Apostrophe: Riccardo's Notebooks

The City is My Mistress - by Riccardo Berra (c) 2012 all rights reserved

2012-01-19T21:59:00.004-05:00

You know you're out there walking
and one line,
then an entire UNiverse sneak up to complete in your head?
send a shiver up your neck, and a shine down your spine,
So beautiful, accurate and bold of you
You should
whip out that bloody smartphone or stone tablet
and get it down
fast as you can,
But you don't

You tell yourself
You'll remember,
You set to remembering,
get home,
You set to forgetting,
Till later when you discover
You no longer have anything.
At all

To recall
That you were once inspired
But aren't any more.

Teeth to edge and hand to heart you beg the bitch.
Kiss her feet. Promise to write.
Promise to be true.
Stop smoking, drinking,
Stop fucking other women
Days

Several
(Hurtful angry shitful low)
days worth more
of staring you down
She relents and returns one line.

Which with
Grateful, beyond words,
you run.

Even if
not even close
To what you had
You get back nothing
More than you deserved

This city is my mistress
I know her so well in the dark
Blindfolded,
She over me
Pressing into her
Til the complete
Emptiness
of release
Begs
in the solitary spaces where nobody but she and I go
For the things I do in her I can tell nobody
For her skin in winter,
Reliably cold and firm beneath my feet
I do not come home
I only am home, in her

So even when she's distant grown
And I'd, retired, banished for another become
Lost in unrequited miscollections
Another anonymity
Some dumb cock
Forced to redrink
My own shabby breath for inspiration
Hers to the last
Is the name
I'll call out.

rbb 1-8-2012 all rights reserved
---------------
My latest, written sorta in reverse, pretty much as described above.
Two poems sorta written as one?
Erotic or not? I'm up in the air listening to

Mississippi John Hurt from D.C. Blues - The Library of Congress Recordings, Volume 2

Clipped on 7-January-2012, 11:34 PM from I'll Fly Away - YouTube

Limerence

2012-01-10T05:00:00.007-05:00

by Ricc Berra

It's been six months, fourteen days, twenty hours and forty-five minutes since we met.

How often have you heard this story?

A man walks into a working man's bar on a hot city night and approaches a girl seated near the door. She pretends not to notice as he rakes her up and down; her new Manolos, black pencil skirt, natural pearls, and the seal gray silk blouse unbuttoned to flaunt just a little more than enough of what she's got. He looks like he just stumbled out of a bowling alley. Her hair is freshly cut and styled. His is tousled in unruly ringlets. Her makeup shows attention to detail. His face, though handsome enough, needs a shave. She sips a Cosmo. He buys a beer. Offhandedly, he announces, "I don't mean to offend you, but you don't belong here."

I act offended, but in truth, I'm not. I know what you mean before you do and I love you almost instantly for saying it. Still, I play coy and won't give you the satisfaction. You do not present well on first appearance. You will need to earn my trust.

"I've as much right to be here as anybody else," I address my own reflection in the bar. "And who are you to judge me?" My inflection rises convincingly toward the end, but I give it all away when my eyes flutter, pulled to yours in such a mad gravity that I blush and look away again. It's too late. You know you have me like bait on a hook.

You say "Sorry but you're so beautiful" and repeat that I seem out of place. It still sounds like a line, but when delivered with conviction, it works. I let you buy me a drink. And another, then a third and before long I'm at ease, laughing at all the right places, touching your forearm, resting three fingers on my thigh, biting my lip. All the signposts are there for you to read and interpret. You need no roadmap, no website seduction tips, you needn't bother, I've already read them all, practiced diligently in my mirror, everything from the perfect angle to avert my eyes, to the swivel in my hips as my bare knees brush yours when I turn on the barstool to face you. Everything has been planned, orchestrated, choreographed for you until you, emboldened by drink and by what you see down my blouse when I lean forward, brush my hair away from my ear and whisper a secret, how you'd like to take me home with you and what we'd do once we get there.

There's no cab fast enough.

Even as you undo my blouse, still insisting I'm too good for the bars, I'm distracted momentarily, trying to remember your name. Did you give it? I know I told you mine. I stare out the unshaded window I have no idea how soon I'll be staring back into at you and another. Your hands are all over my breasts, unhooking my bra and pulling at the straps. Nothing's too good about me at this moment. I feel used. I like feeling this way and don't want it to stop. I laugh at how surprised you are when your hands fishing under my falling skirt find my panties wadded up in my cunt like so much wet tissue paper you don't even bother to remove, just peel aside, bend me over the nearest chair, pushed down for that fat cock of yours slithering up me, pushing so hard, pushing so long, you unhinge me, leave me creaking and groaning like a gate door left open to swing in the wind.

They say that love is blind, but we both know that's not true. Love is full-sighted. Multi-sensory. Extrasensory. My love sees everything, sees you in the shower, my love soaps your shoulders, froths the hair on your chest, splays fingers over you belly, foams the thicker wiry roost below, tickles your cock and delves between your legs.

My love is the towel that draws across your back, creates a brighter bloom on your already flushed skin. My love stands wet and naked behind you, shivering, my breasts pressed into your shoulders, hands on your hips, sliding around your waist, making you gasp as I brush down there. If you don't move, be still, I'll take it as if it were my own, my very own cock, to squeeze, make it hard and grow, curving through my fingers, shake it, jack it, stroke the soft pouch beneath until it hardens too, I'll do everything for you, make you come, be your hands, your handmaiden and when you're done, when you tense and cry out in my arms, I'll bend at your knees and lick you clean again like a mother cat washing kittens.

The pills were not my fault. I wasn't trying to do anything but sleep because always thinking of you has turned me into a vampire and when it, sleep, didn't come at midnight, I took two and when it still didn't come at one, I took two more and when it still didn't come at two, I took four. I'm not sure what happened after that, did I call you, I really don't remember, just a rumbling, dizzy, dippy roller-coaster free-fall into blackness, so fast my head spun into what I thought was sleep until the bright lights I knew were not morning sun and the acrid taste of charcoal and my own retching brought me back to a place that makes no sense without you.

So you see, the pills aren't my fault. If anything they are yours. But I will and I do forgive you. Can you just give me a little sign, something, anything, that shows you understand that what might seem like excess to you now, makes perfect sense to me?

Do you see the pictures of me on the screen now, do you like how I peel my bra down so slowly, the strap off one shoulder, then the other, now down at my belly, my breasts free, cupped and held up for you to take, free for your hands to clench and pull, for your lips to suck and your teeth to nibble? Watch how I slip my panties off, lie back to tease and spread my cunt for you, see how wet it is just thinking about you, how its bright rosiness glistens, ready, open for you. While you stare at me naked, splayed on the bed, surely you recognize that it's your room, your apartment, all your familiar objects, your nightstand, your pillows, your bedspread beneath me as I arch my back and give my cunt to the camera, but really it's to you. The date stamped in the lower righthand corner is yesterday's and that's important for I know your schedule and hers and she, once she sees what's playing on your computer, it's clear how she'll react. You may not remember giving me your keys, but you did and you'll soon see it hardly matters.

When you left me for her, at first I thought she wasn't the jealous type, all those nights spent watching through your bedroom window, the blinds never drawn, the light left on too long, but then I finally saw her close-up at that holiday party on Friday with your brother's sexy Polish girlfriend, so sloppy drunk, touching your knee, flirting and laughing at your jokes. You didn't notice her staring down your brother's date for being so forward with you, but I did and later—when you argued in the parking lot. I know there's little chance she'll want you after she sees what's on your computer.

Placing you in the foreground, you covering me, that was a little more involved. The photoshopping took hours. Finding the right shot of you, matching all the tones, shadows and colors, blending the outlines pixel by pixel, till everything is as perfect as it seems, for, as I look at this final sequence, you on top of me, I have a hard time remembering that it didn't happen, so convincing is it and everything it does to me when I see it. Don't you feel it too?

I'm not the sort to call out other girls as whores and sluts; those are horrible, demeaning labels men force on us to degrade the needs we all feel. It's understandable, other girls wanting you; it's natural that we all want something for ourselves and this is just the surest way to make what I want real. It was real. I still ache, that good delicious ache, from the way you rubbed me, rubbed me raw. There are worse aches than being rubbed raw, much worse.

Too little cuts worse than too much. Emptiness cuts like a knife, worse than a knife, the absence of you beside me in bed, your morning breath musty with sleep, tickling my scalp, your warm, familiar morning cock sliding against my butt, naked under my nightie, my underwear always off, my cunt, so wet, you can't forget how it was always ready, always open to you as you slid in with your morning hard-on, so easy to fill me, so hard now, so empty, stabbed through with emptiness, the raw red gash worse than the laughing men who took my innocence, panties already at my ankles, tits squeezed by calloused alley hands, rough voices in the dark asking over and over, do you want it, do you want it babe, while they fucked me front and back and me not brave enough, not sure enough of my desires to say yes or no. Part of me wanted it. Part of me did not. Part of me went away and never came back. There is little I do not know of my desires now for they are all you, of you, on you only in me sealing the stabbed place and if only for the moment, filling it with the completion that eases away all aches.

And you sit there, the way you sit there, with nothing to say, like you're already somewhere else. You won't even face me. You should. You really should.

My love, why are you looking at me that way?

The Girl with Two Lovers

2011-09-27T02:13:00.000-04:00

With thanks and love to Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard

A girl takes a shower, alone in her apartment. As she sits naked in the dark to dry herself, a familiar ache grows inside her. Lit only by the glow of her computer screen, she touches herself and as she does, she composes two emails, one for each of her two lovers. She asks them to meet her the next day, one at 1l o'clock, the other at 5 o'clock.

The first lover is a day laborer, a brooding hulk of a man, to whom she writes:

You are strong and powerful. I am putty in your hands. When I arrive, I want you to tear my clothes off, slap my face, curse at me, push me, treat me like the little whore I am. You know what I deserve. I want to feel you smothering me, pounding me until I can't breathe and I dissolve in a puddle of cream. When you finish abusing my pussy, just flip me over and force my asshole until I scream and beg for mercy, though I expect none.

The second man is a poet, an intellectual, to whom she writes:

When I arrive at five, I will be Baudelaire to your Rimbaud. I will undress slowly and you, as you always do, will recite the sonnet you've written, just today, just for me. I love that my restless spirit is your muse, your poetry our foreplay and that my body is your consummation. I ache to feel you slip inside me, softly, slowly, until my passion overwhelms me. When I feel your breathe arrest and the flood of your seed inside me, I will know our love is sacred.

Aroused by what she has written and the confusing duality of her nature, she puts her feet up on the writing desk and legs straddling the laptop, brings herself to a powerful climax with one hand. With the other hand she clicks "send" twice, but as soon as she clicks the second time, lightning strikes and the power goes out.

The girl sits shivering in the pitch dark. A gnawing suspicion grows inside her, a suspicion that soon becomes certainty that she has transposed the addresses and sent the wrong email to each man. When the power does not come back on again, she passes a fitful night, tossing and turning, getting no sleep. In the morning she dresses quickly, desperately, in her sexiest panties, bra, skirt and blouse. A quick stroke of ruby lipstick and she's off to her first lover.

They fuck passionately, exactly as she described the night before. While lying together, smoking cigarettes, she reveals that she sent him an email. But the first man has not read his email yet. She is so relieved and tells him that he should delete it without reading.

He demands an explanation. She demurs. His calloused hands pin her soft wrists to the bed. He growls menacingly and demands again, "Tell me everything my sexy little whore" so she does, she tells him the whole story and begs his forgiveness. He breaks up with her on the spot, accusing her of thinking him stupid and herself above him.

Heartbroken, she spends most of the day wandering the streets, but by 4:00 o'clock she reconciles herself that though she has lost one love, she can keep the other. She dries her eyes, freshens her makeup and rushes crosstown—only to find her second lover already in front of his computer.

She is filled with dread, but he doesn't seem at all angry. He rises and kisses her on the lips and neck. He does not recite poetry. Instead, he slowly, tenderly removes her somewhat battered blouse, skirt, bra and panties for her, draping them gently over his laptop. Naked, he throws her on the bed and makes love to her with unaccustomed physicality. While her body still ripples with her orgasm, he flips her over and using the lubrication of their first exchange, he pushes easily into her anus, hooks two fingers into her vagina and pumps away until they both explode a second time.

Spent, the girl nestles in the arms of her lover, eyes wide and glowing with satisfaction. As she strokes the hair on his belly, she whispers you are so sweet and I am so relieved that you have forgiven me. He acts surprised and insists that she explain herself. She thinks he wants to humiliate her a bit before putting her duplicity behind them. As an intellectual, she assumes, this is how the game is played, so she goes along and holds nothing back. When her story has ended, the man rises from the bed, gathers up the girl's tattered clothes and throws them at her.

He tells her to get dressed and get the fuck out—that he never wants to see her again. Though she weeps and begs, he'll say nothing more. She has no choice but to comply. Walking aimlessly through the streets until dark, she finally returns to her sad, empty apartment. The power is on and tearfully, she pulls up the two emails, each sent, correctly addressed, to her former lovers.

Ricc Berra, a New York-area screenwriter, is drawn to complex, troubled lovers and their complicated relationships. This story is inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's 1961 "A Woman is a Woman" and its luminous lead, the lovely Anna Karina. This story is the newest member of Ricc's anthology, "Love on the Edge" which can't always promise a happy ending, but does promise a lot of heat and maybe some light getting there. Read this story also on The Erotic Readers and Writers Association Erotic Fiction Gallery.

Modeling Session

2011-09-27T00:12:00.000-04:00

No. 50+Models.com doesn't only want women with gray hair. Who told you that? Your floral print dress is pretty. It compliments your olive skin. The conflowers make your eyes pop. Relax. Lie on the bed. Pretend you've just awakened from an afternoon nap. Good!

That's one series. Sit up. Face the window. Pull the bedsheet across your torso so the camera thinks you're naked behind it. Good.

Slip the dress off your shoulders. The tiny bow in your sexy peach bra shows just above the sheet. So do the straps. Don't look at me. Look to the side. Think about what happens when we're done taking pictures. Yes.

Now look to camera. Your hair falls over your right eye. Show more leg. Yes. Lovely.

Take off the dress. These shots—they're just for me. The peach panties are at the bottom of the frame. Good. Slide them all the way down and lie back.

Open your legs. More. They make a nice triangle in the center of the frame. No, I'm glad you didn't get that Brazilian. I love all that hair. Pinch your nipples. They're hard already? I know. It doesn't take much.

Spread your lips. Do what you do when I'm not around, but you're thinking of me. Yes. God yes.

So beautiful. Yes. This session is over.

TRES VUELTAS (Three Laps)

2011-05-17T18:40:00.002-04:00

Sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar.

by Riccardo Berra (c) 2011 Love on the Edge, all rights reserved

Ricc Berra. My pleasure. Glad to meet you too.

What do I do? For lack of a better term, I guess you could call me a lifestyle photojournalist. I work for that famous cigar mag you see on the newsstands and know by its thick glossy cover stock and glam shots of celebrities sucking on fat stogies. You do? Always great to meet a fellow enthusiast. Yup, that's it—last month's issue. There's little LiLo going down on a Cohiba. Yessir, I did. That's my cover and I can tell you stuff about her and that photo shoot that even the tabloids don't know. Exactly, what's the point? Poor little girl has enough crap on her plate without me piling it on.

Anyway, you're probably thinking, stop, you lucky bastard, you're killing me, you're, what did you say, a divisional shipping manager? You also write in your spare time? Two kids in Michigan State. Okay, yeah, shit, I know it costs a bundle. Mine starts Cornell this year. So you save like Scrooge, maybe you score four or five premium smokes a year. I won't deny I get the best, pretty much all the time, perks of the job.

I didn't always have it so good; so yes, I agree I am a bit jaded. Most of the time with factory seconds you're lucky to get a good five in a bundle. Champagne tastes and beer budget? Yeah, I feel you.

Point is the last thing I want to do is sit here and run my mouth to some guy I just met, so we can talk about anything you want except politics. Sure. Let me see your pictures. Handsome, your boys. You must be proud. Here's mine. You kidding? I don't mind.

Oh you like those shots. That's a celebrity golf outing. Yeah, that is Jack Nicholson, the Jackster. To say I'm a lucky bastard because of all this isn't even the half of it. Look, since you were decent enough to buy me this second drink and we're both got too much time to kill while they de-ice the wings, I'm going to tell you a piece of the other half.

I'm just back from northeastern Brazil, a charming, ancient colonial town in the Bay of Bahia called Cachoeira. One of Brazil's largest cigar makers set up shop in Cachoeira the late 1800's when its Portuguese founder left Lisbon find fame and fortune in the New World's tobacco fields. The company, Luz da Luna, was named after Dona Maria Luz de Luna, infamous widow consort to the deposed Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II.

Brazilian leaf is enjoying an uptick of popularity due to some risqué ads that feature shots of a former Miss Brazil provocatively non-attired in the title role. You've seen them? You are a dedicated reader. Save that issue, it could be a collector's item. The ads were pulled next issue. Anyway, Brazilian Mata Fina leaf is a sort of Rodney Dangerfield of the tobaccos. But I've always found it rich, sweet and spicy—very much like the country and its people.

The publisher of the mag knows I like it. I gave a Luz da Luna cigar a great review so the president of the company asked for me. Now, I admit, other than enjoying a good smoke and having a way with words, I have no special credentials to do this job; I don't even speak Portuguese. So when I got down there, the first thing the company's press liaison did was to set me up with an interpreter, a whip-smart, funny little character named Joacy Campos-Leão, who spent most of his time regaling me with tales of his latest trip to "Novo York-ae." The parts he left out, I'll save for later.

Anyway, I do my thing with the president of the company, we tour the fields, we spend time in the curing sheds. That was day one. Then the next morning, we go their horticulture labs. It is, it's a very sophisticated operation.

So I'm just taking notes, you know, doing my thing and it's lunchtime, but the president is called away to a board meeting and his sons treat me to a nice long traditional Bahian lunch with many bottles of decent Portuguese Caves Velhas red, followed by some truly excellent smokes and it's mid-afternoon and I've basically gotten everything I need for my piece. So I bid the brothers bom dia and I page Joacy to take me back to the hotel.

I thought I'd crank the AC and maybe get a little shuteye. Though we're icebound up here, down there in March it's blistering hot and I'm sweating like a pig. Joacy turns to me in the car and says you have two choices Señor Berra. We can go on the site seeing tour (to which I mop my brow and grimace at the prospect) or … we can go for a swim. Swim it is he says and he says he knows a spot on the Rio Paraguaçu, less than a mile from my hotel. We drop the camera gear at the hotel and I change out of my seersucker suit and put on swim trunks, a Panama hat and my loudest Hawaiian shirt. Business traveler's tip, though executives do tend to dress conservatively, there's no such thing as a "too-loud" Hawaiian shirt in Bahia.

It turns out Joacy's swimming hole is more like three miles away, but I mind the roads carefully, just in case something happens and I end up hoofing it back. Well we park a bit off the road and walk down a dirt path. Before I see it, I hear the river. We come to an elbow shaped gorge, where the Rio Paraguaçu splits like a snakes tongue and half spills down a 25 foot drop, the other part cuts its way down a tumble of boulders and there are hoards of Blocos below enjoying the water.

Don't take offense, but I gotta ask you if you are really a retail shipping manager and not in law enforcement, because how much of the next part of my tale I tell depends on your answer. Scouts honor? Super.

You enjoy the smoke? Joacy asks as he eyes me carefully and I answer well yeah, we work for the same magazine. No, Señor Berra, the other smoke he replies and pinches fingers to lips in the universal sign of "the other smoke" and I tell him I'm known to imbibe. Well then, he says with evident delight, we have somebody to meet, you'll really like him and we take a detour off the main path to the river. As we round a clearing I hear samba music blasting and I see an open flatbed pickup that is the source of the music.

Sitting on a folding chair behind the open flatbed at about 400 pounds is the second largest man I've ever seen, chugging out of a two liter Guarna bottle. Behind him, the largest man I've ever seen is pointing a 357 magnum straight at us and I freeze dead in my tracks, but Joacy just laughs and waves, calls out and pulls me along. The large man stands down. As we approach the seated man stands with some difficulty due in part to his girth but more to the fact that he only has one good leg, the other amputated above the knee. He leans on a crutch, pulls a jolly little pipe out of his mouth, adjusts the pointed red cap on his head and beams at Joacy. The two kiss—extremely affectionately I thought, which initially seemed little odd, but I always take whatever for what it's worth.

Señor Berra, meet Señor Saci Pererê. A very special friend Joacy beams and I can tell by the affectionate way the big man looks at the little driver man that these two are very special friends indeed. Whatever. I stick out my hand, say Bom Dia with maybe a bit too mucho gusto and big Saci scowls, but then clasps my little baby's mitt in his big, giant ham of a hand. As he does, I notice the Walther PPK strapped under the fleshy fold between his manbreast and treetrunk arm. Saci noticing me noticing quips, 'Bond, James Bond' in a thick accent. Laughing uproariously.

I laugh too; a little sickly squeak and little Joacy and big Magnum begin dialoguing in rapid Portuguese. Saci eases his frame back into his extrawide chair as Joacy turns to me and asks if I brought cigarette papers. I whisper back I hadn't exactly thought I'd need them and Joacy brushes it off. He asks me for 50 real which is less than 30 bucks and I give it to him and he gives it Magnum who produces what my eye judges as a half ounce of tightly packed buds. Hot damn indeed!

Magnum puts fingers to lips and whistles and from out of the pickup's cab tumble, wait for it, two stunning Brazilian brown beauties, twins, maybe all of 20, topless matching 34C's in banana yellow microkinis. How I'd not noticed them with all the male bonding and firearms and the illicit drug transacting, God knows, but there they were.

I agree, my friend, women are God's gift to the planet and Brazilian women, well can we both agree, their reputation entirely deserved. That's a great observation, how did you say it, that beauty is proof that God intended the races to mix. In Bahia, you have the gorgeous confluence of three races, the Indian, the African and the European.

The result with their raven hair, coffee and cream skin, most not so big in the breast department as the two sisters, but all with the generous bundas Brazilian men prefer. Saci's gang excepted of course because other than myself, I was by then certain all the boys on that bus hit the home team bundas.

Yeah, exactly, whatever.

Look, I don't know if it’s the Scotch talking but I'm not getting any sense of shocking or offending you, so I'm going to continue.

You … want me to stop? Oh! Crissakes man, by all means don't hold it. Look at that board, we ain't going nowhere fast. Yes, I'll be here when you get back. Take your piss. I'm glad you're enjoying it. Go. Go.

Everything came out alright? Sorry lame one. Sure I'll take another if you're buying. So where was I? Yeah, the girls. Well one lifts up a tarp in the back of the pickup there's this stack of dark chocolate brown Mata Fina leaves, very thin, perfectly dried and cured and she selects an almost transparent leaf the size of an invitation envelope and she sits on the tailgate. Magnum hands the bag to the other girl, then reluctantly it seemed produced another folding chair for me to sit in.

Girl One whose name I later found out is Iara cups the leaf on her bare brown thigh while girl two whose name is Ina, crumbles fat buds into the little depression Iara made and with one deft motion, Iara spun the leaf on her thigh into a perfect torpedo without spilling so much as a grain of pot. My jaw dropped. When she slid the entire thing into her mouth to moisten and seal it I knew I was in the presence of master torceador.

Yup, cigar rollers and though I'd never had this kind of cigar, you know with this particular kind of filler, I knew I was in for a righteous treat. Ina took it which if you had to put a ring size to it was maybe a 26 like a Carolina or Loquito, well she put a long match to it, took a deep drag, then stood, strutted over to me, bent over me, dangling those gorgeous chocolate-tipped brown betties a heartbreaking inch above my own chest and shot-gunned the smoke into my open mouth. She grinned shyly, handed me the torpedo, then went back to sit on the tailgate next to her sister.

It was peppery and eucalyptus, cinnamon and sweet and round and round it went around the circle, and by the fifth time or so, I tell you the day had visibly brightened, birds were singing sweeter, I'd forgotten the heat, the music slid and coiled into my brain like a viral infection and hell they probably could have harvested my organs and I'd not have given so much as a damn. Joacy, I'd forgotten about Joacy, was perched on Saci's lap and Saci looked my way through the haze and said something to Joacy. Joacy gave me this odd little look and told me that Saci wanted to know what I did for a living. Now if there was a cue of some sort in that look, it was lost to this smoke-fogged gringo brain, so I just blurted, "photo-journalist" which evidently needed no translation for it caused both the Walther and the Magnum to be directed at my head. I screamed, Jesus Christ Joacy, tell him I write about fucking cigars, I'm not a narc or CIA or whatever the fuck. Tell them I don’t fucking want to die and I'll prove what I say is true!

"How?" says Saci in perfectly uninflected king's fucking Oxford English.

"Oh now you speak the English." I say. "Good. I write and take photos for "Cigar Man" and the best way to prove that to you is ... I'm going to reach in my pocket and what I'm gonna pull out, you gotta trust me on this, is going to prove it."

"You do that amigo, but slowly, slowly and we are bom, bom, bom."

I produced my business card, the one with the magazine's logo and handed it to Saci. His eyes narrowed when he read it.

"Shit man, anybody can make a stupid card."

"I'm going in my pocket again."

This time I took out my finger cigar tube and slowly opened it so all could see and produced a dark little beauty about six inches long and a 45 gauge and handed it reluctantly to Saci.

"All the narcs smoke here man."

"Not this," I said, "Look at the ring."

"It's a Montecristo. So fucking what? All it proves is you like the best."

"No man, look closer, see that little F below the seal. It's Fidel's special blend. Straight from his humidor. Thirty years old. My last one in the world. Enjoy it in good health."

Saci turned the little beauty around delicately in his giant paw. I'd been saving it for after my swim. He stuck it under his broad flat nose and gave it an appreciative sniff. "Muitos agradecimentos meu amigo," he said as he clipped the cap. "I will."

"Satisfied?" I asked.

"More than." He replied. "Look, friend, my little Joacy told me you came to swim. And I think you should. You want to smoke again or swim?"

"I think I'd enjoy a dip. If somebody would show me the way down." Magnum double-sealed my remaining weed and I tucked it in the button pocket of my shorts.

Saci clapped his hands and the girls jumped off the truck and took me in arms. I was still a bit jittery, but even a cigar man finds himself in tight spots once in a blue one, so I allowed myself to be taken, figuring when in Cachoeira do as the Cachoeirans do as they trotted me down the path, my arms pressed to the silk of their brown sugar breasts. The path, I noticed, wound down the hill but instead of turning the girls tucked my arms even tighter and broke into a straight run off the edge of the bluff, and powerless to resist I found my legs churning empty air, simultaneously hyperaware of the following, two sounds—the uproarious laughter of men on the ridge I'd just left, the sound of me screaming like a little bitch and the sight of the water fall's rainbow spray behind four of God's most perfect tits in freefall and me thinking hell if I was going to die, this wasn't the very worst way to do so. Before I hit the blue-green water I had the sense to point my toes and I cut the water like a knife, shot down in a foamy spray maybe all of 20 feet, my toes touching soft muddy bottom, before I sprung to the surface gasping and spluttering.

"Very fucking funny man," I barked up to Saci who'd already lit my cigar and waved it enthusiastically at me thirty feet above my head.

His laugh echoed off the rocks overhead while he took a satisfied puff. "Have a nice dip. Enjoy!"

"Oh hell," I thought to myself as the girls and their breasts bobbed on either side of me. "I will indeed enjoy myself." The water felt about ten degrees below body temperature and the air was well above that and it felt like I was floating in cool air.

Iara, she of already demonstrated rolling skills swam up to me and kissed my wet lips, while her hand slid under the water, those skilled fingers, finding and rolling my man cigar. Ina lifted that wondrous bunda in the air, dove under the surface and in a trace, had slid my swim trunks off. She came up with them in her hand, waved them dramatically over her head shouting "Woo woo!" and tossed them on top of a giant boulder on the opposite bank. The girls then began to circle me like sleek brown sharks, first Iara diving under while I treaded water and the next thing I saw and felt was her mouth closing predatorily on my cock and she sucked for 10 seconds and as she came up for air, Ina went down, literally, and took me in her mouth for about 20 second and by the third lap, the girls were taking 30 second turns each, not that I was timing mind you for within a very few minutes I was throbbing uncontrollably and with a sharp gasp, I shot into Iara's mouth and Ina finished me off, both girl's surfacing and exchanging a very unsisterly kiss with my white ejaculate and clear river water dribbling down onto their chests.

My Hawaiian shirt was floating and bunched annoyingly at my armpits at the water line and I felt ridiculous with it on, after all I was naked below the water line. I peeled it off and tossed it on the big rock with my trunks. We paddled about a bit, playing a multilingual, adult game of tag. I love swimming in rivers, for unlike oceans, the dissolved minerals in river water soften the skin and hair and leave you feeling all smoothed out and relaxed. I paddled over to one girl, then the other, kissing her all over, fondling her breasts, playing hide and seek with her raisin nipples and both were eager and receptive to my attentions.

At first I thought Iara and Ina had tired of me, for they swam ashore and climbed onto the boulder where my clothes lay in a heap. They were chatting gaily as they peeled off their bikini bottoms. Giggling they both crooked fingers at me in the universal semaphore of "come and get it" so I stroked with all due diligence to join them. The girls disappeared down off and behind the boulder and as I made my way to them, I discovered a discrete, semi-private patch of grass and scrub where they'd made themselves comfortable. They were stretched out on their stomachs up on their elbows, chattering like any two sisters to each other in Portuguese. It was neither the first nor the last time I regretted not knowing the language, but they indicated their awareness of my arrival and intentions by stretching their arms behind them and spreading their cheeks.

I have always been a poor artist and have tried many times to sketch women's bodies. Other than with my camera, I've never been able to do them any justice. Truthfully, I could've been Picasso and not captured the full visual impact of their glorious hemispheres revealed in unison, the two coffee-tinted puckered holes and identical black wiry nests with their bright beckoning coral slits. They had my instant and undivided attention. I told myself that I'd give them my all or die in the attempt. From Iara to Ina and back again I hopped, grabbing fistfuls of generous Brazilian bunda to ease my way in, brushing stray hairs off their faces, kissing their shoulders, sliding as easily into one as the other, pumping up a samba rhythm, then pulling out and repeating with the other.

When most of your journalistic career is spent covering other people's pleasure, some of it is bound to rub off. I flit from galas to socials to charity smokeouts and I admit I've almost always found women in those situations eager to celebrate something privately after the party. Sometimes it’s a new or impending divorce, sometimes a passage from young to full womanhood, or a release from the ennui of an over-entitled life, and sometimes it's just the joy of peeling out of a tight, restrictive dress after a few too many cocktails. I've had many memorable moments. But never, to this moment, two at once and never twins and never two of such youth and breathtaking perfection as these two, and best yet, without a single one of those breaths wasted in speech.

I worked away and Ina growled and puffed. I worked away and Iara laughed and trilled and when I slightly changed my pitch, she crooned "Ayieee, G spot" which I guess is also universal. She began to push back at me with increasing intensity, me figuring hell, I'm hitting it, so keep hitting it, why mess up a good thing? But Ina was feeling left out and said so to me and her sister—presumably something like 'sharing the wealth bitch.' I didn't understand the words; but the intent was clear. So I'm hopping off Iara, back to Ina to make up for lost time and this is when I discovered the one discernible difference between them. Ina had a dark little mole halfway between twist and twain and Iara had none. I'd discovered her secret. For in no other way were they different, not in the size and shape of their bodies, not in the way they felt inside, not in the ways they moved or spoke. Whilst churning to the hilt, I started to lose it and I pulled quickly from Ina, splashing a snail's trail across her left cheek and crossing Iara's right cheek as I leapt back into just in time to finish as they say, with a bang.

Catching my breath, I crouched and shivered on my haunches between the girls, who kissed and stroked my chest and back with such affection that I felt just a bit humbled to have two such creatures lavishing such attentions on me. They pushed me down between them and I wriggled in savoring the close feel and smell of their sun and exertion warmed bodies.

You're right my friend. Dark women do have a darker smell. Molasses, brown sugar, white sugar. Sugar. Sugar. I closed my eyes for a few minutes while they continued to chatter and stroke me as if I was a cute, friendly puppy they'd just found.

I'd find it hard to say goodbye to them. If they "belonged" in any way to Saci, it wasn't in the way that I needed to worry about. Lost for awhile in the buzz of the smoke, the swim and my afterglow, I became aware of the sun moving gradually off my face, so I opened my eyes, sat up and made signs and intentions to the girls that I wanted to go back up the hill. At first they acted like they didn't understand and then they were disappointed. Why should I want to leave? Why indeed. They pouted a bit longer, but pulled on their bottoms and trudged up after me.

My only real concern was that we should make plenty of noise so that whatever the Bahia Vice boys were doing on that bluff, that our reappearance wouldn't surprise or embarrass them in any way. I made lots of noise and encouraged the sisters to do so too which they found very amusing for some reason. As I climbed, I called out, even chucked a rock or two over my head to announce our imminent arrival. My efforts were pointless for as soon as my head cleared the ledge, I spied no guns pointed at me; in fact the entire clearing where the pickup had been parked was entirely deserted. Even my Panama hat and sunglasses were gone.

Shit is right.

I guess I was a pretty silly sight, my unbuttoned shirt flapping in the breeze like some tropical flag, my hands parked dejectedly on my hips. But the girls were anything but disappointed or surprised for that matter. Instead they broke into a new barrage of rapidfire Portuguese (vindo a nosso repouso, vindo a nosso repouso) and indicated by pulling my arms that they wanted me to follow them.

I considered shrugging them off and making my way back to town and the hotel. What if their intent might be less than honorable and a brother, father or cousin with a large cane machete was waiting to separate me from my stalk the minute I entrusted myself to them?

Right. I .. I really don't mean to be an ugly American. It's just a reasonable concern. Thing is, in all this had been my third trip to Brazil and even in the din of Carnival, I'd never encountered so much as a pickpocket. I know it sounds incredibly naïve and lucky and yes, I do know about the kid gangs in Rio, but how can I explain, there in Bahia, things are different.

So like looking in a dressing room mirror these two beauties, one tugging my left arm, the other the right, each identical (except for the mole) and again I'm figuring, what the hell? Truly, what the hell? Why should this adventure end?

Alas, there's no way to communicate any of this to the sisters and the idea of walking the three miles or so back into town by myself seemed utterly depressing in comparison. So I held out my arms and made know with words they didn't understand to 'lead on.' Arm in arm, we made our way back along the main road, where we stopped. I pointed at Cachoeira and they shook their heads and pulled me the other way, away from town.

We walked for close to an hour west on BA-132, following the Rio Paraguaçu and when I next checked my watch it was near seven. We'd come to a roadside vegetable stand and variety store where a dour moustachioed grandmother was packing up her unsold wares for the evening. She seemed to know the two sisters and I couldn't tell if she liked their lack of modesty that much. Ina stood beside a bucket of flowers and with her most beguiling smile, gave me to understand she and her sister wanted a bunch, so I grabbed the two freshest ones remaining and presented the girls with them. Iara pulled out a third bouquet and indicated that I should pay for it too. I did.

Such a small price for the favors of these lovely young women and they seemed to take such delight in their bouquets that I then grabbed a woven basket and began to fill it with fruits and vegetables and a handmade cheese that still looked decent.

The proprietress had an open carton of Brazilian cigarettes, which are nasty. But thanks to Saci, I'd had nothing to smoke since lunch and sex and cigarettes have always gone together for me in ways that sex and cigars do not. At least as far as the ladies go. But as soon as I picked up a pack, both girls started chattering most disapprovingly at me until I put the cigarettes down. I shrugged my shoulders and paid up. We crossed the main road on a dirt trail heading north and soon came upon a small village clearing nestled in a valley. Iara waved her hands about grandly and said "Gamaleira" and repeated it until I did, correcting my pronunciation, beaming with pleasure when I correctly pronounced the name of her home. The houses we passed were various combinations of mud, tin, concrete and stucco, a bit of cheap vinyl here and there, not attractive by our jaded American standards, but cleanswept and brightly painted. From each open window, the sounds of domesticity; from each pipe chimney, a cheery trail of cooking smoke filled the evening air and tickled my nose with unimaginably savory smells. Our stop at the garden shack had stirred my appetite somewhat, but it wasn't until we walked past those houses that my mouth literally began to water and I realized that with the pot, our previous exertions and the time of evening that I hadn't eaten for five hours and was in fact ravenous again.

As we walked I tried to imagine how the girls lived here in modest Gamaleira; I thought they might be orphaned and I pitied them, for perhaps this was the reason that Saci kept them around. I was spinning this line of thought out to its logical end when we came to the last house, up a hill and set back a bit from the rest of the village and unlike the others, it was solidly constructed of wood and newly painted. Everything they say about deforestation in the Amazon is true, right, good building wood is very scarce and expensive, so the sisters, at least by the standards of their village, lived well. And from the stovepipe of this residence issued the same blue gray smoke of cooking, so I immediately braced myself for whoever or whatever I'd encounter inside.

The girls stepped ahead of me and as they opened the door, a dark arm like their own shot out and pulled, one, then the other girl inside. The door slammed in my face and I heard the shrill sounds of female scolding and younger female protests inside.

Exactly! What had I gotten myself into? At least the scolding sounds weren't male and as no burly relative shot out the door to hack my head off, I knocked timidly. The door opened slowly and well, in an instant, I saw from whom the girls had inherited all their unearthly beauty, for standing in the doorway was a gorgeous creature, identical to them, except for maybe 20 years and I knew at once that I was getting a somewhat unpleasant up and down from none but their mother. She thrust out her hand and said with unBahian curtness "Evaki Salamanca" and I said "Riccardo Berra" and that did no good. She just stared at me in a way that made me squirm, so I handed her the small basket of produce and for the second time this day, produced my business card, this one, with the magazine's imprint.

