Note: An old novel of mine currently being converted into a screenplay. Will be posting many excerpts of the old novel… this scene takes place toward the very end of the book. You don’t really need to know anything to understand it, but you might be interested to know that Lady Dee is a really man.

She was waiting for him on his bed, as he’d commanded. The King shut his doors and locked them, closing the curtains on all the windows, one by one. He could feel her eyes following him around the room, but he ignored her, playing his games of power.

The Lady in red did not seem to notice. “You have fine men, Sire. Lucian is a good man.”

Too good, the King thought for a fleeting moment, and shook his head furiously. He looked at her, her eyes staring back so calmly at him, waiting for him to answer. He said nothing.

She smiled. “But I hear he is no Godric Unbrunner.” She yawned, and he glared at her. “He was murdered, yes? About ten years ago in the dungeons. I heard the stories, very interesting… his body found in chopped up little pieces, locked in a coffin with a note that said his name. They say it was the only way to recognize him. The murderer must have been very kind to leave a note, don’t you think?”

The King stared at her. What kind of woman is this? He growled and thrashed at the air, bounding the room toward her, but restraining himself from hitting her if only because she had the most daring expression on her face. “No. The murderer was my filthy little–”

Her brow twitched in interest. “Yes?”

He stood, staring open-mouthed at her, and then growled and looked away. “Never mind that, woman. Lucian tells me you call yourself the Lady Dee.”

“Yes.”

“What is your real name?”

She smirked, and though he wanted so badly to thrash her, he forbid it. Soon. He would make her scream and cry and beg and moan and bleed oh so soon. Very soon.

“My name is Dee, Lord.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. He would also make her tell him her name. “Where do you come from?”

“The village,” she said, waving a small hand.

“Which village?”

“The one down the road.”

His hands gripped into fists and he visibly shuddered with the struggle to hold himself back. He didn’t want to hit her yet. First he would enjoy her. Then he’d hurt her.

“You are not a peasant, Lady.”

The woman did not answer for several minutes, and the King stared into her fathomless black eyes. Then he stood back in shock, unable to look away. Such hate.

She smiled a dead thing. “No,” she said. “I suppose I’m not.”

Warning: Zombies. Um. Gross-factor.

Note: Very old. 2005-6ish.

rule #1: know yourself

Norman had died a very long time ago, but he didn’t know it. Or maybe he did know it and he didn’t care. Whatever the case, he staggered down the road, staggering because his maggot-infested legs couldn’t support his hulking frame anymore, their rotten meat falling in a trail behind him with every stomp he took. The stench of death rolled around him in a solid wall, even if he couldn’t smell it because he had a fat cockroach for a nose and the cockroach could a give damn about his smell very much at all. He wandered, up the street beyond the cemetery that he’d risen from, not entirely sure of where he was going, perhaps incapable of understanding enough to ask. He had no working brain, the maggots had made sure of it, and what was a mind without a brain?

Any living man would have said that Norman shouldn’t have been walking because he had no lungs, and that meant no oxygen to his moldy muscles. Norman was dead, and dead men do not dig themselves out of their graves and walk down the street for a bit of fresh air. But Norman didn’t know science. Norman was dead, and for a dead man, he was looking pretty well alive.

rule #2: know your target

A woman screamed, and he turned his eye-less head to look. She was blonde, big breasted, and wearing a miniskirt. Pink, he thought. Norman wondered without wondering if she was a cheerleader. He could almost-very-nearly remember a time, vaguely, when he’d dated a cheerleader…

rule #3: understand your desire for the target

His mouth was open in toothless wonder, grinning at the very pretty girl who stood and stared dumbly back at him. Then she made a noise, like the whine of jets, and somewhere glass shattered. Norman was sure of it, but he didn’t care because he was dead and couldn’t really hear, and didn’t realize that the noise she was making was a very bad noise that meant perhaps she wasn’t interested in dinner and a movie after all. He staggered forth toward her, wondering in his zombie way if they were still playing The King And I at theatres, and if cheerleaders liked that movie. He did, and his lifeless arm outstretched, grabbing, trying to see if she had any money to pay for the tickets since he hadn’t been buried with his wallet. He wanted to give her a good time because she was pretty, and every zombie knows that pretty little teenage cheerleader girls in miniskirts were the thing that every undead creature must have.

