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It was just so bizarre an explanation that it interrupted my righteous anger. "The what?"
"Just... just hear me out," my brother said. He had his hands up defensively, but he didn't seem scared so much as weary.
"Sorry Dad," I heard from upstairs. It was my other niece, thirteen-year-old Isabelle. Bells for short unless she'd grown out of that and preferred another nickname. Looking up, she certainly seemed to have grown up in a few other ways, although her changes were less dramatic, and focused mainly on wardrobe. Last I saw her, Bells was just starting to get to the stage where she was interested in fashionable clothes and makeup, at least when I was taking her out somewhere people from her school might see her, but at home you could still feel her lounging around in something like an old NASA t-shirt. Now, as I caught sight of her in the upstairs hall, she seemed to be dressed exclusively to attract the wrong kind of male attention... if I was more up on the slang I might have called her a 'thot' (if that isn't already out of date by now).
Bells strutted out of her room in high heels and pleated school girl skirt that wouldn't have met any school dress code except in a porn movie, and a cut off tank top that left her belly bare. Bells also sported the same over-elaborate eyeshadow and lipstick combination her little sister did, although hers was applied with a little more finesse. Her eyes had that effect, I think it's called winged eyeliner, where it looks like it's swept to one corner in an unnatural way, exotic way. I guess it's a style now, but when combined with her outfit it seemed to make her look extra trashy. She seemed to have more-or-less the same body type and the same straight black hair I was used to (maybe a little longer and more wavy), but it was her outfit that set off red flags. Side-by-side with her little sister, the two of them looked like an obscene pair of underage streetwalkers. "She got away from me," Bells said, and in her shame at whatever her failure of sibling-watching she nervously tugged down on the straps of her tank top. That motion, whether intentional or accidental, ensured that her own breasts made a shameless appearance through the arm holes, even without the straps leaving her shoulders. I wasn't trying to look at them but it was hard not to notice in the second or so it happened that her breasts seemed much smaller than her little sister's... or at least, smaller relative to body size, they might have been bigger overall, but even there I thought little Chloe won out. I forced my eyes to Bells' face again rather than attempt that comparison, and when she caught my eye she said, with warmth but still slightly less enthusiasm than her little sister, "Hi Uncle Mike." Then, followed it up with, "Hey, you looking for a good time? For just a hundred you can cum inside my ass or pussy. No, wait, seventy-five, I think I can give you the family discount."
"I already offered him a blowjob," Chloe warned her, sounding defensive, or jealous, and then turned her eyes on me, almost pleading. "Just twenty dollars. It's a steal." Then she barreled down the rest of the stairs and stepped forward, although instead of going for a hug as she might have before, she instead reached out and made a grab for my crotch. Instinctively, I put a hand on her head to push her back... whatever depravity was going on in here I had to stay clear of it. She struggled to get by but with a smile on her face like it was a game. "It's okay Uncle Mike, I don't mind swallowing."
"They can't help it," my brother said softly, almost forlornly.
"Chloe Susan Spalding! I better not have heard what I thought I heard!" The last member of the household, my sister-in-law Mandy, could be heard from upstairs, possibly the master bedroom, and naturally, I expected her to freak out and blame me somehow for what their daughters were doing... she'd never liked me much, and I always got the impression she was giving me the stinkeye any time I played with her children, and now here her ten-year-old was still trying to go for my cock.
Her appearance was only a slightly less dramatic change than those of her children. She looked like she'd spent the quarantine getting into top shape and had plastic surgery to boot, her lips puffed up like a porn star, skin almost glistening, breasts far more pronounced with her lost weight... she wasn't skinny like her children, but Kim Kardashian-style thicc sexyness. She was always a 'hang around in sweatpants' kind of wife, and even when she dressed up for a night on the town, it was conservative... she hadn't really shown off, at least as far as I'd seen, since she had her kids... but now she was practically putting her assets on display in tight-fitting yoga pants. Her hair, previously kept short, was past her neck now, though she was hardly the only person whose hair had grown out during the age of social distancing. "Did you just say you were going to swallow his cum for twenty dollars?" She moved past Isabelle and stomped down the stairs, a mother's anger in her eyes.
"I didn't ask her..." I tried to insist, but she brushed right past me and grabbed Chloe by her top.
"Twenty dollars?" Mandy repeated, as though that was the issue.
"Family discount?" Chloe suggested.
