by Lucy Taylor
A boy, barely beyond his teens, watched her with a rapt and avid gaze, wetting the corners of his mouth with a tongue made sopping by desire. Mira danced to his side. She took him by his thick black hair and buried his face between her breasts, each one of which was easily the size of the boy’s head. She let him suckle, leaving her nipples silvery with saliva, then pushed his head down and hoisted up her skirt and straddled him. His tongue knew dances of its own, quick, darting strumming motions and deep, luxurious slurps and she opened up her folds to him and took his tongue in like a raw pink fetus seeking reentry to its fleshy nest.
The boy stood up and unzipped himself, took out a bobbing, uncut cock. The sight of it made Mira giggle with delight and recommence her dance, though the music to which she capered was now within her head.
An old man rushed out from a nearby doorway. He grabbed the boy and shouted in his face with much agitation. Mira heard the word “Baubo,” but didn’t understand the rest. Beneath the elder’s scorn, the boy shrank both literally and figuratively. He slunk away, the old man’s arm prodding him roughly along. Leaving Mira panting, bare-breasted, and alone in the center of the plaza. She looked down at herself and gasped, began buttoning her blouse. Wetness ran between her legs, the boy’s drool and her own juices. From her groin and armpits wafted, unmistakably, the pungency of lust.
The door was locked when Mira at last returned to the hotel room. She knocked and pleaded a good long time before C.J. let her in. C.J.’s tanned face was tracked with angry tears.
“I talked to Stavros. Tomorrow morning, he’s leaving on the first ferry back to Piraeus,” said C.J., crawling back into bed. “I’m going with him. I want you to come with us. We’ll find a doctor for you in Athens. An English-speaking one.”
Mira took off her soiled and rumpled clothing and slid naked into bed next to her lover.
“I can’t do that,” she said. “I don’t understand what happened out there, but, oh God, it felt so wonderful.”
“When you exposed yourself, you mean. When you mooned those men.”
“Yes, wonderful,” said Mira, her voice awed and tiny. “I don’t understand. It was like I couldn’t stop myself. And I didn’t want to.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t beaten up or arrested. These people are conservative. They aren’t used to things like this. Did you see the way they looked at you?”
“What’s happening to me, C.J? Am I crazy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you had some kind of fit. Maybe some blood sugar thing. But Stavros thinks it’s . . .”
“Yeah? What does pretty little Stavros think?”
C.J.’s voice became so tiny Mira could barely hear her. “This sounds crazy, but . . . he says this island used to be dedicated to the worship of a deity named Balbo or Baubo or something. Anyway, she’s the goddess of obscenity, of lewdness and sensuality. And he thinks . . . oh, forget it . . .”
“He thinks that I’m possessed. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why he wants to leave. Before whatever I’ve got gets spread around.”
“Look, I’m sorry I said anything. It’s nonsense, silly superstition. Stavros isn’t educated. He still believes the old Greek myths and legends.”
Mira looked at the smooth wall of C.J.’s back, remembering the woman at the temple, her kisses like honeyed darts, both sweet and penetrating. She wanted to tell C.J. what had happened, everything, but she knew that would be impossible. C.J. wouldn’t understand. She’d only be more convinced that Stavros was a beautiful but superstitious rube and Mira was simply crazy.
“You have to leave here tomorrow when Stavros and I go,” said C.J.
“Your new lover.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But he will be.”
“Maybe.”
Mira thought about it briefly. “Go fuck yourself.”
Daylight splashed across Mira’s sleeping face like hot liquid. She gasped and clutched the pillow. A warm breeze gusted in the open window where sunbeams streamed in to form an avenue of light.
C.J. was gone, the only evidence that she had ever been there the indentation of her head still on the pillow.
Mira got up and began to dress. The wound on her belly twinged. She looked down past her swollen breasts and saw that it was still open, a tiny bud-red slit below her navel. She touched it lightly with one finger and almost had an orgasm. Pleasure swam through her, stem to stern. Her head spun with the delirium of last night’s ecstasy as she made her way outside into the village.
