Post by goldenmyst on Mar 6, 2020 22:16:44 GMT -6
1
Grecian Urn for Lovers
Morning light creates a chandelier through the cracks in the ceiling that illuminates a Grecian urn displayed in a glass case. Under the soft but insistent light, the pottery is embossed with Apollo pursuing Daphne. His rod is still risen to defy millennia of censorship.
My curious maiden turns my head. While she explores the scene we share our voyeur’s gaze. Her eyes travel the length of his Apollonian manhood giving rise to my own response. Her fascination for the anatomical detail becomes my piquancy until her poise of Hellenic Greece sends my Argonaut on a quest to weave the wool of her golden fleece.
I tell her, “I was married and she may be out there somewhere. It feels adulterous to look at art this graphic, especially in the presence of a beautiful woman such as yourself.”
The room is even quieter than when the only sound was the air conditioners blowing through the vents near closing time. The noise of her lifting the translucent cover from the vase breaks the silence. She carefully places it on the floor. Then she traces the design which stands out in relief with her fingertips. I feel both angst and wonder as she leaves her prints on the artifact. But when her hands go where her eyes had been my gaze focuses on her touch upon the ancient man’s readiness for the capture of his womanly prize. Then she strokes his woman pleaser with the delicacy of the artist when he painted this vessel for posterity. With a pregnant pause, she lingers at the root where he grows ponderous from the weight of manly desire.
This pendant dangles under her touch as a talisman for yesterday’s progeny. She pines for his potency with the religious fervor of a born again pagan. She buttresses his Cathedral of manhood with symbols of the love she longs to bestow if only she could breathe life into the clay. He was born by fire in a kiln instead of by water in the womb. In so doing his rod is harder than that of a mortal yet too brittle for the caprice of an errant hand. Yet her fleshly stylus touches his testicles whose fragility is that of Robin’s eggs from which nestlings are born.
Rowena’s hand moves like a Ouija board pointer to make contact with the Daphne figure. Her art appreciation becomes an exercise of poetic license. Ro tells me, “I translated Ovid in college. But I took liberties in deviating from a literal translation. Here is an improvisation on a theme from the Roman poet:
“‘Please let me go. My slender body would break under your weight. I am but a reed while you are a mighty oak.’ She sees the pale moon glow reflected in his ebony eyes. A crow caws high in the illuminated treetops. Daphne runs through the night forest like a specter. Her silver lace robe blows in the wind.
‘If you stop following me I’ll hook you up with a nymph worthy of your affections. You deserve more than my scrawny sketch of a Lass.’ He follows her, the warm breeze leaving her face wet. Splashing through a stream, the cold water chills her feet. She eludes him like a dream forgotten or some hazy childhood memory.
Daphne says to Apollo, ‘My youth makes me a flighty girl whose affections are inconstant and not to be trusted. Besides your candle is more than I can handle. But such speech stokes the flames of your desire.’
Like his Siren, Daphne sails through the forest on winged feet. His legs carry him toward her, having reluctantly won his heart. He wants her more than life itself; to once more taste her sweet lips; feel her warm breath on his neck; her cool fingers on his fevered brow. But she is swift like lightning as she leads him through the piney maze.
Suddenly Daphne disappears into the moonlight shadows. He tumbles across a log. He lies defeated. His passion unrequited he feels the sting of loss like burning coals against his delicate skin. His face is pressed into the wet leaves strewn beneath him in a soft rug. His bare thighs are scraped.
Daphne’s spidery fingers let him feel her tickle his spine. Turning over with a groan he looks up with his dark eyes that sparkle in the moonlight. Her aquiline face is silhouetted against the soft yellow glow. Her dark eyelashes are traced across her almond eyes. Looking down at him hungrily desire is written in her smirk with lips full and generous and open. She hears him sigh as she sits, cradling his head in her lap. Her fingernails scrape his scalp as his face relaxes. ‘Do not be swayed by beauty for it wilts with the first frost. Instead, find an oaken woman steadfast when the icy breath of winter blows.’ finis.”
He replies, ‘Your gem is more precious than diamond and even the tryst I fancied. My animalistic urges are not befitting a God and would be curtailed if only I knew the way.’”
I tell my Rowena, “Apollo gets hip to the reality that having the hots for a woman doesn’t make it cool to chase her through a forest. Thereby her tragic morph into a tree is averted. You recited the story as though you were Daphne herself.”
