knowing she’ll finish my thought.
She says, “…you’d only have another question, and another after that. Ad infinitum. ”
“I think I want to go home,” I whisper.
“Then you should go home, don’t you think?”
“What was that I dreamt of, the thing in the tree?”
Now she is leaning over me, on the bed with me, and it only frightens me that I am not afraid. “Only a bad dream,” she sighs, and her breath smells like the summer forest, and autumn leaves, and snow, and swollen mountain rivers in the spring. It doesn’t smell even remotely of fire.
“Before The Village, you were here,” I say. “You’ve almost always been here.” I say. It isn’t a question, and she doesn’t mistake it for one. She doesn’t say anything else, and I understand I will never again hear her speak.
She wraps her arms and legs about me – and, as I guessed, they were delicate and nothing like the legs of women, and she takes me into her. We do not make love. We fuck. No, she fucks me. She fucks me, and it seems to go on forever. Repeatedly, I almost reach climax, and, repeatedly, it slips away. She mutters in a language I know, instinctively, has never been studied by any linguist, and one I’ll not recall a syllable of later on, no matter how hard I struggle to do so. It seems filled with clicks and glottal stops. Outside, there is rain and thunder and lightning. The storm is pounding at the windows, wanting in. The storm, I think, is jealous. I wonder how long it will hold a grudge. Is that what happened on top of the hill? Did she take the man or the woman (or both) as a lover? Did the sky get even?
I do finally come, and the smells of her melt away. She is gone, and I lay on those sweaty sheets, trying to catch my breath.
So, I do not say aloud, the dream didn’t end with the tree. I dreamt her here, in the room with me. I dreamt her questions, and I dreamt her fucking me.
I do my best to fool myself this is the truth.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
By dawn, the rain has stopped.
7.
I have breakfast, pack, fill up the Nissan’s tank, and pay my motel bill.
By the time I pull out of the parking lot, it’s almost nine o’clock.
I drive away from The Village, and the steep slopes pressing in on all sides as if to smother it, and I drive away from the old cemetery beside Lake Witalema. I drive south, taking the long way back to the interstate, rather than passing the turnoff leading up the hill and the house and the lightning-struck tree. I know that I will spend the rest of my life avoiding the White Mountains. Maybe I’ll even go so far as to never step foot in New Hampshire again. That wouldn’t be so hard to do.
I keep my eyes on the road in front of me, and am relieved as the forests and lakes give way to farmland and then the outskirts of The City. I am leaving behind a mystery that was never mine to answer. I leave behind shadows for light. Wondrous and terrifying glimpses of the extraordinary for the mundane.
I will do my damnedest to convince the editor to whom I owe a story – he took my call this morning, and was only mildly annoyed I’d missed the deadline – that there is nothing the least bit bizarre about that hill or the woods surrounding it. Nothing to it but tall tales told by ignorant and gullible Swamp Yankees, people who likely haven’t heard the Revolutionary War has ended. I’ll lie and make them sound that absurd, and we’ll all have a good laugh.
I will bury, deep as I can, all my memories of her.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
The Colliers’ Venus (1898)
1.
It is not an ostentatious museum. Rather, it is only the sort of museum that best suits this modern, industrious city at the edge of the high Colorado plains. This city, with its sooty days and dusty, crowded streets and night skies that glow an angry orange from the dragon’s breath of half a hundred Bessemer converters. The museum is a dignified, yet humble, assemblage of geological
She says, “…you’d only have another question, and another after that. Ad infinitum. ”
“I think I want to go home,” I whisper.
“Then you should go home, don’t you think?”
“What was that I dreamt of, the thing in the tree?”
Now she is leaning over me, on the bed with me, and it only frightens me that I am not afraid. “Only a bad dream,” she sighs, and her breath smells like the summer forest, and autumn leaves, and snow, and swollen mountain rivers in the spring. It doesn’t smell even remotely of fire.
“Before The Village, you were here,” I say. “You’ve almost always been here.” I say. It isn’t a question, and she doesn’t mistake it for one. She doesn’t say anything else, and I understand I will never again hear her speak.
She wraps her arms and legs about me – and, as I guessed, they were delicate and nothing like the legs of women, and she takes me into her. We do not make love. We fuck. No, she fucks me. She fucks me, and it seems to go on forever. Repeatedly, I almost reach climax, and, repeatedly, it slips away. She mutters in a language I know, instinctively, has never been studied by any linguist, and one I’ll not recall a syllable of later on, no matter how hard I struggle to do so. It seems filled with clicks and glottal stops. Outside, there is rain and thunder and lightning. The storm is pounding at the windows, wanting in. The storm, I think, is jealous. I wonder how long it will hold a grudge. Is that what happened on top of the hill? Did she take the man or the woman (or both) as a lover? Did the sky get even?
I do finally come, and the smells of her melt away. She is gone, and I lay on those sweaty sheets, trying to catch my breath.
So, I do not say aloud, the dream didn’t end with the tree. I dreamt her here, in the room with me. I dreamt her questions, and I dreamt her fucking me.
I do my best to fool myself this is the truth.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
By dawn, the rain has stopped.
7.
I have breakfast, pack, fill up the Nissan’s tank, and pay my motel bill.
By the time I pull out of the parking lot, it’s almost nine o’clock.
I drive away from The Village, and the steep slopes pressing in on all sides as if to smother it, and I drive away from the old cemetery beside Lake Witalema. I drive south, taking the long way back to the interstate, rather than passing the turnoff leading up the hill and the house and the lightning-struck tree. I know that I will spend the rest of my life avoiding the White Mountains. Maybe I’ll even go so far as to never step foot in New Hampshire again. That wouldn’t be so hard to do.
I keep my eyes on the road in front of me, and am relieved as the forests and lakes give way to farmland and then the outskirts of The City. I am leaving behind a mystery that was never mine to answer. I leave behind shadows for light. Wondrous and terrifying glimpses of the extraordinary for the mundane.
I will do my damnedest to convince the editor to whom I owe a story – he took my call this morning, and was only mildly annoyed I’d missed the deadline – that there is nothing the least bit bizarre about that hill or the woods surrounding it. Nothing to it but tall tales told by ignorant and gullible Swamp Yankees, people who likely haven’t heard the Revolutionary War has ended. I’ll lie and make them sound that absurd, and we’ll all have a good laugh.
I will bury, deep as I can, all my memories of her.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
The Colliers’ Venus (1898)
1.
It is not an ostentatious museum. Rather, it is only the sort of museum that best suits this modern, industrious city at the edge of the high Colorado plains. This city, with its sooty days and dusty, crowded streets and night skies that glow an angry orange from the dragon’s breath of half a hundred Bessemer converters. The museum is a dignified, yet humble, assemblage of geological
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