Post by ernesto thaddeus m. solmerano on Jun 19, 2007 22:30:29 GMT -5
Continuation of 19...
I wish I could tell the old bag about the lake boiling in the loins of a healthy young boy and how much he needs to release it by playing the rhythmic game with five fingers. Her expelling me from this dump will be a blessing.
“I see that you are making effective use of the omniscient point of view,” observes Dr. Flores.
I don’t feel like telling her that I’m looking for a way to skip some scenes that I doubt I can handle well. How can I render a scene where Esme turns the table on Don, the hunted now playing the hunter leading him up the stone steps from the beach to the canteen, detailing in her alto how he can steal into her cubicle at the farthest end of the corridor without anyone noticing.
They stopped at the bar for drinks. Don remembered that he had not asked her her name.
“The girls at SM call me Esme.” She did not add that her mother chose Esmeralda from a book about a gypsy dancing girl who was being stalked by a hunchback.
Esme said that they should make no sound in her cubicle because the rooms had only sawali partitions. Her shoulders seemed broader with the red towel draped over them. The fluorescent lamp disclosed her broad peasant’s face, the thick thighs, legs and feet. Her bobbed hair clinging close to her head invested her with a mannish appearance. And she was seven inches taller than he.
“You see, Ma’am, I don’t want my heroine to look like a beauty queen.”
“An Amazon!” Don sighed.
“You are not writing in an age of realism, my boy. Magic realism? Minimalism is not you, that’s for sure. Surrealism? Metafiction?
Blah, blah…
Why is this old hag trying to classify my story? This is an original Zorilla, that’s what it is!
“Do you really think your story has a chance? I hear that the Dean is inviting his friends from the UP Creative Writing Center to judge this contest. They’ll tear your story to shreds!”
You mean tear my piece to pieces.
What do you expect of me, bitch? I’m only a junior Literature major in this roach-infested, God-forsaken, poor excuse of a college.
Dr. Flores had advised me not to be pretentious. Right. Dryad and naiad are out. So nymph it is.
“I bet these Korean bimbos are easy lays”, thought Mike. “At least one of them must be a nympho.” True enough, before the night was out, one had hopped into his silver streak for a joyride along the coast. He left a note for Don with the waiter.
“Bingo! Am out for a spin with Kim. Eat your heart out!”
Don tore the slip of paper. When he saw Esme gulping down her San Mig straight from the bottle and heard her release a cavernous burp, his stomach churned.
He stepped over to the jukebox to play something of Josh Groban to clear his head but the witch sneaked in from behind and put on “Spaghetti”…
Still holding the bottle, Esme began to dance and motioned to him to join her. He noticed the waiter looking in their direction. Don strode up to him and ordered another bottle.
He had found himself in far worse situations. Two weeks before, Number 18 was a creature that looked like a carcass the cat dragged in from a garbage dump.
No less appetizing was 13 who told fortunes with tarot cards outside the shrine of the Black Nazarene. To her patrons, she was Madam Za Za. To her sisters in the trade, she was Lola Ingga. Gossips whispered that she was a comfort woman during the Occupation. In her prime, she posed in the nude for painters who embalmed her cadaverous charms on canvas for which necrophilic art collectors paid most handsomely. Half blind and toothless, she walked with mock-heroic poise in the tales of the busybodies who inhabited the shanties along the estero in the shadows of the ruins of the old Chinese pagoda in Quiapo. The meanest of the lot, the Bible freak who ran the store in the neighborhood said that Lola Ingga bribed her way with a case of Ginebra San Miguel so she could get into Noah’s Ark, and after the flood, traveled on foot all the way from Mt. Ararat to Aranque where she first set up her table by the fish market.
I am glad that two girls have taken Dr. Flores away for consultation so that I can go over this portion of my story without her yelling at me again for obscenity and heresy. I would like to ask her opinion, though, about a subplot in a short story. I don’t see why it cannot be permitted if it’s necessary.
