the weeds along the path until he found the head. He held it at arm’s length by ribbons of its skin. “It’s going to keep living ’til it does what it’s got to do,” he said.
Anthony picked up the mannequin’s twitching hand. “Oh, how sad,” he said. “I weep big tears.” He threw the hand deep into the woods. Then he picked up the broken piece of leg and flung it into the woods as well. He nodded to his friend.
Punkin swung the ragged head by its ribbons to gather momentum. Finally he let go, and it flew through the night like a fleshy comet.
* * * *
Anthony entered Athena’s long, low house without knocking. He found her in the parlor.
“Oh. Why, why…hello,” she stammered.
Anthony regarded her with what he hoped was a smouldering stare. “I want you.”
“Oh. Oh.” Athena looked to the shelves—to the books, the jars, the statuettes. “Is Punkin with you?”
“No. I asked him to go on home without me. Didn’t you hear what I said? I want you, Athena.”
“I heard you.” Her eyes settled at last on a brown bottle nestled in a pile of yellow rags. “Do you realize what you are asking?”
Anthony shrugged. “I don’t care if you’re a guy or a lady or what.”
“‘Or what’ can cover quite a bit of ground.” She opened the bottle and poured a thin amber fluid onto one of the rags. “I’ve been many people over the years, Anthony. I’ve been old, young, large, small, male, female…” She rubbed the wet cloth over her face and hands. “It takes quite a while to prepare an acceptable—facade, I think, is a good word. Still, it takes only a moment to undo the illusion. Only a moment to reveal the real me.”
Athena’s thick makeup hid more than blemishes, more than even mere gender; this magickal concoction hid the very contours of the flesh. Unleashed, her purple eyes crawled slowly over the surface of her opalescent face. A delicate lacework of gills fluttered at her jawline. Her shining claws fumbled at square black buttons, and the kimono dropped to the floor.
“So,” she whispered through the uppermost of her mouths. “Do you still want me?”
Anthony studied Athena Moth for a full minute. Then he took a step forward.
Then another.
LARGESSE
Mr. Pash, Mr. Pash. Could anyone be more wonderful than Mr. Pash? He was the best employer I ever had—a wise, thrilling person. And so generous.
Bosses are usually such atrocious beings. You have to nod and grin and act as though you are not afraid of them. You must appear to condone their boorish, money-hungry wickedness. You must pretend to be other than yourself. Such was not the case with Mr. Pash.
My work at his store, Movie Mania, was quite simple. I waited on customers, kept the display boxes in neat rows, vacuumed a bit… Nothing too strenuous. Every now and then Mr. Pash stopped in to check on the store. To peek into the cash register. To offer a word of encouragement.
His eyes were deep, brown, and utterly unfocused. His nose was long and curved like the beak of a bird that eats meat. Thick brown hair, pale skin, a mildly spicy body odor, black stubble no matter what the time of day…and fat. Mr. Pash was fat, yet obliquely so in his bulky sweaters and baggy pants. It was hard to tell where Mr. Pash ended and the sag of his loose outfits began. But make no mistake: his clothes were clean and fashionable.
When he placed his long white fingers on your shoulder, you knew instantly that he cared. If your mother took sick, or if your pet lost a limb in a freakish accident, he would give you the day off without question. If he had candies in his huge pockets, and he usually did, he would give you several nice plastic-wrapped mints. Large and fresh, with red and white swirls. No lint on these pocket treats.
The customers at Movie Mania often spent a great deal of money. The store offered, for rental or purchase, a wide selection of strange and obscure films. Most were DVDs, but Mr. Pash also offered vintage videotapes, too, and the rental of VHS players. Mr. Pash had a fine retro fondness for the videotape format. “There’s something utterly wonderful about all that black tape,” he once said. “Black tape, loaded with black magic!” Our gentlemen usually rented six or seven movies at a time. I say “gentlemen” because our female clientele never exceeded a handful of poorly dressed, foreign-looking women of indeterminate age.
There was always plenty of time for me to watch movies during working hours. Mr. Pash did not mind. In fact, he insisted that I watch the movies so I would be able to tell our gentlemen about them. A salesperson should be thoroughly familiar with his products. The bulk of the inventory was esoteric. To this day, I have no idea where Mr. Pash had acquired such oddities. New movies were never delivered to the store; Mr. Pash brought them in personally.
The Green Claw was very popular, as were a number of other releases—Spine-Eaters, Flytrap Hell and Liquifier III: The Bubbling Death. There were many more, of course, but those four were our top renters. The store’s computer inventory did not list any prequels to Liquifier III, and I have not been able to find this series online or in any catalog.
Mr. Pash brought several copies of Liquifier III to the store on a rainy July afternoon. It was a very hot day, and the rain made the air steamy. I remember worrying that so much moisture in the air had to be bad for the tapes.
“This title should rent well,” Mr. Pash said; his voice was low and purring. “I watched it last night. Very exciting—I think you will agree. Let me know how it does.” He wandered the store for a minute or so, biting his nails (not out of nervousness, I’m sure: perhaps out of hunger or mild ennui). Then he left, smiling so warmly that I thought for a moment of my father, who also had a large nose.
I watched the movie on the store monitor. The Liquifier of the title was a giant demon from outer space—a spiderish humanoid over sixty feet tall, with three-fingered hands and milky eyes. The Liquifier spun its victims into cocoons and injected them with acid venom, turning them into large bubbling bags of dinner. I did not feel uncomfortable about running such a graphic feature; children rarely visited the store.
I was not Mr. Pash’s only employee. A frail old man named Bernard was also on duty. Bernard had unusually tight skin—so tight that it gleamed. I doubt if facelifts had been performed; he didn’t make that sort of money. “How can you watch that garbage?” he said, pointing at the screen with his cigarette. “All that death and screaming and whatnot. A movie didn’t used to have blood spilling all over the place to be scary. It’s not right. Don’t tell me it is.”
“Variety is very important these days,” I said. “What’s life without variety? Even sex would get pretty boring if that was all you ever did.”
“That’s for damn sure.” Bernard blew a cloud of smoke in my face. “You never met my Mrs. Spoon…” Bernard prefaced every anecdote about his deceased wife with this remark. “The woman was an animal. Whittled me down to a pencil, she did. Sometimes I’d catch her giving that look of hers to some man on the street. A nice-looking guy like you—she’d have sized you up. How did I ever get mixed up with a woman like that? She knew her way around a kitchen, though—I’ll give her that.”
A customer came in and Bernard went to wait on him. Bernard’s stories about his dead wife always included some reference to her voracious sexual appetites. The week before, he
