He reached out-slowly-and lay his fingertips on the blue line. For a moment he felt a shock, like the one the man in the bar had given him. But he didn't draw his hand away from the slit the woman held open to him. Under his fingertips he felt the tremble of the blood inside.

Her eyelids had drawn down, so that she looked at him through her lashes. Smiling. "Don't go ..." He saw her tongue move across the edges of her teeth. "There's more ..."

She had to let go of the edges, to guide him. The skin and flesh slid against his fingers, under the ridge of his knuckles. He could still see inside the opening, past her hand and his.

She teased a white strand away from the bone. "Here ..." She looped his fingers under the tendon. As his fingers curled around it, stretching and lifting it past the glistening muscle, the hand at the end of the arm, her hand, curled also. The fingers bent, holding nothing, a soft gesture, a caress.

He could barely breathe. When the air came into his throat, it was heavy with the woman's sweet smell, and the other smell, the raw, sharper one that he'd caught off his uncle.

"See?" The woman bent her head low, looking up through her lashes into his eyes: Her breasts glowed with sweat. Her hair trailed across her open arm, the ends of the dark strands tangling in the blood. "See-it's not so bad, is it?"

She wanted him to say no, she wanted him to say it was okay. She didn't want him to be frightened. But he couldn't say anything. The smell had become a taste lying on his tongue. He finally managed to shake his head.

Her smile was a little bit sad. "Okay, then." She nodded slowly. "Come on."

The hand at the end of the arm had squeezed into a fist, a small one because her hands were so small. The blood that had trickled down into her palm seeped out from between the fingers and thumb. With her other hand, she closed his fingers around the white tendon tugged up from inside. She closed her grip around his wrist and pulled, until the tendon snapped, both ends coming free from their anchor on the bone.

She made him lift his hand up, the ends of the tendon dangling from where it lay across his fingers. She had tilted her head back, the cords in her throat drawn tight.

"Come on ..." She leaned back against the pillow. She pulled him toward her. One of her hands lay on the mattress, palm upward, open again, red welling up from the slit in her arm. With her other hand she guided his hand. His fingers made red smears across the curve of her rib cage. "Here ..." She forced his fingertips underneath. "You have to push hard." The skin parted and his fingers sank in, the thin bone of the rib sliding across the tips.

"That's right ..." She nodded as she whispered, eyes closed. "Now you've got it. ..."

Her hand slid down from his, down his wrist and trailing along his forearm. Not holding and guiding him any longer, but just touching him. He knew what she wanted him to do. His fingers curled around the rib, the blood streaming down to his elbow as the skin opened wider. He lifted and pulled, and the woman's rib cage came up toward him, the ones higher snapping free from her breastbone, all of them grinding softly against the hinge of her spine.

His hand moved inside, the wing of her ribs spreading back. Her skin parted in a curve running up between her breasts. He could see everything now, the shapes that hung suspended in the red space, close to each other, like soft nestled stones. The shapes trembled as his hand moved between them, the webs of sinew stretching, then peeling open, the spongy tissue easing around his hand and forearm.

He reached up higher, his body above hers now, balancing his weight on his other hand hard against the mattress, deep in the red pool along her side. Her knees pressed into the points of his hips.

He felt it then, trembling against his palm. His hand closed around it, and he saw it in her face as he squeezed it tight into his fist.

The skin parted further, the red line dividing her throat, to the hinge of her jaw. She lifted herself up from the pillow, curling around him, the opening soft against his chest. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders to hold him closer to her.

She tilted her head back, pressing her throat to his mouth. He opened his mouth, and his mouth was full, choking him until he had to swallow. The heat streaming across his face and down his own throat pulsed with the trembling inside his fist.

He swallowed again now, faster, the red heat opening inside him.

It was lying on the bed, not moving. He stood there looking at it. He couldn't even hear it breathing anymore. The only sound in the little room was a slow dripping from the edge of the mattress onto the floor.

