The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Stocking Stuffer Collection

“Waves”

mc mf md

(...to the all-seeing Eye—for the ever-growing number of glorious cracks appearing in that crystal coffin :—)

She bent down and touched the water. It was warm. She smiled wide because Everyone knows the water near the mouth of the Amazon is as cool as the Atlantic.

But it was warm to her. As warm as His touch.

She laughed. Loud.

Touched herself down there, just to compare. Even warmer. But still not as warm as His touch.

She had come a long way. For someone who had traveled the world by boat, airplane, balloon, dog sled, bicycle, mule, submarine and foot, she still felt that special tingle down there every time she found a new way to get from one place to another. But nothing like this. She gave a small gasp, despite herself. And touched herself again.

Her guide looked at her peculiarly. “You want I should leave?” he asked, in broken English.

She put her hands to her head, as much to keep her yellow hair from whipping this way and that in the wind as to shield her eyes from the harsh glare of the sun as she peered out over the endless expanse of the ocean. “Yes, please,” she answered without looking at him.

“When should I come back?” he asked, bending down to pick up his pack.

“Never,” she giggled. She couldn’t remember the last time she giggled. How she was looking forward to this.

He looked at her incredulously, even as he slung his sack across his shoulder and took a step backwards. “Pardon?”

She smiled and turned to him, her hand lowering to unclasp her belt. “Here,” she said as she tossed him the belt with the pouches attached. “Five thousand more, American. No argue!”

She turned back towards the ocean and bent down on her knees again. “Buy your family a new house.”

“But...Miss Sutherland...?” He stooped down to pick up the belt.

“You heard me,” she whispered in the same tone as the crashing tide; without turning, closed her eyes and smiled as she heard his footsteps in the sand. Five minutes later, she could still hear them as they stepped from the sand to peat soil. Ten minutes later—the sound of oars chopping the waves. That made her wonder if she could hear the Sunday church bells back in Toronto if she had a mind to.

She gasped for air once again, and fell to her knees in the sand. Her hands dug deep into her trousers. No, no church bells.

Better.

* * *

“Where did you hear about me?” His voice. His blessed voice. Low as the rumbling of the tuba her father used to play, but twice as deafening. Her first instinct was to cover her ears.

Didn’t help.

She began to have second thoughts. This was not at all what she had expected. This...Thing in the hospital bed. Fucking hell, his wrinkles had wrinkles. His right eye was swollen shut from some disease or perhaps simply because he was just so bloody old.

But that voice? It pierced her hands. Deep, endless as the echo you hear when you hold a seashell to your ears.

“I asked you where you heard this from?” He asked again. “What? Are you deaf, woman?”

Her mind reeled from the contradictions. An East Texas accent? But that voice was surely older than any of the six flags that flew in front of the government hospital overlooking Galveston Bay. Hell, maybe this WAS who she was looking for after all.

“Money,” she answered, finally, drawing a notebook and pen from her purse. “I’m a fairly rich woman.” She flipped open the notebook and swept back her hair with her other hand. “I pay very well for information I’m looking for.”

“Bah, money,” he made a gurgling noise deep in this throat that startled her a bit. “Never had much use for it myself.” He lifted an arm. It was so thin that a small layer of flesh hung down an inch from the bone and swung back and forth as he moved. His fingers was knotted in places where there were no joints. She turned towards the window that overlooked the bay.

“I always bartered for stuff I needed.” He chuckled. It sounded to her like, of all things, waves hitting the seawall. “If I ever needed stuff.”

Sensing he had finished whatever he was doing with that ghastly arm, she turned back. “The nurse said your name is Rihaku?” She looked down at her notebook. “Pardon me for asking, but you don’t look Japanese to me.”

He turned his head slightly. His right ear was gone. “I’ve had so many names that I can’t remember ‘em all. But I always liked that one best—Umi no Rihaku.” He smiled. He had two teeth left. She turned back towards the window again. “Know what it means?”

She grinned despite herself as she watched gulls circle a shrimping boat in the distance. “Rihaku the sea,” she answered.

“Yep,” he chuckled again. “You’re pretty good for a youngster.”

She took a deep breath and turned back to him. “Well, let’s just say I’ve been around the world more than once.” She tried, she really tried, but found herself focusing on the wall above his head. “How many names DO you have?”

