This is a series of short vignettes which I wrote in a correspondence with  Jo(Flibinite) as a sort of exercise, both creatively and emotionally. There is virtually no sex in them; there are women, and men, though, in sexual situations of varying intensity. It’s a kind of Gestalt; something like watching an old silent film with frames missing, jerking erratically toward an uncertain conclusion that’s already lying on some long-abandoned cutting room floor. 
I believe that we all pray, at one time or another, for a sympathetic editor’s intervention in the jumble of outtakes that make up our lives.

elle`attend
   The Seasons
Prologue: Vegan

“What the fuck is it?”
He prodded the slab of meat doubtfully with his fork.
“Sausage roll. Got the recipe in Kosovo, on the Albanian border. I was in a support unit for the Seventeenth airborne. Not much to do there between burial details for the locals, so I hung out at the mess tent and picked up some ideas for the bar.”
He eyed the slice of hardboiled egg suspiciously, a delicate promise of fecundity embedded in its meaty placenta. His stomach rolled, and he nudged the plate away with a knuckle.
“Gimme another draft, Eddie.”
He hazarded another glance at the woman at the far end of the bar. She was attractive, in a disheveled, go-to-hell kind of way, and he felt himself getting hard again. He pressed his fingers against his stiffening dick, maneuvering it away from the seam in his Levis that was cutting into it. If he didn’t get laid soon he’d have to spend the rest of his life sitting down.
“Buy you drink?” He left his fingers where they were. The woman looked up from her Dewar’s disinterestedly.
“Your money, Rockefeller.”
He moved off his stool and down the bar toward the woman, holding the plate awkwardly, trying to conceal his erection. He put his glass and the plate down on the bar next to her, and sat down.
“Wanna try some?” He gestured at the plate, shocked to feel her hand on his thigh, her nails exploring his hardon. He nearly took a bite out of his beer glass.
“I never touch meat,” she murmured, raising her scotch to her lips as her fingers slipped between the buttons of his fly, gripping him.. 
He came almost immediately. She never even took her glass from her lips.
She never once looked at him. (300)

Spring

Twenty-seven seconds. 
That was precisely how long it took, from the moment the sprung board on the porch creaked, for her aunt to reach the entrance to the tiny shed across the dooryard.  The girl had it down to a science. She could have the forbidden book safely hidden and be sorting the spools of brightly-colored thread in twenty-two: a five second cushion. Ample, as long as her aunt didn’t notice her unusually high color in the artificial twilight of the shed.
She pressed an exploratory fingertip into the dimple of damp cotton, so new and bewildering, feeling that balloon beginning to inflate in her chest again. She touched the yellowed page where it was watermarked; an ancient, perfect starburst perimeter joining the words ‘unsatisfied’ and ‘desire.’ 
She touched herself more urgently, making a soft noise as the tear crept down her cheek, falling to make a fresh, damp circle next to the older stain on the page; she liked to imagine that it had been made by her mother’s own tear long ago. Her fingers lingered over ‘unbearably awake,’ and on that other astonishingly sensitive newfound treasure that had been hiding so cleverly from her for all these years. She added another undreamt of sound to her body’s blossoming vocabulary.
“Holy Mary…Oh, Maman…”
The board squealed its alarm, unheeded. The girl was by now lost in a far less numerate, and far more transcendent pursuit. A shaft of dusty sunlight fell across the floor as the door swung silently open, limning an uncompromising silhouette. The slim, umbilical shadow of the leather trace in her aunt’s hand joined it to the girl’s smooth, bare thighs. She was now become a Communicant again, ready to receive her initiation into the mysteries of that new, and ineffable trinity: Sin. Contrition. Redemption.
Ecstasy. (300)

