Grimoire Diabolique

A door behind him clicked open, and in flopped Maxine, all smiles, all hanging fat and bulbous face and mole-studded neck. Now that he considered it, he easily saw the resemblance between the two women.

“Hi, there, Mr. Nice Man!” she celebrated. “Bet’cha thought ya’d never seen me again!”

The atrocious baby remained wrapped around her side. It glared at him, blowing spit bubbles.

“Ga! Ga-ga!”

“Git down on them knees, Mr. Rosser,” the landlady instructed, “and give me some proper pussy-eating. Once or twice a day’s all I’ll need. And each time yer done with me, ya kin have some fun with Maxine, too. Way I understand the law, there ain’t no expiration’a the time Maxine can press charges against ya fer child-molestation.”

Rosser was growing dizzy in nauseousness. Mrs. Doberman spread her legs, dividing her sloppy vulva with her finger.

“So come on, you silly man. Let’s git on with it!”

Rosser fell to his knees.

“And when you’re done with Momma,” Maxine added, “I’ll be in the bedroom, waitin’ on ya.”

Shots flapped some feces on Rosser’s back.

 “Ga! Ga-ga!” the baby said.

— | — | —

THE MOTHER

My God, Smith thought. This is my wife.

He’d lain her out naked across the bed. Her nipples looked like bruises now, and her skin—every inch of which he’d once caressed in love—glittered pastily beneath the gelid sweat of death.

My…wife…

The bivalving scalpel flashed in his hand.

I’m autopsying my wife.

Smith took a heavy breath. Then he began to cut.

««—»»

“Jeannie! Don’t go near that!” Smith shouted. He clambered clumsily after her down the wooded hill, careful of stumps and roots hidden under leaves. Whatever that thing was in the ravine—A keg? he wondered. A drum?—it just looked…nasty. It wasn’t supposed to be there, and he didn’t want his daughter touching it. “Jeannie!” he shouted once more.

Jeannie gladly pretended not to hear these heated commands of her father, as would most 7-year-olds. Instead she nimbly wended through branches and brush, and descended into the ravine.

The thicket crunched beneath Smith’s plodding feet. Two decades of a pack of Parliments a day reminded him how out of shape he was. Some doctor, but at least his patients couldn’t accuse him of hypocrisies. He loped ahead, gasping, and raised his arms to shield himself from the spiny branches that seemed determined to thwart his progress. Smith was a liberal; he was also an over-reactor. He remembered any number of headlines detailing his worst ecological fears. WAYNESVILLE CANCER RATES FOUND TO BE THREE TIMES HIGHER THAN NATIONAL AVERAGE. A.A. COUNTY FINED MILLIONS FOR SECRETLY PUMPING UNTREATED SEWAGE INTO BAY. BROCK CLIFFS NUCLEAR WASTE WATER SEEPS INTO RESERVOIR. And so on. Smith, as a father, felt legitimately paranoid of the faux pas of this new age of progress. Just nights ago he’d read in the Post about containers of toxic waste that had fallen off a truck near an Edgewood elementary school. Some teenagers had opened one of the containers, and had died in hours. Then there was that town up north, an entire community evacuated when cable TV diggers had uncovered a secretly buried consignment of binary waste products, compliments of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. The stuff had been there twenty years. No wonder the town’s miscarriage and birth defect rates had been so high…

 What a world, Smith considered.

 And this thing in the ravine, it looked like a chemical drum of some sort, with bright red stripes like a warning. Smith had spotted it from the back porch with his binoculars. Bird watching, he always told Marie. Oh, that’s nice, dear, she’d said once. It’s wonderful that you haven’t lost interest in your childhood hobbies. This was partly true at any rate; Smith had indeed been an avid bird-watcher as a child. The only thing he watched now, however, was that Donna Whatshername next door, the neighbor’s kid. On days she didn’t have classes at the community college, she’d lie out in her backyard, to work on her tan. What she also worked on was Smith’s libido. Jeeeeeeesus Christ! he must’ve thought a million times, focusing the Bushnell 7x12s. It astounded him, the level to which modern swimwear had reverted. Bikinis these days made the ones Marie had worn years ago look like winter parkas. Smith had a funny feeling that Donna Whatshername knew he was watching her. The poses seemed staged, lewd, nearly masturbatory. Too often the girl would untie her top and idly roll toward Smith’s gaze, her eyes closed as if sleepy. Donna was, to put it eloquently, well-possessed of an ample mammarian carriage, or, in Smith’s less eloquent consensus: Good Christ and Lord Almighty, that is one humdinger of a rack of milk wagons!