Watch This

thethemeis: An Unusual Ability

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   I had a friend who claimed he could make women orgasm just by thinking about them. It's a pretty unusual ability, sure, but I'd never seen any proof of it.

   The man was a compulsive liar. I remember clearly the time he told me that his father was an Inuit, a skilled fisherman built for freezing environments with a hide as thick as hippo's skin and fingers that could be as articulate as an Eton graduate's mouth. He told me this Inuit-turned-Brit father of his made his own clothes, mostly out of fabric from sofas on skips and the skins of animals that he'd found dead in the road. He said that you can move an Inuit into the big city, but you can't teach him to swim with the big fishes. He'll always be stuck in his ways, he said, because he misses the land of the snowy ground (apparently, that’s what they call Alaska) like an amputated limb. He told me that his mother had met her Inuit husband when she was the site manager at the oldest oil derrick in Alaska, drilling for the last drip of oil it could find. Staying at an Inuit village for the night, she'd huddled up to one of the locals and woken up with a bun in the oven. It was love at first sight. My friend claimed she went straight on working, and the day she finally gave birth, she was still wearing her hard hat and hi-vis jacket. 

   When I finally met his parents, when I lifted him to pick up some furniture to take to the dump for them, I was met with a small, round, bald Mancunian called Steve and his frail old wife called Ethyl. Ethyl was in a wheelchair; said she had been since she was twenty-three.

   Another time, he told me he’d met Bill Clinton at a work event. They were having their Christmas party, back when companies were allowed to have Christmas parties, and it was being held at a fancy function hall up in town. He said he was standing at a window looking out over the Thames, ‘watching the world go by’ as he put it, when he felt a tap on his elbow. Turning so suddenly that he nearly spilt his martini on his elbow-nudger, he found that his attention had been grabbed by none other than the infamous player-president. Bill was a charmer, he claims, opening the conversation with, ‘I saw your suit from across the room, and I couldn’t help but come over and compliment you on your sense of style.’ They spoke about everything from taste in women to debt consolidation, my friend tells me, before Bill had them both at the bar necking premium vodka.

   This might be believable, if you hadn’t seen my friend’s sense of style. He looks like he pulls his clothes on with his teeth, in the dark, after a heavy sniff of glue.

   If you point out the holes in the plots he weaves, your words fall on deaf ears. Selective comprehension blocks out all your protestations – he only understands what he wants to.

   And because he lies so often, I didn’t believe him when he told me told me he was disappearing. That night, in a dingy bar on the overlap between London and Shitter London, he said he was leaving the continent for good, and I just laughed at him. ‘Fuck off, Keith,’ I guffawed, ‘you’ve never been further than Portsmouth.’

*

   I suppose I should start from the beginning. He invited me to his flat, a one bedroom number in New Cross, to pick him up so that he could drink all he wanted. When I got there, the door to his apartment was ajar and the hallway outside stank of gin. I tried not to let my clothes touch the stained brown walls and I breathed through my mouth, as I pushed his door open and wandered inside his filthy flat. I didn’t have to look much further than his living room to find him, sprawled half on the floor and half on his sofa, covered in gin and dribble and pizza tomato sauce, straddling the line between consciousness and retardation. To be honest, after years of knowing him, I should have expected it.

   I prodded him awake. ‘Keith,’ I said, ‘you still up for the pub, or not?’

   ‘Fuck you, Smokey Robinson,’ he blurted, snapping out of his stupor and straightening up. I would have laughed if my gag reflex didn’t have such a violent hold on my throat. ‘Oh, it’s you. …Have you seen Cherry about?’

   ‘Who – or what – is Cherry?’ I asked, collecting the clothing and empty alcohol containers from his floor to assist in the clean-up operation, as he just sat there dazed.

   ‘A prostitute,’ he replied almost under his breath, murmuring as he lifted up pizza boxes and papers on his coffee table, as if looking for this whore under all his trash. ‘She was here half an hour ago, definitely.’

   ‘Of course she was.’ 

   ‘She was. Asleep on the floor in front of the telly, all foetal like. I woke up and had another go on her.’

   ‘Of course you did.’ 

   ‘She’d better not have taken my fucking wallet.’ His rooting around became more frantic.