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Summer

“Oh, don’t be such a prude, Evie!”
If she only knew. 
I was crimson just looking at her bare breasts, and modesty was not my sole concern, either; at fifteen, Yvonne was already possessed of a woman’s lush figure. I peeked down self-consciously at my own embarrassingly modest endowments, concealed with fabric to spare by my forbidden bikini, the one that I kept hidden in a carton in the shed along with my embargoed books. 
“But Vondie, it’s a sin!” I hissed. 
Flushing even more deeply I looked away toward Runaway Slave Creek, where the others were already splashing and laughing. The hoarse shouts of teenaged boys, their voices still in flux, mingled with the melodious, more mature murmurings of the girls, each employing for perhaps the last time the playful vocabulary of childhood to bridge the rapidly widening chasm between their sexes. For some – perhaps even on this glittering lacuna of a July afternoon – a less innocent, more carnal argot would soon eclipse these childish dialogues forever. 
My eyes strayed guiltily to Yvonne’s breasts again, bedewed with droplets of water. One sparkled in a stray shaft of sunlight, refracting a tiny prism of color that danced across her goose-bumped skin, mesmerizing me. Suddenly, my top was in her hand and she was gone, shrieking with laughter, plunging down the short slope to the creek. Screaming, she dove beneath the moss-green water. 
I wondered stupidly if this was what rape felt like, only too aware that I was dampening the strip of soft, sky-blue velour between my thighs. With a wild shout, I stumbled after her, tugging off my bottoms just before I knifed through the murky surface of the sluggish creek. 
Silken water rushed between my legs, shocking as a lover’s kiss as my fingertips encountered Vondie’s complaisant flesh. (300)

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Fall

“What’re these?”
His fingers wandered familiarly over a cheek, tracing one of the nearly invisible scars crazily criss-crossing her fanny like spider’s silk. She stiffened beneath his touch, lying on her belly in the sodden nest of sheets.
“My Prie Dieux’s,” she said tartly, swallowing the knot of anger that rose in her gorge. She could never get used to the way that just because he’d fucked her, he thought that gave him the right to get so personal.
“What’d you do? Fall off your tricycle into de briar patch?” Paul was infatuated with the romance that he’d invented around her Southern childhood. It made him feel like Joel Chandler, or Tennessee Williams. She wondered how long it would be before she’d see herself depicted in one of his humorless New Englander’s short story anthologies.
“Uh-huh…I fell, all right. From grace.”
“No, really,” he said, his hand wandering to the crack of her ass, then sidling edgewise down to her pussy, still slippery with the residue of their last coupling. “How’d you get ‘em?”
“When I was twelve, my aunt whipped me with a leather strap until I bled,” she said, defiantly this time, daring him to not be shocked.
“You’re shittin’ me!” She felt his hand freeze at the verge of her sweetly-sugaring opening.
“Yeah, I am darlin’,” she purred, reaching beneath herself, between her sticky thighs, gripping his half-hard penis and squeezing it to get its attention as she guided it toward her dripping cleft.
“And if you breath a word of it, I’ll have this li’l thang for my new door knocker,” she growled, slipping his rapidly-reawakening prick effortlessly inside herself. With his first thrust she imagined she could feel the network of tiny scars tightening across her bottom like Faerie ropes.
“Darlin’,” she smiled. (297)

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Winter

“SHIT! Your fingers are like fuckin’ ice!”
I ignored him, twisting his cock in my hands as if it were a pair of pantyhose that I was rinsing out in the sink. They only just reached around, my middle fingers barely touching my thumbs. It wasn’t really too difficult to understand why I was with such an animal.
“So turn the heat up, you cheap bastard.”
“I’ll show you heat, you worthless cunt,” he chuckled, slipping a calloused hand the size of a small baseball glove under my rump and lifting my naked hips as if I were a baby about to have its diaper changed. Lest you get the wrong idea about that chuckle, let me add that his other hand simultaneously lashed across my face, backhanded, bloodying my lip and setting stars dancing before my love-struck – or perhaps just struck – eyes. I raised my arms instinctively to protect my face.
“You want the cuffs again?”
I shook my head, lowering my arms slowly, eyes tearing. Cunt throbbing. Silence, save for the sleet scratching fitfully at the windowpanes. 
“No,” I lied, hoping that I didn’t sound as needy as I felt. 
There was nothing that he didn’t do to me. No act that was too depraved to play out on the battlefield that was my body. It was getting harder and harder to pancake over the bruises, but I didn’t care anymore. I was like a skydiver who waited a little longer each time before pulling that handle.
There were times when I wished that he were just a bit more aesthetically inclined, though. Times when I longed to have him take pictures of us that I could leave spread across the breakfast table for my husband, next to the toast, with a note that simply read:
“Goodbye.” (300)

