INSECTICIDE

(This is a horror short story I wrote a couple of years ago for an anthology. It was rejected by the idiot American publisher for 'disrespect to women.' Which is hilarious, as the woman in the story is the only one who gets what she wants. Plus she's only words...on...a...page. America used to have daring publishers. Not now. This is the country, after all, that gave us the vomitous phenomenon of the 'sensitivity reader'. Laughably censorious. Anyway, the story is blackly funny, and gory, and has hardcore sex in it. Bet you survive if you read it.)

The year was 2000, in the Scottish post-industrial shopping mall Satellite Town. The Death Barker and Alice X were getting stuck into each other on the tatty couch in the scabby unemployment-paid-flat living room, wandering hands, active minds, saliva on cock drying, arousal rising. The halogen light from the lamppost outside the second storey window was the only illumination, splashing everything a strange sickly yellowy orange. Barker had just been sucking on Alice’s twenty-year-old shaved pierced cunt, paying her back for her lip service. She was moaning, fingers tracing meaningless arousal hieroglyphs in his hair, and now it was finally time to take it to the bedroom and the end of the line.
      They both got up, both fully dressed except for her cast-aside underwear and shoes, him with his trousers and underwear half round his ankles, and made it to the bedroom in record time. Barker left his curtains open. He didn’t give a fuck if the neighbours saw, he was too excited. He lost his clothes in a frenzied eye blink, and she stepped towards him, short black skirt and white dress shirt sliding to the floor, black bra popped and dropped away from hard nips, a heady jumble of tats coming into view. She had smaller tits than DB would have liked, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially in a once-in-a-lifetime scenario like this.

      This is going to be the fuck to end all fucks, DB thought, then sneeringly chided himself for such a shit, clichéd expression. He needed to do better than that. Posterity beckoned. After all, tonight was to be the drawing of his final artistic curtain, his finest twisted poetic work, his gaudy verbal death exploration, his final ultra-perverse fuck you to the shitty world and its even shittier inhabitants, and to…Her. To that long-gone, evil, sick, beautiful, impossible bitch. He needed to clear his brain of literary and poetic clichés. He had come way too far for that shit.

