Wendy’s Pink Lipstick Conversion: Epilogue
“Our revels now are ended.”
Serena speaks to Dr. Essenza
Serena shifted in her seat in her office at The Diana Group.
She should have been relieved, exuberant really. Ecstatic.
What Dr. Essenza had just told her saved her company, saved her future.
Saved her daughter’s future.
They’d lost the Living Pink.
Or so Serena Craft had thought.
But with Dr. Essenza’s news, that didn’t turn out to be exactly true.
“We can synthesize it,” she had said. “I’ve taken samples, you know, Serena. I’ve got some in my lab. Not the Living Pink, but something close. Damned close. I went over Nero’s notes, you see. And yours. And it made me start thinking.”
Carla had paused, and Serena had leaned forward, almost attentive.
“Him. You. The, um, zombies down below. They’re loaded with the stuff, and it integrated in you. You and Nero. Probably Sara, too. I’ve taken blood samples from the, um, zombies, and I can use it. I can even grow it. I can grow it, Serena.”
Carla had paused again, leaning back into her chair and sighing.
“There’s just one thing. The Velikovsky waves aren’t as strong. They’re there, just weaker is all. Weak. We’ll need more of the derived pink to do the job of the original pink. I don’t know, I don’t think it will be as effective. But it will work. I know it will work.”
But Serena already lost interest. Let Carla handle it. Dr. Essenza knew what she was about. She led her teams capably, adeptly, efficiently, and even brilliantly. Serena sat in her chair, looking away, distracted.
Sara wouldn’t answer her phone.
And when Serena drove by to check on her, she wasn’t there. The house she’d bought her was empty.
Serena didn’t worry too much, but she called Sara’s friends anyway. Just trying to keep an eye for her daughter. But no one admitted seeing her. Not for a couple of days. Not since Saturday.
Not since.
That poor girl.
And that stupid, stupid man.
I don’t care how much you’re suffering. Driving drunk like that. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Sara had known almost the moment it happened.
The poor girl started shrieking, a shrieking Serena had never heard in her life. It came from the well of Sara’s being and poured out, loud, high-pitched, unending.
They were sitting at the table in the back of Serena’s house when it happened, looking over the indoor pool, the manicured landscape which she’d been careful to integrate with the surrounding desert. Serena loved it when Sara spent the night.
Then the girl started screaming and screaming and screaming, and Serena had to calm her with tranquilizers, going so far as to shoot her with a syringe.
That was three days ago.
When Sara regained consciousness hours later, she didn’t speak.
She moved around the house like a ghost, wandering aimlessly, and when her dear friends visited her, she continued to say nothing.
At least the screaming had stopped.
Then Sara grabbed the keys to her car and left.
Serena assumed it was to go home, but when she didn’t hear from her for several hours, she started to worry.
After a day, she started to get alarmed.
Now, after three days of no news, the panic set in.
Who gave a fuck about the Living Pink?
Or the derived pink or anything else the fucking company came up with?
Where the hell was her daughter?
The disappearance of Sara
The Mercedes pulled into the gravel parking lot and stopped, just in front of the two wooden posts marking the entrance to the Reno Arroyo Canyon Sovereignty Park. The girl who emerged wouldn’t have been recognized by her group of friends.
Gone was the long auburn hair pulled back in a severe braid.
Gone was the makeup, the eyeshadow, the lipstick, the highlighter and foundation, the mascara.
Her auburn swirled in a unrestrained, unbrushed mess, some hanging over her shoulders, some matted and jutting wildly to the side. She hadn’t brushed it in days. She hadn’t slept in days, and she stared at the world with unfocused, dazed eyes, red and heavy with bags.
She still wore the clothes she’d worn at her mother’s house, before her mother knocked her out.
She tripped and stumbled a few feet on the rocky path, then removed her high heels, walking across the uneven ground in her bare feet, oblivious to the pain.
By the time she reached Little Reno Arroyo Falls, they’re sliced and bleeding, but Sara didn’t care. She didn’t really even notice.
Then she descended the path the basin at the bottom of the waterfall, spotting the rocks here and there with the bleeding soles of her feet.
