TFTM: Ladies' Night - Tales of Lust, Magic and Revenge #1

From the mind of Jaimie K. Wilson

A Tales From The Moon Series

Ladies' Night - Tales of Lust, Magic and Revenge #1

Slime of the Earth

The Salty Beaver may not sound like a premier strip club, but for the town of Paris, Louisiana, it was the spot to be for the best tits and ass you could find for fifty miles. Howard practically lived there.

What could he say? He loved the ladies and the ladies loved him back. So, like most Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, Howard headed to The Salty Beaver with a wallet stuffed fat with dollar bills. They had hired a new girl and Howard had been doing his best to charm her for the past three weeks. She looked like she was from the islands, with dark shining skin and an ass you could eat your dinner off of. He planned to have her bouncing on his lap tonight like the playful kitten she was.

Chevelle stared at herself in the mirror and sighed deeply before reaching for the adhesive. She hated fake eyelashes, but they made a big difference when it came to the tips. The real issue, the reason she was dragging her ass, was a local who had set his sights on her. Hardly unusual, but this guy was more handsy than most, and he gave her a bad feeling, a greasy one.

She trusted her feelings, especially when it came to men, but she still had to make rent, so she had gone to the House Mom for advice. Miss Addie was from Trinidad. She was at least sixty, smoked constantly, watched out for the girls and the House’s money, and was the last person on God’s green earth you wanted to fuck with. Because Miss Addie knew things. And could make stuff happen. And when broken, beaten women came to the Beaver in trouble and needing work, Miss Addie gave them work. And taught them other ways of solving their problems.

Chevelle has gone to Miss Addie’s “office” – a small corner of the bar area with a folding table, calculator and assortment of ashtrays. When Chevelle stepped toward her table, Miss Addie didn’t look up. Just drew on her Marlboro and asked, “Here ‘bout Howard?”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Chevelle, looking at the floor.

Miss Addie did a half nod. “Never know when ta stop, dat Howard. I had my eye on him for some time… some time. So, ya want help, gal?”

Chevelle looked her in the eyes and they stared at each other, saying all that needed saying in that single glance. Then Miss Addie reached for one of the many cigarette boxes on her table and pulled something out – a blue glass marble, wrapped in wire and hung from red thread.

“Wear dis tonight,” she said. “And when he touch you down dere, you name ‘im. Name ‘im for what he is and what he will be, now and forever more, until the end of all time. Touch ‘im ‘ere.” She pointed to the space between her eyebrows, never taking her eyes from Chevelle’s.

“That’s all?”

Miss Addie stared at her. Chevelle swallowed.

“What can I do for you?”

“I like gifts,” Miss Addie said, the cold demeanor still in place. “Get me something yellow when the time is right.”

Chevelle nodded and backed out of the bar. Miss Addie lit another Marlboro and went back to punching her calculator and ignoring the ashtrays.

That night, Chevelle was able to focus on her makeup, taking her time instead of constantly worrying about Howard and his disgusting hands. She chose the fortune teller as tonight's persona. Her skirt was a simple chain with swatches of gauzy fabric hanging from it. A long strip of tulle cloth bound her breasts until the moment in her act when she untied it and it fell, fluttering to the floor as she hung, her thighs clenching the pole. Around her neck, she wore the amulet on its simple red string, but across her body, she streaked tendrils of iridescent paint that would glow under the black lights. She layered purple and green body glitter over that, accenting the swells of her breasts, the space below her navel, and the paths of her inner thighs. She wore her long, black hair loose and unadorned.

Howard appeared at 9 p.m. as usual, but this time, Chevelle made sure to make eye contact with him often. With every fiber of her being – with her ass, her face, her breasts, her sweat – she told Howard he was the only man in the room. That this dance was for him and for him alone. After her bit, when she hit the floor, Howard was ready to reel her in for a private dance in the back. Before heading there, she leaned down to him and asked loudly, over the music, “You gonna keep your hands to yourself tonight, Howard?”

“You know me,” he said, laughing, a shit-eating grin plastered across his sweaty face. Chevelle shook her finger at him. “Yeah, I know you...”

She stood up, signaled to the bar, got the nod, and then led Howard down the purple hall to the black rooms on the right. The bouncer let them in and shut the door behind them. Howard collapsed into a small, pleather booth and pulled a fifty-dollar bill out of his pocket, and handed it to her, folded in half. “This is for the dance,” he said, “but you're really gonna have to work for extra. But there's more to be had, I assure you... It just depends on what kind of fortune you have in store for me tonight.”

Howard was doing his very best to seem sexy and in control.

Chevelle just nodded coyly, but in her head, she was already gone – trying to find a place in the music, to eliminate Howard, to find her space. When she found it – when she became the rhythm – she moved toward him like a snake, like a sinuous dream, one that strikes as well as seduces. Howard noticed nothing, except maybe tits and ass and a shimmering collage of purple and green that made the half bulge in his pants lurch with excitement. The ten-dollar bill he had held ready in his hand grew slick and sweaty in his clenched palm. He licked his lips, looking at her, drinking in the way the light bounced off her caramel skin. He burned to touch her. He could almost taste her. He was sure he could smell her.

