Best Fantastic Erotica

by Cecilia Tan

  Open yourself to me. He spoke in every part of her body. Especially the part His tongue had touched. She felt invaded by the command, even more so than when He had sounded her depths. Some part of her mind still could not comprehend what she had become; some part wrestled with the profanity of his plunging and snorting, his unquenchable lust. Some part of her longed to be a man’s bride, to feel a man’s fingers between her legs, to feel a man enter and claim her. Not this tickling and teasing, not this sorrowful lust.

  “No,” she said, shaking. She clutched her clothes around her and stood. Her legs tried to go to him, but she refused them. He stood also, growing larger than she had ever seen, his horn throbbing and twisting into a great scimitar that she was sure would pierce her to the core. She fell back, digging with her hands for purchase but coming up with small rocks instead.

  Without thinking, she threw. A shower of pebbles hit him, and where they touched him, his glowing skin turned to granite. Slowly, he collapsed upon himself, shrinking down again to the size of a dog. His limbs folding beneath him, his flanks solidifying. His horn shrank into a calcified stalagmite. He looked upon her with an almost amused sadness before his eyes hardened into stone.

  Devani ran, clutching her clothes to her chest, crying out when the brambles tore her feet and legs as she passed.

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  The monastery mourned. At morning and evening services, the bells tolled fifteen times—the unlucky number—to commemorate His loss. No one knew why he had gone or where. No one except Devani. But she kept her silence at the services when the monks asked if anyone had seen where He had gone. She bit her lips beneath her mourning veil and refused to speak. She sat in her room, and the tears that fell from her cheeks were hard and round as pearls.

  First came the drought. The river dried quickly, its fish, turtles, and frogs left to gasp in its cracked bed. The crops withered, and the last of the wells was emptied to try to stave off their inevitable death. Skeletal leaves rattled above starving, wandering cows. Then came the locusts, and the people were at least grateful for the abundance of food the locusts provided as they died. Then, there was silence and dust. Praience was becoming a desert again.

  An old hunter was walking the river bed when he found Him. News spread rapidly of the find; even Devani, alone and starving in her chamber, heard. The few Caretakers who had endured through the desolation went to His side, but Devani stayed behind. They found they could do nothing for Him; it appeared some evil power had turned Him to stone.

  A Caretaker thin and corded as a whip came to Devani. “No one else will speak to you, but I will,” the woman said. “You know what is wrong. You know why this happened. You must set it right.”

  Devani only shook her head, the tears shattering against the floor in tiny crystalline explosions.

  The Caretaker grabbed her shoulder, her hard thumb pressing into Devani’s shoulderblade. “You must right this,” she said. Then she left.

  Devani sat for two more days while the world withered. Then, she stood. She went to the chest at the far end of the sleeping hall, the chest where the bridal clothes for his favored ones were kept. She put off her mourning veil for the veil and chaplet of a bride, pulled on the shift and then tied on the silk skirts and stiff bodice. She left the satin slippers in their silk bag; she wanted to feel the hurt ground beneath her feet.

  No one saw her go down to the river by the winding path. The grass was sere and brown, the brambles cracked under her feet. Beneath skeletal trees, she found Him lying stone on stone above the cracked riverbed. She knelt, sensing His presence, His power chained and bent by the substance of this earth, the consequence of her refusal. She touched His throat gently and felt the slow pulse of his life, undulating like a fish under ice. She put her arms around Him and wept then, her hard tears breaking and shattering over His withers like glass. She heard Him again throughout her body. Open yourself to me. She ran her hands over the His surfaces. She straddled His back and lay a long time, shivering, while the shards of her tears cut her thighs.

  At last, she stood. She disrobed as a bride would to entice her groom on her wedding night. She felt the clouds roll in as she laid down on the rock before Him, as she caressed her own sunken ribs and blood-petalled thighs. She let her mind wander to the moments before her betrayal, before the shame and fear had forced the stones from her hand. She remembered the pleasurable wetness answering her fingers in small waves. She remembered the building towers of sensation, layer upon layer sending her towards that pure, wild land. She imagined Him again plunging deep into the red cave of His lady, into the engorged earthquake between her hindquarters. And how He had been there, at her least wish, His butterfly tongue entering her. She wished now that she had been still, still as the woman satisfied under the man’s hand, still as the girl in the bath.

