Hello again, everyone! Well this is a first and perhaps only for me: a grim story. Yes, I know you are out there shaking your heads and saying I thought I'd never see it. What is she thinking? Doesn't she always ramble on for a paragraph about how she has no intent of writing a grim story? Well, now I will ramble on for three paragraphs about why I am writing one.

It all started when I first discovered the electronic WAMiverse late one night in January, after getting my Christmas computer and updating my old 386 to one that could actually handle a modem. Well, on a sexual whim I typed in "mud" at the Yahoo search engine and discovered the whole Wet and Messy fetish index. Doors of secret deep sexual desire flew open faster than the overdone joke during the "Get Smart" opening credits. After about 4 hours of scanning and clicking, I stumbled into the Quicksand sub-section and Der MudGecko's page where I read 'River in the Jungle'. Entering into such a venture assuming a tale of melodrama, I was shocked by the grim ending. (He didn't have a little parenthetical labeling system, sneaky guy.) I was up the rest of the night, nauseous, feeling as if an emotional sledgehammer had slammed my psyche. (Now, this in no way reflects any opinion of the MudGecko; he is a fine contributor, and I enjoy his stuff. This, on the other hand, was the result of my first encounter with an idea of grim/Qs fetishism. For a while I was outraged, I was sickened, I looked for answers. Why was this invaded by misogynistic thinking? Can't we all just get along, yada yada, yada. Then I got some views and some answers, and realized that it was mainly a harmless vein, that I can for the most part take with a grain of salt. (Whether I do or not, I decline to say.) I still do not enjoy grim fiction, but understand its place. I do read it every now and again (except for the last few paragraphs, I have an above the neck rule.) I guess this is a way of exorcising some demons.

Whoops! Almost forgot: This is a piece that may be considered erotic fiction. If this doesn't appeal to you, look out!

Point number two: A lot of you have written me saying you enjoy my sense of humour in these stories. I'm afraid with such a story I'm limited in my interjections, since it will dispel a necessary mood. So not much of my patented Homespun Swamp Woebegone Days style will be attending. You have been warned, don't complain. If you just want to read the "Crypt Keeper" parts feel free, its chock-full o puns. However, although daring, the story is readable so sit back and enjoy if you want.

Alright it's time to check the scoreboard: seems like we have (fem, qs, grim) for this one.

See you on the bottom,

Ivy

Dadadadadum (start of opening music)... Dadadumdeedum (close of opening music)... hee hee heh hee hee (annoying maniacal laughter) "Tales from the Pits" appearing and dripping down the screen in a gunge appearing and dripping kind of manner... hee hee heh hee hee (annoying maniacal laughter that was still going on as logo appeared and dripped finally crescendoing and fading off.)

Greetings, Swamp Things... (heh heh heh) Tonight's tale was told to me on my Mudder's knee: a little morality play that will give you something to sink about. It's a story about a girl who goes mucking about where she doesn't belong. Let's meet Katie. Say "hello" everyone, for soon enough it will be bye-bayou to our little heroine. She's about to find out what it means to be the quick and the dead. This is one of mire personal favorites. A dirty little story I like to call "The Girl in the Jungle Bikini Who Stumbles Into Quicksand and Eventually Dies." (Not very subtle I know... heh hee hee hee hee hee.)

It all started with an itch. Not one of those itches you can see, like a bump or a hive. Not a little red welt you can point a finger at and then commence that finger to scratching. Not one of those kinds you can really scratch easily at all. More like an itch at the small of the back, where you have to contort and twist and perhaps even sidle up next to a rough barked tree and do a little shimmy dance.

Katie's particular itch was a bothersome one. She couldn't shimmy dance next to a tree to get rid of it. This one she always found so difficult to scratch. Katie wanted to skinny dip. She wanted to feel cool river water flow around her naked body. She wanted to splash carefree without a worry in the world and without a stitch of clothing. But up until now, there had been too many cares, and too much clothing.

Back when she was in high school, her classmates had staggered down to the river to swim after a graduation party. Katie had gone along, but hadn't set foot in the water. As her friends frolicked, she sat on the bank surrounded by discarded shirts and shorts and undergarments and smoked and laughed along with them. Katie wasn't shy; this just wasn't her fantasy. Today was. She had locked her apartment door behind her early this Saturday morning, hopped in her jeep and driven the hour back to her hometown. She had tingled with excitement all the way there. So caught up in her desires she had foregone "clothes", and driven all the way up in her jungle print bikini. Exhilarating breezes of 60 mph had teased her skin, and as her bare foot pressed the pedal, toes wiggling, the distance between fulfilment shortened, and her excitement grew.

