What did Emma know already at fourteen, when her insect-enhanced vision began to find such minute distortions in glass that telescopes around the world preferred her perfect lenses? Did she imagine herself at twenty-eight and understand that happiness would elude her, especially if she had everything she thought she wanted?

The disappointment of success was merely collateral damage from the impotence. I thought success would sustain me through the hollow moments, but every time I met Rip’s burning eyes from across the factory floor, I knew that was a lie. Duty can’t salve the wounds of my orphaned desire. Duty can’t overcome the craving that eats at my skin. In a world more archaic, when people had souls, I might have had a chance at disclosure, but nothing so unruly as desire can be honored where duty’s hegemony eclipses every impulse.

If I could talk to Emma, I would tell her you don’t live in the long view, eyeing the years as if they’re the culmination of a well-drafted plan. You live in the ink spills, and whatever you need to make each moment significant is what you use, because the only substitute for significance is suicide. And I have nine-hundred engines to go before Sunday.

I watched Rip working a wrench on the factory floor. All I wanted was to touch her magnificent shoulders. Her arm pivoted as she tightened a bolt. With each plunge of the wrench, shadows cut into her flesh as muscle tightened under pressure. An eruption of lines and veins flowed down the smooth skin of her arm, followed by sweat.

I thought I knew her before she ever spoke to me, before she breathed into my mouth or spread her legs. Her body’s reckless current once made me think she served the same compulsion, but she was a different breed. I spent nights between her legs and hated the lies, but the lust of those moments was never an aberration to be confessed or resisted. She was the hope of pulse and breath and life.

Rip paused to tip her cap back and spied me. She winked. I smiled. Then I stiffened. I smelled the Overseer before I heard him. He was standing behind me, his consumptive breath crackling. He coughed and leaned down to speak into my ear. “You failin’ your quantity, Alice.”

My station was at the end of the line, checking completed engines. Rip worked on the auxiliaries, which included the water pump and feedwater heaters. The Overseer was an observant man. He recognized my distraction. This wasn’t the first time he had come upon me watching Rip.

He leaned close, his stubbled beard scratching my ear. “The Master’ll strap you for each an’vry loss. Eight’s how I reckon it. Eight behind. Eight straps.” He laughed as he straightened, taking his diseased heat with him.

“Yessir,” I muttered.

“I’ll be there watchin’. I’ll be there.”

“No straps,” I said, trying to sound calm. “I’ll make it up.”

As he moved on, his broken laugh faded behind the metallic grinding.

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On the wall of the stable hung coal shovels, a hayfork, and rakes. A large drill with a broken bit had a thick cobweb holding it to the wall. The breeching of a harness hung in disuse, its leather cracked and peeling. Sticks and considerable stones littered the ground near the door. My mind tried to fashion everything I saw as if I were a cobbler for feminine pleasure. Nothing seemed right. Not until I noticed the tip of a dusty milk bottle peeking from under a horse stall.

I snatched up the empty quart of Whiteman’s Cream Line and wiped the open end across my shirt. The tin bail-top lid had been snapped off and the wide glass neck was smooth.

Miss Jinny had been craning her neck to watch me, her arms braced against the stall, her cotton drawers bunched at her ankles and her bare ass high in the air. “What do you plan to do with that, Mr. Cortland?”

After pushing her dress farther back, I rolled the bottle’s texture of embossed words and rings around her skin. “I aim to screw you with it, Miss Jinny.”

Her eyes roamed down my body to my trousers. “Why not use what God Almighty has given you?”

I rubbed the bulge and smiled, reluctant to confess that the Good Lord had blessed me with ambition and a steady gun hand such as proper society allows no woman. The sausage that I had planned to eat for lunch slipped down my trouser leg, so I leaned forward to distract Miss Jinny.

“Or maybe you need a lickin’.”

When her eyes widened, I dropped to my knees and tongued her furry slit until she was so spent of pleasure that she lay breathless in the hay. With panting words, she asked, “How long will you be staying, Mr. Cortland?”

I set my hat on my head and adjusted the sausage. “A day. Two.”

“Why then, I’d be pleased to see you again when you saddle up your horse.” I stayed mum, so she added, “I’m sure I could convince Daddy to discount you a quarter for the help you gave fixing the busted stall.”

I glanced at the stall she had finished nailing before I arrived. Then I winked and left.

Five years ago in Kansas City, Sealy McGuill killed my horse and used her as bait to poison wolves. But that wasn’t why I was in Rawlins, although finding McGuill here and the unexpected benefit of tasting his randy daughter went a long way to paying the debt for Skinny Gin. No, I was in Rawlins because the machinists of the Union Pacific railway went to strike, and the unionists took every chance to beat the devil out of the immigrant scabs hired to replace them. Such beatings required men of low character, which is why I knew I’d find my man, Bill “Jackjaw” Bivens, in Rawlins.

The panic of ‘83 had scared the railway into bankruptcy, so now the high officials had to fight towns looking to make favorable contracts, corrupt politicians looking for votes, and unionists looking to start a war over contracts. The town marshal was in with the union, looking the other way whenever the anarchists took to killing scabs. Bodies had been washing up along the river for months.

That’s where I came in. My name of late is “Charlie Bluff” and I work for the Pinkerton Detective Agency…

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In the lulling hours of late afternoon, when my sons are with their tutor and my husband is at his office, I usually take tea and sit with my daughter watching the birds along the lakeshore, but not today. Today, my daughter is dancing with other well-groomed girls at the Haverton Society, and a woman lies naked in my bed.

She kisses me with deliberation, her lips rubbing across mine, as if trying to pleasure every nerve. After she accustoms my mouth to her caresses, she moves down my neck, and her lawless touches speed my heart. I live for these secret afternoons, when an infidelity to reality becomes my only freedom, for I can imagine a better world than this perfect one.

The satin comforter slides from the bed into a burgundy pile. We snuggle under a sheet, and my adoring hands knead her powder-white flesh as it pulses warmly. Damp skin offers up its feminine musk, and when I reach lower, moisture allows an easy glide. As my fingers plunge into her, she moans and rolls onto her back. Her face slackens and strains as I stroke her wet walls.

I can imagine her wading through the foamy Mediterranean, her lithe limbs beading with water, as we love each other among the waves. I can imagine our intimate talk as we huddle close in a roof garden at sunset, seduced by the sea’s moody hues and sipping wine at a café table. I can imagine many pleasures that we’ll never know because our only choice is an afternoon in a country villa, drapes drawn against discovery as we love each other on sheets that smell of a man.

We roll among gold and white pillows until the annulling beauty of her eyes startles me, but I remain vigilant, appraising her like a sailor evaluating a perilous current. Men aren’t the only dangerous things. Her husband manages her well, so she questions herself far more than she questions him. I worry that she may one day assume a settled indifference, as so many have, or that she may confess and be sent away. Love like ours doesn’t exist, at least not on its own terms, because a century ago, science showed that desire lies beyond choice, and when gene therapies found the means to make us all desire alike, no one wanted it any other way.

When her kiss again breathes heat into my mouth, a new hunger takes hold of me. Sliding down, I brush my nose through the pillow of hair and nuzzle her tender flesh. Salt and sweat stir my blood with a scent I crave but can never truly remember. Content to lick and tease her clitoris, I lay between her legs for almost an hour before she comes in my mouth, slowly, like honey spreading. Her back arches, and she cries my name. Her legs and hips tense with each convulsive wave. Later, as I watch sweat trickle down her cheek, I wonder just how science could claim what was so obviously untrue.