Ro replies, “I’ve walked in Daphne’s sandals many a mile being pursued by unwanted suitors. But there is something altogether exhilarating about being bird-dogged by a man. Let’s reenact the scene from the vase. You’ll be Apollo chasing me as your Daphne.”
I reply, “The horoscopes couldn’t have matched us better.”
She says, “Are you being sarcastic?”
“Heavens no we got lucky in the celestial lotto.”
She says, “I am a magician who hides my Queen of hearts that is my heart by a magic trick from would- be suitors.”
I say, “Between your Queen of hearts and my King of hearts we’re well suited for homemaking.”
She replies, “A house of cards easily falls down with just a blown kiss. Who will turn me into a Laurel tree to escape the provocateur? Let’s see who can sprint faster. I’m off.”
She laughs at first but then runs down the hallway. She hides in shadows but I smell her fragrance and find her. I tickle her until she stops pushing me away. She darts past art deco, cubist, impressionist, and abstract art galleries. But her flight takes her into a pitch-black room for the camouflage of darkness. I trace the path closest to where I last saw her. I say, “Come out wherever you are.” She swishes past me like a falconess on the move with me on her heels. Finally, I find her beneath a Degas painting out of breath and too tired to run anymore. She says, “If you’re determined to have your way with me I’ll be a good sport. Who am I to stop you?”
I say, “I’d never take liberties with you.”
She says, “But I’m a willing accomplice.”
2
Mesoamerica on the Bayou
Ro says, “This museum has an impressive Pre-Columbian exhibit upstairs. There doesn’t appear to be much of a crowd. Let’s go enjoy a private showing of the Mesoamerican rooms. The primitivism of the Mayan sculpture will provide a good contrast to our museum experience.”
We enter the dimly lit room where horned beasts made of clay greet us. Faces of Mayan people gaze from a lost world. She tells me, “Look at that Sun God figure. No look closer. Gaze into his eyes. You need to squat for a better balance. We wouldn’t want you falling into it and getting sued for damages.” The statuary gazes through the millennia.
Ro’s soft ivory body emerges from her madras dress. She discards her panties like last year’s style for the 1960s love in naturalism come back into vogue. My eyes close. She says, “Oh come on. These New Orleans summers are hot. I’m just getting comfortable.”
Suddenly I feel her svelte hand slip the seam of my underworld only to unzip me like an audacious courtesan of an intercessor for the Sun God into whose stony eyes I stare. With a flick of her wrist, she undoes my belt and has both my jeans and fruit of the looms bunched up on my thighs.
Like an abbess, Rowena prepares me as her novitiate in the Orphic mysteries. She says, “You are about to experience Mayan ritual first hand. The burning question for you is how shall we reenact Mayan ceremonialism? So think of my ladyfingers as the legs of a spider. Yet my fingernails are its bite. But lightly grazed upon your tender skin the feeling for you is altogether pleasant like being tickled by your girlfriend. Feel them crawl up your bottom like a web of pleasure to enmesh you. The sensation isn’t anymore naughty than the touch of your sweetheart from the days of yor except in so far as it pleases your imagination to think so.”
“Are you going to perform a Mayan ritual? Please clue me in. At least a vague allusion would ease my mind.”
“Listen closely. I want it to be a surprise. So I will give you two examples to occupy your mind.
First, the blood of the genitals was the most sacred and had extraordinary fertilizing powers to replenish the crops according to the Mayans. So in some cases, the male foreskins were cut to provide blood to the Gods. But there was another more intense penile bloodletting. There was a ceremony in which men and women formed a line in front of a statue to the Sun God. They pierced each other’s members with more and more cord until they could stand no more. Soon they were strung together by their members and collectively anointed the statue with their blood. But there is a third ritual which might be put in the mix. I will leave that for you to ponder.”
“Well since I’ve been circumcised it can’t be the foreskin one. But I think you are teasing me about tying us together by our members. Besides, I would opt out of such a brutal practice. So I am betting on the unknown one.”
Ro cackles like a mad lass on fire with playfulness. She draws crazy eights all over my bottom with the jagged tips of a chewed manicure. Suddenly she reaches into my perineum to drive me wild with tickles until my laughter is only outmatched by her chortles. I await the denouement like a soldier waits for the news of an armistice while in the trenches. I breathe a sigh of relief that she is performing like a Mayan clown whose frivolity is the climax. But what if I am her jester with whom she is displeased? Suddenly as though an answer to my prayer her hand moves smoothly in slow steady strokes across the pillar of my manhood that rises like a megalith from the grassy savannah of the iron age.
