For those of you who also followed excerpts of my short fiction over to Smashwords.com, thank you for finding those short stories worthy enough to add to your libraries and/or to purchase copies. In case some of you wondered whether the cessation of new e-books and blog posts translated to my absorption into a grand romance, well, your imaginations are far superior to mine. Despite what you will read on Negrotica and my sista blog in 2012, I’m practically a virgin again. The only romance I enjoyed last summer was vicarious: rereading a handful of Danielle Steele novels from my private collection. Believe me; it’s a compliment to Steele when I state that relying on her formula for romance is akin to a guy depending on specific selections from his porn DVD library.

Actually, an omen occurred last spring. No, I didn’t dream of Gregory Peck or find affinity with a devil dog — except for the weekly creamy Drake’s cake. (Hey, overindulgence in sweets generates hallucinations of getting laid.) With a demanding temp job that was running out of time, I was in a dead heat with my hard drive toward the finish line: burnout.

Neither a high-calorie dessert nor an expired computer was the real heartstopper, though. In the fall, before the first frost, my feline partner in crime took a pass on a tenth lifetime. I bawled just as hard upon her death as when my mother died and probably harder than when I first was spanked.

Kitty was seventeen. That’s a nonagenarian to you and me.

My pussy was a fuzzy Muse. If you’ve read “Unlike So Many Carousels,” “Knock-Knock” and, on my other blog, Part 1 of the novella “A Blue Noël,” you may have sensed the influence. Regarding the latest effort (“A Blue Noël”), my first Christmastime mystery, I tried to write a happy little holiday story, really. However, my grief guided me to a murky emotional canvas on which love, passion and sex of a Bertoluccian intensity strive to inoculate some of us from the misery that can pervade even the cheeriest folks in heavy doses from Black Friday through New Year’s Day.

I recall my cat’s agility to give herself more of the kind of frisky action than I ever will experience in the one lifetime I’ve been given. She used to perch herself on my desk while I composed into the night, her silent meow always audible from deep within my writerly dreamlandscape. A real-world, oval-shaped reminder to get up and take a bathroom break.

The lengthy time that I was unemployed, I often didn’t eat, but I always fed my purrrty princess. OK, like any cat, she could be a royal pain in the arse. Still, her sudden illness was humbling; her rapid decline, dizzying. Her death brought my joy and creativity to a standstill. Mornings were spent slamming the alarm clock’s snooze button instead of stretching like the TV yoga goddess that used to entrance both of us. By mid-autumn I was more than bent out of shape that, for the first time in a long time, I was starkly alone.

Although for the time being, I remain computerless, I have been using — thanks to someone who is as heroic as Superman — an alternative device to resume publishing. I keep some things old-school, though, balling up those dissatisfactory sketches and rewrites and tossing the imperfect spheres for my new, senior cat to stalk and pounce. She has blessed me with her own spirit and, like my recently departed companion, teaches me daily lessons to be present. To live in the moment. To chase that ball of yarn — or notepaper — as if it’s a dream I need to sculpt into reality.

So today, I celebrate with all of you a new year. Hooray! (Hey, eyes up here, you upskirters.) I invite you to enjoy the eroticism, joy, romance and irreverence presented on this blog’s pages. After a mind-numbing or backbreaking day, mellow out reciting a poem or two. Or unwind reading a short story meant for one or two or … “group therapy.”

One penultimate reference to the WordPress statistics below — I’m trying to solve a priapic mystery. I can’t wrap my mind (not to mention other parts of me) around the big, dark penis that has overshadowed my romantic and erotic poetry, according to the numbers. Much of that lovely (said some of you), agonizing verse robbed me of sleep. I only can imagine that such an elongated, wide-girthed tool also would’ve done the same damage. Stereotypes be damned. Size matters … to many of you too, from Bombay to Belgium. From Queensland to Queens, New York.

Dick pic, you say? Talk about the Black elephant-size trunk in the room. Why, I’m referring to the mammoth member that helps illustrate the memoir titled “Black, Tan and Beige Fantasies.” In growing numbers you’re proving to me that featuring a photo of a Black man’s penis, in the proper context, was a stroke of genius. And, judging by January’s stats, you also have the balls to convince me that two of the all-nude Jeannie Pepper pix (also featured on “Black, Tan and Beige Fantasies”) might have a crack at the top slot on Negrotica.

Pictures are worth a thousand … orgasms (per reader, per year). While argyle swirls from a staggering series of shrieks and moans tha reverberate around the world, I’ll take the extra time to write. Coming sometime in 2012: “B.O.N.I.N.G.: Fleshy Tales of a Size Queen.”

Wishing you and your nether regions joy, serenity and good health …

Bisoux,
Chantale

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

I too am forty grueling years in the making,
Escaping wrinkled demise and fruit flies
On a tangled vine,
Barely spared from cruel, tannic mocking
By beautiful ones plumped by Provençal sun.

Plucked, I was tucked away in dank, wood interiors,
Agonizing over my inferior, altered state –
A liquid fate –
Aching in an oak cell dark like my fermented spirit,
Splintered memories split amid sharp taps and nasal tones.

Now that our destinies have converged,
Savor my robust and earthy notes,
Rolling red, wee waves
Over ridgy palate and fleshy tongue,
Tickling, trickling down the pink of your throat.

Liberate me if you dare from ce verre
Warmed by your tender palm caressing
Feminine contours,
By my trapped heartbeat that threatens to shatter
A fantasy of serenading you in burgundy allure.

I throb beneath the hard rim and your stare,
Painfully aware that you have paused –
Six seconds, pour moi –
To drink in your virile, rippling reflection.

