The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I

Goody Abigail’s house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in the Golden Oaks neighborhood, a subdivision on the outskirts of a grand city in the northeast region of the country. The subdivision had begun as a modest neighborhood, built in the post-war period, but whether that war was the one to end all wars, or the one after that, or the one after that became a matter of indifference, especially to the younger generation growing up in the well-kept yards, playing in the maintained parks and playgrounds, or riding their bikes, skateboards, or scooters down the well-paved and well-painted streets boasting clear signage warning against excessive speed.

The families living in the older houses, among which Goody Abigail counted her home, hid behind modest, red-bricked facades and small, well-kept porches, but the newer homes on new streets still under construction as the population grew, shamelessly thrust columns, stucco, curved driveways, gabled elevations, and tiled roofs to their equally shameless neighbors. And even further out, further away from the older neighborhood of Golden Oaks, worse monstrosities loomed: cubist nightmares derived from the hallucinatory fantasies of demented architects.

But in Goody Abigail’s neighborhood, homes were quiet, restrained if not small, sitting properly on streets lined by tall oaks and proud maples, and displaying that old American virtue, passed down on her English maternal side, of being cozy. Goody Abigail had already reached her later years when first moving into Golden Oaks. Her small family of two daughters soon moved out, the one following the other. The first found a place, and quickly afterward a husband, in a medical office park. The second went to university and stayed, acquiring a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a doctorate of philosophy before finding another university across the country in those heady days of academia when a professorship could be had—and tenure.

So Abigail lived with her husband for decades, until the husband passed, and the good widow had the small house to herself, where she spent much of her declining years in her sewing room, which became a sort of reading room when it became clear that the daughters would have no need of her sewing.

The neighborhood changed.

What had once been filled with Bakers, Cunninghams, MacNeils, Tuckers, and Worths gradually gave way to Carbonis and Delgattos, then Brookses, Kings, DuBoises, and Scotts. In time, Garcias, Rogriquezes, Morenos, and Ruizes flourished. In the cycle of time, some of the Tuckers returned, or the MacNeils, but with them new names and new families from far-off and exotic places appeared, and Fong, Ling, and Zheng joined the panoply of names, along with Abdallah, Hassan, and Qadir or Bakshi, Kapoor, Rana, and Thakur.

So it was a different neighborhood from the one which Abigail had first moved into, so long ago, and though those old grudges and hostilities of people accustomed to holding grudges long after the causes, but not the effects, of the original disagreements were forgotten gradually began to wane to be replaced by a bemused and uneasy poise, the wave and smile of a people desirous of peace and even friendship, yet unable and uncertain how to proceed and how to obtain it.

The young people were quicker to drop reticence.

A bicycle was, after all, a bicycle and needed to be raced.

A basket demanded a ball be thrown through it, and the ball demanded a thrower. And it is a law no less universal than the one regulating bachelorhood that where one child throws a ball throw a hoop, another child, and then another must invariably follow. Not even the adults were immune to this most universal of all natural laws.

Clean sidewalks must be chalked with colored chalk, a quite inflexible rule as unbreakable as the simplest of spells.

Even the sullen teenagers, loth to be seen as human, slouched towards one another in their awkward, monotonic, and monosyllabic way, eschewing all displays of sociability until away from the umbric oppression of their younger charges or the older despotic generation of uncle and aunt, of mother and father, of all things reeking of that adulthood so distant in the eternal future.

And so the patches of the Reverend’s quilt, so often threatening to fray and to pull apart, were organically resewn by the work of youth, proximity, and that most splendid of all human acknowledgments of the passage of time: the holiday.

Religious or secular made no difference to the inhabitants of Golden Oaks, although not everyone always knew just what was being celebrated or why.

When Ramadan came, the liberal unfaithful smiled at each other with a knowing nod and promised to restrain their diet in a show of unity, but they looked at the calendar and at the moon with a growing impatience, sympathetic with the privations of their submitted brethren.

Cinco de Mayo arrived, and though the whole thing seemed a little contrived, no one complained much. After all, la cerveza fluía como las aguas de la Misissippi.

July came and went with its usual display of flag and firework; the day and the moment did not always bind citizen together—neither the country nor the country’s government always gave a solid cause for patriotic fervor.

But the fireworks, public and private alike, usually gave the spectator something to cheer.

It was the cooler months of the year which provided the best moments of delight. Halloween with its bright and festive reds, yellow, and oranges, lighted pumpkins and spooky figures, skeletons, ghosts, and witches hanging from tree limbs in the front yards.

Not all neighbors celebrated Halloween, of course.

But Diwali was just around the corner with its brilliant lights, so much like Christmas.

The foliage celebrated life in its decline by throwing off the usual-but-always-breathtaking barrage of darkened reds, fading greens, pale yellows, and vivid pinks.

Then Thanksgiving, demure, modest, somewhat shamed in this new era of cultural sensitivity, came. The turkeys roasted in the ovens with the pumpkin and pecan pies, but the gravy was poured with a taciturn chagrin—until abuela Juana entered the dining room with a tray filled with steaming tamales. An effusion of comestible delight overtook the neighborhood.

Cheng grilled spicy beef on his back patio, a deck high in the air overlooking the Smiths, who responded with barbecued Cornish hens and plentiful libations of German beer. The rich aromas of masala and curry imbued the air around Prisha Singh’s house, properly facing northeast, with exotic visions of the subcontinent, and Jimmy Prine, who had rarely left his state and never his country, loved to stand on the other side of the street and dream of Delhi, Mumbai, and the British Raj.

Then Christmas came, still the heavyweight if disputed champion of American holidays. Sleighs went up on rooftops, lights were hung from eave and tree branch alike, nativities and Christmas scenes covered the lawns. Inflated Santas ran amok in the Jefferson yard. Jesus continued to be the reason for the season at the Moore homestead.

