One Fish at a Time

ONE FISH AT A TIME

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

How appropriate for the world's longest widely-read novel to have a forty-seven-thousand-word chapter. Most words, most pages, longest prologue, and longest chapter. And it seems we're just really beginning. I have to remind myself that it is actually possible. The Waverly novels run to millions of words, Charles Dickens published millions, and dozens of minor authors like Upton Sinclair and Stephen King cranked out over forty books, each. I don't think either of them, or any other writer, has completed seven fat, widely-read novels in two years, but the competition is comforting because if they were able to so extensively exercise their more modest gifts, perhaps mine will go on and on for years and years. On the other hand, for every even moderately prolific author, there are numerous one-trick ponies like Bach with "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" and Segal with "Love Story". What can you say about a writer who dies? You know what I'll be they do? I'll bet they blame New York.

I have finally taken someone into my bed. Pantherito is too good to miss; sleek, shiny, huge, and jet black. My nickname for him is Tom, as in tomato, as in veggie brain. I've tried the permissive and tolerant approach with the house lions, before, but, and I guess almost anyone could figure this out, when they came to visit they focused on the mouse pad. Cat and mouse and writer don't mix very well, so it's been the floor for the felines for the past couple of years, allowing them to express their love for their almighty master under the bed, not on it.

All this is well and good, but a new chapter's aborning, and we should not tarry.

"The parallel, Norry," the older boy said gently, "was spending much of the time alone with my sister. Not dating, though I guess I was okay looking and okay nice, her not joining Brownies because, nothing against them, we accomplished more, and were hardly kooky recluses in the process. On her seventh birthday, when I was sixteen, something very private happened between us when Dad attended a conference. At first we were both and ashamed and confused, but, in doing avocational research on the Net, we'd come across stories. After we'd one a little research, we found a huge archive of brother/sister files; ours was, well, almost typical. After that, we paid for our sins by working later, so there was a practical side as well as a motivational aspect. We could hardly stand being away from each other, and we spent more time together than ever, most of it behaving as if Harry Truman's mother-in-law was sitting on the bed in her room." Nailing perhaps the worst person in modern history added depth to the conversation of the two youths, and both relaxed confident that any variances from social norms would be unlikely to disturb their budding friendship and the intimacy attached thereto. For long moments they looked at each other, the nineteen year old half sitting in bed, his boyish swimmer's chest exposed above his sheet, his cousin sitting further onto the bed, the boy's right hand an inch from that of the young adult male.

"When Sharon was seven, was she like bigger than other girls?" Norry whispered.

"She was maybe a little smaller," the teen said, his voice now more husky. "That really scared both of us, at first, but then we read stories, the real ones, not the glossed up fabrications of the pros. Some were understated and true, guideposts instead of fantasies, and seemed keyed to relationships like ours. Lots of them were written by teachers and professionals and responsible-sounding people, and featured mature males with girls as young as six.. As time went on, and, admittedly it was closer to hours than days, Sharon decided seven was an appropriate age to at least try experimenting."

"Did it feel natural, or really weird?" Norry asked.

"We kept thinking it should feel sick or perverted or something, and when it didn't, when, after it began, we just felt like a boy and a girl who'd had like a good meal together, or gone dancing, or played `Monopoly'. The fact we didn't feel abnormal, in the least, worried us a lot more than if we'd felt punked or twisted-sister."

"And it was the same, later, when you were successful with her?" Norry asked.

"Totally," the older male replied, "we just got more affectionate with each other, nothing nauseating, but kind of softer and gentler, and Sharon became more receptive. She'd go change into her bikini every night just before bed time, and I'd stay in her room with her until she went to sleep."

"Did you stay all night?"

"Just the first night. We didn't want to get carried away. It was what it was; we weren't married, and we were maybe one-third lovers with no strings attached. Sometimes it's called Free Spirit, and that's what it was, beautiful because she was and is beautiful, gentle, because she's so young, and, like I said, closer to a fantastic meal and a night of a little champagne and a lot of dancing, than to anything out of `Romeo and Juliet', or the passions of the bible, when it gets around to them.."

"Are the, you know, feelings very strong?" the twelve year old asked.

"Extremely," his cousin replied, "afterwards you may just feel lazy and sort of droney and happy, but while it's going on, it's more intense than anything else, and the feelings and intensity build and build the longer you're together in a private place; it can go on for hours. You might say it's like watching an awesome ballgame, but there's a big difference at the end, because both teams, to be a little crude about it, achieve total victory."

The young males were by now butting the fingertips of their right hands and looking more directly into each other's handsome face.

"Has anything happened with you, yet?" the older boy asked Norry.

"I think about stuff at night, sometimes," Norry blushed, "but then I go to sleep, so it's not very intense."

"Norry?" the older of the now hoarse voices asked, "do you want to have a really frank talk, you know, like lock the door and hang out for awhile?"

"I think that's what Mom might have meant," the boy answered, "but I guess I'd want to even if it was, you know, her idea of a great idea." So saying, he crossed to the door and twisted the tab on the knob, returning to his cousin's bed and sitting with his hip solidly against the teen's, his right hand going spontaneously to the right hand of the athletic young adult. He'd tried not to look, but Mace's eyes focused on his own young-adult waist, and the child's eyes followed. Mace was huge, an ear of corn could have been under the sheet, across his left thigh.

"I've never let a boy look at me," the older male whispered, "just my sister."

"Is it freaky, you know, the difference?" Norry asked.

"I won't know until I see you naked," his handsome cousin said, "but right now, no, it feels a whole lot more than natural, like food with a lot of expensive additives that wouldn't be there if they didn't make it taste better."

"It makes my mouth dry," the younger boy noted, "like the time there was a fire down the street, and they had trouble getting one of the kids out."

"I know," Mace said, "when Sharon showed me what she'd bought for me on her birthday, it was like I'd been running in some desert all day. Then she went up to her room to put it on, and I followed her after a couple of minutes, and that was like the sun coming out. My eyes got dry and my heart ran out of blood and I couldn't stand, even leaning against the door of her bedroom, so I had to go in and sit beside her, because she'd turned both her chairs to face the wall."

"What did she say?" the pre-teen asked.

"That she felt kind of embarrassed being the only one in scanty clothing, and that I didn't have to go to my room and put on my bathing suit, but that I could, you know, just strip down to my underpants."

"Did she watch you?" the boy asked, assuming compliance on the part of his then sixteen-year-old cousin.

"Yes," he said, "she unbuttoned me."

"And that felt natural?" Norry wanted to know.

"How do you think it would feel if I unbuttoned your shirt?" Mace responded in a whisper.

"Better than anything, so far," the boy allowed.

"It's just the beginning," his cousin said, "you won't believe it; I didn't, with Sharon. If just getting bare-chested together was all there was to physical relationships, it would be plenty, but it's kind of the wrapping on the manna bar, and even if you're too scared to savor every particle, it's still something that gets better and better."

"Without getting you fat," the younger said.

"Allowing for the obvious exception," his cousin responded, "yes."

"Is that something you guys have to worry about?" the younger boy wanted to know.

"Not quite yet, but soon," Mace said, "Sharon looks like she's flat chested, because she wears like spandex, but she's more developed than any of the girls in her class - from us being successful with each other so often, so we've started being really careful, even though she's still only nine. There seems to be a split decision in the medical community as to whether or not a girl can become pregnant before her periods begin."

"Do you have to worry all the time?" the child asked.

"No," Mace said, "sometimes she gets some special foam that comes in a little pressure bottle. She lets me spray it inside her, then we can go all the way. When she does start getting her period, we can use that to know when it's safe to be free and when we have to use protection."

"Have you tried anything like that with her, yet?" the curious younger male asked.

"We've practiced a couple of times for when she's older, in case we might be in a hurry sometime (the foam takes awhile to work)," the teen replied, "but we took it off before she lay down, because we both like being totally naked when it happens."

"How are you, you know, like careful most of the time?" Norry said.

"When we started, we experimented with different things we'd read about, or like heard about at school, mostly I'd heard about, and we learned other ways of being together -- the things boys do together more than the things a boy-and-girl couple do."

"Is it kind of warm in here?" the younger boy asked.

"A little," his cousin concurred, looking up into Norry's brown eyes, "you can take your shirt off if you'd be more comfortable."

"My legs are kind of warm, too," the child noted.

"Take your shorts off, then," his cousin suggested. "If you're embarrassed, you can pull my sheet down, because all I wore to bed is briefs."

Norry complied as Mace removed a pillow and lay back, linking his fingers behind his neck. The boy stripped to his underpants as the young adult watched, finally standing and emulating the older male's posture, arching his back and slightly spreading his legs. For twelve, the child was huge, his white briefs tented as if hiding and oversize frank. They stared at each other for several minutes, then Mace bucked his hips and stripped himself naked, lying back with his legs widely spread. Norry again copied his mature cousin, and the males began panting at the sight of each other's oversized, circumcised erections.

"Do you want to watch me masturbate, so you'll know what other guys do when they can't sleep?" Mace whispered.

"Yes," the twelve year old replied.

The nineteen year old arched his back, spread his long, athletic legs more widely, and moved his right hand to his waist. As Norry watched from a foot away, he wet his flaring glans and began stroking openly. "Like this," he whispered, "spread your legs and prop you knees against the bed. You can learn while you're standing up, which is better because it tenses the muscles around your thighs."

Again the boy was slave to the man. Bracing himself comfortably, his long, coltish legs widely spread, the child placed his left hand behind his neck and began masturbating, the tip of his penis less than a foot from his panting cousin. For several minutes they jerked off together, staring alternately into each other's eyes, then down their handsome young bodies and huge erections. "Do you want to talk more, or go all the way?" Mace whispered.

"Both," the pre-teen hissed, but he showed is true character by slowing his hand. Mace moved to his left on the bed, and the boy settled on his back beside the mature teen. They kept masturbating gently, arms and hips warmly together, panting softly.

"This must be so awesome with a girl," the boy observed as they linked legs and grew comfortable with each other.

"That's why I wanted you to wait," Mace said, "because my sister has not been overly subtle in indicating that she wants you as part of us. I'd really like to go all the way in private with you," the older boy went on, "and I hope it happens, soon, but Sharon's got candles burning in her room, and she's probably doing what we're doing, hoping you'll show up."

"Will you come with me?" the boy asked.

"If you want me to," Mace replied. "She wants it that way, but if you'd rather have privacy, that's definitely okay."

"Will you be with her, first?" Norry said.

"Would you like to watch us?" the older male quizzed in his hoarse whisper.

"I want to see what happens with you," the naked child said.

"Then you can learn everything," Mace responded.

"Will she be wearing her bikini?" was the next question from the boy as he continued watching his adult cousin masturbate, stroking his big, pre-teen penis gently and slowly as was the older male.

"Yes," Mace said.

"Could you be with her the same way you were the first time, while I watch?" the boy asked.

"She was right about you," Mace said, "that you'd be perfect for both of us, and that we, she and I, would sort of re-discover things if you wanted to spend time with us."

