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Syndic Literary Journal

Stories by Don Edwards

Stories by Don Edwards

OUR LADY OF AJIJIC / Photo by LeRoy Chatfield

Brilliant Insights

Let me begin by saying I have come upon one of the most startling and curious observations in the course of human history: all songs are cha-cha’s. All of them.

You think I’m mistaken or exaggerating? I shall illuminate your bewildered ignorance. Let us start with an easy one: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

“This Land is your land, (cha-cha) This land is my land (cha-cha)

From California (cha-cha) to the New York islands (cha-cha).”….and so on.

Bob Dylan? Surely not, you would say. Picking one at random: “North Country.”

Well, if you’re travelin’ (cha-cha) in the north country fair (cha-cha),

Where the winds hit heavy (cha-cha) on the borderline (cha-cha),

Remember me (cha-cha) to one who lives there (cha-cha).

She once was (cha-cha) a true love of mine. (cha-cha-cha).”

If you’re still not convinced, play the songs and keep cha-cha time. So is Sweet Adeline, the barbershop favorite.

“Sweet (cha-cha) A- (cha-cha) deline” (cha-cha-cha). I need go no further.

The Star Spangled Banner? Definitely a cha-cha. “Ohhhhh say (cha-cha) can (cha-cha) you see (cha-cha-cha) by the dawn’s (cha-cha) early light (cha-cha-cha)?”

Waltzes? Polkas? Definitely cha-cha’s. They just gave them different names in Vienna and Warsaw. Country Western? Hawaiian war chants? Elizabethan ballads? Bach two part Inventions? Gregorian Chants? All cha-cha’s.

And graceless and clueless men who can’t dance a lick can thank me for this universal rule. Clearly if all songs are cha-cha’s, all dances are cha-cha’s too. Any fool can learn to dance the cha-cha, but beware: you will be mobbed by beautiful women at La Tasca on Tall Boys’ nights. Anyway, if you need help, I am an expert cha-cha dancer. Ask my wife.

Speaking of music, I am puzzled by another amazing phenomenon I have discovered while living in Mexico. No Mexican singer can sing on key. Believe me, I have a more than casual experience in making this pronouncement.

We live near the Charro, the stadium just off the Tienguis on Calle Revolution. At least twice a month I am able to test my hypothesis. The bands start warming up around 2:00 PM for the evening show. The tuba player oompahs his base notes, the trumpets blaaaaat their melodies and then the lead singer begins, at the top of his/her lungs, completely off key. It sounds as if trying to correct the discord, they sing louder, choosing sheer volume to correct the blatant disregard for the melody intended by the composer. But since nobody in the crowd can sing on key either, it seems to the fans to be the best they have ever heard.

In closing, since this is an article extolling my brilliance, I take full credit for the following observations, virtually unpublicized, though undeniably true.

1. All intersections in Mexico have signs pointing where you want to go but not posted in the direction you are going. The sign is always on the other side of the intersection for cars going in the opposite direction, never on the side in the direction you are going.

For example, you are driving from the Lake Chapala area and your destination is the beautiful colonial city of Pazquaro. On the way you come to the small village of Quiroga, there is a sign saying “Pazquaro 10 km.” No problem, you say to yourself, smug in your amazing ability to translate kilometers to miles. As you go through the main plaza of Quiroga, there are many signs, but none signifying the direction to Pazquaro, so you logically continue past the intersection. If you are lucky…and stupid, endangering both you and other passengers in your vehicle…and turn around you will see a sign for Pazquaro which cars traveling in the opposite direction can read. If you don’t turn around, you are Morelia bound about an hour out of your way.

So I have a bit of advice to all automobile manufacturers in Mexico. Put submarine turrets with periscope on all vehicles. Someone in the car should always look backwards when passing a key intersection so that the sign that is never in the direction you were going can be seen.

2. All directional signs in Guadalajara point to distant places you don’t want to go to instead of some local area. For example, if all I want to do is drive to Costco, the sign inevitably tells me I am going to Juarez or Mexico City. Since I am directionally challenged, I really don’t want a quick stopover in Tijuana or Guatamala. Thus, I never get to Costco.