Ram Patel started leaving the lights of Diwali up a little longer every year, but whether from laziness or in solidarity with his Christian neighbors no one could really say, not even himself.

And so Christmas ran to New Year’s Day in January and that to the one in February, a thing admired by all, for a year without two New Years is a year without charm. It’s as deplorable as a day without second breakfast; it leaves one fed but wanting.

And the denizens of Golden Oaks grew accustomed to one another.

II

The children of Golden Oaks were united in one thing: Goody Abigail was a witch. The facts remained indisputable. Goody Abigail was old, a woman, and she lived alone. A black cat, gaunt and scraggly, its head held at weird angles from its neck, was seen running to Goody Abigail’s back yard, leaping over the faded and weather-worn wooden fence after prowling the neighborhood at night. Few of the kids had ever seen Goody Abigail, but rumors of her abounded, and no one had a reason to doubt them.

Taylor Kane scoffed at those rumors.

One of the older teenagers and a member of her high school’s Key Club, Taylor had for the past several months read aloud to Goody Abigail as part of her volunteer duties. Abigail’s eyesight had much deteriorated, and word had gone around to Taylor’s mother that the nonagenarian would very much enjoy both the company and the lecture. After some pressing, Taylor had agreed.

She found Abigail to be frail, bed-ridden, very much alive, and not at all witch-like either in demeanor or word.

The months passed, and the holidays wheeled through their cycles; Labor Day had come and gone, and October neared its completion. The ghosts and goblins, the skeletons and witches came out, the shadows of the evening lengthened, and the weather turned cold and rainy, as it always had.

She’d already been to a couple of costume parties, bringing her new friend Kimaya, who had arrived last year and was new to the Halloween experience, but not to costumes or masquerades.

They were neighbors, living across the street from each other, and shared two classes in school. Earlier that year, Taylor, seeing Kimaya holding up an umbrella in the rain, apparently waiting for a ride, offered to take her home.

Kimaya shook her head.

“My mother’s always late.”

Just then her phone rang.

Kimaya sounded frustrated, her voice rose, and she hung up the phone quickly.

“Are you sure,” Taylor asked.

“No. You don’t mind?”

“Of course not,” Taylor smiled.

So a friendship of sorts grew, the kind of early friendship between two young people who knew that they really had nothing in common except proximity and youth. Neither one was sure she liked the other, but as neither hated the other, and as neither had any real alternative so far, they both accentuated their mutual likes and deemphasized the dislikes.

The system worked for them; it didn’t really have the opportunity not to.

III

The life of a nonagenarian, like that of a country, has its history of atrocity and beneficence. Belinda Abigail, who had been born almost a century ago, proved no exception to this. Like the nation that bore her, she began life humbly, of respectable but low station, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a farmer, as was common enough in those days. But the nation had already begun its vast change, and by the time Belinda reached seventeen, she found herself running away from her farm, in the tow of her beau, a tall young man of twenty, to Manhattan, where a man could make something of himself, with enough grit and determination.

She had eloped with a man named Carter, but before Carter could make a man of himself, the war came (because the previous one had neither caused sufficient destruction nor had brought to an end enough human lives).

The sequel proved superior to the original, and not only Carter had been killed but many men of the Bowery neighborhood, and many who returned were broken in body or mind or both.

The country itself was ecstatic, Belinda less so.

But the boom came, and Belinda, forced out of the garment factory due to its closing after the war, met up with a friend from the factory, a woman named Rose who tried talking her into dancing for the clubs opening up like mushrooms all over the city.

“Can you dance?” Rose asked, while Belinda dressed in her bedroom. They shared a flat, and Rose made it a habit to burst in unannounced, disconcerting Belinda—at least until she got used to it.

“You still got nice legs, honey, and that’s all that matters to those mugs.”

Belinda hesitated, and Rose, an enthusiastic reader of Hawthorne, had taken to calling her Goody.

“Good hips, too, and that don’t hurt.”

Eventually Belinda, now Goody, agreed to go to the clubs to watch Rose.

Rosa stood in lines on the stage, kicking her legs high into the air one after the other, her arms around the necks and shoulders of her partners, looking exhausted, intent, purposeful, and happy. She seemed so happy and free to be up there amid all the jeering and hoots and laughter and applause of the male audience.

Their skirts went high, and sometimes their sparkling, jeweled shirts went off, shocking Goody and intriguing her with the way the women swirled the shining tinsels pasted to their nipples around. It all seemed so silly to Goody.

Silly, shocking, risqué, and.

Sexy.

That word was new to Goody, but she liked it, and she liked watching her friend Rose.

Rose noticed.

One night, while both were home, and the noise, hum, and life of New York City bubbled outside their second-story window, Rose turned the blinds down and pulled the curtains closed.

“I want to try a routine for you,” she said, a strange, faraway look in her eyes.

Goody sat up straight, holding her long cigarette in one hand while she set her martini on the round, cherry-veneer end table. She had recently taken to using a long stem for her cigarettes. She thought it made her look sophisticated, elegant, intelligent.

It did in a way.

Rose left the room and came back some time later in light, shimmering red silk outlining her body, the curve of her hips, the swell of her bosom. She fetched an album from its shelf, pulled a thick record from its sleeve, went to the music player and carefully placed the disk on the turn table, setting the needle gently on the record.

She wore garter and hose on her legs, and she began drifting around the room, swaying to the swing of the big band and to the haunting voice of a woman seeming to come from deep within the grooves of the recording. Goody couldn’t pull her eyes away from Rose’s swaying body, she stared as one stares at the swaying head of a cobra, but it was Rose’s hips that captured Goody’s attention.

