Feature Writer: Silvio Stoker

Feature Title: TAKING CARE OF KAREN

Story Codes: M/g, Pedo

Copyright: (C) 2000, Silvio Stoker. ALL Rights Reserved

Author’s Notes: ‘Hi… how are you?’ It was December, but Karen would still go out, dressed in a cheap parka, fake wolf fur around the ill-fitting hood, threadbare cords, red rubber boots. She would walk up and down the alley, or play in the vacant lot when it snowed. He took her picture when she returned, and sometimes he ran out the door so that he might pass her on the stairs. Joel had been practicing for weeks. “Hi, how are you?” His voice shook . This story is a work of fiction

 

TAKING CARE OF KAREN

Karen Weeden was born under a bad star, but the child was so different
from her parents, and later from the men her mother took as lovers, that
Joel sometimes thought of Karen as having fallen from some far-fetched
heaven, or as having been sired upon the slutty parent by some cosmic
mistake, by some handsome wayward deity who had suffered a momentary lapse
of taste in selecting an earthly womb.

Joel Brown lived below the Weedens on the third floor of the dilapidated
four-story building, his apartment level with the El. The trains no longer
disturbed him, but the Weedens did. He didn’t complain about their
violence, being meek, but he was often awakened by Sheila’s screams and
Karen’s father’s besotted voice, the sound of fists and slams, thuds, moans
and miserable wails.

That Karen did not lose her soul was probably due to her father’s death
when the child was four, and for a couple of years after his demise the
Weedens’ apartment was comparatively calm. Sheila, a curvaceous creature
with silicone implants and frizzy hair of an indeterminate hue, came home
with a different man every month or so. Some stayed a week or two, others
days, a few until she found the next one and drove the previous catch away.
Once the woman even tried to seduce Joel, drunk, in the stairwell, and
stopped speaking to him for a time when her mild-mannered neighbor fled in
disgust.

Karen was seven when Joel Brown started to stare. He was usually
excited by older girls, nine or ten, eleven and even twelve if they weren’t
yet in bud. A morose and even an ugly man of forty-six, with an unkempt
beard the same bricky color of his thin and oily hair, Joel would often go
to the lake to ogle prepubescent girls, terrified that they would notice
his furtive gaze and laugh at him. One afternoon at the mall, a gaggle of
pretty young teenage girls had noticed Joel’s piercing stare, and the
eldest of them had pointed at the hideous man who so obviously dared to
lust after them. They had tittered and jeered, and Joel had run away to
consider suicide, cowering in his apartment for weeks afterward, ordering
pizzas and beer and dying of shame. Such accidents happened less
frequently with girls who weren’t yet in puberty, who were less likely to
know what dirty thoughts lurked behind his surreptitious but intense gaze,
and perhaps that was why he had lowered his sights to ten-year-olds.

He could see Karen from his window, without her seeing him if he stayed
in the shadows, half hidden by the heavy curtains. She would often play in
the courtyard, sometimes alone, sometimes with the two other girls who
lived in the building or the Billington boy from across the way. Several
times he saw the seven-year-old’s feet, and in late spring she began to
wear tights, dirty white things that reminded him of long underwear, the
outline of her little crack perfectly clear.

Sloe-eyed, with skin the hue of semen and thick sable hair down to the
small of her back, a slightly upturned little nose and an obstinate mouth,
the poor child fascinated and obsessed him. He bought a camera with a
telephoto lens, struggling with the need to jerk off as he satisfied his
desire to immortalize Karen’s innocent but already strangely pathetic
poses. She seemed more vulnerable than other children, dreamier,
dangerously fragile… fragile, and yet not, as if she were somehow
unbreakable; she was defiant, too, sometimes seeming to possess a trace of
the spiteful, and she seemed older than the other girls her age, serious,
now and then almost like a little lady, self-possessed. Self-taught, Joel
learned to develop black and white pictures – it was rare for the old dog
to learn anything, but he was too scared to turn in the films at Walgreen’s
– and soon he had hundreds of photographs of young Karen Weeden, close-ups
of her skinny butt, of bare alabaster skin where her T-shirt had ridden up
her slender waist, of her delicate hands and dainty feet, of her playing
with the Billingtons’ dog, naïvely lying on her back as if she were doing
something nasty, the black lab between her skinny thighs.

Karen’s toilet training had gone awry. She was scared of the dark, and
her father hadn’t replaced the fluorescent tube in the bathroom for months.
The child had held her poop in, and he’d spanked her after her accidents,
taking her across his knee while sitting on the pot. When she started
trying to be good, her poop had splashed her with cold toilet water. She
hated the cold and the dark, and the bathroom was a terrifying place where
her daddy had hurt her.

She was six when her mommy started to punish her. It didn’t happen a
lot, because Karen hid her soiled underwear, but when Sheila caught her she
had dragged her to the bathroom and beat her, rubbing the filthy panty in
her daughter’s face. Karen kept going in her pants, wearing no underwear
when there wasn’t any, and one night, when she went in bed, her mother
stuck a thick pencil in Karen’s poophole, slapping her between the legs
until she went pee.

By the time she started kindergarten, Karen had learned to wash her
panties and hold it in for a really long time. It hurt when she went poop,
but her accidents were rarer.

It was autumn when Joel saw her mess her tights. She was seven and a
half, her mysterious eyes like molasses. Joel watched her playing with a
girl named Sharon, a first-grader who had become a kind of tomboy, and the
Billington boy. The courtyard was otherwise desolate, and his photographs
were getting better, her fabulous body almost mystical against the
burnt-out grass and boarded-up windows of the slum. He regretted the
angle, desperate for pictures of her ethereal face.

Another girl, Teresa, joined them. They were pretending to cook
something, putting mud and pebbles in a broken kettle, when Karen began to
back away towards the other side of the building, which he liked because it
let him catch her face. She had a strange expression, straining, her
little body utterly tense. He saw her pale skin turn scarlet, her nostrils
flared. Suddenly she seemed to be in orgasm. Karen closed her eyes and
grimaced as a huge turd squeezed through her spastic anus. She staggered
away, going in a circle around her playmates, her hand behind her back, and
Joel realized what had happened. Some feces had slid down her leg as she
cupped her little butt, and the sepia wetness had seeped into her tights.

“Potty pants! Potty pants!” Sharon began the chant. “Potty pants,
potty pants!” The others joined in.

Joel put down his camera, trembling. He heard the girl climbing the
stairs, passing his apartment door, and then he heard her wail as Sheila
caught her by the arm and dragged her into her horrible home. Karen’s
screams thundered in his head. It was like when he’d been laughed at on
the beach, staring at a pretty thirteen-year-old. He imagined rescuing
Karen, running away with her to some wild place where no one could ever
hurt them.

He covered his ears as Sheila beat her daughter. The man who lived
across from the Weedens was deaf, and the apartment across from Joel’s had
been empty since a kitchen fire. No one would help Karen. He cried,
listening to her punishment. He would never punish her. He would worship
her and make her happy. Joel began to jerk off as the noises died down.

After that, Karen didn’t play with Teresa and Sharon anymore. They
teased her whenever she went into the courtyard, and the seven-year-old
would wince and walk away. A week later, Joel put his camera in a shoulder
bag and followed her. He couldn’t stand to be without her, masturbating to
his latest series, staring at the eerie expression she’d had when the
accident happened.

She went into the alley along the El tracks. He walked past her, trying
to act casual, and saw her slip through a fence that surrounded a vacant
lot. Joel went around from the other side. The overgrown lot was behind
an abandoned dry cleaner’s, and the graffiti-covered fence there had fallen
in several places. The building was gutted, and Joel climbed inside,
stepping through the shambles towards the gaping hole that had been the
back door.

He was scared. She had never seen him taking pictures. Karen would
recognize him, though. Joel stepped through the opening, saw her, and hid
behind the portal. His little love was playing in a mud puddle, alone. He
peered at her with one eye, hiding in the shadows. She didn’t see him, and
he grew bolder. The child was fifty feet away, near the fence she had
crept through. He watched her play, then played with himself. She looked
so lonely, squatting barefoot by the muddy water. Joel ejaculated, then
took more pictures. She never looked up, lost in her own world, talking to
herself.

Some days there were teenagers in the gutted building and he couldn’t go
in. Karen could hear them, too, and would peer through the gap in the
fence, frightened. Joel was scared, too, scared that something would
happen to her. Other days, Karen would go to the playground on Sheridan
Road, keeping away from other kids. Her mother didn’t seem to supervise
her in any way. Mrs. Billington, who lived across the courtyard, would
drive Karen home from kindergarten, where her son was in second grade.

Joel tried to pass his beloved in the stairwell, his heart beating hard
when he came close to her. She usually avoided his gaze, but he was near
enough to smell her, to see her soft white skin. He found the guts to say
hi, and the child looked at him, nervous. He could hear her ‘hi’ even in
his sleep, and in November he recorded it, ‘hi,’ playing it over and over
as he studied her pictures, finally making a loop of the tape.

‘Hi… how are you?’ It was December, but Karen would still go out,
dressed in a cheap parka, fake wolf fur around the ill-fitting hood,
threadbare cords, red rubber boots. She would walk up and down the alley,
or play in the vacant lot when it snowed. He took her picture when she
returned, and sometimes he ran out the door so that he might pass her on
the stairs. Joel had been practicing for weeks. “Hi, how are you?” His
voice shook.

“Fine, thank you… how are you?” “I’m fine…” He wanted to say
something more, but his voice caught in his throat as she paused, three
steps below him, then hurried past.

One day while she was at school, Joel took bricks from the floor of the
abandoned dry cleaner’s and filled most of the gap. He was terrified of
getting caught when he took pictures of her or jacked off. Once he almost
was, a couple of teenagers coming in while he watched Karen make angels in
the snow. There were two rooms, though, and he slipped out the side door,
also a hole. The vacant lot was between two brick apartment buildings, but
neither had windows on that side – there must have been another building
between them, long ago.

“Fine, how are you?” “I’m fine, Karen.” He said her name for the first
time, a week before Christmas. He’d heard it so often when she had
playmates. Joel was worried that she would wonder how he knew her name,
but she didn’t.

During Christmas break, she spent most of her time outside, even though
she was obviously cold. He would go to the dry cleaner’s as soon as he saw
her leave, almost safe behind the bricks. He didn’t care that her body was
hidden in winter clothes because sometimes he could get her face. Then
some other, older kids started to play in the vacant lot, and Karen didn’t
go there anymore. She went to the playground for a few days, but the
children there picked on her, and Joel had to follow her to find out where
she was going.

Sheila had invited a drunk to live with her, a lean ex-con with lupine
eyes, and Joel saw him touching Karen. It frightened him. The man – he
had heard Sheila call him Bill – would hold her little hand sometimes,
walking through the courtyard, and Joel could tell that Karen didn’t like
it. Maybe it was because she didn’t like any of the men her mother slept
with, but Karen seemed strange with, even stranger than she had been
before. Joel imagined Bill doing terrible things to the child and
considered calling the police. Sometimes he crept up the stairs to listen
at the Weedens’ door, but it was hard to hear anything except the
occasional fight between Bill and Sheila.

One afternoon Joel took pictures of her coming through the courtyard
with Bill, later making a montage – getting rid of her surrogate father and
putting himself in his place – and Karen Weeden looked up at his window.
Karen saw the camera. Joel froze, but she didn’t look upset and didn’t say
anything to the drunken creep whose hand she held. She didn’t smile, but
when he blew up her upturned face he could read – or it seemed that he
could read – a timid interest or even subtle invitation in her eyes, the
distance between her and her mother’s boyfriend taken up by a tension he
thought he could see even in the grainy picture.

