There were no lights, there was no road, no smell of chicken, no radio playing. Some time during its lingering stay on the side of the road in the middle of the desert for the past thirty-some years, the Malibu had become a convertible, it’s roof completely gone, leaving us completely exposed to the elements.

Not that it mattered. We were the elements now.

“Susie.” I blinked, whispered her name, and she sat up, still licking her lips. There was no more blood, no more nightmare gore. She was just Susie again, her eyes bright in the orange glow of sunset. There was no car coming toward us, and the Malibu seemed to know its own way down the desert highway.

“Susie, did you…?” I wanted to ask her if she had seen, if she knew what I had, in that awful, liminal moment between worlds, realized. When she pressed her fingers to my lips, and then kissed me-god, I could taste my cum on her mouth, how could that be? — I understood that she knew, too, had known all along.

She snuggled up next to me and turned up the radio. It was that song again, that same song, singing this will be the day that I die…

“Just keep driving,” she murmured, and I did, steering us ever toward our destiny, on a darkening road to nowhere.

Sacred Prostitute: Teacher

She knew exactly the effect she had on men.

Holly’s power didn’t come from a lipstick tube or a lingerie store-it amused and saddened her by turns when she realized most women thought so. It went much deeper than that.

“How old are you, Brian?”

He was incredibly young. Doe-eyes-big, brown and beautiful-blinked at her as if she were the brightest thing in the room. Looking around the dimly lit bar, older patrons intent on their drinks, the glow from the television just a ghostly shadow in the corner-she thought, perhaps, she was.