Category: Fiction and Essays

There’s Someone at the Door, Ch. 1

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Someone was pounding on the door. She searched frantically for her clothes. How had this happened?

Her body was warm and pulsing, her crotch wet. She had been freshly fucked. She was alone. Where was she? Who was she? She knew she’d done something terrible, with the wrong person at the wrong time, something dangerous, something illegal. She had betrayed herself and those who loved her in the worst way. But who? Who had she betrayed? Who had she lost forever? Who was she?

The pounding grew louder. She heard keys rattling in the lock. She needed something to cover herself, to stick between her legs. The room stretched out around her, black and huge, cavernous. A dim bulb flickered above her. “Just a minute!” She saw a corner of something and picked it up, cloth, thin, a dress, thin like gauze. She pulled it over her head, and immediately saw how little of her nudity it concealed. She sniffed the smell of sex on herself and recoiled.

The door burst open. She  covered her breasts and crotch with her arms. A tall, strong black woman shadowed the streaming bright light. “Leyla. You have been summoned.” Leyla, was that her name? She shook her head. The name didn’t make her head clearer, didn’t shake the fog shrouding her thoughts.

“What’s happening? Where am I?” She hugged herself tighter, and felt very small and naked. The woman advanced toward her, staring her in the eyes, lips parted, smiling. Leyla felt the strong hands grasp her shoulder and pull her into the hall, and she released her hands concealing her figure.

She blinked at the bright light, and gasped as she saw professionally dressed women lining both sides of the hallway, beaming at her.

“You’ve been summoned, Leyla, you’ve been summoned.” The women were dressed identically, hair up in buns. She felt even more naked as she viewed their proper dress, their utterly controlled and composed uniform demeanors.

The tall woman put a hand on her shoulder and guided her down the hallway. “This isn’t going to be like last time, Leyla. You’ve gotten away with this long enough.” The floor was cold on her bare feet, and she struggled to remember anything that could help her, some scrap of memory.

A voice in her head whispered: “Georgia is the one pushing you. Seduce her. You need her on your side for what’s coming.”

Leyla nodded , reached up and felt Georgia’s hand. The women on either side tittered. Leyla stopped. “You’re sure this is the way it has to be?” She drew Georgia’s hand forward to rest on her breast.

Georgia clasped Leyla’s breast, and drew her to an embrace. Leyla sniffed Georgia’s cinnamon musk. Georgia wound a hand in Leyla’s hair and pulled her head back. She kissed Leyla’s neck, and an “oooohhh” sounded from the crowd.

Then she kicked Leyla’s legs apart, and kissed her neck. She whispered, “bend down and show me who you really are.”

Leyla bent at the waist and touched the floor. Georgia flipped up the skirt of her flimsy dress. “Just so you know, this don’t change a goddamn thing.” Leyla’s eyes widened as she felt Georgia’s hands grasp her backside. She watched the women blush in front of her. One of them, a delicate redhead, approached slowly and gently kissed Leyla’s upturned face.

Layla balanced her weight on the floor, her palms flat against the carpet. She saw another of the office women lowering George’s trousers. She felt Georgia’s fingers surprisingly soft, caressing her buttocks, kneading her skin, embroidering her flesh. Pleasure mixed with the waves of humiliation buffeting her, and she moaned. She understood that she must needed to submit to this experience if she was to survive.

She felt Georgia bring her hips down onto Georgia’s naked thigh, spreading her further, working her back and forth. Leyla locked her lips around the redhead, gasping into her sweet mouth as if she could pour all her sex into her. More women flanked both sides of her, supporting the redhead. One leaned in and unbuttoned the gauzy dress from Leyla’s torso, while heat radiated off her pulsing flesh.

Hands stroked her breasts, coming from all directions. She was lifted into the air, as the now nude Georgia laid down on the hallway carpet. She was weightless for a moment, then guided downward, so that her mouth was square with Georgia’s dark pussy. She felt Georgia’s hot breath on her crotch. The scent of cinnamon drove her in; she spread the black hair in front of her, the heat guided her downward. She spread Georgia’s nether lips and pulled back; the clitoris jutted before her and she kissed it, tongued it, and Georgia shuddered beneath her. A moan went up from the surrounding crowd.