“How many languages you speak?” He smiled again, but she wasn’t looking.

“Was that a question?”

“No, darlin’, that was an answer.” He made that strange gurgling noise again. “I reckon I got a name in just about every language you speak and probably close to a dozen you don’t.” She forced herself to look at him and her eyes narrowed as he continued.

“Not counting those new made up ones like Esper...”

“Esperanto?”

“Yeah, that one.” He coughed. “Stupid people ain’t got enough different ways to talk past each other, they got to go looking to make up more of ‘em.”

She jotted down some notes. “I guess you’ve been around a while,” she said without looking up. “Exactly how old are you?”

He drew a breath. “Now, that’s a really good question.” He closed his good eye for a moment. “I’m gonna have to think on how to answer that one.”

She noticed a chair near the window and pulled it over to the bed and sat down while he lay there silently for a few minutes.

“Depends,” he answered, finally.

She crossed her legs and peered at a spot on the wall behind him. “On what?”

“On how bad you wanna know?”

Oh, yeah, she thought, here it comes. She reached for her purse.

“I told you I got no use for money,” he said, making that strange noise again. It was starting to sound a bit familiar to her. “You listenin’ to a word I say?”

“Of course...”

“Well, you sure as hell ain’t lookin’ at me, so I gotta ask.”

She stood up. “Look, I’m sorry if I wasted your time, but I really don’t know if I can do this...”

“Of course you can, darlin’, you got the waves in your eyes. Your pretty ass ain’t made for sittin’ and your feet got a lot of miles on ‘em. I can tell, darlin’, ‘cause I’ve seen thousands just like you, though maybe not quite as good lookin’. Hundreds of thousands in my time. Maybe millions. Hell, they used to pray to me, you know.”

She sat back down.

“You liked that last part, eh?” He grinned. “Yeah, okay, so maybe some of that money of yours found the right hands. Not many of those left, I reckon. Who was it?”

She put the pen to her book and forced herself to look at his good eye. “Is it really that important?”

He smiled and it only grew wider when she didn’t look away. “Naw, I guess it ain’t.” He looked at the window and reached for the bed controls. “Not much left to fear, anyway.” He continued to stare out of the window as the bed rose to give him a better view. “And I kinda figured once I couldn’t move no more it was just a matter of time before someone tracked me down.” He wiggled what was left of his eyebrows. “I’m just happy it was someone as pretty as you.”

* * *

She tossed her bra behind her and heard it fall on the sand a foot to the left of her shirt. She could feel the very salt in the air as it swept across her breasts. It tickled her nipples. But it didn’t make them hard. They’d been like coral for a half hour now.

Ever since she heard His voice.

Even now it carried from wave crest to wave crest and every bill of every gull and egret for miles around sang His opera.

Slowly, solemnly, she stepped into the water. Even through her boots and trousers, she could feel His touch. He called to her, begged to her, cursed at her, but she simply smiled. She was no slut. Sandra Marie Sutherland was no mere whore to be commanded, even by one such as Him. She had always loved playing hard to get and He would have to work for her.

But she tweaked her nipples and giggled just to give Him a proper incentive.

Stepping up to her knees, through her leathery boots, she felt His hands around her ankles, His lips upon her toes. This was more like it. She laughed. She called his name, taunting him playfully. Wondering aloud how the Master of the Deep could be thwarted by mere cowhide and human engineering.

But just as the last of her words escaped her lips, the sand beneath her turned to ice and she fell backwards onto the beach, her back descending onto sheets of silt and salt, her head cushioned by a pillow of brackish water hollowed suddenly in the sand and her yellow hair caressing the shells and pebbles at His command.

She lifted her head and laughed loud and hard as she watched the waves flow over her legs, invisible fingers tugged at the laces of her boots, a strand of seaweed, long and thin and strong, slid underneath her and snaked between her legs. She felt him rush between her socks and her pants and jet up her legs and his teeth grasped hard on the metal of the zipper and she heard a gull cry in victory overhead as the fabric ripped itself from her waiting hips in all four directions.

She broke into fits of giggles as she brought both hands down to the front of her panties. “No, no, please, no,” she laughed as she watched her boots sprout fins and finally swim off her feet.

