The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [66]
“Now you say it,” he whispers.
“I am a lion!” she shouts.
“No.” He sighs, his forefinger edging upward against her thigh. “I was wrong. You’re not a lion after all.”
“I am a lion.”
“Are you?”
She takes his hand and puts it inside her panties.
“I just need a little encouragement,” she says in his ear.
He smiles. “Try it now.”
“I am a Lion!” She laughs.
“Again.”
The wind whips up her skirt, and she feels his stiff middle finger finding the wetness.
“I am a LION!” she shouts, a wild tremor in her voice.
“Better,” he says. She leans back against the vent as his thick finger begins stroking, pressing, exploring. Life is too absurd for remorse. It’s like getting brained by a falling flowerpot, like getting run over by an ice cream truck.
“I am . . . ,” he whispers, hovering above her.
“I am . . . ,” she whispers, dizzy and cool in the darkness.
Life is too inconstant to be real, a brief glitch in the logic of nonexistence, the moment before the cartoon coyote sees that he’s run off the cliff and is hovering in the dubious air.
“. . . a lion,” he whispers in her ear, his free hand tracing the curve of her hip.
“. . . a lion,” she whispers. Life is a contradiction impossibly sustained by belief, belligerence, desire—that three-ring circus of the human will, clowns and lions and trapeze artists all racing and leaping and flying under the big top.
“I am a lion,” he whispers, one hand on her ass, the other sliding down the back of her leg, lifting it.
Life is too absurd and inconstant and contradictory to stop her from having it all, having it any way she wants. She can be the lion, can kill and eat and play and be noble and beautiful and strong, with no more fear, no more failure, no more rules.
“I am a lion,” she whispers, and licks his ear with the tip of her tongue as he enters her. He grunts and growls as they fuck, a little boastfully, but a little needfully, too, and she likes the sound of it, and she grunts, too, at first half in mockery but soon uncontrollably as their thrusting grows desperate, grunting and growling like lions while all across the city a hundred burglar alarms simultaneously begin their nebulous, tinny clanging.
The power is returning.
Savages
Guru
The Black Tower’s conference hall has never been a cheerful place, but for this occasion Chas has taken the gloom to a whole new level, blotting out the already meager daylight with red velvet curtains and banishing the halogen lamps in favor of crudely hewn stone pots from which rise pale, translucent flames, their dim light flickering over the eighty audience members—the corporate executives, marketing directors, account managers, art directors, and copywriters of the various agencies, companies, and departments with subscriptions to Tomorrow’s annual Trendpak. This lecture is a new addition to Tomorrow Ltd.’s package of services, and Chas has hyped it extensively through a mouthpiece in the person of James T. Couch, who’s been making the office circuit for the last two weeks to drum up an audience. Couch, Ursula knows, performed this duty only reluctantly, harboring, as he does, serious doubts as to the commercial viability of this year’s presentation. “I just don’t get it!” he moaned, having decided at some point to make a confidante out of her. “Chas is always telling us, Keep it Light! Keep it Light! This is not Light. This is anything but Light.”
For her own part, Ursula has reserved judgment, but now, watching the clients opening their Trendpaks for the first time, she admits that Couch may have been right. As they peer into those silver-painted, octagonal cardboard boxes, their faces drop like those of children finding their trick-or-treat bags filled with chocolate-covered bugs. Having taken a look at Trendpaks from previous years, Ursula can understand their dismay. Normally this brightly colored box comes packed with quirky, entertaining new products culled from stores around the world—the latest toys, crockery, books,