Dance over the Thunderclouds - 1. Before Death

Warning

I consider it a necessity to precede this story with a serious warning, exceeding the max. 800 positions. No, not about the few explicit erotic scenes it contains. I guess you guys can handle that!

But this story digs very deep into the darkest crevasses of a severe mental disorder and if you happen to be a reader who suffers or has suffered through one himself: I strongly urge you to ask yourself first if you can handle it! Because this story is not meant to trigger anything in anyone nor is it meant to stir up painful memories from times you rather forget about.

The same goes for those who are closely associated to people with a mental disorder, since this story might hurt you, although it is most certainly not my objective to do so.

If you decide you can…then lots of reading pleasure through this emotional roller coaster…that is at least the way I experienced it while writing it.

Of course, the lots of reading fun are also meant for those who had the luck to keep away from such disorders.

 

This story is dedicated to a small, but unfortunately growing group of young people, one of whom I know personally and quite intimately (not to be understood in the sexual meaning of the word), who suffer from a terrible mental disorder, that festers on for years from about the age of 14 to 16, but with its first symptoms unrecognized and misunderstood and therefor condemned, until it breaks out in all its ugliness at an early adult age, destroying their lives, sadly enough for a fair number of them also literally.

They are met with hostility, incomprehension, and humiliating ridiculing. They are dubbed “weirdo”, “sleeper”, junkie, antisocial and criminal. People ignore and shun them. Friends and lovers turn their backs on them. Even their parents can’t understand them any longer and call them a problem child or juvenile delinquent, thereby cutting them off from exactly those roots, that are supposed to provide unconditional support. No, it is not a happy story, but a story that must be told.

For them!

And especially for that one courageous boy!

 

Berlin.

Maybe it is one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the European continent, it might well be by far the most. Nowhere one can encounter so many languages and cultures in the parks, the streets and the squares of this city, so many different restaurants with kitchens spanning the whole globe, nowhere such diverse arts can be found on the streets and in the theatres, the museums and the galleries. Berlin can be seen as a main center of modern hedonism but it truly is the capital of queers on the continent, with appearances ranging from moderate to militant gay or lesbo, transes, drag queens and every other version of queerity one can dream of.

I’m aware that my own compatriots will crucify me in full public in front of the Royal Palace after which they will tear my corpse to pieces with four strong horses, only to burn the remaining lumps on the pyre and then transport the ashes under police escort to the port to embark on a vessel, from where they will be thrown in the sea and spread by the wind so that all my decaying influences on the Dutch youth can be permanently destroyed, when I write what I want to write. But despite that risk I write it anyway: compared to Berlin even Amsterdam is a backwater city! There you have the reason why I write under a pen-name; it is only to avoid a Dutch nationalistic fatwah!

On a nice summer evening at the beginning of the weekend one of the city’s residents walked through one of many non-descript streets. The red evening sky casted an orange glow over the street and its adjoining buildings, turning even the ugly, square, industrial-like structures into fantastic fairytale castles. Only a distant continuous rhythmic rumbling could be heard, that seemed to have no particular immediate source or specific design but that appeared to come from some vague direction ahead of the lone pedestrian.

It is not exactly a sign of respect when one describes a living human being as merely an ‘individual’. It is quite common to describe such a person as a man or woman, boy or girl. But this lonely person gave no indications as far as his or her gender was concerned.

The only obvious clou was about his or her age: it was clear that this person was young, somewhere around the age of twenty. But for the rest the appearance was reason for massive confusion.

The person’s short blond hair was styled with faint traces of an undercut, so most people might consider him male. But in the multitude of Berlin sub-scenes undercuts are also worn by girls, so there you go with a positive identification. The same can be said about the small golden earrings, which could be an indication for a female. But the reader who hasn’t noticed yet, that nowadays boys and men wear earrings as well, must be very short-sighted and old-fashioned as well.

Neither did the face provide any clarification. The cheek line and the chin were definitely masculine, but the effect was mitigated again by the patches of red blushes on the jowls, the delicately applied eyeliner and the vague pink eye shadow.

The rest of the body was a sure recipe to make the riddle even more insoluble. The shoulders were slightly too broad for a girl, but only slightly. The hips were too narrow, but just by a small margin. However, there was one feature, that identified the individual as male: it was his laryngeal prominence, but even this was cleverly camouflaged with a gleaming yellow choker.

And since the topic comes to wardrobe: the way the person had covered his frail body made him undeniably female, an impression that was only augmented by his gait.

Over a lemon yellow t-shirt he wore a wide, brightly multi-colored kimono-style blouse, that fell over his hips and his legs were covered by a tight, gleaming white trousers. All of it was completed by slightly high-heeled fire red patent booties, that reached just over the ankles.

No matter the fact if the individual was a boy or a girl, it was manifest that he was a member of the huge Berlin queer scene, in whatever capacity or appearance whatsoever.

Having no knowledge about the confusion over his outward appearances, Dominic hurried on in the direction of the rumbling sound, that became increasingly more recognizable as the bass beat of some techno party. When he arrived at the source of it, it turned out to be a drab warehouse building.

After paying his entrance fee at the door he entered the structure and looked around. It could have been some industrial hall or a warehouse, it might have been a used car showroom or even one of these hyper-modern churches, that look like a prayer factory. Because it was only composed of a steel structure skeleton, grey steel plate walls and ditto roof. Even the floor was composed of concrete. To complete this erroneous picture the building was located on some out-of-town industrial estate.

But the building was none of these. It had turned into some kind of dance hall, where hundreds, maybe even about a rough thousand young kids and youngsters danced themselves into a trance-like state for hours on end, constantly whipped up by the dominant rhythmic beat of the bass speakers, that blared out an uninterrupted stream of numbing techno music.

The most predominant scent was a penetrating odor of sweat. It had to be: hours of exertion in the increasingly humid and hot hall had resulted in bodies getting overheated, so that some of the dancers were doing their moves, either smooth and elegant or mere spastic, with uncovered torsos. But no matter the oppressing atmosphere…all of them had left the real world.

Dominic mingled with all the others, plunging himself in the elated mood. Most of the others didn’t know him, some of them ignored him on purpose, others greeted him enthusiastically with high fives or knuckle greets, recognizing him, but not as Dominic. Nobody knew any Dominic, but everybody knew him as Bunny, his nickname in the party scene, a nick name that had his justifiable reasons. And none of them had to do with any comparison between his bright cute dark beady rabbit-like eyes. No, there was a completely different reason for this nick name.

Dominic had his own agenda when he went to the Dance Temple. He was a real wizard on the dance floor, but despite that he only danced a little. He popped some speed, drank a number of cocktails but most of all he was looking for a sweet, cute boy to spend the night with or, if he was lucky, more than one night. And if he didn’t succeed in that he was more than happy with one or more quickies in the party hall’s men’s toilets, where he would drop his tight trousers and undies for any guy who was in his package of requirements. It was not for the money; he didn’t take money for sex, he was no rent boy. For him it was all about the kick of being desired, no matter by who…!

Exactly that had become Dominic’s weak spot, the need to be desired, a feeling that had been sorely lacking during his childhood and youth and as a result a sore point, that had developed over the years without anyone noticing it. It had grown into a compulsion, that controlled almost all of his actions in his early adult years.

Dominic was the product of the proverbial very short duration affair: the male chauvinistic pig, who was in desperate need to extinguish his horniness and abuses an inexperienced, confused young girl to achieve this goal, only to disappear on the horizon after the short being together, having no thoughts or worries about the possible consequences. A long sentence to express a simple, brutal reality: Dominic was raised by his single mother

It hadn’t been much of an upbringing. His mother was not exactly famous for her mental stability, maybe it is more honest to say, that she had a stern reputation of being mentally unstable.

For Dominic it meant a far from happy childhood. His main occupation as a toddler was anticipating the signs of hallucinations, temper flares, panic attacks and general confusion and turmoil, trying to dodge the repercussions these moods might have on him, an impossible problem for a three- or four years old kid. However, little Dominic got the hang of it, more by sheer intuition than by rational interpretation of the telling signs of what was about to come.

If things really got out of hand with his mother disappearing into the ambulance again, screaming unintelligible things, for another period in the psychiatric ward, he went to his grandfather, the only living relative he was aware of.

It was a choice by necessity. Even when at primary school Dominic often wondered which place was the worse: at home with his lunatic mother or at his deviant grandfather’s place?

Even as an urchin he considered his grandfather the most perfect real time personification of his imagination of how a Medieval black magician looked like, a kind of Merlin from the sage of King Arthur, but then of an incredibly mean and evil kind. With the years Dominic found it only natural and logical, that his mother was mentally unstable. Which human being could grow into a mature, stable person with a father like that?

The man was always dressed in black. His head was bald, apart from the lower rim of it, where long, whitish grey unkempt hair hung onto his shoulders and his face was never shaven, but always full of greyish stubbles. His bushy white eye brows give his face the expression of an aggressive bloodthirsty owl or some kind of terrifying ogre. Only the pointed black hat was missing from the picture.

One of his first stays at his grandfather’s place the old man told him about his own childhood in orphanages in his crackling, rasping voice. He did it in such a vivid way, describing all the gruesome details, that the whole story scared the bejesus out of little Dominic, almost paralyzing him with fear for another time. His child’s mind decided, that an orphanage must be a specific part of Hell, reserved for children and run by the brides of the Devil. But as small as he was, he kept wondering about the purpose of telling this dreadful story. Well, this purpose became clear to him later on, actually it became clear pretty soon.

Every time his grandfather considered him to be disobedient, stubborn, naughty or simply not complying to the old man’s demands the same threat was yelled:

“If you go on like this, they’ll send you to the orphanage”.

It was enough to make the poor kid surrender and behave like a good boy, whatever that was supposed to mean at that particular moment, because rules changed with an unbelievable velocity.

When Dominic refused to eat one evening, because he was more than fed up with the little varied menu of brown beans with bacon from a tin can six evenings a week, alternated with white beans in tomato sauce from a tin can on Sundays, his grandfather got furious:

“Ah…would you prefer steak, little piece of shit? Is this not good enough for you? You better start eating, because if you don’t, I’ll send you to the orphanage. And there you will learn what uneatable and filthy food is”.

But the threat was used on every possible occasion: if his room wasn’t cleaned up, if he was home from school late, if he put the tv too loud, it didn’t matter: there was always the danger of the almost unavoidable orphanage.

The worst moment was the daily shower time, especially when his grandfather decided to join him. As a child he had no objection to being undressed and showered, but as he grew up to around the age of six or seven, he experienced it as a very awkward situation, and he felt he had a certain right to privacy while under the shower. His grandfather had other ideas: the man simply undressed him and if resistance was too large, a simple earwig or painful slap in his face would do the trick. While Dominic stood under the shower, the old man undressed as well and simply stood with him. Dominic hated these moments, the old man’s face over his shoulder, exhaling a mix of bad breath and cheap liquor, the chapped frosty lips sliding over his neck, the shriveled, limp genitals chafing and scuffing over his bottom and the cold, bony hand stroking over his belly and his phallus. Every time the chilly fingers fumbled with his penis and balls Dominic found the whole situation so eerie, that his own developing manhood had no inclination whatsoever to get aroused. Apparently, that was against his grandfather’s rules, because his silent refusals were always greeted with the ubiquitous:

“You damned brat, if you go on like this, you’ll end up in the orphanage for sure!”