   ‘Keith,’ I sighed, ‘stop lying and get in the shower. We need to get to the pub. I’m not wasting all night watching you sweat gin.’

*

   And an hour or later, there we were, finally in the pub. After two more gins, that’s when he said it.

   ‘Trust me, Aaron, this is the truth. Even if I didn’t have to go, even if they weren’t literally on my tail, I couldn’t stand being in this country any longer. The taxes, the job market, the media, the residents, everything about this country just grates on me these days. I’m disappearing. After tonight, you might never see me again.’

   I kept my eyes on the girl at the bar, the one with the thick-rimmed glasses and turtle-neck jumper. Her in the pencil skirt and the high heels, looking like she’d had a shit day at work. Given half a chance, I’d make it better for her. 

   ‘Where are you going? France? Germany?’

   ‘Fuck that. I’m going to the US. People like me blend into the scenery in the US. Somewhere like LA, I was made for places like that. They’d never find me there.’

   ‘Sorry… who? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Who’s after you?’

   ‘Who isn’t,’ he replied, sniffing and eyeing the room suspiciously. More of a statement than a question, despite his choice of words. ‘It’s the drugs, mostly. Bad deals, bad debt, bad lies I should never have told. Either way, if I’m not out of the country by tomorrow I’ll be dead by Thursday.’

   To be honest, the way he was living his life at the time, it wouldn’t surprise me if that one was the truth.

   ‘Have you ever read The Boy Who Cried Wolf? That’s you.’

   He laughed, clicking his fingers at the barmaid for another gin, despite knowing that that place didn’t do table service. ‘Aaron, you’re a prick. But I love you. And I’m leaving. Tonight. As soon as possible. Just say goodbye, please. Whether you believe me or not, just humour me by having this goodbye drink with me and pretending. …What are you staring at?’

   ‘What?’ My attention snapped back to Keith, like he’d caught my cock in a mouse trap.

   ‘That girl at the bar. You’ve been eyeing her up since she walked in. You’re like a dog that’s spotted a rabbit. My drinks nearly spilled, the way your erection propped the table up.’

   I laughed, shrugging off my reddened cheeks. ‘Shut up, Keith. No idea what you’re talking about. Carry on, what were you saying? Some bullshit or other.’

   He paused, just staring at me. My blush intensified, and a grin crept across his face like a caterpillar crawling across a leaf. All tooth and smugness, he downed the rest of his drink, ice and all, and said, ‘Watch this.’

   The slicing noise of drifting paper and the hard thump of dropped books distracted me, as the paperwork that my lady friend at the bar had been reading fell from her hands onto the beer-stained carpet below her stool. I wanted not to look because I didn’t want to focus on her again under his watch, but I couldn’t keep my eyes from her as her hand slapped onto the bar, drawing the attention of all seven punters in the room. Her breathing quickened gradually, that chest of hers heaving under the figure-hugging jumper as she gripped the bar for support. As her head threw itself back, flinging that shiny brunette hair all over the place, her legs uncrossed and the first groan fell from her lips, hanging in the air like Viagra for my ears. ‘Oh,’ she sighed, as her ankles curled to point her toes at the floor, ‘oh God.’

   Someone should help her, I thought. She’s having a heart attack!

   But then she groaned, ‘Oh, yes.’

   I sat there with my mouth agape, as her back arched and her sighs grew louder and louder with every passing second. Pushing her chest toward the sky, she cried out for God again as she ran her hand from her slender neck, down her gasping chest and across her stomach. The fingernails of her other hand scratched deep trenches into the wooden surface of the bar. ‘Fuck, yes,’ she cried out, at the top of her lungs, throwing her head around so the hairband that was holding her ponytail in place came loose and allowed some of her hair to escape. ‘YES!’ 

   She was having an orgasm. An intense, blissful, all-consuming orgasm that drowned her in pleasure and erased the world around her, as her insides exploded with delight and her muscles quivered uncontrollably. She was coming hard, and the world around her paused to watch.

   My breathing grew agitated to match hers as I kept my eyes glued on her, and she pushed a hand into her crotch to quell the feeling of ecstasy that was erupting down there. ‘FUCK ME!’ She cried. ‘FUCK FUCK FUCK OH FUCK YES DON’T STOP THIS IS THE BEST I’VE EVER – ’

   She screamed.

