Christopher Ransom - The Birthing House

He swept the floor, scraped paint and then used Jo's Ryobi belt sander to strip the wood of blood and blood dust in an attempt to restore its natural color. He swept the floor again and when he saw that the stain was not going to go away without replacing some of the boards, he decided, to hell with it, let's keep the blood and spill some paint. He did not stop to eat and eventually he forgot about the beer.

When he ran out of paint he returned to the porch and unwrapped the pallet. She had ordered gallons of the stuff delivered from the local hardware store a week ago. Quality, custom-mixed latex in peach, lavender and sea green. A gender-neutral palette, very progressive. Finished with the floors, he started on the walls. He inhaled sweet fumes and remembered moving to new apartments with his mother. New beginnings. He was a man who loved beginnings. The way he left a job before giving it time really to learn something new and get promoted. The way he had started a new screenplay before finishing the old one. The way you met a girl and had no idea what comes next. The way he avoided cleaning up the old mess. Moving. Always a fresh start, never a permanent home.

He brought in the throw rug she had sent a week ago, the one with the sailboat braving indigo waves under gold stars and a smiling silver moon. It took Conrad the rest of the night to peg and glue the oak slats in place, set the natural fiber bed pad in the tiny fortress center to the room so that the moonlight would catch it the way (the house showed him)

he saw it in his head, and sweep everything clean once again. He brought in the lamp she had chosen, an ivory-colored ceramic beast with lion's feet at the base and winged shoulders above, a safari motif on the shade. When everything was in its place, he sat on the floor and stared at the crib, alone in a transformed room the dogs still would not enter. In the dark with the lights off and the moon on the soft carpet, ashamed.

The crib was the thing. Even empty it changed everything. Made the future real, a thing to hold on to.

He fell asleep on the floor beside the crib and awoke hours later in his bed. She came to him before dawn, as if preparing the room had been an act of penance and she were his reward.

He was in high school again. Some event setting up and waiting to be played out. He felt like a king. His friends were all there with him, the best ones from the days when they were all kings. He was wearing his favorite pair of Adidas basketball shoes, the orange and blue Knicks colors, his Ewings. He felt unstoppable. A cool can of regular Budweiser in his hand. He was glad to be back with the Budweiser, the choice of kings and Beastie Boys back in 1989.

It was the buoyant feeling of prom night, of having an infinite life ahead of you and the right girl by your side. Then his friends were calling to him - let's get out of here, dude. But he wanted to stay. Holly standing over him, where they'd left off the night before.

Holly was neither as tall and formidable as Jo nor as short and full as Nadia. She had the build of a cyclist. Her legs were sculpted and thick through the thighs and calves, her ass as firm as two volleyballs. He smiled into her waist as she leaned against him. Her smell was familiar and somehow also new, the smell of jasmine blossoms and another herb, nettles perhaps. The little new age bohemian even then, before it had become fashionable to go natural in high school. He remembered her thing with iced tea.

She pressed her weight fully against his lap, pinning him to the couch. Her wheat-thick hair was soft against his cheeks and over his face. Her skin was cool and smooth. He heard himself whispering in her ear, 'missed you so much . . . missed you so much . . .' over and over, stuck in the lingo of the adolescent and unafraid to plead with her.

Under her rocking movement and warmth and sweet spicy scent, his body responded and he tried to lift her up but her thighs were iron-clad, holding him down. Her hand closed against his crotch and squeezed. Her hand was cool, her grip exquisite. Her breath childlike, scented with milk.

He raised his hands to touch her neck and breasts and hips, but his fingers kept slipping through her hair. She was all hair and gossamer cloth, a shifting wisp he could not grasp.

She leaned back and maneuvered him inside. He sighed in surprise at how she was wet but somehow cool, even down there. She warmed with him inside and fell heavily back down upon him as her hips pushed forward and back, rolling, the fullness of her bush - different, thicker than he remembered - scraping his waist and the tops of his thighs. The physical sensation brought him another level closer to consciousness and she fucked him this way for a minute longer. The whole experience was a reminder of some recurring dream he had come to expect but never taken this far.

But thinking it was a dream always killed the dream and so he tried to deny himself further awareness.

She rode him, bringing him closer in a hurry and then paused, adjusted herself on top of him, grunting in anger and all at once he was awake, at home, in his marital bed. Fear like electrified water shot through his legs and snapped his back straight, but her hands pinned his arms to his sides and her full breasts pressed against his chest. The fear amplified the sensations - good and bad - tenfold.

He tried to see her face but her head was down, monitoring the point where they met, a triangle of black that opened and closed with a wet slapping sound he found erotic and disgusting. She gained substance before his eyes. Her dark form shifted from the ethereal to the clumsy and mechanical, driven by something other than love or even lust.

He struggled beneath her. She yanked his wrists up and planted his palms against her breasts, which were heavy and sheathed in white lace. They were fuller than he remembered, and her entire front was wet, hot with her sweat. He thought her injured; he thought of accidents and blood.

She moaned, winding him tighter. His mind bounced between fear and escape for another thirty seconds while inside her the muscles contracted and pulled. Her walls closed in. To this tension she added a rocking movement, forward and back, repeating the dual motion until he lost control. The sensation conjured a rope with twelve knots at six-inch intervals pulling out of him from his legs and spine through his cock, each knot detonating white flashes of blinding pleasure in his reptilian brain. Only when she was climbing away from him like a spider in the dark did he hear himself screaming.

She scurried out the door with one last fretful moan and her feet padded staccato-like down the hall.

Footsteps. This time he heard her footsteps.

Or thought he did.

Conrad sprang forward and heard his lower lumbar pop in at least three places. He tried to stand and was greeted by pins and needles from the waist down. He fell back into bed, his penis still lost in its own delirious spasm. Muscles shot, cold and shivering wet with her residue, he felt like a freshly shucked oyster, soon to be eaten.

'Why are you doing this to me?' he shouted, trying to laugh after.

No one answered. He sat on the bed listening, turning it over in his head, until he had nearly convinced himself it was another bad dream or a hallucination.

In the morning he thought of Nadia. Nadia had been here before. She even said she did not remember being here the day he bumped into her while Roddy was downstairs having a smoke. But she was just a kid. Would she really come to him in the middle of the night? Not likely.

The only other possibility - that it had been Jo, that she was watching him, toying with him - was so ridiculous that he convinced himself all over again it was a dream. He was lonely, sex-deprived. He had been through a bad couple of months. He might be having a nervous breakdown. It wasn't real. It was only a--