rule #4: find target, follow target

Unfortunately, she ran away, and he chased after, unrelenting in that living-dead sort of way, still reaching like a dog reaching for his bone. Or a zombie for her the pockets at the back end of her dress, where surely the money must be. She screamed something unintelligible to Norman, but Norman didn’t care, because he couldn’t hear it. He chased after her until she was cornered in a dark alley, and he smiled that dead, toothless smile, grunting things only zombies understood. It was meant to be very romantic and meaningful.

rule #5: corner target in a place of solitude

She made more noises, terrible warbling noises, but his ears were blocked with grubs and his eardrums had large holes in them where the maggots had drilled to get into his brain.

rule #6: announce to target your affection

There were tears blurring her vision, and Norman briefly wondered how she could run like this without actually seeing where she was going. But then again, Norman couldn’t see at all, and he could see where he was going just fine. With a zombie shrug, he grunted, reasoning without really doing so that she probably just needed a hug. And perhaps movie tickets… sometimes, Norman needed hugs and movie tickets too. He outstretched his arms in a big circle and stiffly wobbled toward her, his mouthful of maggots puckered into a kiss. The maggots squirmed, some falling to land on the pavement under his rotten feet, wiggling rice between his toes. He bent down.

Rule #7: target will resist–do not let target escape

She screamed so loud, she probably woke the dead. More dead, anyway, as Norman drifted his cold, slimy, half-eaten lips over her cheek and embraced her body with his arms. Some of the maggots fell into her hair, a spider crawled out of his eye and jumped onto her pretty white shirt, and she screamed and screamed and screamed–more glass shattered, an entire cathedral. She thrashed like a hundred-ninety-pound bear with breasts caught in a trap, blue eyes wide with fear, and he held on tighter, sweeter, kissing her again on the cheek, trying to comfort her. The poor girl really needed a hug pretty badly if she was this upset.

rule #8: kiss target

But then she stopped. Just stopped. Confused, Norman backed away to see the expression on her face, and he realized that she was still terrified, too terrified to speak. He kissed her again, and she frowned, leaning away, resisting even as she tried to understand the zombie’s motives.

She asked him something. Low, trembling, curious. He only vaguely understood, but he heard the words clearly.

“Are you kissing me?”

He kissed her again. She needed something more than a hug… she was a wreck.

rule #9: lure target into bed

She shivered. Maybe she was cold. Norman embraced her, kissing down her face, along her jaw, under her neck, and lower…

rule #10: love target

She screamed again. She shoved away with strength he’d never seen in a living woman before, the terror fueling her muscles to run, run farther and faster than her legs than Norman could follow. She got away, still screaming and stumbling as if to gather the entire world’s attention.

Norman sighed a zombie sigh and watched her vanish into the streets. Another pretty girl, gone. And his movie tickets too.

But there were others…

Note: A long-fiction project being written over the years, which entails a number of short stories connecting to a larger plot. This is the first paragraph of that project.

Maggie May was obsessive-compulsive about her laundry. She didn’t know what obsessive-compulsive meant, but she knew that’s what the funny man in the suit told her when her children complained of her habits. They gave her pills, and made her sit down and talk every week, usually about nothing at all, which annoyed her because she couldn’t do her laundry in the little office so far away from where she lived talking about nothing. After all, there wasn’t a clothesline in his office, much to her growing annoyance. The funny man would ask her mundane questions about her childhood, ignoring anything related to clothes–questions like who her mother had been, her father, her children, and most especially about her first husband, who had so strangely disappeared thirty years ago… Maggie always answered everything accordingly, but she didn’t like it, because it was boring and there wasn’t any laundry to do in the office where the funny man worked. That was at home. She didn’t like leaving the house because the laundry was there, and it stayed there, and that’s where she belonged. With the laundry.

Warning: sexual content, gore, cannibalism. seriously.

Note: Written in 2005, I think. Ish.

Her tongue rolled like a python on the shoulders of a snake charmer, licking at the air to taste my scent. She inhaled deeply, her eyes drifting shut to savor whatever it was she was feeling, and then she smiled. Hand on round hip, smooth legs perched with confidence before my bed as I lay exposed like a monarch before her. She asked me, “May I taste you?”

