Chapter 2

Wednesday was groceries day.

At some point in the long past, he didn’t remember when, there had been a reason for him to pick that day, and only that day for buying his weekly necessities, though this reason too he no longer remembered.

Wednesdays just felt right. Perfectly spaced between the drabness of Mondays and the kookiness of Fridays. Like all good things, they stood right in the middle, the healthy cornerstone of the workweek, and on this day—Wednesday—the world felt alive, but tame. Unthreatening.

Safe. It just felt safe.

Not that he needed to expose himself to the elements so frequently, every week. Once every month would have sufficed, given that he ate very little and consumed frivolities even less often. Somewhen in the past, too, he had changed his routine from buying groceries from once every month to once every week. As with his choice of Wednesdays, the exact reason for the change eluded him, but sometimes...

... when he stood next to her...

... it all seemed a bit clearer. «She is so pretty.»

He stood idly by the door. Time slowed down whenever he was near her. «Pretty.» Perhaps it wasn’t the best word for her. «Hot!» Ah, yes. This one was.

The clerk stood quietly, peacefully behind the counter, her curly hair flowing like cascades of gold into her weary shoulders—wide, elegant, graceful shoulders brought down if not by the weight of her generous breasts, then by the sheer brunt of her boredom.

It wasn’t a perk he had considered when moving to that country. Not consciously, that is. To his tastes, women there looked so much better. Women who would be models elsewhere, in that country were usually no more than school teachers, bus drivers, street cleaners, and ... convenience store clerks. «No. No!» He had to remind himself every time. «Don’t look at her. Don’t think about her. No... »

It was hard for one’s mind to not drown in such a sea of good-looking gals. In terms of beauty, competition among all the ladies seemed so stiff even the cutest of them wouldn’t think too highly of themselves, and he wouldn’t be too surprised if many of them probably faced their own loads of insecurities and rejections, thus becoming easy (or easier) targets for men with just enough flame in their hips and heft betw’n their legs to make a play for these damsels’ hearts.

Alas, he wasn’t such a man. He had no heft, he had no flame. None. «Waste.» He remembered how long it took him to simply gather enough grit and look a woman in the eyes for the first time. «Waste. Such a waste.»

The laughter and mockery that ensued taught him well the painful lesson: never look at a lady. Never address them. Never even think about them. Ever. «A waste. Just a waste.» He lowered his head and averted his gaze, then, and walked past her. «Don’t bother them. Don’t bother with them. Even less so with yourself. You’re waste. You’re just ... waste.»

Even then...

He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He often stopped between lanes to have another peek. After years of practice, he had become quite the expert at being a lurker without being a creep. He didn’t want to make pretty girls uncomfortable, no, but he also wouldn’t deny himself the simple pleasure of seeing them. «The sight of a pretty woman is a right.» He often recited in the sad recesses of his mind.

That girl on the counter was the night-to-the-day contrast of the one he’d just purchased, and not only because she was skin-and-bones real. She was slim and delicate, hardly weighing more than nine and a half stones, and without a drop of tomboyishness in her whole demeanor, at least at first glance.

She was an all ‘round princess, yet she still carried that humble look, that honest demeanor of someone who hadn’t had all good things of life handed to her on a silver platter—beauty notwithstanding.

She looked approachable. Down-to-earth. Human.

Human and real. Just like him.

«I wonder... »

Sigh

«I just ... wonder... »

How much better the world would be from her point of view. Good parents, good country, great friendships, solid foundations. How would it feel to have people always smiling when they looked at you? Treating you like a human being? Showing you always the better angels of their natures? «Nice. So nice and sweet.»

A most wonderful thing it should be. A world less dry. A life less menacing. An existence where he would be safe anywhere, any day, not just on Wednesdays, and not just there, in the frigid outskirts of the earth.

Yes. It sure would be nice. It sure would be sweet.

Drop

Drop

Drop

One by one, he placed his things in the cart. «Maybe I’m not such a loser.» He smiled, if only briefly, as he looked at the goods. There was pasta and rice and beans with some nice sauces, and whole pounds of decent, chewable meat, even some bottles of juice imported from his native land, of all places. «Umm.» He weighed one on his hand. «This thing’s a luxury here, yet back in my land it would be cheaper than water.» Considering how hard sanitation and plumbing came around, this wasn’t just an empty hyperbole.

