Myths

by Rob Knight editor

  He must be a popular guy, I thought. And he'd chosen me.

  Was his flesh the butter it seemed to be?

  A waiter -- all in flowing white silk -- brought us the curious menu.

  I arched an eyebrow after reading it. "Is this for real?" "Quite," the host assured me.

  I laughed. "So, what's good?"

  "Everything," he said seriously. "I have had them all. There is no part of the flower that isn't rich in flavor and worth the taking."

  It didn't take a Rhodes scholar to see what he was leading to. At least he wasn't crude. I didn't appreciate crudity at first. Lovers should possess finesse, sensibilities, until they were properly unleashed.

  "Suggest one for me." I nodded, handing the menu to him, giving him permission to do so.

  "Oh, no. You must always select that for yourself. It has no meaning otherwise." He pushed it back. He shook his head until his curls swayed, rolling across his bare and rather narrow shoulders. Not really a disobedience. More of a taunt. Vixenish. I would permit this for the moment. "Okay, I'll have the Blossom Of Becoming," I said, shrugging, and returned the menu to the waiter. I didn't pause to see if my host approved or disapproved. What did it matter when soon all that would be relevant were my desires?

  He was very young. Eighteen at the most, I guessed, appraising him. Was his temple still tight? Did his sphincter muscles tighten, glide, convulse, yield? Did his marble teeth just graze the skin of the head, teasing down the length, no marks, no bites, all meekness?

  The waiter returned with a single crystal goblet in which was a flower I couldn't identify, yet it must have been in the family of the rose. The blossom's sepals parted from a dewy central shadow, out in everblackening petals. The cap beneath it was black also, snipped levelly from what must have been a gray twig. A fraction of this showed at the base, going down into the hollow tube of the goblet's stem.

  "It's really a flower?" I stared. I'd assumed the menu lingo was merely poetic. "A drug. If knowledge comes from a forbidden fruit, then surely passion comes from a forbidden flower," my host explained as he gently lifted it from the glass. "We share it in a kiss."

  He opened his generous mouth and placed it half between his lips. He stood to lean across the table toward me. On his breath I smelled dark anise and hot vineyards. I met his mouth with mine, and we bit down through the black rose until it tore.

  It was like lettuce which has slimed at the curly edges, lemon that has gone from its fresh sourness to overripe sickly sweetness presaging its rot, homemade berries in a jar that molded in crusts across the sugar instead of fermenting into liquor. But I didn't spit it out. If this graceful, tender boy could chew and swallow such a foulness, so could I.

  I looked up again at the window. I hadn't noticed before that in the background one of the shepherds was rutting into an animal from the flock. No one else in the place had anything on their tables. No shadowy produce in stemware, no beer, not even Evian. They spoke together so low that I couldn't hear them. I only detected the subtle rasp of their voices, not dissimilar to the gruff prattle of background machinery. Air conditioners, ceiling fans, radios stuck on the static between stations made such noises.

  "It requires a few minutes to take effect. This place has scant charm. Would you care to walk with me into the trees? It is a nice night and the air will be cleaner," he suggested.

  As he stood up and turned, I noticed his buttocks. The only place on his slim body that seemed to possess any true muscle. They defied his slender hips. The chain mail rasped across my skin in response.

  It was stifling in the place. I stood up as well, taking one more look at the window above our table. The shepherd was not only screwing the sheep, he was also cutting its throat.

  Then I saw David, sitting on the far side of the room. His white satin sleeves ended in intricate eighteenth century lace, a romantic and archaic touch I would have expected of him. He was smiling, grimly.

  *** "The drinkers of absinthe and poppy teas, the sippers of wormwood champagne, those drunk on new wine or who prefer the orgy cups of vestal tears are but dilettantes compared with those who consume the flower," he said very softly. His resonant voice was slightly accented, alien, foreign, enticing as we walked over the gory perimeter of Fig's -- all red stained light, red brick -- and then into the woods.

  Where there were no lights he took my hand to lead me. I tripped once over a root and fell, cursing. He caught me just before I hit the ground and literally lifted me back to my feet. For so slender and girlish a youth, he was unusually strong. It unnerved me. It angered me to feel the roll reverse, having me turn into a clumsy child.

