Under a Yellow Sun

I've had a vision of my future. Is it also yours?

We live on a garden planet called Paradise, which circles a so-called "eternity star." The star is a yellow dwarf that coalesced from the primordial hydrogen immediately following the Big Bang. Unlike a main sequence star, it's not massive enough to ever explode. Rather, it's slowly burning its hydrogen into helium, never expanding, never shrinking, just placidly expending its huge reserve of fuel. It will keep our planet warm for another trillion years.

Our amber Sun, which we call Aleph, is one member of a widely spaced double system. The other member, Beth, is an almost-star, a so-called brown dwarf that glows dim red like a charcoal briquette. It provides little light and no heat, but its presence is invaluable; its gravitational pull keeps our planet from becoming tidally locked to Aleph, with one side broiling and the other freezing.

Our ageless, reincarnated bodies are strong, beautiful, perfect. We are hermaphroditic bipeds. I'm a top, with my penis above my vagina. You're a bottom, identical to me in every way, except that your vagina is above your penis. We fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, genitals interlocked, hard sensitive nipples brushing each other, forked tongue to forked tongue, in a state of orgiastic nirvana.

Other favorite pastimes include the 69, cocks in each other's mouth or tongues in each other's cunts. Our hot semen, of which we have an endless supply, tastes like honey; our vaginal secretions are like cream. When we're feeling naughty, we wrap our prehensile tails around our necks, offering up the tight assholes under them. The mounted view from the rear is magnificent: tight, beautifully defined back and buttocks muscles under a carapace of smooth golden scales that catch the light and break it into all the colors of the rainbow.

We move endlessly from one sexual posture to another. Whenever our throats are completely filled with each other's cocks and breathing air is impossible, we simply slide into the crystalline lagoon where the gill slits on our backs spread open.

When we eat, we sit facing each other, still in coitus, legs locked like scissors, supporting each other with our prehensile tails wrapped around each other's waists. With our hands free we eat what is brought to us by the Second Race on the planet.

The Second race are one-quarter our size. They bring us the endlessly varied sweet fruit of the jungle. They live in terror of us because we also eat them; sometimes broiled by our fiery breath, sometimes raw, but never completely devoured. We throw their bloody remains into the magical waters of the lagoon, where they regenerate. After some time, our little livestock crawl forth from the water completely healed yet burdened with even more horrible memories and expectations.

Oftentimes, we don't eat the Seconds, but merely amuse ourselves by torturing them. The venom of our fangs, which tastes like nectar to us, is acid to them; they blister where we spit on them, and boil where we bite them. We impale them on our sharp horns, tossing them back and forth. We whip them with our long, barbed tails. Their shrieks are endlessly amusing.

*****

I remember when we awoke here together, face to face. We were both terrified, the non-human snouts on the earless, snakelike heads, the large red reptilian eyes, the needle-sharp horns, the long fangs. It took each of us a minute to realize that the other one wasn't a strange, threatening dragon-like creature; rather, that we were both dragon-like creatures, and that we communicated telepathically.

You told me your story. You had been left an orphan after your father went to prison and your pill-addicted mother lost custody of you. You grew up in an endless series of foster homes, under the care of mercenary adults who earned their livings from the money the State gave them to feed you and several other children. You were abused in a dozen ways; raped and sodomized by your legal siblings, by your drunken foster fathers, your dope-addled, perverted mothers. Nobody cared whether you went to school; when you dropped out on your sixteenth birthday, you were barely literate and completely innumerate. On your eighteenth birthday, when your foster parents could no longer receive State money to care for you, your foster mother sold you to a pimp.

The transaction was quite straightforward. Your mother came to your room, packed a suitcase with your few, shabby items of clothing, and ushered you into the front room where Jamal was waiting. Jamal was a fat black man with greasy processed hair and hard, evil eyes. You were told that you were to go with Jamal, and not try to come back, "or he'll beat you senseless. And if he doesn't, I will. Get outta here." Jamal later told you that your price had been five hundred dollars and fifty doses of Oxycontin.

Jamal believed in bringing his girls up right. The minute he got you back to his crib he stripped you naked and beat your tender young ass with his belt until you bled. His other whores, veterans as old as 21, stood around and cheered.

Since you were young and comely, you were marketed to a higher class of john; businessmen, bankers, B-list show business personalities. There were no rules concerning how they could treat you. One banker, a sadist, enjoyed choking his girls unconscious while he fucked them. With you, he went too far. Jamal picked up your body and deposited it nude in a shopping mall dumpster. Your total life on Earth spanned eighteen years, four months and six days.

My story was equally gruesome. I had been a beautiful youth, blonde and fine-boned. I had been an altar boy at our family's church, where the priest introduced me to the fine art of fellatio. His successor trained me in buggery -- receiving, not giving. I was a poor student; I had trouble sitting down, and my mind was elsewhere. I decided early in life that I was gay; when I came out to my parents I was summarily thrown out of the house. I was sixteen.

For two years I lived on the edge of the LA underworld as a rent boy. I got the clap twice and was treated by an angel in the guise of a Planned Parenthood nurse who stole antibiotics for me. I have no idea how I avoided HIV.

Despite being a rent boy, I had a clean police record. I had been picked up and cautioned, but never arrested; a beautiful young man who gave exceptionally good head could blow off many difficulties. Despite my truncated secondary education, I managed to pass the GED exam. With these modest prerequisites -- High School diploma, no convictions --I was able to enlist in the Army on my eighteenth birthday and was promptly sent to Vietnam.

The Vietnam War was the greatest hoax ever perpetrated upon the American people. The politicians and their pet generals told us that if we lost that war, a Red Wave would roll over Southeast Asia -- a barbarian communist hoard would seize Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and threaten Australia. This was the so-called Domino Theory.

We did, in cold fact, lose the Vietnam war, and the only domino that fell was South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh achieved his only goal, the only thing he had ever said he wanted; a unified, independent Vietnam free of foreign interference. The people who profited from the war were the usual merchants of death; Boeing, Lockheed, Colt Industries, General Motors, Bell Helicopter.

I survived one month in Vietnam. A green-as-grass grunt, I stumbled into a deadfall and was impaled in the groin by a shit-smeared punji stick. I was medically evacuated to the Philippines but died in agony a week later.

***

Our telepathic abilities allow us to catch glimpses of what sort of people the Seconds used to be; racists, sexists, homophobes, warmongering politicians, brutal cops, kink-shamers, crooked political demagogues, and hypocritical preachers -- many, many preachers. We search in vain for Seconds who weren't villains, but rather ordinary people, neither particularly good nor bad. We can't find any. The bulk of deceased humanity -- and, of course, the saints -- are being resurrected somewhere else.

It's never cold, but the greater warmth of summer brings soaring season. The planet's gravity is weak, its atmosphere thick: we spread our vast leathery wings and soar for hours among the miles-high clouds, screeching with delight. To keep the thin, tough hide between our dactyls smooth and flexible we rub it with fragrant lard rendered from the bodies the fattest Seconds, the ones who, in their terrestrial lives, had been billionaires living in the midst of poverty. The rendering process is deliciously slow, the shrieks of the Seconds are music, and their lard is infused with the exquisite perfume of well-deserved suffering.

And that is my vision of Paradise, both for me and for my eternal partner, whom I've yet to meet. So if you're suffering great pain and terrible injustice, just bear up under it willingly. Your time is coming. I'll see you on Paradise, on a tropical atoll, bathed in the eternal, soft light of a honey-colored sun.