Rouge erections swelling inside a fondled glass,
I am aiming nine fluid ounces to bounce in your
French-kiss-deprived mouth.
No emotional bribery as with those autre femmes –
Clutch the stem to imbibe me but no spitting out!

While last-call waifs snicker beneath 4 a.m. stars,
Their virtue flickering like vintage glass signage
Blinking neon blue,
I am embracing from inside as hope shimmers in pooling eyes
Of a barman thirsty for advice bottled-up for emotional rescue.

© 2011 Chantale Reve

Counterclockwise pairs

Elude despair on black ice

As midnight drags on.

Copyright © 2011 By Chantale Reve

Your first touch

Left me limp

Like dimpled clay

In the hands of a master

Commissioned by God,

Ready to play,

Fingers caressing,

Realigning the bones,

Slipping beneath straps,

Gliding down zippers,

A pro at undressing

My fear cloaked in drapes

And provoking tears to rain

Launched from a dark place,

Amid sighs and whimpers

Building to strident confessions

While my contorted face

Morphs between bliss and pain  –

These are my impressions of you.

Copyright © 2011 By Chantale Reve

As you kiss my nape,

My locks spill through thick fingers

Poised to block escape.

Copyright © 2011 By Chantale Reve

My name is Summer Wates.  I got wide, succulent lips that can wrap around a dick twice.  Well, except for Shep’s; he’s hung like a horse.  He let his buddies at Sanitation, where he’s been a truck driver for fifteen years, inflate his brain with all that macho jazz.  OK, he’s well-endowed enough to dent my walls, but after a while he was forgetting that my fleshy brown and pink pussy ached to feel his thick, long tongue lathering it up in all the right places.  Sure, it could take on his huge dick twice in one night. The thing is, I was jonesing for pussy all over this housing complex.

My situation was both a blessing and a curse because I had to keep it a secret or else lose my boyfriend for good.  I’d already seen his eyes popping à la Bernie Mac every time Charlene Jones, a.k.a. Cha-Cha, swung her Pam Grier boobs over the entrance to the numbers spot on St. Nicholas Ave.  It wasn’t like me to be jealous of a woman who ranked one level above hooker and served as bait for a storefront gambling racket.  After all, I had a pretty nice rack, too, even if it was a few letters of the alphabet behind Cha-Cha’s.  And mine didn’t pose a danger during my daily calisthenics.  Then again, mine didn’t have the pendulous power to hypnotize Shep, or else by now I would’ve suggested to him, on the count of three, to ignore Cha-Cha’s tits.  Yeah, I was always supposed to understand.

Shep didn’t understand, though.  He surely needed to, because he’d been leaving me waiting.  Waiting for him to come home, siren blaring, like Tank in “Emergency.”  Waiting for him to return home and throb inside my wetness all night until I understood the passion and endurance about which Maxwell crooned in “Til the Cops Come Knockin’.”  Yearning for him to whisper words that would coax out my fluids and to lash his tongue amid my folds until I reached the Ripertonian octaves of “Inside My Love.”  Waiting for him to come home and give it to me good just like in that Usher song “Daddy’s Home.”

Inspired by the Daddy’s Home video, I dragged a kitchen chair into our hallway.  On the seat I placed a black, braided-leather whip that I’d sniped in an eBay auction.  I decided against bending over the chair, though.  Why tempt fate, as in a broken collarbone? I rationalized, neck to ankles in black latex lingerie.  Looking back, I was a hot mess, stumbling around knock-kneed in not-yet-broken-in, high-heeled pleather booties, no less.  Make that Payless.

I squeaked over to the bathroom to hide behind the door.  Only my heels were more musical than my body harness, sounding like hooves down on Crosby Street’s cobblestone.  Just for going out of my way to arouse my man, I deserved for him to surprise me with an early arrival, dropping his canvas bag to mount my latex-spanked hide.  Yeah, right, I thought.  I allowed the more futile sex fantasy to gallop away and focused my energy on pinning my voluptuousness between the creaky bathroom door and the sturdy wall.

That was the longest twenty-six minutes I’d ever spent, vertically, in black latex.  Like an erotic ninja, I was invisible and inaudible — well, the latter if my thighs managed not to rub together and emit sparks.  The only time I liked burning rubber was when I used to grip Shep’s dick from inside my v-cave while he drilled the pink from above at Superman speed.

Tucked in the dark corner, I’d ventured galaxies away from Shep’s Lois Lane fantasy, which used to rev up our courtship days.  My pinched toes were speaking Japanese already, and I’d lost about fifteen pounds from my encasement.  For half the twenty-six minutes, I made a fan of the wooden door as if to summon up a breeze from the alleyway beyond the bathroom window.  My libido battled with anxiety for my soul, while the perspiration oozed from my pores and made intimate contact wherever the latex clung to mocha curves.

Sometime before my near auto-erotic asphyxiation, my would-be hero came home.  I’d later realize that the only hero was the soggy one in a brown paper bag:  a lukewarm half of a meatball parmesana sandwich.  Wedged behind the door, all I heard, in Shep’s annoying Black Italian accent, was:  “Hey, doll.  I’ma home.  C’mona out here and gitta dis juicy sammicha.”  And due human-beatbox breaths later:  “Summer, lemme breaka you offa piece a dis.”

With all the time he spent wolfing down his half of that “sammicha” in the kitchen, I was melting in a Wicked Witch way under all that latex.  Like my name, it was more sweltering inside than outside.  It was burning up especially in the inner city, like Stevie Wonder’s 1980 album.  Luckily Shep hadn’t needed to use the bathroom first, or else he would’ve discovered me doing my best Jill Masterson (re)pose – albeit in glistening black, not in glittery gold.  Upon hearing him lick his fingers and leave the kitchen, I peeled myself from behind the door to peek into the hallway at his reaction as he approached the whipping chair.

