Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 A Day in Their Life by Rob Fleming with improvements by Somers

   He woke up at six, like he did every day.  His inner alarm clock never
failed him.  He had to cough a bit and it took him a minute or two to adapt
to the strong smell in the house.  The house, yeah, that was at the core of
it, he thought.  He should have insisted they give it up.  But that
wouldn't have solved their problems.  He asked himself if they could have
been happy together without any money.  Maybe they could have worked it
out, but it would have taken years to struggle out of the restraints
following a personal bankruptcy.

   He went to the kitchen and placed a cup on the tray of the shiny new
automatic coffee maker.  It was Italian or Swiss; he didn't really know or
care.  They never switched it off.  Sometimes a customer would call in the
middle of the night and then Sarah would need tons of coffee to get in
shape, and she'd need a lot more than that, too.  He observed the residual
powder and the razor blade on the countertop, and knew that she must have
gotten up during the night for a snort or two.  He carefully scraped the
remains into a zip lock bag where he kept it all.  It was just for a rainy
day, really, and it was all for her.  Everything he did was all for her but
he did it like an automaton, and there wasn't much pleasure in it anymore.

   While he lit a Pall Mall and drank his coffee, Dennis let his mind
wander.  He tried to muse whether he would describe his inner state better
as a block of concrete or that of a hollow fruit, eaten out from the
inside. He inhaled the strong smoke deeply into his lungs.  He could feel
the cough rising and placed his cup down so as not to spill it.  Then he
satisfied his hacking cough for a while, and thought about the bitch that
made him this way.  When he could breathe again, he took another cigarette
and lit it from the butt of the first one.  It was always the second one
that did the trick.  He felt much better now.  No, it wasn't she that had
done it; it was actually Dennis who had done this to her and to himself. 
He had made their lives as miserable as they were, and in what seemed to be
such a short time.

   He coughed again, and then he felt much better.  Time to prepare the
tray.  An oversized tumbler with half a cup of brandy, the ashtray and a
Cigar were her "breakfast".

   'Good morning.  Rise and shine!' Dennis said to her, trying
unsuccessfully to sound joyful.

   'Fuck You.' Was the muffled answer from under the blanket, followed by a
horrible, hacking, wet cough.

   'Now, come on, Sarah, you know your first one is here in half an hour.

   'Yeees' she answered with a yawn she managed to squeeze in between more
coughs.

   He took the cigar and lit it for her.  She propped up against the pillow
and received the cigar with trembling hands.  The first drag seemed to
dampen her cough a little.  She took another drag, inhaling deeply into her
lungs.  Without releasing the smoke she took the tumbler, almost spilling
it because of her trembling hand and gulped down almost half of its
contents.  When she exhaled there wasn't much smoke on her breath.

   'More' she commanded handing him the tumbler.

   'Now, Honey, you know you have to be careful.'

   'Fuck you buster, you should have been careful with your god dammed
investment stuff.  You have turned me into this!  Now go and get me some
more fucking brandy.  And I want it now!' She shouted at him angrily with
her raspy voice, and then she began to hack and cough violently.  He wanted
to help her, but she turned away from him, taking deep drags on the cigar
until the cough was cleared.  He silently swallowed what her habits were
doing to the two of them, and disappeared to fill the glass again.  It was
getting to be more often that he had to go back and fill up that glass
again.

   He complied and came back with the refilled tumbler.  He sighed.  She
was right after all.  It had been his simple-mindedness that had brought
them into this fix.  At first it had been a desperate attempt to bribe the
banker with her body.  He had of course been totally against it, but she
wouldn't listen.  To lose the house and all that was attached to it seemed
such a horrible fate, and she was prepared to do virtually anything to keep
it.  So she did it, and she apparently did it very well.  He watched her as
she dragged deeply on the cigar and then took some gulps of the brandy,
with smoke pouring out of her nose.

   'Now, get out of my way.  I need to go to the bathroom and freshen up.'
She said to him, stubbing the remains of the cigar out, and washing the
smoke down with the final bits of brandy in the glass.  She was now a bit
more peaceful as her cravings for nicotine and alcohol had been satisfied
for the moment.  It wouldn't last long, of course, and when the day was
over, a quart of brandy would have found its way down her throat and dozen
or more cigars would be missing from the humidor.  Still, he saw a little
bit of the old sparkle that she once had, considerably dulled by the bags
under her eyes and the wrinkles that appeared on her face, soon to be
removed by the miracle of modern makeup.  He understood how she could be
beautiful for her customers, because she was an impressive sight, yet he
knew that this beauty could not last long.