His land. His country. His old, bastard place...

Blam! He startled himself by throwing the bottle a little too hard in the cart. The sound of heavy metal wringing woke him from some nasty thoughts. Immediately, he lowered his head, afraid that some soul in that abandoned yard would notice him, and strolled away between the aisles, hoping to disappear from any imaginary gaze.

People could sense the weird and the disease in him. It was clear to anyone with the right brain: just as rich, beautiful people exuded the smell of ease and the aura of success, he oozed the stench of failure, the fetidness of inadequacy.

He didn’t resent the fact that he was made to fail and want, however. Not exactly. What truly bothered him, what ate him from his insides, was the slumber. It was the fact that failure and shame should drag on for so long! «Mother nature could take me now. And quick.» He thought, he begged, moving along the isles without picking a thing. «But mother nature isn’t merciful.» Like most mothers aren’t.

How long would he have to go on in that life? Fifty, sixty, seventy years, perhaps? Shivers. The thought of a long life was asphyxiating. «A torture.»

Indeed. It was enough to make him scream to himself, to bang his head against the walls of his apartment, never to be heard. Not that he resented this either. Never being heard. He preferred it this way, that no one heard him and no one knew of his problems. It was much better than someone knowing, but not bothering with it. Or worse: someone knowing and enjoying it.

He felt a swelling behind his eyes. «Oh.» Ba dum! Ba dum! He felt his heart apace, his skin ablaze, sweat steaming on his forehead. There was a slight unease of breath followed by a hazing of the sight. He shut his eyes, counted to three, ten, twenty ... but the pain didn’t go away. Not this time. Not as easily as it used to. The longer he faced it, the worse it got. The last time he’d had it this bad

...

No. No point in thinking about it.

So long ago, so far away. Back, back in his old land.

In public. It involved slurs and beating. Lots of beating.

And blood. And some broken teeth. «Por favor ... por favor... »

He felt as if the world had been stolen from him and all his senses had been scrambled. Feet to the clouds, head back in hell.

In his mind, he got the image of those shelves toppling over like dominoes, all because of him and his clumsiness, his uncurable, detestable carelessness. «The manager will come.» He felt his heart swell and explode. «They’ll scream at me.» The pain and the migraine got stronger, his shivering hands gripping the rail of the cart like they wanted to tear it off and bend its iron.

You alright, mate? A voice came by his side. Almost scared the soul out of his body. You alright, mate...?

...

He looked around. There was no one there. “Umm.”

The place remained empty and the shelves... Phew They were all in place. “Oh.” He touched his forehead and felt its warmth on his sweaty palm. “Again.” That wasn’t the first time he’d heard voices. Voices where there were none.

Perhaps looking at the beautiful cashier would make him feel better.

...

It did. It actually did.

And it was weird. In moments like these, he usually didn’t like thinking about women. It usually brought back uncomfortable memories, and it was useless, simply useless to dream about something he knew he would never have.

That girl, however, made him feel special. Warm and sweet. Like a lover and a sister. Or a goddess who’d turned mortal just for him.

He didn’t feel too intimidated by her. Was it because she seemed poor like him? Sitting behind that counter, looking bored and hopeless, tending to that empty store to buy up a semblance of a better future, as working-class folks usually did? Or was it because she was young, but quiet, acting so beneath her looks?

You should go talk to her.

That voice. That annoying voice in the back of his mind. He closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to physically expel it from his skull. «No.» He reasserted himself with his own voice. He was not to commit the same disaster, the same painful blunder ... from so many years ago.

Chicken. Vermin. The voice uttered with a grin. Waste. You really are a waste.

With the swelling a little worse behind his wet, trembling eyes, he turned the cart and strolled aimlessly to the very back of the market, with nothing else to buy. The calm and the ease, so briefly returned, were now quickly faded.

His head was heavy and aching, and his heart racing to the point of pain, the pressure growing as he realized that, romantically or not, he would have to meet that girl regardless. «Come on. You’ve done this already. Many times, even.» He tried forcing a smile, being positive. A tsunami of vicious thoughts, though, bombarded him at every turn.

