Late afternoon, Jenni Harley (31) was unaccompanied when visiting her grandmother's grave at the Orange Summit Cemetery. No one else appeared to be in the vicinity.
The hollow-sounding voice repeated the call, "Jenni!"
Startled, she thought the voice sounded like a male, a young male.
"Yes?" she answered nervously.
"We'll meet shortly."
Close to panic, she thought was she about to die and may have just received an early warning of some kind. Her heart was certainly pumping as if she was recovering from running up a steep hill. But she hadn't been jogging that day.
She waited, her right eye twitching.
"Gran?" she called, feeling stupid.
Silence.
All she could hear was the chug-chug on a farm tractor in the distance.
A couple of minutes passed and she calmed and continued to brush debris from the concrete surround of the grave, covering bird droppings from the bottle of water she'd packed in her 'Cemetery' basket that now contained the dead flowers, replacing the fresh flowers she'd brought from her garden. She waited for the water to soak through the droppings to facilitate their removal.
When she was done, she blew an affectionate kiss at the headstone on her maternal grandmother's grave that had been occupied for barely six months.
Hurriedly she left the cemetery, turned on the radio of her small electric car and sang along with the song she knew, feeling she was escaping from her big scare while thinking her face must have turned ghostly while when hearing her name being called eerily. Yes, eerily she now thought, having regained her confidence.
Two hours later, she was nude, stretched out on the wooden chair beside the bath, about to towel off the remaining dollops of foam after attending to the regrowth of public hair when she looked up a yelled, "What the fuck. who are you? How the hell did you get in here as the door is bolted shut?"
"Keep calm, Jenni. It's only me," the good-looking guy after around 21 said quietly.
She thought ah, the voice from the cemetery. He appeared oblivious to the vulva in front of him or what had been done to it.
Jenni was frozen in fear, with one leg dangling into the bath and the other foot was stretched out to rest on to the lid of the wood woven laundry basket that earlier she'd pulled out from beside the double basin vanity unit. Her hand safety razor had dropped to the tiles.
Recovering from shock a little, she thought the guy had been presented with a real eyeful. She was surprised that he appeared to be ignoring it. Omigod, was he gay? Then she realized his focus appeared to be on her face.
"Please confirm you are Jennifer Emma Harley nee Baker."
"Yes, that's me, now get out of my house, you pervert."
His face saddened and as she watched incredulously, the well-dressed guy slowly turned blue and faded into nothing.
Before than transformation completed, Jenni had found herself looking through his body as it became translucent. Her eyes rolled upwards and she slumped back into a faint.
Minutes later, Jenni groaned herself awake to answer the banging on the bathroom door.
"Jenni, wake up," called her disgusting husband Mark, who occasionally had to wake her up in the bath. Three weeks earlier, she'd made him install the bolt lock on the inside of the door after she'd caught him out and he confessed that he was having an affair.
Jenni had pointed to two thin white streaks on his dark blue pants. She'd shrieked they were cum stains and the dampness around both sides of his zip would be pussy juice.
Mark countered by saying those accusations were ridiculous and claimed the stains were yoghurt.
Jenni hit back, "When did you last have yoghurt?"
Mark hesitated.
Jenni responded icily, "You liar, you panicked and simply said yoghurt as you know that is white and sticky. You don't eat yoghurt because you don't like it."
He'd admitted he'd lied, saying that his firm's office manager had been on heat and pulled him into the photo-copy room and had demanded fellatio. She'd caught him unaware and he'd weakly let her have her way with him.
Under cross-examination by his wife, Mark admitted the woman locked the door and they'd ended up having fully-dressed sex. He'd practically grovelled when apologising to his wife and begged for her forgiveness.
Since that steamy confrontation, Mark had been sleeping in the guest room and now it was Jenni who wanted sex. She found herself wondering how to make that happen. She thought about jiggling her breasts because that worked, even when he appeared tired. However, she wasn't the only one thinking sex.
Mark, aroused by her nudeness and eyeing her groin said dangerously, risking at being bawled out, "Omigod, you've just finished shaving. I could eat you."
Jenni groaned.
He took the cue.
As he bent down toward her, Jenni groaned louder and, grabbing a bunch of his hair, pulled his head toward her bald vulva while spreading her legs.
