Karina

Passersby stared at me curiously as I stood facing a haphazard diagonal, staring intently ahead of me in the dusk twilight. In lonely absence, her aura haunted me as the fading warmth of the day. While I thought to myself that, just maybe, I was feeling the way she had felt, that very last time I saw her, standing in that same spot, facing the same direction, at a bizarre angle to the flow of traffic, ignoring the absent stares of orthogonally half-drunk voyagers in bright tacky warm-weather clothes, feeling the warm roughness of the sandy cement against the soles of my bare feet.

An innocent glance at the bloom of a vine twined around a square wooden post next to me. Intricately random folds of orange tropical flowers trigger the memory of her smile, a memory which washes over my psyche in a tidal-wave of menacingly gentle sweet aroma, threatening to crush the world in darkness with the agony of her missing beauty, as arm-in-arm lovers contemptuously drive their harsh laughter into my heart, like broken looking-glass shards, or splinters of weather-worn planks of a sunken warship listing beneath the mud of eons.

An older woman in pink shorts and white sun-bonnet, toting a large rustlingly full plastic shopping bag, filled with gifts for the grandchildren back home, whips around the corner, adjusts her course to avert collision, bumps gently into me. “Sorry,” I say.

“Sorry,” she says, and is gone. I continue to stare intently in the dusk twilight of the receding day, reliving the event on this same spot only a few hours ago.

“What are you looking at?” I had asked when I first saw her, she balanced on one foot in the blaring noonday sun, oblivious to her precariousness as she stared off into the distance.

“Come here, look,” she said. I placed my chin on her tiny shoulder and followed her gaze. Through a tiny chink in the hedge-wall glittered the dancing sparkle of sunlight on the distant waves.

“The ocean,” I said, breathless.

“Yeah.” Her soft hair brushed my cheek as she turned slightly, pursing her lips with the coy smile now etched into my burning pages of memory.

She must be about eight years old, wherever she is now, with a calm, reserved adult-ness and long coils of beautiful dusty-blonde hair, the steely twinkling blue eyes.

The ‘K’ she drew with her big toe in the sand on the pavement. “So I remember this spot,” she said, smiling secretly at me.

“K, for?”

“Karina,” she reminded me. Pronounced like the girl in Bob Dylan song,

Corrina Corrina, gal where ya been so long?
I been wondering about you baby,
baby won’t you please come home?

I sang the song to myself as I remembered in the twilight our mid-day “tryst,” cursing this purgatory of infernal waiting as I watched through the tiny chink where the glittering waves would have been in daylight, seeing nothing in the pitch-black of night. Until a miracle transpired: at that very instant, the moon raised its curious brow over the horizon, and my eyes were met with the sparkle of millions of tiny twinkling pinpoints, dancing on the waves.

Passersby stared as I stood diagonally transfixed.

Walking back to the parked rental car, my stray libido must have been unconsciously working overtime, because I started feeling like Shrek watching the villagers sharpen pitchforks: little girls flushed smiling as they met my gaze, and parents almost imperceptibly tensed as I walked by. If only they realized, none of them were the one I was looking for.

The merry-go-round spun aimlessly, populated only by a mother standing next to her little girl on the horse, braced against the centrifugal force, both watching stoically ahead as the horse circled around and around, expectantly if the laws of physics were about to shift and the horse would change direction, or perhaps transfigure into a gloriously live winged unicorn, bearing the both of them away into a land of unimagined wonders. At the center of the carousel, mirrors reflected every which way, and the carillon bells jingled their tuneless music-box calliope melody.

Art gallery walls spaciously enclosed hollow laughter and specious kitsch, weasely obsequious salesman grins and the flashing credit-cards of casually wealthy retirees in expensively ugly shorts. The shallow smell of money. And while the moon busily made its way across the starry sky, the guy who drew portraits every night, sitting in the exact little niche in a storefront alcove, silently studied the face of a squirming, giggling youthful boy, surrounded by the critical gazes of his family.

A front-line soldier patrolling the trenches dug in against the onslaught of transient visitors, each of whom was expecting the perfect vacation, the Portraiteer calmly studied the face before him. The private’s wages were a fraction the income of the gallery-chain owner who sat at this very minute comfortably absorbed in a widescreen TV-commercial for a ridiculously large expensively gas-guzzling automobile. The corpulent General was cozily ensconced, safely away from battle lines, yelling at his wife in the kitchen for an extra scoop of ice-cream.

The tall masts of ships anchored out in the harbor stood swaying as thin shadows against the night sky, talking to each other in the soothingly mysterious language of ropes ringing gently against hollow metal poles, accompanied by the occasional crash of waves on the rocky shoreline.

As I drove the highway to my temporary dwelling, the rental-car radio gently crooned a Polynesian love-song. At the end of the driveway, the motor fell silent. The house was dark and empty, aside from the gaunt shadows of ghosts of vacationers and revelers from years gone by. Letting myself in, the key clattered to a rest in hollow silence on the bland, chipped formica of the kitchen counter.

Lying in bed, the memory of her returned once more, the first time I saw her, earlier that same day, in the brilliant morning light waiting to board the plane. Ahead of her parents, she lugged the bulky suitcase, wheeling it into position in the line immediately behind me just as her parents exploded into an argument.

Or rather her father exploded, make that her step-father - dressed in a loose business suit, minus the tie, top shirt-button undone. A man of big money and important things. “Dammit Lilly, I still don’t see why we had to bring her. It was supposed to be a romantic getaway, remember? You promised.”

