Saturn in Retrograde I 1:4, 1:5

Four

“My name’s Sabrina. Sorry about all that. When we get to yelling at each other, I just kind of lose it. Hey, can I ask you something?...Uh, what’s your name?”

“Tanner...Tanner Benjamin,” he said slowly.

“Hmm, Tanner Benjamin. Hey Tanner, tell me something: if I offered to give you a blow job right now, would you take me up on it?” Four She knelt down in his lap, pulling his cock free from his pants, and taking just the tip of it between her rosy red lips. He could see her high, jutting cheekbones suck in, work his cock, and he knew the deep liquid sensation of absolute, ecstatic pleasure. He put his hand on the back of her head, guiding it down. But it didn’t want to rest there, and leave so much potential territory unexplored. He put his explorers hand up her tee-shirt, which had ridden up as she knelt here to reveal her taut white belly. She had no bra on, just very small, plump pierced tits with deliciously engorged nipples. The oily sensuality of her hot bare flesh drove the spike of intensity further into his skull, and he unleashed a convulsive, brain-splitting orgasm. And he couldn’t very well scream out, you see, because they were still in the Student Union. Upstairs. In the reading room. It had been the closest place, and the only one he knew was easily accessible and relatively deserted. They were hidden in a little nook behind a bookcase full of moldering, cast-off volumes of largely monumental dross. Library indexes. Self-help volumes. Victorian travelogues. She leaned back, hoisted her shirt, and revealed her two delectable little breasts. He greedily tongued them. He thrust his hands down the back of her jeans, taking in twin handfulls of fleshy, doughy goodness. It was extraordinary. No, it was more than extraordinary; it was miraculous. He had never taken into account that he might one day get laid in the Student Union. It was later, as they were driving down the lonely roads out into the country, that he began to suspect that something was, as they say, seriously amiss. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see”

It would be a miracle if she didn’t crash and kill them before they reached the destination that she seemed to be plummeting toward like a meteor. They had moved away from civilization, plummeting into the night like a swift, torpedo-like member might push into the aching crevice of a moist and fertile orifice. He was swept from his feet by this woman that he didn’t even know. “Where are we going? Can you tell me where were going?” He was not frightened. Not much, at any rate. He was actually somewhat exhilarated. The cool air blew through the crack in the window, whipping her short, frazzled hair around her face in a manner that was almost cherubic. She stood on the rusted bridge, frail and terrible and full of fairy favors in the light of the milky moon. He approached her slowly, wondering why, in the space of but two hours he had been foisted into the bosom of a strange dream. “What did you want to be when you were a boy, Tanner?” She looked at him down the long, angular plane of her hollow cheekbone. It seemed like she were asking the deepest, gravest philosophical question he had ever heard in his life. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a boy anymore, I suppose. But I still am. I can’t help it. Life seems like it has never held much for me. Much good, at any rate.” “I think you underestimate yourself. Do you know what I wanted to be? A ballerina.” “Every little girl wants to be ballerina. You’ll have to do better than that for deep, dark confessions.” She smiled, and then frowned, and he noticed again that her face seemed to have the odd quality of hiding whatever actual emotion was there behind it’s complete opposite. Because, he did not feel, seriously, that she had meant to smile then, or frown. Or convey a sense of any feeling that could be accorded a natural, human feeling.

“I am different.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure I can tell you. I’m not sure you’d believe me. You’ll just have to trust me tonight. The night is still young.” They looked out over the churning blackness of the water that swept out of that foul state and must have found it’s own true roots in some dark country where human feet seldom tread. Here, they were alone, for the first time. Above them, only a cold expanse of sweeping stars. And only country all around. “I’m not a human being.”

“I...could tell that, frankly.”