3. All Mexican doctors are required to have at least one of their names be Garcia. I know this to be a fact. My general practitioner is Dr. Garcia, my ophthalmologist is Garcia and my heart doctor is, I presume just to be certain of full compliance, Dr. Garcia Garcia. QED.

4. Now that I can speak a fair amount of Spanish, I wish to impart some rudimentary wisdom to those who are beginners. When you go to the store to buy charcoal briquettes for your barbeque, it is essential you ask for carbón, not cabrón. A cabrón is a very bad word person. The store owner told me politely that he did not sell cabrónes but I could try next door, a high priced liquor store run by his brother.

5. All Mexican songs have three words in them: Corazon (heart), amor (love) and lo siento (I’m sorry). Any song without at least one of these three words is not authentically Mexican. If the words somehow became illegal, all Mexican songs would be prohibited.

Oh. I almost forgot: all Mexican songs are cha-cha’s.

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 The Luigi Revenge

Some years ago I lived in Italy. My office was right in the middle of Rome. In times past I would have been within hearing distance of Benito Mussolini as he waved his arms and stuck out his enormous chin. My wife and I found an apartment overlooking the main park, the Villa Borghese. Beyond the park, we could sometimes see the sunset over the huge dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. Life was splendid.

My commute to work went like this. I would walk through the park, past the magnificent Borghese museum, down the Via Veneto, to the Spanish Steps, across to the Trevi Fountain where children would troll for coins with magnets on a string. Then into the Piazza Venetia, past Trajan’s Column and into my favorite bar for a cornetto and cappuccino. Every day was a wonder. Each walk to work presented new, ancient things to my eyes.

One splendid morning, I stopped in a bar along the way to get some cigarettes. I spoke virtually no Italian. I knew words like pasta, pizza, cambio…change… and how to say thank you, but all in all, I now realize I was fair game

So I said, in my best Italian, pointing to the green box in back of the kiosk, “Per favore, signore. Un cartone di sigarette.” He smiled, handed me a carton of French, menthol flavored death weeds, my preference at the time and took my 20,000 lire note which I had obtained by exchanging my money at the bank.

Expecting considerable change, I was perplexed when the proprietor, still smiling, put a handful of candy in front of me.

“No,” I said, also smiling at the obvious error. “Cambio, per favore.”…change, please.

“Si,” he replied, pointing to the candy. “Cambio.”

I was new to this land, so I was polite and unwittingly abetted a clandestine practice probably dating back to early Roman times. At first I tried to argue the point but my Italian just wasn’t up to it. So I took the damn candy, threw it into my damn briefcase and stalked away to my office. For the very first time I didn’t salute the balcony where Mussolini bellowed his tirades. I chomped my cornetto and gulped my beloved cappuccino. I was pissed.

At first, I thought, I would damn well get my cigarettes at some other kiosk, even though this was a really convenient store on the way to work. But the more I stewed over it, the angrier I became. I never discovered the real name of the proprietor and he was not anxious to give it to me, so I named him “Luigi” since, as far as I know from my extensive movie experience, that is the name of all Sicilian bank robbers. I wondered where he stashed his fedora hat and violin case.

And so began my Luigi Revenge.

The very next day, on the way to work, I asked Luigi for another carton of these appalling cigarettes. I brought with me a little notebook. He handed me back a handful of candy with a big, I presumed, Mafia smile, and I took it with a smile that at least rivaled his. Just after leaving, I noted the date, the amount of the transaction and the equivalent amount of candy. Then I went to my bar, on the way saluting my buddy Benito, his spirit yelling on the balcony across the Piazza Venetia, sat and read the two week old news in the English newspaper, the Daily American, ate my cornetto and sipped my cappuccino leisurely. Life was once again wonderful.

From then on, I faithfully bought cigarettes at Luigi’s Mafia candy parlor, took the change in the form of candy that I would never eat, smiled at Luigi who always smiled first, and later would make an entry in my notebook.

Three years passed. Being in Italy was better than I could have ever expected. But, alas, all good things must come to an end. I had to move. I had to abandon my scenic apartment in the city of noise, to go on. We were moving to France to my new job. I was utterly sad at leaving.

With scarcely one week to go, on a beautiful fall morning, on my daily stroll to work, I began whistling something from La Traviata, the sun was up, women were hanging clothes out on lines from the balconies, merchants were delivering food to shops. This would be a morning to remember.

