Quiver

“Who’s she? How does she know your name?”

“Get out!” His heart beats unbearably fast as his two worlds collide. He feels Simon pausing, throbbing inside him, so close to the skin.

She steps out of her dress. The shadow of her sex fascinates Simon. He cannot remember the last time a naked woman stood before him.

“Dee?” She leans forward and runs her hand down Simon’s back, pausing at the base to push against him in assent. Simon slides back into Dee. She wants to watch. She wants to see Dee’s face as he is being taken.

She reaches down to find Dee’s cock erect, hanging like fruit as he crouches on all fours with Simon above him. She pushes her sex against Dee’s mouth. He finds her clit with his tongue. She swells and traces his nose, his mouth. She has the power now; he services her while being taken on all fours. She watches Simon’s cock slide in and out. Each time Dee is taken, his mouth quickens against her cunt.

A translation of pleasure, a medium of sensation.

She wants to be drawn nearer into the triangle. She lowers herself beneath the men, sliding along Dee’s sweat-drenched body, trying to find a hold by wrapping her legs around his moving torso. There is something so dangerous about this, her intrusion into this male world. She is both frightened and exhilarated. She pulls Dee’s mouth down to hers, kissing him deeply.

He tastes of her, as he takes her tongue deeply into his mouth. His cock nudges gently at the lips of her cunt. She wants him in her. Now. She pulls him down and he thrusts into her. So big, so excited, that for a moment it is like she is with a different man. Dee enters her as Simon enters him. Simon bites the back of Dee’s neck as he sucks her tongue deep into him. A circle of penetration. Of give and take. Of fuck me fuck me I’m yours, the feminine and masculine flowing into each other as one receives while the other takes.

She watches as Dee lifts his face. She knows he is close to coming. He grabs her ankles and pushes them high above her shoulders. Simon’s small, soft hands, strangers to her, hold her apart, pinning her down as the full weight of both men plunges into her. From above Simon watches her, her raven hair spread across the pillow, her face flushed, her lips swollen and parted. He wants to reach her, this female shadow of Dee, this mirrored love. He touches her breasts, so soft; her nipples harden and grow erect between his fingers. His face buries into Dee’s hair, his shoulder. It’s almost as if he can feel his own cock in her, gripped tight by Dee’s ass. She loves the feel of this strange man’s hands touching her, the power of the men combining as one enters her while the other caresses her breasts, her face. Simon’s long hair falls across Dee’s face, twisting up, entwining with the black, the red and the gold. Close, he pulls back ready for a final thrust. Then in to split, to fill, to burst, as Dee screams his own climax, rushing like a train, rushing like a million spurting gushes into her, feeling him coming, feeling another about to come, her cunt hot, a thousand vibrations shooting down from her nipples to her womb, seeing white, as in heaven, as in to lose oneself in the microcosm of the interior, of cunt, cock and skin, of the distance between female and male as all fuse into one, trembling, as pulsating, a tsunami beginning from out of her heart, from the back of the head ebbing out farther and farther, faster and faster, purple, white, crimson pulsating like a star, like the sea itself, as pinned down, revealed, peeled back in all her glory, she screams out, her cries echoing with them.

THE SHORT MAN IN CRIME

Stacey didn’t like to think about her childhood or adolescence. It had been too painful, too traumatic—she was unable to dwell on even the briefest memories. As far as she was concerned, life had begun when she’d met Jock.

Stacey! Stacey! All loopy, large and spacey!

Although she came from a tiny family, she was six foot five in her stockinged feet. Since the age of eight she’d towered over the whole family, having to tolerate the jokes from her father (himself only five foot six) about Stacey, our resident giantess. She always felt like some weird genetic throwback, hunching over the dinner table, stooping down to kiss her mother, fixing the basketball net for the local boys, all the time wishing that the growing would miraculously stop.

She even hunted through the vast collection of family photo albums, searching desperately for that one tall relative who had handed on her gene. To no avail—the Müllers came from a long line of German Lutherans. Exile had left its mark in the pinched and shrunken frames of her ancestors. It was an unavoidable fact: Stacey was a freak. Lying there in her tiny attic room, bumping her head on the ceiling every time she sat up suddenly, she felt like the cuckoo egg laid in the wrong nest, gawkily perched over her sparrow parents rushing around frantically finding food to feed their monster chick.

Sitting at the back of the classroom, forever slouching over her desk, she watched in envy as other girls flirted effortlessly with the boys, who only ever seemed to treat her with a brotherly respect for her size. They would offer to arm wrestle with her, or recruit her for the basketball team, but they never acknowledged her femininity. It was agony for Stacey

, who had a crippling shyness. She could have compensated by becoming funny or successful academically, but the cruel reality was that there was nothing outstanding about Stacey except her height.