She could sense his desire for her peaking, and she crawled into his lap, twining her arms behind him, hooking them around his neck. Howard’s wandering fingers began their adventurous questing, moving from the curve of her hips to cup the bottom of her ass. She felt his fingers pop inside the lining of her bikini bottoms, just the tips of his fingers.

“Howard...” she warned, but on her lips, she wore a slight smile. He just answered, “Mmmmhmmmm,” or murmured or something. Whatever it was, it didn't take her into account at all. He pushed his fingers deeper, and that was when she suddenly leaned back, placing her right hand against his chest and pressing the two middle fingers of her left hand between his eyes like a brand. “Slime of the Earth,” she hissed. “Slime of the Earth,” although the words were lost beneath the music.

There was no flash of light. The music thumped on, but as Chevelle drew her left hand back, a long string of glutinous slime trailed from her fingers to his forehead. Appalled and disgusted, she jumped off of him. “What. The. Fuck.” she said, backing away from the booth and making a beeline for the door.

Howard, who was entirely baffled at how the best night of his life had suddenly careened into this, this gross oddity, waved his hands to apologize. He attempted to stand up from the black, cavernous booth, to get up and convince Chevelle to continue the dance, that he just put his hand in something.…

But as he did, Howard’s hands slipped on everything they touched, as if every surrounding object had been suddenly and miraculously coated with a veneer of snot or viscous oil. He tried pleading to Chevelle but she was already backing out of the room, talking to the bouncer and wiping her hands on her body. The bouncer turned his head toward Howard, who immediately held up both hands.

The large, Maori bouncer took a few steps towards him. “What the hell, man?” he asked, peering toward Howard, who was still half lurking, half crouching in the dark. Howard knew when it was time to make an exit. He put his hands behind his back and made a half bow, sideling out of the room like a crab, repeating all the while, I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened. I'm so sorry. I'll just, I'll just...

And with that, Howard turned away from the baffled, but thoroughly disgusted bouncer and fled the club.

Howard never returned to The Salty Beaver and the entire club breathed a sigh of relief, including Miss Addie, though she would never let on to anyone else about it. Although no one at the club knew – at least, not right away – Howard stopped showing up to his job after two days. He stopped showing up at church and the supermarket and the bowling alley not long after that. And it was probably about two months after that that Nana Pettiway's latest rescue dog started barking at the big bay window of Howard's place. When no one came to the door after several days of incessant barking (and knocking), the police were called.

Inside, Officer Bradwick (who had gone to high school with Howard and even attended a few poker nights at his place) was the first to find Howard – or what was left of him. The corpse must have weighed less than eighty pounds and had collapsed in on itself in the center of the living room floor. The huddle of bones was desiccated. The skin tight and wrinkled; the arms clasping stick legs. The head drooped so low between the legs, it was barely visible. If there had been a stitch of clothing on the body, it wouldn’t have been.

And the smell, dear God, the smell. A yellowish liquid covered the floor, seeping from beneath the body. It was hard to think of that pile as Howard, who had been a decent guy once, despite having a penchant for snuff porn and 4Chan conspiracies. They had gotten into some trouble in their twenties and Howard had always been solid, someone you could trust to keep their mouth shut, to have your back if shit got dicey. How this could have happened – what had happened – was completely beyond him.

All the furniture in the room had been pushed against the wall so that nothing remained around the body. A bucket of piss and excrement that had long gone dry squatted amid pizza boxes, empty bottles of Diet Pepsi, and Mountain Dew. Stained, crumpled pages of Juggs magazine were strewn along the perimeter of the room like weeping flowers in some terrible parody of a Renaissance painting, where Howard had perished of loneliness, of abandonment, with only his bones to keep him company.

The smell was beyond horrific, but the body was oddly dry as if Howard had become a husk, dry and papery inside like a yellowed cicada. The smell seemed to be emanating, not from the body itself, but from the slime sliding out from under it and seeping across the living room’s wood floor.

Officer Bradwick backed out of the home quickly, closing the front door and leaning his back against it, gasping, his face to the sun. As the coroner’s team ambled up the front walk, he thanked God above he was too stupid for the medical field. Breathing deeply to control his nausea, Officer Bradwick stepped onto the white sidewalk. As he nodded and passed the two young men, the one pushing a gurney turned around to yell over a screechy wheel, “You’ve got something on your shoes, man.”

Bradwick looked back and saw his own wet footprints following him from the front porch. He stepped off the walk and slid his feet back and forth in the dirt and dollar weed, trying not to think about what might have coated the bottom of his shoes. Then Bradwick got into his squad car and started it up. But as his right hand left the keys and gripped the wheel, a thin rope of slime – the consistency of warm dog slobber –slowly dangled down to land on his right knee.

The first child of a white mother and Black Japanese father, Jaimie K. Wilson felt she grew up in the margins of mainstream society. A sense of displacement fueled the search for her own identity, which is why her writing often centers around the quest to know oneself and how strongly someone’s history – when not taken from them – can guide their future.

Jaimie became a newspaper reporter after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1998 and won several SPJ awards for features on race, culture, and family. She was also the recipient of an artist residency for poetry at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. A single mother of two, Jaimie now works as a freelance writer, contributing articles, essays, and features to a variety of publications both for herself and various clients. Jaimie is currently working on her first adult fantasy novel, which she hopes to complete sometime before her children drive her completely insane.