And now here she was, standing at the bank on two tanned, mid morning dew moistened legs. Katie shivered from down deep, pleasant warmth seeping through her, that no summer wind could provide. Things hadn't really changed in the five years since she'd been there. No trash or discarded bottles, pock mocked the cool inviting river as it slowly swept its way past. It was as if the scene had been kept static from all the times in her past she had stood there, kicked off her shoes and splashed in the shallows. Secretly, glancing about and unbuttoning her shorts, but never going any farther, since things had never been perfect. Now, they were.

Katie hung on to nearby branches for support and scampered her way down the bank. The river had shrunk back from the bank bottom where she stood, starved by the summer's heat, so 15 feet of mud flat separated her from the water's edge. "So much for perfection" she thought as she stepped out in the mud. Soft, warm mud swallowed her feet, oozing up around her toes to welcome them. She wiggled her slender toes under the mud's surface, feeling the pleasant squish of the murk between each digit. Hmmmm, maybe this wasn't so bad, the mud felt kind of nice. Smooth mud slid around her smooth skin, and Katie smiled. Actually, this wasn't a problem at all, and besides, the river waited, ready to wash her clean as she floated in heavenly bliss.

Katie picked a foot up and the mud playfully slurped at the departure of its new friend. Little globs of mud slipped off her foot to rejoin the soft brown cushion underneath her. Katie splayed her toes, ready for the next step, after all she might as well enjoy this, and enjoying it she was, she thought a little guiltily. She was becoming slightly distracted by the inviting mud, but she was halfway to the water's edge, and that was the fantasy she had come here to fulfill.

Toes spread, ready to accept the cool tongues of mud about to slide between them, Katie stepped down, feeling the mud swallow her foot, suck it into its depths and keep going. The mud eased her leg in, slurping it down to her mid calf. Now this was getting out of hand. She brought her other foot out of the mud shallows, and stepped determinedly forward. The mud happily greeted its new prize, sliding up her leg, or sliding it down to her calf. She felt the cool mire, settle around her, crying happily with tiny giggling bubbles, as it greedily encased her legs, caressing her like an impatient lover. The mud was still cool, still would have been sensuous, but now she didn't want to play.

"All right, I've had about enough of you," Katie thought as she readied to lift her right leg from the muck's grasp, happy to plunge onward. Katie didn't plunge however. She didn't lift. She stayed right where she was, caught in the mire's clutches, as it burped mockingly, with each sucking tug. Katie narrowed her eyes, as she looked downwards at the mud, watching tiny swirling puddles form around her legs. Playtime was over. Katie whispered a little obscenity through clenched teeth at the mud, as she strenuously pulled her right leg free, feeling angry fingers of mud slide down and off her leg. She kicked her leg in triumph, sending speckles of mud arching forward. She watched as they skipped across the remaining flat in front of her. She shook her foot, tossing splatters of mud in all directions. She wiggled her toes, squeezing the mud trapped between them, sending it down below her, to join the ooze slowly sliding into the hole she had just vacated.

Victory apparent in the smile that flitted across her face, she set her foot back down, settling calf deep in the fresh mud before her. She tugged her left leg free a few inches, and yelped as her right slid in to above the knee. Her view skewed by her uneven stance, she looked at the 5 or so feet of mud that lay before her. It would be softer, saturated with remnants of the receding river. There was no going that way. Already she was finding it difficult to move her legs, any deeper and she would be bogged down for sure. She didn't want any park rangers finding her looking ridiculous, waist deep in sludge, the blush on her face spreading down to what her silly jungle print bikini concealed.

Turning back was the only option. She would have to hike around and find an easier spot to enter the river. She looked out toward the water, so tantalizingly close. The mud let out an oily glop, as if surpressing a chuckle. This was getting irritating. She slammed her left foot back into the mud, and watched as it too was swallowed to past the knee. The mud murmured in hungry appreciation of her legs. This was ridiculous. She swatted at the mire with a hand, splashing mud over the front of her legs.

Slowly pumping her legs, she turned back toward the bank. Anyone watching would have thought her a film running in slow motion. It was as if she were jogging in honey. She felt some of the thick suction of the mud recede, as more water bubbled to the surface in forfeit. With the bank in view, Katie gave a slight tug on her leg, ready to wind her way back. Silently under the surface of the muck, the greedy mud opened its softened, famished maw and swallowed more of Katie's lithe form.

"My waist... I'm up to my waist" Katie whispered to herself, as the mud burped around her, water greasily sliding to the surface to slowly feed the growing seed of panic in her. Hands pressed to the surface of the mud, she squeezed them closed, mud squirting through them, specking her whitened knuckles.

"oh my God... quicksand... I'm trapped in quicksand." No wind carried her despairing whisper, and if the mud heard her, an unsympathetic belch was its only reply.