      The dark-obscured couple started to lick and finger and suck and nip at each other, the usual lukewarm body-sizzle nerve-jumping flesh tantrum experiences. It was a shame this would never happen again. DB had better make the fucking most of the radiant threedee image of the tight hard skinprickly heat-radiating wee body in front of him while he could. This bed would be his coffin, Alice’s lush fake vagina his grave, and he could already feel the soil falling over his head. He sighed expansively, got on top of the blonde, kneed her legs open, grabbed his erection, rubbed it up-and-down her sloppy labia mirage a few times, slid it in, then started to slowly fuck her.
     And so here he was, at the point where it had always been heading, the point of no return. Three long years. Three long weary, weak, increasingly-enfeebled years. Round a thousand dead-dream days since he had walked in on…Her…in bed with some guy she had picked up drunk at the pub. DB had meant so fucking little to Her after five years that she had just gone and and sex with some random ugly fuck from the pub, cackling as DB walked in, Her face sweaty and vicious, hurling half-heard wrecked insults, three in the morning dead innocence-mourning horror. He had staggered out of the flat they shared, head spinning, before he committed murder, and he hadn’t spoken to Her since.
      Five years down the tubes.
      Five years. A riot of mutual fumbled high school virginity loss, ever-prickling skin loops, eternal erections, sexy funny botnotes passed in unheeded classes, past-midnight laughs tearing the misery of the world apart, listening to new protocore slabs together the breathy second they hit the net to download, a thousand variants on a life romantically destroyed came to DB as he slowly fucked the not-Her beauty under him, and he was there and not there, hard, thrusting, vacant, removed, dying. Alice had told him elsewhere she understood so well that total incapacity to exist, she had her own lies and woes and sex furies to contend with and overwhelm her.
      Love is natural and real, DB thought, looking down into the unloving glazed digital reflective eyes beneath him, it just wasn’t fucking fair, she just never fully felt it, she went on blithely when DB staggered away from the whole situation, dead from that day on, feeling like he was walking with his guts spilling out and tripping him up, frozen, numb, defeated, online pleading laughed at and blocked, unable to escape somehow, slippery gone-pussy walls too high for climbing.
      DB just didn’t want to be around anymore.
      And after tonight he wouldn’t be.
      And there would be a forever end to unbearable loss and unfulfilled she’ll-come-back longing.
      And so he dug deeper and further into his grave with his straining cock, his first sex in three years, since the world had upended and smashed him. And this wee insane bird-image beneath him was so beautiful, twenty and looked seventeen, dim light from the window lighting her shut-eyed sex-torn features in random patterns of flickering luminescence and visibility, and DB grunted and cried and fucked on, choking back hot snot, tears running down his face, cool on the flush of his coming death mask, terminally wounded animal cries ripping out of his throat and scarring the bedroom air. Alice just smiled and moaned and licked her lips and urged her lover on, uncaring of his pain and the salty hot teardrops licking at her features as they rained down on her from the ruined man. She couldn’t give a fuck except for this one, it was what she had signed up for, dead heart meatrack cruising, enviable vaginal tightness, sexual satisfaction guaranteed. She was no mother confessor, and had no conscience, so the misery and suffering of this devastated suicidal guy fucking her were wasted on her.
      DB had to admit he was enjoying this illusory sex doll fuck, occasionally feeling vague half-remembered emotional flickers of something other than vast painful short-circuits briefly click on and off in him. Just a pity it was too late now.
      He thrust and wriggled and grunted on, wanting to make it last, before he told the world what it was like to die during orgasm, to come and go at the same time, to mingle semen with the absolute, sex with undying space and shallow mocking time, but he felt like he was about to come and slowed down for a minute. He then started driving his cock hard into his cunt murderer balls-deep, fuck it all, thinking he wanted to mix with her, to be in her, to be her, the foiling of impossible common waters of thought and bone ruined by terminal female anatomy (hey, not bad poetry, DB!), then slowed down again and sloppily plopped out of her. His heart was hammering in his chest, making mental note of all that was happening to him right now, to mix it with the base nihilist DNA of the poetry he would soon be spewing.
      Stay focussed now, DB, stay fucking focussed, we’re getting into the home stretch…damn but this wee bird is an amazing fucking ride, such a tight wee pussy…we could not have gotten anyone better…
      On her hands and knees on the bed, face blushflushed, Alice looked round at her sexual partner quizzically as he dropped onto his back on the bed. “My turn?”
      “Aye, your turn,” DB panted, covered in a light sweat, “Let’s fucking go for it!”
      Alice knew what that meant, grinning widely. She scooted up and over him, straddling him, sliding his hard cock into her soaking cunt. Nothing earthly mattered anymore. She started to ride him slowly topside, up and down, just merely touch-touch-touching the tip of his dick with her soaking sex then ramming herself right fucking down on him repeatedly, frenziedly, staring down at his features with rapt predatory attention in that amazing indescribable way women do when they know they are bringing a man to orgasm.
      And DB started to see The Shift in Alice’s young, sweaty, lovebite-covered flesh as it started to ripple, waver, minor Richter scale dance, new insectival dimensions starting to poke through nonexistent larval flesh. DB knew what was coming. He was ecstatic with sex and fear and horror. He was up for it. He’d waited for this moment for his whole fucking life, and he was ready…to…fucking…go!
      And so he went to his ready-word place deep in him. As Alice became more  alien, hostile, inhuman, deeply frightening, yet somehow arousing as fuck, DB thought of all the things he had dreamed of saying to that beautiful cheating whore Her, of the dimensions of squelched cunt fantasies, tantalising tartan arabesques of newly-minted death meaning, whispering endless Scottish horizons of fields with men and women impaled on poles and horny lunatics fucking under the raining blood dripping from their bodies used as gory lube, the collapse of nations into infertile no-man’s-land slippery glass ruins, he, The Death Barker, of unsound broken body and love-ruined lonely mind, was going to tell the world how it felt to die a ruined surrealist meat atrocity, a killer victim fuck, a destroyed once-pure heart, an amazing never-told mutilation tale, a ripped virgin death hymen flapping in the finally-expressed carrion wind of transgressive articulation-
      -So The Death Barker opened his mouth as he started to climax-
      And Alice X became a huge impossible praying mantis, a nature-mocking riot of abdomen wings thorax tibia and fibia with razor spines running along them, head rotating in a near-full circle, seemingly laughing, starting to tear her fucking partner apart, and safe sex died screaming in the hotly cacophonous void, and Alice’s scrabbling green legs dug deep and she started to busily mercilessly nip and tuck and cut and destroy the integrity of DB’s eager murder junkie body, and he was totally fucking ready, even as he felt their incompatible anatomies grind together and she gelded him without even meaning it and a hot PAIN! SENSATION! IS! ALL! SHOT! THROUGH! HIM! YAFUCKINGCUNTYE! and she gouged into his guts and started throwing them round the room dripping down the windows the walls and now he had his one final chance to say what it felt like to die as he spurted into the creature and he opened his near-screaming mouth as wide as he could to tell Her where to go and-
      -He hupped up a huge chunky blood glut all over his own sweat-soaked face as she tore out his heart, said sweet fuck all, and died in idiot regret at the chance of a perfect and unprecedented artistic epitaph statement left forever unsaid.
      The Death Barker’s brains formed one final bored small meal for an illusion of femme fatale destruction, and then the walls static-shimmered and the recording stopped and all went suddenly confused and queasy.