  Open yourself. She looked, but saw that He was still stone. Yet, she would swear she had again felt His breath. Her fingers contacted her hard little circle, and then she spied His horn. It was not the strange sword she had seen twisting impossibly up to the heavens, neither obsidian nor shell nor bone. Nor was it the giant python of his phallus, nearly impossible to hold. The horn had shrunken to a curved knob.

  She rose. She bent and looked in His eyes, opening her legs so that her sweet sex-smell drifted before His nostrils. She thought He might have shivered. Then she turned, grasping the horn behind her at the base, and began lowering herself onto it. Droplets of rain shivered from the sky and ran down her bare skin as she struggled to encompass it. She bore down, gasping, never bargaining for such pain. But the stone was unyielding; at last, her maidenhead parted, and the twisting spiral ascended into her body. She moved slowly and then, thinking of her own hand upon His phallus, with rising speed. Her maiden blood and the ocean of her wetness anointed him like sacred oil.

  With her free hand, she stroked herself again, the waves breaking longer and swifter until her pleasure broke its dam, sending her arching against the stone spiral in breathless joy. She felt it lengthening inside her, felt herself stretching to accommodate more and more until she was falling to her hands and knees, the horn bending within, while He rose behind her. And she thought she heard Him squealing distantly, as she knew he would when driven fully onto his lady’s shore. Devani’s legs and arms lengthened; her hands and feet hardened. Her ass and cunt tilted higher, reshaping themselves. Her neck lengthened, carpeted with gleaming chestnut fur. Then, for truth, he was in her, his great phallus hard as stone, his horn cutting long grooves in her withers. And when she cried for joy as he filled her again, her voice was a high, singing neigh. Their coming answered the lightning that flashed through the rain, the river pouring past their hooves.

  When He slid out of her, she saw the doorway she had opened with her sacrifice, the pure land shining just beyond it. The hills and flowers, the sweet meadows and rivers, were truer than any she’d yet seen. Herds of His kind wandered here and there, and she knew those He had favored instantly, for His children played by their sides. She looked at Him over her shoulder, and He nudged her, answering her unasked question. They stepped together through the rain into the bright fields, the sacred and profane.

  Smoke by Jean Roberta

  In the dark of night, I awoke to a feeling of lurking danger. I heard a faint creaking sound, punctuated by soft shuffling. Someone besides me was inhabiting my rented home, my familiar nest. Someone, male or female, was sitting on one of my antique wooden chairs, which groaned slightly in protest but did not collapse under the intruder. My own furniture had turned against me, or was being held hostage.

  I tiptoed down the hallway. Fear made my armpits prickle, and kept my breathing shallow. Darkness surrounded me, because I didn’t dare turn on a light. I reminded myself that I had learned how to disarm an assailant in several self-defense classes. Stay calm, I told myself, and keep several plans in mind.

  At the entrance to my kitchen, I stood still as though paralyzed. A thin shaft of moonlight forced its way in between
the curtains at my window, illuminating a thigh and a knee encased in faded denim. The rest of the body was in shadow, but I didn’t believe I would have recognized it even under a spotlight. By then I suspected that I was still dreaming.

  “Who are you?” I asked in a strained voice, “and what are you doing here?” My words dropped into the dark like small stones into a deep, still pool. A softly obscene and throaty laugh came toward me from a face hidden in shadow. That laugh seemed to surround me like smoke, seeking unguarded openings and opportunities.

  “You know me,” suggested the voice. “You called me.”

  “You didn’t have to answer,” I sulked. I could feel her watching me closely in the intimate dark, although I couldn’t see her eyes. Somehow I knew she was female, although the voice sounded androgynous. The visible leg in the moonlight looked crafty and experienced, biding its time. She was not only built for sex, this woman. I sensed that she could defend herself, or attack someone with precisely aimed force. I couldn’t guess what catalyst would unleash her violent reflexes. I couldn’t be sure whether she only assaulted her enemies. My flesh recognized her, but my mind was less informed.

