Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

Naked. He rubs his cock with vaseline,

lazy and slow, he doesn’t want to come. A BANG upon the window. He sits up,

flaccid and scared (he’s on the second floor) and opens up the window of his room.

HIS SISTER enters, looking almost dead, implores him to forget her. He says no.

THE SISTER shambles over to the door.

A WOMAN DRESSED IN BLACK waits in the hall.

Brunette in leather, kinky as all hell,

who steps over the threshold with a smile. And they have sex.

THE SISTER stands alone.

She watches as THE BRUNETTE takes MCBRIDE

(her skin’s necrotic blue. She’s fully dressed).

THE BRUNETTE gestures curtly with her hand,

off come THE SISTER’S clothes. She looks a mess.

Her skin’s all scarred and scored; one nipple’s gone.

She takes her gloves off and we see her hands:

Her fingers look like ribs, or chicken wings, well chewed, and rescued from a garbage can—

dry bones with scraps of flesh and cartilage. She puts her fingers in THE BRUNETTE’S mouth…

AND FADE TO BLACK.

INT. WEBSTER’S OFFICE. DAY.

THE PHONE RINGS. It’s MCBRIDE.

“Just drop the case.

I’ve found my sister, and I’m going home. You’ve got five hundred dollars, and my thanks.”

PULL BACK on WEBSTER, puzzled and confused.

MONTAGE of WEBSTER here. A week goes by,

we see him eating, pissing, drinking, drunk. We watch him throw HIS GIRLFRIEND out of bed.

We see him play the video again…

The VIDEO GIRL stares at him and says she’ll see him soon. “I promise, Webster, soon.”

CUT TO

THE PLACE OF EATERS, UNDERGROUND.

Pale people stand like cattle in a pen.

We see MCBRIDE. The flesh is off his chest.

White meat is good. We’re looking through his ribs:

his heart is still. His lungs, however, breathe,

inflate, deflate. And tears of pus run down his sunken cheeks. He pisses in the muck.

It doesn’t steam. He wishes he were dead.

A DREAM:

As WEBSTER tosses in his bed

He sees MCBRIDE, a corpse beneath a bridge,

all INTERCUT with lots of shots of food,

to make our theme explicit: this is art.

EXT. LA. DAY.

WEBSTER’S become obsessed.

He has to find the woman from the screen. He beats somebody up, fucks someone else, fixated on “I’ll see you, Webster, soon.”

He’s thrown in prison. And they come for him,

THE MAN IN BLACK attending THE BRUNETTE.

Open his cell with keys, escort him out, and leave the prison building.

Through a door. They walk him to the car park. They go down,

below the car park, deep beneath the town, past shadowed writhing things that suck and hiss

and glossy things that laugh, and things that scream.

Now other feeder-folk are walking past…

They handcuff WEBSTER to A TINY MAN who’s covered with vaginas and with teeth, and escorts WEBSTER to

THE QUEEN’S SALON.

(An interjection here: my wife awoke, scared by an evil dream. “You hated me. You brought these women home I didn’t know,

but they knew me, and then we had a fight, and after we had shouted you stormed out. You said you’d find a girl to fuck and eat.”

This scares me just a little. As we write we summon little demons. So I shrug.)

The handcuffs are removed. He’s left alone. The hangings are red velvet, then they lift, reveal THE QUEEN. We recognize her face, the woman we saw on the VCR.

“The world divides so sweetly, neatly up into the feeder-folk, into their prey.”

That’s what she says. Her voice is soft and sweet.

Imagine honey ants: the tiny head, the chest, the tiny arms, the tiny hands,

and after that the bloat of honey-swell,

the abdomen enormous as it hangs translucent, made of honey, sweet as lust.

THE QUEEN has quite a perfect little face, her breasts are pale, blue-veined; her nipples pink;

her hands are white. But then, below her breasts

the whole swells like a whale or like a shrine,

a human honey ant, she’s huge as rooms,

as elephants, as dinosaurs, as love.

