In The Way Eye

Johnson wanted nothing more than to turn her over. They were already on the bed in her apartment, tongues blind and wet in each other's mouths. Her skirt was lying on the floor, her blouse completely unbuttoned. As his fingers pressed against her panties, warmth radiated through them.

She wanted him to take it farther. He knew this by the motion of her hips and the short, impatient nature of her breath. She raised her hips off the bed, practically begging him to tear her panties away. He almost moved for it, almost slid his hand into that soft cotton pocket between her thighs, but it wasn't what he wanted. Instead, he turned her over so she was face down to the bed.

Her arms folded under her so her fists rested on either side of her chin. She turned her head questioningly, looking surprised and vulnerable as he moved behind her. Still, she didn't resist when he hooked fingers under the waistband of her panties and pulled them down her thighs. The crotch stuck for a moment and then followed as he eased her panties below her knees and then freed them from her ankles. Johnson dropped them on the bed and looked at the delicate folds of cloth. He gazed at the discarded panties for a long moment, but could not see the place where stains would be hid.

Johnson straddled her, both his pants and shirt unbuttoned. He moved down the bed and placed his hands on her buttocks and squeezed. She had a beautiful bottom. It was plump and round, and her tan lines formed a pale bikini. Pubic hair snuck out between her thighs, black tendrils tickling those lips. Again, he felt the pull of her vagina, felt her willing him to be in the usual spot, but he had another desire.

Music played over their thoughts. Good, because talking would be awkward. Her stereo. Her apartment. Her idea. Sloppy bar talk had led to this.

Johnson couldn't remember her name. He had been drinking vodka over ice and had quickly become intrigued by her black hair and violent blue eyes. She had literally bumped into him at the bar. Her hair and eyes, like night and day, or like a bruise, he thought, black and blue.

"Excuse me," he'd said at the bar.

"No," she'd said laughing, also drunk, "Excuse me."

Her cheeks, spread by his hands, revealed the eye he longed for. It puckered as if leery. Johnson pressed his face into her and tasted her. He could smell the faint, leftover scent of excrement. She relaxed under the moist excesses of his tongue, her anus opening. She groaned and released a stronger odor.

He had bought her a drink because most of hers had spilled down her arm when she'd almost bumped into him. "It's all right, it's all right," he'd said while wiping a bar napkin over her wet sleeve. "I'm going to smell like a drunk," she'd said, laughing.

The people around them had become others. They had become two. It happened that quickly.

Before they left the bar they'd been accosted by someone carrying a basket of red and pink roses, hoping to make a sale. They were in too much of a hurry to care.

He continued to press his tongue into her and she didn't mind. Perhaps she was drunker and more tired than he'd realized. She seemed to be melting beneath him. She writhed only vaguely, maybe just with the heavy beat of blood through her body. He doubted now that she even wanted him at those other lips.

Johnson dared a finger, suddenly nervous. Do it quickly, don't prolong the inevitable. He sucked the finger to moisten it and then probed the hole with its tip. The ring of sensitive, wrinkled skin became all. His fingernail found the opening, entered it. Johnson pushed in to the knuckle, feeling all the surrounding meat of her bottom clench, ready to ease him out. Farther, though, was what he wanted. The finger went in deeper, then still deeper, every millimeter for him a delight. He held one cheek with his free hand, but in truth the rest of her had disappeared. All he knew was the finger and the hole.

Johnson had very nearly inserted his finger as far as it would go when his fingertip met something unusual, something with a smooth, wet surface. Puzzled, he began to pull out and found that the pressure on his fingertip remained constant. He pulled out farther and the thing, whatever it was, seemed stuck to his finger. Johnson shuddered. With a retracted dart he pulled back his hand and his finger met cool air. He caught a glimpse of white in the hole. The woman's anus widened to allow the thing out, a ball indeed, and now he could see blue surrounding black as a pupil shrunk to meet his gaze.

Johnson felt the blood drain from his penis, electricity souring his saliva. The walls of his throat and stomach seemed to rot. He had to get away. The eyeball watched him, nestled in the woman's ass cheeks like a jewel upon a bed of velvet. Johnson took a handful of sheet, pushed away, and threw out his legs to meet carpet. Twisting to be free of the bed, he turned and saw her face.

Her head was turned toward him so he could see the ruined socket, the missing eye. Much of her face was twisted toward the empty socket, where a tunnel seemed to lead down into her. Her nose was pulled out of true and made one of her nostrils much wider than its twin. A blood vessel in the wider nostril had ruptured, leaking blood into her mouth. So ruined was her face and so bereft of life, dried and hardened, that she might have been dead for some time. He fled the room only partially dressed.

Even when Johnson had closed and locked his apartment door, pressed his back against it and moved quickly away as if tendrils might snake out at him from the threshold, he did not feel safe. A litany of thoughts rained upon his mind, each one an accusation spoken in the sermon-like voice of the mouth opened within him.

"You killed her!"

No, not intentionally. Something had simply happened.

"The police will find you!"

I did nothing wrong.

"The eye could identify you!"

That's crazy.

"Something is at work inside you!"

No, no.

Johnson sat on the couch in his smallish apartment. His sparse furnishings spoke of a man who had accomplished little and hoped to accomplish little more. The television, most likely the room's most expensive article, was switched on, but Johnson didn't watch it. His mind started and caught, started and caught, unable to move forward. The sky lightened and morning came. After arriving home, he had thought about and rejected the idea of a drink. The thought seemed useless. His drunkenness had been frightened, possibly permanently, from him.

He neglected to eat or bathe. Johnson went to the bathroom and emptied his bowels without even realizing he was doing so. He avoided his eyes in the mirror when he perfunctorily washed his hands. The phone did not ring and he did not attempt to use it. An idea came to him and he went to his dresser.

His magazines were in the bottom drawer of his dresser. He took them out and spread them about him. He had discarded his clothing and so sat naked and erect, Indian style. The magazines were all of his interest. The pages presented women turning their backsides to him as they exposed their holes.

The more respectable magazines had holes nice and clean, pink and without blemish, but the less respectable ones were more and more concerned with the nature of the holes' business. In the magazines, the women turned their heads away so that their gazes wouldn't make him feel so dirty, but as the excrement bubbled closer to the surface, begging to be released, the heads turned, searching for him. In his raunchier magazines, the asses wiggled, the holes puckered, and when the hint of brown came, Johnson could feel the eyes upon him.

He stroked his cock. The parade of women melded into one woman; all the unremembered faces asserted themselves in one look, one gaze. This woman smiled a wicked smile from the pages of his magazines. He discarded one magazine and picked up another, but the woman remained the same. He brushed the magazines away because he didn't need them anymore. She was all he saw.

Her watched eagerly as the woman bent over before him, straining, trying to squeeze out the thing he most wanted. He stroked faster and felt tingling and then an immense pressure in his testicles.

It didn't matter. The excrement was coming out in a log, hanging there but not yet ready to drop before him. Johnson's testicles withdrew, pulled up tight against him, and then he felt them leave his scrotum. His testicles entered the shaft of his cock, but still he stroked. Each time his hand pumped up and down over his cock, which now looked like a boa constrictor that had just eaten two rabbits, bolts of agony shot through him.

The log landed between his knees and its smell filled his nostrils. The woman disappeared, leaving only her mess. Johnson cried out in pain as he strained at orgasm. The tip of his penis widened impossibly and split so blood ran into his pubic hair. Johnson had time to recognize his own eye as it emerged from the tip of his penis, and after that he was blind, for a moment recognizing the tremendous pain that gutted his body from eye socket to penis, and then he felt nothing.