Man, he must’ve had some rough rounds on the garbage truck that day because he just kicked away my prop and scolded, “Bring yo squeaky ass out da damned bathroom!  I should put you in restraints, and not da kind dat turn you on.”  I complied, snarling.  The soles of my feet were sloshing in sweat, my strangled pussy lips smacking in cum.

Instead of singing in Usher’s urgent notes, Shep kept cursing under his breath that he was going to strip my whip down to make a fancy belt of the leather.  My boo may be handy, but often it’s in the wrong damned way.  No way was I going to confront him about it that day.  Always was fearful of him, but still I yearned for him.  And I waited.

Each day I lingered, unable to focus on where our relationship was heading, because my pussy throbbed something awful.  It ached for a real, caring touch.  That of a female.  Sometimes I got knowing looks and pursed lips, but I’d been cursed.  I’d been raised to believe that lesbians were women with the “nasty disease.”  Anyway, most of the come-hither motions were by women who were old enough to be my Moms.  That wasn’t happening.

Then one morning, temptation knocked on the door.  I’d scheduled a personal day – on a Wednesday, Shep’s only day off.  I wanted to start off the hump day right, by pleasing my man as best I could.  So for the sake of our relationship, I cast off my desire to cherche la femme in case my intuition had been deceiving me.  Then came that rap on the door.  And it sure as hell wasn’t Aretha Franklin.

It all happened so innocently.  Maybe things would’ve been different if Shep hadn’t been so damned hot-tempered.  I’d put up with the mysterious bowling nights.  I’d never known a man to bowl so frequently each week without ever having joined a league — or at least owning his own bowling ball, bag and shoes.  Then one day he donned a pair of high tops and walked out on me.  That was a year ago, but I remember it as if it happened yesterday.

* * *

In the honeymoon phase of our relationship, Shep had been such a tender, attentive lover.  He was practically Babyface, during the era that he was crooning and howling about whip appeal.  Knowing how much I love oral, he – Shep, not Babyface –  never failed to please me.  I loved giving and receiving, but apparently I went overboard in the months leading to our breakup.

My intuition had tried to warn me that I’d been watching my favorite hardcore porn DVD, The Blacker the Berry, The Sweeter the Juice, too many times per week.  Still, I couldn’t believe my ears when he complained on that fateful Wednesday morning that he was tired of awakening to find my plump lips enveloping his morning wood.  I turned so embarrassed and my clit almost totally lost its erection.  I’d already changed panties twice in the middle of the night, but as always my bud was humming and throbbing in my wet, cotton girl shorts, making me crazy.  While Shep didn’t have a problem with me slobbing the knob in the beginning of the relationship, now he was accusing me of being hypersexual.

“You heard me right, Summer.  I accused you of being a nympho!”

“A nympho?!” I repeated after Shep as he struggled to pull on a pair of cargo pants over tented cotton boxers in baby blue.  Then I thought to myself (else risk getting slapped a bigger pair of lips):  The brother doesn’t even know how to spell nympho.  Though, he despised hearing repetition more than he hated using a dictionary.

“Yeah, I’m talkin’ ’bout you, Summer.  You one nasty bitch!” he retorted before I could insult him introspectively.

“Shep, you watch your damned mouth!” I returned, turning my back to him and heading down our narrow hallway toward the kitchen.  “You didn’t have any problem with me sinking to my knees on the side of a dirt road when we were dating less than a week, so what’s up?  Or how about – ”

“How ’bout shuttin’ dat fat lip o’ yours and fixin’ your memory on da expensive engagement ring I gotchu last winter,” he said.  “You don’t get me.  I was plannin’ to jump dat broom witchu, girl.”  He was almost wimpering, the way he emphasized girl.

“’Girl’?  Shep, I’ve been a woman for as long as your dick’s been gettin’ hard,” I said, standing with my arms akimbo and my strong legs spread in front of the fridge.  “And as for that so called diamond ring, it couldn’t even cut glass, but I see you clearly now for who you are.”

“Dat shows how much you know, smart ass.  It took me a whole damned year to pay off dat ring,” he said through spittle, “and you wasn’t even worth da trouble.  Still ain’t.”   He took a seat at the kitchen table but not before creating skid marks with the chair.  “Fix me a cup of coffee like you used to every morning.”

“OK, if the ring was worth all that money, why’d you make me butter my finger that day so you could slip it off, run down the hallway and hurl it down the incinerator?” I asked him.

“I shoulda tossed yo big behind down da incinerator,” he menaced.

“What are you turning so hot for?  Are you supposed to be some prize?  Hmpf, I’d do better rifling through the toffee popcorn and peanuts in a box of Cracker Jacks to–”   I was planning to continue my tirade, but Shep’s brawny brown fist pre-empted my next wisecrack.

“Go ’head.  Cry yo little heart out, Summer,” he said, massaging his fist as if the punches to my lips and jaw had hurt him more than they did me.  “Baby, I see you got yo sights set gutter-low, like some two-bit ho.”

“When you had my legs stretched like Olympic gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s, who was the ho then, tell me?” I said, trying not to laugh with my swollen, bloodied lips at his unintentional rhyming.  I always knew my man had a rap sheet, but not the lyrical kind.  I made no apologies for liking my men roughneck back in the day, but Shep had turned uppity on me.

“Noddin’ into a coma – what?” he asked.  “Bitch, you know I keep yo ass wide-awake, bonin’ dat pussy.  Hell, I be up to my elbows in it.”

I wiggled away from him, as he pulled on his high tops, and into our hallway, where it was safe to answer. “Oh, you dumbass.  Fuck you, Shep,” I growled at him.