Her flesh is opalescent, and she calls

poor WEBSTER to her. And he nods and comes.

(She must be over twenty-five feet long.)

She orders him to take off all his clothes.

His cock is hard. He shivers. He looks lost.

He moans “I’m harder than I’ve ever been.”

Then, with her mouth, she licks and tongues his cock…

We linger here. The language of the eye becomes a bland, unflinching, blowjob porn, (her lips are glossy, and her tongue is red) HOLD on her face. We hear him gasping “Oh. Oh, baby. Yes. Oh. Take it in your mouth.” And then she opens up her mouth, and grins, and bites his cock off.

Spurting blood pumps out

into her mouth. She hardly spills a drop.

We never do pan up to see his face,

just her. It’s what they call the money shot.

Then, when his cock’s gone down, and blood’s congealed,

we see his face. He looks all dazed and healed.

Some feeders come and take him out of there.

Down in the pens he’s chained beside MCBRIDE.

Deep in the mud lie carcasses picked clean who grin at them and dream of being soup.

Poor things.

We’re almost done.

We’ll leave them there.

CUT to some lonely doorway, where A TRAMP has three cold fingers up ANOTHER TRAMP,

they’re starving but they fingerfuck like hell, and underneath the layers of old clothes beneath the cardboard, newspaper and cloth, their genders are impossible to tell.

PAN UP

to watch a butterfly go past.

(ENDS)

This began, somewhere in my head, in May 1993, as a musing on the way people treat other people; and on film, and on the limits and language of film; on pornography and the low standards of pornography; on the language of film treatments and scripts; and on the relationship between food and sex. Or it began one night in 1984, when I had a nightmare in which I was being eaten alive by an elderly witch-woman; I was being kept for food, a zombie, following her around. My left arm and hand were just bone and clinging morsels of chewed flesh. I turned the dream into a story back then, but fragments of it still lingered and began, slowly, to wrap another story around themselves, layers of nacreous image accreting, layering themselves around something I would still rather not have in my head.

When I read scripts, and when I write them, I always pronounce, in my head, ‘Int’ and ‘Ext’ as just that, not ‘Interior’ or ‘Exterior.’ I was surprised to discover, on showing a few early readers this poem, that other people do not do this. “Eaten” is a very literal poem, however, and pronounces these words just like I do.

Elizabeth Hand is the award-winning author of many novels and collections of short fiction. She is also a longtime critic for numerous publications, including the Washington Post , the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , the Los Angeles Times , and Salon . Available Dark , the sequel to Shirley Jackson Award–winning novel Generation Loss , and Radiant Days , a young adult novel about Arthur Rimbaud, were both recently published to wide acclaim. A revised edition of her 1997 novel Glimmering will appear in 2012, as will Errantry , a new collection of short fiction. Hand divides her time between the coast of Maine and north London. Visit www.elizabethhand.comfor more information.

In the month of Athyr Leucis fell asleep.

THE ARGALA CAME TO LIVE with them on the last day of Mestris, when Paul was fifteen. High summer, it would have been by the old Solar calendar; but in the HORUS station it was dusk, as it always was. The older boys were poring over an illustrated manual of sexual positions by the sputtering light of a lumière filched from Father Dorothy’s cache behind the galley refrigerator. Since Paul was the youngest he had been appointed to act as guard. He crouched beside the refrigerator, shivering in his pajamas, and cursed under his breath. He had always been the youngest, always would be the youngest. There had been no children born on the station since Father Dorothy arrived to be the new tutor. In a few months, Father Dorothy had converted Teichman Station’s few remaining women to the Mysteries of Lysis. Father Dorothy was a galli, a eunuch who had made the ultimate sacrifice to the Great Mother during one of the high holy days Below. The Mysteries of Lysis was a relatively new cult. Its adherents believed that only by reversing traditional gender roles could the sexes make peace after their long centuries of open hostility. These reversals were enacted literally, often to the consternation of non-believing children and parents.