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False Spring

All her life she’d been escaping. When she was a little girl, she couldn’t wait to flee Louisiana, and that insatiable snake her aunt wielded with such religious - and painful - dedication. Later, she’d dreamed of escaping the arctic blasts of New England, where a knife-edged wind sliced through her clothing, and she wore every pair of pantyhose she possessed whenever she ventured outdoors. A bitter chill invaded her core, and the only time she was truly warm, it seemed, was when she had a cock buried inside her. 
Inevitably one of these came attached to a proposal of marriage, and she was whisked away by her prince to a warmer kingdom, poised upon the edge of a blue and bewildering world. 
A prisoner, again.
Hers was a lovely cage, as cages go, filled with the most marvelous creature comforts. But a comfortable death is dead nonetheless. So she began braiding a rope, woven of bruises, broken dreams, and betrayals, with which to escape her gilded tower.
“What the hell is that?”
“That? Oh, nothing…ran into the shower door.” 
“And those?”
“Scratched myself, trimming the bougainvillea Saturday…”
She wanted to claw his eyes out when he accepted her ludicrous lies with his typically stolid equanimity.
So she’d finally given him a truth impossible to ignore, tied spread-eagle to their conjugal bed, naked, while her amoreaux du moment savaged her with her husband’s favorite Moroccan leather belt. The woman had been enthusiastic; the welts were visible for days afterwards. True to form, her husband said not a word when he walked in on them. His lawyer served her the next day. 
Rapunzel never thought of this, she’d guessed.
It’s odd, she reflected afterwards. No matter how carefully you fashion your rope, you’re always the one who ends up dangling from it…(300)

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Epilogue: Carnivore

“Wanna try some?”
The man’s heat enveloped her, his scent mingling with the smell of scotch and stale cigarette smoke. She gripped her glass tightly, taking some solace from its solidity, it’s substantiality.  She glanced warily at the plate he’d placed on the bar at her elbow, and the pale, flawless egg floating like an interrupted dream in its womb of dead flesh.
Her mind strayed to other, more distant Easters. How her aunt had pierced the eggs with a skewer, then given them to her to blow the embryonic contents from their delicate shells, before they painted them. She recalled how dizzily shocked she’d been the first time she’d seen a fine thread of blood stitched through a broken yolk; it had been her first intimation of the fragile mystery of her femaleness. Ever since, she’d gotten light-headed, and tasted albumen on her tongue when her menses began.
She thought again of all those eggs between that one and this, flushed from the flawed vessel of her body, a vessel that had been tried and found wanting, suitable now only for decorating in the latest fashion.
“I never touch meat.”
Almost as an afterthought, she insinuated two fingers between the buttons of his Levis. They popped open as she worked her hand in to the wrist, taking hold of him. Warmth radiated up her arm as she encircled his erection, the heat failing – as always – to penetrate to her frozen center. She squeezed him, once, and anonymous generations pulsed in sticky waves over her fingers. Her lips moved soundlessly, pressed against the rim of her glass as he came.
Salve, Regina, mater misericordia, she whispered. To thee do we cry, the poor banished children of Eve…they have pierced my hands and feet; they have counted all of my bones…(300)

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