"Uncle Mike is extended family," she clarified, stressing the 'extended' part, which I guess meant I didn't deserve a discount, or not that much of one. "And your mouth's worth far more than twenty for a first time customer." Now she turned to me, and put on a smile that was rare from her on a normal day. "I'm sorry, you can fuck my daughter's mouth for a hundred, if you got it, but I can't in good conscience let it go for twenty. She's only ten, that comes at a premium, you know." She circled around her daughter, bent to lay her chin on the little girl's shoulder, then pulled up her skirt and I forced my eyes away, mostly, but peripheral vision--or maybe just my imagination--made me certain she was cupping her daughter's pussy. Maybe bare pussy. "If this little devil had her way, she'd be selling her best assets for dollar store candy. But, just so you don't feel cheated, I'll personally give you the twenty-dollar blowjob she offered... just don't get used to that price, it's a one-time offer, today only."
Any other day my sister-in-law offering to suck my cock right in front of her husband, seemingly careless of his reaction, would have been the most awkward encounter in my year, but now it barely rated. And now I got a glimpse again of the weariness of my brother's eyes and had some sense that maybe it wasn't just the look of a dead man walking, but rather someone who'd been dealing with something deeply weird for too long. "Honey," Ben said, "Mike brought some flour, for the starter. Cameron just finished feeding it." All three of the girls seemed to let out a breath. "He's not interested right now and we need to talk... why don't you go back to doing your shows?"
Mandy shrugged, and turned and started up the stairs, her bubble butt swaying alluringly. Little Chloe followed, although she looked back at me as she ascended, a dejected expression on her face, at first... although when she was partly up the stairs she did pause to look back, open her mouth wide and extend her tongue out as though demonstrating her tongue, and tilt her head like she was renewing her offer, before her big sister stepped down just enough to grab her by the arm and then yanked her back into her room.
I turned my gaze back to my brother. "What the fuck is going on in this house?" He gestured at me that I should sit down, and, what the hell, the world's gone crazy, and it felt like the floor could scoot out from under my feet at any moment, so it just seemed wise to be somewhere comfortable.
"I told you, they can't help it," he explained. "It's the sourdough starter. It fucks with their brains somehow."
"You should tell him the whole story, Dad," Cameron suggested, and his father nodded.
He took a breath, sat down across from me, put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. "You remember Eddie? Eddie Kirkman?"
Vaguely. Being a couple years older than him, my little brother's high school friends only merited the tiniest portion of my memory. They were nerds... not stereotypical taped-up-glasses, bullied-all-the-time nerds like you see on TV... honestly, I don't even think they were social outcasts in the sense that people deliberately excluded them, but at the same time when we were in high school together they weren't the type you'd see at parties, pretty much ever. I wasn't the most popular guy in school by any means, but compared to my brother and his friends I might as well have been. He was always on the shy side, and so were his friends, and they had niche interests... so they pretty well spent most of their time hanging out with each other, and I don't think one of them had a girlfriend until they got into college. I remembered at least one was actually autistic, although I don't remember if it was Eddie. "I guess?"
"Anyway, you know he's a bit of a history buff." I did not know that, but didn't challenge it. "And we were talking about ancient Egyptian bread. This story popped up on social media, some scientists actually found some yeast on ancient Egyptian pottery and brought it back to life and actually used it to make bread."
I put the pieces together. "So... the sourdough starter comes from ancient Egyptian yeast?" Seemed pretty far-fetched.
"Oh, no. But it gave him the idea. You see his thing is the Old West. You know, cowboys, saloons, and so on. He takes trips up to old ghost towns, just for fun. And he thought it'd be fun to try to bring back some yeast from those days. If yeast can survive thousands of years, recovering something usable from a few hundred should be much easier. And there was a story in one of these ghost towns that captivated him, and he thought it'd be fun to try to bring back bread that was the center of an old west shootout, in the town whorehouse."
"Wait, what?" Cameron asked. "You never mentioned that part. You know that actually explains a lot."
"It wasn't exactly appropriate to mention, so when Eddie dropped it off he gave you kids the sanitized version of the story. But considering you're buying sex off your little sisters every day that's probably not required anymore." Cameron didn't even try to deny my brother's accusation, just put his hands in his pockets. "Anyway, this local Wild West whorehouse was known, aside from the obvious, for its bread. And when the town went bust after the gold ran out, the whores got into a fight over who got to keep the sourdough starter... during a tussle, the jar smashed, and that led to a gunfight and pretty much all of them died. Eddie thought if the bread was that good, he might as well try to culture some of that yeast from shards recovered from the scene... and I got a kick out of trying out 'whore bread,' so when it seemed to be working for him, I got a sample. I never would have done it if I thought it would make all the women in my family start actually acting like whores."
