Edward Lee: Family Tradition

It wasn’t bad.

But most of the girls were short-timers compared to Jewel. Ninety-nine years? With no parole? Fuck that noise, Jewel concluded. Two DO’s had taken her and four other inmates out to 101 on a brilliant sunny Saturday. Pick Up Squad, they called it. They’d pick up trash along the road while the DO’s smoked and watched over them with shotguns. They were leg-ironed, of course, but when the DO’s got them back into the truck for some partying, they’d generally take the irons off. Jewel had been amazed at the expertise with which she’d sunk the sharpened popsicle stick into both of the DO’s necks during the second round of blow-jobs. They both fell back, blood bubbling from their holes. Five seconds later, all five girls piled out of the back of the truck, and that’s the last Jewel had seen any of them.

For a dumb junkie, at least, she was pretty smart. It wouldn’t be long before there was a state-wide dragnet out on them. And those other stupid slits? Fuck them. They’d be back in stir in less than twenty-four, singing like canaries about how Jewel did all the killing. Shit on ’em. With ninety-nine years, Jewel was not going back.

And she’d been right.

She’d run and run. Through woodlands so dense it was almost impossible to pass without a machete. And as the sun set, she found the shore.

She was standing on the shore of a sizeable lake, and in the middle of the lake—

An island, she noticed.

She grabbed a log and paddled her way across. It took over an hour, and when she got to the other side, she was nearly freezing. But this island looked like an overgrown piece of shit if there ever was one. No roads, no dwellings. It looked uninhabited, which couldn’t have thrilled Jewel more.

She slept for a while in brambles, then later, as the moon drifted high, she stomped her way for the middle of the jungle-like island. Not too long after that, however, she’d been discovered by the two huge reeking men, who seemed to be searching for worms in the moist ground.

Then…

Here Jewel was now, hands nailed to the floor and being clumsily raped from behind by the smaller and stinkier of her captors.

“Here she comes, Skinny,” the veritable ogre huffed. His dirty fingers reached under, pinching her clitoris, his fat hips pounding. “And there she goes—ooo, mama!” The cock continued to feel odd as it released its seed; the dirty hands squeezed her hips as the climax throbbed to its finish.

He popped out; Jewel felt warm sperm run down her leg, as if he’d just uncorked a bottle of it. Then the malodorous bulk behind her asked the strangest question:

“What they feed you skinny bitches up there at girlie prison?”

Jewel collapsed back to her stomach, the pain roaring at her hands. The man pinched the back of her thigh till she squealed. “Huh? What they feed ya?”

Jewel, at this lowest moment of her life, could scarcely comprehend the question.

He punched her right at the small of the back. More air sailed from her lungs. “Be that way, Skinny,” he said. Then he did something stranger than his question. He widely parted her buttocks, then sniffed. Then licked.

She could hear his lips smacking. “Hmm. Peas’n carrots? Meatloaf…with a little more meal than meat?”

Somehow, even through the shivering veil of her horror, her brain registered. He’s…right. Peas and carrots and meatloaf. That had been her last meal, the lunch she’d had in the dining hall just before she’d been taken out on Pick Up Squad.

“Fuck, skinny as you are?” the voice rumbled at her back. He got up again, went back to the counter. “What the fuck good are ya, huh? Like suckin’ a tiny piece’a meat off a toothpick. And I’ll tell ya somethin’ else. For a little bony gal, you sure got yourself one big pussy. Shit, Enoch could park his whole fuckin’ truck in that giant cooze on you.”

Jewel didn’t know what he was talking about and, by now, it clearly didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was back at the knife drawer. He’d already cut off her clothes.

What would he cut next?

The answer was not long in wait. Another sharp crane of her neck and she saw him take a foot-and-a-half-long ham knife from the drawer.

His reeking girth sat down right on her clenched ass, and with the knife he began sloughing wide sheets of skin off her back. The agony paralyzed her; she shuddered in place, a moth pinned to a cork board at the mercy of the entomologist.

Little mercy here, though.

It was the most deft skill with which he pared all of the skin off her back—a great single sheet. Then he did the same to her buttocks, then her legs.

Jewel quivered as if in low electrocution.

“Now let’s git your tummy,” her foul butcher remarked. All the fight out of her, the man yanked the nails out of her hands and flipped her over, then expertly flensed all the skin from her lower abdomen to her collarbones off in a single sheet.

Just as she was dying on the floor, her mind detected these few final words:

“Looks like it’s shad-row and scallions in crispy sesame rolls tonight…”

— | — | —

Chapter Two

When Sheree emerged from the steaming black-marble bathroom, all she wore was a bright-berry silk charmeuse-wrap. Her long sleek legs took her out through the sumptuous bedroom and across to Ashton’s office—not that he really needed one. He was a chef.

“Ashton,” she cooed. “I’ve got something for you.”

“Huh?”

Ashton, his long hair tied back to a tail behind his head, and his bearded face ever fattening, simply stared down at his lit desk. He was looking at a small, leather-bound book.

“I’ve got something for you…”

Beside him sat a glass of Medoc. He acted as though he’d barely heard her. Whatever it was in the book seized his total attention.

Jesus, Sheree thought. Is this guy a eunuch?

Sheree had been living with Ashton Morrone for three years. He was no stud—-for sure—but at thirty-five Sheree wasn’t getting any younger. Ashton owned what was critically determined to be the best restaurant in Seattle, The Emerald Room, on the waterfront, from which he bagged a cool $250,000 per year. Another $100,000 came from his weekly cable cooking show, Cooking With Ashton, and his culinary success had allowed him to purchase this Alaska Avenue waterfront penthouse. They were nice digs, and Sheree liked nice things.

But she also liked sex on occasion, but that didn’t seem to be terribly forthcoming from Ashton. Now, a hot stiffer in her pocket… Was that too much to ask?

Ashton was Number One executive chef in the city, but he was constantly worried about Number Two catching up to him. Hence, stress.

Hence, no boner.

“The best eel in the world,” Ashton muttered, staring at the book. “That prissy son of a bitch James got twenty pounds of it from some Capitol Lake fisherman in Thurston County and served it at his own joint.” The reviews had been monumental. And Ashton, left in the dust, had been overplayed in the local cuisine scene for the first time.

To Ashton, it was the equivalent of a normal man having his balls cut right out of his scrotum.

“Fuckin’ James—mincing snob,” Ashton muttered, referring to his nemesis, one M. Gerald James, owner of the lakeside Rococo Seafood House. “That motherfucker, he have his own tv show? No! Does he get the best reviews in town and four stars in Michelin’s? No! Then the scumbag gets his hands on twenty pounds of Crackjaw Eel—by total fluke— and he’s the hottest chef in the city!”

Sheree came around and rubbed his shoulders. “Oh, honey. James can’t make hash and eggs without screwing it up. He probably molests little kids. What are you so worried about?”