Hellhound

I consider this a fix-it. Specifically the way they brought urban renewal to Hiroshima and all that implies.
Anyone who would do what it's said Annette does is too fucking nuts to act the way she was written in the games. Redemption comes as black apotheosis for the underworld's goddess much maligned by selfish phantasms of good-wife-and-mother.
I wrote this to a diet of Perturbator ("Death Squad," "She Moves like a Knife"), Carpenter Brut's "Maniac," and DeathbyRomy's "Hellhound."

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Telemetry.

Cryptography.

Security.

All kinds of Ys.

Yellow.

Yank.

Yarborough

(next door neighbor, never really got to know him)

“You know, you really are a good-looking thing.”

Yarrow

Yell

Lime

lace

lyric

saw

electric ripsaw cuts the air

air screams

silver

shriek

“Are you going to fucking talk? Or will this have to get unpleasant?” Just block out the voice

I hear it

Don’t even lissen to th’sound’a my voice.

Lieutenant Radley’s voice dies

I make it die

make

all

scream

raw

raw meat

“I thought a belt sander might be a little nicer. Jesus, the power tools you find in a maintenance closet.” Lieutenant Radley didn’t have a belt sander.

Just the clink of belt

Nice lips. Pretty.

Thumb rounds the bottom

they put me in makeup

real tacky shit

on my knees

hard muscle

pretty-boy tattooed for all the:

Thin shoulders thickened by beef

aimless life

jailhouse not in ink but hasty enlistment, well, in light of the defendant’s strange life circumstances and the

remember her face

the judge’s

Judge Cathy Weller

drawn

gaunt

she is a miserly goddess who meters out grace thin as gruel and expects manna-ripe thanksgiving

impossibility

of recurrence, this court remands

the defendant

It doesn’t only cut

first fabric scorches

friction and tremor

sander catches

the engine does not choke.

Clutches rearrange

the gears are made to lope

starve

reduce

feed.

The first-person is refuge.

thud like cousin Merle and me shoving that boulder the last few inches on new-muddy slope.

The eyes are all disbelief.

Imagination fails for some people:

What will happen if I make my five-years-younger cousin eat me out under the balmy shadow of a black-iron oak all crabbed and slippery and dank after a rainstorm?

She is beautiful

she could have had any boy

she reaches for him

the words are so easy in the past-tense.

Someone

maybe me

said pain is without ambiguity.

That’s bullshit.

Pain only has no ambiguity after it’s already over. When it happens it’s fast beagle-bolt of the heart and it blinds and it’s like getting stabbed

getting shot

getting fucked the first time.

Suddensharploudsogoddamnloudscreamscreamjustscream,Jesus,that’ssweet

it’s how torture works.

It won’t make you tell the truth

but a truth

any truth

just make it stop

thready machine heartbeat.

Swallow.

Just swallow.

Swallow. C’mon. I wanna see that neck move.

Hot half-melted fibers lace up meat.

Roadrash feeling

fall

there’s always a fall somewhere

always she loves me not

dad’s fingers

(don’t

(not yet)

hot flare threatens third-person.

Nowhere to hide there.

Breathe.

Ether

Egress

Entry

error

rape

estrange

erase

eviscerate

erase

deep

skin flaps turns to ridge and diamond-grit scrapes and I have to keep my eyes closed I have to keep my fucking eyes closed she isn’t there the pain comes from nowhere

it’s the worst you’ve ever had ever ever ever the worst tell yourself that enough and it never gets worse

slide

push

forty-grit chews

long distended centrifugal

big yellow-red pulses behind the eyes

my eyes

look up at my eyes, you lil’ faggot. Goddamn, that mouth. Yeah. Here’t comes

“Tell me how it feels to be light a little skin, huh?” Blonde bitch’s voice

it don’t pay ta ‘member yer tormentors, boy. Don’ e’en lookit ‘em.

SERE is best taken past-tense and hypothetical.

The way I’d already sucked him off in his office

close chilly sweet air

stare up under heavy lashes and watch the way bullnecked straight bends under torch of onyx-dagger eye.

The face is renegotiable

the edges effaced by neat practice

brushes and powders and creams

shadow and imagination

let Dr. Wolcott throatfuck me

wet sludge

spit ribbons swing off chin filled with dread of future

neck bulges

mouth works quiet

body strong thin in prolonged squat (not that long)

Jesus, hard to believe you’re a fuckin’ boy.

Of course

ha ha

I guess that’s

estradiol valerate 40mg/mL

Dr. Wolcott gives the first dose

all gentle-nurture

lean body all tight muscle and fire-hardened summer copper and silk

I see the office

(smells like this place

(just not dipped in mass grave sludge

(still the same acid disinfectant under a necropolis)

white walls refrigerated white floor air-conditioned

tremor

wonder

questions

heat against my naked belly through raspy rough brown corduroy

the old man’s all graphite-dirty

neat short beard

hackbush brows

eyes

close-cropped hair

voice

ache

hand steadies my back

dwarfed

always small

heel and fingertips unite shoulder blades and deep curve of hips

already have learned to arch my back

throw out bubble round.

Prick

sharp

invasion

lube spreads cold excess drip

gloved fingers stir

sound like jelly

just relax, okay? I’m a lot bigger than some fingers.

“How’s it feel? What’s your fucking name? It’s not on any of your things.”

Swallow

blood

the heart is blind

it gushes

it expects the continued links of places ground down to raw nerve and ripped meat tendrils

dangle

droop down my wrist

“Open. Your. Goddamn eyes or I swear

“swear

“swear”

swear to fuckin’ gawd, thassit, thassit, no fug-guggin’ good, gawddamn fuckin’ boy

ain’t no fuckin’

gurgle-splash

gravity and momentum spar in a mostly-empty bottle of Walker Blue

this is not an economic problem

fuckin’ son an’

an’

half-blind

old bitch has learned to raise tears

see the room

(cavern in the retelling

(no walls

(fourth wall broken in Cartesian theater, audience pull the actors down, hungry mob, necks ripe and naked, just like Hargeisa lab, Chris’

(almost made me blaspheme, no cross, no crown, no God

(it isn’t that

(composure

(it’s about steel

(about)

the walls are white

the sofas are white

carpets are white

they cushion the sacred sound of hatred

shapes too obvious to hide

wrong glances

Karen

sorry

mom sits there, botox and hyaluronic lips, arrogant owner’s-box paw at the chest

Jesus, you got tits.

Drag

coffin nail manicure challenges throat

tests structure like OSHA

strangle-groan

everything reels.

Portrait of a woman on a horse

Lady Godiva

mom’s hair wisps black

perfect-bright

wedding night importune

dad is on one of his benders

he will track booze and cooze

stale perfume

futility

bitter bondage wrapped in inheritance and Catholic guilt.

She smells like Chanel and house-mortgage Benz leather tooled in Auschwitz.

Fuck

I’ll fug

fug

fuckin’ fuck you, then

huh

he won’ be th’only one screws a cheap slut

you fuckin’ smell like j-jizz, Jeesauce

drip

sticky

back from a boyfriend’s place

parents home too soon

hasty lurch

ragged seesaw as destiny in cricket-crowded summer under benevolent bend of sycamore.

A day without pain is twenty-three hours.

Achy-sweet reverberation of raw cock all slimy-hot

lube and fingers

ohmyfuckinggod your ass is so tight,

names are given by other people.

Crawford

who would name their son Crawford?

The people who summer as a verb

wear boat shoes without irony

own a yacht

build their child in the shape of bench press

biceps curl

Aryan imbecile, strong in the shoulders, weak in the heart, empty between the ears

he is a jungle gym and I am sixteen and he is twenty-one and it is all hiccupy bounce in his huge strong arms

naked chest

I see the chisel-broken jawline

hungry tongue

so, like, um, are- are you really a girl?

Yesno

Noyes

German supplies answers but Crawford’s language is Labrador retriever.

Ambivalent caged-bird blur

daze enough and it doesn’t matter

nothing matters with a man’s body used to slit open cavities and burn hot affirmation somewhere thick and sticky and it dripdrops drools clumps in panties and gives texture to fealty crowded close on penitential pews under holy timbers

they unite in negation for a reason.

Karen’s thumbs crease places she tells me will make it obvious

the eyes turn

everything drips inkwash

her breath is Virginian and flammable

slides wet like her spit-matted hair on my cheek.

There’s a push I will learn

weight

fall

back into it I know the way a man

needle

narrow

nick

kill

lick

cold slick bottleneck

reflex

what I will not tell the robes and creak of sand in aging joints and crow’s feet is it was not all horror.

The first swing is by instinct.

But there’s only relaxation

and the bolt of certainty

a bottle does not break like the movies.

It is heavy

squat

made to bear the burden of its contents.

For the first time there is a smile and I know the echo-loft of cathedral ceiling and the horde are all standing-ovation and bite and tear and the boy the girl the man the woman

“Oh, don’t you fade out on me. I haven’t cut anything vital yet.” The voice is Karen’s

almost

just erase some of the highballs

and omit the Davidoffs

and make the rare reserve scotch middle-class gin by the doublewide bottle.

There is cause for efficiency

credenza real estate

fingers

fingers defile

she can’t keep it together because even the strongest of wills inevitably fail.

It is easy to speak of the human spirit’s indefinite resolution when this is hypothetical.

The woman is beautiful

for all the years Annette can see

all the scars she expects to see seared and puckered into the body

all the ways bullets have rearranged the insides, she is sure

from the way the whore has killed life like shooting a sick dog

(fucking degenerate predatory whore)

worthless

cold-natured thing

with a face like a goddess’ crude effigy

cursed to know time

and tarnish

and ungenerous things

and people

Annette.

Annette is movement and dart

stares

studies.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it? Vivisection is supposed to be scientific.” Annette is all eightball

synthesis

answers

easy.

The laboratory is perfect for a burned-over world.

Her parents

she wants to laugh

she sees them in the corner when her heartbeat takes an unwary step stumble thudthudthud

negative burn of dear old mother and dad.

William was

not the man she was supposed to marry, after all.

She was supposed to have been Backseat Becky for some Dr. Feelgood who would reify all the third-persons

all the passive-voices

all the ways life was going to be done to her.

And maybe they were right.

William was mostly a strong back

the only thing she saw enough to remember after awhile.

Reality bows to the alchemist

Dr. Faust really was not supposed to get married.

But he

she is more than only the incubator

warm sticky-sweet womb for all the nights they spend together under silver-blue canopy

stars and the moonlight.

Twist on the stiff clean gray sheets before her body distends

swells

maybe William loses interest and the G-Virus is Morgana

green silk and laughter.

A woman’s fault is to be what she is.

The moon is out tonight.

That special kind of repulsive hot-autumn moonlight when bark is pinched and looks too smooth and arid satellite is a bloated crescent under incubator wet

decadent fruit, all overripe orange.

God does not hang things of meaning in the black sky.

She finds this thing outside

victim of success in the face of lie-down-and-die pangs

the permanent bell-ring of the terminal concussion patient.

She stepped out because the world had started to come to her in a backwards trickle of moment and causality.

A few short weeks

and a week of Inferno

(seven days, seven, seven, seven the numbers of the countless heavens, but hell has nine circles)

have been unkind to the walls

amazing

ha ha

what a few thousand corpses will do

give or take however many she’s given euthanasia

124-grain Gold Dot hollow point.

Security Office

(authorized personnel only

(magnetic card is face-down with white bone alive

(naked spine

(degloved leg

(meat is open and Annette watches and the stink is sour stale shit and piss and putrefaction that comes by T-infection)

She wants to watch the progression on a known quantity.

Security Director Verburg is documented

circulatory pressure

the straggle-stumble of systolic

diastole wheeze.

In T-subjects, the heart is not a dead thing.

The brain, also

even if you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference with some.

The cerebrum is all paradox.

The T-specimen is all paroxysm

idiot jolt of arms and legs

cytokine storm.

William sits

oracle

prophet

alone

stirs tea leaves

burns viscera

and paws through the wreck of cellular rape.

He learns shape like a woman’s neck

she is

laughter pangs her

she remembers

tastes it in the air. The way it’s swallowed without echo into a shaft that leads to nowhere but more moonlight and the bonfire of petty men’s small greed.

Steel walls

fruitless piston-pump onanism

deep into earth

and out again

and every time it only will yield barren things.

Men.

Women.

Disease.

Waste.

All the same as the act it parodies.

Her gunshot disappears.

Even this is stillborn

or maybe dies before it reaches her off walls porous and polished in places from grease

mechanical abrasion

wholesome simple things

quantifiable things.

And another night and more grains gutter in hourglass

(broken

(rancor and wrath with her own limitations when she stares into the past and finds herself helpless

(and then

(then)

“So, still nothing to say, huh?” Annette’s laugh

gets tight.

Everything is

men don’t listen, do they?

Even when they come as women.

Sometimes

sometimes

it all comes uncorked and coils like an ugly black fog out of her.

If he’d listened

if he’d listened

“listened listened listened listened to me, god

“dammit.” Singsing reedy it’s only the way her own voice sounds to her that breaks what she knows might have been another fugue state.

Death spiral.

She needs

yes

the body has needs unmet.

The room is

the cleanest in the place, at least. But they

they

they colonize even the HVAC.

William

he could have welcomed them to the project.

Was it the money?

“My- my husband is not a petty man.” Annette moves

maybe she raves.

In the cold netherworld manse there only are dead men and women and they tell her nothing she does not already know.

She breathes

sucks the air all full of sour-garbage rot.

Better than yesterday

or she is more

habituated

naturalized

institutionalized.

She has

has watched her reflection sometimes

and she has made herself strange

beautiful.

Ample time to contemplate just how irreplaceable some things

and pieces

(and thoughts and feelings and people)

were

are.

Makeup is disruptive camouflage for the skirt and pretty pair of panties.

And raiment for the accidental queen of the land of the dead.

“What do you think?”

Annette can’t

it’s

she can’t really remember why that woman was pinioned wrist-and-ankle to a table.

Nicely built

and maybe not a woman, she thinks

confounded blur of shadow and light

memory of masculine jawline

strong brow

hoarse cough of voice unselfconscious and animal when she barks awake.

Blood loss

Annette sees it.

She

comes

the slow curl of puppydog dreams.

She is sure it has been hours

there is the hours-long tang

rusty steel wool from an old sink snuggled right up against her soft palate

painted up the hard.

Her tongue sticks behind her bottom row of teeth.

Pasty.

Her hair is brittler

but still strong

oily and with a smell she thinks is the staleness of dry eggs on a hot skillet.

A watch

(anniversary gift to herself, not Cartier or something unimaginative but cheap, cheap, cheap as youth, cheap as kisses, cheap as lust, cheap as devotion)

wide fabric band

utilitarian digital face

flat

bold black figures.

September twenty-ninth.

Her guest lies there.

Twitches.

Fifteen minutes.

It’s been fifteen minutes.

She has slept a lifetime.

Her eyes

are so beautiful. Foundation blots out the darkness.

She has had ample time to wait

to perfect the needful things that will captivate even a monster.

Liner

indelible

black

her hands shook while she sat in front of the mirror in another room

hours

maybe years

it was yesterday

she is sure.

six hours ago.

Six hours ago was yesterday. Time orders only notional stars.

They are past her notice.

Asterisms of time and fate

these are her business right now. Ledgers run with black and red.

Her red lips

black-lined eyes

(double-tap of morphine, low-dose in autoinjector, used to be enough to put her close to grins but now the lips barely lift

(dope gives blue-green eyes bedroom weight)

hands steady enough for Rembrandt

for van Gogh

sometimes

the smile is red parted by bone.

For

three

days

every face Annette sees is bone in varying stages of revelation.

Some were

juicy

even

even like the woman

the whore

who wears colors she sees now as flag. Scarlet shadow.

She smooths fingers through her hair

teases out illusory knot from pin-straight

long

maybe too long for close cramp.

This is a very small place, after all.

She has made it air-conditioned oasis in the face of ninety-degree afternoons. Something has gone off in the place’s guts and there are outages

unpredictable moments

she glides by grim reflex

counts the steps by nature and intuition

the female of the species is not given nurture

but hunt

gather

kill

yes

all survival’s temple dance flashes sixty-thousand hertz in her head

replayed

again

red

so much red on her

husband

William

and he holds

cradles

does not look at her when he

all the awful cooling pieces of him

the way she sees things

wonders if they were there

or if it is patchwork schizoid theater

does she stitch in the rough crust of an unnoticed spill on slacks gone dirty around a half-unrolled cuff

or the way she cannot even seem to see the little cuts the bullets made

fourteen-hundred feet every second

they will not be hindered in their sprint

the length of

she doesn’t know.

Entrails unraveled

some of the exit wounds come with jagged flowers and others she must prod to find and the men’s voices are loud and flat muffled through masks

cowardice

one is a woman

she leads

the drones follow.

Easy

obedient

they are simpleminded things

like that Albert.

is repulsive

the way his eyes leer like an alligator’s behind those sunglasses.

The way he makes queasy things snuggle up cold in her gut when the body is stupid

obedient.

The images worm through a comic hole in space made from the shape of a

(marriage)

person.

Traumatic amputation is an especially funny way of putting

“I have to look my best.” Annette even has clothes

not the sweat-stiff vestments

white shroud and hair shirt all muddy-gray polyester and smart

sensible

Midwestern black slacks.

Her shoes were not right for this moment.

This is

what he gave away.

The words escape

she is a scratchboard that waits like canvas.

She has achieved what will and Edenic nakedness can with boiled water and sterile bandages as indulgent rags.

Dry shampoo satisfices.

In the absence of anything that will make her clean, she will be antiseptic.

She stands under UV

enough ozone sparks in her nose like singed hair

and wonders if it makes any difference.

And now she floats.

On heels

and thinks of a dress that belongs to some Chinese bitch she shot in the back of the head.

She wonders

was she Chinese?

was it someone else?

Or did she bring it down with her?

Annette remembers the way the automatic door is sluggish

the kind of sloth made from the uninterrupted absence of anything

anyone

the silence of immersion in the inescapable self.

The scene staggers

drags.

She wants to reach out

(and remembers the flayed ugly things made from meat

stretched like greasy cellophane

tentered on sharp scarps of bone shows through)

They are

silly

cute

stupid.

She does not breathe anymore.

All they know is to listen

blind things

they search

once a tongue’s rasp scrawls around her ankle when she is about to reach through a door and it is sandpaper and she smiles

and it hears the joy because a light heart is too loud in a necropolis.

They teach her their language

and their ways.

They are animals, she finds.

Under the cold light

shadowless high-noon in pharmacy night-blue

she slams a palm on the door switch.

Its weight all races downhill.

She thinks

knows

you learn the nature of a thing from its spirit.

A door made to close does not welcome.

The sound is

sweet

gratifying

she wishes

(it were William’s body

(it were that chink whore’s body

(Annette knows novelty must be nice

(she looks like the kind of woman who sleeps around

(the soft little doll with big breasts for her frame and the lavish round of hips

(the little doll Annette can see with hands on her husband’s lap and steals the dreams from

(everything)

acrid hush in a movie theater

memory of Teller’s cigarettes in the joints

slam ends the journey

silent sound of a hand hammered on a ripe banana.

Overpower

overtravel

its tongue is mush.

Last shreds twitch and grasp at life.

She sees someone, anyway.

Annette has honed murder’s simpleminded praxis.

Stands bright silhouette

China cunt

Annette knows sights align

follow the cut she makes in the bright white light

anthracite hair

slant eyes

Annette can remember kick against steady palm

(learns the incantations, sacred, dwell time, recoil cycle, case drools imperfect toluene combustion smells sweet-stale like feces)

“Like you killed him. Maybe- maybe it was going to be different. You took the dreams from my head.” Annette’s heels are black

(red soles, unironic gift to herself, barely worn)

the slink of tight jeans

a black blouse.

Barefoot in patent leather.

She has not known that for too long.

Naked air

exposed skin.

Her lab’s floor is scuffs and the squeak-chatter-squeak of Dr. Beller’s rollator.

She remembers

laughs

the way his scrawny body lost the last of its tenuous integrity from the T

amok hormonal confusion

androgens

(muscle growth in the face of famine)

antiandrogens

(shapes wrong, breast bud rounds scrawny chest)

growth hormone

cytokine spasms.

Annette watched Dr. Beller for awhile.

Pathetic

slumped over the rollator

tangled

arms outstretched and head twisted strange on a half-broken neck.

She studies the zoology of the T-specimen.