   And that’s when it stopped. Her legs stopped shaking, her back straightened up, and her breathing began to return to its normal pattern. Her intense orgasm abated, and the bar fell silent in its wake. 

   I’m not even sure she was embarrassed. To me, she just looked dazed. She bent to pick up her papers, and staggered out of the pub with them clasped under her thin arm. The rest of us replayed every filthy second of what had just happened in our heads, reliving the moment for just a while longer, holding onto the beautiful view.

   Still speechless, I turned back to Keith, and found that he had disappeared. 

   I haven’t seen him since.

The Cost of Saving a Life

thethemeis: Deception

theauthoris:  LiamD

She once told me that her biggest strength was her ability to deceive others.

It wasn't something I immediately agreed with; as madly infatuated as I was back then, I didn't think her capable of lying to anyone. Yet once the shroud of infatuation began to diminish and a deeper rooted, more rational love began to grow, I started to understand what she had meant.

When we were first dating she would never agree to come out on weekends in favour of tending to her father, whom she said was in ill health. Of course, I found this to be yet another endearing trait of somebody so kind and innocent as her and thought little else of it. She was also unkeen to rush into any sexual activity at first and our physical relationship moved very slowly because of it. But at the time I put this down to her innocent and chaste nature. In my eyes she was perfect. Any expression or action of mine that upset her was always a fault of my own and never an intolerance on her part. Some might say I was a fool in love, that I was safely under her thumb as it were. But the simple truth is she was the only person left alive that I felt strongly for - and how dearly I loved her.

We met shortly after I had finished university. Entering the freshers' year immediately after attending the sixth form college of my secondary school, I was easily entranced by my fellow student's cultures of excess drinking, drug abuse and promiscuity. I lived unashamedly; I was a single, open-minded adult with a lot of sorrows to drown and bad memories to forget. I'm sure by the time somebody reads this, that latter point will be old ground re-trodden upon. Suffice to say if you are unaware, my parents died when I was in the peak of my adolescence. If you wish to know any more on that subject, the information will no doubt be easy to find (and I daresay largely blown out of all original proportions by the tabloids) but it is not a topic I wish to go into now.

Of course, the excessive lifestyle eventually wore thin. By the beginning of the final year of the course I felt so unfulfilled with the disjointed mess my life had become that I came home from the university of Portsmouth without graduating. I returned home to work wherever I could be needed and after a few months of temporary jobs in exceedingly dull factories, I was offered a full-time position at the local branch of Starbucks. It was hardly the most glamorous work in the city but it certainly beat canning Coca-Cola for minimum wage. After serving all morning I would sometimes sit down and drink a coffee (an Americano, with cream and two sugars) myself before making my way home. It was on one of these afternoons during my third month of working there that she walked in and ordered her favourite Hazelnut Mochaccino and a regular Macchiato. If she hadn't sat down at one of the few tables in front of me, I may never have spoken to her at all. But surely enough, she sat just where I could see her and my aforementioned infatuation began in earnest, captivated as I was by her hypnotic green eyes and lusciously smooth black hair. I started conversation with her, most likely about her delightfully unusual drink. She was shy at first, but my desire to get to know this beautiful creature was stronger than any reluctance on her part. The rest, as they say, is history.

She came by the coffee house once a day to buy her poorly father the Macchiato he enjoyed so dearly. I marveled at how we had never seen each other before but she explained how she used to visit the neighbouring Costa before it closed down. Compared with the scantily clad females I had been used to fraternising with during my 'studies', she was a breath of fresh air and our early relationship blossomed quickly. She didn't like her father having visitors due to his condition, and that was a wish of hers I respected, if not fully understood. She didn't like to go into specifics regarding her father's illness and I could only assume he suffered from some form of mental illness with anti-social tendencies. It upset her when I asked her more details so I mostly refrained from doing so.


It took me six months to realise the full extent of her troubles.