“Not so loud, dear!” Lilly (the mother) gave a worried glance over at Karina, the little girl in red-rimmed sunglasses, humming a little tune, dusty-blonde curls erupting from under the brim of a stylish straw sunhat, cascading over her tiny shoulders and down her little back. Skinny legs gangling from white shorts. Ready for vacation.

“Hey mister. Is this the line?”

The frantically whispered argument continued behind her. “Yup,” I replied.

She let stand the suitcase, and lowered her sunglasses a fraction of an inch down her nose, so I could see her beautiful steely-blue eyes. “We’re going on vacation,” she said innocently.

I became aware the smell of cigarette smoke just as the I saw airport attendant tapping the stepfather on the shoulder. “Excuse me sir,” said the attendant, “I’ll have to ask you to put that out.”

“Oh for crissake,” he sputtered.

“He always has a cigarette,” Karina commented to me.

Right then, I already felt tremendous love for this poor unwanted little girl, who was brimming with the joy of the moment, ready to enjoy the excitement of an airplane trip to an enchanted exotic tropical shore.

Karina continued “The babysitter fell through at the last minute, because she had to go help her sister having a baby. So mom got me a plane ticket so I could go with them instead, and they’ve been arguing about it ever since.”

It was one of those interminable airport lines which, even with only 5 people ahead of me had been stuck in a holding pattern for the past 15 minutes. I sat down on my suitcase, so I wouldn’t have to stoop down to talk to her.

Up close now, her face was familiar, as if I had known her from somewhere. Or was it a face I had imagined from a storybook or novel? Or seen in a movie? I still couldn’t place it. Perhaps it was subconscious recognition of someone I had known in a past life, and we had reincarnated together to meet in this odd way, two live humans stuck in a mechanistically dehumanizing situation.

“And what’s your name, love?” I asked.

“Karina. What’s yours?”

“Dante.”

“Dante,” she repeated curiously.

“Named after a famous author, who wrote a big old book about hell.”

“Hell,” she repeated absently.

“You’re going to have a great time,” I told her, only half-believing it.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the wooden legs protruding from my carry-on bag.

“Folding easel. I’m a painter,” I said.

“Oh.” She gave that famous coy little smile that now haunted my memory, the smile that had burned itself into my dreams, branding its impression onto my soul.

Our chat continued as we sat in the waiting area. She asked me about painting, and read riddles to me from the pastime book she had stuck in the pocket of her bag.

Her mom and step-dad seemed relieved that Karina had found a form of distraction. Her mom looked something of an aging floozy, lipstick and makeup each day increasingly a little more overdone, as if it could deny the lines and pores that she saw in the looking-glass invading her face in slow motion, as if the layers of covering could litigate in opposition to the inevitable changes wrought by the sands of the hour-glass, could negotiate a reduced fine, a more lenient sentence.

And now that she found herself unexpectedly burdened by the result of one of her flings, she had put her charms to work finding a man with money, so her little girl could have the nice things in life.

The step-dad was obviously itching for a cigarette, although it didn’t seem likely he was any less cranky with the need fulfilled. Every minute or so his cell-phone would go off, and the mom dutifully, patiently, draped her arm across his neck, massaging his tense shoulders as he yelled at some subordinate far away. She was his trophy, his conspicuous consumption. His shiny new Cadillac that he drove down the streets of the worst slums in order to fluff up his bloated ego, the gourmet banquet he devoured with an audience of the millions of who were kept starving in order to flaunt his obvious superiority, as if status were measured by the amount of suffering one could cause to others.

The two of them were both currently invisible to Karina, hidden by the brim of her beautiful new straw hat as she faced me, chattering away. She invited me into her own little fairyland, and we gaily strode the rustic paths under waterfalls and over rainbows, through meadows of giant pink flowers, over gently rolling hills of chartreuse meadows filled with soft fluffy grass, cartoons and dandelions, crayons and hot chocolate. I sat mesmerised by her glowing smile and bubblingly disconnected happy little stories, until the crackle of the attendant’s voice over the squeaky PA system signaled that it was time to board.

Reluctantly, I eventually stood, and we silently waited for our rows to get called. I lost track of her after we boarded the plane — until by chance that I had encountered her in the center of town, staring diagonally at the sparkle of the ocean, before she was once again whisked away by her trusty guardians.

I shifted again in the increasingly wrinkled sheets, waiting with tense impatience in the infernal dry and dusty desert heat for the gentle rain of drowsiness and sleep.

Throwing off the covers and struggling to rise, I went over to the window, pulling aside the curtain.

What I saw so startled me that I blinked and rubbed my eyes before looking again. There she was — a miracle — playing hopscotch in the sand out in front of my window.

Frantically I ran over to the suitcase to dig out something that I could wear outside. This was a generally simple task, which ordinarily transpired without notable difficulty, but today everything tangled and jammed with my impatience. After putting on inside-out shorts, and a shirt inside-out, and then backwards, I was finally ready. Afraid she may have already left, I gently opened the front door.

Greeted by daylight, and the sweet tropical air. She looked up from her game when she saw me, and smiled. “Hey,” she said, running over to the front porch, where she stood gazing up at me, lips moist, a delightful bundle of life and energy.

“Um, hi,” My intense eagerness was replaced by equally intense uncertainty. What on earth was I going to say to this young girl? Today, she wore a white T-shirt, over a blue-and-pink swimsuit. I tore my eyes away from her the tiny strip of material that ran between her legs, a manoeuvre which she registered with a slight flexing of her hips that blew my sense of reality all to pieces.