Fresh from their success at demystifying desire, men of the twenty-first century began to praise unbelief as a virtue, as if science had liberated their minds, when it had merely unburdened their consciences. Science made other classes of outsiders vanish, too, like the darker races and the poor. Their utopian moment was brief, however, because the world that remained after the last ghettos disappeared disintegrated rapidly into chaos. After men had no outcasts left to unite against, no victims to certify their victory, everyone became a potential enemy, and competition became deadly. Violence erupted everywhere.

Decades of war followed, and savagery nearly eclipsed civilization altogether before men found a way to bond again. They resurrected a common enemy, an ancient group whose exclusion could transfigure their radical violence into righteousness and give them back their religion. They took away our economic freedom and our reproductive freedom and our physical freedom because they needed their vitality to build personal futures with our bodies. Lawless violence was a less appealing prospect than organized violence.

The afternoon ends too quickly. Our love must make way again for husbands and children. Feeling torn open, I shut my eyes against the sting of tears. She holds me against her chest, comforting me with her steady heartbeat. My heart aches because my faith is a woman’s faith, one that doesn’t translate the words of men but scenes of grace lived out by those tossed from heaven into a dark and empty sky. I know God doesn’t require a victim. Only men do, because they don’t realize the one sacrifice that counts is their own.

She chastises my attempt at romantic penitence and calls me decadent, and she’s right, but I tell her that those who refuse healing remain blind. Her psychomachy seems like an artifact from another age, when people could legitimize their desire only by denying it was a choice. I have no such conflict, for my body and soul embrace each other, if only in her presence, for she is blessed among women. She is benediction.

_______
© 2006 Teresa Wymore. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.

Longing for what you can’t have is like suicide, a loss of hope, but I was too practical for that. Besides, I knew she wasn’t what she appeared to be, wasn’t who she wanted to be. She was a reflection in search of a mirror.

The first time I saw Sally, she was taking my photograph. The flash blinded me, and when the sparkles faded, I saw her sitting at my table. Her mouth smiled but her pale eyes never stopped probing. They were hungry eyes, the kind that were too curious to be self-conscious.

“Hope you don’t mind.” She peered out the window beside my table. “What were you watching? Not ducks.”

Following her gaze, I saw a flock of mallards floating in a pond. She was right. I had been thinking about my last girlfriend, thinking the only sense I had was bad sense, always striving forward, ass first.

“I don’t photograph what people are looking at.” She rotated the lens and replaced the cover. “Just what they’re looking for.”

She buckled her camera into her shoulder bag, while I nodded, having no idea what she meant. I spent the next three months trying not to fall in love with her, but as effortlessly as air, she entered all the spaces caution left unfilled.

While I analyzed business strategies on my laptop, she made a diet of black coffee and Rimbaud, sometimes at my table and sometimes alone. As she read, she sipped from a steaming cup, her moist lips forming words in silence.

I recognized some of the words she mouthed but didn’t know French well enough to recognize the poem. Je regrette les temps de l’antique jeunesse, Des satyres lascifs, des faunes animaux. Watching her so absorbed in a libertine’s fantasies made me wonder what her marriage was like.

She was the only daughter of a philistine who made it rich with thoroughbreds and an actress who left the stage to become the old man’s trophy. She was married to a trust fund baby, a marriage over in all but name. Because she was Catholic, she stayed with a man more interested in screwing his caddy than his wife, despite the successful union of cigarettes and self-abuse that kept her own figure boyish.

Some days, I preferred to watch her from across the coffee shop rather than my table. We smiled and nodded and went about our business. She would glance at me and let me know she saw me. My appreciation, my desire, was nothing I could hide, nothing I wanted to hide.

When she finally shared her portfolio with me, her cryptographic allusions returned. A well-groomed cadet in yellow boots looking through a sheet of rain. She said this was her husband. An orange sun eating away the edges of a prosecutor’s silhouette. This was her mother. A fat priest in a worn cassock gazing at a crumbling brick church. This was her father. Two children in snowsuits waiting on the curb of a busy street. These, she said, were us.

After translating a poem for me one Friday, she invited me into her limousine and introduced me to her “green hour.” With ice water and a sugar cube, she performed the louching of a glass of absinthe, which turned the spirit milky green. A sip of the licorice-laced liquor, banned for nearly a century, infected me with uncanny lucidity.

“The most luminous geniuses used absinthe to liberate their art,” she told me. “Baudelaire, Van Gogh, and, of course, my dear Rimbaud.”

The elixir had helped generations abandon their gritty reality in favor of symbol, imagination, and dreams. It was no less for us. She was a camera seeking scenes. I was a widow at a grave. Like Percival avoiding the healing questions, we talked and read, and our days together were a collage of impersonations.

After one green hour that lasted three, she had us driven around four houses comprising the fifty-acre estate called “Witch Creek.” She spoke casually about her wealth in a way that showed she didn’t think of it as belonging to her, and we ended our tour at her pool house. The hum of the pump echoed off the high ceiling, and, along with the institutional smell of chlorine, gave me a sense of exposure. I anticipated an invitation to one of the bedrooms upstairs, but pleasure was a burden for her, a call to revelation. She turned passive, and when she stepped away, I stepped near again. We moved across the room that way until she was against a wall.

I set my lips to her cheek, and my words rained onto her skin. “I’ll keep your secrets.”

She tossed her pink blouse onto a chair and slid out of her black skirt.

My throat was tight as I said, “I want you.”

“I want you.” Her voice was dull, as if my echo had returned from the ceiling.

She removed her panties and settled onto a mahogany settee. She squeezed the slight scoops of her breasts and eased her legs apart. A deceptive sophisticate at ease in her boudoir. Her blushing inner lips peeked through glistening brown curls. Nestled in the smooth landscape of her creamy thighs, her hairy cunt held such primitive beauty, I couldn’t articulate all I longed for.

Tossing my clothes aside, I fell down beside her. Our naked bodies entwined, and she coaxed my tongue into her mouth. She began to suck with a Siren touch that tried to lull me, tried to cool the passion with tenderness, but I didn’t feel tender. My unsteady fingers groped into the tangled patch between her legs, parting the curls as I searched for the little pad of flesh and found it fat with pleasure. I scooted down, took one of her nipples in my mouth, and abused the pink stain until it thickened into a lump.

“I can smell you, Sally. I want to eat you.”

She lifted her head from the settee to look down at me, and one eyebrow darted up beneath her messy bangs. “You can have anything you want, Darling.”

What I wanted was to unravel the moments weaving this pleasure into history. Losing myself in lust would leave the blaze of touches and smells and sounds little more than embers in my memory. The paradox of losing control in order to find it left me wanting every moment to remain a flame, even when the heat was gone. There are those who say love doesn’t fail through denial but through excess. Still, there was no stopping a waterfall. Moist heat cascaded across my face like a southern storm, and breathing her in, I lost myself to fantasies of orgiastic freedom lived out under a tropical sun.

Impatient with my wandering tongue, she reached down and parted the short curls of hair. A listless nurse dispensing medication. Ignoring her invitation, I licked her fingers, and they poked into my mouth, touching my tongue, my teeth, my lips. Curiosity drove her to explore a mouth as small and sensitive as hers.