The flayed things are evolutionary

the hunger is not flesh but sensation, she sees

the cannibal’s lusts are all oral fixation in the end. Elementary retrogression

atavisms in common with wolf and tiger short-circuit social nicety’s Skinner box binary.

They are allowed to do what they want.

Sometimes she stares

steps close to Dr. Beller.

His legs are kinked atrophied flippers

one Italian loafer pricier than an African child.

Of course, many things are pricier than children.

$278.37

this is the going rate, she sees.

She must bargain

dicker

swing a finger

the project needs more specimens. If you can’t get them from- where? Kinshasa? I don’t give a shit where they’re from but get them.

Etiquette does not belong to reptilian Harvard business degrees.

He flails

gigantism

spontaneous

painful

she wonders if the T-specimens even feel pain.

She watches Beller with fascination while he loses any of his specious claims to humanity. The hair grows thin

calories for haywire metabolic processes

even kindling will feed a furnace.

They lose nails

necrotic vestiges peel and sklick off when she corners one, wrangles it like an animal

(it’s a game, of course, and a fun one she will repeat a few times)

grasper from the canine specimen lab.

The dogs

Annette euthanizes the dogs the second there are suspicions.

She will not watch them suffer

at least so much.

It is a strange pang she feels

the twitch of something atrophied and full of longing.

It comes to her when she is finished.

She cries

blur of syringes and lolling tongues

all of it is cold blue in the green-tinged tiled anteroom.

She chooses Dr. Fluent.

She despises the rodent

his greasy swept-back hair

he looks like the ‘seventies backed up out of a drain

lubricious skin sick under glycerin

Old Bay Rum makes for olfactory Superfund sites.

She knows the

short

squalid

pointless thing leers with beady animal eyes at her.

It invades her head

rhetorical questions

self-defense instinct of counterfactual imminence in Technicolor

aversive

repulsive

her hips still pinch the way they always do and should not whenever it is

anyone but William

(and William, also, she thinks)

scary intolerable repugnant.

There.

The day is dead and she has tried

briefly

to pick up a cigarette habit.

It went well.

For half of a butt.

Job well done

resonant clink-clink comes to sudden rest.

Fire cleanses.

In the open shaft purified of the rotten nest of gaping mouths

(heaped in the cable car, it leads only to the place where the pitiless sun roosts, one-way trips never made do not count)

she knows it is sealed

(hermetic against gas attack, radiation, curvaceous bloat of coworkers’ bodies in the furnace)

and knows there are fifty colorful cartons of nicotine death in Pinewood’s office.

She was

a mistake

the recoil shock when Annette’s long fingers slide up the smooth dirty cheeks and Pinewood’s face is the color of chestnut

swallow-snap

contact

touch

another person’s body heat

the way Pinewood’s voice and face war

complexity of the eyes too much

confounding

the alien will of another intelligence

black puzzle box of reason

Pinewood’s tongue tastes like motives Annette feels she cannot touch and never really has

long gloss-black hair

one of the security women.

Annette cannot

stop herself.

There is a scream and Pinewood’s arms are thick ropes but she is half-staggered by lust all idiotic with hunger seen and sought in the pretty pale skin and

liar’s eyes.

Pinewood doesn’t have enough blood in her.

They move from the door when it wheezes closed on the little dorm

rumpled semiclean sheets layered on bunks

med school hookup hangovers

scarce long-shafted orange glow from mole people reading lamps.

Self-consciousness dies

they are alone

there is a little table in the middle of the room and a scabrous metal locker that might once have been clean

and blue thick-enameled

and undented.

It is none of those things.

Gray-painted walls

institutional

there is tile and not carpet.

Every sound is amplified

amphitheater without subtlety

oh, fuck, yeah

boss-lady, ever since I saw you

and there is not enough oxygen in so little blood.

Annette’s fingers find bulgy threads

squeeze.

She wonders

(will wonder)

why she feels this so much more

than she ever did with William

all clothed

Pinewood topless

Latin, maybe

coppery-sleek

black eyes dead and glassy

the body races ahead of its own inevitability.

Her chest moves

big breasts splay apart

nipples puckered tight, thick, areolae close up against the skin.

She keeps her down

counts out the seconds

or close enough.

Two-sixty

two-seventy

she makes Pinewood psychonaut of acquired cerebral trauma, hypoxia

(prognosis good for recovery, strong likelihood of impaired faculties- minor)

Five-hundred is not so good.

Clammy

cool like metal under her

even the first strange red ring that promises a bruise

a woman girdled

she babbles beautiful sweet gibberish.

Annette

watches

falls in love.

Vulnerable

cute

there is existential grief and incomprehension.

Annette is sure she sees the being shrink

contract in the face of something truly

absolutely

beyond something it no longer even has the words to frame.

What comes out is a yip

bark

imbecile-twitching jaws crease her tongue

flaps sticks and teeth cut and there is the shock of sensation.

Novelty

horrible

Annette thought she could train her

a faithful little bitch at her side

hands and knees

and saw it was all romance and held her down again.

And this time there is struggle.

There is muscle

without coordination

fear

grayout

fast-pant sucks breath.

The being is too stupid now

if she ever had been otherwise

to understand hyperventilation syndrome

eyes lose luster

this time Annette plants thumbs.

Pinewood’s eyes are tight gray concrete rings around open manholes

they stay open

drown.

She still gives off a vague waft of stale burnt vegetable water from the steamer on their stove’s black iron grate.

Annette

hates her in retrospect

mostly because the warm stain that spreads in black fatigue pants wrapped nice

inviting

full of curves

reminds her this is by far the least objectionable thing she’s smelled today.

The cigarette is shaky ambition.

Surety there will be a past-tense vindication.

She does not cough.

That much.

Gunpowder is three shots of gin.

They scream

a futile thing

a shy herd

no self-preservation instincts in the face of black muzzle nine millimeters wide.

Brad Silver

Just for Men’d hair

demonic gross greasy

he reaches out

w-wait

“They weren’t infected.” Annette knows her movements are loopy

clip-clop heels figure-eight over the scuffed floor like she waltzes.

Movement

perception

ache

on her feet

she can count the steps to a blister to a callus

but the shoes are beautiful all the same.

The thing lies there

an it, she thinks.

Like Fluent.

Degraded to it.

She thinks for a second she’ll tell him

lassoed

leashed

chained

banked by concrete

hunched low

squats like one of his subjects.

Isn’t it ironic?

You seemed to think you were God over lesser animals.

But it is lost on the it.

The rudiments of what makes a man

or woman

emptied out

brain seared and fucked through until the thing is all exit wound.

Like William, whose glass eyes don’t even see her.

Egg-drop cataracts

googly-wet idiotic empty

the life is gone

it lives

grudging

bitter muscle shrunken tight on the bone.

Strong.

The kennel is rough cement and bare bulbs

light like a barely-remembered night with her parents

‘seventies shag

sepia memory.

Earplugs let her smash the quiet

the bone splits but doesn’t give.

Strong.

For sixteen hours she watches him.

Boredom

squats on the halfpipe edge of this little pit.

He could escape

(she is sure even if he weren’t chained there is not enough behind the gray-swirled eyes to stagger over the lip)

maybe.

Now it is impossible.

Blood

moves

a slow leach.

She wonders

wants to prod

scrutinize.

But sees too much

consistency of thin school glue

or semen.

It is the stink of rot given life and made to dance.

She thinks there must be some kind of evil miracle in the T-virus

that it takes without giving back and makes eternity out of loss.

Polarized.

Absolute.

Honest.

She expects hunger

autocannibalism

but instead it looks and works its jaws and

all at once she sees it.

Exploratory pawing

the body is onion skin thin as heat-blister

it flakes away

he peels

one layer

after the next from around the bullet split.

Faster

faster

TRPML (1-3)

Nociceptive fiber

Αβ fiber

sprawl

twitch

fall in supplication

thanksgiving

she sees it.

The way the thing digs in fingers

twists

slits

cracks dry-rot tissue

styrofoam crumble

perfunctory barely-there

fiberglass insulation of blood-starved tissue necrotic

debride with a firehose

or sandblaster.

She leaves it

sees Beller

(hears, anyway, squeak-squeak-scuff-squeak-squeak-scuff while he propels himself with feeble exhortation)

she sees.

He slides across a hallway made empty of life

less benevolent euthanasia leathers mummified in mausoleum cold.

“Doctor Beller.” Annette hears her voice.

So does Beller.

Annette watches the thing struggle to negotiate simple propositions of geometry.

Balance.

There is the frustration of collision

wheels clump up against a wall.

Its moan is a pathetic animal plaint.

Another simper

whimper

it appeases

a thing.

This is what she sees.

Beast of intellectual burden, now light a purpose.

She could

(easily should)

have administered euthanasia.

She knows she cannot afford carelessness

and all the same she watches instead under algid blue-white light.

Knowledge is spontaneity’s death

imagination enclosed

neurologic ring-fence.

William

never got it.

Every time she would tell him this

sometimes

I think as an artist

a philosopher

an anthropologist

(theologian)

Biology is

signals

burdens

weight

mathematics.

This is all it is.

Load

strength

structure

integrity

Dr. Beller is a strange sexless thing now.

Gaunt emaciated awful

trousers sag

Dr. Beller always was a man who needed to punch his belts tighter anyway.

She

would watch

stare at the old man doddering on to enlightened senility

(presentiment of the future, nervous breakdown portended once

(she sees a photo of Dr. Beller young

(and he was the same man she saw every hour of every day with more hair)

and know he was the idiot savant made Hollywood caricature, Rain Man with seven PhDs, three different medical degrees

who could not negotiate conversation with a woman without the crude swing of paternal or hormonal.

And now she sees necrosis pervade soft tissue

trousers sink comic down the scrawny legs and drag old-fashioned ‘fiftiesish white shorts with them.

The repulsive

immediacy

of a man’s genitalia.

She loved to cradle William’s, warm and round

she thinks

except sometimes she would flinch from it with hysterical phobic pangs

sometimes early when his hands traced out the silhouette of her penciled messy across the sheets with hair worn far longer

and what can a woman filled with words of love do?

This is

different

and not.

The way William always was twitchy-thick coming out of his boyish briefs and his body is strong and lean and the head bulges cut and it looks

(feels)

like a weapon he brandishes

threatens

and she wonders

swallows

wonders

if maybe she is wrong

and he is wrong

and the way their bodies fit together is wrong

if maybe the way his virtues might come of absences instead

and they should fit together like a puzzle

swarm like the ooze she watches climb Dr. Beller’s phyllo skin

fanciful sunsets of bruises

half on the man

half of the man

and half gone entirely.

She loves William

she is sure

(does not really know what love is, the absence of betrayal, absence of pain, absence of fear, ineffable positive things she cannot quite piece into words and sometimes she is sure it is failure of practice)

and

Dr. Beller swims

straggles

finally catches a corner

snares half-naked mating dance of humerus, coracoid process, acromion

meat

rip like red tissue paper in too-eager Valentine.

Dr. Beller stops.

Again she is sure there must be

something

vestigial

animal

ravenous.

She knows there will be the yawn of jaws

underfed muscle given Tutankhamen diet winnowed to overtightened strings.

She expects hunger

mindless and bestial both

but the movement is slow

sure

the masochistic rock of tongue against wounded palate

gum

cheek

tongue

lip

she

begs him

(there really is only one him for her painted thick neon synecdoche for a race of walking penis)

once

please

to dig a big sharp set of canines

(animal, when his hair is shaggy and ungroomed, when he’s back from a run all bright from sweat and smells like spring rain on pavement, when she’s bitten her bottom lip

(shock, accident, sudden red-mist spike, dull backbeat down the chin, offender a Granny Smith put to death on schedule despite protest, thrash of claws, struggle against inevitabilities)

into her body

and he does.

He listens

smile peels his red Michelangelo mouth

teeth bright in the semigloom of melodramatic tragedy

theater of cruelty harbored in bluish dye of uncomplicated color from a Macintosh computer that harbors the last of NDAs, exclusivities, all the words

all the names

the cosmology of the place

the naming of the heavens

and the earth

and the hells

all under red and red.

The pay is

(impossible, mid-sixes for a twenty-four-year-old, is this what your soul is worth?

(did she really have one to sell in the first place?)

remarkable.

They will have a house

after a cramped student apartment that grows whitewashed and hot in the summer where cockroaches tapdanced nights sometimes in the little kitchen just off the front door

(she loves it

(it’s here

(sometimes

(to be inhabited surer than this nightmare)

and he is beautiful

and has signed without question

(“Albert says it’s the opportunity of a lifetime, my God, Annette, my God, it’s not the money- think of the labs, the chances, the- the freedom at last.”)

and given her little choice except the shield of a jealous deity

or to walk

estranged

(don’t use the d-word, her mother’s too-pretty face pinches out the sound)

six months after bells and cake and white lace dresses.

He bites her.

William.

For a half-second everything is all animal and not only the semiferal pinball of reflexes that make her body bolty and skittish and always ready to spring out of its sheath.

Instead he pushes

paints red with a slow brush down her chin

she yelps

(she wishes she wouldn’t have)

the hard-drawn wire of sensations

crossed signals

knees jolt

jerk

he stops

too soon

she is sure something strange and spooky rheumy in her eyes maple syrup-sweet deep in her hips drip at the apex of thighs

shiver

a little groan

William.

His fingers push

this is the one time she is sure

(not only certain)

wears the evidence tattooed all over her insides

the way she crushes

he rushes

(for once it isn’t too fast

(maybe too long

(until it’s not)

pounds her belly

he is strong

(his might breaks steel now, echoes down damp dank halls, she knows he will be back

(probably)

handsome

(this time, yes, he is

(without a squint

(or a in this way)

visceral

dark

deep

hungry.

He pummels

rips

consumes.

And kisses her without a word about her lip.

Pushes

crushes

swallows

drags

(bites)

and she begs him to chew it and he does and it is this

everything empty except for sensation

for the focus of flesh

communion gives everything polarity

sacred

golden calves are minted discreet and shameful

(not too ashamed to exist)

frantic sticky-sweet kind of ugly.

Even his breath has a staleness to it

metal

powdery

(she wants to drink it)

wraps arms

legs

drags

inhales

consumes.

And she is eaten, she is sure

(she can quantify

(qualify

(oxytocin overdose

(dopamine convulsion, seesaw model of coritsol, SHBG, progesterone, prolactin, serotonin, vasopressin

(hot wave of histamine in darkness of nerveless head

(epinephrine

(norepinephrine, morepinephrine, jerk tight tremor shiver ache deep distend close to bottom-out Karman line is no different than end of the world under black water where anglerfish hunt

(splay-legged orgasm

(muscles soften

(deliquescent)

the way a T-subject eats.

Sloppy.

Gluey.

He doesn’t just come

he creams her.

She knows because there is something tidal

frantic storm surge starches platinum-sugar beach sand

in that interval new heresies are courted

new gods are given upper-case

and new cosmologies exalted.

She

erupts

hard

sudden

legs jerk

a rough toenail edge scrapes the bed

her hair is misty-flat from sweat and forms slack rings like dead chainmail in the silvery rainshower unlight

she never has been more beautiful

she is sure

than this second.

He sees her

and she does William

and knows she belongs to her body and the feeling is pain and perfection and her belly bows she’s sure and he ramps up against her spot and he is big enough and it’s a frantic slap-slap-slap

muscle swells

his

hers.

The T-subject is a hole in the shape of higher reasoning.

They follow corrosion’s race

a seaside collapses in time-lapse

exquisite unholy flailing

the wretched.

She sees them without pity and Annette is surprised.

She always has been benevolent

she is sure.

Something taken for granted

(mother reinforces it pointed and sure with five fingers striped raw red on her cheek every time she strays

(and father’s on her ass

(drags her over his lap

(the man’s shadow burns white hot like charcoal on the Fourth of July grill when she feels the way both of her parents stare at her in a fluttery bright sundress and heels out on the patio

(he lingers

(she is sure there is an odd pull of zipper somewhere inside)

but now she wonders if it comes to everyone.

The first is happy accident.

She does not like Dr. Simmons.

But Annette knows her

(Dr. Simmons has come on to her

(Annette is not sure but she thinks

(did they ever kiss?

(or is this the strange way all the same she is ensnared by hard bones and sharp lines and parenthetical lies of smiles unheld on the miserable seam of lips?

(and sometimes enmeshes Annette when it is supposed to be William’s arms tight and lean around her waist)

the woman is rude

(pushy)

arrogant

(Annette is

(sure it only is the odd track of intrusive thought that spreads imagery of salt-and-pepper hair, the way the body is hard and lean, distance runner, she is enthusiastic markswoman at the indoor range, electronic ears and quick pop-pop rhythm of a Glock

(plastic

(looks

(feels

(basically is cheap

(disposable as any Umbrella

(that accursed name

(fucking name

(that

(god

(damned

(blaspheme

(silence the migraine ache that pulses close

(transgression unfelt since sitting under cathedral’s pious hypocritical pillars

(touches herself

(discreet

(when she thinks of Mary

(not Magdalene

(the Virgin

(cult of self-loathing

(she is made from self-abnegation promised in Adelphic hypocrisy

(the way she grasps the body all sacred horror and torment

(the way she will gash herself with the same crown

(climb

(she is sure

(scale his venerated carcass and try to breathe life back into the blue-white stillness of revelation and there in the visions under hot white light on Sunday on her knees with father’s strong fingers taut and guiding in her hair she will tremble and choke

(in the shadow of his pain

(hunger spreads by revulsion)

and sometimes demands far too much

(expects even more

(it is a shove more than push, she does not tell William, she cannot drag any idea why out of her head except she is sure if she even whispers it William will spend even more time with Albert, he speaks of the grody freak

(sunglasses at night

(Je

(sus

(as if there is divine spark inside him

(Simmons’ mouth is the mean print of tarry breaths and gin and harsh-cut with the rapidograph chisel of too many days outside, too much sun, too much life maybe

(she is rough

(c’mon, Annette. Don’t tell me you never, ha ha, felt the chemistry)

Annette

well

sometimes there are mistakes.

Simmons screams

a lot

too much, Annette thinks. She wonders if maybe Simmons should have been more attentive to protocol when Annette watches through a one-way glass panel inset in a blast door Simmons pounds on with hands that

for all their strength and rough breadth when they fold Annette’s cheeks and half-snuff the light

still only are a woman’s.

She has drunk a strong self-deifying draft

like all bio types, Annette thinks

cause and effect conflated like the religious

and description and command and creation, also.

Annette cannot even hear

and Simmons does not even know Annette is outside the door and brushes a finger over the Emergency Lockdown Protocol switch.

It is

ostensibly

the right choice.

William stands behind her

scowls like a Dobermann at Director Schulmeyer

nepotism

cronyism

toupee

when the bastard hoots and baboons around a lavish office about how

Jesus tapdancing Christ

Annette volunteers she is a Christian

Schulmeyer’s cheeks are made of pork

unkosher

and he gets florid.

You could’ve gotten Simmons out of that room. It wouldn’t even have been against protocol

Annette interrupts.

She hears her voice

a half-foot out of her body

bored

“Simmons didn’t triple-lock the specimen kennel. I consider it fortunate I happened on this before more than only Simmons were infected.”

The beast is

a meek and pitiful thing.

Annette sees complacency take.

She read a statistic once of sheep-related human mortality.

Sheep kill more

with more directness

than almost all species but other humans.

The thing is pitiful

the T-subjects almost are adorable.

Simple concert halls full of the spun-out minute waltz of stimulus-response.

The subjects have been handled by incurious hands

Simmons is a woman who mumbles invocations of profit margins

utility graphs

efficiency

economy

biology as actuarial science.

God exists to her and her ilk only as the terminal point of evolutionary destiny.

They find theology in poured polished silver.

They have willed themselves machine with delusions of animate idolatry.

Spiritual golems.

Annette hates them

(does not envy them)

because in the end they are all the same: Not machine but part, piece, gears neater, sharper in etch, machined finer, useful, usefuller than the common rabble

(they do not own the scales but their fingers are worthy weight all the same

(they are lemma to the unprovable equations of present)

and really no different.

They aspire to

value

made fungible by mutual mushroom feast with virtue

and even vice.

Even Simmons is a cheerless thing.

The sex

Annette’s body tightens, jerks, tells screams alarms her that the sex is made not in the image of Simmons’ desires but young blonde pussy

(married

(straight

(these things are ostensible)

in the rear-view

heroin-jolt of confirmation when premonitory emphysema coughs tickle the Frisian horses in Greek fire that crowd a cake she does not want to eat.