I turned into the Luigi’s tobaccaria con shop. Luigi smiled. I smiled. He asked, “Sigaretti, signore?”

Si,” I answered in my, by now, impeccable Roman dialect: “Ten cartons of cigarettes, please.” He arched his brows questioningly. After all, ten cartons is a hell of a one time purchase even for my penchant for lung cancer. But he looked around at the shelves and reached for ten cartons of those noxious mentholated French fags. I took them.

“Nineteen thousand lire, please” he said with his now familiar, swindler smile, probably by now uniquely reserved for this particular sucker.

But Luigi was not dealing with a novice any more. Provoked, I could retort fluently with curses like, “Your grandmother smells like fourteenth century gorgonzola.” I had hand gestures that were completely authentic. Taxi drivers could no longer take me from the airport to my house by way of Monte Carlo and get away with it. In short, I was ready for Luigi.

I sat my briefcase down on the bar, opened it, and brought out a huge bag of candy. Then I deposited my ten cartons of ghastly mentholated morgue alluring lung assassins from Gaul in the briefcase, closed it with a flourish, and proceeded to twirl the combination locks. Then with a great swashbuckling, Anthony Quinn-like sweep of my arm, I smashed the bag of candy down on the counter. With my absolutely authentic and practiced Italian smile of my own, I said, “Questo e il mio lire, signore, questo, e questo”….this is my money, sir, this and this….as I let the candy dramatically trickle through my fingers. Then I stood back to admire the anticipated volcanic Italian eruption about to transpire.

As God is my witness, this was the finest moment of my life.

Luigi stopped smiling. He peered at me in disbelief. He opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again as if to say something, and…..he stalked past me to the door, walked just out in the sidewalk, stomped back to peer at me again, took in my most splendid grin, stomped back to the sidewalk and screamed “Poliziaaaaaa!” at the top of his well seasoned Italian lungs. He kept shouting while jumping up and down simultaneously. Passersby stopped to look at him. In America, he would have been instantly judged insane, but here, near the Piazza Venetia, Mussolini’s hangout, nobody thought anything other than Luigi was being…well, Luigi. They were curious. A crowd began to gather as he started a rapid fire staccato diatribe, laced with expletives.

I knew all the words. My daughter taught them to me, I am proud to say. He was red in the face, pointing to me as I sat on a bar stool awaiting the Carabinieri, smoking one of his death weeds. I was not to be intimidated by such epithets involving coitus with one’s self and lacing this improbable wish with a descriptive of that self same person’s head made of bodily eliminations.

Luigi continued his diatribe, getting angrier by the minute as I calmly sat at the bar, reading the Daily American newspaper about the Yankee/Red Sox game of two weeks ago.

Finally, before Luigi choked on his own drool, a policeman appeared, swished his cape over his shoulder and listened. From time to time, he would look over at me, frowning, then back to Luigi as spittle flew towards him like snowflakes from the torrent of accusatory, deprecatory and overly wordy denigrations. Finally, the policeman put up his hand as if to stop traffic and sauntered over to me. He looked me up and down, pushed his Benito-like jaw in my face and said loudly… as if I were deaf… “E vero, signore?”…Is this true?…

I smiled, pointing to the large bag of candy on Luigi’s counter. Then I said, “Si. E vero” and showed him my meticulously annotated three year ledger.

He looked intently into my eyes, scanned the notebook, looked several times at the pile of candy, paused and then took me by the shoulder. We marched over to Luigi now surrounded by dozens of entertained Romans, every one of them gesturing and laughing and all talking at the same time. He looked a brooding look at me, sternly looked at Luigi and, while the entire entourage suddenly fell deathly silent, he said, “Luigi….the foreigner has you. You are truly f**ked.” He began to chuckle, then laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. The crowd began to laugh. Finally he stopped, looked at the crowd, said something to disperse them and turned back to me.

He clapped me on the back, shook my hand and ushered me back to the bar. We had a “Sambucca con mosca,” a licorice tasting liquor with three coffee beans in it which look like flies floating. The beans are supposed to be crunched while drinking the liquor. He poured three drinks, distributed nine coffee beans among them. Unfurling his cape with a flourish, he solemnly extended one to me and one to a very petulant Luigi.

