Itsy Bitsy Spider, by Michael Bracken

I recognized Millie’s work when I saw the tattooed spider web that radiated out from Mona’s quarter-sized areola and covered her entire left breast.

“Where’s the spider?” I asked.

A coy smile tugged at the corners of Mona Peterson’s lips.

I found the spider later, tattooed at the edge of her bikini line, its eight little legs caught in her curly black pubic hair. By then, I was trapped.

Before then, though, I could have walked away. I probably should have.

***

She first came to my office on a wet Tuesday afternoon, her college T-shirt glued to her like a second skin, and it was obvious she was both cold and braless. I tried not to stare at the dimpling of her thin gold T-shirt as she stood on the other side of my desk and dripped on my carpet.

Her hair hung in a sodden black mop and she tucked it behind her ears before she looked around my office. When she spied a stack of business cards on the corner of my desk, she pried one off the top. Neatly thermographed on the front of the card were my name—Morris Ronald Boyette—and my contact information. She held the card close to her face while she read. When she looked up, she asked, “This you?”

I’d just deposited a few thousand in my bank account—the final payment from a philandering spouse case I’d wrapped up less than a week earlier when I’d caught the husband on video sticking it to my client’s sister on top of a picnic table in Cameron Park—and I didn’t feel charitable. I said, “Yeah, it’s me.”

She dug into the front pocket of her tight-fitting jeans and dropped a wad of green on my blotter. I carefully peeled the wad apart, discovering five waterlogged Benjamin Franklins.

“I want to hire you.”

***

Millard Wayne Trout—Millie of Millie’s Tattoos and Piercings—listened to the story over tacos and beer after he closed his tattoo parlor that night.

“She walked all the way from the university in the rain?”

“That’s what she said,” I told him between bites.

“Did you carry her back?”

“I offered.”

Millie wore a gray sweatshirt, leaving only the tattoos covering his hands, fingers, and shaved head visible until he pushed the sleeves up to his elbows and exposed his thick arms. 

“And?”

“She said no.”

“You see where she went?”

I shook my head. My office is a single room in the back of the building, behind Millie’s 

Tattoos and Piercings. The empty suite across the hall from my office had once been occupied by a finance company too legitimate for the neighborhood and, in front of it, facing the street, was Big Mac’s Bail Bonds. Without leaving the building, I could only see the alley behind the building and the empty lot to the side.

Millie drained his beer and opened another.

Someone tapped on the window and we both turned. Standing on the sidewalk outside were two young women—blond, bouncy, and probably wasted. Millie walked to the front, unlocked the door, and pulled it opened. He stood in the open doorway to prevent the women from entering.

“We’re closed.”

“No, please. Open up for us,” said the taller of the two. “My friend wants a tattoo.”

The shorter one reached in her pocket and pulled out a wad of money. “We can pay cash.”

“Come back when you’re sober, ladies,” Millie said.

“She won’t do it when she’s sober,” protested the taller one. She looked at her friend. “Show him where you want it.”

The shorter blonde pulled down her tube-top.

“She wants it to say ‘Got Milk?’”

“When you’re sober, ladies,” Millie repeated.

“We’ll just go somewhere else!”

Millie eased the door closed. The two young women looked at each other while the shorter one pulled up her top. They staggered away.

Millie returned to the counter where we’d been eating. “Sober clients don’t have regrets,” he said. He poked through the wrappers and found the last taco. “I hate it when they come back crying.”

***

The next morning, after a quick Internet search and a few phone calls, I drove to the university and parked in one of the visitor lots. I hadn’t been on campus in months and it took a while to wend my way through all the new construction. I finally found Mona’s English professor in his office, half-hidden behind a pile of books.

He looked up when I closed the door behind me. “May I help you?”

I settled into the only unoccupied seat, rested my elbows on the arms, and steepled my fingers in front of my chest. “That depends.”

“On?”

“How well you know Mona Peterson.”

Color slowly drained from his face. “You related?”

I nodded. “We can trace our relationship back to Benjamin Franklin.” Quintuplet Benjamin Franklins.

His eyes narrowed. “What did she tell you?”

“What matters is what I tell you,” I said. “You don’t contact Mona again. She gets an A in your course. I hear different, I come back to visit you.”

He sat up a little straighter. “You can’t do anything to me,” he said. “I have tenure.”

“You might keep your tenure,” I explained, “but you won’t keep your balls.”

I let myself out of his office and returned to my Chevy.

***

Lester Beeson had taken over Big Mac’s Bail Bonds twenty-seven years earlier when a disgruntled client emptied a shotgun in Macdonald Pearson’s face. Lester was sitting behind his desk thumbing through a stack of file folders when I stepped into his office. He looked up, saw me, and pulled a folder from the middle of the stack. He tossed it across the desk.

“This guy’s become a pain in my ass.”

I flipped the folder open and looked at an average Joe, the kind of guy who worked every minute of overtime the company offered so he could pay for the bass boat he used as an excuse to get away from some shrew of a wife.

“His name’s Carl Weaver. He lives with his wife in Hubbard.” Lester gave me the address. 