Annette sees

geomantic psychopathology of self-denial

compensatory excesses

gorge

purge

self-hate march rhythm

sacred hymns

qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis

pain

pleasure

pain

pleasure

thready

triangulated

nociception ad periosteum

down

drill

life is complexity of middleware that mediates uncertain pinch of neurotransmitter.

Money.

Holy absurdism of thought made serf to indulgence

Annette is sure even a toothpick should be enough to tack on the simple homily to cathedral door.

Still, the patient is

juicier.

Simmons is all complaint and torment

please, please, please, ya gotta- ya gotta try the APX, please, please

Annette is

for all her

(uneasy coughs, wary looks, it is not William but Albert who pushes

(Annette does not believe

(but does not disbelieve, either, the workings of Samael)

controversy

the senior on this project.

And Annette leans close

(but not so close)

and whispers to Simmons through a pain-kinked haze that has seen the woman flush with fever

already the fetid curl of necrotic portent

bowel

bladder

the autonomic deserts its post first with T

at least at the margins.

It is all imbecile animal, the self to be sustained, except Annette sees

allegory

allusion

perfected waste

the way T not only is a virus but the virus

of humanity

humanity

humanity.

Consume.

Perpetuate.

Except there is an inefficiency.

all viruses

overproduce and so destroy the host.

T gives the process legs

scabrous rough nails

teeth

the odd warble-wrap polyphony of unholy whisper-gasp from dying voice box

Wernicke and Broca desert

groans

grunts

the eyes grow Coke bottles.

But sometimes there still are pangs.

Her eyes will flash awake

B-depletion

catastrophic vitamin crash for all the open-tap TPN

force-feed the irresistible through central line.

Annette watches without remove.

She knows Simmons will recognize her.

Annette is the one who orders the APX be withheld.

She does not explain. She sees herself in the middle-ground of past-tense third-person

answers to the question did I really?

It is clear

yes

she stares with reptile flatness at

the cute little one

Chambers?

No.

Chalmers. That’s it.

Small

a figure of insubstance

she will not follow the herd

truculent

little

ungulate

matters little in the end because Annette catches it desaturated and remote on the security console’s dispassion

monochrome beach broken by wobbly thin distortion seam.

Three of the T-subjects

(same dank concrete cell as Simmons)

are aggressive.

Chalmers is slight

that’s the word

everything about her is not only compact but unobtrusive

anxious

a being of cringes and wary eyes, lapdog agitation

pleads to be soothed.

The hair is long

the kind of black that looks fake

painted enamel on a brittle bisque doll of the same girl

same petulant lips made to pout all pink-sugar

same overbite that gives shy guile to guarded smile

big breasts.

The legs are long

she is a child with a tall woman’s proportions.

The impression is feeble

vulnerable

Annette thinks maybe

it would have been better for this to be her hips’ ache instead of the vague pangs that stab guilt around the appendix

a hollow needle of a feeling

in the end she doesn’t remember to stop refusing to forget.

When Annette shoves her frail body against the wall and drags a tongue up and down Chalmers’ throat she wonders why she tastes no pulse and keeps talking about telomere suspension, wow, T-cells die hard and

and no cellular transcription imperfections

(like the best viruses

(like cancer

(it curates itself

(it is Vestal

(sure

(indelible)

and so she sees.

T-subjects

before the vagaries of multiple organ failure

(desperate fluid push, the body can be sustained

(until it becomes a trunk of raw meat in a heatwave

(drips

(seeps

Annette orders that TPN and fluid push be sustained, wonders if she can hope to ride out the fevers

(binary proposition and the answer is no)

thrash

twist

twitch

the restraints are compulsory.

For the first

four hours of intensive support

(Annette clock-watches, listens to the sound of fading downpour, inevitability pronounced in fever and force)

Simmons babbles

mostly

(she rarely did much else)

and Annette sees under the steady white room drone from life support’s sterile paraphernalia

(familiar ugly red and white, mostly. A GE stands cold blue-etch against the defib. Umbrella does not produce them)

the conviction She Will Be Different.

And then the I frays in wet stone laundry

jumble-throb of agitation

bleach spills through meager color.

Annette watches the spin-down of lofty dreams

spiritual dialysis of higher reason and all its liabilities.

The first to go

Annette sees

is anger.

Simmons is

nice

sad

she flinches

polarized

puppyish

cringes from fearful possibility

for a half-hour fever spikes and Annette peers into the eyes she holds open, looking-glass delirium

a life lived by parental dinner party

of course

love yuuutuuu

sorry

plea

Simmons docks her own tongue before Annette can splay her jaws with a speculum

fast-cranked

metal

rude

collision between enamel and sterile surgical steel takes its predictable casualties.

Annette will not offer gloved fingers to the hungry yawn that silences Simmons at last.

She attempts language after the self-inflicted glossectomy.

Sad cold muscle stays wedged in her throat for ten minutes before Annette is able to lock down the dental speculum

but she admits to silence she doesn’t approach it with much urgency.

It fascinates to watch.

Simmons is full of hunger

dog-dream shudders

pursuit predator ambitions.

Simmons’ skin peels like she’s been boiled

slimy tawdry thing

beauty is all husk

and the butterfly is no different from what roosts in rotten meat.

T-subjects do not need respiration, Annette sees

follows

(when they crack open Simmons’ chest cavity for a prophylactic thoracotomy they see the lungs already are atrophied, vestigial, pointless.

the T-virus’ metabolic engine is unknown but it ticks ahead for all the fire

febrile mania

no amount of immersive cryotherapy

(technology supplies lucrative dignity to buckets of ice and water)

will save the brain.

Heatstroke

muscles split the skin

she chews

tears

craves

in the end it’s tooth that yields and her jaw splits and comes apart and all the damp is just slow rot.

She has melted in odd places

her mandible comes away under gravity and failure of pain temper.

And a hand, also

Chalmers stares

both of them.

BSL 4 space suits

the two inhabit a canary moon, dim IR light, the T-subject is basically blind and impervious to fears of the dark.

Chalmers cracks up, Annette knows

something happens when she sees veins stuck fast

arteries soldered into paper-filet meat bloated to pulp but still with life’s stubborn thud.

Juices weep

Simmons dries

overflows her chest cavity

groangrowl

terrible plangent sound all hunger and thirst

all is sandpaper.

They stand back.

Annette knows there is

(should be)

relief their air comes piped, segregated, chilled like the bones that know sympathetic ache when Simmons swings a naked wrist.

Meat wobbles like cheap latex

grows slop

non-Newtonian humanity.

The bone

neurons hotwire

she sees

understands what no one bothered to see.

Simmons’ bones are still strong

close muscle works tight and shrill against skeleton.

Indispensable things are not.

Simmons’ wrist has come off uneven against stiff rubberized straps

her hand still lurks there

fingers spread in last dead flinch.

Chalmers’ voice grates

ohmygodohmygodshejust

she just took off her

her hand

Annette says nothing.

Chalmers is a poodle

grateful

submissive when Annette reaches out a hand

therethere

concentric intimacy of second-order touch through layered latex.

Chalmers’ fingers squeeze

Annette did not assent to this.

It is the same patience as when she wants only to shrug off William’s arms

(only sometimes)

and endures.

Annette

at the time

is sure it is the imbecile autocannibalistic reflexes Simmons scrawls in journals.

Hunger is the easy alibi.

Prod

Annette knows when she sees Beller this is as mistaken as every other part of Simmons’ reasoning.

Beller does not sate his hunger pangs by ritual pet of belly.

Instead he leans with a constant squeak-thud-squeak-thud

embrace and rejection

maternal revulsion

the baby is a vile thing

her mother tells her that she wouldn’t hold Annette for the first six months

(strangest thing, she pronounces, and laughs behind a wine glass like a Riesling duck pond)

no one can love this.

The wall cannot know passion

Beller shoves

groans

Simmons finds sensation in a world full of too much

hunger does not make sharp but obsessive

all pulses

thought is gone

probably

but a thin ripplet on a pond in a downpour goes unnoticed.

There is center when Simmons rakes the jagged prongs of forked bones through a messy slurry of purplish-colored facial muscle.

Her face leaves

Chalmers stumbles

staggers

there is the sound of imperfect constitution

splatters the girl’s bubble-dome helmet.

Annette holds her hand at the wrist

fast

for just three seconds when she looks down at Chalmers on her ass in a suit that burns orange in the light and her vomit is chunk and juice-drool and Tang across the visor.

Annette, w-what

Annette says nothing.

Simmons makes noises like fingers in honey.

Annette knows she lives a thousand years in a blink.

She wonders

sometimes

if her watch lies to her.

The

perfect

fucking distraction

sits there all obedient-submissive on her back.

The room

Annette has made it as perfect as can be expected. Instruments ready.

Vials.

The light is cool and warm in the same breath

the way the sun makes confusion of sensation.

The woman lies there

bleeds.

Annette

has it been fifteen minutes?

fifteen hours?

She wonders if maybe the woman is dead.

Entirely.

And sees raw meat instead

inflamed

exposed

still bloody like hamburger. It sheets greasy half-colors.

Melted black polyamide has given scaffold and structure.

There is a crumbled egg and dairy stink from the woman’s clothes

stale like a dank basement.

Her blood is bright perfume.

Without her gas mask she looks

pretty

delicate, even

for all the vestigial maleness.

Annette sees now

penetrates

unfurls.

The table is gray-white steel

scuffed

ample use

wheeled.

Some science projects are made for display.

Breath is regular

machinery makes this clear.

Probes

electrode clasps

the jaw is strong

chin clipped and sculpted pouty-pretty like the mandible.

Arrogant nose

eyes still deep-set for all the work put into obliterating a boyish brow.

The hair is Aryan

military-ish bun

tight

thick.

She wears makeup

for what little it’s worth.

Raccoon-sweat memory of kajal

the eyes are beautiful

black

a gazelle’s

grace and exoticism

vampire-queen.

The mask is long-snouted Womble freak.

Everything is black.

Machine gun.

Banana magazine.

Armor.

Uniform.

Blackblackblackblack

The lips have kept a vague coral tinge.

White wheeled carts roost with accusation

Annette knows the whore is awake.

Resting heart rate

faint prick up

sustained elevation

back from faded N3 paralysis.

Cardiac activity

circulatory

respiratory.

Annette’s fingers are long

hands thin and fine.

They belong in tight white gloves.

“Don’t ignore me. It’s rude.” Annette wears them.

A surgical mask

(loose

(perfunctory

(it does not smudge red lips)

“You’re hurt, aren’t you?” She has peeled open the lids

digital manipulation

the whore is skilled at rites of cataplexy

everything relaxed

everything limp

too much.

Numb-waking coma.

The pupils cannot help themselves under pen-light caress

moonlight tracks on dead pond.

“You know, you’re lucky I found you.” Annette gives ritual insult to convention. The back of a hand.

Annette’s head gropes

molasses climbs rough brick hungry creeper black dead sludge slime

afterbirth and stink of imperfect oxytocin overdose

the convulsions are horror

anarchic scrabble of heels and palms on stained sheets

sweat

much worse

vomit

piss

shit

all the convulsant palette of biologic expression in shades natural.

White gown

gaunt for all the weight shed in water and a being of screams and needs and wants

there are no mirrors in birthing suites for a reason.

Annette is caught instead in faceted vase

the birth goes too well

too easy-push-push-push

contraction hell-spasm

an epidural is

not for her mother’s girl. William’s breath gets flat and Annette is infant limp dead paralysis transfixed by stubborn gravid pangs.

She is all hurt.

It is without reward.

The gentle wrap of palm around little cheek that should

by native certainty

bear

something.

It is (supposed to be) the harvest of soft-focus advertorial destiny

they crack open her head

the body cannot protest what it demands instead.

Hormonal warp is an accident of ovulation, the pointless spasm of sleep paralysis victims. And all the same the flesh opens itself and it is intrusion

violation

possession by eight months and fifteen days’ worth of growing

invalidity

patiency

shallow rainstorm overflow on granite

weepy

pitiful

she will collapse on the bed when William is not there and her shoulders will jackhammer in and out of sockets and she will shriek and a man asks her once why she’s crying in a supermarket and she starts laughing at him

(he doesn’t know why, truth is if he just implied she would have fucked him right there in the aisle because he is the first person to ask a single question of her as being without parasite appendage)

she does not glow in this time. It is the oily luster of fever-sick confusion, permanent brain-singed stumbles, forgetfulness, sometimes the placid idiot smile of a dog’s satisfaction. It is all biology. The animal rejoices and the soul cowers kicked in the closet.

She

has no real need for the maternity extravagances she sees every day as ambition like aversive fantasy

all the immaculate garishness in floral print

the weightless emptiness that folds her in the house’s new white Middle American heat

summer

tight

central air-conditioning is its own sin when all it takes is fingers on casement windows to work sorcery

summon Aeolus

she reads for want of anything else sometimes

abhorrent things

fiction.

She wants to burn graven images

be the one to bring iconoclasm to the Kaaba

anything to put

in order

at last.

Just so she will be able to see a face for whom love must be

rehearsed

she thinks.

It is all convulsion. Her body is weightless and an incipient scream works manic bellows in her chest and William

William is there

a little fifteen-hours-with-a-woman-in-labor haggard

he sips naps

she hopes this is confabulation

she will open her eyes and she will reel post-coital and William

they both have

have said fuck it, no to the Umbrella recruiter with her fine slender fingers and mocha-colored manicure and soft amber skin

Lilith

and instead

she screams

screams because she knows

knows this is because this perpetual twinge of pelvis, odd swell of minimal belly, barely-grown boobs, heart parched like roasted rock

it harbors pieces of him

knows she has wanted to lust the fifteen hours with him

last sixteen-and-fifty minutes

because he is there

without distraction.

His fidgets and muted little murmurs and the softened edges of a terrible trendy song he hums like a child and the way he sniffles a little from the mellow orchids that stand in the vase that

that shows her

splintered to facets and crude angles

sharp

too sharp

cheeks sunk down to craters

her eyes are dead

dead

dead like a T-subject’s

her skin is all mottle and bruise

and she will have to

“Haven’t you ever been loved by a mother?” Annette’s voice

does not need to try

to aspire to the creak of splintered timber and cold tight ice.

The eyes open.

“What’s your name?”

Annette knows there is little gentleness in this thing. The body has not been made in kindness’ image.

It’s a problem to her

one she drapes by volition over her shoulder.

“Is this kind of petulance really going to help you? I’m your savior, after all.” The mask barely muffles words declared instead of just said.

Annette wonders

maybe

well

the woman is beautiful.

The eyes are bestial.

It is not romantic.

It is flint-gash atavism

it is the way atom-by-atom all the soft buffers are gone

debrided

until there is only the leanness that comes from being flayed and cauterized.

Annette sees a specialized animal. A distinctive kind of predator.

She sees a late-growth V-ACT’s stare.

The usual T-subject is slothful

V-ACT cranks taps on all the aggressive traits.

Mother Nature’s perversions beget renewed sex hormone

testosterone

estrogen

progesterone

vitamin realignment

ocular clarity cancer-new

sharp

can’t really ask it better one or two? but estimates place acuity at 80/20.

It steams

the wet-tannery carcass reek of exposed muscle.

V-ACT is metabolic suicide ride.

The savage cannot sustain its wrath for so long.

The T-subject’s longevity is gauged in days, weeks of hot viral utility

V-ACT is seven hours.

It must feed

mouthparts and esophagus and gut

(the relevant organs all are renewed, they see this is the reason for vagaries in V-ACT incubation, everything must be aligned, Mother Nature is perfectionist until this thing will be freed and made to break and tear and rake with nails turned claws)

but no matter what’s done

no matter the experimental confusion of lipids, aminos, saccharides, supplements, vitamins

nothing.

Futility.

The V-ACT subject is Great Dane, felled by accidental stupidities in genetic expression.

“Why’re you so suspicious? Aren’t I nice?” Annette’s fingers round the jaw

graze and dimple the dirty-ish skin

warm through the latex.

Crease the imperfect fray of tracheal shave.

A collarbone is fragile-fierce

black tee-shirt under the military jacket

armor and webbing gone.

The pants are button-fly.

“Have I hurt you? I just want to know who you are; what the problem is. You’re so...” Annette makes cold syrup of her voice.

No matter how much she massages it

it belongs to the woman.

“Pretty. And warm. And alive.” Annette hears herself from the third-person.

Wonders how many times people have seen her like this

heard her like this.

She

wants to shriek again.

“I could have chosen anything but this. Do- do you ever think those exact words?” She

what does it matter now?

This whore is the walls

the floor

the ceiling

the flat presence of matter. This time it’s just animal instead of mineral.

“I want it to be different. I do. Do you know how many years of my life I gave to him?” Annette feels her body move.

It does not hear time, she has found.

Age has not touched her.

William’s face is framed with crease for all the pretty-boy

but she is

the laugh splits her red lips

“Buried for almost twenty years of my life. More than half of that spent in this”

Annette has no need to satisfy another’s impatience.

Fingertips taste the pulse’s thud-thud-thud

calm

just a little.

She knows pain’s perpetual companionship.

They do not tell women about skeletal deliquescence

about the growth of spontaneous abortion tissue in unfertilized women

the way the fetus becomes factory for T-Virus replication

the children are consumed first.

Some achieve life

or its approximation

brief and convulsive on the floor.

They swim in a broth of putrefaction

nails aberrant

the necrotic womb does not hold fast.

They scream

the pregnant women

some of them laugh instead.

She finds the laughs are the most pleasant to watch

the reconciliation with inevitabilities.

Foxes

rabbits

eventually the ledgers must be balanced.

She still hates morning sickness in the present-tense.

“event horizon.”

Annette knows she bores this whore

for all the way pain gnaws there is no spontaneous panic-shock.

The body is allegory for civilization.

Frogs do not tolerate hot water

humans always will convince themselves normalcy is a negotiable thing.

“It’s such a beautiful mausoleum. I hike. Run. I was Cider Princess once.” Annette’s laugh has the echo of pebbles and empty tins.

She beams bright yellow light into the eyes.

They follow.

She speaks

pulse lifts.

“Do you understand me?”

Takes stock

the whore may now be a rutabaga.

Blood work

(easy, fast-whir automation, CBC, ABG, chem, coag, all something close to normal

(wait on viral titers)

at least is H. something.

“No? Yes? My name is Annette. Annette Birkin. Doctor Annette Birkin. MD. PhD. Mmm. I never wanted any of those.

“What I want right now- my favorite part of the production. A lollipop.” Annette doesn’t know

and doesn’t care.

Everything is helium light now she sees.

She doesn’t have a captive.

All the rehearsed mesh of interrogation and resistance

electrical burn

sick-sweet skillet smells

and worse.

Mmm.

Traumatic amputation is an especially funny way of putting it.

Annette does have lollipops

sugar bulbs on plastic sticks.

It is her oral fixation.

She wonders

sometimes

why William doesn’t even want her on her knees under his desk, work her head in the shadow.

She thinks maybe she should have let another throbbing-thick piece of meat blow itself out in her mouth.

She

wonders

Annette

wonders

peels the hub of sexual allegory out of its crinkly wax wrapper.

Green apple.

It’s her favorite

by lot from a little coffee mug on a cart of

less innocuous things.

Fun things.

“Are you going to be a- a little puppy for me? All laid out like that?”

Annette cannot quite

“oh, that”

laugh through confused slosh of ten minutes gone in fast blink.

Computer blurt

pathogen hazard

follows

but not the usual grade sounds.

The sound is all red and stalks like a library horror.

She tastes salt in the air off a gravedigger’s neck.

“amazing. So- you’re a T-subject, too, huh? Different strain. Different morphology.” Annette pronounces to no one. “But this is- so interesting. Sure, you’re hurt. Forty-grit isn’t the best for the human body, I suppose.

“Whoops.” Laughter

the

whore laughs, too.

Annette sees eyes follow distraction across the ceiling

temblor writhe of autokinetic phantom.

This

she is on solid foundations with body

meat

wiring

plumbing.

“I need to know your name, you know. Do you speak? Well, girl?” There is

a strange jerk somewhere.

Annette watches the bitch’s mouth lift.

Biceps pulse

red sheets in irregular wavelets out of exposed meat.

“You’re just- disgusting, aren’t you? What am I supposed to do with you?” The eyes follow

her lollipop.

“What? This? Mine.” Annette finally drags off the mask. She looms close, wraps lips around the little greenbottle ornament.

