One Fish at a Time

ONE FISH AT A TIME

CHAPTER TWENTY

"Nordstrom," Dave said, "rowing isn't any great window to universal truths and the enigmatic, it is a way to get a boat from the dock to the island. It's not to be fought like heresy or despotism, it is to be regarded in the softer light of method over madness. You have two oars. A philosopher deals with dozens. Save your energy for the latter and yield to the former. Patiently, slowly, sweep them for and aft, engaging the surface of the water as you pull in the direction of your manly chest and allowing them to breathe the moist coastal air of Maine as you push your hands back toward my manly chest."

"Couldn't you just stomp my kneecaps with your manly, clam-diggers' boots?" the thirteen-year-old boy said, a pleased expression on his roundish and aware face with it's trim of sandy hair.

"Would I do that to a good Catholic?" Dave Irving said.

"I'm a Catholic with a good priest," Nordstrom said.

"Who's taught you lower philosophy than a catfish eats for dinner," the twenty-eight year old teacher observed.

"I'm bound for military school," the cute boy grimaced, "what kind of philosophy would you suggest?"

"Perhaps something high enough that the apes couldn't reach it," the man suggested. They struggled on across the half mile across the island, the boy's hands slowly untangling and adapting the easy rhythm of sliding a long, slim rowboat rather than jamming it like a pram.

"You're not getting good at it," the rear-seat passenger allowed, "but you're not getting any worse."

"If they'd shoot these walruses for blubber and not let them go around climbing into people's boats," the boy responded, "we'd have been at the island five minutes ago."

Dave crinkled a smile at his student and Nordstrom grinned back. They approached quietly, the thirteen year old even proving adept at using the boat's oars against the rocks as they maneuvered into the cobble beach. The cove was sheltered by the thick pine growth of the small island and the nudged gently, the boy moving carefully off the bow, wondering which was harder, rowing a small boat or getting ashore without wet feet. The boat steady, the adult moved forward bracing himself for a moment on Nordstrom's shoulder as he leaped to a nearby boulder. Dave reviewed the dangers, very substantial, of small boats and tides, and they secured their slim vessel against being carried off on the rising water. Operating in rough tidal zones, for all the annoyance and inconvenience involved, teaches grace and coordination. The two males retrieving hamper and blanket from the half floating boat on notably rising water weren't an entire suite, but nevertheless inspired moments of neat footwork.

"Clamber Aboard Island," the boy giggled as they caught their breaths on a driftwood log.

"Welcome A-rock Island", the adult said, "though there's enough trees to make a-board or two."

"So, Nordstrom," Dave said, letting a little sigh in his voice, "are you comfortable alone with me or should we leave the tents in the boat and head back after lunch."

"That depends on what you and do not want to do," the thirteen year old said with a shy laugh.

"I guess it depends on what the weather will and will not do, too," the teacher said.

"I don't mean to be evasive," the boy said, "but I do have certain ideas, and I thought if we at least had lunch away from the house and the tutoring thing I could say something, then you could decide, because I'd really like to stay the whole weekend."

"About the scar, the accident, Jessen," the man used, adding: "and I don't mean to be thorny or neurotic on the subject, and, to tell at least one secret, I'm glad and flattered you're interested enough to make it a major topic."

"I have a major topic, too," Nordstrom said, blushing.

"Secret?" the man grinned.

"Yeah," the boy whispered demurely and not very convincingly.

"Then you'd better stay the night."

The issue settled, the pair made a second run on their replica whale boat, slinging on backpacks and wobbling over the heavy growth of boulders and cobbles. One name for it could be "Totally Save Island", Dave remarked as they circled the woods assuring themselves no bears had taken up residence on the few acres set half a mile from the nearest point of land.

"You really can ask about it," Dave said, "in your shoes, I'd be curious, too. You've got the grades to earn a little down time, and I'm hanging out pretty much on my own, so if there are age and cultural aspects to our relationship, perhaps we might ignore them on a temporary, earned, me chief, you Indian, basis."

"You heap-big drummer, Nordstrom heap-small rower," the boy growled.

"Heap-small body need catch up with heap-big brain," Dave laughed, "so you're doomed to row to Florida."

"One island at a time," the boy said.

"We've done the Greeks one poet at a time," the young man said, "so it's an idea."

"Is there anything to it," Mr. Irving?" the boy asked.

"A lot of men have wasted a lot of time proving Not much," the teacher said, "but it is entertaining, it does provide incisive insights, and what else is there? L. Ron Hubbard?"