“He don’t answer when I call, and the employer I have listed in his file says he ain’t shown up for work in a month.”

“And?”

“I need to see him in my office. I want some reassurance that he hasn’t skipped.”

***

Millie left his shop in the capable hands of Alice Frizell, a wisp of a tattoo artist he’d hired a year earlier, and he rode with me to Hubbard, a small town about thirty miles northeast of Waco.

Weaver lived in a one-bedroom frame house near the cemetery, and only one car occupied the driveway. I dropped Millie in the alley where he could watch the back of the house, and I found a convenient place to watch the front.

Weaver arrived home nearly an hour later, parked his pickup truck next to the car, and went inside. Thirty minutes later, his wife exited the house, climbed into her car, and drove away.

I called Millie’s cellphone. When he answered, I said, “He’s alone in there. Let’s go get him.”

“About time,” Millie responded. “I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

I went through the front door and Millie came in through the back. We met in the living room and quickly realized we were alone in the house. We discovered why when we found the clothes Weaver had been wearing strewn across the bed, three wig stands—only two of which held wigs—on the dresser, and a selection of women’s clothes suitable for a large woman or a man of Weaver’s size.

“Think he’s really married?” Millie asked.

Although we found a lot of make-up, we found no feminine products. “If he ever was,” I said, “he isn’t now.”

Millie and I left things pretty much as we found them and walked out to my Chevy. We drove to a small cafe, ordered cheeseburgers, fries, and coffee. While we ate, a young couple sat at a table near us. The woman wore low-slung jeans that exposed the T-bar of her thong and the tramp stamp above the crack of her ass.

Millie jerked his thumb at the woman’s tattoo. “Whoever did that should break all his needles and quit the business. I do better work when I’m blind drunk.”

“Why do they do it?”

“People get tattoos for all sorts of reasons,” Millie said. “I do a lot of ugly people who would be better off spending the money on dental work and plastic surgery. And I do eighteen-year-olds rebelling against their parents who will probably regret it when they grow up to be soccer moms and Boy Scout dads.”

I looked at Millie. Every part of his body that I had ever seen, except his face and his palms, was covered with tattoos. I wondered where he fit in.

After we finished dinner, Millie and I returned to Weaver’s house. We waited in my Chevy until Weaver’s return at half past midnight, and we were tired and not in the mood for subtlety.

For a second time, Millie went through the back door and I went through the front. We caught Weaver standing in his bedroom wearing only a bra and panties. He tried to resist until Millie planted a fist in his gut. We threw a blanket over him and grabbed some clothes. We walked him to my car, where he sat in back next to Millie and pulled on the clothes we’d grabbed for him.

On the return trip to Waco, I phoned Lester and told him we had Weaver. I said, “You could have told me he’s a cross-dresser.”

Lester laughed. “He must be one ugly woman.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

The bail bondsman met us at his office fifteen minutes later.

“How’m I going to get home?” Weaver asked.

“Not our problem,” I told him as I left with Lester. I knew the guy probably wasn’t going home, and where he was going his choice of underthings would not work in his favor.

After we left Lester’s office, Millie slipped into his car—a 1965 Mustang he’d rescued from a 

junkyard—and I went home.

***

Mona Peterson returned to my office at the beginning of the Christmas break. She carried a backpack and said she had no family with whom to spend the holidays. She said she wanted to thank me for taking care of her problem earlier in the semester.

I told her that the quintuplets had already shown their appreciation.

“The university won’t let students stay in the dorms during Christmas break.” I waited while Mona’s gaze traveled around my office before settling on my face. “I can’t go home and I can’t afford a motel. I gave you all the money I had.”

Clients always have sad stories or they wouldn’t need to hire guys like me. “I don’t give refunds.”

“No,” she said. “I suppose not. I wouldn’t ask for one.”

I waited.

“It’s just that—” She sucked her lower lip between her teeth and chewed on it.

I knew where Mona was headed, and I let her lead me there.

“Do you know any place I might stay?”

I did. I had a two-bedroom brick ranch just off of New Road and I took her there. The second bedroom had become a large walk-in closet filled with storage boxes and dust bunnies, so I prepared a place for her on the couch while she showered. I used floral print sheets and a pink blanket I hadn’t removed from the linen closet since my divorce.

After I finished preparing the couch, I retrieved a beer from the fridge, sat in my favorite chair in the living room, and nursed it.

When Mona stepped from the bathroom, she was wearing a white bath towel wrapped twice around her and was drying her hair with a second towel.

She looked at the makeshift bed and at me. “That’s not what I had in mind.”

Mona dropped one towel. Then she dropped the other. That’s when I saw the spider-web tattoo that covered her entire left breast. I gagged on my beer. When I recovered, I asked, “Where’s the spider?”

A coy smile tugged at the corners of my client’s lips as she crossed the room.

I shifted position but couldn’t hide my reaction to her nakedness. She straddled my lap and gyrated her hips ever so slowly.

One hand still held the beer. The other held tight to the arm of the chair. I said, “We 

shouldn’t do this.”

Mona continued gyrating her hips as she leaned forward and pressed her lips against mine. 