Sugar

corn syrup

acrid-hot reflex on tongue

fake-bitter flavor

bright tight smell

Granny Smith is much nicer than Nana Teller

dopamine flush.

Pop-clap of a stiff suck.

The whore’s tongue is all honesty

desert-dry

hungers for dessert

or contact.

Annette condescends to tip her sucker into the thing’s pretty pink perky lips.

Just a touch and they swell in smile that spreads oily green.

Annette studies

fingertip against blood’s naked candor.

The eyes take on softness.

Just a little.

“You like that?” There is suspicion.

Annette wonders if it is cruelty against humanity or herself.

She leans closer

studies the

dog’s eyes.

But not.

A wolf

tame

not by generous character and fireside intimacy but the shock collar and choke chain and boot.

There is savagery

this is no puppy

but the wildness is dim behind the fever-cloud of something

off.

T-infection leaves predictable scraped traces in sand. This womanwhoreslutcuntholebitchthing shows none of them.

The body is serene

metabolic

autonomic

anatomic

there is not the skin like rare snow-dusted autumn leaves

the gums are bright

pink

healthy.

The tongue is swollen-parched and fine.

The wolf does not bite. Annette knows

well

anyone with enough discipline would know a fingerless captor is not really any likelier to free you.

But there is something

pitiful

sweet

cute in the way the thing’s lips grasp

parched

color’s last kiss.

The tongue is animal

hungry

“Are you lying to me? Is this- I really hope this isn’t just to lull me into a false sense of security.” Annette knows her voice is science-fiction unwholesome

a computer’s breath-touched drone.

Not the voice she’s rehearsed for others.

This one

lazy

she has a pace

sure

inexorable.

Sentences will reach their destination

no matter personal vagaries of patience.

“Do you have a name?”

Nothing.

Probably just a lull in aggression

infectivity likely still is enough to weld scalp and skull if they share the lollipop.

She lets it droop

lifts it away

drinking bird

tease

dangle

torment

Tantalus sometimes touches his lust.

Absolutes belong only to myths

religions

simpleminded

without nuance.

She

is it even a she?

Don’t shes belong to more than beautiful husks?

Don’t shes belong to names?

Don’t shes belong to words?

This thing is no different than Beller, than Simmons.

Just a freak

a freak of freaks

Annette hates it.

Sudden.

Total.

This

fucking

thing lies there and leers and if it’s awake it’s all filled with cruelty even

there is laughter

a bray

sudden

Annette never has needed to ask why lunatics laugh at their own private jokes

(this never has been far away

(not since her

(she does not remember which birthday, all the meaningful scatter-brush of calendar pages that pool around the ankles)

“even for what I think a human being is, that would be cruel. Even for what I think I am, maybe. I- I’ll be honest.” Annette moves closer.

Another klaxon blast

she pulls away

there is a little

pule.

This is the sound.

Annette knows by fondle-reel of past-tense her hair brushed the thing’s cheek.

And then there was a little whimper.

She glances at it.

Avid eyes chase potentiality in her touch

roll with schizoid detachment from continuity

her hands

flick to her eyes

lazy adrift when something hitches and it forgets.

Its fingers are all tremor and twitch

a scuffed-white patch of boot rubber gives confirmation to fabric’s whisper campaign.

The computer spits up not only answer but question and nuance.

T(D) strain.

Annette’s eyes have glazed over pedestrian militaria

supersoldier lather of hungry homoerotic tongue

shriveled pederast hands ravenous for youth

she knows the cumulative shudder of every word she’s ever traded with Spencer

doddering

liver-spotted

gaunt black will that animates wheels.

He burbles praise over a Parable of Tares, no question.

British

plum jam self-satisfiction lathers on every rough surface.

She knows his weak hand that wears its age in popcorn joints hungers for William’s skin

smooth curve of shoulder.

She sees it now.

T’s pulse.

Lonely

enough

eat.

It’s arrogant

stupid

perfect.

She knows the Latin

yes

this will have to do.

Her lupus dei lies there ready and open for sacrifice.

She eats the hopeful eyes

fingers graze the keyboard

mouse-drag

hears the first

sweet little whitewater rush of its breathing get faster

faster

eleven subjects tested successful

(three provisional)

all is the mind in the end.

The provisionals are all moral defectives, spiritual imbeciles

invalids at the deepest most essential layer.

All else can be negotiated

honed

optimized

neuroelectronics promise immortality

(in submission)

Annette has seen

(scrubbed in a few times)

watched the weeping holes in head caressed

the penetration of mechanical

invasive

quirk of benevolent transorbital lobotomy

craniotome kisses naked skull

the principle is mechanical destruction

displacement

deep-auger dagger

the subjects are kept awake.

By design

necessity

principle.

There are

humilities

to be impressed.

This is the way it is explained to her.

The woman is iron and flat eyes

Dr. Schneider

reptile

the totality

rough skin shows premature age and murders tattoo the eyes.

They’ve gotta be remade. All of ‘em are useful. Some more than just in their own way. It’s about

I mean

do you wanna tell the boss no when he asks for

cyberzombies, I guess.

The right kind

D-Compatibles.

But the weird ones

reprobates

something is off.

They must be given Stepford surety

Spencer cannot have wayward demigods.

Annette does not know this one

but there are the names.

Of a kind.

She can rule out Spencer’s two favorites.

They rot in shallow graves

(Albert, she thinks, is a jealous lapdog

(so does William)

but three

HUNK

PORTER

PRIME

“Jesus.” Annette’s laugh has no echo in the air given blasphemy’s wobble

still.

“So which one are you? Prime?” There is

reflection

brows furrow just a little

the conditioning is

thorough

it is described

(demonstrated

(just a bit)

the cold-hot shock of intoxication on glossed lips

vague preamble to guilty

feelings

(most of the time, almost all the time, there only have been little misunderstandings in lonely moments and they go no further than ritual backings-out, a long kiss once, too sudden, too spontaneous in echoless late ‘eighties carpet heavy muffled sound heartbeat like gunshot to incriminate, William does not touch her and she cannot numb herself enough now to pretend she wants to abase herself for hands and lips)

fingers in her hair

(tell me the worst thing that’s ever happened to you)

Annette laughs.

It’s

a reflex she’s always had.

Anything

anything

she will laugh without joy.

This is where awkward moments find panic-scrabble relief valve.

I mean it.

She

Dr. Schneider

is authority

steel

Teutonic heel-click

she does not flinch at die Juden’s pain.

Strength

pull-push

Annette’s neck is stiff

(she wears a tight black pencil skirt, gray pantyhose she has to toss after this)

a whimper.

This is just the first exercise. The subject is made to relive their usefulness to other people. Ground fine until they are faceted to instrument.

Schneider never once talks about names

faces

sexes

genders

anything.

Not when she pronounces the genius of her Method.

Subject

subject.

What she means is object

passive voice

things are done to it.

The self is a twenty-four-seven loop of fragmentary trauma. It all bleeds together, poison kaleidoscope, all the lead and cinnabar and childhood incest.

This is the treadmill.

Try to stay off the belt.

It is to race inevitabilities

anxious flinch of neurons

the walls are made from screams.

Fear splays channels

cuts tunnels

turns the cerebrum into termite mound waiting for new owners.

New thoughts

new reason

new self-justification.

We invent traumas for ‘em sometimes. Give ‘em enough drugs, keep it convincing, they’re suggestible. Kids, mostly. One of ‘em

killed her mom

wow

pretty girl

wouldn’t really know she used to be a boy

laughter in an enclosed space

whiskey-drippy

(repulsive, Annette hates it, Schneider’s is an ethanol metabolism)

already, ah, part of the family. Judge decided

I mean

how is a girl gonna kill her mom twice?

Trained

thorough

rigorous

soft-bodied

the therapeutic value of gang-rape on a cold concrete floor rarely has so much clinical documentation.

Annette sees it.

Alignment

it is not apophenia.

This is the girl debrided

flayed of feedback loops

stimulus-response the durable engine starved to cough and collapse.

It looks

weighs.

“What about Porter?”

Contemplation.

sad little puppy whine, prelanguage, postconscious, the way pain comes even through erudite lips

first stir of regret and woe.

“Are you Porter?”

No recurrence

little sniffle.

Annette will not believe this thing is possessed of philosophic mourning for its own frayed identity.

“Hunk?”

Instant.

Switchblade flick.

“Hunk?” It

nods.

Stupid. Eager.

Its lips work

tongue sticks

the machine strains

sag-sway-lurch-repeat in deep mud.

“They named you Hunk, huh?” Affirmation.

Self

for a thing whose center has been hollowed out to accommodate more useful things.

Annette wishes she had studied at Schneider’s feet

been allowed to see the way the sweet girl is made her husband’s executioner.

Pitiless sklironym

Hunk.

It is clear this is glass file.

The first cuts

now the abrasion

indignity is hair shirt as uniform.

True name.

Demoness.

“What a pretty girl you are. With such a horrible name.”

Pretty.

The eyes perk at pretty.

There is something visceral.

Anatomical.

Something shudders deep inside.

The animal is eager. Waggly.

“What a cute one you are. Hunk. Are you- do you want this lollipop?” The eyes are milk-glass.

Swivel-spring.

Movement.

Stimulation.

She remembers

yes

T(D)

so many

unsuccessful subjects. It is evolutionary binary. No lucrative messes like T-Classic, side-effect better than cure for the moneymen.

99.9992% mortality.

Catastrophic organ

well

liquefaction.

Viral hemorrhagic analogue

(disingenuous, there is no fast-push support for a melted heart)

convulsion on the table

red tide.

The Provisionals are unwelcome lottery winners, nouveau riche garish distasteful.

Not the right sort.

Destined for war

disposable

attrition proves mongrel fitness.

“I wonder what they did to you.” Annette’s steps are muted in a way she hears now is another’s company. “It- it’s touching. An innocent love of a sucker.”

Annette’s expression is grin

Hunk is wary.

Hunk.

The name is

inelegant.

“Didn’t you ever have a name?” Head quirk.

Interrogation

the basal state drilled down to oily welter of evolutionary impulse is not a place of nuance.

Binary drives the machine

off

yes

run

fight

(third state?)

and there is the path.

Hunger.

Anger.

Flush.

Lust.

Annette’s fingertips brush the ankle.

She lurks.

Swallows long

slow.

T(D) is functionally non-infective.

Failures are sandcastles.

Successes are marble gods.

Even if estradiol hadn’t already made this girl’s grapes seedless the machine is sterile by design.

A true artist cannot afford forgeries.

“Did you used to have a name? Before Hunk? It’s so cruel, isn’t it? Granted, you’re a”

Annette’s kept her gloves.

Touch is still

(to a being denuded of discipline)

all full of tail-wag novelty

all the onrush of sense after however many days collapsed in a guttering sewer of its own defective impulses

wiring cross-spark

and the apocalypse engine’s jump-start with forty-grit lick.

There is

“you weren’t thought out very well, were you? All strength. No suppleness.”

Parable of walls

skyscrapers.

Women.

“You were made to endure until you

“just

“go

“to pieces. I guess- were they just going to send you off to some nice farm with a big yard and a nice concrete kennel to shove some thiopental in your neck? What if you broke? Are you worth reprogramming?”

Or is that the wrong question?

Is she the false youth of biomechanical retrogression

hormonal supplements

elaborate bath-broth suspension tanks fountains of youth that come in Cherenkov color rare and expensive like unhoteled Floridian sand?

The thing has to be reground, Annette thinks. Like all knives.

She

wonders

and wonders

wonderswonderswonders does it at last oh good fucking God just does it.

Her heels are muffled clipclock

steely tick on something brittle submission of tight steel spring.

Hunk

she will not call this thing Hunk.

This pup

this little hellhound.

Is touch enough?

Like Simmons?

Like Beller?

Like Annette?

She doesn’t probe

even prod.

She rams.

Two thumbs deep in raw meat.

The animal is nociceptive immediacy.

Pain

exists.

It is there.

The being has been restructured around it.

There is ample space for red fireworks under the serene black dome of ocean.

It is a benthic simplicity

slowness

fire eats itself

the being belongs only to a moment.

She pushes

again

the thing barely gives more than circuit-closed jolts.

off

sad

happy.

No sensory permanence

emotional resilience.

Annette has seen a little puppy bay and flap and fine the next second when a bowl rattles.

Children are little different.

“I should bandage that up, shouldn’t I?” Even in her ears, Annette thinks there might be affection.

The word is not warmth.

Annette feels ice round her ankles

swirl and eddy on the cold linoleum floor

scuff-scrape of ten thousand chairs.

She tastes too many nights of Sisyphus what-ifs on those chairs.

The way William could have slipped his strong fingers through hers and they could have taken an inauguration dance

the king and queen of the netherworld.

“It was all delusion.” Annette stares

swallows.

“I was supposed to be Persephone, you know. She- she’s the one who chooses. Hades just lets her eat. It’s easy to blame him. Mothers-in-law.” Bark-laugh

Mother Birkin

Maude

is Phaedra in last season’s designer.

There is wealth

of a kind

and a treasury of pretensions.

The voice is loud

sharp

a shrillness through which Annette has learned to smile.

To forbear.

It all

tapers

down

to a question.

The eternal

all the others are forensic vagary.

WhoWhatWhenWhere

all disposable.

The why?why?why?why?

the machine chokes on it

smooth lubricated conveyors

diligent daily work

it still stutters to a stop.

Pistons thrown

gears blown

rods bent

everything out of place.

It cannot move but by momentum.

Why?

Why did

why

why am

why is

why

whywhywhywhy

“I’m forty.” Annette leans close. “I don’t look it, do I? Every. Fucking. Single day, I look at this face in the mirror and all I can think is, How long before it deserts me?

“Before I won’t be able to- to do anything? I’ll have given my whole life over to something- oh, who am I talking to. You’re a puppy. Barely. You’ve had even your use ground out of you, haven’t you?”

Closer.

“Are you afraid of me? Do you know I’m the one that hurt you?” Annette’s body is lean bend and the olfactory null of being without

stink

funk

stench

in a world that harbors almost nostalgia for rot.

She wonders if she will miss it

this place

and laughs.

She knows this is not a make it out alive proposition.

Probably.

It stares

and continues to stare.

Waits for the common denominator between service animal and soldier.

Orders.

To be useful is to have life.

“Can you speak?”

A head’s quirk.

Contemplation.

Can it?

“Speak.”

“Yes.” It’s a bark made sonorous.

Miraculous.

No.

It’s not a human made to bark.

This is not the crude approximation

parody

caricature.

This is a dog taught to talk like a human.

The tongue cuts by awkward relearning. There is the ghost of memory somewhere she is sure

something that tells this animal this once was an act of nature.

That is faraway

a lonely voice in a fast river of babble.

Fragments

sparks in the dark

shuffle around long enough and you will raise blue static.

Memories are painted without color but light also is not enough.

“Remarkable! You do speak!”

The thing

nods

yes

“Why didn’t you before?”

Silence.

This is

a function of grammar.

“I order you to tell me why you didn’t speak before.”

“I...Can’t.” Confusion.

Something has happened.

Head injury?

Yes.

But that is its conception.

Head cocks

quirks

lolls

leftright.

Annette knows the implants’ nature.

Cortical stimulation

(and depression)

the cold ice of metabolic intercession

compensatory parasite glands

hormones

histamine

endocrine

amygdala

pituitary

augmented

idealized

(controlled)

she has seen the software. The hardware.

A nerd will spray coke-bottle enthusiasm all over the walls about the vagaries.

Supercomputer

parallel processing

bioware and spinal integration

buzzwords

probably.

Power is the word. The obsession.

“You need a name. What’s your name?”

“HUNK.” The voice is sweet-sad

husky-soft

tracheal shave

therapy

voice training.

Boyish burs still are there.

“That’s a terrible name for a pretty puppy like you.”

Annette

another Annette would shrink at it.

But another Annette is all lies and delusion

another Annette is all medicated by desperation’s hazy thread like the way she watches tar from her first and only cigarette slit sunshafts that stitch down down down the tunnel to her dead world.

Annette is sure Persephone can see sunlight across the river.

It is not so wide to row.

“I always wanted a dog. Instead of a family.”

Annette’s voice is wire-taut

sudden

she is the one to register shock.

“He’s up there. I wonder if he’ll be back. Probably. For all his

the words reel through smoky firmament

faith

conviction

observation

intuition

certainty

“belief

“most G-specimens are still basically simpleminded things. Just- durable. Some G realizes homeostasis with the subject. Evolution on-tap. William was

“he is not one of the Chosen. He must’ve hoped. That was all he thought about. He didn’t even reach to me.” Annette is simple, too, maybe.

No need for complexity of social guile when she sees eyes downturned, heavy lids lead-polished by the memory of shadow

whimper-yip sound

sad whistle-whine that comes deep in the throat and turns marigold in the air.

“Not to me. At that- that fucking syringe. Do you remember? This one?” Annette hears her steps

tic-tic-tic

a dog’s eyes follow

uneasy

the unknown harbors fear by evolutionary habit.

Conditioning only reinforces by gilding gold and painting lilies.

Her little Ophelia tries to off itself in the confused tangle of its own eyes.

Annette snatches it from its stainless dish

clank

metal against metal

fantasy sterility

another G dose from the antigen lab.

“Do you know what this is?”

The dog’s eyes narrow

threat

intrusion

taper down to knife

point

violence

fear

something will be stuck into the skin.

Aversion

Pavlovian association.

Pain exists in the moment.

This is much worse.

Correction

discipline

she remembers what Schneider told her.

They crave it. Kindness. Jus’ a little. Keep ‘em starved an’ they’ll do anything.

And discipline

disappointment

is this what a syringe means?

“Do you know what this is? Speak.”

“No.” Yes.

No.

Monosyllables.

“Do you know who Descartes is?”

“Yes.” Dusty circuit thumps closed.

“Can you explain?”

There is

reflection

contemplation

head shaken.

“N-no.” Fear.

Annette might be disappointed.

“Why is that?”

“I...Can’t.”

Stock taken.

Annette remembers she has forgotten the interval between the start of the tenth grade and her high school graduation.

It is

gone

seared out of her head.

What she pretended to learn

this is there.

And this thing is prelingual

dragged back to the brokedown slash-and-burn bedrock that something be erected again.

New language and all its attendant passions.

Has she ever been an artist?

Is she a lover?

Elementary programmatic vestiges, Annette thinks. The semimoronic jumble of another species’ puzzle pieces that sometimes drop into incidental holes.

Yes.

No.

Conveniences.

Necessities, probably.

They are not volition.

“Do you want?”

Head cock

shades of research beagle.

“W-a-nt?”

Slow taffy pull of reason.

It reflects

how cloudy are the pond and day?

“Do you want things?”

Interrogate the attack dog while it scrapes bone-break canines on velvety fur soft fondle of slobbery mouth and lips.

“I

“do

“want?”

“Do you want something? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Bored? In pain?”

studies her.

She spitballs and bullshits and finally she slings the red potluck spaghetti bowl of personal conjecture at the wall.

She probably is a wrecking ball for a billion of company slush money.

HUNK likely must be handled with antiseptic and gloves and she is oily rags.

Annette doesn’t care.

“P-pain?” Reflection. “Hun-gry? Thir-sty?”

The word bored is alien

nonsense.

“Does it hurt?”

“Hurt.” Annette is sure somewhere the body throbs this.

But chronic pain is

something to be accommodated.

Annette knows.

Another life is creation and creation costs.

A throb

the uneasy way sometimes her hip rolls when she tries to sling herself out of bed

the way she is sure she will spend her life an invalid and after three months it only is a shade to the world, an unwelcome new color

and even when it fades by miracle or flammable blood or when

what’s her name

is it Chalmers?

she shares a joint with Annette.

Secreted in a locker

we’re screwed- who cares about company policy now?

Annette just laughs

who thought she was square?

even when a lungful of something called Grease Monkey can obliterate the pain she still is aware of it in its absence.

This is the thing’s universe.

cannot conceive of a life without pain. Structural. Necessary.

There is no escape.

“Can you even kill yourself?”

“K-k-ill?”

“Suicide?”

No meaning.

The syllables are all confusion.

“That’s sad.” Annette laughs.

The dog’s all full of reflex and emotion.

“You can’t even”

of course it can’t.

“I think you need a new name. Can you learn a new name?”

That isn’t the incantation.

“You will learn a new name.” There is another little whine.