Vermin. Vermin. Waste. Their dreadful, careless grins...! You’re waste. Just a waste.

Maybe he shouldn’t leave. Maybe he couldn’t. He would set up camp in that store and live there like a ghost, a homeless apparition. Not that anyone would notice. Not that anyone would care. «Fuck.» The word exploded in his skull, hurt his bones with every blast. «Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.» Like a death roll inmate, he marched to the counter, trying his best to not look at his executioner.

To not look at her.

To not bother her.

To not ruin her good day, her good mood with his presence. Beauty was something too precious to be tainted by his being. This was, in a way, his only way of caring for a woman: the farther he got from one, the more invisible he made himself to her, the better.

It was a nice and fair relationship: like a vampire, silent and covert, he fed on a woman’s beauty without her noticing it, leaving her always and ever alone, thus sparing her from the smear of his glances, the disgust of acknowledging his existence. Though that girl did not know it, she made the world a much better place just by existing and being beautiful, for her abundance of blessings trickled down into his empty chalice of a human being.

«I love you.» He thought, growing a hunchback as he put the groceries on the counter. She might have been looking at him. He wouldn’t know it. «I could be feeling less stressed by not coming out here so often. But I do. I come. I leave the house. All because of you, beautiful stranger.»

He raised his head. Phew! She was not looking at him. Mechanically, as if the job had become one with her instincts, the woman tallied up the prices, one by one, and laid the produce carefully on the other end of the counter. «Oh.» Her eyes too, he just now noticed, were aggressively green. «Wow.» Almost two big emeralds dimming out every other light in the place. «Gorgeous.»

She barely looked at him directly, but treated him instead with the casual disinterest of a bored-out-of-her-mind teenager who had no terrible worries in her life, but no great joys either. «Here, » he pondered, «she doesn’t have to worry about a thing.»

This pondering made him feel another pinch in his heart. Sometimes it was easy to forget just how clean and tidy everything in that country was, to the point that even a mundane, desolate store in the middle of the cinder shone to him like chrome. «Nobody suffers here. It’s like paradise does exist, but it’s meant only for them.» He felt hurt, a bit resentful, and muttered something to himself.

“Sorry?” The cute clerk leaned forward. “Did you say something?”

He staggered. Deer on the road about to be run over. “Uhh ... err...” He stammered his way through meager words. “N-no. Nothing.” He counted the bills and left as soon as the change was handed to him.

Sometime later... «I don’t know. I wish she, like, said something.»

Perhaps she could have asked whether she’d seen him before. Perhaps she could have commented on the fact that he bought groceries regularly there, same time, same day, every week without fail. Perhaps ... perhaps... «I don’t know.»

Something. Anything.

Stupid. Selfish. He should be glad none of it happened. The best thing for the woman, indeed, was to say nothing, and he knew it very well. «Yes. But still... » It hurt. It was good, it was fair that his existence wasn’t acknowledged, but still...

It hurt. It hurt quite a lot. «Why can’t I do a bloody thing?!» He hit his head with his fists, thrashing the bags as he carried them back to his cove. «You stupid little shit!»

A lone car, rarest of sights, almost ran him over as he crossed the streets. Came out of nowhere and disappeared as if it had never existed. «Fuck.» As he landed on the other side of the street, he realized, with great sadness, that he was still alive. «Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck... »

That doll couldn’t arrive soon enough.

Boobs. Breasts. Titties. Knockers. Shakers. Sucklers. Milkers. Gazongas.

He’d spent half the day looking at them, and they weren’t still half of all the mommy tanks he’d have to gaze upon until the day was dead.

He stretched out long and lazily in his chair. It could get tiresome working with the same thing all day long, day after day in the week, all four weeks of the month, for months and months on end until there were no more months left to waste. «’Tis what I can do.» He reflected. «’Tis all I know. I guess it could be worse. So much worse.»

Playing with pictures all day, building beautiful posters and covers and raunchy works. Many of his clients used to write speedy-pence romances to be sold abroad for peanuts a pop, and sometimes he got the occasional big fish, or had to work with such particularly nasty requests that clients were pretty much willing to pay him whatever he asked. «If not me, » he reasoned, «who?»