The basin was cool and the water freezing. The cascade fell in a continuous bubbling, but to her ears the sound brought neither joy nor memory of joy.
Her dress dropped to the ground.
Clad only in her underwear, she dove into the basin, swimming with long strong strokes towards the waterfall and behind the waterfall, where she found the narrow ledge jutting from the canyon wall.
Hanging onto the ledge, kicking her feet and legs to stay aloft in the water, she closed her eyes, trying to listen.
To what she had no idea.
She had no idea what Wendy did or how she opened the Grotto.
She had no idea how Wendy did anything.
Wendy.
You fucking bitch.
You fucking, fucking, fucking bitch.
How could you leave me?
For a moment the canyon shimmered, wavered. But the canyon wall quickly regained its solidity.
She was Sara Craft, damn it. Daughter of Serena and Nero Craft.
But Sara had not the power of Wendy Love.
Sara couldn’t open the way to the Grotto, and the waterfall poured down behind her.
She shivered in the cold water, suddenly aware of the pain, the discomfort.
She couldn’t think of anything else.
She hocked a large glob of spit in the back of her throat and spat it out loudly at the canyon wall.
“She exists in every universe, and you take her from mine?”
The question echoed against the wall of the canyon, less a plea and more a challenge, a defiance.
She shoved herself back from the ledge, as if disdaining to even touch the rock hiding the Obelisk.
Oh god, Wendy. How could you?
Swimming back through the waterfall, back to the edge of the basin, she stood a moment on the side of the water, considering the depths of the pool.
Then she shook her head.
She was Sara Craft.
Daughter of Serena and Nero Craft.
The cosmos be damned.
The cosmos wouldn’t know what hit it.
She stumbled the several miles back to her car, aware of and delighting in every second of sharp pain shooting into her feet cut and torn on the sharp stones of the ground she walked on.
Sitting behind her wheel, Sara looked over at the empty passenger seat.
Suddenly she fell to the right, clutching at the seat, and buried her face into the car leather, breathing deeply.
She hadn’t cleaned the interior of the car, hadn’t cleaned the seat Wendy had cum on that weird and wonderful Sunday.
And now she never would.
It held the last scent of her Wendy.
Her fragrance, her aroma, her beautiful orgasms.
Her body began to shake and convulse, great sobs of despair and longing filled the interior of the automobile, but no words came.
Slowly Sara picked herself up and wiped her face.
No more tears, she thought. Not while there remained so many things to be done.
Not when she now had a plan.
She’d need to brush her hair, of course.
Bathe, dress, and touch her face up with a little makeup.
After all, it never hurt to look your best when going to war against the universe.
So maybe The Henry Darger Academy for Girls had taught her something at least.
Lynn Trammel turns himself in
A middle-aged, nervous looking man, of medium height and a pale face with loose skin, as if he had recently emerged from a long illness, stood in front of the steps leading to the Edge City Police Department.
Though his body had healed, his mind still remembered the pain, the agony, the endless torment.
Had it been real?
Or just a nightmare, a long nightmare in a sleep lasting many years?
When he awoke, his shop lay in ruins.
But it was over, that’s all that counted, all that mattered.
For the most part.
One last thing remained.
He’d try to resist it.
But it never went away, a continuing, haunting reminder, never leaving his consciousness for even the shortest of brief moments.
Turn yourself in. Confess. I’m watching.
Sometimes in a soft voice, sometimes in a loud roar, but always it rang in the hollow spaces of his mind.
He shook his head, looked up at the steps, and ascended towards his doom.
Whatever awaited him could not possibly be worse than what lay behind him.
Madison visits Mary
More than a month after that horrible Saturday, Maddy Springer, shaking off a lingering doubt, pulled on a pair of baggy jeans and a dark blue fleece jacket to defend against the late November cold and hopped on her ten-speed to Wendy’s house.
No, not Wendy’s house.
To Wendy’s mother’s house.
To Mrs. Love’s house.
She hadn’t seen her since the funeral, but she didn’t want to remember that day. She didn’t want to remember anything at all, but she couldn’t get Wendy out of her head, couldn’t get the guilt, that nagging guilt out of her head that she had betrayed the only friend she had in the world.
Or ever would have.