Annette knows it means just another breeze has blown across the long-weathered footprints that lead back to whatever it was before she found it

it.

Body

aesthetic

the shell does not make a person.

Annette

her one sincere unforced unrehearsed smile was to see Maude pulled off a ventilator.

Annette is a doctor

don’t worry, Dan: I’ll make sure she’s comfortable.

She is a turnip.

For once a DUI turns out just. Vehicular accordion woman-machine sculpture wrapped in splintered bark and carpeted in leaves all shed in pumpkin spice modesty duvet.

Comic. She sees the branches wobble anticlimactic in the theater of the absurd.

Mid-October and there is a snap frost and ice blackens the road’s edge

and Maude weaves in a black Mercedes.

William is next to her in the hospital’s blank

his hand and eyes are dead shale.

I hate you.

This is her gift to him.

Candor.

Annette spits it in the cold air made musty by meals delivered in fruitless ritual under plastic lids and over trays both hues of baby shit and ‘seventies carpet.

He says it.

Flat and level and unrehearsed.

She knows there have been words

they lacerate a portrait made from self-deified oils

she consecrates herself while alive and her husband

Dan

is subservient.

He does not speak out of turn

Maude barges.

Annette knows William’s silence

and love for hate subsumed in clanking masculinity pageant

start in her presence

under her shadow that lies now ready to give one last mortal push to shit itself with nothing to circulate through its entrails.

“I hate you, Maude.” William’s voice threatens to rise

and there isn’t enough feeling left to shove it the last rung.

That’s it.

“I hate you, too, mom.” Call me mom.

Annette wishes it could be the flaccid vengeance of a plug pulled.

They are hard-wired.

She has not brought wire-cutters.

“Do you think that would’ve saved our marriage?” The dog

Annette weighs the image

and finds it pleases her.

A dog.

Yes.

A beautiful dog. Dirty.

Like all badly-loved animals.

There is potential behind the grime.

The way the smile betrays only hope.

It appeases

placates with expectation of inevitable cruelty.

It doesn’t laugh.

Doesn’t

understand

a damn thing and Annette balances it like a knife point-down on a fingertip

(college trick, she has been drunk at many parties, her balance is infallible)

and finds this pleases her, also.

“Not a single thought in your sweet head that isn’t ready and waiting to bite, scratch,” Annette lets her voice pour like dry ice fog

sweet as another woman’s milk.

Her lips are soft

loose

tongue-tip touched to her bottom teeth.

“Burn,” everywhere Annette’s fingers roam, she knows there is contagion

a world of disease

and there is contact.

Even through fabric, the being is squeezed under Cartesian nightmare.

Self.

An I.

It waits

head open.

The firmament is too great

there is not enough in the mind that is not held latent under pressure behind walls made of tear and sweat crust thick enough to give shelter.

Not enough stimulation

not enough touch

comfort

every time Annette’s fingertips crease the thing’s strong chest

slender for someone born a male

but shoulder-to-shoulder it still is powerful for all the ways this thing is slight

more greyhound than Dane.

Through the tunic she lays open button

by button

Annette can see this thing is a skittish Dobermann runt.

(Breath swallowed

(there is cream-colored skin given dullness by sweat cooled refreshed cooled again ten thousand times

(black undershirt

(sports bra

(there is still a surprising amount there, strength and softness too)

It waits for the right stimulus to give a response.

She will dictate the terms.

“Do you like that?” Crusty sweat catches a little on latex.

Annette

cannot bother to care about the words

(self-critical)

to codify things that make a woman feel this way is to slew into pathology’s judgmental lexicon.

Irony dies messy on the table.

This pitiful thing is

hers.

More than a child ever could be. More than

William

even as he is now.

There have been dreams

fantasies. He will see her

he will fall to his knees like gnarled tree trunks.

Milk is sweetest as it rots.

Saltwater will fill her mouth

she will kiss him

(find something to kiss)

and she

will be possessed of hungers she should not have for a creature whose proportions bend to things that should not be.

Tibia and fibula overlong

right arm bulges and splits fabric

meat

muscle

sinew

flayed.

All of it still is the man.

The body is repulsive on the inside anyway.

Sack of bones tight-drawn at the neck.

Hinged and strung together by red silk.

Bags of blood and pulp.

William will be honest.

Simple.

Obedient.

His tongue will be thick and long and she will teach him words again.

The right piety and incantation.

His fingers will be massive

and

something else, too.

And it all just

dies.

Comes to rest

momentum spent

last cough

the tongue unrolls and does not cross a threshold for relay resurrection.

She

doesn’t

care anymore at all about him. It’s not even

she is sure it will be climactic

rage

wrath

bitter rue and recrimination and all the poetic textures with jerkey grain to chew and spit and sob and break her teeth and make her jaw ache and instead

instead

it’s just

oh.

It looks up at her.

Implores with its puppydog eyes.

“Do you?” Annette is sure no one asks it this question and drags all the inconvenient baggage of personhood and autonomy bloody and wet across the floor.

HUNK is an it she can see. A tool. Tools usually are reground when dull and useless.

This one

she smiles

and it smiles

stupid cute silly bright.

A smile harbors no guile for it

a smile is happy. There is no primate menace. It’s been strip-mined to Mohorovicic, leveled out, almost nothing left of that big ink-set skein that calls itself past.

Evolutionary.

Self.

Individual.

Fear

fear is not past-tense but future.

The present is meaningless.

Think about every agony

at the time, you survived them.

After all, you are alive until you pull the trigger.

This thing shakes in red shadow of the past

inhabits the moment

and dreads the future.

It is all animal.

Beautiful.

Annette’s finger sticks.

It needs a bath

badly

and right now she does not care. She knows the bend of spine

she knows how to dance

skinny white girl except her hips are full and for all the lamentation above the waistline she is all pear and juice.

Sweet

soft

dips close.

The animal is reaction

reflex

jolt

jerk at its fetters.

Excited?

Panicked?

The eyes are big. Bulge.

“Shh.” Annette hushes it.

Mists sweet-smelling breath on its face.

“What a pretty thing you are. Don’t worry. Do you think I’m going to hurt you?” There is stiffness. It freezes, gapes back.

This is where logical forks are minted.

Does it know this?

Is this the hard-coded reason of inevitabilities? Learned helplessness is siren’s song.

Protective reflex is maladaptive only from outside the animal.

Inside it is all sticky

placating smiles

bright pink gums for the dehydration.

“I’m not going to hurt you. You’re going to be good for me, aren’t you?” Annette drip-drops the words like little water pearls on a hot skillet.

“Do you know how to be good?”

It nods.

Nods as if this is what separates not life from death

(death is the end of objectivity, break in binary)

but pain from at least the absence of pain.

Nodnodnod

nodnodnodnodnod

“Good? Nice? Nicey-nice?”

Nodnod.

Annette lifts her fingers.

Like any animal, it fears the intrusion.

And like any beast starved of contact there is bliss even from an intrusion on its autonomy made to be infringed like the borders of small countries.

The basic unholy social contract of the torture victim.

Fingertips find an errant thread of its hair

Annette feels the oiliness

smells it.

“You need a name, don’t you?”

“Y-yes.” Annette sees the simple program behind the machine. It struggles with matters of volition. Disagreement is pain and matters of value may invite disagreement.

Subjectivity

Annette can see

is a garden of thorns.

“Because I told you you need a name?”

“Yes.” Agreement without ambiguity is much simpler.

“You will answer to Rachel.” This is the name she always had wanted for any being that will harbor her touch

her hand

her voice’s warmth.

“Ra

“chel.”

Rachel

her little hellhound

chews the syllables. Digests them.

“Do you like your new name? Does it agree with you?”

“Yes.” The voice is upturned bright happy smiling.

Rachel’s emotional range is trivial

happynothappy

afraidnotafraid

one or zero

presence or negation.

It understands as Annette does presence always implies negation and negation does not mean the return of anything fuller.

“That’s so sweet. Good dog.” She knows this is a test. Not of it. The steadiness in her voice.

She speaks in granite.

“I think I have to get to know you everywhere.” Annette doesn’t care for its hair up like this.

She knows latex gloves will snag

terribly

when she unwinds the elastic. The smile is subdued, syrupslow.

The first snare is curiosity.

The next is furrows

snap-crack sound.

Annette

cannot quite work it all out.

Hair kinks

the thing shudders, small for all its size.

This is a matter of patience

and pain

constant and small little needles. Annette knows the thing’s hair must be filled with little wavelets or curls and everything is corded tight into ropes that spark its scalp with snapsnapsnap

not enough to hurt

really

and she sees the touch and her hands’ closeness and the warmth that sinks off her wrist that smells for the first time of anything but its repulsive staleness

memory of sewage around the boots

not shit and piss and foul gorge-rise things but deeper in the cycle.

Silt and stagnation. Unwholesome because it looks almost like fingers could glide through its bitter-cold rush and find more than a dead broth of disease.

Just like this thing.

Gloves are part of the challenge

passion-play

she sorts

it leans close. This does not hurt enough to annul the meaning in her contact.

“You like your name, don’t you, Rachel?”

“Yes.” It sounds drunk

just a little

tipsy-pink tongue soft lispy against the front teeth.

“I am Annette. Birkin. You killed my husband.” There is no acknowledgment.

Kill.

Husband.

Birkin.

“That’s all right. You’re a good dog. Maybe life would’ve been different, but-”

it waits

does not interrupt

does not even try to fill the space she cuts by force of breath.

There is tension

agitation

she forgets sometimes her hands stop when she speaks.

Dirty talk is awkward sometimes when your fingers stop moving on sensitive places.

“I don’t think so.” There is only stupor expectation

pleasepleaseplease.

A smile slides back to sincerity when she moves again.

“Have you ever known love?”

Love is a word too deep to elude a blind man’s eyes.

Teary

a little

“Ever been in love?”

It does not nod

or shake its head.

“Of course you have. Even children fall in love.” Annette finds there is still a bit of slippery oil-something worked into its hair when the last coil gives and she sees she has reordered time and causality and created by unraveling.

Great golden tapestry

huge

wide spill.

Inside is latent odor of another life close to the scalp and nape and it is curled but long enough it sprawls off the table and will reach her pup’s ass when she stands.

When a fingertip creases a baby hair there is a little shiver.

“Is that your puppy place?” Soft coos, murmur-hum behind lips buttoned by gentle gravity.

Eyes stupid

half-lidded.

“Oh, what a good pup you are. I... Think you’re so beautiful.”

The dog is.

The jaw is strong but fades against the spread of its hair and cupid’s-bow lips and soft mouth. The brow has been driven back like an obedient tide but there is strength there all the same.

The hairline manipulated but the skull only can be shaven so far.

Her pup is not ambivalent.

Just indifferent to absolutes.

Annette’s lips are close

close enough she smells it has no odor.

Something so simple

the pointless complexities of parasite colony.

Gone.

T is too jealous.

She has seen it

the paradox of rot when it makes sludge of unneedful things and stands by sorcery away from the useful.

Pure.

Pink.

Blood ripe and rich.

Red.

Annette rolls a thumb over its forehead.

It gives a little sigh

rasps gentle across a brow

ruffles close paleish hair

(whimper

(happy-tail)

rounds a cheek and this time she knows she cannot help it.

She knows she is all fever-sick and doesn’t care.

Pushes her lips between its brows.

The sound is twitch and pang.

Ngn...

“You like that, Rachel?” Its fingers pulse

boots sway a little

she knows the air’s stillness by petty turbulence.

“Good pup. Do you want more?”

It does.

She knows.

And she knows there is much that crawls repulsed all the same.

The weight of human violence will reach out from its walls and floor and ceiling to swallow the unwary in wet slap of meat

smell of men’s selfishness in a close room

and probably women’s

fear.

Sex in the end is about hunger and hunger is sated only by eating.

This will be a

rare

(maybe)

lever.

Visceral things

fat and sugar of limbic generosities.

People food

after all

a smile spreads

is unhealthy in great amounts for a dog’s simplistic metabolism.

Annette’s lips peck-push

down

down.

Her hands cradle its face

her hair falls and deprives it of light

and her

and there is intimacy and the odd antibiotic neutrality of its breath and her pink-rose perfume and long fingers to fold over its cheeks.

“I can be very kind to you, Rachel. You know this. I will never lie to you.”

Annette knows this is meaningless.

It cannot enforce oaths.

But why should she shoulder the burden?

“You will not lie to me.”

“No. No.” Its voice is a private whisper.

Annette palms its cheek.

She hears

feels

the hitch in its breath.

Annette’s lips are close.

She kisses

it.

She is sure it should repulse her. But why? The sterile sickness that has made it chosen the way an apt hunk of metal is for a sword?

Is this destiny?

Usefulness?

Then shouldn’t her little pup be useful to her as more than a strong back and violent instincts that wait to be repurposed?

Its lips are sticky-soft and warm for all its torments.

And yield for all its fear.

Annette sees the eyes get huge.

Dewy

sweet.

She flows

its neck bends

shoulders lift by instinct.

She could punish and chooses not to do it.

No wish for mixed messages.

She could make it wait for its treat but she will be generous.

Lingers.

Its mouth opens obedient eager steaming for her tongue and inside she finds her dog tastes like the smell of a clean room

like its thoughts.

Sterilized.

Without.

But it knows to kiss a sloppy-drool way that is much more endearing on it than a man.

Its pulse stands tight

flushes over its cheeks.

She

likes it.

The way it moves, dips, bows

accommodates.

She swipes its tongue

rewarded with good-dog wriggles and that sonorous hum.

Its teeth and there is a tickle, she thinks

its gums raise a little-girl giggle.

“Good pup.”

When she pulls away there is a little ooooo

mouth wrapped around the syllable

protest

maybe

the couldn’t-help-it honesty of a stupid animal.

“So sweet. You taste like nothing. It’s what I’ve always wanted. I wonder”

Annette swallows.

She doesn’t think they burned Rome in a day.

Marble takes awhile to crack

and pantheons must be defamed

and Vestal cults desecrated.

Its spit is thick and it trails between them.

Or hers.

“Are you thirsty? You should tell me.”

Nod.

“Yes.”

“That’s a need. Do you understand? A need is... Necessary for you to be useful to me. To follow orders. You’re here to follow my orders. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you eat?”

Head quirk.

(I?)

eat

“Y-yes.”

“What do you eat? Food?”

Head shake.

“Not food?”

That means it probably doesn’t understand.

“You’re sure? Not”

pantomime

spoon something invisible.

Does it understand abstraction?

Head shake.

she remembers.

Schneider tells her they can eat

(alimentary tract is useful for blending in)

but they take their nourishment by IV or cartridge.

Incantations of field longevity

stamina.

Schneider is honester.

(Can’t have the subjects getting spoiled. Food is almost impossible to make aversive)

This necropolis has TPN bags by the ton, metric.

She even has thought about it.

She decides a central line is too

messy

unsure

exposed.

“Where do I put it, I wonder.” Murmur. “You’re going to be a good pup when I let you out of those wrist straps.”

Nod.

Certainty.

Swallow.

Eager.

“You need food and water if you’re going to be a useful dog to me. I’ll have to feed you.”

She is sure it takes care of most of the inconvenient necessities, also.

“I really hope you haven’t pissed yourself.”

Shakes its head.

“You know what that means? Wet yourself?”

Head cock.

Ambiguous phrase.

“Did you wet yourself?”

Head shake.

“Do you know what it means to wet yourself?”

Nodnod.

“So sweet. Good dog.” It is. Avid. Enthusiastic. The first strap is anticlimax.

She is sure if this all is a long con it will have a fist around her neck before her eyes register what her brain tells her to feel.

She starts with the uninjured arm

(better to get it all over with)

nothing.

It lies there

limp

compliant.

The wounded arm is next.

The meat has knitted itself closed. It is still all hamburger but Solomonic choices have been made.

Or it’s dead

rotted through.

She prods the palm

twitch

little tremors.

The fingers close

an infant’s

almost.

They reach

knot with hers

naked skin and gloves

dirty

but clean enough for having been in Nomex until Annette strapped her sainted carcass to the table.

Huge eyes

a dog’s eyes

liquid and shallow and overbright.

Stimulus

response

(something moves inside Annette)

“You like that?”

Its nod is slow

and very

very

very deliberate. This is the misfiring sweetness of neurons tasting benevolent contact for the first time again.

Through gloves

and still hot.

Annette’s voice is all fever and long swallows.

“Answer me. Don’t be bad.”

Annette is afraid it will sound feeble.

The heat just makes it boil water when it threatens.

“Yes. I

“I”

“You like it?”

Nodwhine.

Simplistic impulses.

The human vocal range is a function not of reason but philosophy

the sticky complexity of individuation.

A mind

no matter its intricacy and intelligence

has no need for language without the emotionally necessary pangs of a being that will accept imperfection

misunderstanding

shame

alienation

despair

horror

because privation is worse.

Language is a technology that belongs to mutual cravings.

Like her tongue in its mouth

like the easy way Annette knows its left hand will grasp at hers, needy, without reluctance, hydrazine-fed, desperate.

She kisses

and kisses it again.

Its lips are hot and dry and she moistens them with saliva she feels pool animal under her tongue.

“Are you hungry?” It has no capacity for entendre of any kind

not poetry

not allusion.

It swallows

or tries.

It tugs

just a little.

“It feels good?” Nodnod.

Trembly fingers.

“Are you going to be a good puppy if I step away to get some things?”

Nodnod.

And it’s not.

It clings.

Truculent and atavistic.

“Let go.”

Not obedient to this command.

Annette turns over the rough shape of an unknown coin in her head.

“Bad!”

The sound is hideous.

A kicked human

an emotionally shredded dog

all from a red knitting needle in her voice

just a little louder and without echo.

Stranglehowl shades to shoulder hunch

contrite whimper

placation.

The face was half-melted and now it’s cold wax on wire, gaunt and bones in panic-relief.

Fast raspy breath does not touch the nostrils

hyperventilation portended.

The pack’s leader is upset.

Annette is upset.

“Let go.”

This is cruelty

she knows

(smiles in a secret crinkle of eyes

(it only watches her mouth)

and she knows it must learn the independence of self-inflicted separation torments.

It has been graced with contact and it will be the one to rupture it.

“Let. Go.” And a last lethal invocation. “Bad.”

It obeys.

At last.

The unkindest commands

she sees

process slowest.

Eagerness will need to be graven deep.

She knows it is judgment

value

the self weighed and found too dense for usefulness.

Bad.

Bad dog.

Bad human.

Bad wife

bad

but she is the one who holds the words.

“Good dog.” But this is at least some face saved. “You’re a good dog, Rachel. Do you see? I didn’t even have to punish you.” The face relaxes again. “Good puppy. I’ll be back.”

Horror.

Rachel knows what these sounds in this order mean.

“Rachel. Stay.”

Nod

nod.

The exact pit of six heartbeats in her future.

“We’ll work on your obedience later.”

The second Annette is through the door she hears it. The sound is pitiful, plaintive, a strangled bark. It is the anguish of the separation anxious. The soul is lonely echoless in a colorless shadowless room. Unadorned.

Not even a fucking Kinkade.

It barks.

High in the throat.

A hitchy sobby sound.

Annette dogsat for a friend once

(she is sure she had them once)

strange little basset hound.

She thought it was furniture

apathetic

wrapped in drowsy contempt.

Until Annette figures all Lane’s histrionics about Dog

(named her after the Columbo pup and she’s just kind of a dog, isn’t she?)

are protective maternal displacement and she closes the front door for a walk alone because Dog is as athletic as Falk’s dead eye.

Loud.

A yelp.

Annette fumbles for the keys then.

This time she knows whether the psychobabble is right in the end she learned it was futility to cry for mother.

She will not be

not be mother

no.

There will be

important

differences.

But there are needs, also. Sometimes she will crash for diversity in a supply room down the hall.

The door closes by automation.

Opens only by her sacred will.

It kills her pup’s pitiful yaps the second it wheezes shut on vertical runners

electromag thrum

asthmatic smoker’s rasp after a marathon.

The world is

as she left it.

The walls are gray

mostly.

Blood painted thin enough keeps color only by failures of depth. Thick and it goes on like latex paint and turns crusty tar.

Fecal matter sometimes sloshes from the T-subjects she has put down when gas gangrene pops and rot that lets her chew the air creeps too deep.

