The Purloined Lips of Destiny
by Nicholas Alan Tillemans

   Audrey had captured my imagination in a way no woman ever had before. She had a pretty face. She was gifted with a beautiful body. Her legs were long and shapely. Her breasts were ample and she had a firm round bottom. She became an obsession of mine, the memory of which haunts me to this day.

   I was a bookish person. I tended to keep to myself. I was lonely and obsessed with death and being forgotten. I entertained dreams that I would save lives or otherwise do such magnanimous deeds that I would be remembered forever. But the opportunities never arose. Instead, I took my pleasure from watching other people go about their days.

   I watched Audrey from afar for several months. I derived a great deal of satisfaction from her at my own hands. I often beat off, as I watched Audrey cut through the park across the street. I usually had to make it quick. She rarely dallied in the park for long. So, I did everything I could to intensify my pleasure. I held my breath to fool my body into thinking I was suffocating. I gasped in shallow, infrequent breaths…just enough to keep me conscious. I tended to come in short order. Don’t get me wrong. I spanked it like that to porn too. But it was better watching Audrey walk by unawares. My front windows overlooked the park. So, I was able to watch her without being detected. I had fantasies about talking her into my apartment and taking her from behind over the back of my couch. I wanted her. I spent hours rehearsing what I would say to her when I finally got up the nerve to ask her out on a date. I figured that a girl like her was too good for a guy like me. She made me nervous. I was afraid that I would bump into her unprepared and end up making an idiot out of myself. So, I deliberately avoided her for months, until we happened to cross paths one day. It was the only way I would have ever met her. I tripped over my tongue and corrected myself just a couple of times before she agreed to let me take her out for dinner.

   I picked her up the following night from her job at the convalescent home down the street and took her to a nice supper club. There were some awkward moments where I couldn’t think of anything to say. It didn’t seem to bother her. She was very reserved. She talked very little about her past. Her parents were both deceased; and it didn’t sound to me like she had any living relatives. I was careful not to say too much. My childhood was unpleasant. My family was estranged. So, I didn’t talk much about my past…nor, for that matter, about what I did for a living. I felt no pressure to dredge any of it up. Mostly, we talked about our favorite restaurants, movies and television shows. She seemed to appreciate my obsession with Bay Watch. She even talked about her fascination with David Hasselhoff’s success in Germany as a singer/songwriter. Above all, though, she was supportive of my dreams of becoming a middle-aged lifeguard. When I kissed her goodnight, I hardly knew anything about her. I don’t think it mattered what I said or what she said. We both knew that we had something special. We went out on several more dates, feeding off each other’s mysteries. Apparently, she was comfortable enough with me to come back to my apartment on our fifth date.

   It would have devastated me, if she’d turned me down. I’d put my neck out on the line. I’d had an extra set of keys to my apartment made. I’d decorated the apartment with dozens of roses and scattered rose petals on the floor and on the bed. I gave Audrey a set of keys to my apartment. It was a gesture to say that I loved and trusted her and that she was welcome in my home any time. She smiled and nodded as she looked intently into my eyes. I directed her to unlock the door. She was pleased as she stepped over the threshold. I must have said something smooth. She was very receptive to me.

   We embraced. We caressed each other very gently at first. It progressed rapidly. It wasn’t long before we were stripping off each other’s clothing. Audrey made short work of undressing me. I was naked as I unbuttoned Audrey’s blouse and pulled her skirt down from her hips. She was wearing thigh-high stockings with a black vinyl garter belt and matching bra. I ran my hands over her milky white flesh. I took my time. I felt the goose bumps on her breasts, the gradual firming of her nipples and I paid attention to every coo and moan. I caressed her behind. I ran my hand over her crotch. It was cold and moist. I felt thick leather stitches on her mons venus. As I probed more deeply with my fingers, Audrey relaxed, unfurled the lips of her cunt and exposed a set of teeth…incisors, bicuspids and all. Startled, I pulled my hand away and backed away from the bed. I stared at Audrey in disbelief.

   She begged me to continue. She assured me that everything was fine. She stood up and revealed a long tongue between her legs. She licked her lips with it. She pleaded with me to come back to bed with her. She promised to explain everything in the morning. It was unnecessary. I wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t move. I stood very rigidly. Audrey approached me, carefully examining my face. I stood naked beside the bed as Audrey gave me a long kiss and sucked me in between her legs. She pleasured me until I acquiesced. I slowly regained control of my muscles but felt very weak and collapsed on the bed. I fell asleep.