“Help me!” she tittered as the strand of seaweed slid across her stomach and between her breasts and silty fingers rose from the sand to warmly caress her earlobes.

Slowly and passionately, wave after wave formed thin sheets of foam that lathered over the skin of her legs and hips and stomach, sliding softly and warmly over every inch of her lower flesh, glossing and polishing and oiling away the cursed dryness of her birth, making her over into that which could be blessed by His nature.

Of this, she could say nothing. Her lips could only tremble at the glory of the seduction. She could never, in a hundred lifetimes, dream this.

Her arms lifted from about her sex and lay floating in His hands, His watery mouth taking each finger in turn, each nail cleansed to the root and the fragile hairs inhaled and combed and replaced as they were. His sand rose up between her toes, scouring the tender bottoms of her feet, and she could feel his tongue tenderly tasting of the flesh about her ankles.

Tears began to roll down her cheeks to her mouth, her salt mixing with His upon her lips.

The waves came more frequently now and she could feel the sand beneath her begin to move again. Sensing His intentions, she opened her legs for Him. Holes opened up in the earth beneath her feet and as each of them fell into place, she felt the sand cover them and grasp her ankles firmly. Velvety sheets of silt ran up and down the underside of her legs to her thighs and back down again.

The green and blue seaweed strand was suddenly joined by dozens of its slimy brothers and sisters. They wrapped themselves around her arms, and under her back, weaving a mesh of salty rope that slid into knots about her wrists and elbows. Foam from the tips of larger waves kissed and licked at her breasts, one after the other after the other after the other in an unending assault. Involuntarily, she spasmed, her back arched up, but the waves rose up to meet her and the kelp rope tightened about her, forcing her once more to the sandy bed.

“Fuck, yeah,” she grunted.

Deep within, she felt her own wetness rush out to meet his. She could feel His fingers on her cotton prison, the only remaining remnant of her dryness. “Fuck, yeah,” she repeated. “Do it.”

“Do it!”

Suddenly jets of water whipped around and between her thighs. She could feel the water pressure around her hips and waist increase tenfold. Something hard pressed firmly against her throbbing clit. Ten thousand microscopic fingers slid between the cotton and flesh and pulled in ten thousand directions. The seaweed constricted, squeezing her arms together underneath her. A tendril of sand shot up from the sandy bottom and danced between her asscheeks.

She screamed.

More than once.

* * *

“You got all your fingers?” He was still staring out the window.

She closed one eye and peered at him. It was getting just a tiny bit easier for her now. “Yes, last time I looked.”

“Nails painted?”

“Uh, no.” She glanced down at the pen in her hand, just to make sure.

“Good.” He turned back to her. “I got no use for decorations no more. Used to be a big thing with the Children, some kind of holdover from the old days, I guess...” He craned his neck and peered over the edge of the bed with his good eye. “How ‘bout your toes?”

Instinctively, she shuffled her feet underneath her chair. “I don’t see as how that...”

“Let me see ‘em.” His neck made an odd, slight crinkling sound—like Christmas wrapping paper—as he edged further out over the bed.

She drew her hands into her stomach and grasped the pen and pad tightly. “Really, I don’t...”

Suddenly his head drew back over the bed and he stared right through her. “You want to know how old I am? Take off those sandals and show me your toes.”

She hesitated for a moment, then smiled. Fucking dirty old man. She unfolded her legs from beneath her skirt and stuck them out and rested her feet on the side of the bed. “You do it.”

His head did not move. Neither did his lips. “That is not our pact.” The voice rumbled, low, slow, vibrant, and seemed to flow in with the sea breeze through the open window. Startled, she turned her head there for a moment and raised a hand to her neck.

He cackled loudly as she turned back to him. “I learned that from a holy man down in Peru, back before there was a Peru.” He pointed to her sandals. “Now show me your toes.”

She took off her sandals and placed them below her chair, then raised her legs, one by one and placed them on the side of the bed again. She noted he barely glanced at them as he spoke. But that thought rested in the back of her brain for only a bare second, because the voice, that amazing voice, seemed to flow from everywhere and nowhere. It hung about her ears like mist, tickling the hairs within her very lobes and running right down her throat.

Again, his lips did not move.