This time, it paid off handsomely, for she brightened instantly and chirped "Ah Cigar Man!" with evident pleasure and respect. She stood away from the door and enthusiastically bid me to enter. Behind her were her dark-eyed daughters, still clutching their slightly faded bouquets, but pouting and now far more modestly attired in bright matching, peasant blouses. The third bouquet was on a small folding table set in the middle of the kitchen. Three chairs stood against the back wall.

Evaki bustled me to the table and directed me to sit as she and her daughters prepared their dinner. And what a dinner it was. When Evaki lifted the lid of a cast iron Dutch oven that had been bubbling on top of their cookstove, I recognized it by smell alone, the feijoada, a Brazilian stew made of black beans. carne seca which is salted cured beef and sweet sausage. Ina filled a large bowl to the brim as her mother put the flowers in a vase.

Iara gave me a large spoon and all I wanted to do was to tear into the steaming black mass of goodness, but I held myself until all three of the women noticed with consternation that I wasn't eating. I spread my arms before me, indicating they should all sit, but they protested that I should start without them. Still I refrained until they each sat with their bowls and spoons and Evaki said a quick Bahian version of grace, after which she looked up at me and I indicated my satisfaction and we all began to eat. The table was small and several times, the silky knees of one girl and then the other rubbed up against my bare thighs.

Many times I have eaten feijoada—from favela dives to New York's and Rio's ritziest restaurants and nothing compares to that meal. Again, maybe it was the buzz munchies, or the afternoon's activities, or the culinary skills of the mãe da casa, but God in heaven it was good. Creamy and salty and smoky rich, every bite I gobbled down felt like I was ingesting pure love. Evaki barked at Iara and the young girl scrambled up, went to a small pantry and came back with a bottle of Bohemia Escura, which to my palate is the very best dark beer in Brazil. Brazilians consume a lot of beer, very little of it worth drinking. The Bohemia is an notable exception. It's smooth and very malty, a perfect accompaniment to the spicy feijoada.

I tried to fend off a second helping, but the lady of the house was absolutely not having it, so I tucked in for the sake of international goodwill and cultural relations. As I was eating, I felt a hand in my lap, then from the other side of the table, another hand and before I knew it they'd pried my legs apart and the first hand had snaked inside my trunks and had begun to rub my crotch in a manner no way consistent with uninterrupted consumption of feijoada. I coughed, glanced up at Evaki, mortified, but she just laughed, spoke sharply to her daughters and just as quickly, the hands withdrew and allowed me to finish unmolested.

When I was done, the women quickly cleared the table and if I'd had had belted trousers on; I'd have had to loosen them, for my stomach pressed groaningly against the elastic waistband. I leaned back and rubbed my belly contentedly, which brought exclamations of approval from all three women. The fading light of dusk filled the small western facing window. The women chatted animatedly and some sort of decision was reached, for Ina left the house and came back some minutes later with a large stack of perfectly dried Mata Fina leaves.

What happened next defies belief, but I ask you to bear with me, for now, I need to take a piss. Don't go anywhere.

You hear anything about the flight while I was gone? Uh huh. Okay. Just as well, I'd hate to think we've come this far and that you'd miss the best part. You sure you want hear this?

Yes, I'm teasing. So okay, as I said, the girl comes back with a large wad of tobacco leaves and places it on the table. Iara and mamma Evaki take their three chairs from the dinner table and place them back against the wall. One girl filled a wash basin with water from the sink and placed it in front of the chairs. Evaki then took a dusty bottle from atop the pantry and poured me a finger of its clear liquid into a fresh glass and bid me to drink. It was Brazilian sugarcane rum, raw, undiluted and undistilled. I knocked it back. It went down like simple syrup and kicked like napalm. The mother poured me another shot and began to rapidly shuffle through the leaves as a cardsharp shuffles a deck and with an expert eye had made three large stacks of filler leaves and a smaller stack of finishing leaves.

With barely a look my way and without another word, Evaki dropped her skirt and blouse. As did the girls. Each in turn stepped astride the water basin and cupping a handful of water, splashed it liberally on her dark-nested female flower. Each took a large wad of tobacco leaves and sat splay legged on a chair facing me and rolled the wad against her thigh into a neat, tight torpedo. Each then took a perfect finishing leaf from the table and spun it about the tobacco filler, slid the entire cigar into her mouth to moisten it, then lifting her legs, inserted the a torpedo full into her vagina. Each woman pinched her eyes shut, delivering to each cigar, a most intimate squeeze. They then exchanged cigars, repeating the process with finishing leaves, until in less than a minute, they'd produced three flawless "tres vueltas," or in Portuguese, três vezes.

The best English translation is "triple wrapped" but you now see how there are times when your mother tongue does not do justice to an experience. I was breathing quite heavily at that point and desperately needed another shot of rum to steady myself. As my shaky hand poured the glass, Evaki presented me with the first perfectly formed seven inch cigar, which if I had to put a ring size to would be about a 50-52 gauge. While I ran it under my nose to sample its aroma, she took the shot glass from my hand and polished off the contents with a jaunty toss of her coal-fired eyes and black, curly hair. Sitting astride my lap, she trimmed both ends of the cigar and popped it into my gaping yap. She lit it with a long match and as I puffed away and drew the fragrant smoke into my mouth, I understood why the girls had so disapproved of my attempt to purchase cigarettes. Even bringing such machine-manufactured crap into this house would have been a considerable and unforgivable insult.

The torceadors of Brazil are well known and respected throughout the global aficionado community. I'd heard whispers of such private rituals conducted in the bawdy houses of Havana, Rio and Salvador for men of great wealth and power, but until this moment, frankly, I'd assumed they were just tall tales macho men told each other over stiff drinks. I've even seen girls in Thailand that smoke cigars and cigarettes with their lady parts, but never, ever have I seen skill of this magnitude.

And of the cigar itself, whatever I say, won't do it justice. I let a delicate wisp of smoke curl over my tongue and its sweet, peppery musk produced a delirium of sensations. It put me briefly in mind of another premium smoke made in the Dominican Republic. It's called "Ocean Breeze" and its sweet and salty tang is something I've prized and enjoyed quite often, but I'm afraid that the masterpieces Evaki, Iara and Ina Salamanca created for me have forever spoiled me for anything less.

In short order my three charming hostesses had made me three more torpedoes and when Evaki brought them to the table, she stood over me again, took the cigar from my mouth, handed it to Ina and with a businesslike tug, pulled my shorts down below my knees. While my mouth was sealed to the original version of the coffee-brown nipples I'd tasted earlier today, she slowly lowered herself on to my lap. Balancing herself on her toes like a ballerina and with her palms pressed against my shoulders, she swiveled her hips up and down until she established a rhythm that pleased her. Ina stood placidly by and puffed nonchalantly on the stogie, watching as her mother's juicy lap mambo intensified.

This rhythm and the powerful internal contractions she brought to bear as she came down sure pleased me and I felt certain that I'd lose it that instant, but Evaki shrieked "Ah no!" and standing, pinched my cock in a grip of iron. Ina then took her place and gave her mother the cigar. Evaki took a long satisfied puff on it as Ina lowered herself onto me and began her own dancing rhythm. Iara took the cigar from her mother and took several long drags to produce a cheery glowing inch-long ash on its tip. My hands, with nothing better to do, latched onto Ina's rounded bunda and slipping betwixt and between, one finger found the little mole amidst all the juice-slicked flesh and I pressed it and called out "Oh Ina" to which she melted and responded "Ohhh Ricci." She had barely established her own rhythm when Iara thrust her nipples pointedly in my face and handed the cigar to her sister and demanded her turn.

This complex choreography repeated for as one of the three made busy on my lap, the other two were busy rolling and finishing cigars. I counted fifteen on the table when I felt the rockets go off in my head and it was Iara, I think, that took my load and all I can tell you is that the last three cigars the Salamanca women produced had a pronounced slick, viscous sheen on their wrappers.

The cigar I'd been smoking had gone out so Evaki relit it and passed it to me with another thimble of rum. As she sat at the table and folded her naked legs primly under her, the girls stood on either side of me, stroking my head and shoulders until I truly felt like the lost puppy they'd taken home and decided to give all their love to. The cigar's taste grew in sweetness and complexity as I smoked it to the nub. Iara opened the door and a rush of heavy but fresh air swept in tossing the premium tobacco smoke and woman-scents back in my tear-stained face. We struggled awhile then gave up trying to communicate in words. I tried hard to express what this evening meant to me and the three women and judging from the kisses and what happened next, I think I communicated my feelings.

Evaki stood, a bit unsteadily, a cute and bashful smile and indicated her intent to lie down in the large bed in the opposite corner of this handsome but modest one-room house. In truth, I hadn't even noticed the bed or the rest of the house. She curled up on it and beckoned me over with the sweetest words I didn't understand. Again, I regret having neither camera nor drawing pad to visually express the image of this brown flower of a woman on the white bed who'd opened her home and body to me. When I was curled up against her, she called the daughters over, both of whom seemed reluctant to come to bed in the way of all young people. But they listened to their mother and curled in alongside us, four to a bed, very packed, but very sweet. Many sweet things happened that night in that bed until I'm sure I nodded off for a bit, though I'd certainly not wanted to.

Maybe an hour, maybe a bit more passed when a tug on my arm awakened me. Then a tug on my other arm and before I knew it, the girls were lifting me from the bed and the sleep-warmed place where my face had been pressed into their mother's bosom. I'm certain I'd been drooling on her. As I was slipped from her embrace she turned in the bed with a sleep-groan and settled peaceably. My original suspicions were confirmed. The girls, being girls, were not at all ready for sleep. One of them, I'd like to say Iara, but it was too dark to know for certain, tossed me my trunks and I began to put them on and the other girl, Ina? hissed no and put her fingers over her lips in the universal sign of "the other smoke" and I mouthed okay and fished the baggy from the pocket and left the shorts behind.

The girls bustled me out the door and around the back of the house and slightly uphill, I could just make out a treeswing for three. There were whippoorwills and crickets and some calls and cries in the air I have no words for, only sounds. And I'm not going to make them here. The night had cooled off, nowhere near enough to produce a chill, but, I mean how else can I describe it other than perfect. This was all perfect. Had I died and gone to heaven?. I handed the girl on my right the bag. Either one of them could roll better in her sleep than I ever could in my life. Rocking in the swing, watching the moon play hide and seek in the clouds, we passed a long but thin needle of tobacco-wrapped weed. After which, the girls played some very naughty games with me in the swing. I know pot is supposed to cause low male energy, but honestly, I've never had that problem, it's more the reverse that's true. I may have passed out on the swing though. I don't remember making my way back to the house and Evaki's bed.

Just waking up.

Waking up to the smell of strong, excellent coffee and another cigar. I know, who needs breakfast? I could tell by the conversation that there was some disagreement about who was going to take me back to town. My watch said it was eight and I had a one pm flight out. I needed to get back to the hotel. The girls assumed they'd do it. The mother was clearly disagreeing. The girls stormed over to me to claim me for themselves and mom barked at them and in short order the sullen maidens had kerchiefs tied about their heads and brooms and mops and cleaning implements in their hands. They were not happy. But I was and so was Evaki who slipped on a sun dress whose bold color and pattern made a mockery of my ridiculous store-bought Hawaiian shirt. .The second to the last thing she did was clip a little carnation from the bouquet and stick it in her hair. The last thing she did was scoop up the cigars and put them in an ancient box she'd kept her scissors in. The girls were crying and waving as I left the house. I kinda felt like crying myself.

Behind and up the hill, past the tree-swing, stood a shed and Evaki pulled me along the trail toward it. I'd missed it last night, though my eyesight could be forgiven. In the shed a Vespa scooter, not too old, stood chained and Evaki turned to me with a bit of sadness in her unfathomable eyes, kissed me, then produced the key from the décolletage of her dress. I saddled up behind her, wrapped my arms around her tight waist and just enjoying the smell of her in the air as we drove down the hill and straight through the center of town.. I was back at my hotel in less than a half hour. Before she drove off, Evaki said something important to me, but I want to come back to that. By that point, there was no language barrier between us.

The manager let me into my room and the first thing I saw was that my Panama hat and sunglasses were atop my perfectly packed suitcase next to the camera bag and my laptop all lined up on the hastily made bed. There was a note in the laptop's sleeve, in English, from Joacy, apologizing if there was any misunderstanding about leaving without me the previous afternoon.

When I got to the lobby, I asked the manager for an envelope and placed the rest of my real in it and addressed it to Joacy Campos-Leão.

Freud said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and Clinton got impeached over where he put his and Bill Cosby says he keeps his in a basement because cigars are vegetables, but short or long, thin or thick, Maduro, Mata Fino or Connecticut shade, cigars are the way they are for a reason. The torceadors of Brazil understand this and the pleasure their art bring to those of us who know their secrets. It isn't that mysterious. Hey, listen there.

I can't believe it. Finally, they're finally calling our flight. Back to the old homestead in a couple hours, eh? Yeah, I have business there. Yet another charity ball. Tell you something, my heart's not in it. Then I fly back to New York the day after. Hold on. Don't leave just yet. You know, you've been such a sport listening to me go on about my shenanigans. You've bought me, what four drinks?

Really, that many?

Makes sense, 'cause buddy, I'm feeling noooo pain. Let me show you something. I had to stash it in my camera gear. No, God, no, not the pot. Ina and Iari have it. You think I really want to spend 30 years in a Brazilian prison playing "Midnight Express" with some sour-smelling, barrel-chested guardía. No this is much much better. Check it out. You're right, without the stamp, they ain't exactly legal and the last thing I want is some TSA fuck confiscating these babies. Smell it. See.

Now you know I'm telling truth. You have a tube. Good. Give it up. This, my friend, is for you. Sealed up, tight as drum. Of course I mean it. Store it well. Save it for a special occasion or just enjoy it in good health. No, I'm totally serious. The morons at the office can have at the boxes I bought duty free and the samples they from Luz da Luna.

I'd have been miserable without somebody to talk to. See, these last two days I've been thinking of getting off the circuit so to speak, settling down somewhere. No, I'm dead serious. Yeah, the last thing she said to me, Dona Salamanca, was você tem sempre um repouso. Before you got here, I was translating it. It means you always have a home.

So you want a job? Well, I'm only half kidding. I suspect there's more to you than meets the eye.

My pleasure. Yeah. You too. Have a good flight. Just do me a solid. Here's my personal email. When you do smoke it, I don't care if it's tomorrow or 10 years from now, drop me a line. You tell me a story and we'll see.

Bom dia, my friend, bom dia.

(RBB (c) all rights reserved, no reprints or links without my express permission)

The Adulterers' Manual

2011-04-25T04:40:00.011-04:00

by Riccardo Berra
(c) 2011, "Love on the Edge" no reprints, all rights reserved

You meet by chance in places your spouses don't want to go to with you. You never thought you'd even like somebody like her, right up to the startling moment you fell and fell hard. She is so flustered and disorganized that it would irritate you if you weren't already so hot for her. Sometimes you're desperate for things you never thought you wanted. It's only now that you realize how many times you've felt this way before and never had the courage to act.

He is so cocky and self-assured that you're certain it's an act. You don't care. You'd forgotten that just talking to a man could be so heartbreakingly erotic. When he offers you a ride home, you tell your girlfriends a breathless story you hope they'll never see through. By the time they see you leave together, you don't care anymore. He says it's not out of his way. You know it is.

A light rain mists the windshield. You fumble to turn on the wipers. You fiddle with the radio and when there's nothing worth listening to, you make small talk instead.

His car pulls off into a dark, deserted park and you say nothing. He could be a killer or a rapist, but you're already wet. Your body has decided. Cars fly by on the road you just left; their slithery whine of wheels and engines on wet blacktop fades as he kisses you for the first time. Your cunt aches with an open poverty you've never felt before. He tries to take you standing up; your panties stretched just above your ankles, your knees shaking with the twin terrors of discovery and desire. The car is warm against your bare ass.

Her breasts are small and pearly white with hard nipples clearly outlined through sheer black lace on this moonless night. You can't do it though you want her more than anything, more than any woman you've ever wanted. You become afraid that she'll think you don't and that it will be over before it begins. The irony of it is enough to make you weep.

It will take eight years, hundreds of afternoons and evenings and three stolen weekends, always in your bed, never his, until you return to this place and discover that the very best way to do it is in the back of his car, like teenagers, with him standing outside and you kneeling inside, your stockings and panties peeled down about your thighs, your face pressed to the butter-soft seat surface that smells faintly of leather soap and orange soda.

The back door is open. Lightning ribbons and crackles across the sky. Your mouth is bone dry, but you lick your parched lips and force your tongue between her thighs like a dog lapping at a water bowl. You remember the first night. The night you couldn't. History could very well repeat itself, but this moment of déjà vu anxiety vanishes the instant her tiny opening yields and you feel yourself start to slide inside her. She is always so warm, so wet, so giving of herself to you. You straighten up and stare at the roof of your car. You no longer see what you're doing, but your hands are clamped assuredly to her rounded hips and your movements become firm and assured.

By the time it starts to rain again, you feel the final swell of him inside you. You bite your lip, your bowels quiver and you rejoice. You know that he will, to the second when he will come. The rain tattoo bouncing off the car's roof, its long rivulets streaking the rear window, reassure you, make you feel warm and dry, safe and protected inside, even if you really aren't.

Your eyes move from the car's wet-shiny roof up into the impenetrable sky. Your hair is plastered to your forehead as headlights approach from a distance. It doesn't matter. Nothing else matters. There is no certainty in life, but that nothing will alter this moment. In a less-exposed setting, you'd be happy to hold her, kiss her reassuringly and linger inside her until your breathing slows. But before the heat of this moment can fade, you pull out and pull up her twisted panties and stockings. You wonder if they're bunched as you close the back door and zip your fly. She'll have to make the final adjustments. You return to the driver's seat and start the ignition as she scrambles lightly from the back into the passenger's seat beside you. Your fingers lift matted strands of hair off your forehead. You drive for some minutes before either of you speak.

She's the first to break the silence. She says she won't wash down there, that she'll keep you inside her tonight. This never fails to arouse you again.

He kisses you in an unlit alley around the corner from your apartment before he leaves you at the entrance. You're tempted to watch him drive away, but you don't.

Driving, you play the radio and try to clear your head, but all you can see is her, alone, small and abandoned by you in such a large bed, maybe in the white linen shift you like so much or the old red cotton tee-shirt you don't like.

You wear the white shift and no panties to bed on these nights. Two fingers dip into the wet trickle of him seeping between your thighs. You measure the sting you feel down there against the sting in your heart. One cancels out the other.

At the next red light, you linger, fingers tapping on the turn signal. Her husband is out of the country. Your wife has taken her sleeping pill and wouldn't know if you came in at one or three this morning. You ache to turn the car around, but when the light changes, your right foot moves of its own volition from the brake to the accelerator. You continue home. Even though the two of you routinely break every other rule in the book, your lawlessness has its own unwritten but immutable codes. This is one of them.

Nobody you know would ever suspect all the ways that you are tied to him and he to you. Your husband says he's the only one of your male friends that he can stand. You are his wife's closest confidante. You live your lives in tidy boxes and don't want anything to change. You patrol the perimeters with the vigilance of soldiers and spies. Other men flirt with you and you reciprocate. Your husband gets jealous, but your lover never does. In fact, he encourages it. It's all an elaborate bit of theater for an audience who only think they know the two of you. It's not that it doesn't matter. Of course it does. There are two spouses, two families, two aging mothers, two dead fathers, six children, three grandchildren and a wide, increasingly intersecting circle of friends--all at stake. The guilt, though at first overpowering, never really was a barrier. Nor has it ever completely gone away; it just became irrelevant over the years.

There was an afternoon, her in a floral summer sundress, standing at the entrance to her bathroom while you stood on the other side of the door begging her with desperate whispers. It had been nearly two months since you'd last touched her. Your daughter and hers are glued to the television only three rooms away. Finally, you wear her resistance down. She thrusts her butt at you and with two long finger lifts her skirt and pulls her panties aside. You spit on your hand, rub your cock and take her anus.

His left hand snakes under your dress and cups your vagina. He pushes two fingers into you and though you are dry in front and barely wet in back, you thrust your hips defiantly against him, vigilant all the while he takes you like a whore. You urge him on, whispering for him to fuck you like the whore you are. You tell him that you like it. Any second now, a little girl could come tearing around the corner and down the hall. But what would she see? This is one of many times that you hide in plain sight.

A week later you'll return to her apartment. You'll give the girls twenty dollars and send them down to the convenience store around the corner. She'll kneel at her bed's edge as you pull her jeans and panties down her hips. You'll thrust into her so hard that it takes her breath away. You'll wet your thumb and slide it up her ass to the second knuckle as you fuck her vagina.

You call it his signature, a sign that you are well-owned and all your holes are his. Never once, in all your years of marriage, has your husband taken you this way. By the time the girls return with their unhealthy, salt and sugar snacks, he'll be drinking tea at your kitchen table. These are the kinds of risks you take. You seize opportunities, but never the same risk, the same way, twice. This is another of your unwritten, unspoken rules.

He tries to break it off with you one thick, sultry midsummer evening, but in the end he can't. You cry so hard. You flee to the bathroom; your sobs echoing off the cold tile. You've cried this way before, but never in his presence. You flush the toilet and try to dry your eyes. When you emerge, you tell him you'd rather be with nobody till the end of your days if you can't be with him. He squirms on your bed; his face looks stricken by the light of the half-open bathroom door.

You hold her until her sobbing stops. You hate yourself for making her cry this way. You hate yourself almost as much for giving in. You tell her over and over that you love her with all your heart and didn't mean it. You hope she believes you as you slowly unbutton her blouse and push up her bra.

You unfasten the bra for him. It falls forward on your lap. His tongue finds your nipples as you lift your bottom and shimmy out of your skirt and panties. He sucks as if he could nurse out all the pain and regret from your breasts. When you're not with him, it breaks your heart. When you're with him, it breaks your heart. It has always been so. This could all vanish tomorrow.

Both of you have always known this.

The Wild Hunt

2011-03-17T05:49:00.000-04:00

by Riccardo Berra

(c) 2011 all rights reserved

Lo!, 'tis true I prized a hunt above all else when I'dst should'a been a'church and 'twas rather in the fields and forests with aught but the wind and the bay of dogs to flap me beard. And though 'tis true, I be trothed to a soothfast woman of good birth who'd bore me two stout lads and a pretty wee lass, I have laid many a maid on Hallows Day.

The maids all howl and cry at their ravishment and I see the murdrous raving tearful fathers bound for their own safety by my men. All eyes dry forthwith when they spy my coppers. Unlike masters who only feign nobility I do not slaughter parents to plunder the sweet morsels of their daughters. I pay all their due. I am fair and beloved of my people. My ready maids preen; take airs, an outsized vanity in their lord's cock in their pink withers and they strut their blossoms most tiresomely for my attentions. Don't go to her Lord Eadric, instead take me again, Lord Eadric, they cry out, for is not mine sweeter than any other quim you have tasted?

I pat their arses and tell each and every maid she is my best. Now they only wail when I quit their straw chambers for the other more glorious rut; that of horse and dog, of spear and quarry.

Now I lay me 'pon the heath, breastplate cleaved, and all is a senseless red haze, but for the far off bay of the hounds. The boar's right tusk has split my chest like a maidenhead and his blood spills with mine. My last spearthrust spit him clean, snarling throat to quivering entrails. His life gurgles forth, dark-spilled, mixed with mine, his panting head and glazing eyes pressed to me as hot and fast as any lover's final embrace.

Oh, that clarion trumpet, it heralds my judgment is nigh and I be fresh afeared for my eternal soul, having had no time to make contrition for my many sins. For my wanton ways, I am called Eadric the Wild.

No longer wouldst I gallop for the conquests and glory of King Æthelred the Unready. No longer shall sweet Sága, my doxy prize, lift her skirts and spread her charms beneath me. No longer will my spear find home in the tender breast of the stag or the yielding flesh of woman. Never again will I see my widow, my castle or the boy child who unknown to him, is now master o'er all my lands.

In the twilight of this day and mine, carrion crows o'er circle and hounds of hellish mien stalk me. My eyes avert in terror, for the dank steam of their breath, hot upon my breast bodes naught of Paradise. A booming command bids me look hence.

It is not Satan who summons, but proud Lord Odin and his comely naked queen, Lady Freya, both high astride towering steeds, tall as trees and black as pitch. The lady, fair and terrible, bids me rise and I must keep my eyes downcast and respectful as the bounty of her bosom and the ruddy flush of autumn on her withers bids a rising of another ilke.

Mercy fair lord, fair lady, I cry, for though I be heinous and a libertine, I've no taste to be Satan's bitch and wouldst but serve the Almighty! Lord Odin laughs and the far mountains ring and quake in refrain. Rise, young Eadric, he bellows, for it is in His service that you are pressed. Rise up, young Eadric, comely Freya commands as she hands me the trace to a stallion, brother to her mare. I, asteed once more, spy 'neath me the broken shell of a mortal man and a spit pig. The shell I have no further use for. I take the pig, for he is my kill and wheresoever we ride tonight, we must feast before a roaring fire.

Freya's lathered quim presses to the saddle as she lifts spear and voice to the heavens and the helldogs howll and the ravens wheel and caw. Her breasts swing wild and unfettered as she kicks her spurs and canters forth, to the quickening of the hunt. Baresark legions stream about her, till aught is left between me and the godking whose baleful all-seeing eye now-fixed straightaway on me knows my every shameful imagining.

Mercy Great lord! I quake. Whither ride we? I quaere. To the hunt boy, he thundered, shaking a fearsome finger at me, to the hunt. What be afoot Lord? I hailed as he galloped. The souls of the damned, he shouted. The souls of the newly damned.

A new thrill, a new sport, a new chase, I am in death, a new man whose galloping charcoal steed catches apace the Naked Lady of the Hunt. Behind from the miller's hut where I knew so many happy hours, sweet Sága bursts forth, rending her garment in grief, until she is as flawless and fleet afoot as the proud Lady on horseback. Catch her up, the horsebound Lady spake, for it be seven long years ere you taste such earthly charms again.

Desperate, leaping, Sága grasps my outstretched arms and swings like a pendant, once, twice, her toes graze now the tops of trees as I wrest her into my saddle. Oh, my Lord, she cried, I knew you wouldst not forsake me. How could I, my morsel, I cried as she covered my grimed face with salt tears and sweet lips, I could not, and sheathed my surging manhood in her saddle as she clung in terror and ecstasy to my neck as the horses surge, the horns bray, the dogs howl and the Lord and Lady of Judgment's Hand scour the land for the unrepentant, calling out …

"To the hunt, to the wild hunt!"

Midnight Confession (Erotica)

2011-02-22T02:27:00.005-05:00

"A Quicky"

(apologies to The Grass Roots) 2/20/2011

Featured on ERWA March Story Gallery

I stood at the doorway, my face burning in shame. My wife of thirty years lay in the bed with her book obscuring her face.

"I don't know how to tell begin ..." I began, staring at the cover of the potboiler romance. The dust jacket featured a smoldering statuesque maiden whose near-sheer gypsy blouse dangled perilous millimeters above her nipple line. A bare-chested muscle boy with sea green eyes and day-old stubble stood behind her, mauling the ripe package the fabric barely concealed. This is how my wife gets her kicks these days.

"Claire came over this morning looking for you. She looked incredible —a younger version of you. Messy red hair, the skintight sweats, those crazy tank tops she wears. Anyway, her phone's on the fritz so she didn't get your message that you'd be out. You know I worked all night on that story, the one that has been kicking my ass. I needed a breakthrough. I found it at about 4 a.m.."

A noncommittal "uh, huh," came from behind the bodice ripper.

"So this morning, the doorbell roused me from a deep sleep. I rushed down and opened the door. No shirt, no pants. I didn't even think what I was doing. Barely awake and definitely in no condition for company."

"You look happy to see me," Claire chirped as she brushed past me. It was then I felt how exposed I was, how far my morning boner was protruding through my boxers.

"My God, I'm sorry," I stammered.

"Well, I'm not," she laughed. Her hand lingered at the gap in my shorts where my cock jumped in a burlesque of its owner, neither of us knowing quite what to do with a visitor. You know how small our foyer is. I couldn't escape her touch even if I'd wanted to.

And I didn't want to."

"Ah, I think he'd like to come out and play," Claire said, pulling her top down over her luscious tits. She knelt at my feet and took out my erection. I barely had time to close the door behind her. God knows the talk if a neighbor happened by and saw her on her knees with my cock between her creamy mounds.

Remember the time at Lake Morrison when she was eighteen and went into the water without a bathing suit? How her wet smock and sheer panties left nothing to the imagination? She also fucked my best man, the night before our wedding. I doubt she ever told you. The two of them in the barn caught like scared rabbits in highbeams. She knew I saw the whole thing and ever since, she's always teased me when you aren't looking.

Between her tits and her lips, I was ready to blow all over her face, but in the twisted calculations of adultery, I figured, hell, in for a penny, in for a pound. So I pulled her to her feet and hustled her into the dining room. I'm sorry about the dishes we broke as I pushed her onto the table and peeled her sweats off. Does she ever wear underwear? I guess I'd always wondered if her cunt would look and feel like yours. It did, red and bushy, wet and tight, just like you, but twenty years ago, when you were still hot for me.

I'm afraid that our pounding loosened the legs of the old table. I'll need to get that repaired."

"Mmm," came the reply from behind the book.

"But after Claire left, I felt guilty. So guilty that I made up my mind to tell you. I know what I did was wrong. It only happened once, well twice actually. Again on the sofa, but what I mean is just today. Never before and God, never again. I was just hoping, I hope, we can get beyond this. There's no excuse, but maybe we can recapture what we …"

The book lowered very slowly. My wife pushed her hair back and removed her earbuds; the music still tricking out of them. "You say something?" she asked.

"Your sister stopped by this morning," I replied. "She was looking for you."

"Uh huh. I know." She replaced the earphones in her ear canals and looked up at me. "I'm sorry. Was there something else?"

"No," I said, "Sorry to bother you."

Riccardo Berra, Love on the Edge, (c) 2011

Trojan Horse

2011-01-17T21:43:00.012-05:00

This is a dark tale, filled with the dark acts of despicable people. If you are the sort that such tales alarm or offend; don't read, move on, for the Net is filled with sunnier, happier catch and the outcome of these events will shift not one degree for one less bug-eyed observer.

My name is Menelaus Mikanedes, MNM to friends and enemies alike. You know my company's name if you use a computer so I won’t need to waste any time explaining how my inventions have made me rich as Croesus before he gave away 90 percent of his fortune to his pet charities. I am not there yet. I'm not the type to relax and play the benevolent king. Business is battle and you need ruthlessness, ever-sharper weapons and a bottomless war chest to be a winner. Nature of the beast. They say confession is good for the soul, but I won’t be able to affirm that. My conscience is clear.

Three months ago, with contracts pending for two large highly proprietary projects, my security team found a very clever breach into our software development farm that wasn't in the security spec. My guys laid everything out and by the coding architecture and the sheer brashness of the hack, I immediately knew the work by its signature. When they asked if they should close it down, I replied no.

I stared across my desk at these men awaiting my next command. Generals. Good men, two former CEOs of successful firms who I'd bought out for 5 times their companies' market valuations, then hired them back to lead MNM Cyber-Security. Like all good hunters, they were proud of their catch and here I was ordering them to throw it back. They are the most loyal soldiers money can buy, so I doubled their salaries and swore them to silence. While we plotted our vengeance in secret, MNM lost both projects to Hee-Len Leda of Priamic Systems, our Chinese arch competitor. I endured a lot of heat over this from our board of directors. Had they known the truth, they no doubt would have attempted to unseat me. Not that they would have ever succeeded. MNM lost billions. Our stock plunged. My own ranking on the "Forbes 50 Richest List" dove from 10th to 49th. None of which I cared about. A well-run company is not a democracy.

Hee-Len and I have history. If the blatant espionage wasn’t enough motive to destroy her, I could tell you about the humiliation I suffered as her fool for love when we were starry-eyed geeks at MIT. I won’t waste your time. There’s not much to that story to like either, but that’s your problem. My problem was how to get a packet sniffer the other way through Hee-Len's backdoor and we solved this by encrypting folded code into dummy financial reports that Priamic stole off my mainframe. Once inside, our little sniffer unfolded, reassembled and stood silently by the gate, holding open the door and waiting for our counter-assault.

One night last month, we made it. Our main server farm houses a VR lab unlike any the world has seen. The algorithmic refinements are too proprietary to discuss, but it’s all based on MNM's enhanced bluesuit, a wetware interface that converts rich datastreams into physical response with total realism. We demonstrated this dramatically for the White House when the president’s youngest daughter knocked him out in a virtual boxing match. Priamic has their own prototypical bluesuit technology. We were counting on it, though I was fairly certain that Hee-Len hadn’t yet developed or stolen all the enhancements we’d made.

Entering Priamic's backdoor was easy.

While my retrieval techs scoured their mainframe for damage control and a bit of payback espionage, I went on a private raid. What I was sought I found in a rendering of Priamic's corporate boardroom with its 100th floor view of Hong Kong’s spectacular Repulse Bay. Though she was in the middle of a board meeting, Hee-Len was hardly surprised to see me. That changed the instant I stunned her security team and threw her face down on the jichimu wood table in front of horrified telepresent images of Priamic's entire board of directors. As I tore the sexy black dress off her curvaceous frame, I sneered:
“Hee-Len you’ve put on some weight.”

She was always so insecure about her tits, but here in VR a woman’s rack is her own construct. And now it was my toy. I shredded her lacy bra and panties and threw one stout black-stockinged leg up on the table. Pulling her hair back, I grabbed a fistful of her virtually augmented breasts and squeezed until she howled in pain.

Entering her ass wasn’t so easy but Hee-Len’s vigorous protests and pained squeals encouraged me until I was pumping her dry hole like a pussy. Her virtual body's internal rebellion against my intrusion brought me to the brink of climax, but I had no intention of finishing that way. I flipped her sunny side up and when she fought me, I punched her face and split her lip. Oh, how she squirmed and resisted, spitting blood and curses, but I pried her thighs apart like a prize oyster and hauled her legs over my shoulders. I pounded that tight little cunt and didn’t stop until I’d exploded in a convulsive wave buried knife deep inside her. Her blood-stained, quivering lips formed a single word, the question, “Why?”

Here you lie all fresh as dew,
And comely as one whom Apollo has slain with his painless shafts.

Why?

Because it was like Christmas, Easter, New Years and Independence Day all rolled into one and when I was spent and she was used, I withdrew and answered:

“I wanted to see you cry.”

The thrills of that night, the assault, the feel of her virtual body yielding, taken by force, her used, dripping holes, swollen face and bruised body, sprawled in her own boardroom on the tatters of her clothes, these virtual images and real sensations make me rock hard every time I think of Hee-Len. Real sex, and I’ve had plenty since, pales in comparison.

According to international law there was no crime. Despite the witnesses, no judge or jury could ever convict me. I was nowhere near Hong Kong and technically, any physical violation was done to her by her own bluesuit. Surely, Hee-Len Leda got what she deserved. There are a couple of loose ends that I find more puzzling than anything else.

Item one. I ejaculated so much that the crotch of my bluesuit should have been a slimy dripping mess when I peeled it off. It wasn’t. It was bone dry. I had the suit analyzed. It contained not one trace of sperm or semen. Item two. I learned that Hee-Len has gone into seclusion and subsequent hacks into her private medical files have confirmed rumors that she’s pregnant.

The question that keeps me up ...

How?

I only wish my fury would compel me
To cut away your flesh and eat it raw
For what you've done. No one can keep the dogs
Off of your head, not if they brought me ransom
Of ten or twenty times as much, or more.

LIGNE CLAIRE

2010-11-16T17:42:00.004-05:00

by Riccardo Berra 2010 (c) all rights reserved

We live in such instructive times. There are manuals and guides for everything. For your first period—"The Period Book: Everything You Don't Want to Ask (But Need to Know)." For your first sexual experience—the books of Suzi Landolphi. For more advancing sexuality—"Our Bodies, Ourselves" and any issue of Cosmo. An expectant mother reads "What to Expect While You're Expecting," then the endless tomes on parenting in all its interminable stages, but what, pray tell, gives comfort to the 50-something gal who is vanishing?

Perhaps I already have. Invisibility doesn't happen all at once. It's more of a slow motion tumble down a cliff.

My darling Missy. It breaks Mommy's heart, tween Missy staring so deep and sincere in my eye, promising, cross her precious little heart, that she'd always share her most intimate secrets with me. Teen Missy won't even make eye contact and divulges nothing. When I enter the room or catch her eye in the hallway at school, her nose crinkles as if I'm a passing bad odor. Do I smell bad?

My darling Curt. Never, I've concluded after 17 years of marriage, was a man more aptly named, for he passes by and through me like air. Before Missy was born, he was a sex fiend. We both were, God, so shamelessly young and hot for each other, hands grasping crotches, tunneling under skirts and through panties, fingers pinching nipples, tongues in throats. Everything everywhere. Parked cars, hiking paths, broom closets, kitchen tables, once in a museum bathroom, in other people's bedrooms, our own occasionally, leaving love's evidence trails on Mother's Persian and best chaise longue, me bent over, rump up, screaming as he pounded into me—whenever, wherever we felt like it. We weren't exhibitionists—at least blatant ones. We were just uninhibited, in love and saw only each other. Nobody else mattered. But life has gotten its revenge and now it's me that doesn't matter.

For about five more years after Missy was born, we were intimate, but it was never again anything, anywhere near what we had. One of us would lie in bed, pretending to be absorbed in grading papers or watching the Tonight Show while the other would make "overtures" which were increasingly declined. Eventually there were no more overtures. I'm not sure which of us is more to blame for the sex which became like a body function or a household chore one endures out of obligation more than anything else.

Curt has Saturday golf dates and after-hours Executive Magnet Committee meetings. Missy has cheerleading, guitar and soccer and I'm so busy with schoolwork that I sometimes need to look twice in the mirror to hold my own reflection.