They were soft and parted easily to allow our tongues to meet.

I dropped my beer, wrapped my arms around her, and carried her into the bedroom.

When I buried my face between her thighs, I saw the spider, its eight little legs caught in her curly black pubic hair, so small I could only see it close up. Before I had a chance to react, Mona grabbed the back of my head and thrust her pubic bone against my nose.

I had not been with a woman her age since I had been a man her age. I had forgotten how energetic they could be, and we found several ways to pleasure one another. When we finished, Mona turned away, curled into a fetal ball, and fell asleep.

After I slid out of bed, I padded barefoot and naked into the living room, where I picked up the half-empty beer bottle I’d dropped before carrying Mona to bed. I used an old towel to soak up the spilled beer. Then I opened a fresh bottle and drank it while contemplating the meaning of Mona’s tattoo and the web she had spun for her English professor.

***

I returned to the office three days later, did nothing most of the morning, and accepted Millie’s invitation to lunch at the wing place down the street.

Millie stared hard at the blonde seated two tables away. “That’s the perfect canvas,” he said. “Smooth alabaster skin, nearly hairless.”

I told him about Mona’s spider web and that it seemed like his work.

“The spider web?” Millie said. “I’ve only done one like it, must have been a year ago, maybe two. The girl looked so young I made her show I.D. She came alone, paid cash before I started, and never once complained about the process. Some of those college girls can be real whiners.”

“Ever see her again?”

“She came back once, a few months after I did the work, said she needed a place to stay during Spring Break. I was shacked up with Bridget at the time or I might have offered her the couch at my place.”

“She’s not satisfied with the couch.”

“I wouldn’t think so, not a girl like her,” Millie said with a smile. Then the smile faded. “You 

didn’t—?”

I nodded. “I’ve seen the spider.”

“Moe Ron, Moe Ron, Moe Ron.” Only Millie called me that, and this time the nickname fit. “She’s not much older than your son. You should know better.”

“I should.”

“Where is she now?”

“I left her at the mall,” I said. “There’s no way I’m leaving her alone in my house.”

“At least you got that part right.”

***

I needn’t have bothered. Mona was waiting for me when I returned home that evening, sitting in my favorite chair with an open beer in her hand, wearing one of my shirts and nothing else. Only a single button kept the shirt closed.

“How many people did you rough up today?” she asked.

“None,” I said. I didn’t bother asking how she’d gotten in because the back door key lay on the coffee table next to the day’s mail, and I knew if I checked my key ring I would be short one key.

“Well, you did all right by me,” she said. “I checked my grades this afternoon. Straight A’s.”

Mona’s English professor had come through. How she’d earned her other high marks I hadn’t a clue until she undid the button and let the shirt fall open.

“I think we should celebrate.”

***

Lester Beeson caught me on my way to my office the next morning. “Weaver skipped again,” he said. “He’s in the wind.”

I walked up front to find Millie collecting payment from a biker with a face like a Shar-Pei and a fresh tattoo depicting a winged unicorn flying over a rainbow. After his customer walked out the door, Millie explained, “Said it was for his daughter.”

“Can you get free? Weaver’s on the loose again and Lester’s not happy.”

Millie called to Alice and told her to take care of things. We were walking around back of the building to our cars when Mona showed up. She said, “I’m lonely.”

“I have to go,” I told her. “We have a job.”

“I don’t like being left alone,” Mona said. “Let me go with you.”

“You’ll get in the way.”

As she sucked on her lower lip, I glanced at Millie. He shrugged.

I said, “Get in the back.”

She did, and soon we were headed north out of Waco. As we passed through Bellmead, I glanced at Mona in the rearview mirror. “Millie says he did your ink.”

“How do you think I found you?” Mona said. “I saw your sign that night.”

***

We followed Weaver’s trail until we found him sitting in a well-lit diner in Corsicana, dressed as the ugly broad he’d been when we first encountered him. When he saw us push through the diner’s front door, he dashed into the women’s restroom, a place Millie and I dared not go with so many people watching us.

“I’ll go out back,” Millie said, “make sure he doesn’t climb out a window.”

Mona didn’t say anything. She just pushed past us and marched directly into the women’s restroom. We heard a rather guttural scream of pain, and she came out a moment later with Weaver’s blond wig in one hand and his scrotum in the other. On his tiptoes, Weaver minced along behind her.

The other patrons of the diner stared at the four of us, but none of them interfered as Millie grabbed the back of Weaver’s neck and marched him out to my car. Mona followed. I grabbed Weaver’s purse from the booth where he’d been sitting, dug through it, and tossed some money on the table next to his half-eaten meal. Then I joined the other three outside.

Mona sat in the passenger seat and Millie sat in back with Weaver. After I slipped into the driver’s seat, I turned and looked at our collar. “You’re costing Lester a lot of money,” I said. “I won’t be surprised if he tries to revoke your bond this time.”

“He can’t do that.”

Weaver didn’t deserve a response, so I started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, headed home to Waco. None of us spoke until we handed Weaver off to Lester Beeson, and we walked out of Beeson’s office as he began reading Weaver the riot act.

