Seven Kinds of Flowers

"Yeah, it's great!" Lisa replied emphatically. A short, whispered conversation between Malin and her husband followed.

Once Lisa tried the food, she found that she enjoyed it. She must have been hungry, though such trivialities as food had no place in her mind. Anita went around and served vodka from the bottle with the flower bouquet, or one just like it.

"Just half a glass, please." Malin said.

Anita measured 10 ml of pink liquid for her and noted the dose and approximate time on her hand.

Malin looked at the writing as if she was about to change her mind.

Lisa looked up from her plate. "Full glass, please." she said quickly.

"Me too!" Tuva chimed in.

Anita poured 20 ml for each them and noted that second dose underneath the record of the first. Tuva poured hers into her apple juice and immediately chugged it. Lisa followed her example. Then everyone suddenly rose. Anita stood in the space between the tables. She held up a vodka glass with a symbolic amount of the pink liquid in it.

"We have gathered here today to celebrate our sexuality and to pray -- and yes, pray is the right word -- for fertility. So let us open our hearts and wombs to each other! Cheers!" She said and drank up.

"Cheers!" the attendees said in one voice and drank from their glasses, but not everyone finished theirs in one go. Malin only drank half of what was in her glass, leaving it one-quarter full. Lisa and Tuva stood awkwardly with their already empty glasses and were the last to sit down again.

"Whoo!" Siv, who sat to the left of Tuva, shouted and slammed the vodka glass down on the table.

"You know, the taste isn't so bad after all." Freja, who was in turn sitting to the left of Siv, said thoughtfully.

---

"You know what, I think it's working already! I definitely feel something!" Malin said to her husband, a little too loud, just loud enough so for Lisa to hear. Her voice was enthusiastic but with an undercurrent of trepidation. She kissed him, tentatively at first and then with more passion.

Lisa felt something as well: an overpowering sensation in her crotch, one that required urgent action. ``I have to go pee." she said, even though a simple 'excuse me' would have sufficed. It took all her willpower to form the words, and for some reason that seemed so funny that she started laughing. It was not until she thought she might actually piss herself that she remembered to stand up. When she got to her feet she wobbled precariously.

Lisa didn't bother to go to the outhouse by the church hall. She just went behind a still-flowering lilac bush, lifted her dress and squatted. But nothing happened. There was no relief and no stream of liquid hit the ground. She felt her pussy with her hand, as if trying to physically find the source of the malfunction. When the two body parts made contact it felt almost like an electrical discharge. Lisa moaned. The kind of sensation was familiar to her, but not the intensity. She didn't have to pee after all, she was just horny. She tentatively traced the outline of her labia with her fingertip and marveled at how strong a sensation that gentle touch produced.

"Are you all right?" someone behind Lisa asked.

"Maybe you shouldn't disturb her." someone else commented calmly. "I think she's masturbating."

It took a moment for Lisa to realize that they were talking about her. At the same time the harsh smell of cigarette smoke mixed with scent of the lilac bush. Lisa slowly turned her head, but she didn't stop moving her hand immediately. There were two women in maybe their early thirties behind her. They had jackets over their party clothes and each had a cigarette in hand. After a few moments, Lisa figured out that she was supposed to be embarrassed -- the feeling was there, but without any real bite -- and she tried to stand up. One of the smoking women offered her her hand, which felt firm and strong. Lisa couldn't help imagining what one, two or even three of its fingers would feel like inside her.

"I'm sorry." she said and winked knowingly at Lisa.

When Lisa found her way back to the table she found Tuva pouting, an unusual state for her to be in. "She wouldn't give us any more!" she said indignantly.

"I didn't get to come!" Lisa complained, suddenly realizing that she had missed an opportunity, and commiserated with her friend.

Malin was making out with her husband, and in between kisses they were whispering to each other. After a while she leaned away from her husband gently touched Lisa's arm to get her attention, which succeeded to the extent that it made her sigh lustfully.