On nights when the fortune telling business was slow and Madam Za Za had missed her meals the whole day, she would hobble over to Quezon Bridge and in the dark labyrinth of that span over the river, peddle her sunken flesh to the derelicts and drug addicts for a bite to eat. Here in the tunneled recesses of the bridge, in this Minotaurian abyss of lost souls, in this black barge sailing on the Lethean lake of forgetfulness, Madam Za Za put to flight the sense of sight and led her lovers to the empire of dreams.
And after she had disembarked from her vessel after five to seven partners, she had the money for a meal at McDo.
I turn the page quickly when I spy Dr. Flores dismissing the girls and looking in my direction.
“Well, my boy, how are we coming along with our story?”
So, it’s now our story, is it?
“Ma’am, I need you to assure me that a short story may have subplots. It’s okay, isn’t it?”
“I’ve said it before in your class, and I’ll say it again. Just do what you think is necessary to project your theme.”
Theme? What theme? I don’t even know my story has a theme.
The Dean will summon the gods and they will descend from the Olympian heights of Diliman to judge this contest in a small town college with literary pretensions.
They’ll say something witty about my story like, “It’s an adolescent’s wet dream” and throw it into the trash bin. Well, I don’t give a shit!
But something alarming is happening. I’m losing control of my own story. I would like to tell Dr. Flores about this uncanny feeling but she might only laugh at me.
The same girls consult her again. I can run through the Madam Za Za subplot and be done with it.
Don met her through the highest recommendation of his old gangmate in Tondo. With her, it was an undersea fantasy with him as a merman and she a mermaiden. She made him lie back on a mattress of seaweeds as she opened up like a seashell, a Gloria maris, and bore him to her ocean depths with a thousand tiny sea creatures nibbling at his crown causing him to squirm and he bit his lips to stop the scream.
Don tipped her with a hundred-peso bill before he staggered out of her hovel completely spent. Yeah, how could he ever forget 13?
Why are those girls looking at me and giggling?
Dr. Flores sends them off and gets back to me.
“You’ll be flattered to know that those girls think you’re very good-looking with your dreamy eyes…”
Like a faun’s in the mid-afternoon heat?
“…but your ears—they are pointed!”
Like a goat’s?
Esme felt the alcohol going to her brain.
“I need to get that lustful goat—that runt—to my room without anyone noticing.” She thought with a sidelong glance at the little man, her eyes burning with a fury of intention.
If she had not wasted her school days in a small-town college, she might have been taught in Psychology about the dominatrix, which she was body and soul, with leather jacket, leather boots with spikes and whip but the word was alien to her.
Tightening the red towel around her torso, Esme told Al that she had to go. She needed 20 minutes to tidy up. She would leave her door unlocked. Their congress they needed to carry out in silence.
“It’s the last room at the end of this hallway.”
An old rhyme drummed in her memory, “Will you come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…”
Don could not react when the woman winked at him before walking away. At that moment, he wanted no part of this behemoth but there she was—all his for the taking. He had to have his 19 before the night was over.
Once again he had to apply imagination which he had in abundance. He needed to go back to his demesne, the isles of Greece, but there was nothing in Dive Camp 2 remotely reminiscent of the fabled domain. The palm fronds stirred by the sea breeze, the frangipani now in full bloom, the mating calls of geckos from the crevices of the thatched partitions—all these he needed to dissolve and reshape into the realm of the gods. The sound of the surf from the shore—was not that the same-self sound of the sea wind that wafted Boticelli’s Aphrodite on a huge seashell attended by the Hours over the wine-dark waves of Cytherea toward the sun-drenched shore of Cyprus?
Stop! Stop! I’m waxing poetic again.
Moments ago, when I was dealing with the plan of Esme to entrap Al in her cubicle and scare him witless, I was at a loss for words. Now I can’t stop the words from rising in my mind like a flood. And where do they come from?
Boticelli? Cytherea? Cyprus? What words are these in the thoughts of Don, a character I have created? Have I created him in my own likeness? Is he my alter ego? This runt daydreaming about playing Don Juan in a mythical inscape?
Adonis, me? The radiant lover of Aphrodite! Ares, me? The god of war! And yes, also the lover of the goddess of love. Why are they intruding into my consciousness? They are the antithesis of Don, of my own self.
