Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 21:44:05 -0400 X-Sender: teddyt@teddyt.pop.crosslink.net Mime-Version: 1.0 To: laura@netgate.net From: Ted Subject: Bundy Bundy (M/?) Rockingham Bundy III absently stroked the grizzled stubble of his prominent New England chin, lost, like most evenings, in the drollery of Balzac. Above and to the right of his well worn stuffed chair perched a bookshelf, his entire world since his beloved wife Lenore joined the spirits little more than three months earlier. She had read her Emily Dickenson, he his Robert Frost. Now, he studied but the classics, anything written before 1800. Only 47, Rockingham Bundy looked twenty years older. He took refuge in the printed word, a permanence immune to life-sapping emotion. It was not coincidental, he thought, that the letters and punctuation marks on the dusty pages were called characters. Books WERE character. They didn't bite you unexpectedly or walk out when ignored. The rapping at his cottage door became more insistent. He unlimbered his bony legs and took his time before creaking it open. There stood Mary, punctual as always for her Thursday evening appointment with the eccentric hermit. "Come," he beckoned, crooking his forefinger. The young girl of indeterminate age lifted her rounded chin, cocked her copper pigtails proudly and routinely brushed any wayward lint from the front of her plain gray jumper. Rockingham Bundy dusted the center cushion of the 19th Century loveseat with his hand, then hitched his creased trouser legs and sat down. Mary handed him the weekly notation made out in immutable India ink in her calligraphic hand. He read carefully, folded the lined school paper and laid it to his right for later filing. "Mary," he whispered hoarsely. "It's time. Fifty." The girl's patent leather shoes clacked swiftly across the hardwood floor; as she passed him she pirouetted to his right, sighed deeply, and lifted the jumper high, exposing bare tawny legs beneath the rounded hillocks of her white cotton panties. She stood straight as her host gnarled his fingers inside the waistband and meticulously lowered them to her knees. Mary needed no prompting and, is if preparing for a dive from the side of a swimming pool, stretched her arms out in front and touched the floor with her fingertips precisely nine inches to the side of Mr. Bundy's left leg. Her toes barely touched the floor on the opposite side, and the underside of her smooth hips fit comfortably against the side of his right thigh. He wrapped his left hand around her waist as if cradling a large baguette. "Shall we?" he explained. "Yes, sir," Mary replied on cue. They had performed this cleansing ritual often; for him, a weekly reminder of his void; for her, a necessary gift-giving. This other-wordly lap dance began precisely with a soft slap on each of her nates, the echo steadily increasing in both pace and intensity as the seconds ticked louder from the Grandfather's clock in the far corner. Mary moaned and daintily bounced under the expected barrage from her protector's flat palm, Mr. Bundy's attention fixed on a previously unseen blemish on the girl's right cheek, just southeast of center. He kept spanking over that spot, but the blemish would not retreat. In fact, the port wine stain began spreading. It could not be a birthmark for he had never noticed it before. This was a departure from the norm, as the man never before had spanked the same spot consecutively. He was fascinated. Each slap drew forth a slightly louder cry from the girl, and, to his puzzlement, a deeper familiar timbre. The spanking proceeded until he could make out the mark. It was, by Jove, an outline of the map of Wales, where he had met and wed. The explicit shape he had teased so often on his beloved Lenore. Rockingham Bundy paled and shivered, oscillating a spectral wave of viscera that shook generations of Bundys lying still beneath The mark! The map! Her voice! The throaty melody of long- remembered passion! This well ordered man; this immaculately tempered commander of precise thought rolled his misting eyes upward. He impelled his brain to banish this remarkable vision and return to the duty at hand. He took a deep breath, stifling a cough, and prepared to resume gazing down upon the soft hillocks that kept him alive from week to week. His steel gray eyes saw nothing! Nothing but a tiny spot of moisture on the side of his right trouser leg. He was alone again. For the 13th time, Rockingham Bundy III wept himself to sleep.