Woman in Red:When Gluttony Met Sloth

by Adam Lowe


Dust motes slide in shifts like honey down a knife and ancient musk lingers on the curtains. Amongst sheets of velvet and silk, she lies. She half-slumbers amongst her pillows, her chiffon dress torn open. Some say she is a bride, others a princess attending a ball which never occurred. Whatever she is, she has lain here for decades and never ages. She stinks and sleeps and weeps silently, always looking out beyond the balcony.

Men come to her. One by one they seek her out in the dark, sniffing her out on the night breeze and crawling over thorns to reach the palace. There they clamber vines to her window and enter her boudoir. Incense burns, waiting for them. These men say she stinks of sweet sweat, of brandy, of talcum powder. But beneath it all she stinks of her own cunt. So they dream of her with heavy tongues lolling and foam building in their mouths.

She is in Monteiro’s room, which is and is not a part of this house. I hear the men climbing onto the balcony, walking its length, and entering. They come through the woods, jumping the gates, or swim through the lakes, or navigate the labyrinths riddling the rock below. However, they find her.

I have never found her. I can open the doors to her chamber, breathe in her stink, and see only cobwebs, the bed that lies empty.

Tonight her stink is a particularly pungent funk. Tangy with menstrual blood. As though her female glory is before my face, nose to clit, tongue to labia, gushing into my mouth. As ever, I am hungry. I want it all. Her flavours beckon.

Because I can never see her, I decide to cheat the apparition. Rooting through the laundry basket, I lift Madam Strix’s ten denier stockings. They are fine caramel gauze; peering through them suggests the blurred lens of pornographers or whorehouse lampshades. Madam Strix’s perfume clings in ghostly whispers to the fibres, but the smell means nothing to me with the bride so prominent in my mind. From these stockings I fashion a blindfold or veil of sorts, through which the entire world is thrown into soft focus. This lack of clarity will, I am sure, encourage my imagination to see her.

Next I climb the stairs, taking deeply of her smell, and increasingly so, with every step. I want to envision her in preparation: blonde curls spiralling like whipper butter; pert lips dark as rose hips; eyes dewy blue; skin the colour of clotted cream; legs arching in a simulacrum of Venetian bridges. She will taste of sex and virginity all at once, being as she is so fecund and yet so untouched by time or nature.

I walk barefoot and the plush carpet sends rippling tingles over the backs of my knees. And here, on the landing, she fills my nose so intensely I gag. As I reach for the brass doorknob, static stings my fingertips. But when I open the door her smell is gone and just the night air pours in. irritated, I turn to leave, but then, flashing in my peripheral vision, I see her.

She is an exquisite Snow White; Sleeping Beauty pricked and ready to be pricked again. Hair ravels about her, from crown to toe. Golden birds nest in its thick, diaphanous coils and butterflies rest on her silken eyelids. Approaching her, I see her glorious dress: not white as I expected, but scarlet, bloody, crumpled, heavy and of extortionate worth. Glow-worms nestle throughout its folds the way beads might if ever they flashed. She is beautiful.

Her smell returns, but more subtle now, deflatingly human. Gone is the phantasm stench of sex, and here instead is the smell of a woman—maybe not any woman, and still a delicious smell, but a real smell nonetheless.

She stirs. The butterflies dance away as her eyes slowly open, caked with sleep in the corners. She is not afraid; she is not welcoming. She is simply aware.

I hunker down next to her, inhaling her and comparing the real scent with the illusory one. Her breath washes across my face, tidal as it draws back and forth, and I smell warmth and anise.

My cock stirs. I lift her dress, fumbling through layered skirts to her garters. Placing my hand in the crook, I feel her damp loveliness. Now the smell is richer again and my stomach rumbles.

I part her thighs and tear away the cloth at her crotch. Slipping a finger into her, I feel her slick heat. I taste her. She's bloody and sticky and aroused. Sweet, bitter, piscine. Then I fuck her, sliding in and out of her yielding thickness fast and hard, till I explode inside and draw out with a trickle of semen, turned pink and frothy inside her.

I hunger. I always hunger.

I stroke her hair back and her eyes tell me she’s aware. She knows what comes next. Still she’s not afraid. This time she smiles. She laughs as I tear her throat out and pull strips of flesh off her body with my fingers and switchblade. All I want to taste is her rich, ripe blood. Her perfect rare meat.

When I’m done only her hair, bones and clothes remain. I have eaten more than is humanly possible and now I can’t move. I’m full. I’m tired. I feel her energy in me, slow and rolling and lethargic. I feel it possess me.

I lie still I exhale deeply and feel myself drifting into sleep. A heavy sleep. A sleep bearing down on my muscles and turning them to marble. My neck stiffens, the joints seizing up. My heart slows, slows, impossibly near to stopping. As my mind begins to turn black, it dawns on me:

I will never move again.


Bio:Adam Lowe, known to his friends as Beyonce Holes, is a libertine, writer, editor, publisher, promoter and piss-artist.

He writes kickass bizarro nightmares, postmodern punk-girl spec fic and surreal, erotic phantasmagoria and has been published in a variety of literary magazines and, more recently, some genre publications too.

His first book 'Troglodyte Rose' (an illustronovella with Kurt Huggins & Zelda Devon) will be released by CROSSING CHAOS enigmatic ink in the summer of 2009.

Adam currently lives in a squat with a fallen angel, an Egyptian deity (Amaunet), a superspy (Lucifuge), three lovers and the crashed wreckage of the Roswell spaceship in his living room. We've heard he eats babies, bathes in the blood of virgins and drinks absinthe by the bucketload.