“Um,” I articulately continued, “whacha doing?”

“Well, I was going to collect shells. . .” she gestured to the little pink-and-purple plastic bucket in the sand, along with a matching pink shovel, that particular shade of pink which invariably appeals to young girls worldwide. “. . . and then I saw your car.”

“How did you know it was my car?”

“’cause I saw your pack. . .” and I remembered my pack, with the folding easel she had asked about the day before, and that I had neglected to bring it in from the car, so it remained on the back seat, where I casually tossed it.

“Does your mom and dad know that you’re out here?”

“I would have asked. But they were busy. They had the door closed and there was lots of noise. I guess they were having sex.”

“Oh.” Mentally I reviewed my knowledge of human stages of development. Did the average eight-year-old so matter-of-factly toss such a phrase into casual conversation?

Her prodigious sandy-blonde curls, today unencumbered by any sort of headgear, tumbled gently as she shifted her head to gaze at me with her uncannily penetrating beautiful blue-grey eyes.

“Did you collect any shells?”

“Well no, I didn’t yet.”

“Oh.”

We exchanged thoughtful silences. Or perhaps they were awkward silences. It was difficult to tell, with the aura of her untrained enthusiasm washing over the scenery, the warm happy glow of her presence falling like gentle rain in the parched desert.

“Would you like me to go with you?” I asked.

Her face lit up like a jack-o-lantern. “Could you?”

“Sure, why not?” I replied. “It’s not like I need to be anywhere. This is my vacation. So, just a sec.” As I went to grab the keys from the kitchen counter, she stepped up to the threshold and her eyes darted curiously around the room.

“I assume you’re staying somewhere close by here?”

She nodded solemnly, and pointed in the direction of a cluster of buildings invisible through the trees and over a hill. The side where the people with money stayed.

I paused for a moment, thinking. “OK, let’s go,” I said, joining her outside and slamming the door.

“OK,” she replied, snatching her pail and shovel, and gaily skipping along the path.

“This way,” I said. “I’ve been here before.”

She followed, eyebrows raised with curiosity.

After walking for several minutes through the brush, hearing the waves nearby, smelling the fresh scent of morning seabreeze, the path opened to a secluded cove, sheltered from the ocean waves by a reef, so that the waves broke gently on the shore.

Clean fluffy white and tan grains of sand stretched away down the shoreline, freshly washed by the ocean tides. Grains of broken-down minerals were mixed with the tiny pure smoothed white remains of crumbled shells.

She giggled with glee, running up to the water, then back as it rushed to meet her, then dropped the bucket as she bent down to scoop up the sand between her fingers.

“You know how to swim?” I asked, striding over to her side. “Yep. Well, I take swimming lessons every summer. But I never been in the ocean.”

“Ah. So then I had better tell you something very important.”

“What?”

“Be sure never to turn your back on her.”

“Her?”

“The sea. The waves. They can change unexpectedly, and slap you down like that.” I clapped my hands.

“Never?”

I laughed. “Well, you can turn away, but always keep an eye on her. You never know what to expect. You know, those waves come from thousands of miles away, from storms way out at sea.”

“Wow.” She stood, staring at the waves as they crashed out on the reef, and the smaller waves that made it in over the breakwater.

She was so beautifully thin and pale, against the weathered lines of the trees and shores, the tiny wisps of clouds that clung to the edges of the sky, hiding from the sun that lurked below the horizon, waiting to chase them away.

A wave bigger than the rest arose and startled her slightly, and I could see the wheels of her mind spinning, absorbing the seeds of information I was injecting into her life. She faced me smiling. “The water is so clear,” she exclaimed, giving a tiny leap. “I feel like I’m dreaming.” She lifted her feet from the sandy holes that the waves had buried them in.

She grinned. “Are you part of my dream?”

“You’ll wake up soon. I can pinch you to be sure.” I slowly reached toward her.

“No!” she laughed, playfully splashing.

I faced her gleeful bubbling with tenderness and longing, glad to enjoy vicariously her delight in the novelty. Colors that had been faded and dried with the years regained bright saturation and moist exuberance with her enthusiasm. Every particle, every grain of sand rejoiced at the perfection of the moment.

I followed her up and down the shoreline, as she eagerly poked and prodded the water and the sand, her squeals of ecstasy at the simplest little shell, the shadows of the fish swimming curiously in the next inlet, the crashing of the waves out at the natural breakwater.

We met face to face over a starfish half-buried in the sand. She squatted down to touch the starfish with outstretched index finger, her legs spread wide towards me. I knelt down too, and in extending my arm to gain balance I unintentionally, gently brushed her soft, pale, white inner thigh with the outer edge of three fingers.

“Sorry!” I said.

She glanced up briefly, flashed a knowing grin, and winked.

Then her attention absorbed in the 5-pointed animal below us, her face flush with excitement. My eye wandered to the triangular strip of colorful fabric stretching ever so thinly around her pubic arch, bunched up a little so that I imagined I could make out the shape of her sweet valley beneath.

Cringing at first, she touched, and then picked up the starfish, turning it over to see the millions of tiny feet on the bottom, until the sea rose to caress her tiny buttocks, causing her to drop her quest as she stood, allowing the undertow to carry the starfish back out to sea, as droplets of water ran down her legs.

