Chapter 7: The Backside Banquet
The kitchen was a symphony of chrome and cruel fluorescence. Manuel stood at the griddle, his back a wall of silent disapproval, as he slapped down pancake after pancake. They piled up on a platter, a leaning tower of golden-brown carbohydrates.
“Sit,” Delilah commanded, pointing to a heavy wooden chair at the breakfast nook.
Barney sat. Before he could adjust, she was turning, her vast caftan billowing. Then she descended. Not into the chair opposite him, but onto his lap.
The breath left his body in a soft woof. Her weight was immense, a warm, crushing settlement of flesh and bone. His thin thighs disappeared beneath the rolling hills of her posterior. He was pinned, enveloped in a cocoon of leopard print and coconut oil.
“Comfy?” she trilled, not waiting for an answer. She reached for the platter Manuel slammed down on the table, dragged it closer, and forked a massive pancake. She drenched it in syrup until it pooled like an amber lake on the plate. “Open.”
She held the fork to his lips. Syrup dripped onto his shirt. He opened his mouth. The sweetness was overwhelming, the texture soggy. He chewed mechanically.
“Good boy. You need meat on those bones.” She took a bite herself, chewing open-mouthed. “My last companion, Ricardo, he was a bull. A stallion. Could lift me clean off the ground.” She sighed, a wistful sound that ended in a low, bubbling rumble deep within her gut. A moment later, a long, resonant PAAAAAAAAARP vibrated through the layers of caftan and into Barney’s own body. The smell, warm and yeasty, bloomed around them. She didn’t acknowledge it. “But he lacked finesse. You… you have nervous hands. I like them.”
She fed him another syrupy mouthful, then another, a relentless conveyor belt of sweetness. He ate until his stomach ached. She ate twice as much, the occasional gassy commentary punctuating her monologue about lovers past.
When the last pancake was gone, she wiped her sausage-lips with a napkin and studied him. Her eyes, sharp and assessing, lost their nostalgic haze.
“Breakfast isn’t over,” she announced. “A different course.”
With a grunt, she pushed herself up off his lap. He gasped at the sudden return of blood flow. She walked to the clear expanse of the kitchen table and swept the platter and plates aside with a crash that made Manuel flinch. Then, gripping the edge, she bent forward.
The caftan was pushed up, revealing the back of her tree-trunk legs, the shocking panorama of her thong-clad behind. The fabric, already strained, disappeared into the deep cleft. With a practiced hook of her thumbs, she tugged the sides of the thong down, past the tremendous curves, until they sat like a surrendered flag around her mid-thighs.
She presented herself. The two pale, monstrous orbs of her buttocks, dappled with cellulite like the surface of a foreign moon, were now fully exposed to the cool kitchen air. A faint, musky scent, different from the gas, a scent of body heat and morning ritual, joined the aromas of syrup and coffee.
“Come here,” she said, her voice muffled as she looked back between her own legs.
Barney didn’t move. His mind was a white blank.
“Barnaby. The meal is getting cold.” It was the tone one uses with a recalcitrant pet.
His legs, weak and prickling with pins and needles, carried him forward. He stood behind her, his face level with the shocking vista.
“Your breakfast,” she said. “Eat.”
He stared at the crease, the dark, intimate furrow he was meant to approach. He felt a terrifying, detached curiosity flicker through the numbness. The resilience she had mistakenly identified in him was just this: a capacity to absorb the absurd, to fold it into the fabric of his being because the alternative was screaming.
He leaned in. The skin was warm. He pressed his closed mouth against it.
“With feeling, for Christ’s sake!” she barked, and pushed her hips back, forcing his face into the soft, giving flesh.
He opened his mouth. The taste was salty, complex, unmistakably human. He moved his tongue. A low, approving groan echoed from her chest. Schlorp. Schlack. The sounds were wet, intimate, absurdly loud in the silent kitchen. Manuel had vanished.
He did it. He licked and kissed the offered flesh, his mind traveling somewhere far away, to a grey library where things were quiet and smelled of dust. His body, however, remained, performing its duty on the altar of her need.
After an eternity, she straightened up, pulling the thong back into place with a snap. “Adequate,” she pronounced, turning. A smear of his saliva glistened on her inner thigh. “Now, entertainment. The living room.”
She didn’t let him walk. She pulled him by the wrist, a child dragging a ragdoll. The living room was a tomb of white carpets and lurid velvet paintings. She collapsed onto the largest sofa, a monstrous sectional, and yanked him down beside her. Then, immediately, she shifted, arranging herself so she was once again seated in his lap, her back against his chest. Her weight sank him deep into the cushions. She reached for the remote. A movie flickered to life—one of her old, poorly-shot features, where the synth soundtrack was king.
“This was my golden era,” she sighed, settling. Her head tilted back onto his shoulder. “Watch.”
He couldn’t see the screen. He could only see the top of her head, the over-processed blonde hair, feel her body rise and fall with each breath. And then she began to fart. Not the grand, theatrical releases of before, but a series of small, damp pffts and bwips that punctuated the dialogue on screen. Each one a tiny seismic event against his thighs.
She shifted, turning her face toward his. “Kiss me,” she whispered, her eyes on the screen where a younger, slightly less inflated version of herself moaned.
Her lips descended on his. They were huge, spongy, tasting of syrup and a waxy lipstick. She didn’t close her eyes. She watched her own performance as her tongue, thick and relentless, pushed into his mouth. It was less a kiss than an occupation. Glurk. Schlick. Her tongue mapped his teeth, his palate, in a wet, exploring slide that went on for minutes. She broke only to breathe, to murmur, “See the camera angle? Flattering,” before diving back in.
Hours passed. The movie ended. Another began. His jaw ached. His legs were numb. Her gaseous emissions continued, a constant, low-level commentary. She occasionally fed him sips of warm gin from her glass, the alcohol doing little to cut through the fog of her presence.
The sun moved across the room. She never let him up. When he squirmed, her hand would clamp down on his thigh, nails biting. “I’m comfortable,” she’d say, and resume the open-mouthed kissing, a weird, possessive mimicry of romance.
As dusk painted the room in shades of orange, she finally, mercifully, fell asleep against him. The snoring started, a rattling chainsaw purr. The credits rolled on the fourth film. In the flickering light, Barney stared at a velvet painting of a weeping clown. His entire world was the crushing weight, the smell of gin and body and old perfume, the echo of wet sounds in his mouth. He was not just a witness now. He was furniture. He was soil. And in the silent core of him, beneath the layers of shock and compliance, a cold, hard seed of something else began to form, waiting for its turn to grow.