She will clean the hallways most of the time. This one

(she thinks it is Dr. Tang from Man-Machine

(the sensual cybernetic of craniotome and

(a lot of lobotomies

(he is not one of his own mad science victims)

is fresher. He hid until inevitability made itself known. The hall is close and cramped and misfiring HVAC is a contemplative echo of Gregorian nonsense given bent by metal. She hears the long-tongued T-specimens sometimes

thudthudthud like spiders the size of Buicks

(there are those)

she has seen them

and chosen to see if the aforesaid tarantulas fare so well with nerve agent

(they do not)

and she is sure sometimes William will negotiate the path between order’s facade upstairs and the sewers’ creepy sludge parade.

And sometimes she believes she has heard

it is as much a voice as Rachel’s.

It is the phantom pain of personhood kicking the soul’s shreds in the small of the back.

It is a memory of existence

purpose

meaning.

Annette never once hears her name.

She is sure through lacerated dreams and confetti of wakeful moments she even hears mom but never

once

does she hear Annette.

She will hear other names.

Even the arrogant pieces of him he makes her carry like

parasite

traumatic conception

insectile violation.

She will always remember the violence. Shock. Convulsion. She does not bleed from life-ending injury.

Annette will be happy if William finds what he looks for.

The hallway is the clank of wide steel floor, flat and perforated for the sometimes drip of unholy things from dissection carts. She hears the forever whistle-rush of treatment water under her feet to spirit away disease.

Out of nose.

The ceiling’s track lights vomit bluewhite antispectrum. Details evaporate into retinal bleach.

Centers do not quite hold when she squints through the shafted litany of supersaturations.

Bad-dream mist

twilight medicine

maybe she is still in the hospital

this is

Annette has succored by delusion.

Maybe she is in love

and the laboratory isn’t

and her little dog

and stops.

She knows from the throb of pelvis and red ache of dreamless morphine push and the way she wears divorce’s sacrament on her mouth this is.

Bad things happen to some people.

She will hook Dr. Tang’s meat with the crowbar she has used with ample set of shoulder, deep squat push of thighs

no.

Her little attack dog will do it for her.

It is strong

made to break things.

Something already dead should be little trouble for the biceps

quadriceps

triceps

pectorals

all the thick cuts of meat on the pup’s frame given round by hormonal curve

surgical scalpel like Bernini’s chisel on Proserpina’s hips.

For now there are the necessities on a little antiseptic white cart whose wheels she does not bother to steer around Dr. Tang’s bony wrist.

She does it for the same reason she guides the red-hulled grocery dump over a thick glossy spider in a long-ago supermarket under dead-eyed fluorescent.

His hand comes off

fresh-sewage smell

he is still too juicy. Vile.

Nimble bounce-step over the lump.

She is quick in red soles.

When she shoves a palm on the big streaked metal square’s control there is patience

samplelickassessapprove

dull motor thrum.

It never has bothered her before

now there is the consternation that comes from it being too slow.

Awful ugly repulsive sounds

bark-yips like a beaten animal.

“Hey! Hey! Rachel- Jesus, you stupid fucking dog!” It’s

self-soothed down to the bone through its injury.

Quests for sensation

relief

anything close to touch.

The worst contact is still contact

alien

severe

intense.

A mind without cannot afford to be choosy whether it is pain or pleasure when it all is the same nerves that remind you the world is not always lonely.

Yesyesyes until it is a no.

Rachel’s lips and cheeks and chin are red from the dull meat chewed

little strings dangle from teeth.

She has torn too deep

thin arterial blood wends ruby bend of river down the wrist.

Annette is

upset

gut heaves

sudden

she cleaves the space between them and Rachel whimpers like she’s been whipped and shrinks back as far as she can into her own shadow on the table run with odd rheumy juices that cut the dull crust of new-old blood.

There is a plea in the eyes shown Annette under peeled lids

the teeth chattergnash

“Hey! Hey!” Annette springs

knees on the table swung around its thighs.

The body convulses

spasmodic

Annette is twenty

thirty

forty pounds lighter

(easy)

but Rachel’s muscle lies slack and soft and Annette feels unearned size, shoves down the pathetic thing.

Sharp

sure

voice.

“Hey. Hey. Stop it. I’m here now! Stop whining!” It does not stop.

Contact is ambivalence.

Heat.

Even through gloves.

The door is long-closed.

Dr. Tang cannot puncture the blood.

“Rachel.”

Yelps up at her

lurches

almost bucks her

hips

collision.

It is

altered.

Annette feels softness

mons

girlish fat

frictioncontactconnection

almost tangles its restrained legs.

Annette stares

sure

constant

its bolty movements are smoother now

touch is enough.

She has not hit it

not screamed in its face.

She

was going to do that.

She could see knuckles

(just for once in her life, to do what she wants

(perfect unity of impulse and outlet)

and doesn’t.

It is a weak and helpless thing.

Its obedience has been

specious

coerced.

Annette threads discolored cords.

Ambivalences.

No perfect sure answers.

Questions

yes

it is much more rewarding to turn over the gift than see the disappointment inside.

Hope

hope.

Annette is sure she only has been happy in dreamy expectation through future-tense.

Her hips sink

crush.

Rachel is all canine heat through battledress.

“Rachel. Listen to me. Are you listening now?”

Rachel is wiggly, boneless

meek

afraid.

Annette tastes it in the neutral sweat all sterile of unwelcome life.

The sweetness of pheromone and galvanic current of illusory touch

induction panels

polarized skin.

Annette squeezes

hard

“Are you listening?”

It’s less an answer than the same high-throat bark.

“Yes.”

“You know what you did was bad.” Annette does not ask this question.

Its answer is an under-the-breath keen.

“You know that was bad, Rachel.”

Nod on creaky joints.

Annette

cannot help herself.

“I’m angry with you.”

Anger is not emotion.

It is threat given volume.

Another barkyelpmewlpleasepleaseplease

“But I’m not going to discipline you right now. Do you know why?”

It shakes its head.

“Do you?”

Shakes again.

“It’s because you’re stupid.”

Dim candles behind dusty glass.

“Right now, you’re stupid, worthless, and the most important part of you is what’s in your veins. And I don’t give a damn about that.”

The words mean nothing

but the tone is a brick clapped between its eyes.

“Shut up.”

It understands those.

By reflex.

Chews its bottom lip.

It’s

unfair

the way a prickly-red electricity scrapes down her spine from the front when the thing does that, all sad and hiccuping its swallowed sobs back up out of its chest.

“Now I’m going to bandage your wound. If you bite it again, I’ll take off your hand.”

She wonders

can it know?

Fear all the same.

When Annette lifts away her hands, the thing lies there, still.

It waits.

She peels the gloves

snaps on another pair and prods the meat and exposed sinew and bone

feels greasy heat

rough-meat fiber

silverskin and shiny streaks in open rebellion.

The thing does not protest the way it did from a raised voice.

She smells blood in the air

fresh

hot

queasy.

“I’m going to help you, all right?” A naked living skeleton is

different.

Not a T-subject

a G-subject in all their morphologic jogs

supernumerary organs

eyes

arms

tongues

teeth

(too many to count, Beller names a G-subject Smiley because its caved-in chest has become a teratoma grin of them)

genitals.

This is a monster.

A sweet one.

She

dips closer to the bone.

Sees the tight-wrapped cords

the stitch-by-stitch resurrection of the body. It will cross a threshold, she can see, and it will be shocked back into rejuvenation.

Faster than should be plausible.

She has readied bandages

growth reagent

catalyst

Viridi herba extract

Raccoonensis mutant strain, neurotoxic in substantial dosage, symptoms awful, panic, paranoia, hallucination, sleep paralysis, horror, horror.

She bites

sharp

sudden

worries at soft-hard periosteum

click-scrape of teeth

friction

resistance

copper flash deep in sinuses like a punch in the nose

slippery sheath

she is all animal

the thing howls

snaps its jaws.

Annette learns it will only protest.

Still intemperate threat.

Reflex.

Terror.

Panic.

Just once, perfect bite moderation by deep-soaked veneration for its savior

goddess

tyrant.

But it is enough

Annette’s shoulder

a little nip.

She does not yelp.

Shouts.

Controlled

(it does not know this)

and bites rougher

scrapes and tears and digs shallow scuffs and tastes parking lot pennies and menstrual blood and fresh tartare and nosebleeds and electricity and screechy-shrill sounds and it knows now this is what discipline means.

Annette stops

sudden

on her terms.

It looks. Its eyes quiver, big. Tears puddle and the strong jaw shakes and it shows her a zero-to-escape-velocity capacity for emotional regulation and progression.

It bawls

throws back a head and howls.

“Be quiet!” And stops.

Struggles

swallows horrors

(it is not the pain, she sees

(it did the same

(it is pain from tyrant

(punishment from tyrant)

shows torment on a frozen face flushed from crying even through the blood.

Annette sees

shallow and patchwork

the jumble of color that is her face warped by all the little dents.

Red.

She is its red woman, black breath in Eden.

The serpent is only alibi.

Lilith.

Conqueress.

Owner.

Her hand on the leash.

She is no tyrant.

She rules by right.

By rite of submission.

It bows its head and hunches its shoulders.

Tight duck of belly

drawn-close protective afraid.

“That’s right. You needed that. I did that for you. Do you understand?”

Silence

it chews words and the last shreds of meat.

It gropes with palsied hands for cords of memory that snap like its hair.

“Answer!”

“Y-y-yes.”

Its eyes roll unfocused.

Gamble?

Yesno does it understand mathematics and proportion? One of two is half?

Is this its calculus?

“You smell. I’m going to give you a bath. You’ll like a bath.”

Bright eyes.

The correction is forgotten.

Owner’s voice is much nicer now.

“Now I’m going to untie your legs, okay? You’ll be good. Stay.”

Still.

Annette makes

(long swallow of breath to steady herself, smells like her pup, smells clean, purebred in a lousy pound)

self-indulgent spectacle of it.

She wonders when a touch will be too far. When she will trip the hidden traps to collapse walls.

If it will be fingertips up the forearms

(she knows it will not be her palms on cheeks)

saltwater purifies and sanctifies.

She brushes little ribbons of snot away from its sniffly nose.

No there there.

Just

enough.

“You feel better already, don’t you?”

The nod is slow

emotional burn victim

every stretch of spirit and feeling will hurt.

She knows.

This is the cold voice that ordered the G-Virus sample, Dr. Birkin. Do not make us resort to force. It is out of respect for your usefulness to the Umbrella Corporation you will be taken into custody and debriefed instead of executed.

Thud-clump

red-handed

she knows

(hates

(never will forgive)

he is too stupid not to have his beloved with him.

The case is Duralumin

the truly loved must be protected.

William pushes the case behind him

guilty

panicked

and says nothing to Annette.

The figures are fast black aggression.

Violence is portended in posture more than captive firepower.

Aimed

up.

The woman’s voice is her dog’s

and it

Dr. Birkin, set down your weapon and put your hands up.

It is this room

darker

William

trips

staggers back with a pistol she had no idea he owned

the case is a thump.

The dog does not fire.

It is one of her marionettes

stupid

overeager.

The command is immediate

passionless

cease fire immediately! cease fire immediately!

not by magic

another bullet slaps to embroider red lace.

The dog does not help him

does not look like it even sees Annette when she is

the last thing a husband should see, isn’t she?

Confessor

lover

(Saint Sometimes)

he does not even notice.

The dog looks

assesses with another animal’s eyes

Goner. No use supplying medical. We will discuss use of force policy during the debrief. I will recommend a reprimand, Martinez.

Muffled by mask.

Now there is only a little snot still packed in the sinuses

blubbering pink face

“Shh. Don’t cry. You needed that. You understand.”

This is no question.

Nod

nod.

A little pause

it still harbors vestigial self-preservation instincts.

The capacity to question its own suffering’s necessity.

“You did. You did need that because you were bad.”

Guilt

caught

eyes flash

head shakes

nonononononono

denial

desperate

“N-n-not bad-”

“Did I tell you to talk?”

Protest

somewhere

strangled.

“Have to nip this bud right off the rose. I was afraid you’d make me do this.” Panic.

Horror.

Annette cannot know if this is neuroelectric roulette dropping metal in the right gaps to fuse words back to meaning or if this is just the lapdog’s dread of tone when the toy chewed to prideful tatter is not a toy at all.

“S-s-s-sorry. Sorry.”

Annette never has seen a tucked tail and stooped neck expressed as syllables.

“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry-”

“Shut up.”

It does.

Fear is pressure and bulges up against throat from the inside.

Breath still bellows-pumps the words she has forbidden it to speak.

“Good dogs do apologize. You’ve shown me something good”

there is cautious rejoice

“even”

ears get slack again

bad-dog feelings swell

“if you did bad. Do you understand?”

Nod.

“You know what punish means.”

Nod

sinews almost break

nodnodpleaseplease in the eyes

“If you’re a good dog, then you’ll tell me something. And make it honest.”

Swallow.

The voice readies itself.

Already, Annette is sure she sees the tongue stretch, the cavern-echo of a mind try to steer unsteady sound.

“You have to understand I will never punish you just because.”

Annette chooses the words.

She does not say hurt.

She says punish.

Discipline.

Correct.

It is jurisprudence.

It is silly to think a woman cannot be judge of her pet.

“There is a reason. When you are bad”

instant flinch

panic

reindeer-on-ice-skates flail of emotional alarm.

There never is accommodation for bad except as preamble to imminent fall of bricks.

“I will punish you. You always should be good.”

Good

good

good means God’s favor

means

the absence of bad.

The eyes take hold like Annette has vowed ten thousand years of life for her little beast.

It stares

eyes huge.

Nodnodnodnodnodnod tightens until it looks like seizure.

And her hand all sludged with the animal’s own red and juices brushes down the cheek.

Contact

unforced

(could such a thing not crave?)

welcome

(this is much clearer)

adored.

It nuzzles

the face softens

the brain already is loose oatmeal.

“I can’t stay mad at you.”

Its smile spreads.

Its arm still oozes

arteries pulse in ineffectual habit.

Links do not close

broken pipes gush by stubborn instinct.

“You’re too pretty. You are.”

It preens

fawns.

“Do you think I’m pretty?”

The thing does not shiver from jealousy fate has graced Annette with I.

Personal pronouns are inconvenient burden for Rachel, she has seen.

“Yes.” Nodnod emphasis strong, sure.

“Do you know what pretty means?”

Head cock

swallow

its tongue lolls a little

it lifts its face closer

closer

vile and beautiful in a single frame a single being.

“That’s right.” It is animal lexicon.

Beauty is fuck.

Stimulus, response.

She kisses it.

Brushes palms down its warm cheeks

latex catches a little on the left; her right hand is all smoothed from red, dim tactile crust.

Over the throat

fast raindrop pulse.

Rachel tastes like herself

tastes herself, too.

All canids are carnivores.

Humans do not own canines for mating show.

Annette pushes harder

closer

its body is all roll and bend.

Wriggles

boneless

limp-strong, vengeful slinky.

Hand scrapes her shoulder

brief snag on the satin-ish blouse.

please

but it is not long enough to be more than message when Annette pulls away. Lips cling sticky

(her favorite

(she has kissed girls

(lipstick glues perfect)

just long enough to tell

to coax a little huff-whimper from its mouth.

“So adorable.”

It may plead

so long as Annette wants it.

It will plead

every time she wants it.

Her fingers plane the muscular belly

(taste strength, titanium wire, ferocity)

coax a puppyish shiver through the lean body.

“A-ahn.”

“You’re sensitive. Do you know what sensitive means?”

Slow

contemplation

not just taffy stretched but made in the interval before something takes.

Nod.

“I’m so glad. Your body is... So nice.” There is nothing else to the thing but the endearing sadsillystupid way it weaves.

Not blood loss but imbecile hunger.

Its breath comes slow

ragged in the throat.

Its belt is a clink

simple web and metal fastener

smoothed-rough ribbed nylon

braided ribbons of muscle surface shallow through thick thighs painted with enough softness to let Annette dig in her fingers.

Luscious

smooth

perfect.

Perfection

metabolism

complexion

tight milky-white.

Even tans do not take on Spencer’s little attack dogs.

She has been honest

the only damp on her ten-days-stale black panties

(even military underwear is austere, Annette sees)

smells clarified clean ripe unnatural, bottled perfume of antiseptic mall software store and pink sugar and musty honey and acid-sharp.

Annette swallows

never

(at least for a long time)

has had this flesh lain out in front of her.

The eyes are wild crazy grateful

hips buck a little.

Annette snaps off the gloves.

Plants a naked palm on the thing’s flat tummy

rolls a thumb over the navel.

She has none of the scars

none of the wounds

none of the expected anything.

The face barely shows age.

Annette knows she does not know even how old her pup is.

Fans out a hand

pushes

soft organs

hard-banded strength.

Only enough fat to keep supple, cushion necessities.

Bikini model.

Annette sucks her scent deep

vacuum-hoover

“So sweet. Jesus.”

Throb tremor

moments feather.

Annette lets her bare fingers trail up the left thigh

higher

higher to the apex.

The mons is round

girlish

the softness that proves a woman.

Fingers bracket the thing’s pussy

(ironic thing for a dog to have)

squish the full lips she can feel

hear by silence

are totally hairless.

It squirms

swivels feet by the ankles

boot heels rasp.

“Oh, you love that, don’t you? Did I find your happy puppy place?” Annette cannot help herself.

There is

admiration in the voice

fond

sweet.

Yes.

She fondles it

this is the right word. A beloved pet

(wet

(the body is presumptuous in proactive obedience to expected sure things)

caress

squeeze.

Annette knows a throb between her thighs.

The animal-rut crave to take

see

eat more.

“My God, you’re perfect everywhere, aren’t you?” Even the face is strange exhausted youth.

Twentysomething going on ageless.

Its tongue sinks down pinkish lips smudged with a bit of Annette’s red.

Fingers split the difference between individuations

slide under its panties’ hem

hot trapped musty

slimy

“You’re so wet there.”

Whine-whimper-question.

“You’re good. So good.”

Yes

yes

“Such a sweet puppy.”

The simplistic machinery of trauma bond

life story rewound

birth follows death of the woman.

Starvation for love means horizons narrow not to questions of relationships but only their hierarchy.

There is no escape

no deletion of this obedient hunger for good-dog feelings.

A child is its own perpetrator.

This thing is not her child.

Annette’s smile sprawls

breaks her lips

she is happy to see her Rachel.

Tugs down the panties and watches the adorable thing half-levitate off its bubbly rump.

Full.

Heavy

peachy

Annette sees pieces of the self.

The legs are longer

made for the lope-trot of the persistence predator.

Annette knows trained well the hair will be shaggy on command and the fangs apt for raw meat.

It will pursue

flight does not mean the same as escape.

Right now they wriggle.

Hips ripple to bowstring rhythm.

Fingers hooked around the union of thigh and groin

smooth

a pull

exposed.

Peach-pink lips, semi-neotenic, the hormonal supersaturation of T(D) lycanthropy.

They puff

engorged

slippery-silvery.

Annette licks.

Jus prima nocta

(she will be the only

(this is her dog)

potent

sickening-sweet

her tongue pushes tight

rolls up to the anatomical vestige subsumed into clit

a little bulgy

sensitive

huff-whine flashes in the air.

“God. You taste like kiddie breakfast cereal.”

Cold-toosweet.

Steam-hot on the tongue when Annette rolls her tongue. The thing knows restraint.

Mostly.

Knees ripple

Annette’s palms cup the big ass

sink deep into muscle and fat.

“Very nice.” Its contours are made to please, she can see.

Its whiny-sweet song is sagging neck and head and the need of an animal for touch.

Especially this touch.

Tongue

thumbs rolled over its cunt

luscious click-sticky pull intake of breath like Annette has breathed strange life.

It’s

real

full

perfect facsimile.

“Come on, now.” Curiosity sated

self-denial is exquisite spice.

The dog’s eyes get huge

disbelief

nonononono.

Annette smiles

it’s barely enough to quiet the yelp she has come to expect already

a universal alternative to seditious protest.

“You can stand a few minutes. It feels good, right?”

“G-g-good.” The thing cradles this holy word like its tongue catches fire just to touch. Its fine jaw shudders and it works its head back and forth.

It’s an adorable tic, Annette things.

Sends a weird thrill of gravity through her belly.

“You’d fail the marshmallow test, wouldn’t you?”

It does not answer.

Why should it?

Its eyes flash down to Annette’s fingers. It is Annette’s body that is the wellspring of sacred contact.

Anything else is empty self-soothe.

Palliation without hope of cure.

Annette finds the straps

one sharp pull.

Crackcrackcrack velcro.

Free

semi

the next.