The water that had splashed over her shirt revealed the outlines of her swimming suit, and traces of her dime-sized pricking-up nipples beneath. Immersion had caused the sparse fabric layers to lose their powers of concealment over her innocent flesh.

She stood gazing out to the horizon, awe-struck with delightfully blushing innocent sensuous wonder.

The sky grew brighter and finally the inquisitive eye of the sun broke over the rim of the horizon and bore down on our adventures, until finally we both agreed it was time to return for breakfast.

“What are you eating?” she demanded.

“Nothing special, I got some pancake mix down at the store.”

“Oh.” her face fell.

“Why, what are you having?”

She scowled. “Cheerios. The positive worst. My Mom makes me eat them because she says the other kinds have too much sugar.”

“I’m sure they’re good for you,” I offered, unhelpfully, as she led the way, bucket swinging back on the path.

“Yeah right. That’s what Mom says.” She pushed aside a branch from across the path, and held it for me. She gave the most amazingly creative expression of disdain I have ever seen in my life.

“You’re such the dramatic,” I mused.

“Can I come over after breakfast?” she asked as we parted ways.

I shrugged, feigning disinterest. “Sure, why not? We can practice swimming in the ocean.”

Once again, the brightness of her smile rekindled the glow of embers deep within me.

“I’ll ask my Mom if it’s OK,” she said, departing.

“You can tell her I was a lifeguard in high school,” I called after her.

“’K,” she said simply, and the echoes of the word hung in the air after she had departed. ‘K’ for Karina.

Breakfast was an exercise in restraining impatience. Maintaining order, keeping a sensible pace. Every sense was heightened, and it wound up that my timing was perfect in every aspect. The pancakes were delicious, especially with the mangos added to the syrup.

There was a single, glaring monumental flaw in the event. That was the empty chair beside me. The silence in the conversation. The absence of the one I desired.

I was starting to feel full, and making coffee, when I heard the knock on the door. Heart pounding I opened it, half-expecting inquisitive and possibly angry parents.

My little friend stood alone on the doorstep, this time sporting a beach towel, sunglasses rimmed in fluorescent metallic red, and streaks of hastily-applied sunscreen. “Come in,” I said. “How were the cheerios?”

She lowered the sunglasses a quarter inch down her nose to reveal her beautiful blue eyes, and growled in response. I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke on her shirt.

“You have sunscreen,” I explained as I reached out gently, tenderly, to spread the errant lotion across her face. She waited stoically as I caressed her skin, and caught in the magic of the moment, I lightly stroked her amazing sandy-blonde curls. She shivered slightly, and smiled as a cat ready to purr.

“You know,” I mentioned casually, “I had some batter left and I’m done eating if you’d like some pancakes. The syrup is rather excellent as well.”

Her beautiful steel-blue eyes widened, and she took her place in the empty chair, nodding silently. The princess assumed her rightful throne, and waited patiently as I reheated the griddle and the sizzling batter met the oily surface.

“I told my Mom you were a lifeguard, and she said you could teach me mouth-to-mouth resustenation.”

I laughed. “Resuscitation,” I corrected.

“Whatever.”

An odd thing happened in the kitchen that day, unprecedented in known history. You know how the first pancakes are the best, but as the pancake batter sits out, it tends to go flat? But that day, those very last pancakes I made for Karina were spectacularly the lightest, most perfectly textured and ideally cooked pancakes I have ever made in my life.

As if, rather than serving the cheap wine when it was time for the wedding-guests to leave, the best were saved for last.

The syrup as well delivered perfection, and all was devoured in a state of gleeful frenzy, as I sat watching and sipping contented cups of coffee.

I followed the direction of her elegantly graceful innocent young gesture. Through the brush, facing away from us some distance away, I could see the couple. Both were smoking and barking loud, harsh laughter, seated in low-slung beach chairs swilling colorful drinks with little umbrellas in them.

“A bit early in the day,” I murmured.

“She only smokes when she’s with him.“ she scowled.

They didn’t notice us, and we continued on our way.

We set our our towels in a secluded spot, and lay out in the sun for awhile before going in the water. She put on her red-rimmed sunglasses and took off her shirt, meaning that the glasses got lodged in the pleats of fabric and wound up perched askew on her nose as she tossed aside the shirt, revealing the bikini beneath, and acres of beautiful, smooth innocent white skin. Tiny acres.

She straightened the sunglasses. “Help,” she gestured with the tube of sunscreen.

“Um, sure.” She lay on her stomach as I gently spread the lotion across her shoulders, down her back, down her legs. My fingers lovingly caressed every square centimetre of her epidermis, fingertips palpating with tingling satisfaction the tantalizing plasticity of her elastic young flesh.

Across her shoulders, down her spine, then with my thumbs gently tracing up and down her soft, thin legs. She moaned softly as I did so, shifting restlessly. I traced up and down again, spreading the soothing lotion.

“Now your front,” I said.

Abruptly, she sat up on her knees and turned over, then just as abruptly collapsed into a state of soft spaghetti, perfectly al dente, and I caressed her arms, her forearms and hands, her shoulders, down her belly, tracing with my fingers almost to the sacred starfish between her legs. I stopped before I got there, but her nerves extrapolated the gesture and she moaned and shuddered briefly, until I continued down her legs, gently embracing each dainty little foot in each palm of my hand.

When I finished, she cast out a long soulful sigh.

“Now help me?” I requested, after an appropriately respectful interval of time.