Not enough psychos left in the world, it seemed.

He looked at the screen and admired the sumptuous cleavages shining there. The women were all nubile beauties with overdeveloped, lactating breasts, their dresses stained by the overflowing milk, their naked figures dripping with hot, thick mommy cream. “I need you to make them all milk.” His client had specifically instructed him. “Breasts. All ‘em tits. Big tits, all lactating. The dresses almost tearing up, you know, ‘cause ‘em tits so big! Really hot. Some them, really nasty tits, huge baboongas. I want ‘em tits naked, shooting milk. Not all pictures. Some images, nasty tits covered. Some images naked, big tits free. Y’er go’it? I tell which picture which. You cover tits and you not cover tits when I tell ya, a’kay? Very fine. You can name price. I pay for first work, just one project, a’kay, with ‘em tits out, then we see if we continue plan, a’kay?”

There were really strange, uncommon types asking for beaks all the time, but he mostly didn’t mind them, quirks and all. So long as they paid, all clients were equal. «It would be nice, though, to make money without having to work for it.»

To be born an heir. Oh, yes. That would have been the sweetest life: to be born beautiful, from a great family, attending top schools, dating all the princely girls there. To know that all the problems in life would be taken care of because he was a spoiled-as-hell golden boy of heaven, the luckiest sperm in the grand lottery of wombs. «I wish I were spoiled.» He sighed, returning to work after a long sip of bad black goo. «Life sucks when you’re not.»

The work was partially finished. To be added still was all the shine and polish. He placed a few effects on the tits, making them gleam like sweat, like droplets of morning dew on their soft, velvety skins, and then went to work on their pores, their skin tone, adding rosy bits and specks to their most delicate areas, like the cheeks of a woman blushing after a compliment, making it seem as if the ladies were especially nubile and hot, very fertile, like a princess about to be deflowered by her gallant knight, or a female baboon shaking her swollen nethers at her prospective groom.

Countless times he sucked his lips and bit them very lightly, his mouth getting drier as the hours mounted. The skirts of those nubile vixens were just short enough to give the viewers the impression they saw something they weren’t supposed to. A tantalizing window to paradise, more erotic than nudity outright.

Their hips, legs, and rears were just as he liked them: wide, thick, and meaty. Those were healthy, strong teenagers brimming with fertility, good wombs ready to produce great babies, their tight and unblemished sexes inviting big, unwieldy hammers to whack their fruitful innards full of life.

His member got softer still, as tiny and inelegant as a dried-out, shriveled shrimp, as he thought of the kinds of men who could have such young beauts on their arms. «Men who are the total opposite of me.»

His eyes swelled, and the pressure in his head got distracting, if not painful, to the point he found himself struggling to focus. As it happened, the combination of eleven nigh-unbroken hours of work and a lifetime of sexual incontinence wasn’t too great a recipe for one’s mind.

He got out of his chair, his sex making a very, very, very small tent on his loose shorts, and headed into the bathroom.

Pants down. Cock up. Hands down. Jerk, jerk, jerk...

He hated the mirror in front of him. Every time he got a glimpse of himself in it, he felt he could rip his dick out in anger. Thus, he closed his eyes, bent his head low, and tried to imagine instead the man he would have loved to see in that reflection. The man he wished he’d been born as. The man every woman would kill to have in their arms.

He felt the sweat running down his cheeks. His breath was uneven, his heart apace. His head was almost exploding and his brain nearly seeping through the cracks of his skull. “Oooh!” Eyes gently rolling. “What ... what...!”

In the porn flicks of his mind, he imagined not himself, but other lads fucking his women. Big, hulking, hairy muscle-bound stallions teaching those uptight little sluts a lesson. He would imagine their orgasms and their fountains of squirt. Rows of women standing in line, waiting to be seeded by every single one of those tireless bisons.