Millie returned to his tattoo parlor and Mona followed me into my office. As I settled behind my desk, she perched on the corner and did that thing with her bottom lip.

After a bit, she said, “Christmas is coming.”

“And?”

“What are you getting me?”

“A place to stay isn’t enough?”

“You haven’t even put up a tree!”

“How about we pick one out tonight?”

She liked that idea. “Maybe I should go home and rearrange the living room so we have a place to put it,” she said. “Call me a cab, Moe Ron.”

***

Later, over beer, I told Millie I couldn’t stay long because I was going Christmas tree shopping. Then we talked about what had happened that afternoon, about how Mona had walked Carl Weaver out of the women’s restroom.

“She’s got hold of yours, too,” Millie said.

I had been about to take a drink, but I stopped. “How’s that?”

“What do you know about Mona?”

“She hired me to—”

“To scare off the previous man in her life.”

“You think I’m taking advantage of her?” I asked. “I’m not in any position of authority. I don’t have any impact on her grades.”

“You don’t? How’d she ace the English class?”

I lowered my beer.

“Maybe you aren’t taking advantage of her,” Millie said, “but she’s sure as hell taking advantage of you.”

I stared at him.

“Christmas tree shopping? Really?”

I glared at him for a moment before I pushed my chair back and stood. “I have to go.”

He waved me away. “Make like an angel and bend over,” he said, “’cause you know you’re gong to take it up the ass when this is all over.”

***

Mona had moved some of the living room furniture, opening up space by the front window. 

She said, “I think a tree will look nice right there.”

She was right, it did. That evening, after I had the tree secure in the stand, I dug through the closet in the second bedroom for ornaments I hadn’t used since my wife walked out. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but my ex had taken all the good ones, and what remained was inadequate to the task of decoration. I said something to that effect.

“That’s all right,” Mona said. “I think the tree looks fine.”

I strung the only two strands of twinkling lights that still functioned, and we sat on the 

couch staring at them.

As she snuggled into the crook of my arm, I asked, “Why are you here? Why couldn’t you go home for the holidays?”

“My father doesn’t want me around. He says I get in the way.”

“What does your father do that you get in the way?”

Mona didn’t answer my question, but asked one of her own, “What about your son? Why isn’t he here for Christmas?”

I had told her about my divorce, but not about my son. His absence was not by my choice, and I had long since come to terms with our non-existent relationship. I didn’t let her question distract me from my questions. “And why couldn’t you afford to go somewhere else when the dorm closed for the holiday?”

“I don’t get my allowance until the first of the month.”

“Allowance?”

“I have a trust fund,” she said. “My expenses are paid directly by the trust, and once a month I get some walking-around money. This month, all of it walked around without me.”

“What about friends? Couldn’t you have spent the time with friends?”

Her hand slid up my thigh. “I thought you were my friend.”

***

Lester Beeson caught my attention as I entered the building two days before Christmas.

“Weaver hung himself.”

“I thought you had his bond revoked.”

“I did,” Beeson said. “Jailers found him in his cell this morning. He was scheduled for sentencing today. He was looking at three to five inside.”

“A man like him wouldn’t last long.”

“He must have known it.”

I had never bothered to ask what Weaver had done because I wasn’t paid to care. Even so, hearing of his suicide put a damper on my day, and my trip to the jewelry store later that day wasn’t as exciting as I had hoped.

***

The next afternoon, as I prepared to head home to spend Christmas Eve with Mona, a man built like a defensive lineman pushed into my office, interrupting my examination of the Christmas gift I planned to give her. When I saw the butt of a semi-automatic hanging in a shoulder holster beneath his unbuttoned jacket, I shoved the gift in my desk drawer.

He asked, “Do you know Mona Peterson?”

“That depends.”

“Humor me,” he said. He closed the door behind him. “Let’s say you do.”

“Okay.”

“So now you forget her.”

“Why’s that?”

“Her father insists.”

“And who’s her father?”

He rested his knuckles on my desk and leaned in close enough that I could smell the onions on his breath.

“Mona likes to toy with stupid fucks like you,” he said. “You get a piece of that young stuff and you think you’re in love. She’ll chew you up, spit you out, and replace you with another stupid fuck. I’m saving you the grief by taking her off your hands now.”

I didn’t appreciate being told what to do, so I made a move. I thrust my hand under his jacket and grabbed the butt of his semi-automatic.

Before the pistol even cleared leather, my visitor drove a fist into the center of my face, smashing my nose and driving me backward. If my office hadn’t been so small, I might have crashed to the floor. As it was, the chair tipped backward and caught between the wall and the desk, leaving me waving my arms and legs in the air like an upended spider.

“I guess it’s already too late for you.” He peeled five Benjamins from his wallet and tossed them on my desk. “This oughtta cover your pain and suffering.”

He was gone before I could right myself, and by the time I reached the front of the building he was nowhere in sight.

Millie stepped out of his shop and joined me at the curb. He looked at the blood still streaming from my nose and put the pieces together. “Your visitor left in a stretch limo.”

“You catch the plate number?”

He shook his head. “No, but when the door opened I saw Mona sitting inside.”

