Stuck-O and the Patient Elf

"Stuck-O and the Patient Elf"

by

Timothy Stillman

(Dedicated to: "The Forest of Forever"--and to the friend who wrote it, and the friend who read it with me)

Passion bemused him.

There was always and only The Flamingo Elf inside him. In all those sexual mirrors he posed in. Pretty boy. Flared blue jeans. Bare solid chest and stomach. Long blonde hair wavy and curling round his shoulders. Thin build. But a powerful boy. Who knew. All along. That he was something:

Extra ordinary.

His face was china bowl delicate. His cheekbones were high. His slight lips were pale. He smelled like buttermilk. His name was S. And as S. he surveyed the small town from the hill on which he stood at night mid autumn cold, to watch the trains rattle track downward out of town and beyond. To the smoky sky. To the schools of need and wanderlust that swam in the towns like this one. And all the others.

Where there were men and boys and girls and women who did his bidding. For they thought they loved him. They thought they saw a heart tattooed on each of his bare arms. For he wore shirts as seldom as possible. He liked them to see his pecs. His abs. And the dimples above his buttocks. Just below his belt loop. As he walked. As he rolled his tiny hips in the tight tight jeans. There was about him a girlish air. Though he was not effeminate. He wore big tennis shoes, bigger than his feet needed. Because it gave him an air of not grown up yet.

Still a child. Younger than he was. And he was plenty young enough.

Still S. Who was part of the plaid of the night. Who had just come from the woods down the left side of the hill. Where the shadows played. And two boys played with S. As he played with them. In the sex games of childhood. Personal flesh carnival. Personal giving up more than they meant to. As they made him give up more than he meant to. There on the cold ground with the crackly dead brown leaves their bed covering. All bare bodies. Elbows and knees. And sucking here and being sucked there. And naked on the outdoors ground with the cold wind blowing over their entire wild free finally complete bodies that were drinking in every sight and sound and moment and movement. So sexy, that alone. Head held and pushed in and out. Showing how to fuck too.

As they knitted with him. And tried to get him to net them. But S. was far too clever for that. For S. was all the mirrors that ever were. He was alpha. He was omega. He was the womb and the tomb. And everything in between. S. was what you dreamed about last night. Or a month or a year of nights ago. Dreams you half remembered. And saw again in his dreamy blue sky eyes. And wept for the privilege.

S. on this windy hill was neither Gilgamesh, living forever, invincible lonely night watcher, never to touch anywhere close to death, to always know down through the millennia, the deep longing for it, like a lover never to be found. Neither was he catamite, as rumor believed as desperate fact, that the nobles of ancient Greece had multitudinous use of morning noon and night. He was not history. He was not tomorrow. He was in total himself. And that was the children tonight. The two little brothers having found out.

Having evinced more than a craving. More than a yearning when they had been bathed together by their unsuspecting mother. How their little cocks curled and yawned and stretched and wanted to wake up. And she dutiful woman pretending not to see. And thus did not see.

But S. saw. S. saw the feel of their lumber.

S. felt the scope of their eyes on him, little beads of vision distending from them, as their mother lathed them with soap and washcloth, in the close heated sweat beaded bathroom, in the warm sudsy strawberry scented companionable bubble bath water, her warm mesmerizing hand coming so tantalizingly close but not close enough, as Tad's and James' eyes were on the steamy bathroom window, Tad having to turn around to it, feeling S. before seeing him. That silent crying siren call beckoning. The brothers were not old enough to know the evincing of that vision cusp was something close to pain.

That is on a swift resourceful threshold where in childhood depends the happiest of times. Knowing that the grumpiest of times was to be the step child come calling far too soon after. And you might as well get used to it.

You laugh. You feel good. The hurt is next. Payment due always extracted. One way or another. Life sucks a lot of the time.

But tonight. Tonight was, in the main, desert. A reward for making it to eight and nine years of age respectively.

Making meals of S. Caught in the clearing. A taller elf than they.

Their bodies rye crisp, the brothers, strong and fresh and little boy tall and risibly tough because so easily snapped in two. Bathed. Pulled up and out of the tub. Towel dried together. Secret. Their boy hips and sides meeting. James and Tad smiling wincingly at each other. At their mother. Who still did not see. Here we are, here we are, their brains said. We are here today. Not tomorrow. Not the day after. Here now. Why are we having to wait? For...for...Then their hair dried. And off to bed.

