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AVP, Part Four

By Tully

I

Entities surrounded me like cloudy miasmas of liquid in a glass. Pleasure, pain, anticipation and dread, all comprised my current eternity state. We swam into each other. Every part of me became everything else. Everything else became part of me. It’s warm in here. My shoulder aches. “Time to get up, Tully.” No, it’s so warm. I shan’t leave! “Tully, get up!” Don’t leave me, beautiful creatures!
“THAT’S IT. C’MERE FOOTIES!”
Electric neurotransmitters cascaded up the synapses between my feet and my head. Cataleptic laughter burst from my lips. Sunlight. Indigo blanket upon my person. Cloudy windows. Cruddy sofas. Cora’s fierce visage.
I rose and winced upon suffering an ache in my right shoulder. I must have rolled over onto something sharp while I struggled against Cora’s tickling.
“Tully, listen to me,” she growled cooly, “those assholes jumped the gun and set up shop at the salon already. I have to get over there as soon as possible, and you’re coming with me. You’ll eat once you’re there. C’mon, get your shoes! I’m not fucking around today!”
I pulled myself up. Everything felt like tight-hugging cocoons and warm metamorphic stasis. The pain in my arm snarled louder than any other ache. Otherwise, I was calm.
“Where are my keys!?” Cora cried in frustration. “Arggh! My head! Why did I drink so much!?”
“Orrrrr-raaaa! Uh-stair! Mup-stairs! Oh-leevithout-meeee!”
“That little bitch,” muttered Cora, “Tully, come with me.”
I followed Cora up some godforsaken spiral staircase that left so few square inches of floor you could hardly climb it. Morning light flooded the hall from the windows. Doors comprised most of the wall opposite the windows.
“I’m in here!” Marla called from ahead of us. “Don’t open the door!”
“Marla,” accused Cora, “where are my car keys?”
“…I have them. You have to take me with you.”
“No, you’re wasting my goddam time. Give me my keys.”
“Cora, just listen to me, please. Andre and the twins took off early this morning but they told me to stay behind. I need to be at the salon to help coordinate the thralls.”
“D’spyu!” cursed Cora, “If they needed you, why would they tell you to stay here?”
Marla remained silent.
Cora sighed. “So, what are we supposed to do? It’s 11 o’clock in the morning. The sun is out. You can’t travel outside.”
“I can travel but you guys have to carry me out.”
“NO, gimme my goddam keys right now!”
“Cora,” said the creaks and squeaks behind the door, “you have to trust me. I’m stepping inside the box now. The keys will be inside the box with me. You and Tully have to carry me out to your car. Then, once I’m in, I’ll hand you the keys. Deal?”
“Fine! Whatever! Now, let’s go! I got three certifiable maniacs running my salon! I gotta get over there before they ruin me!”

