I desperately need you to fill all my aching holes at once.
Pages and pages of Madonna in black leather, beautiful harnesses with thin straps biting into her skin, along with her perverted crew who grabbed and groped her. The book became a nasty blur. So did the lines that Petra kept being forced to write.
I knew how wet Petra was at this point, which was perfect for when I made her return the book. Waddle up to the nosy librarian and get slicker with shame as he took the book back. I’d make her tidy up all the papers with her lines inscribed on them. Ensure none of her disgusting yellow stickies fell on the ground. I’d grab her bony arm and yank her out of the glass fishbowl. March her through the library. Past all the people innocently sitting in front of piles of books and notebooks and pens. Burdened by their work instead of burning with intense longing.
Then I’d pull Petra into the library bathroom and push her into a stall. Beige just like my manila folder and mustard hat’s sweater. I’d make her close the lock. Seal her fate. Ignore the alarm in her eyes that someone would catch us. That we’d get kicked out of the library or security would be called or whateverfucking panic bender she was going to spiral through. And she would be spiralling, in the best way.
I’d want to slap her face but stop myself because it’d be too loud. I’d make her pull up her modest dress and pull down her stockings. Then her sticky panties. But before I’d allow her to pull them down, I’d finger her through the wetness from the other side, cotton sliding into her, pounding on her clit like it was a doorknocker.
I’d get her to pull her own panties down. Do the work herself that she so desperately needed. Step out of her adorable Mary Janes, rip down her stockings, and get her pretty feet dirty on the washroom floor as she took her panties off. I would watch the whole time. Petra would beg to get back in her shoes. She hated getting dirty and had a thing about germs. I’d get her to open her pretty mouth wide open. Ball up her soaking panties and stick them between her lips. A homemade gag that hopefully would ensure Petra would stay quiet. But there’d be no guarantees. Bend her over so far, her head would be almost in the toilet bowl. Punishment for her mistakes. Then I would fuck her like she’d been dying to get fucked since the moment she received my detailed directions to go to the special collections room and stay silent.
I had texted her the very type of specific instructions that got her off. A kind and generous gesture. Petra was my girl and I loved taking care of her.
Do not be late. Fifth floor. Turn left at the elevator. Enter the glass room. Quietly. You will now be in the Special Room Art Stacks. Come sit next to me. Wear a pretty dress. And special panties. No talking. You will already be sorry from the moment you enter. Special Room Art Stacks—that is where you will meet your demise today.”
Oh, how I love libraries…
After the Rain by Jordan Demaine
The end, when it comes, is quicker than Jeremy expected.
A soldier appears at his parents’ country house one afternoon, her mask pulled down to show her human face. She tells them to stay inside, all windows and doors shut, for the next week at least. As if that isn’t what they’ve been doing for the past twenty-one months. Three days later, Jeremy and his family watch through the panes of glass as a thick pink mist descends over the countryside.
“Will it kill the animals, too?” Jeremy’s youngest niece wonders.
“I don’t know,” Jeremy admits. It does kill the creatures.
When ten days have passed since they last heard a groan in the night or a thump on the door, Jeremy and his sister Laura venture out for a look. They keep their hands on their hunting rifles, but everything is quiet.
“Come over here,” Laura calls. The carcasses of two creatures lie against a mossy stone wall which has been standing since the time of the Romans. They look almost as if they were embracing when they died. “Do you think they felt anything?”
Jeremy shrugs. “I don’t think it matters.” The creatures were people once, but the illness had long since robbed them of any trace of humanity. If they’d made it to the house, they would have done the same to Jeremy, Laura, their parents, and her kids. They wouldn’t have thought twice about it. They couldn’t.
A week after that, Jeremy pulls his car out of the stables. He’s been diligently driving it for fifteen minutes every week, even when there was nowhere to go, worried that leaving it idle too long would ruin the engine. His diligence has paid off. It starts easily, bursting to life with a roar that sounds too loud in the silent world.
“I wish you’d stay a little longer.” His mother frets.
“I want to see if my flat’s still standing. If anything is still standing,” Jeremy replies. It’s partly true. After twenty-one months cowering in a house with seven other people, he also desperately needs some time alone. “I’ll come back,” he promises. “It’ll be four or five days, at the most.” The rifle rests against the passenger’s seat beside him. That’s the only reason his mother lets him go, he’s sure, waving him off as tearfully as if he’s going to war.
The closer he gets to the city, the more it does look like a war zone. The army is out in force. Jeremy sees figures in large masks, protective yellow suits, and thick gloves tossing the bodies of creatures into the back of olive-green trucks. He raises a hand, in greeting and in thanks, as he drives by. Some of them wave back.
The traffic, as well, grows thicker as he nears the city, although it’s still a tenth of what it would have been before, and a hundredth of what it was the day he fled.
Jeremy arrives home in record time. His once-leafy street is in poor shape, although not, Jeremy suspects, as poor as it might have been. Many of the buildings—the coffee shop, the bookshop, the place that sold Irish sweaters Jeremy always thought he might look good in, but never bought—are derelict, nothing more than dark, empty shells with broken windows and missing doors. A few, like Jeremy’s small block of flats, are in one piece, but marred with scorch marks and scribbles of graffiti that weren’t there before. Jeremy parks behind a burned-out car and picks up his rifle.
He doesn’t bother with the lift. Instead, he climbs the four flights of stairs to his flat. The stairwell smells like rot. Dried brown blood is splashed like paint up the walls and along the banisters.
Jeremy’s front door is marked with deep scratches, but the lock has held fast. The same can’t be said for the flat acrossthe hall. That door has been torn off entirely. The hinges hang loose and that same odor of decay wafts from inside. Jeremy tries once again not to think about it, not to wonder if the presence of the family that had lived there, a single mother with two teenage daughters, had drawn a creature’s attention away from Jeremy’s empty flat.
Inside, everything is as Jeremy left it that Wednesday afternoon nearly two years ago. Like everyone, he went hastily; the clothes he’d decided against bringing are still on his bed, the books he’d wanted to bring but forgot are on the kitchen table. A layer of dust lies over everything. Apart from that, it almost seems as if Jeremy is returning home after a regular day of work.
Still moving cautiously—he will likely move cautiously for the rest of his life—he makes his way to the kitchen.Probably best not to open the fridge, Jeremy thinks, although maybe everything in there is long past the disgusting stage by now. He places the bag of tinned vegetables, biscuits, and other nonperishables he and Laura borrowed from a little grocery shop months ago on the counter. He reaches for the light switch with silent hope. Nothing happens when he flicks it.
He’s about to head to the bathroom, to see if the water is in a similar situation, when Jeremy hears a sound. Not from within his flat, but next door, on the other side of the kitchen wall. He goes for the gun, left lying on the sofa, and creeps into the corridor.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” A voice exclaims from the flat next door, very human and rather sweet.
“Hello?” Jeremy calls in return, lowering the gun. “Is anyone there?”