Leyla felt Georgia’s tongue lapping at her clit, her nose moving back and forth. Leyla’s hips bucked faster and faster as her climax built, all humiliation forgotten. Hands stroked her hair, and silk shirt sleeves brushed against her back and ass. She was all heat, motion, and energy. She cried, screamed like she was alone, like there was no one else in the world.

Georgia began to groan, grunt, and the vibrations and heat caused Leyla to quiver and arch her back, spreading herself and her pussy. Leyla started to jerk her head and tongue faster and faster, thrusting and squeezing with her tongue and lips. Explosions rocked through her body, as she and Georgia came together. Leyla slumped forward between Georgia’s legs. Georgia drew Leyla up to her and cradled her, kissing her sweetly and softly on the mouth. “You were good, babygirl, you were real good.”

They stood up slowly, and the women crowded around them began to applaud. They began to dress. “Now we still got to get you to the judgment child. I can’t do nothing for you.” Leyla looked into her eyes, and nodded.

Chapter 2: https://hermanshermitage.com/2023/01/02/theres-someone-at-the-door-ch-2/

Find Water

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Don’t mind your head throbbing. Look for green. Watch for roots. Go downhill. Smell. Smell more. Walk towards it if it smells wet. Remember that your whole being wants water, needs water.

Dig. Dig deeper. Don’t be picky. If there’s mud, stick your face in it. Follow the bugs. Look for salt.

Ignore the sludge in your head and in your veins. Scrape out that clay and stick it in your mouth. Spit it out when you start gagging. Grab for more clay, and repeat, until your fingernails crack and bleed.

Forget everything that’s ever happened. Feel the sun baking you, turning you to leather, and find water.

Recall that you walk in the footsteps of your ancestors of millions of years. Feel the prehuman core of you, the mammal, the lizard, the one who has survived and will survive.

Don’t be afraid of the scorpions hissing around you. Grab a rock and smash them if you can. Separate the tail. Eat those little bastards. Pretend it’s lobster. Imagine a five star restaurant, and crush another one.

Cercophonius squama (Gervais, 1844), Wood Scorpion by Photographer: Rodney Start is licensed under CC-BY 4.0

Keep moving as your body starts to shake. Don’t fear as the sun is setting. Find rocks, find something to keep the wind out, to keep the wind from you, to become your hard shell. Tighten yourself into a ball and shut your eyes tight as the air around you gets colder and colder.

Take comfort, you have not been forgotten. Picture her face and how easy life was with her. Let the warmth spread around you. Sleep, or at least rest.

Wake with the sting of the reborn sun, and shake the bugs off. Grab that beetle and crunch it down. Take your shirt off and shake it out. Turn it inside out and put it back on, the filth faces your skin and protects you a little.

Look to the horizon. Move toward that shimmering image. Hear her voice, soothing, stirring. Don’t doubt it as a mirage. Consider it as motivation. Movement is life, motion is life.

Find the dew on the rocks, the condensation, and cup it into your hands, lick it, slake your thirst, every drop. Take your filthy socks and soak them with the wet, and then stuff them in your pockets as canteens. Picture every drop as ambrosia, golden nectar of the gods gliding down your throat, giving you life and strength.

Feel the life returning to you. Walk with greater purpose. Hear the thrum of the helicopter, wave your arms and shout from your now moist throat.

Fall to your hands and knees as the helicopter lands. Weep from exhausted tear ducts as they cover you with a blanket. Try not to gulp the water as it’s drizzled into your cracked lips. Give your thanks to them, for finding you, for not forgetting you, as they tell you to rest. Shut your eyes and let yourself be carried onto the helicopter. Feel the death lift from you as the helicopter rises above the desert. Pass into sleep, and feel your life returning to you.

Photo by Emiliano Arano on Pexels.com

Reluctant Eye

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This life keeps passing, the events unfold, day after day, week after week, all the same. The children get older, the tiny gods of our religion. The faces in the mirror get subtly more lined with each year. Doubts creep in, anxieties, “is this all there is?” 

There was a point to all this, once upon a time. There was a belief that a life was a success, a failure, or mediocre, and the habits practiced would yield uncommon results. Yet, that’s not how it feels. It feels endless, futile, a re-enactment of a drama from another time. 