Karen had started going to the library. When it was closed, she
wandered through alleys and along the El, but when the library was open,
the child would go to the children’s room and read. Joel felt
uncomfortable about going in there, sitting in the reference section
instead, sometimes able to glimpse her through the glass doors, sitting on
the pillows on the floor, reading Dr. Seuss. He thought about pretending
that he had a daughter or son, but was afraid that Karen would wonder what
he was doing there. She seemed so aware of everything around her, even as
she seemed to inhabit a crystal ball, afraid of anything that came close to
her… except him. She wasn’t afraid of him, was she? She even made eye
contact sometimes, on the stairs, awarding him a weak, forced smile. Her
little mouth was coralline, the lower lip nearly twice as thick as the
upper, often chapped in the severe weather that swept over the squalid
community without surcease, blanketing the broken sidewalks in snow that
soon turned the color of Karen’s excrement.

“Hi, Karen! How are you doing?” He had slipped out of the library after
her. It was dusk. She must have had to be home for dinner. “Hi,” she
answered, unsmiling. “I’m fine, thank you… how are you?”

“Very well, thank you… are you… walking home?” “Yes,” she said.
“It’s almost dinnertime.” She was an exceptional child, her voice the
opposite of her vile mother’s, and Joel almost swooned. “So am I… my
name’s Joel,” he said. “Joel Brown… you visit the library often, don’t
you?” He was deathly afraid of frightening her.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Brown,” she said, and took off her little red
mitten to shake hands with him, shyly staring at the snowy path to
Sheridan. Joel almost came in his pants, taking her hand, still warm from
the library. Did they teach them this at school? He couldn’t imagine
Sheila Weeden shaking anything except her tail. The kid wasn’t even eight
years old! “I like… Dr. Seuss,” she said, then fell silent, looking
down at her rubber boots.

“Shall we walk together?” Joel hardly ever talked to anyone. He had a
small inheritance from his father and had been a hermit since his mother
died, leaving him her insurance money.

“Okay,” she said, looking away, and they went up the path to the busy
street. He was too excited to say anything, and she was a quiet girl.

“Well, have a nice dinner then,” he finally said, opening the door for
her. “Thank you… you too!” She ran up the stairs, flushed.

Joel jerked off into the night, remembering her touch, not even taking
out the pictures. He restrained himself from following her the next day,
careful, and didn’t even run out into the stairwell when she returned. The
day after that, though, he caught her on the stairs again. “Hi, Mr.
Brown… how are you?” He looped the tape. /’I’m fine, Karen… how are
you?’ Over and over again: ‘I’m fine, too… have a nice evening.’

In January, he intercepted her at the library twice. Bill had become a
permanent fixture, and Karen seemed sadder. Joel saw them together every
day, and the drunk had started picking her up at school. Joel hated him.
He listened at the Weedens’ door and was almost caught. He heard nothing.

Karen and Joel didn’t talk until February. He ‘ran into her’ on
Sheridan, anticipating her dinnertime return, and asked her how old she
was.

“I’m going to be eight… next month.” He longed to touched her, and
wished she would shake hands with him again.

He got his big break soon after Karen’s birthday. He had left the
reference room to use the drinking fountain and peek into the children’s
section when he saw the sign asking for volunteers. ‘Friends of the
Library.’ Joel trimmed his beard, got new glasses, and presented himself to
Mrs. Tillinghast. She recognized him, the nervous man who read the
Britannica and different almanacs, but had never paid attention to Joel.
Mrs. Tillinghast was delighted by his signing up, and soon Joel was
shelving books and performing other menial tasks, sometimes in the
children’s room.

Karen grew prettier with each passing day. She was comfortable at the
library, as if her bubble was bigger there, and sometimes seemed like a
girl of nine or even ten as the gossamer of self-possession slowly veiled
her delicate face. He greeted her when he worked there, the eight-year-old
arriving in the afternoon to lie on the brightly colored pillows and read,
the books becoming more difficult, taking off her rubber boots and looking
around before she settled in, her socks often wet because the snow was
deep, sometimes with holes at the heel or toes, outgrowing her cords, her
ankles visible if the socks were short.

She sucked her thumb sometimes, blushing when he saw her, and now and
then he could tell that she was constipated, her movements tense, her dark
eyes nervous as she turned on her belly and clenched her little butt,
Karen’s slender stomach obviously slightly bigger even under her sweaters,
most of them too tight. The seat of her tight corduroys was often worn,
and sometimes her sweater would ride up, an inch of her pale back unveiled
under the hem of her undershirt. She would squirm obscenely, then look
around to see if anyone was looking, furtive, as if she were writhing in a
dirty fog.

It rained a lot in April and was unseasonably cold. She wore a yellow
slicker and sometimes went to the vacant lot when the library was closed,
the other kids having found another place to play. Karen would stand by
the fence or walk in circles, killing time.

One Monday afternoon when it was pouring, Karen took shelter in the
gutted building, and Joel was trapped. He hid in the shadows of the other
room, then heard her grunt. He didn’t dare move because the floor was
littered with glass and nails other detritus. He rubbed himself through
his pants, then heard her leave.

Joel saw her yellow slicker slipping through the fence and found her
feces. The long turd was the hue of Karen’s eyes, steaming in the cool
air. It was as thick as kielbasa and as long as the girl’s forearm, curled
in the shape of a croissant, narrowing at one end, the other darker, like a
drawing of a storm cloud. It stank as if she had eaten fish, and around it
were dirty Kleenex she had used to clean herself. He lifted one and
studied her snot, then sniffed the streak of feces, jerking off. Joel
tasted the turd and took pictures of it, fixing his pants and fleeing when
he heard someone step into the other room.

Her waste was bitter, like nutmeg and rot, but he felt as though he had
been there, almost a part of her. He went home and developed the pictures,
shaking.

Joel went back to look at it the next day, greenish-gold beetles
crawling along the drying excrement. He thought sadly of how she would
age, perhaps to become like her mother. But she couldn’t. He knew she
wouldn’t. He wanted her suspended in time, hovering above the surrounding
squalor like a little angel, his angel, immune to the vagaries of desire…
immune, yet responding to his, his desire was different, wasn’t it, he
would protect her, he would keep her from the filthy earth, teach her how
different she was, his, he would hold her so that her soft feet would never
have to touch the ground, sweep her away…

Then he went to the library, staring at her as he shelved some books,
then greeting her, careful not to attract Miss Gibson’s attention. The
children’s librarian had seemed to notice his preoccupation twice before,
and Joel had been very frightened, no longer trying to catch Karen when she
left.

In late May the weather turned nice, and one day, a Saturday, Karen was
wearing a dress. It was new, and Joel seethed with jealousy, figuring Bill
had bought it for her. It buttoned down to her slender waist, pleated like
a skirt below her narrow waist, puce. She wore patent leather shoes open
from above the toes and pink socks, and her expression was different, or he
thought it was, tinged with a slight conceit, still sad but already more
mature.

In June there was another argument between Bill and Sheila, and Joel
heard the words distinctly through the radiator, even without climbing
upstairs: “You leave her alone,” Sheila shouted, Karen screaming as if in
agony, and the next day Bill carried boxes to a U-Haul. Joel got a bottle
of champagne and drank it by himself, staring at the photographs of Karen
and her feces.

When she wasn’t wearing the dress, Karen went to the library in shorts
and cut-offs, changing after school, and after school let out she had gone
into day care. He followed her often, and once she saw him near the day
care center, but she was getting used to seeing him.

Karen looked miserable and Joel often saw her crying. He couldn’t
understand what was wrong now that Bill was gone, but the child often
looked tragedy-stricken. Sheila was drinking hard and sometimes spanked
her. Joel curled up into a ball when he heard the awful noises, heard her
hurt his darling. Still, there was something in Karen’s face that even
frequent spankings could not explain, unless Joel Brown had developed such
a subtle empathy for Karen that he could no longer tell what troubled her,
oversensitive, memorizing her every feature until he saw her as clearly at
night as he did when he actually gazed upon the troubled girl. Her face
was bruised sometimes, once after the argument that had meant the end of
the evil Bill.

After a neighbor picked her up from day care, Karen would go to the
library. In the second week of August, when Joel had been stalking her for
more than a year, Miss Gibson asked to speak to him. Terrified and
trembling, Joel met his superior after the library closed, ready to run and
drown himself in the lake or get a gun and put it in his mouth. She was in
her late twenties, pretty despite her efforts to hide her alluring but
nervous body and strawberry blond hair, the disturbing intensity of her
deep blue eyes softened by the thick rectangular glasses she wore.

Mrs. Tillinghast, who donated her time to many of the volunteer
program’s activities, had been ill a lot lately, Miss Gibson said, and she
wondered if Joel would like to read to the children on Saturday afternoons.

Joel was in ecstasy. Only five or six kids attended the reading
sessions, and Karen was always among them. He had never had the guts to
attend, and now he would be near her, not talking to her but her listening
to him, looking at him…

The first Saturday, she was wearing the dress. Karen sat at a distance
from the other children, but in her element she seemed almost stuck up
instead of afraid, her skinny white legs shifting on her pillow when her
attention drifted, which was rare, her eyes meeting his as he read from
_The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_, Joel trying to divide his looks
between all of the listeners.

Miss Gibson was there, too, and complimented him afterwards, keeping him
from pursuing Karen.

The following week Miss Gibson asked him to watch the desk while she did
some things in the storeroom. He sat and pretended to read, gazing at
Karen. The girl caught him staring, and the next time he looked, she had
been looking at him. The eight-year-old had the half-conceited mien that
he had seen when she first wore the dress. She was wearing khaki shorts
and a loose cotton tank top, light blue, pink ankle socks, and a string
around her neck that must have held her house keys. He’d heard her letting
herself in when Sheila wasn’t home. Her mother sometimes left her alone
all night, even.

They both looked away, but their eyes met again a minute later, and she
held his gaze for the briefest of moments. The child’s face flickered with
seductiveness for a second, eerily adult, the dark eyes vertiginous, then
darting away. Joel felt like he was falling, and he couldn’t take his eyes
off her, imagining the keys hanging against her washboard chest, the book
blocking his view.

As if she had divined his thought, Karen turned on her stomach, putting
the book she was reading on the pillow before her. She tucked the keys
back into her tank top and the loose cotton sank under their weight, away
from her chest. Karen was a naughty girl. She glanced up at him, her eyes
suffused with shame but coy nonetheless, then pretended to read, fidgeting,
rubbing one foot against the other, then slowly clenching her buttocks,
aware of his stare, tense.

Miss Gibson returned and almost caught him… them; Joel was certain
that Karen’s movements had been deliberate. She had tucked the keys under
the tank top to show him her chest. Her eyes had held whole worlds of
horror and desire, like tiny fetishes in aspic.

Joel didn’t masturbate that night. He was deathly afraid. He had meant
to fantasize about her, to make fodder for his fantasies and follow her,
photograph her, tape her tiny voice… but he had never imagined actually
doing anything to her. When he jerked off he thought about touching her,
kissing her naked body, changing her soiled underwear and washing her,
Karen nervously touching him, curious, his penis, scared… helping her,
teaching her about her beauty and his love for her, about how his penis
stiffened because he loved her…

Had Bill corrupted her? Anger coursed through him like an acid. He
still loved her. He would always love her. He had to get his hands on
her.

