The Arena by Jonathan Janz

Author:Jonathan Janz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2013-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

And now he can smell myriad odors baking out of Melanie. The salt of her tears. The febrile moisture of her skin. He can smell her crotch, and it almost overwhelms him: the clammy undercurrent of exertion commingling with the maddening juice of her arousal.

The scent galvanizes him. He looks into her eyes and sees a new fear there, not of losing him, not the fear of a concerned lover, but of a person who suddenly realizes she might be in danger. It is the exact expression the sunfish had exhibited that day back in junior high. He’d swiped that greenish, iridescent fish with the big net, slapped it down on the dock, and watched it flop around for a good minute or so, always of course making sure the little cocksucker didn’t find its way back to the lake.

When he was sure the sunfish wasn’t going to flop off the dock, he hustled to the house and found one of his dad’s hypodermic insulin needles.

He told himself in the intervening years that he’d done what he did next without premeditation, that it was a harmless act of preadolescent cruelty. But that was bullshit, and deep down he’d known it all along. That gimlet eye of the sunfish had fixed on him before, and its name had been Patricia. That eye had reduced him and reduced him, and he refused to let it happen again. Emasculating him. Deriding him. And he was big as he dipped the syringe into the foul brown lake water. He was bigger as he flattened the fish with a trembling hand. He was huge as he brought the needle slowly down toward that gaping, lidless eye, grew even larger when he recognized real fear in the creature’s silent stare. He became positively colossal the moment the needle tip pierced the cornea of the gasping fish, and when he depressed the plunger and the eye began to swell like some overfilled balloon, he felt an atavistic lust superheating his penis. He ejaculated at the exact moment the sunfish’s eye burst, and then he sat back on the dock, his energy spent. He watched with a loopy kind of apathy as the one-eyed creature struggled in anguish, and when the fish actually got lucky and flopped into the water again, he was amazed to find he really didn’t care.

Until the nightmares began.

He’d dreamt of that little sunfish ever since. It had been especially awful when he still lived with his parents on the lake. He imagined that sunfish—which had been nine inches long at most—swelling to a barracuda and eventually to great white shark proportions. He’d lie in bed shivering, certain the one-eyed beast awaited him in the waters, was out there trawling in the moonlight, ever watchful, ever filled with wrath.

Melanie has lost that fearful look, is talking to him now. He endeavors to reply, but his tongue is a sluggish wad of meat, his lips rubbery and gummed together.

“Can you hear me?” he hears her ask.

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