“Daddy? What’s wrong?” she asks. A head shake, a pat on her head. “Nothing, sweetheart, it’s nothing.” 

These are the same thoughts and feelings that millions have had before; this is cold comfort, of course. A burst of inspiration, a parting of the clouds, a transformation could change everything, but it doesn’t. Mundanity chokes the miraculous. Nothing disproves the assumptions of despair and nihilism. 

She takes my hand and holds it. 

Into the Abyss

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Lost in the woods on

My morning jog, I found my

Way and returned home.

But everything had

Changed. My cherished wife was now

My foe, having been

Instructed on the great

Litany of my wrongs by

Some unknown scribe. She

Viewed me askance, and

All my efforts to engage

Were thwarted. Broken,

Dissolute, the streets

I wandered until

The beat of some infernal

Drum summoned me to

March, in a crowd of

Damned like me. We followed the

Rhythm, to our doom.

Rats

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I dreamed I was a student or teacher, and had a bucket of rats that were tame and very good pets, as good or better than dogs. They had various patterns to their coats, more like hamsters.

I passed them around to the class, who petted them. I talked about the book “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh.”

I remember we had several hamsters when I was growing up. When I was 13, for my science fair, my dad bought thirty white Sprague-Dawley rats for me to keep in the bathroom, to do an experiment about whether their learning would transfer from one maze to another, versus just the specific maze experience.

I was supposed to pet all the rats every day so that the experiment wasn’t confounded by anxiety towards humans.

I didn’t have much experience raising rodents. In their aquarium cage, they knocked over the water dish. Some of the rats got dehydrated, probably died, and were cannibalized by their fellows. I found bones and a tail.

I was horrified. Did I tell my Dad? I don’t remember. But I avoided them. My Dad got mad at me for not socializing them enough, but it was traumatizing.

I got a “Superior” ribbon for the science fair, but wasn’t selected for the State finals.

The dream probably springs from an insight I had yesterday, that I needed to be a super scientist to make up for my failings as a kid to my Dad. I’m a physician repeating my final year of residency, studying for my boards, which I’ve failed twice already. I’ve been pretty depressed for a few years now, and the dynamic with my Dad weighs on me, though he’s pretty supportive now.

The dream was probably some wish fulfillment, about how, since I didn’t socialize the rats, the experiment failed, so now I was making sure all the dream rats were socialized.

Vultures

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The vultures are eyeing me, staring me down. They look hungry, ready to rend me limb from limb. I have to keep moving.

I can smell the stench of carrion around me. I cough, I gag, I continue to crawl.

One lands in front of me, and screeches in my face; I reach out to shoo it away, try and scare it off with my last, fading breath. I pick up a branch near me and swat at the bird. It flies away.

I keep one foot in front of the next, lurching onward. The sun beats down upon me, and I swallow, my throat parched, feeling like a single sheet of tissue.

How did I end up like this? Where had I gone wrong? My head spins; I feel like I’ve been walking for my entire life. Fatigue tears at my shoulders, pulling me down. I can’t stop, I have to remember who I am and what I’m trying to do.

I feel the rush of feathers on my back as the vulture comes at my back; I whirl around and smack him with my open hand, and he flies off. Only then do I feel where his beak tore my back, the new hole in my shoulder. The pain staggers me when it comes. I keep moving, and hold the bloody wound closed.

Sweat closes my eyes. I swipe them free with my bloodied hand, and smear my face with blood. God, what’s happened to me?

If I can reach shelter, I can keep the birds away, so they won’t tear my flesh further. I need water, there has to be water here in this desert, somewhere.

Ahead, over the rise, something dark breaks the yellow sand. Rock? There could be moisture on one of its sides, there could be some kind of vegetation.

The vultures flit before me, shading my burned face in alternating moments. I hear them screaming, circling faster and faster.

I kneel at the rock, which is dry and hot to the touch. I snatch at the sharp edges, trying to pull it out, cursing, stomping on it with what’s left of my boot. Finally a sharp shard breaks free, and I stand, with what might be the last of my strength.

The vulture screeches toward me flying faster. I strike out as it gets closer.

I crush its stupid fucking head.