“Sure thing, jelly bean.” I laid back on the towel and closed my eyes as I felt the loving young hands methodically spreading the lotion across my tingling skin. The touch was magic with electricity, her caress the silk of empires reborn, and in a brief flash of opening eyelids I caught a glance of her, mesmerised by my growing member.

She saw me look and smiled sheepishly, but without stopping her gracious gestures, the brush strokes painting swirls of passion across the canvas of my desire.

Soon we laid together side by side on our backs, enjoying the sun. Birds sang, chattered, argued semantics in bird-talk with bird-brained abandon above and all around us, flowers gaily sprang into bloom.

“What’s mouth-to-mouth restustipation?” she asked abruptly.

“What you do if somebody stops breathing, if they were drowning for example.”

“Can you show me it?”

“You’re required to get a certificate from an authorized instructor, and I’m not qualified to teach health and safety, so I am afraid I am not in a position to properly instruct you.”

“Please?”

“Only authorized instructors are certified to effectively present the proper methodology, on account of the potential risk of liability and other legal considerations. . .”

“So say I was suffocated by your long boring blathering, and stopped breathing, what would you do? Here I go.” She took in a deep breath and pinched her nose with her fingers.

I rolled my eyes, and rolled over into a sitting position. “OK, wise guy. First,” I tried to remove her hand from her nose, but she refused, giggling.

“First, you clear the passageway for breathing. Then you tilt the head back,” (I did, gently) “and place your palm on the forehead, and pinch the nose.” As she saw me yielding to her sinister plan, she let go her nose and dropped her hand back to her side.

“Then you place your mouth against theirs,” at which point I had to stop talking.

Her young lips were soft and taut against mine. She opened her mouth willingly, and then in a miraculous instant, her tongue reached out lightly and flicked against mine.

My reflex was to gasp and pull away . . .

She lowered, then removed the red-rimmed sunglasses, and her cool blue eyes gazed calmly up at me, haloed by her bodacious sandy-blonde curls. At this intimate proximity I noticed the sprinkling of tiny light freckles across her flushed cheeks and dainty little nose. And her moist red lips.

I bent back down and kissed her. She responded with passion that sent tingles through my body, her lips so soft and receptive, her moans of desire as her back arched to meet me, her arms reached up and wrapped around my head and shoulders.

Our first kiss. And when it was over, she held me, eyes downcast in serene contentment, lips full for a splendid instant suspended in time, until she looked up again, cool blue eyes blazing with desire, and our lips met again.

My palms held her upper arms, played across her back, spreading broad gentle brush-strokes of burning magnetism through the fibres of her smooth canvas, filaments of attraction causing the ecstatic synapses to dance in delight.

I marveled at our sharing across the ages, defying with each incredibly simple caress the countless shards of infernal waiting that would rage like a river between us, the endless grains of sand falling through the hourglass of years that stood between us like the a bristlingly armed sentinel, to be smashed into dust by something as simple as a gently traced line across her soft cheek, her fingertips against mine, her lips quivering with intense yearning, as her youth stood side by side with my years and we shared together the innocent pleasure of human sexual longing.

Until the storm subsided, and she lay, gently sighing on top of me, her tiny hand in mine, her smooth cheek pressed against my hairy chest.

“Swim?” I asked.

“’K.” we arose. She straightened her bathing suit bottom across her cute little buttocks.

“You know,” I said.

“What?”

“We can’t tell anybody we were doing that just now.”

She gave a sly grin. “I know,” she said. “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

“No, only the day before,” I sighed, wondering what on earth I was doing. But determined not to worry about it, I set about care-free enjoyment of my vacation.

As the merry-go-round turns, with each spin approaching and retreating from the brass rings and the enticingly open-mouthed clown offering a toss at few extra moments of sinusoidal undulation in two dimensions, I will leave the reader with a receding long-shot of the blissful day that ensued, the laughter and splashing, the shared awe at the sublime immensity of the sparkling sea that stretched before us.

I taught her in these gentle currents how to go under the wave, to yield rather than be knocked over by fighting it; how to recognize the undertow and avoid it, what to do when caught (swim across it). As the waves approached and receded, so did we swim out and back across the wave break until I saw that she was comfortable with the rhythm of the sea, that she had the savvy to ride with the tide.

There was a break for lunch, during which I got to chat with the sauced and sizzled legal guardians, each puffing away on a foul and fuming chimney-stack. The conversation sufficiently moved Max to dispense lunch money, a few twenty dollar bills as an incantation to make us go away and leave them alone again in their slobbering solitude.

From the far side of the merry-go-round, we will call upon the reader’s imagination to span the distance, to paint the details of the giggling and giddy affair, to connect the dots from the the romantic dining (with creme soda and extra french-fries) to the solemn sundae following, to the stroll along the tourist-laden main street glistening with fool’s silver and trashy trinkets, T-shirts and posters saying “I was here” in countless permutations of gaudy rhinestones and hollow plastic, the Portraiteer, seriously longfaced footsoldier entrenched against the enemy, in conquest of sanity against the furiously fantastic expectations of happy vacationers. The artist sized up the squirming squabbling siblings, and standing next to Karina I saw the children around through her eyes, as peers. I suspect she was doing the inverse, seeing the world around her through the eyes of an adult.

“Could you paint my portrait?” she inquired.

I laughed. “I’d love to, dear, but I mostly do abstracts. I don’t know if I’m really capable of a convincing likeness.”

“Please?” she asked, in a voice difficult to resist.

“I’ll certainly give it a try,” I promised.