When I flicked my tongue across her fingernails, her eyelids drooped and her breathing grew agitated again. With teasing slowness, I returned my tongue to her source and sparred with her stubborn curls until sloppy sucking left the settee soaked. Pulling her from the settee, I led her upstairs, and she chose one of the bedrooms that overlooked the pool. The room was dim, and wisps of smoke hovered near the bed. A white taper in a brass stand had been burning for some time, releasing an aroma like vanilla poured over ancient wood. She said she often slept in the pool house and left the candle burning.

On the nightstand, a pile of linked red beads lay atop a prayer book. The rosary’s metal glinted, like memories fading. She glanced at it and then at me. A vulnerable penitent facing temptation. I tried to believe she was the victim of a strict upbringing, forced by conscience to honor a covenant made ten years ago before a priest, as if that was all God would remember. The fantasy had me liberating her from the belief that God was absent from her desire, like a carved-out moment in time, a blind spot to eternity.

After stripping the patchwork blanket from the mattress, I pushed her backward onto the sheet. Kneeling on the floor, I rested her legs over my shoulders. Her cunt opened to me. I rubbed my face against her, smearing her wetness across my cheeks and lips. Musk washed over me, through me, a current stirring my blood. She whined when my nose bumped her clitoris.

My finger plunged into her. She erupted with a cry and groaned with guttural joy so erotic, the surge in my gut made it impossible to speak. She crossed her arms over her face and began to rock her head back-and-forth. “Come on,” she pleaded. A little girl denied candy. “Oh, sweet Grace, why can’t you make me come?”

“Sally,” I whispered when she had grown quiet. “You like this? It’s all right to like this. Tell me you like it.”

“I need to come.”

Her clitoris was throbbing as she ground against my teeth, and what little control she had released itself in gasps of gratitude for the pleasure coursing through her. Her hands pulled my face against her, and she groaned in rhythm to the waves of orgasm.

When I held her, I found my heart hungered for her in the way my mouth had earlier.

She looked at me. “Jack will be home in an hour.” A sensible maid impatient to clean.

Her sudden coldness didn’t surprise me, since her moods often ran hot and cold. Still, her dispassion was a lie. When she tried to leave the room, I blocked her way. I knew I wasn’t the first woman to love her. She was a passive lover, and that allowed her to pretend, but I didn’t want to feel like I was somebody else. Even less, like nobody in particular.

She had contrived to bring me there and planted the image of herself as conflicted, but I knew she shared my faith, that the only sins were in our lies, not our love, that paradise didn’t wait for those who were worthy, but for those who were aware. She wanted to use my fetish as a mirror, another green hour spent in a wasteland of feverish fantasies, but she had become an island of meaning in my sea of chaos. Unlike her, I needed something more than imagination.

“Bored with all the fucking?” I asked.

Her eyes flashed. “You can’t hurt me.”

I wanted to hurt her. At least, I wanted to be able to hurt her, as only someone she loved could hurt her. She treated body heat like a foreign language and tried to invent herself. She didn’t realize she was something to be discovered. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I said, “We’re not done.” Curiosity held her in place until I spread my legs. “Your turn.”

She seemed aroused or fearful or maybe they were the same thing, but she licked her lips. A fallen hurdler contemplating the track. “I’ve never done that to a woman.”

“Hot breath, wet tongue, patience.” I shrugged. “Women are easy.”

With hesitant steps, she made her way over to me and settled onto her knees. Resting her arms across my thighs, she speared her tongue and touched the tip to my clitoris. She reached a finger to spread my labia, and when she continued to use the tip of her tongue, I said, “No one’s watching. All that matters is how it feels. Use your whole mouth.” She was intrigued but didn’t seem to understand what taking pleasure, rather than receiving it, might reveal.

Before I could speak again, the heat from her mouth spread across the entire lower half of me. Her tongue licked my labia, found my clitoris, found inspiration. Her lips caressed and sucked. Her teeth tugged and nibbled. Her restless desire grew wanton, not in the way she set up a scene but in the way she lost herself in mine. She pressed her face hard against me, and I felt her mouth quivering and clenching, as if she couldn’t decide what to do, but whenever her tongue or fingers flagged, I urged her on. It was an epiphany. Maybe an apotheosis. “Just like that. Feels good.”

“Feels good,” she echoed, only this time it didn’t sound like an echo. It sounded like lust. It sounded like hope. It sounded like her faith would never again consist in why she spread legs, but in what she risked for the revelation.

O Venus, O Goddess!
I long for the time of ancient youth,
lascivious satyrs and animal fauns,
Gods mad with love bite the bark of branches
And among water lilies kiss fair Nymphs!
I long for the time when the sap of the world,
The water of rivers, the rosy blood of green trees
Put the world into Pan’s veins!
When the ground shook, green, beneath his goat feet;
When gently fucking the fair syrinx, his lips
Murmured a great hymn of love beneath the sky;
When, standing on the plain, he heard all around
Living Nature responding to his call;
When the silent trees, rocking the singing bird,
The earth rocking man, and all the blue Ocean
And all animals loved, loved in God!
From “Sun and Flesh” by Arthur Rimbaud, 1870

The End

1

Charlotte’s gaze was pale and volatile, like tinder awaiting a spark. Though her perceptive eyes hid nothing, they used a vocabulary I would never know. They spoke a language of the soul. By nature and training, she was a spiritual director, but she lacked the centuries that might have allowed her to embrace my paradox. She didn’t see the tightrope I walked. She didn’t believe in vampires.

As I left the warm August air and entered the cold building for our monthly meeting, Charlotte greeted me at her office door. The collar of her turquoise blouse curled down, revealing the fleshy cushion of her neck, and I wondered if age had filled in that youthful hollow above her sternum or if a certain weight always rounded her so.

She led me into her office where music played quietly, and an almost invisible vapor hovered at the ceiling. The aroma, like baked rolls or pumpkin pie, became tinged with sweet wood, as if a bonfire burned nearby.

“How are you today, Nadzia?” She spoke the Polish accent well, her voice assertive, flourishing with maturity. “Would you like some tea?” She gestured to a chair and left the room.

I sat opposite a window opaque with the night. One wall held a score of photos, myriad faces smiling at some picnic reunion. The glossy photographs hung askew from each other like a forgotten puzzle. Several tables held pencils, feathers, healing stones, a crucifix, and prayer cards.

When Charlotte returned, she handed me a china cup painted with ornate roses. Receiving the steaming cup, I breathed in a spicy recollection from my childhood. She took a sip from her cup. “So, have you liberated your wild horses yet?” Her eyes sparkled through the steam as she repeated the allusion I once shared with her.

She liked beautiful thoughts as a child likes candy, but little else about her was so simple. She spoke of choices and commitments, oaths that required integrity and love that required honesty. It was her strivings I knew so well, not her, but those hopes were compelling. I wanted to believe in her world. Mine had become an extended autism, like trying to understand laughter by seeing it without sound.

I had no answer for Charlotte, so I just shook my head.

“Then we still have hope.”

“For sublimation, you mean.”

“Desire isn’t the only way to be sure you’re alive.” She looked away as she spoke, her focus on the wall of photographs. “There are sensations that tie us to this moment and ones that release us to eternity. A body is like a vast field incapable of being filled, though you keep trying.” She smiled, self-conscious, it seemed. “You bring out the poet in me.”

During our meetings, we often discussed my promiscuity, something she called “a modern disease.” But in all of history, who hasn’t feared being torn open and left bleeding from finding out her love meant nothing? Besides, I didn’t avoid intimacy. What I craved was beyond the flesh, went right through it.

I blew gently on my tea and set it down. “You live in an age with a poverty of imagination.”