You don’t deserve friends, Maddy.
You judgmental little bitch.
You judgmental little bitch of a hypocrite.
She’d pushed away her only two friends, and then they died.
Two deaths within days of each other.
She might as well have killed them with her own hands.
She pushed back any plea she might have made in her own defense.
Trina’s loss was bad enough, but Wendy?
Oh, god, Wendy. I’m so sorry.
And for than a month, she’d think about Mrs. Love all alone, abiding the unendurable.
She’d heard the rumors of course. About how Mrs. Love had changed, how she’d quit her job, how she changed the way she dress, how she’d become an open, unabashed lesbian, going so far as to bring another woman into her daughter’s household, a woman not much older than Wendy herself.
Most of the rumors had come from her mother, Evelyn, who forbade Maddy to have anything to do with either Love female.
“They’ve gone bad, Madison. I don’t want you around them.”
Maddy didn’t need convincing.
Then Sara stopped by her locker, after school. Not much more than a week before. Before.
“Just watch these,” she’d said, handing her a gift bag with a couple of DVDs in them. “You might understand your friends better.”
That night, Sara called her, and well, things got weird.
So much latex.
So much purple lipstick.
Sara’s voice breathed huskily in her ear over the phone, almost every night it seemed.
Saying so many things to her, it was hard to keep up.
But when Wendy.
When Trina’s dad.
Maddy stood up on her bike and pedaled harder, leaning forward on her handle bars, enjoying the crisp, cold air blowing against her face.
She stopped looking at the DVDs.
She stopped masturbating to all that porn, that wonderful, hot lesbian porn.
Sara stopped calling.
And Maddy became a good girl again.
Wendy’s house, Mrs. Love’s house, reared up in the lengthening shadow of West Pigeon Street, a two-story Georgian brick house so out of place in a neighborhood of single story adobe ranch houses.
There were no lights on in the house, and Maddy almost turned to go back.
Three years ago, she watched Wendy drink, smoke, and throw up for her father’s funeral, and now she was gone.
Wendy was gone.
Trina was gone.
Trina’s death hurt her, but Wendy’s?
She’d known her since, well, forever.
How do you get over a loss like that?
Maddy knocked on the door and waited the requisite and minimal amount of time to turn and leave. She had just stepped off the porch when the door opened behind her.
She spun around to see Mary Love standing to one side of door.
Maddy stifled a gasp.
At Trina’s funeral the woman looked sad but vibrant, alive.
A little out of place maybe with the pierced nose and short hair and the stout lesbian holding onto her.
At Wendy’s funeral, beside her daughter’s grave, Mary wore that expression of disbelief common to the bereaved. But she still held up, she still held up.
But now?
Haggard wasn’t the word for it.
She leaned against the door frame, dressed only in a dirty bath robe, her eyes were dark and heavy, her face lined with grief and hopelessness. The darkness of the house surrounded her in its perpetual gloom.
“Yeah?” Mrs. Love asked, a tone of suspicion and hostility cutting into her voice.
But Maddy threw herself against the woman, arms outstretched, landing on Wendy’s mother in a shuddering embrace, her body heaving in uncontrollable sobs.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Mrs. Love.”
But Mary stood still, a stone against Maddy’s emotion.
Then slowly, so slowly, she reached her arms around the weeping girl.
Her hands smoothed Maddy’s back, comforting the grieving teenager in a small solace for her own mourning.
Eventually Maddy’s sobs subsided, and Mary slowly, gently released herself from Maddy’s clinging embrace.
She pulled her robe close around her.
“Would you like to come inside, Madison? I can make us some tea.”
Maddy nodded and stepped into Wendy’s house. Mrs. Love’s house.
Gerald intercepted by The Consortium
The Pre-ascendant turned the volume up in his newly configured sound system. It took him awhile to find the right mental adjustments, but soon he was rocking his head and belting out the refrain to that great simian triumph of philosophy and poetry.
Yes, yes, yes, he repeated to himself.
Next time I will listen to my heart.
The next time, I will be smart.
Good words, good thoughts to put into his next traagilation exercise.
Then he felt the sudden pulling of his body and heard as from a great distance the croaking and belching of many frogs.
