Stripped Down (34 page)

God, it felt incredible. I didn't want her to stop. I thought about my stretched-out, cheap underwear that had come in a three-pack. We always bought it in quantity, the way one might send bundles of dry goods to Africa, and I loved its pragmatic and distant spiritual insurance. Kay wore the exact same kind, and there was something seductive and sexy-librarian-like about its plainness. She acted like she had swerved around that familiar stitching a thousand times. Kay's lips were parted and swollen with red, hungry. I felt one finger slip inside of me and I gasped. “Oh wow,” I said.

“Don't you ever masturbate?” she asked. Clearly,
she
did.

“Where would I do it? In the shed? I'm never alone.” I didn't tell her about my pillow grinding.

Kay moved her finger in and out, then started widening my hole with it by circling right inside the opening. “Concentric circles, nesting rings,” she said. “Just look at it—you're beautiful. And why not in the shed?” I wished that I could kiss her
but I knew I might break the spell if I moved. Kay had more sense than this usually. “I guess you must like boys a little bit,” she commented. “You like having something inside.” I didn't point out the flaw in her reasoning, that the thing inside of me wasn't a dick, but
her,
and nothing else could feel so good. She pulled my shorts down off my feet. She yanked my matronly underpants away. “Let's get on with it,” she said feverishly, and I thought
Hallelujah, yes.
I looked at my coils of pubic hair and then, above, her saintly face. The scent of me wafted through the room, an aromatic telegram, and I was scared the trailer doors would not contain the news. We panted in the tentative stillness. “Now spread your legs,” said Kay. “Relax.”

We'd never done the Passion Play or Stations of the Cross, but Kay seemed to know something about sacrificing virgins. My toes grazed the footboard as I spread my legs apart. Spreading them so wide felt amazing, and my thighs grew hot. I felt a teasing breeze from somewhere but the windows were all closed. Kay ran one finger up and down my wet pussy, parting the seas. “Okay, it will hurt at first and then feel good,” said Kay. “If the sex books are correct. I think I'm competent. Try to relax.” She slid the diminutive fingers of the prayer hands into me. Their coolness made my muscles clench. I felt the sweetest pleasure bubbling through my groin as she eased the hands in.

“Oh, Kay,” I exclaimed, despite myself. “That's nice. Please don't stop.”

“Don't worry, Ally Cat,” she said. “I've got to find your soul in here to save it.”

She slid the plaster further into me until I crawled backward a little bit. Then her slender fingers stroked my body, coaxing
me, letting me know it was okay. I felt myself spreading for her. She tweaked the spot above my hole, so she could slide the hands further in. “I found your magic button,” she grinned. She massaged around my opening, while I let out little moans. “That's it, relax for me,” she said. My saggy underwear hung on the foot post of the bed. She rocked the prayer hands in, and suddenly, I felt a rapturous explosion, right from the plaster fingertips. “Oh!” I said, and Kay slammed one hand over my mouth.

“Be quiet,” she said. “People will kill us. Did you come?”

“I think I did,” I said. She looked angelic with her hair glowing in the lamplight. It was my first orgasm.

It kept pulsing in me, like the glow of a star, while Kay set the prayer hands back on the dresser.

 

I wonder if that star guides her now, as it does me.

Kay's kin are the only ones who want to see me since I came out as a dyke. They are serpent handlers, or Sign Followers—as queer to my other scripture-strict relatives as I am. They split off with the Indiana family after taking up with snakes, and it has been six years since I last saw Kay. At twenty-five, I feel like an awkward teenager when I walk toward the house. The serpent handlers haul metal chairs for tomorrow's service. Aunt May shucks corn by the round hood of my uncle's truck. Like the others, Kay wears nondescript garb, her hair smoothed back, but her arms are buffed out and sexy from the Army. She Frisbee-tosses a paper plate my way and squeals, “You made it!” Aunt May strides up and kisses me right on the lips, and I back away, surprised. “It's our faith tradition,” explains Kay. “Second Corinthians tells us to greet those of our own sex with a ‘Holy kiss.'” The landscape is lush with
suggestive underbrush. I am tense about what slithers beneath the obvious. How could they accept me when they believe the Bible asks them to drink poison and wrestle deadly snakes? Still, they have invited me here, knowing what they know. I wonder where her dad keeps the box of copperheads. He rises from the porch and drags his bad leg with his good leg, then hugs me with one arm and says, “Welcome to Tennessee, darlin'. You're always family he-ar.” I almost cry to hear him say this, since I've felt so shunned. Before I can offer to help set up, he seizes my duffel bag and sticks a limp pillowcase in my hand. “What's this for?” I ask.

