New England Romance

The young man stared at her legs, thighs and sex. Her pants came off and seemed to disappear underneath the leaves, but her boots remained fastened on her feet, and her hips swayed back and forth as her feet pushed into the ground. It seemed for a moment that she had more power than the earth itself, the power of her boots weighing down on the dirt; the world's very foundation crumbling and swooning underneath her presence.

The young scholar stood, just barely keeping his composure on his two feet as his legs wobbled in front of the lovely neighbor. His mouth remained ajar and he licked his lips as a reflex that he couldn't stop. The special neighbor's eyelids fluttered shut and stayed that way, as if she transcended the ground she stood on and reveled in the glory of displaying her body to the young man. Her arms raised above her head while she danced. The young man almost lost touch with his surroundings completely, paying one hundred percent attention to the neighbor in front of him.

At this point, he couldn't even tell how far apart they were, and even though she stood a good distance from him, it seemed that they were interlinked, and he had no awareness of space or time. The young scholar also didn't know if they continued to move or if the ground moved underneath them and he could feel the earth rotating, just as he would soon feel her hips rotating and grinding over his erect penis.

He didn't feel the slightest bit inclined to hide his erection as it almost seemed to tear through his jeans, twitching and throbbing at the special neighbor's every move. She was still gasping and speaking in her own incantations, her own language to her own body, and he couldn't tell if she was speaking to herself or if she also spoke to him. He simply stared and watched, lightly stroking his own shaft through his pants, while she stood, seemingly oblivious, in her own world of nakedness and pleasure.

SNAP! He heard a branch fall again, this time louder than ever, and snapped back to time and space, remembering that they were standing in the woods without any trail. He realized that any of the droopy, lopsided trees could fall and kill them at any moment. Yet, he couldn't bring himself to say anything to this gorgeous entity in front of him; he needed to let her shake her hips, speak in her own language and linger. He wanted to linger with here, too. Whatever plane she was on, he ached to join her. CRACK! He heard another fall, and there was an echoing sound, or more of a repeating that he at first assumed to be an echo, a sound that shot through the woods, a sound so powerful that it seemed to have texture and could knock down the trees by the sheer virtue of its own loudness. Are these trees speaking to each other? The young man wondered. Nonsense. Impossible. That's irrational and superstitious.

But nothing that had happened so far this day was rational: he had only to look at the supreme woman in front of him to see that this, right here, was the stuff of his dreams. His fantasies, his philosophical inquiry, his thoughts while strolling down the city sidewalk, seemed to all amount to what existed in this moment. He wondered, Where will I go after this? What will I live for? Indeed, this seemed to be the kind of world he wanted to live in; the quality of adventure that the exotic girl who teased him couldn't provide back in the city.

The falling of the branches kept repeating but the sound transformed, and now it grew quieter so that the young scholar didn't know if it was actually happening or if he imagined the entire noise. This was especially the case because he lost track of the moment of evolution between the loud snaps and the quieter, mournful sound that was now happening. It wasn't even a snap, or a crack, nor a hitting-the-ground anymore—this was a sound he couldn't pinpoint. But there was a distinct sequence in which he heard the new sound:

First, the wind pushed itself through the trees, in a faint whistle that turned to more of a breath. For a moment, he thought he heard breathing, and he knew that he couldn't be hearing the special neighbor, as she continued to stand, gasping and panting, speaking to herself in between gasps and touching herself. No, this was a quieter breath, like a constipated depressive on the toilet, and it became unclear whether he heard breathing or sobbing. As he thought he heard breathing, goosebumps formed on the back of his neck not because of the cold air but at the thought that a living entity breathed down his neck without apparent location or substance. But then, the breaths became harder and while before, they seemed to be happening underneath the ground (as he couldn't locate the sound), now they were emitted distinctly above-ground; they were harsher, like sobs, with distinct beginnings and ends. There were moments of silence and the sobs escalated, growing louder and louder, and suddenly a sadness washed over the young man that was beyond his escape or control.