“For every toe on your right foot, I have lived two lives. For every toe on your left foot, with the exception of that especially cute little one, I have lived a thousand years per life. Your left thumb represents the ten percent of all my lives spent in quiet contemplation of who and what and why I am and how I came to be. For every other finger on your thankfully unmanacured hands, I have wasted ten percent of all my lives in hedonistic and violent pleasure, existing only to fulfill my carnal indulgences.”

As he spoke in that marvelous voice, she found her eyes move down to her feet, then her hands, until finally she was staring at one thumb that was extended in front of her face. She blinked, then shook her head. Her pad and pen lay on the floor.

“And you’re lookin’ at the leftover thumb, darlin’.” He laughed and leaned back to look again out of the window.

After pausing only a moment, she picked up her pad and pen and did some quick mental calculations. “Nice trick, but your really can’t expect me to believe you’re THAT old,” she sighed. “And you know you can’t really ADD percentages...”

He smiled broadly at her math lesson, peering out the window and changing the subject. “You know why they built that seawall out there?”

“Hurricane, I imagine,” she shrugged. “Now, what exactly did you mean by the...”

“Not just a hurricane, darlin’, THE hurricane,” he interrupted. “Blew in here about a hundred years back, killed more folks than damned near every hurricane before or after. A Lover’s knife, it was, and the reason I’m sittin’ here talkin’ to you now. She tried to get me then ‘cause I snubbed Her one too many times, I reckon, but I thought it was actually kinda sweet in a Medea kinda way. So I stayed around these parts, just to piss Her off.”

“I’m not following.”

“You were gonna ask about that last thumb, right?” He turned back to look at her. “Why I’m sittin’ here talkin’ to you like one of the locals crabbers down on the piers instead of in ancient Greek or Latin or somethin’.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” she smiled and put her pen to pad again in anticipation.

He cackled loudly again, then that voice went low and soft and rolled across the room like a dense fog. “It’s ‘cause I AM one of the local crabbers down on the piers, darlin’,” it whispered. “After thousands of years of tryin’ and tryin’ I finally got it right. And She don’t like it one bit.”

She started to jot something down, then stopped. “She?”

He leaned back in his bed and coughed. “Take off your shirt.” He said it casually.

“I will not,” she smiled and shook her head as if he made a bad joke.

“The nurses know better’n to come in here unless I call ‘em.” He winked at her with his good eye.

She laughed. “I don’t take off my blouse in front of just every ordinary crabber, you know.”

“Fair enough,” he exhaled through that wide, toothless smile. “We can talk about something else, then. Maybe about what the best time of the day is for watchin’ the dolphins? Or where along the beach you can find all the best shells. I know tons of stuff.”

She looked at him for a moment, then put down her pad, gave a heavy sigh and reached for the bottom button.

He turned back to the window. “Now, I don’t know what you come here thinkin’ to find, but I figure it was some good-lookin’ hunk with magic tricks and death rays or whatever, ‘cause that just what those folks who took your money told you to expect. Well, truth is, most of us that been around a long while are not a whole lot different from you right now.”

She’d reached the third button and paused for a moment.

“The world sees this nice, smooth, pretty synthetic skin ‘cause that’s what we want ‘em to see, but underneath it’s all appendectomy scars, bullet wounds, cuts that never healed right, elbow surgeries from tumbles down hills...”

She stopped at the top button and bit her lip as he turned and looked through her again.

“Scars from bad boob jobs.”

She crossed her arms in front of her and started to get up.

“What?” he shrugged. “You wanted magic tricks, I’m giving you magic tricks.”

She sat back down, but kept her arms crossed in front of her. The smile was gone. The bravado was gone. She hung her head and slowly, very slowly, opened her blouse to him. “I...”

“You come to me seeking to walk where there are no footprints. To swim in a sea that has never tasted human flesh. You look at the moon each and every night and do not see the Eye of the Ancients, but only a place where there stands an American flag—a symbol of the reach of mankind. You come to me hoping that there is a place for Sandra Marie Sutherland in the written history of the world.”

As the blouse fell from her behind her shoulders to drape over the back of the chair, he drew a heavy sigh and looked away.

“Sorry, darlin’, but what you really want is somethin’ I just can’t give you.”

* * *

She leaned back in the sand and smiled up at the sun. They always told her that you cannot look at the sun without harming your eyes.

Her smile grew ever wider as she stared.

