The Modern Changeling

The Modern Changeling
by
Bobby Derie

The door to the delivery room slammed shut behind him, cutting the child’s scream down to a wailing whisper.

When she woke, her second question for the hollow-eyed nurse was for her husband.

Half the books were gone from the shelves, half the closets empty, the kitchen table an orgy of empty photographs. She clung the baby to her breast, eyes resting on a wedding photo, the grain of the table showing through where the groom’s head had been.

The bell rang. A blue envelope delivered with a sad smile. She had been served.

In the motel, laptop open, surrounded by what was left of his life. All that could fit in the car, ownership indisputable. He tapped away on the free wi-fi, closing accounts, changing passwords.

“You should talk to her.” Mama said. “Let her explain.”

“Doesn’t have to.” He sighed over the phone. “It’s an old story.”

The lawyer’s office was cramped. Opposite ends of the table. Her mother was watching it, back at home. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, or address her directly.

“Both of you have expressed a desire to avoid going to court,” one of them said. “We believe this will be an amicable division of property.”

Two names, scribbled in ink. Like a wedding license, in reverse.

She caught him, outside. Grabbed his wrist. The big muscle in his forearm bunched, then slackened. His eyes drifted up to her stare, caught his own reflection.

“Do you hate me?”

“No.”

Silence. Somewhere, a child cried.

“I…”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

Neither of them were willing to look away.

“You can hate me if you want to.” he said. “If it makes it easier.”

He broke her grip, and her stare, and walked away.

There was a letter, decades later. Asking for a father that wasn’t there.

###

Same Again, Please

Same Again, Please
by
Bobby Derie

Detective Jack Bastard rubbed the gritty residue into his gums, and pulled away a finger stained with blood.

The body was ensconced in a man-high pile of porn, the corpse curled up like a fetus, blood soaked into glossy breasts and vaginas, his rigid tumescence pointing proudly ahead.

All this Jack could understand and accept. Only a couple things bothered him.

"Where the fuck are his hands?" The pale brown arms on the body ended in curved, blunted metal hooks on plastic sleaves.

"Diabetes." One of the black-and-whites answered from the bathroom, and came out holding a tester and packet of lancets.

Crime scene photos snapped, the forensic guys waited taut and expectant, hounds waiting to pounce on the fox.

"Does anybody else see the problem with a guy with no hands trying to jerk off?" Jack asked aloud. When no one answered, he waved the crime scene techs forward.

Jack stalked the small house. Separated from the one next door by a wall of tissue paper and asbestos, but the skanky teenagers next door selling their asses for rent money hadn't heard anything.

The detective rumbled the book shelves, opened the boxes in the closets, rooted through the sock drawer and under the sink. He finally found what he was looking for when he tossed the mattress.

The dominant themes were smooth-skinned stumps and gaping assholes. Boys in wheelchairs. Homosexual amputee porn.

"Detective, the forensic guys think-"

"The body was moved." Jack said.

The crime scene was too pretty, too staged. A mountain of porn, yes - but straight porn, regular porn.

*

"Is like with dog, yes?" the whore told him, sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette that reminded Jack of a pale, syphilitic dick.

"What, with peanut butter?" Jack asked. "Nah, that doesn't fit. He didn't have a dog."

"Nyet. Like...dog with leg, or pillow, yes? Grab on, rub against. Is how double amputees do it. Yvanna watch. Yvanna like to watch."

Jack was itching in all the wrong places, but now was not the time or the place. He tapped the photo again.

"You've seen him, yes or no?"

"Da. Particular kink. Some things, not on internet. You go talk to Mr. Six."

**

Jack had the garden hose pissing on Six for about ten minutes before he sputtered to some semblance of life.

"Bastard!" The old whoremonger said, climbing back to consciousness from whiskey dreams.

"I come from a long line of bastards." Jack said. "Tell me a story, Six. This guy."

"Aw, fuck. Look Jack, all I did was make the introductions, nothing illegal or anything. Like craigslist for chrissake."

"What, who, when, and how. Don't tell me the why, I don't think I could stand it."

***

"Jesus had diabetes, Mr. Bastard." Dr. Patel told him. The office felt warm, but Jack shivered and sweated. "His occasional periods of rage, irritability, and belligerence were hypoglycemic episodes."

"That is fascinating." Jack said. "Really. But I'm more interested in why you were amputating limbs off perfectly healthy people."

"Because they asked me to, Mr. Bastard." Her eyes were wide and bright, like a fanatic, staring straight through him. "They felt incomplete. Their bodies did not match their image of themselves. They looked with envy at those who had lost limbs to diabetes, to industrial accidents, and wished to be the same - creatures beautiful for their flaws."