She thought I’d misspoken, and amusement flashed in her eyes. “And what age do you live in?”

The dim flicker from a fringed lamp drew my attention back to the room. Although the furniture was well-preserved, the Queen Anne legs and tasseled velour seats suggested something old but not rare. A tapestry rug covered the wooden floor, where distress marks replaced the brown luster. A small brass bell sat on the end of the coffee table in the middle of the room, and on a shelf nearby, a row of empty vases made of blue glass held dust on their splayed lips. The patterns brought back Victorian memories from my century in Europe, but the management of the color and content was something more like New Age gypsy—quite American. I reached for the bell, curious to hear its sound, and at the delicate “tink,” Charlotte smiled. “You rang?”

A sudden insight often brightened her face like a sunrise, and sometimes laughter erupted from her like an afterthought. Now she simply stared, her blue eyes almost entirely black from the size of her pupils, a gaze I would usually attribute to desire, but I didn’t know what to make of it in my gypsy friend. Maybe it was the dim lighting. Or maybe the dry tinder was kindling.

“I want to tell you something,” I said.

“Of course.”

“I love you.” I nodded to her questioning eyes. “Yes, like that.”

She chewed on her lip for a time. “You’re idealistic, Nadzia, but you can’t transfigure lust into love, no matter how lucid your imagination. That sort of alchemy requires transubstantiation; it’s an act of the spirit.”

She took my confession as a new point of discussion. Despite the sting of dismissal, I took satisfaction in her retreat. My honesty scared her. “Isn’t God in the abundance of things, which he made, even more than the suffering, which we make? Isn’t he in our love? Why acknowledge his generosity by giving up what you want?”

“This isn’t about sacrifice.”

“When death on the cross became a way to everlasting life, we replaced our maternal birth with a father’s grace. Mere politics.” She was frowning, so I emphasized my point. “Who really gave you life, Charlotte?”

“You valorize sex. God isn’t just a thing to be pursued.” Her radiant eyes challenged me. “Don’t you see? You love me because you love him.”

“Yes! Yes, Charlotte, I love you because I love him, and in the end, that’s the only reasonable sublimation. Of course, I love you. Of course, I desire you. What would you expect?” Fatigue seized me. “Maybe it’s more honest to say I love him because I already love you.”

An appreciative smile graced her face as she paraphrased from the Book of John, “Love follows upon love.”

A Chopin melody began in the background, one of his preludes. After a departure and a return, the piano took an excursion into pure chromaticism. His paradox was that his music was neither comforting nor unpleasant; suffering was his appeal. He was the truest of Romantics precisely because he never wished to be one. I let my heart wallow in the melody before asking, “Do you think all God wants is obedience and self denial–a holy silence? I think he wants all sorts of noise.”

For a while longer, we discussed what God might want. She resisted the notion of approaching the spirit through the flesh, despite how I argued his son told us to do that very thing. She was a woman of integrity, willing to listen but unwilling to relinquish the truths of her hard-won experience.

Only a dream could transform my hopeless love into reality, so I looked forward to sleep, when I would close my eyes in one world and open them in another. When next I saw Charlotte, she came to me in a dream.

This time, she didn’t rebuff my confession as she had at our meeting but added her own. She repeated the words I longed to hear, and then, lit with blue fire, her eyes held mine as she left her chair.

She took my hand, kissed my palm, and left the scent of patchouli behind. After I stood, she kissed my mouth earnestly, her lips full, her breath arriving in slow waves. She drew me closer, one hand holding my lower back and the other behind my shoulder. Her small hands were made strong with passion, and I arched against her to feel her flesh, to be more fully a part of this upheaval of life.

Like dying stars, my anxieties dimmed as her tongue traced a line toward my ear. Her breathing grew quick and shallow, her excitement fanning my own, until a sudden lucid fear seized me. I didn’t want her to know only this moment of pleasure. I wanted her to know me.

When I drew away, she suggested we go somewhere more comfortable. She took my hand and led me from the building.

As she drove, she mentioned a hotel, explaining about her husband and then asking about my house. I told her to leave the highway, take the gravel road, turn up the hill. We parked on a promontory that overlooked a farm. The low horizon offered up a brilliant panorama of stars untainted by city lights. A new moon sat like a hole in the sky.

After leaving the car, crickets serenaded me and warm air carried the expansive scent of life. I stepped through prairie grass and heard the rustle of creatures at my feet. Without moonlight, the stars left the landscape a muddle of silhouettes, and I looked back through them to feel her dismay as she watched from the car.

She wouldn’t be persuaded, but the thought of surrendering nature for a stuffy room was too much, even for a dream. I wanted to make love to her near a tree where wildflowers perfumed the air and we could smell the earth, but she told me all the reasons a hill at midnight was dangerous.

I understood. She had entertained the darkness, but she didn’t trust the night.

2

The waking world’s summer yielded to a saturated autumn, and I stopped meeting with Charlotte. I thought if I didn’t see her in the real world, I might never have to see her again in my dreams.

Nocturnal flights continued to take me from my rural home to large cities. Among hidden streets, I hunted with renewed zeal.

The eyes always die first. It had never happened otherwise. The corpse at my feet in this Detroit alley was no different from the first one near my home in Beckerek centuries ago. Staring and still surprised by their inadvertent encounter with fate, the drying eyes had lost their light, so I closed them before I fed.

Unlike vision, blood lives on for hours. The athletic neck, heavy with muscle but broken now, lost its tension and the skull lay back. With famished urgency, I tore open the throat to get at the pooling blood. After losing a liter to me, much of the rest settle into its recesses. The corpse appeared unreal, its skin possessing the patina of a manikin. I had no compassion for the dead because I never thought of dying as evil. I’m evil, after all, and I will never die.

I dropped the body to the rats and scaled the building at the back of the alley as easily as a spider speeds up a wall. In my own small town, I was a woman, but in the city, I was a wild thing, unencumbered by gravity or empathy. Leaving the back alleys of Detroit, I attended a gay Chicago club to watch the dancers. The sparkling silver jock one of the black men wore became hypnotic, and the abundant contents became a mystery I needed to solve.

After the show, I entered the dressing room from the third-floor alleyway window while the dancer was removing his cosmetics, but before I emerged from the shadows, a young man, fidgeting like an addict, entered the room. The two men exchanged nods and then, as if it were just an extension of the greeting, the visitor fell to his knees and stripped the silver jock away.

He took the fast-growing swag of flesh into his mouth, but he didn’t have nearly enough mouth. His gagging and slurping noises sped my pulse as I watched him try to swallow the hardness grown to a massive size. Like a pornographic actor aware of the camera, the dancer slouched and rested his hand in the visitor’s spiked hair watching him work.

A knock on the door preceded a man who leaned into the room. He stared at the visitor, still on his knees, and announced that someone was asking for money due from Andre. Andre drew his visitor to his feet. “Go keep Tony company,” Andre told him. “I’ll be out with the money soon’s I get changed.”

The man at the door waited for the visitor to join him. After they were gone, my nude body coalesced from the fog-like shape by which I traveled. Andre stepped back but didn’t reach to cover his nakedness as he appraised my own. I took a long look at his semi-erection, appreciating his masculine abundance.

He seemed to be appreciating what I had to offer, though he frowned after a moment. “How the hell you get in here?” He had a subtle Mediterranean accent but a European elegance. His mixed ethnicity did little to make him exotic, because his handsome features gave him the bland perfection of an underwear model.

“The window.”