“Dat’s one thang you won’t be doin’ to me no mo,” he promised.  “Now dat’s what’s UP!”  With that, he grabbed his Sean John hoodie and slammed the steel door of our apartment behind him.

* * *

After my flowing tears stung my open facial wounds and soaked the bed sheets, I traipsed into the kitchen and looked around.  I thanked God that it had been my apartment, or else that morning I would’ve been headed for the gutter that Shep had mentioned in our argument. 

Sucking on a tart nectarine moments later, I felt the sting but also the misery seeping into my skin and dampening my bones.  After all, I was living in the projects, and my dating prospects immediately would take a nosedive once the men discovered that.  I couldn’t blame them.  Who wanted to take the risk of getting mugged or murdered on the elevator, just to get some thirtysomething coochie?  That was hard reality, much like the concrete of the prisonlike housing complex.

I wiped away the nectarine juice from my dimpled chin and licked the rest off lips that were puffy like Kerry Washington but elastic like Kandi Burruss’ – except I couldn’t act or sing for shit.  Just then, I heard a scratch at the door.  I dashed into the corridor leading to the entrance, still smelling musky from unattended lust.  The entrance was just off the kitchen, and I hurried there fueled to the max from my glucose rush. 

Pressing one eye to the peephole, I watched a wispy woman dressed in a black catsuit arch her back against the wall opposite my apartment door.   It was kind of early in the morning, but I just figured she was a new neighbor seeking insider’s tips about Central Harlem before feeling out the area on her own.  I was lonely, so I opened the door.

“Hi, I’m Felicia Sykes. I’m new around here,” I heard a sweet voice resonate from a cinnamon brown face.

Felicia was cute, but too petite to be considered gorgeous.  I had about three inches on her 5-foot-3 frame.

“What, do you just walk around like Catwoman?”  Something didn’t smell right.  I tried pulling my short blue, terrycloth bathrobe closed tightly around my bold curves.

Her eyes followed every bend and, when I secured my belt, bounced up to my glare.  “I live upstairs but I’ve seen you with – is he your man?”

“Yeah, what’s it to you?”  Now I was intrigued.

She bit her bottom lip and smoothed back what looked like an auburn lacefront weave.  It didn’t matter; she was a beauty in Ohio Players skin-tight black. While it’s true I couldn’t spy her natural hair, I licked my lips at the split-second fantasy that she had a ’fro down there.  As intimately as that outfit hugged her body, I already knew I’d need to fish out Shep’s pic comb to fluff out her bush.

“You two seemed so nice together,” she said, interrupting my sex fantasy, “until I heard the arguments starting up from out here in the hallway.  Speaking of which, did all that yelling less than an hour ago have anything to do with those two tomatoes you got for lips right now?”

“Don’t you have boxes to open, furniture from IKEA to wrestle with assembling, instead of studying with us long-timers here?” I said with a wry smile that hurt my jaw.

“Well, true that.  I mean, I have been here only two weeks, and I’m finnin’ to get my house sold in the ATL.  But, uh, I could tell you needed a girlfriend.  You know, to vent.”

“I must admit you have something there.  And, by the way, the name’s Summer.”

“Oh, as in Donna?”

“No, as in Summer Wates.  Nice to make your acquaintance – look, why don’t you come out of the hallway and join me for a cup of coffee inside.”

“Sure, I thought you’d never ask.  I mean, we can’t keep Summer waiting too long,” she said with a peppery laugh.

I should’ve offered the sneaky bitch  a saucer of cream laced with hot sauce because I could see already that she had feline ways.  She pranced into my kitchen like a black Slinky in fuck-me heels.  Her heavy black mascara lent an eerie accent to light brown, almost hazel, eyes.  I watched her press her slight frame into the chair and felt as if she was entrancing me with her gleaming smile.

“Black, medium or light?” I asked.

“I like my chicks in any complexion,” she purred, her eyes narrowing nearly to slits.

I bet she eats chicks, too, as catty as she is, I intoned.  “Your coffee, I meant.”  I was a bit annoyed at her assumption.  I tripped over the kitchen mat beneath the sink, and she leaped up from the chair as if she was going to pounce on me.  That poor chair has taken so much abuse, my mind wandered, recalling the day Shep had done his version of Kevin Bacon in Footloose.

“Why’d you move from Atlanta?” I asked, busying myself with the coffee filter.  Then I felt two small, warm hands cupping my plump, neglected buttcheeks.  “Oh, wait,” I said.  What I really desired was for her to take the lead in moving things along further Down South.  I wanted her to feel right at home.

“I got bored with riffraff talkin’ shit ’bout New York.  I got family up here, from Harlem to Queens, and the new job my cousin Boozie somehow negotiated for me at the Times Square Westin sealed the deal.  With another cousin placing my name on the waiting list for a co-op in Fort Greene, I had to come.”

I longed to cum.  This fetching stranger was giving me quite a workout in my kitchen, where the most sensual thing I ever had done with Shep was squeezing lemons for lemonade.  We’d made a contest out of it, he and I.  This woman’s tender hands were all over my rump, and I loved the massage.  She changed the pace, balancing my soft, dimpled globes until I clenched from the foreignness of her caresses.  I got so relaxed that I let out a quiet one.  “Oooh, excuse me,” I said.

“So you had to wait long?”

“I’m still … mmmm … waiting.”

“Aaahhh,” I heard myself sigh and tried to cup my mouth the way she was, again, cupping a heavy glute.  Without warning, she spun me around.  My cushiony robe swung open enough to reveal some serious, cocoa-brown cleavage, and her delicate hands were too swift to stop any gesticulation toward modesty on my part.  Though hidden from her feline sight, my nipples were marbles.

“You want this, sugah,” she threatened.

“You want sugar in your coffee?” I asked.