‘
II
The way we came last night looked surreal in the daylight. Trees sheltered the road beneath them with fingers of shade. Sunlight encroached upon everything else. Cora drove marginally above the speed limit. Marla’s box sat upright in the seat behind me. No one spoke until we exited the road.
“Oh, shit,” I said, “I’m still wearing the same clothes from last night.”
Cora looked at her own shirt. “I am too. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
I nodded. “Just trying to stay professional.”
She turned off of the forest road. “There’s nothing professional about what we’re doing today. It won’t matter how clean your clothes are. Hell, you won’t even have to be sober, which is good ‘cuz I’m gonna need a tranquilizer for this headache!”
I quieted upon hearing Cora’s distress.
“Because, E’yas my witness, we’re gonna be slammed with thralls by the time we get there.”
“Thralls?”
“Yeah, you were there for that last night? They’re plan?”
“I wasn’t sure what they were talking about.”
“Thralls are like Qapaqara slaves. Sometimes, Qapaqaras can control them and make them do things sometimes like sitting down, or talking nonstop.”
“Puppets on strings.”
“You know what I mean? Problem is that I don’t know how many Qapaqaras will be there besides Andy, Raven, Bianca and bitch in the box back there, not to mention how many fucking thralls we’ll have to deal with.”
“There are others,” explained the box behind me, ”who will send us the thralls.” The box’s explanation coincided with a sudden sting in my shoulder.
“Is that so?” snarled Cora, “Y’know, you guys put a lot of thought into this plan without telling me.”
“I’m sorry, Cora,” said the box, “We had your best interests at heart.”
“We’ll see.” We turned onto the noisier main street. “Tully, all you have to do is give them what they ask for. They will confuse you. They will sound strange when they speak. They may even try to take advantage of you. Again, I don’t know who will be there. If anyone asks you to do something you don’t want to do, you have my permission to tell them to fuck off.”
“Tully,” quoth the box, “just do for them what you would do for me. You don’t even have to talk. In fact, you probably shouldn’t talk at all unless you have to. Just concentrate on what you do and you’ll do fine.”
Marla’s assurances warmed me up inside.
“Oh. My. God.” Cora deflated.
I saw it, too. Legions of cars blocked every spot. Actually, the salon itself assimilated with the shadows from neighbor buildings. We pulled into the employee parking lot in the rear. A sign on the front facade said, “Reserved!”
“Leave me in here,” urged the box, “I’ll join you guys after nightfall.”
Cora unbuckled her seatbelt and popped the door. “Let’s rock.”
-
III

Okay, everyone has a bad day once in a while. Even if you love your job, a bad day makes you curse the moment when you chose your profession. Oh, I got paid. I made more tip money that night than I could have expected from two years worth of hours. And yes, I’ve had worse days in my life, and those circumstances had excluded the exemplars of my sincerest affection. This time, there were feet. Oh, yes. Feet everywhere! Feet as far as the eye can see!
However, the women whose feet I serviced complicated everything I know about my life, my sexual identity, my friends, and my dubious career opportunity. They were worse than bad porn stars. They were disingenuous, ambiguous, Insincere, awkward, deadpan, brain-dead, paranoid, mute, noodle-y, unwilling, uncomfortable, exhaustive, and boring purple-eyed zombies!
Our designated staff sprinted laps around the island of salon seats in the center of the lobby. Bianca filed her nails at the register and babysat the lobby of quiet, blinking zombies like a can of sardines. Raven and Andre both hustled like red, cherubic snowmen. Andre disappeared occasionally and flooded my docket, both of which, E’yas my witness, allowed him to guide the thralls and fuck with us. Cora yelled at the more animated and loquacious thralls and shoved them back with a broom. I remained at one station and accommodated the revolving door of D’s women.