“Anyone else?”

He named a state senator whose last name didn’t match Mona’s. Before I could grasp the implication, he added, “Come into the shop. I’ll get a wet towel and we can clean you up.”

When I returned home that afternoon, Mona’s backpack was gone. So were half the Christmas tree ornaments. I hung her gift from the tree—a ruby-eyed gold spider on a chain—and stared at it as the twinkling Christmas lights reflected eerily from its eyes. Then I drank myself to sleep.

***

The Friday after Christmas, Millie and I were discussing tattoos and sharing nachos at George’s, half-empty Big O’s in front of us, when Mona’s English professor stopped at our table. I said, “Yeah?”

“Was she worth it?”

I couldn’t answer his question, not then, so he turned and walked away. I watched him take the arm of a woman closer to his own age as they pushed through the door.

Millie and I resumed our conversation about tattoos, specifically about Mona’s.

I said, “That spider was pretty small.”

“I’ve done smaller.”

“Yeah?”

“The smallest tattoo I ever did was for a writer,” Millie said. “He had me tattoo a period on his ass.”

I didn’t want to know why.

Love-Honor-Cherish, by J.D. Graves

"You know my wife," Tom told the grocer, "and you know what they say, happy wife equals a happy life."

The grocer smiled and nodded despite the fact no one had seen Carmen Sloane for five years. Her husband, Tom, on the other hand was always around. Tom stopped by weekly and purchased the same thing every time: box of Fels-Naptha, four large pork roasts, and a gallon of apple sauce. The grocer rang up the total, watching with a pained patient smile as his best customer counted out spare change. Tom ignored the exasperated sighs of the people queuing behind him. A few patrons put their meager items back or dropping them where they stood before bolting for another bodega.

The grocer spoke up, "Tom, I--"

"Yeah?" Tom asked without ceasing his count.

"I just wanted to let you know that, there was a detective come in yesterday asking about you."

"Asking about me?"

"About you--your wife mainly. I told him you were one of my best customers, like clockwork. He wanted to know what items you bought."

"Did you tell him?" Tom asked finishing his math.

"No, I told him to beg off."

"You shouldn't do that, not to a policeman, they have a tough job. They deserve our respect. 

Listen if you see him again tell him where I live, I'd be happy to answer any questions he might have."

"You sure you wanna do that?" The grocer said sweeping the coins into his tray without recounting them.

"Absolutely, me and Carmen got nothing to hide."

Tom gathered his purchases and left. He pretended the news of the detective didn't bother him. He ignored the whispers behind his back as he walked down the street. Suspicious words about the man whom everyone believed murdered his wife. Tom knew Carmen was very much alive. He knew too that no one, in her present condition, could ever see her to verify that fact.

It was impossible.

The damage to his reputation and her good name would be catastrophic. So he allowed the hushed accusations to continue unabated. He donned an air of unflappable good humor and took the time to chat up acquaintances anytime they passed. Always assuring them of Carmen's good health. All part of his daily regimen. Tom knew the truth. And since Dr. Fielding's accident Tom was the only one left alive who knew. Although Carmen lived, her quality of life remained questionable.

Tom knew, it wasn't always this way. In the beginning, like all beginnings, Carmen's beauty turned heads everywhere she went. Tom sometimes wondered, how he got so lucky to have met her, wed her and bed her. But he did. He fell into the euphoria of love. The euphoria never stays long once the honeymoon is over and both spouses reveal their warts and farts. How does one maintain a marriage, without it falling into humdrum boredom or completely apart?

At stressful times, Tom remembered the vows he spoke that warm day in June so many years ago. Anytime he felt overwhelmed, Tom remembered his promise, in sickness and in health. It pacified most notions of fleeing.

Tom felt certain other men would've fled at the first sign of trouble. If the shoe were on the other foot, he prayed Carmen, with her charming good looks, would've kept her vows too. Personal sacrifice, he reasoned, is a learned trait.

Every day he walked the twelve blocks to work and home. He didn't mind the trek, it established a mind-clearing routine and provided good exercise. He'd return home later to care for his wife and agonize over the mountain of medical bills. He could file for bankruptcy, but he knew he'd lose not only his wife but his small business as well. 

SLOANE'S SNACKS was the only mom and pop vending machine company left in Queens.

Before he met Carmen, his business was his pride and joy. These days however, just a means to an end. At its height, SLOANE'S SNACKS profited two million a year with a fleet of seven trucks and twenty employees. When the law passed making junk food and soda almost forbidden, all of Tom's business slimmed. He still owned the warehouse and their apartment building, but they were the only tenants and he was the only one loading the truck, driving the route and collecting coins. The number of machines dropped just enough to keep the lights on in Carmen's room.

She grew agitated and thrashed about anytime it went dark. Tom empathized. He'd be disgruntled too, if he'd been plunged into a black solitude with little communication, besides muffled grunts. But he loved her all the same and knew the feeling was mutual.

As Tom entered their apartment he could already smell her from downstairs, a moldering fetid aroma. He realized he couldn't remember the last time he'd checked in on her or given her a bath for that matter. How long had it been? Tom feared his days blended together. Surely it hadn't been longer than a week at the most.