"So, what, you're telling me this sourdough starter is haunted by the ghosts of Old West prostitutes?" I asked, sarcastically.
"Christ, I don't know, Mike. That's as good as explanation as anything. But my theory is it's just a weird biological quirk. You ever hear the story of that fungus that takes control of ants, turns them into zombies? I think this yeast does something similar, turns women into whores to keep itself alive. It's not so out of the question... I mean, that's what yeast does, it converts starches and such into different acids and chemicals. A normal starter, if you don't feed it regularly enough, it starts producing alcohol, all the sites warn you there might be a layer of hooch. But you know, there's always variety in nature... like... some mushrooms are delicious, some make deadly poisons, and others produce hallucinogens. I think that's what happened here, this lost strain of yeast makes something other than alcohol, some sort of psychoactive compound that makes women willing to sell sex. Not just willing, really, it's more like a compulsion."
"It makes them want to dress sluttier, too," Cameron piped in. "First day we made the bread, I was like WTF, since Bells started walking around in just her underwear, which she never does and Mom... well, like she was going out on a night clubbing."
"I'm not even sure they're fully aware of how weird these urges are, at least not right away. It all feels like the most natural thing in the world, to them." He took a breath, then revealed, "This isn't just us, you know. Eddie told me he got lucky with his hot neighbor after sharing some bread... it was only later I got him to admit that he paid her... but it took us all a while to really figure out what was going on and why. I mean, when Mandy asked me for money for sex I thought she was doing some kinky roleplaying thing. And you know, married almost twenty years, any sex I can get, I'll take. Had no idea my daughters were doing the same to Cameron."
"Mostly Bells," Cameron explained. "Chloe just kept trying to get me to give her quarters to look at her underwear. I mostly just did it to get her to stop bugging me. But you know, every time she had a slice of the bread, Bells offered to give me a blowjob for some of my allowance money and like, everybody's been stuck at home forever it's not like I'm going to meet a girl, where else am I going to get a deal like that?"
Ben snorted a little. "Besides your mom, or Chloe, you mean."
Looking down at the floor, Cam gave a little half-hearted shrug without removing the hands from his pockets. "Mom charges too much... and I only do Chloe because I have no choice."
It didn't look like my brother entirely believed his son, but at the same time, he seemed like he was beyond being mad about his own son buying sexual favors from his ten- and thirteen-year-old daughters. And maybe his wife. "So they eat the bread and they start selling sex?" I asked. My brother nodded. I wasn't sure I believed it, or how I felt about it... I mean, it was awful, obviously, and yet a drug like that could be priceless... if not for the moral issues, that is. "So why not just stop making the fucking bread?"
My brother barked out a bitter laugh. "Oh, if only it was that easy. It's funny, it's not even that great bread. To us, anyway. Maybe the whorehouse had some special recipe since it was supposedly popular among the customers, but the stuff I make is just bland, at least to me and Cam." Cam nodded his agreement. "I'd have stopped making it after the first loaf if Mandy and the girls didn't all love it." He shook his head. "And if not making it wasn't worse. See... whatever drug the yeast produces... it's like a stress chemical reaction. As long as the yeast's happy, it doesn't produce much. I think it comes out in the bread because the yeast's dying as it's getting baked... starts converting sugars into something that only tastes good to women, I think, and causes the whore effect. But it's subtle... I think most of it bakes off, and it's just a residue. The real problem starts if the starter starts to get too hungry... then it goes into overdrive, the chemical spews out into the air, and well... that's when the whore time really begins. Even worse than from eating something baked with it. They eat a slice of bread, maybe they get the impulse but they don't act on it, you know? If they eat too much of it, they might make an offer, or if you suggest it... but if the starter's hungry, and they're breathing it in... they start to get really insistent on it. Like they need to earn money that way."
"To pay to feed the starter," Cameron explained.
"And you couldn't just give them money, without sex?!"
"It doesn't work!" my brother insisted. "Don't you think we've tried that? Unless they make the money sexually, it doesn't satisfy them."