West about things I'd like to see in BDSM writing.

A lot of this writing is about me engaging with BDSM as I've experienced it in life, which does not reflect the problem-free fantasy I often encounter in books.

The clip I've posted below is from the first chapter, which introduces Joie, one of the two main characters. She's struggling with the fallout of an abusive BDSM relationship. She's still aroused by what happened, but she also feels broken by it. She doesn't know how to deal with that.

The therapist she's talking to is a kink-aware professional who ultimately encourages Joie to explore munches and other non-sexual ways of engaging with the BDSM community.

I've put a lot of autobiography into this book so far. If anyone's read the introduction I wrote for Xan's Show Yourself to Me, they'll recognize one of Joie's disturbing memories, because it's my own.

Anyway, I'm going through this book slowly because it's hard for me to write. But I've made a promise to myself recently to do work that I find important rather than trying to write to what I think the market wants. And while it's perhaps not as dark or violent or shocking as some of the other things people have been talking about over the past couple of weeks, it's my own darkness I'm wrestling with, and because of that it feels dangerous to me.

Here's the excerpt:

Sex, for Joie Word, was like a wound that she could never quite let close. If she left it alone for a long time, it began to fade and seal itself away, but it also began to itch, her body signaling that it wanted to be opened again. She would resist, sitting squirming on her hands day after day in a fruitless attempt to prevent the inevitable misbehavior. But when she did give in, she tore herself apart until she bled.

She masturbated, yes, rubbing herself until her wrists ached and her breath seemed lost forever. But orgasms never seemed to be enough, and soon she was scrolling through her phone for names she ought to have deleted, participating in wet T-shirt contests at bars, and smiling back at people who showed too many teeth while they issued invitations.

A few days of madness, then return to home and abstinence, carrying a body newly marked by uncertain pleasures and a heart stinging from the shards of complicated, still-shattering memories.

Her therapist asked her what she made of all this. She had scheduled an appointment with an eye toward healing the guilt she still felt from her divorce, but once Joie opened her big mouth she could not stop talking, and soon the therapist was calling Joie's insurance company, asking for approval for more than the twelve meetings that had been requested in the initial treatment plan.

Joie tried not to see this as evidence that she was hopelessly fucked up. She closed her eyes. She imagined that, to the therapist, this looked like she was digging deep, and maybe she was, but not for the story she wanted to tell. The thing on her heart was never far from the surface, but she usually lacked the courage to prod or reveal it.

She sat in a room that was silent except for the sounds of a dehumidifier; her own, unsteady lungs; and the therapist's breathing, which came accompanied by a tidy little clearing of the throat every ten or twenty seconds. She fiddled with the upholstery of the too-soft chair that contained her and set both of her soles deliberately flat on the floor. It was too warm in that room, but she wrapped her arms around her chest as if she was cold.

By some miracle of language, she found imperfect but adequate words.

***

Abe Lara was a guy who didn't wear underwear, and who had taken hers away after their first date. That act had confused her more than anything else. She had been so naive at the time that she had not yet understood what control had to do with sex, or what about her embarrassment might be exciting for him.

But was she so much wiser now? Adult Joie, squirming in the too-soft chair, inappropriately turned on before her therapist's wrinkled gaze, was still not quite sure what it was about embarrassment that made her body pulse. It could make her come, but she didn't know if she liked it. Friends who were less screwed up than her seemed to think that things that caused orgasms were supposed to feel nice. Joie wondered exactly how crazy it was that everything that made her feel bad caused that secret tingle at the base of the stomach.

Her heart beat against her ribcage as if trying to beat back the room's oppressive air. Her therapist wasn't going to say anything. Joie was getting enough rope to hang herself, winding braided, unspoken sentences around her body until she knew they would choke her unless she let them go. She snatched a few desperately and flung them onto the floor at the therapist's feet.

Abe Lara was a guy who kept a stash of Penthouse Variations under the bed, and he'd read them to Joie, making it clear that this was a test. She'd nearly come into thin air the first time, hearing about a woman getting photographed and fucked while wrapped tight with rope. That had seemed like passing the test, but later, rummaging through his magazines to read on her own when she was in his house alone, discovering both how urgent they made her feel and how riddled they were with typos, fucking herself to lines like Im a total bandage freak, she thought maybe she had failed after all. She had the sense that this was never supposed to become something that belonged to her.

"You feel your sexuality shouldn't be under your control? the therapist asked.

Joie shook her head, frustrated. "That's not the point." She wished she could insist on what the point was with as much clarity as she could insist on what it was not.