Gerald sighed.
He didn’t really think they’d seen or heard his defiance on Earth.
Suddenly his body stiffened, and he blew a load into his jeans in a shuddering climax as The Consortium intercepted him from The Guild.
The croaking vanished at once, replaced immediately by sighs and murmurs of feminine orgasm.
“Oh Gerald,” the Beehive buzzed happily. “You did it. You had sex with a monkey. Aren’t they just wonderful?”
Several eons of orgasm later, The Consortium released the Pre-ascendant.
“Oh, gosh, Gerald. You’re people are so close, so close. You’re all making us hot with your edging, but baby, don’t you think it’s time to cum?”
Gerald’s mind wobbled and spun.
“I. I. Um.”
“We’re handling everything now, sugar. Your people are just too cute. But we have just a couple of things more for you all to do, and then you can cum, baby. Won’t that be great, honey? When we let your people cum? So hot. So good. Don’t you want to cum for us?”
Gerald just nodded.
Of course he did. Of course he wanted to cum.
A female monkey, a female human, approached the Pre-ascendant.
“We’re doing things just a bit differently with this bunch, baby. We really are. So hot. So good.”
A huge orgasm washed over the Beehive, which shuddered and groaned in a high-pitched female ecstasy.
Ch’thologh M’nuthuhfah. Orgasm of change. Pairs well with being.
“This is Betty. She’s going to be a Go-Between for the Beehive. Your people are going to teach her everything.”
Maddy and Mary
Renee thought she could do, she really did.
When it happened, she braced herself, ready to hold Mary up.
But Mary wouldn’t hold up.
After a week, Renee couldn’t take it.
She held out for another two weeks, but then she left.
“I’m so sorry, Mary. I just can’t.”
Mary didn’t say anything. What was there to say?
Let the girl go if she wanted to.
What did that matter?
Besides, it wasn’t like she couldn’t get out of bed or anything. She could get out of bed.
She didn’t.
But she could.
She could shower, get dressed, brush her teeth, make coffee and breakfast, shoot her porn videos, and do her webcam show.
She could.
But she didn’t.
She didn’t do anything.
Oh, she sat on the couch from time to time.
You couldn’t stay in bed forever, and sitting on the couch in the dark, in the silent house, listening to the roof creak, and the wind go over the house, that was a good enough substitute for lying all day in bed.
Sitting up all night on the couch, thinking.
You could think about all kinds of things at night.
Bill’s gun in the top shelf of the closet.
Sleeping pills.
Razor blades.
Bridges.
Ovens.
That one was a little poetic, but it worked. Sometimes.
All kinds of things.
You could think about all kinds of things.
On a couch in the dark in the middle of the night.
When little Madison Springer, little Maddy Springer showed up to her house, well. It didn’t change anything. Not really. But if the little girl wanted a cup of tea, and then another cup of tea, and then a third cup of tea, if the little girl wanted to sit at the kitchen table and just cry, she wouldn’t stop her. Mary Love wouldn’t stop her.
And when her own head fell into her hands on the table, and when her own sobs broke loose, and even when she convulsed in her chair, she knew nothing had changed.
The agony wouldn’t lift.
She’d cried already, she’d cried all week after.
That damned day.
The tears, the weeping came easily to her. The depression, the despair, that came even more easily.
And little Maddy Springer wasn’t going to lift it just by sitting at the kitchen table telling her stories about Wendy when they were girls.
But oh god, don’t you stop, Maddy Springer. Don’t you stop talking about my little girl.
Maddy stayed late into the morning, telling one story after another about Wendy.
And before Maddy left to go back home, Mary Love found herself laughing at some the trouble her damned daughter used to get into.
The walls of the house echoed with it, glad of the laughter vexing the dark.
Maddy started coming by more often, dropping by unannounced, leaving after a few minutes or a few hours. She didn’t keep track of the time and neither did Mary, just so happy to have someone in her house she could share Wendy with.
Two more months flew by. The solstice holidays had come and gone. Maddy had spent part of Giving Day with Mary, but Mrs. Love looked subdued, tired, and Maddy remembered the first day she had visited.
She kept hugging the woman, and eventually Mary had smiled.