Under her room Tom installed a drain pipe that led to the downstairs kitchen sink. This drain became necessary when Tom realized Carmen's mobility was no longer possible. He ducked under it setting aside the soap, apple-sauce and put three of the four pork roasts in the fridge. He knew she'd be hungry but it would have to wait. Her body odor demanded tending. When he passed by her room, the one they'd reserved for a nursery, her stink repelled him.

"Gee whiz honey."

Tom bit his lip in disgust pressing onward for the upstairs bathroom to fill the five buckets with soapy water. He sat on the edge of the tub as water gushed out the spout. It needed to be hot, by the time he carted each bucket to her room the water would've begun to chill. Carmen never responded well to a cold bath, and He wanted to avoid anything extraneous tonight. Besides it was the little touches that reminded her of his commitment.

Tom let the water and his mind run. He remembered after their honeymoon Carmen expressing a desire for a baby. Tom was more than pleased to make his beautiful wife happy and relished every romp.

They tried for months.

Every time, Carmen checked her status she saw the same pink dash, like a sinister hyphen between their vows to each other and the family she wanted. She would go on for days, in distraught fits and rages. At the height of this despair, Tom often worried Carmen might leave him.

Except for lack of pregnancy, Tom considered their marriage comfortable, yet Carmen saw their inability to conceive as monumental.

They visited their physician, initial tests revealed nothing wrong on Tom's part, but Carmen's tests were inconclusive. At their physician's recommendation, the Sloane's submitted to the conventional treatments.

In vitro fertilization at the time cost ten thousand dollars a pop. Tom was happy to write the check, besides business boomed. Each IVF treatment, just a drop in the bucket and it pacified Carmen's growing anxieties. A happy wife doesn't guarantee a happy life, but it's a good start. However, after the eleventh failed treatment. Tom wanted to pursue other options.

So began their relationship with Dr. Fielding’s Fertility Clinic. Fielding suggested they try his new, unorthodox approach, the Athena Process. Tom's semen would be injected directly into Carmen's ovaries. During her cycle, at least one already fertilized ovum would drop into her uterus, partially formed. The Athena Process sounded like the right medicine for the Sloane's despite its ridiculous price.

Dr. Fielding warned the couple about minor side effects. Tom brushed this off as typical fine print, insisting on trying the Athena. Dr. Fielding stopped speaking and looked at Tom. Tom looked into Carmen's eyes, smiled and signed all waivers. After the two separate six-figure checks cleared, Dr. Fielding performed the twenty minute procedure.

"Only time will tell," Tom remembered the Doctor saying.

However, the month passed with no changes.

Dr. Fielding suggested they try again. Tom wasted little time writing a second set of checks, even though Carmen seemed less than enthused.

“It’s a lot of money, honey,” Tom recalled her saying, although he couldn’t place his own response. He noticed a growing divide between them. Right around the time SLOANE’S SNACKS began tanking, Carmen spent less time at their apartment. He’d return to a dark home. No food in the kitchen. No wife by his side. She returned later with distance in her voice as she offered plausible excuses: a sick friend, et cetera. However Tom, certain of her duplicity, couldn't help harboring a suspicious heart. One day Tom lied about going to work. He waited around the corner and followed the taxi driving her into the city. To a high rise apartment. To him, her lover.

In the confrontation that followed, Carmen begged and pleaded for Tom to stop. He remembered how she swayed him from killing the other man. How pitiful she looked on her knees groveling and blaming herself. Oh, how she made promises, confessing nothing but love for Tom and only Tom. The gasping whimpers from her lover’s bloody body angered Tom, but when he looked into Carmen’s crying eyes he couldn’t help believing her. He told himself, this is just a bump in the road. What is a successful marriage without them?

Tom forgave her and contacted Dr. Fielding’s clinic. The doctor was hesitant, but Tom doubled the check’s amount and all parties agreed.

The month passed and finally the glorious day came when Carmen saw a pink plus sign.

She was pregnant.

When the Sloanes made their follow up, Fielding's expression seemed downright shocked. He breathed deeply and folded his hands across his desk.

"Please allow me to speak frankly. If I seem surprised it’s only because you’re the first successful patient who’s gone through the Athena."

"How many have you had?" Carmen asked.

"I'm not at liberty to say, as tests are ongoing. But I'm very happy for you. And everything looks normal."

***

Tom felt steam rising off the tub and began filling the buckets, remembering Carmen the night she found the first lump.

It appeared between her breasts near the end of the first trimester. Soft, squeezable and yet firmly rounded as if she'd grown a superfluous third breast. The Sloanes visited their regular physician who ordered a biopsy. The results came back negative for cancer, and the young physician stated that it was a benign tumor filled with healthy cells. He sighed at the couple then added, "I've never seen anything like it before…I don't really know what it is."

