Ana Simo - Heartland

Mrs. Crandall reached for her dress. She had to go home. It was almost dinnertime. Now was my turn to beg, cajole, and abase myself, even cry. I could not let her go. That night I had to squeeze from her the last drop of information about McCabe. My pain must have been real, even if my theatrics weren’t; I couldn’t tell anymore. She was moved. She held me like Mary held the Baby Jesus, giving me her breast to suckle, putting my tiny hand inside her warm cunt. I cross-questioned her gently, careful that her cunt did not come to a boil too soon, enjoying the slow release of her wetness, the swaying of her hips, delicate at first because we were sacred mother and child. “Mercy can be very funny,” she said. I did not immediately realize to whom she was referring. McCabe hated her given name and never used it. She was plain McCabe to all. Was Mrs. Crandall that distant from McCabe, or that close? No, she could not remember if she ever called McCabe that name to her face. Unlike her jolly predecessor, New McCabe had no sense of humor. The few jokes I tried on her fell flat. Music, birds, food, wine, bandages were our only shared language. “She can be quiet, but she can talk up a storm.” About what? I asked. “Oh, everything, and nothing. Art and life. She’s been everywhere and met everyone. But she’s not stuck-up. Deep down she’s still a healthy Iowa farm girl,” said Mrs. Crandall. I exhaled, surprised. “She says so herself,” Mrs. Crandall added soothingly, with a maternal tremor of her hips. I asked her what they and Petrona had cooked together on Thanksgiving eve. “Your Thanksgiving dinner. What else?” she said, kissing my ear while her cunt wrapped itself tighter around my hand. She had bought the suckling pig in Shangri-La at McCabe’s request. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Mrs. Crandall kissed my eyelids and held me tighter. “That’s all I know,” she said, declaring the interrogation closed as her hips warmed. I believed her. She was innocent. “Poor baby,” she said, tenderly, her cunt arching and flooding my fist. I kissed her on the lips, for the first and only time. Mrs. Crandall then abandoned herself entirely to me. Passion made her body more voluptuous than ever. Her cunt was fleshier and warmer, her breasts more bountiful. She had kept most of herself out of my reach until this moment, while I had thought she had nothing more to give or show me. I put my ear on her belly to listen to the palpitations of her cunt, the sound of my fingers touching her deep inside. I was so stunned by how passion had transformed her flesh that, when her cunt began to quiet down, satiated, I lowered my guard and, in turn, abandoned myself to her. She fucked me like the Mother would fuck the Child. Licking, whispering, sucking, touching. She had learned. I came a dozen times, on her lips, hands, and breasts. I was inside her milky womb when she was inside me. When she stopped, breathless, my face still buried in her breasts, I almost retched in disgust. I had let a stranger touch me. Worse: a stranger with an opaque connection to McCabe, someone who could have been lying to me all along. “I don’t want to fuck her any more than you do,” Mrs. Crandall said sweetly, as if reading my mind. She held my gaze long enough for me to check her sincerity, then said: “Mercy and I just had the beginning of a beautiful friendship that might have flowered if she had stayed in Elmira.” That was Mrs. Crandall putting me in my place. How foolish of me to think that McCabe would stay here with me until death did us part.

I let Mrs. Crandall get dressed, pretending not to notice when she hid the double plug strap at the bottom of her bag. I followed her up the stairs until she reached the main door of the library. When she turned around to say goodbye, I shoved her on the ground and mounted her. She was bigger and heavier than I was, but I caught her off-balance. Weeks on the wheelchair had built up my upper body. She giggled first, then struggled, not daring to make a noise so close to the street. She put up a fight, twisting, kicking, biting, spitting, punching. She broke my lip, which bled all over her face. I strangled her with my left hand. When she was about to pass out, I released my grip so she could breathe, and shoved my right fist into her cunt. I slapped her until her lips and her nose bled. She tried to slide away but ended half-sitting against the door, which allowed me to push her legs wide open over my shoulders and push my fist into her ass. She screamed, but no sound came out of her mouth. When I shoved my fist back into her cunt, she came in a flood of cum, piss, and blood, over and over and over. Exhaustion stopped us a long time later. We lay side by side, listening to the sound of snow falling outside. She was the first one to move. When she returned from the bathroom, she was wearing her blue knitted ensemble. Her face was almost normal, except for a slight swelling on the upper lip. It would look much worse tomorrow. She shoved her soiled, torn dress into her bag. I did not know what to say or do. I was ashamed of myself. I still am. This is the most shameful thing I have ever done in my life. I have confessed it to you in vivid detail at the risk of appealing to your basest instincts, as a way to mortify myself and perhaps, in time, gain absolution, not from you or some improbable god, but from my best self, which watched me in horror and repulsion. I did not know what to say to Mrs. Crandall that night. I stood before her majestic blue-clad figure silhouetted against the library’s storm door, a ragged, stinky pygmy before a towering Athena. “Make sure you lock up behind me,” she said, not unkindly. Then she was gone.

The next morning, there was a small brown parcel in my breakfast basket addressed to “Miss Mirtila” and bearing no stamps or sender. Inside was Mrs. Crandall’s Shangri-La logbook, wrapped in a silk scarf so old that its crisscrossing threads hung in the air like a cobweb. The scarf smelled like overripe blackberries and wet soil, Mrs. Crandall’s smell at the beginning of our daily sessions, before the more potent animal odors set in. Was I forgiven, or was this a set up? Had she lied to me some, a lot, or not at all? I sniffed her scent on the scarf with the indecent voracity of a dog. Then I folded it carefully and put it inside a vacuum-sealed plastic bag, the kind used for frozen leftovers and forensic exhibits. Mrs. Crandall’s scent would be preserved for future use. I was her dog. She was my mistress. Mrs. Crandall whistles; I stand on my hind legs and shove my hairy dog dick up her ass. The Archangel Raphael sweeps down from above, burning sword in hand, and slashes the whore and her dog down the middle. I took a freezing shower, grinding my teeth, until my gnarled toes began to turn blue. I had to flush Mrs. Crandall away, purge her from my body in order to regain my human form. I could not allow her back until I had found and killed McCabe. For that I needed to be human. McCabe was my true quest, my only enigma. Everything else, even Mrs. Crandall’s cunt, would have to wait.

Hardened by the icy shower, I examined Mrs. Crandall’s logbook with the necessary sang-froid. It was, like her, an imbrication of order and debauchery. The entries were surgically precise and systematic. The handwriting was in black ink, with an architect’s small, perfectly even capitals. The map was impressively accurate and detailed. Mrs. Crandall had been modest when she had called it a sketchy line drawing. The book itself told a different, more hedonistic story. It was made of heavy Canson paper with a Belgian watermark, hand-stitched and bound in luxurious black leather. A red silk string page marker was attached to it. An entry on the final Sunday showed that Mrs. Crandall knocked on the third house on the south side of my old street, but that no one answered. Did Mrs. Crandall know that the National Security Advisor, Rafael Cohen, had been born in that cinderblock shack? If so, had she told McCabe? Had McCabe asked?