She studied the trees, the bushes, the clouds. She imagined the clouds were sheep, mountains, elephants, barbecue potato chips, her grandmother’s smile. The peak of Everest, where she left her wedding ring. She closed her eyes and saw Pepi, her pet dog, the first of many. She saw them all, remembered their names. The last one somehow turned into George, the captain of her high school track team, so she quickly opened her eyes to look at the sun again.

Glorious. Rolling every so slowly towards the horizon.

She felt a slight change in the waves as they lapped at her breasts, so she instinctively looked down to her legs as they rested in the sand. A small crab chased a piece of carrion as it was swept over her right foot. It turned its eyes ever so slightly towards her and one claw seemed to point to her sex before it captured its quarry and shot off sideways into the distance. She laughed and turned back towards the clouds.

There was a horse, a gelding she used to ride. Her mother’s house in Manchester, the one with the fireplace and marble statues in the hall. One of the squirrels that she used to feed pecans to. She closed her eyes again and looked hard for Enrique. Ah, there he was, in his flight jacket and cap, smiling as always. The vision of Candace Bernard, her father’s first ex-wife, wagging her finger at her and telling her she’d never amount to anything. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes.

She lifted her head and turned to the left. Not much to see, unfortunately. Sand. Shell. Bits of rock. She looked hard for an ant, a scorpion, a bug of any kind.

Finally, after a few moments, she sighed and turned back towards the clouds. An igloo, just like the ones she saw from the dog sled five years ago. A Chinese dragon from the Year of the Rat celebration in Hong Kong. A long, thin layer that looked like...no. She giggled and closed her eyes. There was Noe, walking across the darkened room towards her, his massive cock swaying and bobbing in front of him like a dowsing rod that had just discovered the Pacific Ocean.

Which, of course, it had.

She laughed so hard, she had to open her eyes. The wetness trailed down her cheek.

Again, she felt a slight change in the tide as it swept over her breasts now, and she looked down.

A conga line of brine shrimp was dancing slowly towards her, rolling this way and that in the tide. The first reached her pussy lips and gave her a kiss before turning and darting off into the distance. The second did the same. And the third...

She rolled her eyes. “Not yet!” she said, and waved her arm at the watery horizon in front of her. “I’m not ready yet!” She watched as the last of the shrimp did its duty and vanished from view.

“Fucking romantic,” she giggled, and turned her eyes back to the sun.

* * *

She bit her lip, closed her eyes. There was a large stone in the depths of her stomach that was made of lead. Her throat tightened.

“Can’t give me?” she finally managed. “Or won’t?”

He gave no immediate answer, save that strange gurgling noise deep in his throat. Put a hand to his scarred and wrinkled forehead and rubbed his good eye with a bony finger. From somewhere outside, a seagull cried. “You really don’t know what you’re askin’,” he whispered.

“I pray.”

“I know, darlin’.” He drew an audible breath. “I’ve heard enough of ‘em to know. I’ve heard ‘em pray for rain, pray for wind, pray for calm. But mostly pray for safe passage.”

“Then you understand.” She wiped the wetness from her eye. “I even applied to NASA at one time, but failed the psych profile. By the time there’s viable private ventures, I’ll probably be too old.”

He looked out his window. “Nothing much up there to see anyway,” he said. “You can’t taste it, feel it, smell it. It’d get old five minutes after you go weightless.”

“Climbed Everest twice. Been to the spring of the Nile, touched both poles, walked across every major desert. Every direction except up and down.”

He adjusted himself in his bed. “Trouble is, darlin’, the place you pray to explore isn’t really a place. It ain’t up or down, right or left.” He turned to her. “She’s a lover who chooses Her Own by birth.”

“I don’t...” She felt the stone down there growing ever larger as he continued.

“Whoever you spread your money around to sold you ocean front property in Arizona, darlin’. It’s kinda like air and water. You don’t swim in Her as much as you breath Her. And your kind just ain’t born with the right equipment.”

“So, it’s not...possible.” Her face lost all color and fell into her hands. And settled there.

A blast of warm salty air blew into the room and drifted about her like a blanket, slowly moving the strands of her long yellow hair this way and that as she let the wetness flow. He swallowed hard and that strange sound moved up and down his throat as he studied her. Shivering and sobbing like the widows and children at the thousands of memorials on thousands of beaches throughout thousands of years. They once prayed too, with prayers unanswered, their wetnesses merging and dripping into the little river in a way he could barely hope to understand.