Then in the late night, not a word said, rush pop up from bed, Mexican jumping beans, whisking off their winter pajamas, dipping themselves into their school clothes. Scared and daredevilish with the winter clothes they wore, when they had sneaked out of the previous direction of their lives to date. That they in effect left behind for good when they crawled out of their bedroom window and onto the slate roof. Risking their very necks climbing and jumping their way down to the cornice and then to the garbage can and then to the ground. Running to the woods, this late night, new experience.

Moon and stars bright and bold guiding them on their wonderland way. Wind of autumn whirling their hair. Their unzipped jackets. Their breath expelled visibly like dragon breath as they ran straight to their fate. Into the fairy tale woods.

And met.

S.

Knowing this much ahead of time. No questions asked. Accede. There. And yes, there.

So, then, begin.

As they wordlessly made their pact with it and with S., both known and mysterious then, never truly knowable, in any work wise proscriptive way that would make S. into a bottle of pills, tossed down one at day break, one at night time, to cure the ails and wake up on the morrow, well and hearty, by pulling the rug out from under the dawn, and laughing at it as it took a very funny prat fall.

And tossed then, sexually, unashamedly, lustily, the taller elf the clothes he wore. Then stood before them and bowed politely. Delighting the boys.

There S., unencumbered with clothes, as these rye crisp boys hurriedly unhooked themselves from their cellophane winter clothes and were then dressed as S. was dressed, which was to say in dappled night time in dappled night time words, bare and sexy and filled with seemingly new and never before angles and plateaus, as were they, the moonlight somehow making them even more naked as it lathed them, coated them with its silver paint.

As if the brothers had never seen each other naked before. And they went round and round the other and the Tall Elf, bursting with exploring, touching, laughing, being touched, delicate, kidding, serious, epicurious. May poles. Autumn poles. Boy poles.

Tracing the stick out. The pull in. The crevices. The shoulders. The butts. The stomachs. The light blond hair dusted on S. groin. Dancing. Tumbling. Wrestling. Though curiously wordless. Their bodies were the words. Their bodies said the books they each were. Braille reading, then. Teach me how. The boys. Willing, willful students. With S. in the role of Dr. Lao.

And then the games began. Storage and perusal in the percentage. Arms lengthening. Legs struggling. Comparing. Hand weighing. Warm hands between warm legs. Height checks. Boy checks in the night time bed of the woods. Little cockleshell penises unbending as much as they could. And little hands on S.'s elfin silken feeling hard cock which at full length impressed them no end. As did his end.

And tumbleweed and tumble about and grow and grout and grew some more and danced on their naked feet star fish in the moon dollops laced through the autumn naked tree branches.

This turning to fable and to an acquiring that was more than seen in the motive that would take the tree bends and upend one's life and upend one's function at whatever the skin world has been told to say this is so. But in the young boys, looking to turns from their own lips to each other's and then to S.'s planting stalagmites of pecks and pecks some more because it felt so funny and tickly and good, there was this huge comma raised, this comma behind the invisible word that asked, "Why?" Why not this? Instead of clothing. And propriety. And distance. And shame.

For the night is pretty and this preening posing S. boy who was not off putting in preening and posing, who was most assuredly the autumn deep night come alive, is prettier than the night. There were golden coins in his hands. He held them there as though they were now magicked to springs of crisp cold water and springs of winter mattresses as well when the snow fell window perfect down and two brothers name of Tad and James had nothing else to do but to hit the mattress, running, boys, and turn their hands to their turrets and giggle fest begun in the cold of the sea of their running heat protecting themselves.

Insulating their insides and making their flesh tummy warm.

The little sexual wars, thought S., now, in the aftermath of the loss of the boys' virginity, the true and real loss, not the brother's play games of the past, and how the revolution is won.

"In my country," S. faking the accent, for he was an American, but that affected, vaguely Continental accent just impressed the hell out of pretty much everybody, "we call this--" he said, pointing to his naked rear, his rear made of a cupcake to the left, and a cupcake to the right, and a slight dividing point in the middle of Hostess land--as he bent over to them so they could see his opening almost in the sharp silver moonlight--"a bum."