“Please pray tell, what addled wits brought you to this state?”
“Dost thou grow impatient? The festivities have not concluded.”
“Your folly is that of a rodeo clown,” I reply.
“I’ll show you who is the fool,” she says.
With the swiftness of a fox, she lays me out, bestrides me, and circumscribes my circumcised flesh which shuts my smart mouth.
Her sensual provocation draws me deeper into her velvet mystery. My heart beats like a drum in this room of silent watchers. Only her voice interrupts the silence as she admonishes me, “I will quell any rebellious schoolboy notions you have of not completing your assignment simply by redoubling the pace so that you cannot resist.”
Her place of original magic opens each node on my stem to let the sap flow. Her inner flower arrangement captures the crown of my sunflower and alchemizes the radiant petals of pure male energy into a sun king who is granted an elongated reign.
My piston assumes the shape of the Sun God cylinder that astonishes my very eyes. Reassuringly she continues her tidal pull upon me until my lips form an O through which the unmistakable deepening of moans follows. After my final pulse, she zips me up.
Finally, she buttons my jeans only to be surprised that my manhood has thickened again so she gives me a merciful squeeze.
“Now unseal the last hidden ritual and its bearing to our frolic?”
“There is a manuscript from the Yucatán known as ‘Ritual of the Bacabs’ that speaks poetically of lovemaking. The ancient author says, ‘I dip, my wick with the petals of she who gave birth to you and the stamen of he who planted your seed. Thou art the yearning of the offspring of the womb, the pining of the progeny of the seed planters. Amen.’”
“Whew. You gave me the creeps. But you saved the best for last. Thank God.”
A more human terracotta figurine gazes from seven hundred A.D. with a visage that could represent laughter or a warrior’s face. My female companion says, “Spooky, isn’t he? His expression could be the amused look of a young despot who smiles while committing massacres as though he were attending a Sunday cricket game.”
I say, “His eyes are closed as though there is something he’d rather not see. I’d like to believe he is the Mayan equivalent of the laughing Buddha.”
She replies, “From Veracruz to China is a long way. But it is a lovely thought that his grin is that of enlightenment as opposed to gloating over a war victory. His necklace with the blue beads indicates he may have been royalty.”
I say, “Maybe the emperor valued him as a holy man and hence bestowed the gift upon him. He may have been considered a wise man whom the king consulted in matters of state and spirituality. Perhaps his detachment from the worldly life gave him objectivity the leader valued.”
“Maybe he was a beggar though the king offered him a place in the court. The emperor sought his advice on what woman to marry and how to pray. But the laughing man refrained from giving guidance in war strategies because of his pacifism.”
I reply to her, “Perhaps the reason the king had this likeness of his laughing advisor made was as artistic propaganda that if a beggar can laugh at the world what happier median than to grow your own food and partake of tomatoes fresh from the vine? A king’s life is fraught with worry.”
She says, “When the lights went out, I planned to pursue a Ph.D. in Mayan linguistics. But my research needed the element of applied ritual to make my dissertation genuine. Don’t worry I won’t sacrifice your life as the ancient Mayans did. In fact, with you, I’ve at last discovered a culture that will challenge my intersubjective research methods in the most fundamental way. Your masculine narrative is as different from my own as any Mayan. And your patriarchal caste system is as antithetical to my feminism as it gets.”
I reply, “I never thought I’d be the subject of an ethnography on the male culture.”
She says, “This event will be recorded in my private literature due to my dissertation being in hiatus. Of course, I’ll give you a complimentary copy as soon as the printing presses are back in operation.”
I tell her, “My eyes are so misty that the goddess statue I face is blurry.”
“Tears are an expression of passion. The Mayan moon goddess Ixchel would be pleased.”
“There are plenty of vacant hotels in this city.”
“Let’s hole up in a deserted mansion. Why not move up in the world?” she accepts.
That night we sleep in the cavernous museum. The next day we will search for food. We have become foragers in a hungry world.
Morning blossoms over the blighted city. I don my clothes. She covers her nakedness with her dress. She says, “Due to the earl grey shortage we held our teatime on the floor with gourmet kisses for pekoe and crumpets. Do you think you impregnated me?”
I hug her. “I don’t know. Would it be right to bring up a child into this world?”
Tears sparkle in her eyes. She says, “Instinct tells me so. Without children, there is no hope.” I lead her by the hand out into the blinding sunlight.