Seven hours of this shit bored a hole right through my skull.
Valarie was first. Her “operator” either interacted with me through the thrall or distracted him or herself with whatever else these sp’yuda do with their lives. Valarie herself spaced out every time she finished a thought. I anticipated pauses after each of our interactions. I predicted these pauses with a high success rate. I asked her repeatedly how long she wanted me to massage her. Several blank-out resuscitations later, she gave me my next instructions. She took an hour.
Julie scrutinized with silent morbidity everything I did. The ends of her legs flopped like noodles in my hands. I wondered if she was anemic and required immediate medical attention. Her eyes pulsated with the only detectable life in her body.
Chloe’s feet smelled like foul, cheesy insoles. Unpleasant images arose which further writ shall not divulge. She also took her white-freckly time before she let me go. I took my first break after massaging her. Cora fed me an apple, almonds, and a roast beef sandwich.
I actually kinda liked Chtara. She kept tickling me at opportune moments. I suspected that either Marla or Bianca may have controlled her to give me a breather. The image of Marla playing this virtual reality game from her box and giggling helped me smile afterwards.
Subsequent customers wiped away these smiles. If D sculpted her feet, then monsters crafted her one-liners. She spoke slower and asked rhetorical questions repeatedly. Everything she said required a response from a script in the Qapaqara’s head. I did not know what each one was.
Esmerelda had toenail fungus.
A second Julie talked over my head and berated me for not paying attention. Her legs flipped and flopped between al dente and overcooked noodles. I kept confusing her with the first Julie. The first Julie only held up her money and said “Forty,” which means “forty-minute massage”. The second Julie said how much, how long, where she had been, and what she had done.
Jeanine wore lipstick, eyeliner, and conspicuous bite marks around her neck. She kept rushing me to finish so she could have a cigarette. Her feet were fat and fit only for standing at the counter to get cigarettes.
My first nameless customer drew attention to how unimportant the customer regards the server, and vice-versa. Receive instructions, do the thing, and take the money. The prostitution of my station precluded every defense I could raise for myself.
Zelda broke free of her Qapaqara’s control halfway through the massage. She kicked me away and yelled for help. Andre and Raven rushed in to carry her away. Cora applied disinfectant and a wet towel to a scratch that one of Zelda’s toenails left on my cheek. I learned later that eventually she calmed down. Apparently, my room was just outside the range of their radio-controlled possession bullshit.
My second nameless customer actually was friendly but her lack of a name made everything awkward. She also somehow knew my name. I briefly basked in the warmth of a congenial relationship with a total stranger. Somewhere, somehow, there are more people just like me whose names I never will know. She thanked me for the pedicure and said “bye, Tully!”. I said “buh-bye” like a goon. I badly wanted to know her name,
Nameless number three topped them all. Her feet stank of low-tide and old, fermented garbage. The inflection of her voice raised each time she ended a sentence, or half of one. Her legs encumbered my arms like rolls of ground pork. Her instructions hovered around three different tasks, and each time I moved to task one, she insisted I move to task two or three instead. She kept criticizing and commenting how when we were done that she was gonna tell Cora about how poorly I served her. And, she did not leave a tip. Fuck these people.