Until now.

He lifted a finger to his cheek and touched it. Lifting one eyebrow, then the other, he brought that finger to his good eye and studied it in awe. Sniffed at it. Tasted it. Hungrily, he poked another finger to his cheek. But it was dry now. Dry. The irony was not lost on him.

He looked back at her as she bent down to retrieve her shoes.

“I didn’t say it was impossible,” he said in that voice, now soft, low and full of beckoning.

She sat up and reached for a sleeve of her blouse which she used to dry her face. She noticed him watching intently as she did so but didn’t pay much attention, as his last words still echoed. “Please?” She sniffed.

He drew a breath and closed his good eye. The humidity in the room seemed to rise as he spoke. “First, I feel I got to tell you a story. You’re not the only one with dreams, darlin’. I seen thousands of ‘em come and go. Some want somethin’ from me, some want to give me somethin’ because they think I did somethin’ for ‘em.”

The large mirror on the wall behind him began to fog up as he continued. “There was one guy I remember really well. He was a kind of an explorer a lot like you. He wanted to look Her over long and hard and find out how to make Her do stuff for him. So they went out dancin’ and they danced for years and years and years, until he finally figured out what made Her tick, even found out how to make Her cum. And when I tell you they made mountains move, I ain’t exaggeratin’ by much.”

He opened his eye and turned towards the mirror. Sandra could see the water forming streams running this way and that on its surface as he spoke. “Anyway, turns out that even though She could keep dancin’ forever, he eventually got tired and wanted to see his Kinfolk, his Children and other lovers and such and decided he didn’t want to dance no more. But by then they’d danced for so long that She got real jealous and wouldn’t let him go. So, with both of ‘em being the stubborn sorts, they finally came to an agreement that She’d let him go for years at a time, but he’d have to promise to come back and stay for a visit every so often or She’d take him back forever and never let him go.”

The water on the mirror swirled and danced in circles as he smiled. “But in order to make sure he kept his part of the bargain, She kept a hold on his body and only let it out when She said so. So he became sort of like the water he used to love so much. She let him loose as a cloud, he came down to earth as rain, got swept down into a river and finally back down into the sea where she reclaimed him. But to make sure he always came back, She would change him a little each time so that his Kinfolk wouldn’t even recognize him anymore, and refused to grant him any favors all those years he was away.” She watched in amusement as the droplets of water twisted this way and that, forming ever-changing faces on the mirror.

“Anyway, after years and years of living like this, he gets those waves in his eyes again and decides he wants, like you, to go where none of his Kinfolk have ever gone before. So he sends Her a nasty message saying he wants a total divorce and jumps out of the river on to dry land before he ever gets to the sea. He finds he really enjoys crawling and walking and running instead of swimming. He catches all sorts of ugly land diseases, like malaria, the plague, ebola, smallpox, you name it, he gets it. But She keeps chasing him and kissing him with her wetness and won’t let him dry up, no matter how hard he tries.”

Sandra smiled despite herself. “And, I bet he ends up in a hospital bed in Galveston,” she interrupted.

He looked at her and frowned. “Oh, you heard this one already.” The droplets on the mirror formed a smiley face, then ran down to the bottom in a hundred tiny rivers.

She put her hand to her mouth to suppress a laugh.

He chuckled. “Okay, I got another one I know you ain’t heard.” He winked with his good eye. “From one explorer to another.”

“Try me,” she said with a defiant smile, she shook her hair back, and put her hands on her hips. Her nipples stood out from her small breasts like bullets.

“You got any tattoos?”

“No.”

“Piercings?”

“No.”

“Good for you, darlin’.” He turned back towards the window. “Kids today got no respect for their bodies. Like they think they OWN ‘em or somethin’.” She detected a hint of sarcasm, she was beginning to understand the eddies and currents of that marvelous voice. “Take off your skirt.”

This time there was no hesitation. She stood up and let it fall to the floor around her feet.