“Luigi,” he said…and now I’m translating roughly. “Luigi, explain to the gentleman what the beans are for.”

Luigi rolled his eyes and said in perfect English, “The three beans are for pane, amore and fantasia…. bread, love and imagination.” And looking directly at me, said, “And I hope you die an excruciating and prolonged death from those appalling French weeds.”

We all laughed until we wept, we three Italians.

  ♣             ♣             ♣             ♣

 

One fine day……

….God roamed the Earth again.

This time he took the form of Jacques Tati, the French comedian. Sometimes I had to be careful not to laugh when I saw Him walk because Jacques Tati has the funniest walk of all time. Torso bent at the waist, stiff legged kind of strut, bouncing up on the toes. While I didn’t think it would be prudent to laugh at God, I eventually asked Him why He took this particular guise. He said that He liked the film, “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.” So did I, but I still had to suppress smiling whenever He walked, bouncing up and down, smoking this meerschaum pipe.

He said He wasn’t exactly bored. God doesn’t get bored for obvious reasons. But lately He said he had been restless, perhaps He just needed some amusement. It seems that He is amused infrequently these days but sometimes things happen that are so funny that He smiles. He rarely guffaws. Big belly laughs are indeed rare. He had one when Michael showed him the “Letters from Earth” that Lucifer had once sent the Archangel Michael, describing what people thought about Heaven. Trillions of people wanging away on harps that they couldn’t play, producing unimaginable noise, certainly displeasing to the Creator. Mark Twain eons later wrote something like it. Michael asked God why he couldn’t just make a miracle and have them all sing and play perfectly. God laughed so loud that He had to repair much of the universe. It took several days, and He was in a very foul temper when he finished the job.

Before I get to the things we did together, I’ll try to give a flavor of some of the things we talked about and at first I didn’t have a clue why He chose me. Frankly I don’t know much more about His nature after this Roaming experience than I did before, but take my word for it; He is a really interesting Person or Persons depending on your particular religious proclivity. I tried to pin Him down about which group was more correct, but He always deflected even the most cleverly disguised question with the comment, “Buh,” an expression He said He particularly liked, one that He borrowed from 14th century Italians in the Po Valley. He also told me, in a conspiratorial tone, that while He didn’t condone many of the Roman Catholic excesses, he loved the stories about Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi. He thought Russian Orthodox music was the best. He was very critical about the apparent abolition of Gregorian Chant. “Episcopalians are much more Catholic than Catholics, these days,” He mentioned wistfully. Baptists had more fun than most, He said. He singled out “The Hokey Pokey” as His favorite pop dance. He had caused the idea to germinate in a bumper sticker company that produced thousands of banners reading, “What if the Hokey Pokey IS what it’s all about.” God told me that this was a profound idea that He tried to get Descartes to write about without thinking that it would be about 800 years before the song was written.

Anyway, He said He chose me to Roam with basically because He liked me and I was “perfectly imperfect,” whatever that meant. He said that He spent some considerable time, something he had much of, deciding whom to Roam with. I was of course flattered, thinking that He might have me nominated for ‘saint of the year’ or something. He immediately picked this up and said, “No, you are certainly not of the saintly category…that’s one of the reasons I chose you.” Knowing that I had a math background, He later confided that I was statistically anomalous. I argued with Him about this, but it turns out that He is pretty knowledgeable about mathematics. His summary of my life was interesting. He said that I grew up, went to some good universities. He liked the lady I married, was pleased that we had children, and followed my progress as a young “eclectical engineer.” (He gave me that deliberate misspelling and I use it with alacrity now). I worked in the Aerospace Industry once. He said that he found my resume interesting, especially when I told people that I designed efficient death rays but in fact produced some primitive guidance computers for explosive devices called “missiles” aimed at our satellite called the “Moon.”

God smiled when He told me that. He had done some recent homework regarding local syntactical idioms. “To Moon,” God explained, “was an amusing verbal rhetorical trope intended to be an anatomically pejorative journalistic statement aimed towards the target of one’s approbation with a ritual downing of one’s clothing below the belt and a mandatory bending of the waist in a direction 180 degrees away from the object of insult. “Strange ritual, but amusing,” He said. “I would never have guessed that this orifice I designed would be used so imaginatively. You people sometimes amaze even Me.”