"But it's a noose if you don't get it," the boy said, "like maths are to a lot of kids. I think in factions and then try to convert them to percentages, for fun, but two pansy's wilting over a posy just doesn't seem to go anywhere."

"Why did you say `two'?" the teacher asked. The boy blushed again.

"I don't know," he mumbled.

"Then it's going to be a night for deep, dark secrets," the teacher growled, and they hoisted their basket and blankets the last few yards to a clearing in the middle of the island. In a half hour their camp was set with twin pup tents and a fire making coals. They returned the their comfortable driftwood couch and watched their boat swing gently from one rock to another.

"If you're sure about staying," Dave said, "we can ground the boat at high tide, but we won't be able to launch it for twelve hours, unless we have to pry it from boulder to boulder because you've lost your head an are bleeding badly."

"I felt comfortable setting my tent right next to yours," Nordstrom said, "so let's haul it up." That gave them a few minute's work, and then the housekeeping was up to date.

"Do you have any pictures of Jessen?" the boy asked.

"Yes," Dave said, "pretty much a school kid, but take a look if you want to." He fished out his wallet and flipped through the plastic sleeves. "We took these of each other three days before he was killed."

"Did you guys swim together a lot?" the boy asked, studying the image of a young teen with wet black hair and a wide mouth posed against the ladder of a high board.

"Merman and merboy," Dave said, "at the pool, rain or shine, distilling Plato to the splash of morons doing cannonballs."

"Sounds refreshing," the boy noted.

For awhile they sat watching the temporary beauty of coastal Maine at dead high tide, and bewailed the god who'd pull the plug on it all, separating dry land from wet water with a band of damp brown seaweed.

"I've got some pictures, too," Nordstrom said. "He's in a bathing suit, too, which is a little weird, because it's Father Yen, and you usually see him in a collar."

"I'd like to see," Dave said, showing two more pictures of Lessen Rudolph and one of himself. The boy removed a small black and white photo from his wallet and handed it to Dave."

"How tall is he?" the teacher asked.

"Six-five," the boy said, blushing.

"If you know the secrets of staying out of his way, share them with a nonbeliever," the man responded.

"He just looks like he feeds on cashiers," Nordstrom said, "he's been tamed along the way an no longer gnaws through his chain."

"Well," the man said, taking a long second look at the image, "now I know what you meant about liking the priest and not the church."

The two sat watching the birds. Seagulls. Damp brown water weed, crows and gulls.

"How big were your secrets with Jessen?" the thirteen year old asked.

"We didn't have any secrets," the teacher replied to the boy's giggle. "You know what I mean," the boy prodded.

"What have you heard?" the teacher and artist asked.

"Just that there were a lot of questions," the boy said, "and then most people say something like, `You know how rumors get started when there are unanswered questions.'"

"Common or rare," the man without a face asked.

"It comes up," the boy admitted.

"And you're out here, trapped like a lobster," the man said, "I think you've settled something in yourself and that you're not some kind of spy. I hope I'm right."

"I listen to the other kids," the boy said, "but we've only lived here a couple of years; this isn't my place, and, it's not that I don't care what they think, it's just that I don't seem to care very much."

"Not much of a life attitude," Dave said, "but present place, present time, present boy, I vote yea."

"I'll come back to visit," the boy said, "but narrow enough to question you and Lessen is too narrow for me."

"We couldn't have been accepted," Dave said, "it had to and it has to be a shadow thing. What would the alternative be? Teacher's dating students, having them as overnight guests, taking trips with them? Where would it end? Sitting up until eleven, reading, talking about history and politics; dissecting religion and current events, debating the abstract and arguing the unknowable? What a world that would be. Fifty million boys with the beginnings of perspective and hints of insight, watching the documentary channels, reading the computer magazines; why it's hard to imagine an end to it all."

"Father Yen says the church would argue for spirituality and faith," Nordstrom said, "that the icons of religion had stood the test of time, that the glory and the spirit are themselves divine, that the mystic and the ghostly are part of a great plan, that there was more to hymn and psalm than clever words that rhyme."

"Glory, glory, hallelujah, this kind is super fine.", the man laughed, finishing the boy's impromptu doggerel, and, least the obvious escape a single reader, falling madly in love with his student.

"It is great entertainment," Dave said after some moments, "and there is beautiful poetry, sentiment, and passion, but no insight. Cut and dried, decreed with leather on hide, no place to run, with fingernails yet to be pried."

