Fair Exchange

The jay flew straight to where a dead oak stood. By its dead roots a stream drained into the lake. Again a horsefly, it flew to the tree top and into the filthy nest made of tangled branches. Dust rose over the nest edge. Two hawks were mating in the nest. One behind and on top of the other. The fly didn't hesitate but bit the female, the one underneath, on its stinking cloaca. The hawk gave a loud surprised cry and collapsed. The fly bit a second time, spitting its pay load.

The fly idled a moment as if it wanted to hang around and watch the fun. It poked at a bit of long dead squirrel. The ardent male hawk had not noticed that his love was now unconscious. He kept on vigorously flopping on her. With a petulant buzz, the fly rose in the air and then again a bird it flew back the way it'd come.

In the ravine, Sam knelt beside his daughter looking desperate. He'd taken off his shirt, a beige knit thing, and covered her chest with it. It was all he had. An opened first aid kit sat tossed aside on the dirt.

She looked bad, completely still, her eyes open, only a bit of quiver in her lips as she breathed and the drool on her chin showed that there was still life.

The man frantically swatted at the fly. Without much effort it evaded him and vanished up her shorts. Again it bit her. Spitting out the mix of blood, soul and her father's essence that it'd carried. The girl jerked suddenly and moaned. Sam forgot the fly and said "Thank God!"

The fly rose leisurely into the air, buzzed about his head a few times in a derisory fashion, then flew up and away.

A moment later the red haired girl lay gasping from exertion on the rock. She rolled on her back, licked her lips and stared at the sky. Of her father, there was no sign.

She rolled back over and looked over the edge. The dad was walking back and forth next to the girl. The girl was still out, but now she looked more like she was sleeping. The guy took his phone from his pocket but then after a moment tossed it onto the ground. "Still no fucking signal!" he shouted.

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Eva woke to heat and fleas and dust and a sharp pain in her neck and excitement in her sex and a hot ardent mess of feathers pressing down upon her. She heaved her startled mate off and then of a sudden she was a naked woman perched in a ragged nest at the top of a tree.

The branch that supported the nest snapped under the sudden weight.

She screamed. The ground lay 100 feet below. She clutched at the branch and missed. She plummeted. Another branch hit her. She grabbed at it and then something else banged her head and something else snapped.

She changed and her wings cupped and ruled the rushing air. She stared at those wings in shock and again tumbled out of control.

She would've hit the ground with a force that would've broken her back, but she was caught. She reverted to human and she fainted.

Her first thought when she came too was, "A dream. Just a dream. I won't drink after exercise on such a hot day ever again."

With her eyes still closed, she realized that she had to be still dreaming. There was far more sun around than should ever have been in the cool of the ravine. She parted her eyes and was confused. Surely the straight blond hair lieing across her face should've been red with a tendency to curl? Surely the flat breasts she felt and saw should've been full? And self supporting though she'd nursed a dozen children? But she was only 22 and had never had sex. She shook her head and felt sick.

A hand touched her shoulder and she found herself looking up into a strange yet familiar man's tanned face. A huge face that filled her vision. His black eyes, alert merciless hunter's eyes, gleamed with amusement.

She jumped to her feet and he straightened. He was the largest man she'd ever seen. He had to be easily 7 feet. And he was naked. His penis was enormous and erect. She realized she was naked too. She put one hand over her sex and with the other she covered her breasts, glad that they were small.

She gaped with shock. She was overcome with desire. She wanted the man more than she'd ever wanted anything. She wanted to jump him and clamp her thighs around him. She quivered and swayed.

The man watched her. In anthropology she'd learned that what made humans such exquisite hunters was their ability to put themselves in their prey's place. His eyes seemed to know everything she thought and felt. The trembling in her legs got worse.

The man laughed and then rumbled, "You are a stubborn little thing. To fall when it's easy to fly, to keep your own form when every cell longs to be my wife, to fight when your very being wants to fuck."

And Eva knew who he was. He was her husband, though she knew she was not married. She remembered fucking him countless times, though she'd never had sex. She wanted him more than anything, there was no confusion about that.

