Seven Kinds of Flowers

Lisa woke up only when the train stopped. She had spent all night trying to fall asleep in her second-class seat. Apparently, she had eventually succeeded. The seat had actually not been the biggest problem, the light had been. It never got completely dark this time a year, not this far north. Lisa suddenly felt her heart jump as she noticed that the sign outside said 'Bastuträsk'. This was her stop! Suddenly she was wide awake and sprung into action. She grabbed her rucksack, hurried down the aisle and made it out just in time.

Tuva was waiting for Lisa at the station, though not on the platform. There was no platform. There was a station building, but it didn't seem to be in use as such any more. Tuva was the only person as far as the eye could see. A smile erupted on her freckled face, which was framed by half-long dark hair, when she saw Lisa.

``Welcome to the North!" she said and embraced Lisa.

``Thank you." Lisa said and looked around at the few buildings around. How could a town, if you could even call it that, this tiny have its own train station?

``Let's go." Tuva said and motioned to the one car on the little area with leveled dirt that functioned as a parking lot. It was a Volvo that looked to be on its third decade. ``It's pretty close; just an hour and a half." she said and looked at Lisa as if to gauge her reaction. Lisa opened the car door carefully. The window was held in place by duct tape and she was almost afraid that the door itself would come loose.

``You really can't do anything without a car out here." Tuva said, almost apologetically. ``I bought it last week from a Finnish guy for 700 euro and I'm gonna sell it before i go back to Stockholm for next semester."

There were a few houses by the road right outside town, but then there were only fir trees.

``Aren't you afraid that the car will break down?" Lisa asked.

``Yeah, then I'll have to eat noodles with a side of noodles til' Christmas."

``But how would we get someone to help us?" Lisa said and looked at her phone, which had zero bars of service.

Tuva shrugged. ``It's summer, we won't freeze to death if we have to wait a bit."

Lisa shuddered. It was easy to imagine that you really might freeze to death if your car broke down around here in the winter, but today was midsummer's eve. Lisa's friends had thought that she was crazy to go this far north to celebrate.

The conventional option was be invited to go to someone's vacation house in the countryside, preferably in the archipelago, to have a traditional dinner and dance around the maypole. All of the vacation houses that might reasonably be in question for Lisa were cramped cottages where you had to argue about who would spend the night in a sleeping bag on the floor. But not having your own room wasn't supposed to matter. On midsummer's eve you were supposed to sneak away and fuck under the open sky, anyway, and pray that you weren't full off ticks when you got back to the table. Most likely, though, no one would get to fuck, unless they got too drunk to mind the ticks, and some nerd with a beard would just lecture about how the shortest night of the year was traditionally believed to be suffused with erotic energy.

Within Lisa's circle of friends privilege of a traditional midsummer's eve celebration was reserved for couples, and Lisa was between boyfriends. Some of her still-single friends had considered it a minor betrayal for her to leave the city and not party with them like usual. They thought the thing she was going to instead sounded weird, even though Lisa hadn't told them about the sex part.

"I think it's really cool that you're doing this, but it will also be cool if you change your mind at any time." Tuva said with a dead-serious expression.

"We've done stuff like this before." Lisa reminded as reassuringly as she could.

Tuva had introduced her to sexual performance art. They met close to a year ago through Lisa's boyfriend for the explicit purpose of having a threesome. The boyfriend was now an ex, but Lisa and Tuva had jointly put together a performance piece with the title "masturbation tutorial". It was structured as an object lesson where they took turns in the role of 'the teacher' and 'the demonstration object' to show different techniques. The delivery was dead-pan, as if they were really trying to teach their audience how to masturbate better, but the real point was the social commentary in the subtext. No more than a dozen people ever saw the piece, but Lisa was still really proud of how it turned out. It was the first artistic thing she had ever done and to her great surprise it felt good, not just OK, to expose herself to the not-quite-strangers of Tuva's extended friend group. Lisa had meant to invite her own friends too, but got cold feet at the last second.

"This thing is different, though." Tuva said, still concerned. "It's totally OK that you're not religious, but some people really do believe."

Lisa realized that she had seemed flippant. "Yeah, I know this is serious." she conceded.