I fix my attention on the center cleft in my lower lip that Curt once called my pouty lip. He'd graze it with his index finger right before kissing me. It has a couple-three tiny crinkles neither fingers and lips have touched since the turn of the century. My complexion, always so unblemished, milkglass creamy, is now speckled like mushrooms after a summer rain. The pale, untroubled porcelain of girlhood has long since become the freckled tissue of middle age. The package torn open, the gift pulled from its box, loved briefly, then tossed aside. Smooth and smooth, exfoliate, cream, bleach, hydrate, rinse, repeat. A gal may scrub from now till doomsday, but there's no erasing what the years have added or replacing what they've taken away.

My breasts were my glory at eighteen. I got a lot of attention from boys and envy from girls. Today's young women get surgery for the raspberry-topped creampuff mounds God gave me, all-natural, tipped skyward, proud and eager to greet the dawn of each new day.

Even if I pull my shoulders back so far it hurts, I'm lucky if the berries meet the horizon. Adding insult to injury, they turned brown with my pregnancy—café au lait, like some over-baked tart. Last month, an article in "Cosmo" said that the best-selling cosmetic in Japan is a nipple bleaching cream called "Virgin Pink." Its popularity is due to Japanese men's belief that pink is more pure and virginal than brown. The only pure thing about that is the precious Darwinism of Japanese men. Who am I kidding? They're all the same.

So if I'm no longer a girlish beauty—more what writers of a certain era called "handsome"—I'm still not the self-pitying sort. Nobody should ever get that impression. I despise women who only measure themselves by their looks. I've earned what few and I do emphasize few sags, wrinkles and spots I've acquired.

In some ways I look and feel far better than I'd expected to. After Luz Ramirez shared a "Woman's Day" article in the faculty lunchroom about post-menopausal osteoporosis, I started lifting weights. I eat moderately, walk for exercise, juggle a home and a career and regularly enough, I get the "distant once-over" from men—some young enough to have come from the place they want to get into. You can spot "the look" from 50 paces. You see it in the way they pick up their pace and square their shoulders, the way their eyes rake you up and down. Then when they're close enough to read your true age, their eyes glaze in embarrassment and flustered recalculation as they quickly retreat from you.

Under, over, under, over, loop, loop, knot, cross.

Knitting saves me. Knitting is discipline. Knitting is its own justification. When I find birth control pills, a strip of dayglow cherry-berry condoms and a dime bag of pot in Missy's undie draw, I do not freak. I scoop the contents of the bag into an available pill bottle and tuck the empty baggie beside the rubbers and the pill clamshell. I do not confront her. She is upstairs now, swearing and slamming things. Her music is cranked to an earsplitting level. I put my earbuds in and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa's Carmen is a suitable replacement for upstairs' unladylike drama. Missy is not a happy camper.

Under, over, under, over, loop, loop, knot, cross.
Under, over, under, over, loop, loop, knot, cross.

Knitting is order—something that holds loose threads together when the rest of the world flies apart. When I find receipts in Curt's pants for restaurants I don't recognize, when I go online and see a string of motel charges on the Visa account, I do not freak. I do not wave the slips under his needle nose with shrill accusations about fucking bimbos on our joint credit account. For a few days it is terribly hard to restrain myself, but I'm so glad I did. Anger fades with the delicious realization that I am now "the one in the know" and he is the clueless one. We are both happy campers.

Curt, my darling, we share intimacies and secrets again. Just not with each other. Mine is the newest addition to the social studies department, a cherub-cheeked 27 year old who stares boldly and doesn't look away when we pass each other. I'm the flustered one. But I am also patient. I bide my time. I learn his schedule and when he takes his lunch. Weeks go by before we're alone long enough in the staff lounge for me to signal my receptivity. The look in his eye, the urgency in his voice asking me to coffee after school, says all he needs to. The way my hand lingers when we inadvertently touch in parting, the way I sway into him, says all I need to.

There is a brief, dangerous exchange in the parking lot. I, at my car, fumbling for keys, all senses preternaturally heightened, feel him bearing down on me. I don't look up. I will not meet his eye though his urgency presses all around me. We could easily be spied from an office window or a passing car. I hiss at him to go to his car and say I'll follow. He protests, worrying, I suppose, that his little fantasy fuck will turn tail and run like the buttoned-up suburban rabbit he suspects me to be.

I don't turn tail. I ride his bumper to the expressway; as he takes the hairpin exit too fast, even as he runs a yellow light and I almost rear-end him when he brakes and points frantically at an open parking spot. As soon as he sees me parking, he burns rubber up a half-block to the next available space. Incredibly pleased with himself, he saunters back and takes my arm as I exit my car. I'm his quarry, lured into his territory—and he's not letting me escape.

His house is at the end of a quiet block in a gentrifying part of town. I like coming into the city. I always have. I like the charming 19th Century bricks and brownstones in this neighborhood. I like his little trinity with its wrought iron stairs winding up to the small but serviceable bathroom where a capacious, adorable clawfoot bathtub dominates the room.

He chatters out a nervous tour like a realtor desperate to close a sale. Copper plumbing this and lead joints that and God knows what else until I shake the medicine vial of pot under his nose and ask if he knows what to do with it. This preempts the tour. His eyes register a mocking half-smile and he quickly produces a small stone pipe. He asks what I have in mind. What I truly have in mind is a soak in his big tub. He tries to kiss me but I back off. I say I'm shy and ask to use his bedroom to undress while he draws the bath.

It's a sparse, monastic affair at the back of the house. There's an unmade twin bed, a small chest, a reading lamp and a small desk for his laptop. There is no mirror, a tender mercy for which I'm immediately grateful. I remove my clothes and fold them neatly on the desk next to the laptop. It produces the only light in the room. Heart racing, I listen under cover of darkness to the sound of running water. I shiver, having never done this before. I have no idea if I ever will again.

When I hear the faucet turn off, I cover my nakedness with my arms and scamper past him to the inviting camouflage of the suds, their unbroken billowy foam atop at least 15 generous inches of steaming water. I'm skittish, but the hot suds melt me the instant I settle in. He acknowledges my long, low sigh of pleasure with his half-smile. Little smoke tendrils wreath his sweet, young face and lips as he asks if the lady desires her privacy.

I laugh too loudly for this bathroom; it's the last thing I desire. I tell him he can go and play with himself if he desires, or stays and help me with my bath. I puff casually at the pipe while he tears off his own clothes, flinging them helter-skelter into the hallway. Men, all so predictable in their bad habits.

He is either too scared or too much the gentleman to insinuate himself into the tub. It easily accommodates two adults and I'd have made room for him if he'd insisted. But my breasts are buoyant; they sway freely in the scented water as I stretch my legs. My pubic bush does a lazy sort of coral dance. I wonder if he sees it beneath the breaks in the foam. I am delighting in the capaciousness of this tub at this moment and I'm glad he respects that.

The pipe teeters precariously on the tub's curled ceramic lip. He takes another long draw on it and kneels on the floor. Loofa in one hand, a tube of expensive rosemary scented body wash in the other, he begins to wash me. He scrubs my back till my skin tingles with the friction of wet sponge and scented soap. A rich herbal sweetness lifts off my reddened skin and fills the small tiled space.

He's gentler in front, reverently lifting each heavy breast as he washes up and down my ribcage. His sponge hand pauses at my bellybutton and waits, in his eyes, a question, a cue, to stand, so he can continue to wash down there. He lingers at the hair-framed petals of my sex, very gently opening folds no man has parted in a decade, pressing round, teasing the other hole with one sly finger, the soap aroma, the delirious arousal, both his hands stirring everywhere, the prickle extending down the leg I lift, my dripping foot poised on the tub's lip, my orchid sex open at eye-level for his inspection. He acts as if he doesn't see it, instead focusing on the raised leg, meticulously ministering to each toe, rinsing and caressing my foot like a woman holds a prize shoe. I shiver so hard I almost lose my balance. I had no idea that toes could be so … I raise the other trembling leg. The process is repeated.

I can't help but notice his penis mashed against the cast iron base of the tub, poor, shuddering neglected thing. I lower myself, a slow, deliberate curtsy back into the water, allowing one wet, well-soaped hand to dangle and latch on to whatever my fingertips find. His quick gasps, musical in their surprise, the pulsing squirming thing between my clamped fingers, hot to the touch. His first kisses cover my neck where stray tendrils of hair curl damply at its base. He pays reverence to one, then the other oil-soaked breast, rolling its slippery rosemary scented nipple between his little fingers. My body quivers again and my soap-slicked fist accelerates to communicate my pleasure. Gasps deepen into moans.

Red-faced, red-eyed and panting, he rises and pulls me urgently from the tub. I grab the towel which he takes from me in the bedroom, enfolding my dripping skin. I am still wet as I sit shivering in the dark. Underneath me the sheets are becoming soaked, but I don't think it's entirely from bathwater. My legs, ashiver with goosebumps, spread open, hungry for what is to happen next. He kneels and hoists my ankles over his shoulders, tumbling me back on the unmade sheets with their cumin smell of man and I scramble up on my elbows eager to watch. Framed between the splay of my legs, his broad tongue, moon face and doe eyes, descend into the narrow valley no face (save the gynecologist's) has been in sixteen years.

Oh. My. God.

One of the few virtues of age, the sole one, really, is that you finally figure out how things fit together and how to get what you want. For about thirty seconds, the boy's efforts produce bliss only a Mozart aria can rival, but invariably, sadly, he can't sustain the note. Even Curt, when so inclined in the old days, thought all he needed to do was put tongue-A to lips-B and nature would somehow take its course. I pray for time to instruct this eager youngster how to better hold my interest. He seems teachable. I make note to check my files for a suitable instructive text.

He is slight for a man, with elfish limbs and delicate features. We are more than evenly matched in weight and height and I'm not a big woman. Perversely, I imagine him being teased as a child and it produces an unnatural itch in my loins. I pull him on top of me, then flip on top of him. Taking his penis in firm hand, I sit just so and lower myself with precision born of endless years of power walking, yoga and kagels, years well-spent after all, slowing down as I take him up, so deliciously slow, until, with two huge, dramatic gasps, I am finally and fully impaled. I move slightly. He moves slightly. I stop. He stops. Crotch to crotch, we grind out slow, mind-robbing rhythm until like a woman possessed by tremens, I cry sweet Jesus, clasp his baby boy bald head to my moist breasts I ride for dear life calling my baby, sweet boy, sweet boy, baby over and over until the last, most powerful spasm tears through us.

A decade's celibacy makes me a poor judge of lovemaking virtuosity. Still, I came and went and came again—this easily as good as the best of Curt. And what this one lacks in talent, technique or even anatomy, he promises to make up for in other ways. Wordless compliance to wordless instructions. Lingering devotion to all my parts. This in itself is so pleasing to a once vain woman—to feel that each of her parts is as desired as the whole.

Just like that, I am not just visible, pardon me, I am striking. I draw suspicious, accusing eyes from women around me who frame questions as statements such as 'you've lost weight' or 'you've colored your hair.' Just like that, the raw days of early spring relax and open their tight little buds to herald the approaching summer. Warmer days to come; sultry days for sultry deeds. I smile for no reason and hum snatches of pretty songs I hear on the radio; my perfectly charming singing voice, little heard, even by myself, for such a long time. Now with reason to sing, Mondays and Wednesdays, I walk around dripping with anticipation of Tuesdays and Thursdays. Weekends are still reserved for family, whether they appreciate it or not. It's Thursday and my afterschool appointment is already soaking, waiting for me in the tub. I'm soaking too.

His front door is unlocked. He calls me his laughing, gorgeous woman. Run on up here, my laughing gorgeous woman, he hollers down from the bathroom. He sounds stoned. I take the stairs two at a time. Where are you going? He giggles as I dart past.

Eyes red and heavy-lidded. He is stoned. I'm jealous.

I always undress in the bedroom, one of my few rules darling, I call over my shoulder. There is no air-conditioning. Outside hot and humid, inside, I truly can't endure clothes a moment longer. I peel away my sweat-soaked jeans and top, bra and panties—all dripping, ripe with overheated me. Scrambling to remove my half socks, hop, hopping on one foot, silly, unbalanced bunny, I jostle the computer. Its screen springs to life on an unsent email.

I do not make it my business to read other people's emails and I detest people who do. But we have been lovers for two whole months and every precious moment we share brings fewer and fewer secrets between us.

The "To line" reads stories@cougarbaggers.net.

Forget spelling. The grammar alone is atrocious and unbecoming of an educator.
-------------------------------
Baggers' Forum Submission
After School Special
By Red Rider

Fellow Cougarbaggers;

Once again, my fists air pumping with the bagger's victory chant. For many months wez entertained by Atlanta Ham and his soccer mom sandwich and by Wisconsin Farmer and his hunka hunka cheese woman and respect always to Milt the Manhattan Milfmaker. This month, Red Rider roars agin.

Every bagger worth his sack knows schools are the perfect stalking grounds. Nine out of ten classrooms, there sits a twat so dried up from years of ignoring men that you need a crowbar to pry it open. Walking shows which ones be begging for it. The way they act when they catch you staring. Then they look away, all embarrassed by the filthy thoughts they're thinking.

So one cat, this schoolmammy cunt never pays me no mind. Then one day she's all flashing looks. I thought she'd jump me right there in the faculty lounge, check it, yo. Oversexed she-cat even gave me a quick handjob, rubbing her juicy bubble butt up against me until I say whoa babe, let's tear to my lair. She practically cremes her panties at my command. I smell her for the she beast she is.

I say follow me bitch. She does. I pull her in my door, closing in, but she's suddenly acting she doesn't want it. But I tell her bitch, strip and when she does, some killer weed drops out of her pocket. Sly bitch. I take it from her and fire up. I ask where she got it and all scared like, she says her teenage daughter. I play cool. We smoke and mellow out and I whip up a bubble bath. I can't stand a smelly puss, who can. I lathered that shit good while she handjobs me.

Cock throbbing, I dragged her ass out of the tub into my bedroom and go right down on that withered puss. I need to delay my raging 10 inch tubular manhood from rocket spunking her face right then and there. The Red Rider always cums inside his coug. I flip her like an egg, over easy, and plow that shit to the hilt yo, forcing more meat and splooge into that old purse than she's ever seen.

Some of you prefer cougars exclusively, but let's face it; cougar sex is so great because they are so grate-ful. We all know that the more sexually demanding they get, the lower their standards fall.

Right before I kicked her to the curb, I said she could have it again, every Tuesday and Thursday. She left knowing that now, her only purpose in life is to be my biweekly cum sponge.

Brother Baggers, you gotta know I already got little Missy cougarette (the daughter) in my sights. That nasty kitten is slingin'. Sashaying all around school lil miss thang and when I bust her holding, I'm all on making a double-cat sandwich with Red Rider meat.

Can you say DOUBLEBAGGER!!!

Snag 'em and shag 'em. Feel me on this my bros? So wet, so wild, so what if you have to bag 'em before you shag 'em? This package ain't so hard on the eyes, it's just, what can I say? The wrapping's seen better days. Tonight a big surprise. I'll catch the old cat by its whiskers, tie her to the bedposts and get all Siegfried and Roy on her ass.

Camera loaded for cougar, yo.

Anyone wanna see pictures? Of course you do, you filthy fucks. Before this night is out you'll get some fresh pink trophies of my latest bag.

Grrrowlya baby,
Red Rider
-------------------------------

My lower lip quivers uncontrollably as the link I click takes me to sites where rough-looking tattooed men with horse cocks perform unspeakable acts in the stretched and degraded bottoms of naked women. The women, all middle-aged or older, have bags or sacks of some sort covering their heads. On the desk, a cheap digital camera sits atop a recycled grocery sack. I sweep them both to the floor as hot spikes pierce my heart and sickness pours into my stomach. I click over to the cougarbaggers.net story section and there are hundreds of them. I want to vomit or scream, but I do neither. With everything I have left in me, I step off the edge, naked and terrible, with the hot taste of blood in my mouth.

There's no forgetting his stupid shocked eyes as I connect my fist to his chin. He is rising from the tub and reaching when I strike, not so terribly hard I think, though this smirking moon face is clearly not used to being hit. Staggered, he loses footing on the oil-slicked bottom, accelerating backwards. I see this as clearly now as I did then, fist connecting, bearded chin twisting, feet failing, water flying, arms flailing, the crown of his head bouncing off the towel rack which I always thought was mounted in such an awkward place, the splash displacing more bathwater, his head ringing off the lip of the iron tub, the unmusical snapping sound, the surprise in his eyes fading to dullness as water rises above them as underneath a bright red rose brews like hibiscus tea.

When the last bubbles surface, I stand and leave.

What could I do?

I could have pulled him out and spread him on the water soaked floor and administered CPR, which I am certified to do, thanks to last month's district in-service. But what kind of life would that be anyway, sprawled unconscious, neck broken, perhaps pulmonary arrest from the spinal injury, my panicked 911 call, justifying being with a naked 27 year old coworker, the EMTs' smirks, the even more uncomfortable questions and trip to a police station in a rough section of town? Then the scandal at a school where I'd been teaching longer than he'd been alive. Honestly, there is little in the way of help I can offer or amends I care to make, for am I not the wronged party in all this?

And who is to say that the cause of death wasn't concussion, bad conscience, aneurysm, broken neck, blood loss, drowning or instantaneous karma. God surely knows not a single tap on the chin that even his scruffy, pathetic little beard will cover any sign of?

I force myself back to the bedroom to sit at the laptop. I delete the filthy email. On the website I thoroughly scour stories with titles like "Fucking Breasts!!!—All Natural or Enhanced," "Catching Granny in the Fanny," Lost in the Wrinkles of Time," "Double-bagger in a Hangar," "Lauderdale Freeway Threeway," "Las Vegas Turnovers," and Fisting Frieda." Though it's slow and horrid going, I press on, naïve never more to the depths of men's depravity. I only care about and look for "Red Rider" posts that implicate me. It takes time to assure myself that there are none, only oleaginous commentary on other scumbag authors' debased tales without ever offering his own. Even in his own pathetic loser universe, he was a runt.

Before I close his browser, I delete the bookmarks for www.cougarbaggers.net and all his porn sites. It's a small favor, not for him, but for anybody, a loving mother or concerned relative who might want to think the better of him. Though they are innocuous enough, I find and erase the other thing I'm looking for, the dozen or so terse, coded exchanges between our secret email aliases. I erase all cookies and history. I empty his recycle bin and briefly consider reformatting the entire hard drive, but stop myself in time. That would just arouse suspicion.

I dress and nursing my tender knuckles, I wait patiently at the livingroom window for nightfall. In what is easily a half hour, the sun goes low and I assure myself that there is no foot traffic outside. My tummy lurches as I enter the street, but I close the door behind me and step free of the house and with each step, I blend further into the empty street and I never, ever look back. My car waits beside a sycamore on a side street that opens on a square where anonymous people walk their anonymous dogs under the trees. By the time I start the engine, my nausea has faded entirely.

The expected announcement comes quietly, two days later. With two more weeks before school lets out, each day I steel myself, saying this will be the day, but when the PA crackles to life and inevitably summons, 'Mrs. Burke to the principal's office … Mrs. Burke to the principal's office,' I collapse into my terror, banging my knee forcefully under my desk as a hot spurt of urine soaks my panties. I flee to the bathroom, lock myself in the stall, sobbing. I tear off the ruined panties that have begun to dampen my skirt. They reek of concentrated fear. I compel myself to stop crying, to breathe deeply and allow my bladder to empty without straining.

The panties I toss deep into the trash. I have no a replacement for them. I splash a bit of water down there, spritz with cologne and dab myself roughly with a large wad of paper towels. I blot the dark skirt under which my wet, naked sex is barely concealed.

Upstairs in the office of Principal Jones, my worst fears are confirmed as she opens the door and behind her two seated men with bulldog features turn in unison to face me.

Damita Jones introduces them, her face trembling as she explains that these homicide detectives have horrible news that they need to discuss with me. The older of the two men rises and takes my hand, holding it with decorum, but much longer than necessary to merely make my acquaintance. His are the gloomiest, deepest-set, basset hound eyes I've ever seen. Looking at you and through you from a sad place, far, far away.

I think briefly of my ruined panties in the bottom of the second-floor girls' lavatory trashcan. I think of my trembling sex, naked beneath my thin skirt. I wonder if he smells me from traces on my hand which he still claws in his overly familiar grip. Mrs. Burke, he repeats, there is some terrible news …

He drops this statement and seems to let dangle for my reaction. It's cruel and I instantly dislike him for it. I have no idea how to react or if my face betrays a reaction. He clears his throat loudly, and proceeds to ask if fourteen-year-old Neeshaan Martin from 125 Drury Lane is currently in my classroom. I don't understand what Neeshaan has to do with a dead social studies teacher and the detective's face offers no clue. After a point, all I can do is nod mutely.

Finally releasing my hand, Mrs. Burke, there's no way to make this easy, his eyes raking me up and down, he continues to take what I feel are undue liberties. Anwar and Shamiqua Martin, Neeshaan's parents, were gunned down in a drive-by shooting in town not two hours ago. There's strong evidence that it's drug related. The younger detective interjects that 125 Drury Lane was a sort of front house for the Martin's and that their primary residence was actually in town.

As the detective continues, I realize I'm here because the guidance counselor is absent today and Principal Jones expects me to calmly and quietly pack Neeshaan up for transport. I know the way her mind works. If the Martin's used their in-district domicile as a false address, then Neeshaan was ineligible to attend. Two to three times a year, the school district has to weed out residency violators and Principal Jones is cowardly calculating that this is the last time we'll have to see Neeshaan Martin, a child who will pass without further notice from our tidy, little suburban paradise.

Neeshaan is far and away, my best student. She hasn't gotten anything lower than a 95% all year. Unlike the rest of the smug, self-affected suburban monsters, she is hard-working and cheerful, an excellent writer with perfect diction and manners. Anwar and Shamiqua, who I first thought a little "hip-hop" for this conservative district, showed up at all parent partners conferences, asked intelligent questions and seemed genuinely concerned for their daughter's welfare. Things are seldom what they seem on the surface.

I mumble that I don't know what to say and of course I'll assist in any way I can. The younger of the two detectives thanks me and Damita Jones thanks me with no small relief in her eyes. She's in my debt and knows it.

The young detective is inappropriately flirty as he escorts me back to my class. He's handsome, but is developing the same canine set of face as his partner. I expect it's an occupational hazard. I tell him his partner has an unsettling way of talking and looking at people. I say if he stays on the job that he'll end up just like the older man. He hangs his still boyish head, says you're a funny one Ms. Burke, but that I, that we, are lucky 'out here,' as this sort of tragedy is all too commonplace in the city where he works. I say I imagine it must take a terrible toll. He asks, too casually, if I'm married. I show him the wedding ring I never took off. Then, I think he winked at me. The light outside my classroom flickers; the corridor is cast in shadows, so I can't be sure.

Poor Neeshaan, my little sweet pea, comes right out when I call her. I escort her to her locker, walk her downstairs and we hug goodbye in the front lobby. As the cruiser door closes on her, I hate myself for the relief I feel that it isn't me who will have to tell her she is now and evermore an orphan.

You might feel a little prick.

I smile foolishly at the DA hovering over me. She winks and smiles back as if we're sharing a joke, the same joke, which of course we are not. The doctor bends into my field of vision with the first needle which he jabs in relentlessly. I howl as he violates my inflamed gums. Tingling, numbing warmth spreads rapidly from the needle's epicenter. The second needle slides in, easy as sex. The dentist asks if my fingers tingle. They do not. I get a third needle. I pop in my earbuds as they strap on the gas, Joan Sutherland, "La Sonnambula," a private concert in my skull, the music all the brighter and punchier for the detachment provided by the nitrous.

I can't tolerate people putting things in my mouth. I barely manage a toothbrush. Nitrous takes the edge off my overactive gag reflex, but I swear they're being miserly with the gas. Maybe they even mix some sort of bitterant in it so you inhale less, but that won't deter me. My nostrils draw greedily past the cloying spearmint scented mask, sucking in the sting of the gas, losing myself in that anesthetic golden fog.

Above me is the music. Light, buoyant and serene. Below me, drilling and scraping, the muffled sounds and sensations of excavation; the subterranean whine of the drill, the insistent burr of my conscience. If this is the worst, I know I can take it. If this is the worst of it … Time passes gently now and when at last the assistant swings the light out of my eyes, I swallow a little cupric gulp of blood and spittle.

Rinse and spit the hygienist commands, handing me a tiny paper cup of diluted blue mouthwash.

That night, I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and can't get back to sleep. The next day is the service, his service, which I can't very well attend, for as far as anybody is concerned, I barely knew the man. I've always assumed I'd missed something; that any day those dog-eyed detectives would return to the school or turn up at my home for me. It was too much to expect, escaping the judgment of God, of the city, of this small community where my own family and everyone I know will finally and irrevocably see me illuminated by the horror of my crimes. None of which has occurred yet. Each new day incrementally decreases the likelihood that it will.

Could it be the distracted, anonymous world we live in or pure dumb luck that he and I stirred so few ripples beyond the odd Tuesdays and Thursdays we met for sex? And who knows, being denied the catharsis of public confession, the burden of secret guilt might consume me, until, like Raskolnikov, I go mad and am compelled to turn myself in.

Yet as days turn reliably into weeks and the academic year ends with nobody saying anything more than the typical exchange of sympathies between strangers for strangers, as the last day's dismissal bell clangs and teenagers pour out into the clear blue, it's almost as if he'd never existed. By midsummer, I see an ad for a trinity going for firesale prices on a charming little street downtown and with my generous divorce proceeds, I put in the winning bid.

For the first time since college, I am an independent urban woman and I like it. I park on the street and shop on the way home. I take long, unhurried soaks in that big clawfoot tub and sometimes I dress and go out into the night, to movies, chamber concerts and bars, just a face, a nobody, indistinguishable from all the other nobodies. Missy's court-ordered visits occur on the appointed dates, but otherwise I am alone. Sometimes I even meet somebody, like the young detective, and I bring him back, but mostly I am content to return to this quiet, tiny bedroom in the back of the house and work until sleep overtakes me, knowing full well the valuable lesson I've learned and that I should never have cause to complain again.

**************
copyright © 2011, Riccardo Berra/Love on the Edge

Ricc Berra is a New York-based filmmaker and screenwriter who finds himself drawn mothlike to the erotic entanglements of complex and troubled relationships. He is most influenced by the writings of John Updike, Lorrie Moore and Milan Kundera, whose mastery of this subject he admires from afar. The title, Ligne Claire, is a reference to the "clear line" graphic novel drawing style pioneered by Georges Rémi, most beloved of our European friends as the creator of Tintin. The style has gone in and out of favor, resurrected more recently with ironic intent, as perhaps this title is. Read more stories from Ricc's anthology "Love on the Edge" and excerpts from his novel Apostrophe—Tales of Longing and Possession here on www.inside-apostrophe.blogspot.com

from Apostrophe, an excerpt, Zones 6 and 7

2010-08-19T04:01:00.006-04:00

As a photographer and son of a sculptor, I've devoted my entire life to "seeing with intent," an act absorbed first at Pop's knee and in all my subsequent studies. It is an engaged process that informs my work and is a link to my departed father. I guess you can say it's in my genes and in my blood. Recently I read this piece at The Erotic Literary Salon which I wrote about four years ago. It is an excerpt from Apostrophe, part of the first chapter, inspired by Ansell Adams' Zone System. The Zone System demands intense, intimate observation and decisions made by the photographer based on what light reveals and conceals. But for me, it is more. It is meditation, metaphor and birthright. It is how I express my love for and admiration of the wonders of the female form. Let the words wash over you.

I prayed to have some response to the things that were so clearly beautiful to me.

Leonard Cohen

Zone 6 Shadows on landscape

In the streets and studios on the campus and the city, desire, age and experience had honed this most talented eye. The photographer takes her in so quickly and discretely that he knows her most intimate details before she knows she’s revealed anything. Most men, heterosexual or not, do this or a form of it but to call his lifelong pursuit “girl-watching” insinuates a certain passive amateurism for this most professional and most practiced of investigators.

Oh you women! That you collude in and encourage this is not in dispute, is it? Seduction is your palette, the razor’s edge between the revealed and the concealed. As he sets and lights his studio for his first shoot, he envisions his glamorous subject at the start of her day, naked, freshly dried and powdered from her bath as she dips into the dresser, selects bra and panties, ah but which? Virtuous white cottons, sinful black lace sheers or luxurious pastel silks? Like an actor in the wings or a soldier before battle, poised before open closets, she performs a dozen breathless calculations as she reaches for each article. Off the shoulder, scoop, A-line, or bateau. Short skirt, long skirt or slacks --- skin-tight for drama or loose for freedom. Her ensemble, no matter how much or how little she wears, always reveals more than it conceals. That is her inventory. His continues.

What’s her approach? Steel–gazed and confident, or clouded and demur? Does she strut, swish, shamble or shuffle; is her movement more invitation than locomotion, hips tick tocking that celestial clockwork that tells everybody around her the time? Does she slouch or shrink or preen or flare her feathers in a flash of misdirection?

As she bends, see how the curve of a breast blooms as the neckline falls away, gravity unveiling curves where the presence or absence of the tiniest dot of fabric or flesh is the difference between modesty and exhibitionism. Nipples beg attention through thin fabric, whether small or large, flat or knobby, pink or brown, puffy or beestung, perking when touched and complaining when cold and sore and needing to be warmed. Breasts revel in their innate concentricity, whether heavy like overripe fruit or pert like the closed fist of a rose.

Hips tip the scale between chastest virtue and depravity.
Bellies, from the palest white to café au lait to shiny black--all quiver like plucked strings in anticipation of touch.

The drawn bow, the plucked chord, worked clay, wood, fabric or stone, all worship, all retrace the fertile crescent a million times over, the outer curve of hips to the inner curve within, delta of Venus, the divinest of ratios, curves within curves, as she turns to reveals the most perfect of forms, the female bottom, flared hips framing every signpost, fashionable and anatomical, sculpted, boyish cheeks, or golden apple mounds. At the center, he fancies that he can “tell” … for this heart unlike the other, reveals all, and when well and truly loved, retains the memory of intimate intrusion.

Like all inverse relationships, the tighter a form is held, the more it begs for release – grateful for freedom from tight jeans or short skirts, the sliding off, up or down, what’s underneath thickly carpeted, downy, shaved, trimmed, or baby girl smooth, blooming all coral pink or rose red, rimmed with darker accents, dry or with a hint of dew, lips tight like a bud or open in a florid riot of petals, sealed at first, all modesty and virtue contained within the place we always leave too soon as lips swell to fullness, lips fall back at the touch, lips, the folded gate between the vee of two fingers and silk darkness.

All signposts, fashionable and anatomical direct this most practiced eye down every dip and swell, the practiced look, the imagined touch, how it feels to slide down, around, then in, oh he sighs, she sighs, the wondrous spot that weeps the more it is loved, this landmark where no adornment is ever necessary recent trends notwithstanding. It doesn’t matter what she wears or doesn’t, whether she dresses the tart or in the stern regimentals of business. Form follows function as the eye travels the well-lit path of desire a hundred times a day. The careful and discrete observer can almost always catch the real show.

Woman's rebellious heart I have supported
ready to pay the price - content to die
if love should slay me, for I am love's champion
and if I ceased, then I would not be I.

Nizar Qabbani

Zone 7 Shadows in snow

His best photographs are unsettling. Some viewers claim the subjects seem objectified or eroticized, even when fully dressed. He wouldn’t disagree. For proof that we live in unhappy times, as if more is needed, a small army of pinched, dysphoric souls once picketed outside a gallery he was showing in, denouncing his works perverse and misogynistic. He was stunned. Where he portrayed adoration, they saw fear and loathing. What he calls devotion, they termed addiction.

He fills several notebook pages with his silent rage. What the hell is sex addiction anyway? God, if the pursuit of beauty is addiction, then he wants no part of a cure. Lust is a gift he is grateful for, the frequently recurring itch no more unbidden than his own racing pulse, final proof not just of life, but of life’s grand and glorious design. If this is misogyny then sex itself is debased and the procreation of life is itself a sin. Now original sin is a concept that he, with his spotty Roman Catholic upbringing, never embraced. Not even later when he understood that debasement for some, is a cherished ritual.

The fleeting exchanges between object of desire and desirer are the most basic, the oldest of human dialogues. In shy displays, gestures and touches, heat, moisture and scents, he finds the artist’s love of form, the writer’s love of language and the lover’s love of love. He believes he has finally come to see what his father saw, that the appreciation and depiction of female form is the most sublime expression of beauty. Every culture in its flower employs its highest arts to express its highest feminine ideals. Is not the worship of beauty through look and touch and imagination the prelude if not the very expression of love? And when requited … when Venus smiles, is not the anticipation of her blessing to be coveted above all other experiences?

There is evidence everywhere, in the faces and forms of fashion models, actresses, office girls and gum-popping toll operators. In every city he’s visited and those he hasn’t, in a small world full of large cities, half a block ahead, despair and desire, side by side, tap out a stiletto tattoo, a code older than speech, smarter than science and holier than religion. Even in societies grown putrid on patriarchal vomit, where only poets have the balls to speak the truth, there is no denying or suppressing it for long. Even when the last poet is caught and stoned into silenced, even when haters whip and rape and imprisons women’s glorious forms into formless sacks, men will always be men and women, women. No social order founded on inequality can long endure because the true weight of the world extends beyond possession to pure longing and the irresistible human morphonomy to love and prize the beloved not as much as, but above oneself.

Hearts and Flowers

2010-08-04T22:42:00.004-04:00

A certain lady sexologist of whom we're fans has a nightly routine in which she and her lover exchange sweet, explicit "nothings." Signora V and I recently had just such an exchange. Is it sweet? Is it nothing? I'll leave it to readers to judge.

-------V-------------
My special request

Love, this is a darker side of my personality that has not been as yet revealed to you though I know you suspect me. As a one-off and never to be repeated scenario I request the following.

To be driven to a dark park at night when I am tired and ready for bed and be forced out of the car and thrown against the ground, (on a very warm night, mind), have my jeans and panties pulled down to my knees and my top pulled up over my breasts and have clamps fixed tightly onto my nipples so that they swell. Then with one hand on my back holding me down firmly I want you to force me, however tired I am at the moment, to let you take me from behind in my special hole. I will resist and finally acquiesce because you are so obviously stronger than me. I may be resentful at the time and the burning feeling that I will experience in my butt will stay with me for the hours to follow. I will afterwards feel a kind of liberation by being taken in the dark outdoors against my will.

This is the second night I’ve written this request. What may I assume?

-------R-------------

I've opened my special file of pictures of you. As I page through them, I frame my response.

What may you assume?
Assume this.

I pick you up. I've insisted that you not wear jeans, but a summer skirt or dress. When you get in the car, I question you.

"Are your panties on?"
"Yes."
"I told you not to. I told you that you to leave them home and come down naked under your dress. You didn't listen, did you?"
"No."
"Fine. Remove them now and hand them to me."

You pout like a teenager while you protest your adult modesty. I won't hear it. I raise my voice. I have to talk over you. I tell you I'll put you out on the street that very moment if you don't comply. As we come to the light I reach across you and pinch your left breast. At least you've come braless, but my instructions were quite specific and I am still angry about the panties.

You stop chattering and sheepishly slide off and hand me the panties. I tell you to lift your dress. You are not to sit on it. It's a hot night and your clammy bottom sticks to the leather seat. As you think about what I'm going to say or do next you become very wet. Your vulva slides against the seat. When I stop in traffic again, you lurch forward. You worry that your lack of traction will hurl you against the glove compartment but you don't dare say anything. You reach for my cock and press into my groin. I swat your hand away.

"Not now."

We drive on to a secluded spot near the reservoir. It's a hot night. Your juices and sweat have made your ass and thighs slick everywhere. The entire seat is slippery with you. I turn the motor off. I unzip my fly.

"Suck," I order.

You look around anxiously.

"What if we're seen?" you ask.

"Don't look around. Suck," I repeat, "Do a good job. If you don't you'll regret it."

Your head begins to slowly descend on my cock. I take your hair and force you all the way down, not releasing until I hear a slight gag from your throat. Your saliva drips down and coats my member. It's time.

"Give me the nipple clamps and get out," I order.

You open the door slowly. I come around and extend my hand, a gentlemanly gesture, but I pull you roughly to your feet. I kiss you hard on the mouth. You taste the tobacco and whiskey I had earlier. You reach for my cock, but I swat your hand away again. I force you to your knees and fasten the clamps beneath your dress. You take me deep in your mouth until my cock drools with your saliva. I pull you up roughly and turn you and lift your leg against the runner of the open passenger door. I flip your skirt up. A car goes by and slows a bit. Your eyes dart in terror at the flash of headlights. But the driver does not see your naked thighs, my busy hand or the urgency of my cock pressed against your puckered special hole. I add a little of my own saliva to the angry purple bulb. I grab your cunt which you have shaved bare just this day, in anticipation of this night. Two fingers plunge in immediately up to the second knuckle. I push against you while my fingers work. I use my grip to force you back. It's slow going. You’re lucky I'm not angrier, because as I push in, I could easily impale you with one thrust and you would feel it for more than a couple hours or days.

"More lubrication," you beg but you don't get any. That was your job earlier. Now your submission is all the lubrication I need. My grip on your cunt is a vice. You become light headed as I push you all the way back on me. Gradually your special hole accepts its methodical assault. You're pinned against the door frame. Your hands are splayed atop the car's roof like a perp bent against a police car. My hand is using your weeping cunt like a dripping oar. My cock is using your tight ass like a cunt.

"You are my cunt, aren't you?" I hiss in your ear. All you can feel is my cock as it ravages. All you can manage is a moan through tear-clenched eyes.

"Tell me you're my cunt or I'll pull out and start over." For emphasis, I tug the chain affixed to your nipples.