Abe Lara was a guy who liked to make her say yes. To strips of cloth around her wrists. To letting friends watch him fuck her. To wrapping his belt around her neck and gasping for air while she came. To loving him, even if… even if…

She still couldn't say what horrible things she'd loved him through.

Abe Lara was a guy who had a specific idea of who Joie Word was supposed to be. His made-up Joie was a goal he pursued.

One day, they were lying on his sweat-stained mattress. The dirty sheets had slipped off days before and been left to soak their evil bouquets into the never-vacuumed carpet. At first, the bare mattress had felt silky and refreshing, but now it was beginning to spoil, and Joie was beginning to realize that it would be impossible to wash.

With her arms restrained above her and her head twisted to the side, she could smell the past of their fucking, and the sordid details of it had her close to coming. In the present of their fucking, he was inside her, testing his endurance explicitly and hers incidentally. Abe Lara was choking her, and the panic of fighting for air stripped the meaning of excitement bare. Her body was worked up and desperate, as in possibly dying, but really that was a form of arousal like any other, as in Joie was possibly about to come.

Her hips rose toward his. Sex was automatic, a thing of pistons and oil that worked mechanically as intended. It required no participation of her mind, and she was glad—until he forced her to come back to him.

"I made you like this," he grunted as he fucked her. "I created every single thing about you now. I turned you into my very own dirty, filthy little slut."

And Joie was coming, and Joie was crying, and Joie was screaming, "Fuck you," even as her pussy clutched at his cock.

The therapist moved a box of tissues into Joie's reach. The sound the tissue made when it came out of the box was vehement, violent. Joie wanted to masturbate. Joie wanted to tell the therapist to go fuck herself. She scrubbed at the corners of her eyes as if she could use the tissue to eradicate her tear ducts.

***

Joie told the therapist that she had tried to forget all that. She had married a nice man, one who would never have dreamed of calling her his "very own dirty, filthy little slut." He had lavished her with candlelight and jasmine-scented massage oils, and she had tried her very best to enjoy it. When the blush of new romance had worn off, he had sometimes testily requested a blow job, and that was the closest she had come to real arousal with a partner in eight years. She had always made sure to kneel on bare wooden floor, not carpet, and to work his cock down her throat a bit farther than was comfortable.

"I feel like I'm playing into that stupid thing," Joie said. "That idea that girls don't want nice guys."

"Was your ex-husband nice?" the therapist countered.

"Like I said, he would never have called me a slut."

"There's more to nice than that."

Joie thought about the massage oils and the candles, which were supposed to have been nice. But hadn't Thad Felix brought those things to her with an agenda? She had been supposed to love him for that, to look at him with hero worship and adoration in her eyes.

He, too, had tested her. Had she redeemed herself from a sordid past? Had she learned to want the correct things? She had passed when she'd agreed to go out with him. She had failed when she had secretly built up her own collection of Penthouse Variations, followed by broader internet explorations that led to even darker corners than the ones Abe Lara had shown her. Sometimes, it had felt like every ripple of every orgasm was a red pen drawing a circle around her failure, drawing attention to the ways she had been twisted, spreading and pulling gently until that sickness surrounded her in an ever wider circumference.

Joie didn't know what it meant to be nice. Not in this context, anyway.

The therapist took off her glasses and breathed on them with a small, sharp, open-mouthed huff. "Maybe there's a context that doesn't place your sexual desires in opposition with the idea of being nice."

***

Thanks for reading!

Stanley's Resolve

by Daddy X                                            

                                                    

Stanley examined his face in the mirror. 

I must get rid of these pimples.  

Then maybe Stanley could have some friends. Maybe even his blonde fantasy, Maryanne the cheerleader. The prettiest girl in school.

Built. Like. Hell.

But Maryanne already has a boyfriend. Captain of the football team.

Hugh, that handsome fuck.  

What does Hugh have that Stanley doesn’t? Besides Maryanne? And not having pimples?  

Clear-faced mother fucker.

But Stanley is also aware of Hugh’s large cock.

He hurts her with it.

Ahem.

If someday Hugh comes down with lots of pimples? And if I lose all mine? Perhaps Maryanne would like me better than Hugh. A real man has to maintain his resolve.

Stanley is taking steps. Taking steps to have Maryanne all to himself.

She’ll be my girl forever.

There’s that dirt road behind the cemetery. He hides there in a tall hedge on Saturday nights, waiting for Maryanne and Hugh.

