glamour
“Is it… I mean, you told me magick doesn’t even need to be ‘real’; that if you fed on me, you’d believe you’d gain and I’d believe I’d suffer for you, and so both would happen. But it seems to be more than that. It’s real, right?”
You nod, staring into my eyes. “It starts that way. Then you get deeper. It’s real. And anyway: Fangs, tendrils, hand sinister. You’ve seen them all.”
“But I could be mad, right? Hysterical? If this is real then it’s observable and… science applies, right?”
The thought tickles you. I watch you laugh, your head thrown back, with pleasure. “Come on. I like evidence as much as the next witch. Let’s do an experiment, if you like. See whether you’re mad, or if everyone else is…”
You play with your phone for a while, and before I know it you’ve ordered an Uber. Ten minutes to do hair and clothes. I run around like a headless chicken.
You stay casual. When we head out to the taxi I’m still buttoning my waistcoat and checking my pockets; you’re casually dressed in jeans and that burgundy jumper you find so comfy, with even your lipstick faded to ombre in the middle.
(It’s not an effect I’m about to complain about.)
You confirm the address to the driver. Chatty, he says, “You’re both scrubbed up nice! Going somewhere good?”
At first I think he might be taking the mick, but he’s sincere, even stealing glances at you through the rear view mirror. I mean, yes, you’re stunning always, the most beautiful creature ever to walk the earth, but others normally wouldn’t look at dossing clothes and say you’d scrubbed up. You brush off my puzzled look with a crooked smile.
“We’re going to watch some dancing.”
I open the taxi door and offer you my hand, which is a ridiculous thing to do but here we are. When I slam it shut again, I see your reflection.
No comfy jumper, no faded lipstick. A black minidress pleated in a gathered starburst at the waist, the lines picked out by something glittering in the fabric. Your makeup is immaculate, slight smoke about the eyes turning them into drowning pools, and your hair flows and caresses your shoulders like a lover. To look at you is to picture running ones hands through that hair, to dream of kissing those lips…
When I spin to look at you you’re smiling that crooked smile. “Come on, we’ll be late.” I feel the plush fuzz of your sleeve when you grab me by the hand.
Whatever glamour you’ve woven coils about you and draws attention. I feel eyes on us as we cross the ground-floor bar, and again once we’ve descended the stairs. We step out into a coolly lit gig space. Tables ringed with chairs cluster around a raised stage, still empty.
You might as well be a supermodel on a catwalk for the attention you’re getting. I notice a few crumbs on your jumper from the Hobnobs I brought you earlier with your tea.
I grab us some drinks, displace the chancer gentleman you’re toying with when I return, and then the lights dim.
Burlesque is always a good night out. For someone with my short attention span the mix of bawdy jokes, drag kings and queens, comedy routines, vaudeville sing-alongs and even feats of magic is a rich and absorbing pot pourri of good, clean, raunchy entertainment. We both laugh and share jokes, and I forget about the glamour you’re wearing.
When the burlesque dancer comes out I see you stiffen out of the corner of my eye. Suddenly there is tension in your body language. Desire. Sultry music strikes up and she begins to sway, her beautiful crest and great fans of vermilion feathers dusting the air. The fans hide more than they reveal, but what is revealed in glimpses is plump, creamy flesh and curves patterned with criss-crossing bands, more holes than fabric.
Her dance proceeds and the audience hollers at every teasing dip and reveal. The unclasping of a shoulder strap allows her cape to float free, pooling on the ground like blood. A thigh steps out from behind the fans’ shelter and we see crimson fingernails stroke up and down. Well, the others do. I’m watching you and your focus is elsewhere. Your lips move as you perform some prayer or ritual, ending when you touch your eyes.
You stand. The dancer, unaware her end is approaching, reaches the portion of the dance where she discards one fan and hides behind the other coquettishly. Dipped knees allow a glimpse of her backside, scarcely made decent by a short, short skirt. The crowd applauds the generous, feminine swell, some banging tables.
A look of uncertainty crosses her face as she clocks you walking towards the stage. Her dance continues, pom-pom-pom mock heartbeats with the fan in time to brassy trumpet notes. But she only really falters when you mount the stage.
Even with your bulk, you haul yourself up, one leg then roll forwards to bring up the other, with deadly efficiency. You stand and I see you’re taller than her. She says something, but the music covers it and you don’t answer anyway; and then she calls out to the security guy by the side of the stage as you advance. He ignores her too.