Dominic developed an insensitivity for the threat: he shrugged mentally, thinking:

“Maybe the orphanage is an even better place than staying here!”

It made, that the threat lost his edge in a way with Dominic becoming more and more impervious to it.

His mother had some boyfriends after his birth. The first one was the same kind of character as the causative agent for Dominic’s biological existence, leaving directly after one or two fucks. In a way Dominic regretted it: the guy seemed quite nice to him. He never understood if he had left out of boredom or out of fear for his lover.

Another one stayed long enough to let his mom end up in hospital with two broken ribs and a punctuated lung. Dominic had witnessed it all at the age of seven. He wanted to help his mom but had no idea how. There was only an incomprehensible amount of awful horror, that made him pee his pajamas pants on the spot. He was unable to move his legs…he just stood there, pressing his hands on his ears to block his mother’s panicky screaming in vain but unable to tear his wide-open eyes from the terrible spectacle. His mind screamed “Help!”, but his lips didn’t move and his voice kept silent.

On one point a freaky idea popped up in his incapacitated mind: what if he would run to the kitchen, grab the largest knife he could find and stab it in the guy…just to make him stop? But it remained what it was from the start: an idea only; his body was unable of any function at all.

Only after he was one hundred percent certain that the guy was gone, he slowly and waveringly approached his mother, who lay on the floor, hardly conscious. He stared at her, at her bruised face, the blood streaming out of her nose and spreading over her whole face. His biggest fear was, that he had to stay with his grandfather permanently, so softly he whispered:

“Mommie…don’t die…please? Don’t die!”

Was it coincidence or was it exactly this terrifying thought that caused it? But while pleading his mother to stay alive his common senses suddenly kicked in. He remembered that his school teacher had taught them that, when they were in a dangerous or terrible situation all alone without any help, they should always call the emergency services, even carefully taking care, that each child knew the phone number by heart!

Even his arm responded, when he picked up the phone and dialed. A man’s voice answered the phone and Dominic started to scream hysterically, trying to tell what had happened. It took the emergency desk operator a long time to calm the boy down, but once he got a clearer picture of what had happened, he reacted with the speed of lighting, dispatching two police cruisers, an ambulance and an Emergency Physician to the address the kid had given him. Never before Dominic had been so happy when he saw the police coming in. But he became less enthusiastic when the whole thing was wrapped up.

Once his mother was on her way to the hospital by ambulance, two very sweet police ladies brought him to his grandfather. When they delivered him there, they explained what had happened and urged him to give the boy all support he needed. Then they left.

The old man gave his own kind of support, when he growled angrily:

“You’re nothing more than a dastard bastard, a very bad boy! Get out of my eyes and go to your room, worthless piece of shit!”

That was all support he got: for the rest little Dominic had to cope with it all by himself!

 

Although his mother’s purely physical injuries healed pretty soon, her already labile mental condition had deteriorated even further as a result of the violence and she was transferred to a psychiatric clinic. A very patient doctor explained to Dominic, that his mom would be there for a long time. And that meant bad news for the boy: it would extend his already very unpleasant stay with his grandfather for another period, this time of undetermined length. It resulted in more than other inconveniences to be endured, because a serious danger evolved as well.

The real trouble started one Friday afternoon, when he had been playing some football with kids he knew from school. That on itself was already an exception: Dominic had grown more and more into a scared loner at school, who always hung with his back against a wall during playtime, so the fact, that he was invited to play along, was a pleasant windfall. But it had as consequence, that he wasn’t at home at four, as always, but only at half past five.

For reasons he couldn’t fathom, this delay made his grandfather real mad. The man roared like a hurricane, expressing his fearsome anger in more than a loud voice. But the most ominous part started, when he dropped his volume and with a mean smile on his face he said:

“I think it is about time for the slit for you, little piece of shit! It broke your strongheaded mother, that damned slut, so it’ll break you as well!”

Dominic had no idea what the “slit” meant but he was to find out very, very soon.

His grandfather grabbed him by the hair. It made him scream out in pain but the man didn’t bother about that and pulled him downstairs into the cellar, where he barked:

“Take your clothes off!”

Dominic tried to protest, but the first forceful slap in his face ended this slight resistance immediately. When he stood in his underpants, the man added a second barked command:

“That as well!”

Fearing another grabbing, Dominic hesitated, but was punished for it by another, even harder slap in his face, that hurt like hell. As a result, he dropped his undies without further opposition and with tears in his eyes, both of his cheeks burning with pain from the two slaps.

His grandfather opened a small wooden door in one of the walls. The only thing Dominic saw was a black hole, nothing more…. But to his surprise his grandfather yelled:

“Get in!”

“But, grandfa….”, Dominic tried.

“Get in or I will kick you in, little asshole”, the man screamed, by now out of his senses with fury.

In the few minutes before Dominic had learned the hard way, that further obstinacy would only result in more pain. He started to do his utmost best to get into the narrow hole, but had great difficulty in doing so. His grandfather made it clear to him, that he was not happy with the progress he made while he was trying to climb in and he contorted his face, when he felt the pain of four hard and vicious kicks on his bottom. But finally he made it…he reached safety…at least he prayed he did so!

“Turn around on your back!” the old man cried.

It proved to be another tall order. The hole was hardly large enough to lie in, but turning around was almost impossible. He did his best and received no extra physical punishment while struggling to get on his back. That was enough to make him almost happy with the result. But in the end, he managed to roll over and he did the only thing the limited space made possible: he laid down!

The door was closed and he was left behind in pitch dark. But in the beginning, it was manageable. No, it was not comfortable: the stone bottom felt hard and damp and the feeling of being in such a cramped space frightened him somewhat but despite all that he could keep his fears under control. At least there were no more painful fists and feet.

But over time his moods changed imperceptibly. It began when he noted a kind of draft as if the slit was part of a funnel. In the beginning it was quite OK, but once he got colder the first traces of panic popped up. He lost track of time, of where he was, of reality, he only felt he got colder and colder until his whole body shivered and his teeth chattered. Despite that he started to sweat, when he involuntarily started to compare his situation with the horrifying image of being buried alive, meters under the ground in a Stygian coffin with no hope at all of any rescue, just waiting for the moment he would be dead indeed. But the worst was still to come!

Without realizing it he had kind of dozed off but suddenly he came back into the cruel truth with a shock when he heard rustling next to his head, punctuated so every now and then by a soft, high-pitched sound. His body stiffened in fear: which terrible thing was there next to him and threatened him?

And what did he feel on his belly? Yes…FEEL!!!! Something was scurrying there, its small nails piercing pin pricks in his skin, and it was followed by something long and cold, that was dragged over his body! And…

“No…no!”, he screamed, “Don’t go there…stay away there!”

The creature moved belly down in the direction of his penis.

“No”, he continued screaming, “Stay away…get off my body!”

He tried to shake the thing off but he had too little space to do something about it. It only resulted in an almost indignant squeaking, but for the rest it moved on like it had before. And then his common senses gave up…no matter if it was real or only imagined, the number of mysterious critters, that were running beside and on his body, exploded to countless and all were determined to enjoy its youthful, juicy flesh as their evening meal!

Hysterically, he started shrieking:

“Noooo…they want to eat me!...Help me, they eat me!...Don’t let them eat me, please!....No, please…don’t let them eat me!”

But there was no help! Nobody came! It was him, the darkness, the cold and the critters, whose numbers now ran into the millions…at least, in his distorted world!

Exactly the body, that in his perception was so terribly threatened, assisted his mind in coping with the enormous anxiety. The shivering became a short shuddering and then it fell completely limb.

A casual onlooker might think, that he died of fear. But his wide-open petrified eyes, the lips, that were mumbling wordlessly and barely noticeable, and his shallow breathing betrayed he was still alive.

 

He heard a sound…then his eyes saw…did he see that right? Did he see light? His disoriented and muddleheaded mind started to function in a reduced kind of way. He remembered he was in the slit, but had no idea at all for how long. Actually, he had the vague notion, that he hadn’t been there all the time, as if a part of time was simply lacking.

But the raw and angry voice he heard brought him to his senses soon enough:

“Get out, you lazy bastard!”

Dominic did the best he could to follow the order and follow it fast. He didn’t want to be hit and kicked again and he most certainly didn’t want some more time in the slit. But his body refused to function, it felt completely numb.

“I can’t, granddad…I can’t! I can’t move”, he cried out in fear.

“Oh, you worthless piece of shit!” the old man growled.

Then he took the boy by the ankles and started to drag him out.

Bizarre as it may sound: it felt good, the pain on his back, when the skin scratched over the rough stone surface. It was a sign, that he could still feel something, that he was actually still alive.

With the coarse help of his grandfather, he finally managed to tumble out of the slit. If the old man hadn’t caught him, he would have fallen hard on the stone cellar floor. Swearing and cursing the man carried him to a crate, that stood in a corner and put him on it, ostensibly as a gesture, that he was given time to recover.

But it was not for long, because after only a few minutes the man barked:

“Get up!”

Slowly he lifted his head to look at the face opposite him, with open mouth and eyes empty and hollow but also pleading for mercy as well.

“Get up, damned!”, the man yelled, “Or you want some extra time in…”.

A move with his thumb towards the slit did the trick: as good and bad as he could, Dominic stumbled up, almost falling another time but again caught at the right moment.

Finally, he stood more or less upright. He felt physically and mentally exhausted, totally empty. He was through with struggling, he no longer wanted to fight the old man standing in front of him. There was no will to resist left, only a vague flicker of wanting to survive. The demonic wizard had reached his goal: he had broken!

“Get up the stairs!”

He tried, he tried hard! He faltered up, missed a stair step, fell two down, only to be picked up again heavy-handed and driven forward by savage hits on his bottom.

He managed to get up but once in the hall, the next command was bawled:

“To the upper floor! To my bedroom!”

With an almost superhuman effort he succeeded, taking a long time to do so, continuously being kicked and hit and threatened with some extra time in the slit.

Ghostlike he wobbled into the bedroom like a drunk. With no willpower left, he let himself fall on the bed, accepting that that was to be the next order. He might as well surrender right away to avoid more suffering.

The old man followed him, a lustful, wretched grin on his face, and slammed the door shut.

That night was the first of many in which the old pervert wholly got it “his way”!

Nobody saw anything. Although Dominic almost screamed his lungs out in pain and fear, nobody heard anything. And above all: all kept silent!

 

Once he was sent to his own room, Dominic crawled in his bed and cried his heart out. Everything hurt…especially his little hole, that felt if it was ripped apart into little shreds, outside and inside. Gradually he managed to start thinking about his hapless and hopeless situation.

Of one thing he was certain: he hated his grandfather, that damned, old creepy sorcerer. It made, that a vague idea came in his mind: what if he went to the kitchen, very tip-toe, search himself the biggest knife available, go to his grandfather’s bedroom as silent as a cat stalking a mouse and then stab the knife right into the pervert? Now, how about that?

“So I can pay him back for all he did to me!”, he reasoned, “Ain’t that a great idea? It would solve everything!”