“No coffee, no sugah.  But I’ll take some cream,” she said, sweeping aside the bottom flaps of my robe with one claw and then the other.  After dropping down to her knees, she slipped a dainty finger between my thighs and found wetness waiting.

“Please don’t.  My boyfriend – ”

“Just ran out on your fine brown ass … undoubtedly again.”

Her fingers slid up to my shaven vulva, and I released the moans of a long-suffering  woman.  “Look, fresh cream,” she said, her eyes sparkling like gemstones.  She let out a low laugh that seemed odd for a woman of her petite physique.

“Mmmmm,” I continued moaning, as I watched through eye slits as she lodged her index finger in my viscous pussy.  In and out she plunged the digit, causing me to stutter out sighs.

She popped out her wet finger and stuck it in the tiny hole of her puckered lips.  The only sounds I heard in the kitchen were of her sucking that finger.  Then she planted it right back inside my cunt.

“Let me hear you.”

I felt as if my vocal cords were paralyzed, but the organs in my erogenous zones weren’t.  “Mmmm, yesss,” I murmured.

“Louder.”

“I caaan’t do thaaat.   Ohhhh … ”

She leaned in close to my face, her finger still moving like a thrusting penis.  “I said louder!”

I was practically wailing, until her tongue slithering between my fist-stung lips hushed me up.  Even Shep had never fingered me like that before — only when he was blaming me for something.

She pulled me down right there on the linoleum kitchen floor.  Peeling off her catsuit, she said, “You’re gonna do me first.  You ever done a girl?”

“No,” I lied.  My first lesbian experience was at dorm.  It was a sorority all right, a sisterhood of brazen lust.

I shucked my terrycloth robe off to some distant shiny squares near the trashcan and got on all fours, waiting for her.  Now we were both naked and waiting.  She slid beneath me, and I executed a series of pushups to kiss her hard on the lips.  Falling back gently on my knees, I pulled her into my embrace and squeezed her breasts as if testing clementines for firmness.  In the fold of my trembling arms, her entire body pulsated with erotic yearning.  She moaned as if she’d been aching for my touches for ages.

Her meandering vocals were my cue to yank back a handful of weave-locks so I could French her deeply.  I took special delight in knowing she couldn’t possibly be aware of my horny pussy leaking onto the floor, its juices filling in the grooves in the linoleum tiles.  Felicia gyrated in my crotch — an impromptu lap dance.

“Turn around,” I whispered.
 

Copyright © 2011 By Chantale Reve

Above is an excerpt from my ebook Knock-Knock, which is published in full on Smashwords.com.  Copies of Knock-Knock are available for purchase at:  http://smashwords.com.  Thank you for your support!

Photo Source:  www.publicdomainpictures.net

Photographer:  Tom Leeds

Out the corner of a moist eye she spied despair

In a couple frenching the way she once had

With him at first blush of their spring affair,

Batting eyes and flashing smiles on stolen time.
 
 

Her lover’s absence across the linen-draped setting

Glared like the minutes clicking panic into hours,

His specter as indelible as her red lipstick print

On the fourth drained shotglass of whiskey sour.
 
 

Limply exiting the café’s revolving door,

She steadied wobbly legs on cracked concrete.

Starting tears merged with grayish downpour,

Emptying a heart of desire gone unreciprocated.
 
 

A flagging spirit conspiring with gravity

Weighed down her frame, her head descended

Like withered blooms on a neglected flower

Or crisp leaves on a teetering tree with roots upended.
 
 

Limerence slipped in when love dropped out of season,

A chameleon absorbing loneliness for the colorblind.

Once adoring eyes are awash with stinging reason,

Peering through the café glass at half-lives left behind.
 
 

Copyright © 2011 By Chantale Reve

 
 Photo Source:  www.publicdomainpictures.net

Photographer:  Petr Kratochvil

Ne’er old to die.

Please mark my words

Puffed ’cross the sky.

Bewinged, I’ll soar

In ecstasy

O’er ’bove the birds,

My burdens freed.

Upon nightfall

I’ll cast moonbeams,

Waltz betwixt worlds,

Enchant thy dreams.

This fear-charged clock

Shall cease to chime,

Yet love shall swirl

Us spheres through time.

Copyright © 2011 By Chantale Reve

Photo Source:http://freefoto.ca/photos/air/airshow/skywriting.html

LaVonda had been throwing back drinks for so many hours on the casino floor that the cocktail waitresses were changing shifts.  Not a clock was in sight, and cell phones were unreliable inside the towers.  Her watch, usually her one connection to reality, conspired against her, its gold-tone hands paused indefinitely at three o’clock.  So much for the valililidddittty of street vendors hawking Ann Klein knockoffs … Swiss movement my ass, she murmured, slurring through her slushy brain.  Three in the morning or in the afternoon — it didn’t matter.  She was a slave to the slots and to her faucet of a bladder.  With players lighting up in full defiance of the non-smoking law, she was a reel-spinning, wrist-flicking risk-taker.  Imbibing thirty-proof per cup — as in plastic, because glasses were too classy for New Jersey’s casinos — she was one match away from combustibility.

Despite her drunken stupor, she was oddly aware of her cosmetic state.  The more that the invisible hands of time wore on, the more mascara she curled onto her camel-like eyelashes, using the chrome of the slot machine as a mirror.  She preferred such a warped reflection than the split image staring back at her from a cracked compact mirror:  her estranged sister Tawana’s bridal shower favor.  The broken, heart-shaped, sterling silver mirror also was a reminder of complicity in her future brother-in-law’s last fling, when he had given his groomsmen the slip at his bachelor party at Leroy’s Lounge and met her in the alley.