Rose positioned a kitchen chair, a small wooden chair with a high back rising to shoulder level, in the center of the living room. The spindled, arched back of it faced Goody. Rose danced gracefully and lithesome around the chair, holding its back with her gloved arm as she stripped off one glove and then the other, all the while holding her eyes on Goody.

Goody’s eyes swept from her hips to her eyes, transfixed, mesmerized. She couldn’t look away if she wanted to, and she certainly didn’t want to.

Rosa posed with one leg on the seat of the chair, and Goody held her breath as her flat mate unhooked her garter straps and seductively rolled her hose down her thigh, muscular and milk-white, over the bend of her knee and down the round, shallow sickle-shape of her calf. She lifted her foot off the chair, peeled off her hose, and tossed the garment at Goody, who caught it in the hand not holding her cigarette, by now extinguished in its holder.

Goody’s heart raced as she ran her fingers through the soft Rayon, still warm from its contact with Rose’s body, Rose’s legs, Rose’s smooth, smooth thigh. Rose glided around the chair in a series of calm glissades, never breaking eye contact with Goody, unless the entranced woman on the sofa moved her eyes to snatch glimpses of the dancer’s hips.

Rose raised her other leg to the seat.

This time Goody put down her cigarette and leaned forward, utterly smitten.

Her eyes focused on Rose’s long, graceful fingers as she carefully unhooked the second garter, smoothly rolling the hose down her thigh, at once soft and muscular from months of dancing, over the bend of her knee, and down the soft, round curve of her calf.

She lifted her foot off the chair, peeled the hose past her ankle and toes, and tossed the second garment playfully at Goody. Goody caught the hose, hesitated an instant and brought the Rayon to her nose, breathing in the smell of Rose’s perfume and Rose’s skin.

Rose paused, winked at Goody, and shimmied and swayed, dropping the straps of her red dress over her shoulders, letting the red silk drop until, only held up by her hands over her breasts, her white milky skin dazzling Goody’s eyes and mind. Goody’s drank in the sight of Rose.

Her hair, a natural red, fell in curly waves on each side of her face, but the top her hair had been styled in a wave curling backward in a rolling wave. She looked serious and sensual at the same time, her eyebrows had been arched narrowly, her cheeks glowed with blush, and her lips burst in bright red. Her hips were wider and rounder than Goody’s, and in her dress she boasted that perfect hourglass figure, which Goody knew had been reinforced by the presence of a waist-shaping girdle.

Her bosom was larger, fuller than Goody’s, and had the target, subject, and object of much commentary on the part of her male audience—and many women as well.

When Rose dropped her dress, Goody’s mind was too preoccupied to feel pleased by the rightness of her guess.

Goody’s mouth felt try, and her breathing grew shallow and short. Her heart pumped wildly behind the cage of her ribs.

Rose reached behind her to unclasp her bra.

She fixed Goody in a stare.

“Would you like to see me, Goody?”

She whispered the question breathily, huskily, the sound of her voice carrying promises of eroticism beyond the wildest dreams of Goody Abigail.

Goody swallowed and nodded.

“Then ask. Ask me to show you my. My tits, Goody. Ask to see my tits.”

Rose had almost faltered there, so overwhelmed by the moment, but she pursued her seduction artfully and without let-up.

Goody couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. The blood rushed from her head, a wind seemed to howl in her ears, and she felt dizzy, almost swooning. Finally she blurted out a loud yes, but it came out as a dry whisper, barely audible even to herself.

“Yes, please. I want to see more. I want to see your. Tits.”

She had never used that word in her life, although Carter would sometimes say it, much to her blushing chagrin.

Rose smiled, inwardly relieved.

She’d been right.

“Of course,” she said sweetly. Then she unhooked her bra and let it fall to the floor silently.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Goody’s heart pounded wildly, relentlessly.

A flurry of confused thoughts poured through her head, tumbling chaotically, chief among them was a sense of surprise—at this situation and at herself. She was a sober-minded woman, Goody Abigail was, and not a woman easily given over to sudden fits of passion or fancy.

She was a woman, and nothing about a woman’s body had previously seemed exotic, wonderful, or even sensual. It functioned as the creator meant it to function, and that was enough for Goody Abigail.

She didn’t fawn over the boys in her small high school back home.

But she hadn’t fallen in love with any of her girl friends either, though rumors swirled about such things happening, bosom friends who clang to each other with sighs and ejaculations.

Goody Abigail had no bosom friend, and she didn’t intend to have one in New York City.

She supposed she had loved Carter, a sudden romantic fervor, quite unusual for the girl, had seized her then. Although whether arising from the tall figure of Carter himself or from the wide vista of freedom eloping with him had meant, she couldn’t quite say. She supposed it had been a mixture of the two.

She bemoaned his death.

Such an injustice, such a terrible, damned waste of a human life.

She hoped he had not suffered; she hoped that he had died swiftly, caught unaware by bullet or shell, but she could never know, and that thought had been a torment for a time.

But Rose had come along, and Rose had pulled her out of her cafard, and Rose had shown her all the things a post-war and victorious New York could boast at night when no one ever slept.

She had watched Rose dance at the clubs, had gazed at the feminine dancers, their bodies all curves and sparkles and barely concealed flesh, and her spirits, only a little deflated, subdued at the sudden onslaught of early widowhood, began to take wing and to fly. They went out, Rose and Goody; it seemed every night of the week saw Rose and Goody walking arm in arm down one of the avenues or streets, stopping to shop at window, laugh in cafés, shout in bars, or dance in clubs, swinging their loose dresses around their calves as they danced, danced, danced.

Rose is good for me, Goody had often thought recently. I like her.

She started confiding in her, sharing secrets she never told anyone, telling her her hopes and dreams for the future, her despondency sometimes at a world grown so. Old.

