Gio Clairval

Dental Assistant Letitia liked her men bald: the muscular and the skinny, the biologist and the forklift driver — any type would do so long as his genetic makeup had predestined him to lose his hair.

Bald is sexy, she thought. Bald is virile.

On the technical side, Letitia welcomed all dental conditions: periodontal pathologies, granuloma, edentulism. Her favorite, however, was the simple cavity. When a patient turned up for his first consultation, sweet expectation of what she might find made her tremble. Cavities opened the door to her wildest fantasies.

That day, as a bald man staggered into the dental practice, howling in pain, her head swam. She prayed for a carious process, hoping the decay had already developed, affecting the dental pulp. In her opinion, it was the best moment to start an odontoerotic treatment.

The man (Luka, an art gallery owner of forty-two — she read in his file) sat in the waiting room, hands gripping the armrests. Letitia sprayed him with nitrous oxide. Luka let go of the armrests as the gas weakened his socio-immune defenses.

Letitia’s following move was to hypnotize her patient in order to induce a classical Lorenz’s imprinting. Swing-pendulum-swing. After Luka was brought through from the waiting room, following her like a duckling, Letitia had him recline in a dentist’s chair sprinkled with a rutting female bear’s scent. The dernier cri in pheromone fragrance.

She had previously mixed the anesthetic with an aphrodisiac substance excreted in her own brain — namely, by the serotonin-gorged epiphysis cerebri.

The dentist, Mr. Heinz, proceeded to inject anesthetic into his patient’s palate, in the most sensitive spot of hard cartilage. Luka, instead of wincing or groaning, let out little moans of pleasure.

“You’re . . . er . . . very brave, sir.” Mr. Heinz cast a puzzled glance at his assistant, who glanced back with Bambi eyes.

Letitia then handed a special amalgam to her unsuspecting boss. “Amalgam” was an old-fashioned word, dethroned by the modern “composite.” She however preferred the vintage term, which evoked a scent of forbidden alchemy. The mélange consisted of the usual ingredients enriched with bits removed from her body. Letitia mixed the formula in her quarters. She had a range of specially tailored treatments at hand: the ovarian follicles she kept for her shiniest patients, while the men afflicted with patchy alopecia received fillings based on piliferous bulbs from her bikini line.

She liked to know that a patient would exit the dental practice carrying a little something of her. Eyes closed, she saw herself experiencing vicarious masculine lives: bar fights, flurries of dirty jokes, fishing tournaments, ball games and muscle car racing, not to mention porn and culinary feasts that even Babette, her favorite restaurant’s cook, would never have dreamed of.

And there was more. Letitia sensed when someone touched her bald man. From the depths of the filled cavity, she partook in her patient’s sexual interplay. The Sandrized men attained such erotic expertise they all became unparalleled lovers.

Was she content with her invasive practice? She still felt something was missing, a rough-edged cavity in her heart that her soul’s tongue could not leave alone.

She sometimes ran into a man who’d been treated at the dental practice with her special amalgam. She would spot him treading High Street, or in a shop, or at a bus stop. The clue that gave him away was the sudden flash of tingling that blossomed in her nether regions, progressed to her nipples and finally reached the scalp in a paroxysm of white-hot shivers.

Each time, the temptation to reveal herself and the secret of the odontoerotic treatment assailed her, although the dental assistants’ strict deontology — already frazzled by her procedures — prevented her from crossing a further line.

Until that very day.

Luka was an attractive man, but it would have been another patient to receive amalgam enriched with the usual parts of her body, had she not noticed a singularity. To counter his receding hairline, he’d shaven off all his hair. She remarked a geometric implantation of the hair growing back on the shaven head.

A perfect rose, starting from the crown, unfurled clockwise, not unlike the pattern of sunflower seeds.

A star-struck Letitia leaned over her patient while, at the same time, tilting the chair back. Now, the dentist’s chair had been designed never to keel over. Luka, on the other hand, could flex and contort his body. The generous chest that was drawing close, threatening to press against his face, triggered a sudden movement. The tray supporting dental tools tipped over. Luka, in an attempt to catch something, gripped Letitia’s white coat, ripping it, along with the blouse underneath. Patient and assistant fell on the floor among the din of tools hitting the tiles like stainless-steel hail.

An unknown feeling washed over her.

In the dead silence that ensued, “I’m afraid of dentists,” Luka murmured. “And I’m truly, truly sorry. Please forgive me, madam. It’s my fault.”

