Sheldon Gleisser

I had been chatting her up for a couple of weeks, but Chinese women are pretty conservative.  I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get her into bed, but Karen, the modeling agent I took when I was in L.A., had been pretty well-digested, and I could feel the hunger coming on.

At Soon’s doorstep, I felt this energy in the air, like maybe we’d kiss, but we didn’t.  Instead, she waved and said, “See you!”  I waved back, turning around.  Keep it together, I told myself, just a little longer . . .

At Conspiracy, a local strip bar, the first dancer had a nice body, but the implants were obvious.  The one after her looked more promising.  At least ten to fifteen pounds too heavy, she didn’t get the attention, or the tips of the one before, but she looked just right to me.

A waitress leaned in, blocking the stripper.  “Well, hi!” she said, “We don’t get guys as good-lookin’ as you here, what’s up, honey?  You could get yourself a real date, see a naked woman in the privacy of your own home.”

            She was tall, almost as tall as I was.  Even in the dim light, I could see she had dark skin and long, dark hair.  She wore a short red teddy. 

I hoped to God they weren’t implants. 

“You’re beautiful,” I said, before I knew the words had left my mouth.

            “Aw,” she said, “you’re not just good-lookin,’ but sweet too?  ‘Cause I get off in an hour, sweet thing.”

            Her place was dimly lit, furnished with older things, like she did all her shopping at garage sales.  A woman who looked like her, working at a strip bar, you’d think she’d have made more money. 

She brought a couple of beers out and set them on the TV table. 

Her smile felt predatory.  She shoved me back and leaned down, unbuckling my belt, unsnapping my pants, unzipping me.

She wriggled out of her clothes and sat on me.

There were teeth in there, sharp ones.  She looked as confused as I did when the teeth bit down but were unable to bite through.

I placed my hands on her hips and whispered, “Who are you?”  I sat upward, kissing her on the mouth.  She pushed me away, unable to believe I wasn’t dying.

I flipped over, pinning her beneath me.  I needed to know what was going to happen next.

It didn’t take long.  I screamed, trying to keep looking at her beautiful face, lit by the dim glow of her old lamps.  The face didn’t shrivel up. 

I kissed her neck and put my mouth to her ear.  “Who are you?”

“My name is Malia,” she said, “And if I had a gun, I would shoot you.”

“Don’t,” I said, “Please don’t say that.  Please just stay with me.  I’ll do anything you want if you stay with me.”

Her name, “Malia,” came from the Zuni word for “bitter.”  She had never known her father, a white man who had raped her mother, a Zuni Medicine woman, at knifepoint.  Her mother said it was why she was the way she was.  The vagina dentata was whispered of in the legends of her tribe.  Such women were the bane of men.

“How many?” I whispered in her dark bedroom as I tried to take her hand.

“I don’t know,” she said, “Hundreds, thousands.”  She was quiet before asking, “How many for you?”

“Two hundred forty-three.  You would have been two hundred forty-four.”

Her hand left mine.  “I want you to go.”

“No, please, let me stay.”

“Stay and what?” she asked as she got up and put on a robe.

“Stay and let me see if I can last longer this time.”  She sat slowly back down on the bed.  I took a stray strand of hair away from her face.  “I want you to feel good,” I said, “I would love it if you felt good.”

“I don’t even know you.”

“Sure you do.”  I grabbed her shoulders, pulling her robe down, getting out of the bed while I untied it.  She spread her legs reluctantly and I pushed inside.

Feeling her bite down again, harder this time, I said, “I’m not going to stop.” I took a breath, closing my eyes, “Not until I hear you scream.”

I thought of a blackboard, with the number 100 written on it.  I concentrated on writing the numbers down by erasing as little of the previous number as possible.  So I erased the one on the 100, and drew tails on the two zeros to make 99, then erased the tail on the last 9 to make an 8, and I kept going, trying not to concentrate on the beautiful woman beneath me.

I had gotten to 76 when I felt the teeth let go.  Her scream was so loud, the windows rattled.  She drowned out my own scream as I forgot about the blackboard, seeing only her gorgeous dark eyes, her silken hair, and her mouth opened in an “O” of surprise.