He remained composed, unlike most people when they meet me. Perhaps he was more susceptible to seduction, already captivated by my false youth, expressed in my lithe figure and long brunette curls. Not every person was subdued simply by the mystical effort of my will, but Andre was more willing than most. Desire was a power I belonged to, not one that belonged to me. The compulsion to possess drove me forward, as the compulsion to be possessed kept him still.

As I stared at Andre’s fleshy mouth, I imagined how those lips would feel. As if hearing my thoughts, he obediently leaned down and took my nipple into his mouth. The erotic magic of watching his dark face tug on my pale breast conjured ecstasy when I took hold of his shaft and found it hard again. I played with the lovely mass of dark meat, my hand squeezing the swollen head until it was bursting out of the foreskin. The musk of his sex teased me with hunger, inciting an ache that dropped me to my knees.

Though my fangs extended, Andre noticed nothing but the burning in his blood. When my grip eased away, his hand took my place. His corded arms, wrapped in a net of turgid veins, flexed as he masturbated above me, drawing his foreskin back-and-forth. He tilted his head back, his eyes closing in ecstasy.

“Come on,” I encouraged him, saliva overflowing my lips. “Feed me. Give me that lovely cream. Give me all of it.”

My submissive posture excited a tangled hierarchy of domination and lust, and the moment grew pregnant with power. His body raced to claim it as his beefy torso shone with sweat and his groans escalated in pitch. He opened his eyes, as if watching his magnificent eruption were the best part of the experience. “Yeah! Oh fuck yeah!” Warm globs dropped as he pumped with his triumphant fist. He groaned and shoved his deflating shaft at me.

Obliging him, I licked every drip, tasting of sugar and acid from his evening’s exertion. He kept his pubic hair trimmed, and the neat black curls glistened with sweat. When he was flaccid, I was able to take all of him in my mouth, pressing my face into his groin. Nursing on his soft, fat meat, I enjoyed the rubbery texture and salty coating until his manhood hung dead before me.

His expression of vacant pleasure became a sneer after his appraisal counted me just another sycophant.

I rose to my feet. “Do you know what I am?” Touching each fang with my tongue, I sensed his self-doubt filling the space between us.

His reverie had dissipated, but I still controlled his will. Muted horror slackened his face as I took hold of his shoulders and pulled him gently to the floor. With no need for eyes in this familiar landscape, touch guided my every move. Lying across his body, I dipped my teeth into his neck. A first satisfying gush of blood followed the tiny “pop” as I pierced his taut skin. Sped by his thumping fear, the flow gave me little chance to savor what I swallowed.

Struggling to overcome the drunken ecstasy that would leave me vulnerable, I took enough only to extinguish the fire in my belly. After I finished, I lay stroking Andre’s splendid torso as his breathing grew shallow and the blood thickened around his wounds. When his chest stilled, I closed his empty eyes.

3

The oral pleasures of blood and semen often satisfied my sexual cravings, but even full, I hungered for something I hadn’t found and couldn’t name. A few weeks later, I paid eight-hundred dollars for the service of two women outside Reno.

Female customers were usually barred from Nevada’s brothels because owners assumed they were looking for their husbands, but in the new millennium, entrepreneurial pimps were beginning to see angry wives as a potential market. Not that I was mistaken for an angry wife. The owner of the Pony Tail Ranch knew me well. I had been using his women for years. After negotiating in the parlor, I signed some papers and we headed upstairs.

Two sumptuous women began their show, licking each other’s tongues and working their way down. They lay on black satin sheets in the Passion Room. Classical piano played from my MP3 player, with earphones creating a world within a world. The music meant I didn’t have to hear the stilted sex talk, and part of my negotiation was not settling for a party sheet and foregoing the pornographic movie required to run continuously in every room. That’s as far as the owner’s goodwill took me. Despising the stricter rules, I walked around the bed watching the women work on each other through dental dams and rude little finger cots. What is sex without immersion in warm salt and liquids ripe with life?

The redhead seemed more genuine in her pleasure as the blonde’s tongue lapped at her through pink latex, so pushing the one away, I settled on my knees. Transfixed by the beautiful youth spread before me, I relished the view of plump labia, soft and pale as cream, a buttery sheen around the rosy slit.

When I buried my face between her legs, the woman giggled and grew still. Her thighs spread with familiar ease, the casual opening triggering a clenching in my stomach. Heat radiated through me, and fluid seeped into my panties. She rocked her hips sinuously against my face so that my tongue slipped into her as the swollen pea of her clitoris bumped my nose.

Her undulations were like the ocean, but she tasted of something faintly chemical, like a douche. The taste was from a depilatory, I thought, because she had no rough skin from a blade. After teasing her excited clitoris for awhile, I decided to risk my own pleasure.

Stripping away my white blouse and jeans, I lay back and let the women finish undressing me. They spent the next thirty minutes licking my nipples and rolling a lavender dildo around inside me. Desire usually migrated to my mouth and stomach, so an intimate joy often became merely another meal taken from an unfortunate partner, but when the timer went off and the women stopped to negotiate additional time, I declined. There was no risk I might become too aroused here.

Thanking them, I dropped another two hundred as I left. Nevada’s free-range laws provided more protection for cattle, though some pimps talked of their sex workers as livestock. Over the centuries, I had spent many nights in brothels, both legal and illegal, but as I left Nevada that evening, I knew I would never use one again.

Leaving the urban menagerie, I moved upon the night sky like an uncanny shadow passing over highways and across farmlands, until, far from Reno, I entered a suburban house on Abbotsford Road. There, Charlotte slept beside her husband, Henry, of twenty-five years and wore pinstriped pajamas. Their room smelled of fresh cotton. Tucked among white sheets and a thick green comforter, they seemed, most of all, quite clean.

My abstinence from her didn’t last a month, and this wasn’t my first visit. I had watched Charlotte dream and listened to Henry snore many times. As Henry slept and perspired, his gray hair curled into dark ringlets on his neck. Charlotte slept so deeply, she seemed not to be breathing at all.

I hated Henry, but I knew I could never come home to Charlotte and listen to her stories, kiss her goodnight, and lay dreaming with her on such clean sheets, so I loved Henry also.

His leg was lying outside the blanket, and I curled my lips around his toe. With a tongue swirl, I drew the hairy digit into my mouth, and he groaned with weak pleasure. He was a psychiatrist who worked primarily in the state’s prisons, and several times I followed him into therapy where he managed the social hygiene with great success.

He was aristocratic, not nearly consumed with his effort so much as his affect, milking his fame at rehabilitating narcissistic and antisocial inmates. Was he dreaming of one of his needy patients or a fawning colleague? Was he dreaming of Charlotte? I sucked on his toe, considering whether to puncture it. Instead, I continued to caress it with my tongue until I smelled the release of his ecstasy.

4

At any one time on Earth, there are more than fifteen major military conflicts raging. This has always been a convenience for me. When my creativity has ebbed or when boredom has set in and all I want is a full stomach, war is easy food. Sometimes war is more like a buffet, though it’s not what it once was: fields of dying bodies left to the elements throughout the night.

In the Latin American jungle, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia had carried on a war for nearly three decades after compromising its socialist ideals. Despite the paramilitary death squads intent on preserving the hegemony of their allies, the FARC survives through kidnapping, murder, and drug trafficking.

Near the border of a FARC-controlled region, I found a cell of guerillas conversing in a village hut miles from one of their camps. Four men and two women sat on the floor shoving moldy bread into their mouths with dirty hands. Two young women in brown-and-green fatigues entered the hut and dropped their AK-47’s to the ground where they also sat to eat.

