The Cosmology of the Wider World
Page 17
She agreed with him and then went even further to draw an analogy between the light of stars and the smell of a dog’s breath.
“Very perceptive,” he admitted when she was done.
The afternoon on the turret went well. Conversation flourished and good will abounded between male and female. Belius drank the better portion of the bottle of wine, and Soffea, who was more demure, tippled daintily at her glass, dribbling most of it down the front of her blue toga. As the evening came on, the wine she had spilled had soaked the old table cloth she wore to the point where Belius could discern the outline of her sculpted breasts. This, along with the overall beauty he had perceived in her and her keen wit and intelligence, made his member stir and grow to where it was barely hidden by the hem of the right leg of his boxer shorts.
When his passion had reached a critical level, he manipulated the conversation around to the point where he could suggest a tour of the inside of the tower. The last stop, if everything went as he planned, would be the bedroom. She hesitated at the suggestion but then coyly accepted.
In the study, he showed her his maps and books and she was so taken in by the obvious extent of his knowledge that she lost her balance and fell into a bookcase, bringing the whole set of shelves and all their contents to the floor with her. In the kitchen, she managed to stab herself in the thigh with a paring knife, which gave Belius the opportunity to lick the wound. When she thanked him profusely with a torrent of burbling, he knew his scheme of sex had a chance. In the wine cellar, while Bonita watched from a dark corner, Belius explained the process of making wine from dandelions as he gently rubbed her back.
The tour through the confines of the tower brought the couple into close contact time and again, firing Belius’ eloquence in a direct ratio to the increase of his desire. It also, because of the warmer climate of the indoors, began to dry the clay that held Soffea together. The first thing to fall off of her was the horn that Siftus had had to refit that afternoon. When it dropped off, Belius was aghast, but, when he saw that she took no notice of it and that it didn’t seem to give her any pain, he laughed it off by saying, “Why have two horns when one will do as well?” A little later, though, when her hair began to float away from her mane and she spat out a few teeth, he decided that he must get her to the bedroom before she fell apart completely.
“The master bedroom,” Belius said as he swept open the door. She hobbled inside, her wooden hoof beginning to come loose. When she turned her back on him to look around, he slyly closed the door and reached over to lower the flame of the gas lamp that burned brightly on the wall. With the light gone, the leaf from the blabbering tree that was her tongue finally went silent. She turned to face him. They stared into each other’s eyes. Her constant motion became subdued and the new calmness was erotic to him.
“You’re beautiful, Soffea.”
She remained silent, staring.
“Your eyes make me think that I have always known you. As a matter of fact …” He craned his neck toward her and peered through the soft shadow. A vague sense of recognition rolled through his skittering mind. “… Have I ever met your eyes before? I mean, haven’t we met before?” The shock of the familiarity of her eyes disintegrated as his attention was drawn back to her breasts and legs and hips.
“What I’ve been trying to say, is that I love you.”
As the words left his mouth, his passion reached a crescendo and the heat emanating from his body wafted over her, drying her already cracking clay even more. The loose hoof gave way and she stumbled backward, landing on the bed with her legs spread wide in the air and her toga thrown back. He needed no verbal invitation. In seconds he had shed his jacket and shirt and shorts. His member pulsed. He lowered his head and charged, giving a great squeal as he leaped into the air. With an aim that could not be blurred by intoxicants or lack of blood, he came down on her with his full weight. She exploded beneath him, body parts flying out the window and rolling under the bed. The dry clay disintegrated into dust and released her life—the smoke-cloud spirit of The Cosmology of the Wider World. As the stream of fluid that carried in it the potential heirs of the race of minotaurs left his body, its sudden absence created a great vacuum inside of him. He gasped with the power of an enormous whirlpool sucking down oceans. With this intake of air, the cloud that had once been his book, reentered him, filling his heart and his head with peace.
Instantly, he fell into a deep sleep that assured him in every cell of his body that he would once again write and that his garden would flourish and that his friends would join him in his study at night, as they always had, to smoke a bowl of the digitalis and speak of things they knew and things they didn’t. In this sleep he had a strange dream of a giant worm, lying miles long near a burning crater beneath the sea, chewing and chewing his overcoat as if it were a cud of grass.
About the Author
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels Vanitas, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace. Ford has published over one hundred short stories, which have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edgar Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and Japan’s Hayakawa’s SF Magazine Reader’s Award.
Ford’s fiction has been translated into twenty languages. In addition to writing, he has been a professor of literature and writing for thirty years and has been a guest lecturer at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, the Stone Coast MFA in Creative Writing Program, Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. Ford lives in Ohio and currently teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Jeffrey Ford
Introduction copyright © 2005 by Jeff Vander Meer
Cover design by Jamie Keenan
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9373-7
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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