"I'm your cunt. I'm your whore," you whine, your voice rising in desperation. Another car goes by but does not slow. My pumping inside you has grown rhythmic. There is a precise moment when you accept it. When you accept everything. This is that moment. You take it and all the pain cartwheels into pleasure. You feel my cock swell and throb inside you.

For the first time that you've known me, you do feel like a whore. You tighten around me, milking me, praying for quick release. You're ashamed of your request and you feel I've taken advantage of your need, your vulnerability. My fingers pressed deep against your pubis mash and twirl. You feel like crying, but instead you come in searing bursts of released emotions, thrusting your bottom back angrily against me. My balls slap against your swollen lips and mash into your cunt. You feel my first hot spurts and your own contractions deep inside where you’ve never felt me before. I press against you shuddering with my own release.

My semen has left your special hole coated and slick. I’m so tempted to linger and play, but some animal noise you hear in the dark makes you twist suddenly in my arms. Still half hard I slither out with a pop. Your eyes question mine. My eyes look down at my open zipper. You gently fold my cock back into my pants and zip my fly for me. I kiss you hard while you do me this service. I open the passenger door wider and bid you to re-enter, another parody of courtliness. When I get in, you slip off the nipple clamps and replace them in your purse. You ask for your panties back. I ignore you and turn on the radio. Nina Simone wails out to the universe, "Lover man, where have you gone?" We drive in sullen silence. You want to convince yourself that you didn't ask for this. That this was sordid and cruel and not worthy of a lady of your age and station. Even you don't believe it. The leather seat is slick under you again.

When I drop you at the lobby entrance you ask for the panties again, frantic eyes darting at the doorman who approaches the car.

"No," I reply pleasantly. "I own them now, as I owned you earlier."

"Did you have a pleasant evening, Signore Riccardo?" the doorman asks as he holds the car door for you.

"The very best," I reply.

You stagger to your feet. Your eyes burn with shame, hotter than the red smart down there in your tight little bum. You worry that the nosy porter will smell the sex on you as you pass him. You are naked before him, but for the merest whisper of your sundress. The elevator door can’t open too soon. My full hand was nearly inside you when you came all over it. You remember that. All our days and nights of gentle, unhurried lovemaking pale in comparison to this. You’ll remember that too. You walk gingerly to your apartment door and insert the key. You are overwhelmed by what happened and your response to it.

We've been together so long. What did you expect? Hearts and flowers?

The Jealous Muse

2010-06-02T02:40:00.003-04:00

by Riccardo Berra © 6-1-2010

She perched on the arm of his chair. When she'd first arrived, he'd been amazed that she could, but she'd stay like that for hours and he never minded. Except for her constant whisper in his head, he almost forgot she was there. She, so light, so delicate, could insinuate herself into the tiniest of spaces. She'd be what, all of 4'11", all of a hundred pounds wet? She had the final printout of his newest novel. She was wearing a diaphanous orange and ochre sundress. No bra or panties. What need has a Muse for undergarments?

She read incredibly fast and each page she finished, she flipped contemptuously to the floor. He'd not let her read the final draft until after he proofed it. He never let anybody read his work until he finalized it. He'd assumed at first that that's what she was being so pissy about, but something else was bothering her. The pages accumulating on the floor were numbered, thank God, but this was getting pretty fucking irritating. He made to swat her butt, but she became, well, it was like swatting cigarette smoke.

"This is your ideal woman?"

She was furious, rattling the remaining pages she held.

"Ideal in what way?"

"Ideal in the way of her perfect physique. Her perfect submission to you. Your perfect lover. I could be this for you."

And she was Naomi, in a tight leather mini, dark of eye and soul, wearing a bandanna tied about her head and man’s workshirt half unbuttoned. The Muse finished the job.

"See my big beautiful breasts, darling. Oh look. My other lover whipped them last night. He was so cruel. Do you see the marks he left on my poor, gorgeous breasts? He bit this one. Hard. See the ring around my nipple. It still hurts."

The writer was becoming agitated.

"I'm sorry sweetie. I forgot. She was … what? A thinly disguised knockoff of the real deal? And how did it end?"

"Badly. You know it did. You were here when I wrote it. I held nothing back."

"I was here. I was there. I was everywhere. I remember you cried."

She could be such a cunt.

"Can you focus for crissakes? If there's something wrong with the text, tell me so I can fix it. My agent's expecting it tomorrow."

"The problem is, I can never live up to this. I can only be the brief illusion of her. But I can't be her. And I can never be what she was to you. "

"Which was?"

"Your ideal lover, lover."

"You keep saying that, but there was nothing ideal about her."

"Oh c'mon. Those gorgeous breasts, twenty-six, submissive. I bet if you'd have been the one whipping her tits she'd have stayed with you."

"I'm glad she didn't. That's the only thing I'm glad of."

"What more does a man want? Have a bad day, come home, hit her. Bite her. Choke her. Take it all out on her and still she'd come crawling to you. She liked it."

"I was always afraid of that."

"But you shouldn't have been."

"What do you mean? I lost myself with her."

"That's what love is sugar. Self sacrifice. Something your type is ill-equipped for. However much you profess to love me, if she came waltzing back into your life and you had to choose, you'd take her in a heartbeat. And that makes me want to kill myself."

"You can do that?"

"That's not the point. The point is I feel I could. I'm depressed. I already know how you'd choose. You make me want to … You never finished with her. So she is your forever twenty-six year old perfect lover."

"She was anything but perfect. I admit, I loved her. Maybe still some residual feelings. Okay? But that love destroyed four friendships. And please. Please stop this talk of killing yourself. It scares me. Do you have any idea how empty my life would be? If you want to destroy me, that's the way to do it. You'd have my blood on your hands too."

"Darling. Don't be absurd. Girls like that don't age very well. And I, I have far too much going on to be dead again. I could be this for you."

And his heart did skip a beat as she became Sofi and wriggled into his lap, mimicking everything from the throaty burr in Sofi's voice to her smirking smile.

"Hi bosscat."

"Hi yourself."

It chilled him how accurately she conjured everything in his head. That this Sofi was exactly his Sofi, down to the tiniest details, exactly as written, twenty-three, strikingly tall, honey-flaxen hair, her expressive, porcelain features offset by ice-blue eyes, piriform, ample breasts, (though not as big as Naomi’s), their proud berry nipples upturned in youth's transient defiance of gravity.

"Exhibit B. Your heroine in the flesh. Another busty perfect woman I can't live up to."

"She is our creation. Crissakes, she was your idea."

He stroked her naked "Sofi" thigh, but did so warily, studying her reaction. The Muse sighed and resumed her original state. That of a Brazilian woman of about 50 perched on his chair's arm, a pretty oval face, cocoa eyes, coal black hair, still-taut café au lait skin, a wide, generous bunda offset by champagne cup breasts.

"She's a fiction, but you're real aren't you?"

"You bet I am. Before all this, (she gestured floridly in the air), I was a mother. Bore five children from these hips. Pushed them through here."

She parted her legs to show him the lush dark whorls that covered the wine-stained cunt lips. She rubbed herself and dark flesh parted to reveal its coral interior.

"But my hips stayed like this."

Her hands smoothed her slim hips with evident pride, and then got busy in his lap, unzipping, fishing him out.

"And inside … I stayed … just … like … this."

She extended one leg straight in the air; a dancer's move of a dancer's leg, then straddled him, bearing down hard and fast. He gasped as her pubococcygei spoke to his cock in the peristaltic language of muscles.

"I did the yoga. I did the kegels. My former lover made me take Ben Wa balls. I could take three and hold them forever. I could hold you forever."

She lifted herself until only the head of his cock remained buried inside her. Three powerful contractions illustrated her point. His eyes fluttered and rolled back in his head.

"I could. See my tits? I nursed all my babies. Endless milk flowed through these. Ah, but they stayed … like this."

She cupped her tiny breasts, pinching her nipples through the web of her fingers. Her face was inexpressibly sad and accusing but the nipples popped through like angry pencil nubs. He pushed her hands away and pressed his lips to each areola. He nipped at them. Her hand pushed the back of his head, indicating that he should continue, but slower and harder. She gasped in satisfaction when he bit down as hard as she liked, much harder than he thought he should.

"There were plastic surgeons on every street corner in Rio. I could've made them bigger. There were plenty of times I thought to. But I didn't because my lovers didn't need that. You apparently do."

As he mauled her breasts, the writer swore she had had "them done" and by no street corner surgeon. She'd been sculpted by an artist. There were no visible scars, except perhaps the psychic ones. She alternated her up-down pumping with wide hip rolls that toyed with his cock like her words toyed with his head. The writer sighed to himself. It was his fortune to have a muse with a tit fetish. A muse who'd come to him seven years ago, at his lowest moment and pulled him from the brink. The muse who'd loved his body like she was doing now and inspired seven years of hard work, his best work, after a long dry spell.

Incomprehensibly, she still considered their time together incomplete because she wanted nothing more than to titty fuck him. In her natural state she'd lacked the equipment. In her supernatural state, she lacked the equipment. Now if she'd consent to play Sofi or Naomi, she'd be more than adequate in that department. He'd thought of asking her to do so, then thought again. He didn't want to piss her off any more than she was at that point. Titty fucking held far more interest for her than for him. The holes God made a cock to go in were quite enough to satisfy him, but not her. For a thunderous handful of seconds his mind went blessedly blank. Three times his breath caught as he exploded up into her.

A half hour later, he lay on his bed. The manuscript was retrieved from the floor, re-ordered by page and sealed in the FedEx envelope with a backup disk. The FedEx envelope was addressed and sat in his outbox. It was all done. The years of work, the endless revisions, the queries, rejections, meetings and contracts—all done. His limp cock, dry but sugar crusted, felt like the face of a kid who'd stuffed himself with cotton candy and a soda at the fairgrounds but wanted more.

The times when she is real, she is so very real. She is everything. Did she really not understand how loyal he was to her? How much he owed her? How much he wanted her in his arms? Sex with their muses is something writers rarely elaborate on. They'll show you the results of it, sure, but never the act itself. It's too private.

He'd prayed that the diatribe had concluded, but she started pacing back and forth, going on again, the same tiresome rant he'd heard for the past seven years, how incredibly superficial she found it here in this culture where men wouldn't even look at her, (which was patently untrue—he'd seen how they looked at her.). How women with 'large thrusty breasts used their thrustiness to belittle their flat-chested sisters.' He'd long since grown impatient with this discussion. He didn't want talk. He made a grab for her tiny manicured hand with its pink perfectly painted nails and placed it on his cock. She let it rest there, gave him a half-hearted squeeze, but seemed no closer to ending her soliloquy. Since she wouldn't do what he needed, softly, rhythmically, he began to stroke himself. At first it worked, her voice receding, even as she stood over his bed, but then something in her tone, her coo, like that of a mourning dove, hypnotic, sweet, soft and sad, wound into his head and caught.

"I will read your future."

He paused in midstroke, as cynical a gesture as a masturbator can make.

"Oh, so you're a Fate now? I thought you …"

"Don't push it. Do you want to hear?"

"Of course."

He resumed stroking himself and his self pleasure took on the hypnotic rhythm of her voice.

"I know what happens. You will become famous. Your work will be famous. You will move to Hollywood. You will leave me behind."

"Never."

"Bah! You can and you will. You will leave me behind. And when you do, the young beautiful things will flock to you. Throw themselves at you. You will have films and success. You will collaborate with your cinema heroes and the most beautiful of all actresses. You will have many loves. Everything you've ever wanted. You are so beautiful, so talented. And you keep improving. Barely fifty and more handsome by the day. Alas not the fate of woman. Ours the reverse. When I've outlived my usefulness, I will fly back to Brasil, Italy, or perhaps Greece. Or..."

"Or?"

"If you decide you still want me in your life, I will move to Maui where the film community parties. If I want, I could have plenty of clients. All more grateful than you."

"There is nobody more grateful than me."

"Then maybe I won't go back to the old world. I'll buy myself a hip party pad on the beach. I'll entertain stars and starlets. My door will always be open to you. And I will even permit the young thing that worships you and satisfies you in ways I cannot. I will let you have her and me too. How about that?"

He was breathing deeply, rising, hardening, but as compelling as her word spell was, it wasn't quite enough. She finally relented, ended the torture and climbed on top of him to finish him off. After all, it was her world. He only transcribed it.

6/1/2010 2022 wc, rbb © all rights reserved.

Specular Highlights

2010-05-21T01:37:00.003-04:00

Copyright 2010 rbb/apostrophe, all rights reserved
by Riccardo Berra

Naomi was with Sean, an A-list soundman and personal friend that Riccardo hired whenever he could. Riccardo adored his friend, but had always had the hots for Naomi. He kept this to himself. Then Sean left Naomi and New York for a NPR staff job in New Orleans that Riccardo with his contacts, had helped him land. In Sean’s absence, shortly after the birth of his daughter, Riccardo began a desperate affair with the 26 year old waitress and aspiring veterinarian. That’s the simplest chain of events, but chronology is where all simplicity ends.

Sean’s departure was quietly orchestrated to cauterize the raw end of a love affair that had careened from bad to worse most years, now headlong toward a crash into multiple flair-ups of physical and emotional abuse. Riccardo had been a patient intermediary and confidante to both parties. It was so indescribably hard for him to reconcile what he felt and what he knew of this couple. Most nights that the three of them were together, it was the Sean and Naomi show, starring Sean who could tear a Nagra down blindfolded with a live joint in his mouth and make you laugh to the point of pissing with his Don Rickles send-ups of stars and scenes from his photographic recall of classic film and TV. Then there was straight-man Naomi, broody and impulsive, with her whip-smart mouth and soft bleeding heart, this patroness of stray dogs, cats and all pitiful creatures. Strange, contradictory outcast souls, but then so is Riccardo.

He’d arrived on the scene of their Brooklyn apartment just in time to talk one of NY’s finest out of hauling the soundman in. Sean, with a blackening welt under one eye, was cuffed and bent over the hood of the squad car. But his face was passive and repentant in the glare of the flashing lights. Naomi had apparently gotten a good shot in. Riccardo talked quickly and quietly with the indignant policewoman for some minutes. Fortunately for all, Sergeant Willie Mikulski turned out to be a hardcore indie film buff who dated a grip. She’d seen Riccardo’s "Failure of Will." She had her own script about “a woman’s life on the job.” She took his card and his promise that there’d be no more drama that night. With a stern warning she uncuffed Sean who slunk back to the apartment and while the cops withdrew, Riccardo walked Naomi around the block for cigarettes. This fight had been about Sean’s imminent departure. She’d changed her mind and begged him to stay. Some people would see that as romantic, but it made Sean absolutely crazy and he began screaming and throwing things. Naomi changed her mind again. She ‘d been threatened one too many times. Sean’s puffy eye withstanding, nobody’d been hurt—this time—but she was entirely ready to see the back of him that night and for all nights to come. As they walked and talked, Riccardo believed her, but could not puzzled out his own feelings to a satisfactory conclusion. When they returned, Sean sat chilling on the couch.

Riccardo grieved Sean’s impending absence but was secretly horrified by how much he looked forward to it. Two days after Sean’s U-Haul rumbled off into the night, Riccardo took Naomi out for “tea and sympathy.” Standing in the doorway, eyeing her leather-clad silhouette, he wrestled with an inconvenient stab of conscience. He followed her in, like so many nights before, but this night different, Sean’s absence a whistling vacuum, the pull of the threshold implying a different specific gravity inside the unlit apartment, where with each step, one by one his altruistic motives fell like scales until finally, there was no innocent reason to be there, if in fact there ever had been.

When she brushed past him to turn on the lights, he took her by the shoulders and kissed her, unfazed by the reproach in her dark, dark eyes, the acknowledgment that their chaste companionship had already transmuted and would now spiral into nights of torrid lovemaking, twice weekly for the next two months. Sex –incredible with this cinnamon-skinned, sloe-eyed West Indian beauty with her cowboy hips, tight butt and abundant breasts. Everything about Naomi was a revelation, a study, not just in contrasts but extremes.

Eyes smoldering in foreplay, but when he penetrated her, like flicking a switch, they went blank, impassive, these eyes that said ‘Do what you want, I’m no longer here.’ He secretly called it her abused child stare and had no desire to analyze why it aroused him so, certain only that it did, convinced in the throes of their couplings that if he could only fuck this blankness off her face that there might be something he could touch at her core, however strange or tenuous.

His education in the murkier aspects of the female sexual response began the very next night they met.

She comes to the door so hot in her scoop neck top and usual ass hugging black leather—tonight a skirt—and kisses him, nothing passive about it, mashing his lips against his jaw until his teeth cut his lip and he complains. She suggests that he spank her. And it’s not really a suggestion, more of a taunt or a dare. As much as the idea appeals to him, he confesses he’d never done it, so how … she cuts him off impatient, lecturing as a teacher would a particularly dull pupil that she would lay across his lap and he would flip her tight leather skirt up and yank her panties to her ankles and punish her bare ass as much as she needed. He drops his pants. He frees her breasts from their black lace prison. They flop warm and heavy over his naked calves as she prostrates herself over his lap. Using a short belt, then his own hand, he straps her narrow cinnamon ass across his knee until crimson welts raise on the brown soft mounds and his entire lap was slippery with her unguent come, and then in a shattering moment, his own. Bright raw red brown ass lay under his thumbs; her pussy dark at edges, pink at the center, weeping and engorged, open to probing. He inserts a finger, then another, a third and then a fourth, screaming fuck when he explodes … Suddenly she seems bored perhaps and stands tentatively, rubbing her sore ass. A string of his ejaculate clings to her heavy right breast which she smears over one nipple then the other, stepping closer, cupping her bounty for him to kiss, straddling his lap like a stripper, her entire bearing implying that what he’d done was barely adequate, that he should hit her now and whenever he feels like it. When he refuses, the rank salinity off her nipples is forced into his mouth and this is the closest he’d ever come to tasting a man’s, his own, essence.

That next month, at her insistence, he bound her wrists and ankles with the leather collars and straps from the large drawer in her closet. He’d been an idiot, he’d told himself, for taking so long to realize what the collection was for. Chokers. She loved them. She wore them all the time and wanted them tight, very tight when coming. She got angry that he wouldn’t do it hard enough, when he wanted to play it safe. He’d never be able to go as far as she wanted. He knew this. He also refused when she wanted to restrain him. It wasn’t that he was opposed to a little light bondage on principle, but there was no trusting this one and her limits—if she even had any. He didn’t ask if she’d done all this with Sean. What point to a question whose answer was so evident?

Their last night together began as others had, drinking in her tiny kitchen. This night they were polishing off the last of Sean’s Kentucky bourbon. The phone jangled impossibly loud in such tight quarters, startling them both. Guilty expressions flew across the table. Sean, of course, from New Orleans, missing her. Riccardo stood stiffly, desperate to flee, wanting them to have their privacy, but she reached for his hand and pressed it desperately to her bosom, the most sentimental or was it desperate gesture he’d ever seen her make. Riccardo could hear his friend’s voice well enough through the receiver to note that the pleading tone of it, irony free and far away, was so sad. Where is the clever banter, the cutting wit, Mr. Funny Man? The conversation was tense and painful, concluding with her empty promise to “tell him when I see him.”

Naomi replaced the phone, stood up, drained her glass like a man. She dropped and dropped the empty Bookers bottle into the trash, wryly pronouncing, “End of an era.” Weaving slightly, she unbuttoned her man’s plaid workshirt, unclasping her bra from behind to expose a shocking livid set of stripes and welts that neatly crisscrossed her abundant café au lait breasts and tiny belly. One chocolate nipple had at its circumference an ugly purple wound that could only be a bite mark. Riccardo began to shake. He was furious. He was terrified. Her expression said she knew he’d be. She cocked her head in that taunting way of hers. She said only one word.

“So?”

He exploded with rage.

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Who Naomi? Who?”

She turned without response, coyly dangling the immense brassiere over her shoulder, dropping it as she sashayed across the livingroom. The impulse to run to her was overpowering, to grab and shake her, to push her to the floor and knock some fucking sense into her. He planted his feet until it passed. Heart racing, he waited for the wooden echo of her footsteps on the hardwood stair and the slam of the bedroom door. Warily he went up to the bathroom and pissed, splashed water on his livid face, telling himself to collect his thoughts, surprised slightly to discover there were none to collect. When he opened the bedroom door she stood by the bed with a silk scarf meekly folded across both hands. He tried to kiss her softly but she turned away in boredom and disgust.
“That’s how you want to play it.”

He snatched the scarf from her hands and tightened it about her eyes. The smirk on her mouth waivered. Her lips parted in a soft O. He grabbed her wiry hair, kissed her hard and she didn’t resist. When her lips rose to meet his again, he pushed her back on the bed, momentarily entranced by the way her breasts rippled and bounced about as her body absorbed the impact of the mattress, becoming even more aroused by the notion that he saw this and she didn’t. Her hands tunneled between her thighs. He forced his way between her legs, attacked her slack mouth with his only angry one, grabbing abundant handfuls of breasts and pinching her nipples until she moaned.

“Finally a response. This … this is how you like it, isn’t it?”

No response.

“It’s the only way you like it, isn’t it?” Disgust, anger and powerful arousal toyed with him. “You don’t want it gentle, do you?” he snarled, grabbing her chin.

No response.

“You think I’m weak, don’t you?”

“Yes!,” she hissed triumphantly.

His hand jerked up, trembling, poised to slap her beautiful helpless, blindfolded face. Her lips parted in a wry smile. She knew. She knew she’d won.

In a red rage, he swore and tore her jeans and panties off. He whipped her belt out of the loops and lashed her ankles tightly together so her knees could only spread a few inches. She liked making things difficult. Fine. He’d make them difficult for her. Her sightless hands sought and gripped the headboard making him wish for handcuffs as he smothered her, oh my little dog, pushing, retreating; then again, getting frustrated, he slid his hips up to straddle her stomach. He took a bottle of baby oil from the nightstand and drizzled it over the purpled head of his raging hard-on. Scooping up overflowing moundfuls of the abused breasts which spilled from her chest onto his thighs, he mashed them together, sliding under, against her sternum, rubbing and kneading to create a bright, slippery passage. Nearly to the point of coming, he stopped, panting hard, and slid back down and covered her, stabbing once again into her dry, tight pussy which relented at once with an efflorescent rush, his poundings producing juicy, slapping reports, everything, everywhere, her geyser eruption, saturating her thighs, his thighs, the bedsheets beneath them.

He tested this slippery terrain as you’d probe an open wound and finding her rectum as receptive as her other hole, with one, then two fingers finding no resistance; no quarter asked or given, he flipped her over and pushed through her clenched anus, sliding easily in and out until she gave a small pained whimper and begged him not to move. For a split second he worried that he’d hurt her—a n absurd notion with this girl. She dug furiously at her clit which sent powerful spasms through her, around his prick until the urge to move became overwhelming. Frantically, he drove in as far as he could go, she howled, exploding again, as he flooded her, pumping waves upon convulsive waves of his sticky release over her own copious wash, collapsing, pinning her, gripping her as if she might escape.

“You’re the first. The first man since Sean,” her wet fragrant hand cupped to his ear.
“I’m obviously not,” he said, cupping the nipple with the bite mark.
“Yes you are.”
“The first man what?”
“To make me come.”
He found this indescribably sad without knowing why.

For all their desperate intimacies, he’d soon learn how little he knew her. One bitter January night, he’d crunched through the ice and salt-crusted walkway to her apartment but was met at the door by one of her co-workers, a very handsome, very young Puerto Rican busboy, who demanded his name, then explained that he’d just returned from taken Naomi to the ER because she’d overdosed on meth.

“She’s got a real problem, you know?”

He didn’t. He hadn’t wanted to. The boy’s look told him what he already suspected in his snake black heart, that in trying to fuck her two ways from Sunday, he’d conveniently ignored the fact that she was coming apart at the seams. She was released two days later. He tried to see her but the busboy stood guard like a jealous dog. She wouldn’t take his calls. The next week, Riccardo was booked in Miami on a shoot. He phoned from the plane and this time she answered. Her voice chilled him. It was cool and deadpan and contained no speck of emotional connection to him. She’d made some decisions. She’d gone through detox and was reconciling with Sean. They were going to be married in California. No, in answer to his unspoken question, she wouldn’t see him again. Ever.

A week later, the other shoe dropped. Sean called. His former friend’s voice choked with emotion confirmed, as Riccardo had since anticipated, that Naomi would hold nothing back. That’s what honest lovers do, right? He’d seen these two hurl insults and harder missiles at each other. He’d broken up screaming fights seen them chained with eyes blackened by the others’ fists, but he’d never felt more degraded than them—until that call.

When he hung up, he saw then as his heart leapt through his gullet, how had he missed her entrance, Ruth, frozen, eyes shock-widened like a doe in the headlights, silently trapped in the corner of the study, as invisible as a person could be. He slept in his downtown office for three months. Nothing was made of it nor was it ever spoken of again by either of them. Terrified by the experience, by the stomach twisting awareness of his abundant culpability, Riccardo slunk once again under the reluctant mantle of marital celibacy. It is hard, hard thing to discover that you aren’t near as good a person as you’d thought yourself to be.

He tells himself that his seduction of Naomi had been calculating and vile. Perhaps it was. The pleasures of sexual predation and conquest though intense, sit unbalanced on the soul. For every conquest a defeat, for every victor a victim and always unpredicted, unintended consequences. He swears a private oath, to never again prey on a woman’s weakness to satisfy his appetites. But he does not, and this is telling, he does not foreswear the thousand infidelities in his heart since their last night together, nor, though he knows he should, can he ever bring himself to repudiate what they shared.

She, so beautiful, so troubled, so beyond his comprehension, was lost forever. More dark than light, thoughts of Naomi always tangle back upon themselves, a tenebrous trail down which he strayed and never completely returned. Many nights she returns unbidden but never unwelcome to a place where there is no guilt or blame, just the unanswerable empty ache of the lover for the dark absent lady, who for a short time, was his.

constellations

2010-05-20T05:25:00.001-04:00

10/4/2009

I’ve taken this path so many times before
I pass people who in contemplating sunset over the river
Reveal their silhouettes
In such stark contrast to the subtler shades of dying light
Rich burnt gold, pedestrian brick red, these waver and fade
To magenta and violet,
My meditation, my motion is past them
The song of blood in my fingertips
The pump of my footsteps on pavement
My steady heart, my fickle head
Rare in truce, constant in opposition
This quivering, uncomfortable asymmetry
So much to regret, such as
That I
Recall all my loves
But forget my best ideas
Rising, slippery, Excalibur bright,
But graspable only by the razor edge of the blade
Before they slide under the surface line
To settle in the silt of oblivion
Only to tease hint
Of their outline
Even then
If I could only stop and look
The delusion I can rescue what was there but once
But I couldn’t and I can't

To late
Gone now.

My most familiar refrain
That now I grasp
Not at the original, but at its rusted iteration
The real treasure
Sleeps untouched
Shells of a man
Shells of notions
Litter shorelines under alien stars
I’ll never see.

This August night
This propagated parkway
This illuminated diagonal
Radiation beneath my feet
As the sun long set and Moon new risen
Takes up her rondo with Mars

In a tight line round the mark of the Blue Cross
Never closer in the millennial memory of men
He Mars, the larger, so removed, so bellicose
She Moon, the smaller, imprisoned, reflecting all, saving so little for herself
But a broken, fixed half-smile

Yet here on the Parkway,
They are improbably tight in the sky
Their proportions inversed
Their attraction shocking but irrefutable
Does he mean to steal her
Rape her.
Kidnap and dash her in his bloody orbit?
Doesn't she know

His red red love isn't kind. It's bestial
Doesn't she know
That if she could but go to him, or he to her,
Calamity would follow
Tides would still

Mountains would groan and bulge like pregnant cows
Earth herself would split
An episiotomy birthing the end of
All tiny antlike Lovers who croon
And make sad songs for Sister Moon.

Don't you ever wonder
What care these two
For the abstemious license of Earthbound lovers and losers
For our offkey songs and lust spluttered lines
For if they who dance in this August sky
Can never claim their truest desires

What care have they of ours?

rbb 2010 all rights reserved

Whatever That

2010-05-20T04:20:00.001-04:00

Whatever that has you but wants you
Wants that longing of adjacent flesh impatient
You cannot move fast enough
to cover all of me that needs all of you
Sighs
Mothman flickers of fluorescent envy
You under me legs yawn like a hungry mouth at which
I’ll feed till my love declines to corruption
Wet by friction bound by its opposite
Kisses rain like glasses falling from a high shelf
a soft tinkle
a dimpled promontory
a deep cleft
Bereft
I made my way with you when cooler counsel said fool not
I should’ve shuffled on to the hollow steady thrum
that was my life, my late life, my dying life
and now it is too late for anything
but spin and fall and sin and fall
regretless
Awake your mouth moves on me
An impression
Of twin tunnels met in an airy illusion of endless bounty
The salt sea scent of sin
Confederate arms
Desperate eyes
Empty hearts
It won’t be our bed tonight
Not without me in it.

rbb 1/18/10 all rights reserved

skin

2010-05-20T04:13:00.000-04:00

Yesterday’s shirt
Still has your smell on it.
I rub myself
And my hand to my face declares
That it held your apple sex
My lips confess your taste
How can the world be so unaware that we’re lovers
When six ounces of fabric tell the whole story?

An afternoon with you and I feel my skin again
Everything glows
The scaled surface scrubbed
Pumice raw
Sand devils scuttle cross sun-blind fields
Cracked crust, thistles, bleached bone, tumbleweeds

Make the language larger
Make the hair stand up
On the back of my neck

How did the world not see me?
The biggest invisible thing in the room
Fine with it, till now
God as my witness
I will make a mighty splash
Before I jump
Jump
Out of my skin

rbb 2004 all rights reserved

Effective Dreaming

2010-05-18T21:42:00.001-04:00

by Riccardo Berra
(c) Apostrophe/Riccardo All rights reserved

“Welcome to the Nepthys Institute for Advanced Chronotherapeutics … Mr. Jack Fischer. I am Hovington Lee your intake coordinator, and I am here to assist in collecting your intake history. Before we begin, do you have a timepiece in your possession?”

“No,” I type.

“Please place any timepiece in one of the certified possession pouches on your left.”

“Fuckin’ already said, I ain’t got one!” I shout. I don’t type. The screen in my lap flickers and resets.

“Welcome to the Nepthys Institute for Advanced Chronotherapeutics … Mr. Jack Fischer. I am Hovington Lee your intake coordinator, and I am here to assist in collecting your intake history. Please follow the prompts on the NetPad and when you are finished with each page, press submit to update your chart. Press the call button if you need further help or explanation. When you have completed the questionnaire, press “Submit Final” and your chronotherapist will escort you to the sleep study suite.”

Thank you Miss Hovington fucking Lee. Twenty percent of the good citizens of this formerly good country are good and unemployed. A swank joint like this should pop for a flesh and blood receptionist instead of a Virtual.

When you called yesterday I thought we were having a real conversation. Fool me once. Not that it’s all your doing. My addiction counselor warned I’d lose all sense of time and what did she call them, certain “social radar skills.” Two handy little fuck-you bonuses of Nex tox. A watch becomes your new best friend. Your old best friends go away. Chronic insomnia—yup, that’s the third bonus.

You’re cute Hovington and I’d love to get cozy and tell you a happy tale. I suspect this won’t be it. The guy don't always get the girl and honor between men always plays second fiddle to lust for a woman. But I’m getting a bit ahead.

Why don’t I start with the Departmental Healthy Audit that flagged my insomnia. Yeah, insomnia. I ain’t shitting. Not so long ago it was a lifestyle, not a medical condition and certainly not some broke-dick TMC (treatment-mandated condition). Mind, nobody forces you to do nothing in the CivDiv, but if you don’t seek treatment in six months or you do but you don’t get cured in 5 years, then you get dunked in the “Unhealthy Pool.” That’s no pool you want to swim in these days. Insurance pays for everything until you’re Unhealthy 10 years. Then they ship you to the Chronic Pool and drain the water. Essentially they pay for you to die. So what the fuck?

It sucks being an “Unhealthy.” Tossing and turning all night, never zoning before 4, 5 in the a.m. There are days when the only thing gets me out of bed is the promise of a cup of black joe and a contraband smoke. Don’t help none always being late for work—walking around, day in day out, like a zombie. But I ain’t gonna get frog-marched into something that’s gonna drug-fuck my head. Seen enough of that. I don’t trust them and their designer pills no more. Last year, a guy I sorta know in router maintenance got a script for a new monoclonal impotence patch and now he has some rare dick cancer. His po sprouted two extra inches overnight and stays rock hard twenty-four seven. Until they cut it off next week. Ain’t near as funny as it sounds. Poor Unhealthy fuck.

Your flier promised “Return to Healthy—A Drug-free Choice! Hovington, baby I’m all for choice. I just don’t know how you fit all that on a NetPad. No use delaying the main event.
“Mr. Fischer? Mr. Jack Fischer?”

“None but!”

“I’m Assistant Chief Clinical Chronotherapist Anka Galeneski, Mr. Fischer. Welcome to Nepthys.”

She takes the NetPad from me and motions cute as a bell, for me to follow. She’s a right easy one to follow. Shoulder-length, wavy red hair, bright as a copper penny in a money museum. 5’2”, maybe 5’3”, low-cut peasant blouse, pale creamy tits, a hint of curvy thighs and long pale legs peek out from under her tight Nepthys-blue labcoat. Something to hold onto. Thirty, maybe thirty-five. Nice tight, little package. Natural red? Only one way to tell. Something to dream about tonight. So we head devil may do down this narrow hallway lit like the Space Station. One side is covered by a large smoked-glass window. Control room I’m figuring. The other side, six frosted-glass doors lead to darkened rooms.

I peek in the control room door as we pass. One wall, floor to ceiling racked cloud blades. The other a bank of fancy monitors, scopes and controls face plush chairs designed for long nights staring at bright displays. I did plenty ass-duty in Mili-Cloud C4I rooms just like this. She opens the last door on the right and lights go on. It’s hotel-swank, with a queen bed, a large vidscreen and a cluster of dim lights and gadgets recessed into burnished plexiwood. An old-style green marblelite bathroom says come hither big boy. The light here is soft and supposed to be soothing. It reminds me of desert sunsets in the Saud.

“So, doc, I’m curious here. Hovington Lee? She still here?”

“Who? Oh, no, She was uh, before my time. Let’s get you ready for bed, Mr. Fischer. You may change in the bathroom and when you’re ready, come out and we’ll go over the procedure. We want you to feel comfortable, so follow your typical nightly routine. We’ll hook up your leads and then it’s off to the races.”

“I usually take a shower. You know, to relax.” I’m eying that fancy bathroom real hard. “That’s my … routine.”

“Fine. People love our showers. Take as long as you want. We also have a small library of Health Department-approved stim-disks and uh, literature to help you relax.”

“I ain’t one for reading in the shower doc.” I lie.

“It’s important you do whatever you routinely do in order to relax.”

Is it my imagination, or did she just eyeball me? My routine, lady? After another long day on the shit billet, I hit the Minibodega 222 for two Beefclone burgers, a Veg Shake and coco-flax bars. I cop a pack of Doobs or Jays and rib the ancient counter geez that these were cheaper when they were illegal. He’s actually old enough to remember illegal weed. He tells me get the fuck out his store through a blowhole in his throat. So I come home. I eat. I smoke what I got. I surf. I start my pathetic dry shower with a few minutes of neurostim Virtual Ass Protégé 666. A good clean-jerk or two and I’m fit to hit the sack.

The Surgeon General herself says natural flogging is safer than neurostim and essential to a Healthy-American lifestyle. She don’t say how oft she do, but she do so I do too. Caught her weekly special on public overtube three nights ago. She said it won’t break or fall off, though Lord knows I’ve tried. She says all Americans have the fundamental right to be Healthy. Now that got me kinda dew-eyed and such, until she started in about some 20 year NIH sex extension megastudy funded by the stim industry. Ain’t science grand? Especially when it sucks the pos of politicos.

Yeah, run it up the flagpole. I’m a patriotic American who stays very healthy that way. Sure takes the nightly sting out of sleeping solo the last year. Except, I ain't been sleeping. Not more than two-three hours a night and it’s killing me. Slowly, but it is and I feel it.

Pre-Saud, I was mister easy breezy. Popular, sensitive, likeable Jack. No bite by nobody. But that’s a long time gone and enough spilled milk to start a dairy. Be that as it may or may not, I’m sure as shit not gonna let this lady Bones see me browsing whatever US Grade A “shower lit” they have on file. The bed has at least one vidcam trained on it and I’ll be wired for sound so any working the bolt is in privato thank you. Ain’t too particular about being watched.

So, I hit the head and strip my skivvies. Then I see it. Oh fucking Jesus, Mary and Joseph on a pogo stick. They have real water showers here with pre-restriction showerheads! Boo yah! None of this Auqua-thority antiseptic mist bullshit. Ever since the Global Drought Declaration a good bath ain’t what it used to be. You smell bodies the way bodies really smell. A good nose knows if the chickichita planted next to you in the El got fucked last night and up which hole. It don’t matter what you use to mask it hon, only the super rich get to wash away their tracks.

The soap smells sweet and flowery, lavender, I’m guessing, and the hot water, glorious fucking free water actually stings as it bounces off my face and back. It’s a damned shame you gotta get admitted to some weird-ass dream clinic to get a water shower. I close my eyes and soap up my chest and as the foam slides down my belly I grab my cock and begin to work it hard.

I start to worry about taking too long. Has it been ten minutes or a half hour? No watch, no way to tell. And no doubt Dr. Anka in her control room is timing me.