That dead-end place where lovers pull a car in tight.

Where the road narrows down to a path. Stanley knows they’ll be having sex. They always do.

Every Saturday night.

Up in the hedge he’s fashioned a blind of sorts. He gets there early and climbs into the branches.  Where the car will be positioned. To peek in their windows.  

Within a foot or two.

Always in Hugh’s car. Sometimes on hot nights, on the hood of his car.

That fucking Beemer of his. Rich cock sucker. He’ll get his.

Like the others got theirs.  

It surprised Stanley to see Maryanne there twice with Carlos Rodrigues, Shareem Peckett and Richard Smiley. Without Hugh.

More fucking football players. They must have promised her something special to get a nice girl like Maryanne to do such things with so many guys.

Stanley took his first calculated steps with those very boys. He couldn’t stand the way she was being mistreated by those brutes.

A girl with a boyfriend, no less. Captain of their own team.

Now they won’t bother her any more.

I wonder what big fucking  halfback Hugh would say about that! How I protected Maryanne. How I protected her from his team members doing such disgraceful things to his girlfriend. Yet a third time. Hugh will never know how I looked after her. If he did, he would probably give me a medal. Or something…

They’ll never find the bodies.

The football players fucked Maryanne’s brains out. Both times Stanley watched them take turns on her, screwing every entrance and fold, natural or improvised.  The team ejaculated enough collective semen on her body to allow the filth they rolled in to stick to her skin and in her hair, coating her in dust, leaves and detritus.

Fucking drunken gang bang.

They all howled, drank beer and spilled it over Maryanne’s tits.

A brine foam of combined juices. 

Every penetration, she screamed into the night, sounding to whoever might be listening as wanton ecstasy.

Just like she fakes them with him. Every time. Just because Hugh swings that big cock, that doesn’t mean he knows how to use it. She let’s him believe he’s satisfying her. Dumb fucking prick.

But I’ll treat her right. Just as soon as I get rid of these pimples.  

Stanley is planning to conceal himself near the entrance to school. Taking advantage of the element of surprise. He’ll bring his dead grandfather’s straight razor. He’ll jump out behind Hugh.

One swipe across the throat should do it.

Hugh will never see it coming. He’ll surely bleed out before paramedics arrive.

Then all the kids at school will recognize the totality of Stanley’s resolve. How deeply he loves Maryanne and wants and needs her all for himself. Not every suitor would do that for a girl. Certainly not Carlos, Shareem or Richard.

Or Hugh for that matter.

None of them will be a factor any more. Once Stanley and Maryanne become a couple, they can make new friends.

She’ll be with me forever.

As soon as he gets rid of his pimples.

Evolution of the "The Dark Side" by Suz deMello

Many of my compadres in OGG interpreted this theme as the darker side of love--all that kinky stuff. 

But to astronomers, the dark side looks like this:

Then, because of a groundbreaking record album released in 1973, 

the dark side meant this:

In 1977, an equally groundbreaking artistic feat was first shown, and the deep voice and threatening mein of Darth Vader came to personify the dark side.

Humans being what we are, of course the personification of evil 

became cuddly and sweet:

We have an inability to embrace the dark side within ourselves, most likely because darkness, feared and hated, has long been synonymous with evil. A few Biblical quotes:

--God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (1st John 1:5)

--The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light (Isaiah 9:2)

--Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? 

The above is from 2d Corinthians 6:14, or as Trump would put it, two Corinthians, as in "Two Corinthians walked into a bar..." 

But is it right to equate darkness with evil?

When humans developed, night was a time of threat and fear. We aren't nocturnal and have poor night vision, but many creatures who walk fearlessly in darkness threaten us. The great cats, who were apex predators on the savannahs where humans developed, are nocturnal; we no doubt were on their menu.Tarantulas, scorpions, and several species of canids, including wolves, dingoes and coyotes--are nocturnal, hunting at night. We may not be in their diets, but we competed with them for food and territory.

But what happens when pale humans fear the darker ones? This may have arisen purely instinctively; we feel comfortable with members of our tribe, but thousands of years ago, "other" was suspect, even dangerous. Perhaps this is the root of racism, an instinctive fear of those who aren't in our clan. Just goes to show that we have to keep a tight watch on what our lizard brains are doing.

However darker people, like our dark sides, should be embraced. 