“Everyone knows the Amazon is mighty, but few know all her secrets. When she talks to Mother Ocean, she speaks loudly, feeding Her fully one-fifth of what She needs to replenish the lives of her countless Children and Grandchildren. Her voice speaks with such power that it reaches out and into her Mother for three hundred miles in all directions. Still, she knows her place in the cycle. At her mouth lie dozens upon dozens of islands, each caught up in the never-ending conversation between Mother and daughter. Upon one of these islands is a sacred place where the Children and Grandchildren have come to make sacrifices to Mother and daughter for centuries. There, even within the very powerful throat of her daughter, Mother’s voice is louder still. It is a place of power and you can hear it and smell it and taste it if you have knowledge in the ways of the endless cycle.”

He turned again to her and his voice was like a horn through the fog and mist.

“How much are you prepared to sacrifice for your dream?”

* * *

As she watched the sun make its exit, she searched the sky for the Eye of the Ancients. And laughed when she thought of that American flag. It seemed like years ago, that conversation. She started picking out stars as they uncloaked. Those astronauts could have their empty heavens. None of them would ever go where she was going.

A sudden and unexpected noise caught her attention. Thunder. She turned her head to her left. Dark clouds. Dark beautiful clouds. One last gift from her new Mother-in-law. Or was it from her new Mistress? She giggled. Absolutely giddy. She could not feel the rest of her body now, but she knew, positively KNEW she was wet down there. She thought back to that time in college when she and Debby Wilson had that drunken bet about who could stay wettest the longest. Poor Debby had no chance. She’d been wet for days now and it looked very much like she’d stay that way forever.

The water lapped at her chin, a reminder that she had business elsewhere.

Lightning flashed nearby. She tried her best to catch it out of the corner of her eye, but each time she turned her head to look, it was gone. Psych! What a tease.

She could hear the drops coming miles away. Then yards, then feet. As she felt the first of them on her left ear, she heard His voice rumble from nearby. She lifted her head as much as she could manage.

A water spout. Tall. Dark. Magnificent. A pillar of His glorious wetness, dancing this way and that upon the waves of the daughter’s mouth. Strange sounds mixed with the small drops falling all around her. She turned her head one last time. All manner of fish were falling from the heavens into the sand around her. Crabs. Shrimp. Squid. A tarpon fell onto its back ten feet from her and flopped this way and that before making its way back into the waves. She laughed.

Written record, indeed. Demeter. Amphitrite. Aethra. Medusa. Sandy Marie Sutherland. Write it down, Candace Fucking Bernard.

He nibbled at her right ear now, kissing the hollow of her neck. She could feel something twisting her hair behind her, braiding it with warm, wet fingers, pushing it down and underneath her head. She stared up at the dark clouds with pure, unadulterated passion.

“Fuck yeah,” she whispered to Him. “Do it.”

His tongue licked at the sides of her mouth, warm and salty. She laughed hysterically. “Okay, yeah, I swallow.”

At that, a bit of foam jumped up and into her nose. “Well,” she whispered to Him, “actually, I never have, but there’s a first time for everything.” He leapt up to ravage her lips. “And I always wanted to use that line.”

She closed her eyes and opened her mouth to receive Him. Down He went into her willing throat. Again. And again. And yet again, until she choked.

Once.

And only once.

* * *

“Sacrifice?”

She could barely see him through the watery haze that filled the small room. Her body was soaked, her hair laying down behind her shoulders.

“Yeah, darlin’, I know you gals today think a sacrifice is not havin’ kids ‘till you’re forty and millionaires, but it used to be a bit different back in the day.”

She instinctively reached down to her belly as he continued.

“Back then, gals used to throw themselves into rivers and oceans. Never their idea, of course, always some old geezer who thought he knew best behind it all. Hardly ever did ‘em much good either. And you know the sad part of it all? No one I know, old or young, ever paid much attention to all those kids thrown in all that water. ‘Cause it ain’t really a sacrifice if you got no choice.”

“All those little girls had dreams, just like you and me. Dreams that drowned along with ‘em. That kind of thing does no one no good and just makes the water ugly and dirty. Some of ‘em even had those waves in their eyes. I seen more than my share of it from both sides of the water now and it don’t make it any easier knowin’ I used to be one of ‘em that laughed at those old geezers thowin’ their daughters away.”

She could feel him looking at her. “You have any kids?”

“No.” She hung her head, her hands still on her belly. “The doctors say...”