I relax and think about Dr. Anka. Her slipping into this green bathroom, peeling off her dark blue labcoat. Mumbling some excuse to be here as she unbuttons her blouse. The bra matches the labcoat except it's lacy and slutty. She unhooks it. Ripe to bursting, twin berry nips pop out as it falls off her chest. Dreamy 36 C’s sway free as she unhooks the tight mini I knew was getting busy under all that sexless doctor-civvies. She pulls down her blue panties and yeah, a nice full, carrot bush, just like up top, all natural all the way this one. Maybe she’s the intellectual sort, but once you get the clothes off, it’s all the same. A lady doctor’s lips fit a Jarhead’s stiffer just as easily as a desert queen’s. Flesh is flesh. The bod is built for sin and I’m a sinful guy. Boo yah.

She slips in behind me and scratches my back with cat-woman nails that bite and leave a trail, but her soapy tits are pillow-soft as they press into my back. The clock’s ticking. No time for formalities or foreplay. I do a reach-behind and grab a glorious handful of furburger before I spin her around and pin her up against the slick tile wall. Water pours down her back in ribbons as I line my soapy soldier up to her puckered pink eye and frog-march to the breech. She screams out in pain or pleasure, I know or care not. It’s by my leave to spike that quivering ass. It makes sloppy wet, smacking sounds as she takes me to the hilt, as she milks me, as my balls slip slap the loose berry lips of that dribbling red-beard puss. In a blur my po jerks and vittles the wall with ropes of come which the water pulls down the drain as fast as it pumps out of me.

I turn off the shower and towel myself dry. I still got that half-tight ball-ache that says with a little more of that sweet-smelling soap cream and my fertile imagination, I could go again in minutes. But there’s the real Dr. Anka on the other side with her stopwatch. And me, with no real sense of time. Steam rises off my red skin and steam fills the bathroom. I’m about as relaxed as I’ll ever get in a place like this. Everything—head to po—is whistle clean. Nothing beats an old-fashioned hot water shower.

"Mr. Fischer." Her voice punches through the steam like she’s right here. I didn't see no com. "Mr. Fischer?"

"You can’t see in here, can you Dr. Galeneski?"

"Ha! No. Mr. Fischer."

"Well if you could, you’d get a treat Dr. Galeneski."

"Everything okay?"

"Jest fine thank you."

"I’m … I’m sorry to disturb you. Take your time. And call me Anka, please."

“Okay Anka. Didn’t mean to lollygag.”

I present myself for inspection, scrubbed, apple-cheeked and in my camo-jammies. She enters my room, NetPad in hand.

"I’m sorry Jack, I didn’t mean to hurry you, but there’s a lot to do this first night."

"I was just finishing up."

"Why don’t you hop into bed?"

How's that for an invite? I tuck into the bunk, nice and comfy. She’s close enough to smell my shower-scrubbed skin. I hope she likes it. She seems to. Maybe it’s my imagination but I’d bet my left nut she copped a butt before our session. Tobacco is illegal and its addiction is another TMC but I don’t care how Unhealthy it is. Together female skin and tobacco smell like slutty sex. She shows me three telemetry patches and tells how they’re wireless neuro-sponders that will link me to the Sleep Center’s Cirrus system. One for my left temple. The other on my right. The third goes over my heart. I’m only half-attending the chatter because as she bends to plays pin the transponder on Jack, I acquire a full-face 180 downblouse. No righteous leatherneck could pass by without a sharp salute.

The two patches on my head go cold for an instant. It’s weird and I’m about to ask what’s what when she holds up a fourth black object. My jaw drops.

“Is that what I think it is?” I think it’s a cock ring.

“This is a penile plethysmograph or PPG. Sexual arousal occurs regularly during REM sleep. Nepthys research has shown that by measuring sexual arousal during REM and comparing it to your brain waves, that we locate the right moment to implant the MILD trigger.”

“MILD trigger?”

“I’ll explain after you place this at the base of your penis. Roll it down as far as it will go. I can step out if you’d feel more comfortable.”

She’s anything but comfortable. Her cheeks are flushed and she’s not quite meeting my eye. Maybe she knows about the bathroom after all.

“No need m’am,” I flash my toothiest smile and slip the cock ring PP- thingy in place. “See? Done.”

She sits by the bedside, opens her NetPad and starts taking notes. When she crosses her legs the labcoat falls open, revealing a tight mini. Just like I imagined it. She blushes and recrosses those tight little legs of hers. Was this too a show for my benefit? She’s working one foot like … I don’t know, I used to think I’m good at reading women’s signals but mine is the minority report.

"Is it okay if I call you Jack?"

"Seems like we’re on mighty informal terms already doc. I got no problem with it. I’m just not sure why."

"It’s simple. You suffer from Core Insomnia Syndrome secondary to nokexamine withdrawal. Our goal is to get you into a regular pattern of sleep. The most common cure for your condition involves light therapy, pscychocircadian D and melatonin dosing."

"No drugs!"

"Right. Nokexamine addiction therapy disqualifies you for psychochronoceuticals. But we have a solution for you. You needn’t feel ashamed anymore."

"Who says I am? I ain’t ashamed. I served my country. Devil Dog D Gyrenes. Sub-Saharan and Balkan Water Uprisings, Saudi Jihadi. Three tours."

"You’re highly decorated. You saw action."

"Some. It warn’t pretty. Don’t expect me to chit chat about icing hajis."

“I don’t honey. I have brothers just like you.”

Did she just call me honey? That’s gotta break protocol, but I don’t let on. I just eye her up and down before I say my next piece.

“Then maybe you heard they handed out Nex with our bag nasties in the Saud. Command told us it was like coffee in pill form. Performance enhancer. And it is. Pop a Nex and everything goes sharper, warmer, brighter. You go 72 hours without sleep. You can run, kill and fuck like the devil. My old battle buddy Toffer used to call ‘God-high.’ But there’s this little unfortunate side effect they don’t paste on the label. Forty percent of us got addicted, bad addicted. When I couldn't kick, they pulled my chevron and medicaled me. So I had to kick civi-style. I tried it on my own for awhile, then six months in voluntary lockdown. Shaved a deuce off my life all told and ever since, I keep military time. Life’s a big green weenie. Boohoo me.”

"Jack, we respect your treatment modality choice. Nepthys research shows that Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreams or MILDs are as effective as psychochronoceuticals against core insomnia, sleep disturbances and many waking phobias. Our goal is to implant the MILD at just the right moment in your REM cycle. We isolate that moment by overlaying the EEG and the PPG to locate a suggestibility trough. A small packet of RF data is transmitted. Ninety percent of the time this immediately triggers an effective dream. These dreams are incredibly vivid and lifelike, but you’ll be aware that you’re dreaming. In this dream, you will go to sleep at midnight and awaken eight hours later, totally refreshed. We will train your body to have this dream these next three nights. By the end of the third session your dream will teach your body to follow suit. Stop me if you don’t understand anything."

“I read the brochure. I pulled two and a half in Neurospatial-Ops. Thas squad telemetry Missy. So I ain’t jest a dumb hillbilly. I got la-yuhs.” I dropped a dollop of snarl in my shugah jest for her sake.

“Forgive me Jack. But it's a lot of complex information and the privacy laws demand oral consent.” Her face is beety and I feel turdy laying it on so thick.

“No offense taken.”

"Good. In order to find the right trough, we need to create a suggestion cascade. This is where Dr. Nathalien Nirs was so brilliant Jack. His research showed that simple talk therapy prior to sleep initialized the cascade most effectively. Which means, you, me, talking, creating a mindset of relaxation and suggestibility. We find the trough this first night. Once we lock in on it and record its event signature we can zoom right to it on the successive nights and re-implant the dream trigger with great precision. You dream effective dreams three nights running. By the third night, you’re cured."

“I’m all for that. So my MILD, whatever is that I’m going to just fall asleep at midnight and wake up eight hours later. I dream it up all by myself. It’s that simple?

“Basically, yes.”

“Does your implant thingy tell me what to dream?”

“No, the MILD data stream initiates the dream bed and triggers the sequence, but your own brain fills in the specifics.”

“And you vidcam my dream?”

“No. We can't. Privacy laws prohibit it. You’ve only consented to an implant. Your dream stream stays unfiltered and encrypted unless you consent to analysis.”

“Okay. For the sake of non-argument, let’s say I understand and I’m good to go?”

“Then I’d say the informed consent part of tonight’s discussion is over. So if you initial here. And here—please.”

She seems a mite jumpy as I thumbsign and hand her back her NetPad. It wouldn’t hurt to mix it up a little. Just to keep it light.

“You don’t know what you’re in for,” I tease.

“How so?”

“Chewin’ the fat with a wordclass insomniac. All night’s the going rate.”

“That’s no problem.”

“You might need to take a smoke break, doc.” Her cheeks flush like I knew they would. Gotcha cutie!

“That’s no problem.”

“I might need to. Hell, you said whatever. Whatever it takes me to relax. Right?”

“You want one?”

"Now?"

"Sure."

"Got Marlborough?” I ask desperate hopeful. “Lights will do.”

Her nose wrinkles in cute disgust as she produces a crumpled pack of Frenchie-G’s from her labcoat. I guess even doctors can’t contraband the prize American smokes. The exact day this country went straight to hell was when I was sixteen. Congress outlawed domestic tobacco production in a splashy clusterfuck of politicos, media and anti-smoke holios. She turns on an exhaust vent near the bed and slides a buttcan joe mug between us. We both light up. I take it deep—all the way down. The familiar burn in all its dizzy splendor—as good as the second coming. It's like highschool again, sneaking butts, venting illegal smoke to stay one step ahead of the XO. Fuck weed, it’s been six months since my last cigarette and it is ultra bravo zulu.

“Vive le France!” I say pointing my cig at her. “Your nickel doc.”

“Let’s talk about you and your life. The more personal, the better. No holds barred.”

“No holds, huh? Roger that. So where to start? Ex-Marine. Daylighting in Civi-Cloud services. Tried eight months to PCS to night shift but there ain’t no openings. So I drag my sorry ass to work at 9:00 in the fuckin a.m. and skate through the rest of my day like a zombie. It’s a job I could do in my sleep, if I ever got any.”

“You have good performance evals. You’re an asset to your Department. Hmm, this says you’re married but separated.”

“Yeah, Darla. We had it going for awhile. But she got tired of me being so, I dunno, demanding? Unpleasant? Restless? You pick the word.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Let me ask a question. Is there a Mr. Doctor Galeneski?”

“Galeneski’s my maiden name.”

“He ain’t in the picture?

“No, I got a restraining order against him. He’s not a nice person.”

"He hit you and shit?"

“He’s a dangerous, unstable man.” Fear flashes in her running lights as she brushes her hair. She much don’t like this line of talk, but she’s the one pitched this tent. I’m sympathetic. I guess you don’t have to be a blue-collar grunt to get in the shit.

“That sucks Anka. No woman should ever be afraid of a man. Darla and I got into it all the time, but I never, y’know.”

“There is a domestic abuse complaint on record, Jack.”

“Damn it! I already said … Look, I threatened her. But I never actually. I know what this sounds like.”

"Do you blame your combat experience or your Nex addiction for your outbursts?"

“I blame Dar-la for being a two-faced cunt. This is so fucked. I never hit her. I raised my fist once. But I never!” I’m shaking now. Fear, guilt, rage. I never know anymore how or why I’ll respond to things. Shit just hits me and my emotions go twistier than a pross in a cockhouse. And I do blame the Nex for that, but ain’t about to give her the satisfaction. I shut my yap and eyeball her till she looks down at her pad again.

“Ok, I believe you.”

“Now, I don’t believe you. But I bet this wireless shit you got on me can tell if I’m telling the truth.”

“If we ran the filter. Nepthys polygraphic filtering became court admissible five years ago. It’s how we finance our pro bono research in chronotherapy.”

“So run your fuckin filter doc, I’m telling it square.”

"That won’t be necessary for our session. I said I believe you."

A man can only stay surly with such a pretty bird for so long. As the evening wears on, the tension lets up a click. She’s actually easy to talk to. We chat this and that til … I don’t know because I ain’t got no fucking watch and no clock or digital display of any sort here. Don’t matter. You know that thing when you’re on a long trip and you strike up a good conversation and somehow it just keeps getting better. At some point in the trip something clicks and clicks again you’re surprised to realize you’ve made a friend. It don’t happen much since the Nex—which is what makes it kinda special.

When I first met her, I’m thinking she’s all hot bod and great brains, some rich fuck like Dr. Nathalien Nirs’ trophy piece and so totally out of my pay grade. Could be I was wrong. She’s really kind of humble and funny and sweet and as unhappy about her life as I am mine. We got shit in common.

I got this theory. I read somewhere that women go into overdrive in their 30’s. I know enough chicks, prudes in their twenties, turned fuck meat sluts when they hit the big 30. My theory is that that’s when a girl decides what kind of man gonna put the bun in their oven. It’s female biology. And it ain’t the female brain that does the deciding. It’s the female oven. I don’t share my theory with Dr. Anka Galeneski. Instead I tell her about Da and Dar.

The old man was an All-America body-builder. Wall full of medals and trophies. At 6’4’’ he was the 360-pound, 25-year-older version of me. Metaroided to the max. He liked to spin stories about the scams lifters pulled to hide their metaroid use. Clone bladder implants. Blood scrubs. All this before the GAC finally woke up and dropped the roid ban good and proper. Now you won’t find an athlete who doesn’t stoke. Just wouldn’t be competitive. The old man retired to become one of the first Roid Trainer. When I was shorty he was raking piles of credits whipping up muscle cocktails till FDA contractors raided him on some bullshit charge. They pack him off to Sing Sing U for 10 and he do 2. While he’s in stir, one of those alphabet soup pharmcos stole his Metaroid cocktail. They dressed it up for their own and they hit the six billion dollar jackpot. He got squat. And he warn’t real happy bout that.

Going in he was a cruel evil sonofabitch and coming out he was a cruel evil broke-ass sonofabitch who got his kicks fucking with me. I was a kid, 15, a tight little package of a man. I lived with Ma until she couldn’t handle me anymore, then she shipped me to him. Served me good and right. He came home from fight club drunk, calling me night owl pussy boy and tunt face and Gaylord and for fun would bitch-slap me until I’d get good and blubbery mad. Couple of times I lost it and came at him, all rage and tears, like a pitiful baby, couldn’t see a damned thing for all the water in my eyes, just flapping my arms at the turd and he’d just cold-cock me. He thought it the funniest damned thing.

Right up to the day he kicked this year, he showed all fit and foxy, I have to admit, handsome for an old fuck. Now we know if they’d a opened him up they’d a knowed what I knowed instinctual. That he was rotten inside out.

Dar and I’d made our annual New Year’s drop on him. It was the most either of us could tolerate the old fuck. We’re not there twenty minutes and of course he’s shit-faced and running his piehole.

“Y’know,” he said, his voice as slurry sloppy as the GM wood brandy sloshing all over his grimy teeshirt, “Darla there’s sitting on her biological clock. Ticky tocky boom boom! It’ll turn into a time bomb. Whatcha say there, Mizz Darla? You and my little gaylord gonna make me a pap. Or ain’t he man enough to plant a seed in your little pod? You come on over here to Da. Let me feel it.”

Darla slinked over and slapped the old man in the face. He roared and tried to grab her titty. He was still choke-laughing as we were out the door. Family happy hour over. Funny, now I recall how, she didn’t really hit him that hard. Not as hard as she might’ve. The pissed off looked for show. And something behind it. Maybe I’m just whistling Dixie, but something was different between the two of them after that night. Never did put my finger on it, but I always kept one eye on Darla ever since.

All this I spill to Anka. Listening, nodding, she just sits and takes it in. Is it minutes, is it hours, we talk into the night? She excuses herself a couple times. First to use the john. Then to check on my telemetry. She’s back and we continue our chitchat. Then she leaves again and it seems she’s away longer than before. There’s no clock in here and I can’t tell what time it is. I lie awake as I do every night, staring at the ceiling. She’s gone maybe a half hour.

When she returns she’s different somehow. Her eyes. The way she carries herself. She stares at me through the dark. She’s not even holding her NetPad.

“Pleasant dreams, Jack.”

“I ain’t asleep, if you’re wondering.”

She moves closer to the bed. She stands over me with a strange questioning look in her eyes and I say “Anka?” and in answer she bends slowly over me those auburn tresses the first part of her to touch me tickling my temples as her plump lips settle over mine and I taste the sour burnt leaf taste of crappy French tobacco and sweet breath mints on her tongue.

I'm a normal guy and I don't think its normal for anybody to go a year without getting any.
Sureo at first, I was feeling cocky having this smart, sexy woman paying more mind to me than any bird has for a month of Sundays. My fantasies about her been running hot and wild all evening, but now with her perched over me so close I feel her breath on my eyelids, I get kinda gut-twisted. Why pay me any more mind than a hole in the wall?

"Why?" It’s all I can ask.

The only answer she gives is to kiss me again and this time all I taste is the sweet juiciness of a woman's mouth. I can't describe how it makes me feel.

“You must lie quietly,” she orders. “It will fool the transponders.”

“Won't they uh pick up and uh activity?”

“They'll record a masturbation sequence" she giggles. “Totally normal. As long as you let me do everything.”

So I do. I don't even squirm as she kisses me again.

And I don't move a muscle as she slips her blouse over her head or even when she unhooks the sexy bra that's just as I imagined it or even when I get an eyeful of those juicy tits that brush over my chin.

I'm a lying sack if I say no muscles move when she unhooks her skirt and it drops to the floor. One muscle’s twitchin to beat the band as she turns to show me her sweet pear ass and slides them little lacy panties all the way down her luscious legs. It’s driving me to distraction.

“A little light,” I beg all breathless at what’s about to happen next. “You are so beautiful. I want to see you.” What I want is to know the truth. Natural or not? I’m betting yes. “Lights up,” I order and the room complies.

“Lights out,” she barks and the room goes dark.

“Compromise,” I beg and she smiles as she climbs on deck and brings the lights up just enough for me to make out that I am right. She slides the covers down and grabs my po like she’s trained to handle it professionally. It don’t take this one much. She's the doc and I'm the grunt whose body's forgot what the body of a woman who wants you feels like. Anka mounts me and gives me my education. Her strange sad eyes meet mine again as she cocks her knee and places my po at the gate of her heavenly tunny. She sinks down, oh so slow and sweet and sad until I’m wetware to the hilt inside her all the while praying fast and furious, Je-Sus, don’t let me come in ten seconds. Make it last Looord, please make me last.

Slowly, slowly up she slides. Slowly, slowly down she pushes. There’s no hurry to this. Buried in her, I wonder as I have once or twice, what it feels like to have something living squirming inside you that ain’t you. I ain’t no homie or psychotherapist but once or twice in a pinch, I think to put myself in the mind of the woman, feeling what this feels like to have a pulsing, warm, man-thing nestled up in you. Does her love tunnel feel its exact shape or just the general feeling being stuffed full? Can she tell that I dress left? That I’m circumcised? Is my tip ringing her bell? Is she imagining what my kids would look like? Is she getting all crazy gooey emotional like I am or is this just another night’s adventure fuck at Nepthys?

Up and down she slides, pretty as you please, no bounce, just slide, the long slippery sloppery music we’re making like Beethoven’s glorious Fifth for po and tunny. Oh my droogy paws desperate to get busy too, grab for the squeezable pillow mounds wagging soft circles right in my face, but when I do, she pulls my grabbers away and pins me down.

“You must lie still,” she commands. With a few extra breaths thrown in for good measure, she picks up the pace.

Yes m’am. I’m puffing like a six pack smoker myself. I ain’t praying, I ain’t thinking and now I ain’t even breathing. I’m just a few seconds from my own personal big bang theory and all my matter has compressed to the tiny couple square inches at my throbbing po-tip.

She’s hopping like a piston now, grunting, groaning, breathing doubletime and Lord I see her come, cause she bites her lower lip and lets out this sweet little squeal like a mouse in a trap and I feel her come, cause her tunny clamps my po like a flesh crescent wrench with waters spraying all around. I’m about to loose this mighty rebel yell, but her hand clamps down on my mouth and even it tastes like cigarette. I lick it to show my appreciation as my hose sprays like it’s stuck on open.

“Pleasant dreams, Jack.”

Next I know, morning and Anka brighten my doorway. I give her this megawatt smile and she returns it.

“Congratulations soldier” she chimes. Eight o’clock on the dot. Excellent first night result. How do you feel?”

“Zillion credits m’am,” I say and I do. I can’t ever remember feeling better than I do right this moment. No tossing, no turning, no heavy weight pressing my chest as I bounce out of bed shiny as a new solarcar. I’m actually looking forward to work.

She’s busy making fussy little notes and I keep waiting for her to drop something about last night. Maybe she’s regretting what we shared, but I sure as hell ain’t. Didn’t do much second-guessing when she was riding the pony. I ain’t expecting love poetry and a blowjob, but something. Anything.

“Is there anything else you want to y’know ask me?”

“Mmm, can’t think of anything. You went out at twelve and got up at eight. It’s as good a result as you can wish for. Did you have a good dream?”

Now hold the fort. I’m sure I catch a twinkle in her eye, so I play foxy too. “Fiddler's Green,” I say, “the abso-tuttin’ best.”

“That’s wonderful Jack. Get dressed and we’ll see each other at 10 tonight. Have an excellent day, Jack.”

“You too, Anka.”

Didn’t go exactly the way I expected but no mas, hoss. Tonight, as they say is another night. Leaving the Sleep Center for work, the day is warm and promises to be warmer. The sky is so generous uncloudy blue it hurts my eyes—a good hurt. Work goes okay except I gotta wade through a gagglefuck of skylarkers who “want to know how I’m feeling.” The spots on my head from the telemetry patches have been itching like crazy all day. I can’t wait to get back to the land of dreams.

“How was your day Jack?” She’s still playing coy?

"Passable Anka, how was yours?"

“It went well, but I slept poorly. I guess I’m a poor advert for this place.”

She laughed her so pretty kinda sad smile-laugh which I’m just drinking up; appreciating why I’m so eager beaver to be back here. Affairs of the heart end badly, despite our best intentions. If life with Dar taught me anything, it was that. So I’m a fool to be falling again as the song goes. So I’m a fool.

“Jack, Dr. Pennister is going to manage your session tonight. He’s my research associate. I’m sorry, but something’s come up. I’ll check in on you later.” She’s practically out the door before I catch her with a desperate question.

“Am I going to have to talk with him?”

“No, remember, we have your trigger set. It goes off at 12:00 and you will too. “

“You’ll look in on me?”

“Promise.”

“Then I’ll look forward to it.” Like that she’s gone. My dream date. Gone.

“I’m Dave Pennister Jack. Let’s get your leads on. Have any questions?”

“Well Dave, where the patches were last night, it’s kinda itchy. Can you move them a little?”

“We can give you something to numb the contact spots Jack, but the placement has to be identical, all three nights.”

He sprays something a little cold, could be Freon for all I know and it takes the itch down I guess. It’s not the same without her. I videe. I read manga-stim. Bored from my gourd my eyes get heavy and the room senses I want lights out and down they go. Seems an eternity passes before Pennister checks in on com. I’m dying to ask him about Anka, but I know I shouldn’t. So we make a few minutes of chit chat. Sports, politics, the sort of talk a guy who thinks he’s better than you makes when he wants to prove he’s still one of the grunts. Something in my voice must show I’m getting tired of his bullshit, cause after a long pause, he calls out, apropos of nothing, “Pleasant dreams, Jack.”

I wake up to a sharp bang. Sounds like glass shattering. There’s yelling in the control room and I hear a heavy thump that pegs my pucker meter.

“Dr. Pennister, I call out. “Dr. Pennister?” The guy who barrel-asses through my doorway is not Dr. Dave Pennister. He’s near seven foot, masked, head-to-toe black leatherette swinging a baseball bat. His first blow lands on my ankle and I scream. His next blow lands on my head and the scream in my throat dies in a hail of stars.

When morning comes and nobody is more surprised at this than I am, Anka is standing over my bed. I jump up all squirrelly and it takes a few moments before I’m calm enough to tell her about what happened. As I do I study her eyes. Their worried look tells me more than I want to know.

“Jack, it’s rare, but we’ve seen a couple of cases like yours.”

“Cases like mine? What the fuck does that mean Anka?

“An effective, lucid dream, followed by a lucid nightmare. As I said, it’s rare and it’s terrifying when it happens, but it’s behind you. I doubt it will recur. We can give you a mild sedative tonight. It may help.”

“No fucking drugs!” I shout.

“We don’t really need to.”

“I’ll tell you what I really need.” I wag my finger, beckon her closer so the com won’t pick up what I’m gonna say. Just in case Pennister or somebody else is listening in. “What I really need is for you to kiss me, like the night before.”

She jerks away. Her face flattens, she don't say nothing and her eyes flutter all kinda crazy and she hightails the room in a right hurry. I shouldn’t a said what I did, but ain't it high time? Guess I figured wrong. Whatever’s left to be said or unsaid, is over. I’ve nothing to do other than get dressed and leave for work.

My third night passes quiet. In my dream, I walk down a long, long corridor. It seems to go on forever, but it ain’t unpleasant. I enjoy the quiet. A little prick of light far in the distance keeps drawing me. Every step I take makes a click. Like tapshoes. Every click sets a beat to my heart. It is a good rhythm and it gets stronger as I get closer. Everything about it feels right. One foot in front of the next, I approach the spot of light which looks now to be a rectangle-outline of a door. It is a door and behind this door is something amazing.

I awake refreshed. It’s revelry in America. On the overtube, the new instant census figures say unemployment jumped to 25% in the last two months. Two hundred Virtuals joined the Teamsters Union and there’s actually a Virtual candidate for union president. I’m so happy I have work, even boring work I can do in my sleep. Water riots killed fifty illegals on LA Island. All of Lalaland is under martial clampdown. Yesterday roboscientists on Hellas Prime isolated a 60 million year old super-bacteria in the Martian southern icecap. They’re bringing the baby Mars bug to Earth for a big celebration. Happy Birthday little guy. We are not alone.

On a personal front, Darla is six months along. She’s begging to come back, but I don’t much like that idea. I’d bet my left nut I’m not the da, but with my da gone, who’d claim kin to the poor little bastard? Ain’t his fault to be born Unhealthy. Ain’t sure I’m ready for this, but the idea sorta sneaks up on me of a little recruit to carry on my mission when I’m gone. Somewheres something I heard hits the nail on the head. Most people, live lives of quiet desperation. But I’m not most people, am I? I ain’t like anybody else.

Last night I got in late and there were messages waiting. I played them back. The last one 12:02 was from Anka. Odd that she would call so late but she decrypted my dreams--strictly off protocol. Something told me she would. She needs to arrange a follow-up interview for the insurance. Her say-so will reassign me back to the Healthy Pool again.

Healthy at last! Booyah.

She mumbled something else about coming over to share some advanced dream catching technology. She said “Pleasant dreams, Jack” and there was a click. Was her voice hot and flirty or is it just sunspot flare on the network? When I woke up this morning, first thing I did was play the messages back and all but hers was there. Did I erase it before I conked out? Is she the real deal, or just another Hovington Lee? Tell you something, it don’t much matter. The dreams of the night time will vanish by dawn.

See, what I didn’t say is in my third dream, I opened it. Probably shouldn’t of peeked behind that door. Because what I saw there terrified me. If you had any sense, it would terrify you too. But after all these years of head-grinding insomnia, 12 on the dot I drop like a stone and I’m up at O-dark thirty, chirping like a baby birdie. I threw away my watch. It’s all inside now.

Day in, day out, reset and re-tuned, I am the Lord of Dream’s finest instrument. I work hard, sleep deep, and rise bright and eager to do his bidding. Drink in your summer, gather your corn. Time, so they say, waits for no man.

Circe

2010-03-24T14:54:00.001-04:00

© 2010 Apostrophe Productions, Riccardo Berra

I have not slept. Not well. Not in a fortnight. Ever since I completed the translation I’ve been plagued by dreams of death and loss. There are other even darker insinuations in these dreams—images and emotions I have no words for. As to the manuscript itself; I am only its translator. I have no other stake in it. I wish for no other stake. I found it cleaning in the attic of my grandmother, who lived to an incredible old age. As her last surviving heir, it fell to me to settle her strange estate when she passed. It was not a task I asked for or willingly accepted, but when I first discovered the manuscript, I was excited. Now, its mere presence unsettles me in ways I cannot explain. It belongs in a museum or in the hands of a private collector. Somebody else will need to take possession and to determine its authenticity. I wouldn’t know where to begin. I only know that the sooner it leaves my sight, the happier I’ll be. Then, perhaps I will be able to sleep again.

If you are reading this, you have come to an accursed place and I pity you. By the grace of God, Almighty, whose succor I desire but have scant hopes of obtaining in this world or the next, I deliver unto you this exhortation. Desist you investigations now, carefully rewrap this journal in the oilskin you extracted it from and secure it as you found it, as warning to the next poor soul. Then, by all you find holy, flee this accursed cave by any means you can. For surely if you do not or can not, you will come to a most unspeakable and damnable end.

My name is Juan Sancho Xavier de Silva III and I was born in the Spanish colony of La Isla Española in the Year of Our Lord 1589. My parents were coffee and cane planters whose modest plantation was worked by Taíno slaves father had purchased in Santo Domingo. Our slaves were for the largest part well-treated by me, my father Juan Sancho Xavier de Silva II and my virtuous mother, Catherina Núñez Balboa de Silva. God rest her soul.

Mother claimed direct kindred with the famed explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa and I know now that she was the only earthly woman who ever loved me, this educated gentlewoman who suckled me at her breasts and held me in her warm lap, at whose sweet knee I learned the genteel arts of scholarship, plant and animal lore and the service of the Almighty. Through mother’s line, seafaring, the exploration of new worlds is in my blood, yet I was content to be the son of a farmer until my father’s melancholia drove him to an act so despicable that it took from me everything I held dear.

Father’s decline was rumored to have sprung from a curse laid upon his head by a powerful Taíno houngan whose son expired while in service to my family’s estate. Though we beat them infrequently, fed them well and quartered them in cleanliness and relative comfort, we had much difficulty in keeping workers. Many fell ill and died of fever spells and shaking sickness, oft within days of being brought into our service. Many of our fellow planters had similar difficulty in keeping slaves due to the shaking illness the dark ones were prone to. My mother, saints preserve her and Redeemer take pity on her blameless soul, claimed it was the Almighty’s way of chastising our congress with the dusky races. Whatever the truth of the plague that culled the Taíno as we harvested the stocks of cane, whatever the truth of the witchdoctor’s dark medicine, the truth of my father’s pathologia is that it preceded the unfortunate death of the young slave by decades. Like the moon, that waxes and wanes with the passing of days, my father’s cyclic humors drove him at times to his bed where he would cower for weeks, refusing nourishment, companionship and the ministrations of my gentle mother and myself. Then like the moon, he’d spring forth in full face to run the farm and our family affairs as if Satan rode his back. As I passed into adulthood, these lunar perturbations became more pronounced and bizarre until I came to fear for my mother’s life, as well as my own. Father, when closeted thus, had a demon’s temper and we, his family, bore the full brunt of it.

Three days before my 19th birthday, having returned from Santo Domingo on the eve of Dia de los Muertos, with seed, supplies and new slaves, I approached our family house and found the entrance locked and barred from the inside. My repeated entreaties to my parents bore no response. As my panic rose, I enlisted the help of two field slaves to force the door and thus gain entrance. Seized at once by the direst premonitions, I bad the slaves return to their quarters. Calling loudly as I rushed throughout the house of my youth, where at last to my utter horror, I encountered the lifeless bodies of my mother and Tima, her cooking wench in the kitchen. My mother, a modest woman of devout ways, was naked, sprawled obscenely on the table in unquiet repose. The poor wench, similarly dispatched, was laid by her side, as if some spawn of Satan meant to return and make unholy feast of their wretched flesh. Their bodies bore unmistakable signs of violation and the mottled purple marks about their necks made evident that they’d been cruelly throttled and twisted by powerful fingers. Blinded by grief and horror, my first impulse was to kneel and pray for their souls, but a red rage seized me and sword in hand, I rushed to my father’s chamber, where aside the bed where I was sired, I encountered the wretch huddled in piss and shit, his knees about his chest, rocking and weeping, repeating my mother’s name over and over as if its mere utterance could revoke the foulness of his deed. If he was aware of my presence, he took no more note of me than he did my sword as it entered his heart and ended his wretched existence with a stroke.

It was my turn to loose a terrible cry and I must confess in my rage, that I abandoned my soul and descended into the darkest of thoughts. It was as if my father’s curse had left his body along the conduit of my blade and flowed into my soul. The house now contained three corpses, none whom had made peace with their Maker and all of whom would now find the gates of heaven forever barred against them. I am not a superstitious man, but I knew with certainty that a house with three damned souls was an abomination before the All-Seeing Eye and an accursed place. Thus with no further reservation than lighting a candle, I took a torch from the hearth and starting in my father’s chamber, spread the purifying flames from room to room, creating a conflagration that lit the night sky and took with it, the only woman I’d ever loved and the only place I’d ever called home. Though certain my father was evil and damned for his foul act, I was now seized by the most wracking remorse. I was twice guilty—of patricide and that I’d allowed him no more time to repent his sins, but had dispatched him as expeditiously to Hell as he had dispatched my beloved mother. In the eyes of the Redeemer, was I any better than him? I fear not.

Mounting my dapple mare, with only the clothes on my back and the coin in my purse, I set out for Santo Domingo and rode through the night as if pursued by Beelzebub. As I rode, the sounds of the night taunted me. Be they demons seeking purchase of my soul, brigands seeking my purse or earthly beasts of the forest—I know not which. Upon my return to town, I sought neither food, rest, nor the Confessional, but exchanged my murderous steel for the leatherskin journal you now read. Again, I bid you cease your reading as this tale only becomes more terrible in the telling. If you feel compelled to continue, I entreat you make haste, for time is more fleeting than you can ever imagine.

Never again, I resolved, would I raise a hand to a living creature, even or especially at the cost of my own execrable life. Instead, like Sisyphus with my heavy book pouched constant about my neck I would bear its weight as constant reminder of the weight of my offenses. Where’er I roamed I would fill it with confessions, prayers and entreaties to the Father of All Things. Perhaps at the end of my days, He, upon reading the earnest penance contained therein, would find in His heart the mercy I had denied my own wretch of a father.

Before nightfall I’d booked passage on the first galley I spied in the harbor, the HMS Mary Rose, a stout seaworthy clipper flying the colors of Britannia. Having questioned the master, I discovered that she was laden with stores commissioned through the philanthropy of that land’s ruler queen, Elizabeth Regina and was bound thus for the Jamestown Colony on the great northern island. I cared little for destination, but thought upon landing to secure a good horse and supplies sufficient to travel inland until I encountered no living soul but my own. In forest, field or mountain cave, I cared not which, I would pursue the ascetic path in the vastness of this new territory and perhaps … I truly don’t know. I only knew I couldn’t stay on La Isla Española to see another nightfall.

Four days fair sailing in a stout wind and we put in at Jamestown. Immediately we espied that something was dreadfully amiss. From the moment we set shore, we encountered not one living soul—neither man, nor beast, not even birdsong which had stilled as soon as we entered the compound. The smell of putrefaction and death clung like a thick smoke about the settlement and we dared not enter any of the houses, if one could even call them that. All that remained standing were scarce more than huts, many of these bore signs of burning or violent destruction. Was it my destiny that witchcraft, death and corruption should follow me where’er I roamed? I sank to the ground, and gave vent to my despair.

Despite the blasted and unholy nature of this place, the captain made as to put me off there. Perhaps he took my lamentations as sign that I too had become possessed of the evil that permeated this place, or perhaps his reason was more parsimonious, as I’d only paid for this much of the journey and no more. He made clear his intent to maroon me as I ran along after him, weeping, begging, promising all the gold in my purse, which he took. I believed him then to be the most ungracious and parsimonious of British bastards, for he’d a done this foul deed if I hadn’t emptied my purse at his feet. He agreed, with much suspicion and reprobation to deliver me to Charles Town, where I could embark upon my self-imposed exile.

We repaired back to the ship—the captain and crew to despoil of the ship’s stores which the greedy wretch claimed under writ of maritime law were now at his disposal. The master, a pious seaman who had showed me initial kindness during our passage, counseled that we should lay anchor in the bay and mount search for survivors to distribute the Queen’s charity to, but this good man was quickly shouted down by the captain and his unsavory crew. My imputations of the captain were only enhanced by his ready willingness to convert his regent’s mercy to his own profit; but considering my tenuous hold on his graces, I held my tongue.

Providence it seems held its own answer to the captain’s avarice and ill treatment of me. For no sooner had we hoisted anchor set forth from the bay, than a great gale wind rose from the land and blew and swept the ship far from sight of land. It is easy to ascertain how the seafaring pagans lived in terror of the wrath of the gods of ocean and thunder, as for two days and nights, all evidence to our eyes was that they raged above and below us, tossing wind, water and bolts with fearsome impediment to our little speck of a vessel.

On the morn of the third day, with no land in sight, the winds died suddenly and sky and water took on a sickly greenish pallor. The captain bellowed for the crew to make fast, evident from the wild look in his eye that he’d seen this sort of sky before and it chilled him to the marrow. I confess to a perverse satisfaction in his dread and my eyes, when they met his, were as cold as my soul. His gaze in turn seemed to blame me for the plight of the Mary Rose, as if the wretch had in that moment read my conscience and divined its black stain. The orders had barely issued from his lips, when there rose such a howl and clamour that it seemed the very bowels of Hell had been pierced and the foulest legions of abomination spilled forth to torment us. Waves, like mountains, rose on all sides. Anything that wasn’t battened down – men, ropes and ships stores, rose about us in a wall of wind and water—all had been loosed from their earthly bonds and flew about our heads like demons. The Mary Rose, beleaguered thus for so long, endured no more and with an awesome groan, began to flounder. I heard a scream near my ear, but saw naught, knowing not from sight or sound, whether its source was manmade or the unnatural fury of this storm. Then I was struck upon the head and lost all sense of time and place.