He reached down, fingertip trembling, and touched its arm. Its hand lay open against the pillow, palm upward. Underneath the red, the flesh was white and cold. He touched the edge of the opening in its forearm. Already, the blue vein and the tendon had drawn back inside, almost hidden. The skin had started to close, the ends of the slit becoming a faint white line, that he couldn't even feel, though he left a smeared fingerprint there. He pulled back his hand, then he turned away from the bed and stumbled out into the hallway with the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

They looked up and saw him as he walked across the bar. He didn't push the empty chairs aside, but hit them with his legs, shoving his way past them.

His uncle Tommy scooted over, making room for him at the booth. He sat down hard, the back of his head striking the slick padding behind him.

They had all been laughing and talking just before, but they had gone quiet now. His father's buddies fumbled with the bottles in front of them, not wanting to look at him.

His father dug out a handkerchief, a blue checked one. "Here-" A quiet voice, the softest he'd ever heard his father say anything. His father held out the handkerchief across the table. "Clean yourself up a little."

He took the handkerchief. For a long time, he sat there and looked down at his hands and what was on them.

They were all laughing again, making noise to keep the dark pushed back. His father and his uncle and their buddies roared and shouted and pitched the empties out the windows. The car barreled along, cutting a straight line through the empty night. He laid his face into the wind. Out there, the dog ran at the edge of the darkness, its teeth bared, its eyes like bright heated coins. It ran over the stones and dry brush, keeping pace with the car, never falling behind, heading for the same destination.

The wind tore the tears from his eyes. The headlights swept across the road ahead, and he thought of the piece of paper folded in the book in his bedroom. The piece of paper meant nothing now, he could tear it into a million pieces. She'd know, too, the girl who played the flute and who'd given the piece of paper to him. She'd know when she saw him again, she'd know that things were different now, and they could never be the same again. They'd be different for her now, too. She'd know.

The tears striped his face, pushed by the wind. He wept in rage and shame at what had been stolen from him. Rage and shame that the woman down there, in the little room at the end of the street with all the lights, would be dead, would get to know over and over again what it was to die. That was what she'd stolen from him, from all of them.

He wept with rage and shame that now he was like them, he was one of them. He opened his mouth and let the wind hammer into his throat, to get out the stink and taste of his own sweat, which was just like theirs now.

The dog ran beside the car, laughing as he wept with rage and shame. Rage and shame at what he knew now, rage and shame that now he knew he'd never die.

I'm a novelist; I don't write short stories. This is, in fact, my only one to date other than a short-short that Ellen Datlow commissioned for OMNI. The Armadillocon people in Austin wanted me to do a reading for my guest-of-honor appearance there in 1988, and I hate reading excerpts from novels, so I had to come up with something. I'd just read an article in The Wall Street Journal about U.S. kids getting into trouble in Mexican border towns, and combined that with some teenage memories of visits to Tijuana-dark hints from the older guys about things much worse than donkey shows. Ellen was at Armadillocon, too, so I gave her the story after I was done with the reading. Alien sex?-I thought that was the whole point. Is there any other kind?

K. W. JETER.

THF JUNGLE ROT KID ON THE NOD.

PHILIP JOSe FARMER.

Philip Jose Farmer was born in Indiana in 1918 but lived most of his life in Peoria, Illinois, until his death in 2009. He was the author of dozens of books and numerous short stories. His first published science fiction, "The Lovers," (a short story, later expanded into a novel) is the first known science fiction tale to portray sex between a human and a non-humanoid alien. He is also the author of what may be the most shocking opening scene of a novel, that of The Image of the Beast (1968), which is certainly about, among other things, alien sex. He won three Hugo awards and was named a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2001.

"The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod" (1968), one of the oldest stories in this volume, may shock fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, but it is doubtful that it will surprise those familiar with the more raw fiction of William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and Junky.

IF WILLIAM BURROUGHS INSTEAD of Edgar Rice Burroughs had written the Tarzan novels ...

