Message-ID: <36119asstr$1018901405@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
From: Rino <rino149@yahoo.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Subject: {ASSM} The Death of Me (MF, Fantasy, slow)
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 16:10:05 -0400
Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail
Approved: <assm@asstr-mirror.org>
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
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Despite the title, this is not a snuff piece.  Rather,
this was something I wrote several years ago with the
aim of magazine publication.  But I never submitted
it, so here it is for ASSM, because it has one fairly
explicit sex scene.

For those two or three people who have followed my
sexfight or tribadism stories, sorry.  Not even close.

The Death of Me

I am certainly dead, but I am only probably here.

The virtual particles that give me form wink in and
out of existence a trillion times a second, as they
have done in the four weeks since I collapsed with a
brain hemorrhage in the kitchen.

For a ghost (if that is what I am), I am quite
unscary.  No one can see me.  I am unheard.  I affect
no person's life.  At least that part is familiar.

When it happened, I was preparing a cup of tea.  I sat
down at the plain pine table, and the worst headache
in the world stabbed me.  I moaned, a banal and
terrifying sound.  The kitchen window let in watery
sunlight, and it was getting darker.

I slid off the chair onto the tiled floor, and the
buttons on my housecoat made a soft skittering.  The
pain eased, and the last thing I knew for a while was
the loose feeling of the blood trickling from my
nostrils.

I gained a measure of light.  The first thing I saw
was the floor.  The second thing I noticed was an old
woman lying face up, eyes open, seeing nothing.  Her
mouth was partially open, and a bluish tongue was
visible.  She looked familiar.  She looked like me. 
She looked like a dead woman, dead on the first day of
a four-week vacation.

I tried to move, but my limbs felt leaden.  With what
seemed more effort than warranted, I arose, my eyes
fixed on the dead face below me.  I tried to look at
myself, at my legs and my arms.  What I saw was almost
there, like the flickering pale afterimage when the
lights are suddenly snapped off.  It was as if I
didn't see the actuality, but saw a memory of an image
from a diminishing dream.

I tried to walk out of the kitchen into the living
room.  My legs did not want to go.  I was able to make
some motion by leaning and seemed to slide forward.  I
drifted in this manner for a few seconds, and passed
through the doorway.  My left hand encountered the
wall, and before I could stop, it slid into it.  There
was a dragging sensation, something slightly tacky,
like old glue.   I felt like I was pushing my hand
through a mildly hot pile of sawdust.

I stopped for minute with my hand in the doorsill. 
The pale image stopped at the edge of the wall.  I
willed myself to flex my fingers.  They moved
grudgingly, encountering resistance.  I pulled my arm,
and my hand slipped from the warmth of wood, and felt
suddenly cold.

If I could move through a wall, why did I not fall
into the floor?  I looked down, and saw that my feet
indeed had sunk an inch or so into the floor, my bare
toes under the carpet.  I began to notice the feeling
of tickling in my feet.  Why did I not fall any
further?  The density of the concrete slab under the
carpet and floor?  An illusion?

I started moving again, in this weird sliding
loco-motion.  For some reason, I felt compelled to go
outside.  The front door was of course closed.  Could
I propel myself into and through it?

I moved faster, and hit the door.  Again that warm
sawdust feeling, a faint odor of scorched wood.  As I
moved through the wood, my sight dimmed, and I heard a
faint crackling, like listening to a distant fire. 
Then the light started to return, and I was standing
on my front porch.

It was a frosty November morning, with a light dusting
of snow on the brown grass.  There was a light breeze
stirring the bare branches of the trees.  The sky was
a milky white.  I thought it was a good match for my
complexion.

I paused and wondered what had happened to me.  The
numbness I had felt a few minutes ago was giving way
to the faintest stirrings of apprehension.  I tried to
speak.  My mouth, or what felt like my mouth, opened,
and something like a sound escaped me.  I could not
hear anything, but I felt as I had made a noise.