The boy assumed that to be a Yes. His hand slowed at his waist and he swung his long, slim legs from the bed. The males stood together for a long moment, foreheads touching, looking down at themselves. Norry, although younger, the host, unlocked the door and led his mature cousin from the guest bedroom out into the hallway. They held hands as they walked naked and hugely erect through the rambling house, finally reaching the door of the second guest room even more hugely swollen than when they'd left the first. Mace knocked gently, slipping into an encore, to be partially realized, of what had gone on between himself and his little sister two years before.. "Sis," he whispered through the crack, quoting himself, "I've been thinking about what you said after Dad left. If you want to put it on, I'll come in and look."

Sharon tuned into the reprise immediately. "You don't have to," she whispered to the door, "you know, it was just..."

"I wish I did know," the boy at Norry's side responded, "that's why I wanted to come and talk. And I'm sorry for thinking you aren't old enough. I was just trying to protect you. I fell into what they call in the Caribbean the colonial trap - thinking conventional thoughts, and never anything else."

There was a short pause. "It's just that I'm really scared," the girl said through the crack in the door. "It is wrong, everyone says so, but I think about it all the time. Then I figured it out. It's wrong for brothers and sisters who don't like each other, just for the physical part, especially if the boy punishes down on the girl. But that's not us. At all. We liked each other, always that I can remember, and now we're spending so much time together."

"Okay," Mace said, "I'll come in in just a minute."

"I was dressed," the teen reminded his understudy. The coltish boy nodded and they retraced their steps to Mace's room, where the teen slipped into slacks and a button-up white shirt. Naked beside the boy in street clothes, shoes and socks, even, the twelve year old felt more exotic than half of Africa.

The couple said Hi to each other as the nineteen year old sat on the bed beside his nine-year-old sister. The girl gave her cousin a hot look of welcome, nodding toward the chairs. Norry swung one from the wall and sat two feet from the couple as they played at looking each other nervously up and down. "It's kind of embarrassing for me, this way," Sharon whispered. "If you had your Speedos on, I'd feel more comfortable."

"I've got some bikini briefs on," the boy whispered, "or I can go back to my room for a minute."

"What color are they?" the girl wanted to know.

"Gray," the teen said.

"I'm blue," she said, "and gray goes with everything, so it would be okay. I just want to get a really good look at you before I get so excited I can't remember any details." Knowing the virago, any observer would be able to testify to the state of nerves evidenced by her acknowledgement of anything to do with blue, gray, or any other chromatic combination. As a drowning man clutches at straws, she was using fashion as a tendril she hoped was connected to reality in the face of actually seeing her dazzling young stag of a sixteen-year-old brother. Now her stallion was nineteen, and knowing what was about to happen brought the same sweating thrill of that first time when she hadn't know, and never would have been able to guess.

Sharon looked long into her brother's handsome eyes, as she had their first time. Her hands went to him, he turned to his left, facing her, and she found his buttons, moving in to kiss his neck and shoulder as she undid his shirt from top to bottom. The boy whispered to the girl, cradling her gamin face as she worked at his belt buckle, her lips urgent at his young athlete's chest. Both the sixteen-year and nineteen-year-old brothers stood and shrugged off their shirts as the seven and nine year old female kissed their bellies and she dropped his slacks to the floor. Mace stood in front of Sharon, arms modestly at his side, while the nine year old replayed her long perusal of his lanky, coltish body and the big bulge in his teen briefs. The boy sat on the bed at his sister's right as she stared from his waist up into his brown eyes, then hung her head..

"Are we like kids in a Southern play?" she whispered.

"Not yet," the boy said, "I can still go if you want."

"It's wrong," the girl responded, "I looked it up in the computer encyclopedia. `Incest'. Against the law almost everywhere, through all of time."

"Opinion of the same minds that have brought us wars, poverty, misery, stress, and strife without end, almost everywhere, through all of time. We're where we are because of a handful of brilliant inventors and capitalists," the boy continued, "not because of our political or cultural excellence, so, taking a good look around, the dictators of morals and customs may be as wrong about brothers and sisters as they are wrong about many important things. That's half Sophist, true, but the pleasure of just sitting close to you, and looking at you as a female, while you look at me as a male, is enough to overcome dictates from on high, or from freaking anywhere."

"I can't take my eyes off you, either," the girl said, "you're so real looking, and so ready looking to do what you're for, what boys are for, and what girls should learn about while they're young, with boys who take the time to explain things.

"Plus, the world needs plays."

Was the tendril of levity defensive?

"Fathers and big brothers hold girls down and make them," Mace said, "call them names, abuse them psychologically and physically, neglect them, and that's what the laws and things are for. Other times there's isolation, like "Flowers in the Attic." We're kind of like that, I guess, but not out of weird, though I guess what we do, hobbywise, is on the edge, but because we're kind of a partnership; one plus one equal three, or something like that. If we really felt the taboo, we'd let it rule us, but we only feel it enough to excite us and confuse us and embarrass us, and I'm not a big-daddy mushmouth rarin' for the saddle in some Dixie drama, which is probably where taboo got its bad name, but an older boy who's spent a lot of time with a younger girl, and grown to love and cherish her to the point I feel highly stirred, to used a dated expression, every time I'm near her, this notwithstanding the fact she's way freaking underage, and my full-born, all-natural sister."

"That part's simple enough," the girl responded, "but I have to say that you argue a little like a lawyer. Sometimes it's what you don't say that makes all the difference." [Time for another reader-involvement puzzle. "Don't say what?" What has Mace perhaps deliberately, perhaps through oversight, or perhaps just conveniently, left out? There are ample clues provided in the story, and the omission is, to give another one, obvious. Read back through their discussion; they've covered the spiritual, moral, social, political, and legal aspects of their blooming relationship, rather completely, so all should be set and settled between them, yet a major issue hangs in the air. What is the issue?]

"Argue like an un-lawyer, then," Mace suggested.

"I will," the seven year old replied promptly, "because it has to do with your un-derpants; in the vernacular, your briefs, not academically or in the abstract, but as evidence. Hard evidence."

"You mean me?" the boy whispered.

"Us," the girl replied, "being together. What your lawyer left out is simply your size. That's the issue, at least until I get older, bigger."

"Boys don't start that way with inexperienced girls," the teen whispered back. "Usually they experiment, first, mostly a lot, and after that what you mean starts happening if they still want it to."

"But that's you," the girl responded, "older and more in control; I'm just a kid, and I'm lucky if I can wait to get the bathroom door closed. Even with your shorts still on I know I won't be able to control myself even if I want to, and I can't imagine wanting to. It would go against all the real nature there is, all over the world, all through time."

"That's the biggest thing I've got to talk to you about," Mace said to the little girl in her blue bikini. "When you said you wanted me to look at you in your bathing suit, I like made up this big speech about how we can let special things happen, but we have to be disciplined and private, too. Both psychic and physical control. What I was thinking is that we couldn't do this too much; waste too much time on it after we got used to each other, but the same control issue, as you say, applies to my being with you before you're ready. I'm afraid of losing it and stagging with you too hard. Hurting you.

"It sounds like the list of impossible don'ts' from South Pacific'," Sharon murmured.

"The biggest one, at the moment," her brother noted, "is `don't hurt you'. That scares me because I'll be the one responsible if things go wrong while we're trying."

"If a shotgun blows up at the range," the girl responded, "I'm not going to blame you for teaching me now to shoot it, not after I begged for weeks."

"It's not as if we can't do anything at all," Mace said, "we just have to wait before we can do everything."

"But what if I start crying and begging when I see you?" the pixie wanted to know, "turn into a brat, because before I had everything I wanted, and now there's something I want more than anything, and I can't have it?"

"We'll make a bargain," the older sibling said, "if you do that, I'll turn into a creep -- always trying to peek at you in the shower and look under your nightie, then you won't like me anymore, won't want anything from me, and thus can go back to the sweet and generous girl I've known since she was a cute baby."

"You make it all so simple," Sharon responded, "and the thing is, you're right. You can teach me the boy things, you know, what guys do together, while we wait. Someday I may marry an older man, and it would be good to be kinda skillful, or even a younger guy who thought I was cute and wanted to be repetitive, or, most especially of all, a gonzo adorable older brother, so he'd know I really love him as a boy, not as an experimental mannequin."

"Three good reasons," the brother said, nodding and looking into Sharon's big brown eyes.

"Maybe it can be like it is with the doll houses," the girl added: "we do them over and over and they get better and better, so by the time we can go all the way together, we'll be better at not going all the way."

Mace blushed. Her mention of their family project had not brought forth images of disciplined repetition, but of the ending of each project, and he was unable to look down and the child beside him without thinking in terms of a hot, fiery climax high between her slim, second-grader legs. Their age of innocence was approaching its end like a freight train loose in a canyon. Their voices were strained and husky, they were panting lightly and sheened with perspiration, their eyes ate on each other like starving raptors. Mace stood in front of his pixie sister. "When you get me naked," he whispered, "take your top off and let me experiment against your bare chest, okay?"

"Can I take it off, first?" the girl asked.

"Yes," the teen whispered.

"Norry?" the girl asked, dropping out of character as her younger self, "do you want to uncover me while Mace watches?"

"Yes," the twelve-year-old cousin said, so caught up in the young couple's reenactment he was startled to hear his name. The female nodded to the bed at her right, and the younger boy sat beside her. She bent forward, and after a moment's fumbling the twelve year old had free his little cousin, and, as Mace stared down from a foot away, his huge penis almost touching the blushing child, Sharon dropped the fabric on her lap and displayed openly for both young males, arching her nine-year-old chest and clasping her hands behind her head. The fit of the bra and been tight, and it was now easy to see why. The petite girl had big, hard, pink nipples jutting from soft, half-orange-size mounds. Both males stared for long moments, then Sharon's small hands went to the waistband of her brother's gray briefs, and she pulled them out in front as Norry stared. The mature boy's penis was slim, but over seven inches in length, circumcised, and bent slightly to his left. Steadying himself on his cousin's shoulder, the athletic teenager spread his legs widely, and slowly moved his hips to the girl. His dark-pink glans found the child's right nipple first, wetting it with seminal fluid as he thrust gently against her bare chest. Sharon sat, head bowed, staring at the beautiful nineteen year old, her arms now hanging at her side as she let her private bombs-bursting-in-there feelings explode through her in burst after pyrotechnic burst equal to the first time she'd felt his hot maleness intimately against her young body.

The duo became more dynamic, the female's mewing welcome stimulating the mature teen to thrust ever more firmly against the little girl's pubescent breasts. Norry returned to his seat and watched the couple as they lost themselves in a mystical dance. Sharon's hands and mouth went to the older male, and she reprised using him awkwardly and hesitantly, drawing gasps and hisses from the shaking, sweating, young adult as she acted out for their inexperienced cousin. After some minutes, she stood and gently positioned the powerful male on his back, coaxing him with her finger tips until the tall, coltish youth was stretched out with his head beyond the foot of her bed. He arched back until he rested on the carpet while his legs found the kneeling girl's sensuously soft waist. Sharon helped balance him by mounting his right thigh, and her counterbalancing weight allowed the teen to stretch in full display. The girl nodded to Norry, and the twelve year old responded by mounting his cousin's left thigh, further bracing the older male.