Rose had laughed at that word.

“You’re only, what, twenty? My god, honey. I’ve got a good five years on you, and I don’t feel a day over sixteen.”

Goody pulled Rose closer to her side, then, reaching her arm through hers and holding her tight.

Did she have one at last? A bosom friend, a kindred spirit?

But Rose’s bosom shook her from her reverie, her tits so free, expansive, and. Fetching.

Yes, that’s the word Goody used.

My god, could that outfit there be any more fetching?

Rose’s breasts plunged downward and outward in pear-shaped, globular drops of flesh. Dark red circles covered each nipple, and red freckles dotted the milky panorama of her body.

They’re just breasts, Goody wanted to remind herself. Of the normalcy and everydayness of the things. For god’s sake, woman, she tried to tell herself. I’ve got them.

But Goody looked at them all the same, and the beating of her heart grew no less quiet.

Then Rose suddenly sat on the chair, straddling the seat with a leg on either side of the chair, pulled the bottom of her girdle high, and crossed her arms over the back of the chair, resting her chin on a wrist.

It took a moment for Goody to understand.

The band played in the background, the sultry voice of the female singer cooed, and Goody finally understood.

This time there was no word left to think, nor any protest left to make, nor any resistance left to feint with.

Rose’s love, Rose’s sex, Rose’s center stared at her, pink dangles of wet flesh flaring from a thin wet line topped by the furled folds of her pink hood, flesh surrounded by her red thatch of pubic hair lining the sides of her vulva and flowing over the top of her mons in a wide and wild triangle of fur.

Rose had been right, she had known she’d been right, and now, delaying no longer, she jumped from her chair, which tumbled on its side to the floor, and dropped beside the stunned Goody. She grabbed her friend, pulled her over her lap, held her face in her hands, leaned over her face and kissed her, Rose’s red lips on Goody’s pale, unadorned mouth, and Goody moaned, wrapping her arms around Rose’s head and neck.

When Rose’s tongue touched her lips, Goody’s mouth opened although she had never been kissed like that before, in that style the boys brought back from the front.

From France, they said.

French kissing, they called it.

IV

Taylor closed the book.

Her lips pursed at the worn, thumbed cover showing a blonde, hair coiffed in a weird, old-fashioned style leaning over the figure of a burnet, lying on her belly wistfully, perhaps a little sullenly. Odd Girl Out.

It was a lesbian novel by a woman named Ann Bannon.

Not something Taylor would have chosen herself, but Goody had insisted, and insisted strenuously, so Taylor bit her lip, stifled her protest and read the story of Beth and Laura. After a while, when Laura stopped herself just in time from giving Beth a good night kiss, she heard the unmistakable sound of Goody snoring.

Thank god, Taylor thought.

She’d been reading to Goody Abigail for, what, two months now? No. More like three. At first she had been demonstrably nervous, even fearful, about visiting the lonely, bed-ridden woman, and when her nurse or caretaker answered the door, welcomed her inside, and motioned for her to follow, her nervousness and anxiety grew.

Oh, there wasn’t anything about the house you could call outright spooky or eerie, but something, well, uncanny seemed to move through the air, an unsettling feeling of watchfulness and waiting. It had given Taylor goosebumps, and she had almost fled the house that first visit, but the caretaker—a stout woman in her late 40s, with dark, graying hair pulled severely back into a rolled bun above her occiput—seemed oblivious to the teenage girl’s uneasiness, steering her by her elbow to Goody’s bedroom.

The caretaker led Taylor past a small and cozy dining room on her right, filled with round, spindly furniture on carved legs, cherrywood or maple or good plain oak, mid-century or earlier of solid American oak, which Taylor could not recognize, but the caretaker did. Old, fluffy, floral furniture sat in the living room, gathering dust (for the caretaker was none too assiduous in housekeeping tasks) along with low coffee tables, short end pieces, shelves full of bric-à-brac, odds and ends, thick hardcover books (some of them leatherbound), and many, many cheap paperbacks, pulp fiction from decades ago, brass lamps with pagoda-shaped shades, and rugs laid end to end or overlapping, although old Berber already covered the floor.

Taylor had felt overwhelmed on her first visit; she either wanted time to explore everything or to have everything swept away, but she could of course do neither of those things. She could only follow the caretaker toward Goody Abigail’s bedroom near the back of the house.

The caretaker had not bothered to knock.

She just turned the levered handle, pushed the door open, and presented Taylor to her bed-ridden charge. Goody Abigail eyed the caretaker reproachfully and a bit suspiciously, but she said nothing to her the whole time the woman fussed over her. Then the caretaker stood erect, turned to Taylor, smiled and left, pausing at the door only to say, “Mind she doesn’t give you too much of a problem, dear. Ornery thing. Been spoiled all her life, that one has.”

Taylor closed the door behind the caretaker.

She tried to inspect Goody unobtrusively, but the old woman’s eyes hung onto Taylor as if connected by invisible wires, and finally Taylor braved a smile.

“Hi. I’m Taylor.”

She held up thick book, a hardcover with colorful paper lining.

“Mom didn’t say what you liked, so I brought this.”

She looked around the room. A chest of Maine cedar stood at the foot of the woman’s bed. Further off, against a wall, a low bookshelf made of Georgia pine carried several volumes and editions of old paperbacks. Taylor would learn of Goody’s deep love of pulp fiction and paperback novels.

Goody’s bed, a hospital-type bed with black enameled rails and an adjustable bedspring, narrow with just enough room for the woman herself, ran perpendicular to the wall opposite the door, dividing the room. On one side of the bed, on Goody’s right side, a tall door led to her toilet area, a large bathroom with a walk-in closet on the far side. On Goody’s left side, a long dresser with a vanity mirror ran the length of part of the wall, and where that dresser ended, the pine bookshelf began. A small but comfortable armchair stood beside the head of Goody’s bed on her right side, and a low loveseat with a curved back faced Goody’s bed, pushed against the far wall.

