0 comments/ 10858 views/ 0 favorites New England Romance By: malescheherazade There was once a curious young scholar who, on a lonely december, decided to escape the frigidity of the city and the ivory tower of academia. Unfortunately, it seemed that the december would remain lonely no matter what: he had no sense of home, and he lived with his nose in books. He spent the wee hours of the night in a damp, dark basement, descending from the fourth floor of the library, where all he could hear were shoes rising from the carpet, to his bedroom, where all he could hear were mice scratching at the locked door. The basement that he called his apartment served as little more than a place to sleep and to masturbate. When he masturbated he thought he heard a scratching on his door, something that seemed to call to him but that he couldn't locate. He only assumed that mice, on the other side of the basement, tried night after night to nibble their way into his bedroom. But sometimes the scratching intensified and sounded like claws, or at the very least sharp fingernails digging into the wood, gradually scratching so that their nails vibrated against the wood, penetrating through to the other side. The young scholar disregarded this. He preferred to pay attention to the text in front of him, or when he was in bed, his penis. But sometimes his disregard failed him, and the vibrations against the wood sent a shiver down his spine, causing him to shudder when he ejaculated, so that his climax blended orgasm and terror. He'd had his share of women but they rarely made it to his bedroom. He was earnest, intellectual, and in the darker recesses of his being, opportunistic and brutal. He had an insatiable sexual curiosity. Yet, his curiosity wasn't always expedient in the moment: he doubted his own instincts, and began to step back from the act, viewing a woman's luscious mid-section as a field of study rather than as a body to enjoy. His recent heartbreaks put him more in his head and, if one observed the young man stroking himself, his figure would appear so caved inward, his spine completely curved over like a mountain peak, that the observer may think him crying or desperately studying his own penis. Still, if the young scholar's animal grunts had echoed beyond the basement, any woman with fingernails to scratch and a darker imagination may clench their teeth, shudder, and dig through his wooden door. The young man was a dreamer. He dreamed of wild romps through Europe with his last love interest, an exotic girl who loved to tease him. The exotic girl knew how the young man desired her and she treated his attention with a coy smile until one day, on Halloween, he lunged at her across a restaurant table for a passionate embrace. She rejected him and almost needed to drag him across the floor so that he could pick up his broken heart and walk away. But on this day in December, he resolved to mend his broken heart. He craved a valley to roll in, not a basement to descend to. He longed for a woman who made his rigid penis twitch, and as he studied the words in books of the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, strands of flowing brunette hair emerged before his eyes, replacing the sentences on the dog-eared page. The young man only saw the silky hair and its wave-like structure, much more sensual and curved than the linear, mechanical text that he examined day in, day out. The hair seemed to reach out of the book and fall with total abandon, reaching out of the book tossing itself wildly off the desk and brushing against his penis, tickling the tip, slithering around the crown. The hair was endless and, as the pages became blank, an infinite amount of hair bounced off the desk, circling around his cock with tender, teasing strokes, swimming in his drops of precum. Ten circles, a hundred, a thousand, he felt the cool undulations against his shaft until his penis exploded onto the bundle of hair, shooting proof of his manhood everywhere, coating the hair with his semen until the brunette strands looked like a naughty mermaid emerging from Poseidon's ocean, or a nymphomaniac using her lover's sperm as hairspray. The young scholar shot his glance away from Heraclitus' pages, and looked at his watch. He realized that his plane back to Massachusetts was in two hours. He unzipped his leather bag and threw in two outfits, two romance novels and two boxes of condoms. Not that he expected to satisfy his sexual fever over the next month. The trip home was to enable him to take time to himself, escape the library and the basement, and perhaps the least promising option, visit his family. But if he wasn't to have erotic encounters, he couldn't imagine to what lengths his family's country road would flood with his genital cream. If he couldn't ravage a woman, he anticipated stroking himself so consistently that she would swim in his semen. The entire street, the entire town, waving their arms above his phallic fluid, sobbing, crying for help, at the mercy of his penis. When he arrived in his small hometown on the New England countryside, he panicked at the sound of trees swaying and the steady wind whistling. He had grown so accustomed to wind smacking through his coat, in what was seemingly an effort to rip into his skin, that the sudden quietness alarmed him. This is ironic, he thought to himself. In contrast to the city's violent chill, his hometown possessed a romantic frigidity that he had long forgotten. He lay down, in his bed that seemed to sit in the middle of a patch of woods, shut his eyes and plunged into a restless sleep. The young scholar awoke to the sound of water dripping from the long limbs of the trees outside. He peered out the window and his jaw dropped. Thick ice covered each tree behind his bedroom head-to-toe. He ran to the front door and looked