   When I woke up in the morning, I intended to chalk the experience up as a bizarre nightmare and forget it. But it bothered me; and I couldn’t take my mind off of it. Audrey was cooking breakfast for us in the kitchen. I gave Audrey a kiss and sat at the kitchen table. Audrey plated the food and set my breakfast in front of me. She sat across from me. Audrey went about eating her breakfast as if nothing had happened. I had to say something. At first, I tried to approach the matter delicately. I asked her whether she enjoyed me. She smiled but didn’t say anything, as she continued forking up her breakfast. Frustrated, I related my nightmare to her. I explained to her that I needed to see her naked in the light of day to put the matter to rest. At my insistence, she stripped naked.

   The memories came flooding back to me more vividly than I even recalled experiencing them the previous night. She approached me. In a sultry voice, she began to explain herself. She teased my cock through my pants with the tongue between her legs. She said that everything would become plain to me in time. I believed her. I found the softness of her voice hypnotic. The awkward arousal I felt before became concrete. I was, again, teetering on the brink of ecstasy. Audrey walked away from me and began dressing. I wanted to feel myself inside her again; but she was unimpressed by my advances. She laughed at me, as if I’d lost my mind. She told me that, since last night, her lips itched and burned. They felt tight and brittle to her. The stitches were tugging at her flesh and causing sharp stinging sensations. She pushed me away and told me that I wasn’t ready. She spoke to herself frantically under her breath, expressing concerns that she’d made a mistake. An inexpressible, unassailable passion welled up within me. I could find no release. Audrey seemed to be the key. But she was no help to me. I was left to my own devices.

   I stormed out of the apartment and slid into my car. I aimlessly sped down the city streets. I blew a few stoplights driving upwards of fifty miles an hour. It didn’t help me. I parked my car in a ramp downtown and walked a couple of blocks over to a strip club for a stiff drink. I needed to calm down. I could hardly hold it together. But I managed to drop a couple of twenties on a blonde stripper and sit calmly as she danced for me. She approached me when she got off stage. Maybe she had kids at home with mouths to feed. I don’t know.

   She followed me out to the parking ramp. She followed me to my car. She approached me, desperate for money. I let her in on the passenger side. I slid into the driver’s seat. She unzipped me and took me in her mouth. Part way into pleasuring me, her whole body collapsed. Only her mouth remained animated and continued sucking and tonguing…spastically though, without deliberation. I panicked. I pushed her up and off me. Long threads of sticky saliva trailed out between my groin and her mouth and thinned to the breaking point as I sat her upright. I looked around the parking ramp. I zipped myself. Trembling, I dragged her body to the back of my car and heaped it in the trunk. I sat silently in the car for maybe a half hour before driving home. I parked my car in the garage under my building. I dragged the stripper’s body up the stairs to my apartment and carried it inside. I set the corpse on the kitchen floor. Her new purpose was obvious to me. Her lips were exquisite.

   I pulled a hacksaw from under the kitchen sink and sawed straight through the stripper’s head in two places: just above the chin and under the nose. I picked up the resulting cross section and cut off the back of the skull. Her blood ran out over the linoleum floor. Just muscle and flesh held the mouth together. The mouth continued to breathlessly stammer its nonsense as I set it on a plate on the kitchen table. Audrey wasn’t anywhere in the apartment. Perhaps, she had taken matters into her own hands. I pulled up a chair and stared at the mouth. The lips excited me. They would fit Audrey perfectly. I used a sponge mop to clean up the blood on the floor and drank whiskey until I passed out.

   I woke up as the sun was setting over the park. The plate was gone from the table. I sensed that I wasn’t alone. I stood up and looked out from the kitchen. There was a light on in the bedroom. I slowly walked toward the light. I faintly heard crinkling plastic as I drew nearer. I stopped and peered around the corner. Audrey was sitting naked on a plastic bag she’d spread out over the bed. She was using a set of leatherworking tools to stitch in her new mouth. She’d set the old one on the plate from the kitchen. She looked up at me blankly for just a moment before returning to her task. She started humming a tune. The mouth between her legs was still animated. She fought it as she finished stitching it in.