“We're going hunting,” announces Kay. “Before sundown.” She grabs a long stick with a metal hook on the end. “Catch a lively one,” says her dad.

Kay is quiet as she steers me through the woods. We don't talk about my coming out process, her escapades in the barracks, the rickety railroad bridge between our lives. I wonder if she judges me, or if she still dates men. Over time, our letters grew polite and petered out. Her solemn brow twists like a point of wind turmoil on a grassy field, and I remember my first orgasm like it was yesterday. It makes my cunt throb to have our bodies so close. She rattles along with the snake stick, and I watch the rhythm of her shoulder blades. Kay might have had a hard time as a black kid in a white family, but people always kowtowed to her. Like those sturdy farm structures that just won't fall, Kay has an effortless way of making the wind bend around her skin. My pussy still remembers how she slid it open. At twenty-five, she looks like something decadent and tasty only adults get to eat.

Kay plods down the overgrown trail, pointing out poison oak. “Shhh. Be still,” she orders, holding out her arm. Before
I can ask what's she's doing, Kay slides quietly to the left and scoops the snake stick down into a leaf-dappled area beside the trail. She lifts the thick, twisting body of a timber rattlesnake with the metal end. I hadn't even noticed its cryptic yellow and brown colors hiding there. She grabs the viper by the head while I jerk back. My heart rifles with adrenaline. “So you like to fuck girls?” she asks dispassionately, pointing the rattler's fangs at me.

“Hold on, I—” I protest. Then Kay bursts out laughing. “I need the pillowcase, fool,” she says. “I'm not going to kill you for being a dyke.” She rope-ties the end of the bag and the viper thrashes then goes still. “They call me ‘charmer' now,” she says. “I flush the serpents out.” I nod and say, “I can see how you'd be good at that.” Her eyes run over my own serpentine curves. “We've got time to kill now,” she adds, nonchalantly. “Why don't I show you my favorite spot?” Then she takes me to a tiny shack in the woods, pulls open the vine-covered door and leads me in. She plops the snake bag on the plank floor. “It's an old hunting camp,” she says. “Don't you love it?” The timber rattlesnake squirms and I try to move away, but Kay herds me near it, pressing me against the dirty wall with her whole body, keeping me scared. She is thrillingly present, her arms holding me there. “One thing I've learned about the power of venom,” she says. “Is that you should keep it in the family.” Then she grins. She puts her fingers through my hair and breathes heavy on my neck, flushing me out. What is she doing to me? I moan a little. Kay is so powerful up close.

We both look at the serpent when it rustles. “I bet it's the pillowcase I used to hump when I thought of you,” I confess, reaching out to stroke her corn-silk-soft cheeks, to let
her know I want her. She leans forward: she has a hot rock to warm my cold blood. She thrusts her hips a little bit, so I feel the lump in them against my body. “You feel what I've got?” she asks.

“Is that—?” I ask.

“It's a viper,” she cuts in. “It'll kill you quick.” She grabs my hand and rubs it over the lumpy curves in her jeans, then blocks me from touching it again. I can't believe Kay is packing a dick. “Oh god, Kay,” I marvel. “I want to feel it.”

“You just wait,” she orders. “Wait for it.” Then she shakes her hips until I hear a rattling sound. I don't know if it's a rattlesnake or gourd or can of dimes. I scrunch my brow. “Is that a real snake in your pants?” I ask, perplexed, and Kay pins me tighter. “Yeah, it's a serpent I caught for you,” Kay says calmly, and puts my hand back on the lumpy mound that really does seem to wriggle. “Don't make me pin you face-first and give it to you
Deliverance
style.” I hear the rattle growing louder, faster, as she grinds her hips against my pubic bone. I try to back away, to ascertain what's slithering in her pants, but she squeezes me against its cotton case. I get irrationally scared but Kay calmly holds my wrists in one hand. She unzips and pushes down my pants. “Can you handle the serpent?” she asks fiercely. “Are you a child of God? Are you holy and willing to prove it?”