  She didn’t appear to move; her knees didn’t bend to push her up out of her chair. Suddenly she was upright, facing me, solid yet capable of moving in any direction with lightning speed. A flame appeared, seeming to come from her upraised hand. I could have sworn that no match had been struck, and no lighter had clicked into service. “Lucifer,” I sighed, not knowing whether I spoke the name aloud or only in my mind.

  I remembered that the bringer of light was said to have been a demi-god until thrown out of heaven for pride and disobedience to the ultimate Authority. Of course the Christians who wrote that story conceived him as a male. He/she had lived underground for centuries, like the ancient Hebrew demons whose names were known in the shtetls of Europe before the Holocaust.

  Smoke wafted gracefully throughout my small kitchen, touching me like soft fingers. I gasped in surprise, backing into the wall. The sensation was almost unbearably delicious, arousing my skin from my scalp to the soles of my feet. Her understanding laugh showed that she knew what I was feeling. She probably even knew that, like her, I wanted to rebel against what seemed inevitable. Being human, however, I was less likely to succeed. Why did I think of her as a success? I knew she was defined in men’s theology as the original lost soul, permanently exiled from peace and love.

  The smoke was so thick around my head that it was raising my hair and sending chills down my back. It was hardening my nipples and sliding between my legs, which I was clenching in vain. I felt as if my pussy lips and my tender anus were being opened in preparation for a humiliating and satisfying assault. The smoke felt hot and silky. I had no way of defending myself.

  She appeared in the shaft of moonlight as an olive-skinned, black-haired woman, compact and solidly curved. I guessed that she must have come from the part of the world now called the Middle East, like so much else in what passes for Western Civilization. She was glowing with self-confidence and anticipation. She unbuttoned my bathrobe with her fingers, and I was helpless to stop her.

  I suddenly imagined (or was it really happening?) the sound of ripping cotton as she neatly tore my bathrobe into strips with a knife that gleamed in the dim light and occasionally touched my skin with its cold metal point. “No,” I whispered desperately. “Don’t.” I realized in the marrow of my bones that I was not in control, that I was losing what little control I had once had. I was afraid that if anyone else ever found out about this episode (how?), my reputation as an independent woman would be lost. Assuming I had ever commanded such respect from anyone who knew me.

  Twenty-five years of memories invaded my mind. I felt a young man, a slim colt who liked to write poems, holding me down with his whole body until the rage and fear in my legs enabled me to push him off. I saw my first woman lover, a school dropout and outlaw dyke who was old beyond her years, raising an arm to hit me (oh goddess) during our last argument. I heard a svelte and smooth-voiced woman, my sister feminist in an organization, taking credit for my work in a TV interview. I saw Athena, my career- driven partner, inviting the lanky girl who was her favorite student to carry boxes and boxes of her books out of our apartment, out of my life. Resentment flooded through me.

  “Little one,” crooned the woman who now held me naked in her hot, strong arms. My bathrobe had completely disappeared. She began rocking me back and forth, wordlessly promising me unspeakable pleasure as a reward for my trust. But I was not a child and trust seemed like a luxury I couldn’t afford.

  “No,” I told her, sounding shrill. “Not now.” Every cell of my skin felt excruciatingly alert. I wondered if I could possibly fight her off without making her angry. I wished I could disappear, or dissolve into some insubstantial, unfuckable form. Like her.

  Like a receding wave, she withdrew. Then she was gone like a half-remembered thought. I was left standing in my dark apartment, clothed in cold air. My bathrobe lay on the floor. When I picked it up, it was as whole as it had been the day before. I put it on. I went to the window and threw open the curtains. The moon shone down on my kitchen table, my wooden chairs, the sentimental Victorian wallpaper with its design of pink roses. Nothing had changed. Nothing moved.

  I felt abandoned. Strangely enough, I felt damned. How could she have left me so abruptly and completely? How could it have been so easy? I had said the magic word NO and she had instantly vanished. Never before had anyone responded that way. Did she really respect me that much? Did she despise me that much? Had she been called away by a more passionate admirer? Did I have the right to call her back after she had honored my refusal? (And how could I call her back when I wasn’t sure how I had called her in the first place?) The silence surrounded me like cotton wool.