Frightened as he had become, the drawbacks of his plan immediately blocked its execution, when they entered his thinking. What if the man woke up, seeing him with that knife? His punishment would be terrible, making even the slit look like heaven on earth. The man would slowly torture him to death as a revenge, taking it real slow to get the most satisfaction out of it. The thought alone was enough to make him sweat from fear.

And even if he did succeed, his problems would be immense. The police would come and they would take him to prison. And prison? It must be even worse than the orphanage. Yes, he would get rid of his torturer, but he would receive even more severe difficulties in return.

And what about God? Even if he killed a dreadful sinner, God wouldn’t love him any longer and He would ban him to Hell. On the other hand, he could live with that. Hell couldn’t be much more worse than his daily life already was.

His conclusion was simple: the knife was no option, being too risky. He started to consider other options to make an end to his grandfather’s life. He had read in some comic strip once about tampering with the brakes of the old man’s car, but he had no idea about cars and even less how he should do that, making this idea dying a slow and soft death as well.

And so he tried to invent other means to achieve his goal by poisoning (“but with what?”) to absurd ideas of blowing up the house (“Roadrunner could do it, so can I…but…where do I get dynamite?”), but over time his physical and mental exhaustion took over control and he slid into a superficial sleep, keeping one ear open for the telltale sound of his room door creaking as the omen, that his grandfather wasn’t fully satisfied yet and wanted another round of “fun”.

The silent threat didn’t materialize and his sleep got deeper, while his heart kept crying.

 

It took months of mostly suffering and struggling for him with normal childish happiness fading into a fuzzy world of wishful thinking, but at last his mother was released from the psychiatric clinic and to his relief he could return to her. It turned out to become a kind of mixed blessing.

When he lived with his mother, day after day he found nobody home when he got back from school and the front door closed, leaving him crying on the sidewalk in the beginning. And each day he had no idea where she was or what she was doing. The only thing that mattered to him was, that she wasn’t there! Since he had no key, he began to choose the only option open to him: he started to stroll through the many, many streets and the parks, sat on benches at stations with the old loiterers and in winter he sought refuge against the cold, the winds and the rain with the homeless in the heated entrances of the department stores. If he got hungry, he ate the contents of his bread box but when he got fed up with the eternal saveloy, he started to feed his bread to the ducks in the parks and stole or begged for his lunch. But after a while even the ducks got fed up with the saveloy.

And even when his mother was at home she didn’t seem to notice if he was there or not. It made it a fait accompli for him, that she had no real need for him.

The necessity of becoming a guttersnipe protected him from his mother’s sudden and violent mood swings, when he lived with her. Being a city rat sure had its advantages, so he had grown into one at the age of ten!

When he lived with his grandfather, life was more a kind of squared hell. With his will being broken by the slit, he finally lost the ability to fight the old pervert. But a deep-ingrained phenomenon, instilled in mankind during the days of his origin, came to the rescue. If you can’t fight it, there is another choice to avoid the danger: flee from it! In Dominic’s case it meant, that he took to the streets as well, where he found peace as long as he sauntered through the huge city, far away from all the immediate dangers in his personal life. Over the years his grandfather’s menace was used too often, increasingly alternated with a new threat with prison or even juvenile labor camp – as if something like that really existed – for his presumed crimes while being on the street.

“But grandfather”, he would object, “I’m not doing anything….”

His defense would be apostrophized, mostly augmented by a slap in the face with:

“Shut up, damned juvenile delinquent, or do you want some time in the slit?”

Even this lost its effect on Dominic, who became completely thick-skinned for it, just bugging out on the streets to avoid the ordeal, only to return after a long time, maybe even next day. Because he had learned as well, that tempests show up out of nowhere at the most unexpected moments, but that they lost their devastating force over time, finally dissolving into nothing like all other things.

At primary school he developed into a scared, lonely boy, who always hung with his back against a wall during playtime, while others played football. And if someone noticed him, the effect would always be negative, mostly by mobbing for being a sissy or simply by being roughed up. But for the rest he might as well die…nobody would miss him, nobody would mourn him.

As long as Dominic was in primary school the way out from his grim reality by walking around through Berlin for hours and hours formed his only opposition. For the rest he was too docile or maybe too weary for any other form of resistance. But once he entered secondary school, his escapades on the Berlin streets increased by necessity…a necessity of survival!

Because that is what his time at the school turned into: a constant struggle to survive the school days without being kicked or beaten or being subjected to vicious pestering. Again, he was the frightened and skittish boy, who hung with his back against the wall, evading the mobbing by the other kids, who considered him a freaky sissy, by ways of not being seen in the first place.

However, with all his peers being about the same age as he was, a tiny flicker of hope turned up by the onset of all their puberties, especially when one of the most prominent school bullies, a large, muscular kid called Paul, grabbed him unexpectedly by the shoulder and dragged him into some bushes, where the kid dropped his jeans and undies and ordered him to lick and suck his dick.

Afraid of being beaten up if he would refuse, Dominic complied and got on his knees. But after the first tentative licks he started to like it and greedily he sucked in the small penis and did as he was told. For the very first time it gave him the exalting kick, that he was noticed, that he was of some importance to someone and it confirmed him that he had the right to live, even if only for a short while. On top of that, it gave him the first taste of fresh, warm sperm, when Paul started to groan while his phallus began to squirt blot after blot in Dominic’s mouth.

But even this tiny positive effect turned against him, when Paul set about to boost on the school yard, that that damned skinny poof had sucked his dick, telling the story into the tiniest detail, carefully mixing truth and boastful fantasy into a credible account, to all who wanted to hear it.

First, Dominic considered to start a counterattack by spreading details about the very modest size of Paul’s penis, but, afraid that no one would believe him and that it would only result in more venomous mobbing, he decided against it and reacted as his previous experiences had taught him: he fled to the streets. He really started to like it on the streets, where he felt protected by the anonymity that reigned there. He took a firm decision never to set another foot again in that damned school for the rest of his life, making him a school drop-out.

His own puberty also provided him with a new weapon to alleviate his problems. His main trouble was, that nobody saw any real need for him, actually not even noticing him, as if he was unwanted from birth on. His mother never paid any attention to him, preoccupied as she was with the multitude of emotional demons and for his grandfather he was only a nuisance with limited practical use, that was solely concerned to the old man’s own sexual needs.

His strategy for the coming years was as simple and straightforward as it was rude and rash: if nobody gave him voluntarily what he needed, he would simply enforce it by persuasion if possible but by brute bribery and extortion when necessary. It seemed a perfect way to claim his rights on recognition and on life, no longer feeling himself reduced to a mere robot with a heart and a soul filled with emptiness, another zombie in a huge metropole full of zombies, something detestable, whose footsteps only tarnished the sidewalks, a boy that nobody wanted to know.

His emptiness was undefined, a feeling he couldn’t express nor understand. But it made him sucking in all possible positive stimuli, things that other people called love, affection, warmth and tenderness. It were words, that were incomprehensible to him, but everybody used them…well, with the exception of his mom and his grandfather, that is. That had to make them very, very important words. Could it be, that his incapacity to experience these evidently beautiful sensations and his complete lack of knowledge of how they should feel was the cold void inside him?

In his still youthful ignorance and innocence he didn’t notice, that he was playing with fire. Because he translated the concepts ‘love’ and ‘affection’ with a single word on a pure one on one basis: he transcribed all of these important abstractions with the single word ‘sex’!

As a result, he started to frequent the cruising areas in town on a regular basis at the age of thirteen, being a willing victim for elderly men who loved to fool around with a young kid but who omitted to ask about his age. And if so every now and then one did, he just lied a few years with the excuse that he happened to look very young for his age; he couldn’t change that, could he?

During his very first visit to the cruising area, he was scared and uncertain, but gradually he got used to the sultry atmosphere and the associated judging looks, dealing with the many ‘admirers’ in a not very subtle way in the beginning: if a guy was interested, he just dropped his jeans and undies and gave it all free for the grab to the prospect ‘lover’. But learning fast he turned into a shrewd and irresistible seducer and not many men were able to resist the offered temptations. With his original deflowering being pushed away deep into his subconsciousness as a very unhappy echo, his memory told him he lost his virginity at the age of fourteen to an elderly man in his sixties in some shrub of bush, enjoying it enormously, since he considered himself a “big boy and real pro” by now.

He had more or less grown into one. He never failed in seducing the man he had set his eyes on and his repertoire of cajoling and sexual actions grew by the month, perfected to the utmost degree of sophistication, that made every lover mad of lust and all that before he had turned fifteen. By then he also had his nickname in the local gay scene: Bunny. He had earned a reputation as the cutest, the hottest and the most luring boy in the whole huge city.

Again, he was assisted by his in-born intuition. He simply sensed it when a man wanted him and if the guy was within his own searching parameters, he made sure he got him!

It was all very well in spring and summer, but in autumn and winter the parcs were empty.

But after he heard, that the men’s toilets of the main station were a great place to “work”, he went there and got what he wanted. So every now and then a client thrusted a fifty euro note in his hand to show his appreciation for his performance. Although he didn’t want it, he accepted it without objections as a kind of fee, suddenly considering himself a rich kid.

No, he had no need for extra pocket money. For him it was a means to fill the gap and to feel the sensation of being desired and wanted, to be important to someone for at least a short while. But mostly the effect of his kick was short-lived and he responded by searching for his next victim. On good evenings he might manage four fucks by four different guys. By now his youthful innocence was gone; what remained was his youthful ignorance. But once he woke up in the morning, he felt as empty and depressed as before and the whole cycle would start again.

Only once he acted out of character, forgetting all his enticement tricks within a matter of seconds.

It was on a lovely spring evening when Dominic made his ‘hunting rounds’ through a park, when his eyes fell on a gorgeous man in his end-thirties, beginning-forties. He was huge and muscled and his blond hair lightened up in the orange of the evening sun. Dominic made up his mind: this guy was a real price and he was his for the coming night…with or without the poor man’s consent! The only thing Dominic had to do was to enlighten the spark of craving in him and he was a real pro in doing just that. The poor sod wouldn’t stand a chance!

Unconsciously he opened his mental trick box of temptations and, although he had no idea who Richard Wagner was, he behaved liked a Wagnerian Lorelei, casting a spell on the boatsmen to lure them on the rocks.

But this particular ‘boatsman’ was less compliant. Contrary to the normal reactions of Dominic’s admirers, he didn’t immediately grab the boy in the groin or laid his hands on his bottom. The only thing the man did was that he started to talk with Dominic, asking him what his name was, what he was doing there, if he was in the park more often, that kind of things, and he asked all of it in a gentle and kind way without a trace of suspicion or condemnation.

Dominic was completely aghast by this reaction. His normal modus operandi slipped out of his thoughts and he lost control over the whole promising situation. It dawned on him, that something extraordinary happened: here was a guy, who was not only interested in him as a young, beautiful body of a fun boy for the night, but who seemed to be genuinely interested in him, as Dominic! It was an unexpected and overwhelming experience!

As a result, he reacted in an unpredicted way he had never known before: he opened up…no, not his asshole but his heart. Hesitantly he answered the questions, but once he was over his restraint, he started to spill his guts out in an almost torrent-like way.