-
IV

The sun had set and business had lightened up. Fatty-fat-fucking-fuck-this-chick just had left and I had taken another break. The mirror revealed a quarter-moon crescent scab on my left cheek. I just had lathered my hands with berry soap.
“Tully, you’re gonna hate me in a second,” Cora said from behind me, “you got one more customer. She just walked in and asked for you.”
Brrrup! Brrrup! Brrrup! Brrup! Shhrip! I dried my hands off and sighed. “Yeah, gimme a second.”
“How you holding up?”
My crow eyes blinked. “I’ve been better.”
“You work hard, Tully. Don’t work yourself to death!”
“Yeah.”
“C’mon, I got a beer waiting for ya when you’re done. Marla should be sticking around, too.”
Marla! Her name awakened a passion within me. “To be continued.”
I stepped out front and found this rotund planetarium with beautiful green eyes and flip-flops (in early spring!) waiting for me. “Can I help you?”
Locks of her hair spidered out in dreads. A miasma of swirling intricacy adorned her crown. “Could I get a world-famous pedicure by Tully?” she smirked.
Ego, ego, ego, ego. “Certainly!” I gesticulated towards the parlor rooms.
We isolated ourselves. Green summoned a green capped plastic bottle from a satchel she had slung over her shoulder. “Could you use this, please?”
Both the rigidity and abruptness of everything she did signaled to me that she was another thrall. “Certainly,” I repeated hoarsely.
Green peeled off her flip-flops. “Busy day?”
I chortled ironically. “Yes, quite busy.”
She chuckled. “Yet, you can still laugh.”
“Not really.”
“A day without laughter is a day not worth waking for.”
I unscrewed the cap. The absent brush beneath the cup bewildered me.
“Where is the brush?”
“Oh, there is no brush. Just daub a little bit on your finger and spread it on my nails.”
I squeezed out a dab on my index finger. An aroma of blended cinnamon, cloves and Granny Smith apple, surprised my nostrils. The polish clung to my finger more like speckled gel than paint.
Green’s toes were wide and monkeyish. Lecherous delight graciously welcomed the gaps between them! I pressed the polish into her big toenail and twisted it. Much of it clung to the nail on first contact. I squeezed out another viscous drop from the bottle. The aroma was sweet and inescapable!
Green asked me “you ever suck your own toes when you were a kid?”
The novelty of the question teased more laughter from me. “No, actually.”
“How come? I thought everybody did that when they were a kid.”
“The thought just never occurred to me that that was a thing to do.”
I spread out the residue of polish on her big toenail. Both its length and breadth required many drops of green stuff to actually cover it.
“I used to suck my own toes,” Green replied a touch defensively.
I said nothing. A conversation with these airheads was like trying to follow a porn script that I didn't know.
“Sometimes,” she chirped, “I used to not stop until I had sucked all ten of them. I used to have really bad obsessive compulsive disorder when I was a kid. But that’s an ignorant thing to say because obsessive compulsive disorder actually is a debilitating disease and I’m quite functional. What strikes me even more about toe-sucking is that millions of years ago our ancestors probably used to suck their own toes. They knew that they had these little doodads on the ends of their wassits and that if they stuck their wassit in front of their fazool that they could insert their doodads!”
I readied myself for a rhetorical brick wall.
“Early humans were Id-minded maniacs whose only jobs were to survive, mate, and reproduce. They had billions and billions of pleasure pathways in their brains, and those survived because they used to fire them constantly! Who’s to say that some of these weren’t just for toe-sucking? If people today still suck their toes, then their ancestors also must have!
“I do it sometimes because I like it. It doesn’t hurt anyone. It doesn’t require anyone. It takes a minute and I feel better afterward! It’s so relaxing! Then, if I could get someone else to do it, it’s so much better! I can concentrate on work, school, other bullshit. It’s like a part of my day that I can’t go without!”
The longer she spoke, the more aware I became that her topic centered around the same toes to which I had applied this green pasty stuff. How many mouths had these toes lectured? My heart demanded more breath.
“It’s so easy, too,” Green went on, “All you really have to do is open your lips, and with a push and a pop, you’re in heaven! Some boyfriends I’ve had in the past couldn’t fit it in their mouths. Others just plain wouldn’t ‘cuz they didn’t like feet. But by this point, feet became my standard to determine who I could be with and still be myself.
“Look at my big toe! I haven’t cut my nails in a couple months. A lot of guys would get creeped out by the length. Mind you, it’s clean but they all thought that I was some kind of hawk or seagull, like I’d swoop in to catch a trout from the river!”
Her imagery made me laugh again. I found myself liking this girl even more than Chtara or nameless number two. She had spoken way more than either of them. Even an idiot with a type-written script in front of her had to read the whole thing. Actually, I had been listening so closely that I neglected to move on to her other toes.
“I used to surprise people, too. I’m very spontaneous with my feet.”
My lower, primitive brain started to take over.
“It’s not enough to expect or anticipate. It’s how people respond that counts.”
Then, she raised her foot and promptly inserted her big toe in my mouth.
“See? Had I done that earlier, you would have resisted.”
I halted the pedicure amid this new development. The green paste had melted against the roof of my mouth and dripped around her toe to my tongue. The sweet, saccharine taste made me salivate.
“It’s okay, you can suck my toe. I want you to suck my toe.”
I sucked her toe and swallowed the sweetness it delivered. Suddenly, everything I had suffered up to this point began to dissipate. My senses resurged. Joy returned.
“Marla and the coven all are good friends of mine,” Green explained, “Marla specifically summoned me to brighten up your day in any way I could.”
Suddenly, her voice changed. “Tully, my dear muffin top, my darling poppet.”
Toe in mouth, I glanced up and shook at the sight of purple eyes in the place of green. My shoulder stung bitterly.
“When Cora lets you go for the night, come meet me in the red room.” When she finished speaking, the green eyes resumed.
“My name is Areba Spinner,” she said in her normal voice, “I’m sure we will meet again someday. Until then,” she popped her toe back out, “Ciao!”
Areba swept the straps of her flip-flops back between her toes and exited.