“I wasn’t put together for this,” she said the next morning.  She was seated on the bed, her back to me.

 “For what?”

“This,” she said, “This.” She motioned around the room, then at me.

“It is different, not having to deal with a dead body.”  I looked up at the ceiling.  “Mine fit in a tall kitchen-can bag.  Light, too, easy to get rid of.  But for you, I guess . . . most of it was still there?”

She was quiet, and I knew I’d asked the wrong question.  “Get out,” she said.

“Malia, I’m sorry—”

“Out!”  Pointing to the door.

I started to get dressed.  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten so personal—”

“We just got about as personal as we’re going to get!”

“No.” I put on my shoes. “You can’t mean that, please tell me you don’t mean that, we just don’t know each other well enough, we need to get to know each other better, once we know each other better—”

“I don’t want to know you any better than I already do, I told you, I’m not put together for this!”  She opened the door. 

“Let’s talk about this, Give it a couple days . . .”

“You see some future here?  We each pick someone up, see the latest Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy, then mm-mm, good?  Dinner and a movie, would you like that?”  She grabbed my arm, pulling me closer. “We’re living on borrowed time separately, but together?  How long you think it would it be before they traced something back to us and we were dragged off to the Smithsonian for dissection?”  She let go of my arm, giving me an extra little shove out the door.  “Go home, Romeo.”

I couldn’t eat for days after that.  Finally, I re-traced my route back to her place, but there was a “For Rent” sign stuck to the door.  I cupped my hands over my eyes and leaned in to the window.  The place was empty.

I kept an eye on the papers and the Internet, looking for stories of male bodies turning up with signs of genital mutilation, but I never found anything.

I got so depressed I sought out street hookers to see if I could catch something fatal.  All I got were the worst memories you could imagine.

The women wore short, white skirts.  I watched their legs tense and release, the muscles of their thighs and calves defining abruptly as they ran for the ball or stood to serve.

The best was blonde, tall, forty or so.  She wore no ring, but I didn’t want to take her if she had kids.  I could find that out quickly enough.

As they talked and laughed between sets I saw her looking at me, could see the edges of her mouth turn up into a grin.  She even showed off a little.  I clapped at a particularly good point she scored, and she turned to me and gave a little curtsy while the other women sent up a collective “Ooooh!” and one of them yelled, “Playing for the fans now?”

Taking her would mean getting out of Columbus.  That was okay.  I had been there too long already.

“This seat taken?” someone said to my left.  I looked up, but she was too backlit by the sun to see her face.  All I could tell was she was pregnant.

Momentarily frightened, I said, “No,” and looked around for an escape route.  I was afraid it was some undercover policewoman until she sat down.

“Malia!” I said, then looked at her belly.  “Is—?”

She took my hand and placed it on her abdomen.  The skin was pulled tight.  I felt it move.  “Malia—” I said, hugging her, not wanting to let go. 

There was some laughter from the tennis court.  The tall blonde had looked over at us, and the tennis ball had bounced off her head.

Malia said she couldn’t believe it at first, had even tried to end the pregnancy.

“Tried?”

“They couldn’t get him out.”

“Him?”

“Yes, a son, are you happy?”

I’d have been happy either way.

“I went home to my mother, and she said ‘when the bane of men has a man-child, this will be a child of consequence.’”

“Your mother said to find me?”

“No,” Malia said, touching her belly, “He did.”

I did everything I could to be a good father. 

There are guys who are really turned on by pregnancy.  We placed an ad in the personals section of a local paper to find them.  We averaged one every two weeks or so.

I was wrong about most of the body being there after Malia was done.  All that was left were the fingers, toes, sometimes the top of the head.  As she got closer to giving birth, even those things were gone.

She was eating for two.

I felt bad for Malia as I helped her out of the car and into the cabin.  Much bigger than most pregnant women, her sensual stripper’s stride had become an awkward waddle.

I was afraid for her, but I had survived suicide and she was the bane of men, so I figured we could deliver this baby.  More than the birth, I was worried what would happen after the birth.  Would Malia stay?  All of the books I read said a child did better, developmentally, with both parents.