He would imagine this one glorious, beautiful male, his body sculpted in marble, his face carrying the smile of an effortless, weightless life, fucking rows and rows (and rows and rows (and rows and rows (and rows and rows... ))) of ladies, each and all to a fainting orgasm, one after the other passing out, collapsing under the sheer exhaustion and elation of the mere penetration by his giant member, his ungodly tool shattering their pearls into a gushing, quivering mess. “Oh, what...” He rolled his eyes and moaned: “What a man!”

He milked himself onto the mirror. Splat! Splat! Splat! Pitiful threads of translucent white goo, barely semen, more like a dick sneeze, not an ounce of the virility expected from a real specimen of his gender. He rubbed off the remains of his sex, trying to coax more of that paltry paste from whatever was left inside his flabby tool. Alas, that sad dribble was all his cold worm could muster.

When hardened, his member was only a little longer than his palm was wide. Not so much a penis as simply foreskin wrapped around a pinky. Thus, his ejaculate was suitably just as pathetic. Splat ... splat ... splat...

He watched the paste slide down on the mirror. The contrast couldn’t have been more hurtful: that slug of frustrated manhood in the mirror versus the powerful man-bull in his mind, the image of his mighty studliness fucking his harem of mares ever so vivid, burning so brightly as the bonfire of a pagan god of fertility. And next to it, the dead, wet charcoal that was his wet, drab, sad penis resting on his palm. «Eu sou tão patético.» He wanted to spit at his own image. «Tão miserável!»

He had come when he had come. And when he had come, it was not a squirt, not a dribble, but a fountain, a whole damned dam breaking loose. The beastly god roared like a lion, thundered like a bull, and his load was enough to make a woman full for the rest of her life. Like with no other man (or band of men), he had stretched her beyond the limits of even her filthiest fantasies and made her experience more pleasure in a single thrust of his stallion rod than all the pleasure she had ever felt with all lovers that had come before.

Many lovers. All losers. Every last one of them washed away by the potent torrent of her steed.

Boooom...!

Blaaast...!!

So it was seared in his mind, the picture of a giant bull in the shape of a man ejaculating oceans in the womb of his conquered lover. The ejaculation of a natural-born leader. The sexual apotheosis of a god incarnate.

And next to it, the petty little dribbling of a flabby, kiddie dick. When all was said and done and his sack felt empty like a popped-up blister, no more than a hollow and dried-out piece of skin hanging from his crotch, the boy was left with the bitter task of cleaning up his mess.

Sad. Disgusting. Pathetic. The words bounced in his skull. Though he was aware of them, he wanted not to think about them. Or about anything at all.

Sad. Disgusting. Pathetic. Ridiculous. His hand wiped the mirror, pieces of damp toilet paper clinging to the glass and sticking to his fingers.

Sad. Disgusting. Pathetic. Ridiculous. Repulsive. He tried focusing on the meandering, undulating motions of his hands and arms, leaving the words back and deep within his mind, tucked away, buried low, pretending that his thoughts were never there.

Sad. Disgusting. Pathetic. Ridiculous. Repulsive. Repugnant. But they were. By all gods’ mercy, they were. Sad. Disgusting. Pathetic. Ridiculous. Repulsive. Repugnant. Unworthy of life!!

He came out of the bathroom, death and disease clinging to his skin like a plague, and sat again on his desk, pale skin looking ghoulish under the dead light of the screen. He took one deep breath and exhaled a long, defeated sigh. «Merda.» He was horny again. «Fuck!»

His release had given him no release. Like a castaway who drinks the salty waters of the sea, that false taste of satiety had only rendered him thirstier. «Fucking ... hell!!» He beat his head. «Fucking hell in all fucking’s fuck!!» The pressure in the back of his eyes had returned, and grown so strong he needed to squint, squeeze, and scratch his face every second just to set his sights straight and his thoughts clear. «Kill me. Kill me now.»

To want to die. To kill oneself. Two different things. Different things that stressed just how... «Useless. Useless. Useless. Useless. Useless. Useless!!» He really was.

To kill oneself. That was an action. It required strength. Courage. All the more so depending on the method. Now, to die, to simply die, that was easy. People did it all the time, for it was natural, it was just as Mother intended. To die, one simply needed to be alive. That’s it, that’s all. Be alive and you will sure be dead. Someday. Somehow. But a sure thing no less.