A few minutes later, Letitia reached for the tiny box that contained an amalgam never used before, a composite enriched with tissue excised from her Gräfenberg spot. The best ingredient. Sublime.

When Luka left, Letitia asked a colleague to stand in for her and exited the practice, scrubs still on.

On High Street, the men stared, perhaps made curious by the white coat open over a half-ripped blouse. But Letitia only ran after Luka. Desperately.

Their encounter, or collision, in front of his house, produced a series of shockwaves.

“You’re mine,” she said.

“I love you,” he replied, unaware of the G-spot inserted in his maxillary first molar (N. 26).

He elbowed the door open; she kicked it shut behind them. They ripped each other’s clothes off on their way across the apartment until they lay intertwined under a flashing skylight. Maxilla and mandible interlocked, impervious to the dentist’s burr.

The Gräfenberg Spot fired them up in unison. Transplant success.

GIO CLAIRVAL‘s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Postscripts, Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, several anthologies, and elsewhere.

Annesha Sengupta

I was walking home from work on a crisp day when out of the corner of my eye, I saw an alley I had never seen before. I knew that the alley hadn’t been there yesterday, because yesterday I had specifically remarked to a co-worker that there was absolutely no mystery in this city. Everything was unwrapped and displayed, spread out against the concrete streets like butter on bread. My co-worker, sullen with her hair in a bun, had dug pointedly in her purse for a pair of earbuds.

But there it was, the alley I had wished for. An alley to satisfy the most demanding of dreamers. Thin and purple, brief pockets of smog obscured any eventual ending. My fancy tickled, I squeezed into it, thinking briefly of muggers, but deciding that the mysterious alley didn’t appear between two previously touching buildings for me to get mugged. As I proceeded down the alley, I felt the strange moistness of the brick against my fingertips. It was the kind of gristly rock found in steamy temples (like in Indiana Jones). I was in the pulse of the city: follow the vein and enter the heart.

After about ten minutes of walking, I came across an open door. Its sign was written in French (I spoke Spanish), but I could tell it belonged to some kind of store, a shop (the kind spelled S-H-O-P-P-E). That a store would be stuffed this far into an alley, magic or not, surprised me, and I wondered briefly about monetary flow and customer counts. With some hesitation, I entered.

Arranged around the shop, which was more spacious than I expected, were hundreds and hundreds of violins. They were painted the deep red of dried blood and ancient things. Some of them were simple and unadorned, some of them were covered with intricate carvings depicting scenes from nature or mythology. Their thin strings glowed faintly, the way light glows against closed eyes. Splayed around the room were sheets of music, all drawn by hand. I could tell, by the way each note was drawn, so perfectly and lovely, that it was the most beautiful music in the world. Two small cats, one black, and one white, were entwined together on the floor. A scroll lay on the counter, ancient with mildew and sealed with wax. Behind this counter there was a very old man, probably Russian, with his white hair high in a widow’s peak. This, this had the makings of glory. I rocked back and forth on my heels, caught up in the magic, not knowing what to say.

“Young man,” the Russian spoke, imperiously. He had a voice like leaves rustling. “Young man, do you by any chance play the violin?”

“No,” I told him, frowning. “But I play the piano.”

The old man cocked his head. “Oh?”

“Yeah, sorry.” I felt foolish. The atmosphere suddenly became very heavy, and I felt like I wasn’t meant to be there after all. The walls of the shop turned burgundy and squeezed. I stared at the cats, realizing that I was a dog person. All the parts to fantasy were set in motion, and I kept guessing the trigger wrong.

The Russian didn’t tell me to leave, but I could see the suggestion in his bleary eyes. He looked at me with a hollow pity, but I didn’t ask why. A few dull moments passed, and the violins began to swim before my eyes, smooth curves blending into harsh ones.

I was saved by the entrance of a girl. Her hair was dyed gray with purple streaks, and slung across her back was a violin case. There was a magic in the way she looked around the shop. There was even magic in her goddamn shoes (five laces, three knots). The Russian smiled at her fondly, as if welcoming a daughter. He held up the moldy scroll and she walked towards it, entranced.

I coughed.

The spell was broken, and all eyes were on me. The cats began to hiss, the girl screamed something in French, something I could understand even though I had never taken a word of French in my long, tedious life. I ran. I ran fast. The alley seemed to widen, eager to be rid of its foreign invader. Her words echoed endlessly in my ears.

“What are you doing in my adventure?”

ANNESHA SENGUPTA is a full-time undergraduate student at New York University, though she hails from Richmond, Virginia. In her writing, she tries to find the thin line between hard and soft, beauty and obscenity. Her science fiction has received a National silver medal in the Scholastic Art and Writing Contest. Life scares the hell out of her, but she loves it anyway.