The naked boys, laughing at the word "bum" being called such a thing, thinking for a moment that dissolved immediately, for it was not worth thinking about, especially when such happiness was theirs and soon to be more, then playing with their own and each other's "stickerydo" as they sat on the ground behind S., their legs entangled with each other's, as they shivered from the night cold, though oddly enough S., equally disencumbered, did not, which the boys would think of a long time later, which would add to the dreamy unreal aspects of this.

They would take the memory of S. and this night, and they would leaf through it mentally as through a Disneyland flip book.

Though, instead of being able to make Pluto run forward and then backward, your preference, they would imagine making S. do what he did to them and they did to him over and over again till death us do part.

And speaking of parting, then, S. bent over all the way, opened his cheeks to their wide eyes and their wide open mouths, "somebody will stick something in there if you're not careful"--this from S., which the boys took as meaning he had eyes in the back of his head, and clamped their mouths shut a moment, and then, remembering where they were and what was going on, and not wanting to miss a single epistle of it, opened them wide again--S. had been through this many times, he knew from experience they had their mouths open--and his anus seeming to breathe in its smoothness and coral pink invitation without hair of any kind, "this we call a bum hole. Now, you, Tad," (he knew Tad's name without anyone telling him; further proof of Elf Power; he no doubt knew James' name too) "come and stick your stickerydo inside it and let me show you a new way of wanking. That's jacking, to you."

Which made the boys fall over in hysteria. Little giggles pranced out of them like the hooves of Santa's reindeer on top of Christmas snow roof houses, eager to deliver to the good little boys and girls, and the two little ones dared each other and one would start to get up, then would fall backward in gales of hysteria, then the other would try, and result in the same condition, and this higgidely piggidely went on longer than it usually did, in S's estimation, but finally the game was stutteringly getting on the road. And what a wild toad ride was to be had by all.

They played the game "Stuck-O" in which he got to fuck Tad while James fucked him, after some learning and experimentation, and though the brothers didn't quite get the push me pull you just right, and S. could only get a tiny length of his own penis into Tad, S. being extremely careful and gentle, etiquette and proper equipment placement was not required, it was FUN that was required, he told them that Stuck-O means everyone pretends that someone a parent or teacher or preacher or someone is watching from the wood copse, and one of us notices, alarmed--

--the boys immediately alarmed (as S. always knew they would be--it's a joke, the little boys would think, we've been had, and we are dead meat) and, S. continued, his voice sure and safe and calming, you tell the others, we are all horrified and embarrassed to the nth degree, so we try to scurry away, into our clothes, or if not time for that, if the long arm of Johnny Law is indeed fast approaching, we make a run for the hill, bare, and billy be damned who sees our little wing wangs hanging out--

--the boys giggled (as the children always did)--but we find we are--oh god help us all mightily--we are Stuck, thus the title of the game Stuck-O, and we have to pull out of each from the other, but we can't---we're like dogs fucking--and getting stuck and there's no one to pour water on us, to free us--oh we are to pay for our fucking--

--Tad and James forgetting the danger, now trusting S. that this was just a game, giggling through their bodies like the sea tilting at them from inside themselves, at the rude word "fucking" which was somehow sexier and more naughty than the actual fucking process that was happening--well, such as it was--while S. uttered the word "fucking"--and we can't.

get.

loose.

No matter.

How hard.

We.

Try.

So everybody, Preacher Busybody is looking at our bodies all cock to bum and getting a stroke on himself, and I mean, with his hand of course, not conking out like a stroke that paralyzes you, and we have to get busy with our bodies and free ourselves and busy ourselves the hell out of here before he cums all the hell over us every one, and all rise for the benediction and get your bodies busy--

So everybody pretended they were stuck, and they tugged mightily and they grunted and they held their breath and the brothers got mixed up on when to push and when to pull, and they freed each other, and fell over each other, tried to stand, pulled each other down, bumped into each other, elbow here, knee there, piled ultimately into a very unwieldy squirmy heap, while S. was orchestrating his every move and by his every move, orchestrating theirs as well, so fine and fiddle and ready for love, and they hugged each other so tightly and kissed and kissed; the boys had their heart beats racing even faster--the fear in the middle of the "spunking" was fun too--the boys learning this word tonight too; sex is education learned from the myriad mirrored and reflected in reflected, all different, images of S. who was whatever they wanted him to be--he thought they had the right, they and all the others yesterday and tomorrow--

--to have the memory of once knowing someone, really knowing them, who was whatever they wanted him to be, because they would never find that in what passed for the real world; which saddened them, and in that way S. was something of a vampyre. They would forever long for him. That was the main thing of it, when everything else wore off. He would always be the memory of the once and now gone eternal god springing from the head of Zeus. Against which all others would pale. But this was not his fault. This was how life was set up. He did not make the rules. He took. Yes. But.