      Everything went quiet.

      And then…

      “YA…YA STUPIT…FUCKING…CUNT! DEATH BARKER, YA HACK! YA DICK! YA CLOWN! YA TONGUE…TIED…ARSEHOLE! YA PERFORMANCE ANXIETY…FUCKING…”
      Snapped back into 2124, The Flesh Baron stopped shouting abruptly, seemingly running out of impromptu insults to curse his poetic partner with. ‘Poetic partner’? HA! What a laugh! The fucking halfwit got a golden opportunity to make poetic history…and he blew it! All he had to do was say a few simple sentences about death as he died…and he just…he just…
      The Flesh Baron stopped, took a deep shuddery Lamaze breath or three, and tried to collect his thoughts. Slowly but surely, he calmed down. He nearly kicked off again a couple of times as he looked down at The Death Barker’s vomit-soiled nude corpse on the big table in front of him, but he eventually returned to some semblance of normality, or as normal as a transgressive oddball like him ever got.
      And so it had gone. TFB had met TDB (they never even really knew each others’ real names, and often used just initials) online in a transgressive literature website on the dark web three years before, just after DB had split up with the cheating bird that had fucked him up permanently. They only lived 25 miles apart, so would often hang out, mocking past wannabe-perverse literature and poetry creators, revering others. The usual litshit, really, you know how that goes. They weren’t particularly close, but then again, who is these days?
      The longer the two twenty-three-year-olds had known each other, reading a lot of the utter shit put out by pretentious, capewearing, black-clad arseholes, the more angry and incensed they had become. They read the right writers, mocked the wrong ones, and looked at their competitors – not that they thought that they had any – narroweyed and ready.
      The two hipjoined artistes had come up with a plan to write the most perfect piece of perverse poetry ever spoken, by literally having one of them die for art. TDB had always been the more suicidal of the two, driven mad by his ex’s infidelity, so he had nominated himself to die by virtual reality. Insecticide: suicide by insect. It would be a mercy killing really, he was in so much pain. He would die in a bizarre fashion recorded by an intervision camera he had swallowed, and he would come up with the greatest gory fuck-youest artistic poetic transgressive statement ever made by man, reciting beautyfuel insane poetry and telling his ex to go fuck herself as he was murdered by a ludicrous virtual reality optical illusion.
      The whole thing had to reek of part farce and part unanswerable artistic dedication, part final painkiller anaesthetic balm, and they had worked on it for a full year, researching weird shit, camera angles, lenses, the best new VR technologies…and crazy women willing to be involved. They had found the perfect young psycho on Nekrogirls.com, which was a dark web site where wannabe-necrophiles flashed their tats and pussies and piercings and pathologies.
      Alice X was from VeloCity, the Scottish capital, not too far away. She was obsessed with the two Return of the Loving Dead necrophilia films of the late 20^th century, and she was so fucking scary crazy she was game for literally anything at all. Intense death orgasms, praying mantis murder, body disposal, being filmed – none of it bothered her in the slightest. She had allowed them to record her dimensions naked, wriggling her tats in an aroused exhibitionist frenzy, but not enough to have any actual sexual contact with either of them, because she said that fucking a live guy was just way too sick and perverse.
      Which was where the second part of the so-far-failed sexual, poetic and suicidal experiment would come in. Alice had done all this on the explicit understanding that she would get to fuck TDB’s corpse after he died, fulfilling a lifelong wannabe-acted-on sexual fetish. After being told of TDB’s unanswerable female pain she thought of the whole experience as love lost and love found. So now here he was, naked covered in vomit and semen (he had come as he was dying), ready to fuck. Again.
      In the closing stages of the insect sex, TFB had injected his partner in poetic crime with a dark web-bought three-drug heartstopper combo that Yanks had used in the death penalty back in the day: pentobarbital, Pavulon, and potassium chloride. Ever the anal poets, they had been pleased that all the lethal ingredients started with the letter ‘p.’ This was timed with the changing of Alice’s image to the praying mantis…or was meant to be. TFB had no idea what had happened. Instead of throwing out poetry, TDB had just puked all over his own face and fucking died without saying anything. The dirty insensitive wanker! All that time and effort and energy wasted for nothing!
      Well, maybe not entirely nothing.
      Now it was time for Alice to have her fun.
      Necrophilia. For fucksake. TFB shook his head. Creepy, clichéd shit, done a million artistic times in all mediums. Still, it would do in a pinch. He looked down at his dead pal, face twisted into a harsh vomitous rictus. Alice would be here at any minute, so he would have to get the cunt cleaned up. He nipped into his bathroom and grabbed a towel, wiping the slime off his dead pal’s features almost tenderly.