As Norry began touching a female for the first time, the girl began masturbating her shaking, arching brother, stroking his penis in a vertical position with her right hand, and grasping him between his long, athletic legs with her left. So the tableau remained for long minuets, the teen stretched and arching to the floor, two children astride his powerful, widely spread legs, the female masturbating him gently and fully, the junior male's left arm around the girl's waist, his right hand fondling her hard, pink nipples and soft, feminine mounds.

Then it was over, though a story with its climax held in abeyance. Mace whispered to his sister, and slowly lay on his side as both youngsters freed his legs. He stood after a moment, shaking but able to function. Another minute, and Mace lay Sharon back on the bed, pulled a pillow down beneath her bottom, and took his naked cousin gently in his arms. He eased the twelve year old over the nine year old. Sharon spread widely, and the older male helped the boy find the girl and held his shaking, panting young body as the child pumped with his slim hips, thrusting into the hot softness of the nine year old in half a dozen strokes. The teen released the young couple and stood beside the bed to watch the beginning of their mating. Sharon, her hips on the pillow, lay flat for her new lover, arms over her head, legs spread wide with her heels on the edges of the bed. Norry rose above her, looking into hr eyes and between their sweating, childish bodies, and then back into her pretty school-girl eyes. As he continued more vigorously with his tentative thrusting, he lowered on his arms, the better to feel Sharon's urgent nipples against his heaving chest. As she had for her brother on their first time, she lay spread eagle and still, not so much holding back as absolutely focused on the heat dazzling her young body between her knees and her pretty navel.

I was wondering just now at the correlation between being the best artist and picking the best subject. Picasso Sr. painted exquisite renderings of pigeons in doorways. Hardly a great subject, yet art without need of adjectives.. Now then, supposing he'd used his talent on painting a dashing, dark-eyed village boy with a buttercup of a kid sister. Suppose, while we're at it, I used my genius to delineate three or four pigeons pecking at crumbs on a stone stoop. Texture of roughly quarried stone against the sleek grays and iridescent greens of the silky urban bird; the tension of their grouping, the play of light sifting to courtyard floor with tufts of weed and grass sprouting from less trod chinks adding their own common green. As I said, it's the subject that counts.

The subject of some of my essays is sex. Let me say this about that: Andrew yes, Randy, no. Once again, I find in my so-called fiction, while I may expand upon size in the name of drama, I do not exaggerate the length of a teen's climax. Andrew came in my mouth, no lie, for almost five minutes. He was naked, we had the lights off, and I tasted the first saltiness from him after the first five minutes. I was holding him low with my left hand and didn't feel the hard pulses that usually coincide with the flood he releases over my tongue, so I kept sucking him as he panted and shook. Time and again, there was, excuse the non-sequitor, freshness to his slick, thick saltiness. When for two or three minutes things diminished, I eased off him and asked if he had more sperm. He shook his head, so I began cleaning him off and experimenting to see if I'd ever catch my breath.

Randy flew the coop after a couple of hours leaving me in a faint-heart-ne'er-won-fair-laddy quandary. He came over by himself and responded readily to being kissed and fondled. Trying to play my own game, I asked him if he wanted to get naked in the bathroom after he'd used the computer for awhile. He nodded and said yes, unhesitatingly. I mostly worked in the kitchen while he played, but did check once to see if he was ready, asking a leading question as to whether or not he wanted to continue playing Shogo. He said yes, so I went back to the kitchen. Ten minutes later he came out of the bedroom, said he had to go, and left. It was the most erotic thing he could have done. First, it shows he's not a punky hustler who wants it, vis-à-vis Mario, whose story appears elsewhere. Second, it shows he's not addicted and makes no special issue out of being molested, one way or the other. In any event, he's playing his role brilliantly, and, if he drifts off, I'll always wonder if it would have made a difference if I'd taken him in the bathroom with Fidel

What a non-thing it all is is the hard point to get across, especially when to read me you might think I lie around dwelling on hot young bods day and night. Well, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind, as my illustrious ancestor said, so if I tell you its only peanuts I write of, then write of almost nothing but peanuts, you'll have to separate the meat and the shell on your own. Maybe this will help: I tell you it's nothing, to guide you; then write about it incessantly, to entertain you.

Three slow days in a row, each four or five thousand words. It's like a vacation, writing at the reduced rate, with hours each day to do nothing I spend what otherwise would be wasted time trying not to be appalled at having yet to go almost twice as far as we've come. I've never put the muses to harness for an all-out enduro, something like circling the globe at the equator, then tacking on the Iditarod and the French bike race, so it's brave new words, out where I have no idea what I'm doing simply because there are no guideposts or frames of reference. Erica Jong may have had a fear of flying, mine is of landing, or, for that matter, settling below mach six. Of course, I also feared my mother, and I've survived her by ten years, so maybe I should just relax and accept the fact that, all things being equal, yes, this will conclude as the greatest and longest of all works of art, and stop dithering and asking pointless questions like Why me?

If there is an answer, it probably is incest, as noted previously. "Encarta" actually has an intelligent article on the subject, and the writer allows that there is a group of geneticists that feel the negative side of inbreeding is exaggerated, and that, in general, it does increase the quality of a blood line. To be inbred as an Emerson and Forbes, two of the most brilliant clans of all times, and probably THE two most brilliant, has to be as good an answer as any to why single scenes in my books exceed the work of all American writers, and most British authors, as well. Of course, if you listen to me on the subject, you'll find it really is the subject matter that sets my work on its own vaulting pedestal, and I'm just a hack leaning against that pedestal and taking a pederest, so smug at having picked the right subject matter and themes, I can lie around typing away at my leisure and break all the records, including the previously neglected fact that this is, in the world's longest widely-read book, history's longest essay. So again, subject, subject, subject.

I just woke up and got back to work. What's all this subject' stuff? Shouldn't it be character'? If Norry, Mace, and Sharon played soccer at the same field, and hung at the mall together, would they be any less engaging? Maybe they could know somebody who sniffed glue, you know, so there'd be drama in their young lives, and there'd be two hour every month at the soup kitchen to add depth and vitality, distinguishing them from all their little white-bread friends. It wouldn't be good to take chances in such a manuscript, but if one of the characters intended reading a Harry Potter book? Mightn't that work as symbolic of the quest for knowledge, perspective, and the fuller understanding betokening insight? Think of the verdant field to be found by an author in all the things the young brother and sister have missed throughout their abnormal lives -- why there'd be a field day in merely looking over their shoulders as they instant-messaged their little friends after school, and then there'd be the day Mace brought home a B in algebra, and the bright future his wizardry foreshadowed might, with a little editorial spit and polish, be brought into play as the culmination of their entire story. Yes, the potential is there: the challenge for the wordsmith to be found in stroking smoothly across the page the intricacies, the tender byplay, the resonance and texture of spontaneous conversation as the young siblings make their way from Footlocker to The Gap, maybe stopping along the way at Mrs. Field's for a homemade cookie. Mace could use the telephone in his sister's room, and little Sharon, the computer in her brother's. He could let her ride shotgun in the family minivan, though other outward displays of affection would have to be muted as some people have a way of reading things, you know, the wrong way.

Does this rare journey into outright sarcasm set off little bells half-way between your ears? Make you wonder why most books, especially those written for or about children, are so thin? Do you find a correlation between the quality of adolescent lives and the paucity of their literary heritage? I do. My life was treacle and nowhere until Jon's first cum, which I didn't even see because we were lying on our backs under a blanket, but I got a drop of his semen on my hand (to this day, I don't know where the rest of his sperm went, probably against the wool, though I looked for it and didn't see it) and that was a clear indicator that there was more to life than my howling mother and "The Hardy Boys". I began reading to find out more, found out, instead, there wasn't much more, and then began writing so there would be more.

One abstraction vaguely to do with Randy. This is kind of a tough one. What if Austin, Samantha' fat younger brother, eleven, came onto me? Not overly aggressively, the turn-off of turnoffs, but in an affectionate and hesitant way? Would I deny what he wanted on the basis of his corpulence, or be a man about the whole thing and molest him? Perhaps Esperanza holds the answer. She was Karen's older sister, thirteen, a golden octoroon, dead hot on my bod, and a gordita, a fat girl. I'm not saying that if fate had thrown us together in a totally secure environment, for many hours, something might not have happened, but it probably wouldn't have happened twice. And how about Randy getting fat? Say he continues coming over, that someday soon I hold his naked twelve-year-old body in my lap, his chest arched, his hands behind my neck, as Fidel masturbates had and fast against him, cumming heavily and thickly on the silky warmth of the little boy's nakedness, then he jerks me off, his hand wet from the teen? Would all that come to a screeching halt if the boy put on ten pounds? If he became an avid and hot lover, very willing with mouth, lips, tongue, and hands, it might last. Okay, now how about if he puts on twenty pounds, looking like his cousin, Austin? I think Steven Rolling demonstrated that, although practically indescribable, the skill set of the pre-teen lover is finite. If this turns out to be true, then an obese Randy, while likely remaining a friend, as Austin is, would still be of no Interest to a guy like me. In summary, it's a damn good thing fat people like food, because that's all they're likely to get.

Pantherito is off, thanks to Austin's carelessness, on another jaunt in the exceedingly dangerous world of the ten-pound housecat They say no act of kindness goes unpunished. No sooner had I allowed the huge black cat bed privileges, than he jumped up on my feet, accidentally hooking the big toe of my right foot with one of his prodigious, hooked claws. Realizing immediately, in spite of what might be generously called his methodical mind, something was amiss, he tried to jump to the floor, taking my foot with him, and, for just an exquisite and not soon to be forgotten moment, hung in mid-air, the god-like wrath of he from whom all blessing flow, making little impression. It didn't take much jerking and flailing to free his hook from my flesh, and he refrained from using the five talons on his off paw, so in an hour I was counting myself a pretty lucky fellow. In an hour and a minute, the giant returned. For all it's six bedroom, my dwelling is a humble affair, amounting to some five-hundred square feet on the upper floor. My mouse pad occupies roughly one of these five hundred, yet he was unerring in first finding, then occupying Earth's most holy ground. Trying to move his immense, but not at all fat, carcass so I could get back to work, resulted in such a chorus of mews and chirps as were never heard in an aviary. So now he's out with the snakes and alligators, a hell of a meal on the hoof, and I'm back at work.

Good. We've practiced a little mainstream footwork with pigeons and house lions, and in taking the liberty, have provided that artistic merit and those redeeming social qualities and cultural values that separate the salacious and literary, discovering, in the process, that the typical lives of typical American teens are an artistic challenge beyond even those talents and gifts awarded by the gods in compensation for their prank of a mother. That's a lot for such a short essay. Perhaps I should thrown in a prurient scene to maintain reader interest. Well, as I was compensated by the muses, let me, in turn, compensate the patient reader.

Three sweating, panting young bodies. A twelve-year-old boy now fully mounted and rapidly gaining experience with the pretty girl beneath his rhythmically thrusting lower back and buttocks. The girl still lies on her pillow, her arms outstretched and her legs spread, knees against the mattress, as her nineteen-year-old brother braces against the bed, staring down between their young bodies when Norry rises on his arms, and masturbating with the tip of his circumcised, adult penis inches from the second-grader's face. Thus free of any trace of merit; literary, artistic, cultural, or otherwise, and the responsibility associated with it, we proceed with the entertainment portion of our presentation.

