
+Abduction under the sign of the hummingbird+ 
by kimmie holland & meeah mackenzie

It seems such a shame, she says, to outright kill him, as she signs the contract for them to do just that, or whatever might be its moral equivalent. She signs it in his own blood, extracted by black-clad "ninja nurses" from his sleeping body just the night before, which, though weird, is not surprising, as it seems, for some reason, that there is so much superstitious bullshit to this all. The agent, if that's what he is, for the company who has recruited (let-us-call-him) Ken, looks over the nine sheets of paper she has signed, or tried to sign, her hand trembling slightly.

"This looks okay," he says in his pale voice, "in order. More or less. Enough that is, to get us started."

"So when do you..." Kathy made a gesture, which, once she realized what it looked like, she aborted, horrified. "...you know..."

"Soon," the man says, somewhat enigmatically.

He stands up, or is going to. Everything, in any case, has been packed away in his briefcase, which bears a logo, or a crest, that at the very least looks official, in that vaguely governmental way. He has, overall, a "faded" appearance, as if he's made a lifetime habit of taking parts in conversations just like this one, where one tries not to say anything, or as close to that as possible. Even looking at him now, Kathy has no idea, really, what he looks like.

"Okay then," she says, smoothing, unnecessarily, her navy-blue skirt, "I guess that's..." and she thinks about having a cigarette, "...that."

Morgan is watching him, from the sedan, through a pair of high-powered opera glasses, while his partner, Talbot, sketches something, maybe that elm tree by the playground, or is it a linden?

"That's him," he says, and adds reluctantly, "I think..."

Talbot looks up from his sketchbook, almost disinterested, and gazes off sort of in the direction of the basketball court at which Morgan directs his attention without quite doing so. "Which one?" he asks, as if prompted by someone not in the sedan.

"The blonde."

"Which one?"

"The one in the red shorts."

Talbot looks confused, somehow, still. So Morgan adds, "He's the one who can't seem, for the life of him, to go left."

"Ah..." Talbot says, but without conviction, or maybe not paying attention, bent intently, even more intently than before, over his sketchbook, trying to render a twig, or, perhaps, someone bending over to pick up a seashell. Let's face it, he's earnest, but not very good at rendering reality.

 
"Did I do the right thing," Kathy asks, sipping a chilled white wine at an outdoor caf&#12539; in the town's leafy, sun-dappled central square. She has ordered a cold chicken wrap and waits for it, thinking, maybe, that she should have ordered something else. Alyssa, who sits across from her, although Kathy keeps momentarily mistaking her, with her hair done like that, for the red-headed Beth, is still picking, against all odds, at her arugula salad.

"Hmm?" she says, smiling, pretending she's still chewing.

"About Kenny...you know."

"Oh yes...oh Kenny..." Alyssa, formerly Beth, waved her fork, momentarily empty, in a little circle in the air, "...he'll get used to it...I guess."

It was possible, Kathy mused, sipping her white wine again, that her friend had no idea what they were talking about. Sometimes, she thinks, I'm not sure I do either and maybe, just maybe, all her more or less happy friends, like Alyssa, are right: it's much better that way.


"It's all for the best," that's what they always say, and that's what she is saying now. Kenny is crying, shaking, his blonde body, naked, golden, in the last light of an autumn afternoon. This is supposed to be a doctor's appointment, a  routine exam for life insurance, something like that, and instead he is here, in a room at an inn by the sea, having what might be an affair.

Mary Pat is holding him, stroking his limp penis, comforting him, telling him it's okay to make a mess, they will  have to strip the bed anyway, in all likelihood, probably  roll him up in the sheet, to get rid of, as she, rather matter-of-factly, puts  it, "what remains of the evidence."

"She'll find out...she knows...she...?"

"Its okay," Mary Pat says, and Kenny notes the tone of her voice: tenderly amused, and it really does calm him, momentarily, "its okay" until he decides to ask the next question.