And the carousel, now gloriously filled with gleeful children, sinusoidally set in circular motion imitating the moons, planets, sun and stars orbiting and spinning during the years had separated me from Karina, to the tune of an ancient circus far away, transmitted across the ages via the glyphs and runes expressively interpreted by mechanical calliope.

“Can we?” she asked.

“Of course,” I replied.

After the wait for our turn at turning, we shared a single horse, she in front, squirming against my burgeoning codpiece, now and again flashing back a delighted smile.

My arms being the longest, I was in charge of grabbing the brass rings, but her shot was true, and by the number threw that hit dead center, the ride would never have ended, we should still be spinning this moment, having sailed spinning in each other’s arms, laughing joyfully into an eternity of turning, a splendid spiraling into infinity.

The other game she played (and was winning) was that as I leaned forward to snag one of the brass rings, and only when I wasn’t expecting it, she would place a moist and juicy kiss dead center on my cheek. Nervously, I looked around to be sure nobody noticed, but the horses nearby were unpopulated, and the other riders were to occupied with their own good time to be bothered with any excess of affection between a man and his daughter, or stepdaughter, or uncle and niece, or whatever.

And the glyphs of the tuneless gaiety spiraled away through galaxies of neatly targeted rings and kisses.

Strolling away afterwards, she feigned dizziness, and so asked to be carried piggyback. Of course, my princess deserved to ride first class, arms around my neck, her soft warm belly against my back, legs spread, and at the center seated on her precious flower pressed against the small of my lower back, cheek close to mine.

As we promenaded along the sidewalk, the corner of a crazy flickering Lissajous parallelogram on the street adjacent caught my eye. My gaze followed its length to see that it was caused by sunlight reflecting on the windowed corner of a storefront, and looking diagonally through the glass panes I caught a glimpse of our reflection in a dressing-room looking-glass, she riding in her triumphant perch, I (for now) the beast of burden, the dance of two lovers mirrored in the elusive distance.

Us.

Eventually I put her down, and we found ourselves on a cliff overlooking the ocean, once more in a secluded spot. I became aware how naked she was in the skimpy bikini, as we looked into each other’s eyes, each studying the face across. I traced her eyebrows with my little finger. She placed her palm on my chin, reached up and kissed me.

More slowly this time, the passion flows between us. The deep current of a full river. Our bodies touch in different ways, permutations of limbs in contact — my wrist on her thigh, her shoulder against my ribs, the back of my calf caressing her cute little bottom.

There is a delicious subtle tension between us, magically synchronized by our shared innocence. As she briefly draws away, I hold her towards me, as I lean back she clings to my arm, her push met by my pull, my push answered by her pull, like planets orbiting each other, flying apart from inertia only to be drawn back together by gravitational force.

How can we so perfectly perform the dance of passion with so little experience? Or perhaps the experience is a detriment, since the leader of the dance is the sense of novelty, of exploration, of finding new sensations and postures and movements. Free from the burden of jaded ennui, we achieve the ideal jeweled perfection.

She pushed me over onto my back and pinned me down fiercely with her torrential lovemaking. I held her tiny preciousness in my hands, stroking and touching and crushing her longingly against me.

Her sexuality was more brazen now, and she rode my curving steel-edged ironwood root gently cupped in the warm valley of her desire, rocking and moaning, only the stretched and wrinkled clothes between us preventing the actuality of the unthinkable. I tasted her lips, her tongue, her cheeks. Wetness from her beautiful red mouth dotted my cheeks, my eyelids, my neck.

Blissful ebbing and flowing of tides, as the dusk crept nearer with its friendly darkness, waiting to show us the stars it was keeping in its secret hideaway, inside the blackness of the aged ruins of a castle fortress deep in the sky tinged with purple. A fortress laced in vines decorated by the sensuous intricately random folds of orange tropical flowers.

Soon she lay still and silent on top of me, breathing joyous sighs of our closeness. I felt the pleasant soft moistness of the pre-drops from the passion of a few moments ago. I imagined the sticky sweet dewdrops of moisture that had collected inside her opening.

“Dante,” she said.

“Yes?” I replied.

“Are we in love?”

“We seem to be doing a pretty good imitation of it.”

“No, really,” she insisted.

“Sorry love. I’m not sure I know how you tell for certain. It’s not like I’ve ever felt this way before.”

Abruptly, she propped up her head, staring at me. “You mean this is your first time?”

Waves crashed on the shoreline below us.

“Well?” she demanded.

“I don’t want to think about the past. There isn’t much to think about anyway.”

She grinned. “It’s your first time, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t say that!”

She lay her head back on my chest, giggling.

“Look, Karina. I really care about you. I don’t want to do anything that might hurt you, or let you do anything you’ll regret later on. Kissing like this is fun, but. . .”

Waves crashed.

“But what?” she asked.

“I just want you to be happy. Anyhow, I barely know you. . .”

Crashing waves. A seagull squealed nearby.

I continued: “I don’t want to traumatize your childhood or anything.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause, well you know. It could be bad. And stuff.”

A warm breeze lifted the fronds high above around us.

She propped her head again. “You know, I think you just need to relax a little bit.”

“Right.” I made to get up. “We should be getting back. Your mom is probably wondering where you are.”

She slid comfortably down my front as I pried myself off the ground, and came to a rest with her open, moist mouth only centimetres from my bulging crotch.

“Need to relax,” I repeated to myself, hoisting her up to standing.