      “You fucking…hack! What would Quiller Spiller think?” Quiller was an amazing Scottish transgressive writer from the early 21^st century whose work they loved. They had gone to all the trouble of recreating his shitty dole-paid flat for the virtual reality dump TDB would die in, hoping it would maybe even inspire him a bit more into vivid flights of poetic brilliance.
      No such fucking luck.
      The doorbell suddenly went. TFB was so deep in thought he nearly shat himself. “Fucksake!” he cried out involuntarily. He glanced at an elektroklok on the wall. Midnight. It would be Alice X. Obviously. She liked her theatrical gloomy past-dark entrances. He stashed the chunk-sludgy towel and went to open the door to her. She barged past him excitedly. “Is he dead? Is he?”
      “Aye, he’s dead, but I still need to clean up the corpse a wee bit, I…ah, fuck it.” TFB shook his head and walked behind the eager and excited young blonde as she burst into his living room. She walked up to where the dead, slowly cooling, wannabe-transgressive so-called poet lay, her eyes wide.
      “He’s so…so…” She paused, searching for the right word…”beautiful!”
      Beautiful, for fucksake, she’s as bad a writer as TDB is…was, TFB snorted internally.
      “Aye, well, depends on your concept of beautiful, I suppose,” he shrugged.
      Alice’s excited, kid-opening-presents contact-lens-blackened eyes swept up and down the naked, dead man. She reached out and hesitantly touched him. “He’s still…he’s still warm!” She sounded ecstatic and excited, not fazed in the slightest.
      “He’s only been dead a few minutes, and I turned the heating on.”
      “He’s come all over himself too! Did he do that when I ate his brains?” Alice was giddy, smiling goofily, unable to believe her luck.
      “Aye, pretty much.” He sighed. “You can watch it later.”
      “Did he tell you what it’s like to die?” Alice’s hectic flushed face betrayed her growing arousal as she ran her fingers over the corpse, tickling at one nipple. “He’s so…soft. So smooth! So warm! So…hot! I love it! I love him!”
      “No, that’s the one problem, the fucking idiot puked all over himself, and died before he could say anything. Ya fucking hack, DB!” The old anger rose in TFB briefly, but he kicked it in the face and consigned it back into black disappointed internal oblivion.
      “So can I fuck him now?” Alice was beyond excited. She snakeskin-shed her heels and jeans and teeshirt. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, no doubt for speed’s sake. She was ready to fucking go, the sick wee fuck. TFB didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Still least he’d have something to stick on the dark web, maybe even make some money out of from sick freaks like this weird bitch.
      “Aye.”
      Alice giggled and hopped up and down and clapped her hands excitedly. She reached across and scooped a thick chunky spunk gloop from TDB’s leg (they had agreed that he couldn’t come for a week before it, so that they got a good slopshot) and popped it into her mouth, swirling it round for a moment before swallowing delightedly, licking the remnants from her fingers. “He tastes fucking amazing! I have to have him now!”
      Alice went to hop on her dead lover, ready to create some corpse fucking art, but TFB stayed her with a hand on her naked shoulder.
      “Wait a fucking minute! I have to set the recording gear going! It’s all set up! Just wait a fucking minute, don’t be in such a rush! Wait! He’s not going anywhere!” He barked a short angry disbelieving laugh, then went over and turned on the various cameras he had set up to capture different angles. Underground or not, he’d be fucking damned if he would make some shoddy-looking load of shit that looked like it had been filmed in a toilet or something.
      “Okay, I’m ready…so’s he…let’s go.”
      Alice had been fiddling with her fanny and stopped, smiled a great big fuck-me-hard smile and hopped onto the table. She kissed TDB’s flaccid, spunk-soaked cock, licking his cooling juices from it, running her tongue round the foreskin to get all the goodness out. Then she slowly and sensuously licked all the remaining salty off-white globules from the dead man, collecting them in her mouth.
      “Are you ready for your close-up, Miss X?”
      Alice X nodded happily and showed the spunk gobful to the camera, before happily swallowing it and then showing her pink clean tongue to TFB. He almost felt aroused in spite of himself. Being an underground transgressive artist was hard, too fucking hard, all these flaky and unreliable weird personalities to deal with. Maybe he should move into something easier.
      Like auto-erotic suicide.
      With no camera rolling.
      And a beautiful, sick, well-polished, much-practiced death speech.

      The happy young woman arched and purred and licked and slopped and fingered on, making unnatural artistic history.
      It’s easy when you know how.

THE END