“Mr. Zorilla, Mr. Zorilla! Why have you stopped? Go on with your story…”
“Yes, Ma’am. You see, I’ve been thinking about my problem with language…”
Blah, blah, blah!
“Read on, man, you have me hooked to your story.”
Not “my dear boy”? Man, oh, man, yes!
When Don sneaked into the woman’s narrow quarters, his senses reeled with the heady scent of verbena, the strains of Strauss from an invisible transistor radio over the sound of the surf, and the light of the full moon streaming in from the window bathing the brown body on the bed.
Jesus! She was beautiful!
She seemed bigger now that he pressed his body against hers. Now he had to close his eyes to the dreary, drab density of Dive Camp 2 and open his spirit to the dreamscape of desire, to the dance of domination and death.
He invoked the Great God Pan and he was puny no more. Lust surged into his loins and as if empowered with the trident of the seagod, he pierced her pudendum.
“Goodness gracious! Do you have to be so clinical?”
“It’s not a dirty word, Ma’am. Pudendum: the external genital organ of a woman. Plural: pudenda…”
Blah, blah…
“Enough, Mr. Zorilla, enough! You are a raving maniac! But do go on!“
The eyes of the nymph closed in a grimace of pain, but the Great God Pan had to make her see her captor and tormentor. With thumb and index finger, he parted her eyelids, all the while thrusting his shaft into her shell, shaking, shoving, to sink deeper feeding more and more his hellish hunger.
“Mr. Zorilla, my boy…”
So, we’re back to “my boy”, are we?
“Aren’t we overdoing this alliteration bit?”
We? We? Is she now claiming a share in my creative vision?
“Shit!” Esme bit her lips to hold back a scream. At the initial thrust of his body against hers, a sharp pain struck her back. “Shit! It’s that damn pin!”
“Ma’am, remember the brass butterfly I mentioned on page one?”
Oh, Jesus, the old bag is going to admonish me again. She’ll say that it’s too contrived. All right, say it, say it, damn!
But Dr. Flores says nothing. She only turns to him with a puzzled expression.
If the point of view is that of Don, he will describe the woman’s invulnerability to pain as Spartan.
As the Great God Pan’s dance of desire increased in tempo, frail frame shaking in spasms, heart thumping a wild rhythm of abandon, lungs close to bursting with anticipation of release and relief, ears turned to the hardly audible wail of a flute from an unseen radio, mind mirroring images of an Arcadian grove with dryads and fauns in frolic in the mid-afternoon sun, a nymph ravished by a demigod, a Porsche parked by the roadside by the sea and Adonis humping a sloe-eyed bitch on the back seat, the woman supine, Esme motionless in total surrender, a lioness stalking her prey arching her back as she prepares to spring at her victim, Al pumping away, Don humping the woman, Esme, the nymph, Mike, the Grand Knight, in a wild, mindless confusion of identities, the tide of volcanic lava rising to the crown, crest upon crest, erupting, exploding in a flood of fiery liquid, a stifled cry escaping from the throat, the substance of life escaping from confinement, desire ebbing away, strength going, going, gone.
“Oh, Jesus! Oh, God! Dieaus Pitar, Deus Pater, Zeus Pater, Jupiter, Dios Padre! Pace, pace, mio Dio!”
“What’s this, Mr. Zorilla? Not content with obscenity, are you? You have to resort to blasphemy, too?”
How do I explain to an old maid that in the throes of passion a man invokes the Almighty at the moment when love and death are one?
“Ma’am, you know what the Germans call liebestodt…“
Blah, blah…
The little man drenched with sweat and drained of life lay still on top of Esme.
The geckos shrilled in a comic cacophony of love calls as she turned to him and herself over still holding his lingam embedded in her orifice. When she thrust her whole weight on him, his eyes and mouth flew open.
“Hah! My brass butterfly…”
Before he could scream, she had shoved a quarter of her red towel down his mouth.
“Now, you behave, pipsqueek, or I’ll ram this whole towel down your throat and the world will be better off with one scumbag less!”