"And the sex angle?"

Her mouth drew into a line, skin around the knuckles whitened. "I am given to understand that Mr. Six arranged matters with those interested. I had nothing to do with that, I merely provided medical services. There are expenses to the disabled life, Mr. Bastard."

She rolled her skirt up to mid calf, and removed her lower right leg. The nylon hung off the stump like the half-shed skin of some ancient reptile.

****

Later, at the bar.

"It would be nice if it was all an insurance scam. People getting limbs lopped off to get their policies paid. There was a whole town full of them down in Florida at one point. The amputee porn could just have been a sideline."

The bar tender topped Jack up, and the detective stared into liquid that smelled like peat and gasoline, but the reflection caught the bartender's smile.

"So why did they kill him?" she asked.

"They didn't." He washed his teeth in whisky and set it back down, wishing for some ice to crunch. "Kids next door, thought he had a stash of money or drugs, spiked his insulin. They'd seen three seasons too many of CSI: Special Victims unit. Knew that corpse pricks got hard after a while - so they pooled their porn to make his little nest, let people think he'd done himself grievous self-harm while masturbating."

Jack laid his head on the bar, enjoying the feel of the cool wood mash into his cheek.

"One of them discovered he was diabetic, found Jesus, confessed to the whole thing. Probably have a book deal by Monday. Same again, please."

###

Take A Razor To Your Head & The Yellow Mass

Take A Razor To Your Head
by
Bobby Derie

Jesus locks hide the mirror from the eyes, the hinged blade at hand. Wicked straight curve gleams on dead porcelain, waiting waiting. Patient and hungry. One final look, to put the past away again, to take on the paint and the mask. No other way. A drop of oil, then thumb the lever, hear the buzz. Feel them catch and tangle, pull away from the scalp. Watch the months and years fall into the sink again. Smooth stubble all around. Click off.

Razor time, sharp as anything, the first scraping pass done more by touch and feel. Finish up with the mirror, mind the scratches, it’s only pain. Warm trickles down the back, clean the bloody blade. Fold it up again. The air conditioner rumbles to life, cool air pushed against bare skin.

Who stares back from the mirror?

The Yellow Mass
by
Bobby Derie

Silent and uncomfortable during the liturgy, trapped in the middle of the pew, I considered my means of escape—in the event of an emergency, to flail at old women and children, stampede over the crippled and elderly in the mad rush past the baptismal font and escape into the relative safety of the vestibule, where warm mud-colored coffee and powdered donuts awaited, perhaps crumbcake.

She anchored me there with a light touch on the crook of my arm.

We had never discussed religion, and I had never wanted to. Hers was one of those obscure faiths, more bizarre and counter-intuitive than the Anglican Catholics or the Christian Atheists, and she had snookered me in by appealing to my vanity. “You haven’t even tried it.” The theme to three childhood tattoos, twice as many scars, and the occasional flashback from long-dormant experiments with drugs that buried themselves deep in the grey matter and lingered for years and decades. “This is very different.” She insisted.

The liturgy of the Eucharist was brief, and mostly hidden by the altar. The minister turned his back on us and fiddled with something, saying a few words, and when he returned there was a pale golden chalice full of pale golden wine.

I don’t know what I was expecting as we shuffled up for the communion. The church was done up in yellow cloths that hid the images of saints and crucifixion of the windows; great billowing clouds of amber that reached up to the arching roof and hung in banners and flags to frame the altar, which was also of bright yellow—silk, perhaps. I followed the crowd past the rail with its golden cushions to stand before the altar itself in a circle. The acolytes carried the chalice around, and everyone took a sip.

“Don’t worry” she whispered to me, too low for the others to hear. “it’s sterile.”

That set it off, of course. The rising panic. I saw the golden chalice go to each set of lips in turn, to drink the pale yellow liquid, the rim wiped clean by a square yellow handkerchief. There was a reek now of ammonia and I thought of sober men and women at urology conferences  lining up for such communions, literally taking the piss into themselves with ritual satisfaction, the necessary preliminaries before an orgy of golden showers where pale, saggy flesh would be doused and renewed in yellow streams that exactly resembled the slightly off-color wine that supposedly filled that cup. The minister approached us, dressed informally in blue jeans and a long-sleeved yellow shirt. She took her sip without comment and apparent satisfaction, then turned to look at me. I noticed his zipper was undone.

The golden chalice was before me, only a few sips left, the smell tangy and familiar—but I had never tasted sacramental wine. All eyes upon me, I took my sip.