On Saturday there was a severe thunderstorm. The library was almost
empty, and only Miss Gibson, Karen, and a second-grader with myriad
freckles came to Narnia. Mrs. Tillinghast’s husband called as Edmund was
lost to delicious evil, a catalpa having fallen on their garage. The
reading was interrupted as Miss Gibson agreed to take Mrs. Tillinghast’s
place in the reference room, and Joel was left alone with Karen and
freckle-face.

Karen was wearing the dress and her pink socks, and the second-grader
didn’t pay attention, finally wandering off to look at the Goose Bumps
series so popular with television children.

Karen and Joel both got nervous, the eight-year-old only a few feet
away, sitting Indian-style on an indigo pillow, avoiding his gaze as he
continued to read. Joel got a hard-on and held the book so that Karen
couldn’t see, trying to concentrate, not looking up until he couldn’t stand
it anymore.

The child was hugging her knees, her eyes frightened but her face a
parody of female need, almost feral, obviously displaying her crotch.
Karen’s cotton panty was narrow enough for him to see a hint of rosy skin
at the very edge of her vulva, the white cloth printed with little violet
bouquets. She crossed her feet, two toes sticking out of a hole in her
left sock. Joel couldn’t breathe, and neither could she, shivering.

Joel looked over at freckle-face, but the second-grader was engrossed in
a stupid book. Then he looked back at Karen, who had shifted her legs,
crossing them and fixing her dress. She had tears in her eyes when she
looked at him again.

Joel kept reading, lying down on the bright red pillow beside her as
nonchalantly as possible, as if he were tired, leaning on his elbow and
turning the page. Karen lay down, too, less than three feet away, facing
him, breathing hard. When their eyes met, the eight-year-old seemed
relieved that nothing terrible had happened. They understood each other.
She knew that he knew that she had done it on purpose, that she was testing
him, seeing if he wanted to see. He did. He wanted more than anything to
touch her, and struggled to stay in control, his mouth dry.

She saw the bulge in the gray tweeds he had bought for these readings,
and Joel could smell her fear. Fear, and recognition – she knew what it
was. She knew it was for her. Karen twitched as warm urine gushed from
her peehole, squeezing her legs together and squinting as her sweet face
was suddenly twisted into a terrified grimace, then started to sob.

Freckle-face looked up from her book, trying to figure out what was
wrong, the man lying by the weird little girl. It was scary, and she hid
behind a shelf, hoping her mommy would come.

Joel was petrified. He saw what Karen had done, and glimpsed the
second-grader disappearing behind the shelf.

Karen sat up and tried not to cry, hyperventilating like she had before
her mother’s boyfriend fingered her pissy hole and played with her botty,
whispering dirty things to her and telling her to touch it, rubbing it
against her tummy or even her trickle until the salty stuff squirted into
her cunny or across her face. He had made her put it in her mouth once
while she rubbed it, crying, the mattress soaked with her pee, telling her
how pretty she looked. Karen had choked on his come, but then he had made
her feel good, playing with her poophole until she wasn’t sure if she hated
him anymore, hurting, sniffling, his semen running out of her nose, his
finger in her botty until it was really warm and she felt like she had the
runs, squirming, her face against the soiled bed as her mother’s boyfriend
frigged her, chewing on the filthy sheet and finally howling as he wiggled
the finger and diddled her slit, Karen holding her cheeks apart like he
told her to as steamy spasms seemed to sweep up her spine, her sphincter
squeezing the finger as Karen felt like it had slid into her tummy, a water
moccasin on a spit, and her stomach cramped and he pressed on her clitty
until she thought she would pee but got hot and sticky instead, wiggling
her butt while he laughed at her and rubbed her cunny, then held her and
stuck a pencil in there, hurting her hole. He took it out and put her on
her back, then started to put his thing in her trickle. Karen tried to
scream, retching, and felt the bulb fill her wet little opening, then push
in and out of her until it only hurt when he pushed it against her hymen.
She thrashed against the bed, and then there was nothing for a few minutes
but pain, her cunny empty, his hands on her calves and ankles. Suddenly
she felt something in her poop hole, like what squirted out of his thing
only cold, and then her botty was burning, only she was drowning, jerking
like a little frog, then limp, then drifting back to feel him gripping her
ankles and fucking her bottom hole, slowly forcing his cock into her colon,
her butt hanging over the edge of the bed, then him going out like a fire,
in again, stabbing her, out, in again and out, in and out, deeper and
deeper until the pain made her puke, faster and faster until Karen was
carried away by an undercurrent of utter agony, breathless, the thing
throbbing inside her until it spewed warm semen into her intestine and
Karen wailed, arching her back and bucking in ecstasy at the sudden
wetness, his thumb on her clitty, her head back and her eyes rolled up
toward the roof of the world.

The beautiful library swam before her eyes as Karen Weeden felt the
urine soak her dress in front of Mr. Brown. She whimpered and stared at
nowhere through her bitter tears, the one place where she could breathe now
ruined, flooded with her shame.

Then the man touched her. She whined and spread her legs, almost
delirious, but he wasn’t touching her like that – he was putting his tweed
jacket between her thighs. Joe was flushed, shaking. He steeled himself,
rose, and went to the reference room. Miss Gibson was alone.

“Miss Gibson,” he said in a low voice. “I’m afraid Karen… one of the
listeners… has had an accident.”

“An accident?” She clutched the edge of Mrs. Tillinghast’s desk.

“I mean… she wet herself,” Joel explained. “She… she seems very
embarrassed, and… well, perhaps you could call a taxi and take her
home?”

“I can’t leave the library, Joel! What’s wrong with her?”

“An accident,” he muttered. “Well, then, maybe close the children’s
section and I’ll accompany her… a taxi…”

He was terrified that Miss Gibson would think he had caused the
accident, that he had done something wrong. He _had_ done something wrong.
He felt sick.

“I suppose I must,” Miss Gibson said.

Freckle-face was standing in front of the pillows, staring at Karen as
if the miserable girl were a freak of nature. Miss Gibson shied away from
Karen, and Joel fumbled with the phone. There were no taxis, the
dispatcher said; it was raining hard and the wait would be half an hour at
least.

“Miss Gibson… maybe I’d best walk her home… the storm, and…
and… and there aren’t any taxis!”

“Yes, do,” Miss Gibson said. “But do ask her parents to call me…
I’ll have to make a report, you understand; the regulations are very
particular.”

Karen stood, holding the jacket in front of her and staring at the
floor. He gave her her shoes, touching her shoulder reassuringly, and found
her slicker. Karen put on the shoes, sobbing, and he helped her into the
yellow raincoat, taking his jacket away.

“Goodbye for now, then, Miss Gibson.” He was almost as embarrassed as
Karen.

“See you soon, Joel…” Miss Gibson hesitated. “That was very nice of
you, to give her your jacket. Very… chivalrous.”

He blushed, then led the child from the room.

Karen clung to his hand, confused. Mr. Brown was like her kindergarten
teacher, Mr. Culling, who’d shouted at her when she sucked her thumb and
spread her legs. Mrs. Billington had been late picking her up from
school, and Karen had thought that Mr. Culling wanted her to be dirty for
him. That was before her mommy brought home Bill, when her mommy was with
a man named Ken Scarpelli. Ken showed Karen how to be sexy, but he never
touched her, and she liked showing off for him even though he sometimes
said nasty things to her. Mr. Culling said nasty things, too, but he
didn’t want to look at her. Later her mommy caught her showing Ken her
cunny and beat her up. Ken went away.

She didn’t show it to Bill at first, but she always felt weird when she
was alone with him. Then he made her strip. Bill called her dirty, but he
wanted her to be, or sometimes he did… that was confusing, too, and
Karen didn’t know what to do. Bill made her play with her trickle and
rubbed his thing, asking her if she wanted to touch it. She was scared of
it, of him. He showed her pictures of nasty little girls and told her she
was just like them. He said her mother would strangle her and put her in
the garbage if she found out. She didn’t know what strangling was, and he
squeezed her throat. She peed herself, and then he took her kitten and
strangled it in front of her. He threw it in the garbage and played with
Karen. It hurt and she hated it. She hated him. He laughed at her.

He kept telling her how sick she was and how he was the only one who
knew. Her mommy called her sick sometimes, too, less often now that Karen
washed her soiled underwear and didn’t have accidents too often. Bill
started making her feel good even though he hurt her and she felt awful
afterwards.

Then Mr. Clampitt found out that Karen was sick. He was the accountant
at the day care center, and Amy Clampitt, who was in charge of the younger
girls there, was the man’s daughter. One day she took Karen to her
father’s soundproof office. He was really old and smelled like mothballs.
Mr. Clampitt locked the door and told Karen to take off her clothes. His
daughter watched her, too. Karen tried not to pee, trembling, and he told
her that she was beautiful. He asked her who did things to her, but Karen
knew she couldn’t tell. Bill or her mommy would strangle her.

Mr. Clampitt caressed her, then kissed her. Karen had never been
kissed. He told her she was very special because most little girls didn’t
like to have sex. He made her feel good even though Karen knew that sex
was sick and wrong. He put a blanket in front of a soft chair and had her
kneel and bend over. Then he licked her, her trickle and her botty. She
was embarrassed, then went crazy, the pleasure too intense for her until he
put his penis in her cunny. He was much smaller than her mommy’s boyfriend
and sort of soft, but Bill had never tried to put it deep inside. Mr.
Clampitt took her from behind, taking her virginity and ejaculating in the
child’s vagina. It hurt horribly, but even so she felt a strangely
pleasurable ache when he seeded her, and even pushed against him to get his
semen deeper into her cunny. Karen cupped her buttocks, whimpering, used
to her mommy’s boyfriend’s cock there.

Instead, Amy Clampitt licked her, sucking her father’s seed from Karen’s
cunny as Mr. Clampitt took pictures. She had soft hands and played with
the eight-year-old’s nipples, then caressed her and tongued her back and
arms. Karen wiggled her butt as it became too intense for her, and Amy
tied her wrists to the chair. Karen let her, trusting Miss Clampitt’s
young fingers, and gasped when she felt her sore little gash being opened
again. It didn’t hurt as much the second time, but Karen realized that the
penis was a stranger’s, that it wasn’t Mr. Clampitt’s. She couldn’t see
whose it was, and she was frightened, but Amy kept caressing her, then
kissed her and fingered her botty, Mr. Clampitt’s camera clicking and
whirring, and then the second man squirted into her cunny hole. Amy
tongued her slit again, then gave her a deep kiss redolent of sperm,
diddling her. The third man was much bigger, but he was careful and
Karen’s vagina had dilated.

Mr. Clampitt and his friends fucked her all afternoon. She wasn’t sure
how many there were. Sometimes she thought she remembered the feel of one,
but she was very sore and the longer they screwed her the less certain she
was. She thought it would go on forever, Amy softly stroking Karen’s
buttocks as cock after cock filled her cunny with come.

Then she was alone with Amy Clampitt. The woman took her to the
bathroom in her father’s office and put ointment on her vagina, then gave
her a letter. ‘Give this to the man who does things to you,’ Amy said.
‘Or something terrible will happen.’ Karen was dazed. Her crotch felt like
a wound. She asked Amy what would happen, and Amy made Karen tell her
everything about Bill. Then Amy said that if Bill didn’t strangle her, Mr.
Clampitt would.

Karen gave Bill the letter, oblivious to its contents. He went nuts and
hurt her, but it didn’t feel good. He would have killed her if Sheila
hadn’t come home early, and the next morning he moved away.