The young women probably believed they were fighting for the country’s thirty million poor. They probably believed the Marxist maxim that contradictions make radical transformation possible. They probably believed that their antagonism would stir a rebellion against the oppressive corporate colonizers. All-in-all, they probably believed too much.

As I hovered near the hut, a smoky addition to the fog, I wondered at the choices these women made, ones not so different from mine. In a country known for machismo, where citizens could expect to be killed by the army, paramilitaries, or the guerillas, these women avoided marriages that left them as little more than chattel. With guns they had the same freedom as the men of their camp, provided they engaged the enemy and executed internal justice when called upon.

After one of the young women left the hut to relieve herself, I intercepted her. As I stepped into her path, she raised her rifle, her training quickly overcoming her surprise. Spanish was not my best language, but I managed to convey a courteous greeting.

As often happened, I had not found the opportunity to steal clothing upon reforming, and she looked me over, confused by my nakedness. My mystical presence was already having an effect, or she would have been shouting for her comrades. Instead, she answered my question, and after I discovered her name, I asked, “How many men have you killed, Maria?”

“Too many to count, and you will be next if you’re an enemy of the people.”

I recognized her lack of political instincts, and with a clear understanding of slogans, my hand swept the space between us. “This air is your air, Maria.”

“I don’t own it.”

“It’s here for you. No one can keep from you what you need.”

“They do all the time.”

Becoming a killer affects people in various ways. Some people develop a stress disorder. Others adapt to it as a mere function they later leave behind. Some become addicted to the visceral sensuality of it, while others attach themselves to the power. And then there are those who, like Maria, lose all meaning–a suicide of the soul if not the body.

She frowned but didn’t struggle as I removed the rifle from her grip and guided her into a thicket near a lagoon. I had looked into many young eyes in my life, and hers, though tired and much older than her years, were quite forgettable. Everything about her was forgettable—her short hair tucked into her beret, her nervous gaze, and her naïve expectations. She was another meal among centuries of meals, only I find I still haven’t forgotten Maria.

She had emptied herself of the feeling of pain for the mere feeling in her hands and thought that made her strong. She hated being a victim so much that she put a rifle on her shoulder to make victims of others. Reflecting on Maria’s choices, I began to wonder at the contradiction between my passion for life and my dispassion for particular lives.

Preparing to feed, I realized I could simply walk away, or disentangle her will from mine and allow her to fight. I found I had options, but no choice. After all, I was one of those visceral, sensual killers, addicted to the taste of pulsing flesh, and the only I way I knew to overcome temptation was to give into it.

***

After a few weeks exploiting any convenient body, I discovered I was utterly bored. I couldn’t stand myself, much less my prey so appalling in their submission, so barren in their passions and unthinking in their actions. The rationalizations I employed to rescue my self-perception had carried chaos into my life; I was as empty as my victims. Charlotte once told me that we end up casting onto others the shadows we fail to integrate within ourselves.

With uncomfortable clarity I remembered my life before this transformation. Impotent to make choices more impressive than whether to bake rye or wheat, I had longed for a life free of my husband, but I also wanted to hurt him like he hurt me, to make him cry as I cried. In 1723, a creature that followed my husband home from a tavern gave me my wish.

My goal has been to forget as much as possible. The oldest of my kind, like my creator, always drift away, farther and farther, until they simply cease. Unlike the light, darkness does not increase. It doesn’t bond in packs or covens and tend toward conspiracies. Those are lies agreed upon when the truth of one’s choices begins to terrify.

The bargain made with the darkness for its lawless power is desolation. Decaying spirits do not keep company.

5

How I wanted to see Charlotte, to hear her voice, to know her thoughts. She spoke of important things and carried a precious stillness around with her. Like a planet to the sun, I was drawn to her by a fundamental force I couldn’t resist. This was the evidence for hope–that I had been drawn out, again and again, seeking Charlotte.

She had once called me a hedonist, driven by the acquisitive desire of lust rather than the generous self-emptying of love. I didn’t know the difference. With her I felt generous. I felt love and lust and embraced life. I glimpsed heaven as I never did alone. How can one experience that and not want to “acquire” it? A philosopher once said when God is known, he becomes Man. In my case, he became a woman.

To decide is to let what had once been useful fall away. Believing I had no choice had been useful, but was I an accomplice to a decision made three centuries ago or the architect of a choice made each day since then?

I called and scheduled an appointment. At our last meeting, I had made one confession. I had one more yet to make.

When I saw her, I felt as if I had only left her the day before. As we sat in her office on an evening in late October, I told her I had been busy with work. When I needed the cover, I was a travel writer, publishing in trade journals and popular magazines, so she didn’t question my absence. “Sounds like you’ve been busy.”

Her framed photographs had new matting, though the images remained the same. “I see you’ve updated.” I never asked who they were, these snapshots of smiling couples and picnic gatherings. I didn’t want to know about the many people more dear to her than me.

Glancing from one photograph to another, she nodded. “Reminders of renewal.” My curiosity must have made itself apparent, because she added, “They’re pictures of the families and friends of murderers and their victims. An organization my husband and I work with brings the two together.”

What she said made little sense to me, and I struggled with her implication. Men collected crime scene photographs and studied the techniques of serial murderers. Men disseminated videos of mutilated children as war trophies and paid for images of raped and beaten women. I had seen such fetishes in one form or another for nearly three-hundred years, but this collection of Charlotte’s was something I couldn’t grasp. A man doesn’t smile for a camera with an arm around the mother of the monster who suffocated his daughter.

I found myself wondering aloud, “They’re lying. These people hate each other. How can they not hate each other?”

Charlotte shook her head slightly. “Violence is a thief. It steals our capacity to love and makes victims of everyone.”

The confession I had been anxiously practicing evaporated from my mind, leaving a chilling dismay behind. Until now, I had pitied her small life and never really believed she knew what she was talking about. Now, her claim felt like an accusation, leaving me with an unaccustomed sense of shame, and that made me angry.

“What do you know about violence?” My hands strangled the arms of my chair. “Do you think love is only about forgiveness? Do you think violence should be answered with a ‘yes’? Victims don’t owe criminals understanding.”

“No, there’s no obligation.” Her eyes narrowed as if she saw something she hadn’t before. “It’s just an opportunity, an opportunity for peace.”

“Peace?” My tone grew heavy with ridicule. “Peace is stopping the pain.”

“Yes.”

Peace was what I wanted. Peace was all I ever wanted, and my choices had been testament to the belief that the way to peace was through power. Charlotte knew how wrong that was, and all I could think was, how did she know? How could she accept with ease what three centuries was just beginning to teach me? “There’s more to peace,” I insisted, “than just the absence of violence.”

“There is also faith.”

***

A few days later, I waited outside Charlotte’s house just to get a glimpse of her. The cold rain soaked my costume as I hid near a side yard window wearing a cape and black boots. With my fangs out, I had spent the previous hour joyously scaring children with silly sounds up and down the street.

It was Halloween, and the night was breathing.

After a car entered the garage, I climbed the gate and dropped into her back yard. Through her rain-stained windows, I saw lights turn on in a trail to her bedroom, so I climbed a shed and leapt onto her balcony. When Henry entered through the doorway behind her, Charlotte turned on him. Her arms struck out at the ceiling as she shouted.

