Ellis Wiens Vs. Kerr Martin

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The authors are ready to fight.
Now their fate rests with you, the readers.

Read both stories carefully before casting your vote. Each author has responded to the above prompt, but their interpretations may differ wildly. Consider how they approach the challenge and which story leaves you with the stronger impression.

The poll will be active for one week. May the best author win.

Stranded on the crags of the cove, I know somehow I’m not alone. My muscles cramp, clambering up weathered rocks to escape the waves, a hungry tide rising. Waves I swam against for what felt like hours. The sun keeps me company, blistering my skin with a long goodnight’s kiss as it sinks in the west. I envy the crustaceans, how they shed their shells. The burns hurt so bad I pretend this skin isn’t my own.

Night. The wind chills me to the bone. I notice the faintest glow from the ocean below. I take care not to cut my soles on the jagged stones as I climb down for a closer look. Cyanobacteria. A brilliant bioluminescence stretching across the coast, like stardust in the sea. I see jellyfish, Atlantic sea nettles maybe, pulsating. The smell of salt and geosmin, or something about the scenery, strikes me as familiar. Pangs of déjà vu.

My oldest memory, so old it’s indistinguishable from a dream, comes to me. Just vague sensations, an aquarium of cnidarians, that fresh scent of seabreeze. Strange how liminal it is, predating even any impression of my parents.

I forgot who I was for a second. Let me get my bearings. I’m—oh God, what’s my name. Must be dehydration.

Think. I grew up in Tampa Bay. I remember the hurricanes, Ian and Milton, reckoning with death in the storm cellar from an early age. I remember Aurelia, my highschool sweetheart, how right after graduation we proposed to each other at the same time, laughing and crying over it for minutes on end. We had no need for tradition. We were so close we could almost read each other’s minds. Two years later the flood of 2040 took her from me. Not even a body to give me closure. We had to pry ourselves from each other snuggling in the buff to go about our days that morning. If only I knew I’d never see her again.

Lost five years to drinking. I turned my life around working aboard a fishing vessel. No bars to tempt me out at sea. That’s how I wound up here. Took a risk tacking against the storm to prove to myself I was brave. We were capsized and swept away.

God, don’t leave me.

Something else stirs in the water, cold light arranged like a crack of lightning. I tilt my head slightly and it shimmers iridescent, warping into a womanly shape.

Come.

I’m hearing things. Seeing things as well apparently. It shifts into an undulating pink, a sex-flushed bosom. Whisps of tentacles, hair parting from her restful face.

Aurelia.

I masturbate, rough, ripping cracked skin as if the friction will stifle my shuddering. I cry out, ejaculating.

I can’t hold on. I fall in and into her embrace. The enzymes sting only for a moment.

Everything numbs. I watch the jellyfish contract their bells, silent death knells. I remember the land, the love I lost, like it was all a dream.

Title: Lust

‘Just lie with me.’

For the first time in life I was stable. A husband and father who was relied on instead of a son who wasn’t considered well adjusted enough to do. To be. I had keys in my pocket that opened something I owned, bills with my name on them, a garage full of tools I had painstakingly learned how to use. There were toys under the couch, dishes in the washer, a wife asleep upstairs who expected me to be beside her in the morning.

The house was quiet. So quiet that I heard the first laugh immediately.

Whispering and laughter. The smell of skunk danced alongside a hiss of amused distaste from beneath the door to the front room. The clinking of glasses. Something scratching against the floorboards.

I recognized each voice, three of them, and the three of them were me, yet no longer I.

‘Where have you been, Kerr?’

Living.

A glass knocked softly against another and music swelled from a jukebox I didn’t own.

‘Dying.’

I’m not the same anymore. I’m not you anymore, any of you. I’m better now, whole.

‘Dull. But you remember excitement, don’t you? The heat. The want. Being young, dumb and full of cum.’

The door seemed farther away when I reached for it.

‘Why don’t you come in? It’ll be just like old times. You used to be so…free.’

Michael remembered every woman as a mouth, a curve, a filth on the fingers. Kai wanted arms around him, legs tangled with his, any warm body to see him through the cold Scottish winters. Aaron craved teeth marks and bruises. Violence so ugly that it proved the night had happened, violence that branded the encounter in blood.

Behind the door, someone breathed heavily through their nose, and there was a soft moan of a thousand teasing touches. Right then, confronted, I wanted all of them at once. Every mouth, every inch of skin, every slick opening, until wanting became indistinguishable from suffocation. Teasing, tasting and being consumed. Dissolving like I used to dissolve into nights where carnal appetite filled the hole loneliness left behind.

For a second I could almost see it through the wood. Bodies knotted beneath strobing neon light. Wet mouths and bare backs. Someone impersonating my laugh and another calling my name from the deviant mass, needing me, wanting me.

‘Just lie with me.’

The bodies followed me back to bed. Smoke. Sweat. Sour, sinful perfume. I lay beside my wife and felt the crowd shifting beneath the mattress, skin dragging over skin, mouths opening in the dark, lips and tongues teasing and tantalizing. My chest tightened and my heart pounded. Michael called it hunger, Kai called it love and Aaron told me not to stop. I had to stop. If anything meant anything, I had to stop. The thirsting mind of a sick youth couldn’t move in. Not to this house, my family’s house, between the walls of my capability.

In the dark beside my wife, a voice that knew my body better than anyone whispered, ‘Just lie with me.’

I did.