Would that I had died in that moment, this story would end mercifully without the telling, but The Almighty is not so merciful and continually seeks accounting for the unexpurgated sins of men. I was revived by the chill of the ocean, clinging fast, I know not how, to the shattered timber that had been the ship’s mainmast. A frayed length of rope trailed from the shattered wood and I used it to lash myself to the beam, fearing my fate should I faint away again. Secured as best I could, I cast about, but saw no sign of the Mary Rose. I could only presume that she’d a-slipped to her watery grave, with all hands lost. I lapsed in and out of mind, knowing not how many hours or days had transpired before I awoke beached on the sands of an island that the ships charts, as I recalled them, had no record of.

The Floridian coast is littered with many barrier islands, but I could not believe we’d been blown that far south. On the outbound journey we’d traversed the area known to sailors as The Devil’s Quim. Many whispered prayers and signs of the cross had been made even by these impious wretches during northbound passage, but we’d slipped through without incident. Had the fearsome gale hurled us so far south? It was possible, but I possessed no sextant or maps with which to make such a determination. My sole possessions were the leatherskin pouch and the oil-skin wrapped journal which still hung about my neck and yes, the shattered beam that had delivered me here to this alien shore. I only knew my thirst and hunger and these drove me off the beach toward a high solitary crag where I knew I must gain shelter from the blazing sun, water and sustenance or perish shortly in the attempt.

Staggering, at times on hands and knees, I eventually encountered a small shaded spring, where I eagerly slaked my terrible thirst. I ate some grasses and moss I found nearby, but these were so bitter that I could scarce move them past my gullet. Following the path of the stream I found nearby, its source and above it, purchase of a ledge. After a short but painful climb, I espied the opening of a cave, whose gaping mouth presented a commanding view of the ocean and most vital, respite from the blazing sun. I collapsed on the floor near the entrance and slept fitfully until nightfall. I awoke to the sounds of forest night and the stars of the easterly sky and behind me, from the belly of the cave, came the unsettling premonition that I was not alone.

The cave entrance was wide and dry, but its depth appeared unfathomable, likely even by the light of day. My ears pricked, detected subtle rustlings and scrapings in its bowels and though my every instinct for self-preservation bid me flee, my shivering body had no endurance with which to comply and I sank back into uneasy slumber and slept thus till daybreak. My first sensation upon rising was the return of blind thirst which drove me again to the stream to refresh myself and soothe my sun and salt blistered skin. Though still wretchedly weakened by hunger and the recent travails of my ocean voyage, I found my strength somewhat restored and made my way back up the sharp rock to the mouth of the cave, half resolved to make it the site of my cloister, all apprehension of the previous nights’ fears, momentarily stilled.

It took little exploration before I encountered the first of the extraordinary sights of that day, for as I followed the cave’s first bend, there appeared to my eyes, a collection of stacked crates and barrels, puzzling enough in their own right, but when I beheld the familiar stamp of the HMS Mary Rose on them, my head reeled and I sank to my knees in terror. Was this more witchcraft, or an illusion of my famishment? My quaking hand reached out to touch the bottommost crate and sure enough, the hewn wood was entirely real enough and still wet from the sea. Again the urge to flee was overwhelming, but I, to my discredit stayed my flight. Starvation gnawed my gut with sharp fangs and overtook my reason. Rising, I pried open the topmost container. It contained within, numerous five pound sacks of millet, rice and lentils. Another crate contained salt pork and fish. There were a dozen such crates and barrels within that dark confine and in my wild imaginings I convinced myself that this was a Providence-delivered miracle. With provisions such as these, a man could live in relative comfort for many months without foraging. Perhaps the Lord had sent this miracle as a sign of forgiveness and concordance with my plan. If so, I would devote my life to prayer and writing in this solitary womb of earth in grateful capitulation that all that had driven me here was toward His ultimate and mysterious purpose.

I sank back to my knees and prayed in earnest gratitude for the first time since leaving Santo Domingo and this is when I heard the same rustlings that had so unsettled my sleep the previous night, but closer and coming yet closer. The hackles on my neck rose in a fearsome shiver and then I saw her, or more precisely, I saw her eyes.

In a rush of dank air, two gleaming amber orbs bore down on me from the cavernous heights and in that instant, my relief turned to horror and my horror deprived my mind of reason. Frail wretch that I am, I collapsed in a cold stupor.

When I regained my wits, I awoke to the most improbable of sights. A small girl of perhaps 15-years age sat cross-legged atop an unopened barrel. She regarded me with cool disdain through those inhuman golden eyes.

“It’s not your God you should thank, but me,” she proffered, as if this absurd proposition was in fact the most obvious of statements. I started away and made to run, but her movements, impossibly swift, placed her direct in my path, barring my escape. I wished, futilely, that I had not surrendered my sword for a book, for a book offers no defense against a demon, which I took this guileful apparition to be, despite her unthreatening visage.

“He who was content to let you perish, you praise. When I alone take credit for your restoration.”
“Who in the name of God, are you,” I cried circling warily, seeking some purchase of the cavern’s entrance.
“In the name of your God, I am abandoned and accursed," she replied with a high, bitter laugh, “But you may call me Circe.”

Recall now, how well my wise and gentle mother had schooled me through childhood. I had always been enamoured of the classics, in particular the epic sagas of the blind poet Greek. From him, I knew well the perfidious name Circe and its mere utterance in this place chilled me beyond recounting. For some minutes, we played this cagey sport, I edging toward the light at the cave’s entrance, and she toying, allowing all progress but that which would have secured my freedom.

With my back to the dank wall, I considered the absurdity of my situation, me a strong, strapping man, she so small and frail, why I did not simply push my way through her and retreat, but it seemed she divined my thoughts on my face for as soon as I was aware of them, she stepped closer and responded as if I had spoken aloud.

“I will not allow it.” It was then I became aware that though she spoke and I heard, her lips moved not. I simply heard her utterance in my head.

This is how I became kept of Circe, witch queen, she who seduced Ulixes son of Laërtes, though she claims that the poet embellished greatly and the Ithacan was less kingly than Homer made him to be. When I asked Circe why she should desire my companionship, her reply was cryptic. She answered my question with a question.

How came I so willing to serve my absent God in hermitic isolation, but unwilling to serve her in the comfort and companionship of her roost?

Sometimes she appears to me as a woman, full of breast and comely in all aspects save for the blue gray pallor of her skin that none upon apprehension, would confuse with the flesh of a living woman. Unsighted, to the touch, it is indistinguishable. Sometimes, Circe wears the guise of the small girl I first met, other times, she is a towering vespertilio with a furry gray breast and leathery wings thrice the length of a man. Even half-furled, her wings span the cave entrance. She says that she has lived a thousand of my lifetimes and has loved as many men, but none more than me.

Even her most tender attentions repulsed me, for they were never without menace. She’d eaten the survivors of my ship as they slipped into the green gray grip of the ocean. She’d had every intention of eating me as well, but before striking she looked into my thoughts and saw reason to pity me. It was she who dragged my rough bark to her island and rescued the undamaged stores from the wreck of the Mary Rose, all toward the express purpose of keeping me in comfort.

Circe has struck a bargain with me. If I accept her batlike manifestation and evince no recoiling then I will be allow exit from the cave to explore the island at will. The vespertilio is truest to her natural form she claims and she says that she feels closest to me thuswise, though I suspect her true guise is something altogether more terrible, unseeable and unknowable. I confess, after some initial reluctance, I have found in her soft gray bosom, comforts unearthly divine and if it be wrong, I know not right from wrong anymore.

She insists that I am free now to come and go as I please and have been for some time. I respond that she is toying with me, that with her powers of the will, I am no freer than my slaves in La Isla Española were; but Circe says that I should search my own soul and I will know she is right. I did as she suggested and it is true. I am, mother taught, a creature possessed of free will, free to sin or resist sin and embrace salvation. Circe says Juanito, you are naïve having traveled and seen so little. All throughout the Old World and this New World, the gods of earth, stone, water and fire have been usurped by my God and He is far bloodier than the worst of them. Circe loves me though, for the modesty of my suffering. To her, my torment is a purer form of piety than that of all the priests or “godly men” I have known. It is why she spared me when she looked into my thoughts, as I lay senseless, lashed to the splintered mast of the Mary Rose.

Though Circe is fearsome in aspect and I would quake a million times in first apprehension of her, I find when I am embraced by her, that I fear nothing, feel nothing, and want nothing but her. Her visage has long since ceased to drive my mind to terror, but to sensual languor. It is a sin, but I am already well beyond salvation.

God did not mean for man to lie down with the beasts, yet when the moon rises and Circe holds me prest to her furry breast and enfolds her wings about me, it is, as warm and inviting a refuge as ever I sought in the brothels of Santo Domingo. Circe croons to me, lullabies, memories of my dead mother’s songs, her touch, her voice, even her smell; all this Circe has stolen from my head to succor my soul. Her croonings have a language not of men. When I am thus calmed, she takes my unquiet sex from its sheath and her webbed digits palpate it to full mast and before I can offer protest, she slips it into her fluttering womb. Her ministrations are gentle and I have long since abandoned protest. I have abandoned all aspects of my former life.

Circe sleeps more by day and I roam the island at will. Long ago, I considered building a bark in secret and attempting to flee, but I have no opportunity or will for flight. I have walked the length and breadth of this island many times over and the ocean’s waves guard its perimeter with inviolable resolve. I fish the tidepools and hunt small game. I crush bright berries for ink. I gather fruit and sketch. I walk in aimless contemplation and observe the western sun setting o’er the New Lands. If I have not returned to the cave by nightfall, Circe finds me out and wafts me gently back to her rookery. She hunts and feeds while I sleep. On what, I know not and ask not.

On this eve, Circe returns to the cave and moves about slowly and with great care. She chooses to don her “womanly guise” to announce to me that she is with child.

As the stars wend the heavens, Circe’s silent song of love and maternal jubilance rings in my head. She has collected all my seed within her womb and has wasted none of it. All shall bear fruit. She shall spawn, not one, but a thousand thousand children, like her Oceanid mother before her. She asks for a kiss and I give it to her. Even to a mind long inured to the horrors of this world, I find in her proclamation, a cold new dread that I can put no name to. I pray my kiss will not betray me.

I write this final entry in darkness. Soon Circe will call to me again and I will lie with her. At daybreak, while she sleeps, I will shrug off the burden of this book that I’ve carried for so long and secure it within the cave. I have resolved to climb to the precipice above the cave and hurl myself into the sea. I bury this intent deep within my bosom and cover it with random thoughts and songs. I pray she does not look within my soul and find me out. Even without my other offenses, this act will without fail deny me entrance to the gates of heaven. Had I not long since abandoned esperance of salvation? Circe has oft argued that there is no God as I understand Him. I care not. I only seek peace. Though I have not and will never reach my thirtieth year, I have twice made my mark and it is a dark and shameful one. I have created an abomination and if there is payment to be exacted, what worse punishment is there than the damnation I already anticipate?

Thus if you have come to this dark place through intent or misadventure, if you disregarded my warning and have overstayed to peruse the entirety of this sorry tale, if you now see the gleam of Circe’s yellow eyes circling o’erhead, know that it is too late. Know that I tried to warn you. Pray now, pray quickly that God may give you strength for what you must endure and that He may receive your immortal soul at the end of all endurance. As I fall, there will be a prayer on my lips. Will the Redeemer answer it? Life, if it has taught me anything on the eve of my final sacrifice, reveals that all hope is but folly.

It’s So Much Easier When You’re Away

2010-03-22T03:12:00.025-04:00

by Riccardo Berra/Apostrophe © 2010

A mental snapshot.

My 10-year-old Callie, shrieking, jumps into my arms, bony fawn legs locked above my waist.

"Daddy, daddeee, I missed you so much. Did you miss me?" Her arch little smile, so sure of her feminine wiles, even at this tender age.

"I missed you so much my princess; I missed the air around you." I make vacuum cleaner sucking sounds. She squeals in delight, then wriggles from my grasp as towhead monster Mark Jr., my 5 year old brick house swaggers in. The action toy he clutches mimics his gait. He ignores my open arms.

"I got the new red Power Rangers." He waves it in his sister’s face; she swats it from his grasp. It sails onto the couch. They run upstairs shrieking at each other.

"A little help!"

Next shot.

Reflexive scowl stamped on her features, Ellen, my 42-year-old wife, pushes a suitcase through the door as if it contains lead ingots. A practiced martyr, she insinuates with inflection and body language alone how much of a total shit I am for not attending to the car as soon as she pulled up. I’m judged and found wanting oh, maybe a thousand times a day. Lately for good cause. My faults cling like wet leaves to the marital headstone.

Ellen, Callie and Mark, have been away long enough that I’m completely out of their orbit, the wobbly hyperkinetic trajectories of Mom and kids and Dad and kids and kid and kid. Let's not neglect Mom and Dad. We’re right back to circling each other like wary, battle-bruised sharks sniffing the water for blood. My family's return has sucked all the serenity from this place that was so quiet just three minutes ago. I am disquieted and out of my zone.

I'm the senior science writer for a magazine that graces dentists' offices, coffee tables and nightstands across America. The bulk of the research for my latest feature column was completed in the family's absence. I’m now at the part I love, the fugue state of shuffling and sifting to find the story that hasn’t been told, because I haven’t told it yet. All the heady-thready stuff, the scribbled cocktail napkins, OneNote tabs, taped interviews, outlines, insights, late night inspirations, Post-its tacked to my monitor have been sucked up, all aswirl like autumn leaves, making and breaking sparky new connections. I roughed out a first draft which I'm suddenly desperate to get back to.

This part is all mine. This is the black box shit they don’t or can’t teach in `how to write like a writer` schools. What’s mine is mine until I write it. Even then it’s still mine, unless in some blockheaded, uber-genitive huff I decide not to write it. Then it would stay mine forever. But Dr. Johnson got it right of course; I wouldn’t get my fee and I would get desperate, angry calls from my editor and his boss, the senior executive editor and his boss, even the new publisher, with whom I swapped cocktail stories last weekend on the balcony of his Midtown penthouse. We were all at a summers-end soirée for magazine brass to celebrate the mantle's passing to the young publisher from his father, son of the magazine's legendary founder. China cup pretty, a very young British heiress soon to be his second wife, clung unhappily to his arm. My new boss told his intended I am the magazine’s best writer. Not the best science writer, but the best writer. He told me we would become great friends.

Nobody’s calling about missed deliveries. There’s no need and never has been. I and my work are utterly reliable. Like all its predecessors, this article will go out a little shy of the deadline as an attachment to a short, cordial email. Then in a process akin to bovine digestion, Editorial will edit and fact-check and kick it upstairs. Somebody else will chew it over again like cud and kick it higher. It gets vetted by Legal, kicked back downstairs to Production and somebody else stripes in photos, charts, callouts, ads and headlines. The point is that by the time you read "my article" with my byline; it’s long since stopped being mine. It's theirs and then yours. The secret of good writing is possession. The secret of making a good living writing is dispossession. People wonder that we’re so fucked up.

Add to which, my lover of three years is royally peeved at me. I’d half-promised to take her to that Midtown party and then got jumpy about how it would look to my coworkers, none of whom have met Ellen, all of whom would instantly surmise that Karina is not my wife. So I back-pedaled off the invitation under the frailest of pretenses; then compounded the error by showing Karina the first draft of the article as a sort of consolation prize. It was the source of our first argument. Karina disagreed vehemently with what I’d written about childhood ADD (the cover page feature for January 's upcoming "Health and Science" issue). She highlighted all the sections she found objectionable. The manuscript was filled with lurid lines and slashes. There’s a red "pharmco stooge" scrawled in the margin next to a passage lambasting herbal therapies as untried and dangerous. I find this such an odd position for a third year medical resident to take.

Doubly odd, for her Dima, whom I’ve held and read to like one of my own, works so desperately hard to put language together and his mother, my sweet soon-to-be Dr. Karina Adamova, has subjected the poor little slob to a battery of alternative/holistic/nutball therapies—all to no avail. First over his nightly red-faced screaming objection, she implemented a strict macrobiotic regimen for both of them—seaweed, raw foods, tofu and such. Having excised all manners of processed fat, sugar and carbohydrates, the good gooey normal stuff that dribbles through the prematurely sclerotic veins and expanding waistlines of America’s children, Karina ruthlessly enforced the diet until Di lost nearly ten pounds and the pediatrician gave his mother "what for." The diet got shelved. I remember Ellen and me rolling our eyes and breathing a mutual sigh of relief. Kay then took Di off Ritalin and began using some homeopathic remedy she'd found on the net. That was the final straw. Dima’s teachers howled in protest and she had to relent yet again.

Callie and Mark used to save up their candy and sneak it to Dima whenever he visited. They knew he wasn't allowed to have it. Unable to refuse my children and her own son at the same time, Karina was softened and outflanked by their generosity. Karina is fierce, cynical and fatalistic. Karinamalyshka is also wise, forgiving and adorable in the way of her Slavic forebears. Czarevna Karina.

Ellen scrolls through the phone’s digital memory and doesn’t even flinch when she sees Karina’s caller ID.

Karina
My parents
Her parents
The neurologist I interviewed
My editor
Karina
Karina
Karina

… The phone drops on the couch like a dead fish.

"Somebody’s been burning up the lines."

Not said angrily or accusingly. Just said as if it were something important that needed noting. I say nothing. Her eyes rake mine, deadpan, a split-second "fuck-you look" roiling on the horizon. Anything is possible at this moment—rage, grief, jealousy, or stone cold absolute nothing. The moment dissipates as quickly as it appears. Ellen sweeps back out the door. A gust of autumn air sweeps in to fill the vacuum.

There are no more lies between us. For three months, I’ve remained discreet, but have not lied to cover my infidelity. For three months, Ellen has acted like I never said a thing. We've even made love twice. We’ve stopped arguing. There’s an eerie, extraordinary calm between us. Though it's persisted much longer than I'd ever anticipated, I’m sure it's only temporary.

After three years of playing the coy flirty next-door neighbor game, Karina and I finally "happened" at a neighborhood Halloween blast, another in a succession of socials El abdicated. I arrived stag as usual, thinking all these middle-aged fools, myself certainly included, too old to be parading around in costumes. Trance music pounded from inside; glowing pumpkins lit the way in, me a parody of myself as a New York hipster wannabe, black on black, a smart fedora raked across my thinning crown.

Next shot.

… Of my Russian princess from the back, a Tchaikovsky swan. See how the white taffeta scoops so dangerously low exposing the long pale curve of her back—scapulae to iliac crest. Chest outthrust, hands fluttering about her hips and breasts, she preens and flirts pointlessly with three Brazilian Zorros, all wickedly handsome, all flamboyantly gay.

How her pale eyes blaze when she sees me. Seeking rescue from the Zorros, she crooks a finger my way and when I don’t move fast enough, she pulls me to the dance-floor, chattering mile-a-minute in her thick, endearing Baltic English. Normally I hate dancing, but the way she folds herself into my arms and begins to move so sweetly against me brings out an reserve of fluidity I didn’t know I had. Who knows what’s on the fucking stereo. The song changes. Karina tosses her hair and laughs to herself and when my eyes search hers for an explanation, she kisses me—hard—smack on the lips. Not a next-door neighborly kiss. My trembling fingers reach instinctively for her face but I freeze. All except for my terrified eyes which go everywhere at once. I push away.

"Kay, we can’t do this!"

Our host in the corner, I’m not sure, yeah I am sure, makes a point of not seeing us. Karina’s pale face flushes scarlet. She deflates in a flash. She smells of the several shots of courage it took to do this. Pain and shame crisscross her features like a lightning strike.

"Sorry." She mumbles, chin pressed to her chest. "Sorry, sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry." Tears well in the corners of her eyes.

"We can’t do this … here."

My voice has the twerpy, swallowed rasp of a coward about to leap off a ledge, but her eyes instantly rekindle. She grabs my hand again, pulling me through the kitchen and down to the unlit basement landing. Pinning me against flaking lath, dislodging paint, old horsehair plaster chips and God knows what else, she mashes her breasts to my own and puts my tongue and lips through calisthenics they haven’t endured since high school. Spin the bottle and take your chances.

"How did you know we’d be together?"

How? Before that first shockwave blasted off so many dry, shriveled layers of pith, I’d just assumed I’d gone dry to the core. Surprise—hot stinging pink flesh and raw red blood still pump away. I’d merely been hibernating. Though transformed, it took two more years, till this summer in fact, before I could come out to Ellen and share this truth with her.

This is that shot.

Me at the kitchen table in the dark with my head in my hands. Ellen at the fridge, holds it open as if the additional 40 watts from its interior are sufficient to illuminate the scene.

"Since I don’t enjoy fucking you fuckhead fucking fucker and I’m not your fucking intellectual equal, why don’t you have the fucking good sense to fucking leave?" Her voice rising instead of falling at the sentence’s end. "Why don’t you just get the fuck out?"

This last part comes out in a strangled scream. Two sentences—more passion and more invectives than I’ve heard in the entirety of our relationship. This is entirely expected.

"Because I don’t want to and I don't really think you want me to."

"Well, you're wrong; I do."

"The kids need me. You do too."

"Bullshit!"

"Ellen, you don't want to hate me."

"Oh, you’d be surprised."

"Sweetheart, you stopped wanting me so long ago."

"Stop telling me what I want! What I need. What I think. Anyways, it’s not true."

But her eyes show she knows it is.

"You replaced me in your heart with our children. I’m like this occasional visitor. You’re a good mother, but I needed, I need more."

"You need. You need. You’re too needy. Worse than the kids."

"I won’t disagree and I won’t pressure you anymore—that way."

"Does everything come down to sex with you? Everything?"

"No, and if you want me to leave, I will."

"You weren’t patient with me. You never were. You think I’m stupid. And I’m not."

"I know you’re not."

"I’m smart. Not so good with words and big fancy ideas as you. But not so stupid."

"You’re smart enough to know we have history. History we can’t undo."

"Who said I want to?"

"I don’t either. I still love you. I've always loved you. And I want to stay."

"Stay, go, whatever. Just don’t expect me to wake up tomorrow morning smiling, wash your shirts, cook your meals, draw your bath, spread my legs ..."

"It’s for the kids."

"They’re the only ones I’d play this little charade for."

"And please. Nobody else needs to know or put their two cents in." (I'm thinking parents, in-laws, family. Her father who has always hated me without cause. Now he'd have a good one.) "I think we can agree on that."

"Don’t presume to know what’s agreeable to me. Mark."

"I presume nothing."

"You presume everything. You wanna have your cake and eat it too. You always have."

Movement upstairs. We both heard it. I slipped to the landing in time to just catch the trailing edge of something bright and wispy, like the cuff of pink Hello Kitty pajamas or the corner of a favorite blanket. Add to my album of shame, this unrecorded image of a sweet little face twisted uncomprehendingly over the pit of parental discord that has just opened beneath her.

Ellen and I stared at each other in mortified silence. I expected additional accusations and epithets. It would only be fair. I expected a demand that I immediately break off with Karina. That would be fair too. But Ellen had spoken her final words on this subject. On my end, there were other things I’d thought I'd wanted to air. Aspects of "our history" that support the case of Mark the attentive husband, provider and father. Mark as not the philandering, abandoning asshole. But this argument and all others go flatline. The next morning Callie is gay and chatty—perhaps thinking what she'd overheard had just been a bad dream. All our other family routines continue like no conversation had ever taken place. It's quite startling how we’re a lot more pleasant together than we used to be. It’s nice, an uneasy sort of nice, strictly eye of the storm.

"How’d you know we’d be together?"

A pale swan sans plumage, lost in my arms, her neck gracefully curved, warmed, steam rising from everywhere we touch. Pale eyes search my face for an answer.

"You were there. Something came back when you kissed me at that party. Something absent so long, I’d forgotten it ever existed."

"Silly, romantic man." She pushes me down on the bed and straddles my knees.
Her hand flutters between my legs. Touching me everywhere but …

I imagine a solitary traveler asleep on a long journey. He awakes to discover that he's not only arrived at his destination, but has slept through the entire journey. Like suspended animation or teleportation; there is no sense that time has passed. She covers my face with savage kisses. Her churning hips coat my hips and thighs with a slippery whorl of desire. She bears down, pinning me beneath her greedy, weepy cunt.

"How did you know Kay?"

I don't wait for her answer. I push back—up and into her and she gasps, her pelvis rolls, a balletic undulation and she receives me whole. Her long hair falls forward in slow grace, her tresses tickling my forehead and cheeks. She fills my ear with wet kisses and whimpers. Twice in an hour, we’ve done this like we’ve done it our whole lives, like we were made to, meant to. This practiced intimacy derived not of boredom or routine, but of the tight breathless symmetry of two forms sculpted from the same material by the world’s finest craftsman, polished to join without seams or gaps. It’s something I’ve never felt in my writing, though God knows I’ve tried and perhaps once or twice come close to.

"How did you know?" I repeated.

"When you fill me, fill me. Fill me!"

Her moans rattled the window jamb in her little bedroom like the autumn wind outside. In the tenuous strand of days ahead we’ll spend our flames against each other; perhaps even grow old as lovers, but never together. That’s already writ. Sad perhaps, though sometimes we swear our love bends the curve of time.

Nights like tonight, Dima sleeps over while his mother works her rotation at the hospital. The great thing about Ellen—one of the great things—she never once treated Dima any differently when she found out about his mother and me. Never skipped a beat. She isn’t built like that. Treats him like her own. He, any kid, all kids, trigger this nurturing fail-safe in her. I wish I still did. I love watching her and what she gives to the little ones. It drives Karina absolutely crazy.

Ellen stands at the kids’ bedroom before lights out. She’s naked beneath a thin, above-the-knee linen nightie that hides nothing. Her prominent nipples and the inverted triangular outline of her bush are visible to an eye practiced at looking at tthem. We share the narrow doorway without touching and maintain civil distances in these intimate quarters, except for those two times, both at her initiation, when we didn’t. She dresses, undresses and makes her toilet in front of me. Nothing has changed that way. After 90 days of dead calm I disquiet myself with the fleeting notion that she just might be the sort to seethe and writhe in silence, then snap without warning and harvest my dick by the light of the moon. Just like that crazy chick in Virginia last year. Ellen reads my involuntary gasp as affection for the kids. Her eyes on mine warm—a little. I am moved as Callie reads "Goodnight Moon" to Dima who mouths the words with her. Mark Jr. sleeps in a corner of his sister’s bed, curled, fatcat-like in repose. The house is full, like it’s never been empty.

I brush past Ellen, grazing one soft breast beneath the soft fabric of her nightie as I enter the bedroom to heft my little boy from his sister’s bed and deposit him in his own. When I return, she flips off the bedroom light.

"I’m going out for air," I tell her.

"Going to meet your lover, lover?"

"No, just air. Unless you have a better idea."

It was a stupid thing to say. Her eyes roll. The gown ripples with the motion of her breasts and thighs as she turns and recedes into the shadows of our unlit bedroom.

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast

I have a 30-year old Cuban cigar sticking out of my pocket, courtesy of my new great friend, the publisher. I pause to reverently unwrap and stoke it in the Truffaut-blue day-for-night wash from the billboard across the way. Dylan, no, a sadder, sweeter voice—Van Morrison's, trickles down from an open second-story window.

The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it's all over now, Baby Blue

There was a time when I saw my life as linear, a life like all others, originated at a discrete point, infinitely small and hard with no value; projecting through time, not razor straight, but ballistic—predictable and bounded in ascendance and decay. Of course, it didn’t quite play out that way. Pungent and sweet, like the smoke from my cigar, like the song from the open window, the ray curls, branches and blooms—unexpectedly polynomic.

Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

Lyrics trail me down the pavement as I pick up my pace. A flush rises in my cheeks. The blood sings in my veins and fingertips. I adjust my hat so the rising wind won’t take it. The first big drops begin to fall.

Molte Corse, Molti Mondi (Many Travels, Many Worlds) Part 1

2010-03-12T03:39:00.004-05:00

The apartment was empty. It would feel no less empty with her in it. Violetta knew it and knew the empty echoing click of her key in the lock would bring a lump to her throat. She’d been fighting tears since the early morning call during which Riccardo claimed he wouldn’t have time for her before his trip. They’d argued; the argument so silly and pointless that she can’t remember what she’d said, only that it was biting and cruel without cause and that there was now only rawness left in the battle’s wake. In the dread little insecure part of her soul that she despised, she endured another withering barrage of envy for Sofi, who so much more than her, never left his side, having become his constant companion in business and love. Little Miss Familiar, little miss anal protégé, with her stunning beauty and technical prodigy, such boundless youthful energy, absorbing, at such an astonishing rate, every aspect of his business and pleasure. Best, best of all at being useful. Not just flitting from point A to point B, but moving with direction and purpose. While poor Vi on the other hand, fades, every day becoming more useless, insecure and clinging.

Vi shook off this self-pitying monologue like a wet dog shakes its fur and reassured herself that of course they’d all be together as soon as she herself returned, that any wounds were imagined, on her part of course. Today’s bitter words by then long forgotten to be replaced by the ardor of absence. This reunion in three weeks’ time would be as achingly sweet, explosive and intense as all previous ones had been. She was being silly and hormonal to imagine otherwise.

Packing: Why is this so difficult? Impossible to order her luggage or thoughts. Riccardo and Sofi would return from their cross-country shoots to occupy this apartment while she was away. But if Europe was “away” did that make New York “home”? Cruel eternal Roma had always been home but Marco had made her feel like an outcast in her own country. Here, a life as scattered as the clothes on her bed. Zia Maria tanning her wrinkles in San Tropez with her even more ancient first cousin. Gia, in boarding school in Switzerland. Marco? He could winter in hell as far as she’s concerned. Laughing Stella in Bermuda, so sick, terminal in fact, yet stubbornly refusing to step over death’s threshold.

Itinerary: Duties to discharge in Rome, documents to sign, transfers of title related to sales of d’Este estate properties, then off as quickly as possible to Switzerland to snatch what little time she could over the school holiday with her daughter, then off to Etienne in London. London had sure felt like home during her schooldays, those happiest times in her life, before Riccardo. Could any of these places be called home? She laughed bitterly, enjoying the cruelness of the joke on herself.

“Al diavolo con i pensieri tristi!”

Again with grim determination she shrugged off her black thoughts and her mood did lift a bit and all it took were a few minutes of concerted attention to finish packing. She sat on her suitcase to close it and from the feel of it beneath her, immediately realized that her favorite leather jacket was not within. A frantic search through two closets confirmed what she already knew, that it was in Riccardo’s locked office. She swore loudly and vividly. There is no language better than Italian for that. Nobody, not even Melchiore would be there now. She wanted to throw things, to rage through the entire apartment, but as soon as she caught her breath, she became hyper-aware of the sound of her own fast breathing. Spooky and brooding and way too quiet—hard to hear even the electric hum of the street through the windows. Vi switched on music to fill the vacuum. Determined one way or another to improve her mood, she remembered something from the kitchen, one of Ricardo’s special little cigarettes buried in the oregano jar. She lit it, took a couple of tentative puffs, then let it burn out.

“Aspeta. You don’t need much,” she cautioned.

The cable R&B music channel plays Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ I Miss You. It was enough to snare the familiar catch in her heart. Tonight, alone, there was only one part of the apartment she felt she could stand to be in. Slowly, painfully, she takes off her dress and with his little cigarette in hand, passes through the old lady part of Zia Maria’s apartamente, to the bathroom, past the shower large enough for a poker game, to the cauldron tub now appointed with some personal touches from the last time three lovers had used it. House palms and rubber plants lent livelier form to the space. Fat unlit candles stood between the plants and a tray of bath and body oil bottles beckoned from the far corner. Thoughts of her missing lover as she sits on the lip of the tub encourage her to conjure his touch with her own.

Lately, he’d been so unavailable, either on shoots or holed up in planning meetings or editing. His PBS documentary, ‘already overdue,’ he’d claimed. She knew he wasn’t making it up. They’d worked round the clock with extra crews and three editors. Now he was off to Chicago for something he called pick-ups.

“We keep missing each other,” he teased.

“Maybe on purpose, si?” she insinuated, then her voice caught and broke, the tears choking it before she could stop them.

“No. I will see you when you return,” his voice consoled, “Why cry? You know I miss you.”

That warm smile in his voice always made her want to run to him and kiss him all over. Instead, stupid woman, she’d argued with him. It had been a sad, one-way goodbye.

“I cry because I miss you and am desperate for you.

That’s what I meant to say.”

Water gushed from the faucets as Vi poured scents and soaps under the frothing jets. She unhooked her bra, but left on the pretty little purple and black lace thong which she imagined him pulling aside to slip his erect member wherever he wanted. Would he like it, this pretty little notion, it’s purpose certainly not coverage, but provocation? It accentuated her girlish hips, pressed into her neatly trimmed delta and her special hole, making them all the more enticing and accessible. It was hard to get him to notice her panties. He was always in such a hurry to pull them off.

Bella. Scents of floral and musk filled the room. The tub lapped and foamed away as she slid in and spread out, immersing herself until the frothy water lapped up against her throbbing breasts and their poor hardened nipples that ached for the more insistent touch of her man’s firm fingers and greedy, thirsty lips.

“Ricardo? Sofi? What are you doing in Chicago without me?
Così ingiusto!”

Vi’s punished herself by conjuring Sofi splayed provocatively across a large bed, strong, muscled legs parted, black sexy lace panties dangling barely about one ankle while he rubbed her luscious butt and made it shine.

“If the room has a bedside mirror like our bedroom, you can see how you look while fucking, watch your own face contort while he does that slow torture that drives us so crazy. Che cosa picoletta? Are you naked, except perhaps for those strappy little suede and leather sandals, the ones with the turquoise clasps that you wear everywhere?

I bought those for you, remember.

Are your toenails painted red? Little eye candies. Candy apple red. His warm, hairy body so close, so good now as he embraces you. Something hard pokes at your back right now. I ache at the mere thought of his fingers owning the curves of your sweet peach, rolling you over, placing your hands on the crown of your hips. Vi touched herself where the hurt was the most urgent.

The sandalwood oil that I gave you—warmed. Or perhaps the cocoa butter. We know which he likes better, but I’m not sure. The oil feels more natural. The cocoa butter allows more play. After he makes your cheeks glow, he’ll press a finger in the pink rosebud between them. Such a little miss tight-ass at first, you’re not anymore, no coaxing needed to accept his probing, or mine for that matter, anticipating its entry makes you warm all over, makes you quiver as it slides deeper preparing your sweet jellied hole for larger things.

‘God you whispered to me afterwards,
it’s like discovering a new sex organ!’

Don’t tell me, little girl. I know how that finger makes you jump in its anticipation but soon you slip far, far away, buoyant, floating on a incandescent sea of salt. I saw the last time he buried himself in you, always so gentle with you baby girl, I no longer require such tender mercies, but you clamped one hand to the bedsheets, the other to your crotch and rubbed as if you’d ignite. So powerful, the hot fast explosion tears through you, back to front, the waves that rock you deep inside as he pumps and pumps, that soft machine that ‘warms your behind.’ So lovely, that expression, ‘warms your behind.’ Little girl, you have finally discovered why I call it my “special hole” and why I want him to fill me now, so I can whisper, through tears, over and over, harder and harder, my darling, I’m sorry for the cruel stupid things I said, I didn’t mean it, take me, it’s yours, my special hole is yours, my special love.

Sometimes after coming he shivers against me like a frightened child pressing against its mother’s bottom, but if he’s still hard, don’t let him leave you, push up against him, trap him deep inside your silky bowel. Tell him he can’t leave and show him why. If you do it right, if he’s not too tired from his long day, you can keep him firm inside you. Whisper sweet, your soft whimpers, tell him how much you need his cock in your babygirl ass, how much you’d crave him if he were gone. Say you’ll die if he leaves. That you treasure everything about him. You know how much he loves this. If he comes again or not, there’s no more better way for your body to express what you feel in your soul. This is how, and here I conclude my lesson, a woman commands her own and her lover’s pleasures in her special hole. Just remember that you learned it all from me.

Riccardo, my darling, are you the love I‘ve waited my whole life for, or just the cruelest imitation yet?
I could cry for the hollow thing I am now.

Vi’s finger toyed insistently with her own “special hole.” Music, like a chastened pet, circles warily at a distance as Vi attends urgently to her throbbing rosebud with one hand, pulling at her right nipple with the other. Eyes pressed together she conjures him all to herself, sees him disappearing from the rumpled hotel bed of his younger lover, sees him rising opposite her through the water and steam, eyes, lips, only for her, stroking himself to readiness, he comes only for her.

“Neither one of us … wants to be the first to say goodbye” Gladys Knight’s wail fills the tub like the hot water gushing from the faucet.
“It’s my fault we didn’t have a proper goodbye.” Vi informed the empty space where he’d be, no longer holding back the inevitable tears, the wave she knew was coming. Though her heart settles like an lump of cold lead in her chest, her body won’t abandon the fantasy made so vivid by her desperate hunger. Her hips wriggled under the water like they no longer belonged to her, her flushed breasts rose from the scented water, dripping, tipped by the flicker of the scented candles and sparks more incandescent than candles faster and faster she spent herself with a cry that echoes from every tile in the cavernous bathroom. This was the first night of too many lonely nights to come, clinging to the insubstantial promise that their time apart would be but a short prelude to the nights and days ahead.

Violetta lingered in the water’s last warmth thinking more prosaic thoughts about her role in initiating the younger woman. Last Friday, when Riccardo had excused himself from dinner to take a call, Vi had confessed to Sofi, with sly giggles and whispers, watching for his return, how the first time watching her with him had brought her to three powerful successive orgasms. Sofi, so wide-eyed, so eager, but not so missy-innocent anymore, was more impressed by her as of late. Oh, she’d acted so shocked at first, then aroused, then ultimately was won over by Vi’s dualities – the very proper lady and the very craven slut, the fierce intellect and fiercer libido, body and spirit, these sides, three and a half decades at civil war with each other, now restlessly cohabiting in the same compact form.

“God, girls these days have it so much easier.”

