Feral

CAUTION: FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY

One summer Trace was asked to contribute an original short story for the annual anthology of an online literary erotica site, Curved Lips.com.

“Can you make it a Dan Knight story?” the editor asked enthusiastically over the phone. She was calling from Georgia and had that sweet little Southern lilt to her voice that Trace found neither sexy, engaging, or interesting. All of the editors for Curved Lips lived in far-flung areas of the continental United States; in fact, one of their fiction editors was a wild-bearded man named Ray who lived in a tarpaper shack with no electricity in the Rocky Mountains. Ray used a solar-powered laptop and hunted for his own food. Trace called him The Unabomber.

“A Dan Knight story would require too much set-up, too much back story,” Trace told the editor. Her name was Pamela. She owned the domain name Curved Lips.com, oversaw all editorial content – sometimes nixing a story that the other editors had already approved – and self-published the annual fiction anthology that Trace was being asked to write for.

“Well, here’s the theme, sugar,” she sang into the phone. “Social Darwinism.”

“I’ve written about Jack London and Social Darwinism before.”

“Think erotica, sweetie. Jack London isn’t erotic … is he?”

Within thirty minutes of ending the discussion with Pamela he already had the title he wanted to use for the original work. He raced to the keyboard and typed it onto the blank screen:

FERAL ALONG THE FAULT LINE

Trace decided to write a piece that paid homage to some of his favorite authors from the Seventies: Marc Norman, Joan Didion, and, most specifically, the terrific Rudy Wurlitzer novella, “Quake”, the harrowing tale of the violent aftermath of a great quake that lays L.A. flat.

So he had his title and his inspiration. Now all he needed was a story.

He made a cup of coffee, broke the band on a fresh pack of cigarettes, and settled in at the desk, staring at the title on the monitor.

FERAL ALONG THE FAULT LINE

Earthquake. Darkness. Night. A gun. Sex. Social Darwinism. He wanted to hook them with the opening line, pull them in and repulse them at the same time. If you asked Trace for a slice of erotica, you would be foolish to expect candies and flowers. He pounded out the opening in thirty seconds:

“Yeah! Eat my asshole!” she screamed. “Get your tongue in there deeper, baby!”

She was on her hands and knees, ass in the air, elbows digging into the paisley bedspread on the living room floor. Her breath rose and fell in shallow gasps. Her long brunette hair, usually lustrous and full of bounce, was wildly spun in all directions, bringing to Kevin’s mind the image of a compass that had been broken, it’s points shattered into dozens of pieces.

Tabitha dug her sharp red nails into the pink flesh of one of her buttocks, drawing small rivulets of blood in the process, and held the crack of her ass open, eagerly encouraging Kevin’s tongue to probe deeper.

He paused, sipped his coffee and took a drag off the Marlboro. What kind of a social structure do these people inhabit? he wondered. Clearly Tabitha is exerting some kind of power over this Kevin fellow. He typed:

As usual, Kevin was struggling to keep pace with her manic sexual energy but an artist always does his best to please his patron.

Tabitha had been supporting Kevin for the last seven months, paying his rent, utilities, groceries. She even bought him a whole new wardrobe at a chic Sunset Plaza boutique despite the fact that his job – when he was working – required only a modest wardrobe that consisted of paint-smeared sneakers, ragged jeans, and denim coveralls.

Kevin was a painter. He specialized in residential and commercial interior walls. He looked upon exterior paint jobs as the domain for lesser artists and an artist is precisely what he was. You wouldn’t find his one-man business in the Yellow Pages under “Painters.” He was listed under “Artists.”

“Get up, baby! Get on your knees!” Tabitha hissed.

Kevin pulled his face away from the musky scent of her asshole and got to his knees without question. She stood over him and pulled back the thick folds of her labia.

“I’ve gotta pee, baby,” she announced.

Now, that is edgy, Trace thought. The coffee was getting cold but there was no time to reheat it in the microwave. He was on a roll. He continued to pound at the black keyboard:

So, this was the “new thing” she said she wanted to try when they spoke on the phone that morning, Kevin thought. She had already found dozens of ways to humiliate him sexually – each one rising her to new plateaus of orgasmic nirvana – so what was one more foray into sexual deviancy going to cost him? Nothing. It would pay his bills for the next month until he found another client willing to believe that he was more than just a house painter. Even though he was the only one capable of seeing it, Kevin firmly believed that he brought an artistic sensibility to his interior flourishes with a paint can and a brush. That’s why he demanded a rate three times that of what the market would bear.

That’s why, he thought, I’m on my knees waiting for this sick, deviant bitch to piss on me.

Tabitha was in mid-stream, dousing his face with hot urine that smelled of boiled potatoes and vitamin supplements, when he heard the dishes in the kitchen rattling. At first he thought it was a truck rumbling by outside. Kevin lived in a small Lockheed-era home in Burbank on a busy main thoroughfare two blocks away from Warner Brothers. Monstrous studio grip and electric trucks were always rolling by his front door.

Then there was the initial jolt, not a rolling motion like most earthquakes he had experienced, but a hard jab that he felt in every bone in his body. The jolt knocked Tabitha down. She fell on top of him in a heap, shrieking, piss flying everywhere. It was as if a urine-loaded Water Weasel had collapsed upon him.