   The first john rang at the door.  Sarah, clad in a transparent
nightgown, cigar clenched between her teeth, opened the door for him. 
Dennis hid in the former study, now a sort of surveillance room.  As much
as he hated it, it was a requirement to watch Sarah in action.  Most of her
johns were regulars now, but still one never knew what could happen.  So he
had to watch while others fucked his wife.  No question, she earned heaps
of money and tax-free too, but at what price?  It was the price of their
souls, long since departed in a haze of alcohol, drugs and cigarette smoke.

   He had been utterly shocked when he had first seen how Sarah kissed her
customers.  It was like she tried to swallow their tongues.  She had never
given him such a passionate French kiss.  Now each john got as many tonsil
checks as he cared for.  And it didn't touch him any more.  The part of his
soul that had once been filled with love for his wife was dead now.  Gone
like it had never been there.  But he knew that he had made his fate the
way it was, and this was his payback.

   Sarah took the guy by the hand and led him to the other bedroom, the one
used for customers.  She smiled for the first time that morning, and winked
at her first john of the day.  Once it had become evident that she was
going to make a living out of this, they had the other bedroom redecorated
in a decadent French style, everything in shades of pink, with white
lacquered furniture and a huge round bed in the middle.  Mirrors covered
the ceiling, but several tiny cameras were hidden all around.

   Dennis started the recording, and settled down to watch.  When they had
started their private brothel, he had alternated between revulsion and
perverted arousal.  In those days he had a bucket ready for his vomit.  Now
he would only on occasion use it to urinate when he couldn't leave his
observation post because things got too hot.  Then there had been times he
jerked off in front of the monitors like what he saw was just a low-grade
porn flick and not his Sarah getting her brains fucked out.  It was some
other woman who was in that room, and it was he that was doing the fucking,
moving his hips violently against her body and impaling her fragile form.
That was the way it ought to be.

   For a while he had cherished the illusion that Sarah did it only to save
their home, but gradually he came to the conclusion she actually enjoyed
it. This utterly depressed him, for it made him think of himself as some
kind of hired hand, existing only to serve the mistress of the house.

   She had picked up smoking in a very short time and had become an
absolutely relentless smoker now, although prior to this career she hadn't
really smoked at all.  Dennis acquired the habit, too, but more in
self-defense than because he really wanted it.  As she deepened the amount
that she smoked, she graduated from light cigarettes to filters, and then
to non-filters.  Finally, she started smoking cigars, inhaling them to her
toes in her quest for more nicotine.

   She probably received more nicotine than present in four packs of
filterless cigarettes each day.  It was still not enough to quench her
thirst for mind-numbing substances, so she turned to the brandy and
eventually, to the coke.

   At first he had tried to cope with the situation and keep up the
pretense of a happy relationship with Sarah, trying to repress his jealousy
or whatever it was he felt when she was giving away her body.  But he felt
that she was doing it for them, and this had made him ignore all of the
warning signs.  As her "meetings" with the banker grew more frequent and
she had begun to smoke, a thing she had despised before, and he couldn't
avoid noticing the change in her character.  For a while he had controlled
his emotions and he had even started to smoke in order to fight the
feelings of solidarity.  Then she had told him she would "offer" herself
also to others for money so they could pay off the mortgage and he felt how
something inside him began to crumble away and rot.  They sunk into this
abyss.  He didn't sleep with her any more and they stopped making love to
each other.  Moving out of their bedroom was only one step of many.  Dennis
now slept in the small room off the kitchen, because both bedrooms were now
for madam.

   Devoid of emotion, he watched Sarah perform.  The guy lay flat on his
back, stark naked and Sarah was on top of him, now wearing her favorite red
bodice, her painted nipples pushed up.  She wore no panties when she was
working like this, and her labia hung down, concealing all that went on
beneath, gently slapping the john on his groin as her ride began.  She
drove him up, up and further up, massaging him as she had done countless
times before, and bringing him into the state of perfection, bigger than
life, juicier than life, a huge monstrous bull that had no release save
one.