I suppose Esme’s schooling in a provincial college had not brushed off all the palay entangled in her hair. She would not have known the word pipsqueek or scumbag. Less likely will she imagine herself as a Venus flytrap and Don as an insect stuck in her sac.
She could only think of her tormentor as an extension of her libidinous stepfather, of her perfidious boyfriend, even of the SM supervisor she caught exposing himself in the ladies’ dressing room. These men had done her an injury. At this instant, they were reincarnated in her captive.
Esme reached into the unseen radio and turned on the volume a little. Don heard Waldteufel’s “España” and thought that the castanets were personally insulting him with their wild gay gypsy rhythms.
She focused on the most sensitive, the most vulnerable part of his body and mustering all the force of her oppressed womanhood, she squeezed her sphincter muscles with all her might. She felt his whole body tighten in pain as fire from his manroot seared his spine.
“One!”
Esme looked at her captive’s anguished eyes, now opened wide in sheer terror, recognizing in her mortal enemy dating far back in time to the age of the cave. She fed on his fear like a black widow sucking out with her maw his substance and laying her deadly eggs on his carcass. For the plot he had hatched against her this night and for the humiliation he had inflicted upon her, she squeezed again with greater force. A whimper escaped from his throat through the towel. She rammed more of the material down his gullet.
“Two!”
“Good gracious! On top of everything, you have to be a sadist, too.” Really now, Dr. Flores yawned, her eyes drooping.
“Ma’am, I need to project not only this woman’s physical strength but also her rage against the male animal…”
Blah, blah…
The second blow invested Esme an air of authority that gave her a sense of growing, growing, like a hot-air balloon being pumped with flaming gas so that it could soar and float above the clouds. She dwarfed her prisoner whose eyes were bulging out of their sockets pleading for mercy from this ogress who had him in her grip. When the elf foresaw that she was coming down on him again, he shut his eyes tight, but her thumb and index finger pushed open one eye so that he would not miss her final triumph.
Once again Esme called all the power of her flesh and bones in the culmination of her vengeance and squeezed with the walls of her womanhood the little shrimp caught in its secret folds now moist with a sticky caramel that oozed from its depths, her lips parting in a groan of rapture.
“Three!” she sighed.
Esme delivered a farewell blow with a foot on his shin, a clenched fist on the belly and a kick on the groin.
“Dr. Flores, Ma’am, you’ve dozed off…”
I am sorry for all my unkind thoughts. I’m such an ass! In repose her face has lost its lines and she’s looking young.
“Mr. Zorilla? I’m sorry I fell asleep. It has been a long day. I’ll come first thing in the morning tomorrow and we will finish going over your story. Promise!”
What fate has abandoned this lady in this God-forsaken provincial college? Tonight she’ll take a sidecar to get home to her pets.
I had picked up Sehkmeth in a garbage dump and given the cat to her to keep her company. The alley cat I named after the Egyptian cat-goddess. In time she had two kittens…
Blah, blah…
But I need to finish my story.
Al, battered and bloody, staggered out of the demon’s den and, doddering, made his way to the beach to wait for Mike and the sunrise. He flopped into the warm water, soaking in the healing power of the brine, the surf salving wounds of the soul.
Why do I have this uncanny feeling that I am not writing this story? That it is writing itself? That its characters are taking control after I have animated them?
In the warm soothing embrace of the sea, Don reentered the realm of the Great God Pan. He blows into the reeds of his syrinx to summon to a gathering goatherds and satyrs and fauns to listen to his song. Let the unseen nymph who pined away with passion for Narcissus echo his song, my song, from Troezin to Themiscyra of the women warriors, from the slopes of Etna, the flaming fire on which the fiery shafts of Zeus are hammered into shape to the icy heights of the Caucasus, from the sun-drenched vineyards of Bacchus to the island of the Minotaur, from seven-gated Thebes to the forest of talking oaks.
Hear my song:
I, the Great God Pan, pinned down the nymph with my hairy bulk, my goat-feet kicking away the stones from the earth, my scaly hands grasping the breasts of my captive whom I have spirited away from her sisters cavorting in their sylvan bower this mid-afternoon…
Blah!