  I was always the stronger one. I could never abide a second class status.

  I snarled and jerked out of his solicitous grasp. "I'm okay!" I shouted, then shoved in the darkness.

  I felt nothing. Saw nothing.

  If I'd been embarrassed before, now I became a bit frightened. I hated being afraid. "Kid?" I whispered. The chain mail seemed suddenly too tight, as if it had woven into the follicles of my flesh.

  I reached out, turned, windmilled my arms into space. Yet there was nothing. No trees, no partner, not even the rustle of grass at my feet. The moon must have broken through clouds then for it abruptly flooded the ground, layered through the trees, touching in turn each of dozens of candles set in a circle of bald earth. Each wick flared as the moonlight graced it.

  He stood in the center. He had removed the gold trousers and now stood naked except for the wreath. His skin was even paler in the candle and moonlight, a flawless snow of a youth who might have been any age, might have been newborn. He was quite unmarred, so untouched that he could have been the pure boy set astride the white horse to ride through the cemetery seeking a vampire's grave.

  I had been a vampire in my life. Would this vision of virtue refuse to touch the grave that had been the guilt of my past? I pictured him strung, spreadeagled. Lacerated with a cat until his unmarred body was finally baptized in real passion's maps. How much could I sip? Lick from the seeping creases of the chessboard squares and diamond diagonal stripes before he would faint? Before he would die?

  No, no. Never kill. Always let them just live. They were demonstrably grateful for it. This wasn't an angel, I told myself. This was a venal bitch with a birchrod penis and elastic buttocks. He wasn't seeking love. (No, David sought love.) This one hunted for depravity. It was why he had this circle of candles out here, to help him fulfill some fantasy of a wild bacchanalian rite.

  But tonight he would discover a different ritual. I would convert him to my religion as an unwashed medieval crusader charging into the pagan east.

  The drug must be working, I decided. The moonlight only seemed to have lighted the wicks.

  His hand extended to me to join him in the circle, only appearing to end in fingers which trailed fog like a child's frosted paints. I stripped off the snaky silk, the leather trousers. I kept on the mail tank because it glittered well in the moonlight. I liked how tight it felt, how cold it stuck as ice to a tongue. My heart pounded beneath it. Clank. Chink. Rattle.

  Then I did take his hand. I cruelly squeezed it in my own, much harder than I needed to. Hard enough to feel the gentle knuckle bones slightly corkscrew. His eyes flickered but his smile widened. An indication that he would like to discover the limits of my severity.

  I grinned back, opening my jaws enough that he could see the points of my dentally-altered incisors. I was so proud of them. It was an expression of jaded threat that it took practice to make look right. Otherwise I would be just a silly caricature -- atrocious instead of vicious.

  I felt the light glint from them, as bitter hooks of fashioned metal. I actually tasted it in dangerously poison quicksilver beads and in scalding droplets of scented wax.

  The drug. My muscles were molten metal. Wolves and panthers raced through my veins to swell the feral heart. Jaguars and jackals loped from it in the arteries to make me the beast incarnate, peering with threatening eyes thro
ugh the chain tank cage, jangling the iron there with their anxious claws.

  The drug, yes.

  He sensed this and he rose to it, came fully erect as I stepped within the circle.

  Tonight I would reach beyond all the restraints of this sordid mortality to discover that I had become, become, blossom of becoming the immortal I had always wanted to be.

  The drug, was it not so? His giant fig engorged until it was blue in the scant light, purple in the candles... I imagined it bursting like a ripe plum, juices poisonous and intoxicating, trickling over my lips, escaping down my throat in swallow's automatic contraction.

  I almost stepped back out of the circle. Almost leapt out, wrenching my fingers away from his. I had never sucked a man before nor even dreamt of it. The sweet cream notion gagged.

  "Do you not desire me, Michael?" he said simply, almost with casual duplicity. Nearly mocking me. His erection bobbed, summoned. My mouth watered unconsciously.

  I turned and spat out the hunger. The idea was absurd. Was like white spotless silk on a sweating minotaur, posies around a wolf's balls -- oily with sebaceous fluids.

  He pursed his lips. "I understand, Michael. It is your first time. Do not be shy."

