Water the Fire

"Man with a badge found him sweating and drunk alongside the road. Now, I don't have to tell you how little love there is for a gypsy, but for a drunk one there be even less. Old boy hauled my father up and managed somehow to get him into his patrol car. They were driving down the road a ways when the badge decided to have himself a smoke. Despréaux even offered him the light, but I don't think he done it on purpose."

She cocked her head. "They said on the news the fire started because of an engine spark."

"You could say that, couldn't you? Anyhow, what they took little kindness to before, the law really don't like after the fact. And what with the way he's been burning up the whole countryside…"

"Stop saying 'he'. It's a fire not a man. Not your father. Just a fire."

"You ever wonder why my people is so hated?"

"I don't hate your people."

"No," he smiled. "You're quite the exception."

She pulled him tighter. "I guess 'cause you're all so mysterious a folk."

"And then some. Are you ready?"

"Ready for what?"

"When I tell you, take the deepest breath you can and go under." He coughed and spat water. "But don't close your eyes." She nodded, eyes smiling. "Okay," he said. "1-2-3!"

She inhaled deeply and slipped beneath the surface. The world was black but for the blurry glow of the moon overhead. Suddenly, she saw his arms shoot up. His kicked his legs furiously and his body seemed to rise. In another instant the whole sky caught fire.

Her hand shot out and clutched his coattail in fear. He slid beneath the water, holding his face close to hers and pointing up. Pinching her nose, she saw flames dance over the water. The inferno shot suddenly into the heavens and erupted into a mountainous plume orange and yellow.

She swore she saw fiery ram charge over the lake's seething surface. It stole her breath as it steamed past. Bubbles spilled from her lips, and she struggled to get topside. But he held her tight. Her lungs cried out and panic ripped through her body.

Something powerful opened inside her and energy flooded her blood. She clawed and fought him, but he was impossibly strong. She was sure she would drown until he pressed his lips to hers and returned life to her screaming lungs.

Nothing she had ever experienced was so suddenly intimate. Enveloped in his very essence, she drank greedily from his breathe. Her hands went to his sides, and consumed by animalistic hunger she pulled at his pants until they could be kicked free. She wrapped her legs around him once more. His hardness was beneath her dress, pushing insistently against her panties. They rode to one side against his undulations with so little fuss that he was entering her with an ease that caused his exhalation to puff out her cheeks.

His taste pervaded her as the oxygen was absorbed into her blood. Her belly seemed to flood with fire. He was as deep as every desperate unspoken plea she needn't utter. She wanted to sink to the lake bed and give up her last breath before she'd dare let him go. His clenching fingers punished the flesh of her bottom as he moved to draw her deeper upon himself. They were suspended just beneath the lake, its surface a raging inferno.

She drank the last of his breath and it was when he began to climax that water seeped through their bond, unyielding between her thighs and cold where it spilled into her mouth. They came up for air, barely holding their faces above the water for the sheer exhaustion that seated itself in their blood-rushed-and-retreated bodies. He fought achy thighs and she gave back his waist, unwrapping her legs and feeling the savage withdrawal of his sex from hers.

She put her hand down there to feel the viscid detachment of her exposed opening. One fluid spilled from her, warm and copious, as she swam within the embryonic embrace of another. He was beside her, trying desperately to control his breathing. She found herself seeing him in a new light, never mind the shifting wind that brought embers raining down all around them. She was utterly, fantastically consumed by a hungry fire of her own.

It was then that sirens filled the woods with their moaning echoes. Her eyelids flickered and she might have imagined it, except for the bullhorn that annihilated their reclusion.

He reached for the dock ladder, but she clutched him. "We can hide here. We'll be safe."

He looked at her plainly. "I'm the fire breather's son, you know."

The expression she fixed him was one of anger. "So what? They don't have to find us."

"You saw the television. They'll be wanting their reward. It's only the natural way."

She watched numbly as he pulled himself from the water in the early dawn light, the great jacket heavy and pouring with a torrent of moisture. He moved with steady purpose, swinging his arms at his sides, feeling the jacket come alive around him. The coattails swished and snapped, and seemed to curl in derision. The air was charged, incessantly hot and dripping its humid offering from betwixt those heavenly thighs.

The sound her feet made over the heavy dock timber was like somebody bouncing up and down on a diving board. She was running then, and caught up to him right as he dug his toes into the mossy earth and started to climb toward his fate. Clinging to him the way she could, it was a wonder he had any strength left to resist.

Fear stole over her again, but he ceased to feel it like so much else that had passed between them. His heart had ached since his momma went her way with God, but the pain was suddenly gone. It may as well be that his heart stopped beating. He simply did not care. Trees crackled and sparks flew around him. Voices howled agitated commands in the distance.