It is on its knees palms tight and flattened with fingertips drawn into knuckles.

Sits pretty.

Looks up at Annette, arches its back, proclaims its quiescence without even a demand.

Its body is silver and silk.

Compensates for awkward bind of pants and underwear around its calves.

Skin dimples.

“Look at you. What a magnificent dog you are.” Fingers card the hair, snag a little on trivial knots.

Even this thing’s death is clean and perfect

or as close as anything can be.

It sways

sings that wordless little throat-song that sometimes catches squeaky rust in the hinge of its neck.

There is a sink

huge stainless basin big as a bathtub.

Annette will not degrade herself to wash in it. It is superstition; senseless.

Most baths have seen worse, she is sure.

It has been enough for her clothes.

Cooswingchildbabble.

It is not even a three-year-old.

“It’s time for your B-A-T-H.” She spells it

whimsical

Rachel cocks her head beagle-adorable.

“Am I going to have to teach you how to read?”

Of course she will.

Literacy is independence.

The mind must have autonomy

(subject to rigorous control)

to set ideas in abstract order.

To control ideas is to hold levers in simple minds.

Annette will tell it the meaning behind symbols

the meaning behind meanings.

“Bath.”

Uneasy

nose-crinkle.

“Do you not like water? You can tell me the truth. Be honest.”

Head shake.

Uneasy.

“Why? Wet?”

Silence.

“Scary?”

Nod.

Shame.

The victims of certain types of trauma do not share common reactions.

Trauma response will reflect preconscious nature of rearing

cultivation.

Reactions of evasion and denial belong to families without emotional center or refuge

parental disinvestment.

To make pain criminal involves much less effort than the uncertain and unrewarding pursuit of redress.

“You’ll be all right. You smell. It’s almost disgusting. C’mon. I’m going to help heal your wound, too.”

Head cock.

Annette points.

The animal’s eyes well with wet, shallow-flat red at edges.

To be reminded is to bring immediacy to remoteness.

Sobby-thick sounds

too cute to stand.

It knots deep between her thighs.

“That’s a sweet puppy. I’ll help you.”

It lets her undress it the rest of the way.

(More gloves for the boots, pants, socks)

the feet are a little large, Annette sees.

Barely noticeable

there all the same.

Sensitive-soft on the arches

coo-giggle.

Toes twitch.

It bites its bottom lip.

Annette wonders

practiced?

reinforced?

innate adorable?

It still dimples the bottom lip, breathes heavy-rush.

She pulls away.

“Follow me, Rachel. Heel.” Annette is close to saying girl.

And stops.

One excess layer of complexity it does not need.

She becomes I by evolution and an I without grammatical necessity fast becomes ego.

It moves by bounce.

She does not expect heel to have meaning.

It does.

It stands

not at attention but cute and meek and still the pup is all Edenic muscle

the Eve of Dogpatch.

Strong sleek beautiful inhuman.

Abs surface and sink back under marshmallow soft.

Big breasts when Annette orders her to strip the last, only undershirt and sports bra

struggles with the right bend of shoulders and arms

(little fear-yelp muffled adorable by fabric when things go dark with clothes over its face)

Annette needs to give it the last pull to extricate her pup from captivity)

it does not dare to kiss but gives her bedroom eyes

reels and sways.

Annette finally sees it.

There is no need for imagination with a creature impervious to disease.

The line is central

ventral

chromium-cyborg tapped down close to the heart.

Unobtrusive enough

tragic for a being made permanent life victim.

Annette swipes it with a fingertip.

Instant

reflexive

a jolt

stiff upright

expectant

shades of dinner bell.

Drool patters down the chin.

“So you are hungry.”

Nod

nod

nodnod.

“I wish you came with a manual.” It does not understand what might be disapproval but fears all the same.

“I’m going to wash you up first, Rachel.” It will obey.

Annette’s fingers lace around the muscle-fortified elbow

pull.

Rachel follows, heels tic-tic clock rhythm against unsteady naked soleslap.

The basin would be big enough for both.

Annette does not need to wash

(will not in this)

but scours it every day all the same.

Ritual.

Pull on long gloves and make polished the imperfect things

she is behind many of their conceptions.

This is much easier.

The faucet is industrial, immense maw for water’s spiritual cleansing.

Cranked

moderated

hot-ish

the way she likes her baths.

It stands.

Fidgets.

Annette brushes a finger down its collarbone, makes study of the fine ridge

smooth fall of curve to heavy breasts.

Big.

Fat and marshmallow.

Baby-pink nipples.

It is entranced by the magic show of contact.

Annette’s fingertips

(nails rounded, just a little longer)

graze the place of sensitivity

kept not for it but only the usefulness to others.

Annette wonders if that little pang is empathy.

Wonders if Schneider’s Dr. Bob ravings are anything more than bullshit.

Was there a genesis to shame or is fear enough?

They pebble.

The basin is filled enough.

“Climb in, okay?” Annette wishes for a moment their sizes were swapped, that she could swing it fragile and dependent

utterly

totally

without hope alone

into her arms and ease it down into the water.

Forlorn eyes.

“Rachel.” Fingertip pointed.

It is nimble.

Instant athletic compliance.

Splash-bewilderment

water

yes

warm water.

There is novelty in the stare.

Warm water is the dominion of artifice.

The dog does not have fire.

Smile relax sag it sinks into an instant-turbid gray scum that springs off its skin. Hair floats, becomes two-toned halo when the threads spread wide.It draws knees up against its chest and looks the child for all its shape and size.

New bandage-rag.

Vanilla-smelling soap.

Rachel stares dim at effervescent union

idiotic hungry-schizo chase of little bubbles on the water’s face.

Insipid pleasures for an insipid being.

Waggly.

Eager under Annette’s hand when she reaches out to touch.

Steadies it with a palm on its shoulder.

The lather-rub-scrape-splash-rinse-lather rite that glides daily through civilized bodies.

It has no meaning without emotional narrowness.

This

this is a warm bath

a hand without indelicate dogma of conditioning in bonds of budget and convenience.

This is her pup.

Annette cuts cleanliness into old sweat and dirt.

Its voice rises as willow and lilac

she is enchanted.

Sob-sigh-sing

neck loose rubber.

Cruelties must be focused.

To bring pain without sense she is sure is shortcut that only will shortchange the owner.

True pain comes as extremes

not arbitrary horrors but the self-knowledge of confession.

Annette pulls the plug

drain gurgles.

Panic.

“Shh. Shh. No. No. Stay. Stay!” Movement

heat flees

cold accosts on naked skin

exposed

heels scrabble on wet metal

hands flail

uncoordinated

panic reaction

“Stay!” Eyes flare

teeth

just for a second.

Dog only tried to bite Annette once

(tried is maybe a little much for the lazy chap of teeth together in its too-huge jowls)

and it was in the bath, also.

Elementary

evolutionary

it shakes, hair matted wet and instant-cold on its back.

“Shhh. Shhh. Don’t worry- oh, shit.”

Indelicate

unwelcome

intrusive.

It is a being of primal needs.

Water

hydrogen bond

tissue froths at fast-drying edge, wound half-mended already.

“You’ll be warm in a minute. I promise.”

Promise

promise

this word

this word the beast knows.

Cautious hope.

Vows are not always honored.

Annette is nimble, sure.

She will not keep her pup in too much misery for too long, she thinks.

She catches her watch.

It has been

blink-stretch

too many hours.

Annette knows this flame of hours

instant-obsession

love-pang.

She is

infatuated with this creature.

Maybe it will pass

(probably)

she does not care.

Gloves snapped on.

No need for sterile protocol.

Instead she drowns it with the sensation it courts.

Synthskin

T-incubated, no survivors in test batch, perfect results before the inevitable.

She knows T(D) is a jealous monster.

Any others

(even his Morgana)

will be clubbed

boiled

bones chewed.

It is God and all others only pretend to thrones.

There is agony.

Synthskin is graft

layered flat

baklava build-up

level

on top of level

every one anchored with another electroneedle-spike

(this part is not needed more than once but the first time she does it the beautiful thing stiffens and the face grows slack with good-dog things

(so she does not keep herself from adherence to unnecessary surgical protocol, turns its resurgent meat to voodoo doll, slides in one after the next with a tawdry sound of slush and jaw-sag and drool, links up the fine little leads, thin as a human hair, thin as telepathic contact when Annette cannot help herself from sticking herself with a needle threaded to one of Rachel’s just to know)

and it cannot get enough.

Empathy shared

Annette smiles

almost adorable-stupid like her pup.

Head tilted.

She

knows her body revolts. There is something repulsive, eels treat her belly like a swimming pool, turn over ornate aquabatic tricks.

Something has gone wrong in her body, too.

This is richer than her lip chewed

than the disemboweling agony that comes from being coerced judge of unconsulted life sentence.

This is

she does not know how far up the line the kink starts. She knows the system is resilient and needs no help to work around it.

Subsumes.

Accommodates.

The first is stretched-to-snap anticipation of morphine-eager cells

(no habit yet, Annette does not care anyway, there is enough to reenact the collective woes of Beat prose)

endorphins drool

synapses hunch at starting block

everything waits for stimulus

command

chest tight

breath ripe from soap, cut by blood

her pup is there and watches

feels.

And watches her own skin.

It makes eye contact only with stooped neck and bow-wilt of back and under big lashes.

Eternal unwitting

(maybe)

coquette.

Naif-whore.

Caricature.

Woman-dog.

Neither.

There is something

erased

about its existence, gash of negative like the Grand Canyon in the air.

Annette

sees just

a little sparkle of something she cannot live without.

She will push her palms in shallow water and for lack of anything better to do make unnatural dam, pull liquid as solid, the neat cut of cloudwalk momentum.

Eventually the two lips slap into a united seam and for just a second water builds towers of Babel.

She knows it cannot harbor an I.

The self is alien to a being converted to tool.

But this is different for her.

And for it.

“I’m like no owner you’ve ever had.” Annette knows maybe

somewhere

something inside this thing should riot. Instead it reacts to pitch, to coo given fuck-drunk slur by the needle.

By the knowing.

She watches red well

drives it harder down

recites anatomic incantation made living religion

handles snakes that squirm white-blue electric through te deum of brachioradialis

farther

sensual monasticism of extensor carpi radialis longus

(Gloria Patri)

pain

(perfect

(right

(speedball-weightless arms and legs)

She floats in electrolytic delamination of others’ dogma

knows there are no supposed to bes but only laws of average and modality

and knows her existence defies dice.

Soft sound of punctured meat.

She never has known the adventure, the texture and contour of her body as flesh. There is fascination. Maybe. Can there be novelty for a butcher in a cut of meat from another cow? Will the grain matter?

She sits and cuts into her belly and drags out ovum and package and the uterus only harbors inconvenience once a month and especially once a year.

She pinches gloved fingers around the needle. Rachel watches. She is transfixed by fingers Annette sees mostly because of what they harbor for her. When there is action, hands. Usually. When there is calm, quiet, the emotive semisincerity of eyes.

Submission always signaled

proactive

she has heard the same low whistle-whimper five or six times in the last few minutes because Annette cannot help herself from watching

watching

watching.

The needle stitches intimate deep layers through her forearm

and touches bone.

The sting is instant

lightning-sharp constant perpetual the harvest of an elbow slammed in a door nerve-pinch by nature sheathed by complaint primal screaming this is not supposed to happen

and she laughs.

Smile peels her mouth

gasp

pull breath full of her pup.

“Oh, God!” Bellring

histamine and capillary flush

jaw plunge

she

comes.

Immediate.

Perfect alignment

(she practices with a rifle in the indoor range with Pinewood leering behind, sight picture, target, focus on the target not the sights, pull the trigger, yeah, like that breath-pull suck deep crack-thud-recoil-clink)

death comes by shot ordained. It sketches red lightning strobe

for a second it kicks her out of her own body and she sees knotted road-map diagram of nerves, vascular system, musculoskeletal (locomotor in revolt, rape-marriage to new obsession, she creams herself stupid mows down reason like frogs in front of German machine guns), all written in wet red yarn.

Too much

(not enough)

Not the rhythmic calisthenic familiarity of fingers or a man’s (well, William’s, the other two were in college and existed mostly as confirmation of obvious things, William had a Reputation, whore, whore, whore, why did she marry a selfish whore?) fuck.

Disappointment this thing is given totally to a woman’s body.

Woman’s ambitions.

Would a transsexual cock be any different?

Nicer, she is sure.

Surer

selfless, maybe, starved of animal impulse to root for squeeze-tight gratification

rebound of feminine-fantasy backbeat this thing would bother to hold

she sees its pussy is no different than hers.

Same sensitivity

same grace.

The thing touches itself. Annette sees the way it stays its right hand from Annette because she has given it an ears-folded warning, no, don’t touch, this is a delicate operation, and Rachel instead does not self-soothe but embellishes Anette’s hand and the needle spike. And her. Linked by uncertain electricity Annette is sure exists. Rachel’s fingers instead browse over a shoulder thin for muscle’s fortified well and skims its own collarbone. Fingerpads are junction-link. Annette knows it is not only schizoid delusion.

Muted but it is there.

Connection like a breath in the shape of a body

there and gone faster than she knows what happens and then back again. It turns into standing image, half-real projection. Does not stay constant but telegraph blinks it down nerve pulse.

Damn.

Breath hitch.

Shivery squeak from its lips.

Fingers roll over the thing’s long sleek neck.

Tongue lolls

(this is not new)

drool coasts off the wet pink muscle

(the same)

Annette knows this has nothing to do with medicine

even its abortion

she doesn’t care.

More layers

more skewers.

Her pup cannot get enough.

Whimpery-orgasmal.

“You like that, huh?”

The nod is wordless by failure of breath.

Her pup pants

big breasts spring when her lungs work

inoutinoutinout

eyes even stupider

face even slacker

happier

the last layer is lamentation.

For both.

The skewers come out. Even Annette’s.

Now there is pang and suffering.

She cannot blame the dog. Even with wire broken her cunt sparks and slams her knees against two hollow-clatter metal doors like chocolate sauce on cake in some delirious denial fantasy where she pretends she ever knows what food tastes like.

Her cunt.

Cunt.

Yes.

That word.

The word she hateloves. She sees William’s face once when she tries on painted colors of dirty talk and she is excellent with it. Pussy, pump my pussy, fuck my hole, fill me up ‘til I’ll drip you tomorrow

hammer my fucking cunt until I can’t sit down.

It works, at least, in the moment.

And still the vague disapproval

mothers don’t have these voices

wives, too

ontology of a woman is serial killer scrapings

Madonna-whore Venn diagram.

A whore fucks for money.

A slut does it for free.

A wife does it too rarely, she finds, and this is supposed to be good.

Her body is supposed to be the right reassuring kind of cold.

Remote.

Untouchable.

If he cannot have her, surely he does not need to be afraid of anyone else.

rewards her for being frigid even while he administers the right punishments all the same.

This thing does not.

This thing is lust

purity

begs her to be.

“Oh, you- you’re such a good dog.” The laminated tissues melt together without hitch or time-lapse. It is the death of a lonely snowflake on a palm.

Bright

bubbly.

Annette surveys the tub.

It’s

clean enough.

She doesn’t care. That’s really what it is.

“Stay. I have a treat for you.” She gives it brightness so syrup-sweet she’s sure it’ll need an insulin chaser.

It is not only voice.

Or eyes.

Or lingering neurotelepathic lust.

It is her body.

There is no better judgment to overrule.

Hunger.

Orgasm without touch is carnal gunshot.

Sudden

over without the mind’s participation.

“Do you like treats, Rachel?”

The thing stares with enormous eyes.

Pupil and iris negotiate meaningless real estate bargains.

It looks like a lens in focal confusion.

It licks its chops

expectation

heavy-hot breath.

“I think you do, don’t you? You know what shampoo is?” Annette leans close.

Disciplines her voice, keeps it like fresh ice.

Smug answers follow inane questions.

What separates us from the animals?

False proposition

but even so, it is not opposable digits

not the cellular phone or

hah

literacy

(how often is this gift savored?)

It is a conception of past, future, potential; the elemental power to conceive of a time when things may not be as they are.

Happiness may be greater in the future

a man’s hand is not worth love’s sacrifice despite the moment’s urgent stab.

Her voice must be held back because any lapse of authority is hours’ labor.

Necessary

(probably pleasurable)

reinforcement.

But there is pleasure without work, also.

Dumb blink.

The words did not register.

Too few cobwebs garland the empty auditorium to catch them all.

“Do you know what shampoo is?”

Head cock

(too cute to stand, she must order herself to stay)

“Shampoo?”

Head shake.

“You’ll like it.”

She pulls away.

A meaningful test, Annette only can rationalize to herself ex post facto.

The whine is water behind her.

Annette does not turn.

She sees it already.

Hair half-flat wet around the shoulders and back, still mussed-greasy up to its scalp.

Eyes enormous.

Follow her.

“It’s all right.” Annette salves it a little. Her shampoo sits on the cart.

It looks back at her.

It could’ve cleared the distance in a slippery wet lunge.

Instead it sits there

trusting

sweet.

“Good dog. You stayed. You knew to stay.” The voice is all

so much gentler than she usually hears it in her ears.

The face reflects.

Annette has brought something else.

Long.

Thick.

Pink.

Twin cut heads.

She

doesn’t even know why she owns it.

A married woman doesn’t need a double-headed dildo.

Adventure

in-the-dark delusion

alone.

Probably sixteen inches tip-to-tip

(William was seven

(of course there was a tape measure once)

heavy and pleasing.

slavers a little.

“Oh, do you know what this is?”

Nod.

Ravenous.

Annette has readied a little silver instrument tray next to her pup’s bath.

The dildo

the shampoo

(she is short-timer maid of unusual necessities)

premixed TPN in cheap silver retorts.

An IV rack will supply the gravity. Simple pump, blue and white plastic, strange, bright, infantile.

Full-spectrum formula.

She has read it will not grow fat.

V-ACT metabolism can be expected.

It is powerful in proportion to its feed.

Swallows.

“I- think we’re going to have a very nice bath. First your hair.”

Head cock

blink

curiosity.

Fingers brushed through oily hanks.

Hair?

“That’s right. You need a glossy and pretty coat.” Annette wonders why

how

the Umbrella moneymen

(they are always the moneymen)

could miss the point in such a being with such totality.

Sweet little pup on her knees, fingers spread wide over the sink’s edge.

Hunger grows more complex when Annette makes show of stepping out of her shoes and onto towels she’s set on the floor in front of the sink.

Blinks.

Pop her jeans’ button between thumb and forefinger, neat roll of wrist.

Bigger.

It smells her.

Bloodhound avid.

Annette sees the nostrils reel her in wet ribbons.

Down

down

short zipper and long legs.

Steps out and lets them puddle with black panties blotched with a wet little pearl in the crotch.

She knows

(feels)

a sloppy cord links fabric and flesh.

Rachel studies its arc before it’s gone, snapped, draped somewhere and lost in receptive fibers.

Annette’s top comes away easy

no striptease

or at least history’s most workmanlike.

No patience.

She knows the art would be lost on a dog

not the movement.

The air is warm for all the cold in the world

and still cool, institutional, raises prickles on her skin and wraps her in the strange too-sensitive feeling of boundary.

Her breasts are

fine

small but proud. They are

disappointment, surely

but she is a lean pear only up the neck and they still please Rachel enough she swallows again like a Labrador retriever shown bowl and food.

“Stay. Be good.”

Nod

nodnodnodnod.

Commands each are absolutes by necessity.

Without nuance to interpolate they are self-contained boxes.

Enough time and the dirty-river rush of events has obliterated continuity.

Rachel paws a little.

If Annette did not know the animal she would find it crass

a swipe at one of her tits

tight-puckered nipples darker than Rachel’s.

Fingers are contact. Touch for a being gone without.

“No.” Retreat

for all the shared regret that stretches between owner and beast.

“Good dog. You touch me when I tell you it’s all right.” There are no cutesy questions to muddle the process.

Annette leans around her

heat

human contact

(or close enough)

shoulder brush

Annette is afraid for the footprint of a stumbling heartbeat the whine is hers.

Cranks the water.

There is a rush

excitement.

Even a nozzle with a sprayer head.

“Are you ready?” Annette knows it will be fun to shock the little thing

violence and pressure.

But it peers up at her and for the first time Annette does not need to think and will before there is some

kindness

visited on another being.

She has tried

(failed)

and now there is not the trying

certainly not the futility.

