Severin holds her breath. The branch pulses briefly, and a soft vibration spreads through the hardening tip, as though an invisible tongue was tugging at the rapidly swelling skin. A wave of pleasure rockets through her, so overwhelming that her knees buckle and she pitches forward, grabbing the branch for support. She falls to her knees on the soft grass, and lowers, letting the supple blades brush up between her legs, sliding along her wet sex. Small sparks collide and soar off her body in tiny arcs—Knox’s magic, swelling up out of her, too much for her to contain. He would know what to do, if he were here. He would know how to take it back, how to fly and soar with her through the placid streets of the town until they crashed together in some secret quiet alley, turning her inside-out as she burned in his grasp, coming in wave after wave as his power flowed back out of her, until there was nothing left except her broken and satiated body in his arms, staring up through the telephone wires at the cool grey beginning of day.
The thought of Knox sends Severin’s hand darting out, as if to grab and lower the branch from her breast to between her legs. But once it detaches from her nipple, the wooden limb slips back and away, and the lantern begins a slow retreat back toward the house. Severin rises to her feet, brushing bits of dew-soaked grass from her knees. Now the second branch is beckoning, its spindling ends curling up over and over as if to say, this way, child. She follows, stepping carefully onto each smooth flat stone as they draw nearer to the house. The music is more than a suggestion now, but still indistinguishable; and the light no greater. But Knox’s magic has combined with her lust, and the full power and extent of it courses through her blood and sings out in her bones. The night is a kaleidoscope of endless variations of black, each more brilliant and wondrous than the last, and she sees them all, she passes through them and leaves infinite variations of her image in her wake, a corridor of Severins that melt and drift upward into the trees and catch on the wings of sleeping ravens and crows.
The lantern is inside the house now, and Severin follows, up the stone steps and past the mundane summer screen door. Layers of rooms on rooms, hallways and stairs and closets that open into infinite realms; and people. As she passes them, following the lantern through its circuit of the house, she sees how they move back and forth between the other world and this one. Sloe-eyed men and women with scarecrow manes of hair and black lips, spiked dog collars at their necks and silver chains sliding around their rotating hips as they roll their lithe bodies back and forth in time; and then they are naked and glistening with the sheen of sex and earth, limbs wrapped around thick-furred creatures with amber eyes and antlers that slide between their lovers’ legs, only the thick gasps and groans of their pleasure breaking the silence. Severin watches them all as she passes, watches tongues and lips lapping at crimson and purple folds of flesh, watches nimble hands guide hard, dark cocks as thick as young tree trunks deep inside quivering, eager mounds of flesh. They do not stop as she passes these rooms, but as she lingers in doorways, or along halls, hands reach out and caress her, heads bow down and lick her nipples, or rise up and nuzzle the cleft of her ass. Tongues dart out, sliding between her lips, hands grab hers and lower them into darkness, into hot wet orifices and around shuddering phalluses, slick with the fluids of others.
Someone hands her a cup—in one reality, it is a simple red plastic cup of beer, but here Severin raises a carved wooden bowl studded with strange flashing jewels to her lips, and wild honey pours into her mouth, honey that is not honey, that is something more, that sends her body into an enervated state of alertness. Everything, she sees everything in all its vast minute complexity now, the great woods beyond the walls of the house that whisper and sway and draw up power through the earth and spend it in showers over the land; the tiny goggles on the fireflies as they hover over the pools and piles of entwined limbs; the atonal echoings of extraterrestrial winds that blow through the subterranean chambers and rooms of the house; the beating of every heart, of every wing. Something large stops her, bends down and laps at the beads of honey trailing down her breasts. Severin reaches out, expecting horns. Only soft fur, wide ears, and the sensation of sharp fangs against her skin, a long rough tongue snaking out and down between her legs. Severin’s head rolls back in ecstasy: she stares up at the ceiling, noting how she can see though it as if it were made of glass. Pine needles everywhere above her, green and brown like a cloak, and the sharp scent of pitch and musk in the air.