"It's my heritage." Tuva replied sincerely.``There are written sources from as early as the sixteen hundreds that talk about fertility rituals, but the practice is probably way older than that." she explained. ``Isn't it awesome!" she continued, enthusiastically. ``Female sexuality as an object of worship! I think that when the practice was banned in 1879, that can be understood as an example of the state enforcing patriarchy." She paused for a moment. ``I don't think I have told you, but right at the end of last semester I got the OK to write my master's thesis about that. My advisor wants me to include the colonial aspects of the imposition of Christianity on the Saami indigenous people as well, but I guess that's fair."

``Congratulations!" Lisa replied emphatically, but she felt a sting of envy. She had a topic for her master's thesis as well, but not one that excited her nearly as much. Tuva had this cute, nerdy way of getting excited about stuff.

Tuva stopped the car next to a wooden one-story building with a cross on the door. Next to it was an almost comically small church, probably not much larger than someone's living room on the inside, made from rough-hewn stone. Beside it was a wooden steeple painted red.

``Is this the place? I thought..." Lisa asked, surprised.

``The priest here is really cool. She doesn't mind the traditional stuff at all, even though it's technically pagan." Tuva explained, with heavy air-quotes around the word 'pagan'. She leaned over to Lisa's side. ``I'm so happy you are here." she whispered and quickly kissed Lisa on the cheek before she opened the car door. Lisa felt butterflies in her stomach.

There were a few other cars parked, but no other signs of people. The wooden building, which was apparently the church hall, had a cast iron stove as it's center piece. A half-dozen tables and a commensurate number of chairs were arranged around it. The only person inside was a woman with ginger hair down to her waist. She was collecting and stacking chairs. The contours of her slender body could be seen through the impossibly thin fabric of her thin linen dress. Even though there was no electric lighting, it was clear that the woman wasn't wearing any underwear.

``Are we the only ones doing the ritual?" Tuva asked with a hint of concern in her voice.

The woman turned around. ``Freja is cutting birch branches for the decorations. We carpooled from Umeå." she said. Her face was even more conspicuously freckled than Tuva's.

``This is Lisa, all the way from Stockholm." Tuva said.

``I'm Siv." the red-haired woman replied with a cautious smile.

``Pleased to meet you." Lisa said and tried not to stare at Siv's pointy little breasts, which were almost as visible through the thin fabric as if she had been completely naked.

``Hello!" a voice said through the door. From the bright rectangle emerged a blue-eyed woman with intricately braided blonde hair. She was wearing a dress with embroideries. The fabric was opaque, but there wasn't a lot of it: barely enough to contain her generously proportioned breasts. It was so short that when she bent over to the freshly cut branches down on the floor, Lisa found herself staring at her pussy and asshole for half a second before the woman straightened out the fabric.

``Oh Hi! I'm Freja!" the woman said and extended her hand to Lisa. She tried to seem unfazed even though she must have realized what had just happened; Lisa could tell she was blushing under her make up. Lisa was blushing, too, when she shook Freja's hand and introduced herself.

Tuva opened her rain coat. Underneath she was wearing a black lace body. The fabric that covered her breasts crotch was so thin as to be almost irrelevant in practice.

``I think I'll go change." Lisa said, cheeks now deep red. She had worried that the dress that she had packed for the ritual would be to revealing, but now it seemed like it would make her look like a prude instead.

---

About the time Lisa was finished with her make up, there was the sound of another vehicle pulling up. A moment later, the door opened and a woman entered. She could have been as young as fifty, but it was hard to tell. She wore a dress with embroideries, in the same style as Freja's but not at all revealing.

``Anita!" Tuva said and rushed up to shake her hand. ``I'm so glad you are doing this." She gushed and reinforced the handshake with her left hand.

``I'm happy to!" Anita said and smiled warmly. Then she turned to Lisa. ``You must be the guest from Stockholm." she said politely and introduced herself.

``It's OK to fake it, right?" Siv asked. ``Even though it's a turn-on for me to have people watching, I don't think I would be able to actually come in front of a literal audience."