Evidently it had been meant for visitors, but it could not be used in its current state. Stacks of newspapers and old magazines and tattered catalogs rose up like some towers on the sunken-in cushions of the loveseat.

Goody Abigail herself was very much alive, and that fact more than anything brought relief to Taylor’s troubled mind. She had expected to see a frail, pitiable, dying thing; instead she found a vibrant soul inside a decrepit shell, with eyes that sparkled and gleamed with fire and life. But Goody continued to regard Taylor in silence, apparently giving the teenager the same cold shoulder she gave to her caretaker.

Taking courage, Taylor scooted the armchair to face her audience, opened the book to its beginning story and began reading.

“When Captain Roger Angmering built himself…”

Goody settled in for an evening of Poirot.

It could’ve been worse, she supposed. You could do a lot worse than Agatha Christie.

Taylor lost track of time reading; she might have read for half an hour, she might have read for an hour or more, but when she heard the soft snoring coming from Goody Abigail’s bed, she stopped reading, put the book on a nearby night table, and prepared to leave.

“Thank you, Taylor. Good night.”

Goody’s voice was remarkable clear and loud, and when Taylor turned to say good night, she looked into her vivid, lively eyes, eyes which had followed Taylor to the door.

All that was about three months ago. Initially taciturn, the widow Abigail became downright loquacious the following evenings, until she had Taylor laughing and giggling at Goody’s jokes, many of which were surprisingly dirty.

Now Taylor stood up.

“Goodnight, Goody.”

“Did you like it, Taylor? Do you like the story?”

Taylor had long learned to agree with Goody Abigail—or at least not to argue. Goody had the annoying habit of making people come around to her way of thinking, and the less Taylor resisted, the less Goody tried.

“I did. I do like it. It’s, um, interesting,” Taylor lied.

Then Taylor left the room, closing the door behind her.

The caretaker met her in the living room.

“Well, how was she tonight? Same old, same old?”

“Catty and chatty,” Taylor replied. “She does love to talk.”

The caretaker had heard that before from the teenage girl, but she still arched an eyebrow.

“That so? Well I’ll be.”

The caretaker closed the front door behind Taylor, who heard the deadbolt lock as she walked down the porch steps, wondering what she’d read Goody next. After they finished Odd Girl Out.

Something scary, she thought. After all Halloween was two weeks away.

She couldn’t know that Goody Abigail had other ideas.

V

When Rose’s tongue entered her mouth, Goody’s mind exploded into a new world; she was not like those travelers who endure many hardships and overcome many obstacles to land on the shores of a country at once new but foreseen, planned-for. She was not like those travelers who reach a destination at least partially imagined. She had imagined none of it.

She could not have imagined any of it.

No man’s tongue had ever tasted the inside of her mouth.

She felt sure that if Carter had ever tried that she would have bitten the thing off.

When Rose’s hands floated to her breasts to caress her mounds, to caress and brush the skin under her bra, she moaned.

And when Rose pinched her nipples, she squealed.

Goody didn’t know what to do with her own hands, so she did nothing except hold Rose’s head to her own, hesitantly but longingly urging her own tongue against Rose’s intrusion. She murmured, and she moaned.

She cooed.

And she purred.

Part of her wanted to hate herself for doing, and no, not out of any sense of shame. But part of her wanted to feel above this sort of thing, wanted to feel her regal intellect rising above the petty cares and concerns of the pitiful flesh. But Rose brought down her intellect, summoned it only to dismiss it utterly; Rose concentrated her cares on Goody’s flesh, and Goody discovered her ignored flesh to be far from pitiful.

Her thighs parted when Rose’s hand explored her nether regions, although here again Goody could hardly imagine what it was doing down there.

She soon found out.

A human body, a woman’s body, does things and feels things, and what Goody felt now at Rose’s touch upon her sex changed her reality completely and wholly.

Lightning in a bottle.

Canned heat.

Goody swooned and writhed.

She was going to have to learn new vocabularies, new languages, new lexicons for what she felt, for the electric power surging from what Rose called her pie.

And later her quim.

And even later her pussy.

And finally her cunt, owning the word fully and without embarrassment, seeing in it nothing but beauty and raw power.

Carter had never touched her there; he had never done any of what Rose was doing to her now, setting her on fire, and driving her crazy. She wriggled her hips against Rose’s hands rubbing on her, oh fuck it, her pussy, rubbing her pussy until Goody mewled and howled like a screaming cat, and when Rose’s fingers entered her wet hole, god she was flowing now, so wet, so turned on, nothing could prepare her for this sensation, this feeling, this charge shooting through her, this wave washing over her, this brilliant light shining inside her.

And when she finished, her open mouth still on Rose’s mouth, she pulled away, and shuddered, her chest heaving.

“What. What was that?” she finally was able to ask, sounding like child in her timid wonder.

“What do you mean,” Rose answered, not understanding Goody’s question.

“That feeling. That thing. That thing you did to me. What was that?”

Then Rose understood.

“Oh my sweet god, Goody. Haven’t you ever cum before? That was an orgasm. You had an orgasm. You climaxed.”

Goody’s imperial intellect began to regain itself, drawing its strength to reconquer its lost realm.

“Of course I’ve climaxed before. I’ve just never. Orgasmed.”

Goody’s haughtiness was met by a burst of laughter from Rose.

“Oh you sweet, sweet miracle. You know that? You’re my sweet, sweet miracle.”

Something more regal than Goody’s intellect basked in the glow of Rose’s adoration.