Grecian Urn for Lovers
Morning light creates a chandelier through the cracks in the ceiling that illuminates a Grecian urn displayed in a glass case. Under the soft but insistent light, the pottery is embossed with Apollo pursuing Daphne. His rod is still risen to defy millennia of censorship.
My curious maiden turns my head. While she explores the scene we share our voyeur’s gaze. Her eyes travel the length of his Apollonian manhood giving rise to my own response. Her fascination for the anatomical detail becomes my piquancy until her poise of Hellenic Greece sends my Argonaut on a quest to weave the wool of her golden fleece.
I tell her, “I was married and she may be out there somewhere. It feels adulterous to look at art this graphic, especially in the presence of a beautiful woman such as yourself.”
The room is even quieter than when the only sound was the air conditioners blowing through the vents near closing time. The noise of her lifting the translucent cover from the vase breaks the silence. She carefully places it on the floor. Then she traces the design which stands out in relief with her fingertips. I feel both angst and wonder as she leaves her prints on the artifact. But when her hands go where her eyes had been my gaze focuses on her touch upon the ancient man’s readiness for the capture of his womanly prize. Then she strokes his woman pleaser with the delicacy of the artist when he painted this vessel for posterity. With a pregnant pause, she lingers at the root where he grows ponderous from the weight of manly desire.
This pendant dangles under her touch as a talisman for yesterday’s progeny. She pines for his potency with the religious fervor of a born again pagan. She buttresses his Cathedral of manhood with symbols of the love she longs to bestow if only she could breathe life into the clay. He was born by fire in a kiln instead of by water in the womb. In so doing his rod is harder than that of a mortal yet too brittle for the caprice of an errant hand. Yet her fleshly stylus touches his testicles whose fragility is that of Robin’s eggs from which nestlings are born.
Rowena’s hand moves like a Ouija board pointer to make contact with the Daphne figure. Her art appreciation becomes an exercise of poetic license. Ro tells me, “I translated Ovid in college. But I took liberties in deviating from a literal translation. Here is an improvisation on a theme from the Roman poet:
“‘Please let me go. My slender body would break under your weight. I am but a reed while you are a mighty oak.’ She sees the pale moon glow reflected in his ebony eyes. A crow caws high in the illuminated treetops. Daphne runs through the night forest like a specter. Her silver lace robe blows in the wind.
‘If you stop following me I’ll hook you up with a nymph worthy of your affections. You deserve more than my scrawny sketch of a Lass.’ He follows her, the warm breeze leaving her face wet. Splashing through a stream, the cold water chills her feet. She eludes him like a dream forgotten or some hazy childhood memory.
Daphne says to Apollo, ‘My youth makes me a flighty girl whose affections are inconstant and not to be trusted. Besides your candle is more than I can handle. But such speech stokes the flames of your desire.’
Like his Siren, Daphne sails through the forest on winged feet. His legs carry him toward her, having reluctantly won his heart. He wants her more than life itself; to once more taste her sweet lips; feel her warm breath on his neck; her cool fingers on his fevered brow. But she is swift like lightning as she leads him through the piney maze.
Suddenly Daphne disappears into the moonlight shadows. He tumbles across a log. He lies defeated. His passion unrequited he feels the sting of loss like burning coals against his delicate skin. His face is pressed into the wet leaves strewn beneath him in a soft rug. His bare thighs are scraped.
Daphne’s spidery fingers let him feel her tickle his spine. Turning over with a groan he looks up with his dark eyes that sparkle in the moonlight. Her aquiline face is silhouetted against the soft yellow glow. Her dark eyelashes are traced across her almond eyes. Looking down at him hungrily desire is written in her smirk with lips full and generous and open. She hears him sigh as she sits, cradling his head in her lap. Her fingernails scrape his scalp as his face relaxes. ‘Do not be swayed by beauty for it wilts with the first frost. Instead, find an oaken woman steadfast when the icy breath of winter blows.’ finis.”
He replies, ‘Your gem is more precious than diamond and even the tryst I fancied. My animalistic urges are not befitting a God and would be curtailed if only I knew the way.’”
I tell my Rowena, “Apollo gets hip to the reality that having the hots for a woman doesn’t make it cool to chase her through a forest. Thereby her tragic morph into a tree is averted. You recited the story as though you were Daphne herself.”