Mr. Clampitt and his friends used her once or twice a week. Sometimes
there were other girls there, their daughters or a couple of the kids in
day care, and Karen learned what she was. At first they were nice to her,
at least when she took her clothes off and after they raped her, but then
Mr. Clampitt told Karen that her holes weren’t pretty anymore. Karen and
an eleven-year-old named Nicole were whores who were only used when the
Clampitts and their friends molested girls whose holes were too little for
the grown-ups’ penises. They would pose and beg while the men played with
the prettier, younger girls, and Karen stopped crying, repeating what they
taught her until it was hard for her to tell whether she wanted to say
those things or not, looking into the video camera and talking about how
much she needed them.

Too young to contemplate suicide, Karen went crazy, and after a few
weeks she needed to be hurt. The pain lessened and she sometimes got
little orgasms, especially in her botty, and now and then she was left
alone with Nicole.

The redhead told her secrets. Nicole said that Karen was still pretty,
that Mr. Clampitt and his friends were bad men who couldn’t love little
girls because they hurt them. They didn’t like girls who liked sex because
they didn’t really like sex. Nicole told Karen that her other boyfriends
didn’t hurt her. They gave her things and made her feel good, they took
care of her, they were careful when they needed to make love.

Karen Weeden suffered under the weight of these many mysteries, and
Nicole’s secrets touched a nerve, the sensitive mental membrane in certain
prepubescent girls, usually a year or two older than Karen, the tender caul
that makes a young girl erotic. Nicole was gorgeous, Karen slowly
realized, not just a hole like Mr. Clampitt said she was. She was the
kind of kid that needed to be raped at a very early age, a whore-child.
Karen wanted to be like her. They made out, too, until Amy Clampitt caught
them. The accountant’s daughter was a victim. Karen tried not to be a
victim, thinking about Nicole’s soul when Mr. Clampitt and his friends
abused her. The eight-year-old had had a revelation: the Clampitts and the
other rapists hated them because they weren’t ruined. Remarkably, the
child was still alluring, despite her damage. She survived the afternoons
in the accountant’s office, and by August Karen Weeden was transformed –
she had transformed herself – as if her wounds had been repaired with a
perverse and precocious femininity.

Drunk out of her mind, Sheila didn’t notice what had happened to her
daughter – or, if she did, she didn’t care. When she’d caught Karen with
Ken Scarpelli, displaying herself, Sheila had blamed it on her boyfriend.
But when she sensed that Bill was having sex with her daughter, she began
to blame Karen.

Still, fate and poverty conspired against the Clampitts. Unable to pay
the bills, Sheila enrolled her daughter in a different day care center at
the beginning of August, and Karen Weeden spent her days in a squalid but
innocuous building with children who hated her and adults who pitied her as
if she were a stray.

Karen clutched Mr. Brown’s hand. Joel opened his umbrella and led her
up the path to Sheridan, almost empty of traffic. The storm was terrible,
but Karen wasn’t scared. She wasn’t scared of very much anymore, or she
was permanently scared, scared of everything. In the month that had passed
since her mother had taken her away from the Clampitts, Karen had been in
constant turmoil. Her young body had recovered somewhat, but she sometimes
couldn’t concentrate, and her mommy hurt her more when she was without a
man. Karen sometimes forgot what she was doing, and she had accidents when
Sheila yelled at her, peeing, and then her mommy would put the wet panty in
her mouth and whip her. Sometimes it made her trickle wet, and sometimes
Karen got excited for no reason, or when grown-ups looked at her, or around
certain kids.

She loved the library, but she got wet there, too, a lot, especially
when she was constipated, and then she couldn’t concentrate and read the
same sentence over and over. She didn’t play with herself, she just ached,
and once she came when she went poop in the restroom there.

Even so, Karen was a very bright girl, and she was soon reading at a
fifth-grade level. She dreaded September, though, when she would begin
first grade. The kids from the courtyard picked on her, and she was so
full of secrets that she was sometimes afraid she would burst, or be
crushed like a doll beneath their terrible weight.

She began to notice Mr. Brown’s stares when he started to say hi to her
in the stairwell, and she wished he would look at her more. He seemed to
want to, like the old janitor at the new day care center, only Mr. Brown
was different. He worked at the library, and so he was part of her other
secret world, the one where nothing hurt and everything ended happily ever
after. His eyes weren’t like the others’, either, soft somehow, even if
they were piercing, even if they seemed to be undressing her sometimes.
When she said hi to him, Mr. Brown’s eyes would stop undressing her, and
then she would get confused, wondering if she hadn’t been mistaken. Maybe
he was like Mr. Culling? But Mr. Brown wouldn’t call her a dirty little
whore, she decided. He was afraid, like the janitor. Or maybe he didn’t
really want her? What if he only wanted to look at her, like Ken Scarpelli?

She hoped Mr. Brown was like the men Nicole had told her about. She
daydreamed about him giving her things and making her feel good. She got
carried away, imagining him marrying her mommy and taking care of her when
her mommy wasn’t looking, only her mommy would happy, too, and they would
live in the library with Miss Gibson and lots of cats named after the
children in Narnia…

Now she had ruined everything. She had struggled not to cry or pee in
the accountant’s office, imitating Nicole, and half of Karen was a fairy
tale… she wanted things to be wonderful even though she couldn’t quite
imagine what wonderful was, or – when she was really sad – whether she
would like it, if it was wonderful, whether wonders were not the same as
sleep. Karen had wet herself in Narnia. Mr. Brown had acted like the
nice grown-ups at the new center and not like he wanted her at all.

She clung to his hand and walked with him, holding back tears as the
hard rain beat against his big black umbrella. Her soaked panties were
plastered to her bald pubis, the urine irritating her trickle. Karen began
to cry, and Mr. Brown put his arm around her shoulder. It made her feel
more secure, but it made her feel bad, too; it felt like the grown-ups at
the center made her feel, ashamed of her dirty little cunny, the girl’s
slit still sticky from his stares. Why had he wanted to look at her?
Maybe he hadn’t? Or maybe she wasn’t pretty, like Mr. Clampitt had said?

Joel’s heart pounded as he put his arm around her, feeling her delicate
shoulder through the slicker. She was just like he’d imagined her,
devastated, trusting. They needed each other, like father and daughter.
Lovers… He ran his fingers through her hair, already damp with rain,
then touched her face. Karen held her breath, getting tense like she
always did when grown-ups needed to rape her, wet and nightmarish, as if
her brains were being used to mop up the slime in her astral body and then
wrung out above her bright little mind. It was hard to walk, his fingers
brushing her ear, then her neck. Karen tried to concentrate on the
sensations between her legs like Nicole had told her to, not on getting
hurt, taking deep breaths.

They had reached Jarvis, and Joel took the shortcut along the embankment
of the El, relieved that she didn’t protest. They were alone. Karen bit
her lip as her gash got soggy, her botty moist and warm.

“You have such pretty hair, Karen,” Mr. Brown whispered, his voice
hoarse. But he kept walking, his hand on her shoulder again. “Did you
like the storytelling today?”

“Yeah,” she whispered, struggling to stay calm. “Yes, th-thank you.”

“I like reading to you,” he said, clearing his throat. “What are you
reading now?”

She couldn’t remember. “Oz,” she lied.

They went around the corner to their building and through the courtyard.
He took his hand away, and Karen felt abandoned, fighting back tears. He
held the door for her and unlocked the inner one. Then they were in the
stairwell.

“Karen,” he said gravely, reaching his floor. “You have to ask your
mother to call the library, okay?”

“Yes,” she said, then started to sob.

Suddenly he hugged her. She puled as urine ran down her leg, clumsily
lifting her raincoat and dress to show him her pee place, crying. Joel
trembled as he saw her bare thighs, Karen standing two steps above him,
then embraced her, trying to calm her down.

“Ssshhhh, honey,” he whispered. “It’s okay… is your mommy home, do
you think?”

“N-no… she…” Karen cupped her cunny through the wet cotton.
“F-fuck me,” she whimpered. “Fuck me…”

“Karen!” He was shaking. “Karen, stop it!”

Joel unlocked his apartment door and pushed her in, terrified. What if
someone had seen them? The eight-year-old leaned against the old coats
hanging in her neighbor’s hallway, weeping.

Joel picked her up and carried her to the bathroom, then ran water in
the tub. He took off her slicker, breathing hard. She saw the bulge in
his tweeds and shivered.

“Karen… why don’t you take a bath… and… and hand me your dress
through the door, and your… panty, and I’ll wash them, and then you can
go home and not tell your mommy. Okay?”

She nodded, dazed. Joel left the door open a crack and glimpsed her
naked body as she handed him the clothes. He staggered to the kitchen and
opened the washing machine, then yanked his cock out and jerked off,
sniffing her panty, tasting her pee, coming almost instantly, ejaculating
into Karen’s rumpled dress.

Joel couldn’t think. He put the clothes in the machine and poured four
fingers of whiskey into a tumbler. What could he do? Talk to Sheila?
Call Miss Gibson and tell her… what? He decided to do nothing. He
drank and transferred her dress to the dryer, her words revolving in his
head. ‘Fuck me… fuck me…’ But the dirty words were not for him! They
were… were they what Bill had taught her? What had he done to her?!
Joel wanted to kill the lean drunk and slutty Sheila Weeden, to… … …
How could anyone hurt the girl? How could they? Joel Brown imagined
scattering the mean kids who had made fun of her before her, carrying her
through the courtyard, his princess… ‘F-fuck me…’ Where had she
learned that word? How did such a word dare enter the shell of her
delicate ear?

Karen Weeden sat stiffly in the deep water of the claw-foot tub and
tried to contemplate the situation. Nicole had taught her to meditate, but
Karen rarely got past contemplation. It was hard though, much harder than
getting lost in Narnia. She was too young, and what she had to contemplate
was too profound. She suffered from a sort of psychological glaucoma, as
if she had to tunnel through everything that happened to her, most of it
terrible, trying to breathe, to get to the softer soil of sleep. But even
there the men would find her, and Karen would wake up screaming, slick with
sweat, ghostly hands strangling her, a spectral penis stuck in her little
throat. She wet the bed, and sometimes she played stinkfinger until the
ghosts went away, stroking her slit and sticking her finger in her botty.

Karen had only recently begun to be seductive again. She remembered Mr.
Culling calling her a whore, and she hadn’t tried to show anyone else, not
unless they were going to rape her, not until the janitor started staring
at her. Nicole had told her that nice men wouldn’t want to rape her right
away. Something happened though. Karen felt like she would suffocate when
she saw the bulge in his pants. She wet herself, waiting for him to punish
her, holding the hem of her dress up around her hips, peeing. The black
man looked down the hall and said something, but she couldn’t hear, as if
the tunnel had collapsed, urine trickling down her trembling legs. Someone
was coming and the janitor slipped away. Karen dropped her dress and ran
to the restroom.

Now she had done that in front of Mr. Brown, at the library, and Miss
Gibson had seen her, and she could never go to the library again. Karen
cried, then let the water out of the tub. She loved the library. She
couldn’t even think about what she’d said to Mr. Brown. ‘Fuck me…’ It
was what she’d said in the movie with the Clampitts and Nicole, what Nicole
said, what all of the girls there said. And Mr. Brown had said ‘stop it.’
Why did he look at her then? She was scared of her mommy… but Mr.
Brown was washing her dress. Maybe her mommy wouldn’t find out? She loved
the library so much!