The small single-frame house trembled. To Kevin, it felt like a giant pair of hands had seized both sides of the house and were trying to shake the contents loose. Outside, Kevin could hear all manner of loud crackling and hissing noises as power lines fell, plunging Burbank into darkness.

Trace looked at what he wrote. A giant pair of hands? What about “two giant hands”? He thought about it for a few moments more, decided that it was just a silly metaphor for a silly anthology and moved on dismissively:

He could feel the house shifting and there was a noise in his head like the shriek of a jet engine. Tabitha screamed when a hanging plant shook loose from the ceiling, the ceramic pot shattering on the hardwood floor a matter of inches away from her skull. Kevin quietly cursed Tabitha’s near-miss with a cranial fracture.

Kevin struggled to get to his feet but terra firma was suddenly nothing more than a myth. The floorboards were moving like the keys of a player piano. Cracks and fissures were appearing on all four walls, the stigmata of powerful earth tremors.

After two full minutes the shaking was still going strong and that was when Kevin realized that this was no Chatsworth earthquake, no Whittier Narrows shaker, not even equal to the Loma Prieta that they endured up in the Bay Area in 1989. This was a major motherfucking earthquake. This was, without a doubt, the much-anticipated Big One.

He heard a symphony of chaotic noise in the dark night as the rumbling persisted. Car alarms wailing in protest. Glass shattering. The groaning of buildings surrendering to the strain, collapsing in weary resignation to their fate. There was a strange popping sound and the snake-like hiss of broken water mains and broken gas lines. He heard a car slam into a house across the street. If anyone in the house screamed in reaction to the sudden intrusion he couldn’t hear it. In fact, he heard no human noises whatsoever, just the creak and groan and shriek and collapse of human machinery and architecture and he found it odd that at such a calamitous moment in human history not a human voice was to be heard other than Tabitha’s labored breathing next to him.

And then it stopped as abruptly as it started.

Trace extracted himself from the desk chair and limped to the microwave. He nuked the cold cup of coffee, emptied and washed the ashtray, lit another cigarette, and promptly returned to work. He did not pause to read what he had previously written. He just kept going, as if on auto-pilot:

“Jesus Christ!” Tabitha blurted. Her nudity was a strange incongruity to the destruction inside the house.

“Put some clothes on,” Kevin said with a punishing frown.

He gingerly made his way into the kitchen, side stepping books that had been ejected from cases and onto the floor, shattered pottery, broken glass from the windows. That popping sound he heard but couldn’t identify must have been the windows exploding.

Kevin kept very little food or dishes in the kitchen so the damage was minimal, except for the broken window and the sink, which collapsed into itself and was sending a jet of water into the air. Kevin found the bottle of Ketel One in the cabinet undamaged. He unscrewed the cap and took a long pull.

This is it, he thought, this is the one we aren’t going to pull back from and dust ourselves off and move on to wait for the next one.

Within hours, he surmised, perhaps minutes, when people realized the extent of the damage, social order was going to break down. Los Angeles was going to become a living and breathing mass of social Darwinism and what did he have to contribute and to keep himself safe?

He found his gun under an overturned night stand in the bedroom. At least he had that but a lot of other people in the quake-ravaged city would be armed too. It would take a long time for the federal government to get relief aid in and until that time there would be widespread looting, perhaps even house-to-house.

What would he have to offer when the roving hordes came to his quake-scarred door? What would he have to barter with to keep himself safe and warm and fed?

He returned to the living room to find Tabitha still nude. She had parked herself in a corner of the room with her knees drawn up to her chest. Her slender arms were draped across her knees. Her eyes were catatonic.

Her, his mind returned in answer to the questions. You have her to barter with, this sex-mad bundle of perversion and paraphilia is your meal ticket.

Tabitha probably wouldn’t bat an eye at the notion of getting gang raped by a bunch of smelly thugs with baseball bats in exchange for a box of ground beef pilfered from the bowels of a collapsed grocery store.

And if she did refuse, Kevin reasoned, he always had the gun to coerce her.

He just might get through this after all.

And there would be a huge demand for interior painters when the reconstruction process began.

THE END, he typed. He e-mailed the story to all of the fiction editors at Curved Lips, including the Unabomber in his dark mountain cabin.

Two weeks passed and he heard nothing. Finally, into week three, Ray, the Unabomber, sent Trace a sheepish e-mail:

“Trace,

Terribly sorry we cannot run this fabulous piece. Unfortunately, my colleagues did not share my enthusiasm for your story. Most felt it was either misogynistic or pure pornography (Yeah, go figure, huh, Trace?”)

Anyway, sorry I couldn’t help you, buddy. Try us again next year with something maybe a little more toned down?

Best,

Ray”

“It’s Social Darwinism!” Trace screamed at the e-mail on the computer screen. “It’s a misanthropic enterprise either way you look at it!”

Trace only stood to lose $100 on the rejection so it wasn’t the money that mattered. He simply hated having his writing misunderstood.

It was two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. There was still plenty of daylight left. Trace made a fresh cup of coffee and thought about his next Dan Knight story.

How would his alter ego, Dan Knight, handle the rejection? Trace wondered. He smiled at the image of Dan Knight loading his revolver and pulling out a map of the United States, planning his homicidal itinerary. First stop: Georgia. Next stop: that remote cabin in the Rockies.