Contact!
She grabbed his ears with each hand to signal she wanted him to remain in that position and called, "Eat me, do your best job ever."
They had three rounds of sex on the bathroom floor and both fell asleep, uncovered and without having cleaned up.
Mark awoke on the floor in the morning, to find himself alone.
He went to the kitchen after showering and dressing in fresh clothes. He waited wisely for Jenni to speak first, sensing that despite their best sex together since their honeymoon, he would be still considered a reprobate. He was long aware that Jenni was quick to scold and slow to forgive.
"Have your breakfast. You may continue sleeping in the guest room. But the only time I wish to see you is at dinner on week nights and not at all at weekends until I say otherwise. In the meantime, you instruct our family lawyer to draft divorce papers."
Mark was thinking what if she wanted sex but instead asked, "Are we to divorce?"
"Did you not hear me mention divorce papers?"
He shrugged helplessly.
Then thinking about Anna-Maree and Shelley young teens at a residential boarding school 280 miles away, Mark asked, "What about the twins?"
"What about them?"
Clenching his hands into fists, he bowed his head, feeling guilty to the core, and said submissively, "Nothing."
Standing triumphantly like a circus ring mistress in closing a successful performance, Jenni barked, "Now fuck off."
Her husband, reeling in anger and hostility, slunk away.
Next evening, Mark left the bar after almost weeping into his second glass of whisky and headed for home, timing his arrival into predominately exile when the jailer would be watching the stupid pre-dinner time comedy show on the kitchen TV while preparing and cooking dinner.
He half-smiled and thought he was still to be fed and at least consumption would be with Jenni at the dinner table rather than eating home deliveries he ordered nightly to be consumed in his open-prison.
Dinner that evening was largely eaten in silence.
Mark had thought of not pouring her two glasses of wine as was his customary duty but decided that was a bad idea because the jailer might retaliate by ordering him to cook his own dinner in future and to buy his own provisions.
Fuck that.
Over dinner, she prattled on the marvellous American comical show that she'd been watching, instead of being intelligently critical by saying why do that put such puerile crap on TV but then remembered that her late-father had been American and she would have been partly raised under the umbrella of American culture of adoring crap that was labelled 'American comedy' although not all of it could be dismissed as crap.
Nevertheless, the timing of some of their comics was generally superb, which suggested the critical fingers should be pointed at the script-writers and the studio bosses who ruled that the aim was to amuse right down to the dumbest level of understanding of Americans.
Mark felt better at getting that off his chest and noticed that his wife was far from being amused by him sounding off like that.
He listened disinterestedly while she talked about minor issue arising at her School of Nursing of which she was director of curriculum and chief supervisor of instructors.
She also talked about her girlfriends, a couple who were newly pregnant with nothing about how they'd become pregnant which may have been rather interesting to him and how traffic congestion on the city roads was increasing which was the last thing he wanted to hear.
In turn, she listened disinterestedly when Mark as CEO of a chain of men's fashion stores had fired Lucas, manager of buying local and imports of new stock, that morning after being confirmed that her was free under employment law to fire the sod after he'd been caught by the company's sales manager drinking with two buddies, all of who were wearing new Italian high-fashion suits that the company had locked-away ready for releasing next month at the city's annual men's fashion show.
At least she did say she hoped the manager had been asked to explain the theft.
"Yes, the boss, our legal adviser and his legal adviser were present and I questioned him and he confessed. He said we needed better security. I asked was her prepared to reimburse us for the three suits at full retail price, with the staff discount apply to his suit but he said, 'Get fucked, Mark. You have no evidence the suits were stolen and I realised we had been spotted by Moses and we all discarded those suits to ensure there was no evidence of misappropriation to pin on me'."
"I told him he was fired and to remove himself from our premises instantly he would be paid the normal dismissal entitlement less the full retail prices of those three suits and if he was unhappy about that I'd see him in court."
"The bastard," Jenni said. "Did Moses reprimand you for allowing that to happen. I know what the skinflint is like."
"He tried but reminded him I reluctantly employed him but Moses demanded his employment to that position as Lucas was his wife's nephew."
"Oh lovely, um may I tell the girls about this when we next meet for coffee?"