Slowly we strolled back as the tropical darkness closed around like a cozy blanket of solitude. We held hands part of the way, and just before we came in sight of her house, she stood on tiptoe and made me bend down for a final quick kiss. Quick but effective.

I accompanied her to the open front door. Light poured into the night from within. The atmosphere surged with a postcoital (for them) seriousness of intent.

“Karina, there you are. Quick, get dressed. We’re going to go out for dinner.” It was her Mom.

Max was invisible inside. My princess vanished within. I caught a glimpse of her cot just inside the front door. It must have been hers, rumpled bedding, her pink pail and shovel beside, her dolls strewn on top. The stink of dead cigarette smoke stung my nostrils.

“Thanks for watching her for us,” her Mom smiled at me as she too stepped inside, “It was nice to have some time alone.”

“No problem,” I said, vanishing into the fading dusk light as she closed the door behind her.

The path was invisible as I stumbled through the twilight that surrounded me, until my keys found the aperture in the front-door knob, my fingers found the lightswitch, flooding my senses with harsh photons, and the keys clattered on the chipped formica kitchen counter.

Now the same room that had been so cold the night before was cozy with the glow of our afternoon together, with the memory of her sitting at breakfast right there, in that chair. I sat down next to where she had been and imagined her there for a moment.

Alright, enough.

I switched on the TV and found myself watching a channel which seemed entirely devoted to footage of volcanoes erupting, spewing walls of lava into the sky, trees and houses in the path in flames and collapsing, crushed under the molten river.

Drowsy with the day’s activity and sun, I eventually found myself starting to doze, and so killed the noisy tube and retreated to the boudoir where I removed all my clothes and collapsed like a house burdened with floes of lava, and crashed into chattering dreams of molten yearning.

Suddenly I snapped awake, how long had I been napping? My brain struggled through the drowsy fog. Outside, pitch-blackness had crept in, but a dim light from the other room washed the wall across from the doorway. My still half-dreaming consciousness was thinking myself back at home, and it took a while for my mind to explain unfamiliar shapes and shadows around, not to mention the tiny footsteps in the hall. Finally I realized that I was in my cozy vacation spot, exactly as the familiar presence stepped into the door frame. Later I realized that it had been her slamming the front door that had awakened me.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she muttered, rubbing her eyes, dressed in long white nightgown with vertical pastel pinstripes. “They were making noise again.”

“Uh,” I articulated, wondering how I was going to don some articles of clothing without her seeing me naked.

She stood at the edge of the bed, towering over me with tousled curls.

“You could sleep on the other bed,” I attempted. She glanced over at it, neatly made up and untouched.

A week or so later, it would still be in that exact pristine state when Lilly, Karina’s mother, would drop in to see where her darling daughter had been spending her nights. Mom would walk a brief circuit of the accommodations, glancing curiously into the bedroom, studiously making note of the two beds, one which remained as the housekeeping staff had primly and properly prepared it, so tightly and neatly tucked that an Olympic trampoline team could not have succeeded in ruffling it. And the other. . .

“See, there’s a spare bed,” I would furtively explain, meanwhile noticing the disheveled state of the bed I actually shared with my princess, strewn with various articles of her clothing and dolls and an odd scattered assortment of little-girl clutter.

Her mother would give an inscrutably bemused glance, and say “You know, the two of you could really work on being a little less obvious.”

Tonight, Karina stood at the edge of my pillow, towering with tousled tresses. Wordlessly, she lifted the covers and crawled in beside me, curling up in my arms. Amazing how well we fit together, like adjacent pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had finally found the right match.

I did try to casually relax and doze off again, but it’s kinda hard when the javelin is ready to go pole-vaulting, if you know what I mean. Worse, she felt it prodding her cute little buttocks, and began to squirm and moan softly.

“Karina,” I said. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Don’t you think we should wait?”

She turned to face me. “Why? Do you need a few minutes to look at girly magazines first?”

“I don’t have any.”

“You could borrow some from my Mom. She’s got a big ol’ pile, so she wouldn’t notice one missing. She likes to give ‘em to guys.”

“No, I mean more than a few minutes. A few years, maybe.”

“Years?!” she yelped with alarm. “Then I’ll be, like, OLD!”

“Right,” I said. Then, seriously: “Look Karina, I’m dying to make love with you, more than anything. I just don’t want to hurt you.”

She snorted. “So to keep from hurting me you’ll break my heart?”

Outside, the crickets and bazillions of other bugs called fervently to their mates. Inside me, something fell into place. I knew she didn’t fully grasp what we were talking about, and that it was probably a line she had stolen from her Mom. But that instant, I knew that what was to follow was inevitable. The one tiny thread of logic opposed to the burning forces of attraction between us had just blown to smithereens by her chance remark.

Beneath her amazingly prolific dusty-blonde curls, I traced her eyebrow with my finger. “You win,” I said. My heart pounded so ferociously I was afraid it would cause an earthquake. Her tiny fingers closed gently around the tip of my throbbing penis.

We kissed, slowly, deliciously, luxuriously, savoring each instant as time strolled leisurely towards destiny.

I felt her tremble in my arms at every light fingertip-touch, as we wrestled and writhed together reciting passionately wordless sounds of love, longing, and fulfillment, on that magical night together.

Curiously, she stared at my erection. “So juicy stuff comes out of the end when you get all excited?”

“Yes, that’s pretty much how it works.”

“A lot of stuff?”

“Not too much. Some.”

“You aren’t afraid you’ll go to the bathroom?”