“No. I mean---it has nothing to do with the other stuff we’ve done tonight. I mean, I’m not like you. I’m not solid like you.” He bent over to rub the skinny, pale arm. It felt like a cold stick that had been covered in skin. “You feel real enough,” he told her, and began to move closer to her again. Her smell seemed to have grown somewhat more bitter; more stale. He was a man whose deepest intuitive leaps were often governed by scent. “I have never,” he stated flatly, “had a woman offer, out of the blue---what you gave me tonight.” She looked at him again, and the expression of her face was one of vulpine hunger that nearly drove his blood to churn. “It was about time, boy. And there are other things that we can do tonight. Secret things. Ending things.” “Really. Like what?” She turned and put her arms over the rusted metal railing. Below them, the water still brooded in tiny currents and eddies of time, swirling and swimming and catching secrets in it’s liquid depths. “I want you to help me a kill a man. Some men. Maybe a few men. Will you help me?”

Five

He considered. He wanted, badly at times, to wreak some sort of vengeance against God, humanity, what have you. It all amounted to the same swell of rage he felt when, upon awakening, he looked in the mirror to realize that he was still himself. It was not fair. Did the fates have no pity, then? It was not fair. He looked at the black lake. Though the moon shined heavy in a cloudless sky, there was no light that was going to penetrate that water. It was some sort of living symbol of the running through his fingers as if he had just taken a monstrous runny shit in his own hands. And the kid hadn’t even lived to be five. Ironic. It had been a drunk driver, and his own dear sweet daughter whom he detested like a pile of angry flies was swept from this world and all of it’s woes, and buried rather unceremoniously beneath a tree in the darkest patch of the children’s cemetery. He had been permanently crippled, offered a government paycheck, and had become, increasingly, a burden to his skinny, neurotic, grieving Joan, who lived on pills, cheap cigarettes and bad romance novels. It was television that offered him his own respite, occasionally, from the world of horrid drabness that seemed to encircle him in it’s joyless embrace. Tonight it was going to be the San Francisco Padres playing, but any other night it might be the plastic-surgery addled visage of some pathetic actress. Or cop shows. His name was Bill, he of the lusty belch. There was a knock at the door, which was damn peculiar for eleven-thirty at night, but he managed to hobble from the chair with his four-claw cane and make his way over to the window. He looked out. Nobody. He scanned the darkness warily for a moment. Damn. What if it was some sort of drug fiend or gang member? The resounding knock re-asserted itself. He crept over to the spy-hole. He breathed a sigh of relief. It was Neighbor Roger. He opened the door slowly. Fear had been replaced by consternation.

“Can I help you, Roger?”

he said, as if he wanted to do nothing of the sort. ‘Uh, yeah, uh Bill, I was wondering, um, well---my t. v. is on the fritz, and I was wondering if maybe you could use some company while you were watching the game. I know I should have called first, but, ah...” Oh great, thought Bill, all I need is fucking Roger over here drinking my beer, eating my fucking food.But he said, “sure...sure thing Rog. Um, just come on in, make yourself at home.” Neighbor Roger, who was forty, divorced, perpetually broke, and always smelled, faintly, of b.o. walked unsteadily into the living room. He sat down on the rumpled couch, taking out a cheap cigar, and thanking heavens that Bill had never much had the courage to say know to anyone. “Uh, hey, can I get a beer, old buddy?” Bill stiffened. He already had anticipated that.

“Uh...look, Rog, I uh...well, the fact is, is that Joanie is getting off early tonight, see...and though, you know, I want you stay and all, I don’t know how she would feel if she came home and found you passed out on the couch or something.” Roger looked at him a minute from underneath the lid of his bushy brows. He gave a quaint little smile, as if to say, “look whose done been pussy-whipped, good buddy. I wouldn’t have thought it of you. I don’t know what the hell this world is coming too, anyway, when regular guys like us can’t even get together and have a few, a few beers and watch the game without some bodies old lady getting uptight about it.” Roger leaned forward on the couch, thrust one huge, gnarled hand into the fold of his bomber jacket, and took out a small paper sack.

“Yeah, good buddy, I thought of that. So I thought maybe I’d bring over something to maybe help sweeten the whole night out a little. Lookey here---” He took from the contents of the sack one pornographic videocassette and one tiny, miniscule bag of what, presumably, was marijuana. “Ya got me, doc. I ran out of beer, and I had a little smoke left, so I thought maybe I’ d bring it over and share with you.” Bill sighed, and sat down with a plop that might have been a forced fart.

“Aw...fuck Joanie,” he said finally. “A couple valium and she’ll be happy again.”

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