Joel knocked on the door. She didn’t answer, and he opened it a crack,
trying not to look at her, putting a towel her clean dress and panty on the
toilet seat. “Here you go,” he said. “I’ll make some hot cocoa for you,
okay?”

“Okay,” Karen whispered. “Thank you…” Mr. Culling had taught her to
be polite, and she liked it, pretending that she was a girl in a book.
There was a turn in the tunnel and Karen tried to be good again, climbing
out of the tub and drying herself, opening the drain. She loved hot cocoa.
Her mommy bought her Nestlé’s Quick, but there was almost never any milk.

Joel had a second whiskey, making her cocoa – Hershey’s, a pinch of
salt, sugar… He was very nervous. He had to call Miss Gibson. He was
afraid of Miss Gibson. He was afraid of everyone, even of Karen…
especially of Karen.

The child came in so quietly that he spilled some cocoa, barefoot,
holding her breath. She tried not to look at his crotch, standing in the
doorway of the kitchen, staring at the floor, her tiny feet white against
the linoleum, scuffed avocado, so tense she was scared she would snap,
embarrass herself again… Joel pulled out a chair for her and her
exaggerated politeness kicked in, she had to pretend – she had to act like
she did at the new day care center, sitting down, stiff, his hand so close
to her for a second, his groin… she liked make-believe, liked getting
lost, it was easier than thinking about getting hurt, about bouncing up and
down on a big fat cock, bucking like crazy, trying to get it to squirt in
her butt so that it would stop hurting… Karen didn’t know what to do
with her hands until he handed her the cup of steaming cocoa. The
Clampitts had her keep her hands behind her back, or sit on them, or they
held them when she was in a squat, in pain, pain that got worse after the
fleeting pleasure of feeling a penis fill her rectum and throb, her body
going rigid as it started to spurt, gasping, then bleating and shaking her
little tail, milking it, getting it to go deeper, her rectum suddenly
desperate for the warm slime, moaning and moving up and down on the wet
shaft, slippery then, needing it, whining when they lifted her and put it
in her mouth until her mouth got filthy and the feelings focused there…

“Did you have a nice bath?” Joel avoided looking at her, afraid she
would do something nasty again.

“Yes… thank you, Mr. Brown.”

“I’m going to call Miss Gibson,” he said. Karen clutched the hot cup.
“I’ll tell her your mom wasn’t home… then I’ll ask your mom to call
her… we’ll… I’ll make up something, okay?”

“Thank you!” Karen felt light-headed. He was being so nice to her, like
a man in a storybook, and he was nice to her even though she’d been so bad.
She wanted to hug him. No one ever hugged her, and sometimes she even
wanted to be raped only because she needed to be held.

Mr. Brown called the library. Miss Gibson said that she couldn’t file
a report until she heard from the parent, but he promised to get a note
from Sheila and take it to the library in the morning. Chivalrous. It was
only then that he started to consider not returning Karen, just for a
second… but Joel couldn’t make the leap. He couldn’t even make the leap
from masturbating in front of the photographs and his visions of her to the
actual girl in his kitchen. He had to pretend, too. He pretended that she
wasn’t really there.

“We’ll tell your mom that the library was closed because of the storm…
she just has to say I brought you home.” Joel realized he was asking the
child to lie. “I mean… well, it’s just a fib,” he said, sitting down at
the table with his whiskey.

“We can tell her… what happened… if you want,” Karen said quietly.
He was just like the man at the day care center, not the janitor but the
ones who always treated her like a pet, a poor pet.

He looked at her. Karen was on the verge of tears again. “No,” Joel
said quickly. “I don’t want to… I just… well, I didn’t want to ask
you to lie.” He stared at her long wet hair, at her stubborn yet submissive
face, her soft flesh almost translucent, like onionskin, her dark eyes
suffused with dread, her lips parted, then at her feet, hardly longer than
his hands from their rosy heels to the longest toes, slender, the muscles
of her legs taut, her thighs as thin as his upper arms… “You’re so
beautiful, Karen,” he whispered.

No one had ever said that to her. Karen blushed, confused. “Th-thank
you.”

“What time do you think your mom will be home?”

“I don’t know…” She sipped her cocoa as it cooled. “Will you… will
you come upstairs with me, when she does… please?”

“Sure… should I make some dinner maybe? Or order a pizza?”

“Yeah!” She brightened suddenly, almost overexcited. “Would you?”

“What do you like?”

“Mushrooms… and pepperoni!”

Joel called a place he liked on Howard Street and considered asking her
to the living room. The kitchen seemed safer somehow… the living room
had a sofa… He poured another whiskey, then changed his mind and took a
beer from the refrigerator.

“I guess school will be starting soon,” he said, pouring the Rolling
Rock into a glass, though he usually drank from the bottle.

“Yes,” Karen answered sadly.

“Do you like school?” What could he talk about other than her beauty?

“Not really,” she said, avoiding his gaze. “Maybe it’ll be better…
I’m going to be in first grade.”

“Oh? I thought you’d be in second by now… and you read such
difficult books.” She stiffened. “What’s wrong… Karen?”

“I… I can’t go there now,” she said, her lower lip trembling,
fighting back tears.

“Of course you can! Everyone has… accidents, Karen. No one will
even remember. I’ll be very disappointed if you don’t come to my
storytelling hour… you’re my favorite listener!”

They talked about Narnia, and she relaxed a little. Joel didn’t. He
yearned to take her into his arms, awed by her every gesture, by her eyes,
sparkling at last through her sadness, by her smell… the pizza came,
overwhelming her delicate odor, and he hardly ate, watching her, her mouth.
She was ravenous, and had eaten four slices when they heard her mother
return.

“I guess I have to go,” she said, dimming.

“Yeah… get your shoes… I guess… I guess you can leave your
socks here? I’ll wash them for you, and maybe… you could come over
tomorrow?”

“Yes!” She almost hugged him, but was scared to.

They went upstairs, her going first. Sheila was smashed, and glared at
Joel when she opened the door, remembering his rejection, so long ago.

“Mrs. Weeden… your daughter… the library closed, after the
electricity went out. I… we’ll need a note, saying she’s safe.”

“Oh.” She went and got a pen and paper, shoving Karen in front of her,
then leaning against the door. “Who’s we?”

“The library… I work there. I’m a volunteer.”

“Who do I write it to?”

“Miss Gibson… the children’s librarian.”

“Okay.” She scrawled a thank you and handed it to him. “Thanks for
taking care of her… did she give you any problems?”

“No! Not at all! She’s… she’s very nice.”

“Yeah, right.” He said bye and turned to go, but she called down after
him. “Hey… if you think she’s so nice, maybe you want to watch her
tomorrow night? I’ll be back late… I could pay you something… not
much.”

“Sure… you don’t have to pay me. I like kids… don’t really have
anything better to do.”

“Cool… she usually stays at the library till it closes. I’ll just
tell her to ring your bell then… what was your name?”

“Brown… Joel Brown.”

“Thanks! Thanks a lot!”

Joel finished the whiskey, alone and pensive, worried, then drunk, then
crawled off to bed very early, looking forward to Sunday as he never had
before, and scared, too, scared to his very core.

He took the note to Miss Gibson as soon as the library opened. The
librarian was wearing a charcoal skirt and black pantyhose, a hint of lace
showing through her starched white blouse where it wasn’t covered by her
blue silk jacket, the bra unnecessary because she barely had breasts.
Anemic and frail, awkwardly tall, Miss Gibson stood close to him as she
thanked him, and slowly Joel realized that she seemed to be interested in
him.

He had been with women before, in college, intellectual types, but they
hadn’t been as interesting as Miss Gibson. The librarian had the body type
he had longed for before he began to be obsessed with young girls, that of
a starved gazelle, but Joel had always been painfully shy and only slept
with women who seduced him through long and tortuous friendships, most of
them messed up like he was, hung up, bad in bed, vacillating between
frigidity and a meaty joy that made him wilt. Miss Gibson had no meat on
her bones, and she took his mind off Karen for the first time, the thrill
of maybe being seduced by a woman again mixing with ancient terrors and a
paralyzing shyness.

She was shy, too, and weird, and Joel decided that the children’s
librarian might even be a virgin. Were there really such things?
Cloistered, perhaps? Miss Gibson said goodbye and Joel felt as though he
had sinned, thinking of someone other than his love in such a way.

Karen was not a virgin. He knew that now, but he couldn’t bring himself
to think about it. It was a gray day, though it didn’t rain. He bought
another bottle of whiskey on Jarvis, really with an ‘e’ this time,
Tullamore Dew, anticipating his beloved’s visit. Baby-sitting… he would
be baby-sitting her. How strange. He spent the day walking, reading
mysteries, cleaning his apartment, washing her socks after sniffing them,
the urine different a day later… and she arrived early, while the pink
socks were spinning in the dryer, at four in the afternoon. She was
wearing the dress and sandals, no socks.

“Hi… my mom says… well, she told me to come here.”

“Hi Karen! Come in… I’ve been expecting you… only I wanted to get
some videos and didn’t have a chance yet… do you want to come with me
and pick a movie?”

It was so nice to be with her in public, now that he had a reason to
be… her mother’s permission. They reached a busy street and Karen
automatically took his hand, then flushed when she realized that she maybe
shouldn’t have, how unfamiliar it was. Joel’s heartbeat quickened, and he
held her clammy little hand all the way to Blockbuster, in bliss. She
picked _Escape from Witch Mountain_ and _The Black Stallion_, and she took
his hand on the way back to their building. Joel made popcorn and they sat
on the couch, almost two feet of Naugahyde and the bowl of popcorn between
them, nervous, Karen sipping Coke and her neighbor his whiskey, straight,
watching Disney.

After the first movie he ordered pizza, and they ate it on the sofa.
Karen kicked off her sandals and crossed her legs, aware of Mr. Brown’s
stare, the plate in her lap. She wasn’t hungry. It was hard to breathe,
and she hadn’t gone potty for three days. She had bad stomach cramps and
she kept thinking about Mr. Clampitt playing with a four-year-old while
she and Nicole begged to be fucked, Amy Clampitt holding the camera and
kicking them if they stopped wiggling or begging, the four-year-old crying
when Mr. Clampitt tried to fuck its cunt, then fucked in the ass, not deep
but hurting it before he buttfucked Karen hard and fast, then Nicole, the
redhead grunting in agony and need while Karen diddled her… Karen wanted
to feel like that, like Nicole did, clawing at her little titties as Mr.
Clampitt ravaged her rectum, squeezing her throat. Nicole said men were
nice to her, but Karen knew that the eleven-year-old liked what the
Clampitts did to her, or part of her did… the redhead hadn’t pretending
anymore when he butt fucked her, and Karen knew it ’cause she fingered
Nicole’s wet slit, rubbing her clitty.

“Excuse me,” Karen said, putting her plate with its half-eaten slice of
pepperoni and mushroom on the coffee table and going to the bathroom, aware
of Mr. Brown’s eyes on her ass, the puce dress clinging to her behind.
Bill’s dress. He’d been nice to her, too, not always only hurting her.
Was that what Nicole meant by ‘nice’? Karen wasn’t sure what ‘nice’ was;
it couldn’t mean Mr. Brown, he wasn’t nice, he was just there, like a
kindergarten teacher. Why had he wanted to look at her? He had, hadn’t
he?

