Finally, He Gets It

DON'T LET THE DOLEDRUMS FOOL YOU

Tempting Goodness for Outdoor Meals, boasted the advertisement. Vera studied the package for margarine with big gray eyes. It gave her ideas, but then she remembered that time in April. She had prepared Jell-o topped with whipped cream in a bowl and had waited for Jim to come to his bed. Once he appeared, coming out from his study just down the hallway, she had begged him to sample one of the ten delicious flavors over her vagina. He became furious with her.

"Vera! What's gotten into you?"

He had done it again, had made her feel ashamed. He had called her "perverse".

"You've got some nerve calling me names, Jim Woodward, as if pussy for dessert wasn't the very thing men dream of!"

"A w-what?!" Jim had reproached in stutters, until she promised to wash her pretty mouth out with soap.

She came out of the bathroom a half-hour later in her blue cotton bath robe and a yellow towel wrapped around the russet-brown locks cascading upward into a thick funnel reminiscent of an African Queen.

Going back to blow-dry her hair, Vera could see Jim eying her in the mirror and Jim's boner was poking out of his red and gold checkered pajamas that he had changed into. He was anxiously sitting on his bed in privileged confidence.

_That ungrateful beast of mine,_ she had thought. _What happened to the man I married? What happened to the boy who used to feel me up during our movie dates?_

Vera had grown tired of those missionary style thrusts and the glazed eyes that looked right through her. She had slid into bed and austerely refused his advances. Jim reached from his separate mattress and pulled her to his arch in anger. Vera threatened to kick him and he let go with a sigh and punched his pillow. After a few seconds of additional protest, Jim gave up and went to sleep.

Jim had always been a charmer to look at, such as this evening in his new charcoal suit with the red and gold tie that she had bought him for his birthday the previous November, but he was a frigid lover.

Even now, into their fifth year of marriage, he was a rack of nerves in bed. If she rubbed his hard bony manhood before coital penetration, he would get excited and ejaculate all over her unloved pussy. Her sepia-cloistered flower of evil would sit like a cuttlefish until God-fearing Jim rolled over and fell asleep.

She had begun to enjoy doing it herself. Her fingers had become her only joy in marriage, save for big half-peeled cucumbers and the spin cycle on their washing machine.

Jim was a missionary-style hack. When he came home drunk after weekend men's night poker games he was a stinking bore and would probe her pink silk-panty-covered ass uninvited with his flaccid little meat slab until passing out into a dull roar.

Sometimes during those alcoholic nights he would get rough with her and bruise the soft creamy lip of her pink clitoris with his poorly aimed thrusts. If not for the pain and discomfort, it would be a welcomed change to their stud-bitch bedside manner, in which she often felt like a robot-sex-doll enslaved to their little suburban home in the middle of Flint, Michigan.

Vera could not get pregnant. This had added to her depression of late and in consequence their doctor had recommended lithium. She had been on it ever since, going on three months now, but the stuff wasn't working. She had seen Dr. Von Franz for a second opinion.

Everyone in town was afraid of Dr. Von Franz because he prescribed alternative medicine based on his research in the Amazon Rainforest of South America. Everyone was afraid except her Aunt Clara and the Hippolyta Group, a society of women of which her aunt was a member. Jim's side of the family was strongly opposed to such "pagan blasphemy and hooliganism", and Jim forbade Vera from having anything to do with Aunt Clara or Dr. Von Franz.

The recollection deflated her as she prepared the evening meal. They were having Tom and Liz over for a dinner party. Tom was Jim's friend from work and Liz was Tom's wife. Tom and Jim were engineers at General Motors.

It was a June Saturday in the year 1956. Jim had allowed her to return a few books at the public library and now she was skimming the color pages of a National Geographic.

Advertisements had taken over her women's magazines, attempting to control her through male-dominant subliminal messages. They wanted to keep her tractable and tame. They wanted her to tell Jim to buy things so that in turn she felt indebted.

Vera, like Liz, was a stay-at-home wife. Vera's mother had been a Rosie the Riveter during the war making tanks and ammunition shells and Vera had practically spent her childhood at the factory. She had dreamed of becoming a scientist like Marie Curie but had married right out of high school.

A few years her senior, Jim Woodward had been captain of the baseball team. Some slugger he was now. He and Tom went golfing some weekends, which was the only time that either of them stroked their wood, Vera gathered—they were both raised Catholic. Liz was a Presbyterian. Vera was Methodist.

