Boskoi

Karen supposed later that she’d noticed the three women’s singularities separately over the past few weeks on her regular trips to the gym. It wasn’t, however, until all three were sat together in the small café overlooking the swimming pool that it finally registered. Each of them was missing part of an arm. The tallest of the three had no right hand. The brunette who, Karen knew from early morning jogs in the park, was seeing at least three different men, was missing three fingers on her left hand. The biggest shock was the third woman. Karen was sure she’d seen her rowing the canal in a kayak last summer with the local youth club, and yet her right arm was missing from the elbow down. As well as these abbreviations the three stood out from the rest of the lunchtime gym crowd in other, more subtle, ways. They had confidence, this apparent in every movement and nuance as they spoke and listened in turn. They also seemed glazed with an aura of belonging, in the way that many gangs and groups and troupes are. Within this sphere, though, each of them seemed almost to be vying with the others in a manner not far from invisible and yet as bold as their respective gym outfits. Each carried their physical anomaly with the finest of balances, neither shying nor flaunting, and aside from the occasional glance that Karen noted towards each others limbs no-one other than she seemed to have noticed anything remarkable at all. When they rose, as one, and made their way to the exit, they seemed to rock the air that surrounded Karen. They had something, these three incomplete women, something that chimed in Karen and yet, at the same time, made her feel dull and marooned. As she walked to the counter to get another coffee Karen trailed her hand across the back of one of the chairs that they’d vacated, as though trying to glean a little of their sparkle.


Two weeks later, while stopping to do up her lace halfway through her run through the park, Karen saw the brunette woman walking slowly arm in arm with a shaven-headed man in an overcoat that fell expensively to his knees. They were crossing her path obliquely, maybe thirty metres away, heading away to the far gate and so Karen was taken aback when the stubbly and pale head turned sharply and she found herself staring eye to eye with a rather flat-faced boy of no more than twenty. He held her gaze for a full ten seconds as he continued to walk with the blond, his head tracking at a seemingly impossible angle, then turned back once more. His companion had hardly seemed to notice. Karen had noticed, though, in fact was still noticing very much the effect that the man-boy’s attention had had on her. She felt chilled, slightly, and as though she were momentarily stood in the centre of an immense, empty warehouse. There seemed to be too much air around her and it made her head swim slightly. She took a sip of water from her bottle, rinsed and spat, and then continued jogging. It took her ten steps to realise she was running the way she had just come but right then that seemed to be the best way to go.


It was three weeks to the day when Karen next saw the man from the park. She’d been sat in the gym café engrossed in checking her emails, and only looked up when someone walked past her wearing far too much perfume. It was the tall woman with the missing forearm and, she now noticed, no little finger on her remaining hand. Karen was surprised to see the man from the park sat opposite her, two tables away, waiting to be joined by the clearly ecstatic woman. He surely hadn‘t been there a moment ago as a rowdy family had just that minute left. “Janine…” He stood and pulled a chair out for her. “You look radiant.” His voice was, Karen thought, disappointing and a little on the high side. It certainly didn’t match his features which, even in such a young face, seemed to imply an underlying gravitas softened by humour. This last apparent in the surprising amount of lines around his eyes. The rest of his face was smooth and dense-looking, as if his flesh was firmer than normal. His eyes, even when turned away from hers, were no less intense than they had been that morning in the park, and it seemed to Karen that her mind was dragging the feelings she had felt then into the present, leaving her feeling slightly isolated and, she realised with a degree of incomprehension, a little indignant that he hadn’t turned to acknowledge her even once. She watched as their muted conversation flowed, as his slow and warm chuckles seemed to spill from his lips. A stab of jealousy confused her further when the man trailed a finger over the woman’s stump, which elicited a feline movement of arm and spine. Finding herself feeling angry and tense Karen decided to go home, and even though she dallied mightily with her handbag, and stopped to look back at the door, neither the man nor his companion looked at her once. Walking slowly back home she felt unsettled and was later concerned to find that neither a long hot soak nor best part of a bottle of red seemed to rid her of the feeling.