up and down the street, and the smooth, wet ice rendered the rough concrete invisible. The young man quickly dressed, putting on his jacket and scarf, and ventured outside. It seemed an ice storm had attacked the town. The pine needles drooped toward the ground, and suddenly he felt like he wasn't totally alone. Or, at least he shared the trees' loneliness. His head hung low, his shoulders slumped, his knees bent and arms descended just like the lanky limbs of the trees, weighed down by the smack of mother nature. He felt powerless, just as the pine branches were powerless in a ruthless, subzero grip. The young man longed to stare at the Heraclitus book again, and surrender himself to the gentle grasp of the brunette locks. But as Heraclitus himself said, nobody can step into the same river twice. The hair would never stroke his shaft in the same way again, and he would probably never climax that vigorously again. At least not here—his fantasy hair would freeze and disappear into jagged, apocalyptic ice. Upon a closer look at the street, the young man stopped obsessing over the drooping trees behind his bedroom. He began to imagine himself as one large tree beside the road, a tree that had fallen smack down and engaged in extended intercourse with the power lines. Felines danced and slinked on top of the ice, showing no sign of cold paws, and the young man thought he could hear the faint sound of purring, a soft, sensual, comforting sound blowing through the branches. The trees started to sway along with the felines, as if dancing together, moving in some rhythm, possessed by the sound and by the kittens' invitations. The young scholar simply stood and stared at all of this, and started to feel weak in the knees. He closed his eyes, hearing nothing but meows and purrs, and chunks of ice falling from the trees, dissolving, as if the kitties freed the branches and the ice melted at their purrs. The young man began to melt with the ice and, standing under a tree, felt water drip on the back of his neck as he gently shook his hips to the rhythm of the trees and the cats. The melted ice sent a shiver down his spine and caused his lips to part. He suddenly felt his lips more fully than ever and while they were usually pursed in an intense effort to study, on this day in his driveway they seemed to expand, opening as if in an invitation for a kiss. He let his tongue roll along his upper lip as if he had some agenda, an inner hunger that the trees, the kitties and the lips egged him on to satisfy. He undulated and danced, thinking he was alone. Suddenly, he heard what sounded like footsteps—but more stomps rather than mere steps. Yes, he heard vigorous feet crushing the ice and giving the ground a long-needed massage. He heard the sound of distinct boots, and those boots sounded familiar, a continuous SMACK that had echoed in his core for years, but that long escaped his consciousness. They were his neighbor's brown boots, and the special neighbor wore boots with a determination at once feminine and transcendent, and could make a man kneel. The young scholar's mouth watered and he thought of falling to the frigid ground, quivering from lust and hypothermia and clutching at the soles of the special neighbor's boots, hoping that the neighbor would press her foot into his chest, at once shattering his ribcage and sending jolts through his body. That SMACK lingered in his core for years—he had repressed it because she was significantly younger, but today his frenzy demanded attention. He imagined taking her completely, right there in the ice. The special neighbor approached him and, after a smile, they embraced. She was thin and soft in his arms, breakable in her persona but, as she wore those aggressive boots, she possessed a ravenous self confidence that could eat up the trees, the kitties, the young scholar—that last option the most preferable. "Hi!" She licked her lips in a struggle to strike up a conversation. She licked slowly, as if trying to cover all of her lip's territory while she searched her mind for the right words: her tongue's tip touched the middle, then the right corner, then, sliding right along the flesh to the left corner. What is she thinking? He wondered. She thought of the storm in the lip's center, the years that passed since they last saw each other on the right corner and then, the hot sex they would have, the agility with with his penis would enter and leap inside her while they're catching up after all the years of repressed feelings—those thoughts during the tongue's slide from the right corner to the left corner. "Years since I've seen you walking..." the young scholar heard her say. Her voice floated over the melting ice, and her statement sounded dreamlike, incomplete. She grappled with a timid uncertainty nesting deep in her gut, almost buried in her womb, as she couldn't help gazing into the young man's eyes. As she burned her gaze into him, her eyes opened, wider, wider, until tears started to form around the sockets. The young man stared back, his mouth still open, lips parted from the melted ice trickling down his spine. The special neighbor searched the recesses of her being, the marrow of her bones, to discover the origin of the deep uncertainty, trepidation and violence inside her. It was similar to feeling butterflies in her stomach, the feeling that she sometimes had when she got crushes on boys as a young girl. But these were violent butterflies: enlarged moths with sharp, black wings, piercing the total width and depth of her feminine insides, soaring through her from head to toe. She wasn't sure if she felt disturbed, excited or both. She turned away from the young man, eyeing the street, the trees, the ice in all directions—then slowly turned her head back toward him. She rested her chin on the tip of her collarbone, gradually