She could be that, her heart said. She could be a sweet, sweet miracle. Rose’s miracle.

Life changed for both Rose and Goody after that night.

What had started as a casual friendship, then later deepened into a good friendship, and culminated into a sensual, sexually charged romance, now blossomed into something neither of them expected: that most splendid of all human torments.

Love.

Clichés are clichés for a reason.

The lights shone brighter that year in Manhattan, the sun glowed hotter, the rain fell sweeter, fresher. The breeze more cool. Even the traffic belching their fumes on the pavement did so in a way seeming more playful and impish. The honking horns honked cheerful and happy, noisy birds gleefully announcing their presence to the world.

They fled to the country outside of town, and the stars shone brighter in the night sky. They came back to a city thrilled to have them, welcoming them with the arms of Broadway and Beeker Street.

They walked arm in arm, and though some people stared, they were women, and they were dancers, and much is granted a showgirl that is not granted a secretary, shop girl or housewife. They moved more publicly in those areas of town where one could move openly, avoiding too much affection or places known to be haunted by vice.

They ate in dives and four-star restaurants and were in love.

They danced in clubs and bars and were in love.

They stayed home and kissed and were in love.

Until the awful day.

Goody never went there in her mind, never visited it in her memory, but the ache of it followed her all the days of her life, a stupid accident on a stupid bridge in the stupid rain.

There was no funeral, Rose had no family.

Goody couldn’t bear to say goodbye to the body, and when a friend, a sweet man who held her up during those first terrible days when Goody couldn’t get out of bed suggested cremation, Goody only nodded and let the sweet man handle everything.

Let the living care for the dead, she thought. Let the living handle the living dead.

For that’s what she was.

She ate what was placed in front of her, drank what was held to her mouth, dressed in the clothes handed her.

Eventually she could leave the apartment, but she could never dance again.

An odd worry seized her, odd and surprising her with its anxiety. A curious sensation for one who had died, but it alarmed her.

No, no, no, said the sweet man, her friend, a man who had known her and Rose for since the first days of Rose’s dancing in clubs for money.

Don’t you worry none, I’ve got it. I’ve got all that taken care of. You work again when you’re ready. I won’t hear of it. I won’t hear any more of it.

Such a sweet man.

He brought her out of it, brought her back to the land of the living. At least he accompanied her, holding onto her as she struggled up, determined after the days had passed into weeks to live again, after her fashion. After the fashion of so many women and men too she now could see with her eyes wide open.

I can do all that, she said.

Sure you can, said Aaron, her friend, the sweet man.

But she kept the urn and a small, framed photo of the two of them together, Rose and the miracle Goody, dressed in their dancing outfits, Rose lifting Goody off the floor and in her arms with Goody laughing at the camera, her arms outstretched to seize the life in front of them.

Aaron gave Goody what a man can give to a woman, and Goody loved both of them, first her darling daughter Rose and later her lovely daughter Emily.

He did more than that, of course, did Aaron, and Goody loved him for it. She cherished his friendship, and she loved his presence, his humor, his playfulness, and she maintained him against the world, sensing secrets he never told. She brought him through his yearly bouts of week-long despondency, his frequent struggles with work. She held him up as he had held her up so many years before, and together they reared their two children.

But life made Goody two times a widow, and when cancer took his lungs and then his life, Goody turned cold.

By that time her daughters had already moved away, one to California and the other to Australia.

She’d always been a reader.

She liked Johns. John O’Hara, John Updike, and then later John Irving.

But she loved pulp fiction, and she loved the lesbian writers who had started coming out in the 1950s. Bannon, of course. Bradley. Meaker. Taylor. She adored them.

But she put them down one day.

A new fervor for the occult overtook her. Witchcraft, Wicca, and of course bought a Quija board.

Her sewing room had long been converted to a reading room, and now she started using the Quija board there. She had set up a sort of shrine to Rose, set her urn and photograph on top of a cabinet, and burned candles while moving the planchette around the board. She’d burn herbs or boil them, bringing the scent of them throughout her home. She’d sit in that room and read; later she brough home a black cat, and the black cat would leap on her lap as she read from some obscure book or other.

A favorite book she’d read again and again was Herr Doktor Platon Mecklenburg’s seminal treatise, Der Austauschung der Seelen.

Sometimes at night lights were seen to shimmer around the house, glowing orbs moving in the backyard, going through the walls and windows effortlessly.

Adults scoffed when they heard the kids say all this.

But the rumor went out.

Goody Abigail was a witch.

The black cat prowling her yard confirmed it.

VI

Taylor usually walked the four blocks to her house, unless the weather turned very cold or threatened to rain. Tonight, although mid-October, felt cool and fresh, and in the lengthening shadows of deepening evening, Taylor huddled into her sweat jacket, hoodie up, thinking about school tomorrow. A waxing moon rose in the sky just above the tree and roof line, and in its light the branches of the maples and oaks, gently stirring in the night breeze, cast dancing shadows on the sidewalk before Taylor’s feet.

Jackson had been pestering her for days, wanting her to go to the Halloween dance, the Friday after next.

“C’mon, girl,” he’d say. “I finna go as Lando, and you. You c’be, oh I don’t know. Whatever.”

“Elvira,” laughed Taylor, snickering at her mother’s passion. Mrs. Kane dressed in a long black dress every Halloween, très décollage, and every year she had to explain no, she wasn’t Morticia.

If he asks me tomorrow, I’m going to say yes.

A charge of excitement hummed through her, swelling her chest. Jackson—tall, dark, muscular, and handsome—was a star football and basketball player.

She didn’t have the boobs for it though. Elvira. Not like her mother.