When my birthday came around on January 14th, I begged her to come out to our local public house for a drink to celebrate. I am generally not a man of many friends, presumably because most of the people I have met feel an overwhelming responsibility when they discover my past. Similarly, I have always struggled to stay in touch with the few friends I kept from school and university. Thus, she was the only person in my life I wanted to celebrate my birthday with and ultimately she gave the impression I had made her feel so much pity for my lack of company that she was forced to obliged to come out for a drink just this once.

What followed that night was mostly harmless fun until we retired back to my flat for the evening. I admittedly drank more than I had done in the best part of a year that night and may have been slightly forceful with her when she told me (as per usual) that she wanted to wait until marriage before going further with our physical relationship. But any shame I felt later about unzipping her dress against her harshest protests would be immediately dispelled by the evidence I found upon her bare skin which documented her rich years of domestic abuse. The sight of the deep wounds in her back immediately sobered me and I, perhaps coldly, pressed her with questions about the origins of her hidden scars. She proceeded to tell me the whole story, between intense bouts of weeping. About how her father had been sexually abusing her for the majority of her life. About how he had beaten her mother to death. About how he had skilfully forged a document that told the world his raving daughter was insane when she attempted to report him to the police. She had now been covering for her abomination of a father for fifteen years, lying to everyone she met about how he was ill and needed her constant attention.

'No more!' I exclaimed to her, amid tears of my own. 'You're not going back there, we're moving away from this place for good!'. She gave me no response, but I could see from her face what she was thinking. She was psychologically bound to this man. She would never feel safe if she knew he was still around, still able to find us, I had to make sure he would leave her alone.

'Okay,' I said, after we had both calmed down. 'Take this, just in case...' I handed her my flick knife, more of an heirloom than a weapon in my mind, but it was large and still sharp and could seriously wound an aggressor if needed. After showing her how to extend the blade safely, we made our plans for the morrow and rested for the long day ahead.


The neighbourhood was quiet as we walked towards the door of her familial house that morning. I slid her key into the lock as quietly as I could before slowly edging it open. We attempted to stay silent but as we crept through the yellow-walled hallway a loud creak of the decaying floorboards betrayed our presence.

'Uurrrrrh,' A wheezy, aged groan emanated from the living room. I gave in to the rage that had been slowly building into a crescendo of hate for this monster who had ruined my beloved's life and I charged into the room to meet him. What I saw sitting on the chair checked most of the boxes against the perverted child abuser I had imagined him to be. Her father was thin, lank and though his greying hair was combed over,   hewas clearly balding. His teeth were mostly yellow, in some cases completely brown, and protruded at various angles from a mouth that constantly drooled. The upper half of his body was covered by an old green jumper that was riddled with holes and questionable stains. Above the blue slippers upon his feet were grey trousers also stained around the thighs and groins with a deep unsightly brown colour. I was pondering on this and all the disgusting things he had put his family through when he noticed me. His eyes widened and he attempted to thrust himself towards me..

'You... CA-!' I interrupted him mid-sentence with a hard punch to his face. It connected well and I felt his brittle jaw crack as a necessary pain flared in my balled fist; I had never learned throw a punch properly.

'You are disgusting!' I was screaming at him, throwing more punches, barely restraining myself from beating him to death. 'How could you do it, to your own family? You SICKEN me!'

I finally stopped, in fear of killing him. The old man was sobbing in his chair, quivering like a small, frightened animal. I suddenly felt an uncomfortable mix of satisfaction and guilt, but remembered my reasons and what this monster had done.

'You will leave her alone, do you understand?' I had managed to calm myself down by this point and spoke to the old man in calmer, more reasonable tones. 'We are leaving and if you ever try to come and find us, I will kill you'. He nodded between his mucus-filled sobs and once I was satisfied he had understood, I briefly entered the kitchen to wash my hands of the old man's blood. I had barely dried them on their dog-themed tea-towel when I heard her scream.

Running back into the living room, thinking myself a fool for leaving him alive, expecting the worst, I found her standing over her father's chair with my bloody flick-knife, her face white in shock.

'He lunged at me... I didn't know what to do...' Her father sat dead in his chair with a glazed look in his eye, a profusely leaking wound around the area his heart would be.