pressing the end of her fine jaw into her shoulder, an expression at once coy and assertive. Her eyes invied him along for a walk, not pleading or begging but drawing him toward her like a magnet. It was clear she needed him, and she didn't need to clarify that any more through begging. All she needed were her deep brown eyes, decadent, reminding him of a dream he once had about rolling in a puddle of dark chocolate with a woman. The young man and the special neighbor began walking down the street. As they walked next to each other, the young man only saw his neighbor in profile, and no longer lost himself in the infinite depth of her eyes. and her brunette hair that resembled the strands that fell on to his lap, the ones that reached out of the philosophy book, stroking him until he exploded. They watched the branches fall from the trees and crackle against the ground. The sound of falling branches echoed through the entire street. They passed several trees on the side of the road, and the branches fell just after they walked past. The young scholar felt tempted to study this pattern in his mind, but for now only the sensory quality of it lived in his bones: they walked on the street and the branches snapped off the trees, following their footsteps. CRACK-fall, CRACK-fall, CRACK-fall, until they realized that they had been listening to the trees for so long that they weren't talking to each other. They were lost in a new world that looked like the street they lived on but was quickly transforming into the site of the apocalypse—as the branches fell, the world fell apart. What made the town a part of the country was breaking. Yet, a new world was emerging, something inside of them and that made them not care about the fact that their outside world was falling apart. They turned their attention away from the trees and to each other again. "So, if you're not walking down this street every day like you used to, what have you been up to?" The neighbor asked, both out of curiosity and obligation. "Living in the city. Trying to enjoy it. Doing some research work about the ancient philosopher Heraclitus." "That's cool." "Well, hot, actually. He described everything in terms of fire. He thought fire was the primary element." The young scholar hated himself for trying to be clever. "Well, it's good you're doing that. We could use a fire right now, couldn't we?" Something trembled in her voice, probably as a result of the violent uncertainty she felt about the young man since the first moment seeing him. But he loved the awkward tremor in her voice; he detected in her voice a broken eroticism that demanded his attention and demanded to sing a song of its own. Her voice, her figure, her way of holding herself, seemed broken and melancholy, but in fact maybe she was just craving to be broken through. Her quivering voice belied her deliberate stomps as she crushed the ice with her boots. Her hips sashayed and he thought he saw her back arch slightly, much like the felines prowling the street. "I've been painting still. And drawing." As the young man listened, the neighbor's voice intoxicated him, and it began to sound less like a tremor and more like a purr, as if she blended in with the kitties, their purrs still vaguely heard in the distance, back in the young man's driveway, along with the snapping branches. Those sounds eventually faded completely. The young scholar and the neighbor reached a dark region of the forest on the side of the road. The neighbor stopped, opened her mouth and stared. The young man felt a mixture of apprehension and desire as he and his neighbor stopped in front of the woods. "What if a tree falls?" he thought aloud. But the neighbor seemed to say nothing in response, for the young man didn't see her mouth move, nor did he hear her speak. She walked ahead, first stiff, raising her shoulders and straightening her spine in defense. But in defense of what? He wondered. Why should we go into these woods, with no path? Branches have been falling since we began our walk. "I don't want to be like a falling branch" he blurted out. "Yeah," she responded. But she charged ahead, and it seemed she moved toward a light, something flowing beneath two tree branches. She grew smaller as she charged ahead of him and he stood there, paralyzed. SNAP! A branch fell inches from his head. He breathed loudly. The neighbor turned around and removed her jacket. She stood, for a moment frozen, and slowly pulled her shirt underneath downward, exposing her shoulders. She shivered—out of coldness or arousal? The young man wondered. He moved toward her, losing himself again in her deep brown eyes, and every breath turned into a heave. He felt like her hand reached inside him and stroked his lungs, carressed them and manipulated his breath, and if she wanted to, she could suffocate him. He stood there, sighing, panting, and almost had an orgasm through his breathing alone. With every sigh, he imagined rolling in the forest leaves with her while the ice coating the trees metamorphosed into melted chocolate, dripping on them, raining on the lovers. He salivated, tasting chocolate, skin, and earth all at once. Meanwhile, the neighbor stripped for him, and it seemed that they continued to walk forward at the same time that she stripped. Her hips shook, sometimes softly, other times jerking from side to side, and he knew that those were the convulsions she'd make while he was inside her. She knew, at the same time, that her hips' gestures only hinted at what her body would do when he buried himself in her; that her composure, power and self-control in the present moment was all a facade. She ripped through the threads of her tattered green t-shirt with seeming effortlessness, and her thumb followed a line down her center, tearing through the shirt, exposing her