All images were found at bing.com and are legally used in this context

Wild Heart of Darkness

Sacchi Green

My darkest story was written so long ago that I no longer have a readable file of it. I know I have a print copy of the anthology somewhere, but it would take a lot of digging to find it. Just as well…it made young men wince and twist in their chairs when I read it at a science fiction convention back then, partly because of certain physical activities described, and partly because of the shock that someone who even then could have been their grandmother had written it, and read it aloud. I’ll be merciful and not try to find it.

So I’ll post a story that may rank as my second darkest, although there are other contenders.  I’ll be merciful here, too, and only share the second half, not because the first half is any more or less dark, but because the whole thing is too dratted long. It’s not erotica, exactly, and what sex there is occurs in the first half, but some sacrifices have to be made.
__________

From "The Wildest Heart" (originally appearing in Mitzi Szereto’s Darker Edge of Desire)

On the day of the eclipse, the drifting fog tasted of death. She knew by his tension as they started up the trail. When she crouched beside the grimacing carcass he stopped her with a snarl.
"Get away!" The harshness came from rage and guilt, and his need to be alone before the change overcame him. Mist swirled between them as she tried to read his face. He avoided her eyes, focusing on the blood-red barberries, the tufts of gray fur caught on the thorny bush in the coyote's death convulsions.
"Leave it! I..." The man-voice came with an effort. "I should have been here. If you hadn't kept me..."
Blaming her couldn't ease his guilt. While the young coyote lay dying, the man and woman had been forcing the boundaries of pleasure and pain, pushing tension to extremes until they were swept over the edge. His flesh still resonated to the memory, even as bones and tendons screamed to lengthen, shorten, change.
"Get away! Leave me alone!"
She straightened, arms clutched around her belly as though to keep herself from shaking. Wide gray eyes burned through the fog.
"Yes. It's time. I never meant to keep you, never expected..." Then she was gone, but a last whisper drifted to him on a streamer of mist; "Good-bye, and thank you." He blocked it out.

The wolf crouched in the underbrush through the day, a black hole masked by swirling cloud. Toward evening the air cooled and cleared; sunset glowered in the west as the moon rose in the east.
He waited. Coyotes circled at a distance. Condensation soaked his outer fur, but the heat at his core burned steady and intense.
The earth’s shadow crept across the moon, and across his mind. Only a bright sliver of clarity remained when tires crunched on gravel by the gate a quarter mile away, and the scent he awaited trickled toward him on a faint breeze.
To keep the wolf-form was to commit to a kill. In man-form, capture would still be an option. But something in him fought the change, and then, as he pressed, he knew with a touch of panic that it wasn't going to happen.
He thought of the woman, mouth against mouth, skin against naked skin, but words stabbed through his mind; I never meant to keep you… Good-bye…
The moon was a dull red bruise. Old images throbbed inside his skull; another darkened moon, other deaths, blood-scent saturating the thick jungle air; another failed attempt to change.
Coyote voices cut through his clouded thoughts. A few adolescent yips at first, then howls, then the full voice of the pack-leader not far away. The wolf focused, committed, let his rage feed on the reek of fear and hatred spilling from the killer.
Another howl, closer now, and the man slowed his approach. The acid stink of his fear seared the air. He stopped, and the wolf tensed to pursue, but another howl from behind drove the man forward.
A light wavered, glinting on a long knife and the dull steel of a rifle barrel.
With what remained of man-thought the wolf wondered what dark fantasy drove the killer, what madness impelled him through darkness and terror, hating the coyotes, fearing them, without reason. Even wolves were too sane to waste effort on revenge.
Except for this wolf.
The killer came on again, the beam of his light sweeping the brushy roadside. It swung past the wolf, stopped, swung back.
In the absence of weapons he would have taken time to savor the man's terror. Only a second now to display slanted eyes blazing with reflected light; then a snarl, just enough for the flash of teeth longer than any coyote's; then, as the light crashed to the ground and the gun swung forward, a twisting leap that carried him under and to the right of the burst of gunfire. A strong, smashing shoulder; the man, unbalanced already by the gun's recoil and his own panic, went down with a guttural scream.

The wolf was on him, slashing the forearm that clutched the rifle, snapping the bones with powerful jaws. The man still gripped the knife in his other hand, but the wolf scarcely felt it slice his thigh. The scent of his own blood was a mere trickle in the hot flood that swept him as he tore through the man's shoulder, face, throat. Human blood in his nostrils, his mouth, his gullet, blood not just of this human but all those others, under that other bloody moon, as his comrade lay dying on the jungle floor and the wolf-form had no hands to help him, carry him, no voice to radio for help, no human thought but the thirst for vengeance.
This man died too easily. Only that fleeting thought linked the wolf to the remnants of his own humanity.
A bright crescent rimmed the moon's dark bruise. The wolf moved, stiffly at first, then at a limping trot, crossing a stream where the torrent flushed the blood from his coat and cleaned his wound. The slash was shallow, since thick fur had obstructed the blade, but movement kept the wound bleeding and he would eventually weaken.
He needed a den, a safe place to rest and heal, but his sense of place wavered as the woods around him warped into twisted, reeking jungle, reverted to northern forest, then distorted again.