At first she didn’t turn around when she heard the footsteps behind her, but as they gained on her, she hurried. She didn’t like to turn around. She didn’t like to show fear. She quickened her pace, until she fell into a kind of trot, not quite jogging, but more than a usually brisk walk. The footsteps behind kept pace with her, neither lagging nor falling behind.

She tried telling herself she was being stupid, that she lived in a safe neighborhood, that no one bothered anybody there. All that was true of course, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she mustn’t slow down, she mustn’t stop for any reason, and that she mustn’t, absolutely she mustn’t look behind her.

And she didn’t.

Already the corner where she turned left to go down her street approached, which meant she had to cross the street. An idea came to her. She could see who it was that walked behind her while looking both ways to cross the road. It wouldn’t be so obvious then. She could hardly keep from seeing her follower while checking for oncoming traffic. Suddenly an owl hooted in the distance, and the light of a car going down her street filled the night.

She quickened her pace to a jog, the following footsteps echoing right behind. She fought back a sense of rising panic.

This is stupid, Taylor.

This is so fucking stupid, Taylor.

But she couldn’t shake the dread.

At last she reached the corner, stopped, looked up the street, and then, drawing courage, looked down the street behind her.

She saw no car.

That was not a surprise. Any car coming that way would be shining its headlights.

But she saw no person, either.

Although the footsteps couldn’t have been more than a dozen feet behind her.

She crossed the street, and out of the corner of her eye she saw a small black shadow flit across the street with her.

But the shadow was just a black cat.

Far too small to make the tread of heavy feet.

Her house was on the left, three houses down.

She’d make it.

She could make it.

And as she walked she listened for the fall of feet behind her, but she heard nothing.

Sighing she turned at the walkway leading to her front door and stopped.

Did she imagine it in her fear?

The light footfall of someone she couldn’t see walking away, walking down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, near the corner she had turned moments ago.

Then she saw it, the wavering dark forms of a couple, a man and a woman, walking a dog, partially obscured by a large bush.

Had that been them all this time, she wondered as she unlocked the front door and stepped inside the safety of her house.

As she stepped inside she heard the dog bark and growl.

“It’s just a damned cat, Wilbur,” she heard a male voice shout angrily.

VII

The readings for Goody Abigail got a little weird the following night. Goody herself was even more talkative than usual. She proved to be outright gregarious. Taylor would not have been surprised to see the nonagenarian widow sit up in her bed, but the woman didn’t have to do that. She could hold court with her head on her pillow, her eyes sparkling with vivacity as she regaled Taylor with story after story of nightlife in Manhattan, in post-war Manhattan, dancing with her beloved Rose.

The romance of it all kept Taylor listening. She had no interest in hearing or reading about lesbians, but the way Goody put everything, the excitement and romance in her voice as she spoke of Rose’s beauty, her charm, her humor, her exuberance, and her disdain for convention affected the high school student. Just that afternoon, she had finally said yes to Jackson, and now, hearing of Goody’s love life, her adventurous love life, filled Taylor with a yearning to live that life herself. With Jackson, maybe.

Or someone else.

High school romances never worked out, anyway. She knew that. Besides, wasn’t she getting ahead of herself? It was just one Halloween dance with Jackson. It’s not like he asked her to.

“She was just so beautiful in my eyes, so warm, so. So big. So much larger than life, and she showed me everything. Everything. She knew fortune tellers and mediums, chemists and jazz musicians, saxophone players, all of them were just so. Amazing. Voodoo priests. I saw a zombie once. The sight of the poor man. It stayed with me for a long time.”

It wasn’t like she’d. She wasn’t that way. She hadn’t done it yet, and she sure wasn’t going to give it up to Jackson no matter how tall, dark, handsome, and athletic he was. She was a good girl. Well. Cautious, anyway.

Afraid.

And with good reason, she told herself. Boys can just stick it in and walk away, but we’re the ones who get stuck. It seems so. So. Intrusive. They can just wipe it all off, but we can’t.

Taylor frowned.

It kind of grossed her out when she thought about it.

Oh, but he’s so.

God, that body.

What would it be like?

“And when poor Aaron passed away, Rose and Emily had already been long gone, and I just missed her so much. I just missed her. I tried. Tried being a lesbian. I bought a lot of books in a fever to understand. Oh, I liked reading about it. And later, when I screwed up enough courage to go to the new bookstores, I found the magazines. There over there, honey, on the bookshelf if you ever need to look at one. They helped. It helped, a little. Seeing all those pretty women with each other, no man to bother the eye. It helped. But a woman needs more than that, doesn’t she, honey? A woman can’t be satisfied with pictures. Not the way a man can be.

“So I tried. But I wasn’t really looking for another woman. I was looking for Rose. But she was gone. She left me long ago.”

Taylor sat next to Goody, looking down at her hands in her lap, deep in thought. Deep in reverie.

“Still,” Goody said quietly. “Pictures are better than nothing. Especially if there’s a story to go with them. Why don’t you pick us out something on that bookshelf to read? Something from one of those magazines?”

It had surprised her at first, the way Taylor so easily fell in line with what Goody wanted or said. She put it down to respect for age and the shadow of impending, well, no. Taylor didn’t like to think about that. All the same, she felt that the widow wouldn’t be with them long. It was the least she could do to cater to the old woman.

And she did.

She fluffed her pillow, adjusted her bed, dimmed the light or turned it on, changed the channels of the TV whenever it was on because Taylor didn’t always read. No, sometimes it was just better for the girl to sit beside Goody Abigail and keep her company. To listen to her stories.

Which became more and more frequent.

She wouldn’t think anything of being asked to move the chair a little closer, or to move one stack of magazines to the floor to make place for another stack of magazines, to flip through some of the pages, see for yourself, girl, or to explore all the titles, all the provocative titles of Goody’s pulp fiction, her little dyke library.