God also made it clear that I didn’t know squat about real death rays. “Let me tell you about death rays. When the universe finally collapses on the ‘big bang,’ THAT is a death ray. Krakatoa was one that I used to good effect on Earth. At the time, your species needed some good sunsets to uplift your spirits. KA-BOOM. Great Death Ray, these volcanoes. The key is to make a big noise but not kill anyone. ‘Death Rays’ are anomalous,” he said with a mathematical smile.

God was not impressed by the fact that I knew about Legendre Polynomials and Fourier Transforms. Saints, He explained patiently, all were excellent mathematicians but often apparently didn’t realize it. Transcendental functions were somehow acquired by all saints on the way to sanctity, He said. He wasn’t sure why. A non-saint that He really admired was an Indian mathematician, Ramanajan, who without any real math training past high school, rediscovered the calculus and could see infinite series approximations to the most wonderful trigonometric functions imaginable. He said that He almost awarded him sainthood for that impossible insight. God also, obviously, liked the notion of ‘infinite’ series anyway. “Aquinas was actually a lousy mathematician. Good logic, but really bad at algebra. I even gave him a vision about factoring, but he just couldn’t get it right. I finally gave up. Nice man, though. I liked his proofs of My existence. Cause and Effect is my favorite.”

“Adam,” He continued, “was math phobic. He couldn’t add compound fractions. That fact somehow missed Genesis. If you don’t write it down it gets lost. One big one really missed the boat. There were actually seventeen commandments, not ten. ‘Mind thy own business’ was number twelve and ‘Honor thy children’ sixteen.”

So that’s the flavor of things we talked about while we Roamed. I didn’t think that it would be polite to ask Him what He might want to see since He knew everything anyway, but after awhile I got over being overawed. He seemed to be a really good Guy. We shot some pool in one of my favorite bars of some years ago: the Castle in Manhattan Beach. He cleaned my clock in a game of eight ball, but I held my own in a variation of the game where you had to call your next shot. I said it wouldn’t be fair for Him to know what I was going to do, so He deliberately held back the future for the time being. We split six games and had a few Guinness Stouts.

Finally I asked Him if there was something He would really like to see. “Yes,” He said. “On the sixth day during my creative period…and believe Me, I was very busy that day… I made this animal that, well, I was in a whimsical mood. I had finished the birds of the air, the fishes of the sea and the animals of the land when Michael distracted me with some trivial heavenly logistics problem and I started to laugh. I imagined an animal with a huge body, a horse-like head, though bigger, with cartilage protruding from its forehead and long, skinny legs. I decided it should walk as if it were trying to avoid stepping on eggshells, you know, dainty little steps a ballet dancer might make. So I waved my arms, and created it, but to tell the truth I forget what I called it.”

“It’s a moose,” I answered. “I saw one last week when I was in Nova Scotia. Funniest damn (‘excuse me,’ I said) animal on earth.” God started to chuckle. “Oh, yeah. Now I remember. The legs were left over from an eight legged camel-like creature I was going to call a “Wump.” One of your children’s book authors recreated the idea a few years ago himself but with a lot more humps. By the way, camels are also really funny looking animals. I got the idea to let them spit from a saloon on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy.

So we rented a car and went to Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. I drove because He said that He needed some time to attend to other matters in the universe for a little while. Looked like He took a nap to me, but He later told me that a super nova in Orion’s Belt threatened a sentient race of slugs. I said that slugs probably were tool challenged and how did they get along without opposable thumbs? God looked at me as if I were nuts. “The only thing you folks have done with your vaunted opposable thumbs is to make machines and bombs. I sometimes wish I had blessed the dolphins before you. They have philosophers you could never understand and a moral code that is transcendent. They care for their aged, infirm and poor. Why you grind them up with tuna is beyond Me. Someday your race will be held accountable for that.” He went into snooze mode for the next few hours as we passed Halifax on the way to the causeway.