Fredric Sinclair

It will be written that there was blood and horrible gashes through the head. They will say that he kicked wildly, like a horse pricked in the side, that he let loose such a scream as to send shivers down the most hardened butcher’s back. It will be said that tears ran down his face, that he sobbed such as a grown father sobs for the loss of a child to some unnatural breach of nature — just so they will say he wept, deep in the chest, with full, manly guttural groans.

They will say this and so much more. But they will be wrong. He was like a babe in my arms. Had I been his mother, he would have given suck. Who knew that reason could so overrule the old man? No sooner had he hardened to my touch did he soften, like a blister to balm. And as a blister needs a lance, in his very hands he clutched it, bright and shiny. I worked it out, his hold firm at first, but in time he gave willingly, like child releasing some forbidden token, hesitantly, until he knows he’s lost it, till no more. I coddled the hand. It shook from the cold. Some will say it was fear. It will be written that he shook from fear.

I ask those who wish to embolden truth: why should he fear a boy from down the street who had come once a month since he was six and had never once in all that time given him but the slightest cause to frown, let alone tremble — tremble as a man might tremble if he saw his own shadow rise up and take form and lurk for days with sullen, abject insipidness? Why should the sight of a child, a local boy, one of his many usual customers, cause him to tremble so? What does it matter that he didn’t recognize me? It feels like yesterday, when I first swung up on his leather chair like a cowboy mounting a horse. Just so, I kicked and hollered and cried Whoa, there, big fella! How the old man would tremble then with laughter. Wasn’t I the hero then, with my full, flaxen mane for his fingers to plumb?

Damn his whistling! Damn it to hell! He swept and swept. All that sweeping when the deed was done. The whistling and sweeping and how he winked at me when it was all over and said Giddy-up, now, chap. The bristles of the broom and the sweeping and all that scratching on linoleum, all that scratching, scratching, with those wonderful, thick bushels of blond and bronze catching in those bristles.

When he was finished, I’d give him my five dollars, and he’d bend down and pat me on the head and stick out a lollipop. Even? he’d always say with a wink. Out I’d go and the door would make its jolly jingle and not once would I think (as I think now, horribly, wakefully, tossing in the night, turning on the light to inspect the pillow cover and dab it with a piece of tape to count in the morning) — no, not once would I think of what he had taken. Stolen! Not once did I notice (but how I notice now, how I notice every day) how he, in his old age — when in the natural course of life one enters a perpetual drought and the fields go barren and the crops go lacking — not once did I notice how in need of lacking was he! Such a full, thick tassel. Downy waves of black. Lustrous strands of metallic sheen. So much overflowing at such an age, he still daubed it with greasy palms of Vitalis. Either he had not paid in full the taxes of a life long-lived or nature’s great auditor, time, had been fooled, burgled, hoodwinked. While I — who has now but barely reached my prime, who has only but timidly sampled the sweet nectar of youth, let alone thrown himself wantonly into the battering storm — show the visible scars and haggard visage of a thousand noisome inquiries.

Stop your prying. Will you stop? It was time. He was overdue. I tried to explain it to him, but he didn’t understand. He only shook his head. Shook it and kept on shaking it. So I took it in my hands, only to stop the shaking. But then I had it in my hands. That head. That hair. I took a handful. Oh, that hair. I tugged it. And tugged some more. And even more still till I heard the slightest rip. Then I eased my hold and steadied his head between my knees before I grasped again with renewed resolve. I got a handful, roots and all, though by now I was getting a taste of how much spunk the old man still had in him. He kicked like a stallion and wailed like a babe in the crib, but I kept him down and assured him that the steadier he stayed, the quicker and easier it would be for the both of us, for now I took out those glittering beauties he’d surrendered when I’d grasped him by the hands and stared into those wide, dark eyes that quivered like polished stones in a riverbed. Now they rolled . . . and rolled, and when I thought they would roll right out of his head, I set the blade flush to his scalp, lowered my mouth to his ear and whispered — Even.

FREDRIC SINCLAIR is a New York-based author. His plays have been produced at The Players, The Director’s Studio, Richmond Shepard Theatre, Manhattan Repertory Theatre, and the Midtown International Theatre Festival. His writing and co-production credits include Provincetown, Bluff Head, Lethe, The Friend, and Aiken in Cyberspace. He also has written two novels, Preemption and American Sampler, and numerous poems. www.fredricsinclair.com