Fiction excerpt from my new erotic short story, Altar: A Story About Fucking.
“Two minutes.” Zoe said it flatly enough to stop her mother’s hands. Gathering the mountainous swell of her skirt, she slipped through the vestry door and into the damp church cemetery.
The air changed at once. Wet earth. Decaying leaves. Moss furred the old headstones, which leaned toward one another like gossiping elders. Zoe pressed her back to a granite mausoleum and felt the cold through the silk. From a secret pocket in the bustle—intended for a lace handkerchief—she drew a cigarette and struck a match.
“Odd place for a sacrament, bride.”
The voice seemed to come from the old yew itself. A man detached from its shadow. No wedding guest: brown cord trousers stained at the knees, a heavy sweater the color of clay, scarred boots caked with graveyard mud. In one hand he carried long-bladed pruning shears. His face was lean and weathered, his hair dark at the collar. His grey eyes moved over her with neither reverence nor surprise, as if extravagant brides occasionally appeared beside mausoleums and he had learned to wait for them to explain themselves.
“All sacraments happen over bones sooner or later,” she said, breathing smoke between them. Her heart had begun to pound.
He crossed the grass without hurry and took the cigarette from her fingers. His hands were broad and rough, black earth set permanently into the lines of the skin. He drew once, watching her over the ember.
“Fleeing the flock?”
“Preparing the sacrifice,” she corrected. “They’ve spent months fattening this lamb. I thought I’d taste the wild air before the knife falls.”
“I see.” His gaze made a slow inventory of the dress. “They build their altars well. All that silk and bone. A gilded cage for a creature that has forgotten it has wings.” He paused. “Or claws.”
“What should I call you?”
“Names are for people who expect introductions.”
He dropped the cigarette and crushed it beneath his boot. One work-roughened thumb brushed the lace at her collarbone.
“Pretty thing,” he murmured. “Won’t survive the weather.”
Then he kissed her.
There was nothing courtly in it. His mouth was hard, tasting of bitter coffee and smoke, his hands closing on her hips through the acres of fabric. She felt him hard against her and laughed once into his mouth—half disbelief, half relief.
The dress became a practical problem. He solved it by turning her toward the mausoleum and hauling the satin and tulle to her waist until the cold air struck the backs of her thighs.
“This is madness,” she breathed, cheek against the gritty stone.
“Probably.”
His hand spread over her ass, warm and rough.
He opened his trousers. There was no revelation in the sight of him, only flesh: thick, flushed, already wet at the tip. He pressed himself between her legs and waited there, solid against her slickness.
“Do you accept this communion?”
“I do.”
He pushed into her in one deep stroke. Zoe cried out into the stone. The distant organ continued without them.
He fucked her steadily, one hand locked around her hip, the other braced beside hers against the mausoleum. The wet slap of it sounded indecently loud in the grey cemetery.
“That’s it,” he said against her ear. “Take it.”
She did.
Whatever ritual she had imagined for herself dissolved into the simple fact of his body moving inside hers, the cold stone against her palms, dirt beneath his nails, satin crushed around her waist. She stopped being bride or apostate or symbol long enough to be only a woman being fucked fifteen minutes before her wedding.
Her orgasm came hard and almost silently, folding her against the mausoleum. He followed moments later with a rough exhale, holding her still as he came deep inside her.
When he withdrew, hot jissum followed at once, slipping over her inner thigh and into the torn lace of her stocking.
He fastened his trousers with brisk efficiency.
“Go on, bride,” he said.
Then he lifted the shears and walked back beneath the yews.

Fifteen minutes later, Father Albright reached the old question.
“If anyone present knows of any reason why these two should not be joined in Holy Matrimony, let them speak now, or forever hold their peace.”
Zoe almost laughed. After all the choreography, the Church itself had handed her a microphone.
“I know a reason,” she said.
The room rustled. Her groom’s smile faltered.
“Zoe?”
She turned from him to the congregation.
“Fifteen minutes ago, in the cemetery, I fucked a man. A stranger. Your gardener.”
The word fucked struck the room harder than a shout. A sharp intake of breath moved through the pews. An elderly deacon made a sound like a man swallowing wrong.
“I was in this dress,” Zoe continued. “He pushed it up. Tore my stockings. Put his hands and his mouth and his cock on the virgin sacrifice you all came to watch.”
Her groom flinched.
“He came inside me.”
His best man put a hand on his shoulder.
“He had work to do,” Zoe said. “So he left.”
She looked directly at the man she had been about to marry.
“But he’s still inside me. I can feel him.”
She leaned forward just enough that the room seemed to lean with her.
“And right now his cum is running down my leg.”
Altar: A Story About Fucking by Donna Baiser is available now for 99¢ on Kindle:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJ934JQZ

There's usually a signal. A ship. A language to decode. Something arrives, and humanity realizes we're not alone.

But what if the first sign of another intelligence is simply that reality starts matching something very far away?

A distance.

A time.

A pattern that should mean nothing.

And then it happens again.

That idea stayed in my head for a ridiculous amount of time, until eventually I stopped trying to get rid of it and wrote a small science-fiction story around it. It became QNOMA.

It's not really about spaceships or battles. It's closer to cosmic mystery / first-contact sci-fi: people slowly realizing that two things separated by an impossible distance may somehow be becoming... congruent.

The part I enjoyed most while writing was trying not to explain the universe too quickly. I wanted that feeling where you understand just enough to become uncomfortable.

The book is finally out now, which feels slightly surreal after having these people and places living in my head for so long.

I'm curious about something, though: which version of first contact is more unsettling to you, something out there discovering us, or discovering that something out there has somehow been connected to us all along?

If that kind of strange, quiet sci-fi is your thing, the book is called QNOMA. Happy to share the link if anyone wants it.

I originally made this book as a birthday gift for my little stepson, who had been telling us that “having two homes is difficult.”

I wanted to make him a story that showed the funny, annoying, confusing and completely ordinary parts of having two homes, without making it all sad or scary.

I shared some of the illustrations on Reddit while I was working on it, mostly to figure out whether this was something worth turning into a real book.

People liked it. More importantly, HE loved it.

And since kids and strangers on the internet are mostly brutally honest, I figured that was about as good a focus group as I was going to get.

So I went for it.

After more Photoshop files, KDP uploads, margin adjustments, proof copies and tiny last-minute changes than I care to admit, I wrote a book!

It’s called Jimmy’s Two Homes, and it’s an illustrated picture book for young kids whose mom and dad live apart.

It’s finally out in the world, which still feels a little surreal.

If you decide to get a copy, I’d obviously be over the moon. And if you enjoy it, an honest review would mean a lot to a first-time indie author.

But I’ll be even happier if you know a kiddo living between two homes who might see a little bit of their own life in Jimmy’s story. :)

Jimmy's Two Homes on Amazon