Emerging into a clearing he saw, by the light of the half-restored moon, the haven where instinct had led him. He crept toward the house and the moon-washed figure waiting. The rightness of it drew him; the wrongness dragged at him and kept him low to the ground.
She reached a hand out slowly. He growled a warning. No human touch! But this touch, so familiar...
She backed gradually up the steps to the door and then into the lamplit interior. He followed, stiff-legged, unable to either close the distance or let it lengthen.
Slowly, slowly she sank to the floor. Her eyes closed, freed him from the painful intensity of her gaze. She fumbled at her shirt collar, swept back her hair, and arched her smooth, vulnerable throat in symbolic submission.
He crept forward, tested her with jaws that pressed gently from nape to windpipe. Then he released her neck and lay his dark head against her shoulder, drawing in her scent in great shuddering sighs as her arms went around him and a cloud of russet hair fell forward to mingle with night-black fur.
At last she leaned back enough to stroke the silver streaks at his temples. Traces of shock still showed on her face, but more than a trace of tenderness.
Then her hand moved carefully toward his wounded thigh, and her touch set off such ripples of pleasure that he almost missed the signals of impending change.
She stiffened at his urgent growl. He thrust his muzzle against her eyes to keep them closed, then tried to pull away.
Her arms tightened. He gave in, let the change surge through his body as her voice flowed over him, murmuring, comforting. "It's all right, all right, all right." Her hands and body clung to his as the wolf-form became man-form.
At last he lay naked and exhausted in her arms. With an effort he raised a hand to open her eyes. The man-voice came with an effort. "You knew?"
"Not knew. Just wanted. I thought it was my private fantasy." She stroked his head again, then moved her hand down over shoulder, chest, belly. When she eased from under him to kneel by his side and lower her face toward his loins a surge of longing stirred him, but her mouth went to his wounded thigh. Gently she licked away the blood.
"Your blood...could it make me..."
"No," he said. "You have to be born to it." And she wasn't, she couldn't be, he would have known if that flesh had ever changed. But there was still something unfathomable, something infinitely strange and wild about her.
"I thought so." The shadow crossing her face went far beyond disappointment. She tossed the hair out of her face and stood. "He's dead?"
It took him a moment to understand. "Yes."
"Your clothes are near there?"
"Yes. I'll have to get them." He started to rise, wavered, then made it to the couch.
"It's my turn now." She shrugged into a jacket. "Will it look as though coyotes did it?"
"Coyotes couldn't." The crack of a heavy arm bone between his jaws echoed in his head.
"We can't let them be blamed, hunted down. And talk of a wolf would be even worse." She felt in a pocket and drew out gloves. "Is the knife that cut you still out there?"
He nodded, and was swept by a wave of dizziness. She seemed to know what she was doing.