It was warm.

###

On Rape

On Rape
by
Bobby Derie

The bastard sat across from me, the table between us, the coffee grown cold and still. The lights burned my eyes.

“Is it worse, do you think, to commit a rape and not enjoy it?”

I allowed that I did not follow.

“The narrative of rape is lust. That’s what we tell ourselves: the rapist is horny. Wants it, needs it, so bad, but can’t get it—so they resort to violence, force, trickery, drugs, whatever. For some of them, it’s even a power thing, a dominance thing, not so much about the sex itself as lording it over someone, having them at your mercy, to do things to them, to force them to do things to you. That’s still just another way to get off though, you follow?”

I did, and could have said more, but only nodded.

“But sometimes it’s not about lust at all. Some people, they’re driven by something. They don’t like it, they don’t really enjoy it, rape is just something they do, something they are. They don’t like rape, they just do it. They have to do it. Have to rape.”

I shared that I did not care for the subject.

“What, rape? Rape rape rape? Nothing wrong with talking about rape is there? Not in this country, anyway. It’s in all the papers, all over the internet, there are entire books about nothing more than rape. Lots of talk of rape, all the time, in all the television shows and webisodes, rape in every form and fashion—you don’t need to go to the dirty sites for your daily dose of rape, not when you can turn on prime time and hear about some young boy getting sodomized almost in half—but not to worry, the handsome detectives will solve this case in an hour plus commercials!”

I repeated that I did not care for the subject, and added that whatever the unwashed masses indulged in, I found it objectionable how rape was sensationalized.

“That’s a good word. Sensationalized. Made appealing to the senses. Bright colors, loud sounds, bold headlines in active voice. Sex, even violent and unwanted sex, sells. But surely there’s some good in sensationalized rape. Gets the word out there. Victim advocacy groups. Get people to come forward and admit they’ve been raped, put pressure on the cops to find the rapists, show the people what happens to rapists, provide an outlet via rape-media for those potential rapists to get their fix without doing the deed themselves. You’ve heard about prison rape, right?”

I allowed that I had.

“Terrible thing, really. And true. It’s not that many of them are actually homosexual, mind, but when you’re locked up for a couple of years you just know that it’s a nice warm hole or lips wrapped around your cock—or pressing against your cunt, no reason to think women’s prisons have it any easier in that regard. See, prison rape is different from what I was talking about before—that’s almost entirely a crime of lust, of need, sometimes dominance. Just a limited population of victims is all, and we hardly feel sorry for them. Do you?”

I arched an eyebrow. Do I what?

“Do you feel sorry, for rape victims?”

I did. It was, I added, the most terrible violation next to murder.

“Even the prison rape victims?”

I nodded. Even them.

“It’s so good that we have so many tools to catch them now, don’t you agree? Fiber analysis. Cell phone data. DNA, processed from rapekits.”

I nodded again.

“Good as a fingerprint, DNA is, at least in court. Television has brainwashed all the juries to believe in it. They won’t often convict without it. No hard forensics from the crime scene investigation folks, no lasers and test tubes, and they’ll try to acquit. Judges have to train them off it.”

I allowed that this was a sad state of affairs, but surely it was better for a few to go free than an innocent person convicted of rape to be convicted.

“Words right out of my mouth. You would know, right? I mean, that’s what you do, when we find the bodies. Send them to you.”

I confirmed that as an assistant to the county medical examiner, I was often called upon to swab for such trace evidence.

“Rape on account of lust, those tend to be a bit spontaneous. Sloppy attacks. Leave a lot of traces. We try to process those damn quick. Of course, sometimes there’s a backlog in processing the rape kits, but we’ve gotten better at that lately. You seen all the new computers they’ve moved in?”

I had. I nodded.

“Murder-rape is the worst, of course. Get a body in there, violated, cum and shit leaking out of every hole, duck tape around the wrists and ankles—and that’s if it hasn’t been sitting out in a creek to ripen up for a couple days. You processed one like that a couple weeks ago, right?”

He took out a photograph, laying face up on a morgue tray, a dirty angel. Monique. Yes, I had. The lab had come back with a match to a registered sex offender, led to his arrest. I told him as much.

He took out another photograph.

“And her, a couple months back?”

Blonde hair framing a massive wound; head caved in with a blunt object, seminal fluid still leaking out of her mouth in a tiny dried white rivulet. Janice. Another success, another arrest—her biker boyfriend.

A third photograph was laid out.

The lower half of a young boy. We never found his upper torso. Jeremy. Retired schoolteacher hung himself before the cops broke down his door.