And what was I to do but nod stupidly, caught in the sway of her long, red, micro-braided hair that ticked as the beads hit each other, beating, like the beat of her lips as she smacked them together, salivating, waiting to taste me? I am a simple man. When a beautiful woman asks me such a question, I do not refuse her.

For anything.

She grinned at me, and then bent down to my ear, slowly, bronze breasts sipping from her loose bra to hover just bare inches before my mouth. She licked my left lobe, bit down gently, tasted me. And then she hummed like a whore. “That’s good,” she said.

Very good, a little voice down in my waistband groaned back.

And then she bit me again. Hard, this time, on my ear lobe. Not a love bite, not even a childish bite, but a bite bite, like a diner bite, a chewing bite that made the blood flow, and hurt like a goddamn bastard. I yelped in surprise and pulled away, pushing against her, swearing, glaring over her shoulder, but she held me back. Held me, me, a man. She was just a weak little woman–yes weak, those arms were thin and bony and–and she had me in a grip that I couldn’t escape from as she bit down harder on my ear lobe, and I felt the skin separating, tearing, bleeding all over my neck and shoulder. I yelled, but she chewed, still chewed until the meat finally gave way and broke off into her mouth.

She pulled away, still chewing my left lobe like bubblegum–would she blow bubbles with it?–sucking the blood off her fingers.

I screamed. I clawed at the floor beneath me, crawling away, far, far away, but she grabbed me by the leg and pulled me back, straddling me, licking me again, grinning.

She swallowed my lobe, swallowed it down her throat, into her stomach, she ate it, ate a piece of me and then grinned, grinned at me, grinned teeth. Pointy white teeth. Sharp… pointy… teeth…

I can’t remember where she came from. I was sleeping, and then she was sitting there over my bed in provocative clothing, you see. I thought I was dreaming.

But I wasn’t.

I still don’t know what she was or where she came from. I don’t know if she’ll come back for me. All I know is that she ate my entire left hand, three of my toes and a kidney. She said that I tasted good.

I remember, because she made me taste myself. She’d put in my mouth, yes, and I ate it. Have you ever ate a piece of yourself?

It’s a strange sensation.

I think I liked it, liked the way her tongue roved along the back of what remained of my ear, lapping up my blood like a cat lapping the slime off one of her kittens…

Oh, look. I have that craving again. May I taste you?

Note: Written sometime during 2005. I think. *thinks*

“Someday, the sun is going to stop rising,” she said.

Her hands were shaking as they hung over the rail of her chair, limp, like a dead thing waiting to decompose. She was hardly breathing and I wondered for the slightest moment if she really were dead and I was speaking to a ghost, to a memory of a time trapped in the broken bottles and snapped six-pack rings stranded around us.

The waves of the river whispered in my ear. Laughing at the absurdity…

I shook my head, and glanced up at the sky. “Why?”

“Because.” She shrugs, and one of her dead arms wave loosely, caught in a sudden breeze. “It’s gotta be sick and tired of this shit. Up and down and up and down… it’s like a seesaw, only nobody’s on the other end, ’cause nobody wants to play. It’s just work, every fucking day, and I’m tired, so tired, I just want it stop. Your father, all he does is drink, and you, you just sit there, and–”

I tone it out. I’ve heard it all before. I stare outward, playing with my fishing pole, wincing when the pitch rises into a screech and she scares all the fish away. She could shatter glass if she tried hard enough. I grip my glasses worriedly then, and I have to shake myself, but she doesn’t notice. Her face is bathed in light despite the darkness in her eyes, and the moon peeks from beyond to clouds to smile down at us. Not that she notices. It’s full tonight, too. Maybe I should grow fangs and howl like a dog, and see she what she does then.

“…and I’m just damned sick if it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Ma.”