The man listened with a warm and compassionate smile, nodding in understanding so every now and then and only interrupting to ask something to clarify a certain point.

When the sun was almost down and darkness covered the park, the man stuck up his hand in a soothing gesture and said:

“Let’s not discuss all this here in the park. Come with me to my place just around the corner and we’ll continue our talk there. Is that OK with you, Dominic?”

Wordlessly Dominic approved with a nod and meekly he followed the man to his apartment.

When he entered it, he could barely conceal his curiosity and wonderment. In each and every room there was a large beautifully decorated crucifix, on many walls paintings of the Holy Virgin could be seen and the whole apartment was full of devotionals, from candles to small statues.

“What is this guy? A priest or something?” he asked himself in bewilderment.

They sat on the couch with a cold drink and resumed their talk, that is: Dominic did the talking, the man, who introduced himself as Max, only listened.

Talking gradually evolved into crying with Dominic heaving out all the pains of his heart and mind, expressing all loneliness, all emptiness and all humiliations, purging his troubled soul from its desolate contents. Max said nothing but kept the suffering boy in his arms, rocking him in comforting movements, maintaining a steady, soothing rhythm.

However, having no idea if his suspicions were right, no matter that he started to see the man as his personal Savior, compassion or not, in the end it all ended where it always ended for Dominic: in bed. And Max had no problems to prove his virility by mounting the boy five times, each with its own mind splitting orgasm, and then repeated the effort the next morning for another two times, as soon as they opened their eyes. The whole experience dizzied Dominic, since it was clear to him, that this was more than only lust. For the very first time it was something akin to what Dominic dreamed of about how love would feel. He reveled at the idea and in return he did more than just receive…he received with a deep but unknown feeling, wondering:

“Is this what other people call…love?”

Max was decent enough to provide Dominic with a hot shower and a truly great breakfast. However, Dominic felt his wariness confirmed when he said his goodbyes to the kind but increasingly mysterious man, who spoke, stroking gently over his straw-blond hair:

“Go with God, my boy. No matter what you do: He will always love you!”

Strengthened by all the splendid food the boy started his wanderings through Berlin for another day, finding sitting and walking normal a bit problematic after all the lovely punishment his little hole had endured during the night and early morning.

The first months after his fifteenth birthday he became more and more restless. He blamed the weather for it; it was a hot summer with beautiful, long warm evenings and it is widely known that hot weather makes every living soul randy.

The truth was, that his emotional emptiness had developed into a monstrosity of huge proportions, insatiable for affection, warmth, recognition and the need to be desired, in Dominic’s own translation: he had a continuous need for sex.

It was never enough and the continuous urge for more made Dominic careless and reckless.

It made him end up in places where a boy his age never wanted to end up: bound and blindfolded in the middle of a “gentlemen’s round”, only there to suck or be fucked, in murky, dark SM playrooms and cellars, where sadistic masters shackled him naked on a St. Andrew’s Cross where he was flogged or hung up on his ankles and tortured. Or he was put in a cage with steel rings around his neck, wrists and ankles and chained to the floor, where he was subjected to every humiliation thinkable, no matter how severe it was. Whenever this happened, he wanted to cry out his pain, fear, frustration or anger, but he couldn’t: screaming is pretty hard with a gag in your mouth!

If the master or “owner” for that night was contented with his performance as a pain slave, only then he got the final reward: a rough, loveless fuck, the harder the better and only then he was satisfied.

The most bizarre memory was that evening, when some elderly man gave him as a birthday present to his younger boyfriend, only “dressed” in a red-and-gold bow with ribbon around his dick and a red rose with its stem sticking in his little hole, thorns and all, just like he was a thing to play with during the night.

He endured all pains and indignities to reach his goal: he had been important to someone, his right to live was confirmed again, at least for a short while.

For him it was a pretty simple matter: the end justified all means! As long as he got what he wanted.

 

Luck had to run out one time or another. And it most certainly did one pleasant late summer-evening in September, when Dominic was caught in the act by two police officers, who were patrolling the park, exactly at the moment when he had a cock in his asshole. He and his ‘lover’ were busted, his ‘lover’, a man in his fifties, for sexual abuse of a minor, he for illegal prostitution.

He objected violently…he was no hooker, he never took money for it but the cops were adamant and he ended up at the police station in no time, no matter what he said.

During the first interrogation he just shut up as his right was, as he had learned, at an already young age, from some streetwise city rat. It brought him in a police cell for the night and there, only there, he broke to pieces. Without really knowing what was rolling towards him, he felt instinctively that by now he had overplayed his hand and that he was in real deep shit now! The cool image of the tough, untouchable street- and park wise slut and the city rat, that could withstand and handle anything, fell apart and for a second time he let the tears flow freely, cursing his mother, his unknown father and especially his dirt bag of a grandfather who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. But most of all he cursed his miserably lonely and empty life, that seemed to have lost all glimmers of hope for a better future. He cried on until he wept himself into an uneasy sleep with equally uneasy dreams.

The next morning, after he ate a scanty prison breakfast, he was brought to a room where two females in civilian clothing were waiting for him, which he presumed both to be police officers.

He was told to sit down and once he did, the left one started with:

“Well, Dominic, have you thought about your present situation tonight?”

He looked at her in surprise and cried out:

“How do you know my name?”

She smiled and replied:

“Not that difficult. Your grandfather reported you as missing, since he was worried about you”.

With a condescending grunt and a cynical smile on his face Dominic retorted with:

“He, worried? Now that would be a first one. Have you told him where I am?”

“He knows you are in our custody, yes”, was the business-like answer.

The cynicism in Dominic’s attitude only increased at this answer and dripped from his words, when he said:

“Then you better believe me: that will really worry the old bastard!”

“What is that supposed to mean?” the second woman asked.

Dominic pinched his eyes, shrugged his shoulders with studied indifference and with a cold stare directly aimed at the woman he muttered insolently:

“Doesn’t matter. It’s none of your fucking business anyway so just forget it!”

The first woman grinned good-humored and reacted with:

“Ah, playing the tough street kid again, are we?”.

Dominic’s only reaction was staring at her with a hostile gaze.

She looked to the other woman and asked her:

“I guess that settles the matter for the time being, don’t you think so?”

“I guess it does!”, the other woman said.

Not understanding the meaning of these words Dominic felt panic coming up and he cried out:

“Now what are you talking about?”

The first woman looked at him with a mock amiable smile and answered:

“Doesn’t matter. It’s none of your fucking business anyway so just forget it!”

Then she pushed the button of the intercom and said:

“You can take him back to his cell now!”

But they didn’t let him forget it: he was worried sick once he was back in his cell, wondering what the two women meant. He found out a day later!

During the morning of this second day the second woman entered his cell, smiled at him and said:

“Dominic, Juvenile Court has taken custody over you and has ordered that you are to be placed with very sweet foster parents on the countryside. So, we’ll go to your grandfather’s house now to pack your things and then I’ll bring you to them. By the way, your grandfather isn’t at home, so he won’t bother you”.

Despite the fact that Dominic thought “I don’t fucking care if he is at home or not!” it made him curious, so he asked:

“Where is he then?”

The lady seemed to ponder over an answer but at long last said:

“He is right here at the police station. The police had a tough talk with him, in which he admitted he mistreated you and regularly had sex with you. So, they arrested him for having sex with a minor entrusted to his care, something that judges don’t look very kind upon”.

“Good for him!” Dominic muttered with a grim look on his face.

“It is not about him, Dominic”, the woman said, “it’s about you and about your future that we worry. Come on, boy…let’s go packing”.

Without waiting for a reply, she took him decidedly by the hand and led him out of the cell.

 

By the time evening fell, he found himself in the house of his fresh foster parents in a small village near the Polish border. He had to admit: they were very nice people who really did their best to make him feel at ease and his life better than it had been so far.

But they didn’t really succeed, because after he got his bearings in the rural landscape, that was so totally different from his normal environment of the big city, which meant to him it was plain boring, Dominic found out, that there was a total lack of gay infrastructure, not even a single cruising area. Not that it really mattered, because his stay with the family turned out to be very, very brief.

The reason for this was called Jürgen, the own son of his foster family, a very cute boy of about six months younger than Dominic and the kind of boy he felt intensely attracted to the minute he laid his eyes on him. Jürgen was slightly smaller but equally slim, had raven-black hair that hung just over his shoulders and a beautiful and disarming smile, that made his deep dark eyes glitter.

Initially they became friends, but in the end Dominic succeeded to overcome Jürgen’s uncertainty and apprehension and seduced him in a very finicking way. However, when his foster mother caught them in one bed together, naked and in flagrante delicti, Dominic’s stay at the family was a very brief one, being picked up by his case worker the next day and brought to a home with strict regime.

For those who have no idea what it means: it is one notch under juvenile penitentiary with the difference that its inmates are not convicted for crimes, but branded for behavior that was most of the time caused through no fault of their own but by many faults of others.

For Dominic it meant, that he was constrained to the home’s grounds without any chance to go out, had to follow the daily program without any exemptions unless he was sick and lost almost all freedom to decide what he wanted to do for himself.

It became years of extreme hardship in which he had no possibilities to satisfy his needs for affection, recognition and the need to feel desired. Mostly it came down to jerking himself off to the extent that one evening he thought grimly:

“I have worn my pecker out before I can get my hands on a real man again!”

There were scarce opportunities to wank or suck some other boy’s dick, gulping down the sperm gluttonously as soon as it started to squirt around but the real satisfaction? No, that was a thing of the past and most definitely not for the near future. For Dominic it meant years of extreme privation. Ah yes, there was this other thing as well, but that memory was so gut-wrenching, that he preferred to forget about it for the rest of his life. And for the rest he fought through the days in an effort to stay upright in an environment of the rights of the strongest, either by mouth or by fists, which was a hard job for a boy of his slender built between all the macho muscle monsters and seasoned, ruthless street rats.

But finally, the day came when he reached the age of eighteen and the future dawned magnificently, since he came out of the reach of Juvenile Care’s mighty claws: he was adult! He could develop his own life the way he wanted it!

Since he wanted to return to Berlin, Juvenile Care had found him a tiny but affordable apartment. Although the word ‘affordable’ must be understood in a very elastic meaning of the word, since all real estate in Berlin is absurdly expensive. It had one room, a small kitchenette and a tiny bathroom where he could just turn around between the shower, the washbasin and the toilet, but he didn’t mind. It was kind of home, his very first own home!

The shortage of personnel on the German labor market worked in his advantage: within three days after arriving in Berlin he found himself a job in a record-and cd store downtown, so he could at least pay his rent and the health insurance and he even had some money left so that he could buy something to eat.

And so his life returned to his normal pattern, apart from the fact that he no longer went to school or roamed through Berlin during the days but he duly reported to his job at the appropriate time.

During these working days he was a modest and inconspicuous record- and cd salesman, in the evenings and especially during the weekends he transformed into a most sophisticated and alluring garҫon fatal, the boy who could seduce almost any man he had set his eyes on and over whom he had casted his irresistible spell.

Bunny was back in town!