stomach, her chest, her collarbone and her beautiful breasts. She wore no bra and, once she ripped the line through the shirt, she pulled it behind her and revealed her full upper womanness. At this moment, she expressed not the coquettish control that she displayed at the beginning of their entrance into the woods, but an innocent wonder and awe. Her eyes widened in genuine curiosity and discovery, searching her own breasts that were big enough for her to look at from above, playing with her own breasts, making them move with every breath. Once her shirt came off, the young man wasn't the only one who sighed and panted. Her breaths began to quake, and then they shortened, so that she was panting herself, and her breasts seemed to expand with every pant. In every nanosecond, the young man watched her breathe, captivated, as if she conjured an ancient female superpower and sculpted her own body right before his eyes, breathing so that her prodigious breasts became rounder, fuller. Her eyelids fluttered shut and her teeth made up-down motions; her jaw opened and closed, and the young man leaned in because he thought she was saying something. She spoke to her body in her own language that came out in guttural noises and jaw gestures that looked like bites. She dictated a personality to her own breasts, and they continued to grow rounder—they were exhibitionistic breasts, ready to be seen and touched. As he stared at every inch of her breasts, his eyes not missing one detail of her smooth, tender, tanned skin, her sighs reversed into gasps. His gaze possessed her body, sending her into a fit of arousal. While she expanded her own breasts with her womanly powers for the young scholar to feast his eyes upon, he stared and seemed to posess them himself. Her nipples hardened, awakening from a deep sleep underneath her skin, popping out, eager for his lips to massage them. The neighbor's jeans dropped, seemingly by a force other than her own will, for her hands weren't anywhere near her pants. Her hands delicately followed her own breasts. She stroked her breasts like they were entities separate from her, and at first she touched them as if she were petting a cat. As her carresses continued, it looked more like she tended a fire, pressing her fingers into her mammaries and nipples the way a survivor in the wilderness teases firewood with a stick. New England Romance The young man stared at her legs, thighs and sex. Her pants came off and seemed to disappear underneath the leaves, but her boots remained fastened on her feet, and her hips swayed back and forth as her feet pushed into the ground. It seemed for a moment that she had more power than the earth itself, the power of her boots weighing down on the dirt; the world's very foundation crumbling and swooning underneath her presence. The young scholar stood, just barely keeping his composure on his two feet as his legs wobbled in front of the lovely neighbor. His mouth remained ajar and he licked his lips as a reflex that he couldn't stop. The special neighbor's eyelids fluttered shut and stayed that way, as if she transcended the ground she stood on and reveled in the glory of displaying her body to the young man. Her arms raised above her head while she danced. The young man almost lost touch with his surroundings completely, paying one hundred percent attention to the neighbor in front of him. At this point, he couldn't even tell how far apart they were, and even though she stood a good distance from him, it seemed that they were interlinked, and he had no awareness of space or time. The young scholar also didn't know if they continued to move or if the ground moved underneath them and he could feel the earth rotating, just as he would soon feel her hips rotating and grinding over his erect penis. He didn't feel the slightest bit inclined to hide his erection as it almost seemed to tear through his jeans, twitching and throbbing at the special neighbor's every move. She was still gasping and speaking in her own incantations, her own language to her own body, and he couldn't tell if she was speaking to herself or if she also spoke to him. He simply stared and watched, lightly stroking his own shaft through his pants, while she stood, seemingly oblivious, in her own world of nakedness and pleasure. SNAP! He heard a branch fall again, this time louder than ever, and snapped back to time and space, remembering that they were standing in the woods without any trail. He realized that any of the droopy, lopsided trees could fall and kill them at any moment. Yet, he couldn't bring himself to say anything to this gorgeous entity in front of him; he needed to let her shake her hips, speak in her own language and linger. He wanted to linger with here, too. Whatever plane she was on, he ached to join her. CRACK! He heard another fall, and there was an echoing sound, or more of a repeating that he at first assumed to be an echo, a sound that shot through the woods, a sound so powerful that it seemed to have texture and could knock down the trees by the sheer virtue of its own loudness. Are these trees speaking to each other? The young man wondered. Nonsense. Impossible. That's irrational and superstitious. But nothing that had happened so far this day was rational: he had only to look at the supreme woman in front of him to see that this, right here, was the stuff of his dreams. His fantasies, his philosophical inquiry, his thoughts while strolling down the city sidewalk, seemed to all amount to what existed in this moment. He wondered, Where will I go after this? What will I live for? Indeed, this seemed to be the kind of world he wanted to live in; the quality of adventure that the exotic girl who teased him couldn't provide back in the city. The falling of the branches kept repeating but the sound transformed, and now