He gave them approval, usually for the first time, he engendered their trust, their true innocence, not handed them by someone else who would decry them and forever do their thinking for them if the children let them, and most did, their giddiness, their right to their sexuality, the beginning of life for them that he turned the tumbrels of and thus they became living beings, knowing it for the first time--

--he took their happiness, their vulnerability, he companioned with them and they with him, and he left it with them as well, let them share in it in memory as often as they wanted, and in this the giving of memories, was any of it real at all?, was the taking of the blood of the memories and those who thought they alone owned them, their private treasure, their private pain, linked, intermixed, as it always plays out, always, and their trying to get rid of them, not to be hooked by the past forever, this then--but what a past experience, like no other, this, S. believed, must count for something--

--all those quicksilver glad misted remembrances of dreams-- naked and his legs over their shoulders as they felt his boy pussy with their "dingalings" and the need to pour themselves into him even if they were too young to pour themselves into him, they did it spiritually, then, okay?, and everytime they remembered the sheer joy he had given them, the sadness of its being over, never sure if it was ever real, to be sure would make at least a little difference, would be like a knife in their hearts--that was where the vampyrism set in--and that the vampyre did not take part in it at all, did not even remember; this made the fangs dig in even deeper.

A traveler, even an Elfin traveler, has need to be a star in minds. To keep the loneliness at bay. To think, tonight, someone is thinking of me. Immortal already. The need to be even more immortal. And warmed in the cold cold winds. Errant thoughts. Not dwelled on too long. But definitely there. Unimportant mica chips.

--and no mistake in the selflessness of him, in the conconspicuous air of reward and reward some more, there was the sound of a heart breaking off in the distance of tomorrows that S. never bothered with, he told himself, for he had to tell himself that or he would go quite mad, for S. was his own country, he was his own time table, he was the passing dream that awakens you in the dark of night with a sigh and you find yourself weeping as you wake, something you had not thought possible before, something that was a bit embarrassing, that your body could betray your personal happiness turned sadness like that, without your even knowing.

But when such emotions occur occasioned by the going away from and the getting more and more distant, then there is need of the body to prepare itself and comfort itself, and who cares then about your own personal awareness? It's lonely too, all aside from you.

The train had rattled off into the distance as S. stood there at the crest of the hill and the autumn wind flamed his tits into burnt ember, and he remembered before the brothers left him, and crying that they had to, and clinging to him, and both on their bony knees of stick stilt legs, as Tad sucked S.s cock and James played with S.'s balls and the boys kissed each other with S.'s seemingly always hard cock by the side of their faces. And they begged. To not go. To stay with him. To never ever--

--and when he helped them dress and helped them leave, they walking backwards all the way, trying to see him as long as they could until they could see him no more, and turning forward and running weeping to home and falling down in their yard in the night time moon that had turned hyena, it laughed so hard at them, when only moments ago seconds ago decades ago they were, the three of them--

--Winken Blinken and Nod, and the sex games and the nakedness went with their childhood, and were not divorced from them as the grumps had always believed, which of course made no sense, for if there were ever sensual sexual creatures on this planet, it was and always will be children; no matter the suppression, they will always find a way--

--and when they left, he forgot their names, forgot even their shadows, forgot everything about them save in a general fluid way which is the unalloyed gift of the traveler, to keep moving, to keep flowing, and not to turn backward for even a moment, though he did remember now, but it was already washing away, like faded ink on a yellowed and aged page, from him, one specific thing from the latest boy tryst, and that was, before he had them to get dressed, James told S. he had to pee for them, they all had to pee together, at the same time, they had to interlace their urine, and they had to pee and they would not take no for an answer; it was a ritual, that was all. A boy dare kind of thing. As if they needed any more dares. Peeing off a bridge or something was pretty small potatoes compared to all that went before.