"When...will they..."

"Oh darling..."
Mary Pat's own penis, shall we say it, is still inside Kenny's ass right now, and she is moving her hips ever so slowly, letting Kenny feel it inside him, filling him, as she kindly strokes Kenny's indecisive little member, which harden and softens, hardens and softens, endlessly, as if he has an entire lifetime to cum, but he doesn't.


"This boy, pleases me," said the man in the armchair, via computer, as he typed out the words with his thumb on the abbreviated hand-held keyboard concealed in his left fist. "He pleases me, do I dare to even say it...greatly."

Across from him, his visitor nodded, politely, accepting the compliment. J. Loft had a reputation as a man who could please men who were difficult to please, and a talent for it, which was fortunate because such men were irascible, unreasonable, very negative. The man who sat opposite him had lost his voice, and much of everything else, to what it's easiest to simply call "cancer," but has been kept alive, marginally, with certain medicaments, but the ingredients to these miracle drugs, although not exactly uncommon or expensive, were, shall we put it as delicately as possible, inconvenient?

"What is extra pleasing," the man in the armchair, let's call him R., says, "is the symmetry of the entire operation. There is an aesthetic circularity to it all that is rare to find these days. In evil, I mean. Do you understand?"

J. Loft did not understand, not really, but he nodded, like a fellow adept at these matters, instead of a businessman, a provider of special services to those to whom special services  might be provided, and could pay handsomely for them. He found it a pleasure, really, after so many years in covert government work, not to be pestered with a thousand-and-one unnecessary questions from above: did you cover your tracks, leave any witnesses, clues, hints, loose ends, etc. and to work instead, sans supervision, under the assumption that he was competent enough to do the job he'd been hired to do, to be treated, in other words, like the professional he was.

"I am a man who enjoys being a man," his employer continued, "even in my...somewhat diminished...capacity. Perhaps..." and he gazed outside, fondly, towards the pool, where three turquoise dolphins were playing, "even more so for my diminution."

J. Loft didn't speak; he wasn't paid to speak. He wasn't paid to listen, either, but, of the two, the latter was by far the more appropriate, closer to what he was getting paid to do. He thought of his next job, using the time economically, making a mental checklist: silencers, curare, pear-shaped vibrator, chastity belt, and plenty of pink electrical tape. Tools of the trade. 

"It's not exactly as if the boy will be separated from anything he'll really miss," the man in the armchair, was saying, using a voice, naturally, not his own, but one that had been programmed and remixed from old movies starring Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum, and Marlene Dietrich. "Well..." and, apparently, he pressed the button that activated the laugh-track combined of this odd audience of screen legends, "not anything except, perhaps, his life."


The man in the black suit looks at a small pastel-colored business card in the palm of his hand and says: "Are you Mr. Gregory Tanner?"

"No," Kenny says, but the encounter has him, admittedly, unnerved. He has been getting phone calls for the last three weeks, every day, asking him the same anonymous question. "No," he repeats again, as if he knows instinctively it is pointless: he can't convince anyone of anything. "I'm not this man."

"That's funny," the man in the black suit says, checking the business card again. "It seems quite impossible that you are not him."

They are in a supermarket where Kenny has gone to pick up some milk and bread and a few other things Kathy asked him to bring home. They are standing, for no good reason, in front of the frozen food section, where they have the Indian dishes, various sorts of masala and makhani and saag paneers and whatnot. 

"Sir...I should go..."

"Yes you should."

But the man in the black suit, his name, what he says his name is, anyway--Talbot, wasn't it?--doesn't move and it's clear that he doesn't intend to let Kenny pass either, not yet. Instead he lifts his left hand to Kenny's face, and lays it against Kenny's right cheek. What Talbot says next, he says in a very soft voice, "You are warm, sweetheart..."

Kenny imagines, wildly, that he is about to be arrested, thrown against the freezer doors, cuffed, driven away to an undisclosed location.