There amid the trashcans, Tawana’s Damon flung LaVonda’s satin purse to the concrete, made a tutu of her peasant skirt and screwed her silly against a brick wall.  Guided by the burning head of his stiff penis, he crammed his pre-wedding jitters into his future sister-in-law’s aloe-moist vagina.  He pounded her like pestle to mortar, and she thrusted back at him, until lightning intruded upon them and thunderclaps disguised their grotesque utterances.

That transgression with Damon had happened six years ago.  Tawana was working on her second broken marriage and carrying her fourth child by the time LaVonda was slurping and slinging back mixed drinks at The Palm, which was her favorite casino resort.  A fan of a particular penny-slot game there, she was ten spins away from rubbing on tiger balm as she tried to hold out for the next big-bonus round.  On a previous trip, a mere $50 investment translated into a $275 win, but the allure of the casino wasn’t the chance of winning a jackpot; it was the escape from mindless conformity in corporate America.  Unlike in Las Vegas, LaVonda found Atlantic City’s casino resorts to be less discretionary.  Be they business types, ‘burbanites, bohos or bums, all patrons were welcome, as long as they had plenty of cash — theirs or others’ — to lose.

When anyone asked LaVonda what she could do without, she answered, “Pannies.”  When anyone asked her what she couldn’t do without, she replied, “Pennies.”  God was farthest from her consciousness.  Her denomination was the mighty cent.  Gambling was her religion.  The endless drinks served to addicted players were like communion wine.   Years had flown by since the time the regulars at the casino — men, women, trannies and TVs among them — had nicknamed her “Angel.”  Drinking H₂O used to sting her throat; now it had the effect of holy water sprinkled upon a demon.

In her luckier days, when the RNG – random number generator — hadn’t been set in the house’s favor as frequently, she’d often hit the jackpot.  In those brighter days, her quivering and shrieking of “Oh my God!” amid a succession of clanging bells was the closest she had come to the holy experience of a multiple orgasm.  She didn’t count the times when she was an older teen at church and a dyke-cum-deaconess would sit beside her, cloying open her oyster, then diddling the pearl, during the Reverend Hosea Fillandring’s ninety-minute sermon.  How LaVonda’s tummy cramped and her wet pantyhose clung to trembling thighs!

Her moaning would go undetected through all the “Mmm-hmms” and “Wehhhls” from the amen corner.  Strummed to high notes by the dewy-digited deaconess, she’d fall out, screaming like the Holy Ghost had seized her body.  A church nurse was always on the spot in more ways than one.  When LaVonda learned that the church nurses were in on the ambidextrous deaconess’s orgasm hustle, she ceased going to church altogether.

If she had one regret about her decision to ditch church, surely it was that her maternal grandmother, Yorindah Therèse, was turning in her grave back in what survived of their family’s small tract of land in the South Carolina Sea Islands.  Down in Atlantic City, strolling on the beach and making peace with seagulls and egrets after the vultures had stripped her pockets to the seams, LaVonda felt closest to her Grandmama Yorindah’s restless spirit.  She would toss her oblong head back, release any burdens, and allow the salt water that splashed upon the shore to spray her face as so much salt water had cleansed her grandmother’s and her ancestors’ while they toiled in the rice marshes.  She wondered what was more sinful:  her choice to turn her back on organized religion or real estate developers’ rape of her foreparents’ land to build golf resorts and other commercial hideaways.

Although the Atlantic City strip was far from the Lowcountry where the Gullahs reigned, there on the beach, in the shadow of the casinos, LaVonda would reach deeply into her memory for the caressing of Grandmama Yorindah’s weeping willow hair brushing her cheek and neck as she bent down to kiss her sweet potato pie tittuh midway between a crab soup lunch and a red rice and barbecued-chicken supper.  Such fragrant memories kept Grandmama Yorindah alive in her mind, though some of her folks believed the rumor that the pillow-breasted old woman with a West African tongue and Irish winks for eyes never was buried at all.

After three years of celibacy, LaVonda began worshiping the phallus.  She made up for lost time, spending many nights on her back and on her knees.  One time when she was feeling especially daring, and limber, she took on twin Italian brothers on a chaise lounge.  The syncopated sucking and fucking brought out the soprano in her — even though she was an alto — and attracted unwanted attention from folks who had drifted away from their tropical drinks on sand-coated wooden tables.  When the pair got caught with their bananas in each end of LaVonda, they lost their jobs as cabana boys and resorted to male prostitution in Cape May.

Most boyfriends, however, were hit or miss when it came to her spot.  For them, she was the dating jackpot.  Although she was pleased with the generous tip each offered, eventually she’d hear the dreaded word: “Deuces.”  After using her for room and dining comps, they found other fillies to ride.  By the age of 35, most of her ex-boyfriends had coined her “the penny slut of Harlem” yet held onto her mobile number for phone bones.

One particular, former beau was an ornery Scottish dude with freckles and a carrot-orange crewcut, who had been discharged dishonorably from the Marines.  When he moved from Central Harlem to Hell central, a/k/a North Philadelphia, he adopted the ritual of using his free night and weekend minutes to recite Revolutionary poems as foreplay.  In an inspired bit of role play, he repeatedly would call her his “Crispus Attucks bitch” before releasing the phone and shooting blanks in her ear.  She dubbed him “the Minuteman” and always faked orgasm near the end of their phone sex by screaming, “A Brit sees me cumming!  A Brit sees me cumming!”

When phone and cyberfucks began gnawing on her nerves like a hangnail sucked during a footjob, she needed a warm body.  She turned the knob to the door that led to the realm of one-night stands.  Depending on these mutual serial monogamists’ occupations and adventurousness, she carried on with them at not-so-dimly lighted restaurants, on highway shoulders, on airplanes, at construction sites, in the fitting rooms of high-end men’s stores, in trailers at on-location filming, in railway station restrooms, in parking lots, and at cemeteries – anywhere but in a bed in her apartment or in a hotel.  These activities kept her physically fit but bereft of love, and she knew that it was her own fault.