``If all goes as planned, it will all come naturally. Just go with the flow." Anita replied. "But first, we have to think about the issue of consent." She produced a stack of papers from her backpack. "I'm afraid we have to be a little formal. The way the ritual is usually practiced, we pretty much have to assume that no one is sober enough to give consent in the moment." she continued and handed out the papers to the young women. They turned out to be forms.

"So these are the things that we are going to let strangers do to us?" Tuva asked, probably to give Anita an opportunity to clarify to the group.

"Yes, but remember that you can always withdraw consent at any moment." Anita replied. "You're not from the BDSM crowd, so I probably don't have to clarify this, but there is no safe word or anything like that. Just say 'no' if you mean 'no'."

Lisa signed at the dotted line after only a moment of hesitation. They were to play the part of virgins, which meant that there would be no penetration during the ritual, not even with fingers. The consent form reflected that. When everybody had signed Anita collected the forms and gave a small bracelet in return.

"This is what we call a 'consent bracelet'" she explained and put one on her arm, only to remove it again with a small tug. "See how easy it is to pull off? If you don't have it, it means you have withdrawn consent for everything."

The four other women nodded.

"Now that that's taken care of, lets measure your doses." she asked and produced a wide-necked bottle from her backpack. She held it up, beaming with pride. Inside was a small bouquet of flowers. It was preserved in the spirit to such an extent that it almost seemed fresh, just a little faded. The colors had leeched into the alcohol and given it a pinkish hue. Lisa didn't recognize any of the flowers -- not that she would, she was a city girl -- but she counted seven different kinds.

"You really got the whole bouquet in there. Cool!" Tuva commented and proceeded to find a glass for each of them.

"This stuff is really powerful, we should start with just half the dose." Tuva said in a serious voice. "If you want none at all, that's fine too. You can participate anyway." she added.

Anita carefully measured 20 milliliters and poured into for each of four vodka glasses, that were shaped like inverted cones on stems.

"If you had asked like a week ago, I could have scored some MDMA." Siv said skeptically.

That seemed to Lisa like an option that was hard to beat, but she didn't say anything.

"No, this stuff is really powerful!" Tuva insisted. "They say that if you pick seven different kinds of flower and put them under your pillow on midsummer's night, you will dream of the man you will marry. Some scholars argue that this is where that folk belief came from: this stuff can cause vividly erotic hallucinations, and the recipe contains seven herbs that flower around midsummer. The connection is not that far fetched."

Siv shrugged "I'm pretty sure that I could have scored some 2C-B, too. Then we could do a nexus flip. I've had vividly erotic hallucinations on that." she said.

"I prefer natural over synthetic. Me and my husband have had some pretty powerful experiences on mushrooms." Freja said with a conciliatory smile towards Tuva.

Siv took a sip from herd glass and made a face. "Oh my god, that's bitter!" she commented.

"Are you ready?" Tuva asked with trepidation in her voice. "If you want to back out, now is the time to do it."

The other three young women raised their glasses. Anita nodded slowly.

"Cheers!" Tuva said and drank up. The others followed her example.

They all put on their consent bracelets. Anita went around with a marker and wrote the dose and time on the palms of each of the young women's left hands.

---

``Do you feel anything?" Tuva asked and Lisa shook her head. Then she noticed that something seemed to drip down the wall. When she looked closer, she saw the grain of the wood panel twist and form naked bodies, male, female and everything in between, intertwined in an infinitely complex embrace. She couldn't stop staring at the evolving pattern, which got more and more pornographic the longer she looked.

``Do you feel anything?" Tuva asked again and Lisa could finally pry her attention away from the wall. What she saw when she looked at Tuva, she could only describe as angelic: her freckled, blissfully smiling, face with the twinkling brown eyes and the cute little nose, framed by her half-long glistening dark hair. Her pupils were so dilated that you could hardly see the irises, which made her even more beautiful.

``You're pretty." Lisa said, not so much as an answer but as a general comment. Tuva's breasts were as freckled as her face. The usually wide, dark pink areolas had contracted and were bumpier than before. Lisa had once sucked those nipples, and the memory came back with shocking intensity. Tuva didn't seem to mind her staring, but rather seemed to bask in the attention.