She had considered her few options and made a decision: She would go back to Baubo’s temple and see if she could find some clue, or better yet, some respite from the madness that had overtaken her. That, at least, was her rationale. In truth, she hoped to find her lover of the day before, the goddess who gave birth to frogs and, perhaps more frighteningly, had incited her to last night’s wantonness.
The day was furious with heat, the breeze offering no respite except to stir and redistribute the torpor as Mira started up the dirt track to the temple. No one was about. The village seemed deserted, even the taverna on the waterfront bereft of its usual clientele of domino-playing males. She moved slowly, her body stiff and achy from last night’s outlandish exercise. At a crest in the journey, she paused to look out over the water and saw a large boat, a ferry, plowing westward in the direction of Piraeus.
Her heart caught and hitched as though a claw had punctured her aorta – C.J. and her new toy Stavros were surely on that boat.
Something moved on the horizon in the corner of her vision. She gazed behind her and staggered backward. Running, stumbling up the dirt track, came a dozen or more villagers. The man in the lead looked up and saw Mira. He pointed, beckoned to the others, urging them on. They began to run in earnest.
Mira stumbled forward in blind panic. So C.J. had been right – last night’s escapades were not so easily forgotten or forgiven. Perhaps she would be jailed or expelled from the country. Or worse – something in the villagers’ pursuit put her in mind of fates more ancient and punitive – adulteresses stoned and wanton women entombed alive in cloister walls.
She began to run, thinking only that she must reach the temple, that Baubo – witch goddess, whatever she might be – might help her, offer her a place to hide.
Her limbs were flagging, but terror lent her strength. She cut through fields of olive trees, skirting the sea, and climbed at last to the crest of the final bluff where the madwoman had given birth to toads.
And stopped, the breath rasping in her chest, unable to summon even one last reserve for further flight.
They were waiting for her. Hundreds of them. The entire village. They had known that she would come here and had arrived first, leaving only a handful behind to goad her into flight.
“Please,” said Mira, but she knew the word was meaningless. They had not gone to all this trouble to merely turn away and leave her to her madness.
She took a few halting steps. The villagers stared.
Someone pulled out a dulcimer and began a melody. Another blew into a primitive bagpipe, the tsambouna.
The music threaded through the silence like a golden needle passing through white cotton.
Laughter started.
Mira didn’t realize until some moments later that the weird, manic laughter was produced by her own throat, but its effect was instantaneous. The villagers began to jerk and twitch in what, at first glance, appeared to Mira to be a crude dance but which was, in actuality, a clumsy striptease. They began to caper and leap about, flinging items of their clothing into the air. Their aimless exuberance reminded Mira of the frogs’ mad leaping, except that now the random jumping was accompanied by a hundred small obscenities.
A young woman with a baby on her hip exposed large rosy-nippled breasts. She squeezed and twisted a breast and milk squirted forth. It struck the face of a dancing man who opened his mouth wide and gobbled. Others gathered round. The woman emptied both breasts into the throng, milk running in ha
ir and eyes, dripping from smacking lips.
Old women clad in widow’s black scattered their funereal garb across the temple stones. Cackling, they caressed themselves and capered in lewd jigs.
An old man bent over and let loose a hornpipe melody of exuberant flatulence. The rhythm of his obscene tooting kept time with the tsambouna and the dulcimer while others laughed and clapped.
A woman lifted up her breast and suckled from her own nipple while with her other hand she milked the semen from the penis of her partner. A dog joined in the fray, aroused and thrusting at the dancers’ legs. Some women dropped onto their hands and knees and vied to suck the canine’s crimson stalk.
And madder grew the dancers and wilder their excesses with flowers plucked to make bouquets protruding out of anuses and cocks garlanded with spring anemones and vaginas sprouting orchids and rockroses.