I had never seen her angry. I had never even imagined her angry, but she was flinging her arms, her face red, her voice loud enough for me to hear its tone, though not the words. She stormed from the room, slamming the door behind her.

After dropping from the balcony, I raced to the front yard. A few minutes later, she pulled out of the garage in her car. I stepped into the driveway, causing her to screech her brakes, and when I opened the door and entered, she stared at me for a second before continuing on her way.

As she sped down the street, she swerved to miss a group of young trick-or-treaters. When her angry tears subsided, she asked what I was doing at her house.

“Don’t you like my costume?”

She glanced at me several times. “Vampire?”

“I vant to suck your blood.”

Her sober expression cracked with a slight smile. “Where’s your bag of candy?”

“Don’t you think I’m a little old for trick-or-treating?”

Her smile broadened. “Then why the costume?”

“I like to scare children. I’m sure I told you that. And what better night than the dead’s version of New Year’s Eve?”

Her expression sobered again.

“You’re upset.”

“Can I take you home?”

“How about coffee?”

Although she began to shake her head, she pulled into the parking lot of an all-night restaurant. “And pie.”

A short time later, we sat in the restaurant drinking hot coffee. Charlotte was a mess, her eyes red and puffy and her hair as tangled as a bird’s nest. She rarely wore cosmetics, nor did she need them. Her unadorned eyes were less than dramatic, but the natural texture of her lids and lashes made every expressive nuance meaningful. Her highlighted hair, blonde rather than gray, was her single vanity.

I knew about her husband’s flirtation, so I didn’t need to ask why she was upset, but she offered, “Henry’s in love with another woman.”

I wondered if she thought this was the first time. “He doesn’t know who he is.”

She tilted her head and scowled. “He’s a sixty-year-old man.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I think I’ll burn all his clothes.”

“Change the locks,” I suggested. “And run his car into Lake Michigan.”

“I’ll throw his Roger Maris autographed baseball into the swimming pool.”

“Oh, you are angry, aren’t you?”

We both laughed as pie arrived–chocolate for her and apple for me. I enjoyed watching her eat and found her more attractive than ever in this disheveled state as she bordered on emotional extremity. Hate can make love that much stronger, but Charlotte didn’t seem the type to enjoin a power struggle. After the shock wore off, she would undoubtedly be quite reasonable.

She straightened her pink rayon blouse, tucked her blonde hair behind her ears, and took a drink of coffee. After she took deep breath, I saw she had already reached a new level of calm. “That was quick,” I said.

A grateful smile eased her jaw. “You’re an observant woman, Nadzia.”

When we finished eating, she offered to drive me home, and I considered how vulnerable she might be. This friendly moment had given me a taste of intimacy, leaving me hungry in a way I had never been–hungry in my soul. Desire soon became a compulsion pushing hard on me to know her body as I knew her words. Somehow, she had unraveled my complications, and it slowly came to me that I was here in this moment to know her, not to be known.

Before she started the car, she turned to me with an expression of luminous awareness. She offered no sign of resignation, just recognition, as if she knew my thoughts and didn’t hate me for them. I should have thanked her and let her go, but it was Halloween, and I wasn’t really alive. I muttered an apology for all I planned to do.

Careful to keep our relationship on even ground before, I allowed desire to consume me this time, and in consuming me, it consumed her. With the release of my inhibitions, I became fully present, a personification of desire itself. She appeared struck but not subdued. Only in retrospect do I realize how foolish it was for me to expect a woman like Charlotte to surrender herself so easily. My attempt to take control of her will only left her confused. “Trust me, Charlotte, and listen. I need to tell you something. Just listen.”

As I stepped through the scenes of my life, disbelief marked her brow in creases until I told her about my visits to her home and the many nights watching her and Henry. Fear clouded her lovely eyes, followed closely by anger, but under the mystical pressure of my full presence, she began to envision the darkest of realities.

In time, she yielded to the revolution that seized her worldview because she had a profound commitment to destiny. She was capable of accepting an awful truth in a way few people were. Shaken by Henry and now by me, she seemed ready to cry again or maybe go mad. The emotional extremity that she had safely backed away from earlier threatened again, and this time, I didn’t hesitate to exploit it.

With every fiber of my body, I desired her and tried to impress that need into her. I kissed her neck, keeping my teeth near her throat. I was ready to steal her life if she didn’t surrender it, but I wasn’t proven a nihilist that day. The heat of my kisses relaxed her, and she sighed, her neck easing back. I continued to trail kisses down to her shoulder.

When next I looked into her eyes, the clear and perfect light was growing dim. After we left her car and then her city and then her world, she still didn’t embrace the darkness, but she had finally come to trust the night.

6

Lightless as a womb, a tropical forest surrounded us on an island near the equator. Experiencing flight with me in my numinous state didn’t seem to frighten her, and when I set her down and resumed my naked form, she took my hand. We passed beneath dense canopy and through verdant underbrush and emerged onto a warm beach where stars filled the sky more completely than anywhere else on earth. We had arrived at a place untouched by anyone, and this time, it wasn’t a dream.

I had been seeing Charlotte for three years, after serendipity transformed an opportunistic hunt into a discussion. During that time, I sometimes imagined consuming her in an orgy of lust or attempting to turn her, as if I might hold onto her forever.

Now, as the ocean appeared like a second star field in motion, its blue depths rippling with black waves, it occurred to me that we don’t live in an ocean of time but only in island moments. More than most people, I could fully live each moment, because that was all I really had. I was immortal, but only Charlotte possessed eternity.

We kissed hesitantly, and she trembled until our awkward touches evolved into an intoxicated harmony of appetites. Her lips clenched mine, and her warm breaths caressed my cheek. I pressed my lips to hers and then spread her mouth to taste her moisture. She slowly dropped to the ground and I followed, until we lay together in the sand some distance from the ocean.

The fresh scents of her shampoo and perfume couldn’t hide the smell of sweat made sweet by her day in the sun. I kissed the exquisite taste from her cheek and chin and worked my way down.

Cooing my name, she tipped her head back and her breath caught beneath my gentle bites. Saliva spilled from my lips when I realized I had her carotid. My fangs descended and my thoughts scattered. My senses scattered, too, so I was unsure what was most real: the hollow in my stomach, the longing between my legs, or the constriction that made it difficult to breathe. Releasing her throat, I struggled with love so intimately bruising, my chest ached.

I wanted to possess her, to make her love me and no one else. Mine was the love of death–love that accrues, dominates, and controls. The love of life heals and liberates, seeks meaning and connection. This was the love Charlotte possessed, or maybe it possessed her. As I let go of dying circumstances, a new mystery absorbed the world, making my touches about pleasing more than pleasure, but the clarity I cherished was gone from her gaze. That keen-eyed awareness was behind a wall of arousal, which strangely disappointed me.

Brushing my fingers across her cheek, I examined her skin, the story of her life, and felt as though I could know everything if I just touched her enough. Her skin was powder-white, soft with thin lines around her eyes and mouth. Even expressionless, her eyes retained those marks of mirth and pain. As my fingertips massaged her cheekbones and then pressed gently against her sinuses and forehead, traveling through her eyebrows and circling her temples, she closed her eyes, aware that this touch was not a preparation but my way of loving her.

In time, she returned her attention to me, taking my face as if she could draw her whole life from my mouth, and I welcomed her as if I had it to give. She pressed kisses to my forehead, eyes, and cheeks, and then her lips explored my mouth, penetrating and devouring. Her hands raked over my skin as her kisses grew passionate. We spent hours kissing this way beside the sea, and the fire-rush of the waves cascaded into my awareness only after we finally lay apart, staring into each other’s face.