Half a continent away, Sofi sees similar forces emerging in herself but she’s too young to be troubled by them. How could a young girl ever understand that even if she and Vi have arrived at the same destination; that they’d traveled from the opposite ends of the earth to do so?

Copyright 2010. This story may not be reprinted or linked without express, written permission of the author.

Lee’s Daughters

2010-02-27T18:54:00.007-05:00

The battered old laptop flickers to life for the first time since my recently famous father last turned it off a year ago, a week before he died. I miss Daddy, mind you, but I don’t go all weepy anymore when these sorts of “first-time-since things” come up, as they still do from time to time. Like a nest of butterflies, hundreds of automated calendar appointments, notes and reminders pop open and I give up trying to swat them closed while they’re still loading. I go down to make coffee. The lawyers had handled all the estate stuff and I’d put this last task off for as long as I could. I could wait a few minutes more. Though his fame like his death was swift and unexpected, my father left things in good order. He was always careful that way. Daddy is the smartest man I’ve ever known.

One, two,
Who are you?

I finished sorting through his file cabinets a few months ago. Clippings, manuscripts, documents, receipts—the papertrail of the man’s life. I’d boxed up some of it, recycled and trashed most of it. I was reminded of Robert E. Lee’s daughters, apparently so devoted to their pater famiglia that at his behest they remained lifelong spinsters. I find this a little pathetic, but understandable. In our family, I am “the smart one.” Lois is the pretty one. Ellie, the baby. We had our roles set out from birth.

Three, four,
Close the door.

Ellie whined on the Skype call. “Why does sheee get the laptop, while all we get are these little thumb drives?”
“Lee-Lee, you don’t want it. It’s just an old piece of junk. Besides, Mar’s the writer and resident computer geek. She knows how to work with those old clunkers.”
Listen to Lo playing the peacemaker while I grind my teeth. A new role for her.
“The drives are full of Daddy’s photos of us as kids. Lots of old stuff too. Him and Mom young. They’re precious. I don’t really want the damned laptop, Lee,” I said. “I have one already. But Daddy had a reason for giving it to me as he must have had a reason for waiting a year to do so. Listen, are you guys coming back East anytime soon? Mom really misses you.”

I could think of no better way to draw this conversation to a quick, tidy end. One week ago, I’d received the registered letter from Dad’s lawyers, notifying me that there was a parcel at their office with instructions for me from my father that I was to open it a year to the day after his death. No, his instructions precluded shipping it to me. I had to come and retrieve it myself. At first blush, it all seemed rather melodramatic and pointless, but Daddy had a point to everything. So, once again I’d cajoled and bundled Gregg and the kids back into the Volvo and up the Taconic we headed for East Ellenville. The parcel contained two thumb drives and Daddy’s old Dell.

Five six
Pick up sticks.

My own dear father took me out to our favorite diner when I, the oldest of the three daughters, started dating. He told me it was time we had a serious heart-to-heart about “relationships.” Oh God! Just the two of us, eating pie, sipping coffee; me waiting, praying this wasn’t going to be another sex talk. The first one had been … Words truly can’t describe.

Wasn’t quite that bad, but close. After some preliminary discussion about school and a recent writing contest I’d won, this was our weighing my options for future happiness on a sliding scale of paradox discussion.

“Have fun but be careful. Be picky, but broadminded. Women are required to make more choices in their lives,” he cautioned over a warmed forkful of Cosimo’s homemade chocolate pecan. “Not all of them will be ideal.”

Seven, eight,
Lay them straight.

I’d thanked him for his Shakespearian counsel. I’d listened attentively. I’d asked him about work. It was more than a little embarrassing but I didn’t have the heart to say I’d no clue what he was talking about. Ten years into marriage it took me to realize that this was perhaps the single best piece of advice I’d ever receive. And I’m supposed to be the smart one. Daddy you were on the money. You were always on the money.

Nine, ten,
A big fat hen.

“I still have a lot to do here,” I protested the day I sent Gregg and the kids packing back to Jersey. They were just getting under foot and he, darling Gregg, can manage them better at home for awhile. He didn’t want to be here, again, too much, this sixth time in one year. Him and my mother—don't even get me started. He wouldn’t say so, but he’s damned close to a meltdown. Again. It's at least partially my fault. I haven’t exactly been attentive these last months. The house in Verona is trashed and the sink stinks with unwashed dishes. They left yesterday. Even with the housekeeper coming in daily, he’ll have his work cut out for him. I haven’t “been there” for him in the other way wives are supposed to be “there” for husbands. It's really on and off with us. I saw the resentment, skepticism, gratitude and release—all that and more in the review mirror; his big gray eyes staring back at me with Danny and the Twins strapped in the back like juvenile astronauts.

Gregg blew a kiss. I blew a kiss. Kiss. Kiss. We maintain appearances, even when there’s nobody to notice but us. It started to snow. A handful of swirling flakes chased the Volvo's receding taillights. I allowed a momentary twinge of maternal panic before I went back inside. They’ll be fine, I told myself. They’ll be fine. Gregg said I should wipe Daddy’s computer clean and donate it or sell it on eBay. He expects to hear from me in a day or so, telling him I’m on my way home. The look he gave me told me it shouldn’t be any longer than that. I will miss my babies. I miss the way we used to be together. So many things we used to say with words are now communicated in the parsed, highly compressed language of looks, gestures and sighs—the shorthand of longterm relationships. You’d think that would make it easier but it just gets harder.

I got my tubes tied when I had the twins. I went back to work at the agency and almost immediately began to fantasize about having an affair. I don’t know where this came from. I was truly shocked. Some of the girls said it totally killed their drive. Not me. It sent me into the stratosphere. Something about just the idea of sleeping with another man made me want Greg more. I wanted to want him more. I imagined confessing to him. Taking his anger and angry sex. Sort of a radical therapy. There were opportunities but I didn’t act on any of them. Then I began to suspect Greg had already availed himself of this type of “therapy.” It’s the little things that give him away. Like the fact that he’s actually nicer to me. That he doesn’t press me for sex anymore or complain when he doesn’t get it. We don’t argue as much. None of this is proof; truthfully, I don’t want to know. Knowing requires acting and acting would fracture a delicate fault line and shatter at least six lives in a million pieces. That’s some grim math. Nobody wants that. Me least of all. Some secrets are secrets for a good reason.

My mom’s voice floats up from the warmth of the kitchen below.
“Mary, you left your coffee. Should I warm it? “
“No. I’ll be down in a second. “
“Then let me warm it for you, it’s gone cold!”

Ten minutes later she calls up again and. I’m still clicking away and grinding my teeth. It’s not that we have a bad relationship, but when Daddy died all her attention swung back to me. My sisters escape the Mom radar by living on the other side of the country and visiting dramatically less often. So I get the full glare of the spotlight. It’s understandable, forgivable, but not always welcome. Isn’t that terrible? Now I feel guilty and can use the coffee and her company. Afterwards, she’ll just need to leave me alone for awhile. I killed off all the appointment pop-ups and got down to the desktop, a stand of trees. There are two large partitions on the document drive, both hidden, so I unhide them. No big deal.

What are you hiding Daddy? The first partition is over forty gigs. But it’s empty. Erased. I preview a recovery on it and get hundreds of names of mpegs and video files. Ugh, Daddy! I don’t want to know. Men are all alike. When I unhide the second partition another popup appears on the screen—“This drive is encrypted. Please enter your password to decrypt and view.” The cursor blinks annoyingly in the empty field. What the fuck Daddy? How am I supposed to know what his password is?

Mom’s at the table munching a bit of toast and jam. My cup sits opposite her, steaming vigorously.

Minutes turn into hours. Mom insists on a ride to the Giant Eagle supermarket—for what I can’t possibly imagine. The house is full of food. The kitchen and downstairs pantries could feed a family of six for months. She tells me over the too-hot coffee that she needs to bake a cake. I’m not sure why. Mom, for my entire 40 years on this planet, has baked all our birthday and celebration cakes, baked for friends and family—wonderful bakery quality cakes she sold for a pittance—little more than the cost of ingredients. People took advantage of her, but she never saw it that way. While we were growing up, money was always tight and I pushed her to be more businesslike about her sideline, but I never got anywhere.

Dad tried for years to make it on his own as a writer. He wrote three novels and dozens of short stories. He got a handful of short stories published in small literary magazines over the years, but nothing ever caught fire. So he did freelance jobs. Like me, he did a stint in an ad agency until he couldn’t handle it anymore. He was out of work for years until a job opened up at the community college. I was fifteen when he was hired to teach what they euphemistically call English for idiots. The class was packed with working adults and students who’d somehow escaped highschool reading on a gradeschool level. Daddy never complained about the class or his work. He never talked at all about it. Every night he’d take his tumbler of scotch up to his office and grade paper and write lesson plans. We never knew if he was still trying to sell his writing.

Then, out of the blue, his screenplay sold for a million dollars to a bigtime Hollywood studio. Everybody was shocked by the idea of this 78 year old dude writing his first feature film. It has the touch of the outlandish that Hollywood adores. Especially after the screenwriters’ ageism lawsuits. The laughable part is Daddy wrote that script many years ago, decades before—when he was my age. The movie, one of those big fantasy sword and sorcerer epics came out before Christmas. What Daddy knew—his passion—Le Morte d'Arthur. His PhD treatise was called “Malory in the Age of Chivalry,” but the screenplay “Legend of Arthur” was pure swashbuckle. Knights and their big swords. Maidens and their dragons. Go figure. That it made his widow an instant millionaire with points. Go fucking figure. After toiling his entire life in anonymity, Daddy only had a year or so to enjoy his newfound fortune. At least he had that year. Month after month, “Legend of Arthur” breaks box office records. Every month, Mom gets another fat check from California.

I can’t imagine who’d ask her for a cake now. I already told her I don’t want one. I need cake like I need the extra fifteen pounds I put on these last months. Cake is a fat-bearing torpedo. It knows right where to go. My tits, my best assets are starting to sag. I won’t even discuss the hips. Protest is futile.

“I just need to make a cake. I have to go down to the Eagle. I’d drive myself, but my eyesight isn’t …”
“Enough, I said I’d do it.” My voice is shriller than I’d intended.
“Well when?”
“Right now Mom. Whenever you want.”
“Okay. I worry about you and Greg. He seemed so unhappy. Are things okay between you? You know you can …
“There’s nothing to talk about Ma.”
“Are you grinding your teeth again?”
“No! Can we just get going?”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”

Her and her friggin cakes. I trail dutifully behind her. I need to walk, a real stomp into the woods, not this slow painful crawl down the produce aisle where she meets a couple of neighbors who still offer polite condolences and promise to stop by and “look in on her.”
I’m polite and friendly, but my mind is stuck on Daddy’s F drive.

By the time we get back, I’m hot and flustered and couldn’t sit still even if you held a gun to my head. I tell myself I’ll take the damned walk I’ve been promising myself for three days. The neighborhood winds like corkscrew around a foothill north of the Shawangunk Range. Because it’s an old-style development, they didn’t chop down all the trees and level everything. In the vast tracts of interior space behind houses there are numerous trails leading into old-growth wooded areas where what few kids are left in this retirement community use for hiking, off-roading, drinking and smoking pot. Other stuff, the typical stuff kids have always done in the woods. I pull on my hiking boots. I pull out the Altoids tin where I keep the six joints my office-mate Kevin gave me. I stuff the tin and a pack of matches in my backpocket. Damn, these jeans are so tight. I squeeze my phone in the front pocket and set out. I don’t tell Mom I’m going.

I skirt along the edge of the Anderson’s driveway. Two metal posts and a heavy chain bar the path’s entrance from motor vehicles. As a girl, I’d hop the chain without a second thought. At forty-something, with tight jeans, I skirt cautiously around the barricade.

The trail is etched by ravines and deep gullies. Tiny remnant streams trickle along, where once powerful, ancient washes tore deep into this hillside. Fed by receding glaciers, these waters dropped their booty of giant boulders like retreating thieves. I come to a little wooded crest and find the familiar vaguely chair-like rock that I’ve long considered my own “sitting rock.” I wrestle the Altoids can from my back pocket and light one of the joints.

Marijuana has always had a strange effect on me. I mean I like it. It doesn’t fuddle me out like it does most people. The closest I can describe it, it’s like the polarizing filter on Daddy’s old Nikon. You rotate the filter a quarter turn and suddenly everything seems more vivid. I haven’t had a joint in ages. Not since before Danny was born. I miss my babies but I am luxuriating in my selfish self-ness. I feel a long, peaceful quiet even out around my edges and spread into the woods. Like nature’s caught my buzz. The day is warm and bright for early March, but the wind still sings and moans and moves the bare trees about like living flutes, a lonely sound I have always adored.

Pot does two other things to me. I almost forgot; it’s been so long. Pot makes me so horny. My stomach flutters and my pulse quickens in a little sad recollection of the mad, passionate escapades Gregg and I got up to after smoking. They say pot renders men flaccid. That was never a problem with him. Not until recently. I don’t know if he’s smoking or not, but he’s sure as hell not waving “Mr. Ironcock” in my face, demanding to be let in. Demanding that I sit in his lap and play pony. It’s more like “Mr. Handcock” or his “other therapy.” There were a couple of times recently when we both seemed primed for action, but they turned into one of those “Don’t worry about it, they say it happens to all men” kind of evenings. He didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to say it. Now I’m feeling a little sad and I have to pee—bad—the other thing pot does to me.

I’m not one of those little prissy girls who need a warmed commode and a closed door to drop trou. I’ve been smoking, tromping and peeing in the great outdoors since before I was teenager. I unbutton my jeans, pull them to knee-level and cop a squat. My stream comes, a thick, steaming gush that makes a satisfying thrum on the dirt between my spread feet. I watch the little yellow rivulet roll and melt into the frost-crusted earth. I touch myself down there, through the coarse nest of hair, spreading my lips, pressing in to milk out any residual fluid in my bladder. One fingertip grazes my clitoris. I’m tempted to leave it there, tempted to rub one out or whatever expression the kids use these days. Why the hell not? You’ve got to take your pleasures where and when you find them. My fingers linger in the wet folds. I feel the cold on my exposed rump and it feels good. The pee has completely soaked in, leaving only a darkened, dampened trail on the earth beneath me.

A sudden crunch of twigs and brush above me shoots my pulse through the roof. A dog barks. I stagger to my feet, yanking my jeans and panties back over my hips. It’s far from a graceful maneuver and I lose my footing, pitching face first where I’ve just urinated. “Motherfucker!” I shout, scrambling to my feet.
“Uh, are you alright?” A voice, a softly-accented male voice comes from where the disturbance originated. A hot flush covers my body as I turn to confront him, a young, slight man in a ski-jacket holding a very large German Shepherd on a leash. I’m trembling now.

“I’m so sorry, I just smelled something good and came to see.”
“You smelled me peeing?”
“No, no,” he laughs. A musical, good-natured laugh. “The other thing you were doing.”

Oh my God, Oh my God, I’m shaking in uncontrollable mortification but the man makes a pinching gesture to his smiling lips. “You ‘ave any more of this?” he asks.

“Oh, oh, I guess.” I wipe my wet hand on the rump of my jeans and retrieve the joint from my sitting rock. “Need a light?

“Oui s'il vous plait. Please,” he responds taking the matchbook and joint from my trembling fingers. He relights the joint and took a deep drag. Still holding it in his mouth, he bends to the dog’s collar and unleashes it. The monster bounds down the hill, straight at me, but just sniffs curiously at my feet before tearing off into the brush. “You don’t need to worry about Charlemagne,” the man explains, exhaling a plume of blue smoke. “’ee is beeg, but very gentle.”

“Charlemagne? What about you? Do I need to worry about you?”
“Oh no, I am of even less concern. Jean Jacques Metier,” he extends his hand. I wipe my hand on my pants again before accepting his.”
“Mary Lindstrom. Look, I’m sorry, I can explain …”
“Explain what? What is to explain?”
“Nothing, I guess. I was just taking a hike. I’ve been exploring these woods since I was very young. I used to live … I mean my mother lives …”

He waves his hand and coughs out another lungful of smoke before passing the glowing joint back to me. I take a couple more puffs, then stub the roach out on my rock while he talks.

“You know there is a store up there?” He gestures up the hill.
“Calloway’s.” It was a grocery and package store. They’d folded two years ago when the economy up here went sour. “I didn’t know anybody …”
“Well I own it now. I am a pâtissier.
“You make candy?”
“Chocolats mostly. I bake too. I was at Les Enfants Terribles in New York. Maybe you know it?”
“I work in the city but I haven’t been there yet.”
“Well my desserts are still in demand. There and elsewhere. I make, I ship FedEx. I deliver the delicate ones by hand. I live here now.”
“How nice for you.”
“Are you making fun?”
“No. No. No. I’m serious. I think it’s great. I … I’m a writer. I live with my husband and children in Verona …”
“New Jersey?”
“Yes. Not the other one. I work in an agency. I edit websites. Internet ads. That sort of thing. I have a hiking blog, but I’ve not updated it in so long. I don’t know. I don’t even know if I have a job when I get back. My father was a screenwriter. He died last year and I’m up here helping my mother. She drives me crazy, so I just needed a break.” All this tossed in the air in a flustery blur of words and superfluous hand gestures. But the Frenchman, who I suddenly realized is rather handsome in a boyish, blue-eyed blonde-headed way, takes it all in, nodding solicitously, as if I’m reciting Rimbaud instead of blathering like some premenopausal housefrau.

“Ah oui. Mothers. And I disturbed your solitude. My apologies.”
“No, really.”
“Yes, really, so please, may I invite you, I can put on the fresh coffee and perhaps show you some of my latest works.”
“I don’t think so …”
“Not to be immodest, but I am very good at what I do.”
“I’m sure you are Jean …”
“Jean Jacques. So fine you…”
“Jean Jacques, I really should get back. It will be dark soon and my mother will worry …”

I blush furiously, realizing how juvenile that just sounded coming from a woman nearly old enough to be his mother. Then I compound the error with one word. “But …”

God, so stupid. That one extra “but” slipped out of my stonehead yap and I instantly regret it.

“… But. Then, you can come tomorrow and I will …”
“I don’t think so.” I raise my hand shyly, the one with the wedding ring.
“Please, you misunderstand. I’ve been trying something new. A new assortiment de chocolat. You can try. Give me an honest opinion. It would be a huge favor. Huge. Please. I beg you.
“You beg me?”
“I do.” He even clasped his hands together.
“Then I consent,” I said with a way too coquettish giggle for a married woman. Who the fuck am I trying to kid? “There’s one condition. You say you bake?”
“I say and I do.”
“There’s this diner. Closed years ago. Do you know how… Of course you know, I’m just being really stupid. I …”
“Just ask.”
“Pecan pie … do you, you know, make it?”
“Tarte de pécan?”
“Tarte de pécan.”
“Oui. Mais bien sûr. Chocolat or whiskey?”
“Chocolate. All the better. One o’clock then?”
“It will be my pleasure.” He actually bowed as I left.

Jean Jacques. Jean Jacques. Jean Jacques. I am skipping down the trail chanting his name like a sixteen year old cunt for a brain. Jean Jacques. Jean Jacques. Jean Jacques. His very name could be a confection. Who am I fooling? He’s young enough ... I am old enough … I’m being an idiot I tell myself. Over and over again I say it. Trouble is, it doesn’t sink in.

“Mary, oh my God Mary Therese, where have you been? I’ve been so worried. I tried to call.”
“Mom, I just went for a walk. Reception is spotty in the woods.”
“The woods?”
“Mom, I’ve been hiking these woods for decades.”
“Mary, that’s just insane. Last year the Anderson twins were raped and left in those woods.
“Mom, I heard about that.”
“So? Then you should know better.”
“I do. I know the Anderson girls are little sluts.”
“Mary!”
“I’m just saying Mom, they weren’t walking the woods in daylight. They were drinking with bikers in an afterhours club in New Paltz and from what I hear it had nothing to do with rape.”
“Mary!”
“Mom!”
“There’s no talking to you when you’re like this, but listen, Gena Maffucci is picking me up in an hour. We’re going to Tuesday Bridge Night at the Community Center. You play so …”
“Pass, Mom. I’ll heat up a bowl of soup and work.”
“Don’t stay up too late.”
“You don’t stay out too late.”
“Oh Mary!”
“Oh Mother.”

In all this time, I’d completely forgotten about Daddy’s laptop and the mystery that awaited me upstairs. And it was high time to get to the bottom of it so I could get back to my own home, my husband and my babies. I made up to my mother and heated the soup I’d made the other day. As I sat in the kitchen, Mom bustled around with her preparations. I looked out the window. There were a few snowflakes in the air but nothing to keep her from her appointed rounds. Thank you God. The house would soon be empty. The doorbell rings and Mom twitters “Ooh!” and is off with another warning for me not to stay up too late.

Empty house. Encrypted drive. I again rifle his desk unsuccessfully. I pull out the drawers. Run my hands under the top. There is no mysterious note with the missing password. Logic dictates that it is something I know and he knew I know. He was always careful that way.

A half hour later, I am cursing and grinding my teeth again. I have tried his name, my name, my mother’s name, each of my sister’s names, the name of our borough, all the dogs we ever owned, the name of his screenplay, all the birthdays I could think of and the damned cursor sits there still blinking and taunting me. “Please enter your password to decrypt this directory.”

“Fuck a duck!” I bellow, my voice echoing through the fortunately still empty house. I take the stub of the joint out of the tin and open the office window. A blast assails me and scatters what few papers are left in this office that was once so cluttered with paper and life. I close the window partway and light the roach, smoking it down until it damn near blisters my fingers.

I have my pee in the upstairs bathroom while Dad’s office airs. I return and jam the window down. I’m hungry again and I don’t want soup. Something sweet. I’m staring distractedly at the green trees on the laptop screen behind the blinking cursor when it comes to me just how utterly stupid I’ve been.

Ziziphus zizyphus (from Greek ????f??, zizyfon), commonly called Jujube, Red Date, or Chinese Date, is a species of Ziziphus in the buckthorn family Rhamnaceae, used primarily for its fruits.

Jujubes, a type of starch, gum and corn syrup based candy drops originally produced by the Heide Candy Company. The product was sold to The Hershey Company, and then to the current owner, Farley & Sathers. They are much stiffer than their relatives (e.g. Jujyfruits).

Jujubes, yeah, the stiff ones. Looks a little like a raspberry. Comes in four different flavors. My favorite candy and my Daddy’s pet name for me as a girl.

Jujube. I type it in and the partition blossoms like a flower to reveal three directories with our three names on them. Lee and Lo’s directories are mirrors of the flash drives they’d already been sent.

My directory is a different story. It’s a long string, a couple hundred Word documents.

I chose the first one, the one with the most recent date. Its title of course, is Jujube.doc.

Dear Darling Mary (Jujube):

My precious darling. I knew a long time before you did how hard your road would be. Of all my children, you are the most like me and I pity and treasure you for it. If you remember the advice I gave you as a blushing schoolgirl; you will also recall I did not repeat it on your wedding day. You ‘d made your choice by then and it was not my place as your father to second guess you. Your husband is a good man and I bear him no ill will, even though that’s a father’s prerogative with his precious daughter Still if you are not happy now, it would not surprise me and nobody would be less happy about that than me. I take no joy in being right about this. I think you probably realized I knew I was dying shortly before they bought my script.

I didn’t know! I didn’t and I have to dry my tears before I read on.

After so many years of struggling, I want you girls and your mother to enjoy these final days. I think we all should be allotted one secret to keep if that secret harms nobody but the keeper. And I enjoyed my final months, knowing you all were so excited. Your mother will live comfortably on whatever comes from the movie, for the rest of her life. Whatever is left when she’s gone, I’ve instructed her to split evenly between you and your sisters.

But I wanted to give you something more. The other files, 237 of them at last count are all the stories I wrote. As I was so terrible at promoting myself and playing the game, you and I both know how few of them were published. So now, they are yours, all yours to do what you will with them. Many, I think, just need a good editor and from what I can see, you clearly have the requisite skills. But you have more than that, so don’t just stop there. Make them your own. Do what I could not do.

I don’t know how comfortable you’ll be with some of them. While I wouldn’t call them smut, they have strong, erotic themes. I have long been fascinated by the machinations of courtly love, a love that differs from our modern love only by the steps in the dance.

Others of the more contemporary stories perhaps express the gulf between my romantic ideals and the reality of life with your mother. I loved your mother more than words could express, but I am, in my deepest heart, a man she would not recognize. So, I did her the most generous turn a man could do for a loving and loyal wife. I hid my true nature from her, a revelation I make to you with some reservation, this reservation not for my own comfort, but in concern over any pain knowing the truth will cause you. You have always tended to over-idolize me; perhaps after reading, you’ll reconsider. Yet somehow, I don’t think you’ll think less of me than due, for whatever you read here is a reflection of me, as you are, beloved daughter.

As I say, these are yours to do with what you will.

Forgive your emotional old father Mary. Forgive his many faults as a father and as a man. Take the best of this modest legacy I’ve left you with and use it and your own blazing talents to advance a better way for yourself than I have made for you. None of this is mine anymore. As you read this, I am gone, so it is all yours. I only hope in the fullness of your time that you will have what I have been most, most truly blessed with. A beautiful, gracious loving child to whom you can pass on your true legacy.

I have one final request to make of you. Call Lenny Richtman at Creative Arts when you are ready. Tell him that you’d like to show him a manuscript. He knows to expect your call.

All my love sweetheart,
Dad

I’m not tearing up now. I’m bawling like a baby. I click open the next document, the biggest of the 237. At eight megabytes it is a 300 page novel called Apostrophe. It is beautiful, profane and knowing. It is a story about a committed ménages a trois, three lovers, living in New York during the sixties. It is a story in need of an editor. It needs a woman’s touch. It would make a great movie. I read seventy pages in, making fast, frantic notes until my eyes blur and the words slide off the screen and I can read or type no more. I don’t know when Mom came in. She went to bed without disturbing me. How many nights had she done that for him. Given him his privacy. Managed the day to day mundanities of raising three girls to leave him to his writing. The writing he’d now bequeathed to me.

The horizon is a flat gray smear as I drag the comforter off my bed and crawl onto Daddy’s leather couch with it. My eyes have been so wet for the past hours, I’m somewhat surprised that it’s wet too, this amazing vagina which squeezed out three kids, two at once, which has seen its share of action, but still wants more. That still wants to be desired. To be touched. If there’s nobody around to love it but me, then I’ll love it. Shivering, even under the thick comforter, my skin against the leather, hand thrust down my sweatpants and working, I don’t feel guilty or weird touching myself in my father’s study. As he said, he’s gone now and it’s all mine. As I rub, my mind goes through a lifetime of lovers, real and imagined, like a Vegas dealer flipping cards, but it’s not until I turn up the face of Jean Jacques Metier, East Ellenville’s newest candyman that I come and I don’t recall when I’ve ever come harder touching myself. Oh, this is a bad omen, I say over and over as a muddy dawn appears and I fall into an uneasy trembling sleep.

Kevin’s call comes at 11:30, waking me. I haven’t slept this late since before my first pregnancy. I have no coffee. I hope my voice isn’t too groggy.

“Hey Mar, how’zit going up there?”
“I’m fine Kev, really. I sent Gregg and the kids home. I’ll be back in a few days” Then a long, uncomfortable silence.

“Mar, I have some bad news. I know it couldn’t come at a worse time. I don’t know how to ah, say it. So I’m just going to.”
“Right. Just say it Kevin.”
“Diulio says I have to let you go. It’s not like you’re like fired. You’ll get severance, a good recommendation. You can collect unemployment. I told her to hold off. I went to the mat for you. I mean with your father and everything. I think it’s really cold. But she’s the Exec.”
“I know, Kevin, it’s okay, really.”
“No it isn’t. You’re my best editor but Mar, I tried to warn you about taking so much time.”
“You did Kevin and I appreciate it.”
“Look, tomorrow, it’s Friday. I can, uh, y’know, come up? Bring more of that, y’know. You asked me for it. You liked it, right?”
“It’s nice. Real nice. But Kevin, I’m with my mother.”
“Geez, I know Mar, but I could find something nearby, it’s just, y’know if you need somebody to …”
“You’re sweet, but I’m doing okay.”
“Okay, fine, where do you want me to send your check?”
“To my home Kevin. Where else?”
“I don’t know Mary. I’m not enjoying this.”
“I know Kevin, Look, I’m sorry. I’m a little upset, but I’m fine, really. You’re a good guy.”
“You’ll keep in touch, won’t you?”
“Of course. I’ll call when I get back. And Kevin?”
“Mary?”
“No hard feelings.”

I pad downstairs still holding on to the phone. That was entirely expected. And nowhere near as hard as I thought it would be. Over coffee, but out of earshot of my mother, I make the second call. An officious young man puts me right through to Mr. Richtman, who has been, true to Daddy’s words, expecting my call. I tell him that I’ve been working on something my father wants him to see. That I can send the first two chapters in a couple of days, but I’d need more time to send the completed work. I tell him as much as I know about “Apostrophe”. He only has one question.

“How much time?”
“Maybe two months. I work fast,” I reply.
“That will be a welcome change,” he quips. “and a distinct pleasure to work with you.” The businesslike crispness dissolves from his voice. “Mary?”
“Mr. Richtman?”
“Call me Len, Mary. I wish I’d known him earlier. Gotten to know him better. I miss your Dad.”
“Me too Len.”

Mom enters the kitchen slowly. I don’t know how much she’s listened to of my side of the conversation. She puts her hands on my shoulders and gives them a little maternal squeeze. She asks if that was work. I tell her it was, but that I’d be changing jobs soon. She tells me a mother’s place is with her children. I tell her that the new job will allow me to write from home, so it would work out just fine.

“I have every confidence in you honey. Always have.” she adds, then toddles off to the den to watch her gameshow. Oh shit! Jesus Christ on a stick. It’s 12:30 already!

I shower and dry quickly. I put on my best silk black bra and sheer matching panties. I pull on jeans and a denim workshirt. I am layered in contradiction. I pull on my hiking boots and tear from the house with a terse explanation for my mother that I “need to walk.”

I trot from the house and am near a run when I approach the trailhead and take the steep climb up to the crest. Panting, I emerge from the clearing an hour later and approach the former Calloway’s from the back. I pick my way through piles of wood and a shamble of construction materials until I approach the backdoor. It’s open, but I knock and his lilting voice invites me in.

I’ve not seen the front of the store yet, but the back, the kitchen, is a revelation. It is complete and fully furnished. I stand in the small mudroom and kick off my shoes, surveying the exposed brick walls. Copper pots and saucepans hang from hooks. Three-inch thick butcher block counters extend from the sink and wrap around three sides of the room. An ancient commercial oven radiates heat and smells I can’t begin to describe. He stands, arms folded amiably, in the center of the room, so immaculately white he gleams, from head to toe, from the top of his toque to the cuff of his creased, ironed white slacks, every inch a… I lose my courage.

“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“But you are not. You are here.”
“I know, but we said.”
“Mary, a lady is never early or late. She arrives precisely when she arrives.”
“Charming, I saw the same movie.”
“Nothing escapes you. It is warm here. Come. Sit. I hope you came hungry. C’est bon. I promised you first, the pie, the tarte de pécan.”

I seat myself at the small country oak table, with a view of the oven from which emerges the heavenly pie, pecans wet with the dark sheen of their own oils, steam rising and curling from the pan like a lover’s fingers. He cuts me a small slice and plates it on a small white china dish. My mouth waters like Pavlov’s pooch and I press my lips together, half afraid that if I open them, that drool will spill down my chin.

“Taste,” he commands.

Pecan pies can be lumpy, cloyingly sweet affairs. Heating improves the texture of lesser pies, but does little for the taste. I raise the first forkful to my lips. The sensations that flood my mouth make me want to weep. The creamy oil of the pecans has infused the chocolate layer beneath them. The chocolate, rich and dark, with just a hint of bitterness, coats my tongue and the roof of my mouth. I let the bite linger on my tongue as waves and waves of pecan and chocolate and their combined notes swirl over my taste-buds like the wind in the trees on the trail. I chew slowly, the caramelized pecans both crisp and creamy in texture, yield, practically dissolve under the pressure of my teeth. I am, as I suspected, in the lair and at the mercy of an artist and each forkful like the first, confirms his intent more than words ever could. Will I let him? Do I have any choice? Should I resist and run from this place as fast as my legs can carry me or abandon all pretense? After all, I’m the one who took to this trail on a wing, like a besotted schoolgirl. But I’m not a schoolgirl. I’m a woman, the married mother of three and I have no delusions anymore.

“So?”
“Jean Jacques, You have no idea what this means. I’ve never tasted anything like this.”
“I am so happy you think so. Coffee?”
“I’d love one.”

He pours a rich, dark espresso, so nutty and aromatic that I wish that I’d saved some of the pie to go with it. All that’s left are a few crumbs. They’re enough. I don’t dare ask for more. What will he think?

“Another slice?”

I hesitate and his eyes study my face. He says, “No, perhaps not. I have other things to show you.”

“I am in your hands.”

“Tant mieux. It is always best to be a little hungry, no?”

“As I said, I am in your hands.”

Stand. Here. He guides me to the counter. My bum presses against the warm, oiled wood. I smell his smell, the sweet yeasty smell of a man and of his baking.

“Chocolat is the food of love, but I don’t suppose you know how it got that way?”

“Something to do with flavonoids and the similarity to arousal compounds.”

“That is the scientific explanation. Now I give you the real one. But only if you consent, and if you do, I must blindfold you. Do you consent?”

I nod only because I am trembling and unable to speak.

He took my scarf off the hook and tied it gently but securely about my eyes.

“It is a legend, but every pâtissier will swear to its truth. In the 1750’s the Royal Pâtissier to Louis the 15th was searching desperately for a new way to present this delicacy to the king. Up until that time all cocoa had been mixed with milk or water and drunk. Now open your mouth.”

I did as he instructed. He pressed a little chocolate morsel past my lips. “Don’t bite,” he insisted, “Let it melt on your tongue.”

Smooth, creamy milk chocolate flavors wound around my tongue and something else. A spice. Rosemary? Yes, rosemary, pungent, oily, building in intensity. When I finally swallowed, the confection slides down my throat, coating it. I taste it in places I didn’t even know I had tastebuds. I am only dimly aware that the buttons on my workshirt are being very delicately undone. So delicately, it feels like the chocolate is undressing me. I shiver, though I was anything but cold as the shirt slides off my shoulders as if it were dissolving. Two fingertips drew a delicate circle about my navel. They elicit a little shudder.

“So, desperate for inspiration was the young chef that he confessed his despair to Madame Jeanne du Barry, maîtresse déclarée, courtesan to the king. Madame du Barry was a woman renowned for her beauty, wit and the extravagant gowns the king bought her. This kitchen she told him is missing one essential thing. With which she dropped her petticoats. “Kneel,” she commanded the young chef and when he did she took him under her skirts until his face was like this.”

Jean Jacques is by my side. I smell and feel his breath on my cheek, warm and sweet. He presses his palm firmly between my thighs. I am startled by the touch, but can not back away even if I wanted to. When I take a somewhat calmer breath, he slips another tiny morsel in my mouth. This one, a little darker in taste, has a strong floral note.

“Rosewater?

“Oui her scent. Her signature.” As I toy with the little drop of heaven swirling it in my mouth. Jean Jacques’ hands are busy at my waist, undoing the clasp, sliding my jeans slowly down to my ankles. Fingertips again, they sweep my bra and panties. I am, for all intents and purposes naked to his touch. Even without sight, I feel him studying my breasts and hips, these hips that squeezed out three little ones, these breasts that fed them.

“J'approuve,” he whispers, then continues his narrative.

“It wasn’t until after they had made mad passionate love and the lady fair had left, that the pâtissier found his inspiration and made the first bonbon chocolats. He was a brilliant chocolatier, but not so smart at court intrigue. He sent his samples to Louis, whose nickname was "le Bien-Aimé," the Beloved. Tasting these delights the king understood immediately all they implied. He had the unfortunate chocolatier beheaded the next day.”

With that he slips another candy pearl in my mouth as his other hand slips simultaneously beneath my panties and gently caresses my sex. The electric jolt of jalapeno fills my mouth. My eyes water and they aren’t the only part of me that does.

“As every pâtissier knows there is only one way for inspiration and passion to come from your kitchen.” The clasp on my brassiere is released. “You have to bring passion into your kitchen!” Another chocolate is in my mouth. This one is sweet, dark and intensely fruity. It erases the heat of the jalapeno like the snapping of a finger. It is glorious but no taste I recognize.

My breasts, my large café-au lait areolas and firm nipples are in his mouth. I pull my own panties down. He scrambles and tears at his own clothes. He is inside me so fast and hard and I come so quickly and loudly that it rouses the dog who’s been sleeping by the fireplace. Charlemagne trots over to us and licks my toes with his broad tongue. It makes my spine tingle. I scratch him behind the ears.

“Charlie, au lit,” Jean Jacques orders and the dog complies.

The second time is slower and more languid. We feed each other Champaign, crusty bread and chevre. We’ve christened his kitchen with our passion and the smells, tastes and cries of passion. I have no doubt he will be a huge success. As I dress to leave, he presents me with a small red foil jewel box, a remembrance. When I open the box the next day, there are the same four chocolates, from creamy milk to darkest dark, their shape instantly recognized and remembered, the shape I could not discern while blindfolded. Jujubes.

Mom is driving me to the train tomorrow, early, so I can’t work too late tonight. Ignoring the look of reproach she masks as worry, I pour a tumbler of Scotch to take up to the office. I drop in three ice cubes. They bob agreeably in the amber liquid as I walk. I’ll need a couple of sips before I call Gregg and explain as best I can, that I’ve quit the agency. He takes it well. What happens after that? I’ll try to prepare him for that too. Help him to understand. I don’t completely understand myself, but that’s okay. Apropos of nothing, I’ve stopped grinding my teeth. Haven’t done it in days. That’s a good omen. I skype my sisters. I tell them that I’ve decided to keep Dad’s laptop for a backup. For sentimental reasons. Surprisingly neither complains. Lo says she and her kids are coming east next month and will spend their Spring Break with Mom. I love my sisters. The 237 stories are on my hard drive now, but the laptop isn’t going anywhere. It’s not getting wiped or donated or sold or given away. It’s staying with me, unaltered. It’s what Daddy wanted. And it is, without any doubt or reservation, what I want.

