Femme Fatale : A very short story *

July 20th, 2020

Awake Goy

By RED FOX

This was originally submitted as a comment under the heading: ‘A True Story: So Help Me God.’ Good stories of 500-1000 words are exceptionally rare. This is one of them. Here we have a gothic horror story which resembles a prose poem. It could have been written by a disciple of Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovcraft.

FEMME FATALE

by Red Fox

Only a few weeks ago, before the Covid-19 lockdown, I picked up this gorgeous gal in a downtown bar in San Francisco. I was smitten at once by her sexual allure. She sat at a table by herself, her smoky eyes playing over me with cynical disdain, her raven black hair reaching down to her waist like a hangman’s cloak.

I was hypnotized by those eyes and sucked into their dark unfathomable spaces.

Crossing her long legs, clad in black skintight leather jeans, she crooked her finger at me and beckoned me over to her table.

I fought the mad impulse to obey, and sat where I was, determined not to give in to this sultry siren. Suddenly she flicked her tongue out at me, in tiny little spasmodic flicks, just like a sex lizard. I gave in at that point. I rose, staggering over to her table like a graveyard zombie.

She spoke no word. She rose at once and we left the bar together in secret conclave. She hailed a cab. We arrived at her apartment in a rundown part of the city.

In we go . . . and up three flights of purple shadowed stairs. A horrible tenement building stinking of urine and human feces. Condoms strewn all over the place. I want to vomit . . . to turn on my heel and run.

It was hopeless.

She grips my wrist with talons of steel and leads me into her sumptuous apartment.

A total contrast to the grimy stairwell. Soft maroon carpets everywhere. Antique furniture. Rare books on the occult on every shelf. A four-poster bed with crimson curtains in the palatial bedroom.

I won’t go on. Words fail me. I am a moth dancing in flames!

We made mad passionate love all night. She was the Ultimate Lover, schooled in all the amorous arts of the Orient . . . her long flickering tongue, her lizard tongue, doing things to me that no human female had ever done to me before. I was transported to regions divine, on a cloud of nirvana, never to be forgotten.

At dawn I fell into blissful sleep and slept maybe ten hours.

When I woke, she was gone.

I found myself in a dirty room . On a filthy bed. Alone.

On the stained sheets lay a shrivelled body bag made from lizard skin. It was her sheath, the disguise she had worn as she walked about the world looking for her victims.

She was one of Them — THEM! — one of the Space Lizards from beyond the Milky Way in a distant galaxy.

I have sought her long and listlessly in subsequent days, but I have been unable to find her in this doomed city of darkest night. Human females no longer interest me. They leave me cold.

All I do now, day and night, is long for my lost extraterrestrial love — my alien sweetheart — the Lizard Lady of my dreams.

Here I am now . . . sixty years later . . . an old man in another city whose name I cannot pronounce. I stand at the bar, waiting. Waiting for what? I don’t know.

I shut my eyes . . . I open them . . . the mist clears in my mind. I am sharp again. Suddenly alert. Knowing something extraordinary is about to happen. My palms prickle with anticipation.

I am alive again!

. . . She sits at a table by herself, her smoky eyes playing over me with cynical disdain, her raven black hair reaching down to her waist like a hangman’s cloak.

I am hypnotized by those eyes and sucked into their dark unfathomable spaces.

Crossing her long legs, clad in black skintight leather jeans, she crooks her finger at me and beckons me over to her table . . .