“More old geezers who think they know best,” he interrupted and made that strange sound again. “Kin of the kin of those folks who had those kids drowned for rain or good crops. All those “virgins” they would throw away. I mean, how the hell they know they’re virgins? So they throw the ones that ain’t had kids, ‘cause that’s easier to tell for sure.”

Her hands moved slowly down her belly to her panties as he continued.

“But they all had dreams. Dreams that died. One thing that comes from livin’ on dry land for so long is that you come to really appreciate what real sacrifice means. You can’t just dive in the river when someone’s tryin’ to hurt you, so you marvel at those who can manage it for their entire miserable lives. And you really come to appreciate their dreams because they aren’t just somethin’ they can wait forever for and know their dreams will just walk up to them because all they have to do is live long enough. Makes their sacrifices really powerful.”

The mist soaked her through to the bone as she stood up.

“That fella I was talkin’ about earlier, that other explorer. He had a dream once too, and thousands of years it took him to get right up to where he could stare it right in the face.”

The slickness of her legs helped the underwear slide smoothly down to the floor.

“And then, just when he figured he’d gone and done it, some silly kid with waves in her eyes and a dream of her own comes down to the water aimin’ to throw herself in. And she doesn’t even have any old geezer pushin’ her.”

She walked over to the side of the bed, her bare feet sliding across the cold tile floor.

“And he starts thinkin’ about all those hundreds of times he laid there and laughed at all those other kids who drowned for someone else’s dreams. All those prayers he ignored or couldn’t answer.”

The fog was so thick now that she could not see. She felt for the bed sheets and found them there, wet and dripping. She closed her eyes as she pulled them back. And listened to that marvelous voice, thick as the mist that filled the room.

“And he throws up his bony little arms and says, fuck it, what’s another couple thousand years to someone who can afford to wait?”

She felt his form flowing underneath the sheet and lifted her legs to straddle it.

“’Cause he now understands how much her kind of sacrifice really matters.”

She reached beneath herself with two damp fingers and spread for him, lowering her wetness to meet his.

The air around her began to move as he rose up to meet her. She felt a slight pressure on her petals as she went lower and then her entire insides were engulfed, her small body bloated with him as he filled her. So sudden was it that she almost fainted, both hands lowering instinctively to the sides of the bed as she fought to keep her balance. She groaned with pain and pleasure and her abdomen cramped horribly and it took every effort to fight to keep her legs and thighs from failing. She could feel him rise within her, never lowering, only higher, ever higher. Her stomach, lungs, throat, breasts, even the tips of her thousands of hairs felt him now. His glorious wetness.

Mist swirled around her face, neck and ears and just when she felt her body could take no more of him, it was over.

One last whisper in that voice. That amazing voice.

“Thankee, darlin’.” Then it was gone.

She awoke, startled, to the sound of gulls screeching in unison outside the window. The bed beneath her was empty, save for the wetness. His glorious wetness.

It stood an inch deep in all corners of the room, filled the walls, the closet, the little yellow trash can in the corner. Her shoes.

She lifted a hand to her belly. It groaned in response. Water leaked from beneath her. She touched herself, then brought it to her lips. Salt.

She laughed. Loud.

Turning to the window, she waved a hand at one of the gulls that had landed on the sill. “What?” she asked with a smile. “No ring?”

It just stood there, perched, and cocked its head from one side to the other. She wagged a finger at it as her feet splashed their way to retrieve her very wet clothing. “You go tell him Sandra Marie Sutherland is no common tramp.”

She smiled as it let out a shrill cry and departed. “Damn right, you better hurry,” she chuckled.

* * *

“Damn, girlfriend, you’re a fucking mess.”

Sandy didn’t answer. She was busy bobbing up and down in the surf.

“Can we please do something about this?” she asked Him.

“Well, darlin’, most of the time we just let the crabs have ‘em. I mean, they gotta eat too, right?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“Nope. C’mon, you gotta stop thinkin’ like you’re still driftin’ on the waves of the little river.”

“Make you a deal. I’ll try and stop thinking like that if you stop talking like that.”

“Sorry, force of habit.”

“Wow, this is so fucking cool. Been together less than a day and already we sound like we’ve been married for years.”

“Bah. Humans.”

“Hehehe, you’re so funny. So, where do you usually go on your honeymoons?”