recent sex in warm gusts of memory.
He was not worried at the delay. She would be what he wanted, Lucy upstairs. He knew it. There might be more steps to take, but she would be the mother, the lover, the hook on which to hang his plagiarized blueprint for living.
There had been no love there, upstairs tonight, but it would come—Lucy would force it into being. She had no choice. She would never find her black lumps of poison or cut them out, and like Steven she would never be part of the world. In time, when she realized this, she would need someone to cling to, someone to absorb and deaden the impacting horror of her sentence. And to justify this dependence she would have to call it love.
The Hagbeast would permit no such joining, of course. She would move swiftly to destroy any source of affection, any avenue of hope, that threatened her tyranny.
And so she must not find out.
But that was impossible. How could he hide from her a growing involvement with Lucy when she tracked the slightest of his movements with every sense she possessed? He was transparent to her and sooner or later she would know, despite any camouflage he might erect, that he was directing himself to more than his daily struggle against her.
She would know. She would home in and ruin his dream before he had a chance to use Lucy to make it real. She would expel him from the flat or she would kill him. There could be no middle ground.
Here, now, with Lucy’s cunt scum crusty on his dick, with the raw materials of his envisioned satellite world at last close enough to reach, the inference was obvious. And it did not surprise Steven that he found little horror in its contemplation—he had suffered too long.
Steven did not sleep.
How could it be done?
What would it feel like to kill, to actually extinguish the pile of meat that had shitted him into existence? If she had been a mother like mothers were meant to be, then he supposed it would be impossible. Or if possible, that it would trail such jellyfish tentacles of remorse his eyes would be forever clouded with the final stinging vision of thick white foam boiling past her swollen tongue and out over his wrists.
But she had never worn a blue-checked apron or baked sweet pies in a kitchen where the warm air made her cheeks rosy, never reached down with floured hands to lift him up onto the table and kiss his face and laugh at his giggles with her eyes so bright he thought he would never see anything else again, or want to, never shown him things or let him press the dough before she wrapped him up in herself and carried him off to bed. And because this was so, he knew the act would not bleed forward in time to harry him in small-hour awakenings. It would stop when she stopped.
The killing would bring him relief, but its doing would not be easy. He could imagine himself, head back and howling, in a suffusing glory of murder, gouting semen across her naked shoulders as he hauled back on her head and snapped her neck. But reality would be different. Reality would be a frightened rush to the finish with no time to linger over details, a headlong plunge to get it over with before his courage gave out, before a lifetime of conditioning reared up and robbed his arms of strength.
Steven squirmed in his bed. He had to do it, there was no other way. But in twenty-five years he had not lifted a hand against her, and thoughts of starting now with the ultimate hand-raising made him frightened enough to puke. His body felt boned and unequal to the task.
Much better to find some way less direct. Killing without the necessity of active throttling, stabbing, beating participation. She was old and immensely overweight, the systems of her body degenerating under an onslaught of filth and the mordant of age. There had to be a way to place a final, terminal strain on them. An iceberg method that kept the bulk of its guilt and purpose hidden from sight.
Steven watched the shifting reflections of streetlight on his
1796-1874 Agnes Strickland, 1794-1875 Elizabeth Strickland, Rosalie Kaufman