   She had another cigar clenched between her teeth and as their rhythm
accelerated, she dragged harder and harder on the cigar as evidenced by the
increasingly larger crimson head, growing bigger and bigger with every
pull. He could keep his eyes closed and still see what came next.  She
would bend back and then take out the cigar and crush the man's mouth with
her lips, pumping the drivel into it.  That would trigger his orgasm and
then she would stretch over him and start to alternate between his mouth
and what was left of her cigar, till the guy would have another erection
and roll on top of her.  He would push his knees under her buttocks and
lift her pelvis up.  She would reach for another cigar and after a while
she would begin to show signs of ecstasy, rearing up and throwing her head
from side to side, till a beast-like growl would escape her throat.  The
guy would sometimes thrust on for a while and Sarah would groan till he
would collapse over her and then she would roll the half-unconscious body
to the side and go to the bathroom.

   Most of the johns were like that, though the details varied somewhat.

   After the guy had left, Dennis met her in the kitchen, the last room
unchanged since better times, except now it reeked of stale smoke like the
rest of the house.  Dennis still kept it reasonably clean even though he
had no idea whether she still cared.  Sarah seemed oblivious to his
efforts. All she ever seemed to care about lately were four things: booze,
cigars, coke, and her daily fucking with her clients.

   He tried to make her eat something.  If she would start to lose weight,
she might disappoint her johns, although he had no idea why he should worry
about that.  Maybe he was simply afraid of the void that might open up if
they were to just live together like before.  Although, it couldn't be like
before.  There was no way back.  Even if he might succeed in getting her
off the bottle, the coke and the cigars, what did they have left?  Love? 
Three years as a professional had taken care of that sure enough.

   There had been times, in the beginning, when he had dreamt about earning
the money to keep the house and then try and forget it all.  Sarah had
laughed at his ideas.

   'You have made me become a slut, now you have to take me as I am.  I
HAVE FUN WITH THOSE MEN, DAMN YOU!' she had shouted at him.  End of the
discussion.

   Reluctantly, Sarah chewed on her steak, washing down each bite with lots
of brandy and dragging on a cigar in between.  She shoved it off,
half-finished, then swiveled around quickly to her drawer in the kitchen
with sheer anticipation and withdrew the expensive bag of powder, the straw
and the razor blade and began to make it up on the kitchen table.  He
glumly picked up the dishes and put them into the dishwasher, eyeing the
little pile that she gleefully and efficiently chopped into two extremely
long snorts.  He knew that he ought to stop this constant drain on their
finances, and then maybe they would be free of this life forever.  But
Sarah was into it too deep now, he thought as she put the straw to her nose
and closed one of her nostrils and proceeded to suck an entire, long line
of white powder into her lungs.

   It gave her what she needed most, just an exhilarating boost of
substance that helped her to be vivacious, and she needed that around
midday.  This was in preparation for the next client, of course.  He
glanced at her as she took a long and leisurely drag on her cigar, and then
reached for the brandy glass with the straw still in her fingers.  She
smiled at something distant as she exhaled the huge puff and swallowed the
brandy.  He noted that lately she seemed to drink and smoke constantly, but
there really wasn't anything he could do to stop all this self-destructive
behavior.  He had tried to hide the bag away once, and he was met with a
wild woman, who almost clawed his eyes out and threatened suicide.

   She swept up the final line of coke into her nose and then she
brightened up substantially, having received her new lease on life.  She
laughed at her accomplishment, smiling as she did so and declaring how good
it was.  She looked down at the powder that remained with a genuine
radiance, proceeding to clean up the remaining bits with her finger and
place them on her tongue.  She downed the rest of the contents of the
glass, and drew deeply on her cigar.  She rose unsteady to go to the
bathroom.  He followed her to help her get into the tub.  Hopefully the hot
water would sober her up just enough to service her next customer.  She had
been forced to reduce their number to no more than three each day, as she
would be to drunk in the late afternoon even for her kinky regulars.  She
thanked him for helping her, and looked up at him with large, dark pupils.
She kissed him, and this was the highlight of his day.  Although Sarah was
very high, he imagined her wanting him for a fleeting moment, but something
told him that she didn't even know whom she was kissing.

   He sometimes wondered what kind of guys they were.  They weren't after a
beautiful face or body, although Sarah had been quite an attractive woman,
but now her excessive drinking and smoking showed and she looked ten years
older, her flesh beginning to sag all over.  Her once wonderful firm
breasts now sagged pathetically and her complexion had turned to a sickly
gray.  Yet her sight seemed to arouse her regulars even more than at the
beginning, when she had still looked like her old self.  Especially how
some of them apparently derived pleasure from her cigar smoking made him
sick.  Still, sometimes, when he watched her ride a guy while chewing on a
cigar, smoke billowing out of her mouth and nose, he got an erection too.
He didn't feel anything; it was just his organ by itself.