Since Carmen was pregnant, surgery would be put off until after delivery. Carmen became despondent over her tripled bust. Tom, try as he might, failed to soothe her. One morning, she awoke to find a new growth on her lower back. A week later, Carmen developed a pair on her abdomen. That morning, the Sloanes stopped by Dr. Fielding's for a sonogram, only to discover their fetus was abnormal. Small and embryonic, far behind schedule for the second trimester. Dr. Fielding sat there perplexed and muttered, "This just can't be."

"What, doctor?" Carmen asked.

Dr. Fielding parsed for the correct explanation, "The fetus has regressed to an even earlier stage of development. It appears to be a zygote again--"

***

Tom lined the buckets of water outside Carmen's room. When Tom pressed on the knob, the door didn't budge.

A streak of anxiety rippled across his face. How could she lock the door from inside? Tom leaned in and pushed, hearing the hinges give and squeal. He felt strange pressure from the other side. He pushed again and the door inched open a crack, a sliver of light splashed from the top of the doorway. Tom stepped back realizing to his horror what blocked the door. At once he saw the entire awful picture. He didn't bother asking himself why. He'd known all along that eventually something like this could, nay, would happen.

The night Dr. Fielding died, he called to explain his hypothesis. The Athena had accelerated her fertility and ovulation beyond a quantifiable measurement. Now, Carmen's ovaries, literally contained hundreds of thousands of fertilized eggs that, bombarded her womb every day. This state of constant ovulation, forced her body to reject each old fetus for the new one. But instead of passing them normally, her body absorbed the growing child inside her. Which led Dr. Fielding to conclude, the tumors which emerged at an alarming rate, were in fact fetal manifestations. And worse, she would soon be overtaken. The only way to reverse the condition, required a full hysterectomy. This meant they could never have children of their own.

Tom pressed harder against the door and the crack inched open. His fingertips brushed against the flabby flesh that spilled out of Carmen's stinking room.

"She must've fallen over," Tom told himself picturing her body breaking free of the tresses and moorings he'd installed, ”Carmen!"

Tom moved a knee into the works heaving into the room, barricaded by Carmen. Her swollen blob-like skin seeped into the hallway. Tom knew he needed to find her face. He needed to check her airway was clear. Tom chucked a hand against her loose billowy body. Tom felt its soft dampness as he clamored his head through the crack and scanned the room.

A sea of naked flesh rippled from wall to wall almost reaching the ceiling.

"Carmen!"

He gripped a fold pulling himself through, crawling delicately across her, sticking his hand in every crease looking for any sign of her hair or her face, but the roomful of sore-covered skin offered no clues.

Carmen was everywhere, and yet she was nowhere to be found.

He traversed this epidermal landscape and slid off to a rare square of floor. On his feet he 

muscled under her frameless form as this heavy ocean engulfed him.

The smell was worse than ever before, as he crept in the reddish dusk of her body. After much pushing he pressed on, finally finding an eyebrow. He knew the rest of her face was around somewhere. His mind reeled and he remembered, shortly before her body rejected her skeleton and grew out in all directions, the last full words she said that day.

"Please Tom, if we don't find a cure, please don't let me go on like this hideous--"

"You're not hideous," Tom said ignoring the fact that her forehead drooped over her eyes and her cheeks sagged past where her chin once firmly rested.

"I don't want to live like this…if there's no cure."

"Trust me my darling, Dr. Fielding and I won't let that happen."

At that point, Tom was in no condition to tell her the truth. That a patient's husband had rampaged into his clinic, and shot Dr. Fielding full of holes.

Tom could've taken her to see their regular physician for the operation, but he just didn’t do it. Besides if she had the operation, she'd never have children, and Tom couldn't bear the thought of her leaving him again.

Now he needn't worry.

Tom could not bring himself to admit this to her. And on the last day she was able to speak words, he assured her that he loved her and he'd never leave her. For that was the only truth that mattered then as it did now. He knew how lucky she was to have him as her husband, lover and caretaker. Not to mention, father of their children.

Tom navigated his way to her red mouth. The only part of her body that remained attached to her bones. Tom quickly realized she was not breathing. It was too cramped to attempt CPR or any other lifesaving measure.

Carmen was gone.

Tom was too late.

He took her misshapen face and held it close to his own. He was seized with grief. But this grief, quickly dissipated into anger, when Tom realized they weren't alone. Somewhere under the vast corpus of his wife, he heard the tiny muffled coos of another one of those things.

Tom frantically pushed and plodded until he found the source of the noise. And there, bloodied on the floor lay an infant girl still attached to an expelled placenta.

Tom cursed it madly before collecting it and pushing his way out from under Carmen's dead girth into the hallway. He cut the umbilical cord and swaddled it in a dish rag, just like he done for all the others, and made his way to the bathroom.

As he twisted on the cold water, He remembered fondly that first one, so many years ago and how unprepared he was for it. It appeared normal, but Tom knew better. This little pink thing twitching in his hands. Its little toes and fingers fanning out in a state of newborn shock. And then he remembered the noise. The god-awful screams of this tiny creature. And Carmen, his poor dear Carmen, unable to hold the thing or breast feed it, or help Tom in anyway. How she just lay there, propped against the wall in her room. He remembered looking down at the first one with awed disgust, and how much he hated it.

For that small parasitic life form had destroyed his wife.