It was at least an hour before he heard her car return. When she didn't come in he went out, wrapped in a blanket. She sat stiff and silent, the light of the clear full moon slanting across her staring face, her hands clenched so tightly on the steering wheel that he had to pry them loose.
Gently he eased her out of the car, but she struggled so violently that he let her go. Then she began to retch. All he could do was steady her and smooth her hair back and try to warm her in the blanket.      At last, long after there was nothing left to come up, she staggered up the steps, tearing at her clothes as she went.
"Inside out...so I wouldn't stain the car." He helped her strip, then subdued the inner wolf and built up the fire so that it would consume her gore-smeared clothes. Her gloves were beyond belief.
"It's all right now. Only a human could...they'll call it insanity, madness." She was retching out a stream of words. "The knife, over and over, down to the bones, over and over. But it's all right now."
He held her tightly while she shook, tried to warm her, carried her at last to the shower to wash the blood and cold from her body. When he had her wrapped in a fresh blanket and seated before the fire he tried to get some solid information.
"Where is the knife now?"
She stared into the flames. "In his heart. In a tree."
"I'm not sure I understand."
"The knife," she answered patiently, "is sticking through his heart and into a tree, as high up as I could reach. The rest of him...well, no one will think a coyote, or wolf, had anything to do with it."
He steeled himself against the impulse to shrink away, even as the wolf within recognized that she was right, and wise, and braver in her own wild way than he could ever be.
Her calm was fleeting. She began to shake again, arms clutched around her belly, and he tried to soothe her with hands and words.
"You did what you had to do, it will be all right. You did it for them, for me."
"Not for you." Her words came in a raw, exhausted whisper. He felt a tendril of cold fog brush his face and heard other whispered words; I never meant to keep you...
"I couldn't have done it just for you. I would have tried, but I couldn’t have done it."
"What, then?"
Her voice became gradually steadier. "I never meant to tell you, to ask anything of you, never expected you to stay. I didn't realize how much I would want you to stay. I just knew that I wanted you, even more than I wanted what you could give me."
Scent had told him, instinct had told him, but his brain had shut them out because it was supposed to be impossible.
"I'm not asking you to stay with me even now." She turned from the fire at last and her gray eyes were deep and fierce. In the flickering light he seemed to see the shadow of great wings.
"You don't have to stay, but be there, be somewhere I can reach, because now that I know, I will not be left to raise this child alone."
He started to ask, "Do you want me to stay?" then said, instead, "There’s no way you can keep me from staying." She dropped the blanket and pressed against him with such fervor that the unasked question was answered.
He would have to tell her someday that only changers could breed with changers, even though her wild spirit might never break free of human-form.
Wolf-bone to man-bone was a small step, full pelt to sparsely-furred skin and a thick head of hair only a matter of degree. But mammal-bone to air-chambered hawk-bone, hair to feathers, arms to wings...      He had never heard of such a leap, never imagined it until she carried him in ecstasy to the high, clear realm of the hawk and slashed the sky in the falcon's mating dive.      What child would come from the blending of his blood with her far stranger, wilder spirit? He was afraid to even wonder. But he would be there.                                                                                                                                                                                                                         .                                                          

"Release"

I vacillated a tad on what to post today. As always our subject is so wonderfully open to interpretation. Recently I've taken to co-authoring some dark erotic romance pieces with my sister from a different mister, Sassie Lewis. So I thought about discussing those works, but they're still embryonic (a little TOO embryonic considering the impending submission date on one of 'em!)

I also considered waxing lyrical about the sensual pleasure I find from the dark side of skin tones. While I adore everything from pale white to so-black-it's-almost-blue when it comes to skin colors, for a couple of decades now it's been the caramel-to-coffee range especially which has fascinated me.

And then it occurred to me... I have a short piece, published in the "Gritty" anthology (edited by the amazing and powerful Sommer Marsden and cover art by yours truly!), which combines both parts. A story with darkness at its heart, and with a gorgeously brown-skinned heroine.

Please be aware of two things before reading, though...
a) it's an entirely consensual piece, but is potentially confronting in its physicality; and b) I wrote it in 2010, so it was my best work at that point. I do believe my mad skillz haz improved since then.

Release

By Willsin Rowe

I hadn’t seen Rowena for a couple weeks. I only ever found her when we both needed it. When her need called out to mine.

I’d just wheeled my daughter, Amelia, into her classroom and wiped her mouth clean. I waved goodbye and tried to believe she might one day wave back.

Lost in my reverie, I nearly tripped over Rowena and her son. She sat on the asphalt, her back against her car, her wiry arms locked around Michael’s body. She was singing in her haunting molasses tones while he rode out some kind of fit or tantrum.

I squatted in front of them, tried to get Michael’s attention, maybe break the spell, but he wasn’t seeing anything outside his own head. Rowena smiled wearily at me through the shuddering of her son’s body.

It passed quickly enough, and she took him to class. She nodded at me just before she went inside, and I checked my watch and drove away.

She arrived at her house to find me waiting, leaning against the hood of my car.

“Stu,” she murmured. “You lost?” Her smile showed so white against her skin.

“I was. Now I’m found.”

She brushed past me and I fell into her wake. She closed the front door behind me and I took off my shirt. She simply watched, admiring the freckled white colour of my skin as I adored the earthy brown of hers.

She ran her hand through the light sprinkling of hair on my chest, strutted past me and up to her bedroom. I kicked off my shoes and socks, tore away my jeans and prowled naked up the hall.

When I arrived she, too, was naked. She stood staring at the pictures of Michael on her wall. She had her hand out, touching the frame of her favourite one. In it, he was smiling broadly, helium balloons all over his wheelchair and with his face painted like a lion. He was four in that picture, and he’d never been outside the hospital.

