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Toronto, the fliptop city—grey and gelatinous as a mad scientist’s exposed brain, overlaid with a distant hum of thought. Faint memory fog erasing the horizon’s skyscrapers from Floor 13 up. And the two of you, drifting through.

More Ann Radcliffe influences: The rain has accentuated Chinatown’s usual crab season reek and moved it steadily northward; all up and down the road, the pavement is bracketed by crates of exposed underbellies and weakly waving claws. Her place turns out to be a shutter-heavy house just off of Nassau Street, incongruously squatting in the shadow of a hospital smokestack, its r

oof wreathed in a cannibal fog of incinerated body parts. You pause, glance up. The moon hangs caught between tree-branches—a lost balloon, half-wilted.

Then you’re inside, upstairs, in a room up under the eaves, barely bigger than your bachelor apartment’s closet, with a naked mattress on the floor, and a dusty, shrink-wrapped poster of a rose hanging on the far wall, a string of light bleeding from underneath to frame it with a square halo; placed over a small window, maybe, to block the room off from exterior distraction. Water-stains darken the ceiling. It smells stale, with a sickly hint of floral-scented moisturizer. Not exactly enticing.

When you turn around, however, you see she’s already unbuttoned the top of her dress and let it slip down around her hips, loosing a pair of snub-nosed breasts with areola-like cataracts. The light-thread slips along her side, taking the rest of her dress with it, writing hieroglyphs over her emergent stretch-marked hips. Old bruises gild her thighs.

“I found you,” she says, the first thing you’ve heard out of her so far. Her voice is scratchy. A twitch of guilt raises goosesweat; yeah, I guess you did. But it doesn’t seem to reach your face—not enough to stop her talking, at least.

“Want me,” she tells you.

And then she sucks your lips inside of hers and bites down, knocking you back as your clothes peel apart. On the poster above you, the rose yawns, faded and labial, like a cheesy Grade Twelve creative writing exercise metaphor. But your groin—which jumps and pulses against the smooth weight of her inner thighs, the loose and shaven flesh of her pubis—is no literary critic.

“I found you,” she repeats, coming up for air. Then again, with a weird little crack in the words’ sandpaper surface: “Want me?”

Yes, yes, yes.

Her blue-rimmed talons, her blue-toned mouth. Her hands scrabble down, points out—the date-rape rosary, reversed: Nipples, navel, pelvis, sac. Incongruous, the contrast; how selected parts of her strike you with such an exaggerated force of detail, while other aspects slide away on contact, impossible to describe. The nape of her bent neck, small-pored and finely furred with a blush of colorless hair—as she glides down along your torso, tongue out—versus the blur of her profile. Halogen skin, almost grotesquely lambent; a stained white radiance, like the kind that spills from lanterns made of human skin. You can count every link of her spine. One hand shelling you with a single twist, a grate of zipper teeth, and slipping to cup your testicles as the other grips you firmly, skins you back. Her breath touches the exposed tip of your penis with condensation.

Then you arch, unable to control you own response, as she takes you to the hilt: A cold scrape of uneven bottom teeth along the underside, a liquid plunge. Back and forth, lips pulling like mist. Nothing to hold onto. And you’re so hard now, your cock feels like it’s gone numb.

Things are coming to a head, obviously; but it’s too soon. You rear up, pull her up as well, arms hooked under hers. (She comes easily, light and frail, a sex-doll stuffed with milkweed down.) Kiss her breasts as they go by, sucking hard, but provoking no visible response, not even the barest stippling of arousal along the inside of her cleavage. Nothing blooms in this garden—stone roses only, petals turned forever inward.

Then you lie back, ready to return the favor.

For a beat, she gazes down at you from this weird Picasso angle, cut off at the knees, the wishbone triangle of legs and pelvis bound together by that pale pubic knot. Seashell furls, secretively overlapped: Put your ear down there, mister, and see what you can hear. Sunken bells? A blood-beat tide, raw and roaring?

Time to find out.

Gently, you pry her apart with both hands—spread her wide. She doesn’t stop you.

(But what would she stop you doing?)

If her body has limits, she’s posted no signs to indicate them. So you stare up into her mystery, put out a hesitant tongue. Taste it. She’s waxy and redolent with some indefinite, interior scent: Liquorice, filtered through a watercress base. Narcotized. Her juices sting, slightly.

Again, no visible response. No blush of mere physical pleasure to dampen that detached glow of hers. So you bite deeper, determined to prove you can make her come. All things being equal rights-oriented, they give prizes for that, don’t they? The Orgasm Cup. Best Multiple In A Given Session. It’s a matter of pride now, because this is beginning to remind you of Lisa—her way of absenting herself, without a spoken word or visible sign: Sure, I’ll play along, but this is your business, buddy, not mine. Just hurry up, finish up, shit or get off the pot.

Fuck you, baby.

Oh no, fuck you.

“That’s enough,” she says. Sliding back. And screws herself down onto you with a swiftness that seems to surprise you both equally. You hiss, in unison. Because she’s tight, hurtfully so. And dry, not slick—all friction, with a vague, talcum-powder stickiness. She churns her hips, frantically, digging around inside herself, trying to find the right button. At which point, part of you rebels.

(I mean, whose fantasy is this, anyways?)

So you heave yourself over, taking her with you, forcing yourself securely back in the saddle—sheet-wrapped, one of her knees jammed up against your ribcage. Deeper than you’d thought possible. She hums approval; you can feel it through your sternum, an interior caress. The sheets erase a different view of her face with every thrust. Grasping for her elusive wrists, you wind up just getting still more ells of fabric, looping yourself ever further inward: Bed of lies, bed of nails, bed of quicksand.

“Call me,” she says, with barely a catch, between the bellows-rush of your own panting. “Like you used to. Call me—”

“Honey—”

“Slut.”

A feather-touch at either palm, steering them inward. Another ripple of speech, intimate and infected, rising up your arms like an arthritic seizure.