it grew quieter so that the young scholar didn't know if it was actually happening or if he imagined the entire noise. This was especially the case because he lost track of the moment of evolution between the loud snaps and the quieter, mournful sound that was now happening. It wasn't even a snap, or a crack, nor a hitting-the-ground anymore—this was a sound he couldn't pinpoint. But there was a distinct sequence in which he heard the new sound: First, the wind pushed itself through the trees, in a faint whistle that turned to more of a breath. For a moment, he thought he heard breathing, and he knew that he couldn't be hearing the special neighbor, as she continued to stand, gasping and panting, speaking to herself in between gasps and touching herself. No, this was a quieter breath, like a constipated depressive on the toilet, and it became unclear whether he heard breathing or sobbing. As he thought he heard breathing, goosebumps formed on the back of his neck not because of the cold air but at the thought that a living entity breathed down his neck without apparent location or substance. But then, the breaths became harder and while before, they seemed to be happening underneath the ground (as he couldn't locate the sound), now they were emitted distinctly above-ground; they were harsher, like sobs, with distinct beginnings and ends. There were moments of silence and the sobs escalated, growing louder and louder, and suddenly a sadness washed over the young man that was beyond his escape or control. Chunks of ice fell from the trees onto his convex spine. He covered his ears; he could feel his ears fill with fluid and they ached as the sobs continued. His eyes began to feel fatigued, as if he had been sobbing himself. This can't be, he thought. I'm in control. The sobs stopped and for a moment there was silence. The special neighbor continued standing in front of him but for a moment, she stood seemingly motionless. Two more sobs and they developed sudden cracks, and the young man sat, hearing these choke-like sobs, beginning to cry himself, sitting there helpless. He cried out to the special neighbor: "Are you hearing something? I don't know what to do." She looked at him, her eyes widened with that innocent curiosity that she had the moment that her breasts first appeared in the woods, and she nodded her head in one of the most out-of-context ways he had ever seen. "Yes? Well, maybe we should..." he began to say. The special neighbor laughed, as if in agreement. She continued dancing, her boots intact and pushing into the ground. The cracks became so intense that the sobs turned to growls, but the distinct growls of a female, and it became clear to the young man that he heard an old woman. He even smelled an old woman's skin, and could feel the precious dryness of an old woman's knuckle between his fingertips. He thought he felt an old woman's sandpaper lips on his own, and first he shook his head, spitting. After a moment, he stood, a deer in the headlights. "Hey...I...I need to go." He declared. The special neighbor smiled, nodding her head vigorously, but then her neck moved with her head in such a sensual way that he couldn't tell if she nodded her head or shook it. She brought her hand down to her sex and started stroking herself. The growls in the woods intensified and the young man felt something touch his stomach. He screamed. His stomach sucked in and his entire groin became a rock. He looked long and hard at the droopy trees only to find an old woman with hollow, white irises clinging to a tree-trunk. She leaned against the trunk, bent over, wearing a sea-green coat with a mahogany stain on her back, and she stayed against the tree, her mouth moving. She looked away from the young man, simply clinging to the tree-trunk and muttering to herself. The branches lowered, the growling rung in his ears, and the special neighbor danced, touching her own vagina, purring and gasping, speaking in her self-created language louder and clearer than ever. The young scholar looked from the old woman to the special neighbor. He stood and stared at both women, and while he tried desperately to fixate on the neighbor gyrating and touching herself, the old woman stayed in his peripheral vision, her brown smear, white eyes and corpse-colored skin haunting him. His erection shrunk and he kept sucking in his stomach as if someone impaled it with a pedophilic hand. The old woman clung to the tree-trunk. Her fingernails dug into the wood, and the young scholar sucked in his stomach with greater and greater force as he saw her penetrate the wood with her fingers. She began to tremble, and her little shakes gave way to full-body rumbles as the young man watched her fingernails descend like termites into the wood. The special neighbor resolved to never tell anyone what happened in the woods. She kneeled next to the young scholar, who lay comatose on the floor of his parents' home. The house was deserted and cold: his parents escaped for the city, and there was nothing in the house but a bunch of flies, spaghetti noodles hanging out of every orifice in the furniture, out of the cabinets, squiggling out of the stove and microwave, as if the ice storm contained a germ that snuck into their refrigerator and prompted the already-cooked spaghetti to explode everywhere in the house. An empty milk carton stood on the kitchen island, looking frozen. As the neighbor knelt, she drew a portrait of the young scholar while he lay asleep. She supervised a fire in the young man's woodstove. As she drew the young man, her eyebrows seemed to sink. She formed her lips into a disingenuous smile, one of tension and discomfort. She sighed repeatedly as if she struggled to catch her breath. She kept touching herself to test the idea that her body still existed. She looked at the spaghetti