Jae Mazer was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and grew up in the prairies of Northern Alberta. After spending the majority of her life battling sasquatches in the Great White North, she migrated south to Texas to have a go at the armadillos. Jae always had an obsession with reading and inherited a love of all things dark and horror from her dad. One day, she decided that she had devoured enough words that she could spin a decent yarn of her own. Now she is an award-winning author with a dozen novels under her belt and short stories in various publications.
Read more from Jae right HERE.
HE LIKES VANILLA CAKE THE BEST
by
Jae Mazer
Gertie smiled as the clerk wrote on the cake in curly pink lettering. Pink like flesh. He’ll like that too.
The bakery staff cocked eyebrows at Gertie when she asked for an extra bag. But why shouldn’t she get one? She’d earned it. Eighty years trudging through life, she should certainly be entitled to a bag for a cake and one besides.
Leaving the cocked eyebrows behind with a dingle of the silver bell on the door, Gertie hobbled down the street, bagged cake in one hand, cane clutched in the other. Dusk was draping itself over the city like a shroud. Perfect, she thought.
An old lady such as herself shouldn’t take the alleyways, she’d been told. But who in their right mind would want to thrust anything up inside her crumbling old cavern? Or steal a cake with pretty pink lettering? Gertie hoped someone would. But it was never that easy.
After wandering through several alleys with no reward, Gertie finally stumbled across a blanket pile that breathed like a man. It was crumpled by the dumpster behind the old Italian restaurant. Gertie exhaled a puff of relief. She was tired of walking; her bones and muscles were quite cross with her tonight.
“Good sir?” she said as she poked the blankets with the end of her cane.
But it wasn’t a sir at all. It was a woman, and a young one by the look of her. Aside from filth streaked with dried tears down her bruised and puffy face, there was nary a wrinkle to be found and no bristles of grey hair poking from her mangled mess of hair atop her head.
“Aren’t you a pretty one,” Gertie cooed.
The girl looked relieved. This poor young bird had too many men folk violently cramming themselves inside her, Gertie figured. A woman was nothing to be feared, much less a bag of flesh-covered bones like Gertie.
The girl pulled the blanket back and creaked to her feet. What is she doing? Gertie wondered.
Oh.
The girl collapsed into Gertie’s arms.
“There there, dear,” Gertie said. “It’s okay now.”
“Help me,” the girl mewled. “So hungry. Cold.”
Gertie stroked the girl’s hair. Had life not been a heartless bully, that young beauty’s hair would have been strawberry silk shimmering in the moonlight, soft as candy floss and smelling as sweet.
“Lemme get a look at you, my love,” Gertie said as she took a step back.
Gertie didn’t have to move with haste. The girl was battered and starving enough not to know what was happening. And if she did, she was too defeated to care.
It took only a moment for Gertie to unsheathe the blade from her cane. Another moment to run the tip down the girl’s jumper like a lover tracing his finger from her throat to her clit. And the speed of a breath to slice off the girl’s left breast.
“Thank you,” Gertie said before drawing a smile across the girl’s throat with the tip of her blade.
The girl dropped like a heavy blanket, crumpling into her bed of the same.
Gertie sheathed her cane blade, tucked the bloody breast meat into her spare plastic bag, and continued her promenade home.
Gertie’s Cape Cod style bungalow was waiting for her like a hug. She entered its embrace, leaving her cane just inside the front door, ready for her next excursion, should there be one.
Next stop was her quaint kitchen. Gertie fetched a dishtowel to clean herself up—one of the ones she’d knitted herself with that lovely yellow yarn her granddaughter had bought her. Gertie unboxed the cake and put it on a proper serving platter, taking care to not mar the buttery icing with any blood remaining on her hands or clothes. That cake was so pretty, even if just for a moment.
Gertie hung the plastic bag with the girl meat inside over her forearm and hoisted the now candle-adorned cake on one palm so she could balance herself against the walls as she walked.
“Happy birthday to you …” Gertie sang as she opened the door to the basement.
Gertie struggled down the stairs, her way lit by only the flicker of the birthday candles.
“Happy birthday to you …”
The firelight waltzed with the shadows, and a tear welled in Gertie’s good eye. She wished she could still waltz like that.
“Happy birthday, dear Belphegor …”
The demon lurked in the corner, charred flesh rippling over bulbous muscles. The candlelight twinkled in the ichor dripping from the flaccid member swinging between his legs and the bloody drool twirling from his lipless maw.
“Happy birthday to yoooooooou!”
Gertie set the cake down on a little table she’d covered with one of her crocheted doilies and slid the plastic bag off her arm.
“Got you something,” she chimed with a blush.
With her mangled, arthritic fingers, she pulled the breast from the bag and held it out to the beast. He sniffed the air, then ran a forked tongue over the bloody areola. A breath hitched in Gertie’s throat.
“Do you like it? I meant to get you a man part, like you like, but there was only a girl, and—”
The beast’s face cracked in half as his mouth curved into a wicked smile, baring his many rows of jagged obsidian teeth. He reached out his gangly arms and pulled Gertie in for an embrace. She nestled into his chest as he growled a bitonal chant in her ear.
“I know, sweetie,” Gertie said. “I love you too.”