His deep voice rumbled, "I wondered if the first thing you saw, the first suitable thing that is, not a branch or the sun, would be me or my hawkish rival. Fun either way, but I'm glad it was me."

Eva turned and ran. A second later she realized she was running on all fours, her hands had become slim cloven hooves throwing up dust and pebbles each time they struck the ground in her mad gallop.

She all but flew up the bank away from the lake and into the woods. Her skin was covered with sweating brown fur. The world through her eyes seemed all shades of sepia and it was impossibly full of sharp smells and distinct sharp sounds.

Behind her came a deep excited barking.

She turned her head. She looked back along a deer's back. Beyond her bounding rump, she saw a large dog eagerly giving chase. She tripped and fell in a kicking heap. The dog jumped on her but didn't bite. It panted and salivated down upon her.

Automatically she changed. She streaked into the air, her wings a jay's blue. Behind her she heard a derisive call and looking back she saw a goshawk rise into the air to give lazy chase.

She landed on a branch, out of breath, terrified and amazed.

What a dream, she thought, desperate to awake.

She looked about but there was nowhere to hide. She looked a second time and in an instant she was but an ant on the branch, one of a multitude trotting along a scent trail.

The world was filled with a voice that said "Very clever."

She was plucked squirming, a razor sharp beak holding her by the thorax. The bird's tongue touched her antennae and her senses were overwhelmed with desire for him.

Eva became a bear. She grasped the branch desperately with her claws. The bird gave a disgusted squawk and Eva tumbled down the tree more falling than climbing.

Again she became a bird and was off through the trees. She saw a stream and hit it with a splash. A minnow now, she swam swiftly down and slid under an algae slick rock, gills trembling wildly.

There was a splash that sent shock waves of indistinct sound through the water. She seemed to hear it with her whole small body. Before she could dart away, two hands cupped her and the rock and some mud and she was lifted up into the harsh painful air. The water drained off the hand and she flopped about painfully unable to breath.

With a sob Eva changed back into herself. The man's hands gripped her bottom. The cold slippery stone poked rudely up between her thighs.

The man balanced her a moment. The muscles of his arms and shoulders strained. He laughed with triumph, tossed her in the air, caught her and set her down ankle deep in the stream.

She sank down onto the muddy bank and burst into tears.

"A spirited chase," the man said easily, "But incompetent. My wife would've lost me as easily as one of time's happy moments flits from a man's grasp."

He touched her shoulder and she looked up at him and all she could see was his cock and all she could think of was how much she wanted him. The need was driving her insane. When would this dream end.

"Who the fuck are you?" she demanded.

"More to the point, who are you? A bit of a mess is what. The cells of your body are my wife's. Your soul, living within them is trying to be in control and it hasn't got a prayer. They're the cells that helped me take this land, which helped me kill or drive off all who lived here. What a day that was. We are about to relive the love we made that night: you, my wife's your cells and I."

She stared at him without understanding.

"Come with me," he commanded.

The stream ran cool about her ankles. The day was hot with the smell of sun on summer meadow flowers. She sighed and leaned and kissed him on his chest. Her forehead was level with his nipples. He led her splashing up the brook, twined against him. He led her to where the stream parted around a small islet, all moss and fern. He helped her down and onto her back.

"This is my first time," she whispered. Her fright magnified her excitement.

He looked surprised. He slipped one dry and probing index finger up her passage. "So it is," he said with delight.

He knelt over her like an enormous cloud. "This will be our second first time. I will be as tender a lover as I was then."

She reached up and grabbed his hips and pulled him down to her. She vanished beneath him. Someone walking by would have just seen a man lying face down sporting an extra pair of legs and arms. Perhaps some kind of drunken Hindu god. When he found her entrance, any passerby would've heard her wordless shout. A moment later she gasped, "You'll kill me."

He drove all the way in with one easy flex of his thighs. She shouted and wailed again. Her thighs were split painfully wide. Her hands clutched his ass, not to push him off, but to pull him more fiercely down. She felt his balls on knock on her bottom.

He lay still. There was just the sound of the birds and the murmur of the stream and the whine of the insects and Eva's gasping sobbing breathing.

He moved just slightly. She was very tight and the urge to rut was consuming him. His thighs and ass tensed.