Then fear descended upon me like an eclipse.  I bent
forward and cried in hitching noiseless non-gasps,
dark waves of grief and terror.  I felt an absolutely
black despair, and more than anything else wanted to
go inside and just wake up from this dead dream.  To
have a cup of tea.  To read the morning paper (but I
had canceled delivery for my vacation).  To go to
work.  To see someone and talk to them.

I remained there, enfolded in my translucent arms, for
perhaps a quarter-hour.  I knew that for the month of
my vacation from my administrative position at the
University, no one would check my house.  The paper
had been suspended and my mail was being held.  There
were no relatives and I knew that any acquaintances
would not call.  My life was --
had been -- a narrow path of work and books, with only
the barest interaction with neighbors.

I raised my spectral head.  I was puzzled by an odd
feeling.  My fear and shock was being replaced by the
mildest tickling of yearning.  I felt...hungry.  

I heard the door open on the house across the street. 
I looked toward the sound, and saw Mr. Kindrick come
out to retrieve his paper from the frosty lawn.  He's
been retired for a few years, and I could set my clock
by his habits.  So I knew it was 8:30, and he had just
finished his coffee.

Without realizing it, I had risen from my porch.  I
looked at Mr. Kindrick, and almost raised my hand to
wave.  He looked across the street, and his gaze
passed right through me.  

I leaned forward, and started my sliding traverse
toward him.  I did not know what I would do, or even
what I could do.  The hungry feeling intensified.  I
swore that I felt my mouth start to water.  I didn't
care; reason and rationality had left me when I had
stared at my warm corpse earlier.

The snow felt cool through my feet as I glided across
the yard.  Blades of brown grass sliced through my
insubstantial flesh.  I pumped my legs a little; I
moved faster.

I crossed into Mr. Kindrick's yard.  He had opened his
paper and was idly perusing the front page.  Before I
could check my advance, I moved into him.

Unholy joy flashed into my brain.  I felt the warm and
moist ecstasy of living tissue infuse every flashing
particle of me.  I knew intimately his beating heart
and the metronome pulse of blood.  And within the
rapture, I realized that this was what I had hungered
for.

During those few seconds of immersion, I tasted the
totality of Mr. Kindrick, and knew things about him
that he barely comprehended.  The awareness of muscle
and lymph, of fat circling the abdomen (and narrowed
arteries in his heart) became a sharp injection of
bodily memory.  I knew for the first time the subtle
weight of genitals nestled in gray boxer shorts.  

Mercifully, this lasted only for the duration of the
short trip through my neighbor.  I passed through him,
and encountered the relative blandness of air and
ground.  I fell onto my knees and then slowly
collapsed, splayed onto the earth. 

Mr. Kindrick finished his slow look through the front
page and turned around to head back into his house. 
His slippered feet passed through my chest, and again
I slipped into a cataract of empathic transport.  I
seemed to have had a surfeit of sensation, because the
memory of that has faded into that first contact.

Mr. Kindrick went into his house.  Presently, I
somehow found myself back at my front door, uncertain
of how I actually traveled.  I drifted through the
door, and stretched out on my back on the living room
carpet.  I had no desire to try sitting in a chair and
falling through the cushions, stirring dust and old
forgotten coins.

The experience had left me shaken.  What had happened
to me?  What was that undeniable hunger that compelled
me to fuse with that man?  The appetites of this
existence frightened me, for I have never had strong
cravings.  My life had been comfortably arid; I had
long ago come to terms with solitude.

If my life had been a desert, then my death should be
as dry.  

I lifted my head and glanced at my corpse in the
kitchen.  Still there.  It didn't have the decency to
disappear.  Looking at it wasn't particularly
disturbing, but there was this odd sense of duality. 
It was like a mirror that returned a dead reflection. 


Shame came on like a rising tide.  Guilt over the
hunger, the vampirish thirst for life.  I resolved
that I would not fall into that naked greed again. 
There was nothing I needed so much that I could not
deny.

I decided to amuse myself by walking through things
and exploring the texture of material from the inside.
 The first stop was the bathroom (how strange never to
urinate again).

Moving my hand through a mirror was like dipping a
finger in warm wax.  Impulsively I put my face to the
glass (I thought I could see a bare phosphorescent
outline of my features, but I probably imagined it)
and felt the slick touch of glass give way to the
pasty roughness of plaster and paint.