"Kalle and I both think you are really sexy..." Malin started. Now her pupils were widened and she was glowing with excitement. There were just a few lines in her face that suggested that she was any older than Lisa. Now she had taken off her sweater and let her dark-blonde hair down. She was wearing a corset, stockings, garter belt, consent bracelet and nothing more. Her nipples and clit had piercings that matched her earrings.

"We are into group stuff as well." Tuva said and grabbed Lisa's other arm. She didn't seem possessive so much as afraid of missing out.

"I thought you said you weren't a couple." Malin said with genuine confusion.

There was the sound of a horn. Anita stood in the middle between the table with an instrument made from the bark of birch trees. It was almost as long as she was tall. She blew the horn again and then she spoke:

"It's time for the ritual to begin!"

---

The ritual had the outward appearance of a party game: They placed a large sheet on top of the grass in the space between the tables and the four virgins stood in the middle, facing each other. They had the their arms around each other's shoulders, like in a rugby huddle. This had the dual function of to keep their hands occupied, so they wouldn't be tempted to cheat by touching themselves, and to keep them from falling over in case their knees went weak.

"It's like were not even different persons anymore!" Freja said, with utter fascination. Her face was no more than a dozen centimeters from any one of Siv, Tuva or Lisa's faces. They all nodded, they all understood what she meant. "I can feel you! Sexually, I mean." Freja clarified with great mental effort, but pointlessly: they all felt it, but had they not, she could not have succeeded in explaining it to them in words.

Things in the periphery of Lisa's field of vision seemed to shift and melt away, but whatever she was focusing on was crystal clear and somehow seemed significant. Tuva's nipples were pointier than Lisa had ever seen them. They were pitching little tents from the gossamer-thin fabric that covered them, and Lisa could feel how the she could feel them rubbing against it as they moved with Tuva's breathing. They didn't chafe, the sensation was more like someone tickling them with a feather. Lisa could even taste their dark-pink, almost brown, color.

The remaining women, those who had come with their partners, danced around the four virgins to music from an unseen source. Now and then, according to rules which Lisa didn't care about the details of, someone gave one of the virgins a caress. When someone stroked Lisa's butt in that way, she found the touch welcome. She moaned and tried to find the words to beg for more. Someone, maybe someone else, behind her laughed and did stroke her butt again, but more gently this time. What Lisa really wanted was for someone to grab and knead it, but no one did.

"Yes! Yes! Yes! Like that!" Siv approved of some unseen touch. Her nipples, so much smaller and daintier than Tuva's, seemed like they would literally poke holes in her dress and rivulets of sweat had formed on her brow. Lisa wanted to kiss her, but Tuva, on her other side was faster. Lisa could feel the sensation in both sets of lips as they came into contact and it was somehow bittersweet.

Freja, on Lisa's other side, had her eyes closed and was making noises that were not quite moans. A pair of hands had reached in past her chest and pulled down her dress, and were gently squeezing her now-free breasts. Lisa felt a sting of envy, not because of how large and shapely they were, but because she was having them touched.

Someone ran her finger down Lisa's spinal cord, or so it felt. Even through the fabric of her dress, the touch made her arch her back. Lisa closed her eyes, and suddenly she was alone. She saw her own uterus descending from heaven. It was pulsating like a beating heart and a warm light emanated from it. The intensity of the image overwhelmed her, it was comparable even to that of the bodily sensations.

The light and heat came from a point source in the middle. An egg cell, she concluded, recalling a middle school sex-ed class about a decade prior. The same semester she had learned that the sun was giant, churning nuclear reactor. That fact somehow seemed relevant now, as if the egg cell was the same thing, the same power, concentrated inside a sphere of vastly smaller dimensions. For a brief moment she understood it all, this ritual and how it was connected to everything else. Then the egg exploded. At break-neck speed she saw an embryo develop in the uterus, which still belonged to her, like in one of those cartoons from sex-ed. It terminated in a contraction. Thankfully, her subconscious was primed for pleasure, not pain, and its best guess for what a contraction felt like made her moan.

