The Natural Order of Things by Kevin P. Keating Page B

cocktail dresses.
    De Vere’s eyes flutter open. He is pulled from the back of the police cruiser, lifted to his feet, and dragged into headquarters. At the front desk he is made to stand at attention. “Another dirty married man,” someone quips. Boiling white light seeps behind his eye sockets and scalds his brain. He waits there for hours, it seems, but eventually, mercifully, he is booked for indecent exposure, public intoxication, solicitation of prostitution, a long recitation of trumped-up charges. He hears the words, but they do not make any sense to him, and at this point he doesn’t really care what they mean. He is photographed, fingerprinted, his body searched for contraband. Manacled and moaning like an idiot that lurches from some horror movie dungeon, he is led through a series of endless corridors that echo with tortured screams, like someone being stabbed over and over with a penknife.
    An alarm sounds. A clanking steel door rolls open, and he is shoved into a large holding cell swarming with flies. He collapses beside a mysterious yellow stream that trickles toward a drain. After a few minutes he becomes dimly aware that he is not alone. Other men, dozens of them, each indistinguishable from the other, materialize like shades from the underworld. All suffer the afflictions and burdens of anonymity, their faces transformed into primitive masks, wooden idols with wooden scowls.
    The men close in, their eyes unwavering. Unlike the police they do not ask him to cooperate. They taunt him, playfully at first as children sometimes do with a puppy or a kitten to see how it will react, and once they determine he is harmless, they begin to slap him in earnest, jab him in the kidneys, stomp on his fingers, yank him by the hair. He doesn’t struggle for long. They force him to his knees, tell him to open wide, not to bite.
    “Gonna get me some slop on my knob.”
    “Mmmm, yeah, get my salad tossed, that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”
    “You like that, don’t you, bitch?”
    “Do a good job now, or they gonna carry your ass out in a body bag.”
    With this warning, they line up ten deep, some massaging themselves in preparation, spirits of the dead eager to douse him in ectoplasm. He lifts his head and recognizes the small, feral eyes of the man standing at the front of the line.
    “Good evening, my friend,” says the cabdriver. “Life, as you know, consists of little more than the ebb and flow of excessive pleasure and pain, wave upon wave of joy and sorrow. Unfortunately, you have found yourself in a deep trough. But do not fear. It will not always be so for you. Fate is ever-changing. Oblivion alone is imperishable.”
    Then the driver unbuckles his belt and, with a smile that reveals those unsightly gray stumps, whispers, “And now, if you please, there are many men waiting …”

In the Secret Parts of Fortune
I
    Halloween, season of sorcerers and black magic, and once again Elsie has allowed Claude to visit her bed, but first she commands him to chase the dog from the house, mainly because she can’t stomach the animal’s crude pantomime of their monthly romps. It stares at them while they make love, panting to the irregular rhythm of the bedsprings, swabbing its genitalia with a dripping, lolling tongue of magnificent reach and precision, growling and gnashing its teeth whenever Claude clutches the sides of the mattress and unleashes his ridiculous yowls of ecstasy into the luxurious eiderdown pillows. Sensing a conspiracy, Elsie springs cat-like from the bed to lock the door and confides her fear that the Great Dane is not merely playing the part of a voyeur; its real intention is to carefully observe everything that goes on in the house while its master is away on business and then to reenact it all for him upon his return.
    “They have a mysterious way of communicating with one another,” Elsie whispers, her voice colored by panic. “I think they may be … 
telepathic
.” Soft