Katie's seed of panic began to blossom, fed by the rich soil that was slowly consuming her. She could feel the mud, flowing around her waist, flowing between her legs, its thick and heavy hands seeping through her flimsy suit, and violating her sex with its dank and oily kisses.

Beneath the mud, Katie's toes probed, finding nothing underneath its thick brown surface. Nothing that is except for an infinity of mud, slowly sliding around her, welcoming her to its world, a universe that extended to no limits of hungry sucking ooze.

Panic seized Katie, tears welling in her eyes, she thrashed, legs fighting for mobility in the vise grip of the mire. Her efforts were rewarded, for the mud; entertained by her futile struggles allowed her to visit more of his realm. Slowly it pulled her down, kissing more and more of her body a deep rich brown. It took each of her breasts in a velvet hand and cupped them, and a thousand starving mouths opened and a million slavering, slimy tongues lapped at her nipples in a slobbering, slick frat boy kiss.

Katie pulled an arm free from the muck, her struggles causing a small spurt of mud to geyser between her breast and slide down them in ichorous trail.

"Help me... help me..." She whispered, through panic muted lips. The heavy mud absorbing her desperate words, and translating them into its own loving language of slurps and suckings. A stench of decay, a reeking miasma of bog, of mire, of ages long sloughed past, filled her nose in the short breaths she was taking. The mud was constricting her, pressing on her chest, squeezing the life out of her. She involuntarily twitched in the mud's embrace, fighting its unwanted lover's caress. Panic. Blind. White. It was only panic, she told herself. She shut her eyes, and slowly breathed deep. A fetid, acrid stink burned her nostrils. She buried the fear, buried the panic. Deep within her, down, down, down into the depths of her body. Down into the void of the mud devouring her.

Her breasts were gone. Consumed. Obliterated. Blotted out by the unceasing flow of the mud up her body. She bobbed, a disembodied head, swallowed up to her neck by the unrelenting ooze. Somewhere above her hand stretched out, free for now of the unsatiated mire.

"Help me! Someone please help me!" She screamed, empowered by lungs forgotten somewhere under all-consuming sludge. Tears swept down her face to fall and mingle with the brown and tainted waters of her quicksand grave.

Katie tilted her head back, keeping from the mud's slimy clutches. She felt her hair behind her grow lank and thick under the muck's grimy fondling. The mire whispered unheard and garbled sweet nothings in her ears as it filled them, swallowing sound like a heavy velvet curtain.

A bird overhead flew by and with its idiot's glance saw an unmarred alabaster face, lips white with the chilling touch of panic, a stranger in a sea of brown. An unfinished bust left deserted on an expanse of dark unchiseled marble.

Katie closed her eyes, she didn't want to see the gloating mud finish her as it slowly completed its consumption, flowing over her, sliding around her and excising her from a world that slowly would spin on. She knew she couldn't escape its greedy victory. She would feel it. Feel the circle that was all that remained, slowly close. Shrink and fill in on itself, an implosion that would end as she felt the thick mire plug her nose, carrying a silenced bride across a timeless threshold.

Suddenly, she felt a hand in hers. Katie opened her eyes and tear blurred and hopeful, she saw her savior. A park ranger in mire darkened khakis, one hand clutching a safety line, the other her fear rigid hand. His lips moved in some vacuous hero's liturgy. Her jilted ageless lover still blocked out all sound but a blood rush. It looked like he was saying, "Hang on now..."

She saw him wince as her nails dug trenches in his palm. She really had no intention of doing anything else.

Heh heh heh... Well, it seems our do-gooder no-goodnik rescued sweet little Katie just in time. Let me tell you she was happier than a pig in slop get back on land, or should I say a pig out of slop... hee hee hee. It also seems our heroine who was so afraid to have a Park Ranger see her in her jungle print bikini lost her bottoms in the process. Well, I guess they both got morass than they bargained for. EHH hee hee hee hee. I know what you're thinking, she said grim. She said grim in the intro. She had grim in the little parenthetical summary. But therein lies the cliche twist. This couldn't be a WAM, bam, thank you ma'am story. As stated in the title, our girl in the jungle bikini stumbled into quicksand and she eventually died... 60 years later of natural causes. Heee hee ehe heee heee heeeeeeeeee. Next time read the fine jungle prints. Remember you snooze, you ooze. Heh heh heh heh... Well I hoped you otherwise enjoyed this little mud larking of mine. Until next week Fen-pals, its your old friend the Pit Keeper signing off with a fitting Beatles ditty. NO, not the Walrus is Paul!!!! But "You say goodbye, and I say wallow..." heh hee hee hee heheheheheheh heee heeeheee ack cough choke hee hee hee hee hee hee heh heh heh.