“Funny thing: before we got this new computer system in, sometimes the county medical examiner had bodies swabbed twice. Different lab techs each time. With the first kit off to get processed, they’d just file the second kit away in evidence. Seeing as you always did the first kit, you might not have known that.”

I did not know that. I said nothing.

“Now we’re catching up with the backlog, and those sloppy seconds that came after you? They all contain your semen. A judge gave us a warrant to search your car and apartment. We found your trophies.”

He took out a plastic envelope, with locks of hair.

I asked to call my lawyer. He nodded, stood up, looked me in the eye.

“I don’t know where your head is at. Whether you did it because they were there and you were horny, or whether you’re so sick it’s just a compulsion and you scrub yourself raw and bloody afterwards. Maybe you liked to think about what happened to them and reenact it. Maybe you just thought ‘what the fuck, it’s not like their virgins anymore.’ Believe me, I’ve heard worse from people that fucked the living. I’m damn sure you thought you’d gotten away with it.”

I repeated my request to call my lawyer. He nodded.

“First things first. Please stand up and turn around.”

I did. He grabbed my wrist.

“Walter Jaxson, you are under arrest for the crime of necrophilia…”

###

Coke Meditations

Coke Meditations
by
Bobby Derie

Captive cola shelved for collector’s craze, emblazoned with the bright colors commemorating some ancient Olympics, waiting to be valuable once again. Dark sticky acid sludge held in thermo-chemical stasis, the slow breakdown of light filtered through tinted glass, the seal will rot and expire before the solar energies finish the subtle transmutation, the carbonation gone out ages hence. Caramel-colored water waits past its fizzy date, the lost Mecca on the dusty shelf, sugar-sweet trove that could feed a hundred generations, impenetrable in its slick tomb, surrounded by the corpses of ants.

Entombed, forgotten, amid the detritus of years, the cool and damp and dark draw down to work their strange alchemy, which has shattered lesser things with the slow work of years.

The familiar clink of spade on glass, and eager hands clear away the dirt of human habitation and the ruin of cities and people and ages. Faded now are the five rings, weathered and chipped the ancient dietary facts, but raised and vibrant on the bottom in letters of glass, the original bottler.

The gavel falls, once, twice – a bid, a raise, the video feed registers a new spate of activity, numbers on the screen incrementing higher as users at their distant computer terminals raise their limits. The heat dies down, longer pauses between raises, the contest becomes a momentary news item, search engines register the slight uptick in hits. Commercial data is exchanged, addresses relinquished , advertisements planned and commenced, marketing nostalgia ware to the idly curious. The gavel falls, the ads are clicked, do you want to upgrade to next-day shipping? Sold.

In the lab, under sterile lights, the tumult of the crowd is lost. There were riots at the mad science plans, the cultural loss, petitions signed and legal actions filed to halt the grievous violation. Calm men and women spoke of scientific progress, lost wonders, promise of new stuffs and chemical miracles. In the lab, the technician readies the probe.

Nanotendril snakes it way along a badlands of scarred glass. At this scale, the scratches of years transform the smooth surface into a treacherous landscape. Initial circumspection shows the seal worn but intact, protected by the agglutination of sterile dust and dirt from the fungi and bacteria that would colonize such stuff. The sharpened head burrows in, dragging the body behind, pseudo-worm musculature digging through the seal to taste the trapped air with tech first developed for burrowing through Antarctic ice. Digital chatter fills databases, collecting every chemical impression as the snaky probe continues the slow crawl, now suspended over precious millimeters, to make contact with the dark brown lake below.

Glass wine, refined for ages, the acid slowly eating at the imperfections, gaining flavor as the walls slightly dissolve. Awash in unfamiliar chemicals, lost with parent species: the taste of kola nut and coca leaf, strange extracts still intact amid the carbonic acid and dissolved sugars. The lab room cheers, the chemical data of their prize secured: a new cola for a new generation.

In the museum, under soft lights, climate-controlled tomb, the violation sealed, the brown-black lake still once more. Commercially exploited but not discarded, rescued by the archaeologists, the anthropologists, the art collectors. Shuffled from auction block to galley, studied and measured, decrypted and decoded. The essays and articles fill volumes and wikis on speculation, facts, petty academic politics, and scandal. No one seriously tries to drink it. Then the lights go out.

A three-fingered claw lifts it from the crèche where it had been laid, the centerpiece of the tomb-complex, another artifact of a strange and forgotten race. Lights flash at the entrance, the sound of motorized vehicles, and the claw secures its prize. The penalty for looting is death.

###