Tapes cut and respliced at random by Brachiate Bruce, the old mainliner chimp, the Kid's asshole buddy, cool blue in the orgone box from the speech in Parliament of Lord Greystoke alias The Jungle Rot Kid, a full house, SRO, the Kid really packing them in.

-Capitalistic pricks! Don't send me no more foreign aid! You corrupting my simple black folks, they driving around the old plantation way down on the Zambezi River in air-conditioned Cadillacs, shooting horse, flapping ubangi at me ... Bwana him not in the cole cole ground but him sure as shit gonna be soon. Them M-16s, tanks, mortars, flamethrowers coming up the jungle trail, ole Mao Charley promised us!

Lords, Ladies, Third Sex! I tole you about apeomorphine but you dont lissen! You got too much invested in the Mafia and General Motors, I say you gotta kick the money habit too. Get them green things offen your back ... nothing to lose but your chains that is stocks, bonds, castles, Rollses, whores, soft toilet paper, connection with The Man ... it a long long way to the jungle but it worth it, build up your muscle and character cut/ ... you call me here at my own expense to degrade humiliate me strip me of loincloth and ancient honored title! You hate me cause you hung up on civilization and I never been hooked. You over a barrel with smog freeways TV oily beaches taxes inflation frozen dinners time clocks carcinogens neckties all that shit. Call me noble savage ... me tell you how it is where its at with my personal tarzanic ... involves kissing off dharma and artha and getting a fix on moksha through kama ...

Old Lord Bromley-Rimmer who wear a merkin on his bald head and got pecker and balls look like dried-up grapes on top a huge hairy cut-in fold-out thing it disgust you to see it, he grip young Lord Materfutter's crotch and say-Dearie what kinda gibberish that, Swahili, what?

Young Lord Materfutter say-Bajove, some kinda African cricket doncha know what?

... them fuckin Ayrabs run off with my Jane again ... intersolar communist venusian bankers plot ... so it back to the jungle again, hit the arboreal trail, through the middle tearass, dig Numa the lion, the lost civilizations kick, tell my troubles to Sam Tantor alias The Long Dong Kid. Old Sam always writing amendments to the protocols of the elders of mars, dipping his trunk in the blood of innocent bystanders, writing amendments in the sand with blood and no one could read what he had written there selah Me, I'm only fuckin free man in the ...world ... live in state of anarchy, up trees ... every kid and lotsa grown-ups (so-called) dream of the Big Tree Fix, of swinging on vines, freedom, live by the knife and unwritten code of the jungle ...

Ole Morphodite Lord Bromley-Rimmer say-Dearie, that Anarchy, that one a them new African nations what?

The Jungle Rot Kid bellowing in the House of Lords like he calling ole Sam Tantor to come running help him outta his mess, he really laying it on them blueblood pricks.

... I got satyagraha in the ole original Sanskrit sense of course up the ass, you fat fruits. I quit. So long. Back to the Dark Continent ... them sheiks of the desert run off with Jane again ... blood will flow ...

Fadeout. Lord Materfutter's face phantom of erection wheezing paregoric breath. -Dig that leopardskin jockstrap what price glory what? cut/ This here extracted from John Clayton's diary which he write in French God only know why ... Sacre bleu! Nom d'un con! Alice she dead, who gonna blow me now? The kid screaming his head off, he sure don't look like black-haired gray-eyed fine-chiseled-featured scion of noble British family which come over with Willie the Bastard and his squarehead-frog goons on the Anglo-Saxon Lark. No more milk for him no more ass for me, carry me back to old Norfolk / / double cut The Gorilla Thing fumbling at the lock on the door of old log cabin which John Clayton built hisself. Eyes stabbing through the window. Red as two diamonds in a catamite's ass. John Clayton, he rush out with a big axe, gonna chop me some anthropoid wood.