The porcelain of the bathtub was easy to fuse into,
but there was nothing particularly inviting about the
cold ceramic rigidity.  I avoided the toilet.

I headed back into the living room.  Not using the
door is a time saver.  I wondered what the TV set
would feel like.  I swept my hand through the plastic
cabinet, into the picture tube.  The vacuum inside was
repellent.  The total absence of air, the nothingness,
reminded me of bad smells.

I grew tired.  I knew I was becoming bored with my
trackless non-life.  I could not read a book (I had
tried to pick one off the shelf, forgetful of
permeability), I could not make a cup of tea, I could
not even turn on the damned radio.  (How I longed for
some music.)

I slipped down onto the floor and stretched out.  It
was not quite mid-afternoon of the day of my death. 
The weariness was like a deep ache in my heart.  I
sought sleep, a small measure of surcease.  

Without invitation, the memory of immersion in a
person came back into my mind.  And the smallest
whisperings of want played in my amorphous head.  I
tried to think of other things, of the need for sleep.
 The craving would not go away.  

I thought that to move would at least mute the voices.
 I arose, and drifted to the window.  Through a gauzy
curtain, I saw the midday street scene.  It was a
Saturday, and people would soon be leaving their
houses for weekend errands, a trip to the market,
perhaps catch a matinee at the nearby second-run
theater.  Doors would open, cars would move, voices
would rise and fall. My neighbors would be *doing*
things.

I passed through the glass, the glazing a gentle
quicksilvery tug on my evanescence.  I moved into the
world.  Sound and sight (but neither smell nor taste)
grew into a gentle bath of sensation.  I began to get
hungry.

Purposely I glided down the sidewalk.  The sun had
come out again, and the early fall morning dusting of
snow had started to melt.  I drifted down to the
intersection and stood there, turning around slowly,
taking in the morning.

A sedan came down the street, and collided with me.  I
passed through a fascinating array of textures in the
space of a quarter-second.  Heat and oil and steel and
plastic, the hot gases of combustion, a brief passage
of lit cigarette, the touch of his hand, oh, the touch
of his hand.

That brief taste of the living force heightened my
awareness.  A few hundred feet away, I could sense
some people inside a house, and the flavor of their
existence was like the scent of a savory meal almost
fully cooked, vapors drifting through the air and
locking onto my nose.

Again, it was like a possession.  I closed my eyes and
let the beacon guide me.  Soon I found myself in a
darkened house, and I heard noises I could not quite
identify.  

I drifted through a wall into a bedroom, and saw the
source of the sound, the root of the vibrancy that had
called.

They were a young couple, naked, thrashing in the
final moments of their lovemaking.  He was on top,
muscular back and buttocks rising and descending in
steadily increasing rhythm.  She had her legs wrapped
around his back, her hands spread out to the side, and
grasped strongly by his hands.  The sheets were
tangled up at the foot of the bed, and I could feel
waves of arousal impacting me like heavy surf.

A distant part of my mind recoiled, but the shame at
witnessing a private act was washed away by pure need.

I gathered my will and threw myself on the bed.  As I
fused with the man, I experienced total loss of
rational thought, and became inundated with the
driving force of his passion.  I felt somatic
awareness center itself in the penis and groin, and
the approaching orgasm was a heated rope ripping
through my senses.

As he began to near ejaculation, I rolled over and
fell into the woman, my virtual legs matching her
flesh, my unsolid breasts merging with hers, being
crushed against his chest.  I received the rapid
thrusts, conscious of the juices of lubrication, the
swollen labia, the ripples of contraction in
her/mine/our pelvis.  I gasped and whooped with her,
and we kissed his corded shoulder and sucked the
sweaty flesh.  

When it happened, we heard the sustained grunting of
his climax, became aware of wetness, and that
triggered our own peak.  Total pleasure flooded into
us, a raw, unalloyed torrent of ecstatic waves, and
our vagina contracted forcefully around him, a
muscular hand that squeezed in involuntary rhythm. 
The heat radiated from our breasts in the beginnings
of post-orgasmic flush, and the nipples lengthened and
became stiff pebbles against his chest.