They were able to whisper to each other in short gasps. "Have you ever watched it happen with a boy?" Sharon asked the beauty between her widely spread young legs.

"No," Norry gasped in answer.

"Mace?" the girl responded. She could see the young adult's nod, Norry couldn't. All he knew was that suddenly everything changed, moving in moments from the passionately intense to the depravity of the wantonly wild. With her eyes she begged her beautiful young buck be easy with her, and slowly drawing her legs and arms around his sleek, boyish body, she coxed him gently to a shaking, panting stillness, using her own strong arms against his sweating chest to help the youth support his weight. Mace spread his long legs more widely, thrusting gently to his sister's face so the base of his swollen red glans rubbed against the child's pretty mouth. Norry could feel the fast rise in the tension of the adult at his right shoulder, and, as he stared down into the eyes of the gamin tomboy, also see a seemingly impossible swelling of Mace's huge, heavy penis. In all of a thousand lives there could be nothing like this, the twelve year old knew. He sensed he was also tensing just beats behind his teenage cousin. "Watch him," Sharon hissed, familiar with the steed. Mace stilled, the boy stared, and the girl stuck out her delicate pink tongue. The adult moved his back slightly, holding his swollen tip against the child's right cheek. "I'm cumming off, Norry," he gasped.

"Kiss me after you're watched it three times," Sharon mewed, her final words bubbling through a glacier of thick, milky, teen sperm. Norry couldn't believe such a torrent, that such an almost vicious, to say nothing of viscous, gout could be repeated, ever. He was just thinking he was right, when a second long, hot jet sprayed for the shaking male at his shoulder. That it had been repeated was too much a miracle to digest, and the boy simply couldn't summon the confidence to wait for a third ejaculation from the powerful teenager. He lowered his hawkish, handsome face to the school girl. Their lips poised and met. Mace used his left hand to cradle the heads of the boy and girl on the bed, and carefully eased his flaring, dark-pink glans between their experimenting lips and tongues. He was slick and salty, and both the young lovers welcomed him avidly. He came again, then five more times hard and fast as the children moaned and swallowed, heavy rivulets of thick, while male seed streaming down the right cheek of the nine year old.

"Mace," the girl said, almost a little funny because she gurgled and bubbled on the thick cum in her mouth, "hold my hand." She reached from Norry's now surging back and her brother took her small hand in both of his. "Hold him," she said.

The young adult moved beside his naked young cousin, wrapping his right arm around the boy's muscular waist. Norry pushed fully against him, and, stimulated beyond endurance by the powerful grip on his young body, froze deep inside the hot, wet tightness of his nine-year-old mate. "I'm cumming," he said, his voice also affected by the heavy swallows of semen he'd shared with Sharon. The sperm flowed between the children in panting silence. Both males looked into the female's eyes as it happened and kept happening. Her look of welcome and contentment vanished, turning first to one of surprised, then wide-eyed shock. "Mace," she half-blubbered, "he's making me cum."

It happened like she was being electrocuted during a grand mal seizure, every spring of the mattress jolting her, bouncing her, whipping her and flailing her. She screamed, "Norry, stop," as her fingers raked him to her and her legs beat hard against his stone-rigid body. Mace huddled to both the slim, young bodies, and, comforted by his mature presence, Sharon let go, whispering frantically to her young lover, begging for his child as he spilled hard within her again and again.

They lay together for long minutes, the girl, being female, reviving first. "That was my first time," she whispered, he voice tinged with awe, to her young cousin. "Mine, too," the boy replied.

"You must be wondering," Sharon finally went on, "about what happened two nights later, after we'd read some stories in `Old Joe's Collection.', and knew more about our bodies." The boy was, in fact, wondering about baser issues such as breathing, standing, or talking, ever again, but there was that in the little tomboy's voice which stirred through his dizzying lethargy, and by the time the young couple were dressed and out in the hall, ready to enter into their reenactment, the boy was back in his chair by Sharon's bed.

Curtain:

(A girl's bedroom, obviously but not opulently feminine. The room is furnished with a four-poster bed, more utilitarian than extravagant. Likewise, there is a dresser and chair of simple craftsmanship. Several bookshelves are crammed with a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and magazines are stacked on top. Posters of C.S. Forester, John Irving, and Larry McMurtry adorn the walls. While it decidedly a girl's room, with a large and aged Teddy Bear relaxing against a pillow, a collection of lengths of two-inch iron pipe, and caps, a power drill, and various clockworks, both electronic and mechanical, contrast with what would otherwise be a bookish and gentle haven.

A female of nine years enters, SHARON, followed closely by MACE, a tall, handsome teenage male, and her natural brother. They are talking and we listen.)

MACE: We can read more if you want.

SHARON: If anything goes wrong, lets, but I think the story about the seven year old on the tractor with her granddad was a true one, not something dashed off by a whiz kid, and they were successful, even the first time."

(SHARON crosses to the bed and stretches against the left rear post, linking her hands at its top.. MACE slowly approaches his sister and his hands go to the clasp of her dress.)

SHARON: Do you think rich people had carved pineapples on top of their bedposts so brides could hold on better?

MACE: They were a symbol of luck.

SHARON: That's mixed up. The luck would start when they let go.

MACE: They were a symbol of luck, not luck itself.

SHARON: You're not being Dole and pulling my leg, are you?

MACE: I'm just grasping at straws because I want to share everything at once with my ravishingly beautiful and unbelievably sexy kid sis.

SHARON: I'm wrapped up like a candy bar.

(Sharon lowers her hands to her sides as MACE unbuttons her dress, kneeling to hiss her back as he slowly lowers it, revealing the child in her slip, her bare shoulders soft and delicate beneath the silk straps of the white garment. The boy hangs the girls dress neatly on the far bedpost and strips, quickly, in a moment returning to SHARON who standing quietly with her forehead against the softly finished but unadorned pillar. MACE removes the straps from SHARON'S shoulders, kneeling as he lowers the silk down over her young ballerina's body and leaning to kiss her now almost bare shoulders. Leaving SHARON in her training bra and blue panties, MACE goes on to fully molest his pretty little sister.)

MACE: Should I go into the bathroom and get a washcloth with some soapy water on it, the way Helen did in the story she wrote about what happened on the tractor when she was six?

SHARON: You're younger and handsomer than Mike, in the story, and even though she loved him, you know, with girls it's like it is with boys, and things are easier for a girl with a handsome nineteen-year-old boy than they would be even with an athletic sixty year old, like Mike.

MACE: Are you sure, darling? We have lots of time.

SHARON: Keep doing what you're doing, and if I'm wrong now, I won't be in a few minutes.

MACE: I really like this part with you, just seeing you a little at a time, like unfolding something priceless and wrapped in silk.

SHARON: I like looking at you, all of a sudden. It always shocks me how big you are.

MACE: Mike was as big as I am, and Helen was smaller than you, that's what it said, but memories can be hazy, and some writers exaggerate, even if they're telling a true story, so if you want me to get you all wet and soapy with warm water, just tell me, okay?

Intermission:

(The audience has by now been vitally challenged and needs time to adjust to new paradigms on Broadway. The Intermission is for one hour.)

Curtain::

(MACE enters the bedroom with a wet, soapy washcloth. He wrings it gently into his right hand, then hangs the cloth atop the bedpost. He molests SHARON with his wet hands, especially under her training bra. The girl mews in happy welcome and stretches her slim arms yet higher toward the top of the vertical shaft of the four-poster. The naked and highly aroused MACE responds by more ardently fondling and stroking the juvenile body of the nine year old, then removes SHARON'S bra and panties, thrusting his adult penis high between his sister's legs and against her now-panting belly as she spreads widely in welcome.)

SHARON: Helen was in about this position with Mike when she was bent over the steering wheel of the tractor.

MACE: Darling, it might have been fiction. Some people are pretty good at it. He might have been small, and she a big, husky six year old, more like a girl your age, but who would read a story like that?

SHARON: I'm not husky, am I?

MACE: You're more Barbie than Barbie; you're perfect and beautiful and I'd love you if your mother was an apple and your father a toadstool. I was comparing you to a girl three years younger.

SHARON: I know, I'm just nervous, like at execution time. The thought of feeling you up inside me is like watching the approach of a ham-handed drunkard with a small, blunt ax.

MACE: If he faces a long afternoon with a husky girl, one could hardly expect him to be sober.

SHARON: Hardly.

(MACE has been molesting SHARON and now reaches again to the wet cloth hanging atop the bedstead. He wets his right hand and his sister renews her grip on the pine post and again spreads her long, slim legs in welcome. His hands find her immature breasts, then trail down. His left arm supports her just below her heaving ribs, while his right hand continues slowly down over her belly, and lodges deep between her legs. He masturbates SHARON openly now, breathing hotly against her silken brown hair. SHARON mews and whimpers in response.)

SHARON: Helen let Mike do this for acres.

MACE: Big farms, wide open spaces, lots of daughters and granddaughters. Things happened on cattle drives that built a rail empire, so it's natural to view the breadbasket in the same light.

SHARON: It must have been difficult behind a mule.

MACE: Mules need rest and don't tell secrets.

SHARON: Do you think it's true?

MACE: I think a hundred men out of a hundred and ten, who had a pretty, friendly, pigtailed brat in braids and overalls tagging along, would exceed the daily quota of work of a man with only a mule and a plow.

SHARON: And the mule would be happier, too. Add it all up, and it's how the West was Done.

MACE: One seed at a time.

SHARON: Will you talk when you're inside me? Remember, Helen told her granddad about something she saw while she was hiding in the hayloft. If she could tell a story, can you talk to me?

MACE. He was a lot more mature than I am.

SHARON: But Helen was more immature, wouldn't that sort of balance?

MACE: Yes.

SHARON: Mace, did you like the philosophical side of the story?

MACE: I was scared of possible editorial tangents for awhile, there, but the writer had more class than that, so, yes, I thought Mike's paying for his time with Helen by working harder and longer to make up for his sins, and finding his ability to focus was directly related to his having hours of more than any man could want, thus allowing him to die knowing he had missed nothing, was compelling.

I think it fit us both.

SHARON: I'm just glad we have something to work on together.

(MACE and SHARON, both naked and leaning against the bedpost, look over their left shoulders at SHARON'S dresser, then the male returns to masturbating his sister with one hand and feeling her budding breasts with his still soapy left hand.)

MACE: If you were playing in a pioneer farmer's-daughter story, who would your father be?

SHARON: Patrick Swayze when he did "Dirty Dancing".

MACE: And who would you look like?

SHARON: Alison McKenzie when she was in "American Graffiti".

MACE: And is it flat countryside and a wheat farm, or in hilly country where there's corn?

SHARON: Corn.

MACE: Is he your daddy or your older brother?

SHARON: My daddy.

MACE: How old are you when you're raped by him.

SHARON: Ten, almost eleven.

MACE; What's the mule's name?