Big hairy paws strong as hold of pusher on old junkie whirl Clayton around. Stinking breath. Must smoke banana peels. Whoo! Whoo! Gorilla Express dingdonging up black tunnel of my rectum. Piles burst like rotten tomatoes, sighing softly. Death come. And come. And come. Blazing bloody orgasms. Not a bad way to go ... but you cant touch my inviolate white soul ... too late to make a deal with the Gorilla Thing? Give him my title, Jaguar, moated castle, ole faithful family retainer he go down on you, opera box ... ma tante de pisse ... who take care of the baby, carry on family name? Vive la bourgerie! cut/ Twenty years later give take a couple, the Jungle Rot Kid trail the killer of Big Ape Mama what snatch him from cradle and raise him as her own with discipline security warm memory of hairy teats hot unpasteurized milk ... the Kid swinging big on vines from tree to tree, fastern hot baboonshit through a tin horn. Ant hordes blitzkrieg him like agenbite of intwat, red insect-things which is exteriorized thoughts of the Monster Ant-Mother of the Crab Nebula in secret war to take over this small planet, this Peoria Earth.

Monkey on his back, Nkima, eat the red insect-things, wipe out trillions with flanking bowel movement, Ant-Mother close up galactic shop for the day ...

The Kid drop his noose around the black-assed motherkiller and haul him up by the neck into the tree in front of God and local citizens which is called gomangani in ape vernacular.

-You gone too far this time the Kid say as he core out the motherkillers asshole with fathers old hunting knife and bugger him old Turkish custom while the motherkiller rockin and rollin in death agony.

Heavy metal Congo jissom ejaculate catherinewheeling all over local gomangani, they say-Looka that!

Old junkie witch doctor coughing his lungs out in sick gray African morning, shuffling through silver dust of old kraal.

-You say my son's dead, kilt by the Kid?

Jungle drums beat like aged wino's temples morning after.

Get Whitey!

The Kid sometime known as Genocide John really liquidate them dumbshit gomangani. Sure is a shame to waste all that black gash the Kid say but it the code of the jungle. Noblesse obleege.

The locals say-We dont haffa put up with this shit and they split. The Kid dont have no fun nomore and this chimp ass mighty hairy not to mention chimp habit of crapping when having orgasm. Then along come Jane alias Baltimore Blondie, she on the lam from Rudolph Rassendale type snarling-You marry me Jane else I foreclose on your father's ass.

The Kid rescue Jane and they make the domestic scene big, go to Europe on The Civilized Caper but the Kid find out fast that the code of the jungle conflict with local ordinances. The fuzz say you cant go around putting a full-nelson on them criminals and breakin their necks even if they did assault you they got civil rights too. The Kid's picture hang on post office and police station walls everywhere, he known as Archetype Archie and by the Paris fuzz as La Magnifique Merde-50,000 francs dead or alive. With the heat moving in, the Kid and Baltimore Blondie cut out for the tree house.

Along come La sometime known as Sacrifice Sal elsewhere as Disembowelment Daisy. She queen of Opar, ruler of hairy little men-things of the hidden colony of ancient Atlantis, the Kid always dig the lost cities kick. So the Kid split with Jane for a while to ball La.

-Along come them fuckin Ayrabs again and abduct Jane, gangbang her ... she aint been worth a shit since ... cost me all the jewels and golden ingots I heisted offa Opar to get rid of her clap, syph, yaws, crabs, pyorrhea, double-barreled dysentery, busted rectum, split urethra, torn nostrils, pierced eardrums, bruised kidneys, nymphomania, old hashish habit, and things too disgusting to mention ...

Along come The Rumble to End All Rumbles 1914 style, and them fuckin Huns abduct Jane ... they got preying-mantis eyes with insect lust. Black anti-orgone Horbigerian Weltanschauung, they take orders from green venusians who telepath through von Hindenburg.

-Ja Wohl! bark Leutnant Herrlipp von Dreckfinger at his Kolonel, Bombastus von Arschangst. -Ve use die Baltimore snatch to trap der gottverdammerungt Jungle Rot Kid, dot pseudo-Aryan Oberaffenmensch, unt ve kill him unt den all Afrika iss ours! Drei cheers for Der Kaiser unt die Krupp Familie!