We were both starved when we pulled into a small restaurant north of Ingonish. The waiter was an old timer and asked where we were going. I could see that he found God pretty funny the way He was walking, but I pretended not to notice. I asked him where the best place to see moose might be. “Well, probably up at Meat Cove,” he said. “Ay-ah.” He proceeded to describe the herds of moose that used to roam (God perked up His ears at that word) and were slaughtered by the locals for export. “Pretty stinky stuff when you get enough moose all cut up. Ay-ah. Sailors said they could smell it 60 miles out. Still some moose there now, but not so many. Locals tell of a big old one, antlers like a bulldozer. Ay-ah. Lucky if you see him, that’s for sure. If he exists, he doesn’t come out for just anyone.” While I paid the bill, God walked over to the waiter and I noticed they were talking and laughing. I guess he can laugh ok without damage to the universe when he assumes another form. When I caught up with Him I asked if they were talking about something profound. “No,” he said. “He wanted to know why I walk so funny.”

We got back in the car and I drove up to the turn off, then the dirt road up to the edge of the cliff observable from below. A Canadian flag could be seen at the top. “Ever notice the Canadian flag,” God asked me? “Not really,” I said. “Well it is an unintentional optical illusion. Two angry men face each other on the perimeters of the maple leaf. Pretty amusing.” We started climbing up the steep slope, through some dense fir trees and a small meadow. With his funny walk I was concerned that He might get winded. Then I realized who He was and decided to take care of myself. Finally we came to the top, a beautiful grassy promenade overlooking the north Atlantic. We sat together in silence for a long time. Several whales surfaced for a time and disappeared.

“Big Sur is like this,” He finally said. “Also the Amalfi-Positano coast in Italy.” I said nothing though I had been to both places. God said, “Yeah, I know. That’s why I brought it up.” And he smiled. Made me feel good. We were silent for a long time again.

I started looking around with my binoculars. God lay back, closed His eyes and seemed to be snoozing again. This time I didn’t think he was taking care of the universe. As best I can describe it is that He really was focused on being on Cape Meat. Either he put a moratorium on problems or he had delegated things to Michael…I don’t know…but I knew He was very here. I scanned the coastline. Beautiful, craggy rocks, waves attacking them, birds everywhere. On the hill behind us was a forest of pines, green, green all the way to the horizon.

In the middle I spotted something white. Really white. Bone bleached white. I increased the magnification on the binoculars. It was a large tree, jagged like lightening but a tree that had died a very long time ago. Startling and alone in a small clearing in the midst of a dark blanket of fir trees. God opened one eye and said, “This tree is five thousand years old, the granddaddy of all the other trees on this island. I nicknamed him ‘Ralph.’ He’s my favorite tree in the universe. Ralph is one damn good tree.” I had a small intake of breath over His phraseology.

You don’t take a tree singled out by God lightly even if it is dead, even if it has been dead for thousands of years. I suppressed a question of whether trees also go to heaven, and what constitutes a good tree from a bad tree. I thought I saw Him with a sliver of a smile, but who knows. Then I saw it. “Look at that…over by Ralph,” I yelled. There beside the blanched limbs was a huge animal. “The damn Moose the old guy was talking about,” I shouted.

God was staring intently at the beast.

The enormous rack of antlers, the wide chest, steam out of the flaring nostrils, pawing the ground with those pencil-like legs, the moose reared up, shook his head and stopped, silent, rigid almost, looked towards where we were seated. Then he leaned over, bent his forelegs and knelt, lowered his wonderful antlers and then, abruptly, nodded his huge head, got back up, turned around and walked majestically back into the forest.

We sat for time. God turned to me and looked perplexed. “Well, I guess the moose isn’t so funny looking after all.” We finally climbed down the trail and later checked into a motel. We were both silent. I slept like a baby. The next morning I awoke. God was gone. A note on my duffle bag said, “Go spend a few hours with Ralph.” Signed God.

For a moment I pondered what a signed autograph by God might be worth on E-Bay.

Nah, I thought. Probably not.

I can’t be sure, but I think I felt God smiling.

 ♥             ♥             ♥             ♥ 

Love in Bloom

Marsha Bloom’s bosom heaved for the fourteenth time that morning. John was coming, at last. She so longed to see the object of her abject desire with every fiber of her being. She knew he was a profligate rake and a faithless rogue, but her quivering craven achings quiesced whatever vibrant misgivings she might possess.

Wistfully she absorbed her unblemished bounty in the full length mirror for the last time. Her sapphire orbs gleamed with an iridescent glow, bottomless pools of torment peering out at her from under a teeming thatch of sanguine, salacious tresses. The low cut bodice showed her exquisite globes to jutting perfection. One more dab of glimmering gloss on her succulent lips and she knew she was ready. The doorbell rang.