Ro replies, “I’ve walked in Daphne’s sandals many a mile being pursued by unwanted suitors. But there is something altogether exhilarating about being bird-dogged by a man. Let’s reenact the scene from the vase. You’ll be Apollo chasing me as your Daphne.”
I reply, “The horoscopes couldn’t have matched us better.”
She says, “Are you being sarcastic?”
“Heavens no we got lucky in the celestial lotto.”
She says, “I am a magician who hides my Queen of hearts that is my heart by a magic trick from would- be suitors.”
I say, “Between your Queen of hearts and my King of hearts we’re well suited for homemaking.”
She replies, “A house of cards easily falls down with just a blown kiss. Who will turn me into a Laurel tree to escape the provocateur? Let’s see who can sprint faster. I’m off.”
She laughs at first but then runs down the hallway. She hides in shadows but I smell her fragrance and find her. I tickle her until she stops pushing me away. She darts past art deco, cubist, impressionist, and abstract art galleries. But her flight takes her into a pitch-black room for the camouflage of darkness. I trace the path closest to where I last saw her. I say, “Come out wherever you are.” She swishes past me like a falconess on the move with me on her heels. Finally, I find her beneath a Degas painting out of breath and too tired to run anymore. She says, “If you’re determined to have your way with me I’ll be a good sport. Who am I to stop you?”
I say, “I’d never take liberties with you.”
She says, “But I’m a willing accomplice.”
2
Mesoamerica on the Bayou
Ro says, “This museum has an impressive Pre-Columbian exhibit upstairs. There doesn’t appear to be much of a crowd. Let’s go enjoy a private showing of the Mesoamerican rooms. The primitivism of the Mayan sculpture will provide a good contrast to our museum experience.”
We enter the dimly lit room where horned beasts made of clay greet us. Faces of Mayan people gaze from a lost world. She tells me, “Look at that Sun God figure. No look closer. Gaze into his eyes. You need to squat for a better balance. We wouldn’t want you falling into it and getting sued for damages.” The statuary gazes through the millennia.
Ro’s soft ivory body emerges from her madras dress. She discards her panties like last year’s style for the 1960s love in naturalism come back into vogue. My eyes close. She says, “Oh come on. These New Orleans summers are hot. I’m just getting comfortable.”
Suddenly I feel her svelte hand slip the seam of my underworld only to unzip me like an audacious courtesan of an intercessor for the Sun God into whose stony eyes I stare. With a flick of her wrist, she undoes my belt and has both my jeans and fruit of the looms bunched up on my thighs.
Like an abbess, Rowena prepares me as her novitiate in the Orphic mysteries. She says, “You are about to experience Mayan ritual first hand. The burning question for you is how shall we reenact Mayan ceremonialism? So think of my ladyfingers as the legs of a spider. Yet my fingernails are its bite. But lightly grazed upon your tender skin the feeling for you is altogether pleasant like being tickled by your girlfriend. Feel them crawl up your bottom like a web of pleasure to enmesh you. The sensation isn’t anymore naughty than the touch of your sweetheart from the days of yor except in so far as it pleases your imagination to think so.”
“Are you going to perform a Mayan ritual? Please clue me in. At least a vague allusion would ease my mind.”
“Listen closely. I want it to be a surprise. So I will give you two examples to occupy your mind.
First, the blood of the genitals was the most sacred and had extraordinary fertilizing powers to replenish the crops according to the Mayans. So in some cases, the male foreskins were cut to provide blood to the Gods. But there was another more intense penile bloodletting. There was a ceremony in which men and women formed a line in front of a statue to the Sun God. They pierced each other’s members with more and more cord until they could stand no more. Soon they were strung together by their members and collectively anointed the statue with their blood. But there is a third ritual which might be put in the mix. I will leave that for you to ponder.”
“Well since I’ve been circumcised it can’t be the foreskin one. But I think you are teasing me about tying us together by our members. Besides, I would opt out of such a brutal practice. So I am betting on the unknown one.”
Ro cackles like a mad lass on fire with playfulness. She draws crazy eights all over my bottom with the jagged tips of a chewed manicure. Suddenly she reaches into my perineum to drive me wild with tickles until my laughter is only outmatched by her chortles. I await the denouement like a soldier waits for the news of an armistice while in the trenches. I breathe a sigh of relief that she is performing like a Mayan clown whose frivolity is the climax. But what if I am her jester with whom she is displeased? Suddenly as though an answer to my prayer her hand moves smoothly in slow steady strokes across the pillar of my manhood that rises like a megalith from the grassy savannah of the iron age.