  I was furious. I'd show him who was superior. The creatures in the blood were howling, throwing themselves against the chain mail cage, wanting release. Let us out, we'll take care of him!

  The drug the drug the drug the drug and I found I couldn't pull away or strike him. I could merely sense the black coils of his hair, the full ardent sacs, the heavy animal member thick with foreskin.

  Then I saw the purple semen froth at the blunt end of it. Wisteria blossoms and fennel seed soaked in vintage dark wine. As if dribbled from a flask not quite ready to pour.

  I smelled it and desire overwhelmed me. What was that? Plague? Venereal disease? What do you really know about him?

  That he is a shining boy so splendid that wickedness chimes and lust sings psalms for him. All evils vie to play him a nocturne.

  The sight and the smell so perfumed and brandied were only the effects of the drug again. Again.

  And again.

  Can you not taste it? See it in a drunkard's visions, the flask to fit a drunkard's lips? No! My stomach flopped. The mail was so hot. I clutched the tank and heard links explode as I ripped it off me. The metal bit in trenchant tips, bringing me back to my blood senses. And his blood. Yes, that would be muscat nectar.

  I reached out to grab him, spin him around, force my way into his rare and downy rectum. I would bite down on the back of his neck, my jaws holding him, tasting blood that must be claret. Deeper. Burgundy and pepper plasma. Perhaps it was what he wanted after all. Rape. I would teach him SHY. He slapped me away, full lips curved into a taunting arc of a smile.

  I wrapped the ripped banner of mail around my fist and swung. It connected wetly, skull crumbling as he staggered only two steps. His head reared back with the blow, blood all of purple flew, sparkling indigo fireflies. I laughed with satisfaction; his beauty wasn't so flawless now. Lover's scars: the marks which showed that one had left false heaven to enter the world.

  His head snapped back up. He shook, bellowing. Horns coiled in callous bone from his skull and he had the face of a bull.

  It's that damned drug, I thought. Psychotropic rose, hallucination's fly agaric. His hands came down firmly to my shoulders, landed in mallets. He forced me to squat on my knees.

  "Come to paradise and the woods of Thrace, the stones at Delphi," he said. The voice was deeper, sonorous, a bull's snort of well water sound.

  One hand kept me on my knees while the other curled mist fingers through my hair to bring my head forward. The body was still that of a youth's despite the face that boomed above me.

  Sweet. Hot vineyards. Darkest groves. The precious drops to the flavor of madness. My jaws worked to open with thirst, with gladness.

  "No! Damn it! Damn you!" I roared, thrashed, tried to bite him, to wound that insolent member too harsh, too ancient. I smelled the dust mixed with musk. Boy Bull God. Made no difference. I would never submit.

  But finally his strength pushed me under. I had to take him into my mouth. Oh! golden starlight in spirit's wine. All-conquering are the shafts made from the Vine.

  He moved slowly and where was I? Elsewhere. For that compliant whore could never have been me. I heard steel tink. The mail beneath my legs? On the bare earth where I crouched? The erection swelled, elongated. It bristled with needles, whirred with hidden blades smaller than warts. The pain shook me back from sacred rites, from profane sacraments. The iron taste of my own blood made me gag. I choked, blood spilling from my mouth. My own was sour for I was an eater of meats. I clawed at him, raked my nails down his thighs and across his backside. I struck him, trying in vain to break free. I attempted to clamp down my jaws to tear him loose at the hairy base.

  But it grew as he held me fast, his moans of pleasure inhuman: the shrieks of mistral wind, roars from summer thunder. His deep purple seed finally exploded, igniting in my mouth as the moon had the candles. It burned acid down my throat all the way -- it seemed -- to my heart where his cock buried itself. I passed out from the fire, fainted like some whipped child. I blacked out with mice and kittens in my veins, rabbits and sheep in my arteries.

  I couldn't speak for months. Not only from the sheer agony of the attempt but because my vocal chords were badly damaged from his caustic semen. My tongue was almost ruined by whatever mechanisms sprung from the flesh of his root, as were my gums. I lost numerous teeth.

  I learned to talk again, slowly, painfully, articulating with great care. But I was never able to rise above a gravelly hiss. I sit with the others in Fig's, hoping he will choose me again. Craving his youthful slimness, his creamy skin, the fog in his touch. The brutal strength. The flavor of the boy become the bull.