"Father Yen would give you a run for your money," the boy mused.

"He can have it if he lets me run," the man responded.

"He's cute," the boy blushed, "calm as breath, off a warm sea, still as the water under that breath. You're just jealous that he has a face at all."

"Nordstrom," the man whined, "we did not come out here to fall in love and set up housekeeping, so knock it off with the cute stuff, yourself."

"I didn't come here to do anything of the kind," the boy shot back, "I accomplished that mission, with no theatrics, when you were playing Goofus O'Moron the drill sergeant and making me dig holes and fill them in while speaking in tongues to something that wasn't even there. I said to myself that there was a man so overwhelmed with the abnormal that it's actually quite beautiful. That was all it took, and I remember thinking only one thing and that was how glad I was to have an excuse to take my shirt off near you. Love. You can't can it, you can't label it, and no one inspects it before it drifts off on the air."

"You were very discreet," Dave whispered to the boy sitting on his left.

"We had work to do, and I have a lot farther to go on that stuff than you do, so the chances slipped by," the boy said. "Besides, you were being paid, and that scared me."

"I'm glad we didn't wait until after the Fourth," Dave said, "I'd hate to have camped with you the last week of August."

"We're ships that tarry in the night, at least," the child added.

"I wish I could ring Finished With Engines' instead of Standby'," Dave said, continuing a nautical dialogue that had begun early in their relationship.

"I wonder how often it happens," the boy mused in response. "A kid like me and a man like you find some opportunity to leave everything behind, and live happily ever after."

"A few in five thousand," the man guessed, "I'm sure it happens, or at least I hope it does, and, ironically, it could happen with us. I've got enough money and friends from over the years we could shuffle happily off to Buffalo so we'd appreciate Mexico that much more when we crossed the border. But I have no inclination to do something like that, do you?"

"I don't see any challenge or mystery to it," the boy agreed. "There's too much neat stuff flying around out there to jump into a box that says: `Relationship', and, for me, that would be a girl, anyhow."

"That puts us on the same page on that issue," Dave noted, "which is comforting. With Lessen, it was different. He did want all of everything, that's why the papers made an extra thing of a routine skid and crash accident, because he'd acted erratically from his first week in my class, first, very privately with letters, but then in more obvious ways like being by my car in the parking lot and bicycling around my house. It wasn't overt, but it wasn't very subtle, either. His letters concerned me from the beginning. I did sixteen years in school and never even thought of writing a teacher a letter. I tried being a little open, but, predictably, that led to a nose-of-the-camel-in-the-tent situation Finally I let young Mr. Carpenter win. Changed from afraid to what-the-hell. I was single, no dependents, the house here and another in Florida, dating a second cousin I'd known growing up, I could afford to take a chance. Thus the swimming. From stiff interviews because of his letters, which he claimed were just stories he pirated from the Web, to spending six or eight hours a week together learning to use the high board."

"And that wasn't enough?" Nordstrom asked. I would have given a lung for an hour a week with Father Yen.

"I'm not quite as spectacular as your priest," Dave noted.

"You're more exciting than he is," the boy remarked, "because to me an ounce of brains is worth more than an inch of..."

"Two point five four centimeters," the teacher interrupted, hoping to keep things as tidily in line with Grecian ideals as possible with this dazzling specimen of boy.

"Something like that," Nordstrom blushed.

"I guess it's a little Romeo, Romeo to be finicky about the linguistic side of passion," the teacher responded, "but if you treat it like philosophy, largely as entertainment, and paint yourself, just sometimes, as a single dancer before your priest's god, then you should speak well or he'll end up holding your tongue."

"Father Yen would have preferred a long confession," the boy said.

"I'm on his side there," the young teacher said. Lessen and I went that route, starting with his letters, and it worked for two years. He was satisfied, and got back into the swing of being a normal kid. Then I had a breakthrough in my painting. He liked an edge he saw in my work and wanted me to do a portrait of him. Again, something that he really wanted came up, the first thing being me, and he started getting moody and difficult. Yielding once had worked, so I yielded a second time. But guess what. Being rendered in oil as the beauty he was, and yes, naked beauty, set off new fires, and, a few weeks later, they led to the accident."

"We didn't bring a shovel, I guess," the boy mused, changing the subject.

"No, why?" Dave said.

"I just had an urge to dig some holes," the boy whispered shyly.

"In granite boulders?" the teacher asked.