In the following few months Karen visited the gym less regularly than she’d have liked. She had landed two contracts with online agencies that, although they’d do little for her CV, meant she could afford to write her own articles in between assignments. She never again saw the three women together, but singly, and twice in pair’s. The one with the missing forearm - Janine - was often on the treadmill when Karen turned up with her towel and water bottle in hand. She’d taken to using the machine next to her, and tried to build up to introducing herself but found her inability to deduce whether it was the matter of Janine’s arm that drove this, or the possibility of finding out more about the man-boy stopped her from doing so. So she ran. Staring straight ahead at the mirrored wall for most of the time, with the inane europop from the numerous flat screen TV’s mumbling in the near distance, and occasionally, guiltily, watching the woman next to her. She was undoubtedly beautiful, in a handsome, firm-boned manner and yet she wasn’t what Karen would call sexy; perhaps photographs of her might be but she projected an aloofness in person, a flattening of emotions that was more of an absence than a presence of something as venal as arrogance. Her ash-blond hair was pulled into a workaday pony tail most days, over a high and smooth forehead. She had an athletic build and, Karen estimated, stood around 5’5’’. Then, of course, there was the arm. Aside from the fact that half of it was missing, it looked doubly anomalous when Janine was running as its abbreviated length appeared to pump twice as fast as her other, and the stump juddered out a brisk pattern at the beginning of each down stroke. Karen found the stump fascinating and had to stop herself from staring at it as it moved in front of her in mirror-image. So singular was it that she often felt that she hadn’t seen it properly before because she sometimes thought she’d added inches to it in her imagination. The colour and apparent texture of the skin suggested it was a birth defect. That, or she’d lost it at a relatively young age. And yet Janine’s gait on the treadmill suggested otherwise. There was a certain bob to her running stroke, an adjustment to her weight distribution that seemed like it was something the body was working on, rather than the best it had come to do. This glitch was near unnoticeable and it was only because of Karen’s background in school gymnastics and a subsequent sport physic diploma that she noted it. The more she thought about it, the more things didn’t gel. Janine was clearly a fit and active woman, and with an apparently life-long physical alteration, yet she ran as though she’d lost her arm only a few months before. Usually Karen would have gone along with cold logic, but whenever she thought about this anomaly she couldn’t help but bring in a trick she was sure her mind was playing on her. She felt ninety nine percent sure that, since first setting eye’s on Janine, her arm was some four inches shorter.




Some days later Karen arrived at the park at 6.30 in the morning, looking forward to running her muscles into a delicious burn. She was doing stretches by a large stand of bushes, half bare as autumn neared its end. Down on one bended knee, the other leg stretched fully to the side, she balanced herself on splayed fingers and bounced slightly. Something red jerked in the corner of her eye a couple of yards into the bushes and, thinking it may be her first robin of the year, she turned. Something moving, behind twigs and stems and sparse leaves. The brunette, a red knitted cap on her head, was knelt between the bare knees of a man laying amongst the brown and green carpet within the bushes. Her head rocking forwards and back, right hand gripping his white knee. Karen found she could barely breathe and, as quietly as she could, began to bring her out -stretched leg back under her. An awkward heaviness in her throat was swallowed away as she continued to stare at them. Worried that she might make a sound and attract their attention she felt unable to move. Simultaneously shocked, embarrassed and, she fought to admit, a little aroused Karen watched as the brunette knelt back and the mans knees dropped, exposing his cock being pumped slowly in a leather gloved hand. The shaven head of the man-boy looked as though it must be propped on something; a bag maybe, or a pillow of fallen leaves. His hands pushed up her skirt, exposing tanned thighs and then she moved forward and lowered herself. Up and down, in a languid movement repeated, head tilted back until the red cap fell from her, setting the dark hair to drape down her back. Face to the sky she reached forward and slid the forefinger of her truncated hand into his mouth millimetre by millimetre. As the second knuckle passed his lips she jolted and held perfectly still, apparent pleasure causing her to stretch fully over his slight body. As the second knuckle passed his lips his eyes ground into Karen’s without seeming to move and yet the split second of their locking hit her with a palpable force. Half-stunned, as the brunette began to writhe, as he sucked on her finger, as his eyes bored into her consciousness, Karen whimpered as, unbidden, a weak orgasm pulsed between her tightly pressed thighs. Breaking the stare only because she rolled to one side, briefly off-balance, she fought her way to her feet and backed away from the sight in front of her, turning after five steps and breaking into an unsure trot.