She meticulously straightened the frame, still gazing sadly. I slowly reached out and drew her hand away from the wall.

“He’s a happy boy,” I murmured. As if that balanced the picture.

She turned to me, her eyes sinking straight to my crotch. “He ain’t the only one.” It was like a switch inside our skulls whenever we got together. Quantum shifts in emotion.

I smiled with only my mouth. Stuck my chin out.

“Do your worst.”

She appraised my erect member for a moment, then lashed out, slapping it sideways and turning a big patch of the pink skin red. I hissed, my smile tightened into a grimace, but I stood my ground.

“Is that it? Think about Michael’s father. Where’d he go?”

Her luscious brown lips curled into a cold sneer and she made a two-handed fist, pounded my shoulder and sent me tumbling onto her bed. She jumped on after me and swung her flesh club into my other shoulder before butting her knee up between my thighs, resting it right under my balls.

Her stained hardwood eyes rolled, looking everywhere but into the cold grey of mine, and then she growled. She spat thickly on my straining cock and licked the back of her hand, fingers and all. She straddled my hip, her moist slit kissing the ridge of bone. She ground her clit against the hardness beneath my skin. She pressed down with her wet fist on the belly of my cock, ran her knuckles up and down. She clenched her other hand and started rubbing her face like a cat, squeezing out empty tears and wilfully distorting her handsome features.

I started muttering toxic nothings at her.

“And where are your parents? Why aren’t they helping?”

She ground her teeth and twisted the hair around my nipple. My hip was greasy with her scent and my skin was tingling all over.

“When did they drift away? It was when Michael was born, wasn’t it?”

She curled her fingers around my shaft and squeezed it, right below the head. She brought her other hand down and began to choke it. She spat curses all over my skin, all over the room, all over the world.

“Cunt! Lousy fuckin’ cunt!”

She slid her slit off my hip and slapped her mouth down on my chest, biting at my nipple and still spurting the foulest language she could conjure. She dug her nails into the tender skin of my shaft and drove her knee back up into my crotch, pushing my legs further apart. 

Her tongue poked out, jarringly pink against the cocoa of her skin, and she licked down through my hair until she had half my straining cock in her mouth. She pulled on it like it was life and I balled her sheets up in my fists. Still she was cursing but no-one outside her would ever know what she was saying.

She licked down the shaft and took one of my balls in her mouth. She gnawed at it with her lips while she scratched her nails down my thighs, leaving crimson welts. I don’t know whose balls they were for her, maybe her ex’s, maybe her first boyfriend’s, maybe even God’s. It didn’t matter. She was hurting them exactly how she had to.

Her armpit rested over my knee as she worked. Without warning I lifted my leg and rolled her onto her back. She came away from my balls with a slippery sucking sound that almost made me come.

She landed heavily, her breasts quaking, her raisin nipples making me dizzy. I leapt onto her and held her hands down beside her head, my knee right where hers had been. I rubbed it up and down on her slit and she stared hard into me and hissed crazy threats and promises of hell on earth before she spat on my chin. 

I squeezed her wrists and wiped my face on her hair, opening my throat to her. She licked from collar bone to jaw and sucked on my larynx, drawing a moan straight out of me and into her.

I released her hands and tried to roll her over. She resisted, snarling at me. I was bigger and stronger but she fought like a puma, with all the anger she’d balled up since the last time we met. I got her onto her side, but then she wrapped her legs around my waist and flexed her magnificent thighs, twisting me until I fell.

I found my face right in her dark gash and I hooked my hands around the meat of her legs. I planted my mouth over her cherry pink slit and drove my tongue inside her. She squeezed fistfuls of my hair and I called up all the rage from within me. Anger for the future our kids will never have, despair for the future they will. I held the frenzy inside me for a moment then bellowed it into the hot cavern of her cunt. She absorbed the sound and the fury and blocked my ears with her thighs.

I drove my mouth into her time and time again, circled my face in her like she was a shower, like she was cleansing me. I butted her with my cheeks and chin, pounded her hooded clit with my forehead, turned her hot pink hole almost red. She berated me, dared me, demanded that I hit harder. I thought I might break my nose against her pelvic bone, or break her fingers as she tweaked herself.

She pulled her knees up, rested her feet on my shoulders, her entire crotch gaping open for me.

I slipped my tongue down to her ass and slicked her hole. I ran my fist over the gushing heat of her pussy. I dug my thumb under her hood and pressed her clit.