“Hunh?” She looks over her shoulder at me, surprised to hear my voice, or perhaps just perplexed as to my meaning. I look beyond her to the end of the fishing pole dipping into the river, one hooked worm rolling under the moonlit waves though all the good catches have swum away. The tide is so high, I’m almost sure the water itself is trying to reach heaven. If heaven were on the moon…

She turns away again, and that deceased arm comes to life, decayed hands digging into her jean pockets for her half-gone pack of cigarettes. She pulls it out with her forefingers and flicks the butt with her thumb, her other hand rustling in the second pocket for a lighter. There’s a snick and a little burst of light, explosions in the dark–my eyes are drawn to it like the eyes of a moth as the flame floats higher and higher, toward her mouth… is she going to kiss it? I imagine her lips burning, her tongue brown-red and roasted, like good pork, but no, the cigarette is there and the flame stops at its tip, burning the embers of the tobacco in a coal orange light. She inhales deeply, holds, and then releases with a great puff of exhaustion. The smoke makes me cough, and she flicks the end of the cigarette to send ashes into the air that fade fast as they are formed. Her hand collapses, dead again as the smoke still rises from still burning embers resting in her forefingers.

The smell is a poison that makes me cough, but I love it. I love the smell of a cigarette. I inhale deeply, and she snorts back at me with derision. “I don’t understand you,” she says.

“That’s not true,” I bite back.

No response. She doesn’t even look at me.

I glare at her. “You’ll see the sun tomorrow, I assure you.”

A snort. “Whatever.”

Whatever.

She takes another drag of her cigarette, and I cast stones into the roaring waves to cover the stretched silence between us. It should bother me, but it doesn’t. I don’t even know why it bothers her. How can you let anything bother you, out in nature, under the moon?

The river laughs, clawing toward heaven, and I reel in my line. I bury the worm in the soft dirt on the shore.

“It’s going to stop,” she says again, shifting in her chair.

I just shake my head. I know better. There will be other suns, other rises. Other moons to chase them back around again.

Notes: This is an old one, like most things that will be posted here. For explanation, it’s about being a fanfiction writer.

My lips are the pen and paper becomes your skin, writing words given to me by lovers living within the walls of my head, encouraging dares I would never dare for any other body underneath. Oh, sweet nothings of leviathans made of gold upon men made of leather and hair, I bite a story into you of characters I do not own, of worlds I did not discover, of voices I did not hear but for the obsession curling itself into my toes every time they scream–and you say, “Do me like them,” choking as they have choked to understand the broken drabbles and unfinished fiction spilling from my mouth like smoke. Do me, let me do you, let me do you like them, let me do you a story of things that I have seen in the worlds that weren’t mine that I have written upon your skin.

There is a marrow of something original in your bones that I crave to suck deep into the DNA of my cell structure, but your flesh is in the way, warm and firm and waiting to be eaten. I have no world to carve into you–it has already been carved by another woman, by another man, by another writer far more clever than myself.

But I crave like fremen who crave the sea, and I want that untamed richness inside of you, the worlds that you can build so carelessly because you have not been infected with the obsessions that I obsess every waking and coma-tose moment of my life. It is a fan, the heart whispers, a fan blowing the heat away from your skin, and my teeth prick at the bumps of pores opened to your sweat–no, fanatics squealing on a roadway for another tragic Jackson–that is who I am, that is all I will ever be. Jacksons and Jobes and Jeremiah the Bullfrog.

Your blood rolls like a fine wine on my tongue, and you begin to whimper, whimpering, “When will you be done?” Because we have been going strong for several years now, and I have not written from the original richness in your marrow since long before the obsession began to obsess, their voices lingering at the shell of my ear.

Oh, sweet nothings of Christ and Lucille, I hear the call of worlds already written, but I care not for they love me like love never did. What lines already spoken, what view of the path already taken–to write what has already been written is like to please you when you have already been pleasured, and you scream pointlessness… but you have never relished in pointlessness like I have relished pointlessness, and your richness prevents you from ever understanding.

What is the point of writing a story if there are not those of us to read it? What is the point of having religion if there are not those of us to follow it? What is the point of creating obsession if there are not those of us to obsess in it?

What is the point indeed but the point of the knife digging into your flesh, hallowing your bones to steal the marrow that I crave to make pointlessness of your points, and delusions of your reason.

My lips to the paper of your skin, telling stories already told like a mother giving Peter Pan another child to Neverland–clap if you believe in fairies, clap if you believe in this:

I’ll be done when I’m dead.

The only fiction that will be posted here are things that I don’t care to protect or submit to magazines. Excerpts of other things that *are* protected will be posted, but to view the entire work of these pieces, you’ll need to beg and plead and then maybe I’ll send you everything I have via email or filters in exchange for wonderful fangirling/boying.

Enjoy!