SmokeLong Quarterly

With a straight face, the client says he prefers we blow him because he’s worried our cunts have teeth. The name for this myth is vagina dentata. It’s obviously not real. What is real is eurotophobia: the fear of uteri, vaginas, labia. I guess that this is what he has. Or castration anxiety, Melanie says later. Between us, we have a half-major in sociology, another half in lit, one minor in psych. I would have finished mine but what difference does a BA make in this climate?

Melanie offers her ass, but she won’t go half-and-half. She’s hardline with our profits like that. No deals, no discounts; I’m lucky I found her.

He doesn’t want it anyway. Just your mouths, he says. We didn’t come here to argue so we just do as told, knee-highs to the kitchen floor.

He stops us.

Can’t you put your hair up or something? Pigtails? He needs something to hold onto, he says.

I crack my neck toward Melanie. She hates taking directions, says she never gets used to it, says she’s above critique. I can’t admit to her that I enjoy it, feeling led and handled. Useful. If I could, I’d say, isn’t that being absolved of critique? Isn’t it transcendence?

Melanie doesn’t want him watching us primp so we use his bathroom. I split her dark waves straight center with the end of a key and channel my hairdresser mother. I see the violet dyed tips of her fingers, smell the ammonia. After the predisposition to alcoholism, the flat feet, she found time to give me something practical. She became her job to me.

Not my kids, I hope. If I have any.

Melanie calls this look the Pedophile Package: mary janes, pigtails, pleated skirts. Not to them of course. It’s our most common. She markets us as eighteen despite being mid-twenties. She says it’s all a performance, seven veils, smoke and mirrors.

It’s closer to ephebophilia though; we play late adolescents.  Most people who call creeps pedophiles really mean ephebophiles. And I guess I don’t have a problem with them. They easily make three-quarters of our clients. Better us, right?

When we start I know Melanie’s gotten over the pigtail thing because she complies without hesitation. His demands are all the classics. They bore me: Call me Daddy, Kiss each other. Melanie has this way of committing through distance. She has to close her eyes. Sometimes I think I can hear her counting. She pouts her lips cartoonishly like she’s been taught sex by numbers. Times like these I tweak her breast real hard just to wake her up. It’s money, yeah, but can’t she enjoy it with me?

He says, You ready to swallow this load? and Melanie stops. She swats my mouth closed. Says we don’t swallow even though she knows I do. He’ll have to finish somewhere else, she says. She’s loud and deep; she wants to be ugly.

I hate her like this.

We get back in rhythm but he’s focused on me now and Melanie knows it. She tries redeeming herself with excess petting, moans. I can feel her fluttering in my periphery, hot cheeked and ravenous.

He cums in my mouth without warning and habit takes over.

There are illusionists who swallow fresh water with live frogs, fish, snails – gallons’ worth – and keep them alive in their guts for hours. They practice for years stretching their stomachs, regulating their breath. They can coax them out of their mouths on command. They spit them back up. Abracadabra. Look who’s alive.

I wonder if swallowing tadpoles could grow frogs in your stomach, like they tell kids about watermelon seeds. I wonder if there was a time people thought women got pregnant orally. Were there Vikings or Cro-Magnons or half-chimps shooting it in the snatch to avoid the dangers of another mouth to feed?

It’s $150 each all said and done, which isn’t our best rate but what does it matter when it only takes twenty minutes and maybe another fifteen to fix our makeup? He makes a big show of handing me an extra twenty in front of Melanie. We use it to get Big Macs on the way home.

Never again, Melanie keeps saying, grubbing fries in her mouth.

But I see him a few more times alone. I chew tinfoil before we meet. It’s what my mother had used to sharpen her shears before a new client. I can still see her sitting in our living room, gliding an open pair down soft metal, spitting cherry pits into a ceramic cup.