"I want...to buy...wildflowers..." he says, desperately, and gestures, feebly, towards the front of the store, where the exit is, and the floral bouquets, both of which are impossible to see from where they stand.

"Yes, naturally, but they must be red carnations," Talbot says and allows Kenny to think that he's finished with this unsavory encounter by the frozen foods for some blessed seconds before he adds, "no, white."


"This tastes so scrumptious," Kathy murmurs, her face between Pam's legs, licking, short stroke, long, short, short, long etc. a hashish chocolate mousse that Pam had her Peruvian housekeeper whip up in the kitchen, some hours before. Kathy pauses, replacing her tongue with a gentle finger, and says, licking her lips, "Are you sure your mom won't be home any time soon?"

Pam is looking at her right nipple, squeezing it between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, examining it, as if seeing it for the first time, wondering what it was doing there or, as if she weren't really seeing it at all.

"Sweetie?" Kathy prompts.

Pam looks up, pouting, automatically, and for some reason Kathy thinks of her husband, standing in front of a full-length mirror, on painted tiptoes, following the curve of his spine and pantied tush. The photograph, taken, supposedly, at an oceanside hotel resort, did not seem to be of Kenny at all, but when she questioned the man who slid it, along with others, across the glass-topped table in the atrium of the downtown Marriott, she remembered him saying, "Oh but it will be."

"Huh?" Pam says, looking, with that haircut, remarkably like Alyssa, who looked like red-head Beth with her hair up and blonde, who was, of course, her mother. "Did you say something?"

"Yes...no...never mind...your mom, she's in Bucharest, isn't she? She told me last Tuesday."

"No, I think its Gdansk."

"Hmm," Kathy hums. "Well, anyway, I guess I should be getting..." and she notices just how spacey the hashish, or the champagne, or both, is making her feel "...somewhere." 
"I haven't come yet," Pam says, sounding unashamedly spoiled, picking up a joint, already lit, from somewhere, from a small change pocket in the side of her neck is what it seemed like, her eyes looking, somehow, inverted.

Kathy strokes the girl's soft white belly, just below the navel, pierced, as expected, and the intention, clearly, is to return to licking her moist, very lightly furred, and now oozing chocolate chiffon, pussy, but that's not what's in the cards, so to speak. 

"Lick my toes," Pam says suddenly. "That will get me off quick."

Kathy, who knows this kid's body as well as her own, never suspected this about Pam, but the idea excites her, and she immediately thinks of placing halved strawberries between the girl's notoriously perfect white toes, the image reminding her, effectively, of strawberry shortcake.

"Could you please," Kathy said, her breath hitching a little, "ring the kitchen?"


In an over air-conditioned hotel room, Kenny stands, hugging himself, in pastel-colored bra and panties. His work clothes are hanging in the closet, and a small overnight bag, containing white platform sandals, white teddy, and white thigh-high stockings is on the bed behind him. He is waiting for someone, probably Mary Pat, who is late, or not coming, and it's possible that he has checked in here alone, looking at himself in a full length mirror, standing on painted tiptoes, checking out the line of his paper-thin profile, from shoulder-blades to ankle. He is aware, of course, that he may have been followed here, or that the room itself, as improbable as it might seem, is being monitored, and, really, how improbable, nowadays, is that, after all? Is Kathy having him watched? Does she suspect something? He slips his hand over his soft tummy to the front of his panties, silk, impossibly cool, under trembling fingertips, and he isn't hard at all, which makes perfect sense, having been taking those pills that come in the mail, sent, by god knows who, to his office, on the sixth, ninth, fifteenth, and twenty-seventh day of each and every month since he can't even remember when.


"I don't like doing this," Mary Pat says, tossing back his blonde hair, a cigarette between his fingers, in the process of being lit by a man calling himself (once again) Talbot. "I want you to know that. I don't like it at all."