"I thought a metal blade screeching on the rocks might wake somebody up, and, at the very least I'd be..."

"Bare chested," the man whispered, completing the child's sentence.

"Plato would say that was the second-to-god Form," the boy recited. "The perfection of the adolescent as an ideal almost as unthinkable as it is unobtainable, then me, as the earthbound, day-to-day Form of a kid digging a hole, and my wishes off of digging, as the farthest Form from god."

"All that and you can convert fractions," Dave mused.

"All that and I summer on a stone and the end of a rock," the boy responded, glancing around at the ledges forever meeting the sea, but for the one cobble beach where only boulders did the job.

"Anyone who's out of the tropics is in the wrong place," the artist said, "so you've got lots of company."

"Just half way up the Amazon, that's all I want," the boy said, "I'm not into exploring or coming out like Ben Loman, I just want to see different birds once in awhile, to hear different sounds, to know I don't know it all, that I'll never see it all, that I'm human. Around here, you see it all in a month, so you become a god because you do know it all; nothing surprises you, nothing intrigues you, nothing stirs in a bush that could kill you. Books and sun and a typewriter, a few decades to leach out the bad stuff and then take a look around. If you've blown your life at least you tried. Many are called, few are chosen, you know, that game, and even ending up with the softest call and as the last choice."

"It's killed many a young man," Dave said, "these brass buttons lead to this death, that blazing trumpet to that death, this book to a forsaken desert, that film to `Temptation Island'."

Nordstrom Davis had had enough. He'd fended off one droll barb after another in the name of maturity and dignity, to save nothing of emerging masculinity. And there was a second facet. He'd watched the couples in the arms of Father Yen and they'd lain back in his easy chair and masturbated incessantly for the entire first hour of attractive heterosexual couples becoming as hot for each other as he was for the tall wiry Eurasian showering his belly with cum at a particularly sensual scene. So, in total, the background of funny remarks, and the intense taboo of being wetted with the seed of a priest tripped the last of the boy's safety circuits and he began giggling, quickly slipping into weeping hysterics as he fell into Dave's lap.

"It might be the stone or it might be the rock, but something's getting to you kid," the older male said as he petted the child's gasping, choking head. His words, meant merely playfully, were interpreted by the boy as exceedingly wry and droll, sending him into a new spasm of fits and rapture. "It's an island, let's keep it that way," the man added, sensing the boy was about to settle down and wiping away his tears. In a couple of minutes he did the job over and snorting and hiccupping the boy settled comfortably back at his left elbow as they made bets with each other as to high the tide would actually rise. The maths boy devised a time-based system of scoring, and they played by putting small stones at presumed high points, then waiting five minutes to place another stone. Since the tides vary to a degree there is no dependable mark representing high water, so the game engaged them until it was obvious the water was ebbing and Dave was rewarded with all the marking stones for missing by less than half a linear (as against vertical) inch. They returned briefly to their camp to encourage the fire, and made a last circuit of their small confines double checking for bears before they'd begin cooking dinner. They then returned to their driftwood and sat as before, the boy at the man's left arm.

"Did Lessen think you were funny?" the boy asked.

"Sometimes he had kind of fits," the older male answered, "you know, spells, attacks. Frankly, I tried not to notice, but I do have to say I thought it sometimes unbecoming so I hope you'll let that be a lesson to you and if you interpret something in a frivolous way that you have the dignity not to engage in any kind of overt display."

"Or there goes the island and our dry sleeping bags," the boy mused. "I see your point."

"No fire, no boat, no place to swim," Dave added, and the boy nodded in understanding.

"Too bad about that shovel," Nordstrom whispered shyly after enough minutes had passed to be sure of his frivolity cure.

"You could pretend," the man said "You're five years under age, and the law is flexible when it comes to make-believe."

"I want to," the boy said softly, rising and turning to his right to stand between his master's knees.

"I want to, too," Dave whispered, touching Nordstrom's handsome face, then running his fingers back past the boy's ears and under his jaw to his neck. Looking into the child's eyes, he continued his feather touch to the boy's first button. He undid them all as the thirteen year old pulled his white shirt from his cargo shorts and placed on the log, then stood of his adult partner, arms high over his head.

Dave pulled the beautiful young boy to him, kissing and softly sucking his nipples as he rand his fingers slowly from the child's soft, smooth underarms down the taut sleekness of his gently heaving flanks.

