Cold Rain Fever
*****
Madison stood before a room full of women in hooded black robes. Each of them shimmied silver and black pom poms and murmured to each other conspiratorially. A spotlight shown down on her with an accusatory glare and a hostile chill permeated the room. Madison's skin prickled with cool dread. What could this mean?
To her right, Daniel stood behind a large wooden table, tall in a tuxedo with mirror polished shoes and a red rose pinned to his left lapel. A gorgeous brunette-haired woman stood next to him. She wore a gossamer white wedding dress and held a bouquet of red roses, with her right arm thrust possessively through the loop of Daniel left arm. They looked like a bride and groom statuette on top of a wedding cake.
Madison's stomach turned at the sight and she tried to get Daniel's attention with a frantic wave, but the angel woman whispered in Daniel's ear. Daniel smirked and the angel woman responded with a giggle and a love-struck sparkle in her eye. To her horror Madison realized that Daniel was about to marry her. Madison opened her mouth to protest, but no sound came out.
Before Madison could charge across the room, a loud clash of cymbals announced the appearance of a judge who reclined on the wrap around sofa at the head of the room. The Judge was a winged pixie in a red silk robe and the yellow-orange eye makeup of vengeance rimmed her blood red eyes. Fire licked from her fingertips as she reached for a heavy gavel, which she pounded three times like the stroke of doom. The room went deathly quiet as the Judge glared down at Madison imperiously.
"This is the case of Defendant Madison," the Judge intoned in a contra-alto thunder. "I have reviewed the evidence and heard the arguments. You have been given a full and fair hearing and I hereby find you... guilty as charged!"
The gallery full of hooded women in black issued a derisive hiss at Madison underscored by the swish of pom poms. Again, Madison opened her mouth to protest, but again she was unable to form words or even make a sound. The judge banged her gavel three times for quiet and then continued without notice of Madison's frantic attempts to speak.
"Enough! This Court does not need any additional testimony from the likes of you, young lady!" the Judge scolded. "The evidence is clear, and you are guilty! Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt! You were a terrible girlfriend, and even worse fiancé and an abominably bad wife on a scale this court has not witnessed in its long history!"
Another hiss of denunciation and pom poms went up from the hooded women in the gallery. The spotlight seared brighter, but the cold aura of condemnation in the room only intensified. Madison looked around to see if she could escape, but she found she could not get out of the cone of light created by the spotlight. The Judge thundered on.
"Generally, you were a very bad girl!"
The gallery bayed and shook their pom poms in agreement and the Judge waited a moment before she banged her gavel for silence again.
"What's more, your behavior reflects badly on all women and cannot be allowed to go unchecked lest all men should be led to think all women are not but gold digger bitches who only care about how much they can squeeze out of a man and are incapable of love!"
The gallery of black hooded women groaned and shimmied their pom poms in approval of the Judge's words and this time the Judge let the hisses and curses they flung rain down on Madison until they were spent. After the condemnation of the gallery faded away, the Judge continued.
"Fortunately, a good-hearted woman has come forward to accompany this good-hearted man through life! May their marriage be blessed and fruitful and may they share a rich and true love, which is reserved for those who are soulmates!"
The hooded women in the gallery keened a cheer of triumph and gratitude, which caused the angel woman to blush and wave shyly. Daniel touched her cheek and looked at her with such love in his eyes that Madison nearly vomited jealousy. She was Daniel's soulmate, not that that angel bitch! She tried again to scream to Daniel that she loved him, and she was sorry for the hurt she had caused, but again her voice failed. The wild cheers and shimmer of pom poms faded away and the Judge continued.
"As punishment for your crimes, this Court will impose the maximum sentence from which there is no appeal!"
More cheers and the exultant swish of pom poms went up from the black hooded women and the Judge banged her gavel again.
"Defendant Madison, you are hereby... DIVORCED!"
"NO!" Madison finally managed to scream, but it was too late, and Madison knew it. No one heard her over the crowd's furious and lusty approval of the sentence. The Judge stood, seized her gavel, and brought it down with an ear-splitting thunderclap of finality. As the sound of the gavel faded into an echo, the women in black robes pointed accusatory pom poms at Madison and moaned jeers at her in high, shrill voices. After a moment the Judge nodded to the angel woman, who then pulled Daniel close and kissed him passionately. Madison's bereft cry was drowned out by the taunts and invectives hurled at her from the crowd and Madison could only watch as Daniel returned the angel woman's kiss with equal zeal. When their lips parted, they shared a happy gaze of contentment that struck Madison like a hammer blow.
Then as she opened her mouth to scream her protest, the floor opened, and Madison fell. She fell for a long time, down deep into a stone-lined well where she finally splashed down into a deep pool of freezing cold water. Madison struggled back to the water's surface with a gasp of cold air that seared her lungs. She looked around wildly but saw no way to escape.