But the lantern is again beckoning her, its light bright and enticing; and she pushes the creature and his lovely tongue away and continues down the vast hallway, across rooms as wide as the campus, vaults as vast as the bay, through chambers as small and intimate as cradles. All of them filled with people, young men and women who look like her, or used to, trembling in the throes of numinous transformation. But is she not here at the command of the king? and is he not commanding her elsewhere? The honey’s buzz has faded, and so has the light of the lantern, as it slips out what looks like an ordinary back door. Severin follows, stepping over supine bodies and back onto thick grass. And now the sensual cacophony of the house fades, and a profound and reverent peacefulness flows over her. The light of the lantern fades altogether, and she is standing in a sea of human men and women, all on their knees, heads down, hands out. They are bowing, she realizes, all in the same direction. They are genuflecting. They are worshipping.
Severin picks her way around the bodies. The ground is warm, free of twigs or rocks, and it feels like silk beneath her feet. All the bodies together form a wheel, she realizes as she makes her way in, a great wheel with thousands of spokes, radiating out from a center filled by the tallest, widest redwood she has ever seen in her life. She stops, stares up, up, up; and has to look away, vertigo washing over her. She sees the great trunk, the mass of branches like the clouds of a thunderstorm gathering overhead, she sees its end and yet it has no end; and when she concentrates on the land beneath her feet, Severin can feel that the redwood has no end in both directions, that it is everywhere, so painfully aware and alive that her mind reels in both joy and horror. This entire planet is an insect, it is nothing, and it is all held together by a being that dwarfs and transcends all of creation. In other universes, on other worlds, specks of life like her are making their way toward the tree, giving themselves over fully to the thought of their coming vastation. Letting out a small, ragged sigh, she continues on, weaving her way back and forth until she is standing several feet from the base of the tree in a small space in the sea of naked bodies that would exactly fit a young woman who has fallen to her knees.
And so she does, carefully planting her lower legs in the soft earth, moving her torso down until her breasts and face nestle against the ground, arms flung out in straight ley lines on either side of her head. And she waits.
The rise and fall of bodies, breathing. Somewhere, soft sobs. The warm night wind. Her buttocks are high in the air, legs slightly apart, nipples brushing the dirt. The wind flows around her limbs, caressing and cooling them even as it teases the warmth from her skin. She feels Knox’s magic growling around inside her body like a trapped animal, once again waking up and seeking release. The ground shudders, little quakes sending cracks and rivulets of moving earth all around and under her. Another wave of desire floods her body, and she spreads her legs further apart, pressing and rubbing the tips of her breasts in slow circles until they grow hard again. Slowly and surely, that familiar sensation returns: the tugging at her nipples, as though hard lips were suckling at them. Severin’s hips buck slightly—she presses down, then raises herself just enough to see. Yes, the branches, cresting the surface and clamped against her breasts, throbbing as they work their way around her tender flesh. A low moan escapes her lips, and all around her she hears the moans and sighs of the others, like a long wave gathering strength as it makes its way to the shore.
The redwood shudders. It’s the sound of thunder, rolling down through the mountains and covering everything in its path in a surge of electric
awe. Everyone grows still: Severin catches the breath in her throat and doesn’t let it out. Beside her feet, she feels something burrowing its way to the surface, pushing the earth aside as it breaks free. Raising her head slightly, she looks between her breasts. A branch the size of a small tree trunk, bursting out of the earth. “No,” she mutters, but it’s too late—small whip-like branches erupt up and twine themselves around her wrists, while others wrap themselves again and again around her ankles, holding her fast. She pushes up; and the vines tighten, causing tears to squirt from her eyes at the pain. But the redwood is radiating red-hot desire now, and the magic in her blood responds, overriding her fear. Severin relaxes against the restraints, closing her eyes.