Resolution runs hot through the blood of a Southern gypsy. It lets him face any number of fates without so much as an askance look. For example, behold what the human swamp rat endures his whole life. You've no doubt heard about the treatment popularized by legend, where unlucky souls are bound face-up and forced to endure a randomly timed drip-drop of water upon the forehead. Supposedly, the device could drive its hapless victim down the road to Insanityville.

Now, don't wander off because you think I'm fooling. Sure, water torture does not quite beat the drum for the exemplars of sadism. As far as cruel means by which to effect a lesson, make a point or evoke some secret disclosure, the administered splat-splat of teensy-eensy beads of water onto an adversary's brow is unlikely to make the cover of Inhumanities Weekly.

But I beg to differ as to the question of water torture achieving a distinct alteration of one's consciousness by force, and I kid you not, the offspring of resolution.

Its journey employs an irritatingly artful element of surprise. It speaks the language of nerve endings rooted and coursing one's entire body. It seems to understand which are radiant and which are corruptible, which curry special favor with the brain and which most readily seek attention. It needs no rest, for in the steamy South it travels by day and by night. Its briny composition is what teases and tickles the senses, but it's the agonizingly slow journey which truly taps the torturous.

Traditional water torture calls for its victim to be bound and immobile so that its genuine intent can be realized with minimal deviation. But for every Southerner, either chaired up on her porch, hammering a shingle into a roof joist, walking a country mile or sleeping fitfully on a bed of sodden sheets, the victims can toss and turn, wipe and blink and whisk and bathe to no more success than a weary arm and a feeble mind. Sweat is not a pair of clothes you can take off. It's a way of life.

As the salt-weighted moisture swims down a temple or trickles down the spine, a man must never fuss. He must take it, and like no other distress, does it mold him to the most resolute creature on the face of this here planet.

And so maybe you can understand, why at that very moment, he would face his wrath as a lesser man might face a glass of iced tea.

"I would force myself on you, if it meant staying your madness." And beyond threatening to do so, she did. Falling to her knees in the mud and wresting his hands away, she clawed open his fly and liked to have swallowed his entire stem. When he did not harden in her throat, she pulled her mouth off him and cried.

"Take me!" she cried. "Do anything. Just do not leave to be shot like a dog." And with that, she employed the utmost will to eviscerate his resolve. Rain washed over her face, and she quaffed his cock once more, wrapping her arms around his butt and forcing his hips to give thrust. And he did become hard. And throw back his head, so that she felt she might succeed.

Fire roared through the trees along the backside of the lake, chewing right to the grassy lip at the water's edge. It seemed to sense the impasse, and immediately split off in either direction, devouring life as it wrapped its seething tentacles around the bank. Suddenly, he gathered the girl in his arms and turned back. She exhaled gently and gave herself over to peace, knowing that he would save himself, feeling no surer sense of love between them.

He reached the end of the dock and let her down. His trousers still hung low and she nuzzled his semi-erect penis, oblivious to the encroachment of fire and fate. He closed his eyes and clung to her as she took him inside her mouth once more. Heat from her tongue coiled itself around his sex, causing his breathing to sharpen.

His fingers moved through her hair as life churned and rose in his testicles. The thrust was sharp and quick when he climaxed, and she squeezed his hips to keep him from pulling away. He brushed her cheeks and dropped his hands to her shoulders, gazed down into her eyes and whispered,

"I'm sorry, my love."

Time slowed, and he knew then that the worst last thing he would ever bear was the look on her face as she fell away from him into the water. A moment later as he gazed drowsily at all those angry faces, he heard his father's words echo through the woods…

We shall water the fire, if only to weather the storm.

The man with the bullhorn touched the badge on his shirt and pointed. "Kill him, then let's get the hell out of here."

Her eyes were clamped shut. She had her hands pressed to her ears to block out the noise. But the heat on her face made her flinch. When she looked up through the cracks in the dock, she saw a brilliant ball of flame floating in mid-air. And just like that, it shot skyward and seemed to climb for no other destination than heaven above. The dock quickly caught fire, and she swam out into the deep to get clear of the debris and the shore.

The fire had completely consumed the woods and all around her it licked the edges of the lake. Smoke swirled overhead like a cyclone through which she could just make out the blue sky, shifting thunderclouds and then a ray of sunlight. The sound was the most intense thing she'd ever heard, but after a while it was all so much that she couldn't be sure she heard a thing.

He was there. She could feel him in the heat that tried to reach out and touch her. But it stayed onshore, swirling and dancing and whispering. Like nothing else, he was beautiful.