Marsha knew John could glimpse her curvaceous, delicate figure through the opaque, etched glass of the front door as she gracefully descended the broad, brocaded staircase. She could see the outline of his rugged, rippling, muscular frame and sensed he radiated the hot, wet, tempestuous tumult of his love. Slowly, ever so slowly, she eased the rigid, tumescent deadbolt out of its yielding, generous repository, and there he stood. She ached to reach up and brush that rakish lock of hair out of his burning, lusting eyes.

“Marsha,” he whispered.

“John,” she sighed.

“Marsha, Marsha,” he groaned.

“John, John,” she whimpered.

“Marsha, Marsha, Marsha,” he urged.

“John, John, John,” she wheezed, as they fell into each other’s arms, mouths joined irrevocably as if two plumber’s aids were grasping to unclog a resistant drain, tongues delving like serpents among a flock of wild geese. She could tell he was ready. His turgid shaft was bursting at the seams of his truculent trousers. Her raging loins were urging her to seek his turbulent tube of fire.

At last, they broke their scorching embrace.

“I’ve dealt with Melvin,” he murmured menacingly.

“Oh, no….I hope..,” she said steamily, unfinished thought hanging in the wafting, wild air.

“The rapacious raconteur is gone,” was all John muttered, mutely.

They crept silently through the damp, dismal dwelling doorways to the love sanctuary they both yearned for. She was the raging beast of his yearning. Every fiber of her being ached for his bald avenger.

Casting themselves upon the downy bed, clawing and clutching each other’s garments, rending them limb from limb, naked in the vast array of silk and scent, her blood pounded thunderously while his throbbing member sought the nest of his desire. He was a stallion of volcanic thrusting, ravaging her pale, voluptuous craving need. Outside, the wind, howling in protest, moaned in time to their plunging, insatiable vortex of love.

Suddenly the garden door to their wanton warren of turbulent tenderness burst open.

Deep in the throes of amorous ardor, quivering with longing, Marsha screamed, “Oh, my God, John! It’s Melvin,” and she wilted in a dead faint, leaving John, face flaming with unrequited, crazed lust, aghast.

“You thought you were rid of me, you scurrilous scoundrel,” Melvin cackled maniacally, rolling up his sleeves, massive, menacing fists clinched.

John was not easily cowed. Seething with rage, disengaging his wilted pole of power, he shouted, “Barbarous bastard! I’ll finish the job right here,” and with that, John bounded belligerently towards the pernicious form of his foe, as if an infuriated rhino in heat, tendons distended in his neck like carborundum ropes.

Fists pulsing like pistons, Melvin sledge hammered John’s oncoming chiseled jaw, squeezing his thrashing thorax, his flailing, granite-like knee pounding into John’s swollen seed sack. Moving with the grace of a panther, he whipped himself into a frenzied, fighting automaton, countering his adversary’s troglodyte fisticuffs with thunderous pummeling. A feint, a dodge and both were on the floor, death blows slinging like Trojan catapults.

Marsha, awakening from her swoon, threw herself upon the melee, biting, scratching, clawing what she knew not.

“Cease!” thundered John, blood flowing from the feline carvings of his beloved.

“Desist!” raged Melvin, eyes gauged and flaming from her vicious attack. “I am sore wounded!”

“Oooooo,” Marsha began to croon, both hands retreating from savagery, now melding into the intertwined flesh, stroking rods of savage steel.

The triangulated mass of flesh began to writhe with her silky manipulations, shouts turning to whimpers, screams to melodious moans, hammers to gentle caresses of silky succulence.

“Ooooooo,” continued Marsha. “John! Melvin,” she purred with a starved, wanton ache, swampy wetness gushing from her nether being.

“Mmmmmmm, Marsha,” groaned John, battering ram in full elegant effulgence.

“Ahhhhhhhh, Marsha,” sighed Melvin, his terrifying turgidity springing to attention.

“Marsha!” “John!” “Marshaaa!” “Melvinnnn!”

“Maaaarrrr….”

“….ssssshhhaaaaaaaaa!!!”

The End

 

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Compiled/Published by LeRoy Chatfield
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