She felt a sudden painful cramp in the arches of her feet and in her calves and her whole body shook and she came with a pent up cry of painful excitement.

He fought nature for a moment longer and waited until she lay still. Then he started rhythmically running his cock in and out of her. She came again amid gasping, panting and tears.

The fucking seemed to go on forever. Beneath him Eva did not see the sun fall between the trees. She lay lost in the hot dark, her face pressed by his chest into the moss. The smell of their sex hung steamy about her. Sweat poured off her. She began to sob weakly. She begged him stop. She had come again and again with pain and pleasure. Now she was drained and felt nothing but a kind of boredom and a fearful ache in her cunt and in her thighs.

The first fireflies of the evening flickered about them. She stared at them in a daze, at first not knowing what they were.

He thrust down hard. He grunted and her bruised cunt felt him pulse within her. All his weight sank upon her and she felt that the air had to pass an impossible long way through a tiny cracklike cave to get fouled to her gaping mouth.

In a smooth movement he pulled out and stood. "You're one fine fuck," he rumbled with satisfaction and then he was gone, leaving Eva lying barely conscious on the crushed moss and ferns.

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Hours before, back in the ravine, shortly after the second bite from the fly, Sam's daughter woke with a stretch and a sigh. Sam said "Thank God!" and as her eyes popped open, he bent down.

Her eyes met his. His face hung but a foot above her. Her eyes widened with delighted surprise.

Watching from above, Dawn grinned. Her mother's soul burned so plainly in the slim girl's body that it astounded her that the dad didn't notice. How could anyone be so blind? She laughed and only barely managed to turn the sound into the chattering of a squirrel.

"Oh my darling," the girl said in a tone her dad'd clearly never expected to hear from his daughter, "Have you been worried?"

"What? Oh yes. I think you had an allergic shock to a sting. The first aid kit had an antihistamine. I put it in your mouth but it didn't seem to do any good."

"Forget the pill."

"I tried to call 911 but my phone doesn't get a signal."

"Forget the phone."

"I was so worried."

"My darling, forget your worries."

Her eyes lowered admiringly from his face to his bare chest. Nervously he said, "I was afraid you'd get a chill," he grinned at how silly it sounded, the day was so hot, "I put my shirt over you, it was all I had."

"Forget the shirt." She tossed it to one side and stood and the dad took a step back.

"Eva," he said, "You're not alright. We have to get you to a hospital."

She frowned. "Forget the hospital. Darling, you are the treatment I need."

She took a step toward him.

He took another step back. "You're not feeling well. Don't you know me? I'm your father."

She frowned even more. "I know that. At least I think that's true. But I also know you're so much more than my father."

"What?"

"You're the most desirable man on earth. You're eye candy off the internet. You're the fuck I've waited all my life for. Though I live another thousand years, I'll never meet any man as perfect as you."

He opened his mouth too stunned to speak.

"What sort of idiot wears clothes on a hot day like this," his daughter asked. She widened her eyes playfully, confident of his stunned attention. She pulled off her t-shirt. "You like what you see?"

She glanced down at herself and seemed surprised. "Well maybe not so much," she said dubiously.

"Eva please," he said, "You're not yourself".

"That's true enough," she said, "Hopefully there's something better down here." She undid the buttons on her shorts and let them fall. Her underpants seemed to bemuse her. She seemed to forget him while staring at them. "They're boring. Why wear something if it's boring?" she asked.

"You're bound to like this though," she added and fixing him with another smile, she pulled her white underpants down over her knees and stepped out of them. She tossed them into the stream. It carried them rapidly away.

Even upset as he was, he had to admit that his daughter was a sight.

In his distraction, she surprised him. She took a running step and jumped him, spreading her legs as she flew. She wrapped her legs around his waist and gripped his neck and kissed him hard on the lips.

"Eva," he shouted, "Stop!" He tore his daughter off and set her struggling feet on the ground. He strained to hold her at arm's length.

She said, "I'm gonna bounce your bones till the meat falls off them."

With a strength he didn't know he had, he picked her up, carried her to the pool and threw her in.

She stood with a shout and came splashing for him. "My darling, let's fuck in the stream and boil away the water."