This work may not be reproduced in any way without the express written permission of the author. Riccardo Berra/Apostrophe © 2010

Vi's memories must become reality again

2010-02-08T16:13:00.000-05:00

I am sitting in Fiumicino typing on my laptop from the Alitalia business lounge having been awaiting my delayed plane for 8 hours in order to return to you............and Sofi. Due to your hazardous snowfall in the NE the long wait to board my plane has increased my anxiety about seeing you again. I know we have seen each other on a webcam a handful of times but I am filled with trepidation.

You will see my increased lines on my face, my hands, my stomach. It has been over a year since we last saw each other in the flesh. Still, my flesh, now over a year older, thankfully cannot claim a single inch in fat!

I cannot help thinking that you will not desire me anymore after enjoying Sofi's, still very young, luscious body for these past 13 months or so. I know I am still attractive to men as I notice I still catch their glances but I want you, Ricci, to desire my slender frame and small pert breasts as you did before. If it were not for your loving words on the telephone, your beguiling charm that never ceases to engulf me when I listen to you telling me even the simplest of things with a minimum of words, I may not have been about to board this flight!

Your words, both written and spoken, have charmed me ever since I met you and I chide myself for being so captive to them. I cannot deny that I crave the first kiss and the first chance we get to lie naked one on top of the other after so long. I have one request though, which I do hope, Sofi, you will not take amiss - Please let me spend one night with your Ricci, our Ricci, alone before resuming our love trio. How so much more experienced you must be, Sofi carissima, in the art of love-making.

I remember when anal sex was unknown, and even unthought of for you, and how I coached in how to submit to Ricci and enjoy this act of loveplay that he so cherishes and craves on a daily basis; but, I cannot write about this anymore as the thought of being his 'fetish object', submitting to him soon again in this way excites me more than my words can illustrate.

My flight has been called so now I am signing off and this email will be in your inbox, Ricci, for many hours before I will have the chance to be with you! I wonder if you will be alone, or if you, Sofi, will be standing at Ricci's side as the apartment door is opened to let me in. My actions more than any further words will show you how much I have missed you!

As I close my laptop, I should just mention that I've been on the blog and seen recent posts from both of you. I hope our story does well and that the readers who have followed our story will read and appreciate it. Si, and vote too.

We're being followed

2010-02-08T15:26:00.004-05:00

Thanks to the incomparable Dr. Susana Mayer who supports our blog and story with this mention on her Erotica Literary Salon blogsite.

Support us and support her unique live event. Riccardo will be there to read from his latest work. We're still looking to publish Apostrophe, but wonder if the mainstream publishing industry is ready for a work that is both literary and really, really hot erotica.

Love and kisses

Sofia

Help My Story Go to the Finals

2010-02-08T14:41:00.002-05:00

Plural Possessive is online for votes starting today and running for one week. It is in the running for the finals at the Better Sex Erotic short story competition. Please support us.
XXOO
Sofi

Six Words for A Kiss

2010-02-08T14:37:00.000-05:00

Vi, can't you see how much I miss you? Remember this:

6 words for a kiss

lips

My hand rides your brown thigh, barely touching,
speed to plough familiar winding roads home to lips on lips through lips under over pressed parting lips,
no speak no tongue none but my own that’s still so hungry for your lips

air

Swimming hand in hand, dark, then a flash of street lamp surge,
we surface through body-warm, amniotic night, and as you turn and sodium vapor ripples across your face,
jumps my pulse, passion whip edited, to other nights matted as tight against my chest
as the sweat-pressed silk that clings to your hips

outside

the Mexican restaurant brain froze fluorescent green Margarita,
Tabasco and tobacco pinch my tongue as your strut reminds me that my heart has long since broken its moorings
and rises—up my chest, out my throat, float, past teeth,
free to dance on contrails raised from ember concrete sidewalks made ripe by orchid night

secret

a hard black pebble lodged under my tongue so round so smooth so polished by practiced deception
of all but you spills effortless from my throat and only you know that though
what I declare rolls fictive like heat lightning dancing off far mountaintops
it is not but razor true

prayer

why do I always do this, enrapturing my own destiny
as if some tremulous ego finger tap a tat
lifts my fumbled words above the line,
perhaps because in your lips on mine,
I taste the first act of the divine

art

3 a.m., Brahman's hour, beyond magnetic lines of sin and salvation,
truth belie, delta pi, fevered wakefulness and sleeping liss,
this longing in your absence is a song with
no tongue,
no lips,
just rhythm, just a frantic rattle in a cage, two clicked tones—
on/off,
senseless/dream,
illusion/more illusion,
marijuana/haze,

oh beg this fickle muse to whom I pray
to forgive me if I cannot stay
for your next
Kiss

The very definition of desire

2010-02-03T02:49:00.000-05:00

This is the link to vote for "Plural Possessive" during the week of February 8th. Wish us luck.

Post-Mortem

2010-01-11T04:54:00.012-05:00

This is a new story, unrelated to Apostrophe, but still appropriate for the blog. It will be featured next month on the Erotic Readers Short Fiction site all throughout March. The act of putting it out there greatly helped my editing process. This is a brand new version, so read and enjoy.

Post Mortem

When did I know that today would be unlike any other day? Certainly not during the neuron withering argument over something stupid I am said to have said or done or not said or done, according to Annabelle who knows all my faults and logs all my failings in her hermetically sealed vault for times such as these and all times to come.

I don’t want to argue. After fifteen years of the guerilla warfare known as marriage, I seldom feel up to it anymore. Even when I’m the offended party. Satisfaction for this tongue-tied poet comes not in spontaneous frontal assault but in surgical postscripts. So as soon as she paused in mid-sentence and spun off to the bathroom to relieve herself, I wasted no time reciprocating the gesture and broke from the house in a sweat-inducing trot, the sun just beginning to dip behind our little brick rowhome as I stole across the ice and snow-slicked avenue for the River Drive running path.

Was it then that the premonition, no more than a tiny prickle down the nape of my neck, insinuated what if, what if, this was absolutely the last time? Since these thoughts came so often—what with the separation with Annabelle so imminent and so long in coming I paid it little heed as my lower half accelerated like a fine sportscar, second, third, winding quickly up to fourth gear, pulse pushing blood to fingertips at 90% of cardiac output and any apprehension of singularity fading as I closed in on a bouncing brunette ponytail. Before passing, I slowed just enough to appraise her waxed, glowing shop-tanned legs and the baroque flourish of butt she’s no doubt out here to tame. I blew past the pretty jogger, replaying the argument with Annabelle. I crafted a withering rebuttal I wished had occurred to me ten minutes earlier and filed it away to end our very next battle in my favor, even while acknowledging how pathetic and sad that is. But I wasn’t sad at that particular moment.

Not at all. The adrenaline lust philosophical endorphin cocktail swirled in my veins as Lou Reed wailed Sah-weeeet Jane through my brand-new Skullcandy noise-cancelling earbuds and I assured myself that if the Angel Gabriel played an axe, it would indeed sound just like this solo when an oncoming Nissan Sentra, candy-apple red, does the funniest little shimmy left then right, then leaves terra firma entirely, like one of those George Jetson-mobiles.

Jane, stop this crazy thing!

In a strobelight pop and a flash of red, Lou punched out and I was twirling like a wayward kernel in a hot air popper, the acceleration and disorientation like the rickety Loop the Loop coaster at the Kennywood Park of my Pittsburgh youth. I never stopped but landed and I can’t even say that because there was no downward motion or interruption of motion. I simply was on the roof of the Vesper Boat Club House surveying the grim scene below with what can only be described as serene detachment.

I saw what I saw – there was no mistaking it for anything or anyone else, but I’d … I don’t know, I’d just always imagined my end as being, well … more conclusive. But here I am, shrugged from my skin in a gesture as peremptory as flipping an egg and as my monologue rattles on unabated (as it always has) it forces me to accept that I do too. Body and soul, not only independent and but now independent and separate. I’ve been a lapsed Catholic most of my life, but in these latter years a tenuous agnosticism had taken hold and I’d pretty much rejected more or less in sequence:

Original Sin, Redemption, Hell, Devil, Heaven, God, Soul and Afterlife

There I was and here I still am … sum of the cogito. So what else, who else is out there? Hello? What’s to become of me? I tell myself I’ve been a good man, better than most really—but no saint. Judge or be judged. That’s what they say on the other side of the fence, but do I have any say in this? Here’s the first test.

Isn’t my life supposed to flash in front of my eyes?

Quick as asking, it did. Every moment from the tight bloody slide of my head from my mother’s crotch, my childhood, every student I'd taught, every woman I’d fucked (and loved), every poem I’d ever written, all I’d achieved, and all and all and all I’ve left undone. All rewound and re-lived with the fierce, gorgeous, breathtaking, heartstopping clarity of a spike of heroin. Not that I’d ever … Let’s just say it’s a good thing this experience is reserved for the end of days. Who’d ever want to do that again?

I would.

I would! I’ve made some god-awful choices, mostly with women and having just relived them all, I feel the full weight of disappointment loading up, heavy, clanking and clamorous as Marley's chains. I feel sick. I despise myself. Judge or be judged? I judge myself a failure. But hold on. Hold the fort! It isn’t just the fanciful speculation of poets and philosophers, but the mathematical models of cosmologists and Hilbert space theorists that speak to alternate universes, infinite self-similar bubbles where all choices are better made, unmade or remade. Before the modal realists we just assumed there’s no rewriting history. Now who’s to say? What better time to find out?

I turn to the steel and glass city I’ve called home my entire adult life. It’s gone all aflame, its crystal blues, obsidians and slab grays, doused with buckets of gold—living, luminous gold that pours down ochre, umber and rust into its canyon streets. Staggered by its loveliness, like a woman undressing by the river’s bend at sunset, I raise my ghost voice.

I will not leave yet
Regrets, love debts
You know what I mean?
What we ask for
What we receive
The closed door
The open heart
What passes for
What passes through
And what remains behind
Undone
I will not leave yet
With
So many regrets

I am at her door. My finger on her bell.
Her name is Carrie Anne. Like the Hollies song.
Hey Carrie Anne!

I wasn’t sure about you, she said. Not until I got this. She bounced excitedly on her toes, en pointe, waving the poem I’d written after a sleepless night’s jerking off five times in a row wasn’t enough to drive the image of her, naked, twirling on a balance beam and landing in my arms. Over and over I’d replayed this fantasy until it became obsession and obsession became fetish and the lines rewrote themselves so many damned nights that I lost count.

Never had the balls to send it. Inexplicable, really. The question tormented me for the rest of my days. My first love poem, unseen by any other eyes but mine, lies moldering away in a green folder in a cardboard box in my basement. Why?

No, here it is, so fresh it crinkles in her dark little hands. And here she is, my Carrie Anne, my first, unrequited, unclaimed, lost love. Seeing her again, all those twisted sixteen year-old anxieties land thump on my chest. I barely suppress a giggle. In light of what else landed there today—it certainly puts things in perspective.

She throws her arms about my neck, mashing her tight little breasts up against me, French kissing with all the clumsy ardor that makes teenagers so beautiful.

I didn’t think you were interested in me.

Oh but I was.
I fell hard the very first time I saw her.
That and I’d always wanted to know if what the guys said about gymnasts’ asses was true.

She graduated a year ahead of me and enrolled in one of those Midwestern monoliths where her gymnastic prowess secured her a berth on the US Olympics team. Sadly, it was the squad that boycotted the Moscow Olympics after the Ruskies invaded Afghanistan. I made plans to look her up and offer congratulations, condolences, myself. By the time I’d passed through her town, I’d lost my nerve yet again and never ever got any further than her name and a phone number scrawled under the 36-year old version of "her poem," the one crumbling in the cardboard box by the water heater.

I’ll only let you in if you read it. She waves the poem in my face. God, the paper even smells new.

Oh hell no! I never read my old work.

What are you talking about silly? She kisses me again and thrusts out the paper. Read!

It’s only six lines:
Ahem.

How beautiful you in motion are.
How like an angel,
Expressed, like a train bound to my heart
If you would but be my lover
Such beauty, such motion
Would have no apprehension but in my arms.

I hang my head and hold my breath. I pray she won’t take me to task for the cribbed words and florid syntax. She’d sat two rows away from me in AP English, all straight glossy chestnut hair and shiny brown eyes and paid attention to everything. Even me sometimes. I’m sure of it. But except for some stares held overly long, how could she ever know how hopeless I’d been over her? Seeing her again, I realize for the first time that she is Latina; some caramelita confection of the Spaniard and the dark races they bumped aside in the New World. It always amazed me how many details we miss in the people and situations we assume we know very well. However closely we look, I think we always miss more than we see.

My parents aren’t home, she offers with sly dark eyes. Come in. Wanna see my bedroom?

Yeah, I do.

My greedy eyes absorb everything as I mount the stairs behind her. It is all I can do not to touch the clockwork orbs I know swing under her tartan miniskirt, just out of reach and barely out of sight as she ascends. More evidence of divinity? Her tiny bare feet make no impression on carpeted surface. The muffled quiet of the house is broken by the mournful chime of a grandfather clock in the livingroom. I stop dead at the upstairs hallway mirror. Staring back is the shockingly familiar reflection of the lanky 18 year old lad who’d worshipped this teen siren in abject misery and not the 52 year old man for whom the wound of wanting but not having had not so much healed as scabbed over. She turns at her bedroom window; her palms smooth the man’s loose cotton tee and outline her sorbet cup tits with their bee-stung nipples.

Stand back.

Hmm?

I have a routine to show you.

A routine?

Yeah, me in motion. Just like you wrote.

I meant every word. It …

Get ready to be inspired, mister poet.

With a delicate curtsy, her hands slip under the plaid skirt and slide her panties down about her ankles. A step and a playful kick send them sailing in my direction.

Then she launches herself into the air and for the second time this day, time and space seem to cartwheel about me; her shoulder length hair twirling like the dance of the galaxies, her loose cotton shirt collapsing about her wrists and the tartan skirt billowing inside-out to reveal the trajectory of her downy brown snatch with its tight dark whorls sailing straight for me. With a grunt and a last second extension of her arms, her naked legs land on my shoulders.

If I extend my tongue I can just about touch the cleft vee not an inch from my nose. When I do she scissors my neck and I lift her by her arms and spin her shrieking to the bed where she bounces pleasingly atop the flowery bedspread, her tight form and its better purchase drawing me as magnets close together with a desperate metallic click, her neck atilt, eyes aflutter as I prize open her molasses thighs to place the tip of my cock at the tiny base of the delicate morsel between them.

When is the union of genitals a union of souls?
Her squeaks, squeals and whimpers.
My sighs and moans.
My fingertips press to her throat.
Her fingers jammed in her mouth. Where does the free hand go during such moments? It’s a riddle—one of many I’ve contemplated during various acts of love.
Her childhood bed protests noisily under us.
Her staccato breathing, my hoarse grunts, quicken in concordance.
On the brink of coming, I withdraw, fighting, panting down the overwhelming urge to finish the act and pin her legs all the way back to take her from behind.

You know, with ass-fucking, how at first your lover’s hole presents a tight parsimonious ring, one you never expect a dick to fit in, then with a little slick, steady pressure and mutual inspiration, it relents just enough to offer entry and with it the extreme pleasure religious folks claim God did not intend us to have. (Assuming I see my Maker soon, I’ll be sure to ask.) With a little patience, the ring, the tube, the walls relent, offering a fluttering muscle-gloved embrace as smooth and accepting as any pussy. Well hers never does relent. It may be that she is young or exceptionally well-trained, but she holds me down there like the fist of God, throttling and squeezing and fighting and though her voice says yes, yes and her silky hips say yes bucking up against me, and her legs thrown high over my shoulders say, yes oh yes, take it—her back passage relents not one millimeter until a spasm stiffens her like the rigors of mortis and a seismic explosion rocks her core where she holds me so tightly I can endure no more and screaming I shoot up and into her, pumping waves after waves like a man bleeding out into the vacuum of space.

Happy now? Lying on the bed, she turns to me; the angle of the sun in this light-flooded little girl-cum-woman bedroom bisects her—the tilt of her face, her breasts, her thighs, her peaks and valleys, half ablaze, half in gnomonic shadow. Are you happy? I know you're not really here. But I hope you're happy. Wherever you are … happy, her whisper trails into the darkness lengthening between us, we should’ve done this so long ago, when there was all the time in the world. I always wanted to.

And damn, before I can even respond, I am back on the Vesper Club roofdeck and the sun says no time at all has passed, but far more incredible than that, an entire antediluvian layer of regrets has—blown off like so much prairie dust sweeping away years of crudded failure with all women since her. It’s like warm matter annihilates cold antimatter in the universe’s own version of orgasm or whatever it is in a ghost that compares to the glow in a living man’s bowels, that tight just-fucked dick-ache confirmation that yes, surprisingly yes, everything that high school boys say about gymnasts’ asses, is in fact true.

I am in bed with Annabelle. I recognize her unencumbered profile, as familiar in the dark as her unperfumed scent. I also recognize the forms of her ample bra and the black cashmere sweater she wore on our first date tossed hastily over my desk chair. I’d knelt behind her on that bed and static electricity crackled between us as I peeled the fuzzy, clingy garment off her solid chest. I’d unhooked her bra and admired her generous breasts with gentle strokes and kisses. She’d then requested lights out and we’d gone to bed together on our first date.

Much later in our relationship, she’d joked that I’d married her because of the way she looked that night in her cashmere sweater. There’s a bit more too it than that. She was ripe, blushing and mysterious. I’d reached around in the dark to cradle her heavy breasts. I toyed attentively with the nipple within easiest reach, admiring how its silky smoothness knobbed and elevated under my thumb. She sighed heavily and wriggled her apple bottom against my raging cock which I interpreted as a signal to proceed, but she suddenly became resistant. So I stopped and waited for an explanation. She’d offered that she was on the pill, but hadn’t done this before, which I’d taken to mean she was a virgin. I hid my shock well I thought. So that night, at her insistence, we kept our knickers on and only slept together.

The heady prospect of taking her virginity instantly became my new obsession. Already well-practiced in the art of delayed gratification, I was suddenly presented with a huge and totally unexpected payoff. All that night, I stroked her gently and remained an absolute gentleman. Rising and dressing in the semi-darkness, she left me that morning with a kiss. Her spot in the bed was still warm when she bent to kiss me, boldly passing her hand under the sheet and squeezing my cock, whispering next time. Next time. I promise. Everything you want.

Everything?

Freely and completely yours!

I spent the next hour with myself. I’d lost count of how many times.

She stood me up that night. She didn’t return my calls and I never got an explanation that made sense. Something about having to keep a date with a downtown lawyer she’d made before she’d met me. I got totally shit-faced and swore I’d never call her again. I didn’t have to. She showed up uninvited the third night, a bottle of wine, candles and flowers in hand. She’d put the flowers in a vase, lit the candles in my dining room and made up as I made dinner. On her knees, by the sink, she unzipped me and timidly took my cock into her mouth as I rinsed the salad. A mixed bouquet, fresh green angry makeup sex which was good, wonderful actually, with just a sprinkling of bitters.

See, I’d worked myself into a total state, anticipating how I’d take her maidenhead, lingering on every detail of deflowering my first and only virgin. How delicately I’d position her body for the assault. How gentle but firm I’d be as I entered her. What it would feel like to be held inside her, knowing I was her first. How I’d fold her in my arms and comfort her after the deed was done. The blow job, tepid and uncertain as it was, should have been the first clue. Nothing in longterm relationships is ever free and complete.

So I go back again to the first night in my bed, when I didn’t have all these subsequent memories, when Annabelle was more unknown than known and everything between us was breathless and exciting. My hand soothes the curves of her breasts, her breathing gets heavy and her bottom wriggles invitingly against my tentpoled BVDs. I go back knowing everything it had taken a lifetime to learn.

I turn her face toward mine and kiss her insistently while my other hand sneaks under her panties, lifting the virgin cotton from the coarse mat of hair and her juice-slicked labia. Two fingers slide in, right up to the second knuckle, nestled to the furry, sticky base of her pubis. The only resistance comes from the rear guard, the too-tight elastic waistband that pinches protestingly against the back of my hand. Not a virgin. I hook my fingers inside her, asserting this truth, as if the lie would have ever made me want her more. Who knows what drives the minds and hearts of women? I never did. Her lies, my lies, leapfrogged across the years, layering the crust of our courtship and marriage. Until the end, I never took her to task for any of her lies, any more than she had mine.

She moans in my mouth and half-heartedly tries to extract my hand, but her protest wavers as my buried fingers find a rhythm that distracts her. Her hand flutters and falls limply to her thigh then takes to stroking my arm, her lips offering one token complaint, ‘not your fingers,’ so I yank off my underwear and help her with hers, scrabbling, before she can change her mind, to replace my cock in the spot that my juice-soaked fingers have bookmarked, staking it like a miner lowers himself into a tight, bottomless cave, the delicious resistance almost virginal, though I never had nor ever will have any basis for comparison.

I love you, she whispers as she moves her hips to offer herself, I love you, she repeats more insistently as she spreads her legs wider to give herself completely to me as I plunge my cock so deep inside her, again and again.

This dilemma originally presented in the throes of our third night and how absurd it was, good guy that I’d always considered myself to be, how could I respond in any other way than that which consummated the relationship that never quite jelled, more coagulated, over those fifteen years? How can you pump away in a woman, take her most intimate gifts and not provide her the assurance she seeks? Even if you have to lie to do so?

I don't love you, I respond.

There’s no unkindness in my voice, but her body stiffens as if slapped. I thrust harder and deeper and it's as if something splits inside her, eyes welling, face twisted to one side, contorted in pain and pleasure, tears flowing but hips pumping mechanically under me, accepting, offering herself at last, freely and completely, as a virgin offers her throat to the sacrifice blade.

You can’t love me. We've just met. It's too much, I add as our hips gnash in the finality of the deed that can’t be broken. Too soon.

This duality of arousal and turmoil in her body thrills me and the stifled ‘It’s not!’ sob in her throat gave voice to my cock as I squeeze my eyes and explode into her, all rockets and stars and tumbling ass over teakettle into blackness knowing at once in any alternate storyline my truth had corrected, that there is only this single night of sex, no protestations of love, no marriage, no desperate attempts and grim failures at compatibility, no children, no "making love last," just me, eyes reopened and staring at a bleak, sad, middle-aged face in a bathroom mirror, April morning light, the sound of water running under me, love’s cosmic slate scoured clean by the most caustic of all erasers.

I turn off the faucet, the feel of water on my hands only a dim memory. A desperate sob chokes my throat because I know exactly where I am, the staff john at the university, the one place I am not prepared to be. I will attempt to leave, but an unseen hand will shoot from the last stall and drag me in and she will throw me against the wall, tear at my crotch with claw-like fingernails, devour my lips with sharp teeth that mash and press, shove a thrusting, desperate tongue down my throat while her insistent hand wrestles mine between her legs to stanch the gush I remember made me feel as small and helpless as the Little Dutch Boy before the Zuider Zee.

Nearly four years ago, I’d rebuffed her; frankly her wantonness terrified me. I'd pushed her away and not gently. Annabelle and I had just restarted couples therapy and after a particularly bad session I might have inadvertently led Lucy Kournosova on a little—a momentary flirtation, a lapse of judgment. Nothing more. I thoroughly enjoyed Lucy when she was talking shop, (linguistics), and not going on about her other specialty—herself. Her in-your-face intellectualism was fearless and sexy, but she’d misread me. Too greedy, too desperate. No seduction. No come hither stares or coy words. Just pull you in a bathroom stall and fuck your brains out? Where’s the romance in that? Well, no thank you. There wasn’t enough of me to go around as it was. Speedy, crazy Russian bitch.

Two years of marital misery ground under the wheel, during which time I revisited the bathroom episode many times over and finally came to realize what Lucy had known all along.

That we were the same.
That we belonged together.
My hindsight, her foresight.
Her aggression now understood for its urgency.

But she had her pride too, oh she had her pride, and I’d sorely wounded it. Another year unraveled and an extended, teased-out foreplay ensues—each week new poems are written, some of my best work, entire cycles some, wooing missives invariable returned unopened, crumpled, torn and judging by the wetness on some of them—spat upon or worse.

When I, (bright boy), decided to “go green” and started emailing my apologias, she diligently printed them out, as her point really couldn’t be adequately demonstrated without something to crush. Weeks of rejection accreted into months. Yet I clung to one flickering hope, call it poet’s hubris, that she couldn’t help but see what I’d written before invariably depositing another little paper carcass on my desk. Unwilling to admit defeat, I sent one last desperate email the Monday before the winter break.

Just three short lines – as follows:

Friday, December 14, 6:00 pm
Room 214, (the staff john)
No more words.

I was quite certain that a little wad of paper would appear on my desk at some point that week, but when it hadn’t by 5:30 on Friday, I rose from my desk, locked up and sporting a dog-eared paperback Lorca, I proceeded to the last stall in the second floor bathroom. Finding myself with a growling nervous stomach and time to kill, I did what one should in a stall to the muttered refrain of Romance Sonambulo:

Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
With the shade around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
Green, how I want you green …

By 6:30 my legs had gone numb from sitting way too long and I lurched painfully to my leaden feet, pounding my flanks, praying the God I didn’t believe in to relieve the pins and needles stabbing my lower extremities. Convinced I was wasting my time and that the window I’d fought so hard to reopen was closed forever; I heard a click. The bathroom door? Then a series of clicks—heels on tile. Then water in the sink. Then another click turned the light out and I smelled perfume. Her voice tested the darkness, just outside my stall:

This is a song of the final meeting.
I glanced at the house's dark frame.

I knew the work. I smacked the circulation back into my thighs and responded:

Only bedroom candles burning
With an indifferent yellow flame.

I unlatched the door and pulled her in.

Mistress. She told me afterwards that she likes the word, for in the precarious equilibrium of infidelitous love, it perfectly captures her role and the balance of power between us. Mistress Lucy, lingual linguist, lust—the tight, parched bud—denied, delayed, released, finally blazes into hothouse orchid love. The tongue-tied poet’s mistress love.

I square my shoulders and grab hers. Bottle-green April daylight floods under and over the partition. She thrashes and struggles against me, grappling with my hands even as I pin her with a kiss. I flip her around. I am not gentle. Her eyes flutter as her cheek collides with the cold green metal pilaster. I wrestle up her tight skirt, tearing desperately at her stockings. The sound of ripping nylon ignites me. The gash widens as my hand cups her cunt.

I’m pushing my skinny little Russian butt out for you. You called it a boys butt.
She pushes back against my strumming fingers. Feel it? Put your fingers in it. Is this a boy’s butt?

No, it's not.

Lucy, I have the mother of all boners and I want to stake it in you until I spray your dripping womb in celebration of all the children we’ll never have. Let’s waste their seed in all your hungry holes, spill it down your chin and thighs, splatter your breasts and encrust our bedsheets. For a thousand days more I’ll press my face to your lips and drink your health and you’ll drink mine.

The stall shakes and rattles as we pound away at each other. Bolts groan and loosen in their grommets. We come in unison, to the sound of water running in the sink, to the birds of April chirping, to the howl that tears from her throat as she pulls from my desperate embrace and flings herself into the corner, legs splayed, stockings tattered, her skirt still hitched above her hips, her cold-echoed wail rising and falling like a siren.

I stare helplessly. Can barely frame the question. Why?

Because you are dead!

No, no! Don’t you get it? I’ve obliterated the past. I am all yours now.

It’s a grand, sweet gesture. You were a sweet man. I saw your romantic side. From the very first. Ah but it’s just a gesture!

How can you say that my darling? I reach out, but she whirls away furiously and begins to whine and rock compulsively. She won't be touched.

How? How? Because I love only you and you are dead. And I want to join you. I want to join you. I want to join you!

You can’t.

I will!, she screams.

No. No. You can’t.

The dam bursts and her grief pours out so hard that I think, some small part of me hopes, that this is over now, that she’ll recede into darkness like the others, but she doesn’t, I don’t, I just stand there with my useless ghost arms extended, lapping up all her pain. I’ll take every last drop of it. It is all I have left. It is all I want and all I’ve ever wanted. I realize now there are no alternate realities where it works out better, where we are married with a Rambler wagon and 2.2 apple-cheeked kids playing behind the white picket fence. There’s just the blazing singularity of our love, flawed and tragically late to the gate, flaring then receding to a brilliant pinpoint, heartache, like gravity, a constant between all worlds, for all times to come.

I’m back on the boathouse roof. The sun still hangs in the same spot above the horizon. The city caught in dying light still sings its own praises. But something has definitely passed; there is a new lightness in the air, a sense less of burden than of grace. There’s no point to going back; but perhaps there are other stops to make before my final destination. I need to think on this. There’s no hurry. I have all the time in all the worlds.

The ambulance plods along in rush hour traffic. They aren’t running their siren. No need to. Their call radio is on, but low, so the driver can enjoy her tunes over the chatter. A compact, hard-bitten woman of 40-some years, she rubs her bottle-brush haircut and daydreams about the leather corset she’ll strap into after dinner. She methodically steps through the nightly ritual of bathing and drying and how on special nights, her shower-warmed, soap-scented breasts fit so snugly into the stiff hide cups. How each heavy tit lifts and separates and how her nipples compress against the animal skin when the belt under her shoulder blades is tightened. How the smells of sweat-stale leather and clean skin combine at just that moment. She lingers on the groin piece, her personal customization to this garment, two stiff, barely pliant strips that press into and slightly part her pussy lips, then flare to provide access to her ass. This handworked device, her own work thank you, has eyes and snaps in the front and back. It can be tightened or loosened or even removed, but it was designed to allow probing fingers to be surprised by, to savor the contrast of two spots so wet and yielding between two ass-warmed, cunt-warmed, but unforgiving strips of leather. She likes how anything that penetrates her also has to endure the stern friction of her accessory.

She reaches forward and changes the station. Any more of this and she’ll leave a wet trail on the driver’s seat. Not that her partner here is in any shape to notice. She hums to the music.

God, what a messy piece of work, the probie moans. The probie, a green, freckle-faced kid, no more than 21, 22, squirms in the passenger seat, breathing hard and shallow from the emetic wave that tore through his gut moments ago. Fucking probie left his damned lunch at the damned scene in front of all those damned bystanders. It wouldn’t do.

I’ve seen worse, the driver replies with a tilt of her head. She’s not unsympathetic, but he’d have to tighten his shit if he expects to get through his evaluation period. No pussies on this bus. You will not throw up in here, she snaps. The kid slumps and shakes his head in shame. He deflates with a big shuddering sigh, making such a show of trying to relax.

Funny thing, he says. That big goofy smile on his face? How often ya see that?

Not very, the driver concedes, drumming her wheel to the music.

What would this cookies and milk kid do if he saw what she saw in her head? Maybe, if he sticks it out and earns his pin—she’ll make it her business to find out. Everybody needs something to look forward to.

What a way to go, the kid sighs.
Yeah. What a way to go.

© 2010 Riccardo Berra. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.

You -- my fetish object

2010-01-11T01:02:00.020-05:00

Tits and bum, bum and tits, all a matter of approach, isn't it?

The act of masturbating involves fetishizing the very particular thing that arouses you the most. I think men and women are the same in this. Am I wrong? When you imagine me in your masturbation fantasies, I'm sure when you put finger to clit it doesn't involve dinner, fascinating cultural conversations, a good wine, a movie, long walk and a bath?

I 'm sure just as it does for me, that it might start with generalities but zoom very quickly to focus on very small spaces. I confess, your bottom has always been a fetish object for me.

I kiss it.
I objectify it. Think about it when you, the whole you, aren't around. Think about it when you walk past me or find some reason to bend over oh so innocently in a room full of people, only to straighten and make knowing eye contact with me. You know I'm watching your every move and you tease me. How many times have you played this little game with your little ass, bent over, your small, tight, girlish ass displayed to everybody, but open only for me--as eager for me as I am for it?

I can tell when it wants me as much as I can tell when its weepy sister on the north side wants me. This evening I rubbed my prick against it knowing that our previous lovemaking had lubricated and prepared it. I confess, when I came the first time today, my thumb buried to the hilt, pressing down against my own cock in your other hole, surging on the other side of that thin wet wall pounding that juicy cunt, what sent me over was imagining already coming the second time buried in your ass, its warm, firm embrace milking me dry. It's nothing against your cunt. I love your cunt. I will always pay it its due. But we both know the first time is a warmup and that you have turned me into an ass glutton.

Then we lay like spoons. That's the incredible thing about us. How well we fit together. As if we'd started out from the same block of wood, chiseled apart by a master's hands, only to be fitted back together again. This is how it works. My hand resting on your pelvis tightens. You thrust back. My hips lock with yours. my slowly growing prick picks up a rhythm between your cheeks, grazing your little starfish, knowing full well how easy it will soon be to slip this key of mine through that tight lock, into that tight juicy hole that waited to embrace me. My attention narrows, I don't hear the noise outside. My phone is ringing but I no longer hear it either. Fuck the phone. I only hear my breath, then yours. I focus down on that tiny point of contact, on that tiny inch of flesh, rubbing slowly up and slowly into that tiny inch of yours. Click. It all fits together with a click.

Can I tell you something else, something sweet, another amazing thing about our amazing, improbably relationship?

It's how accepting you are. You are not mortified to learn how thoroughly I have objectified you. And what parts of you I've fixated on. You laughed when I asked how you felt about this. You are flattered. My fetishizing you pleases you and this makes me feel so close to you. What did you expect when you acted the slut and hoisted your bum up, showing off your pink nail polish as you held your firm white little cheeks open for me? Honestly, how else did you expect me to react?

Oh, if we'd had more time.

I would have taken one of your ass toys and started the job I was determined to finish. I love using them on you. I love the way I can fill both your holes, tight as a glove. I think it's time we wash them up and get them ready.

I would have taken you a third time. I would have taken you in your bathroom perhaps imagining the other times, when I desperately jerked your jeans down to your ankles and took you, the fear of discovery imminent, coming in you, so sweet, so hard, so fast, so desperate for more, always more, more ...

I want to reciprocate. It's only fair. I want you to come on me. To use my body as your personal masturbation tool. Use whatever part of me strikes your fancy. My toe, oh my toes, my fingers, hump my leg, push my nose into it, use my entire face as your fuck toy. Use also, from time to time, the more obvious appendage.

Just before I come, just before you feel the roaring in your ears, the tightness building toward the explosion, I pull out and spurt between your cheeks and use the slippery semen lubrication to penetrate you once more before I fade into hopeless softness and languor. I know my own reactions very well. In that few seconds after coming the third time that hour, I would've with a short thrust, re-entered you knowing how you love to hold me, hold me as long as you can, as long as I am willing to be held, my conquest of my fetish complete for a couple of hours ...

...Or at least until my hunger for your sweet ass tosses me like salad and makes me shut my eyes desperate to recapture ever last detail I can of how good it is.

Story Contest Semifinal Voting Starts Monday February 1st

2010-01-07T15:00:00.000-05:00

Better Sex Erotic Fiction Contest Semifinals Date Change

This from the Better Sex Erotic Fiction blog:
"Since we've added an extra week of stories and community voting Semifinal Voting will take place FOR ALL STORIES the week of February 1st. Three stories with the most votes during this week will move to the finals. Finals include a nonbinding community vote and cash awards from a 3 judge panel. Judges always award our final cash prizes."

Make A Note: Semifinal Voting Starts Monday February 1st.

Erotic Fiction Contest--Cast Your Vote

2009-12-17T03:02:00.001-05:00

It's week 9 and it's all ours. Check out how the voting is going on the 6th Annual Bettersex.com Erotic short story competition. Way to go Sofi!

BREAKING NEWS ABOUT BETTERSEX EROTIC FICTION CONTEST

2009-10-12T19:36:00.005-04:00

sitelink

Just got word that all three of our stories will be published on the contest site on the week of 12/14. This guarantees that one of our stories will make it to the semi's.

Woohoo!

All three stories required editing to slip under the contest's 3000 word limit.
Here are the full unexpurgated versions of

It's a big holiday traffic week for the site and hopefully lots of people will see our work, but time to get out your little black book (Vi) and your Twitter list (Sof) and get out the vote.

Please come and vote for your favorite.

News about Apostrophe

2009-10-08T23:39:00.024-04:00

Word is out we'll have at least one story coming soon at the Erotic Fiction Contest at Bettersex.com. It's vote by popular accord, so we urge everybody to go to our stories when they come up. Check back here for details as it could happen as early as next week.

To all our friends. Two of our stories were featured in an Erotic Readers and Writers Association e-book "A Slip of the Lip, that that sought to anthologize, in the words of its editor, the fabulous, Remittance Girl, the best, most innovative and original description of a kiss.”

Reviewer Jean Roberta observed that "A remarkable number of these short pieces look self-contained in the way that an acorn is a self-contained object that has potential to grow into a mighty oak tree. In several pieces, the kiss is an event or a goal in itself."

She noted later in the review that "Several other stories deal with more complicated situations: adulterous attraction (sometimes across a generation gap) ..." (Gasp, SL sounds awfully familiar. :-) Your finest writing yet, imho)

"Riccardo Berra has several stories in this collection, all high-voltage. In “Screen Kiss,” a woman understands the significance of kissing in old Hollywood movies: “She’d never understood and assumed they [movie stars] were just acting. Kisses. Who knew?"

(BRAVISSIMA Vi!!)

The reviewer, Jean Roberta, closes encouraging ...
"Printed-out, this collection makes an excellent picture-book, the kind that is excellent for giving. You might even get a kiss in return."

Read Jean Roberta's entire review here.

Download the free e-book here.