“Paw.” The only game Dog played was paw. It blinks.

Abstraction

euphemism

Annette brushes a warm fingertip against its right wrist.

Nod.

Musical whimper.

“That’s your paw. Your right paw.”

Head cock.

The left.

“And your left paw.”

The nuance of feet will need to be explored later

(she always has liked pretty girls’ toes and Rachel’s are small and pleasing in shape)

but now it is hands.

“Paw.”

Both.

“Right paw.” Rachel

deliberates.

Water laps her knees before there is the will to stop turning over the question and shoot electron twitch through muscle and nerve.

She knows her rights from lefts.

Offers a delicate hand with limp wrist, still uneasy-afraid.

“Good dog.”

There is no trick.

Owner only wants to reward Rachel.

Simple calculus of ingenuous creature.

There is no tomorrow.

There always was yesterday.

There is a moment from now.

Others turn over the cards and give full-contact illustration.

Annette’s fingers are kind, also.

Steady the hand

give a little spray.

There is shock

horror

frantic bark

“N-n-no-”

“Good. You’re good. This is not to punish you. This is a treat.”

Senile corvid neophobia.

What is not right now always harbors the potential for worse.

The unknown is likely to be.

Quality in common between abuse victims and simple animals

fear.

Nod.

“Do you understand?”

Nod.

“All right. Now come close. All right? Come into my arms.” Annette will indulge herself.

The dog does not need to be asked twice.

Leans close across the basin’s edge

she folds it against her chest

heat

animal heat

soft breasts

skin like butter and firm dough and muscle’s lean sheets

chin on Annette’s shoulder in submission by nature and want both.

Annette levels the sprayer’s silvery nozzle with the small of its back and pushes just enough to let out a heavy mist.

The thing is

wonderful.

Skin soft

breasts squash close hot and overflowing.

Nipples scrape

it moans

that melodious way it sculpts the air around its nimble tongue.

She steers water up

and knows now it

like all newborns

is possessed of oral fixation.

Not aggressive

not even annoying.

The peck-peck-peck of soft pink lips on her neck

the sizzle-sparkle of its tongue

little loose-lipped scrapes of teeth

even a few bites all puppyish around her shoulder.

“Good. You’re so sweet, Rachel.”

It is.

Rocks

coos.

Its hair reeks like a week’s sickness in witchy knot but even that leaves the way a dog’s will in a water-flat fug.

And Annette can see from the hand’s movement it obeys

to the letter.

If it cannot touch her it will indulge itself. It is not novel; not the rehearsed solipsism of self-pleasure, either.

It is all hitches and whimpers and back-arches and bucks and jolts into a crude clutching hand.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” Annette’s mouth ghosts around the strong shoulder, up the neck, doesn’t give a damn about the vague odor when she creases an ear.

Its voice comes as achy melody.

“Y-yeeessssssss.”

“Do you know how to come?”

“C-come?” Question

meaningful?

Frightening?

The word orgasm probably is a little ambitious.

“Let me show you.”

Its body is so much bigger

and it is contracted and small up against her chest.

It doesn’t protest

just a little fidget

when Annette’s nails tingle down its tummy

(fluttery coo, it approves)

fold over its hand.

She pushes

impulse

“O-o-o-o-o-ooooooohhhhhhhh”

epiphany.

Annette does not need to be so stern she cannot laugh.

Bites the earlobe

wraps it in her tongue.

Everything is close-dark under even the harsh lights that bring too-heavy shadow to the room’s edge.

Its body wreathes her

“Come here. Hold onto me.” This is

trust

also.

It is much

much

much stronger than she is.

And it vindicates itself, obedient, quiescent, left arm draped over Annette’s shoulder. It holds its weight by boxer-taut belly

pants and drools down the crook of her neck and nape.

The limbs are awkward for all the trained might

fingertips lazy-scrape her back.

“So good, Rachel. So, so, so good.” Annette does not displace

laces fingers in the spaces between Rachel’s and follows the animal’s hip-jerks and keeps the water moving up and down and up and down its neck and back until it doesn’t even remember to be afraid of the wet warmth that melts its hair to the very top.

Rachel is wetter

hotter

greasy slick on Annette’s fingers.

Stroke

rub

uncoordinated over mons

modest but nice

across squishy-luscious labia

quirk close to the place between them and then back up to the clit

sparks

shrill yip

favorite place in the naming of the parts.

Annette folds her hand tight

gives guidance

sets down the sprayer to pick up the shampoo bottle

multitasks

too cranked

nerves move by reflex.

Now Rachel scrapes

grinds into their conjoined hands.

“Y-yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!” Mindless affirmation. This is all kinds of good-dog feeling.

“That’s your clit, Rachel. It’s so sweet for you.”

“Clitclitclit.” Vapid childish mantra, repetitive reinforcement. “Ngn... Yes. Yes.”

“So good.”

So good.

Annette knows to slow

tease

just enough to give time to crack open the shampoo. Drizzles subdued weight she massages now, hand on the back of its head, down the neck

steadies it like scruffing a dog.

It submits with bliss

head sinks back

it loves to be groomed, Annette sees.

Loves her fingertips and faint brush of nails on its scalp, slow massage.

Filth flows away in apple blossom.

“You smell so nice.”

“N-n-nice, nice, nice”

“Come for me. Come.” It

does not grasp euphemism.

Scrabble of knees

squeak of toes

throws itself deeper into her arms.

“Good pup.” She cannot fault it for its natural stupidity. “Orgasm. That’s what this is called. When I do this.”

Tighter on its clit

fingers swirl

(Annette’s favorite, why should her dog not share tastes?)

and perfection.

Spine stiffens.

A strangled bark-screech.

Shudder

melt.

“O-o-o-o-”

“Orgasm.”

“O-ooooo-”

“Cute.”

She pulls away

too fast

does not even give it a chance for a kiss. Instead Annette finishes the wash

fast.

Frantic.

She needs it.

Needs it now.

So she takes it.

It is not the messy labor of heparin and saline flushes to tether the mop-headed cutie to its meal.

Simple sterile hub clicks into the chest and at once her dog’s eyes grow huge. Grateful. The body knows it is fed

that life drains from translucent inner bag and into its veins, all milky from lipids and supplements.

This is not its gift.

That is Annette.

She stops the water’s flow

swings herself into wet-hot and for the first time she is in contact with another being. It is easiest to sink between its strong-soft thighs.

It means Rachel climbs her like she means to show her submission like a bride.

“Come here.” The tube is sure in its anchor. She must still be careful. Her pet is clumsy, stupid, will not understand the simple machinery of pipe bridges to its heart while pumps supply cadence to an arrhythmical system.

Arms over hers

above the tube

it is a dance.

Rachel’s hands and arms are strong

its weight is barely there on pinched-in knees that push into Annette’s hips and swallow her into captivity that is hotter surer fuller than all the wavery numb-sweet pool that eats her.

Buoyant

it dances

sways.

“You want another orgasm?”

Annette is in love with the clinicism.

Nodnod.

To teach your dog a word like orgasm

take them for a perambulation.

She knows it is graced with treat’s texture.

Rachel is all wiggles and nods.

Mmmn

mnnn

ngn

pleasepleaseplease

“I’m going to show you something really nice. Now stay there.” Annette can reach behind

gropes for the double-ended dildo.

The world is breath

swallow

she feels something die and doesn’t mourn it.

And that is it.

She wonders if this will be the shock that collapses a ceiling.

She cannot focus

not when she steadies her pup

and herself.

Her wrist is weak loose wobble and play

fingers threaten to slide

and still

still

her body opens.

Head scraped on her cunt

up against the lips

presspushsqueeze

filled

pressure pops in her ears.

And

and the dog already acts by reflex.

Stiffens

swings its body up and mounts her and this

this it understands

the way flesh is supposed to kink and coil together.

She sees the face turn demented.

Breasts bounce

nipples spring-snap

lips get rubbery and trace unselfconscious sneery Ooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Hips buck

it jerks

jolts

fucks itself and this

is not enough

“Fuck me.”

The words are profane

pointless

but wilt in the air and the thing understands and in an instant its face is buried in her throat

suck-lick-chew-appease-repeat

hips swing

back

sledgehammer in waiting

dagger up into her belly with a rubber-throb ripple of movement. She sees it behind her eyes, red path, her sweet little puppy with strength to break her body at rut.

Water splashes

Annette’s nails supply scratch and scrape and caress over the back

fingers clench on the nape

reassure by pressure while it fucks

fucks

fucks up into her.

She has not

for too long

(maybe ever)

known this kind of heat

aggression

frailty

hated self-control.

“Good pup. Good pup. Good Rachel. Good Rachel.”

Annette’s own voice gets lazy drooling stupid.

It should kiss her

(knows no romance, pump fuck pleasure shudder orgasm breaks like lightning when it bites just a little too hard and Annette says nothing because this is the strobelight she needs to put everything into clarity that cracks the sky)

instead it pleasures her

licks

draws blood by the pinprick.

Annette clinches it close

cradles it like a child

and it fucks her like a wolf

inoutinoutinout

to the root and back out again, so fast, so frantic, so level even sure it only goes to pieces every time the pup staggers into new orgasm and rights itself again.

And again

and

she cannot help herself.

Steers desire down its back

almost snags herself on the TPN and instead daggers long fingers and short nails into its ass’ peach.

“Good- good- good dog, good dog, good dog, keep- keep fucking- fucking- fucking-”

again

until Annette’s head blacks out

until she knows something deeper than deep

darker

thicker

cracks its eggshell mind.

Atropine seep

too sickening-sweet

shudders to a panting hot sweat-misted stop.

Annette has lost

she doesn’t care.

Has gained more orgasms than an entire life.

“Good dog.”

It folds itself close, again careful of the IV, perfects its body in her arms.

Cocooned in water its body warms by dog-heat Annette sleeps, everything squeezed out like a washcloth and hung to soak more.

It is a houndish nap, twitchy

eyes switchblade open at intervals, panic-urgent

and in the absence of anything worse than its drooly lips they drop at last, all spent.

She and her little beast will have important work.

She dreams of it, all the long shadow and bright white teeth.

Notes:

Another me
long ago
she was supposed to harbor the sweet things. She was a treasury of all the maternal-kind, all the warmth and compassion.
She drowned.
In compensation you get this. I'd love to know how it made you feel to watch this beast stagger to life fever-ripe, eyes shiny shallow black.

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BaikonurCosmos, CryoCrispy, TheTentacleCommander, Aurielle_Astrae, and TenDollarT as well as 6 guests left kudos on this work!

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TenDollarT Tue 02 Jul 2024 03:34AM UTC

Wow. Goddamn. Where to start.
I love the medical and scientific jargon. We're immediately in her swirling sewer mind. Necromancer is exactly the right word. The Queen of the Damned, where Damned is everyone who's path she crosses. Damned not by choice, but by fate. Perfect. And again that great sense of time's blur punctuated by unclean, unclear events. A strangulation. A few executions. A few "scientific" sacrifices. Nothing good. Medical alienation delineation by zero dignity, self or others. Psychopathy is maybe the easiest diagnosis, but there's too much empathy present for that. More like Evil of the classically Banal Kind.
-She smells like Chanel and house-mortgage Benz leather tooled in Auschwitz-
Dead on. =]
Also a busy life of empty accomplishment feels both very on-target and somehow specifically feminine. I'll remember that. Gained the (under)world, lost her soul. Except it's still in there. She's still Persephone, and Persephone still wants to leave.
(Musical suggestion: Morcheeba - Gained The World. Subtle? No. I listened to Hellhound and the inspiration is clean and strong.)
Annette's adoption of Hunk (a terrible name, agreed) is a (I was gonna say Janus-like, but we need more heads on our pagan icon of misanthropy. Tiamat? Let's go with Tiamat) Tiamat-like fusion of her becoming William and Doctor Wolcott and Wesker's creepy-crawly eyes and the mother she never was in making Hunk her homunculus companion-weapon-sex toy-bodyguard. And really Janus would be wrong because the fusion is organic, not contradictory. A mother is a god to her child. Annette wants that and though the urge is much more Demi then Maternal it's still both. 7 heads that feed one stomach.
(Safety. Safety is a funny idea. Nobody can be made to feel safe. People get attack dogs to feel safe; those dogs routine kill them. I think the truth is they want a totem for their fear, but they want one that can overpower them. I could get a gun to feel safer, but I'd still probably be why it kills me. I could sit around in my body armor all day, but it's hot and heavy and also kinda stupid because while a platecarrier is bog-standard protection for a soldier globally it's still at best a hedged bet that a steel plate (mostly) covering (some of) my vital organs that doesn't sustain a hit from too big or too fast a bullet will keep me from dying (right away) because even with all the "Thanksgiving At The Security Industry Expo" trimmings -a neck guard, groin plate, side plates and a good helmet- if a merry piece of metal whizzes towards my spine or head a few angles above all that sweat-smeared kevlar I'm still obliged to get up from the game and leave my cards on the table. GG, no RE. But a BullyXXL or some other fetishized hair-trigger bone-crusher? THAT says "I don't fucking care and I'll spend a lot of money making sure you all know (please ignore my distraught screaming when I find it dining on my 3y/o's trachea).")
(I am, for the record, an adopter of little black kittens with little ninja-knife mittens. That I clip because clawing my junk while I sleep is not ok however unintentional.)
And of course Birkin had options. She could have kept Chalmers -a runty mutt, but loveable and obedient- or Pinewood -almost acceptable but almost is an obscene word- but even people so obedient they let her murder them weren't enough. She didn't need pets that would die for her, but who would _live_ for her. As a mother does, however inverted.
Verdict: fantastic shit. A portrait of a Resident Evil appropriate monster ie someone relentlessly selfish. Whatever the feminine of TechBro is. And of course, madness. The ever-stretching dark beyond only mirrors the howling empty within. Engineering the G-Virus to select for that one-in-a-million survivor who can then be conditioned and wired for obedience. "We make the ubermensch! And she'd better know who's in charge!" Beat that for an industrialized inferiority complex.
edit for honorable mentions.
Aryan imbecile, strong in the shoulders, weak in the heart, empty between the ears
frantic storm surge starches platinum-sugar beach sand
Viridi herba extract
Raccoonensis mutant strain, neurotoxic in substantial dosage, symptoms awful, panic, paranoia, hallucination, sleep paralysis, horror, horror.
Steps out and lets them puddle with black panties blotched with a wet little pearl in the crotch.
<3

Last Edited Wed 03 Jul 2024 08:37AM UTC

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1. Veronica Ayoob (Veronica_Ayoob) Wed 03 Jul 2024 02:40PM UTC
  
  Nodnodnodnodnod
  Yesyesyesyesyesyesohfuckyeah!
  I wish I could inscribe these words in Enochian sigils up and down my spine and they'd surface across my skin like the shallow phantasm of benthic figures under gin-clear Caribbean water. Do I get a kyaaaaa? Whatever. Gave me one, anyway, all gap moe.
  This cuts, peels, degloves, serenades me with the siren song of wrists-deep spelunk in gut and innards. Oh, I can taste the blood in the air; the madness and sweet rot, too.
  Thank you! I'm not the kinda girl who keymashes, but this is close enough. Blank out; imbecile smile like celestial thousand-yard stare that gapes between galaxies with the old-eyes-in-young-face of doomed Marines on Pacific islands.
  Oh, I love the imagery you've brought. Blast Jethro Tull, Wind Up, Locomotive Breath on cool-off repeat after dissonance steered by electron reaches critical mass, bipolar pendulum swings, I am the kind of girl who burns villages and then peers meek under tuckered-out lids and uses bonechar for kajal. Shatter, break, erupt, split the night with artillery howl and thunderclap, oh, I gotta have more lightning, more blood and hellfire, the end is the real reason for the story.
  Annette- the necromancer. I love it! Oh, how that image slapped my brain a thousand times without word, and subtlety- damned subtlety, disgusting thing, shamed me when I wanted to name this abominable abortion-child Sympathy for The Devil before I knew it justjustjust had to be Hellhound instead- and how I knew Annette just wouldn't approve (far too true, far too honest, could you trust her to tell you with sincerity what she had for breakfast yesterday?). It's just too right. Annette doesn't hit things on the nose because I wonder sometimes if she ever can uncross her eyes after a life in the dark of others' madness she's grafted in deeper and righter than it sits in those who just play pretend. After all, only a truly pure being bleached of all her individuality can take on a perfected trauma bond with Devil-God duality spun up to caged-bird at 100Hz all parallel processing messy.
  (I forsake subtlety; listened to that song- a new favorite, I will blast it as many times as I want, autism means never needing to worry about changing music.)
  She always has feared excommunication. After she drives the Spear into the last angel, she'll know God is real because Her eyes never will be dry again.
  Tiamat. My Lord, yes! Mother of monsters humanity will call gods for lack of a better word, there is no proportion, things do not fall apart because they never came together in the first place. Plains are there to flood, women are pillars of salt that wait for names, cities kindling.
  Yesyesyes about maternality. And she's the worst kind of God-Mother: Jealous, all narcissism she will call empathy, she must not bring benevolence but have benevolence brought to her, the centerless vanity of the wanting Creator. And the links to all her poor little crybaby's formative nightmares- sublime.
  The attack dog part- how do you praise, brothers, sisters? How do you praise? Arterial spray is sweet validation. If the cute pup eventually wraps its jaws around her neck and eats the moon and sun I think there will be vindication. Your words are glorious.
  (An aside: I'm one'a those maniacs owns incantations of ceramic, NIJ Level IV from reputable labs, plate carrier, yeah, surrounds myself with firepower that is magnet for a halo of flies, oh how we fear, and oh how we hunger, too. Sapir-Whorf Almighty all-conquering, to admit ideas is to reify them in your life, the second things are set they are bondage, presence is deduction from potential, firearms mean firefights, armor means the bullet's unmerciful crack, trauma plates and cushion to fail in the end, the world is there to destroy. Why own a dog if you can't sic it on someone and the Ghurkas got it right about what you have to do every time you show the cold bend of metal)
  (Black kittens: Very adorable. Not much a cat person, but a black cat I will snuggle every time)
  And: Yes. Annette always needed something that was hers. With totality. With certainty. Pinewood? Trainable, maybe, but who wants an imbecile of unsure loyalties? Chalmers? Ohsopretty, but will she rip the throat out of your three-year-old? Annette is sick of the heavy lifting under the shadow of her own helplessness. The servant always must be better than the master because hierarchy is responsibility overthrown. Her sweet little puppy, however: Strong back, strong neck, strong legs (strong hips, better to fuck me with), strong center once negotiated and sculpted the way she wants. What else do you do when you find an atomic bomb in the shape of a beautiful woman but watch the mushroom cloud?
  So much yes.
  I think the feminine techbro will be the Biobossbabe. Liz Holmes is barely anything next to the hustlers we'll see who promise easy answers from oracular drool of deoxyribonucleic drug dreams. Saint Elon can promise to blow our neurons out across the cosmos in his image but the only thing less explored than the oceans is the secret of meat that brings captivity of day and night. A real mad scientist, oh, this will be sweet like belladonna berries.
  I figure this Umbrella Corporation has more in common with the grim parliament of ravenous tyrants lite with palsied grip on their submissives' leashes that just wait for the right bunny to bolt and the hounds to chase down Helios and give him burial in gutted firmament. Most god-worshipers saw tomorrow but what unites all my blood and faith is eschaton worship, swing bone ax into Yggdrasil and set the sap afire and watch its glowing cross spill through the heavens.
  I fit together the spillage from the cracks in my broken brain in one universe. I am sure this Umbrella Corporation eventually will show up in the prehistory of Omer Science and the Rubicon Research Institute. We have death rides, death marches, Bataan, Unit 731, Birkenau Buchenwald walk with me through the KZ and up the staircase of bones under a crown of spent stars to Kojima tarnish and Coral red across the cosmos. As a species we learn everything except how to learn from what we've done ten thousand times before and it is our epimethean muddle of mornings-after that bring us our tragedy addiction. Life's defining moments are before the pain takes and the voice drops on the line and potential is weightless even while it starts to crumble in vacuum and you see tarnishless gold is only leaf.
  We cannot live without tears because we love them too much.
  Delicious. All just so delicious, salt and praise. Can't help my tail from wagging.
  :3
  <3
  :3
  
  Last Edited Wed 03 Jul 2024 03:17PM UTC
  
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Hellhound

Veronica Ayoob (Veronica_Ayoob)

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TenDollarT Tue 02 Jul 2024 03:34AM UTC

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