Karen climbed on the toilet backwards, barefoot, lifting the dress, and
went poop. She was horribly lonely after the hurtful pleasure, tinkling,
wiping herself. She was three years younger than Nicole. It was much
easier for her to understand the redhead than it was for her to relate to
kids her age, though. Everything that was hidden had seemed mysterious,
then scary, and now it was painful. What girls and boys had under their
clothes, what was in her botty, what happened after kissing, what happened
where no one could see. She was there, and she could see… but was she
really there? What happened with what she saw? Lost in such metaphysical
speculation, the eight-year-old flushed the toilet and washed her hands.
What if there was a Narnia?

Joel was drunk. He could sense that Karen didn’t want to eat the pizza.
She didn’t want to watch the movie, either. He had to talk to her… but
what could he say? The girl came back, gloomy, and Joel looked at her,
speechless. Then he got up and popped _The Black Stallion_ into the VCR.

Karen Weeden fell asleep, curled up at the other end of the sofa. Joel
covered her with a knitted blanket and drank, looking at her sleeping face,
her mouth open. Then he got the camera and took some pictures. After
midnight, Sheila knocked on his door, and Joel touched Karen’s shoulder,
rousing her. The child screamed. It curdled his blood. Karen regained
her composure. “She’s like that,” her mother said, swaying in the
stairwell, talking about her as if she wasn’t there. “I don’t know what to
do. I wish I’d never had her.”

Joel said nothing, seething. Sheila thanked him and led her daughter
upstairs.

Monday morning was strangled by his heavy hangover, lambent, and Joel
swilled El Pico at a place called the Farolito, huevos rancheros, a Bloody
Mary, more El Pico, then turned his jacket in at the cleaner’s – the scent
of Karen’s urine was very strong on the third day – and walked to the
library. On Mondays he had to shelve books in the children’s section – had
to, wanted to – but Karen wasn’t there. In vino veritas must refer to the
morning after, Joel thought, the look of the world after a mock death, as
if the universe had undressed. Karen wasn’t there.

Miss Gibson had gotten contacts. Joel could tell that she had done it
for him from the way the librarian looked at him, too timid to be
seductive, too intellectual, terrified of rejection. She really was very
pretty, Joel thought, not quite as pale as Karen, like white chocolate,
luminous, lanky. Her bright blue eyes had lost some depth as she swam to
the surface, condescending to display her delicate beauty, seeking a mate.
The straight strawberry blond hair she had always tied back in a ponytail
flowed over her tense shoulders, shimmering. She had no freckles, and Joel
studied the soft aureate hairs on her skinny arms, the blue veins on the
hairless underside when she reached for a book. Miss Gibson was wearing
the expensive silk jacket again, stiff, cyan, tapering at her slender
waist, buttoned this time with two dozen tiny buttons, and a hyacinth
skirt, white stockings, pumps. She wore no jewelry, and hardly any
make-up. She didn’t need it.

She looked like she would cry when he didn’t compliment her, then
realized that Joel was eyeing her and returned his gaze like a painfully
shy schoolgirl. There was something pathetic about her, and it emboldened
Joel. The more he stared at her, the younger she seemed, submissive,
strangely girlish. Before he left, he approached her and asked if she
would go to dinner with him. Miss Gibson was trembling.

“Yes,” she answered in a tiny voice, staring at the pillows where Karen
had peed.

“Is… is tonight… too soon?” Joel hadn’t asked anyone out since
college.

“No… tonight… tonight’s fine… will you meet me here?”

“Yes… I don’t have a car, though…”

“I do… the Kia… six then?”

“Yes, six… I’ll see you then, Miss Gibson.”

She brightened as though she had passed through some ordeal. “You can
call me Ashley,” she said with a nervous smile.

What had he done? He again felt that he was betraying Karen, and went
to a bar, not wanting to drink at home where he would definitely get drunk
before going to meet Ashley. He got drunk anyway, drinking a lot of coffee
before returning to the library. The redhead noticed and winced. They
drove to a Thai restaurant and ate, talking about books and drinking Singha
beer, which went to the librarian’s head, and Joel found himself violently
attracted to Ashley. She was twenty-eight and had gone to the University
of Chicago. She acted like a frightened teenager, and Joel noticed that
Ashley did everything he said, ordering what he suggested, almost scared to
speak if she disagreed with him about a book, waiting for him to tell her
what to do. He’d never led before, and liked it. Leaving the restaurant,
he asked if she would be able to drive; he didn’t have a license. With her
body weight, she was tipsy after a couple of the strong beers.

“I don’t know… what do you think?”

“We could call a taxi and get the car in the morning,” he said. “I
mean… you could… unless you want to stay at my place.” She bit her
lip and looked at him like a child. “I have a couch that folds out.”

“Okay… if it’s okay,” she said quietly. He went back into the
restaurant and called a cab. He couldn’t have asked her in any other way;
even so, his shyness had diminished somehow. He wanted her so.

Within half an hour they were drinking wine in his living room. It
didn’t relax her at all, and the tension turned him on. Finally he asked
her to remove her shoes. She looked like he’d asked her to strip, but did
it, avoiding his gaze.

“Don’t you want to take off your jacket, Ashley?” He spoke in a low
whisper. She hesitated, then fumbled with the buttons. Tears welled up in
her big blue eyes. Still, she obviously wanted to take it off, wanted
him… and yet he was afraid to touch her. “What’s wrong?”

“N-nothing…” A sob choked off her soft voice. Joel took her into his
arms. She kept unbuttoning the jacket, crying, then swung her long leg
over his lap and pressed against him, whimpering, lifting her skirt and
pushing her crotch against the bulge in her pants. The bittersweet,
slightly vinegary smell of her sex reached his nostrils, and Joel kissed
her lips, his hands on her haunches. “Do you like this?” She whispered,
rubbing her panty-clad cunnus against his trapped penis. “Hold me…
please… let me… haaaeeennnh… hold me! Please… mmnnnngh…
mmhhh… mmhhh…” Ashley came, clinging to him like a child and moaning,
then blushed crimson and began to cry. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “I…
I’d better go…”

“Don’t go… Ashley…”

“Do you… hate me?” She crawled from his lap, her jacket open, the
lacy bra beneath her blouse loose on her little breasts. They looked no
bigger than a sliced egg. She was sweating, and her sweat had a strong,
sickly scent that mixed with a cloying perfume.

“No! Ashley… please don’t go!” He begged. “I… I love you,” he
said. He did. He was in love with her, or with the unexpected proximity
of another person he wasn’t afraid of, her, and he’d never felt so close to
anyone, so suddenly, her torment drawing him like the spoor of some
mysterious quarry, threatening to disappear, an apparition about to
dissolve. It was as if the room had gone dark. She was his daughter and
sister and lover. He needed her. He couldn’t let go of her scent, of the
momentary intimacy, as if he had split a second like a cut diamond and
caught her there… and now she was slipping away? Even his timidity had
been breached, and he caught her wrist.

She stared at him, shocked. Ashley was in love with him, too, but she
had never imagined confessing it – and she distrusted it, the swift and
scary emotion swathed in familiar shame. “I love you… I love you,
Joel… but you… you don’t know me…”

“Don’t go! Please… I’ll… I’ll fold out the couch, okay? I
mean… for you…”

“You wouldn’t love me… if you knew me,” she said in a self-pitying,
childish whimper.

“I would… I do… please stay?”

Ashley sat down again, at the opposite end of the couch, and offered up
her secrets, begging him not to interrupt. “Let me tell you… then…
if you still… want me… you won’t, Joel… let me…” But she had
opened like a cloud, and he could hear her desire, a distant thunder.

Ashley Gibson had fallen badly in love with her father at the age of
eleven. She suspected that her feelings were dreadfully wrong… and yet
she lived for her father’s kisses. She had long been disturbed by his
obvious stares, by the tension between them when he tucked her in at night.
She waited anxiously for the feel of her father’s hot breath against her
face, trusting the fire in his watery eyes as he slipped his hand under the
covers. She whimpered as her father’s fingers slowly crept to the bodice
of her dark blue nightgown and brushed against her tender breast, softly,
making her blush, both embarrassed and aroused, aware that the little pink
nipple had stiffened at his touch. He took her breath away, her chest
frozen beneath the silken fabric. Afraid and needy, she parted her lips
for his smoky tongue. Sometimes it lasted ten minutes, sometimes longer.
She would get nauseous, ashamed of her arousal. ‘I wish you weren’t my
daughter… I’d want to marry you… would you marry me, Ashley?’
‘Yeah…’ ‘I don’t want to hurt you, darling… only kiss you…’ He would
weep sometimes, and she could feel her father’s pain… and desire, the
awesome and somehow awful desire that was his and soon hers as she sensed
the restraint with which he caressed her. During the day he was the
perfect daddy, attentive, attractive, intelligent, treating her mother like
a queen… Ashley was horribly worried that her mother suspected them –
suspected her, her seductiveness, Ashley floating away on waves of guilty
bliss when her father would embrace her, whenever her mother stepped out,
whispering sweet things about how he couldn’t keep his hands off her,
kissing her neck, guiding her hand to his groin. ‘It’s okay… don’t be
scared, darling… feel me… feel what you do to me, darling… are you
frightened?’ ‘N-no…’ She was afraid of it, gingerly rubbing his penis
through his pants, but he didn’t take it out or touch her below her budding
breasts, and she’d convinced herself – or let him convince her – that they
needed to kiss and caress and embrace like that, that she and her father
were star-crossed lovers, that her arousal meant that she belonged to him
sexually. ‘Ashley… I’m so sorry…’ By the time she turned twelve the
shame she felt was constant unless he was kissing her. When he tucked her
in, opening her nightgown and gently sucking on her nipples, kneeling
beside the bed and stroking his cock – she couldn’t see it, but she knew –
Ashley’s nausea became an unbearable and degrading need. She sucked his
finger and fingered her gash, knowing he knew what she was doing,
humiliated, her orgasm a paroxysm of despair, gasping, hearing his semen
spatter the floor below her bed, his horrible groans. When Ashley was
thirteen, he began watching her masturbate and letting her see him, her
pubescent body naked and wanton, her blue eyes focused on his penis as she
played with herself, her toes in his mouth, his manhood sometimes brushing
against her, her father’s semen splashing her thigh and her fluttering
hand. He put her tampons in for her when she menstruated, and started to
take her to the bathroom as if she were a little girl, caressing her while
she squatted on the toilet, backwards, wiping her after she went potty.
Once he gave her an enema, making her cry. She would get terrible
headaches, and sometimes she would throw fits, hurting herself. Her mother
began to ask her what was wrong, worried, and then Ashley tried to hang
herself from the slippery elm in the backyard, the branch breaking. Her
father hardly talked to her when she got out of the hospital, and for a
time the abuse stopped. But it wasn’t abuse to Ashley; she blamed herself,
she needed him, she wanted to be loved. When she was fourteen, she crept
into his bed one night while her mother was away, and he asked her if she
was mature enough to be his whore. He’d never said anything like that to
her before. She cried, and he sent her away. Then, when she was almost
fifteen, he was arrested for rape. He had been having an affair with one
of her classmates. Ashley was heartbroken. She tried to hate him, but she
couldn’t. She felt abandoned and betrayed, damaged beyond repair. Her
father was killed in prison, and she thought it was her fault. Men came on
to her, but she refused their advances, even in college, even after
graduate school. She became a first grade teacher at twenty-four, still
suffering from a sexual melancholy, and a year later she got a position at
a private girls’ school, teaching fifth and sixth grade. Without a private
life, Ashley concentrated on her work, but then discovered to her utter
horror that she was violently attracted to young girls, particularly girls
approaching puberty. She befriended a lonely twelve-year-old beauty, not
intending to molest her, but ended up getting her drunk and going to bed
with her, not touching her but frigging herself, begging the pupil to frig.
The girl told her parents, and Ashley lost her teaching certificate and got
probation, returning to school to study library science and moving from
state to state. Ashley Gibson was a virgin, and she was afraid, afraid
that she would lose control and touch another girl. She thought about it
all the time, and had almost done it at the library several times.