SHARON: Quiet Reynolds.

MACE: Have you been plowing long?

SHARON: Since tarnation soon after sunup.

MACE: But you're not tired.

SHARON: It's my first time alone with Daddy since Mommy bought me something special and told me her big secret, so I'm too excited to be tired.

MACE: Do you help with the plowing?

SHARON: Daddy does four furrows, and I do one."

MACE: Do you like it?

SHARON: I feel plumb useful, so I don't give no mind to me druthers.

MACE: That's wonderful and noble.

SHARON: If you'd waited a second longer, I'd have added: `most of the time.'

MACE: I'm glad.

SHARON: Why? Did you think you were in for an afternoon of corn with me? Growing inch by inch and spiking heavenward from the folds in the verdant earth?

MACE: I don't know. A husky girl and a mule?

SHARON: Daddy was wiser and more sensitive than you are.

MACE: He made you, so...

SHARON: No he didn't.

(Pause.)

MACE: You better tell me everything.

SHARON: I will, Daddy, but lets get Q.R. out of his harness. I know we're both really nervous, but you've done enough for the morning.

MACE: You're so sensitive to the animals, darling, I love that about you.

SHARON: That was yesterday, Daddy, today I feel like one, an animal in a storm, all wet and itchy and wanting to be someplace dry and quiet and out of my harness, the one Mom bought me yesterday at Zeppo's Department Store.

MACE: That was a special day for your mom, when she got her first bra. Did she tell you everything, darling.

SHARON: Oh, Daddy, she told me so much. How people eat and drink and gamble because they disobey Edict One, and fail to do unto their daughters as their daughters wish done unto them; how granddad stayed fit and stayed sober and stayed home, and what happened when she led him by the hand up to her bedroom to show him how she was developing, and how he got you to start dating her when you were fifteen, and she was twelve, and you knew she was pregnant from granddad, but you still loved her, and how she promised me to you when I was old enough to start growing, and how I can have your baby when I'm big enough if I want to, and how it feels for a little girl to be with a full-grown man, and how granddad knelt behind her up in her bedroom while she knelt and bent over the bed. All the details, even how it felt when her daddy started letting his seed run inside her, and how she became closer with her mom because they were open and natural about sharing Granddad's sperms instead of her sickening herself with vapors and dithers, and how excited you all were when she missed her period, and getting you guys married with a wink here and a hundred dollars there, and how she's really twenty-one instead of twenty six, which she'd have to be for me to be legal, and how most families have other traditions and customs and behave in different ways, but how what we have seems to be working for us because we don't have hidden problems and secret tensions so Mom has to drink laudanum and turn gray before her time.

(MACE gently moves SHARON from the post of the bed. He fetches the two pillows and places them so his sister can kneel on both with her legs widely spread. He places his hands on the girl's hips and moves gently close behind her naked body. Using his right hand, he finds her, then again takes her slender waist in both hands as his hips take up a gentle and careful rhythm against her bottom.)

MACE: Did your mom tell you a lot about what happened up in her bedroom.

SHARON: She told me how scared she was and how ashamed she was when she sat in his lap to show him how her breasts were starting to grow, `just like the first time I had to do show-and-tell at school', she said.

MACE: How about the first time she rode Widowmaker?

SHARON: Oh, Daddy, that time she was really scared.

MACE: Do you like being at this tree with me, darling, do you like what's happening?

SHARON: I'm very comfortable, Daddy, and I'm not as scared as Mommy was because she told me everything she felt while Granddad was kneeling behind her and holding her hips like you are.

MACE: Did you like being bare-chested with me, darling?

SHARON: Yes, Daddy, my nipples never got big like that before, even when Mommy was telling me how she got big when Granddad started whispering things to her while he was unbuttoning her blouse.

I used to be pretty good about not flying when I was mad and should probably apply the same principle to writing. On the other hand, if I'm too mad to write, nothing gets written, so I guess one hideous weekend out of the way, and see if there's anything left to pick up or rather just type The End and be done with it. My pet of the moment is related to photography; to my once stolen camera that was turned in by Linden to his aunt prompting my sending Bev up to Belize City to retrieve it. Just as this was organized, the electric power moguls came along and disconnected me at noon on Friday. Since blackouts are relatively frequent here, I paid not attention, bill paid up, no sweat. Then the neighbor's lights started coming on, and the truth dawned at sunset. No power for half a day Friday, the entire weekend, and half a day Monday.

Finally the camera turns up; works, but he also stole the driver disc, so no joy. These would be small things, except photography is the only hobby I have. I'm out of the house maybe three hours in ten days, I work and care for others absolutely incessantly, and the one small luxury and pleasure I finally achieved after two years, stolen, then a trap laid to get me to pay for a trip to Belize, costing yet more. It pushes me to the absolute limit of cutting everybody off, entirely. In two months I could have not only a new camera, but a new computer to run it on. If I do this, I support people who get up in the morning and build cameras and computers; as it is I seem to have nurtured a tribe of merciless thieves.

I have no interest in Christ as a tomb dancer or angel shuffler, but have tried living to pragmatic aspects of the doctrine, at terrific expense, with as little sexual compensation as a few hundred dollar would buy at the border, or in town, for that matter, and to what possible trace of any avail, at all? This isn't just harping on a personal problems, picking scabs, it's central to the defectiveness of the entire Left; all liberalism with its Dudley Dogood, myopic arrogance. There's no neutral ground. I do for you -- neutral. The truth is, I do for you -- you steal from me what hurts the most and where it hurts the most. It certainly, if nothing else, emphasizes a point of a controversial nature: that all kids are good for is sex, and he who approaches from any other angle is a moron, no matter what mensa says. Luckily Jose makes a partial fiction of this, but Steven and Samantha seem to be winning in the overall-veracity department, and I haven't even had sex with her.

So, not one of Mrs. Gump's better chocolates, but, as an experienced world traveler, the whole crummy episode does put me in mind OF the border, how long it would take a taxi driver reinforced with a couple of hundred U.S. dollars to come up with a family-bred nina who wouldn't mind settling in with a cute older guy, close to her family, and so on and so forth.

And there's not letup. No sooner am I in the midst of, what for me, is an extreme angst attack, than Queenie and gang demolish the entire supply of boiled eggs for the cream sauce, not only not leaving me one, but leaving all the shells in the sink. Maybe treating me like one of their own is calculated to make me feel young. The problem is, when I'm left alone, I do feel young, hardly more than sixteen, but I got rather overdosed on abuse as a five year old, so perhaps ended up thinner-skinned than is optimum.

Finally heard about the unscheduled inclusion of Texas in a role not originally intended by NASA. I wish it had happened on the way up, stranding an orbiting crew long enough so they die, and thus supply the stick that breaks this mad dog's back. Malcolm thinks they should keep pitching, apparently seriously believing in colonization of Mars. I think it's more likely I'll win the Peabody Award for children's literature.

Actually, it was kind of a fun weekend without power. Bev sent over a good kerosene lamp, and it brought back memories of living on the local islands, which I did for about a year. The high point was little Kira. She was here with Randy, Austin, Junior, who's nearly her age, two, and another friend of Randy's. They were all playing in the boxes in one of the spare rooms, and little Kira came out again and again to stand right in front of me and stare at me while pulling her dress up to her chin. In, all, she must have done this for half-an-hour. She never approached closer than a foot, but never was much further away than that, either. I try to follow advice I read once to never look a child in the eyes for more than two seconds, and, even by my standards, Kira is a child. This did little good, she stood staring at me, lifting her dress, looking down at her tummy, and staring again. I responded in no way, just sat in the rocking chair reading "The New York Review of Book". Of course, just my luck and how the weekend was (really) going, what should I come across in the "Review"? "Don't Tell". That's the title of a book on whose cover dwelleth the image of either a milk-and-cookies, or a twinkie, in his undershirt, head bent down rather exactly as it might be if a man had his little white underpants off and was teaching him with his mouth. Said provocative image was renderethed on a full page, proving New York is in the game, even if approaching through the back door. There was no mention of "case-histories" on the jacket, which shows how much class you have to have to make it there. Anyhow, the juxtaposition of large rendering of boy and half-naked Kira seemed to have aesthetic merit, though, admittedly, such beauty might be attributed to the eye of the beholder.

Sex as art does seem to be becoming a theme. H'mm. I thought it was for entertainment. If anything, at the outset, the funny stuff was meant to be art; a quip here, a joke there, and wry commentary as a subset of the symphonic wave. The sex was for the audience, because that's where the audience, like the money in Mr. Sutton's bank, is. I mean, personally, I knew Jose, waiting in the bathroom and very ready for me to stand behind him, or kneel in front of him, was physical, forceful, elemental beauty. Randy is a hot statue, ah, but forbidden. Too bad. It was artists who build America. Did you know that? Their paintings, from Niagara Falls, west, were the true catalyst of the vast migration of the Eighteen Hundreds; yes, supported by writers -- but it was the paintings and engravings that pushed the `go' button (anyway, they sure pushed mine, and I don't think I was happy one day in the East after I was clued-in by Mr. Remington, et al, to say nothing of the movies, which gave the art a reality).

The whole camera episode is a reminder of what a hot-house flower I am; some kind of exotic orchid needing a perfect combination of this, that, and the other thing to flourish. They cut off my electric power, I'm dead for three days. Kid steals a camera, it hurts so much I wonder if I'll ever get back to writing or whether the muses will be so turned off at their constant harassment with the human condition they'll cook up one of them there revolutions the peasant folk have a mind to hanker for. While it was clever of me to pick reindeer, with their exile alternative of the North Pole, there probably is a limit; a point at which wind-chill and polar bears beat moping and whining, and offer at least relative allure, even here in February.

My friends all drive Volvos, I must make amends. I could have Benzified myself time and again, with a Jaguar thrown in for weekend use, and I have nothing other than a four-year-old computer for work and a microwave for cooking, not even a camera. I'm the premier literary figure in the world today, probably of all time, and it has earned me three herbal pills that the reader who sent them said were much superior to Viagra. There's a paycheck to be proud of. And all for those, small and large, who are so unworthy; Samantha's unworthy of my terrific support of her family for nine years, the reading public is unworthy of such levels of talent and genius, well and fully mixed, and it ends up the only worthy s.o.b. in whole quilt and cow field is someone so obvious it would be pointless to have another reader's quiz on the subject.

Fiction and essays really are two different worlds; wounded and badly scarred, facing devastating the lives of others I deeply care for, I can wobble along an editorial track, but the thought of kids having fun and learning at least one aspect of love, in the process, puts me in mind of what my critics will say -- a cold, clammy business, or something like that. Where I had my characters half suspended from a bedpost, the cold-clammy set would have them cuffed to a cold, clammy wall, so that's something to keep in mind in our search for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, which brings up that salty little conundrum, perspective: friend or foe? They'd argue that a stainless and plastic cubicle at Pelican Bay wasn't being manacled in a dungeon, and, indeed, minors would be given lots of therapy, rather than being punished with prison and torture. I'd wonder what they'd done wrong, in the first place, to warrant the interest of the State, but then, I would.