Chunks of ice fell from the trees onto his convex spine. He covered his ears; he could feel his ears fill with fluid and they ached as the sobs continued. His eyes began to feel fatigued, as if he had been sobbing himself. This can't be, he thought. I'm in control. The sobs stopped and for a moment there was silence. The special neighbor continued standing in front of him but for a moment, she stood seemingly motionless.

Two more sobs and they developed sudden cracks, and the young man sat, hearing these choke-like sobs, beginning to cry himself, sitting there helpless. He cried out to the special neighbor:

"Are you hearing something? I don't know what to do."

She looked at him, her eyes widened with that innocent curiosity that she had the moment that her breasts first appeared in the woods, and she nodded her head in one of the most out-of-context ways he had ever seen.

"Yes? Well, maybe we should..." he began to say. The special neighbor laughed, as if in agreement. She continued dancing, her boots intact and pushing into the ground.

The cracks became so intense that the sobs turned to growls, but the distinct growls of a female, and it became clear to the young man that he heard an old woman. He even smelled an old woman's skin, and could feel the precious dryness of an old woman's knuckle between his fingertips. He thought he felt an old woman's sandpaper lips on his own, and first he shook his head, spitting. After a moment, he stood, a deer in the headlights.

"Hey...I...I need to go." He declared. The special neighbor smiled, nodding her head vigorously, but then her neck moved with her head in such a sensual way that he couldn't tell if she nodded her head or shook it. She brought her hand down to her sex and started stroking herself.

The growls in the woods intensified and the young man felt something touch his stomach. He screamed. His stomach sucked in and his entire groin became a rock. He looked long and hard at the droopy trees only to find an old woman with hollow, white irises clinging to a tree-trunk. She leaned against the trunk, bent over, wearing a sea-green coat with a mahogany stain on her back, and she stayed against the tree, her mouth moving. She looked away from the young man, simply clinging to the tree-trunk and muttering to herself. The branches lowered, the growling rung in his ears, and the special neighbor danced, touching her own vagina, purring and gasping, speaking in her self-created language louder and clearer than ever.

The young scholar looked from the old woman to the special neighbor. He stood and stared at both women, and while he tried desperately to fixate on the neighbor gyrating and touching herself, the old woman stayed in his peripheral vision, her brown smear, white eyes and corpse-colored skin haunting him. His erection shrunk and he kept sucking in his stomach as if someone impaled it with a pedophilic hand.

The old woman clung to the tree-trunk. Her fingernails dug into the wood, and the young scholar sucked in his stomach with greater and greater force as he saw her penetrate the wood with her fingers. She began to tremble, and her little shakes gave way to full-body rumbles as the young man watched her fingernails descend like termites into the wood.

The special neighbor resolved to never tell anyone what happened in the woods. She kneeled next to the young scholar, who lay comatose on the floor of his parents' home. The house was deserted and cold: his parents escaped for the city, and there was nothing in the house but a bunch of flies, spaghetti noodles hanging out of every orifice in the furniture, out of the cabinets, squiggling out of the stove and microwave, as if the ice storm contained a germ that snuck into their refrigerator and prompted the already-cooked spaghetti to explode everywhere in the house. An empty milk carton stood on the kitchen island, looking frozen.

As the neighbor knelt, she drew a portrait of the young scholar while he lay asleep. She supervised a fire in the young man's woodstove. As she drew the young man, her eyebrows seemed to sink. She formed her lips into a disingenuous smile, one of tension and discomfort. She sighed repeatedly as if she struggled to catch her breath. She kept touching herself to test the idea that her body still existed. She looked at the spaghetti flying out of the cabinets, then to the young man lying on the ground.

The young scholar awoke. The special neighbor smiled at him. What was it he had seen in the woods? He couldn't call to mind what had just happened.

"Your kitchen's a mess," the neighbor said. The young man looked around, swa the spaghetti noodles hanging out of the cabinets and they looked like they were slithering out, over the wood, landing limply on the marble counter.

"This is what happens when my mother cooks spaghetti and leaves it in the fridge," the young scholar said. He saw the pot, with tomato sauce, sitting on the kitchen island and continued to look back to the noodles, which were now swinging back and forh out of the cabinet doors.