“Please pray tell, what addled wits brought you to this state?”
“Dost thou grow impatient? The festivities have not concluded.”
“Your folly is that of a rodeo clown,” I reply.
“I’ll show you who is the fool,” she says.
With the swiftness of a fox, she lays me out, bestrides me, and circumscribes my circumcised flesh which shuts my smart mouth.
Her sensual provocation draws me deeper into her velvet mystery. My heart beats like a drum in this room of silent watchers. Only her voice interrupts the silence as she admonishes me, “I will quell any rebellious schoolboy notions you have of not completing your assignment simply by redoubling the pace so that you cannot resist.”
Her place of original magic opens each node on my stem to let the sap flow. Her inner flower arrangement captures the crown of my sunflower and alchemizes the radiant petals of pure male energy into a sun king who is granted an elongated reign.
My piston assumes the shape of the Sun God cylinder that astonishes my very eyes. Reassuringly she continues her tidal pull upon me until my lips form an O through which the unmistakable deepening of moans follows. After my final pulse, she zips me up.
Finally, she buttons my jeans only to be surprised that my manhood has thickened again so she gives me a merciful squeeze.
“Now unseal the last hidden ritual and its bearing to our frolic?”
“There is a manuscript from the Yucatán known as ‘Ritual of the Bacabs’ that speaks poetically of lovemaking. The ancient author says, ‘I dip, my wick with the petals of she who gave birth to you and the stamen of he who planted your seed. Thou art the yearning of the offspring of the womb, the pining of the progeny of the seed planters. Amen.’”
“Whew. You gave me the creeps. But you saved the best for last. Thank God.”
A more human terracotta figurine gazes from seven hundred A.D. with a visage that could represent laughter or a warrior’s face. My female companion says, “Spooky, isn’t he? His expression could be the amused look of a young despot who smiles while committing massacres as though he were attending a Sunday cricket game.”
I say, “His eyes are closed as though there is something he’d rather not see. I’d like to believe he is the Mayan equivalent of the laughing Buddha.”
She replies, “From Veracruz to China is a long way. But it is a lovely thought that his grin is that of enlightenment as opposed to gloating over a war victory. His necklace with the blue beads indicates he may have been royalty.”
I say, “Maybe the emperor valued him as a holy man and hence bestowed the gift upon him. He may have been considered a wise man whom the king consulted in matters of state and spirituality. Perhaps his detachment from the worldly life gave him objectivity the leader valued.”
“Maybe he was a beggar though the king offered him a place in the court. The emperor sought his advice on what woman to marry and how to pray. But the laughing man refrained from giving guidance in war strategies because of his pacifism.”
I reply to her, “Perhaps the reason the king had this likeness of his laughing advisor made was as artistic propaganda that if a beggar can laugh at the world what happier median than to grow your own food and partake of tomatoes fresh from the vine? A king’s life is fraught with worry.”
She says, “When the lights went out, I planned to pursue a Ph.D. in Mayan linguistics. But my research needed the element of applied ritual to make my dissertation genuine. Don’t worry I won’t sacrifice your life as the ancient Mayans did. In fact, with you, I’ve at last discovered a culture that will challenge my intersubjective research methods in the most fundamental way. Your masculine narrative is as different from my own as any Mayan. And your patriarchal caste system is as antithetical to my feminism as it gets.”
I reply, “I never thought I’d be the subject of an ethnography on the male culture.”
She says, “This event will be recorded in my private literature due to my dissertation being in hiatus. Of course, I’ll give you a complimentary copy as soon as the printing presses are back in operation.”
I tell her, “My eyes are so misty that the goddess statue I face is blurry.”
“Tears are an expression of passion. The Mayan moon goddess Ixchel would be pleased.”
“There are plenty of vacant hotels in this city.”
“Let’s hole up in a deserted mansion. Why not move up in the world?” she accepts.
That night we sleep in the cavernous museum. The next day we will search for food. We have become foragers in a hungry world.
Morning blossoms over the blighted city. I don my clothes. She covers her nakedness with her dress. She says, “Due to the earl grey shortage we held our teatime on the floor with gourmet kisses for pekoe and crumpets. Do you think you impregnated me?”
I hug her. “I don’t know. Would it be right to bring up a child into this world?”
Tears sparkle in her eyes. She says, “Instinct tells me so. Without children, there is no hope.” I lead her by the hand out into the blinding sunlight.