Like a prayer, I whispered, “You’re so beautiful.”

“Only through your eyes.”

I recalled some of the smooth faces I had touched, the firm jaws and sturdy necks I had tasted. “I’ve known many pretty women, Charlotte, but I never knew beauty until I met you.”

Erotic hunger strained around her eyes and nostrils, and as I unbuttoned her pink blouse, her breathing began to race. After pulling off her shirt, I traced my fingers over her bra, across white fabric and seams decorated with lace trim that made a failed effort at daintiness. There was nothing dainty about Charlotte. An impractical, self-consciously styled undergarment would have made her a less vital woman. As I caressed the satin, I traced the seams and touched the bare white skin of her breasts. My fingers feathered her flushed chest until the sound of the rushing water stole my attention again.

We went into the ocean, wading waist-deep, where waves broke and returned to us with a playful push, and I removed the rest of her clothes. Her naked body filled my arms. Kissing down her neck, I reached her breasts and nuzzled my face against their pliant weight. I took one tight nipple into my mouth. She pulled me closer and groaned, so I suckled, desperate to hear more. This was where I wanted to meet her, in adoring oblivion–raw spirits stripped of rational thought, drowning in sensation.

I fell to my knees and kissed her belly as the water lapped at my face. Seawater washed over me and soured my mouth, but the more I kissed her, the sweeter the water became. A desperate urge seized me, so I pulled her back to shore and lay her down where the sand met the sea. Draped across her legs, I rested on my hip looking up at her, caressing her belly and breasts as the sea foamed across us. “How do you feel?”

She touched my hand and followed its movement across her body. “Hmm.”

My fingers journeyed lower, straying into the delta of hair between her legs. Heavy with water, the curls lay flat against her skin, and I traced a path through them toward her hidden flesh. As I slipped one finger between her labia, my heart pounded fiercely. She was trembling but said nothing, so I made it clear for both of us. “It’s been a long time since you’ve been touched this way.”

She caught her breath. “I’ve never been touched this way.”

“I want to taste you while the water washes over us.”

She spread her legs a little as I tongued the smooth cleft of delicate space above her clitoris. A wave poured over us, lubricating all our surfaces, so I rubbed my face around her slick skin and lapped at her as the seawater drained away.

She let me spread her more as I explored deeper. Settling in between her legs, I curled my hands around her thighs and tickled the tiny hood of her clitoris with my tongue. She muttered affirmations and rocked against my mouth while the sand loosened under us.

As I drew the warm pad of my tongue through her folds, a swirl of seawater joined me. When the wave receded, water dragged my hair into my face, and I brushed away the brunette curls. “Are you ready?”

She took a moment to think about it. “Not yet.”

Water puddled into the corner of my mouth when I smiled. “That’s my girl.” Like her, I wanted this enchantment to linger.

When I licked the sensitive skin of her perineum and anus, she whimpered. She squirmed before enjoying the feeling enough to put aside her self-consciousness. “That feels so good,” she moaned after awhile.

She tightened against the intrusion of my finger, though her reaction told me the experience was new but not unwelcome. Feeling her body as if it were mine, I knew the sizzling sensation of that first penetration, the giddy arousal from a finger’s pressure inside the smooth walls so sensitive to pressure and so rarely touched. When I had one finger gently stretching her, she began to groan deeply.

I drew the spongy bud of her clitoris into my mouth and flicked it with my tongue. She covered her face with her hands and measured the pace of desire with each ocean wave. Her hips flexed a compulsive rhythm while her moans rose in pitch. As happens so often, the peak of pleasure expressed itself with the sound of pain. Her cry became a wail and faded into tears.

After resting, she returned up the beach with me. Near the trees, she lay on her side as I rubbed her back and imagined her lying next to her husband. I asked about Henry.

She said something I didn’t hear before turning toward me. Her clear eyes told me she possessed herself again, and I dreaded her anger and what she might do with her knowledge of me. All I could offer was a small conciliation before that happened. “I’ll have you home before sunrise.”

With a kind hand, she caressed my cheek, and I realized she could forgive me for seducing and betraying her. She may have been angry, but she was unwilling to relinquish her peace. I had no doubt she also believed she was less a victim than I was, because the violence was my own. Just as I knew this was the most important moment we had shared, I knew also this was the last.

“Is it always like this for you,” she wondered, “a few hours in the night?”

I laughed at the absurd notion that a night had ever been like this.

“Where do you usually go during the day?”

“A mountain near where I was born.”

Although she didn’t follow with the next logical question, which was where I usually went at night, I could see the unpleasant thought in her eyes.

The shadow of the dying balsamic moon sat low, lending no light, only the promise of regeneration to follow with the seeding of the new moon. She turned and looked up into the sky. “He’s given us so many examples, how is it people still don’t know the answer?”

“We’re afraid to ask the right question.” I thought again of the dreams that allowed me to adore her as mythology. Focusing on her meant I missed seeing what receded into the background. The effect was meaningful, was a message about the paradox of love. Love distorts the world as if through a strong lens, or perhaps more like a light illuminating value as it obscures choices. As she came to trust the night, I trusted the light–a new, less blinding light free of the stark shadows which had hidden the single divine participation still possible for me.

Unlike Charlotte, I never made the sublime leap of loving as both a means and an end, which is why I made that terrible choice three centuries ago. God wasn’t a parent I had to please but a lover I wanted to pleasure, and I had finally found him. He lived in her efforts to love single-heartedly and honestly, to listen to the silence and to share it. I felt him in her warm arms and heard him in her acquiescent sighs. Sometimes, I met him alone, where he beckoned me away, and though I could never follow where he walked, I knew someone who could. In the end, that was enough.

We left our island paradise long before sunrise. Exhausted by the intensity of my presence, she slept as we returned. After leaving her on her couch, I went to the bedroom and found Henry snoring. Dark options passed through my mind before the habit of violence began to dissipate like a cold fog beneath the morning sun.

Following the night west, I experienced a less radical yet more meaningful freedom. Pulse-for-pulse, I was still the daughter of a peasant farmer; I was still a self-made creature incarcerated in this cannibalistic existence; and I was still a woman not so different from others, except that I relied on God’s promises a little more and men’s laws a little less.

Passing across the sea and Asia and into central Europe, I returned to the damp earth beneath a snowy summit of the western Sudetes. As I lay resting that day and the many days to come, I sometimes wondered what Charlotte remembered of me before time finally claimed her. She had called me idealistic, thinking it a means of escapism, but I didn’t aim for perfection. I didn’t even believe in it. My idealism consisted of loving imperfection only because it was perfectly real, and in that way, idealism became a means of transformation. This is the irony of a wickedness that loves the world.

Before Charlotte, I couldn’t conceive of a desire that didn’t create a victim, but hope, I had learned, is an action, not a search for proof. For the rest of my days, whenever I turned inward, I asked myself if I sought peace or just escape, and when I loved, did I indulge in hedonistic oblivion or foster transcendence?

With Charlotte, I had been not merely what I was, but what I could be, and through images endless with vertigo, love became an uncertain reality, improbable but possible, like the Resurrection that drove all her hopes. She had pointed out the light under the door and left me to choose whether to enter or to walk away. I found I couldn’t live a monarchy of the heart, but I could love, as dark things love–in shadow and silence, and for one lost moment, I was courageous and looked into the face of the sun.

The End