"Father Yen did it mostly from behind me," the boy whispered, "and he was naked even the first time."

"Did you strip romantically?" the man asked, "or locker-room?"

"Kind of slowly, I guess," the boy said, blushing as his master looked deep into his gentle blue eyes.

"Where did it happen?" Dave asked, standing and gently turning the boy. Nordstrom responded by reaching back and linking his arms behind the powerful male behind him, and arching and wriggling to the strong hands that quickly found his slightly soft belly.

"In his bedroom at the rectory," the boy said.

"Were you alone with him or were other boys watching?" Dave whispered.

"He had me alone," the boy said.

"And it was your first time?" the artist asked.

"I saw something in the woods once," the boy whispered, "but it was the first time anything happened to me.'

"Did you start it, or did he?" the man asked.

"I did," Nordstrom replied.

"How?" the man asked.

"In confession," the child explained, "I said I'd been having sinful dreams. He asked me about them. I said I kept dreaming I was running and I bumped my head on a honey tree and my hair got all sticky, then I was in a shower trying to wash it off, only the shower was in the woods, and I wanted it to be out in the field so everyone could see because he came in the shower and helped me wash it out and I wanted everyone to know he loved me."

"Holy shit!' the young adult exclaimed, "you and Lessen were separated at birth Why didn't you just pull a forty-four magnum and get the dude to dance while you whistled the tune?"

"Freedom of choice," the boy said, "there isn't much in the church, so I made it a priority."

"I'd sure like to know his options after your `I had a dream' speech," Dave whistled. "There's a number no mathematician could do a thing with."

"So you know it worked, then?" the boy said, and Dave didn't know him well enough to tell whether the child was being disingenuous or not. Maybe someday he would, and that thrilled him as much as the silky-smooth pubescent body panting and arching gently as his hands roamed over the exquisitely soft tautness of his belly and developing teen chest.

"How fast did it work?" the adult continued with his quizzing, adding: "you know, to the nearest second or two.'

"Cripes, I don't know," the boy replied to the voyeur, "it had to be in the hundreds."

"It must have been a long walk to the rectory," the artist observed.

"Or, we could have walked slowly," the maths whiz noted.

"Did it really happen right away?" Dave wanted to know.

"Yes," the boy said. "I needed significant counseling so we talked for an hour, then it occurred to me that only by knowing a sin could I feel grace from freeing myself from its evil clutches and degenerate influence."

"Society needs perverts like archer's need targets," Dave commented in a friendly whisper, only beginning to re-accustom himself to the magnitude of sensations that resulted from molesting a welcoming young male.

"What did you talk about?" Dave asked.

"He started with a disclaimer," the boy answered, "you know, telling me anything we talked about was outside anything to do with the church, that there was nothing professional involved, and that he wanted to ask me a lot of questions, but that I could go if it got uncomfortable, with no questions asked. When he was satisfied I was there of my own free will he started quizzing me. He asked if anyone had really touched me while I was taking a shower. I told him the dream was made up, and that I'd seen something while I was out playing Tarzan the Younger, and I wanted to talk to him about that, not any dream."

"When did he get you naked?" Dave asked.

"When I told him how the boy I spied on undressed the man he was with," the thirteen year old answered. "He was interested in the details, because they could help him draw conclusions as to whether their act was a mortal sin, or merely a temptation leading to a lesser violation of ecclesiastical law."

"I take it when he came to his conclusion," the older male said, "it was spot-on."

"It couldn't have been otherwise," the boy noted, "because we got every detail right -- I was spying from like six feet away."

"And...?"

"He deemed it a technical transgression that should be taken under advisement "

"Thus freeing the souls of two people he never met," Dave said, arching his eyebrows at mysterious ways, in general. He liked Nordstrom but felt since the FBI spy case, and the failure of the priest to somehow notify the authorities, in the name of global security over an individual's assumption of secrecy, the institution should be denied tax exemption for the extremity of its anti-Americanism. [The bible is rife with vengeance and life is hollow and frustrating until you serve the cold dish, individual or nation. In language that is easier to understand, it's okay to be pissed on, but you do need to dry off.]

"Nordstrom," Dave whispered as the boy began shaking in his arms, "what was the correlation between what you saw happening in the woods and Father Yen?"

