Honey is Sweeter than Blood Read Free

off her face.  Did her husband ever want to cover her face, so she wouldn’t stare at him while he was inside her, impatient for him to finish? Did he ever want to muffle her mouth so she wouldn’t demand to be carried to the car, driven to the mall, pushed in her wheelchair, whining, complaining, criticizing, judging, rejecting him even while she remained with him? Did her husband ever want to make her incompleteness complete…by taking an axe, and raising it above that pretty pale throat?
    *     *     *
    “She’s the perfect woman, huh?” Kristen joked, referring to the figure lying on the sand in Honey Is Sweeter than Blood .  She was inside Justin’s house, sitting before his computer.  He had wanted her to see this painting.  He hovered very close by, however, in case he needed to dissuade her from looking further into his gallery on her own.
    “Perfect woman?” he echoed.
    “Sure.  No head.  No nagging.  Just the essentials.  What every man wants.  The human blow-up doll.”
    Justin remembered the quadruple amputee he’d fantasized about last night.  Yes.  No hands to touch him.  He would do the touching.  His girlfriend had once slapped him across the face and split his lower lip.  No legs to walk away, to storm out the door.  No mouth to yell.  To call you names.  No hard eyes to loathe you.
    “This is amazing considering how young he was,” Kristen went on.  “Yeesh—gross donkey.” Its ribbed belly was split wide open like a vagina full of teeth.
    “Mm,” Justin grunted absent-mindedly.  He was trying not to breathe in the smell of her hair, just below his own head as he lingered at her shoulder.  Her breath smelled of cigarettes.  He hated that.  They had kissed again, this time in greeting.  He hadn’t liked the warm smell of the air that she expelled through her nostrils.
    Yes, he mused, the woman in the painting was lovely, a simplified form, its symmetry abstracted, refined.  In addition to the inviting orifices of vagina and anus, there were now the raw red wounds at the wrists and ankles, at the end of that lovely neck.  One, two, three, four, five tapered red stems.  He had a thing for the number five.  A star made of flesh.  He would like to walk across that dream sand right now and actually spread the body out into a star, arms and legs wide.  He was growing hard as he pictured it.
    The women whose pictures he had collected off the Internet previously had been his willing sex partners as well.  Though they had hands, they couldn’t push him away.  They wore smiles and never frowned.  They were like exotic spiders mounted under glass, for him to admire without fear of being stung and poisoned.  But now…his new collection…so much better…their forms so improved  upon.  He felt like an artist himself, now.
    “Here’s a cool one,” he muttered, leaning over her shoulder to open up the next picture in his gallery, Hans Bellmer’s weirdly conjoined The Doll .
    “Oh, now here’s the ultimate woman!” Kristen laughed.  “Jeesh, she can give birth out of both ends, even.  They should genetically engineer a whole bunch of these things, raise them on a farm,” she joked.  She elbowed Justin lightly in the ribs and grinned up at him.  “You’re a kinky bastard, aren’t you, Just?”
    He smiled bashfully, gave a shrug.
    She curled her hand in his shirt front.  He shuddered as her fingers slipped behind the buttons to brush his bare skin.  “Are you showing me this stuff to try to turn me on?”
    “I…” He didn’t know.  Part of him desperately wanted to get her into his bed.  After all, hadn’t he prepared carefully for just such a possibility? Wasn’t his bed even now in readiness?
    And yet, he was also terrified.  Of her hands, like the one inside his shirt, its sharp nails playfully raking him as if to threaten him with disembowelment, or worse, castration.
    Kristen rose up from her chair.  Her arms snaked around him and she