  I drifted back to my bedroom in the dark, feeling like a little girl who has been awakened while sleepwalking. I climbed into my bed alone. Wasn’t that what I wanted? But how could anyone really want to be alone in a big bed in an overpriced apartment in a cold, impersonal city? But surely, I thought, that way of living is better than being trapped in the wrong family, the wrong relationship, the wrong community. Women have a right to make choices, I told myself, and sometimes the best choice is proud solitude.

  I couldn’t sleep. My breasts felt full, sensitive and slightly sore, needing to be held and sucked. My skin was hungry all over, even on the palms of my hands. I felt vulnerable and powerful at the same time, but I knew I couldn’t satisfy myself. Not tonight.

  I wanted to bring her back. I wanted to feel her presence. I missed her as though she were my grandmother who used to sing me to sleep in Yiddish before I started school. Could you be gentle? I asked the phantom, Mistress Lucifer. Could you come back and convince me that you love me whether you really do or not?

  My front room reverberated with silence. I opened the curtains hanging over my picture window, revealing a view of other windows lit by moonlight. Something more was needed: firelight. I went to the kitchen to find the pair of tall white candles I had been saving for a special occasion, and I planted them in the brass candlesticks that an ex-lover had once given me. I wondered whether the demon I wanted to invoke would prefer some other color than white. The candles looked as though they were intended for a dinner table, not a dark ritual. But I had nothing else, and my candles, after all, were intended as props for a seduction. I set them on the floor and lit them. The little flames grew longer, flickered and created a small circle of warm light on the hardwood floor. I slid out of my bathrobe, shivering.

  I am a fool, I told myself. Nothing I do now is likely to work. Smoke and moods, once dissipated, don’t return. However, feelings change like the wind, and I wanted her enough now to risk whatever damage I was attracting to myself. Pulling my eyes away from the candle flames, I glanced at my moonlit skin. My thighs looked long and smooth, my breasts looked full and slightly sullen. My whole body looked inviting. “This is what I offer you,” I w
hispered aloud, crouching on my carpet with my cupped hands open before the candles.

  I felt the smoke first on my back, where it tickled and provoked. I positioned myself on all fours for security, my hands and knees pressing the floor, but I couldn’t hold still. The smoke slid over my aroused scalp, over my shoulder and arms, into my armpits and over my shocked nipples. It gathered and thickened between my legs, daring me to try to squeeze it out. The smoke was forming a new shape, becoming incredibly hard and flexible like rubber, and it was probing my anus. I jerked and resisted before I could tell my body to relax, and felt a light answering slap across my ass, as though I were an animal or a bad child. The thing was penetrating me like a snake burrowing into its hole, and my muscles were fighting it with a will of their own.

  I was afraid. I didn’t expect this, I told her in my mind, and I’m not prepared; is this unnatural act meant to be a punishment? Her laughter surrounded me. The object became slick and greasy, sliding deeper into me in rhythmic thrusts. Relax and breathe, I told myself. The object acquired a nubbed surface that rubbed and explored parts of me I had never been aware of before. I felt as if I could dissolve in ecstasy if my body’s desperate need to expel the intruder would just go away.

  My thighs were being nudged farther apart. The pressure in my ass seemed to recede as the smoke against my clitoris turned to crushed ice, making me flinch. Something hard and smooth, like a knife blade, was sliding along the flesh of my inner lips.

  Both of my nipples were being tickled, as though with feathers, then they were being sucked hard. I squirmed desperately, feeling overwhelmed by the sensations. I suppressed an impulse to beg her to slow down. I believed she would do what I asked, but I wasn’t sure I really wanted her condescension.

  While the hard, flexible object buried in my ass continued to move in patient, cunning spirals, warm velvet seemed to be rubbed over my sensitive clitoris, which was already responding with small electric spasms like sparks. My whole body was being rocked backwards and forwards as I shook like an engine being revved into life.