A slew of failed romances left her feeling lonely as Valentine’s Day approached.  Bad enough that Mondays were dismal; she didn’t want to endure a workday filled with hand-delivered bouquets of tall-stemmed roses and boxes of chocolate-dipped strawberries.  She couldn’t allow herself to imagine the mind-blowing sex that many of her co-workers would be experiencing on the weekend leading up to Valentine’s Monday, especially knowing they would be bragging and smirking — if not lying — about the “real reasons” for their bad backs and cakewalk-like gaits until Presidents’ Day.

Thus, she planned a quick getaway via Amtrak from New York City to Atlantic City, which the past ten years of her life spent gambling taught her was more pleasant than a ride on one of the fleet of casino buses from Port Authority Bus Terminal.  The storied bus ride from 42nd Street (formerly the land of hookers, pimps, drug addicts and runaways) to the Atlantic City strip (still the land of hookers, pimps, drug addicts and runaways) was a test of nerves of steel.  The most expensive Bose headset couldn’t block out the cacophonic mobile-phone conversations in seven distinctly New York City languages on those buses:  Jamaican patois, Trini patois, Tagalog, Puerto Rican Spanish, Dominican Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Haitian Creole, Hindu, Urdu, Italianegro English and, the oddest of them all:  Nouveau-Middle-English-Southern-Black Melanglish (not that Ebonics ain’t a good word, ‘cos “where you be” ain’t technically incorrect, dependin’ on deh century you be livin’ in).

Add to the compressed international orchestra — like a Zap Mama CD played backwards — the aromatic blend of multi-ethnic cuisine and the rustling of paper bags, thrashing of aluminum foil and popping of plastic storage made for a three-plus-hour bus ride that was stinkier, noisier and more nauseating than the all-nude dance sequences of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company that LaVonda had allowed her publicist-friend, Yesenia, to talk her into seeing from the front row at the Brooklyn Academy of Music back in the early 1990s.

Happily stirring her latest concoction on the second floor of The Palm, she stretched her legs against the carpeted platform beneath the slot machine from her chair-cum-barstool.  She recalled how painless it had been to purchase her round-trip Amtrak tickets in advance and retrieve them from the kiosk at Penn Station in Manhattan.  An extra perk was receiving a free buttered soft pretzel and complimentary cheese sauce from the young female vendor whose older brother used to play trombone between LaVonda’s legs when they were both in band back in the days when dime bags gave high school a special meaning and Mary Jane wasn’t just the name of a girl, a peanut butter candy or a T-strap shoe.

* * *

The trip to Atlantic City was breezy except for the hour-long stopover in Philly, which always made her say “Damn, damn, damn!” aloud as she pulled her upright suitcase onto the narrow escalator that ascended into the ornate hell which comprises 30th Street Station.  “Fuck Witness,” she uttered to a sixtysomething female passenger four people ahead of her who was yammering to her cacklemate about the on-location scenes in the Harrison Ford film.

Outside of “I beg your paaahdon,” the bespectacled, blue-haired woman, who was a dead ringer for Kathy Bates, was lost for words.  Instead of facing forward, she was looking back at LaVonda and, upon exiting the escalator, lost her footing and one of her peacock-blue, sequined mules.  The shoe hurtled through the high-ceilinged space of the rail station about two yards before clocking a Red Cap, who was handing out government cheese sandwiches  to fifteen homeless people on his lunch break.  They were seeking refuge in the shadow of “The Angel,” Philadelphian shorthand for “Angel of the Resurrection,” the bronze Pennsylvania Railroad World War II Memorial at the station’s 29th Street entrance.

Oblivious of the archangel Michael’s magnificence, LaVonda dropped her belongings and grabbed as many of the scattered, plastic-wrapped sandwiches that her airbrushed-taloned hands could hold.  In midflight, she glared in disbelief as her loquacious nemesis stepped over the concussed railroad worker to retrieve her gaudy shoe while not missing a beat in chattering psychobabble about the memorial’s metaphoric significance in Witness.  LaVonda had no use for metaphors and art.  Neither did she have any regard for blue-haired, spider-veined women, the very kind who refused to remove their tushes from slot machines as if they owned them.

For LaVonda, the only positive points about the landmark rail station were that it provided a train to transport her to “A.C.” — the affectionate term for New Jersey’s inferior version of Sin City — and it offered a fabulous food court.  After filling up on calories at either of two buffets, including Delilah’s, or at Cosi, McDonald’s or Dunkin Donuts, passengers could stroll the dangerously elegant promenades to relieve themselves in high-ceilinged restrooms situated as far away from police officers as possible. 

The time that LaVonda had spent bending down at such a sharp angle scooping up sandwiches offered a razor-tongued, hirsute woman manning the information booth a panoramic view of clenching ebony ass accentuated by a leopard-print thong tangled in a rainforest of black pubic hair.  The mistress of information, who was a closeted viewer of upskirt porn and of mating scenes on National Geographic programs, was so caught up in the free jungle floor show that she abandoned an argument to which she had been subjecting an Atlantic City-bound, honeymooning couple.

A leopard of a different pattern of spots, the woman leaped into a futile fantasy of her stainless-steel-padded vulva rubbing against lush vegetation until their erotic friction burned away the thong.   The neglected hetero couple cleared their throats as she withdrew a glistening hand from inside her navy blue pants, retracted her fangs and scratched her chin hairs.  After fanning the flames in her mind, she left behind smoke — an S.O.S. with no chance of libidinous rescue.  Feigning disgust, the couple walked off in a huff and then headed straight for one of many dark corners for an interstate, semipublic quickie.