In the dark, in the clearing of the great forest, in the great wheel of humanity, Severin hears the eruption of something soft and wet. A quick, small touch against her naked inner thigh, followed by a longer caress, the gentle lappings of multiple tongues radiating from the soft velvet petals of a flower. Severin relaxes and tenses all at once. The tongues work their way up the thick curve of her flesh, around the lower edge of her buttock, and then settle in between her legs. All around her, cries and groans; and her voice joins them. The entire mouth clamps itself firm between her legs as the tongues work their way around her flesh, sliding through every hot slick fold, roiling around the hard button of her clit, parting her like soft sand. Now she feels the hard round tip of something infinitely larger moving up through all the tongues, unsheathing itself from the branch and pressing its way in. Severin grunts and raises herself higher, and the branch responds, eagerly thrusting its way inside in a series of short, hard bursts. The ground is quaking hard now, and all around her she hears the shouting and howling of people in both pleasure and pain. She’s so close now, the branch is moving in and out of her with lightning speed, and Severin can feel Knox’s magic coalescing, coming together, expanding like magma—
She cries out as she comes, fireworks of pleasure bursting from her cunt and radiating all up and down her body—she cries out and she screams, as the magic drains away, sucked into the branch’s proboscis, the voracious mouth of the redwood. Knox, bleeding away, her memories bleeding away, and the stars are fading and the screams and her own heartbeat and the wind rushing backwards into the night, and the flow and push of millions of others against her, the darkness and the explosions of pain and light; and upward, up and up, Severin and her million new eyes, her million new limbs, filtering up through all of the branches of the ages, and now there are stars too many stars to count and she is bursting up over them in an orgasmic shower of cosmic seed and dust that has no beginning or end and she is without beginning or end and then she is nothing at all, until it begins again, somewhere, someday, in some other universe, in some other part of her eternal king.
***
Knox stares out of Severin’s dorm room window, four stories up, with its view of Sehome Forest and the great mountains beyond. He sees all across the curving folds of the land, from the highest upthrust of mountain to the most secret of crevices, to the thick shafts of wood springing from the moist land, bristling with seeded pine cones and dusty green needles. In this part of the wide world, he muses, humans raze the land, split the wood, and erect their houses, but they have no true home. They have no purchase. Here, it is the trees that weather the inland and ocean storms, that carry the white weight of pyroclastic flow with stoic grace; and when the winds blow, they do not break. They bend, ever so slightly, then snap back in a thunderous rush, thrusting back at the air even as they open their branches, letting brown seed scatter wide. This is the land of King Cupressaceae, and here he is all: Alpha and Omega, cock and cunt, the beginning and the end.
But this isn’t his city, or planet, so what does he care?
“What the hell!”
A light flicks on, and Knox turns. Severin’s roommate, the pretty, nervous girl whose energy tastes so fearfully sweet. She’s sitting up in her bed, sheets chastely pulled up against her neck. As if he’d even entertain the thought.
“Oh, it’s you. You scared me, I thought—what are you doing here? Where’s Severin?”
Knox walks over to Severin’s desk, and takes a small wooden box from the top shelf. “Severin and I—we broke up. She’s not coming back.”
“What? I don’t understand. She’s dropping out of school?”
Knox smiles. “You could say that.” He starts for the door.
“Wait a minute! That’s hers—you can’t just take it!”
Knox turns. The girl hunches over, radiating fear. He lifts off, floats through the air like cigarette smoke toward the window.
“How do you do that?” she whispers. “Why did you teach Severin, and not me?”
“Because you’re ordinary,” Knox says as he slides through the cold glass, ignoring her piercing scream. “That’s why you’ll never know.”
It Feels Better Biting Down
“What’s with the lawnmower? No one mows this early in spring.”
“It’s June,” I reply. “Spring should be long gone.”