“I miss her so much, Maddy.”
Then one day Mary had news for Maddy, but Maddy could already tell by that time.
“I mean, I had all that protection with Steve,” she said. “Birth control. But you know, we did it a lot.”
She saw the embarrassed look on Maddy’s face.
“I’m sorry. That’s a little crude, isn’t it? You don’t need to know about all that.”
Just a little bump, but Maddy caught her breath when Mary reached for her hand, pulled up her shirt, and let Maddy feel her belly.
A few more weeks passed, and Mary showed.
She began to waddle around her house, resting on the couch with her hands on her swollen belly, her eyes looking straight ahead in a silent reverie.
Maddy popped by again after an absence of more than a week, walking in without knocking. A habit she’d gotten used to after Mary’s insistence.
She found Mary sitting on the couch, her robe parted to show her belly, hands slowly rubbing her stomach.
She smiled brightly when she saw Maddy and patted the cushion next to her.
Maddy sat down.
“You’re getting so big now,” the girl said shyly.
“I know,” Mary laughed. “She’s beginning to kick.”
“She?”
Mary nodded.
“I just know it. Here, feel her. She’s restless today.”
Maddy had gotten used to Mary insisting that she touch her belly.
To tell the truth, she loved to feel the life inside of Mary grow, she loved to watch the pregnant woman waddle around the house, intrigued and moved to see how the woman’s breasts swelled.
Sitting on Mary’s left side, Maddy scooted even closer, touching her thigh with her own. Mary’s robe fell further open, with Maddy noticing, really noticing how Mary wore nothing under her robe except her underwear, almost hidden below the swell of her growing womb.
Maddy bit her lip and reached over with her left hand to touch Mary’s skin.
Mary took her hand and moved it to where the baby kicked.
Maddy felt it.
“Oh my god, Mary! It’s kicking, she’s kicking, she’s kicking so much!”
Mary let Maddy’s hand go, but the girl continued to feel her, to touch her.
Mary grabbed a nearby bottle of oil.
“Here, spread this on me. It helps prevent stretch marks.”
Mary squirted several drops of oil onto her belly, covering the back of Maddy’s hand with it as the girl continued rubbing her.
Mary’s robe fell open completely, and Maddy inhaled sharply as the soon-to-be-new-mother’s breasts fell into her view.
Maddy’s mind danced and whirled.
Mary squirted oil over her breasts, her pierced nipples hard, dark and extended above her swollen glands, and the teenager stared as if transfixed by the oil gleaming on the woman’s skin, rolling in small rivulets down her slopes.
Mary’s breathing became more shallow and quick, faster.
“You can touch them, if you want Madison. Please. They need oil too.”
Time stood still for Madison Springer. Then she turned to face Mary directly, watching how her hand ascended slowly, slowly to touch the rising swell of Mary’s breasts. Her hand slid along the glistening skin, smooth with oil, and Maddy touched Mary’s right breast, spreading the oil over her soft, yielding flesh, pinching her studded nipples between her two longest fingers.
Mary groaned when Maddy touched her nipples.
It had been so long.
So long.
She shifted in her seat, raised her hips slightly, and pulled her panties to the floor. Spreading her legs she reached with her right hand to play with herself, to touch herself while Maddy rubbed her nipples and her breasts, not quite sexually, not sexually yet, but the girl was getting hotter and hotter, more turned on by the second, and Mary knew it.
Her cunt burned.
Maddy was shocked, but she couldn’t turn away, couldn’t get up and leave. She didn’t even want to.
Somehow touching Mrs. Love like this, touching Mary like this, touching Wendy’s mother like this made her feel more alive than anything she’d ever done. And then Mary turned her face to Maddy’s face, her mouth open as she stroked her own pussy in front of the girl, and touched Maddy’s lips with her lips, her mouth still open.
Maddy didn’t move.
Her lips stayed closed, but Mary’s lips continued to touch Maddy’s lips, and Mary’s tongue extended to flick, ever so softly to tenderly brush her warm lips.
Maddy’s lips parted, and her own tongue reached out, tentative and shy.
Soon Maddy and Mary were kissing each other passionately, their tongues furiously exploring each other, while Mary spread her legs wide. She broke her kiss to nudge Maddy down.