---- O ----
I wish I could tell the old bag about the lake boiling in the loins of a healthy young boy and how much he needs to release it by playing the rhythmic game with five fingers. Her expelling me from this dump will be a blessing.
“I see that you are making effective use of the omniscient point of view,” observes Dr. Flores.
I don’t feel like telling her that I’m looking for a way to skip some scenes that I doubt I can handle well. How can I render a scene where Esme turns the table on Don, the hunted now playing the hunter leading him up the stone steps from the beach to the canteen, detailing in her alto how he can steal into her cubicle at the farthest end of the corridor without anyone noticing.
They stopped at the bar for drinks. Don remembered that he had not asked her her name.
“The girls at SM call me Esme.” She did not add that her mother chose Esmeralda from a book about a gypsy dancing girl who was being stalked by a hunchback.
Esme said that they should make no sound in her cubicle because the rooms had only sawali partitions. Her shoulders seemed broader with the red towel draped over them. The fluorescent lamp disclosed her broad peasant’s face, the thick thighs, legs and feet. Her bobbed hair clinging close to her head invested her with a mannish appearance. And she was seven inches taller than he.
“You see, Ma’am, I don’t want my heroine to look like a beauty queen.”
“An Amazon!” Don sighed.
“You are not writing in an age of realism, my boy. Magic realism? Minimalism is not you, that’s for sure. Surrealism? Metafiction?
Blah, blah…
Why is this old hag trying to classify my story? This is an original Zorilla, that’s what it is!
“Do you really think your story has a chance? I hear that the Dean is inviting his friends from the UP Creative Writing Center to judge this contest. They’ll tear your story to shreds!”
You mean tear my piece to pieces.
What do you expect of me, bitch? I’m only a junior Literature major in this roach-infested, God-forsaken, poor excuse of a college.
Dr. Flores had advised me not to be pretentious. Right. Dryad and naiad are out. So nymph it is.
“I bet these Korean bimbos are easy lays”, thought Mike. “At least one of them must be a nympho.” True enough, before the night was out, one had hopped into his silver streak for a joyride along the coast. He left a note for Don with the waiter.
“Bingo! Am out for a spin with Kim. Eat your heart out!”
Don tore the slip of paper. When he saw Esme gulping down her San Mig straight from the bottle and heard her release a cavernous burp, his stomach churned.
He stepped over to the jukebox to play something of Josh Groban to clear his head but the witch sneaked in from behind and put on “Spaghetti”…
Still holding the bottle, Esme began to dance and motioned to him to join her. He noticed the waiter looking in their direction. Don strode up to him and ordered another bottle.
He had found himself in far worse situations. Two weeks before, Number 18 was a creature that looked like a carcass the cat dragged in from a garbage dump.
No less appetizing was 13 who told fortunes with tarot cards outside the shrine of the Black Nazarene. To her patrons, she was Madam Za Za. To her sisters in the trade, she was Lola Ingga. Gossips whispered that she was a comfort woman during the Occupation. In her prime, she posed in the nude for painters who embalmed her cadaverous charms on canvas for which necrophilic art collectors paid most handsomely. Half blind and toothless, she walked with mock-heroic poise in the tales of the busybodies who inhabited the shanties along the estero in the shadows of the ruins of the old Chinese pagoda in Quiapo. The meanest of the lot, the Bible freak who ran the store in the neighborhood said that Lola Ingga bribed her way with a case of Ginebra San Miguel so she could get into Noah’s Ark, and after the flood, traveled on foot all the way from Mt. Ararat to Aranque where she first set up her table by the fish market.
I am glad that two girls have taken Dr. Flores away for consultation so that I can go over this portion of my story without her yelling at me again for obscenity and heresy. I would like to ask her opinion, though, about a subplot in a short story. I don’t see why it cannot be permitted if it’s necessary.