When the contractions finally came, she squeezed my hand, sweating, cursing me with every word out of her mouth.

Teeth broke off, spitting into the air as the baby crowned.  Then he emerged fast, shooting onto the blanket.  I wrapped him up and he began to cry, the noise like a jet engine.  His body was segmented, covered in a soft, red exoskeleton, like a lobster.  The boy’s mouth, a fang-lined slit, was opened wide enough to swallow a grapefruit.  He screamed at the world, the tough little body vibrating against my neck.

I felt teeth sink in.  He was sucking blood.  I could feel myself begin to lose consciousness.  I made sure I fell on my back so I wouldn’t crush him.

He could take what he needed. He was my boy.

When I woke up, Malia was calling the baby “Wuliton.”

I blinked, trying to tell if what I was seeing was true. “You’re feeding him . . . something?”

“Yes.”

“Can I hold him?”

“When he’s done.”

“Wuliton?” the babysitter, a heavyset girl with braces and a punk haircut, made a face.  A pink T-shirt reading, “Yes, I do, but not with you” stretched over her chest.

I held out an ashtray.  She looked at me before stubbing it out.  “My wife named him,” I said. “She’s Native American.  It means ‘to do well.’”

“Mmm,” the babysitter grunted.  I hoped she didn’t have too much nicotine in her system.

“I just fed him,” Malia said, coming downstairs. 

I stood, taking my wife’s hand.  “There’s plenty of food in the fridge, just check on him now and then, we’ll be back in a couple hours.”

“Whatever,” the babysitter said.

I put my arm around Malia.  We walked out of the house.  In the car, Malia closed her eyes.  I checked my watch.

We found a bloody sneaker and a strip of pink cloth.  I looked down at him proudly before picking him up and walking around the room.  The red color had left his exoskeleton as he’d gotten older; his armor was a kind of a dark flesh tone now, its texture like toenails.

“Wuliton!” Malia said, trying to get his attention.  “Yes,” she said, when he finally looked at her and smiled, his teeth red and slick.  Malia rubbed her nose against his.  “Yes,” she repeated.  Wuliton began to laugh.  I grabbed his hand as he reached for the babysitter’s discarded cigarettes.  Damn nicotine!

It’s funny having a baby.  Your own life becomes meaningless, the world so important, even though we didn’t have the same worries as other parents.  We knew our child would survive.

The Zunis say all human ills are from being out of balance, not observing nature’s laws, being ignorant or selfish.  Perhaps Malia and I had sprung from that.  But Wuliton sprang from us.

They were re-making the planet.  Storms were more violent. Polar bears could only live in zoos.  The ozone layer was wearing away.  Forests were disappearing.  New diseases were already appearing.  And who was going to survive all that? 

Only someone designed to survive.

So, we take what we need, and I don’t waste time feeling guilty anymore. Humanity had its shot.  It would soon be time for Wuliton, and his children.  We’d just have to keep him safe, another ten, fifteen years, stay on the move until all the bills came due. 

Until the day our son would not be seen as a monster, but as a king. 

“Souvenir,” another short story Sheldon wrote, was a runner-up in the Mary Shelley Awards and published in Rosebud magazine in  2006.  In 2008, "Converts, another of his short stories, will be  published in Rosebud as runner-up in this year's Shelley awards.  In  addition, Bless You and S.C.A.R.E.D., two short films he  wrote and directed, were screened both at the 2006 Dances with Films film festival in Los Angeles and the Ohio Independent Film Festival  in Cleveland, Ohio.  Version 2.0, a short play Sheldon co-wrote with  Robert Flanagan, was produced as part of the Contemporary American Theater Company’s short play festival in 2002.  Survivor’s  Guilt, a short film he wrote and directed in 1997, screened at the  Dresden Film Festival in Dresden, Germany.  Teller’s Ticket, a  film which he directed and co-wrote with Mr. Flanagan, was based  upon Mr. Flanagan’s short story printed both in his short story collection  Naked to Naked Goes and in the Norton Anthology) won honorable mention at the Houston International Film Festival in 1991.