He remembered how clumsily he disposed of that first one, which Tom recalled distinctly as male. A year would pass before he stopped keeping records of boys and girls. By then he'd fully embraced the proceedings.

The parasites arrived once every two weeks.

Some arrived in pairs.

With Carmen's care his top priority, there was no room in Tom's life for these other things that kept falling out of her. She needed uninterrupted attention, and Tom was more than happy to provide for her, as he'd always done. He was not, however, willing to suffer these horrid creatures any longer than needed. Tom would've preferred to drag out their deaths for he knew, they deserved to suffer, just as they made his wife suffer. But their mere presence aggravated him and he wanted rid of them as soon as possible, so he drowned these horrible things in cold water. The furthest thing from a mother's warm womb.

Tom became very skilled at carrying out the process, and found that it gave him a thrill like no other. He felt like a superhero or Carmen's very own white knight, gallantly arriving and slaying the screaming demons. Once the little things stopped moving, their executioner, would bury their remains in the cellar. Just another set pattern in the routine of his life. No different than brushing one's teeth or picking ticks off the family dog.

Tom placed the stopper in the drain. The lime encrusted spout droned out any audible noise from the bundle of cloth on the tiles.

The water rose and rose. He moved a hand through the water to check the temperature. Satisfied, Tom twisted off the tap. He collected the thing, stood above the tub and submerged his charge in the water. He held her there counting the seconds, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three...Tom enjoyed watching the life float out of these vermin. He gazed down at the thing under the water and smiled triumphantly at his work.

Tom couldn't help but note certain similarities. The thing looked familiar. He knew in the genetic soup of the womb, each one was different and unique, yet all the same. This pest was particularly cunning, for it had developed certain features of its mother.

A mother it would never know. A woman whose beauty was beyond compare. A woman who had loved Tom, despite everything and vowed to be his wife until death separated them. A sacred vow for a wife whom Tom cared for relentlessly over the years, forgiving all her transgressions. Who, now, was just a moldering lifeless blob.

Tom felt his arms slacken. His wrists relaxed. His fingers still clutched the evil thing, but his mind soared elsewhere. Tom's emotions swelled in him, as he realized that this baby, would be the last one ever. He’d never again feel the joy of being Carmen's champion. Slayer of her demons. Killer of her disease. Keeper of their vows.

Tom pressed forward, if it was going to be the last one, he needed to make it count. He was going to execute it with supreme malice. He stared with dagger eyes at the tiny thing in his hands. But it only smiled back at him from below the water's surface.

Twenty-five Mississippi…

The thing appeared calm.

Twenty-six Mississippi…

It glowed innocence.

Twenty-seven Mississippi…

She radiated love.

Twenty-eight Mississippi…

She looked just like--

Twenty-nine…

Tom looked at the drowning child's face and realized that this need not be the last one ever. 

He'd need to change his routine, go on an extended hiatus, but in the meantime he'd have someone to care for. Not just anyone, but a newer version of--

He lifted the baby out of the water and patted her intently. The baby appeared to be unharmed by the ordeal. She held no grudge against him and breathed in a calm hiccuping rhythm. Tom looked over this child with awed amazement and christened her, Carmen, in honor of her mother.

He noted the small size of the child cradled in his arms. He counted ten fingers and toes. Two eyes and a very hungry mouth. To Tom, Carmen appeared healthy, which to any new parent is a moment of great relief. He was now, after waiting so many years, going to be a father. And he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he would protect her from all the evils of the world, especially when the time came, for Carmen to have children of her own.

Carmen's delightful coos soon turned as she became visibly upset. He knew at once what his crying daughter needed, warm milk or formula. The pair headed for the door, but he stopped short of opening it.

Tom realized he couldn't go shopping with baby Carmen. The grocer would ask questions. He countered that he could present Carmen as a foundling, but then foster services would surely take her. He'd again lose his Carmen. She'd come of age never knowing anything about her parents and how they loved each other, and what lengths they went to bring her into this world. Then he thought of the basement and the buried treasures that they’d discover there.

"That just won't do."

Tom at once formed a plan. They would walk the twelve blocks to the warehouse, climb into the delivery truck and drive to the country where they would start a new life together. The city, after all, was no place to raise a family.

He lay Carmen on his bed, packing a bag with clothes. He paused for a moment outside her mother's door and thanked her for everything.

Then together they scrambled down the stairs and hurried towards the door. In this haste, he failed to see the flashing red and blue lights outside his windows. As he pressed the knob the doorbell rang. In one swift movement the door opened and Tom faced a bewildered cop on the stoop. A neighbor had phoned in a complaint about an awful smell coming from his apartment and they'd come to investigate.

The cop's bewilderment subsided instantly once the opened door emitted the rancid reek wafting from upstairs. He recognized at once the putridity of dead flesh and drew his sidearm. The neighbors crowded the sidewalk and whispers chattered amongst them, about the man who murdered his wife.

Tom stood smiling in the doorway, unflappable as always, and displayed baby Carmen to the onlookers. Then beamed with pride at the policeman and said, "We couldn’t be happier. She's what my wife always wanted."