On nights when the fortune telling business was slow and Madam Za Za had missed her meals the whole day, she would hobble over to Quezon Bridge and in the dark labyrinth of that span over the river, peddle her sunken flesh to the derelicts and drug addicts for a bite to eat. Here in the tunneled recesses of the bridge, in this Minotaurian abyss of lost souls, in this black barge sailing on the Lethean lake of forgetfulness, Madam Za Za put to flight the sense of sight and led her lovers to the empire of dreams.
And after she had disembarked from her vessel after five to seven partners, she had the money for a meal at McDo.
I turn the page quickly when I spy Dr. Flores dismissing the girls and looking in my direction.
“Well, my boy, how are we coming along with our story?”
So, it’s now our story, is it?
“Ma’am, I need you to assure me that a short story may have subplots. It’s okay, isn’t it?”
“I’ve said it before in your class, and I’ll say it again. Just do what you think is necessary to project your theme.”
Theme? What theme? I don’t even know my story has a theme.
The Dean will summon the gods and they will descend from the Olympian heights of Diliman to judge this contest in a small town college with literary pretensions.
They’ll say something witty about my story like, “It’s an adolescent’s wet dream” and throw it into the trash bin. Well, I don’t give a shit!
But something alarming is happening. I’m losing control of my own story. I would like to tell Dr. Flores about this uncanny feeling but she might only laugh at me.
The same girls consult her again. I can run through the Madam Za Za subplot and be done with it.
Don met her through the highest recommendation of his old gangmate in Tondo. With her, it was an undersea fantasy with him as a merman and she a mermaiden. She made him lie back on a mattress of seaweeds as she opened up like a seashell, a Gloria maris, and bore him to her ocean depths with a thousand tiny sea creatures nibbling at his crown causing him to squirm and he bit his lips to stop the scream.
Don tipped her with a hundred-peso bill before he staggered out of her hovel completely spent. Yeah, how could he ever forget 13?
Why are those girls looking at me and giggling?
Dr. Flores sends them off and gets back to me.
“You’ll be flattered to know that those girls think you’re very good-looking with your dreamy eyes…”
Like a faun’s in the mid-afternoon heat?
“…but your ears—they are pointed!”
Like a goat’s?
Esme felt the alcohol going to her brain.
“I need to get that lustful goat—that runt—to my room without anyone noticing.” She thought with a sidelong glance at the little man, her eyes burning with a fury of intention.
If she had not wasted her school days in a small-town college, she might have been taught in Psychology about the dominatrix, which she was body and soul, with leather jacket, leather boots with spikes and whip but the word was alien to her.
Tightening the red towel around her torso, Esme told Al that she had to go. She needed 20 minutes to tidy up. She would leave her door unlocked. Their congress they needed to carry out in silence.
“It’s the last room at the end of this hallway.”
An old rhyme drummed in her memory, “Will you come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…”
Don could not react when the woman winked at him before walking away. At that moment, he wanted no part of this behemoth but there she was—all his for the taking. He had to have his 19 before the night was over.
Once again he had to apply imagination which he had in abundance. He needed to go back to his demesne, the isles of Greece, but there was nothing in Dive Camp 2 remotely reminiscent of the fabled domain. The palm fronds stirred by the sea breeze, the frangipani now in full bloom, the mating calls of geckos from the crevices of the thatched partitions—all these he needed to dissolve and reshape into the realm of the gods. The sound of the surf from the shore—was not that the same-self sound of the sea wind that wafted Boticelli’s Aphrodite on a huge seashell attended by the Hours over the wine-dark waves of Cytherea toward the sun-drenched shore of Cyprus?
Stop! Stop! I’m waxing poetic again.
Moments ago, when I was dealing with the plan of Esme to entrap Al in her cubicle and scare him witless, I was at a loss for words. Now I can’t stop the words from rising in my mind like a flood. And where do they come from?
Boticelli? Cytherea? Cyprus? What words are these in the thoughts of Don, a character I have created? Have I created him in my own likeness? Is he my alter ego? This runt daydreaming about playing Don Juan in a mythical inscape?
Adonis, me? The radiant lover of Aphrodite! Ares, me? The god of war! And yes, also the lover of the goddess of love. Why are they intruding into my consciousness? They are the antithesis of Don, of my own self.