 

The high hopes at the beginning of the evening had evaporated in disillusion. The whole evening had resulted in virtually nothing. Oh yes, there were two quickies in the men’s toilets, but one was limited to sucking a guy and only the second one wanted a fuck. But it was the rough and heartless kind of fuck: ‘pants down, dick in, thrusting and cumming, dick out and pants up” and the guy was gone without saying a single word. He had had such high expectations on finding a sweet, cute boy to spend the night with, with kissing and stroking, whispering sweet things to one another, but it was not to be. At least not this night.

Increasingly depressed he walked to the bar and ordered another cocktail. He started to worry, that his attraction and glamor were fading…he was no youngster any longer but already twenty! Briefly he considered to buy another few speed pills to cheer himself up but he decided against it. It was only halfway the month and cash was already very strained. And there were still another two weekends to come before he got his next wages. Only to reconsider, making up his mind that he would buy some later. He just had to find a way to save on other things!

Moodily he sipped from his cocktail but shook himself out of his somber considerations when he sensed a pair of eyes, that were observing him. Somewhat annoyed he looked in the direction from where he thought it was coming, only to stare in a pair of unbelievably dark eyes, that seemed to be truly fixated on him. He turned his whole body in the direction of the eyes, wondering if he should shift into seduction mode or not.

His doubt was caused by a small landslide in the way he perceived his own role: it felt as if he was no longer the hunter but had turned into prey. The eyes, that were aimed at him, worked like silent but strong magnets that drew him towards them like he was a piece of iron.

He couldn’t decide what to do and tried to buy time by studying the owner of the magnetic eyes.

It was a girl, at least, that is how she looked at first glance. But by now Dominic was seasoned enough in the scene to recognize the incongruities, the same ones he was well aware of that he had them himself. Because this ‘girl’ had too masculine a jaw and chin as well and the Adam’s Apple was too pronounced. Apart from that: her shoulders were too broad and the hips too narrow, which was even accentuated by the fact that she wore a skinny jeans with torn knees. However, the head and the face were most definitely feminine and she was really slim, almost twiggy. Dominic wondered in silence if she would weigh over 120 pounds.

The dark eyes were boosted by the black eye shadow that was applied in a pretty abundant way and carefully epilated eyebrows. They dominated a narrow face with an equally narrow nose and sensual mouth. The face was surrounded by black, straight hair that fell over the shoulder.

Her upper body was dressed in a wide dark sweater, that hung loosely around her and the female aspect was heightened by the double necklaces and multiple numbers of white and leather wrist bracelets.

His study had exhausted his defensive capabilities against her magic attraction and thoughtlessly he started to move slowly towards the forcefully glowing mesmerizing eyes. He was considered an evincive and refined gay dog but it turned out he felt almost a beginner, when he saw how the girl reinforced her lure with a hardly noticeable beckoning with her index finger, making him without a will of his own and trapping him completely in her sorcery. So he just moved on, step by step, approaching her with his cheeks flushing and his lips dry from tension.

It took a long time before he was about a yard in front of her. She smiled enchantingly, making him blush violently again and said with a husky tenor voice:

“So, you are the kid they call Bunny?”

“Uhuh”, was his only insecure, nervous reaction.

She giggled in a teasing, almost provoking but nevertheless disarming and sweet way and said hoarsely:

“I don’t believe it. Bunny, reputedly the hottest kid in town, the most fatal Don Juan…”.

She grinned, then continued:

“Or should I say Lady Juanita? And here he is, right in front of me and behaves like a shy, almost frightened schoolboy on his first date”.

Dominic tried frantically to evade her compelling gaze, afraid that he might drown in the ink-black eyes, and fought to get some semblance of order in his confused head. She seemed to ignore it because she continued:

“Don’t try to tell me that your folks gave you that name, because I’m not buying it”.

Dominic shook his head, still playing dumb. But he knew he had to say something if he wanted to get at least a fair chance on her, so after gasping for air he muttered:

“No, my father wasn’t present at the baptizing”, thinking immediately:

“What kind of dumb answer is that?”

He noticed how the sweat was gushing over his back from what amounted to panic, but again she defused a tense situation when she pulled up one eye brow in a questioning gesture and reacted with a single:

“Oh?”

He had to correct this mess very fast…he knew he had to. He was making himself totally ridiculous, he was devastating his image, so he said, tougher than he actually felt:

“Very long story about a very short moment! Just forget it!”

But she didn’t forget. No matter how sweet her voice sounded, she pressed the matter relentlessly when she said:

“So, your mother named you Bunny? I really can’t believe that!”

Dominic held both his hands up in a gesture that might mean a defense but could well be the expression of a capitulation to the continuing gentle pressure and cried out:

“No! My mom named me Dominic!”

“Wow”, she exclaimed with a grin, “That took a lot of effort”.

She took a few steps forward, almost pressing her body against his, laid her head on his shoulder and with her lips against his ear she whispered:

“In the scene they call me Martha, but my mommy named me Martha. I guess that is enough as an introduction and to clear up my gender status in one stroke, don’t you think so?”

“Uhuh!” Dominic stammered, not fully recovered yet from his unheard of bout of shyness. He was surprised by his own reaction. What was she, who was she, that she could penetrate his whole system of seduction role tricks, reducing him to a mere lovesick adolescent setting his eyes on the boy of his dreams for the very first time?

In a way he didn’t understand he felt exposed, even threatened. Could she gauge the fathomless void, that was inside him? Could she read his mind for the reasons he had for doing what he normally used to do? Had she by any chance penetrated into his soul’s inner core? And had she discovered there the fears, anxieties and uncertainties that haunted him?

Now he understood why he was sweating so profusely…it was indeed sweat out of panic!

He struggled hard to get a grip on his anxiety, so that he wouldn’t let this once-in-a-lifetime chance slip out of his hands. Because intuitively he sensed there was more in it than just one night…the piece of iron was firmly in the grip of the mysterious magnetic eyes.

Martha changed her approach quite sudden. She took a few steps back, laid her large, manly hands on his shoulders, looked at him from crown to toes and with an enchanting smile she sighed:

“Oh, look at you! You are so cute when you are shy. You should use it more often on your lovers…it might be a great success. But eeeuhhh…”.

She pressed herself against his body for another time and in a low whisper she uttered:

“How about it…the two of us? Your place?”

“Well…”, Dominic muttered somewhat ashamed, I…I only got…well, you know…a very small apartment. And I’ve only got a single bed!”

“Doesn’t matter, bumblebunny”, she smiled crookedly, “I’ve got a strong suspicion that we won’t need that much space!”

“Bumble…bunny?” he stuttered in a confused wonder.

“Yeah”, Martha giggled, “I thought it to be a sweet nickname for a cutie like you. Come on, let’s go. Take me to your palace!”

Hand in hand they left the Dance Temple and walked towards Dominic’s tiny apartment.

On the way back he was on his guard, carefully looking around, searching for signs of peril. Martha noticed it and asked:

“What are you afraid of?”.

“No, I’m not afraid, just cautious”, he replied.

“But for what?” she insisted.

“For Polish gay busting gangs”, he answered somewhat irritated, “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of them bastards”.

He was referring to groups of Polish men who came to Berlin for the sole purpose of beating up an unsuspecting gay guy, only to slip back over the border to their own country before the German police could get a hold of them. But they weren’t the only safety hazard, especially in the neighborhood where he lived, where kids of thirteen or fourteen had started to consider it a sport to go gay hunting.

Martha only guffawed, which annoyed Dominic who considered these gangs a real danger for the security of all gays, including himself.

“You seem to find it pretty funny”, he said in an admonishing way.

“To the contrary”, Martha objected, “But…they only beat up gays”.

“What makes you think we’re safe then?” Dominic wanted to know, not really getting the gist of what she wanted to say.

She made him stop in front of a large shop window, which was illuminated by the light of the upcoming sun.

“Take a look at our images”, she said decisively.

Dominic did as he was told but the reflection gave him no reason to reconsider his safety situation on this very early Sunday morning.

“They’ll never get the point that we are two gays”, Martha said confident, “Because we look like two Lesbians. So, bumblebunny, we’re completely safe! There’s nothing to worry about!”

Giggling for another time she took him by the hand, drew him against her shoulder and indeed, as Lesbians deeply in love they continued their way to Dominic’s apartment.

 

The two ‘fake Lesbians’ disappeared as by magic, turning very gay very fast, as soon as Dominic’s apartment door was closed.

Clothing was virtually torn from bodies and thrown around, which was quite an accomplishment, considering the fact that their lips seemed glued to each other, while tongues industriously tried to find their compatriot in the other’s mouth.

Once both were naked Dominic lost his apprehension and slipped into his usual role. He pushed Martha against the apartment door, clamped his arms around her neck and lifted his left leg, that started to slide over Martha’s right leg and hip, the warm soft inner thigh stroking temptingly over her skin, that seemed to glow from the stimulation.

“Mmmmm”, Martha moaned, “I start to recognize the real Bunny…finally!”

“Huhuh”, Dominic confirmed, but this ‘Huhuh’ sounded no longer insecure and confused, but was uttered in a very self-assured, hoarse and alluring way: Bunny got into his stride!

The warming-up was long, sleazy and extremely intense and at the end of it both of their bodies glowed with unqualified lust and desire, a perfect pre-cursor for what both sultry pairs of eyes asked for in pleading and demanding glances: the question for more!

And more they got. After Dominic walked to the bed with rocking hips and bottom, he lay down and Martha joined him without further invitation and put herself on top of him. She fulfilled her own forecast, that they wouldn’t need much space but she also fulfilled Dominic’s expectations about a very hot night when she started to reconnoiter his skin with her lips and tongue. He responded in kind, letting his tongue glide over the bony naked shoulders and her frail upper torso.

Gradually both their attention shifted to other, the more intimate and erogenous zones of the body. Dominic was impressed by Martha’s dick, that no longer gave a frail impression, being long and thick and sticking out like a proud lance during a Medieval tournament. With closed eyes he started to dream about how this beautiful lust bringer would feel once it was inside him. He expected it to become his most fabulous experience so far after all the previous, partly also very spectacular experiences. But he did not ask for it…not yet!

“Let’s just wait how things go out of themselves”, his mind advised him insinuatingly in a low mental whisper, “Don’t rush things, boy!”

It proved to be a wise decision because Martha indicated, that he had totally different plans. She rose, turned around and positioned herself with her bums and huge phallus right over Dominic’s mouth, dipping the dripping body part lower towards the lips. Dominic opened his mouth, snapped towards the huge tip and swallowed it up. He started to suck it passionately.

In the meantime, Martha bent over and took his significantly more modest fun tool in her mouth with both of them ending up in the well-known and more than delicious 69.

Dominic used, what he considered his trademark when doing blowjobs: softly and very gently he scraped his front teeth over the uncovered dick tip from its rim to its point, hardly touching the sensitive tissue but only exerting minimal pressure. It solicited an intense, lustful moan from deep down Martha’s chest and inwardly Dominic smiled: it had worked again!

But despite that it didn’t work out the way both wanted it to be. Martha got a bit too excited and frenetic and started to thrust in Dominic’s mouth, who normally had no problem at all with a good mouth fuck, but Martha’s extraordinary dimension blocked his airway when the tip pushed into his larynx. He gagged, fought for breath, felt he was suffocating and panicked because he thought he was dying. Frantically he waved Martha off.