   Once fully attached, the lips functioned completely in accord with Audrey’s will. Their movement was again smooth and deliberate. Audrey stood up from the bed and approached me in her full splendor. The anticipation alone caused me to come instantly. I was done before it started; and Audrey immediately lost interest in me. She rubbed my head like she was petting some dumb, ridiculous animal. I wanted to say something; but I couldn’t put any words together. I felt such tremendous anxiety about doing anything whatsoever that I stood perfectly still.

   Audrey dressed in front of me. She put on the same lingerie she wore for me the previous night. She picked out a short skirt and tight blouse from the closet. She dressed and walked to the kitchen to use the phone. She dialed someone up. I heard her giggling and going on for a while. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She hung up the phone and left the apartment. When the door closed behind her, I came back to my senses, walked into the kitchen and sat back down at the table. I felt empty. The experience was over too soon. It was unfulfilling. I felt unimportant…like a presence that simply facilitated her. She had someone else.

   As I sat at the table, I examined the stripper’s mostly decapitated body curled up on the floor. I walked over to it. When I placed my hands on it to drag it, its limbs began to move as if I had breathed life into it. At first I was taken aback; but it made me feel virile in a way I couldn’t feel with Audrey. I pulled the shades and savaged its every orifice. When I was through with it, I hog-tied it and hid it in the closet in my study. I wrapped the top of the head in plastic wrap and set it in a box under my drafting table. I took Audrey’s old lips from the bedroom, sealed them in a Tupperware container and hid the container in the back of the refrigerator.

   When Audrey came home, I pretended to be asleep. She smelled foul. I nearly vomited; but I held it in. When she climbed into bed, I pretended to just wake up. I put my hand on her thigh. I knew that she would turn me away. I caressed her body to confirm my suspicions. She moved her body defensively. She rolled away from me as soon as I passed my hand over the dried up lips between her legs. I stood up and kicked over the nightstand.

   I demanded to know where she’d been all night. Audrey glared at me without so much as a word. At once, I felt dizzy and lost control of my body. Like an automaton, I went to my study and dragged the stripper’s body out of the closet. There was no animation in the corpse any longer. It smelled like death. Helpless to stop myself, I pulled down my pants and penetrated the corpse in front of Audrey. There was nothing provocative about the stripper’s body anymore. There was no question of passion or choice. I had none. She had none. But, I defiled the corpse until I was bruised and blistered. Audrey left me reeling in pain. She went to the bedroom and shut the door.

   It took me a while to pull myself together. I slowly lifted myself to my feet and walked out of the room. The rose petals on the floor had dried up. I crunched over them as I made my way to the living room. I collapsed on the couch.

   The next morning I woke up in a sweat. My neck was sore and my head was throbbing. My groin was still burning. Despite everything, I was aroused and thinking all the same thoughts I was thinking the other day before I stormed out of the apartment. My head was burning up with fever. I was sick at the thought of living out the rest of my days this way…a slave to the proclivities of this bitch…my only pleasure to be found in the husks of the women I disfigured for her glory. I didn’t need to go through the routine again. It had to stop.

   I went to the kitchen and pulled a claw hammer out from under the sink. I crept down the hallway to the bedroom. I caught my breath at the door for a moment. The radio alarm clock unexpectedly sounded. I immediately recognized the song playing as James Taylor’s "Shower the People". I burst into the room. I took a swing at Audrey’s skull and cracked through it with the claw end of the hammer. Blood spilled out from the gaping wound the hammer left; and the blood pooled out over the otherwise pristine white sheets on the bed. Disoriented, Audrey struggled pathetically. She begged and screamed for me to stop. I didn’t listen to her. I tuned her out. I continued smashing in her face. She kept pleading long after she should have been dead. I cracked the teeth out of the mouth between her legs. I fucked it. She ineffectually clenched her gums. She was weakening and, then, spastic, just before she stopped moving altogether. I shut off the alarm clock. I sat on the bed beside Audrey and stared. I was distraught. I recognized that I was, at once, entirely on my own, and without real understanding of the changes that had come over my body. I expected some answer. I looked very closely at Audrey’s lips. A thin sheet of bloody saliva began to form in her mouth and bubbled out until it burst. My answer came. Audrey’s lips began to mouth my name. There was a mechanism to be understood.