But Vera _had_ visited her eccentric aunt, who had introduced her to the even more eccentric Dr. Von Franz. A man approximately in his early forties, Von Franz wore small round glasses and had receded, short, curly white-blond hair.

His office was filled with oddities: shrunken heads, creepy-crawlies in jars of formaldehyde, long, hand-carved pipes and blow guns, and exciting black-and-white photographs of Amazonian witch doctors and similarly unimaginable things beyond the scope of Vera's 1950s America.

After a strange examination involving pungent, oddly scented pipe smoke and exotic pan flute music playing in the background, Doctor Von Franz prescribed her something called ayahuasca, which she was to administer orally from a beaker only during a full moon.

"Only joking, of course," he had said, "unless you're into Awajún witchcraft. But don't overdo it! This stuff is potent!"

Today, the Saturday of June 28th, the moon was full in the daylight, although barely noticeable within the bleu celeste, and despite Vera's fear of acting strangely during their dinner party, she had anxiously taken her first dose. It was a leap year, after all, and anything was possible. Maybe tonight was the night.

THE PARTY'S IN THE KITCHEN

"Honey! Tom and Liz are here! Could you come out here for a second, dear?"

"Be right there!" Vera shouted casually as she placed the knife on the cutting board. She went out to greet their guests. "Hello Liz, Tom! Glad you could make it!"

Liz was wearing her blue plaid dress, which made Vera think of Scottish Highlanders, to fit her scrawny body like a package and Tom was handsome in his charcoal gray suit and red checkered tie (boringly similar to Jim's casual ensemble). Liz was a blonde beauty with squinting blue eyes. Tom was stocky and athletic and slightly shorter than Jim, at five foot eight. He had dark brown hair, cut short into a crew and beginning to recede. "You look lovely, Vera," said Tom, kissing her on the cheek. Yet Tom was keenly aware that something was amiss with Vera—she could see it in his troubled green eyes.

She and Liz went to the kitchen while Jim and Tom vanished into the study.

"Here, what can I help you with?" Liz said. She had placed the brownies on the counter while Vera was setting the white wine inside the fat little Frigidaire.

"Almost got it," assured Vera. "The roast is in the oven. I just need to finish preparing the salads and..." She looked at Liz from across the island. "You have such lovely hair."

"Thank you," said Liz, blushing. A beautiful smile lifted her face. "I can't seem to do very much with it, so I just let it hang. Yours is so flexible. I'm jealous."

"Don't be! You have a lovely head of hair." As Vera said this she began to picture what Liz's private little forest was like, in contrast to her own modest little woodland, and suddenly she turned her eyes away in shame. But Liz did have a fine figure, and her vanilla calves shone under the sunlight beaming in through the kitchen window.

"I would love to spank your delicious bottom with a carrot," Liz said, or at least Vera had imagined that she said. Perhaps the drugs were kicking in. The doctor had said that it would not take long.

"Hmm?" Vera asked, surprised. "Did you say...you want to...spank me with a carrot?"

Liz burst into a giggling smile and put her soft hand on Vera's arm. "Are you alright, Vera? I could barely understand what you just said."

But Vera was not alright. She was terrified.

There was a satyr with black cloven feet and sienna-colored wool for legs crouched down on the kitchen floor and he was balancing a golden wine cup on his penis while holding himself up with his human arms stretched back, and he was looking right at her with a crazed, expectant look. Standing about three feet tall, he had a black and reddish-brown horse's tail and a white beard and thick brown curly hair on his black goat-horned head and his eyes were golden with slit-shaped pupils.

Vera emitted a guttural moan and glanced at Liz with fear-swollen gray.

"What is it, dear?" asked Liz concernedly.

"Nah-n-n..." she answered, shuddering in trepidation.

For a moment, Vera settled back and continued fixing the vegetables. She was careful not to lose focus, not to turn her eyes. She was not going crazy! She was not! The roast would be done any minute now. She had responsibilities.

When Vera looked back at Liz to study her reaction, she saw a naked blonde body chopping the carrots. Above a bronze torc necklace with an engraved equine motif was Liz's head. Vera closed her eyes and snapped her own head to clear the impure fantasies flooding her mind and then took another look.

Everything was fine except... And then Vera began to scream.

"It's humping my leg!! Get it off!! Get it off!!"

Vera was hysterical. 'She's having some kind of panic attack!' thought Liz.

"Heeeelp!! Oh!! Help me!! I've gone craaayyzzee hee hee..."

Jim rushed into the kitchen, soon followed by Tom, and apprehended Vera. He shook her by the shoulders.