"You too!" Tuva replied emphatically and Lisa's eyes found their way back to hers.``My skin is so sensitive!" Tuva continued, fascinated, and ran the fingers of her right hand over the back of the left one. A shudder went through her body and her nipples went fully hard. Lisa almost instinctively extended her own hand to Tuva and she gently gave it the same treatment.

"Wow!" Lisa said as the same kind of shudder went through her own body. It was as if the sensation reverberated several times before it subsided and left her hungry for more.

Freja and Siv were making out on a sofa on the other side of the room. They both had their legs spread and caressed the insides of each other's thighs. When Lisa turned to Tuva again, she found that she was staring at them as well.

"It's time to get going." Anita said. She had to repeat herself twice to get the attention of the two women in the sofa.

---

It was so bright outside and so much life everywhere. Flowers and insects, fresh grass and fresh leaves. The air felt almost like it does before a thunderstorm, except that the charge was sexual rather than electric. Lisa had to concentrate to walk, had to keep her eyes firmly trained on the ground, which somehow seemed to heave and pulsate. Time and time again she got distracted: by lustful moans that she wasn't quite sure whether she had actually heard or not, by naked figures that did wonderful things to each other right outside her field of vision so she had to constantly turn her head, and, most of all, by Tuva's firm little butt that moved rhythmically as she walked in front of her. Lisa couldn't stop touching herself: running her fingers over her lips and between her breasts, even sneaking a tickle of her nipples.

At some point Lisa stumbled. Tuva turned around and caught her. For a moment, it seemed like all that it would accomplish would be to send them both tumbling, but they ended up on their feet in a wobbly embrace with their faces mere centimeters apart. They couldn't not kiss, and they couldn't stop of their own volition. Something inside Lisa kept repeating the phrase 'I love you' in different voices, but she wasn't sure if it meant anything. Eventually, someone tapped Lisa on the shoulder. After the second time she turned her head and squinted to Anita, who was the one who had done the tapping.

``We're almost there." she reminded encouragingly and pointed down the gentle slope to the meadow in front of them. A maypole was erected in it's center and a quartet was performing 'Ievan polkka'. At first Lisa didn't realize that she was hearing music but rather felt a rhythmic modulation of the pulses that permeated everything, which she had now accepted as natural though she was not certain when they first appeared. Then she noticed that there were words; she was concerned by the fact that she didn't understand any of them until she realized that they were all in Finish. People were dancing hand in hand around the maypole to the music. A bit to the side, so as to not impede the dancing, tables were arranged in a U-shape.

"The virgins have arrived!" Anita shouted as soon as they reached the meadow. The people instantly stopped dancing and turned to them. Then there were applause. Freja started giggling at the sudden attention and the other girls joined in as Anita led them to the table. Theirs was the place of honor at the central table, directly facing the maypole. People were seated only on the outer side of the table arrangement, like one might sit at a conference, so that everyone could see each other. Out of habit, Lisa scanned the crowd for single men and was disappointed to find none. Then she remembered that this was a fertility ritual and, except for Anita and the symbolic 'virgins', only couples trying to get pregnant would be there.

The table was already set and the dishes were covered in plastic wrap, which some of the still-sober attendees went around to remove. Lisa couldn't care less about the food, which was standard midsummer fare: smoked and cured salmon, pickled herring, a variety of pies, salads, and spreads, some of which were clearly marked as vegan. There were no alcoholic beverages on the table, only water and fruit juices, but there was a vodka glass for each person in addition to the regular drinking glass.

Lisa sat with Tuva on her right side and a woman that seemed to be in her late twenties or early thirties on her right. She politely introduced herself as Malin and the man to her right as her husband Kalle. She mentioned that they were from Helsingborg, way down south, even if you counted from Stockholm, and that she worked as a some kind of analyst. Her husband was a coder at a start up in Copenhagen. When she noticed that Lisa and Tuva were more than a little distracted by each other she cautiously asked if they were a couple.

"No, we're just horny." Tuva said with a straight face and stroked Lisa's thigh. Lisa responded by kissing her.

"Have you tried that traditional vodka?" Malin asked as soon as she could get Lisa's attention again.