My twin sister rolls over onto her back, rubbing the afternoon sleep from her eyes with ten long pale fingers and two long pale thumbs. I’m lying next to her in our nest of pillows on the living room carpet, holding a book with hands that look just like hers, pale and strange, the extra finger curving into each palm, shy-like but not vestigial or immobile, not completely reticent. A sleeping stinger waiting to strike, my mother once said, in her raspy, rye-tinged voice. We like that.
“Where is it coming from?”
“Neighbors,” I say. “Behind us. Not the sides.”
“I didn’t know someone new moved in.” Sister sits up. That’s what I call her anymore, and what she calls me. It drives our parents crazy, because we only answer to Sister, and they never know which one they’re going to get when they call our name. It only started last summer, just before our senior year, but sometimes now I can’t even remember our original names. We are Sister, a singular entity with twenty long fingers at the ends of our four pale hands.
“I know.” I close the book and stare through the open-screened windows. Only the neighbor’s roof is visible, framed by wind-tossed trees swaying under a cream blue sky. “No one’s lived there for years. Remember Father complaining?”
“A white trash eyesore, he said.”
“Property rates dropping, he said.”
“All the plants dying,” Sister says.
“Too many pine needles, too little sun,” I say. “That whole backyard is dead. The last owners graveled it over like a parking lot.”
“What are they mowing then?” Sister asks.
The engine sputters and buzzes in a low, monotonous drone. The air pooling in through the open-screened windows smells of cut grass and gasoline. It smells enticing and new.
Sister stares at me, waiting for my response. I let the book slip from my hands. Mystery is blossoming behind the fence, waiting to be bit into like a stolen plum. We bare our teeth like wolves. We call it the delicious smile, because something strange and delicious is about to be found, to be torn apart and sucked dry. It’s another little thing that drives our parents insane, because it doesn’t look anything like a smile at all.
I’m always the first to move. My sister likes to hang back a bit. I stand up and hold out my hand, and she reaches. I pull her to her feet with little effort on my part, our extra pinky fingers locked as she moves up toward me, a graceful pantomime of our violent birth. We make our way to through the silent house, hand in hand. Our parents are gone for the weekend—visiting friends, they said. They’re probably just hiding out in a local motel. Summers are hard for them because school is out and we’re always around. To be fair, we don’t make it easy. We never have, not since our unexpected birth. We’re not stupid; we know how they feel about us. We see them as one with two sets of eyes. They don’t like our indecipherable games, our private whisperings in secret languages, our twisty extra fingers brushing across their n
ormal non-twisty things. Sometimes I feel bad. Only sometimes. They only ever wanted one of us to begin with, and anyway, this is what twins are. Wrong. This is how we’re supposed to be.
By the time we get to the den and open the patio door, the mowing has stopped. A high-pitched fluting noise floods the air—it’s the wind washing through all the construction sites surrounding our block, playing with chain link fences, weaving through empty, honeycombed frames of houses and apartment buildings, and stiff forests of construction beams half-driven into the hard ground. The skeletal remains of what was to be a new neighborhood, abandoned to ruin almost as quickly as it had begun. As we step outside, I raise my hands. I feel the warmth of the day, growing steady behind the cool gusts. In this part of the world it usually takes so long to throw off the winter cold, but this summer already feels different. We stand on the concrete slabs, looking across the yard at the fence. Father put it up a decade ago, when all the hedges started to wither and die off. In the slight gaps between each wide wooden slat, there’s no movement or sound. We wait.
“Nobody’s there,” I finally whisper. “Maybe it was next door after all.”
“I heard it, too.”
“It’s cold out. Let’s go back inside.”
Sister grabs a plastic lawn chair, and walks across the grass. Irritated, I stand at the patio’s edge, toes curled over it and brushing the green blades as I watch. She places the lawn chair against the fence, then steps onto the fabric seat, pressing her face against the slats. Slowly she stands until her head peers over the top of the fence. Almost instantly, she crouches down, shock lighting up her face like the sun.
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