"What's wrong with her?!" wondered Tom.

"I don't know!" Jim answered in a fluster. He frantically checked his wife for cuts or burns as he struggled to contain her.

"I-I don't know what's happened!" relayed Liz defensively. They hadn't bothered to ask her. She, too, was aghast. It had all happened so suddenly, and because nothing rational had transpired between them, she was worried for Vera. "We were just..." _What's gotten into her? Has she lost her mind?_

"Here!" bellowed Jim. "Help me! Let's...take her to the study!"

"Ahhhh!! Ahhh!!" Vera was still screaming like a wild banshee as Jim and Tom carried her into the hallway and they couldn't get her to stop. She didn't seem to be entirely conscious.

"But shouldn't we...call a doctor?!" reasoned Tom.

"No! I don't know!" Jim vociferated. "What if they have her committed? I can't just have her locked up in a loony bin, now can I?!"

"I reckon not!"

"Tom, dear, maybe we should call her doctor!" said Liz as she followed them to the study. "If it's her medication, he should know what to do..." "Right, the medication..." Jim said absently before checking his wife's skirt pocket. "Got it...here it is..."

The study was a two-tiered room with a green-carpet-squared section before a large window and a smaller, lower-level marble-floored section around a fireplace.

A gaudy steel desk and a pair of high wooden shelves sat on the left wing of the carpet and a red, gray, and white plaid futon sat on the other near the window.

They forced Vera onto the futon and covered her in blankets and then watched as she began to settle. She was breathing heavily in short spurts and looked at them with stormy paranoia in her eyes.

"Jim!" Vera called suddenly. "Jim, hold me!"

But Jim only looked at her with a confused expression. He was afraid. He turned away and examined the little brown bottle from Vera's pocket.

"Boy o' boy..." Jim said, scrutinizing the bottle. He couldn't make out what it said. Whatever it was, it certainly was not lithium. "What do you make of this?" he said finally, anxiously showing the small brown bottle to Tom.

Tom read the inscription. "I don't know...what's aya...hua... ayahuasca? Is it a new brand or something?"

"Oh dear..." Vera murmured from the futon. "...the Amazons...they're in the carpet... Be careful!" She was reaching for them, afraid to set foot on the floor.

"Why, that rotten...that ssstupid-!!" Jim yelled hotly. "Maybe I _should_ have her committed!"

"Jim!" Liz cried in alarm. "Jim, you wouldn't!"

Jim brushed Liz off with violent hand signals and met Tom's conflicted gaze. "Why, do you realize what she's done?! She's gone to that...quack, Von Franz! After I deliberately told her not to!!"

"Now, just calm down, Jim," said Tom.

"Everything will be alright. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation...just you wait..."

"Rotten succubus!" Jim growled. "Vera you've ruined our marriage! Our trust!"

He looked like he might hit her until Tom stepped between them. Jim protested as Liz and Tom struggled with him until finally they pulled him out of the study and locked the door.

"I'll make her some tea...the poor dear!" Liz uttered from the other room.

AMAZON DREAMS

Vera didn't know how long she had been locked in the study. Liz and Tom had vanished some time ago. Dr. Von Franz would have been here by now, or at least he had vowed as much during consultation, which meant _they_ were coming for her. Fear overcame her as she thought of what _they_ might do.

She had once read a magazine article about electroshock therapy being used to treat women suffering from depression. It had made her hairs stand on end, to picture such a hellish place.

_Oh, doctor,_ she thought, feeling broken and bedeviled. If only the good Dr. Von Franz was here to help. She had his number written down in her purse, but it was in the bedroom.

She could hear Jim talking to someone—on the phone, she assumed, unless Jim had gone crazy, too. Vera thought that she could perhaps listen in, but...

Careful to avoid the little Amazon villages within the carpet fibers, Vera got up from the futon and danced over to the desk along the left wing to pick up the receiver. Quietly as a cat, she lifted the receiver on the black office phone and heard a man's sterile voice: "Yes, we'll pick her up there...not to worry. We'll take care of it, mister uhhh..."

"Woodward; Jim Woodward."

"Yes, Mister Woodward... See you first thing in the morning..." Then the man hung up.

"Now, just a minute, I'm not-I'm not permanently crazy!" Vera shouted into the receiver. She heard a quick and sudden click on the other end.

Vera ran over and angrily beat on the door of the study. "Jim, you unlock this door this instant! Do you hear me?!" Vera waited at the door and listened. "Jim, Please!!"