Once the large tree was out of his mouth he gasped for breath and wiped the cold sweat from his face.

“Too deep?” Martha asked worried.

Still coughing Dominic only nodded.

“So, no deep throating?” Martha muttered, disappointment in his voice.

A bit ashamed Dominic shook his head and replied:

“No! Hey, I’m really no newcomer but I never managed to do deep throating. As soon as the dick enters my throat, I feel like I’m dying and I really panic then. I’m sorry”.

“Never mind”, Martha whispered with a kind of forgiving smile, “But I sure hope your other parts have a higher resistance for overloading”.

“Try them out!” Dominic grinned, by now with twinkling eyes again.

“Sure will, bumblebunny”, Martha moaned voluptuously in confirmation.

True to her word Martha started immediately to prepare her lover for the night for things to come.

She started to lick Dominic’s by now fully aroused pecker but, contrary to what Dominic expected, she didn’t do it from base up, from the balls towards the sensitive tip, but the other way around. Suddenly the tongue disappeared, but only long enough to lift the boy’s legs, sticking them high in the air. Dominic automatically grasped the back side of his knees and pushed them up against his chest.

“Good boy!” he heard Martha sigh.

The tongue continued its explorations by licking over the balls, then slid slowly and gingerly over the skin between Dominic’s legs with as much pressure as a light breeze on a warm summer night, only to end at the beginning of his ass crack. Hands spread his haunches and the tongue shamelessly started to caress Dominic’s ass.

Dominic had lost count a long time ago of all the many, many times he had been fucked since his fourteenth, but of one thing he was certain: that, what happened to him right at this moment, was an absolute first! And he was addicted to the delicious feeling right away. His bliss increased exponentially, when Martha carefully opened his sphincter with two fingers and when Dominic felt how the trans’ tongue slipped inside him, lightly touching the by now extremely sensitive inner spheres of his rectum. It caused him to be thrusted into a delirium of raw lust, forgetting all about reality and the now and where of this early Sunday morning. He moaned, groaned, cooed and shrieked out of boundless delight and was very certain, that this was the best time he ever had while being with a man in bed. There was only one description for it: it was simply divine!

However, Martha seemed not satisfied yet and had more tricks up her sleeve. After a long time the tongue was replaced by a finger, that delicately entered Dominic and started to play around in the narrow constraints of his intestines. Again, it was as overwhelming as a blazing wildfire. But then Martha abruptly stopped and said:

“You want the real thing inside?”

Dominic nodded eagerly. How could he abstain from the feeling of being desperately wanted by this fascinating shemale?

“And in which position, bumblebunny?” came the next question.

“That, my sweetheart, is up to you!” he replied.

“Oh?” Martha reacted somewhat naughty with a clearly visible glistening in the eyes, “Then, how about the Sailing Cruise?”

“Huh?” was all Dominic could utter.

His spontaneous wondering reaction betrayed, that this night would be full of firsts.

“Ah, never heard of it, do you?” Martha grinned, “No problem, I’ll teach you how it is done. See it as a wonderful expansion of your…eeeuhhh…repertoire”.

The shemale pushed Dominic’s legs down again from their elevated position, which suited him just fine, since his thigh muscles started to cramp somewhat.

She ignored Dominic’s carefully hidden subtle moves to loosen his leg muscles and patiently started to lay the boy in the required position.

First, she bent Dominic’s right leg and pushed it over the left one, that was kept in a fully stretched position. Somewhat disappointed Dominic followed the movement, thinking it would be another variation on the ages old Spoons position, and rolled on his left side.

“No”, Martha corrected him, “Stay on your back, only twist your hips a bit”.

Disappointment was replaced by confusion, but nevertheless Dominic complied by rolling back on his back but he kept his hips somewhat twisted, making his bottom stick out slightly to the rear, while the muscle tension opened his crack up almost automatically, giving unlimited access to what every top was looking for.

In delight Martha looked at the view and muttered:

“Mmmmm...what a magnificent, sweet and pink pussy!”

Dominic felt himself blush for another time at this compliment, but Martha behaved like she hadn’t noticed it. She lay on top of Dominic, curled the boy’s right leg over her hip, planted her chin on the boy’s chest, looked right into his eyes and softly said:

“Now, the beauty of this is, that it is you, who can control this. It would break my heart if that happens, but in case you don’t like it the way I do it you can throw me off with a single push with your right leg. But if you like it, you can curl your lower leg over my bottom and push me in deeper. By the way, you’ve got a rubber?”

Dominic smiled as enticingly as possible and whispered:

“If you’re talking about HIV…no need to! My last test was clean and I’m on PrEP”.

“Wow”, Martha grinned, showing she was impressed.

That said, the shemale wriggled into position, placing her huge tip directly aligned to the narrow entrance and started her gentle penetration.

This penetration was a tough job for Dominic, despite the fact that his virginity was long gone by now. Martha’s phallus was enormous and as a result it hurt like hell. Dominic had to fight the urge to throw her off…he didn’t want to break her heart!

And then the pain subsided and was replaced by a magisterial emotion. Dominic felt how he was filled. No, not his rectum (which was pretty well filled as well) but his own heart and soul, that filled up with a feeling akin to the one he experienced a few years before, when he was with the elderly man called Max. Again, he was unable to define it, this feeling of intimate connectedness, an emotion with which he had no experience at all.

His mind flashed the same thought as it had done when he was with Max:

“Could this be what other people call…love?”

It had to feel that way. Despite its gargantuan size the rod inside him moved gently, almost tender and in reaction Dominic folded his lower right leg over Martha’s bottom and started to push him in, in the meantime moaning:

“Deeper…! Deeper…!”

It uttered a low, satisfied and lustful groan from Martha, who gladly did as was requested. Another thought popped up in Dominic’s dazed mind:

“If this is indeed what they call love…then I love him!”

The thought was immense, even overwhelming. It hit him like a sudden revelation of something often mentioned but still obscure, that feeling that had eluded him for many years…until this very moment. It made, that he increased his pressure on the shemale’s bottom with almost uncontrolled, sudden, rapid moves, hammering her in without any possible avenue of escape.

Martha felt no inclination to escape; she was more than willing to give her lover all he wanted. Her tree kept moving in a steady, careful and touchy-feely way, gaining depth by the millimeter. Dominic lost all track of time; his euphoria seemed to persist for ages and he caroused in every second of it, screaming out:

“You grinch! You damned grinch!”

But the delivering orgasm was inevitable and had to follow, only punctuated by a low, hard growl coming from deep out of Martha and a loud shriek from Dominic.

It took some time, but once he regained his breath Dominic muttered:

“I love you…I think!”

“OK!” Martha cried out, acknowledging the message with a broad smile.

Somehow, the shemale was not satisfied yet: she brought her lips against Dominic’s by now wide-open cunt and started to felch the sperm out again, after which she chewed on it before swallowing it with a glint of relish in her eyes.

They re-played the whole evolution another three times, twice in other positions (including another unknown for Dominic, that Martha called the Helicopter, but that Dominic found to be a bit too complicated and exacting), but the last time Dominic insisted on that magnificent Sailing Cruise, bent on re-experiencing that same wondrous feeling in his heart and soul.

Overcome with exhaustion they fell asleep at exactly the moment when the church bells started their chiming over the city of Berlin to call their congregations to mass, entangled in each other’s arms and whispering sweet things to each other until their eyes could no longer be stopped from closing all by themselves.

 

One can’t expect to go to sleep that late and still have breakfast at a duly time of the day. As a matter of fact, even calling what Dominic and Martha had a brunch would be indecent, since even brunch time had long gone by, because they ate their first meal at a time when other people enjoyed dinner. For them it made no difference: the coffee was hot, strong and black, the croissants were fresh - at least reasonably- and they had a real good time together.

After some general and pleasant chitchat without too much significance they exchanged their cell phone numbers and talked over last night’s experiences, but gradually their conversation turned serious, the topic changing to the history of their lives with Dominic remaining conspicuously silent. But he was becoming more and more jealous about the fact, that Martha’s childhood was a happy one. He knew the other side of it and he knew it very intimately.

One part of his mind listened to Martha, the other part was pre-occupied with his own memories, comparing them with Martha’s and finding his own painfully unsatisfactory. It was not, that he begrudged Martha his youth, it was more that he granted himself a better one.

Without conscious thought about what he was doing he walked to the cabinet, opened the drawer and took a package of cigarettes out. He was a fairly late starter as far as smoking was concerned. He had his first cigarette in the strict regime home, only to try to become a part of the group, a desperate but nevertheless futile attempt to be one of the boys. The memory of his first smoke still made his belly rumble and even the thought about it could make his face turn green again. But he got hooked on nicotine anyway.

He took one out of the package and lighted it, inhaling deeply. It seemed to annoy Martha.

With an irritated expression in her eyes the trans said:

“Do you really have to smoke?”

“Huh?” Dominic reacted in surprise.

“If you really have to smoke?” Martha repeated her question with growing irritation.

”Why not?” Dominic inquired, not seeing any problem in smoking a cigarette, feeling kind of frustrated by what was in his eyes an inappropriate and unjust correction.

“Maybe because I don’t like it!” was the sharp answer.

Within seconds Dominic’s frustration developed into anger, only to ignite into rage. Something snapped in his mind. For years he had swallowed small and large frustrations, humiliations and pain and had endured all the ordering around. He had braved it all, had never dared to object or challenge it but in his mind all these negative experiences brooded and boiled into a highly flammable and volatile mixture. And right at this moment this mixture chose to torch in a ferocious explosion, triggered by the sparks of Martha’s question and final remark on the subject, throwing all his shrouded emotions out in one fearful discharge of unreasonable fury:

“Who the fuck do you think you are to order me around? Are we married or something? You think you can tell me what to do? Now, do you? The fact, that I let you fuck me, doesn’t mean you can give me orders on what to do and what to leave! Is that clear?””

His screaming and yelling increased in the same exponential way as his rage completely got out of hand:

“You think you’re really someone, don’t you? Did you think you’re my grandfather? You think you can break me in the slit? Huh…now do you…you want me in the slit?”

“What’s that…the slit?” Martha asked flabbergasted.

”You can’t fool me!” he screamed, “You know damned well what it is! Or maybe you like it better to replace these bastards at the home? Or this geezer who stuck this rose in my ass…Would you like that?”

There was a second of pause. Seeing a tiny opportunity to defuse the situation, Martha giggled and said:

“How cute! A rose in your ass!”

As far as there had been any left, even the last limits in Dominic’s anger were swept away by this remark. With half closed eyes he stared at her with a glance of what was almost hate and hissed:

“You think so? With the stem in me, including the thorns? What are you? Some kind of stand-up comedian?”

His volume increased to hurricane strength again when he continued, screaming on the top of his lungs:

“You think that is funny? Well, I’ve got news for you: it’s not! I’m no longer taking any insults from no one. This is my place! And at least here I have a right to live!”