“Kiss me down there. Please. I need to feel you so bad down there.”
Mary lifted Maddy’s shirt by the bottom as the girl sank to her knees to kneel between Mary’s legs.
“Take your bra off,” Mary said.
Maddy reached behind her and unclasped her bra, staring into Mary’s eyes as her own modest breasts sprang into view.
“God, you’re so beautiful, Maddy.”
Then Mary grabbed the back of Maddy’s head and pushed the girl’s face to the hot space between her legs, where a raging fire burned that could not be put out.
Maddy spent so much time at Mary’s, her mother started to complain, suspecting something more than friendship. By then summer had come, and Maddy stopped caring what her mother thought.
“If you try to stop me,” she warned, “you’ll never see me again.”
Maddy’s father didn’t say anything. The girl had her own life to live, her mother needed to give her room.
She could do a lot worse than spend all her time with a pregnant woman.
“Harvey,” Evelyn protested.
“Just leave me out of it,” Harvey said. “She’s not doing any harm.”
“She sleeps there more than she sleeps here!”
“She’ll be gone in another year anyway, and you won’t know where she sleeps. You can’t keep her here no matter what happens.”
Mrs. Springer gave up. She couldn’t fight the husband as well as the daughter.
And anyway, there was that new spa her friends started raving about.
“You simply have to go there, Evelyn. It’s just a total transformation.”
So she booked an appointment for the next weekend.
Maybe Harvey was right.
No sense in worrying about Madison.
She’d be eighteen soon enough.
The Guild and the Entity
In the midst of the Crab Nebula, the small, honeycomb-shaped object prepared to depart, its mission unaccomplished but over. They had lost the object. The girls had won. Again. It was humiliating, but they’d just have to get over it. Buck boys, they belched at each other. Better luck next time.
We lost those Pre-ascendant fellows too.
No big deal, there.
What with them always pissing their pants every time we summoned them.
Bit of a mess, really.
Best be rid of them, let the girls have ’em.
A small, dark, rugged object entered the nebula without much notice. Just a wandering asteroid, comet, something or other. The universe was full of them. The belching and croaking in the halls of the honeycomb rose louder and louder, gaining in volume and depth.
Kind of a competition.
The loudest belcher got to drive.
The asteroid continued to speed towards the honeycomb.
A final round of belching took place.
One between the clan mind of Eh’Xhotherereth and tribe psyche of B’ddnna B’mho.
But before the last belched was belched, the honeycomb shuddered, quivering in a million tremors as the Entity penetrated the walls of the honeycomb, delivering its charge.
The belching turned to a multitudinous cry of tormented pleasure as The Guild, suddenly exposed to the sensations of wet pussy against hot pussy and fleshy tit against fleshy tit, trembled in a continuous orgasm lasting eons and the births of galaxies.
So hot.
So lesbian.
The Consortium echoed, resonated, and shook with laughter and moaning.
You can thank us later, boys. When you’re done cumming.
The coming of Iris Light
Dr. Essenza, she still used the title although she hadn’t worked in the lab for years, glanced at her email and sighed. She stopped feeling like a scientist a long time ago. After Serena resigned as Chief Executive Officer, resigning all functions and operational activities. Though she remained on the board as majority owner.
Oh yes, she had sold many shares in the company almost a decade ago. After the disappearance of her daughter Sara.
Most of them to a small outfit calling itself Entertainment Incorporated.
But Carla had kept the company running profitably, and she showed no signs of losing her step.
It’s true they hadn’t had a major invention since losing the Living Pink, but the new product, New Pink, performed reasonably well. Absolutely well in comparison with any other competitor, but, well, in comparison to the original, it sadly lacked.
But competition had a way of competing, rivals caught up, produced their own innovations, stole secrets, and even infiltrated the corporation’s inner sanctum, despite Janie Bellykitty’s best efforts at security.
Oh yes, the loss of the Living Pink harbingered a slow change for the zombie lesbians in the lower dungeons. After about a year, they began to regain consciousness, control over their bodies and minds; the perpetual orgasms receded, and they woke up. Intact, but not unchanged.
Oh golly, they were all so very lesbian now.