“Mr. Zorilla, Mr. Zorilla! Why have you stopped? Go on with your story…”
“Yes, Ma’am. You see, I’ve been thinking about my problem with language…”
Blah, blah, blah!
“Read on, man, you have me hooked to your story.”
Not “my dear boy”? Man, oh, man, yes!
When Don sneaked into the woman’s narrow quarters, his senses reeled with the heady scent of verbena, the strains of Strauss from an invisible transistor radio over the sound of the surf, and the light of the full moon streaming in from the window bathing the brown body on the bed.
Jesus! She was beautiful!
She seemed bigger now that he pressed his body against hers. Now he had to close his eyes to the dreary, drab density of Dive Camp 2 and open his spirit to the dreamscape of desire, to the dance of domination and death.
He invoked the Great God Pan and he was puny no more. Lust surged into his loins and as if empowered with the trident of the seagod, he pierced her pudendum.
“Goodness gracious! Do you have to be so clinical?”
“It’s not a dirty word, Ma’am. Pudendum: the external genital organ of a woman. Plural: pudenda…”
Blah, blah…
“Enough, Mr. Zorilla, enough! You are a raving maniac! But do go on!“
The eyes of the nymph closed in a grimace of pain, but the Great God Pan had to make her see her captor and tormentor. With thumb and index finger, he parted her eyelids, all the while thrusting his shaft into her shell, shaking, shoving, to sink deeper feeding more and more his hellish hunger.
“Mr. Zorilla, my boy…”
So, we’re back to “my boy”, are we?
“Aren’t we overdoing this alliteration bit?”
We? We? Is she now claiming a share in my creative vision?
“Shit!” Esme bit her lips to hold back a scream. At the initial thrust of his body against hers, a sharp pain struck her back. “Shit! It’s that damn pin!”
“Ma’am, remember the brass butterfly I mentioned on page one?”
Oh, Jesus, the old bag is going to admonish me again. She’ll say that it’s too contrived. All right, say it, say it, damn!
But Dr. Flores says nothing. She only turns to him with a puzzled expression.
If the point of view is that of Don, he will describe the woman’s invulnerability to pain as Spartan.
As the Great God Pan’s dance of desire increased in tempo, frail frame shaking in spasms, heart thumping a wild rhythm of abandon, lungs close to bursting with anticipation of release and relief, ears turned to the hardly audible wail of a flute from an unseen radio, mind mirroring images of an Arcadian grove with dryads and fauns in frolic in the mid-afternoon sun, a nymph ravished by a demigod, a Porsche parked by the roadside by the sea and Adonis humping a sloe-eyed bitch on the back seat, the woman supine, Esme motionless in total surrender, a lioness stalking her prey arching her back as she prepares to spring at her victim, Al pumping away, Don humping the woman, Esme, the nymph, Mike, the Grand Knight, in a wild, mindless confusion of identities, the tide of volcanic lava rising to the crown, crest upon crest, erupting, exploding in a flood of fiery liquid, a stifled cry escaping from the throat, the substance of life escaping from confinement, desire ebbing away, strength going, going, gone.
“Oh, Jesus! Oh, God! Dieaus Pitar, Deus Pater, Zeus Pater, Jupiter, Dios Padre! Pace, pace, mio Dio!”
“What’s this, Mr. Zorilla? Not content with obscenity, are you? You have to resort to blasphemy, too?”
How do I explain to an old maid that in the throes of passion a man invokes the Almighty at the moment when love and death are one?
“Ma’am, you know what the Germans call liebestodt…“
Blah, blah…
The little man drenched with sweat and drained of life lay still on top of Esme.
The geckos shrilled in a comic cacophony of love calls as she turned to him and herself over still holding his lingam embedded in her orifice. When she thrust her whole weight on him, his eyes and mouth flew open.
“Hah! My brass butterfly…”
Before he could scream, she had shoved a quarter of her red towel down his mouth.
“Now, you behave, pipsqueek, or I’ll ram this whole towel down your throat and the world will be better off with one scumbag less!”
