New England Romance

MEMORY. And truth. That's what was philosophically prevalent in the core of his being, in some space between his lungs, his stomach, his bowels and his inner obliques, where some metaphysical space exists. As his desire was no longer a notion but a cry, he continued his deafening screams: HHHyougakkriiiaarra. But what was he saying? Was he crying out in an indecipherable mumbo-jumbo expression of sentiment, or was there implied content in his syllables? Each time he cried, other layers of complicaion possessed him, plagued him, blocked his faculties of understanding. What seemed at first like a memory, and an emerging truth, instead became that third thing: another notion. He began to see notions of memories and truth, and as he walked out the door, holding his arms out in search of his lost companion, following the perfectly formed footprints of her boots in the ice, further sights distracted him. The trees with their drooping, hanging branches emerged as what he suspected to be illusory, raw data that he saw with his own eyes yet that he was reluctant to accept as self-evident truths. But that wasn't all: the trees also ignited an impulse for recollection inside him, as if he tried to recall a memory. He couldn't tell whether the memory was from long ago or if it was more recent, but those trees spoke to something he intuitively knew, and something about those branches, looking weak, chewed up, dampened and ready to snap or wither away, aroused the young scholar. He felt adrenaline rush through him like fire, and he thought of Heraclitus and a clear sensation of brunette hair tickling his penis not a couple of days before. After a second, he realized that this memory only distracted him—the trees were actually telling him something else. He looked and looked; the trees swayed and swayed. They tried to dance with him, but as the branches reached down to him they poked his ribs, and there was no affection; one may be content to hang the young scholar from any of these trees and their angular shapes and sharp branches would show no sympathy.

The young scholar followed the footprints of the special neighbor, though they became less and less recognizable and they seemed to descend into an unforgiving neck of the woods—one with no path. The only thing that the young scholar could do was to continue screaming the only tangible truth he knew—his desire, no longer a notion.

"HHYOUGAKKRIIAAARAAAAAA!"

His cry split the forest in half. A mass of trees fell in a series of snaps, like a domino effect.

"HHYOUGAKKRIIAAARAAAAAA!"

The ice on the ground cracked. He was only slightly aware of what happened around him, so focused on trying to conjure the memory that rested deep inside him. As trees continued to fall, He realized that trees piled up on top of each other, one after the other, closing him into this little patch of the woods. Would he freeze to death? He stood in a wide open space, almost in the shape of a circle, that seemed designed specifically for him. The special neighbor's footsteps were barely visible, but the young scholar could see them clearly, and they traveled in a circle, as if the neighbor had reached this part of the woods and vaporized at the epicenter where the young man currently stood.

"HHYOUGAKKRIIAAARAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

After a final forest-splitting cry, a single tree remained standing, and the young man heard sobbing much like his own that he experienced a few minutes prior. The sobs turned to grunts, then to growls, then to moans and whimpers. He felt sandpaper against his lips, and the dry knuckle of an elderly woman between his fingertips. He gasped.

First he saw the white eyes staring directly into his own eyes. The old woman brought her index finger to her lip and licked the tip of her fingernail, a tear trickling down her cheek. Her head twisted backwards, as her back was to the young man and she bent over, clinging to a termite-infested treetrunk and the young scholar stared with his mouth open at her shit-brown smear, fingernail and white eyes. Something reached inside him, and it felt like a finger trying to designate a fragment of his bowels. He cried out. But he thought that whatever reached inside him ws trying to tell him something. Was this the memory he searched for? Now the memory was the only tangible truth, but why was it a truth worth pointing to?

The young man could no longer speak. "HHYOUGAKKRIIAARRAA," he cried, through a broken voice, as if one had gone to the lowest octave on the piano. The old woman held out her hands, extending her dirty fingernails where bugs squiggled. She moved toward the young scholar, seemingly without force or movement of her feet, floating to him.

The old woman kissed the young scholar, her sandpaper lips clinging to his in desperate need of companionship. She pulled down hs pants with a light tap of her index finger, and stared at his penis for sixty seconds. While he sobbed, the young man got hard for her, blood pumping away in his penis. The old woman touched it delicately at first, kissing the tip of his penis, beckoning to it lightly with the tip of her tongue. She rested her tongue on his hole for thirty seconds and he exploded onto her tongue. When the old woman touched her tongue, the young scholar's semen sprayed the trees and the street; she made his semen multiply in quantity until it seemed they were swimming in it. The trees, stacked on top of each other, cracked, so that the world seemed to float on top of semen and bark. If they were drowning, the bark would be the life-rafts, but the young man saw no escape. She licked and licked.

The old woman stopped touching and started groping. She touched his thighs with one hand, and his stomach with the other. He sucked his stomach in and started to sob. The old woman touched his thighs and balls, and he sucked in air even faster and harder. It felt like honey was flowing from the tip of her finger, her fingernail was stabbing into his leg muscles and drawing blood and he started to smile through his own sobs. She rubbed his stomach muscles gently and he whimpered, tears flowing like a scared little boy, and he was so terrified of her the only thing he wanted to do was to wrap his arms around her, calling her something that didn't make her seem like a terrifying, dismembering witch.

Finally, he searched for the only thing that may have saved him: his intellect.

"Nature loves to hide," he said.

The old woman vanished. There was silence. He heard an incantation somewhere close to him, something that sounded like a mixture of purring and a language other than English. And there he saw, balancing herself atop the bark, the special neighbor. The young man's semen covered her brunette hair. She held a book in her hands and as he gradually drifted toward her, she gave him the book. He watched her.

The young scholar held the open book in his hands and together, they floated home.