Von remained silent, waiting for his associate to volunteer a predictably pathetic excuse. Greg did the same. An awkward silence stretched its legs.
“What’s that you got in your hand, Greg?” Sammy finally asked.
Greg hadn’t looked this surprised since his sister caught him masturbating in the shower (but slightly less so than when she’d hopped in and taken over the shucking responsibilities for him). He struggled for a good answer. What he found was, “Just . . . just some . . . gum. Like you . . . chew?”
Sammy smiled. “So chew then, Greg old buddy. Don’t let me stop you.”
“Yeah, Greg,” Von agreed. “Chew.”
If he’d been lost in the forest before, he was going into the oven now.
“Greg, you have the rare distinction of running over one man’s junk and disemboweling a cadaver while trying to procure a changeling penis, all within about 30 minutes,” Sammy said. “And you ruined a work of art in the process. So if you don’t start chewing in the next ten seconds, I’m going to tear you a brand new asshole, ‘son.’ And I will use all my surgical know-how to make sure that you live long enough to use it, too.”
Greg chewed. It may not have even been the most unpleasant experience in his life from the layman’s perspective (lest we forget other extracurricular activities with corpses, though female, whose every orifice he had lunched on, and ravenously at that), but it was altogether more humbling.
“Oh, hell,” he said between mouthfuls. “It’s . . . it’s really chewy, guys . . . Christ on a unicycle, it’s so damn chewy …”
It was not hyperbole. His jaws worked mechanically, piston-like, to conclude this humiliation fast enough to break the sound barrier, but the morsels resisted. They bred in his mouth, tough as gristle with the texture of the fat on a steak. He could almost visualize each part as he chomped . . . the shaft, the head, the urethra, the veins, the erectile tissue. His own size seemed to wilt between his legs with each bite.
He cried as he ate.
“Fantastic,” Sammy complimented. “You took it like man, Greg. I didn’t think you had it in you . . . although I guess you do now, don’t you? So now that I trust you two dopes have been exorcised of your little substitution fantasy, you can get your asses on the horn and start making demands to Mrs. Rochester. Unless vibrator companies have jumped into the telemarketing biz, you’ll be the most welcome call of the night.”
Greg’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. He gagged miserably, but held it down.
“Hurry up and swig some Listerine, dickbreath,” Sammy said. “The time is later than you think.”
Part III: Embryonic Necropsy and Devourment
“Make sure you dumbasses hit star-six-seven when you call,” Sammy admonished.
Von stood at the kitchen counter with the portable phone in his hand, reading over the “script” in front of him. Greg had prepared it, which in retrospect probably wasn’t the best idea. Somehow it had seemed more important for Von to watch the latest installment of a porn series called Gaping Anus the other night rather than iron out the script with him. It was the 24th volume, but he had to hand it to them—they were finding ways to keep it fresh. You never knew which gal would start out with a nickel-sized rectal circumference that wound up more like the ball from a shot put three hours and forty-seven minutes later. It seemed like 4 hours well spent. All Greg had to do was incorporate the points he had outlined. He now understood that the word Greg should have stood out to him more in that scenario.
“Haven’t you ever heard of punctuation?” Von finally asked, disgusted.
“Let me see that,” Sammy said and snatched it away. “I don’t know why you wasted your time coming up with this thing. You’re trying to ransom her husband’s junk, not sell her a magazine subscription.” His brow crinkled as he read it for a few seconds, frown deepening. “He’s right, Greg. It’s not exactly Hemingway. This ain’t even Flowers for Algernon. If you tried to read this to Mrs. Rochester word for word, she’d tell the police they oughtta narrow their search to guys with Down’s syndrome.”
“Or a retard,” Von said.
Greg made no reply. He stood by the refrigerator, wincing at the sour taste in his mouth. Vomiting would be worse than the actual eating, though; all those masticated chunks of penile debris resurrected. The thought was horrifying, and the prospect felt more and more likely with each slosh of his disturbed stomach juices. He had to eliminate the taste.
“I’ve got to eat something else,” he announced.
“Still hungry?” Sammy chuckled. “We could have Von turn out his pockets.”
Greg opened the refrigerator, staring at the shelves like a man beholding an oasis in the desert. He reached in with both hands and removed a large Tupperware bowl, then started yanking open drawers, looking for a spoon or fork.
“Just help yourself,” Sammy said, irritated.
Von took the script from Sammy and crumpled it up. “Hell with it. I’ll make something up.”
“Couldn’t be any worse. Follow the subject with the predicate and it’ll already be a vast improvement.”
Greg peeled back the Tupperware lid and sank his spoon into a nearly gelatinous concoction of crimson slop and glistening lumps. He filled his mouth with it, grinning idiotically. “Fine eatin’ here, Sammy. What is this, some kind of cobbler?”
“I believe the medical term is ‘spontaneous abortion,’” Sammy replied.
Greg’s grin froze on his face. He looked down at the bowl again, first seeing his rather awe-struck reflection caught by the light above him, and then the true texture of those lumps he’d first taken to be cobbler crust. The truth seemed obvious now. He prodded it with his spoon and discovered a runny film at the surface of the glop, like pond scum.
The amniotic sac . . . or what passed for it in its premature expulsion.
“There may be a few morsels of the placenta left,” Sammy said, matter-of-factly. He could have been talking about the reds in a bowl of M&M’s.
Von had paused with the phone in his hand the instant Sammy said “spontaneous abortion.” He finally dared to speak. “You mean some whore had a miscarriage and squeezed all that slop out of her joytrail? And you tossed it in a bowl and froze it?”
Sammy nodded. “That’s about the size of it.”
Von processed this for a few seconds. “Well, hellfire, Greg, why’re you just standing there staring like that freak in Sleepaway Camp? Get me a spoon, too!”
Greg, hand held over his mouth, surrendered the bowl and spoon to Von without a word. He looked rather green around the gills.
“You’re kidding, right?” Von asked, staring at the bowl. “I ain’t using this spoon after you. You just had a dick in your mouth, son! I don’t want no part of that.”
“I rinsed my mouth out,” Greg protested slowly, as though afraid more than words would escape through his lips if he spoke too fast.
Sammy intervened. “Are you two gonna debate dental hygiene all night, or are you gonna get this Rochester bitch on the horn?”
“Right now I’m a bit more interested in how you got ahold of this here tasty little dessert,” Von said. He dipped a thumb into the mess on the outer edge—where Greg’s spoon probably hadn’t explored—and slid it in his mouth. He sucked at it thoughtfully, one eyebrow arched, then moaned approvingly. Some of it remained smeared around his lips like clown make-up.
“How I wound up with a puddle of abortion in my refrigerator? It’s kind of a boring story, really.” Sammy shrugged, but agreed to enlighten. He could have been talking about vacation slides from a trip he hadn’t really enjoyed. “I zapped this primo slut with my stun gun when she left the library, then brought her here. Slapped some meat down on her in so many different ways, I could have made my own cookbook. After a few weeks, her belly started expanding. I figured she was just bloated, but after awhile I realized there was a little Sammy on the way.”