...And as we drove that day the sun shone. The air was blithe and snug and innocent of all social graces; the air was responsive to music and self-absolved to an impressive degree. The road before us was paved with a smooth amplitude. The countryside around us changed countless times within every unspecified period of time. More than once we passed a shrewdness of apes who hailed us with primitive gesticulations, shouting phrases like, “Hasn’t it occurred to you, chum, that you’re making this up?”
But we drove past without answering, and as we went Etcetera sang a song in her glycerine voice. It was an embroidered, impermeable song. I watched her throat as she sang, and her throat unfurled like a lush fern. The words of the song were things we saw from the Car as we drove, and this is how her song went, exactly recorded here, syllable by syllable:
A farmer’s fence made of trampolines,
crystal whores and clinking winks,
red unassembled Ifs,
lost teeth in the breeze,
old men in baseball caps reminiscing about hindsight,
spastic pantomime,
pretty naked boys reading tea leaves in the ditch,
funnels racing across the flat horizon,
blue as deep as interblue,
wind passing into my fingertips, whistling out my nipples,
tractors rolling below the soil,
mountains capped with living-rooms,
gravestones on the bottom of swimming pools,
reconstituted mispronunciations,
removable aspects of lust,
grain silos storing sunlight,
inukshuks stomping in the distance,
solo windows haunted by solo wolves,
rain clouds filled with dark magenta wine,
a woman as vivid as a horse, and bucking,
reflections of objects not there,
a silent wire.
That was the first part of Etcetera’s song. I loved her so much right then that blood began to collect in my socks, in preparation for critical shortages. I gazed at Etcetera, a dapple of summer in her seat, and said to her, “Please let us make lust soon, or I shall wither into a paraphrasing.”
Etcetera turned to me. She gave me an exquisite, knowing look. Her look was knowing in that way she could look that way. “Yes, Otherwise,” she said slyly, “let’s make lust, in a predictable place.”
So we pulled the Car onto the shoulder of the road, and peered out of the windows at the place we were. This is what we saw:
We were high upon a mountain range. Everywhere around us stood pillars of stone, raised long ago by Vikings lost from their blanched, frozen antipathy. The stones towered around us, carved with images of interplay that no species has ever successfully attempted. It was the ideal location for lust-making. Etcetera and I climbed out of the Car.
The ground was stone, shattered into leaves as thin as paper. I slipped the green plastic miniskirt from Etcetera’s sloping thighs. Then I slipped the orange plastic blouse from her ribs and breasts and shoulders. She removed my intractable brown tunic, and we lay together upon the leaves of stone, and we kissed each other until we were awash in the lukewarm saline sea of our mouths. Slippery as dolphins we slew across each other’s skies of skin. Our mouths were like lone Cheerios in a vast bowl of milk, attracted to each other by that force of breakfast mystery. Our limbs clung to one another’s limbs, intermingling and socializing, until we became looped within our loops. When my cock entered her soft liquid cunt it was nothing less than the moon falling into the knot of its intended orbital compulsion, than the wind siphoning through the impeachable peaceful palm of the hollow mango. It was nothing less than the sleeping squirrel falling through the burnished evening into the tummy of the downy hibernatory ground. My cock within Etcetera’s cunt was all these things: it was a closed eye for her open eye, it was a binary-code completion, it was a discovery of apple-blossom Newtonism, it was a Copernican rotation. All about us the planetary system followed Einsteinian daydreams of curlicues, and the stone pillars jellified and wept before their inventor the daylight. And Etcetera laughed like Christmas morning, and I laughed, we laughed together, for we realized at once that all the afternoon was unreturnable, it was non-refundable, yes: the afternoon had been sold to us without a receipt.
When our flesh-thirst was momentarily quenched I said, “Surely, my dear Etcetera, after such a cosmic lusting, you must feel something more for me. Do you feel even the smallest blossom-bound bud of love?”
“It seems to me,” Etcetera replied, “to lust so lividly I must feel open to abandoning my body completely. To be this confident I must have a great love for myself. If I’m occupied loving myself, necessarily, I cannot be busy loving you.”
It was wisdom beyond reproach, and I sighed sadly. We redressed ourselves, and then put our clothes back on.
Later, as we drove along in the Car, we saw the sun spreading its cadmium wings upon the horizon, and knew the day was ending. At her bidding, I left Etcetera at the edge of a precipitous ravine. I drove on to another place, where I slept.
All night long I dreamed perfected implausibilities. I dreamed that Etcetera spent that night, that transfer of the molten moon, leaning over the edge of the ravine and streaming a butterfly-bright tracery of urine. I dreamed her sweet outflow fell a thousand years into the ravine, to precipitate as a silent serein upon the inhabitants of that slit in the earth. I dreamed those inhabitants upturned their faces and tongues to taste Etcetera’s water, upturned their hands to twinkle with it, and imagined a heavenly urethra above them, the very heavenly urethra I imagine now. It was a dream I would forget instantly upon awakening the next morning; nonetheless, it’s a dream I still cherish today, as a child cherishes a piece of quartz he picks up from the sand of a continuous beach and thrusts into his child-sized pocket, marvelling at it every time he crouches down and the pocket stretches jabbingly over the sentience of his thighbone. Yes, this is the way I cherish it, probably.
RETURN TO ETCETERA AND OTHERWISE