The young man retrieved a bottle of wine from the part of the counter next to the refrigerator: "Salmon Creek." He opened the bottle and poured each of them a glass.

"What's your life like in the city?" the special neighbor asked.

" It's different. I'm trying to appreciate it back here more. It's chaotic back there, and I work too hard."

"What are your friends like?"

"Well—people cry a lot. And have sex a lot. Sex is very important to people."

The special neighbor laughed. The young scholar decided to take a risk: he picked up a romance novel from his bedroom shelf; one that he purchased ot of curiosity and frustration long ago. He grinned at the specical neighbor.

"Are you serious?" she asked him.

"I love these books," he confessed. Once again, he hated himself for attempting cleverness, but he explained how he finds romance novels sexier than any pornographic videos most young men watch. He said all of this to remind her of his uniqueness—to demonstrate that the type of literature that arouses him says something about the way that he makes love. He wanted her to know that he would savor every touch, every kiss, every stroke, pull and thrust with her. The special neighbor laughed at him. The young man cleaned up the spaghetti,, pulling each dangling noodle out of its spot in the cabinet, wiping up the smears of meat-sauce with a napkin and placing them in the trash. He imagined, in a gesture of spontaneity, jumping on top of the dining room table, spaghetti noodle in hand, staring down at the special neighbor and stripping. Once he abandoned his pants, he would take the sauce-covered noodle and wrap it around his penis, glaring at the neighbor with bedroom eyes as he made a clown show of stroking himself—even strangling his shaft—with the piece of spaghetti.

Instead, the young scholar and the special neighbor sat down on the living room sofa, drinking their red wine. The young man ran his finger along the outside of the glass, staring at the legs that the wine left inside the glass. He needed a distraction from his neighbor, as her laughs minutes before embarrassed him.

And she continued to laugh at his penchant for romance novels.

"They're just...not real. Those are books that fifty-year old women read when they're bored with their husbands."

"I like them. They're scandalous! They decorate sex in a heightened, pretending-to-be-proper language and it's—sexy!" the young scholar sheepishly tried to defend his taste, and it occurred to him that he didn't seem so much the intellectual.

"You're so funny," she said, her voice like velvet, as smooth as the legs inside the wine glass. The special neighbor grabbed the young man's chin and kissed him softly, and when his tongue carressed hers he felt he rolled his tongue around in a bowl of honey, with each sweet portion sticking to each side of his tongue the moist substance expanding, stretching and sticking until their salivas met along with their flesh. His tongue entered her cavernous mouth and went deeper and deeper, not reaching her tonsils since her mouth seemed to possess its own modality, a bottomless well of pleasure for his tongue to roll around in. They kissed and kissed. She was soft, deliberate, sensual. Her lips clung to his, as if the top and bottom lips wrapped around each other in their own micro-embrace.

The neighbor fell backwards on to the couch so that the young man now mounted her. She no longer wore her boots, but her jeans remained firmly on her legs and the young man made clumsy groping gestures in a half-hearted attempt to rip through the pants. Why this sudden half-heartedness? He wondered to himself. Am I tired? But it occurred to him that the day's events escaped his memory, so he couldn't even justify his own tiredness or apparent lack of desire for the beautiful specimen underneath him.

The young man knew, in his gut, inctinctively, that he had felt a strong surge of desire for this woman before, not so long ago. He felt it buried away, like an energy that he needed to conjure, and he suddenly felt deprived of his own manhood. His penis remained flaccid, he wasn't erect and a dread of impotence plagued him. The young scholar searched his neighbor's face for any traces of resentment she may have expressed, but her eyes were closed so he found her impossible to read. Nevertheless, his own stiffness killed the sensuality that their moment had previously promised, and, more than that, the steamy sexual encounter that the day had promised.