  But he never chooses me. Why should he? He's had me. I'm used. My flower is consumed and useless, croaking, harsh.

  He chooses others and shares in a kiss whatever they order from the menu. Whether it be The Petals Of Ecstasy, The Stamen Of Power, The Bud Of Genius, The Blossom Of Becoming, The Seeds Of Love, or The Pollen Of Dreams. Names for the same thing. They are the identical bloom which is his and his alone to enjoy.

  The Cupbearer

  By Eumenides I sit beside the window of the beach house watching the night come in. It steals across the sky from the west, sneaking up on me so that one minute I am looking out over the calm expanse of the Atlantic lit by the sun, the next, sea and sky blend together into a darkening red. I understand now what the Greeks meant by 'wine dark sea'.

  There are no neighbours within miles of this house. The isolation of wealth and power is complete. Though I have neither of these things, my father does, and he bought this property as a retreat for when the pressures of public life and the demands of investing his fortunes become too intense. He has never set foot here.

  I step onto the porch, frail wooden railings blasted bare of paint by fifty years of sand and wind. Sea oats grow up around the place, camouflaging the stilts that keep the place out of range of the tides. I am wearing only light cotton trousers, and on a sudden impulse I kick them off and walk nude toward the pounding surf.

  The water is cool, incredibly refreshing after the day's heat, and I allow it to flow between my toes and over my feet, up to my ankles, then receding only to surge forward again. The stinging spray mists my thighs and prick, and I stand on the shore like Venus on her shell. This night is a gift from the gods.

  I look up to the sky, and here, so far from the city, the stars are resplendent, glowing with a steady light that reaches deep inside me, igniting an answering flame, and I begin to move on the edge of the water, taken by Terpsichore, dancing to silent music. And then I throw back my head and the stars seem to pulse, grow suddenly bright beyond measure, then fade to their normal brilliance. It is as though someone or something has marked me.

  As I stand transfixed a dark shape comes winging fr
om the east, from across the water. A gull, I think, though they are not nocturnal. But it is not a gull or any bird so mundane. It is an eagle of surpassing wingspan, the king of birds, and he swoops and dances in the sky, echoing my own earthbound dance.

  I begin again, tossing my long hair so that it tickles my back rhythmically, and the eagle mirrors my actions. As the bird grows closer, I can see that it is a cruel bird with talons that could eviscerate me without thought, eyes that cut into me like daggers, but I am not afraid, even when he hovers within inches of me and we begin to spin on the axis of each other.

  Turning, turning and the eagle starts to change, wings withdrawing into muscular arms, feathers lengthening into silken hair of deepest midnight. I am young, scarcely eighteen, but I have lived a life surrounded by beautiful people, and I have never seen such a man, more magnificent than even Hollywood's richest dreams.

  He stares down at me sternly, and then his hand takes up my chin, and the world spins again as his lips meet mine. This first kiss is tender, but the next is fierce, filled with longing and desire, and our tongues are sabres clashing in a duel that must never end.

  He pulls me to him soundlessly, and I go without a struggle. The night is alive with the surf's pounding and the low rustle of the wind, and my hands close around his body, smooth and sculpted, tracing the definition of his muscles. As we come together, I can feel his erection in full priapic splendour pushing into my belly as he molds me to him.

  His hands are in my hair, tangling and pulling, as we kiss again and again, and then suddenly he is easing me down onto a chaise that looks as though it came straight off a Greek vase. I do not question how it came to be. If an eagle can become a man, then anything is possible. His hand strokes my face and traces shivering trails down my chest and belly, twines in the coarse hairs that grow between my thighs and finally, finally when my frustration is at fever pitch, makes delicate contact with my straining prick.

  The wind is like a thousand tiny fingers that caress every inch of my skin, inviting me to pleasures untold, and my prick feels swollen and heavy. The man's hand encloses me, stroking me from root to tip then back again while his thumb plays across the head and his other hand cups and caresses my balls. I shudder, and know I am so close to completion. He also senses it, and I am suddenly bereft of contact, and I feel myself turned, my knees now positioned under me, giving him access to my most intimate areas.