She squealed with ecstatic pain and I drove my body up until my shoulders were right under her knees, my cock pressing somewhere into the heat of her. I pushed blindly, not knowing where I’d end up.

I slipped easily inside her and our backs arched, our bellies sucked onto each other. She sank her nails into the meat of my triceps while I pounded hard into her pussy. She urged me on with insults, no longer looking at me, not letting me think she was talking to me at all. When her words faltered she caught my eye.

“Wha’bout your wife? Who took her from you? The quacks? The Universe? Fate? Call y’self a man?”

I grabbed her leg and hauled her over onto her belly. Her ass poked up defiantly and I worked it with my hands and teeth. I ran my tongue over the warm dusk of her skin and down into the midnight of her crevice, soaking my wet muscle in the humid aroma of her.

She arched her back so hard I thought she might snap her spine. Her ass rode up so high there was nothing left to do but dive back in. I screwed my fingers into the swollen flesh of her hips while my cock plunged deeply into her heat. I slapped at the stretched muscle of her ass, turning dusk to sunset. She battered my pelvis with hers, hissing through clenched teeth, still demanding I defile her further. I drove harder and slapped harder and leaned harder until I forced the air from her lungs. At last the swearing stopped. All we had left was grunting.

I fell forward over her tight, toned back and licked sweat from her shoulder. She collapsed under my weight and I rolled sideways. She rolled the other way and then pounced on top of me, sucking my growling cock back up inside herself.

She dug her knees into my ribs and bounced up and down, pounding the air from me. Her gorgeous breasts carved circles from the air and I clapped my hands around them, squashing them together before I coated every inch of them with my tongue.

She pulled them up and out of my grip, started slapping her open palms down on my chest, leaving huge patches of red. She nicked me a few times with her nails and I lied to her about the pain as I drank it in.

She caught the side of my head with a loose fist and then froze for a shaved second. Her body stiffened all over and her face screwed up. Like a hurdler who’s just cleared the final jump, she fell back into rhythm and ground herself into my crotch, squeezing and releasing until we both tumbled over the edge of a climax the size of Victoria Falls. I burst inside her, all the despair I’d clung to evaporating in the heat between us. She swallowed me whole and turned her face toward Heaven, baying out the dregs of her anger. Our hands entwined and we held on, each of us hauling the other back from the abyss.  

We slowly came to rest, the back of her head pressed to the side of my throat, her hands, so brutal only seconds before, now laying like butterflies on my chest and shoulder. 

Neither of us said a word, nor even grunted. The breath rasped from our lungs through clenched teeth and flared nostrils. My throat was wet with her tears, my face wet with my own.

It always works this way. It’s something I doubt most people could understand. We take turns to hurt and to be hurt. It’s always superficial, and it’s always - always - private. No bruising, no scratches, nothing that will show in public. No explanations or answers needed.

All I ever am to Rowena is strong and hard. Hard enough to beat herself up on. All she ever is to me is soft and wet. Wet enough to drown myself in. When we strike each other we strike the world, the ugly universe that distorted our beautiful children. When we absorb the pain, we’re punishing ourselves for our failings, our impatience, for the guilt we feel for wishing that our babies were − here comes that word, the one we daren’t say aloud − normal.

Other people, other parents, smile blithely and tell us how strong we are. Like raising kids is easy for them. Like we have a choice. If we had chosen this path, maybe I’d agree. Rowena and I both know we’re cowards. That we’d wave our magic wands and take away our kids’ disabilities in a hummingbird’s heartbeat. Because this is our life, until it ends.

Stuck together by sweat, tears and juices, we laid without moving for a time we couldn’t measure. Sooner than either of us could bear to imagine, we would become parents again. Parents of gorgeous kids who’d done nothing wrong and who loved their lives. Who probably didn’t understand why and how they were different. Whose minds may live in the most wonderful world, but whose bodies could barely function in this one.

Rowena lifted her face and gazed down at me. I ran my fingers up into her lustrous hair and smiled, pulled her down to me. We kissed with a passion that had nothing to do with sex. It was a shared need, a complete and unspoken understanding. A bond that we’d never found anywhere else.

We spent as long as we could with our mouths caressing each other, tender now that the wrath had passed. When the time came, we showered, dressed and hugged, and we drove separately back to school and collected our kids.

Rowena waved lightly as she and Michael drove back out of the car park. I tossed a wave back at her. I knew I wouldn’t see her for weeks or even months.

Until our hurt pulled us together again.