S. knew the reason for the ritual. They did not think him real.

So, not uncommon, they thought if they saw the tall elf pee, and if his pee, which surely an elf could not make if he were an elf, for fairy tales do not allow for such indiscretions, mothers reading them to their little children snuggled abed in the nighttime hours, after all, but in case he was just a mere old human after all, James and Tad could not let that destroy the illusion which had to be real one way or another--

--so if he peed, then he was not human, but an Elf, and his Elf Pee would be magic pee, and if intermingled with the lowly infinitely less illustrious pee of two merely human small boys, then that would give them some of the S. Elf's power, therefore S., as all the other times, did indeed agree, and they, naked, stood in the woods and intermingled their pee, all three peeing with hard ons, making a direct line downward and out a little, (this perfectly coordinated co-mingled clear pure silver water fall,) another thing the brothers had never been able to do before with hard ons, more mystery tonight, but the boys giggling no more, sad, somber, this was a leave taking after all, as they both rigid eyed the Elf's Pee which was sparked with, naturally, a luminosity of gold, then they jiggled the last of the drops off, and they held S. the final time as he knelt before each boy and put each penis in his mouth one last time, then kissed the tips of them.

Then, as always, moving a small distance from them, as they looked down at him, not crying, no, they would not cry over this, he looked up at them, and his eyes were the skies before Christmas, so soon to be Christmas, and over so impossibly fast, and said softly, the Continental accent haunted and trembly. Just a show for the kiddies, of course, the Elf thought. You empathize. In that way, you apologize. Without their knowing it. That was important too.

"Never let anyone tell you you are not a hero. Never let anyone tell you or make you feel that your life is not worth living. Never let anyone push you around. Never let anyone laugh at you. Or make you feel they are your superiors. Never try to buy friendships. Or debase yourself to find friendships, or to keep them. They are not worth such a thing.

"Never forget, you two brothers are each other's closest friends from now to forever. You will be rejected. You will fall in love with people who will not love you back. They will be indifferent toward you. Or they might hurt you on purpose. Though indifference is worst. How do you fight a cloud that isn't really there? People will fall in love with you who you do not love back. Do not hurt them. Be gentle.

"And one fine day you will, if you are fortunate to find someone who sees you for the unique and special creatures that you are, someone who sees the molten center of you like the sun, who is unlike those dim bulbs who never saw you standing there, and you, so warm, so giving, so loving, because they are stupid and the hell with them, then if the love lasts for each of you, that might be the saddest thing of all. Then you will really have to be brothers in arms, tight and true and secure.

"Know patience. Know waiting. You will have to wait a long time for some things. The things that count most. Longer than fair sometimes. Your life will tick by and you will grow impatient. Try not to. It is the cost. Your life. And the running out of it. There's no other choice. Too many trip wires otherwise. You'll understand, sadly, one day. Godspeed, little men. Now let's dress and run home."

The boys quivered. They ached. They left. Downhill from here. Dream given early on. But it always seemed to be for pretty much everyone.

And now S. started walking down the hill. To catch the next freight. Or to just walk along a street or country road till he came to the next place. Only the shirt he had tucked inside his belt, for when it became extremely cold and he had to wear it, and the clothes he had on, nothing more, he traveled lightly.

The sun would be up soon. Watery and dim. The morning light tulle and hazy.

As S. walked through and away from the woods that had once sprouted bare boys, and which would sprout more than a few more bare boys to come, and some bare girls too, now that James and Tad knew the way here, he was feeling ridiculous for a moment, thinking yep, that's me, old Johnny Fuckin' Humanseed. He laughed. Ruefully. And then he was gone.

. He played music in his head as he walked and the wind blew cold on him and he did not shiver. He would not cry over these two boys. He would not return. Even in his mind. He had read the books. He had no need to read them all over again. There were so many new ones to take their place. Yes, S. thought, part of me is what I've warned you about. He headed to tomorrow. Or rather tomorrow headed to the topography of him.

Who it found waiting patiently. For S. knew patience. For he had much need of it. And of the knowing. Even being an elf, and all.

the end

Timothy Stillman comewinter@earthlink.net