He was so carried away by his irrationality that he didn’t notice that Martha dropped her eyes in shame and guilt. He started to scream out things, that the only audience in the room could never understand what this was all about, since the shemale had played no part in all he released from the confines of his burdened memory: how his grandfather regularly grabbed him by his balls or his boy’s pussy under the shower, only to break him most finally and force him in vicious ways later on to have sex with him, “softening him up” by anal penetration with a wooden stick; how the meanest dictator in the home forced him to undress until naked, kneel down and suck his dick or face the consequences, only to be compelled by brute force to repeat the same humiliating act to the four closest vassals who had avidly observed the whole procedure, eagerly awaiting their own opportunity. And how he became the most wanted sissy slave to cater for the sexual needs of this five men gang, who called themselves “The Real Rulers”, for the rest of his time in that hell, his hands tied high above his head to some heating pipe to be used as fuck meat in what they called their ‘fun cellar’, even to the extent that he was rented out for a fuck for the price of two packages of cigarettes, coerced by intimidation, blackmail or plain physical violence, weapons for which he had no defenses available. He yelled and screamed on in an increasingly incoherent and uncontrolled ranting way. And his state of mind made, that Martha’s reaction eluded him completely.

The trans stared at him with open mouth, eyes in shock. But gradually the eyes changed to an expression of horror, ending in a kind of resignation.

“Now, bumblebunny…”, she tried to quieten him down, “Slow down a second…”.

It did nothing to diminish Dominic’s frenzy one bit, to the contrary: it only provided extra fuel. Fully hysterical by now he screeched:

“Get out! I never want to see you again! Get the fuck out of here!”

Martha stared at him another time, this time for maybe two seconds, her eyes cold and hostile by now. She rose, saying only one word:

“OK!”

She grabbed her things and walked towards the door. Without looking back, she opened it, stepped out and slammed it shut again. In pure frustration Dominic grabbed the cigarette package from the table and threw it after her, where it hit the closed door and fell apart from the impact, spreading its contents over the floor.

Exhausted from his temper tantrum and fighting to regain his breath Dominic sank on the couch. His eyes searched his cigarettes on the table.

“I need a smoke”, he muttered, wondering where the package had gone to. He was certain he had one and it had been on the table. His eyes wandered through the room, searching for the missing cigarettes.

It took some time, but finally he saw the torn package lying at the apartment door, the cigarettes dispersed over a large area.

“How did that happen?” he whispered in wonder.

He saw no reason to bother about it, since it didn’t matter that much to him. He found what he had been looking for, got on his knees and started to collect the undamaged cigarettes. In relief he lighted one of them and sank back on the couch. He felt extremely fidgety and found the atmosphere in his room suffocating, so he rose again and opened the only window, carefully avoiding looking out. Maybe he would see Martha walking away and he didn’t want to see Martha while she was walking away. He sagged on the couch for another time, lighted third cigarette and with a gloomy face he stared in front of him.

The cool outside air, that streamed into the room, and the darkness, that slowly fell over the city, soothed his frail nerves and returned his emotions to a more manageable level.

But strange as it may sound, that turned out to be a mixed blessing. Because once he was able to think reasonably again it dawned on him that he had caused a real catastrophe: he had fallen in love with that spellbound trans and had ruined all his chances within the course of one natural day. Part of her attraction was, that he had considered her unattainable the evening before but he proved to be wrong. Now however, she seemed more unattainable as ever before and all that because of his own stupid outburst of anger.

Softly he started to murmur in himself:

“It was so beautiful not even twenty-four hours before and I blew it all to smithereens! I have to find a way to make it up. I have to call her…explain it to her and apologize…and hope she will forgive me!”

But how big were his chances, that he could repair the damage done? Was it only damage? Or was it total loss?

“I must try to save what I can…”, he muttered with a grim expression on his face, “I have to. I can’t exist without her any longer!”

The spell she casted proved inescapable and the only thing he could do now was to try to win back her favors. But not this night! Because, he reasoned, he must have hurt her deeply and she might still be angry with him. She too needed time to climb down from her own fury and chill as well. Tomorrow evening would do just fine.

Late that evening he made up his mind: he would call her tomorrow evening. Worn out he went to bed, but the sanctuary of sleep proved to be very elusive. For most of the night he dealt with searching for words to express regret, construed sentences with the correct intonations and rehearsed them soundlessly with moving lips. He tried to anticipate her reactions, frantically looking for ways to counter them as well. Only when the first rays of daylight crept in, he slid into an uneasy sleep. The painful craving for his goddess had begun!

 

Mondays had always been bluesy days for Dominic but this one was truly monstrous. He was unable to concentrate on his job, making mistake after mistake, his thoughts buzzing around Martha and the difficult task awaiting him: the phone call to apologize and to make it up…if she would accept that!

His slovenliness even brought him a mild dressing down from his boss. It happened, when an elderly gentleman asked him where he could find the trays with baroque music. Without actually listening or thinking he sent the man in a certain direction, not aware that he made a mistake, that might place his professional competence under suspicion.

He started to notice that something was wrong when he felt he was stared at when working at the counter. He looked up in the direction from where the gaze came, only to look right into the eyes of the oldtimer, that showed him a surprised and irritated gaze.

He immediately knew why: he had sent the man to the wrong tray. The geezer must have been in confusion and shock when he found cd’s of Genesis, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Merillion and Yes when he was looking for Bach, Telemann, Couperin, Frescobaldi and Scarlatti the Father. Although…with a grin hidden behind his hand Dominic thought:

“So what? Genesis is pretty baroque as well!”

But it became somewhat problematic when the man complained with the store owner about the ‘lacking competence of his employee’. It brought him a mild warning from his boss. Immediately after that he felt submerged in a terrible storm surge of anxiety:

“He doesn’t like me any longer! He wants to get rid of me!”

With supreme effort he got his fears under control. It made, that he tried to run the extra mile while at work, to pay attention and be more alert, but this intent was overshadowed pretty soon by the problems with Martha, problems he had caused himself in the very first place.

Then evening came. He rushed home and ate hurriedly. After he finished his scanty microwave dinner he sat down on the couch and stared at his cell phone, that lay ahead of him on the coffee table.

He pinched his eyes, stroke his hands over them and grumbled softly:

“Let’s do it! Let’s find out if the axe will fall or not!”

A wry smile came on his face: on one hand he found the thought exaggerated, almost ridiculous. On the other one: it was the way his heart felt about it.

With a shaking hand, the palm wet from sweat, he took the cell phone. He stared at it for a few seconds, took a deep breath and pushed the button where Martha’s number was stored.

The phone rang…three…no, four…five times. Then he heard:

“Hi, this is Martha’s…”

“Hi, it’s me, Dominic”, he cried out in relief, a feeling that was destroyed right away when he heard:

“…. answering machine. Sorry, I’m not available. But leave your name and phone number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Kiss, sweeties”.

“Fuck!” he muttered under his breath.

Hoping she would be available later he tried another four times, each one of them answered by the same message.

It meant he was granted a stay of execution, but it convicted him to a longer period of uncertainty and anxiety as well, things that he was unable to cope with.

During the evening an uncomfortable suspicion crept in his thinking: was she plain fake? Did she block him in some way by changing her number? It increased his fear, that things were over in a most definite way, a feeling that increased his unrest to alarmingly dangerous levels.

Especially when he kept trying to contact Martha for days on end, calling her four times an evening. In the end it continued for weeks. He persevered doggedly, but the only thing he heard time after time after time was that damned canned message. He heard it that often, that he knew every word of the text by heart.

On several evenings he broke in tears after another series of fruitless attempts, muttering things like:

“Don’t leave me alone! I know it was my fault but please come back! I miss you!”

Or only:

“Please…pick up the phone! Let us talk…please! Don’t leave me!”

Over the weeks he got more and more depressed after listening to the recorded message again and again. The emptiness came creeping back, the paralyzing feeling that there was nothing in his heart and soul that could be called a positive emotion: no warmth, no love, no affection, only dark feelings, like deep sadness, anger and fear. Unstoppably the deep, ugly void recovered all terrain it had lost to the lightning strike of passion that one early Sunday morning.

One evening, after three weeks of fruitless attempts, he made up his mind. He would try to call her one last time and after that he just had to face reality.

But his last attempt failed miserably as well, when he heard:

“Hi, this is Martha’s answering machine…”.

With a droopy face he pushed the rest of the message away. The axe still hung over his head, but by now on a very thin thread. And it was bound to fall any minute now!

That evening, after he decided to stop trying his hand to get in touch with Martha, the turning point came. In his thoughts and feelings Martha plunged with dizzying speed from his absolute goddess to a whore, a bitch, a despicable creature, a mere rat and a piece of filth. From the adored and sorely missed desirable person she turned into a detestable ugly slut. He bitched on her in his mind all days and at evenings, when he was at home, he did it even out loud, ending his increasingly furious speech mostly with a heartfelt:

“Fuck you, Martha!”

Only to let it follow with a deep sigh with:

“But I’m afraid the chances on that are lost!”

There were no longer positive memories of her in existence. Once an idol, she was maligned to an obscure demon by now. His love had turned to veritable hate!

One evening, after he had ended his daily harangue, he stared listlessly at the tv, his mind not registering what his eyes saw, because it was too absorbed by the maelstrom of dismal thoughts and feelings. So it annoyed him when his cell phone rang. He didn’t feel like answering the call, but out of habit he stared uninterested to the small screen to see who was calling.

He more or less read the number in the screen. It didn’t matter, it was an unknown, it wasn’t Martha.

Inertly he answered the call with a grumpy:

“Hello!”

“Hi, bumblebunny”, came the cheerful reply.

Joy and mitigation flooded him and excitedly he cried out:

“Martha! It’s you!”

“Yeah”, came a giggled answer, “Who else did you expect? Fred Flintstone?”

Unfortunately, not only the positive emotions mushroomed but they were accompanied by other sensations of a darker nature, like the heartaches, the uncertainty, the fears, the anger and the hate from the last weeks. For a second time Martha’s voice functioned as that tiny spark, that ignited a chain reaction, that flowed out like torrents of water pouring down from a broken dam.

Dominic went virtually ballistic when he started to scream:

“Why are you torturing me? Why do you hurt me for all these weeks? I couldn’t reach you for weeks. Why?”

“Wait a second, honey”, Martha tried to calm him down, “I…I…I was abroad for my work and I…eeeuhh...forgot my cell phone. When I saw all your calls this evening, I called you right away”.

Dominic never heard her somewhat wavering and not really convincing explanation, simply because he was unable to listen. He just ranted on:

“You just want to punish me for this one simple outburst and let me hang out to dry for three weeks. It’s not fair! You’re cruel!”

“But I called you now!”, Martha said softly, trying for another time to bring him back to reason.

Her soothing voice drowned by a large margin in Dominic’s by now frenzied volume when he screamed:

“You want to punish me for the fact I’m a bad boy and an evil creature! No one has the right to punish me! NO ONE! You’re not my hangman! So just piss off and leave me alone!”

By now he was out of breath from his outburst. He tried to regain it, but on Martha’s side the line kept silence for a few seconds. Then she said with an icy voice:

“Are you done?”

He was unable to reply, he just kept panting.

Next Martha said in curt, stiff tone, barely hiding her own anger:

“This is the second time you start yelling at me for no apparent reason. I forgave you the first time, but not this second one. I hope you get a grip on yourself and your problems, kid. Have a good life!”

The following fatal click, that ended the connection, said it all: she cut all ties with him!