She shoves me hard against the wall.

Then I feel the venom, the quietude, Kay's sweet cock sinking in.

The rattle comes from so far down, I cannot tell its origin. It rises up inside the room. It seizes me. It clutches Kay. My muscles knead themselves into a wild delirium. “Oh yeah,” I groan, and try to pull her further in. But Kay slides out her
cock and makes me look. I want to call it back. “Most people think the rattle is good luck,” she says. Her dick is jutting out, and where the balls should be, there are the curving lumps of keratin: she's fixed a rattlesnake rattle there. “Some fiddlers put these rattles in their violins because they think it makes the instrument more masculine,” she says. “Or that it sings along. I harvested this rattle from a tire track rattlesnake. No one can shred the rhythm in a body. That's why the serpent handlers rise up off their seats to praise.” She starts to move her hips, and eases into me. I grab at her. Kay pierces me and I succumb. “I'm going to make you come so hard,” she says. “For all the years I've held it in.” And then my hot, adopted cousin fucks me good. I'm baptized in her sinuous religion.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

D. Alexandria:
dalexandria.com
Anna Bishop: [email protected]
Chuck Fellows:
qchase.com
Violynt Femme: [email protected]
Thea Hutcheson:
theahutcheson.com
Debra Hyde:
twitter.com/debrahyde
Lynne Jamneck:
lynnejamneckdiaries.blogspot.com
Catherine Lundoff:
catherinelundoff.com
Eric Maroney: [email protected]
Peggy Munson:
peggymunson.com
Radclyffe:
radfic.com
Jean Roberta:
jeanroberta.com
Sinclair Sexsmith:
mrsexsmith.com
Kathleen Warnock:
kathleenwarnock.com
Rose William: [email protected]
Kristina Wright:
kristinawright.com

ABOUT THE EDITORS

EILEEN MYLES (
www.eileenmyles.com
) has written thousands of poems since she gave her first reading at CBGB's in 1974. She is the author of many books of poetry including the Lambda Award–winner
Skies
,
on my way
,
School of Fish
,
Maxfield Parrish,
and
Not Me
, and the novels
Chelsea Girls
and
Cool for You
. She coedited
The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading
. She's a frequent contributor to
Book Forum
,
Art in America
, the
Village Voice
,
The Nation
,
The Stranger
,
Index
, and
Nest
. She is also an accomplished theater and performance writer, actor, and director, having contributed to many productions at St. Mark's Poetry Project and P.S. 122. She has read to audiences at colleges, performance spaces, and bookstores across America
as well as in Europe, Iceland, and Russia; in 1997, she toured with Sister Spit's Ramblin' Road Show. Eileen is currently finishing up a novel about the hell of being a female poet.
And Hell
, an opera composed by Michael Webster, written and directed by Eileen, premiered at P.S. 122. For the past three years, she has been dividing her time between New York and San Diego, where she teaches writing at the University of California at San Diego.

 

TRISTAN TAORMINO (
tristantaormino.com
and
puckerup.com
) is an award-winning author, columnist, editor, sex educator, and feminist pornographer. She is the author of seven books:
Secrets of Great G-Spot Orgasms and Female Ejaculation, The Big Book of Sex Toys, The Anal Sex Position Guide
,
Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships
,
The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, True Lust: Adventures in Sex, Porn and Perversion
, and
Down and Dirty Sex Secrets
. She has edited 24 anthologies, including
Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica
and
The Ultimate Guide to Kink
. She was the founding series editor of sixteen volumes of the Lambda Literary Award–winning anthology
Best Lesbian Erotica
. She runs Smart Ass Productions, and has directed and produced more than twenty adult films, from sex education to reality porn. She's written for a multitude of publications, from
Yale Journal of Law and Feminism
to
Penthouse
, is a former editor of
On Our Backs
and a former syndicated columnist for
The Village Voice
. She has appeared in hundreds of publications and on radio and television. She lectures at top colleges and universities and teaches sex and relationship workshops around the world. She lives with her partner and their dogs in upstate New York.