Joel Brown listened in silence, sipping the wine. The redhead saw his
hard-on and felt the horrid dyad of desire and shame she had known with her
father. She wanted to tell him everything, like a drowning child pulling
her rescuer down into dirty water. She had rubbed against her father like
that only once, when she was twelve, the only time she’d come without using
her fingers. Ashley brought herself off constantly, even in the restroom
at the library, but had never gone home with a man before. Ashley never
fantasized about intercourse. She still saw herself as a little girl when
she played with herself. She dreamt of getting married, but when she went
home, lying naked and caressing herself for hours, lost in a trance so deep
that she sometimes urinated and even defecated in bed, cowering as if there
were someone else in the room with her and masturbating herself to sleep,
Ashley suffered from strange nightmares that often started while she was
still awake. She had fleeting visions of young girls she had glimpsed
during the day, of nude children writhing in the gloom, their frightened
bodies bruised by huge penises she never saw, of the pupil she had tried to
seduce, staring at her, scared, breathing hard… Ashley dreamt of getting
married, of her husband – a faceless giant – watching her undress on their
wedding night and seeing her sins as if they were tattooed on her pallid
skin, as if sludge oozed from her virgin vagina. She saw herself stripped
and hung from the slippery elm, bleeding. Ashley had never been hurt by a
man and masturbated very delicately until she was sore or soiled the bed.
Then clawed at her tiny breasts and scratched her clitoris, crying. She
rarely inserted her finger. Then the alarm would ring and she would hit
the snooze button, hugging the pillow and sobbing. Sometimes she would
frig or go pee before getting up and staggering to the bathroom. She
always set the alarm very early, taking a long bath and smearing her body
with moisturizer, cleaning the mess – she put plastic under the sheet – and
preparing for work, dressing as if she were putting on a second skin,
dreading what the day would bring. By day, Ashley was composed unless she
lost focus, but towards afternoon she would begin to fall apart,
daydreaming about a lover who resembled her father, lonely, hiding behind
her responsibilities, waiting for evening and dreading that, too, driving
home and stripping.

She had noticed Joel staring at Karen, and she’d noticed Karen, and
Karen Weeden was like one of the anonymous nudes in Ashley’s nightmares.
Joel Brown aroused the librarian, but most men did. He was different,
though. Ashley fantasized about taking her clothes off for him – the way
he’d asked her to take off her shoes, asked if she wanted to take off her
jacket, making her feel helpless, like her father had – and she sometimes
daydreamed about being Joel’s daughter, about him finding her in bed and
pulling down the covers. She would squirm in her waste, trying to hide the
dirty thing she’d done, but her daddy would see and comfort her, then take
out his cock. Karen was their daughter, and daddy would watch Ashley
suckling the eight-year-old. Karen would get naked and straddle Ashley’s
thighs, her back to daddy, and Ashley would fondle Karen’s buttocks while
the child sucked her nipples and Joel jerked off, coming on Karen’s back.
Ashley would take a teaspoon and feed their daughter her daddy’s semen…

But there was another Ashley, the morning Ashley, the librarian who had
studied hard and had been a wonderful teacher until the vile demon her
father had sired upon her caught sight of a vulnerable pupil… these two
Ashleys barely knew one another, but they knew of one another. She wasn’t
insane. Really only a very small part of her was womanly, the weight of
her clothes compared to the scant weight of her perverted but still almost
celibate body. Still, that part of her that kept her above water was
surprisingly strong, resilient, the twin of her darker demon. Even when
physically immature, Ashley had never entirely given herself to her father,
keeping back her soul somehow. The depraved child who ran to the restroom
to masturbate whenever she got wet wanted nothing more than surrender.
Ashley wanted to belong to someone in a way she had never belonged to her
father. She hadn’t been ready to be her father’s whore, and now she needed
a daddy who would love her perversity as much as he loved the librarian.
Ashley hated herself, or the librarian hated the whore, but it was a sexual
hatred, putrid, desirous. Her soul, a child’s soul, could never forgive
her father for not loving her. The librarian thought he hadn’t loved her
because he had abused her, but her wet part had wanted him to love her
hard, to fuck her brains out, to rape her until she was his in body and
soul. She imagined him dying in prison because he loved her, martyred,
ejaculating as his cell-mates hanged him.

She spoke in disjointed sentences, revealing everything except that she
had seen how Joel looked at Karen. The library had been Ashley’s
sanctuary, as it had been for Karen. Joel Brown had invaded Ashley’s inner
sanctum. Then he had asked her out and seen her abject need at last. She
had crawled into his lap like she had into her father’s.

“I go… in bed,” she whimpered, squirming. “I go potty… in bed,
like that girl… I can’t… I frig… I frig it… frig… frig it,
my cunny…” Ashley was panting, crouched at the end of the couch, her blue
eyes wavering between lunacy and despair. “Potty… and I… I don’t
go… I go in bed…” Joel took her into his arms again at last. She was
cold and dripping with sweat. Ashley straddled him again, rubbing against
the bulge in his pants. “Hold me,” she whined. “Hold me… horsey…
mmmhhh… horsey… d-daddy…” She was so wet that her juices soaked
through his trousers. He stroked the bare skin above her stockings as she
humped him, her arms around his neck, writhing. “Horsey…” Joel gently
lowered her to the sofa and slid her panty aside. Her hair was darker
there, drenched. Ashley held her arms at her shoulders, her white blouse
damp with sweat, thrashing as he fingered the sore opening of her virgin
slit. Her clit stood out, scarlet, erect. Joel took his cock out and took
her virginity with a sudden stab. She howled and grabbed his hips, bucking
in agony, pulling him deeper. Her hole was unbearably tight, viselike
despite her blood and slime. He slid from her and teased her anus. Ashley
bleated, wild-eyed, but didn’t struggle, and Joel forced his penis into her
rectum. He had never possessed anyone so completely, and stared at her
desperate movements, her long-limbed body in hideous pain, first at her
sphincter, then deep in her bowels… pleasured then, fucked, still in
visible torment but needing it, moaning in agony and need as he filled her
colon with his cock, his balls slapping against her skinny butt as the
slimy hole loosened and he reamed her, hard. The redhead barked as spasms
of unspeakable ecstasy swept through her intestines, tearing at her
starched white blouse and clawing at her titties through the tiny bra, her
long legs spastic as his penis reversed the flow of her feces, forcing it
from her rectum and into her brain, fucking her brain, raping her mind like
a little dead girl until her lungs caught fire and Ashley shrieked in
orgasm, semen flooding her reeling senses like scalded milk.

Joel slipped from her anus and lay down beside her. She was shuddering,
but she wasn’t crying. He held her, and she clung to him like a daughter.
She clung to him, afraid he would throw her away.

“Don’t leave me,” she whimpered. “Please…”

“I’ll never leave you,” Joel vowed. He helped her take off her torn
blouse and unnecessary bra. Her upper body was a prefect rectangle,
angular, ribby, the little titties almost entirely nipple. Ashley was
embarrassed by her apparent immaturity. “You’re so pretty,” he whispered,
gently fondling the firm flesh, her teat raw from her rough treatment of
the tiny alabaster lump, the molested nipple a kind of madder yellow.

“Do you like them?” Ashley grasped his wilting penis, tentatively
stroking it. “I don’t know what to do… tell me?” Joel kneaded her
titty, then slapped it playfully. “Please… don’t… hurt me.” She
moaned plaintively. “Hurt me…” Her deep blue eyes were wild with need.
“I want you to hurt me… mhh… my body… is it nice?”

“Yes… you’re not like a woman at all.”

“What am I like?” His penis stiffened in her grasp. “Am I doing it
right?”

Joel put his fingers in her mouth. “Didn’t your daddy ever do this?”
She whimpered as he finger-fucked her wet mouth. “I want to fuck you in
the mouth, too, darling. Suck me, Ashley… suck my cock.”

Sobbing, she obeyed, taking his dirty dick into her mouth and drooling,
the moaning. “Mfff… mmfff… I… I have to… go,” she whimpered,
frightened. “Will you… take me potty?”

“Do you have to go poop?”

“Yes!”

“Go here,” Joel whispered, putting her on all fours and lightly spanking
her slit a little, then licking her, running his tongue along her sweaty
crack to the sore sphincter, rimming her. “Go here… go in bed like you
do… I want to see, Ashley…”

“No… naaauuuuuugh… take me… potty… please…” Joel frigged
her anus with his thumb. “Pleeeeeease… ohhhh… don’t… please…
aunnngh… aunnngh… aunnngh…” Ashley was utterly humiliated, pushing
against his thumb, the filthy taste of her blood and feces mixing with his
semen in her mouth. He held the invading digit still, and she bucked
against it, mewling. She knew that men liked her behind, but had never had
anything in her butt. “Hurts… fuck me… please… fuck… mnngh…
mnngh… fuck me…”

“Frig… I want to see you frig…”

“Yeah… yeh… mnngh… aunnngh… aunngh…” She fingered her
cunt, fucking against his thumb.

“Your poophole… are you dirty, Ashley? Are you my dirty girl?”

“Yeah… fuck me…”

“Frig your pooper, Ashley… frig it with me? Show me how you frig…”

“I have to gooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh…”

He took his thumb out and she convulsed, cupping her cunt and crying as
semen and snuff-colored feces gushed from the tormented hole. Joel pulled
her into a squat and spread her buttocks apart. Ashley farted more, wetly,
masturbating. Her malodorous waste flooded the sofa as she went pee.

“Play in it, Ashley… play in it, pretty girl… play in your poop…
are you my dirty girl?”

“Pretty… lyehhh…” she gurgled. “Lyehhh… frig me… I have
to… frig…” Ashley squatted in her feces, then put some in her mouth,
baby-faced, bawling.

“You’re so pretty like that… good girl… oopsey-daisy…” Joel
lifted her and impaled her rectum on his rampant shaft. “Is that good,
darling?” It was incredibly good. She had always felt empty after
defecating, lonely in her little rectum. Ashley found her balance, holding
his hands, and squatted down on his penis, stuffing it into her butt,
feeling it fill her colon again, her mouth full of feces. “Fuck me…
fuck me, Ashley…”

“Yeah… yessss… ohhhhh… aunnnnnnnngh… lyehhh… mhhhh…
mhhhh…”

The base of his penis looked so large between her skinny buttocks, the
shaft buried in Ashley’s shithole. “Fuck me, baby…” Grunting, she rode
him hard, wailing and sticking it beck in when it slipped from her anus.
Suddenly she howled in orgasm, then went limp. Joel lifted her from his
cock and put her into a crouch again, pushing her face into her poop and
reaming her rectum from behind. Ashley slobbered, rubbing her face in her
feces, then devouring the dense waste, shuddering as he rammed his cock
into her colon with deep, hard thrusts, holding her girlish hips. Finally
he fucked her mouth, cutting off her breath. She gagged and gasped when he
ejaculated, choking, snorting semen. Her ecstatic face was covered with
excrement.