Lisa felt herself overflowing; a drop was forming on her right inner labia. At least that was how she visualized the sensation she felt, which made her whole body tremble; it could equally well have been a small imbalance in air pressure. "There's semen inside me!" she thought "I'm getting pregnant for real!" She opened her eyes, and indeed saw a wet spot on the sheet right between her legs. Panic welled up inside her, but also an inexplicable joy. She summoned a previously unknown reserve of willpower to calm herself. "No. It's my own. I'm not really pregnant." she told herself again and again, even as her mind replayed the fetal-development cartoon. Someone gently stroked the inside of her thigh with a single finger, not even very close to her pussy. "Fuck me!" she exclaimed and imagined a penis entering her, not even to fuck her, really, but to spray her insides full of cum. The image excited her just as much as it terrified her.

Someone still stroked Freja's bare breasts with a gentleness bordering on cruelty -- she was literally begging to have her nipples touched. The breasts started to grow, her belly as well; the nipples expanded and darkened, and started to produce droplets of milk that soon turned into little streams. Lisa knew it was not real. She didn't even really see it, not as a full-blown hallucination, but the mental image was too powerful to ignore. She turned to Siv. Her slender body was even more dramatically transformed by the same type instant pregnancy. The thin fabric of her dress ripped and then hung in tatters around her belly and breasts.

Much of Lisa's experience with the pregnant female form came from a single photo exhibition that she had visited together with Tuva that spring, and when she turned to Tuva a different kind of image appeared. It was a memory, but altered. They were walking together along the quay towards the museum, which was right by the water. The crisp air and the blue sky, the first that they had seen in weeks, were the same, but they where each pushing a pram with a baby in it.

The infinite source of power was still in Lisa's uterus and she vaguely remembered that she was here to share it. She channeled the sexual energy through her arms and legs, like some kind of CGI witch from a movie, and it carried with it a tingling, frothy joy. When it flowed into the other women in the circle Lisa's bond with them was instantly re-established and she could feel what they were feeling again. It flowed through her legs into the ground, where it radiated outwards and made the wombs of women around her light up with compressed stars as well. Even in the endless daylight she could feel their heat and light.

Lisa's clitoris was caught in the middle of the energy flow, like a rock at the fork of a raging river. The sensation this produced made Lisa's breathing go from heavy to quick and shallow. The situation was untenable, the feeling was too intense, but she had to keep channeling that energy. That was what she was here for, people depended on her. Lisa bit her lip and closed her eyes.

"You really can't take it anymore, can you?" someone behind her whispered in her ear and Lisa shook her head helplessly. The next moment Lisa felt how someone kissed the nape of her her neck. It was as if she had been kissed everywhere at the same time: her lips, her cheeks, her neck, her nipples, her belly button, her clit, her asshole, even the mouth of her cervix, though she could only ever imagine what that would feel like. The power source inside her went nova and filled her with a white-hot sensation that totally overwhelmed all perception.

After an indeterminate span of time, which felt both like an instant and an infinity, Lisa found herself on her back on the sheet, with her head resting in the lap of a woman she vaguely remembered having met before. Lisa felt an intense attraction. The twitching of her body, the mouth of her vagina grasping for something to hold on to, was more like an ordinary orgasm now. Later, when Lisa was finally still, the woman smiled at her and Lisa recognized her as Malin from before.

"Thank you!" she said emphatically and Lisa noticed that she had tears in her eyes. "I am sure it will work now!" Malin commented to Lisa and looked down at her belly. "We have been trying for three years, I don't know if I could take it much longer" she continued and a salty tear fell on Lisa's cheek. Then she made eye contact with Kalle, who was standing over them. Malin gently lifted Lisa's head out of her lap, spread her legs and let Kalle put his erect penis in her.