On one particularly anguished day, after her best friend had seduced the boy she’d been secretly fantasizing about for months, she sent away for a restraint to stop growing. She’d found the advertisement in the back of a comic: “The gawkiest in the class? Frightened of never finding a boyfriend you can see eye to eye with? Try McKay’s growth restraint. Guaranteed to control unnecessary height. $15 plus postage.”

The gadget came in a plain brown box. She rushed up to her bedroom, locked the door and drew the curtains. She carefully tore off the tape, frightened she might break the mysterious equipment that would be her salvation. In the box were two heavy elasticized ankle binders along with a roughly photo-copied page of handwritten instructions: “Fasten around each ankle every night for a month. Reduced blood circulation will decrease the flow of growth hormones around the body. No refund available.”

She wore the ankle binders for a year, until her mother noticed the bruising. In that time she’d grown an extra four inches, reaching five foot ten at fourteen—with the rest of adolescence still to come. By twenty she was six foot two and still growing, resigned to a cranelike existence bombarded by unwanted views of hidden nests of dandruff, shiny bald patches and toupées. It gave her a definite angle on masculinity, one that made men very nervous.

At dances she took to flirting sitting down. Men would approach her, and Stacey, dreading their moment of realization that she was taller than them—and thus usurping the natural order of things—would remain seated. She’d invite them to sit with her, giving some poor excuse like weak knees. The curious would stay, while she chatted on brightly, a bit too brightly, a bit too incessantly, as the anticipation of standing grew in the pit of her stomach.

Dancing meant that most men would be conversing with her nipples. She would have to hold them at arm’s length, terrified that any proximity would look too obscene. Ridicule was her constant terror, from the moment she woke up to the moment she lay down, horizontal and safe in her extra-long single bed. With her long arms wrapped around herself, Stacey would rock herself to sleep, her electric blanket humming beneath her.

She lost her virginity at twenty-seven to a drunken brickie who mistook her for a transvestite hooker. On finally relieving her of her underpants, he voiced his disappointment, but fucked her anyway. It was a grubby and rather uncomfortable affair, but Stacey was glad to be rid of her virginity; at least she didn’t have to wear that too, like a stigmata.

She worked behind the counter at a branch of a gambling enterprise collecting money and distributing the betting slips. It was a man’s world, but one that was too distracted to notice or dwell on any physical anomaly. She was quiet, efficient and had a knack of talking down the occasional devastated gambler. In another life she could have been a good nurse or social worker, but the scale of her world had been totally distorted by her size. Fear made her innately clumsy and she was forever tipping things over with her huge awkward hands.

Des, her boss, a cheerful man in his late sixties, liked her and was secretly thankful that she was the only employee who never asked for a pay raise and was even grateful to work on public holidays.

She’d walk in every morning in her usual plain blue dress that covered up her ample bosom and remarkably good legs. She matched the dress with a short cardigan, heavy tights and flat shoes. Buying clothes had always been a problem. It was painful negotiating the changing rooms with the stark reflections of herself in the full-length mirrors, some of which cut off her head completely, leaving her torso strangely dismembered in bra and pants. It was terrifying having to ask for a skirt of the right length. She was a size sixteen, not fat but womanly, as her mother kept saying proudly, while wondering where the bosom and height had come from; it certainly wasn’t her side of the family.

Stacey’s uniform brought her invisibility, carefully constructed to make her melt into the very walls. She could stand at the bus stop and not get noticed, sit opposite an attractive man and not blush as she reached up to pull the cord.

It was his height that initially attracted her—five foot one or two at the most. He was a flashy dresser, always in gray, blue or pale-green suits, the padded shoulders of which only seemed to emphasize his lack of height. His shirts were expensive but in atrocious taste, invariably undone to display a virile growth of chest hair, buried in the center of which shone a heavy gold chain. A mass of black curly hair worn to his shoulders framed a podgy face of bog Irish ancestry. His eyes were his most beautiful feature, a piercing blue, shining behind surprisingly long black eyelashes. His age was difficult to determine, but almost certainly between the mid-thirties and forties. Stress, and possibly drink, had blurred the features, which somewhere in his youth might have optimistically been described as elfin.

Jock was the first man she’d met who acknowledged her womanliness. He complimented her hair or her complexion, grabbing her hand as she passed him the betting slip and saying things like, “The deeper the treasure is buried, the greater the joy in discovery.” At first she was terrified he was parodying her, but he was insistent, staring intensely into her eyes, while his own seemed to convey such warmth and passion that at times she felt as if he was making love to her right there in the middle of the TAB.

His authority and the way the other men revered him excited her. He seemed totally confident in his swaggering and aggressive presence. It was as if he had used his diminutive stature as a propellant to power. Soon she found herself dreaming about him at night. She wondered what it would be like to have that head of long hair buried between her breasts.

It is the day of the Adelaide Cup, one of the grand events of the Australian racing calendar. Stacey is working a double shift; it is her fifth hour behind the counter, but she smiles on.