The celebrants grabbed Mira by her hands and breasts and buttocks. Their feverish caresses stripped her clothes away and she was swept into the orgy. They peppered her with kisses but reserved the most ardent tonguings for the wound upon her belly, where Baubo’s kiss had left a puckered replica of a tiny cunt.
“Baubo has returned to us,” some of the old ones murmured. “Baubo has a priestess now, and we can dance again.”
In the evening, before returning to the village, they brought Mira jugs of wine and beer and platters of the finest food. The women cleared the earth and made a bed for her amid the ruins of the temple. In the growing dark, alone now, she squatted naked on the hillside, gazing out to sea, trying to remember what was lost to her.
There had been a life for her out there once, school and home and lover, but all that seemed pale and vapid now, dim and distant as the far-off stars and moving rapidly away from her. She let it go with a sense more of relief than loss.
In the night, when she awoke in brief confusion, with fear plucking at her like the beak of some flesh-eating bird, she had only to touch her belly wound and pleasure spiraled up her spine. Her body bloomed with orgasms and her heart with song.
THE SAFETY OF UNKNOWN CITIES
Lucy Taylor
Someday you’ll come to love this.
Those were the words the jailer said when she clicked on the chain. The chain was secured to a leg of the bed, and the bed was of heavy oak. The prisoner wasn’t strong enough to lift it.
The jailer held a threaded needle which she had sterilized in, boiling water in the kitchen.
It’s just a game, the jailer said.
And began to sew.
The prisoner screamed and begged and made promises of future perfection, future obedience to any and all rules.
The jailer reminded the prisoner that she had run away before and would likely do that again – and more besides – if given the opportunity.
Still, the prisoner cried bitterly, so the jailer took her in her arms and held her, stroked her, kissed her, touching her in places where she both dreaded touch and craved it.
Thus soothed, she finally tumbled into fitful sleep.
Someday you’ll come to love this, said the jailer. Someday you’ll understand.
The prisoner was nine years old.
In early fall in the city of Hamburg, Val Petrillo arrived late for a slave auction. It was held in the basement of Das K, one of Europe’s most notorious sex clubs, and consisted of nude or seminude men and women, willing participants all, being auctioned off for an hour or two of use in one of the private rooms in the establishment.
Val had heard about the auction – and about a particular “slave” – only hours before and had interrupted a weekend tryst with a Japanese businessman to fly in from Geneva.
It was her first visit to Hamburg, and she regretted the necessity of rushing directly from the airport to the club. Such untoward haste was not her style. She liked to savor a city at leisure and at length, to arrive by train, preferably with the sun just coming up and to sit by herself on the platform for a few minutes, observing the purposeful strides of the commuters, the slink and slouch of the derelicts and whores, the foreign tourists, often timid and unsure, and trying not to look so, but uncertain of the language or the proper direction in which to forge, and feeling their way with caution in an alien terrain. Val never considered herself part of this joyful, seedy, bubbling throng, but rather a distant watcher, the way a pigeonkeeper might observe the milling, shitting, shuffling of the flock.
Sometimes in such a moment of private observation, she’d see a particularly striking face, an eye-catching shape of hand or jaw, a memorable breast or ankle and, if the watched one happened to look back, a brief moment of meeting, of connection might occur, and Val would think, “You might have been my sister, brother, friend for life. You might have been my lover.”
Sometimes such people did become her lovers, but the beauty promised in that first gaze never quite matched Val’s expectations, no more than the skylines of the cities that she visited, some gleaming, thrusting ornate minarets or towering slabs of glass proudly into the sky, others squat and shabby or drab with soot and the grit of harbored pestilence, ever quite lived up to her dreams.
So she stayed on the move. From city to city, bed to bed. Indulging her two addictions. Wanderlust and fleshlust. The passions of her life. Over the past few months, however, a new purposefulness had infused Val’s journeying. In the sex parlors and private clubs she frequented, she’d begun to hear strange rumors. Occasionally, from a pair of lips made slack by drink or satiation, she’d heard whispered tales of a place she’d dreamed about but not yet visited, a carnal city of such perversion that it tested sanity, a place beside which the fleshpot Sodoms and modernday Gomorrahs of the known world paled by comparison.