   I left her on the bed, dug through her purse, grabbed her keys and took the address off her driver’s license. I went to her apartment and let myself in. A wrinkly old man with hideous beady eyes was sitting in a chair across the room and sharpening the thick blade on a curious contraption resting in his lap. The blade looked sort of like a cookie cutter, apparently designed to cut out semi-rectangular shapes between two and three inches thick. He was oblivious to me. The object was apparently very heavy. The old man groaned as he set the contraption on the ground and loosened a vice grip at the bottom of it. He slid the blade up and down. He drizzled oil over it and then thrust the blade down to the floor a couple of times with great force, gripping a handle over the blades He seemed excited and almost started at me. He looked at me and pointed at the contraption. He was shaking violently. He pointed at the vice.

   He started to speak. "See, you put the head in here like this." He sharply jerked his head to his shoulder and leaned to the side to indicate that a head was to be inserted sideways into the contraption. He continued. "You tighten the vice until the jaw is tight and the mouth stops moving." He raised the blade as high as the vertical dowels allowed. "Then, you cut it out like this." He thrust the blade down to floor along the dowels. "It cuts it like butter." Trembling furiously, he started at me. "It’s better than pussy." He could just barely walk. He lost his footing and fell. He didn’t catch himself. His head hit the ground with a loud crack. Blood spilled out of his left ear and pooled up on the floor. As far as I was concerned, the old man was dead.

   I looked through the apartment. My phone number was written on a notepad by the phone. I ripped out that sheet, crumpled it up and put it in my pocket. I looked in the bedroom closet and found a box containing young women’s passports, social security cards, driver’s licenses and all other manner of personal identification cards spanning back a few hundred years. I left them. I wrapped the old man’s contraption in a throw blanket and left the apartment. I drove back home.

   Still looking for answers, I desperately searched my soul for something that would console me. Hoping to salvage something, I used the old man’s contraption, as he’d shown me, to cut the mouth from Audrey’s head. I sought to correct the injustices I’d done. I stitched the stripper back together as best I could with Audrey’s tools. The new mouth looked pretty on her face. I didn’t know her name. I called her Sophie. Sophie’s a pretty name. It didn’t seem to bother her. I couldn’t tell. She was a little waxy and couldn’t speak for herself. But the name made her seem more alive to me.

   The feelings I had for Sophie grew stronger each day I spent with her. I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry for myself. Sadly, it wasn’t enough to quiet my hunger. It wasn’t more than a week before my madness resurfaced. Just six days after I’d bludgeoned Audrey to death, I impulsively forced Sophie down on me. It pained me that it wasn’t her choice. But I couldn’t stop myself. Within a day or so, Sophie began to deteriorate; and she moaned until I couldn’t take it anymore. She didn’t put up any fight when I cut the mouth out of her head. I used a butcher knife from the kitchen. She stood perfectly still as I cut her. She collapsed in a lifeless heap on the floor as soon as the mouth came out. I dismembered and buried both of the bodies in a ditch twenty minutes south of the city limits. I preserved the mouths in formaldehyde. I hid the jars under the floorboards in my living room.

   It’s been several years now. All of the same forces compel me. I don’t have a choice. I behave as if Audrey were still in need of new mouths. Every week or so, I go out at night and procure new surrogate mouths and servile bodies to mend. The process of priming the bodies rejuvenates me. Apparently, I’m now the beneficiary of my efforts. I haven’t aged a day since I buried Audrey. Of course, youth has its price. I’m running out of room under the living room floor. Late at night, I sometimes hear the floorboards creaking and splintering up. I can’t sleep. It isn’t my fault. I try to ignore my appetites. But they command my flesh. I am bound to them. The benefits are plain. I feel potent. I don’t feel lonely anymore nor do I wish for things beyond my reach. I’m not concerned with naive hopes of being remembered. I’ve touched the world, taken it apart and put it back together in so many colored ways that the very fabric of existence tenses its muscles to scream my name. Its ineffectiveness is my greatest reward.

©2004 Nicholas Alan Tillemans

Nicholas Alan Tillemans is author of the offbeat, dark comedy novella Hard Ball (published April 2003). You can read a review of his book in "The Hacker’s Source, Issue #15". His short stories "Baby Hunter", "The Mechanics of Perversion" and "Acetone Enema" can be found here in the 2003 archives. His short story "Blind Feeling" is slated to appear in the Chimeraworld #2 anthology, Spring 2005. You can find excerpts from his second (unpublished) novella on his website. He is currently working on a manuscript, which will be his first novel-length work of horror fiction. Visit his website at: http://home.earthlink.net/~ntillemans