flying out of the cabinets, then to the young man lying on the ground. The young scholar awoke. The special neighbor smiled at him. What was it he had seen in the woods? He couldn't call to mind what had just happened. "Your kitchen's a mess," the neighbor said. The young man looked around, swa the spaghetti noodles hanging out of the cabinets and they looked like they were slithering out, over the wood, landing limply on the marble counter. "This is what happens when my mother cooks spaghetti and leaves it in the fridge," the young scholar said. He saw the pot, with tomato sauce, sitting on the kitchen island and continued to look back to the noodles, which were now swinging back and forh out of the cabinet doors. The young man retrieved a bottle of wine from the part of the counter next to the refrigerator: "Salmon Creek." He opened the bottle and poured each of them a glass. "What's your life like in the city?" the special neighbor asked. " It's different. I'm trying to appreciate it back here more. It's chaotic back there, and I work too hard." "What are your friends like?" "Well—people cry a lot. And have sex a lot. Sex is very important to people." The special neighbor laughed. The young scholar decided to take a risk: he picked up a romance novel from his bedroom shelf; one that he purchased ot of curiosity and frustration long ago. He grinned at the specical neighbor. "Are you serious?" she asked him. "I love these books," he confessed. Once again, he hated himself for attempting cleverness, but he explained how he finds romance novels sexier than any pornographic videos most young men watch. He said all of this to remind her of his uniqueness—to demonstrate that the type of literature that arouses him says something about the way that he makes love. He wanted her to know that he would savor every touch, every kiss, every stroke, pull and thrust with her. The special neighbor laughed at him. The young man cleaned up the spaghetti,, pulling each dangling noodle out of its spot in the cabinet, wiping up the smears of meat-sauce with a napkin and placing them in the trash. He imagined, in a gesture of spontaneity, jumping on top of the dining room table, spaghetti noodle in hand, staring down at the special neighbor and stripping. Once he abandoned his pants, he would take the sauce-covered noodle and wrap it around his penis, glaring at the neighbor with bedroom eyes as he made a clown show of stroking himself—even strangling his shaft—with the piece of spaghetti. Instead, the young scholar and the special neighbor sat down on the living room sofa, drinking their red wine. The young man ran his finger along the outside of the glass, staring at the legs that the wine left inside the glass. He needed a distraction from his neighbor, as her laughs minutes before embarrassed him. And she continued to laugh at his penchant for romance novels. "They're just...not real. Those are books that fifty-year old women read when they're bored with their husbands." "I like them. They're scandalous! They decorate sex in a heightened, pretending-to-be-proper language and it's—sexy!" the young scholar sheepishly tried to defend his taste, and it occurred to him that he didn't seem so much the intellectual. "You're so funny," she said, her voice like velvet, as smooth as the legs inside the wine glass. The special neighbor grabbed the young man's chin and kissed him softly, and when his tongue carressed hers he felt he rolled his tongue around in a bowl of honey, with each sweet portion sticking to each side of his tongue the moist substance expanding, stretching and sticking until their salivas met along with their flesh. His tongue entered her cavernous mouth and went deeper and deeper, not reaching her tonsils since her mouth seemed to possess its own modality, a bottomless well of pleasure for his tongue to roll around in. They kissed and kissed. She was soft, deliberate, sensual. Her lips clung to his, as if the top and bottom lips wrapped around each other in their own micro-embrace. The neighbor fell backwards on to the couch so that the young man now mounted her. She no longer wore her boots, but her jeans remained firmly on her legs and the young man made clumsy groping gestures in a half-hearted attempt to rip through the pants. Why this sudden half-heartedness? He wondered to himself. Am I tired? But it occurred to him that the day's events escaped his memory, so he couldn't even justify his own tiredness or apparent lack of desire for the beautiful specimen underneath him. The young man knew, in his gut, inctinctively, that he had felt a strong surge of desire for this woman before, not so long ago. He felt it buried away, like an energy that he needed to conjure, and he suddenly felt deprived of his own manhood. His penis remained flaccid, he wasn't erect and a dread of impotence plagued him. The young scholar searched his neighbor's face for any traces of resentment she may have expressed, but her eyes were closed so he found her impossible to read. Nevertheless, his own stiffness killed the sensuality that their moment had previously promised, and, more than that, the steamy sexual encounter that the day had promised. But what was it that the day had promised? What happened that day that promised something? The young man thought and thought but couldn't come up with an answer. He thought obsessively, and the neighbor sensed that something was wrong so she plunged her tongue further and further into his mouth, grabbing his thigh, a gesture of repression and charging ahead. She didn't want to think about the woods. Yet, when she tried to charge ahead, groping the young man's thigh, he pulled back even more. The only desire that he currently experienced was a desire for desire. He reluctantly endured her hand on his leg and tried to reciprocate the touch