Always the teller of the tale was vague in his or her allusions, but more than once she’d heard tell of a man known only as the Turk. It was he, so the rumormongers claimed, who could offer entrance to the City.
It was in pursuit of the Turk then, be he real or the fabrication of minds too corrupted by venality to know truth from lies, that Val had come to Das K. A young man from the Philippines, an unskilled laborer who loaded and unloaded cargo on the Hamburg docks by day and indulged his taste for SM by night, was scheduled to be “auctioned off” in a few minutes. Word had it that he had met the Turk, had even ventured to the City. Intrigued, Val was intent on meeting him.
In her early thirties, Val was a slender woman with black hair curtaining a tanned and oval face and features sufficiently symmetrical and absent of expression to make her, if not quite conventionally beautiful, at least inscrutable. Edgy with anticipation, she sat alone now at a back table of the club, sipping Courvoisier. A pair of twins, two young Nigerian women with enormous flaring nostrils and lips the size of dark red rose petals, were being auctioned off, sold at last to an older, professorial type in bifocals and tweed.
A blonde young woman, leashed and corseted, was purchased by a leather dyke, who handcuffed her prize before leading her off the stage. Then a man, all strut and beefcake, with a complex lacery of green tattoos entwining his arms and thighs in a kind of epidermal kudzu, was sold for an outrageous price to a flamboyant creature with sequins in her false eyelashes and a bulge in the crotch of her spandex tights.
When the Philippino boy was finally brought on stage, Val let the bidding rise, then quickly bid a sum so large no one ventured to try to top her. As she was going to the cashier to pay before collecting her slave, Val felt herself observed. Turning slowly, she saw a platinum-haired young man with green lynx eyes watching her from the bar. He wore a silk shirt and loose-fitting black satin vest, a diamond earring and ghoul eyeliner that would have shamed a whore. His flesh was so pale it looked translucent, a stitching together of gossamer insect wings. When their eyes met, he raised his drink, a tiny cordial glass containing what appeared to be a gold liqueur and pantomimed a toast. Val gave him no acknowledgement. Pretty though he was, at the moment, she had no use for any but her purchase.
Minutes later, alone with
her slave, Val quickly forgot the hauntingly pale features of the apparition at the bar. She took the Philippino boy, whose name the auctioneer informed her was Santos, to an upstairs whipping room, where she initiated the proceedings by stripping and ordering the slave to fuck her. He did so with might and gusto, but after a few minutes, Val feigned displeasure and secured Santos’s wrists to a pair of manacles affixed to one wall. Then, availing herself of the sturdiest of a selection of whips, she beat the boy’s naked back and buttocks until his glossy, nut-brown flesh was a tapestry of raised pink welts.
Through it all, the slave uttered not a sound, which disappointed Val somewhat, as she found the chief reward of flogging to be the moans and cries of a submissive, and so she wielded the whip with greater vigor but managed to wring forth not one plea or cry.
At length, she freed Santos’s hands and allowed him to fuck her to climax, her own and his, which he accomplished with much writhing and shuddering but not a single sound. They lay still for a while then, breathing the heady, pungent odors of orgasm, hearing laughter and applause from the auction still continuing downstairs.
“I heard about you in Switzerland,” Val began in German, one hand covering and idly petting Santos’s cock, “I’ve been told you’re quite the connoisseur of perversions.”
He smiled and shrugged. It occurred to Val that perhaps he spoke no German. She tried English then, with no better results. Summoning up what meager Spanish she possessed, Val persevered, “Is it true you’ve had relations with a man known as the Turk? And that you’ve been to a place they call the City?”
Again, that small apologetic smile, but this time Val knew he’d understood. His penis, when she uttered the words “the Turk” had stiffened beneath her hand.
“You’re still my slave, you know. And I asked you . . .”