LaVonda was oblivious of having turned on the information officer’s feline heat, but she was aware of the purposefulness of the restrooms at Philly’s 30th Street Station.  Often in the past she had turned knobs, on the impossibly white sinks and on the anonymously erect shafts — of various colors — in the immense bathrooms.  It was easier for her to slip into the men’s room rather than the ladies’ room because of the long-practiced, sacred code of brotherhood to which horniness is the only requirement.   As she gobbled the first of her ill-gotten cheese sandwiches, she engrossed herself in the memory of her favorite stall, which she called No. 69.

Copyright © 2011 By Chantale Reve

Above is an excerpt from my ebook The Last Resort, which is published in full on Smashwords.com.  Copies of The Last Resort are available for purchase at:  http://smashwords.com.  Thank you for your support!

Photo:  “Angel of the Resurrection,” Walter Hancock’s Pennsylvania Railroad World War II Memorial at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station

Photo Credit:  Chantale Reve

They had sat at the far corner table of the venerable Downtown Brooklyn restaurant so many times before, long ago, when egg creams still were on the menu.  Their weekly conversations had seeped so deeply into the cushions of the tangerine banquette that waiters knew when to surprise them with monogrammed anniversary cheesecake slices.  Back then, it was Sinatra piping through the speakers in the ballroom disguised as a dining space, but now Aretha’s voice was gliding and diving amid a fluttery flute in “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do).”

Malaika could still see her newly beloved’s handprints on the crisp, white, linen tablecloth that used to leave residue on her favorite black painted-on jeans.  And the chandeliers that would shake every time patrons would run up the narrow staircase to the second-floor restrooms still shimmered their bright lights through vintage crystal.  But one thing was clear:  Her prince wasn’t coming back, no matter how often she returned to the restaurant with a shattered-glass heart.

She clutched the white tablecloth at the memory.  It was like reliving the summer day that Shaquan walked out, dashing so fast past the white lace curtains that they sailed up in surrender.  She had more to say, but the breeze he had left behind took her breath away.  All she could do, standing in the kitchen, was grab ahold of the curtain panels as he swiped his bass guitar from the hall closet.  He snarled his goodbye and slammed the metal door on their marriage.

It had taken her husband a year to save up for that guitar, which dangled from a hook in the window of the pawn shop at Seventh and Third, but double that time for him to compose the one tune that would end up stringing together another woman who had fallen to pieces like a neglected antique doll.

Hearing Shaquan’s construction boots thudding on the main floor two flights down, Malaika recalled how her heart had pounded out of her chest when she first heard his heavy feet heading up the staircase toward her Boerum Hill apartment and their destiny.

Those were the days when Shaquan was ardently courting her, when he would fill her mind with promises ripe with juice like that of rosy-red mango.  She remembered that they hadn’t discovered each other’s bodies yet and how her breasts would plump up as if preparing their milk for the babies they would create in due time.  She recalled how, when he kissed her cheeks with the succulent wine-hued wedges God gave him for lips, and when his coarse goatee brushed the cleft in her chin, she would become disoriented.  As his wholehearted hug lifted her breasts out of her bra, she would respond in an accordion of sighs.

Taking a detour to fantasy, she would cheat on him with his future self, imagining how the thrusting of her new lover’s penis might be as forceful as his footsteps.  Malaika would get so caught up in the coming attractions of caving into Shaquan’s desire, of her passion translating into an avalanche of her guarded pink walls, that she would end up hearing only the last words of his effusive greeting. 

Three years after the Negril honeymoon, they were barely getting by in Brooklyn.  Shaquan was growing weary of 3 a.m. risings and lackluster blowjobs from his wife.  Soon, he began giving Malaika grief because he was losing “needful sleep” by painting the nursery.  Before the pink semigloss paint could dry on the walls, the long-awaited baby daughter they had named prematurely emerged silent from Malaika’s womb.  In the months that followed the funeral, Shaquan grew quieter at home but was making the buxom receptionist from L.B. Schatz Construction shriek his name.

Several years after exchanging vows for better or for worse, Malaika stood frozen in the kitchen where chef-quality dinners had grown cold on too many nights.  There she remained as stiff as a cadaver, heavy with burden, a half-hour after learning the news that he and she were expecting an unplanned baby.  Malaika snatched the flimsy curtains from the tension rod and sank down to the linoleum floor until she was in the fetal position, the lace panels covering her like a disheveled wedding dress.  Clutching her belly, she cried, “Why-y-y-y?!  Why-y-y-y?!”

When her face emerged from her moistened hands, as if she had been immersed in deep prayer, Malaika’s eyes met an extended dark-brown hand holding a glass of water.  Her head slowly rose as she drank in all six feet of his lanky frame clothed in the black and white of his uniform.

“I tawt ya might wann dis,” he said in Jamaican patois.  His was a sing-song accent somewhere between a tropical breeze and a steel drum.  “Me wanna console ya, so can I stat widda ello?”

“Thanks for the water, but I’ll just have the menu now, please,” Malaika replied coldly.

He wished that the gleam in his ready smile could dry her tears and that she could glimpse promise in his gemlike eyes.  As she opened the menu that he gently placed before her on the tearstained tablecloth, the first strains of the Grace Jones song that had been her ska-loving ex-husband’s favorite piped in from beyond the chandeliers:  “My Jamaican Guy.”

“Eh-eh,” said the waiter, which caught her off-guard and made her smile and broke the ice between them like Appleton rum poured quickly into a glass under a beaming Negril sun.  
 

Copyright © 2010/2011 By Chantale Reve