Even "Clippy" can't cheer me up today. I inadvertently sent him to goal a few months ago, then hit a wrong key, and he came back. I can't imagine not liking the little guy, but to hear them tell it on Tech TV he's the product of a dunce and a cornball. When everyone has gone out of their way and taken pains to do you severe wrong, it's nice to have a friendly companion that doesn't crash on your keyboard every hour or two, enroute to his nap on the mouse pad.

It is tempting to call this the end, and simply publish it as is. No million words, but almost four-hundred-thousand. Who ever remembers the end of a novel? The only climax and conclusion that comes readily to mind is the ending of "The African Queen". It's what you get along the way that separates the wheat from the chaff; sketches, vignettes, studies and outlines. Also, it would be symbolic to end on a pessimistic and woeful note, especially in light of the fact there is nothing on god's green earth to be optimistic about, and, while this is appealing to the graveyard humorist, such a fun-lover must be duly daunted by the fact that his quips and repartee are enjoyed by a civilization at the brink of extinction, "South Pacific's" whippoorwill, notwithstanding. Of course, the anology of the human race falling on its face is dated, what with the popular trend to bowling-ball bodies, to say nothing of mats of facial hair, which have to be good for something.

It would be nice to be lazy for awhile. Do nothing, think nothing, write nothing, and let my bank account grow. Find a Kentucky trailer park, get a credit card so I could find out what's really going on in the world of porn, and a willing boy or two. Get a decent camera and contribute, visually; in the meantime, just do nothing for weeks and months. Maybe they still have that game of Mech Warrior (in Spanish) at the local computer store, or, while I was rummaging around for the driver disk for the Toshiba camera, I found my old "Train Simulator". Turn everybody out, turn everybody away, become the reclusive miser and temperamental artiste of legend; leave my perfect novel of a life, to date, and start once again on page one. Whether or not that would re-harness the muses I do not know, but they've performed far beyond any call, so if they're off in search of another set of ten fingers, I'll only regret I don't have a set of bearskin booties for each.

It just occurred to me that I'm infamous; Samantha and I are an infamous couple, for example. Randy an infamous boy toy, Kira, an infamous temptress. The logic goes as follows: we're know but we're unknown. By this time hundreds of thousands of people, on global a scale, know about us, but none knows the other knows. As there figures reach the millions and multi-millions, we become more and more famous, but in secret. Infamous. This makes Tom Cruise, the actor, not the ready lawyer, outfamous, I suppose. On the other hand, if we-all were webfamous or netfamous, either of these terms might do in a pinch, leaving one T.C. netfamous, and the other, plain, everyday, ordinary-old rich and famous.

In the dirty tricks department we have Daisy as star of the year. Noah just dropped by asking when the rent was due, and had to hold himself up on the doorframe when I told him she hadn't paid me a dime of rent, ever. Apparently she's been dunning him, even from before she moved in. Noah's a hard-working farmer and has adopted several of her kids, so, appropriate for a novelist, I live where the arm that stabs you in the back is long and sinuous, but it can't be much fun for a farmer. Anyway, it's the street for them. Last night they ate seventeen boiled eggs for a single meal, then left the kitchen so stripped of dishes I had to eat off the plastic lid of a freezer bowl. As America is succeeding brilliantly at finding each and every limitation and fatal flaw of democracy, any way it's writ, so I'm finding, with the help of others, the limits of mercy and charity, and it fairly makes me pine for the smell of a factory-fresh Bimmer.

I wonder to what degree antipathy plays a role in my attitude. I have done it all, established myself as a literary figure, and one-day force, while living a life beyond the scope of any novel I've read, so, what's left? The western border with its knowledgeable taxi drivers, or the deep-south trailer park and fancy ride? Which tree would best nourish the delicate bloom? Does the species hibernate well? Can I take the months off to make a substantive change, and find the wave I've been able to ride the last couple of years? The neat thing is, it simply doesn't matter. I have not only realized my goal, I've exceeded my wildest dreams. To my peers with their cars and portfolios, I can say, given the most meager trail of seeds, I built the mightiest empire, and, if it's all in my head, at least it turned out to be the world's best head. I don't count myself as a person; the wants of others always came first, so maybe it's time to join the human race and simply play my role by grabbing for my share, knowing at least I tried.

Parting gift from Queenie. The house has been fuller and fuller of flies all day; usually I'm not bothered by one in a week. Under a pot in the sink, the one housing all the shells from last nights egg blowout, was a plastic bag of chicken parts, aged to a turn of the stomach. Remarkable. I've tried persuasion, nagging, tantrums, and everything in between, which, at a minimum, is a good basis for not trying any longer. I'm going to become a Mexican, a people legendary for reigning over stools down at the cantina. Totally small and insignificant, creeping in the shadows, living plush and lying low, a trapdoor spider waiting for a fly interested in life as a whole, not just action in the toilet. If I never find one, I've had two, and that's a couple up on most people. I think morbid fatalism suits me, or maybe it's just a reaction to it fitting the world at large.

In real time I got to practice the new me. The electrician stiffed me fifteen dollars, just now, on changing my porch light, then I stiffed him right back by not letting him take the step ladder (like gold here) until I heard from Alex that it was okay. He'll undoubtedly bill Alex for the repair, on top of my paying him cash, but at the cost of a two-hundred dollar ladder I easily could have trusted him with. Real cruelty, because he needs it for work and has kids to support. Tough. Got rid of Samantha in less than a minute, suggesting she find someone else for her family's never-ending bag of tricks. And now who should return, but the electrician, with a five-dollar rebate, and not getting the ladder. It's working, already. I'll feel a raw twinge at seeing Samantha riding in the truck I can't afford, but live with it. Just because I got all the talent doesn't mean I ever get the girl, but I do leave this one fresh and untouched for whoever does. No concern of mine, and there's a good chance we'll let Samantha live her life as she sees fit, without the distraction of an old lover; without inviting her back.

Age really is a state of mind. I feel twenty years older than I was at 12:19 p.m. on Friday, when the power company pulled the plug. I have a hard time understanding why anyone cares about anything. If a pedophile loses his interest in children, that about says it all. Eating and smoking, they're the things, maybe cats if you live in a rural area and don't care what gets knocked on the floor.

In my last book I made a comment to the effect of he who tarries with more than one, oft endeth up with none. I meant to add a codicil: He who tarries with none, always ends up with none. No Samantha, no Queenie, and Randy doesn't seem inclined to return. That leaves three teen boys, so I'm not batting zero, but they're of no significant interest and I'd trade them for a pocketful of jacks and marbles.

I don't know if this is a hiatus or the terminus. I'm going to dig out "Train Sim" and see if I can get a mile of freight over the hills and into Los Angeles without involving every sniffing dog west of the Mississippi.

No joy on the game. Sloggo gets petulant about his D-drive from time to time, and, though I can see it plainly enough, he can't, thus resetting me to default mode, which is writing huge, fabulous novels. As I said at the beginning of "The Tarzan Mushroom Hunters", it's ironic that you know how long this book will be by virtue of files yet to open, and I have no idea in the world. For my fellow writers, there is a technique for getting back on track, should you find yourself shunted onto a siding. Forget what you're working on at the moment and think of a scene, out ahead, you'd like to write, then write your way to it. For example, I have two. One, since we're still in our media essay, is a scene from "A Very Brady Movie" in which little Swiss Miss hangs out with the hard-mouthed beauty next door, and her cute but crummy brother, and then from "Home Improvement" we have the youngest son left to baby-sit for his two visiting nieces, which gives us a drop-dead sexy thirteen-year-old boy and girls of eight and ten. Four or five hours ought to do the scene justice. Meantime, we're I forget how many layers deep in this so-called essay, and my fits of mood and disgruntled attitude may be merely laziness at, a, having to go back and figure out where we are, and, b, reweaving the story so if it ever does come to an end there's enough continuity for any ombudsman who might one day materialize to be able to say, "See, it is a novel, after all."

Randy was over at seven-thirty this morning, providing a drop of nutrient for the orchid. Just played "Laser Tank", with not even a kiss, because kids in school uniform are off limits, plus I hadn't shaved. He said he'll be back this evening, no matter, he's cute enough to wait a year for.

It gives perspective to stop doing something; also appreciation. This is obviously true for athletes who need time, after a layoff, to get back in shape, and is probably true of surgeons and a few other crafts -- take a break and you have to spend time getting back up to speed. During this time, you come to realize how difficult what you do actually is. Writing good novels is, hands down, the hardest thing to do in the world, and there's nothing like five involuntary days off to remind me of that happy fact. While it's difficult to juggle, imagine how hard it is to restart juggling, especially in the middle of your act. The audience is booing your weakness and clumsiness, and there are all those plates to glue back together. Added to the inherent difficulty of catching another wave is the larger-than-life domestic scene; greedy supplicants, indifferent girlfriend, fabulously sexy boy toy, and Fidel who cums like a horse. Sort it all out, get all the little trolleys back on their little tracks, headed in the right direction, and turn up the power. Make it look easy so you can go around bragging how great you are, without anyone paying the least attention, leaving you free to become greater yet. There's as much strategy as tactics in playing longball; a lot of ducks have to be in a row in the atmosphere and attitude departments. You must be free of stress or commitments of a general nature so you have the emotional reserves to handle the impromptu and ad hoc nonsense that is sure to come along, find what humor and charm there is to be had, and then have the energy to chronicle it. This, I should note, is speaking of the New Novel, brimming with both story and the life of the writer, but still a useful insight for the almost childishly simple reason that the Old Novels have all been written. Also strategic is a contempt for New York and the high level of drivel attached to the city's output; many a night is made tactically significant working off no other fountainhead than knowing you can not only do better, but well enough to slap them around, high and mighty in assuming none of them write well enough to slap back. A derivative strategy is writing fiction well enough to have something to talk about when the mood strikes to sashay off into essayland. I don't to this as much as I might because I seem to have a cast of characters around me who are fully up to snuff when it comes to providing plot lines and variances freaking galore, but if I lived a normal life I'd discuss aspects of the novel and the thinking behind this scene or symbolism of that sketch; moods I meant to convey and emotions I intended to inspire with this phrase or that use of syntax. Of some strategic value is an underlying mindset to disregard or at least dampen any tendency to be playful. We all remember how we despised the class clown, so a serious overall approach to your craft will save you the stress of consternation issues and leave you with the best chance of popularity. Yes, it's the sane and serious approach that's called for because, say, for example, you have a lighthearted touch, how does it bode for the future? What I mean is, how long will your audience remain in the mood for your trifling and efforts at charming byplay? .In other words, what is there to laugh at in their lives, both at present and in the future? As the answer is approaching "nothing," your market-grade funny stuff may find a cold reception. This is when you turn to Horror, and see if you can instill your characters with more dread than the Man from Visa assumes at nine o'clock, five mornings a week. A great strategy is not to write, at all, but rather carry around in your head a masterpiece you doggone-well know is better than anything else out there. I did this for decades and so can testify in favor of letting the wine age in the barrel. Further, your conceit and holier than thou attitude may be off-putting to some of your friends, leaving you, once again, with more time to either think or write your novel. How much you grandstand along the way is perhaps more tactical than strategic, and, of course, derives from how good you at least think you are, in the first place, Self-adoration should also be mentioned as a potential source of gratuitous word count. Another significant strategic element is laziness; strategic in the sense it is required at all times, even though you may not have sat down before beginning work and plotted vast amounts of down time on your calendar. Energy, dashing down every thought that enters your silly head, is the death of art; lassitude and an attitude so slothful you only transcribe the very best turn out to be essential attributes of greatness, which, I might add, is why a kid with an IQ of four-hundred, decided, at age two, to be a writer. One copes with the fallout from a slacker/misery identity on a situation-by-situation, tactical, basis, but should know the costs at the planning level, as they can be extreme.