We had cleaned the place as best we could. We had to stay another day before we were satisfied there was no evidence of any bloodshed or our being there at all. Driving away from London on the M3 I felt like a complete fool, having found nowhere to effectively hide the body but the boot of the car. I still think it a miracle that we were not caught that day. Once a safe distance, we stopped at the most obscure, unmarked wood we could find and I buried her father using a shovel we had taken from his own shed. We drove on, unsure of ourselves, praying he would never be found, that we could live happily thereafter, no questions asked.

I drove us to the apartment I was still renting in Portsmouth by the canal in the Gunwharf Quays - it was the only place I could think of to go to and I could only hope it would put us far enough away from the crime scene. Once we had arrived at the flat, we collapsed onto the double bed, exhausted. I looked into her green eyes and in spite of everything that had happened, couldn't help but smile. She smiled back at me and pulled my head towards her. Suddenly she was kissing me confidently, intimately. I pulled back, startled and confused.

'It's ok,' she said calmly. 'I think I'm ready now'. This time, when I attempted to take her clothes off, she gave no resistance. Sometimes I still wonder what she thought at the time but for myself there is only one word that can describe the love we made that night: perfection.



The next day I awoke in a state of confusion. I was sitting in the living room with no recollection of getting out of bed. I was acutely aware of a dull pain in my legs and arms.

'Good morning darling!' A familiar, yet somehow strange voice greeted me. I looked up to meet her eyes, shuddering as I realised the implications of what she held in her hand.

'I gave you some pain killers, quite a few in fact, and they'll help for a while, but I wouldn't try to stand if I were you.' I looked down to my thighs and recoiled in horror at the deep red stains below them slowly turning an off-brown.

'Why?!... I saved you...' my voice was hoarse, I was stunned, reeling from the situation I had not expected to find myself in. Of all the things I had expected today - the police sirens, an interrogation, a prison sentence - this certainly wasn't one of them. 'Why would you do this...'

'Oh darling, can't you see? It's because I love you! I've always loved you.

'Daddy never understood, he killed Mummy and thought that would be the end of it, but he didn't know Mummy had shown me how to look after him.' She took off the t-shirt of mine she had slept in and turned around as she blindly scraped the dripping knife across her back. She moaned with pleasure as the blade punctured the surface. 'One for me...'

Guessing what would come next, I tried to move but my legs seared with pain and I unhappily realised I would be rooted in this position for some time. I tried to covered my face with my arms as the knife cut deeply into my right cheek but they too were immobile and I screamed out in agony.

'There, I knew you'd like it, we can do this every night. Now, I'm going out to get us some coffee, don't go anywhere will you?'

She skipped out of the apartment and left me in the chair, trying to figure out how I could get away.

That was twelve years ago. I have long since given up hope of escape. I don't know how she's keeping me alive, and I sometimes wish she wouldn't, but I'm always far too weak to attempt to move, even if she didn't insist on cutting the tendons. I feel too weak to even call for help. There is no telephone; I didn't use a landline when I lived here all those years ago and I even if my mobile's SIM still works, she has hidden or destroyed it.

So no, I no longer dream of escape, I now dream only of death. Sometimes I think of her father sitting in his old blood-stained chair. I think of the disgusting green jumper he wore, and of the ones just like it that she has bought for me over the years. I wonder if he was happy when she finally killed him, if he still harboured thoughts of escape or if he had been driven too mad by his deranged family to care.

She came back with the coffee, it has become a regular occurrence. The skin on the right side of my face is blistered badly from where she pours the hot liquid directly onto me. Sometimes she is unhappy with the results and boils the kettle for another round. I cherish the days that she doesn't. She has taken to working in the local hospital. Sometimes I wonder if the document proving her insanity was real or, alternatively, if it even existed at all.

Recently she has started seeing somebody else. He's young and handsome, and she sometimes meets him outside the Quays by the canal. She looks shy but comforted around him and I'm not sure what she has told him about me, but from the way he looks concernedly toward the window I can only guess. I wonder if he will be the one to put me out of my misery, or if he will be too chivalrous to reveal her scars.

Most of all, I wonder if she has warned him in the covert way that she warned me, I wonder if she has given him any clue at all. For over the past thirteen years, one thought has recurred to me again and again.


She once told me that her biggest strength was her ability to deceive others. I wish I had believed her.