I suppose Esme’s schooling in a provincial college had not brushed off all the palay entangled in her hair. She would not have known the word pipsqueek or scumbag. Less likely will she imagine herself as a Venus flytrap and Don as an insect stuck in her sac.
She could only think of her tormentor as an extension of her libidinous stepfather, of her perfidious boyfriend, even of the SM supervisor she caught exposing himself in the ladies’ dressing room. These men had done her an injury. At this instant, they were reincarnated in her captive.
Esme reached into the unseen radio and turned on the volume a little. Don heard Waldteufel’s “España” and thought that the castanets were personally insulting him with their wild gay gypsy rhythms.
She focused on the most sensitive, the most vulnerable part of his body and mustering all the force of her oppressed womanhood, she squeezed her sphincter muscles with all her might. She felt his whole body tighten in pain as fire from his manroot seared his spine.
“One!”
Esme looked at her captive’s anguished eyes, now opened wide in sheer terror, recognizing in her mortal enemy dating far back in time to the age of the cave. She fed on his fear like a black widow sucking out with her maw his substance and laying her deadly eggs on his carcass. For the plot he had hatched against her this night and for the humiliation he had inflicted upon her, she squeezed again with greater force. A whimper escaped from his throat through the towel. She rammed more of the material down his gullet.
“Two!”
“Good gracious! On top of everything, you have to be a sadist, too.” Really now, Dr. Flores yawned, her eyes drooping.
“Ma’am, I need to project not only this woman’s physical strength but also her rage against the male animal…”
Blah, blah…
The second blow invested Esme an air of authority that gave her a sense of growing, growing, like a hot-air balloon being pumped with flaming gas so that it could soar and float above the clouds. She dwarfed her prisoner whose eyes were bulging out of their sockets pleading for mercy from this ogress who had him in her grip. When the elf foresaw that she was coming down on him again, he shut his eyes tight, but her thumb and index finger pushed open one eye so that he would not miss her final triumph.
Once again Esme called all the power of her flesh and bones in the culmination of her vengeance and squeezed with the walls of her womanhood the little shrimp caught in its secret folds now moist with a sticky caramel that oozed from its depths, her lips parting in a groan of rapture.
“Three!” she sighed.
Esme delivered a farewell blow with a foot on his shin, a clenched fist on the belly and a kick on the groin.
“Dr. Flores, Ma’am, you’ve dozed off…”
I am sorry for all my unkind thoughts. I’m such an ass! In repose her face has lost its lines and she’s looking young.
“Mr. Zorilla? I’m sorry I fell asleep. It has been a long day. I’ll come first thing in the morning tomorrow and we will finish going over your story. Promise!”
What fate has abandoned this lady in this God-forsaken provincial college? Tonight she’ll take a sidecar to get home to her pets.
I had picked up Sehkmeth in a garbage dump and given the cat to her to keep her company. The alley cat I named after the Egyptian cat-goddess. In time she had two kittens…
Blah, blah…
But I need to finish my story.
Al, battered and bloody, staggered out of the demon’s den and, doddering, made his way to the beach to wait for Mike and the sunrise. He flopped into the warm water, soaking in the healing power of the brine, the surf salving wounds of the soul.
Why do I have this uncanny feeling that I am not writing this story? That it is writing itself? That its characters are taking control after I have animated them?
In the warm soothing embrace of the sea, Don reentered the realm of the Great God Pan. He blows into the reeds of his syrinx to summon to a gathering goatherds and satyrs and fauns to listen to his song. Let the unseen nymph who pined away with passion for Narcissus echo his song, my song, from Troezin to Themiscyra of the women warriors, from the slopes of Etna, the flaming fire on which the fiery shafts of Zeus are hammered into shape to the icy heights of the Caucasus, from the sun-drenched vineyards of Bacchus to the island of the Minotaur, from seven-gated Thebes to the forest of talking oaks.
Hear my song:
I, the Great God Pan, pinned down the nymph with my hairy bulk, my goat-feet kicking away the stones from the earth, my scaly hands grasping the breasts of my captive whom I have spirited away from her sisters cavorting in their sylvan bower this mid-afternoon…
Blah!
---- O ----