The man in the black suit is standing against the railing of the boardwalk, his back to the ocean, which lies flat and grey behind him, like a razor blade used too many times. He puts the cigarette case back into the breast pocket of his black suit, returns the light to the pocket of his black pants, and folds his arms, looking down at Mary Pat with a false, if paternal, benevolence.

"We understand," he says, as if speaking for everyone he represents. "...it is why, you might say, that we chose you."

"He is my friend, goddammit..." Mary Pat dragged nervously on the cigarette, which tasted, surprisingly, normal. 	He crossed his long legs, his short skirt riding upward, almost over the tops of his stockings. His white blouse, somewhat unbuttoned, showed a pink bra, and not as much in it as he would have liked, but that was a situation he was in the process of correcting, even as he spoke. "It's not fair...what you are doing...to me, to us..."
  

"Sometimes you have to get past the superficial differences between people," R. says, talking to himself, yet all the while imagining that he's talking into a tape recorder, "but they are all basically the same, as most couples are revealed to be, after a little surgery, which proves, as if it needs proving," and he pauses for a wracking series of coughs that sounds like a wet fish being slapped on a sidewalk. When he speaks again his voice might be coming from a different person altogether. His head, immobilized for his own safety, doesn't move, but his eyes flick left-right, right-left, left-right, right-left, etc. to the two photographs pinned side by side on the light-box. Kenny-Kathy, Kathy-Kenny, Kenny-Kathy, Kathy-Kenny, etc.
	
"...which confirms," and he struggles to form the words out of the poisonous phlegm thickening his windpipe, "that we only love ourselves."


On a canvas lounge chair, on the porch, Kenny lies, his thin, tanned, well-toned body barely dressed, he can't help but notice, in a royal-blue bikini, very skimpy, and a needle stick in the back of his left hand, an IV dripping into him, slowly. What is dripping into him, however, is a mystery, and although he could ask one of the nurses, or whatever they are, who come by occasionally, to change the bag on the metal pole, he is either asleep when they come, or somehow, he forgets to ask.

"Don't I need to get back...to something?" he asks someone, maybe Mary Pat, sitting beside him, reading an old fat novel, something she must have found in the day room, something by someone named...oh, he can't see the name, what's the difference anyway?

Mary Pat, or whoever it is, lowers the book, eyes behind very dark glasses, and smiles. "No hurry," she says, and the way she says it brings tears to Kenny's eyes.

"I'm very tan," he says irrelevantly, and, just for the hell of it, tries to remember when the last time he ate might have been, but he can't think back nearly that far. "I guess..." and his eyes fall level on the ocean, all fat and blue, over the porch railing. "...will they drown me, then?"

Mary Pat pretends not to hear, or maybe she really doesn't, but some time later, in response to some other dreamy half-sentence that Kenny utters without knowing it, she chuckles affectionately, and says, "You're so silly."


She reads about it in an online edition of an out-of-state paper, in the news of the weird section, or something like that, and even though she sits on the deck in a yellow string bikini in the 93 degree heat of a central Florida afternoon, she feels as if a cold shadow passes over her. 

That woman in the photo looks so much like me, she thinks, it's a good thing they found the body in a motel room where...in Minnesota?

The glass door slides open and Kenny stands there with two tall frosted glasses of lime-slush and gin. He's wearing a tiny bikini bottom and a pair of her rubber thong sandals and his oiled body is smooth and tan all over. Looking up at him, she knows the news story of the murdered woman is all wrong, full of misstated facts, faulty deduction, and wrongly arrived at conclusions, but that doesn't make it any less eerie.

"Mojitos, sort of," he says with the forced cheer of someone with a gun at his back, and then, mirroring Kathy's troubled expression his demeanor suddenly changes to something slightly less faux, "...is something...wrong? You look..." but he's waiting for Kathy to fill in the blank, which she never quite gets around to, or can't, and she's waiting for him to...what? Whatever it is remains unspoken, a blank space, but underscored, to remind them always that something is always missing.

<the end>


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