I hear concerted, focused jingling from up ahead -- can't see because of the fog -- so maybe we should find out how five days of hurdles and tangents have left our mythic steeds.

MACE: What kinds of things, darling?

SHARON: About a hunting trip some of his friends were taking with their daughters. He was very honest with her, and she liked the men and the girls, so they talked about it a lot and how she'd feel taking her bra off so they could look at her, or how she'd feel if one of them took her by the hand and led her into the bathroom to take a shower, while everyone else was watching.

MACE: How long did they talk about things like that?

SHARON: About half an hour. She said she'd be scared, but she liked being scared with a man, and if she liked it with him she might like it with his handsome young hunting buddies, especially if there were other little girls along.

When she was ready, he took her new bra off and lay her on her back on the bed to look at her while he stripped. Then he pulled off her panties and lifted her from the bed, putting her on the floor beside it. He taught her how to stretch out her arms and spread her legs, then he lay gently on top of her and he whispered to comfort her as he started moving against her naked body the way you're moving against me.

(There now occurs an unavoidable character shift as the performers begin penetration.)

SHARON: Mace, I'm really beginning to feel what's happening.

MACE: God, sis, so am I.

SHARON: Do you really want it to happen this way?

MACE: No, I want to look into your face.

SHARON: That's what I want, too. Do you think we can stop?

MACE: If I'm up inside your belly any more I won't be able to.

SHARON: I don't see how there can be any "more" involved, I feel like every animal in the world, already.

MACE: If we could think of something to talk about to come to a stop, then you could lie on your back with me, or I could lie on mine; either way, we'd see each other. But first we have to stop.

SHARON: We could go back to our roles in the play, that might confuse us enough so we could get off the floor.

MACE: I'm your daddy, and we're out resting our pioneer mule, and the bed's a log, and I'm starting to get half-way inside you, and you're telling me secrets about my wife and her father, things that happened when she was six.

SHARON: Oh, Daddy, that's wrong. In the story, she's almost eleven and her name is Alice, and just as he's kneeling behind me, a touring car drives up with Ralph, Don, and Adam, Daddy's three hunting friends. We see them turn into the drive through my bedroom window and by the time they get to the door, we're dressed and downstairs. When the door opens Nan, Karen, and Phoebe jump out of the car where they've been hiding and run up to the door.

MACE: That should be complicated enough so we can stay together until you're ready to lie on your back for me.

SHARON: My dad's name is Chris and mine is Crissy.

"Yesterday's midget," Ralph called into the house to the grinning response of the tall, slim, almost-eleven-year-old girl.

"If someone could come up with a pill to keep them soft and cuddly, there'd be a fortune," Chris Mollohan laughed, welcoming his friends and their daughters into the living room. Ralph Baldwin handed his host an envelope of brochures, explaining the invasion was in furtherance of planning their upcoming hunting trip, if the time was convenient.

"Sheila is away for the weekend," Chris said, "she and Crissy just had a long talk -- family secrets -- you know the kind of thing, so we're overhoused with a full icebox and rarin' for company."

"Can we make lemonade?" Crissy asked, and at a nod the four girls were off to the kitchen.

"She's turning a bit on the ravishing side, don't you think?" Adam asked Chris.

"All of them are cast for a riverboat extravaganza," Chris noted, "if they don't get stolen by a ballet company, first." The four young fathers huddled, three on the sofa and Chris facing them on an ottoman. "How far are you along?" he asked Adam, first.

"Nan and I have talked," the teacher said, "and she's anxious, but I wanted to wait a few days to be sure, you know how kids are."

"Did you talk on the way out?" the host wanted to know.

"Yes," Adam said, "she was positive about me and the trip."

"Karen is, too," Don Knight, a surgeon, said, "if anything, more than, and I don't see there's much of any way we're going to make it past about nine o'clock tonight."

"I've been with Phoebe," Ralph said. "We wanted to wait, but things didn't work out that way."

"Was it furtive and quick, or did you have time?" Chris asked, causing the teacher, doctor, and architect to huddle closer with the wealthy young farmer.

"I let her design an alcove in one of my houses," Ralph elaborated, "and we went out to see how it looked in the flesh. She said it looked like a fish bowl and made her feel like a mermaid. By this time she was flirting in the highest gear Mr. Ford ever thought of, and the game was afoot, with the sylph of the brine and circling shark, no fair wearing clothes after she'd worked so hard to create her aquatic bowl and the master carpenters had worked so hard to build it."

"Nice girl," three male voices said, and Ralph nodded in agreement. There was more to the story than its beginning so Ralph glanced in the direction of the kitchen. Chris stood and crossed through the pantry, arriving just in time to chip ice from the bottom cabinet of the ice box. He advised the girls as to the nature of the talk in the living room. Phoebe blushed happily and her three friends joined her in preferring to join their handsome young fathers rather than remaining at the kitchen table. Chris helped with the tray of drinks and in a few minutes Phoebe was cuddled in Ralph's lap as he told of spending two hours alone with his talented daughter.

"I brought the scarf, Daddy," the ten year old said, "so I won't shock you or anything, but it didn't seem sensible to design a room to go back and forth in, like a real fish bowl, so I designed it for an up-and-down fish, which I interpreted as a girl, dancing, and from there it's as simple as fish not wearing clothes, with, of course, a wee bit of red silk cloth, which is the wrong color for seaweed but the right shade for a dancing girl."

"And if your dance is compelling and intriguing, you would like to design an entire house to the motif?" the thirty-year-old architect asked.

"Lots of men have daughters," the girl observed, "so some of them might like to showcase their kinder on a broader stage."

"They never covered that in school," the man allowed, "a house built around a central floor, similar to a courtyard, with, maybe a rusty old ship's anchor, and a catwalk across the top so the proud owner could toss food to his dancing guppies."

"I knew you could make it better," Phoebe said, "and maybe a sand floor, like the bottom of a real aquarium."

"Yes," the athletic and boyish father agreed, "and next to the anchor, a sunken trunk large enough to hide a blushing daughter if there were ever unexpected visitors during a performance."

"Daddy," the girl said, her tone suddenly muted and intimate, "I want to tell you something very important. Sooner or later we'd want you to know, and it's better for me to tell you right here and now, at the beginning. Whatever you feel, it's still happened, and can't be undone. I wouldn't want it undone. I'm the luckiest girl I know of, maybe the luckiest, ever, ever. I've been practicing with my brothers."

"All three?" the architect asked.

"Mostly with Mark," the girl replied, "but with Lance and Joshua some, too."

"With the red silk scarf... and?"

"Daddy," the girl whispered softly, "without the scarf, for Mark."

"Was it your free will?" Ralph asked.

"No," Phoebe, "it was your slavish will. I wanted it to be you, first, but you were a dear about daughters and little-girl things for little girls. I didn't have the confidence to push, probably because I was worried about the off chance that you might turn out to be right.. Mark was almost as bad, or, I suppose I should say, `good', but he isn't a married man, so that made it a little easier, and we had a chance to spend a lot of time together, and that didn't make it easier, but gave me more time for what is hard, and that is stripping away phobias and mystic instructions from On High, as if those flat-earth fanatics knew anything about real people and real feelings."

"What were your feelings?" the handsome father asked the gamin ten year old.

"Not the passions of the bible," his daughter replied, "those are what I feel for you, but more the sweetness of a poem; soft, gentle, warm, purry and furry. Of course, it didn't stay that way."

"No," Ralph allowed, "I shouldn't imagine it would have."

"But he was gentle with me, Daddy, even though he's almost twenty, he was like a boy just a little older than I am."

"Was he a male inside you, darling," the father whispered.

They moved to a settee crafted into a wall of the atrium, the girl sitting facing her father on his lap. She bowed her head. "Yes, Daddy," she replied. He pulled her cloud of brown hair to his chest and kissed his sprite, tilting her chin up to look into her eyes.

"Do you want to tell me about it darling, or is it private?" he asked.

"We decided honesty was better," the girl replied, "I told him about my feelings for you, and he agreed you'd be more likely to take me if I wasn't a virgin, also, he'd experimented with one of his male friends who'd been taught by a teacher who was voyeuristic, and his friend told him everything that happened, and it made what they did together more exciting, especially the first few times, therefore, I should tell you anything you wanted to know about what went on between us after Mark locked the door of my bedroom."

"How do you feel about telling?" Ralph asked.

"When we were talking," the pretty child replied, "I was sitting in his lap, but it was after my dance, coming up from the sea floor, and I only had on the scarf and my panties."

"Was he naked?" the father wanted to know.

"Yes, Daddy," the little girl said, "completely. He leaned against the wall and posed while I was performing, then I sat on his lap, same as I am with you, my shark in a suit."

"Now that you mention it, we are overdressed for the evening," Ralph said.

By accord they moved through the nearly completed Victorian dwelling, each finding a downstairs room to change in. Ralph, as a member of the audience, reclaimed his place on the settee and waited for his brown-haired, brown-eyed dart of a daughter to place herself for the opening act of her drama. The girl entered with her back to him, showing she was completely naked under her red sash. She knelt on the wool carpeting of the alcove, arms at her sides and rolling forward until her head touched the floor. "Daddy," she whispered, "I need something to grow on because I'm a brand-new baby and very weak and delicate." Her athletic father rose and stood in front of the little actress. Phoebe, sensing his presence, reached out her hands. "Oh, you don't feel at all like a shark," she said, massaging the back of the man's calves. "More like two smaller fish than one huge, dangerous, devouring monster."

"What did Mark say?" the father asked.

"That he thought I was too young and weak to try out my flippers and swim to the surface, so I should stay at the bottom of the sea and he'd bring things from the dry world down to me, and, when I had received special gifts from the surface, we'd swim there, together."

"Then what happened?" Ralph asked.

"He rose, posed at the door, then went in search of gifts, plundering mother's jewel box in the process. He coaxed my head from the floor with a pearl necklace and my arms from my side with her rings. I pretended I wanted a pin and rose to my knees so he could pin it on my sash. It was the first time he'd seen how I was growing, and that made him grow a lot, and we forgot about the game, all except for the one special gift from the surface which is the legendary gift bestowed upon the mermaid by righteous seamen."