   Having done several more lines of coke, and several more glasses of
brandy, Sarah had been hardly able to walk back to the bedroom and Dennis
would have to do what he hated most, greet a customer at the door in her
place.  Maybe he was still capable of some kind of feeling, he thought. 
Maybe not everything had died inside him.  Well, he had, just in case he
might wake up from his ongoing stupor, made preparations for the day he
wouldn't want to take it any more.  He had a simple plan.  In the cellar he
had a 5-gallon canister filled with gasoline.  He would make her drink
brandy till she lost consciousness.  Then he would spread the gasoline all
over the house, tie a thin rope soaked in gasoline around the lower end of
a candle, light it and drink a bottle himself.  While the liquor made him
pass out, the candle would burn down and set the rope and with it the house
on fire.

   The afternoon customer didn't care that Sarah was already stoned and
drunk.  He just fucked her a couple of times in the missionary position. 
That was all he ever wanted.  She did it automatically, in stoned
indifference to any feeling, just flying above everything smoothly,
succulently, and with her cigar there to top off her feelings and keep her
going.  He left after an hour, while Sarah had fallen asleep.  She would
wake up later, coughing and cursing, screaming for aspirin, a cigar, and
brandy.  He would of course give her both and light a cigar for her, just
as always.

   The last customer wanted only a blowjob, a smoky blowjob as he called
it. Denis sometimes grew mad when he saw what the customers did to her. 
"Before" she had refused even a plain old doggie style.  All she ever
wanted was the missionary.  She had never given him a blowjob and she
hadn't even let him eat her out.  He had loved her too much to complain
about that, but he had often dreamt about how some variations could have
added a bit of salt and pepper to their rather quiet love life.  And now?
She allowed those guys to do everything they wanted to her, even slap her
in the face sometimes, although she wouldn't allow for real brutality and
Denis had interfered once, when a customer had raised his fist to beat her
up.  That one hadn't returned.

   Sarah, although much too drunk to see straight, wanted to watch TV for a
while and even asked him to hold her on his lap.  He couldn't really
understand why she still wanted that.  But then, like many alcoholics, she
didn't realize any more what she did.  It didn't matter.  In the old days,
when she would sit on his lap in front of the TV set, he would always get a
hard on and in the end they would go to the bedroom and make love.  Did she
expect that could still happen?  He wouldn't know.  All he knew was that he
felt nothing.

   She finished off the second bottle of brandy, not bothering with a glass
anymore, and he felt she was about to slide off his knees, so drunk was
she. Gently, he took her in his arms and carried her to the bedroom.  She
didn't mind sleeping in the bed she also "worked".  He would have to change
the linen in the morning.  The smell of sperm and cum on it never bothered
her.  That was good, because it was a smell that was prevalent in that
bedroom.  Her sleep was nearer to a coma these days.  She would have slept
on the pavement in front of their house if he had dumped her there.  He
undressed her slowly, an easy task, as all he had to remove was the gown
she wore over her bodice and the bodice of course.  Seeing her sprawled
naked on the huge bed triggered a faint memory and he got a hard on.

   He took the jar with the Vaseline she kept at hand, although she rarely
needed it, and covered his dick with lots of the grease.  Then he began to
push his rod into her anus.  He had sworn never to invade her misused pussy
again and he also enjoyed humiliating her.  He felt the tightness, but she
was still conscious enough to give in and relax her sphincter, so he could
thrust his greasy dick in and out till he felt the sperm spurting out into
her ass.  He felt no pleasure.  It was just a mechanical act, an
alternation to his daily masturbation.  She didn't really know who was
fucking her in her delirium; she just automatically went through the
motions of thrusting as best she was able.  That's a good girl, Sarah, be
the dirty little whore that you are and fuck yourself to sleep now, because
I can give it to you too, he thought.

   She snored now and it was time for him to go to his own room.  He kept
the little cubicle he used as a bedroom for himself always clean and
austere.  He would read a few hours and then shut down the light without
much hope for a relaxing sleep.  The alarm would only interrupt a light
slumber.  But it didn't matter.  Nothing mattered.  Maybe tomorrow, after
the last one had gone, he would get the gasoline and put an end to it all.
Maybe, if he would find enough anger and hatred in him.

   The End