The Kid balling La again but he drop her like old junkie drop pants for a shot of horse, he track down the Hun, it the code of the jungle.

Cool blue orgone bubbles sift down from evening sky, the sinking sun a bloody kotex which spread stinking scarlet gash-worms over the big dungball of Earth. Night move in like fuzz with Black Maria. Mysterious sounds of tropical wilds ... Numa roar, wild boars grunt like they constipated, parrots with sick pukegreen feathers and yellow eyes like old goofball bum Panama 1910 cry Rache!

Hun blood flow, kraut necks crack like cinnamon sticks, the Kid put his foot on dead ass of slain Teuton and give the victory cry of the bull ape, it even scare the shit outta Numa King of the Beasts fadeout The Kid and his mate live in the old tree house now ... surohc lakcaj fo mhtyhr ot ffo kcaj* chimps, Numa roar, Sheeta the panther cough like an old junkie. Jane alias The Baltimore Bitch nag, squawk, whine about them mosquitoes tsetse flies ant-things hyenas and them uppity gomangani moved into the neighborhood, they'll turn a decent jungle into slums in three days, I aint prejudiced ya unnerstand some a my best friends are Waziris, whynt ya ever take me out to dinner, Nairobi only a thousand miles away, they really swingin there for chrissakes and cut/ ... trees chopped down for the saw mills, animals kilt off, rivers stiff stinking with dugout-sized tapewormy turds, broken gin bottles, contraceptive jelly and all them disgusting things snatches use, detergents, cigarette filters ... and the great apes shipped off to USA zoos, they send telegram: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CLIMATE AND WELFARE PROGRAM SIMPLY FABULOUS STOP NO TROUBLE GETTING A FIX STOP CLOSE TO TIAJUANA STOP WHAT PRICE FREEDOM INDIVIDUALITY EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY CRAP STOP ... Opar a tourist trap, La running the native-art made-in-Japan concession and you cant turn around without rubbing sparks off black asses.

The African drag really got the Kid down now ... Jane's voice and the jungle noises glimmering off like a comet leaving Earth forever for the cold interstellar abysms ...

The Kid never move a muscle staring at his big toe, thinking of nothing-wouldn't you?-not even La's diamond-studded snatch, he off the woman kick, off the everything kick, fulla horse, on the nod, lower spine ten degrees below absolute zero like he got a direct connection with The Liquid Hydrogen Man at Cape Kennedy ...

The Kid ride with a one-way ticket on the Hegelian Express thesis antithesis synthesis, sucking in them cool blue orgone bubbles and sucking off the Eternal Absolute ...

* Old Brachiate Bruce splice in tape backward here.

William Burroughs is the author of the wild classic, The Nova Express, from which the popular term heavy metal is derived. This and most of his works deal with the Nova Police, drug addiction, macho homosexuals, sodomy, terrifying alien invasions of Earth, LSD-purple prose, contempt for and disgust with women, and an absolute amorality. Whether he's a genuine or an ersatz genius, only time will determine. His apocalyptic low-life visions and inventiveness fascinate me, though their one-note repetition in his later works also weary me.

The work at hand is a pastiche-parody, my tribute, inspired while rereading William Burroughs's Naked Lunch. I thought, What if he, not Edgar Rice Burroughs, had written the Tarzan stories? Result: this short piece embodying the spirit of William's style and content in his peculiar mode. I had fun doing it, but may the Lord of the Jungle forgive me.

PHILIP JOSe FARMER.

HUSBANDS.

LISA TUTTLE.

Lisa Tuttle was born and raised in the United States, spent ten years in London, and now lives in a remote part of the Scottish highlands. She began writing while still at school, sold her first stories while at university, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the year in 1974. Her first novel, Windhaven (1981) was cowritten with George R. R. Martin. Her most recent work is the contemporary fantasy The Silver Bough (2006). Tuttle has written at least a hundred short stories, as well as essays, reviews, nonfiction, and books for children and young adults.