That night, and for the four after, Karen had a dark and hallucinogenic dream that hovered between nightmare and eroticism. Heavy with the ruby reds and thick dust of an old Dutch master, spinning like a drunken and corpulent centrifuge and gleaming dully as though coated in dense and compromised wax this was the first dream Karen could recall that was shot through with scents and tastes, miniscule sensations like that of a thin bead of sweat running unchecked between her naked breasts, turning in its course just before her neat, winking navel and chiming against the tiny hairs that its path disturbed. The muscles in her face contorted and her nostrils flared and drank in a cool, almost alpine musk that was tinged with electric blue and yet thick and dark like chocolate blood. Bare back pressed into something soft and cool that gave with her movements, these being directed, seemingly, by the intense eruption of contradictory senses from between her legs. Her mouth thick and claggy seeming to ring with a metallic taste, and ever-present, in her minds eye, was a crudely drawn Venus flytrap. Allowing her eyes to drop she realised that she was being licked and sucked with an animal intensity by the brunette, whose lips, tongue and teeth were engaged in something close to a mechanical assault on her swollen and drenched cunt. Karen reached out an ever-stretching arm, to push the head further against her but her hand seemed to slip and the brunette hair slipped with it and she found herself locked into the eyes of the man-boy and the intensity of this moment each night brought her to a shuddering, animal climax that seemed to only intensify as he raised his head and her scream began on seeing the arterial blood and gore falling from his leering mouth, over his ivory chin and bare, shaggy chest. Each night the same dream, and each dream ending in her yelping awake as the peak of a strong and violent orgasm wrenched itself from her body. After five nights, the dreams stopped. Karen woke each morning for the following week feeling relief in her mind and an unsated greed in her belly. She decided to change gyms, and began running along the banks of the canals each morning. She filed dull copy for dull people to read on a dull website, banked the money and spent the evenings and weekends drinking nice wines and tapping away on her laptop.


Some months later Karen was half-snoozing on an almost empty train back from an interview in Manchester. She never listened to music on train journeys preferring, like today, to shut her eyes and pick up on the fragments of the conversations going on in the carriage. The frankly appalling glottal assault coming from the mouth of a teenaged girl seemingly telling her mother how much drink the previous night’s drugs had allowed her to consume, to some degree of respect judging by the direction of the conversation, was thankfully replaced by a warm and lush female voice, rising as the train pulled into a small country station. It had a dancing lilt that identified it as Eastern European, and shaped each English word a little more succinctly and made them, to Karen’s ears, prettier. She allowed the sounds of the words to wash over her, ignoring what was actually said until the woman’s unseen companion answered in a jarringly familiar voice. Karen opened her eyes even as her mind argued between lying dog and fleeing. They were both looking at her; the man-boy insolently running his eyes over her body while the brunette glowered an unashamed hostility at her. A flush scalded her from head to toe and without a word she grabbed her bag from the seat and strode to the door. As the train pulled out of the station she kept her back turned, but even so she fancied she could feel his gaze raking her. She stood firm. There was no way she could risk meeting the stare of the brunette woman. It would allow the scream that she held, hurting, in her throat to tear out of her and send her into hysterics. The brunette woman had been missing an entire arm, and her left leg just past the knee.



Karen spent the next two days drinking wine in an attempt to rinse away the unwanted feeling that sat in her mind like a carcass. A vertiginous horror loomed within and she couldn’t think how to shed it. The wine kept her numb to a point but she still found herself picturing the incomplete woman, the sex, the man-boy, around and around and interspaced with slices of the dream. The woman was clearly body dysmorphic, that was the only logical conclusion. The man was, perhaps, a surgeon. Struck off, maybe, or just a skilled amateur. That was impossible, though, because he couldn’t be any more than 20. A fixer, then. A middle man with connections in the medical world. It wasn’t that unlikely; the internet had proved to be a useful tool to draw together all manner of weird and wonderful fetishistas. She remembered having once shared an elevator with a man whose face was entirely covered with tattoos. She’d felt a clanging, opaque shock at what she perceived as a blunt and calculated disengagement from society. All that from two fleeting glances. The feeling took days to leave her; a sadness she’d projected onto him mired in a sense of naivety that boomed next to his challenge to how things ought to be. A hundred-fold, a thousand-fold, this was her guts and mind’s reaction to the vacant spaces adjacent to the woman’s stumps. The man-boy’s association with this state chilled and stirred the waters even more. On the third day she was woken at dawn by a soft but persistent knocking at her door.