Incongruously, the audience whoops. About now in her routine she would have removed the strappy body-piece. I look around at delighted and titillated faces: no one is concerned by the curvy woman now drawing up to the scared dancer.
Almost as if hypnotised by the music, your tendrils advance, sliding through seams in your jumper and swaying as they go. The dancer shies away and looks like she is going to bolt but is immediately arrested by the snap of your tendrils around her knees and neck.
She screams, a discordant note against the increasingly raucous melody. I notice a couple of people’s eyelids flutter as if irritated by a fly, but nothing more than that. She gets a chance to bash you with a giant feather fan—nothing a forearm can’t turn away—and then drops it and cuts off silent when the blade of your curling tendril slips round her neck down to her breast. Blood beads but never spills, sucked into the blackness. The tendril’s advance into her chest isn’t even slowed by the need to slice into her flesh and squeeze between her ribs.
The audience christens some hallucinated trick with scattered applause and cheering.
The dancer goes red as she is strangled by her own blood, pulsing with the frequency of a heartbeat through the tendril wrapped around her neck. Her hands scrabble for grip on it and find nothing. I watch the back of your head, watch how it tilts, giving you an air of abstract curiosity as you watch the dancer’s life drain along your vampiric limb and gush into your belly.
At some point her legs buckle. You hold her aloft by the throat a moment, but then fold her into a kneeling position with the aid of the tendril around her knees. She stares at you with eyes rolled upwards, too weak to even tilt back her head to see you straight.
The tendril unfurls with serpentine grace, tracing across her skin like a lover’s touch. The audience reacts with a sound of growing anticipation. Perhaps they’re seeing her tease at removing her pretty red underwear, rather than watching you hold her shoulders in place with your hands as you begin to lean down.
She says something—begging, asking why, I can’t hear—and you give her a terminal answer. She stares up into your slavering maw and knows it is her death as it glides gently down to seal her in your annihilating darkness.
I attract a few curious and annoyed glances when I stand up. Oh, right, I’m not affected by the glamour. I sit jerkily like a malfunctioning robot.
She barely struggles. In fact she slides down your throat like she was born to fill it. I alone am treated to the heart-stopping view of your arse raised high while you take your gluttonous deep bow, stuffing her fleshy top half down your greedy gullet. I am the only one to see you kneel and haul her weakly kicking legs over your head, letting gravity and your saliva-slick oesophagus feed the rest of her into your swelling stomach.
But everyone else cheers and claps and wolf-whistles.
The music comes to a triumphant crescendo. Immediately it is fouled by a belch designed to immure your living meal as tightly as possible in your tummy.
The compère announces the end of the act—how right she is—and you get to your feet, ponderously walking to the stage steps while black-shirted stage hands gather the discarded father fans.
You ease yourself into your chair between me and another audience member and hide a belch behind your fist. The next act, a strong-man, is underway, but it’s hard to focus. I can hear screaming from inside your squirming stomach. Struggling stimulates your production of digestive juices, I know. She’d do better to remain still and suffocate, not pour your gently murderous enzymes all over herself first.
I lean close. “I need to get you home. Right now.”
You can see the need in my eyes. To fuck you, or worship your stomach, or feed you, or all of the above. You smile and shift your weight on the chair. The dancer’s massage causes a preemptory fart to sneak free of your compressed guts. The glamour doesn’t cover that, but others will put it down to me, I guess.
“Do you understand now?”
I open and close my mouth. I could try to string together something about observation being the root of science and you clearly altering perception, but I don’t have the brainpower. “Honestly, ask me later. You just put on the most incredible show and all I want to do is rub your tummy till she breaks down inside you.”
Sloshing around in a bath of acid and her own blood, your meal seems nevertheless to have a lot of staying power. You sigh warmly and pat your independently jiggling belly. “Okay. Quiz later. Tummy rubs now. Home.”
“Home,” I agree, taking your hand. Then I hesitate, looking bashful. “She was so beautiful. Please take that away from her. Swallow air. Please. Let’s bring her home, give you a massage inside and out.”
You smile beatifically and inhale deep. A series of croaks marks air traveling the wrong way through your larynx.
Your sobbing, writhing gut sags as you stand. We depart, and she keeps you company. Hours for us. For her, an eternity; and then eternity is lost to her.