in a manly grab, only to meet with an uncomfortable tension in the neighbor's own legs and genital area. The more the special neighbor grabbed onto the young man's leg, with increasing effort, the more the young scholar tensed, pulling back and finally sucking in his stomach, an inward cry of protection and he felt like a child tied up in the woods, naked, with duct tape over his mouth and ropes around his wrists and ankles, receiving a brutal, bloody spanking against a tree trunk. At this, he almost remembered something. His desire for desire intensified until he began to cry. At first he tried to stifle his tears, even fighting to hide any traces of a sob from the special neighbor, but he couldn't help sobbing and in a single moment, two tears fell from his face onto her skin. Once the young man started sobbing he couldn't stop, and he released his sobs gently, clenching his eye sockets together like a tragic hero's anagnorisis. His stomach sustained its own tension, as if something inside him clung to a memory,a truth, or a notion. He didn't know what was the object of his clinging and what he felt that he ran after, but something inside him was running, even as he felt paralyzed on top of the special neighbor, his sweaty hands now limp on her jeans. The special neighbor tried to remedy his sadness with a kiss but when he started to cry like someone in mourning, she backed away from the couch. Soon, his sobs came out like holy water from an inexhaustible well, and when she asked him what was wrong, he just kept sobbing, a broken record. He felt something stretching inside his stomach, trying to open him up, and simultaneously he felt that comething castrated him, cutting through the middle of his testicles and leaving the lumpy flesh out on the floor—a force that he was suspicious tried to stretch his soul into a woman's, to stretch his entire upper body and stomach, lungs, internal oblique muscles into a widely opened vagina, so that he could no longer worship his own phallus. Meanwhile, he knew what he most tangibly clung to; a notion. Even in this most visceral moment on the icy evening, the young scholar posited that he had a notion of desire—that he believed in desire, and he believed that he once possessed a strong desire for this particular woman, but that he couldn't feel or sense a desire. The feeling that followed his notion, desperation, mania, chaos, surged through him, a raging rapids in his blood stream that would seem to change the color of his skin or light him on fire. His sobs continued until they started to sound familiar to him, and they began to sound like sobs that weren't his own. They contained repitition, with sharp beginnings and ends, but with cracks and crevices in which they gave way to growls and grunts. He began to sound like an animal; his eyes reddened and welled up with tears. He saw the special neighbor move away from him, but seemingly without any movement of her own will or her own two feet. She now wore her boots, and as they pushed into the floor, the ground seemed to push her along, away from the young man as she floated above the surface. This looked familiar to him, the placement of her boots, the floating quality with which she moved, and especially the way in which she seemed so close to him in one instant and so far away from him in the next. He watched her in a distinct moment of silence, and reflected that his sobs had possessed his body and they seemed to originate in a force distinctly designed to simultaneously snatch his burning desire and to push the special neighbor out of his vicinity. The young scholar arose in spite of the sobs that he choked out of his system, and as he lifted himself from the leather sofa he struggled to escape his own skin, like a panic had seized him and his movement was an attempt to liberate himself. The special neighbor had floated out of his sight, disappeared while the young man's tears blocked his vision, and currently his notion of desire turned into a more tangible feeling. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, he thought. Or does it just tease one with longing and lust? What began as a notion started to manifest more as the other two options: a memory and a truth. His desirous longing was so clear that his eyes developed red veins. Never in his life had emotion possessed him as much as this moment. He cried out, with an indecipherable ear-splitting feat of the throat, "Hhhyouuugakkriiarra" in hopes of the neighbor hearing him, but he cried through the sob. It occurred to him that his cry resembled something that the special neighbor herself had once uttered, a time when she spoke in a non-english language, a moment that he couldn't locate in his memory. New England Romance MEMORY. And truth. That's what was philosophically prevalent in the core of his being, in some space between his lungs, his stomach, his bowels and his inner obliques, where some metaphysical space exists. As his desire was no longer a notion but a cry, he continued his deafening screams: HHHyougakkriiiaarra. But what was he saying? Was he crying out in an indecipherable mumbo-jumbo expression of sentiment, or was there implied content in his syllables? Each time he cried, other layers of complicaion possessed him, plagued him, blocked his faculties of understanding. What seemed at first like a memory, and an emerging truth, instead became that third thing: another notion. He began to see notions of memories and truth, and as he walked out the door, holding his arms out in search of his lost companion, following the perfectly formed footprints of her boots in the ice, further sights distracted him. The trees with their drooping, hanging branches emerged as what he suspected to be illusory, raw data that he saw with his own eyes yet that he was reluctant to accept as self-evident