They fell asleep in a tangle on the floor. Ashley woke in agony and
sucked him awake at dawn, pink-eyed, her delicate features soiled with dry
feces. She went pee, sucking him, then licked his asshole. Joel pulled
her on top of him and helped her put his prick in her cunt, her facing him,
obviously not liking to get fucked in there as much as she liked it in her
bottom. “Play with my balls,” he begged. “I’m gonna come in you, baby,”
Joel whispered, kneading her tiny breasts. “We need to make you pregnant,
don’t we? Does my dirty girl want to get pregnant?”

“Yeah?” It had never occurred to her to get knocked up. She didn’t
think of herself as a grown-up.

“Frig your botty, baby… do you need to play with your poophole,
little girl? Frig it for me…” Ashley masturbated her anus with her
middle finger, rocking her hips. Joel pinched her nipples. Ashley whined,
shuddering and worming her finger in and out of her rectum. It was
horribly embarrassing to be so aroused in her butt. She knew it made her
immature, infantile. “Use more fingers, Ashley,” he whispered
encouragingly, spreading her cheeks.. She slid a second finger into her
bung, sobbing. “Good girl…” Joel grasped her wrist and brought the
filthy fingers to his mouth, sucking three and guiding her hand back to her
butt. She wormed them inside. He hurt her titties, and Ashley quivered,
puling, then came, her cunt milking his prick, frigging her back door.
Joel ejaculated, then put her on the floor and slid into her intestine.
Ashley groaned, then shuddered in orgasm as he urinated into her bowels,
emptying his bladder. “Good girl… let’s go potty, darling… hold it
in… hold my pee, okay?”

“Yeah…” Joel slipped from her ass and helped her to the bathroom.
Ashley was almost delirious, suffering cramps, but she kept her hurt tiny
sphincter tight until he put her in the tub and closed the drain. She held
his hands and squatted, then squirted out his piss. He didn’t even have to
tell her to lap it up. Joel guided her hand to her crack and Ashley
diddled her anus again, drinking the stinking urine. He turned on the tap
and played with her clit until she came again, three fingers in her rectum.
The redhead’s orgasm was painful, the sore nubbin and her sick little colon
over-stimulated, raw. Joel took off her ruined stockings and bathed with
her, and they lay in the water like lovers, kissing.

Ashley stroked him softly, childlike. She had gone from perverted
virgin to submissive whore in a single night, her solitude broken. The
world was totally different; she needed to be molested like a little girl,
but she knew that her depraved desires were her lover’s, too. She hadn’t
dared to dream of a man who would understand her like he did, almost
wordlessly, and though she wanted to be punished for her perversity, her
fears of never finding fulfillment evaporated in his embrace.

“Joel… can I call you daddy?”

“Yes… I want you to.”

“I love you, daddy… the water’s dirty… hold me, I’m cold.” He held
her close. “I want to have a baby, daddy.” Her voice was shaky. “Will it
hurt me?” Joel snaked a finger into her ass. “Aennnh… it hurts,
daddy… do you like me there?”

“I love you, Ashley.”

“I love you… do I taste good?”

“Yes.”

She giggled shyly. “I have to go pee!” Joel coaxed her into a squat on
the edge of the tub and tongued her peehole. Ashley squealed and started
to piss. “Daddy! It’s dirty… daddy…” She clutched his head as he
sipped her urine and sucked her clitoris. “Oh, daddy… it hurts… hurt
me… ennhhh, you’re hurting me!” She moaned in pain as he nibbled on her
nubbin, then fingered her anus again. Joel pulled her back into the tub
and turned her over, then stabbed his tongue into Ashley’s inflamed back
door. Her moans turned miserably desirous, and he sodomized her, brutally,
slamming his prick into her butt and pulling out, banging the bright red
hole until she started to scream. Joel switched to her twat and shot off,
trying to get her pregnant.

Joel Brown was drawn in so deep that he forgot everything other than
Ashley. She enveloped him like a fog. They showered, and then he had her
shave. Shagged out, the redhead had regressed, a helpless child. He had
her call in sick at the library and put her to bed, then went shopping.

Ashley was crying when he returned. He spanked and masturbated her,
then dressed her in the clothes he’d bought her – a ridiculously tight
dress, dark blue damask, black stockings and another tiny bra, also black,
like the g-string – and held her while she wept. She was falling apart.
Her botty hurt and she was scared of having a baby.

“Don’t ever leave me alone again… please?”

“I won’t, I promise.” He diddled her again and again. Her genitals were
obscene without hair, and Ashley kept asking if he liked them.

“Is my cunny as pretty as Karen’s?”

“What?!” He froze. “What do you mean?”

“You like her, don’t you, daddy,” Ashley whispered. “I wish she was our
baby.”

“You do?”

“Yeah… I wish she was with us.” Ashley’s eyes were a lurid
twelve-year-old’s. “She’s dirty like me.” Ashley moistened her fingers and
stroked her slit, her dress up around her hips, the g-string around her
ankle. “She’s like this, daddy… I think she plays with it… look…
look at me…”

Joel put her on her back, her head hanging over the edge of the bed, and
slowly slid into her throat. She learned to swallow, frigging her holes,
and finally he urinated into her esophagus, washing his semen into her
shuddering body. He held her while she puked his piss, then fingered her
to orgasm.

So they wallowed for several days like weird pigs, discovering the
other’s depravity. He was almost surprised when Ashley woke one morning a
woman again, worried about work. Even his – and she was entirely his, wife
and daughter, waif and supernatural whore – Ashley retained a sense of
self, a sort of seductive distance that begged to be violated but couldn’t
be, as if part of her were a ghost through which his hand might pass,
masochistic and yet somehow inviolable, or recombinant; no matter how he
hurt her (and he did, hitting her titties and spanking her between the
legs), the part of her that wasn’t matter – her soul – remained available,
apart. She couldn’t be alone, though, as though she never had been,
accompanied the ghost of her father, now departed.

Only at the library was she ever without him, and strangely enough she
seemed the same as she had been before her defloration, withdrawn, even
virginal. They broke the lease on her studio apartment, and Ashley moved
in with him. They didn’t get married, but Joel gave her a diamond ring.
He showed her his pictures of Karen. Joel didn’t need them anymore, and
wore his heart on his sleeve at last. His true love had turned out to be
an adult, even if emotionally immature. He hadn’t sinned, not with the
child anyhow, he thought, not a real one… Ashley was fascinated by the
pictures, though, frigging and whining even after he fucked her in the
butt, begging him to knock her up. It was as if the ordinary biological
need to give birth was utterly warped in her. She had a whorish womb, and
her need to reproduce seemed only erotic. Ashley needed a kid because she
wanted to hold herself at a distance.

Joel hurt Ashley, but he also took care of her. After the first couple
of days their lovemaking grew milder, and he always lubricated her before
using his hand or a bottle. Nor was their relationship merely sexual.
They shared everything, Joel meeting her at the library after work, walking
her home. He gave her enemas while they discussed Flaubert and Balzac.
They slept with his cock in her rectum, his hands on her tiny breasts.

It was the redhead and not her daddy-man who had a disturbing smile on
her face when Sheila Weeden showed up one day, knocking on the door with
her little girl. Yes, they would watch her for the weekend, Ashley said,
her blue eyes glowing like gas. Karen got her pajamas and returned
barefoot to stay with the Browns, her mother’s stiletto heels clacking
through the courtyard to the broken sidewalk, then fading away as Friday
evening fell.

Deathly pale and obviously miserable, the eight-year-old was being
molested by the janitor at the day care center and her mommy’s new
boyfriend, a pudgy drifter named Paul. The janitor only used her mouth,
but Paul sodomized the hapless child while Sheila slept, gagging her and
greasing her and reaming her sick little rectum until the girl was
delirious. Karen was constipated and leaky. Her cunny was infected and
she was in constant pain, suffering from insomnia, frequently unable to
keep food down and often blacking out. The janitor was nice, petting her
and never forcing it into her mouth. Paul had a huge penis and hurt her
with it.

Ashley was wearing a white silk robe. Karen recognized her from the
library, but was too tormented to be ashamed or even surprised to see her
there. Joel was wearing flannel pajamas, a kind of industrial green. The
pair was weary, having fucked all night the night before, but Karen’s
reappearance troubled him. He knew that Ashley wanted a child, as if he
had never had the same urge. The eight-year-olds pajamas were a thin
synthetic, pink. She had lost a lot of weight, and the elastic waistband
was loose on her bony hips. Joel poured himself three fingers of Jameson,
and the three of them sat in the living room, nervous.

“We’ve missed you on Saturdays, Karen,” Joel said. She hadn’t come to
the readings. “Don’t you miss Narnia?” Karen nodded, noticing Miss
Gibson’s nervousness and dirty smell. She’d never thought of females as
predatory. Mr. Clampitt’s daughter did things because her father wanted
her to, and Nicole had been a little girl like her. Ashley let her robe
fall open, biting her lip. Joel tensed as Karen saw his lover’s raw
nipple. The redhead held her breath and drew up her legs. Karen could see
her cunt. The sore slit glistened with slime. Karen swooned and wet her
pajamas. Joel took her into his arms and rocked her. She must have
weighed about forty pounds. “Baby,” he whispered. “It’s okay…
Karen…” She seemed to be having a seizure, almost epileptic.

Ashley snuggled up to him and drew Karen to her breast. The girl sucked
Ashley’s nipple, sniffling. A faraway look in her corrupt eyes, Ashley
pulled her into her lap and unbuttoned the pink pajamas. Joel downed his
whiskey and stared. He was a different man now. Part of him wanted to
punish Ashley, but he was both aroused and unable to hurt her in front of
the child he had wanted for so long. His lover wasn’t hurting the girl.
Puling, Karen let the librarian undress her. Ashley saw the girl’s
inflamed cunny and badly bruised bottom hole. Karen winced as Ashley
gently fingered her distended genitals, straddling the redhead’s thighs.

“Does it hurt, honey?” Ashley’s voice sounded as if it came from the
tomb. There was concern in it, but she was hysterically aroused. Karen
winced, grimacing. “Do you want me to lick it?” Karen nodded.

Ashley put the child on her back and lapped at her slit. Karen grasped
her ankles, her emaciated body quivering in pain. Ashley drooled, tonguing
the girl’s clitty and damaged sphincter, then licked her finger and
masturbated the eight-year-old anally, licking her dirty gash. Karen
started to thrash, then stiffened and moaned. She had come.

Joel felt sick all of a sudden. When his nausea didn’t pass, he left
the room and threw himself on the bed, sinking almost with the suddenness
of illness into a disturbing slumber, as if he were dreaming several dreams
at once, his self split into several and each of them awake, a brood of
messy lives suckled by his swollen liver while his body was shut down, only
his eyes flickering frantically beneath their heavy lids. His heart beat
hard and fast, then fluttered and fell.

Karen responded to the redhead’s tenderness. She had never been in such
hands. The woman bathed her lovingly, and together they sought Mr. Brown.
Like a meaty divinity who had borne Karen into at least a momentary calm,
Mr. Brown, sinless, had ceased to be. The librarian he had rescued shook
him, but no breath clouded her mirific eyes. His lungs seemed no bigger
than ovaries, empty. She shook him and shook him, then backed away.
Ashley wrapped the unresponsive child in a long coat and ushered her out
the door. Trembling, Ashley Gibson followed upon the waif’s heels,
spectral in her white silk robe, barefoot.

Her little Kia coughed to life. The librarian drove until the tank was
almost empty, Karen watching her in the rear view mirror, trusting and
tragic and finally unafraid.

THE END