My story, "Just a Kiss Away" was released last week in the anthology Broken Mirrors Fractured Minds, available for a limited time at just $.99. This is an excerpt from the story dealing with a horrifying legend surrounding the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter."
Tomas Reynolds has just been spellbound by a stripper named Dolly, born with a rare genetic disorder that left her fully functional as a person, just completely headless.
That night, Tomas stayed till close, and knocked on Wade's door. The manager had obviously just finished a line of cocaine, and was trying to play something on a guitar instead of counting the night's earnings. It took Tomas several seconds to realize that if the instrument had been in tune that tune would have been "Gimme Shelter."
"Give me that," he said taking it out of Wade's hands. "Fucking singers, never learn to tune." With that he took out his smartphone and began turning knobs until his tuning app told him he had achieved the E God had intended.
"That new girl is something else, huh," said Wade. "Man, I've got to tell you. I had some doubts about it, but I didn't want to be, you know, racist or anything. I let her audition and I swear I almost poked myself in the eye with my own boner. Dolly... Dolly, Dolly, Dolly. That girl's got a body you could peel potatoes with!"
"She's... different," said Tomas, finishing the tuning. He started to play "Gimme Shelter," but decided instead that "Beast of Burden" might be safer. Wade started counting the money, his nerves soothed by the soft music.
"What did you think?" he asked. "The girls all like you. You've got a good eye. Do you think she'll work?"
"She's gorgeous, and the headless thing didn't seem to bother anyone. Most of the guys that come in here don't see the girls as anything but life-support for tits and ass anyway. I'm not sure if they even noticed she didn't have a head unless they were maybe using it to imagine a blow job. I think she'll do just fine."
"Yeah, 100, 200, 300, 400, I think she will, too, 700, 800, 900," replied Wade, counting. "There's one thing that bothers me, though."
"Yeah?"
"That song," said Wade.
"It's the Stones," Tomas. "They play the Stones in every strip club in America. Hell, probably every strip club in the world."
"Oh, sure, sure," said Wade. "But they play 'Brown Sugar' and 'Jumping Jack Flash' and shit like that. You get a goth girl every once in a while that wants to try out 'Sympathy for the Devil' but 'Shelter' is just fucking eerie, Tom. It's about an ever-present and skull-fucking death. You know the legend?"
"No," smiled Tomas. Wade never made much of a musician, but he was a walking encyclopedia of bizarre pop-rock knowledge. Just because he snorted cocaine through rolled-up magazine pages didn't mean that was all he got from them.