Lisa watched as they fucked and basked in the glow that emanated from Malin's waiting ovum. Kalle pumped his stiff penis in and out in long, deep strokes. Malin braced herself as best she could and tried to pushed back with her pelvis for each one. It worked well for the first then seconds and then she lost the necessary muscle control. She was already coming. Kalle pushed the full length of his penis in and ground his crotch against her. Lisa could see, or imagine, she wasn't sure which, how the tip of the penis touched the egg and made it explode into a fetus like her own had. When Kalle pulled out and a trickle of semen followed and left a stain on the sheet.

It was not until they were finished that Lisa noticed that she, too, was crying, though she couldn't figure out why. In retrospect, she guessed that it was out of sympathy for Malin, Kalle and all the other childless couples.

"What is it?" Tuva asked with palpable concern.

Lisa turned to face her. "I'm OK. It was just so intense." she replied.

"Are you sure? Is there anything I can do?" Tuva asked as if she didn't quite believe her.

"Just lie with me, OK." Lisa said and rolled over on her side. Tuva lay down and spooned her. Together they listened to the ambient sound from birds, insects and couples fucking.

---

"I think I'm coming down." Tuva remarked after a while.

"Me too." Lisa replied, though she hadn't noticed before Tuva pointed it out. The not-entirely-pleasant confusion was mostly gone and the ravenous sexual appetite felt satiated. There was no hint of any more visual disturbances.

Freja poked Lisa gently in the back to get her attention.

"We're going for a walk." she informed. "We're going pick seven kinds of flowers. I've done that every midsummer since I was a little girl, so it would feel weird not to." she explained, somewhat sheepishly. She and Siv walked away hand in hand.

Lisa put her hand on her belly, below the navel. She felt a pulsating glow, that seemed warmer than her body heat could ever account for. What she felt was the mere potentiality of an egg cell; she wasn't ovulating now and she didn't plan to in the foreseeable future. The New Age beliefs held by many of the people in the community did not appeal to her, nor did the ancient pagan creed, which had mostly been lost to history anyway. But it was now obvious to her that the egg was sacred. To worship it felt as natural as to worship the sun. She didn't; but it seemed way more intuitively appealing than to follow any modern religion.

"Do you think we will ever have children?" Lisa asked.

"I don't know. Maybe." Tuva replied and her cheeks became deep red.

Lisa blushed as well when she realized how Tuva had interpreted the question. She thought back at that time they visited that photo expedition. That was the first time that they actually hung out just the two of them. Not the first time they had been alone together. They had worked closely together with the performance and once a late night of editing the script had turned into a whole night of talking about all things under heaven. But the photo exhibit was the first time they had hung out just to hang out, like a date. No, not like a date. She had been so happy that day. The way the first sunny day of spring always made her feel, but infinitely more intensely.

Lisa felt like she had just solved one of those riddles that seem hard but in retrospect turns out to be embarrassingly simple. She knew very well that women could fall in love with each other, but somehow hadn't thought of that fact as an explanation for her own feelings. There was an awkward kiss and an awkward silence.

It felt like Lisa's chest was going to explode. Something needed to get out. "I love you." She finally said.

Tuva stared wide eyed at her for what felt like an eternity, but could have been a few seconds at the most. "I love you, too." she said and they kissed again.

Would they ever have children? If they would become a long-term couple they might well want to eventually, maybe as soon as in a couple of years. Lisa didn't know much about the practicalities of sperm donation, but it seemed like a realistic option.

"Let's go for a walk." Lisa said after a while.

"I've got a better idea!" Tuva said and her eyes once again started to glow with enthusiasm. "My uncle has a sauna down by the lake; I'm definitely not OK to drive yet, but it's only a couple of kilometers."

"That is a better idea!" Lisa said. She couldn't think of anything that would feel better than a sauna right now. It would be like a ceremonial cleansing, which seemed appropriate after a ritual like this one. They would wash off the sex-scented sweat and then they would be clean for each other.