To you I'm probably clunking in; premature interruption. With the time-shift part and parcel of writer's craft, and readers' distance, what I think of as premature may be seen by at least some audience members as immature, the more so when it's revealed that I've been on vacation for a couple of weeks and have ended my time off with a knife at the throat of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It had a simple enough beginning, this holiday, my first as a published and widely-read novelist, with the smell of smoke. I was in the kitchen, cooking, but we all know better than to expect distasteful fumes, if, for not other reason, than I'm too poor to go around burning much food, and, besides, the smoke wafting the length of the house had a distinctly electrical aroma, or, more precisely, the eau of plastic heated beyond endurance. The source of the smoke was my new monitor, which, as I followed the trail to its source, like a sniffing badger, was displaying a steady green pilot light, but no image. News as bad as it gets, and the starting point for a lot of shuck and jive made slightly easier by finally getting a telephone line. Two weeks, just like companies give real, live white people for fifty weeks of devoted service, and not a line to write.

What to do. Read. A few months ago I started "The Brothers Karamazov", so it was first on the list. Let me say this about that: (and I wouldn't bestir myself if the gushing Forward hadn't called it, unequivocally, the greatest novel ever written, and gone on to praise Dostoyevsky as the greatest novelist of all time -- my reaction to both statements you are safe in assuming) What the Russian does in eight hundred pages is scrape any remaining flesh from the all-but-hollow gourd of Communism. Why did they bother? The serfs were in the process of being freed, gradual reform was widespread, there was much private ownership and dividends and the like are a significant part of the story. The investigation and trial of Dmitri is a set piece of sensitive, concerned jurisprudence and he, a landowner, is judged by a jury of peasants. Massive amounts of food and drink are consumed by everyone, hi and low, alike, and the privation of the boy in the story is little different from my Year 2003 neighbors. In short they needed any rapid change, to say nothing of revolution, like a hole in the head, or, more succinctly, as much as did the American colonies. My great great great great grandfather started all the overthrowing nonsense in the years leading up to 1775. He was a moron -- are we clear on that? His own congregation turned into a rabble of drunks, blasphemers, and whore masters ten miles west of Concord, right under his nose. Doesn't that just say it all?

Then there's the Big D on religion. Clatter, clank, thump and bump; hundreds of pages of the muck. The schmuck was a brutal, gambling, drinking savage -- why would anyone in their right mind be interested in a single ecclesiastical notion he spat out?

As ever, Dostoyevsky reminds us that the family, of however mean a station, that sends two or three able bodied workers out into the world, leaving the home fires to be tended by the elder family members, and, in their turn, by the growing children, can hardly help but succeed, barring excessively bad luck, common enough in those primitive times, or, common in all times, excessive addiction. Since luck and compulsion topple all and sundry, they have a poor place in fiction because they are too close to universal to be very interesting. Technically, the novel seems a hodgepodge, and very much as if it were serialized for pay, with word count as a driving force rather than a showoff's gimmick. There's a huge monastery scene in the beginning which has little if anything to do with the story, and the little boy seems to have no other purpose than to provide a stopping point for the story. The Forward assures the reader he or she will not be the same person after completing the book. The reviewer was correct, at least in my case. Before I read the world's greatest novel, I thought I was the world's greatest novelist. Now, I'm sure I am.

I followed "The Brother Karamazov" with "Silas Marner". It's a tiny thing, barely scraping by as a novel, at all, but George Eliot savages men with a dagger so beribboned in velvet it only hurts when you laugh. Like her fellow English, female novelist, P.D. James, Eliot hangs her story on extreme coincidences, one on top of another. Wish I had the nerve, but I have to face the fact that humans who bear children have more moral fiber than I can even dream of. In summary, I loved it; a little work of great genius, and the opposite of "Brothers", which is a great work of little genius. I don't know if anyone has ever investigated the link between sanity and vanity, but should a scholar one day be interested, I, having sharpened the fangs of amorality on poor Annette, am considering my own version of this pastoral of rural English life, but later, as we're amply far afield for the moment.

Another re-write. "The Lonely Silver Rain", which I believe is the final Travis McGee. Up pops a trail of little pipe-cleaner cats, leading to, you guessed it, a fifteen-year-old girl who is loath to call the salvage expert Daddy, though the biological connection is a dead cert. Now if she were, say, ten or twelve, h'mm? Again, something for later.

A P.D. James, the one with the not-believable coincidences and embellishments, a `50's vintage John D. MacDonald, "A Man of Affairs", with an excellent Travis prototype, then, because it was, however unanticipated, a vacation, no less than a dozen Georges Simenons in a row. I even learned Maigret's Christian name is Jules. Perhaps the sanest thing in the world today is the French author's status as the best-selling of all writers.

And that was how I spent my winter vacation. Now for the domestic news. The 17" monitor was replaced with a 19" featuring .25mm dot pitch. Buy two, so you'll never be without one. Once again, I'm half-horrified by all the controls and the possibility of degrading the perfect, factory-set image, but at least this model has a default icon. Other than that, well, let's just take a moment and think back now. Samantha didn't need to be invited back, she came of her own free will, and we've resumed our chaste relationship, you know, the one with just enough edge to it to be absolutely perfect. Queenie and gang are still living downstairs, but I've withdrawn the oft-bitten helping hand. If I stand in my kitchen, facing west, I see Daisy cooking over a wood fire in the back yard, off my left shoulder, and, to the right, my microwave oven. They seem to be making out fine, and, to paraphrase the old song, they got along before they met me, and they can get along without me now.

Randy skipped off with ten dollars change this morning, bringing to the fore the abiding twin issues of money and sex. He is the most awesome of lovers, exceeding even Stephen, because he loves to make out for ten minutes at a time, and is extremely good at it. I sucked him twice, the first time on my bed with his shirt pulled above his nipples and his penis protruding from his shorts and underpants, and, the second time, twenty minutes with him naked on the floor of one of the spare bedrooms, a pillow under his bottom. He's highly reactive, panting, running his hands through my hair, and thrusting. I haven't been able to make him cum, but he told me he has, so there's that to look forward to. In the meantime, it is awkward having him abscond with the loot because the only punishment is banishment, and his penis has grown half an inch in the last two months. Media-acceptable moralists will tend to say Aha, seeing as how they're so averse to getting the point, but in the depraved and vulgar world to which I was bred, the loss of five U.S. dollars seems almost a niggling price to pay for an hour or more of kissing that superbly boyish mouth and fondling Randy's sensationally sensual young body. I suppose someday it may come to pass that I watch him shower his hot, young sperm all over his slightly soft belly and silken-soft thighs, again, something to look forward to, and probably a bargain at twice the price.

Rhageedha was just over once, but managed to spend ten minutes in Samantha/s lap, pulling up her skirt to show her tights, then pulling them up to show her panties, commenting the while on how she looked almost naked. Very cute girl.

All this is to say that my winter vacation was not without its provocative moments, and, as there should be in any real writer's vacation, there was a high point steeped in mystery and intrigue, with your scribe and erstwhile mastermind learning a thing or two about jumping to conclusions, no matter how compelling the evidence -- right out of Maigret's Paris, see if I'm wrong.

By pure chance I happened to be looking out my east-facing living room window and I saw Samantha approaching (she almost always comes from the west). In a matter of seconds I noticed she was walking very slightly stiff-legged, bent a little forward at the waist. She was wearing her backpack and I watched her come through the gate. In a couple of moments she was at the door. We talked about Kira's preschool and at some point I asked her where she'd been, as she'd been out of school for over two hours. She gave a noncommittal reply, saying she'd remained after school to chop the yard and sweep. Then I found she was wearing no tights under her uniform jumper. Samantha has been here two hundred times if she's been here once, always wearing tights or shorts, never wearing just panties.

I have the same job, day or night. Writing fiction. By its very nature, the trade requires an active imagination and a capacity to fantasize and embellish, sometimes dramatically. A little time went by, and I asked Samantha where her tights were and where she'd taken them off. She said under the house, before she came up the north staircase, and they were in her backpack.

Now let me divert here to say I've already solved a major American crime, the bombing at the '96 Olympic Games in Atlanta. The bomber was and is a man named Robert Gee. He took the video CNN used (exclusively). There is no possible way he could have been filming and perfectly picked up the explosion from the perfect distance unless he set the device off himself. I happened to be bedridden at the time of the murder, and so watched the tape a hundred or more times, including early versions with crucial audio evidence. I also saw him interviewed and listened carefully to his cheesy explanation that he was taking pictures of crowd reactions to edit into an overall tape of the games. Preposterous. He, or possibly an accomplice, set the bomb at the base of the tower so Gee know exactly where to aim his camera, and he set it off by a radio transmitter, or by use of a timer synchronized to his watch. There's more. Oddly, we share immortality as a motive, but, for all my braggadocio, he must be the smarter crook because he got a dollop of cash for his efforts, and all I'm likely to get is the wallop of a prison guard. Be that as it may, I do boast a bit of the Holmes in ye olde blood stream, deducing that access to his pubescent daughter was O.J.'s motive (plus killing them quickly because he was in a few feet of the sidewalk), and so when Samantha came stiff-legged up the lane, then lied about taking off her tights, I bestirred my lazy bones to jump to a conclusion. Luckily, I've been so poked about by fickle fingers of late I approached the situation at hand with persistent, low-key quizzing over a couple of days rather than foaming up in a confrontational manner. Smart. Turned out the girl had "pee-peed" her tights and had a blister on her heel. That was the most exciting part of my vacation and I'm lucky it passed with no harm, no foul.

Afraid I can't claim the same in regards to my recent output. I've spent the better part of two days going over the last fifty or so pages. What a mess! The only relief was being able to delete a short paragraph, otherwise is was slog and patch, almost of all of which could have been accomplished -- more effectively -- by an editor. I guess the most succinct analogy is that of cutting and polishing a gem. Few can do the former, while polishing can be left to a diligent understudy. Of course, the bonus, in my case, is that even an amateur polishing brings out a brilliant stone. As an added note, I finally got back online and downloaded the odd hundred thousand words from alternative sites. If I had time, I'd do some point to point research, go back and find a bunch of stories written three or four years ago to compare with today's product. Seems to me the new stuff is dramatically ruder, cruder, and clunkier. I found twenty stories in a row that were unreadable, and that's pretty bad, even allowing for my personal hang up on British-based files with their terminology, specifically: wank', arse', toss', and, from Australia, bell', ugh. They're even worse than shit chute' and love tunnel'. And a grossness of relationships, too. Men deep-throating little boys, then writing flummery about the kids enjoying it. Wouldn't mention the subject of tawdriness on steroids except it's highly reflective. Any questions? That brings up email. So far, this book has been published while I was offline, with no idea of when I might get reconnected, so I've left off my address. Added reasons were spam and viruses, both of which intrude, though, as I've mentioned before, re-writing lost manuscripts is training par excellence. Bottom line is that I'll try again, as the mail was a lot of fun and I did make some pen-pal friends. No tee-hee's, please, and if I wasn't a sick f--- I'd love every Semite. I already know that.

In summary, this has been the first real holiday of my life; the first as a full-blown master of the most difficult of arts, the first where I could relax, utterly, duty done in spades. Two weeks off my wave, leaving me to wonder if I'll ever catch again what I've ridden, almost uninterrupted, for twenty-six months. Of course, if I were a real surfer, I could ride any old wave. Shall we paddle out and see what happens?

TEMP. FILE END 03/03/03

Posted by Thomas@btl.net

xxx