As she shuddered from the shock of the icy-cold water on her skin, two impossibly cold hands seized her ankles and pulled her head underwater. Madison kicked and pulled against the hands, but she couldn't escape their frost bound grip. Panic roared in her mind, and a merman with the face of Steve the Oaf smiled at her with possessive lust. Madison shuddered with revulsion and kicked against his grip so violently that he let her go. Freed from Steve the Oaf's clammy grasp, Madison frantically pulled for the surface. She came up in a spray of water droplets and gasped for air. Above her Daniel's face appeared, and although he was high above her, Madison thrust a pleading hand up towards Daniel.
"Daniel!" she screamed. "Daniel, I'm sorry!"
Then Steve the Oaf dragged her back under the water's surface. She flailed frantically to reach the surface again, but this time Steve the Oaf did not let go. Instead, he flicked his tail and dragged Madison down deeper into the pool. She thrashed and kicked but she couldn't escape, and her breath began to burn in her lungs.
Down and down Steve the Oaf swam, and as Madison grew weaker, he wrapped her in a ice bound embrace that pinned her arms to her side. One of his cold hands entwined in her hair and once he had secured her in his grasp, Steve the Oaf kissed her, deeply and hungrily. His tongue snaked into Madison's mouth, and he sucked the air from her lungs. Madison tried to scream, but only a few little pathetic bubbles issued from her mouth.
Too weak and oxygen deprived to fight, all Madison could do was feel cold revulsion as Steve the Oaf crushed his body into hers, wedge his tail between her legs and forced them open as his huge, blue penis slither towards her. Weakly she shook her head in protest as it slid coldly up her thigh and the tip teased against her. She lifted her eyes to pray for rescue, but all she saw was a grin of possessive and destructive lust spread on Steve the Oaf's face.
Then in one long, smooth, and horrifyingly pleasurable thrust, Steve the Oaf penetrated Madison. She couldn't protest or resist and for a moment Steve the Oaf granted her the small mercy of a pause. Then a lascivious look came onto his face, and he thrust in and out of Madison's airless body like a kind of bio-engineered animal designed to inflict pleasure on her. Madison momentarily tried to resist the cold deluge of pleasure, but her body betrayed her, and lust overwhelmed her reason. She forgot about the water, she forgot about the divorce, she even forgot about Daniel and spread her legs to accept the mortification of pleasure that grew swiftly in her body. Seconds later, Madison's body erupted in a violent and shamefully large orgasm. She opened her mouth to scream out her pleasure but couldn't because she had no air in her lungs.
But Madison's sentence of humiliation and degradation didn't end there. Steve the Oaf pushed harder and faster without any care if Madison enjoyed it at all. He wanted conquest, not connection and he grinned at her with the maniacal frenzy of a shark attack. Again, her body spasmed and in response Steve the Oaf's face twisted in ugly ecstasy as his body grew taut. With an animal roar of raw pleasure, he spewed forth a dark cloud of cold, eely seed inside her. Madison felt his essence, frigid and slimy deep inside her, impregnate her.
His lust spent, Steve the Oaf pushed Madison's limp body from him and sneered a look of satisfied contempt. Madison drifted, unable to float or swim to the surface, helpless and bereft. She reached out to him in a plea for some tenderness, but Steve the Oaf recoiled in disgust and struck her a merciless slap across the face with his webbed right hand. Stunned from the blow, Madison drew a deep breath of the cold water into her lungs in hopes that she would simply drown to end this miserable torture, but she discovered she could breathe the water like air. She looked down at her body and saw that her legs now formed into a tail like a fish and, below her she saw Steve the Oaf surrounded by an enormous churn of grotesquely pretty mermen and mermaids. They sang to her in reedy voices and beckoned for her to join them in the depths.
Madison could never return to the surface of the water, never again feel warmth, never again return to Daniel and, worst of all, her inability to resist the cold darkness of beings like Steve the Oaf was what caused it. Her fate was to be with Steve the Oaf, bear his children and swim in these icy-cold waters as part of the grotesquely pretty school of mermen and mermaids. But the cruel curse would be that she would not enjoy her life in that cold and airless place because she had the memory of warmth and of Daniel and the painful knowledge of how she carelessly threw that all away. Madison emitted one long, mournful cry, but now her high reedy voice couldn't be heard outside the icy-cold water. A great surge of loss strangled her heart, and her eyesight blurred with tears of anguish. She deserved this, to be treated like this, for all she had done. To her shame, Madison had failed Romeo twice, and now she was condemned to never be free of Steve the Oaf and this world of icy-cold water. Foolishly, she had thought she wanted this life, and now, for just a few awful and shameful minutes of fleeting pleasure, she had exactly what she deserved. Daniel was gone from her life and Madison's heart shattered into a thousand little crystal shards of pain.
"No!"