He took one more look at his daughter rushing at him and he took to his heels. "I'm going for help," he shouted.

At the top of the rise something, he thought it was a stick appeared out of nowhere and tripped him. As he fell, he heard a squirrel chattering close by. It sounded somehow gleeful.

He sprawled heavily. His daughter jumped upon him. Her hands reached under him and started to struggle with his belt and the button and zipper of his shorts. "Why are pants so complicated!" she shouted in complaint.

He pushed her roughly off. He jumped up and started running. Brambles tore at him, he tripped on a log. His haste left him too distraught to stay on the path. He turned to see where it was but saw his daughter coming determinedly for him.

"Shit," he groaned. He had to get help. The only way was to get away from her and then angle back to the trail. He turned and ran again.

Eva, or rather the woman in Eva's body, followed him as best she could but she couldn't keep up. She slowed to avoid the worst of the brambles and for a time followed the crashing sounds of his passage, he really wasn't at all woods wise.

That thought calmed her and without the girl's dad in sight, her dad, she thought, then she brushed the confusion away, without his presence, she could think. She began to slip more easily through the woods. His trail was easy to follow. If only she could've changed shape, of course that was it! She tried, but her form stayed the same. Her eyes narrowed as she thought about what was happening, "That asshole," she said in anger.

She felt an irresistible rise of desire and followed his trail as quickly as she could.

She came to a swampy clearing. A large moose browsed contentedly on the foliage at its edge. Its tail flicked at flies in a derisory fashion. There was no sign of her love's trail leaving the clearing. She had been fooled, and easily too. She felt a hot flush of anger.

"You fucking slut!" she yelled at the moose. "When I'm myself again I swear, I'll drive you from these woods and hills!"

Where the moose had been now stood her daughter Dawn, knee deep in the marsh. Dawn grinned easily. "Dad prefers me, I think it'll be you, Mom, who leaves."

"Bitch!" the woman screamed, beside herself. She jumped at her daughter but Dawn'd vanished and all that happened was that Eva's slim form fell face first in the muck.

She picked herself up and sat with her back to a tree. Tears started in her eyes. Idly her fingers began to play with her sex. She jumped up. "Shit! I forgot all about him! My darling man."

She slid easily into the woods, retracing her steps to find where she'd been deceived.

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At first he tried to cut back to the trail. The going was made slow by the tangled growth, the moss covered boulders and the countless sudden steep little hills left behind by particularly vindictive glaciers.

He realized he was steadily rising so he had to be climbing the ridge, going precisely in the wrong direction. Then he realized that if he hadn't left his cell phone back by the stream, he'd probably have reception. He came close to despair then.

He began to follow the "always go downhill when lost" rule. Sometimes he stopped to listen. He half wished he'd hear his daughter and that she would come upon him with all her faculties back in order. He did not go so far as to call out to her though.

He came to where a large tree had been uprooted and had crashed down clearing a sizable gap in the woods. The clearing was grassy with tangled blackberry brambles. It was oppressively hot.

He sat on the trunk. It was soft and spongy with decay. He wiped his forehead with his arm. He looked at all the scratches on his arms and bare gleaming chest. They began to itch all at once.

"Eye candy," he thought, with a tired grin, "I look more like an unhealthy species of toadstool."

"Hey," a voice said.

Before him stood an auburn haired girl. She wore only a white blouse that loosely held breasts that needed no holding. It was knotted at her stomach. She regarded him with a slight smile. She looked impossibly cool and clean. Her skin was the palest milk color and there seemed to be an awful lot of it. Her pubic hair was sparse and only slightly darker then her skin. His eyes rested there.

"This must be a dream," he said in disbelief.

"Think what you like," she said calmly, "It's a free country."

It dawned on him that he was staring. He looked away, flushing.

"And look where you like too," she added, with a grin, "If the country's free, so's the landscape."

"Do you know where my daughter is?"

"Yep."

When she said nothing more, he said, "Look, I'm in a bad mood. Even if this wasn't a dream I'd be inclined to do something I'd regret."

"Try," she said, complacently.

"Where is my daughter?"

"She's taking her ease by the lake to the east of here and she's taking a stroll through the woods to the west."