And perpetually horny.
Janie Bellykitty, formerly James Bellydog, emerged with her serious demeanor in full swing.
But she couldn’t keep her hands off the girls.
Not that Carla blamed her.
Still, changes were unavoidable, and when rumors started flying almost a year ago that Entertainment Incorporated had designs on acquiring Serena’s shares of The Diana Group, she wasn’t surprised.
Dr. Essenza was almost relieved.
Maybe she could get back to being a scientist.
The phone rang, and Carla pushed the speaker.
“They’re downstairs, Dr. Essenza.”
“Thank you, Cynthia. I’ll be right down.”
Representatives and officials from Entertainment Incorporated milled around in front of the welcome lobby counter, looking self-important, self-satisfied, and well-heeled, man and woman alike.
One person, somewhat near the back, apparently a junior level manager, stood out from the group, capturing Carla’s imagination.
She couldn’t tell if it were a man or a woman.
She or he was tall, taller than the others in the group by several inches.
She or he had blond, almost yellow hair cropped in a kind of bob resembling something like the head of a mop sitting atop an angular, cat-like face with pronounced cheek bones framing pale eyes whose color could not be easily discerned.
A long, fine nose.
And lips that ranged from narrow but full to broad and slim.
She dressed in masculine, if flamboyant clothing, but his face carried very feminine traits, at once rounded and angular.
Carla noticed the frilly lace of the cuffs, the lace along the collar and lapels of his paisley jacket, a shimmering garment at once blue, pink, red, and black in various floral or almost floral patterns moving in and out of the paisley. The effect made Dr. Essenza’s eyes water.
The man or woman saw Carla staring at him (or her), and when introductions were made, she or he made sure to shake her hand in a powerful, not quite friendly grip.
“Hello,” the person said in a fairly high, melodious voice, “I’m Iris Light. I’m so very pleased to meet you.”
A faint, unpleasant shudder trembled throughout Carla Essenza’s body.
I should really consider retiring, Dr. Essenza realized.
And soon.
Mary gives birth
The baby, a girl just like Mary predicted, came in late June, pink and crying. Maddy walked around the hospital room cradling her in her arms, cooing into her ears, and only reluctantly handing her back to Mary, who inspected the child. When she spotted the birth mark on her left ankle, she fell into contemplation.
Maddy’s senior year passed quickly. She practically lived with Mary now.
Although her own mother, Evelyn, had recently came out as a lesbian, much to her husband’s bemusement and relief, Maddy didn’t really feel a connection to her. She loved Mary. She had fallen hard for Wendy’s mother and couldn’t imagine not spending as much time with her as possible.
Moving in with her just seemed logical.
When she turned eighteen it came as a completely natural choice that she would join Mary in her webcam performances, role-playing mother and daughter to their huge and hugely encouraging followers. Her foray into adult entertainment, lesbian adult entertainment, live and recorded, also came as the next natural, logical step in the path of Maddy’s life.
Mary never got pregnant again, but she watched her child grow up with an expectant and nervous apprehension.
She was a curious kid, this new girl.
She’d say the oddest things.
Once, while Mary and Maddy watched her play on the swing set in their back yard, she looked at the both of them and asked in all seriousness, “I’m not all here, am I?”
And then she ran around the around the swing set yelling giddily at the top of her little blond head, “I’m not all here, I’m not all here, I’m not all here.”
At six, Mary’s suspicions deepened.
At eleven, they solidified to a certainty.
It can’t be, she thought. It’s not possible.
But it was possible. Neither memory nor photograph lied.
The girl was a spitting image, an exact duplicate of her little lost Wendy.
At thirteen, even Maddy noticed it.
“How?” she asked Mary.
“I don’t know, but she is. She really is.”
“But that means.”
Mary broke out in the loudest guffaw, a laughter of pure joy and irritation.
“That damn girl. That damned girl knocked me up. She knocked her old lady up with her very own self.”
Elizabeth Wendy Love stomped down the stairs from her bedroom to find her two mothers laughing hysterically in each other’s arms.
“What’s so funny? What are you all laughing at?” she asked suspiciously.
But neither Mary nor Maddy could answer her.
What was there to say?