SmokeLong Quarterly

He had her pinned to the back seat, expressing his love.

Do you love me? she whispered in his ear. Do you, do you, Jimmy Dale, do you love me?

His only response was to love her harder, faster, because he knew true love came at the top of a young woman’s lungs, and he wanted Sherry Jane to love him loud and several times. Like a screaming primal hyena he wanted Sherry Jane’s love.

Oh God, Jimmy Dale, do you love me, do you? Please tell me you love me, you’ll love me forever.

He began to love her forever, because that’s what she wanted, and Jimmy Dale wanted Sherry Jane happy, so happy, happy enough to let him love her whenever and wherever he wanted, but especially in the backseat of his black ’67 El Dorado, because that was his favorite place to share his love.

He began to love her with her right foot behind her right ear and her left foot thumping the roof of the black ’67 El Dorado. He loved her in a way, he was sure, no woman had ever been loved before. She dug her claws into his skull and screamed Jimmy Dale Jimmy Dale Jimmy Dale! and he tried to love her even harder and deeper but he was getting tired now. He was happy that her love had come to her but he was scared too, because she wouldn’t relinquish her grip on his head. He felt her claws penetrate his cranium and touch his brain and he began to have visions of Sphinxes flying at him (he didn’t know they were called sphinxes, but he’d seen them on TV and knew what they looked like), sphinxes laughing and waving their claws and flapping their wings and swishing their enormous tails like cats about to pounce.

Baby? he tried to say, but Sherry Jane couldn’t hear him over her own screaming.

Jimmy Dale Jimmy Dale Jimmy Dale! she screamed, over and over and over. He knew now she loved him as she had loved no other. She began to engulf him; he was buried between her thighs and his whole head, now peeled like a grape, was in her mouth. He wanted to pull out and explain that he hadn’t meant to give love this good, that he’d underestimated his love power, but his head was in her belly and his lower body had disappeared into her nether regions and his blood was on the soft leather seats where she’d rent him in two. Completely inside her, he decided, if he ever escaped, he would rein in his massive love. Never again, he decided, would his love be unleashed.

When she had finished him she climbed into the front seat and turned the key and the big Cadillac engine fired and roared and she fishtailed away and drove like a mighty rushing wind back to her house and ran in and told her sister, breathless, pointing, heaving, giggling Look what Jimmy Dale gave me!