But what was it that the day had promised? What happened that day that promised something? The young man thought and thought but couldn't come up with an answer. He thought obsessively, and the neighbor sensed that something was wrong so she plunged her tongue further and further into his mouth, grabbing his thigh, a gesture of repression and charging ahead. She didn't want to think about the woods. Yet, when she tried to charge ahead, groping the young man's thigh, he pulled back even more. The only desire that he currently experienced was a desire for desire. He reluctantly endured her hand on his leg and tried to reciprocate the touch in a manly grab, only to meet with an uncomfortable tension in the neighbor's own legs and genital area.

The more the special neighbor grabbed onto the young man's leg, with increasing effort, the more the young scholar tensed, pulling back and finally sucking in his stomach, an inward cry of protection and he felt like a child tied up in the woods, naked, with duct tape over his mouth and ropes around his wrists and ankles, receiving a brutal, bloody spanking against a tree trunk. At this, he almost remembered something. His desire for desire intensified until he began to cry. At first he tried to stifle his tears, even fighting to hide any traces of a sob from the special neighbor, but he couldn't help sobbing and in a single moment, two tears fell from his face onto her skin.

Once the young man started sobbing he couldn't stop, and he released his sobs gently, clenching his eye sockets together like a tragic hero's anagnorisis. His stomach sustained its own tension, as if something inside him clung to a memory,a truth, or a notion. He didn't know what was the object of his clinging and what he felt that he ran after, but something inside him was running, even as he felt paralyzed on top of the special neighbor, his sweaty hands now limp on her jeans.

The special neighbor tried to remedy his sadness with a kiss but when he started to cry like someone in mourning, she backed away from the couch. Soon, his sobs came out like holy water from an inexhaustible well, and when she asked him what was wrong, he just kept sobbing, a broken record. He felt something stretching inside his stomach, trying to open him up, and simultaneously he felt that comething castrated him, cutting through the middle of his testicles and leaving the lumpy flesh out on the floor—a force that he was suspicious tried to stretch his soul into a woman's, to stretch his entire upper body and stomach, lungs, internal oblique muscles into a widely opened vagina, so that he could no longer worship his own phallus. Meanwhile, he knew what he most tangibly clung to; a notion. Even in this most visceral moment on the icy evening, the young scholar posited that he had a notion of desire—that he believed in desire, and he believed that he once possessed a strong desire for this particular woman, but that he couldn't feel or sense a desire. The feeling that followed his notion, desperation, mania, chaos, surged through him, a raging rapids in his blood stream that would seem to change the color of his skin or light him on fire. His sobs continued until they started to sound familiar to him, and they began to sound like sobs that weren't his own. They contained repitition, with sharp beginnings and ends, but with cracks and crevices in which they gave way to growls and grunts. He began to sound like an animal; his eyes reddened and welled up with tears. He saw the special neighbor move away from him, but seemingly without any movement of her own will or her own two feet. She now wore her boots, and as they pushed into the floor, the ground seemed to push her along, away from the young man as she floated above the surface. This looked familiar to him, the placement of her boots, the floating quality with which she moved, and especially the way in which she seemed so close to him in one instant and so far away from him in the next. He watched her in a distinct moment of silence, and reflected that his sobs had possessed his body and they seemed to originate in a force distinctly designed to simultaneously snatch his burning desire and to push the special neighbor out of his vicinity.

The young scholar arose in spite of the sobs that he choked out of his system, and as he lifted himself from the leather sofa he struggled to escape his own skin, like a panic had seized him and his movement was an attempt to liberate himself. The special neighbor had floated out of his sight, disappeared while the young man's tears blocked his vision, and currently his notion of desire turned into a more tangible feeling. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, he thought. Or does it just tease one with longing and lust?

What began as a notion started to manifest more as the other two options: a memory and a truth. His desirous longing was so clear that his eyes developed red veins. Never in his life had emotion possessed him as much as this moment. He cried out, with an indecipherable ear-splitting feat of the throat, "Hhhyouuugakkriiarra" in hopes of the neighbor hearing him, but he cried through the sob. It occurred to him that his cry resembled something that the special neighbor herself had once uttered, a time when she spoke in a non-english language, a moment that he couldn't locate in his memory.