I laughed. “When it gets all stiff like that, it shuts off that part of the valve.”

She gently traced the contour with her finger, causing it to stiffen further, sending tingling shivers up my spine. “I want to feel your juicy stuff come out the end inside me,” she said.

“Oh,” I said involuntarily, not the word but the wordless love-sound of longing for her.

She eagerly explored my fully loaded love-shaft, prodding and probing, caressing the curly hair around it, gently grasping each ball in turn, then returning to the tip exploring and tracing lines around each and every contour, feeling the sweet love drops between her fingers.

Meanwhile I slid my hand under her nightgown, and found what I was looking for — the secret valley, hot and dripping with sweet dewdrops, surrounded by soft, smooth, silky spritely young folds of youthfully springy skin. My other hand, arm around her, brushed graceful strokes across her smooth chest, acknowledging each tiny pert nipple in turn.

The wordless “oohs” and “aahs” and “uuhs” filled the air with the melody of lovemaking, and the bazillion bugs outside heard the humans inside calling fervently to their mates.

I found the secret pearl of her pleasure, and her cries shifted into a more intense gear, as gently I prodded and played, feeling it rise and stiffen between my fingers as the oozing of sweet stickiness increased into practically a waterfall. The floral essence burst into the hot night air.

My ear against her chest, her beautiful curls delicately brushing the back of my neck, I felt her heart pounding as her breath quickened and her hoarse moans accelerated into increasing intensity. Keeping my thumb on her precious pearl, I began to carefully push my finger inside her tiny opening. I knew I had found the rough edges of her G-spot from the change in her song. I kissed her gently, moistly on the cheek, as I mercilessly continued the gentle tickling and teasing. The hand she had resting on my stiff organ had lost her attention by now, and her other hand was on mine, pressing me to her. All else in the world ceased to exist for her, as her cries and moans focused on each rising and cresting wave, until suddenly she trembled and convulsed, and I felt her rhythmically closing on and releasing my fingers, as she arched back, spread her legs, and even more fiercely pushed herself against my hand.

Her eyes flew open briefly, and she turned and kissed me with dazzling aggression. Kisses turned into butterflies, turned into minutes, into hours, into softness and melting away of snowy bluffs crashing into the rushing torrential river, fell into a blizzard of cherry blossoms fluttering through the air like a million faeries.

Before I knew what, she had sat up and flung the nightgown to the floor beside the bed, and flung me back face-up on the bed, one hand on each of my wrists pinning me down as she carefully aimed the center of her dripping cavity on a calculated arc toward the tip of my vibrating rod.

“Gently,” I whispered, “It might hurt a little the first time.”

She grinned up at me. “I don’t think it’s any bigger than my Mom’s toys,” she replied.

“You use your Mom’s dildos?”

She nodded, still grinning.

“I hope you wash them before you put them back — Oh my God,” For at that instant, the opening ring of her sweet smooth-skinned valley of delight connected with my trembling desire, and as the tip disappeared inside her I shuddered blissfully and uncontrollably.

Then I knew we shared profoundly, the same desire, the same fulfillment. Her tiny child’s body so different from my bulky adult one, yet we felt the same feelings, knew the same sensations, thought the same ideas, embraced the same longings, and now finally we were together as one.

I gazed at her above me, helplessly enchanted by her beautiful dusty curls, bouncing gently with each thrust, and steely-blue eyes calmly smiling down on me.

Blissfully I felt our oneness blossom as she writhed and circled pushing herself over me, encircling me, embracing me, holding the most secret and forbidden part of me with sweet innocent lovingness inside of her. As our mouth-lips met gently in loving caresses, her sexual lips kissed my trembling rod with even greater sensation and fulfillment. She spread her legs even wider to take me inside of her, and our wordless love-song continued in contrapuntal harmony with the love songs of the insects outdoors.

On the dark-grayish canvas, the sensations of her hot sticky moist little vagina sending drops down the shaft of my penis was a searing red, down in one corner, a dot becoming a line, becoming a zigzag, growing and smoldering. Each tiny little gesture screamed blissful agony of release across the cracks in the foundation of time, each little pelvic thrust or motion amplified a million times as we gyrated together in perfect synchronization.

She grinned to see the effect she was having on me, still with both of my wrists pinned, until I sped up and twisted unpredictably, causing her to lose herself once more in her own pleasure, closing her eyes and throwing her head back up to the ceiling with intensity.

In searing red and purple our forbidden oneness caressed and cavorted indescribably until the seeds welled up into a penultimate wave.

“Here it comes,” I cried out, thrusting once, twice, again, again, and then exploded with a million cherry blossoms, luxuriously enjoying my depth inside her as the thrusts became more deliberate.

“Yes,” she called gaily as she felt the drops she had been waiting for burst into her womb, and adding to the perfection I felt her pitch and lose control, her ecstatic contractions responding instinctively to mine, our release joined together on a deep profound level in time and space, as simultaneously across the years between us we shared the sacred forbidden cresting of the wave, the joyful release, the melting away of snowfall into the cascading waterfall, the collapse in coolness and tranquility as together our breathing calmed and quieted.

Finally I withdrew the dripping dagger, knowing that I had left some of my sacred naughty sweet juice inside of her, some of my precious seed, and that by it we were now joined together in memory of the dazzling simultaneous satori. Now she smiled gently, gazing once more in tranquility with her steely blue eyes beneath those amazing dusty-blonde curls, and we cinched the cool covers around us and gradually faded into blissfully refreshing dreams.