truths. But that wasn't all: the trees also ignited an impulse for recollection inside him, as if he tried to recall a memory. He couldn't tell whether the memory was from long ago or if it was more recent, but those trees spoke to something he intuitively knew, and something about those branches, looking weak, chewed up, dampened and ready to snap or wither away, aroused the young scholar. He felt adrenaline rush through him like fire, and he thought of Heraclitus and a clear sensation of brunette hair tickling his penis not a couple of days before. After a second, he realized that this memory only distracted him—the trees were actually telling him something else. He looked and looked; the trees swayed and swayed. They tried to dance with him, but as the branches reached down to him they poked his ribs, and there was no affection; one may be content to hang the young scholar from any of these trees and their angular shapes and sharp branches would show no sympathy. The young scholar followed the footprints of the special neighbor, though they became less and less recognizable and they seemed to descend into an unforgiving neck of the woods—one with no path. The only thing that the young scholar could do was to continue screaming the only tangible truth he knew—his desire, no longer a notion. "HHYOUGAKKRIIAAARAAAAAA!" His cry split the forest in half. A mass of trees fell in a series of snaps, like a domino effect. "HHYOUGAKKRIIAAARAAAAAA!" The ice on the ground cracked. He was only slightly aware of what happened around him, so focused on trying to conjure the memory that rested deep inside him. As trees continued to fall, He realized that trees piled up on top of each other, one after the other, closing him into this little patch of the woods. Would he freeze to death? He stood in a wide open space, almost in the shape of a circle, that seemed designed specifically for him. The special neighbor's footsteps were barely visible, but the young scholar could see them clearly, and they traveled in a circle, as if the neighbor had reached this part of the woods and vaporized at the epicenter where the young man currently stood. "HHYOUGAKKRIIAAARAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" After a final forest-splitting cry, a single tree remained standing, and the young man heard sobbing much like his own that he experienced a few minutes prior. The sobs turned to grunts, then to growls, then to moans and whimpers. He felt sandpaper against his lips, and the dry knuckle of an elderly woman between his fingertips. He gasped. First he saw the white eyes staring directly into his own eyes. The old woman brought her index finger to her lip and licked the tip of her fingernail, a tear trickling down her cheek. Her head twisted backwards, as her back was to the young man and she bent over, clinging to a termite-infested treetrunk and the young scholar stared with his mouth open at her shit-brown smear, fingernail and white eyes. Something reached inside him, and it felt like a finger trying to designate a fragment of his bowels. He cried out. But he thought that whatever reached inside him ws trying to tell him something. Was this the memory he searched for? Now the memory was the only tangible truth, but why was it a truth worth pointing to? The young man could no longer speak. "HHYOUGAKKRIIAARRAA," he cried, through a broken voice, as if one had gone to the lowest octave on the piano. The old woman held out her hands, extending her dirty fingernails where bugs squiggled. She moved toward the young scholar, seemingly without force or movement of her feet, floating to him. The old woman kissed the young scholar, her sandpaper lips clinging to his in desperate need of companionship. She pulled down hs pants with a light tap of her index finger, and stared at his penis for sixty seconds. While he sobbed, the young man got hard for her, blood pumping away in his penis. The old woman touched it delicately at first, kissing the tip of his penis, beckoning to it lightly with the tip of her tongue. She rested her tongue on his hole for thirty seconds and he exploded onto her tongue. When the old woman touched her tongue, the young scholar's semen sprayed the trees and the street; she made his semen multiply in quantity until it seemed they were swimming in it. The trees, stacked on top of each other, cracked, so that the world seemed to float on top of semen and bark. If they were drowning, the bark would be the life-rafts, but the young man saw no escape. She licked and licked. The old woman stopped touching and started groping. She touched his thighs with one hand, and his stomach with the other. He sucked his stomach in and started to sob. The old woman touched his thighs and balls, and he sucked in air even faster and harder. It felt like honey was flowing from the tip of her finger, her fingernail was stabbing into his leg muscles and drawing blood and he started to smile through his own sobs. She rubbed his stomach muscles gently and he whimpered, tears flowing like a scared little boy, and he was so terrified of her the only thing he wanted to do was to wrap his arms around her, calling her something that didn't make her seem like a terrifying, dismembering witch. Finally, he searched for the only thing that may have saved him: his intellect. "Nature loves to hide," he said. The old woman vanished. There was silence. He heard an incantation somewhere close to him, something that sounded like a mixture of purring and a language other than English. And there he saw, balancing herself atop the bark, the special neighbor. The young man's semen covered her brunette hair. She held a book in her hands and as he gradually drifted toward her, she gave him the book. He watched her. The young scholar held the open book in his hands and together, they floated home.