As the moment waned, I was somewhat dazed, and rolled
from the woman, breaking contact.  I moved away from
the couple, who still lay joined, chests heaving from
their exertion.  I drifted away, stupefied in my
satiety.  

As I slipped away, gravity exerted a lighter tug on
me.  I rose and fell in looping arcs as I meandered
through the neighborhood.  While hovering, the
rational brain tried to get synchronized with the
situation.

The drive was undeniable.  The desire to fuse -- the
absolute aching need -- was not something I could
oppose.  From these contacts, I knew that it sustained
me, fed me, kept me alive within my lifelessness.  I
could not resist this, no more than I could resist
breathing (had I still been drawing breath).

And I was the only one who was touched.  There was no
indication that anyone had been aware of my presence
at any time.  To them, I did not exist.  And it was
ironic at that.  For all my years in this
neighborhood, they had not existed for me.  They were
part of the little-noticed scenery, the outside
environment that barely registered.  

And so, over the next few weeks, I got to know my
neighbors.

Jimmy Romero, three houses down, is eight years old,
and dearly loves something called the Power Rangers. 
In his fantasies, he defeats evil robots with karate
kicks and wisecracks.  I have joined him in his
battle.

Sarah Sorenson is a seventy-eight year old widow who
misses her husband.  She feeds her cats, and makes a
weekly trip to the cemetery, and returns spent from
weeping.  I grieve with her.

Mark Tompkins is a twenty-three year old carpenter. 
On weekends, he shoots baskets in the neighborhood
schoolyard, in pick-up games that last for hours.  I
have been with him when he installs cabinets and leapt
with him on long arcing shots for the net.

Meredith Vincent is nine years old and has been blind
since birth.  She goes to a school for the blind, and
loves audiotapes of all kinds of books.  I have
listened with her in the perpetual dark as the
narrator read the good words of Steinbeck and the
adolescent adventures of Nancy Drew.

I felt the pain of Billy Lerner, as he buried his pet
cocker spaniel.  

I shared the joy of Melissa, who was recently married,
and so deeply in the concentrated love of her man that
she instilled a glow that lasted for days.

I moved through them all, an observer both intimate
and far removed.  I touched over a hundred of my
neighbors, and knew them down to the ribbons of DNA. 
I was their ultimate confidant, who learned all their
secrets, and never betrayed a one.  I was the journal
into which they emptied their soul.  I was the heart
that received and cherished it all.

And then, after four weeks and two days, I felt the
urge to return to my house.  There was an dark wagon
by the curb.  The front door was open.  I drifted to
the walk, and I saw them maneuver a gurney outside,
and there was the body of a woman strapped to it.

I had been due back at work the previous day.  And
someone had called and called, and then someone came
by.  That old woman was going to be taken care of,
finally.  It was a loose end that needed clearing up,
and I was glad to free of it.  I had so much more to
see, so many more people to meet.

I prepared to slide away.  But I couldn't move in the
direction I wanted.  I began to slide over to the body
of the old dead woman.

But that isn't me, I shouted in silence.  It isn't me.
 I'm here, and I don't want to go.

Doubt and fear entered my mind.  Was none of this
true?  Had my journey been just the final thoughts of
the dying brain, a time-dilated fantasy of regret and
yearning?

I tried to pull back, but my hand entered my body as
the gurney was lifted into the station wagon.  Slowly
I slipped back into what I thought I had forever
escaped.

And as I fell back into familiar flesh, the fear
ebbed.  I was home, and it was a welcoming and tender
place.  I pulled myself into myself, and it was like
pulling the covers up before a night of good sleep. 
Dreams were ahead, good dreams of rest and serenity,
and no nightmares would intrude.

The attendant reached down with his hands, touched my
eyes, and gently closed the lids.  A brief flicker of
fusion brought me the barest glimpse of pity.  It was
misplaced, I thought.  The death of me was finished. 


__________________________________________________
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-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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