With empty, hollow eyes he stared at the small phone in his hand for a while, sobbing softly. Suddenly he rose and swung out his arm widely in a move of impotency and hurled the cell phone through the room, where it disintegrated in small pieces when it hit the opposite wall.

Dominic sank his head against the bathroom doorpost, clearly beyond caring. His shoulders shocked and he let the tears run freely over his cheeks. He clawed his nails in the doorpost’s paint and slowly sank on his knees, the nails causing scratches in the fresh paint, his face pressed against the cool wood. Once on the floor on his knees he let all inhibitions go and started to weep uncontrollably.

While doing so he lifted his head from the doorpost, stared up and in a wailing lament he cried out:

“Martha…please…please! Don’t do that to me…Please…Don’t put me in the slit!! Please... don’t do that! I’ll be a good boy now! I promise! Don’t leave me in the slit!”

It took a very long time before he more or less recovered when it seemed, that there were no tears left any longer. Clumsily he scrambled up, giving the vague impression, that he found his common senses back again. But that was a huge misconception.

Because there was this loose ended issue in his way of reasoning during his violent outburst on the phone, a new line of emotional thinking. It was the thought, that he needed to be punished for being bad and evil. And this disruptive idea forced a firm foothold for itself in his already twisted soul.

With difficulty he stumbled to the kitchenette and opened a drawer. His eyes found what they were looking for and his hand took it without conscious thought. It was a pair of scissors.

Holding them in one hand, he sat on the couch and with a deranged grin on his face he started to scratch wounds into his other arm. He clamped his lips to stifle any outcry of pain and in satisfaction he stared at the blood dripping over his skin, dark blood, black blood…blood polluted by his sickening life! He was possessed again by the all-encompassing numbing emptiness inside him. It made the sensation of the pain exhilarating…at least he felt something!

“Wanna feel…wanna… feel…the pain! Pain…!” he murmured incoherently.

Then he muttered through clenched teeth:

“Nobody has the right to punish me. Only I can punish myself for my wrongdoings!”

With a bloodcurdling giggle he made another deep scratch in the flesh, relishing the sight of the blood flowing out.

“I have to punish myself…for being a bad boy…a filthy coward, who did nothing… to help mommy…an evil boy…a demonic child without the right to live!” he whispered softly.

The last thread had succumbed to the pressures of the heavy weight it had to support.

The axe had fallen!

 

If the weeks before this very last phone call were only a very bad dream, the weeks after it were simply a monstrosity!

Dominic’s condition deteriorated by the day. First, he hardly slept. Every evening he tossed and turned, trying to get his dark thoughts under some pretence of normalcy. And if he slept, which was about three or four hours per night, it was a restless sleep.

There were always dreams and all of them were about Martha. Some of them were sweet, about them being together, making love. But most of the nights there was this terrible nightmare, in which she forced him to undress and then bashed him into a narrow, black hole in the wall, giggling and forecasting into the smallest and most horrible details, how she would set the critters free, that would eat him until only his bones were left. By then the panic in his mind had exploded to such unmanageable and dangerous levels, that he woke up once the first boy-eating creatures started to scurry over him, hardly able to recognize, that the nightmare was over and that he was back in the real world in his bedroom. In other nightmares she giggled hysterically when she lit a woodpile, claiming she was only burning garbage.

Each time he woke up from it, screaming, flailing his arms and legs, shuddering, with chattering teeth, covered with cold sweat and panting for breath, as if he had the suffocating smoke of the burning wood in his lungs. And then he had to get up to recover his duvet, that laid on the other side of the room. Dying three or four times a week by being eaten alive in some dark hole or in the blazing flames of a pyre was a terrible ordeal, …even if it was only in a dream.

Eating was almost something of the past. He hardly ate. Why should he? It was not some kind of conscious hunger strike, it was just that he wasn’t hungry. And why should he eat if he wasn’t hungry? Wasn’t hunger or at least the avoidance of that feeling the pre-requisite for eating?

Even if he ate, it was unhealthy junk food without any nutritional value. He just ate it as stomach filler to avoid the uncomfortable feeling, that his stomach was empty. As a logical result, the weight of his already frail body plummeted in free fall to terrifying depths, a process, that was only increased by regular bouts of diarrhea as the consequence of too fat take-away food. Which meant that, even if he ate, the food flushed out of his body, taking even the tiniest traces of nutrition with it so that nothing was left.

And there was always this paralyzing weariness. He was tired when he woke up, he got more tired during the day with each step or action feeling if it could be his very last and when evening finally fell and he crashed on the bed, he was exhausted, only to wake up next morning feeling incredibly tired!

At work it got worse and worse, even to the point that his boss threatened him to sack him if things didn’t improve. He just shrugged it off, he couldn’t care less. He was beyond caring.

Nevertheless, he fought on, although in a grossly uncoordinated and ineffective way. He knew, that he had a problem, although he couldn’t pinpoint what that problem was. He knew he behaved irrational, but had no clou to why he did it.

The most paramount over all his negative thoughts and feelings was this continuous sensation of the vast emptiness inside him, that, compared to the times “before Martha”, seemed to loom even larger in the present days “after Martha”. In his dark fantasies he envisaged it as a huge black hole inside, turning him into an empty shell with the skin around him only there to keep all the blackness inside so it wouldn’t contaminate others around him. No matter his images about it, it controlled all of his life and it evaded all his frantic attempts to define what should have been inside the void.

He knew full well he was born and raised in this city, he realized he knew every back alley, inner courtyard and almost each single bush in the multitude of parks the city had, but nevertheless he started to hate this metropole. For him it had turned into an assembly of ugly and impersonal concrete-and-glass towers and an eternal smother of exhaust gasses and deafening vehicle noise, no longer populated by human beings but by creatures, that had degenerated into a kind of shades, that were absorbed with staring in their cellphone screens and whose body language made it obvious, that they were no longer interested in anything or anybody outside their own skin. Even the sight of them could make him feel sick! And to avoid that he withdrew into staring in his cellphone screen himself when he was on the streets, so that he wouldn’t be confronted by the walking wraiths around him.

Stubborn as he was, the thought never occurred to him to see his doctor or was this refusal to do so prompted by fear, fear to learn what was really going on with him? He fought on without any help from the outside, totally blind about what was going on and what to do about it. But it hurt him deeply, when his friends started to turn their backs on him and abandoned him, leaving him solely to his own meagre devices, that were dwindling by the week. The reasons for doing so were shrouded in mystery for him.

The weeks turned into months and Dominic’s condition got worse and worse. But he still refused to surrender. To the contrary: he tried to struggle back by finding a counterweight for all his sadness and misery. He found it in the Dance Temple.

But these outings were no longer the happy parties they had once been. Even they degenerated into a kind of compulsive actions in which he tried to make contact with other people, reaching out in an overwrought way with insufficient and on top of that inappropriate means. One doesn’t make new friends by behaving rude, gruff and distrustful. And most of all, his eyes were continuously searching for the frail silhouette of that exotic and desirable trans, called Martha. But he never saw her! It was, as if she had disappeared from the surface of the earth…at least from Berlin. But wasn’t that the same?

Bunny was a thing of the past. He was only a shadow of the boy that was called that way, his glamorous, seductive ways being replaced by listlessness, depression and the wrong kind of determination of wanting to score. Even his ‘regulars’ gave him the cold shoulder. It hurt him painfully, he didn’t understand why. Here he was, the one and only Bunny…without recognizing, that there was no Bunny left and that others only saw the saddening leftovers of the empty case of that once desirable boy.

He was in the club each and every evening that it was opened, becoming more and more a loner, he danced…and he danced alone. He tried to work himself into a trance, that enabled him to withdraw from the ugly and mean real world. And when he got tired, he just popped some more speed, getting him going for another few hours, mostly to repeat this procedure in the early morning hours to exceed his endurance. Every time he left the club more depressed in early morning than he had entered it the evening before, wondering where she was and where she had gone to.

And so, the next joyless weekend came. He went dancing on Friday evening, kept going until the first busses started rolling through the city. He went again Saturday evening and stayed even longer, hearing the church bells chime for early mass when he stumbled home the next Sunday morning.

And that Sunday turned out to be horror. After a few hours of sleep he rose, feeling every muscle in no matter what part of his body ache and he had a splitting head ache, that felt as if a freight train was rolling through his brains.

The day became sheer torture. He stood under a hot shower for two hours to sooth his overstrained muscles, coming out from under it red as a lobster. He took too much painkillers to get rid of the headache and for the rest he just slumped on the couch, dozing off so every now and then, but waking up again from pain, because one or the other muscle had decided to cramp right at that moment.

He already was chronically tired, but the extra fatigue of the last two nights made even the smallest task impossible. The thought, that he had to take a leak, meaning he had to rise and walk to the bathroom, was an insurmountable tall order. He did it anyway, simply because his body dictated him to do so but even more because the thought, that he would wet his pants if he didn’t, was even more terrifying. And eating? No…he was not hungry, so why eat?

Despite his measly condition he left his apartment shortly after half past eight and started his walk to the Dance Temple. Maybe “walking” was the wrong word: it was more a kind of faltering, at moments almost stumbling over his own feet. He didn’t notice it; he only found it strange, that he needed more time than usual to get at his goal.

After he paid his entrance fee and entered the hall, he found it a good idea to change normal procedure. He didn’t see a chance in the world to get in the right groove in his present state, so he made up his mind to boost it a bit by taking a fair portion of speed right away.

And so he started dancing…again! After he didn’t know exactly how long he noticed he had trouble moving and decided to take a short break. Thirsty as he was, he gulped a cocktail down and augmented the effect of the previous dose of speed by some more pills. And he went back to the dance floor.

Yes, it worked…he felt like moving over the floor like a winged god, gracious, seductive and flashy. But he didn’t notice the worried looks on the faces of the people around him, who saw a boy who was swabbing around uncoordinated, in awkward, almost spastic moves, swaying left, then swaying right by far too slow, completely missing the music’s rhythmic beat.

Dominic became annoyed when he thought:

“What bullshit is that? Why are they putting the volume lower?”

Then he thought he felt something on his shoulder…could it be someone’s hand? A muffled voice seemed to penetrate through layers of cotton wool, asking:

“Are you OK, pal?”

He tried hard to lift his head up to look in the direction of where the voice came from but failed miserably. He could only mutter an elongated:

“Uhuh….”.

Then the music stopped completely and it turned a terrifying black in his head, a deep, intense velvet black, as he had only seen once…

…as black as the eyes of Martha!

 

“That’s weird! I could have sworn all was black. But now…some blinding white light…funny…it beckons me…why that?...No, it speaks to me…”Come over here, Dominic, it is much more beautiful here!”…how does it know my name?”

There was a short pause in the confused reasoning.

“Wait a minute…I read something…people who are…shit…who are dying…they see a white light…but…now wait a second!...Hold it right there…I don’t want to die….fuck, I just turned twenty…I got a whole life before me…I want to live…I never knew love…I want to love…I want to be loved! Don’t let me die now! …Don’t take away the chance to love and be loved! ...Fuck off, damned light!”

The light complied and receded slowly. Blackness took up its all-encompassing reign again. A last flicker of measurable brain activity brought him the hair-raising thought:

“Does…that…mean...I’m…dead…now?”