It was no use. He had blocked her out. He was getting rid of her—probably dreaming of that secretary, Dorian, whom she had overheard them frothing over just last week. Dorian had cleavage. Did she not have cleavage? Weren't her warm milk-filled cushions good enough for that jittery child?

Vera tried to think. Maybe Aunt Clara could help her. No, it was surely past Aunt Clara's bedtime. She went back to the desk and called, anyway, but there was no answer. She tried Liz; Again, no answer.

Vera pictured herself being taken away in a straitjacket. She had seen it done in the movies. They would just come right in with big grins on their dumb faces and...

"Mrs. Woodward, how are you at catching butterflies? Come with us and we'll find out...that's it... Now umm Mrs. Woodward... Where are you going, Mrs. Woodward?"

Perhaps the men in the white suits could stop these angry fairies from pulling her hair out. There were five of them that had come out of a book on the bookshelf. After playing with the fireplace, they had flown towards her, giggling. They were cute little fairies with transparent wings and they were furious that she was trying to ignore them.

"Ouch!" Vera shouted. "Stop it! Stop it!" She ran away from them, scurrying around the room. Jim came in, just as the fairies finally flew away into the air vents.

"Finally... Jim! My dear Jim, please don't let them take me! Call Dr. Von Franz! He knows I'm not crazy! It's witchcraft! Witchcraft, Jim!"

"Sure it is..." Jim said uneasily. "Honey, I need you to take these pills..."

"Jim, let me out of here!" pleaded Vera. "I need to brush my teeth...to use the toilet... Just let me out!"

"Take these pills and I'll let you out!" Jim promised with a simpering, crazed look.

Vera protested. "No! I won't let you do this!"

Jim suddenly became aggressive. He forced her to swallow the sedatives with a glass of water and then angrily stormed back out again, locking the door behind him. He had been crying, Vera realized. He must have made a difficult decision.

Vera returned to the futon in nervous shivers and began feeling very drowsy. She wondered to what extent her hallucinations had to do with the books she was reading from the public library, Fantastic Mythical Creatures and Ancient Peoples and Their Religions. She wondered if anyone would bother to listen to her describe these associations. Then she fell asleep.

She dreamed of Liz. They were in the kitchen as before, but this time they were both naked. Liz approached, her blonde hairs glistening on vanilla skin. She kissed Vera lightly on the lips and began feeling her up with a carrot. The carrot brushed up and down Vera's round little butt cheeks.

Liz kissed her again and then moved the carrot down her ass until it rubbed the lips of her pussy. She could see it extending through her silky brown-haired muff as it moved back and forth. It felt good to feel the texture as the vegetable warmed against her. She closed her eyes and kissed Liz deep on the mouth. They seemed to interlock forever, there before the cutting board. It was wonderful, being close to someone again, feeling beautiful and wanted, but suddenly a great, undeniable force pulled Vera away and her dreams became dark.

She was strapped down to a small squeaky bed and taken outside, into the universe, then pushed speedily through an enclosing tunnel of flashing lights that, after hours of confusion, led to a sanitized chamber of torture where demons took the form of humans pretending to be doctors. They gathered around as she lay ataxic and corpse-like, speaking to her in tongues with dark slits darting behind spectacle-distorted eyes.

They grinned down at her with pale schadenfreude while two of them shook their inflated heads up and then down in slow motion. Once they were sure she was watching, one of them squeezed a spray of elixir through a freakishly large syringe and shot something painfully into her arm—and everything fell into blackness.

When next she awoke, the fireplace of the study offered hopeful escape. She heard a whisper from that place of premonition and, looking out at the lower tier, saw Jim stark naked by the fireplace, which was lit with green-tipped flame, casting shadows.

"Jim, you've come!" Vera purred dreamily. "You've come to your senses!" She beamed happiness and with her slim finger beckoned him forward.

Jim's hair seemed to be engulfed in orange flames as he strode forward. He smiled with warmth and reached for Vera on the futon pull-out, but she hesitated, taken aback by the unexpected encounter. She thought of demons that took possession of people's bodies and it frightened her, but something pulled at her like gravity.

"Let me explain," Jim said, caressing her, his voice a soothing baritone. "I'm sorry for losing my temper like that...I love you and I would never hurt you... Oh, Vera, my darling girl! I called that doctor, Von Franz, like you asked, and he gave me something, some kind of...aphrodisiac...from Peru, he said. And I thought... I've been secretly reading this book and...an Egyptian book on sex, you see—to please you, my dear, and..."