I Belong to the Living Dead

This morning, Kaye will drink black coffee and eat a banana while she reads the last two chapters of her novel on the back porch overlooking her vegetable garden.

Later tonight, she will be fucked senseless by a member of the living dead.

She joined the cult in early Spring, although she wouldn't have called it that at the time. Back then, she would have said it was a community of like souls or something of the sort. They gathered at a train station not far from Kaye's house. They never proselytized, but Kaye always knew them by the way they dressed: all of the men in dark trench-coats, black slacks, and white button downs, all of the women in pale smock-frocks with bow collars. They seemed like ghosts wandering around, lost in a time they didn't belong to. Whenever she passed them waiting for their bus (always the same line: the Route 43 to Harlowe), she couldn't help but look at them up and down. Soon enough, they started looking back.

One day, she was reapplying make-up in the restroom alone when a member of the cult came in. She stood in the corner of Kaye's eye, waiting to catch her attention. Her dark brown eyes met with Kaye's, a sort of knowing look in them and in the woman's eerily pretty smile. Without a word, she lifted the hem of her smock-frock to reveal she was completely naked beneath apart from a complicated-looking criss-crossing of red silk rope.

Later on, Kaye would learn the name for this "rope dress": hishi karada, a form of Japanese bondage. The woman was wearing the diamond pattern -- a simple, elegant knot.

At the time, though, Kaye knew nothing of this. She stared at how the ropes met tightly in a V shape at her sex, watched as the woman turned around to show how the chord was threaded between her buttocks and around her slender neck, and all the while she could only think of how many times she had seen these women boarding busses and standing in groups, laughing like people laugh when they know a lovely secret.

Now, Kaye knew the secret too.

She boarded the Route 43 bus that very same day and followed the woman to a stone chapel building beside a graveyard. She could hear people turning to look as she passed through the wooden doors, could feel their gaze on her as she entered, face flush, eyes downcast. For some reason she couldn't explain, standing there in the chapel with everyone looking at her, she could feel hot tears rising, her pulse pounding in her ears.

But all of that stopped the second she felt his hand on her chin. Joshua lifted her face until she was looking into his deep blue eyes, limpid pools. They stood there for a moment, and the air seemed perfectly still in the room. Then, without a word, Joshua leaned forward and kissed her.

Kaye touches her lips, smiling to herself. If she concentrates, she can still taste him, exactly as he tasted on that day.

She's tasted him since then; more of him, too. Each time is somehow different, like the same sweet cocktail seems to taste different each time it's made, the bartender estimating and following her whims, depending on the weather and the time of day.

Now Kaye stands, her novel finished, and grasps for her sunglasses without looking. Her eyes are fixed on the horizon and the sunbeams reaching towards her like outstretched arms. She takes her blanket under her arm -- her wicker chair is wet with dew in the mornings, so she covers it with a patterned quilt before sitting down -- and goes back inside her apartment: it's simple and clean, a one bedroom ranch-style house, with an open floor plan between her kitchen and the common area where she reads on rainy days. He pays for it for her: easier, he explains, than having her take the bus to Harlowe every morning. She bought the orchids in the window and the books in the pantry (she rarely cooks these days, so her kitchen shelves are stocked with everything besides food). She takes a deep breath once inside, closing her eyes as she exhales. A red clock on the wall reads 10:00am.

There it is again: that blurred feeling of relief and disappointment all at once, like a smudge on a windowpane that doesn't let the sunlight through. Only now, she gets to feel as though she were wiping that smudge clean, and she feels impossibly happy -- giddy, even.

So Kaye takes her a-line skirt and rolls it up her thigh, her wrists moving with practiced precision, until she's standing half naked with a tube of fabric around her waist. Her bottom is full, ample, and as pale as the summer moon. Between the twin cheeks, there's a circular base about the size of a half dollar. She takes it between her middle and fore finger, pulling gently but firmly until the anal plug comes forth, the widest part of it still inside of her. She bites her bottom lip and clenches her eyes shut, breathing deeply in and out, as she wrenches the toy from her and gasps hard, as though she'd been underwater and had finally emerged. It's larger this time, she knows -- she never knows how much larger, just that it's larger. Just that he has complete control of her body, of how it changes, relaxes, and reshapes. She goes to the sink and places her mug at the base. She resists the urge to explore her backdoor for herself: she's under specific instructions not to put anything in that hole besides what he tells her to, and only for exactly as long as he says she should.

Each of her holes exists solely for him.

She belongs to the living dead.

*TO BE CONTINUED*