I. BUFFALOED.

MY FIRST HUSBAND WAS a dog, all snuffling, clumsy, ardent devotion. At first (to be fair to him) we were a couple of puppies, gamboling and frisking in our love for each other and collapsing in a panting heap on the bed every night. But time and puppyhood passed, as it tends to do, and as he grew into a devoted, sad-eyed, rather smelly hound, I found myself becoming a cat. It is not the dog's fault that cats and dogs fight like cats and dogs, and probably (to be fair to myself) it is not the cat's fault, either. It is simply in their nature to find everything that is most typical in the other to be the most difficult to live with. I became more and more irritable, until everything he did displeased me. Finally, even the sound of his throat-clearing sigh when I had rebuffed him once again would make my fur stand on end. I couldn't help what I was, any more than he could. It was in our nature, and there was nothing for it but to part.

My second husband was a horse. Well-bred, high-strung, with flaring nostrils and rolling eyes. He was a beauty. I watched him for a long time from a distance before I dared approach. When I touched him (open-palmed, gently but firmly on his flank, as I had been taught), a quiver rippled through the muscles beneath the smooth skin. I thought this response was fear, and I vowed I would teach him to trust and love me. We had a few years together-not all of them bad-before I understood that nervous ripple had been an involuntary expression not of fear but of distaste. Almost, before he left me, I learned to perceive myself as a slow, squat, fleshy creature he suffered to cling to his back. We both tried to change me, but it was a hopeless task. I could not become what he was; I did not even, deeply, want to be. It was not until we both realized that such a profound difference could not be resolved that he left me for one of his own kind.

I didn't intend to have a third husband; I don't believe the phrase "third time lucky" reflects a natural law. With two honorable, doomed tries behind me, and having observed the lives of my contemporaries, I concluded that the happy marriage was the oddity; in most cases, a fantasy. It was a fantasy I wanted to do without. I still liked men, but marrying one of them was not the best way to express that liking. Better to admit my allegiance to the tribe of single women: My women friends were more important to me than any man. They were my family and my emotional support. Most of them had not given up the dream of a husband, but I understood their reasons, and sympathized. Jennifer, bringing up her daughter alone, longed for a partner; Annie, single and childless and relentlessly aging, wanted a father for her child. Janice, who worked hard and lived with her invalid mother, dreamed of a handsome millionaire. Cathy was quite explicit about her sexual needs, and Doreen about her emotional ones. I had no child and didn't want one, earned a good living, seldom felt lonely, had friends for emotional sustenance, and as for sex-well, sometimes there was a lover, and when there wasn't, I tried not to think about it. Sex wasn't really what I missed, although I could interpret it that way. I yearned for something else, something more; it was an old addiction I couldn't quite conquer, a longing it seemed I had been born with.

There was a man. Now the story begins. It can't have a happy ending, but still we keep hoping. At least it's a story. There was a man where I worked. I didn't know his name, and I didn't want to ask, because to ask would reveal my interest. My interest was purely physical. How could it be anything else, when I'd never even spoken to him? What else did I know about him but how he looked? I watched how he moved through the corridors, head down, leading with his shoulders. He had broad shoulders, a short neck, a barrel chest. Such a powerful upper torso that I suspected he had built it by lifting weights. Curling black hair. An impassive face. On bad days, I thought it was noble. On good days, he looked irritatingly stupid. I did not seek him out. I tried to avoid him. But chance brought us together, even though we didn't speak. I wondered if he had noticed me. I wondered how what I felt could not be mutual, could not be real, could be, simply, a one-sided fantasy; an obsession.

Pasiphae fell in love, they say, with a snow-white bull.

One day I went to the zoo with Jennifer and her daughter. Little Lindsay was thrilled, running from one enclosure to another, demanding to know the animals' names, herself naming the ones she recognized from her picture books.

"Tiger."

"Tiger! Lion!"

"Ocelot."

"Ocelot!"