But this time it was so blatant, far more blatant than last night’s reading of Odd Girl Out.

Taylor didn’t move, she didn’t budge, and she didn’t stir. She just looked nervously in the direction of Goody’s Abigail’s lesbian bookshelf.

“Go ahead, dear. You’ll pick something good out. I know you will.”

Taylor staggered from the chair and moved, zombie-like, to the bookshelf.

“There’s a stack of magazines right next to it, darling. Pick something from there. I’ve collected all kinds, but those are newer. Color photos of the voluptuosities as well as such wonderfully vivid stories. You’ll see.”

Taylor stomach lurched when she saw some of the covers of the magazines. None of them could be considered decent, luridly made up women posing topless with tongues extended, sometimes standing mouth to mouth with another woman equally disrobed. Finally Taylor picked out a magazine, a dark haired woman, hair curled in kinky perm falling over the sides of her face, lay on a bed, her olive skin glowing, wrapped in fur, exposing her fleshy legs and wide hips, her breasts somehow demure and lewd at the same time, modest for one so curvy, topped by dark nipples on tight dark circles of her areolas.

Taylor sighed.

But at least she looked relatively modest, sensual without being lewd.

“Oh that’s a good one,” said Goody. “I knew you had good taste.”

Taylor sat back down and shuddered, her heartbeat quickened, and she felt nervous, exposed, and scared. This was all wrong. This was all so.

Her eyes lingered on the model on the cover of the magazine, and then she opened the pages, looking for somewhere to begin, trying to avert her eyes from the vivid, raw display of female bodies displayed with such abandon. Disregard. Part of her fumed at the exploitation, another part of her was intrigued, and another part of her just wanted to get this all over with. To go home, take a bath, a bath, a bath, and to wash this whole experience from her mind and from her body.

“Where do I start,” she asked timidly.

“I can’t remember the page number exactly, but there’s a section just chock full of stories. Just flip through the pages until you find it, honey. Those pictures are all so extraordinary, don’t you think?”

Extraordinary wasn’t quite the word Taylor would have chosen.

Page after page of one woman after another, some of them scarcely older than Taylor herself, caught in poses of taking their clothes, showing off the tight, proud bodies, smiling and laughing at the camera.

They don’t look exploited, Taylor mused.

Something other than that puzzled the girl, though. Troubled her, her stomach churned, and her heart pounded, and her breathing grew faster, shallower, ragged. She felt her cheeks turn red. They felt so warm; they burned.

Who was Taylor; what did she believe? Whence came she, or from what, from whom?

She had thought about it; she spent so much of her time thinking about it, sometimes.

Did that make sense? I mean not always, I don’t think about myself all the time, but when I do I think about myself a lot. If that made any sense, her mind would wander and wonder at times.

She supposed she must be a Christian, kind of. Sort of.

All those old stories, about law and sin and punishment. They were just so brutal, and because they were brutal, she rejected them, and because she rejected them, she considered them little more than fairy tales, things to make naïve people afraid. Sensible people, people who knew better, didn’t need such nonsense in order to behave.

They just, well. Behaved.

Because they made sense, those rules, some of them. You just followed them because if you didn’t you could get into trouble.

Big trouble.

And if the Kane family believed in anything, it believed in the avoidance of trouble.

So they went to church on Sundays—but not every Sunday and sometimes not more than one Sunday in a month.

And they celebrated Easter. With dyed eggs and chocolate bunnies.

And they celebrated Christmas. With eggnog, champagne, and lighted Nordic evergreen with gaudily wrapped presents piled beneath.

But a fundamentalist hides in the heart of even the most timid of faiths, and the Kanes added repression of sexuality to the avoidance of trouble as the sum total of the law and the prophets.

Though even here the matter stood in a balance. Mrs. Kane’s Elvira costume. Mr. Kane’s love of swimsuit issues and tool calendars, although he worked in no garage, and considered tools of any kind to be instruments of trouble and therefore the devil.

Taylor had taken note of all this, of course. She suspected hypocrisy and was not deceived; she also approved of it.

She hated trouble too.

And even after her body started changing, and even after new and terrifying hormones ravaged her new and terrifying body, she clung to one ideal and held it firm.

Boys were trouble.

Oh, some of them could be tall, dark, and wonderful like Jackson, so hard and muscular. The way he hugged me today, she thought. He could have crushed me, and his arms were so hard. Even his hips were hard.

She felt him of course, used the embrace as an excuse to roam his body quickly with her hands, to feel that strange and powerful masculine body.

But so few of them were like Jackson, and how many of them were just stupid, awkward, ugly, and even just, well, repulsive?

Loud and obnoxious?

She played with herself. Of course, she played with herself.

At night in the quiet of the darkness, she’d let her hands slip to touch her spot, that spot, that place. She’d slip her fingers over her wetness, just a little, just a little, and rub, faster and faster and faster, her nub, feeling the shocks of pleasure run over her before quivering with a small yelp, a tiny whine so no one could hear.

Then she’d get up, wash her hands, and pretend nothing had happened.

It wasn’t hard to ignore sex, though.

Not when all you had to go by were those stupid boys.

And she stayed away from those girls, those loose girls, at school. The sluts.

She stayed away from the sluts.

You could tell right away that they were trouble.

She didn’t look at magazines.

Or watch those videos on her computer.

Or watch those movies.

She just didn’t have the exposure to it, and it was so easy for her to drive away the idle thought.

Some girls could do that. It came easy to them, sex was so gross, boys were so gross, and there were so many other things to talk about and to do, to look at and to buy.

Clothes, shoes, dresses.

Underwear.

Parties, Key Club.

Band.

It was easy to avoid trouble.

If you were like Taylor Kane.

She never stopped to think that sometimes trouble found you anyway.

VIII

IX