“Oops,” Lourdes said softly. “Sorry.”
But the hand stayed there, very lightly, for a second or two, and something squirmed around the edges of Madison’s thoughts.
She did the clamping-the-legs-together and caught Lourdes’s hand where it was. The fingers spread, rubbed.
Then Lourdes gently pulled away and sat back. Gently she asked what Madison was doing. Madison didn’t know. Well, she sort of knew.
“Has somebody touched you there, Madison? On purpose? Not on accident like just happened?”
“Yeah.” Squeaky voice into the baby doll’s hair.
“Can you tell me about it?” A tiny shake of the head, though she could have told; she’d been practicing. “Can you tell the baby doll about it?”
“What’s her name?”
“What do you want her name to be?”
The technique to get buy-in worked. Madison smiled. “Pretty.”
“That’s a good name. Can you tell Pretty about it?”
Careful. Don’t be easy, don’t play too hard to get. There was a humming sensation at the base of her brain—the primal part, the reptilian part that took care of basic survival stuff.
“Is it too scary over there all by yourself, Madison? Do you and Pretty need to come sit by me?”
Madison did need to. This is it. Don’t blow it.
“Or on my lap?” Whoa. “Even a big girl like you needs somebody to hold her sometimes.” Hold sounded nice. Hold me.
“I don’t like it here.”
“You don’t like it here in the office?”
“This room’s ugly.”
Lourdes didn’t take offense or laugh. “Would you like to go into the other room where the toys are?”
Can you say kidnapping? Madison nodded. Lourdes led the way.
They sat on big, soft pillows on the floor. Pretty the doll went onto Lourdes’s lap first, a canary into a mine, into Lourdes’s lap, into the hollow there. Madison sat cross-legged on the floor, crotch open under the white jumper, pink flowered panties barely covered. Little Shit faced forward to fend off any gropes of her chest. Her boobs and crotch were throbbing, boobs painfully, crotch not so much. Hopefully the call button was still there inside the Ace girdle—the temptation to feel for it and give herself away was weirdly erotic, like the urge to step off a cliff that made you have to back away. Instead, she put her hand under her flared skirt and rubbed herself, and saw Lourdes smile.
“Why don’t you come over here by me?”
Madison really wanted to go and really wanted to stay right here, almost but not quite out of reach. It was like being licked in the inside folds of her brain.
What are you doing? Which of the three of them was saying that to which of the three of them?
Lourdes scooted close. She smelled like Lourdes, like somebody Madison didn’t quite remember. “Can you show me with Pretty what somebody did to you?”
Madison giggled and kissed Pretty with her mouth open, touched the plastic mouth with her tongue.
“Someone put his tongue in your mouth?”
“Her.”
“Someone put her tongue in your mouth?”
Madison nodded and licked the doll’s mouth again.
“A grown-up woman?” Madison nodded and the woman’s, the therapist’s voice got even more gentle. “Did she do anything else to you, honey? Touch you anywhere else?”
A heat was spreading in all their minds and bodies now. Madison squirmed. Little Shit tried not to. Lourdes put an arm around her. “Can you show me with Pretty?”
Madison put the doll against her crotch. Little shit really hoped she didn’t have to insert the sorry thing.
“She touched your vagina?” The word clanged like a bell. Lourdes was practically cooing. “Like this?”
It seemed to take long minutes before Lourdes’s fingers actually came into contact with the stretch of pink flowered panties. It seemed to be all one quick motion when the fingers wormed inside the elastic. The realization exploded in Lourdes’s awareness that the skin she was caressing wasn’t hairless but shaved at the same instant that Madison threw up and Little Shit went for the call button.
The Ace bandage unwound and her boobs deployed like airbags. You little shit. The call button wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Then she found it, and Raul and Dixie slammed into the room with guns drawn.
Lourdes just sat there. Madison was gone. Little Shit covered what body parts she could. When they pulled Lourdes to her feet and cuffed her, Thanks was in her mind, like a wave on a beach. Not the word, just the gratitude itself. Thank you then, and the name she’d given Lourdes to call her by. And, before she could get all the way out of Lourdes’s mind, something like I love you.
——
Melanie Tem’s solo novels include her Bram Stoker Award–winning debut, Prodigal, and most recently Slain in the Spirit and The Deceiver. She has also collaborated with Nancy Holder on Making Love and Witch-Light, and with Steve Rasnic Tem on Daughters and The Man on the Ceiling. The earlier novella version of The Man on the Ceiling won the 2001 Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy Awards. The Tems also collaborated on the award-winning multimedia CD-ROM Imagination Box.
Her short stories have been published in the collection The Ice Downstream; on E-Reads; in numerous magazines, including Colorado State Review, Black Maria, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Cemetery Dance; and in anthologies, including Snow White Blood Red, Acquainted with the Night, Poe, Portals, Black Wings II, and Blood and Other Cravings. She has also published nonfiction articles and poetry.
Tem is also a playwright and an oral storyteller.
She lives in Denver with her husband, writer and editor Steve Rasnic Tem, where she works as an adoption social worker. They have four children and four granddaughters.
Lucius Shepard
—
Late in the day, Michael kept passing little towns with deserted streets and winking caution signals, paper trash swirling in the gutters, places that reminded him of movies in which mankind had been destroyed and computers continued to operate stoplights and sprinklers and house pets feasted on the rotting flesh of their owners. Beyond them, sun-browned hills conveyed the interstate north toward Oregon. Traffic was sparse and he boosted his speed, letting the Cadillac drift wide on the turns, driving with his neck turtled and his shoulders hunched. He felt that he was burning with indefinable brilliance and menace, that he had inhabited some nihilistic fantasy and become its outlaw Jesus. Every half an hour or so the girl beside him, a skinny bottle blond in a tank top and cutoffs, would break into his baggie of coke, taking a few hits for herself, then loading the tip of her nail file and holding it beneath his nose, smiling and making meaningful eye contact as he sniffed and blinked. She had milky skin, nice legs, and sharp features that reminded him of photographs from Depression-era Appalachia and matched her hick accent. She might, he thought, remain pretty for three or four years before she began to look dried up and waspish, and that would most likely be fine with her. Three or four good years would be about what she expected.