"Not too much," the boy said, "I'd already dreamed up the fake dream. But I think it helped getting my nerve up, because the boy I saw was really nervous while they were talking, but after he pulled his underpants down while the man knelt watching him, he relaxed and they lay on their backs together and he let the man do anything he wanted and they talked while they were getting excited and pretty soon the boy was inventing ways to touch the man, and after it happened they whispered for a long time, and the boy -- he was about eight -- wasn't nervous and they were making another date as they got dressed. So," Nordstrom continued, "that was proof that the weirdness thing was only skin deep. Meantime, I had a crush on Father Yes from second one of minute one and I wasn't the lone ranger. I heard other kids murmuring and one said shower'. I was just another kid on the team as far as looks go, so I knew I had to start using my brain. I came up with my dream' story for confession, then the day after I spied in the woods something clucked and I stopped at the church after school and he took me to the rectory. He called my mom, then took me upstairs."

By accord Dave slowly released the young teen and they again sat side by side catching their breaths.

I'm trying to catch mine, too. Randy has been here most of the day playing computer games, and stayed on alone after Samantha left. His body is lyrics in perfect harmony, silky skin and enough fat to sculpt his warm belly as delicate as a young teen's breasts. Every curve in playboy, with hot baby skin. He is totally accepting, plays and we chat happily as I'm desensitizing him. I took him into the bathroom briefly and we made out for a few minutes. He kisses avidly and it's beyond comprehension how that preteen mouth and lively tongue might one day feel. Also, seeing him naked, leaning back against the bathroom wall, legs spread in the classic position most boys assume naturally, and the ones who are taught always repeat. Then being naked with him. He stayed an hour after I finished with him, chatting and learning to play solitaire. He's a specimen boy, neither bold nor uptight; mostly mellow, partly playful, bright, which is a refreshing contrast with Samantha, the princess of the inner circle of charm, but not quick. I invited him to come live here, just mentioning the idea. I could use a houseboy, and his family is virtually next door. He was over with Kira, emblematic of danger in small packages with her lightest honey gold skin and round, solemn face. I got on Randy's case a month or so ago over teasing her, and for that or some other reason, he's knocked it off and now she dotes on him as she always has on Samantha. Being nice to his cousin might play dividends well into the realm of fantasy, and I'll return to my underlying thesis which is that they could be sleeping together now, and, assuming he was nice to her in a general way, no harm, no foul. She's being denied this by superstition and taboo sold as products. "You children go in the bedroom and lock the door if you want to that," is the only reprimand an experimenting couple should ever hear, with caveats against intruding on normal activities. Kira and Randy may grow up to be fat and uninteresting, not to put too fine a point on it, this may be the only chance they have to express an entire side of their lives, and, while it's one you can live without, as most fat people do, it's the same empty frustration you get from not avenging yourself on those who've severely abused you, by act or omission, for extended periods of time (as the world of Allah has abused the country in which I was born.). All one need keep in mind is the libertine lives the emptiest possible existence, no hope of any kind, and that we're human, controlled by reason, not animals and slaves to instinct. And reason does not say never, ever, how could that be reasonable? it says carefully and rarely. Of course, there'd be nothing rare about a developing Randy sleeping with a four-year-old Kira every night, but if you read it that she's one of a very small group of partners you understand my slant on the issue.

Molesting an inexperienced boy is like playing with a kitten, only softer and silkier. And you do it in the same way, a few minutes here, a few more two visits later, ten minutes, after three visits, and so on. If you hold a kitten more than ten or fifteen seconds, it gets restive, and if you still try to hold it, anxious. At it's first twitch, you release the animal, then it will always like being held, or at least not object, and you can hold it longer and longer, if, for some reason would be inconceivable to me, you wanted to. Randy knows the door is never locked; there's not the slightest pressure; he's a good kid, I've known him for years, I now live next door to him, and he's in control as to whether he visits in the first place, whether he stays when the others leave, and what happens if he stays. I'm rubbing this in because it's important. There's no conceivable way his life would be influenced, even if it was open knowledge in town, by what goes on between us, while it's made substantially better by our friendship, whether he's my boy toy, or not. It's a refrain in a minor key, both on its positive and negative sides. It adds, when played with discipline, texture to the music of life, and of and by itself, is capable of taking away nothing; will not be missed from the orchestra. Vastly less fuss, that's the place to start, eventually sanctioning alternative relationships to remove any legacy stigmatism. Every professional involved in any abuse case should assess on the bases of force and coercion, and if it isn't evident, go on to a case where it is. Save the really bad ones, the fourth grader huddled in the corner of the playground, and if a kid's skipping rope with the others, any rumors probably means she's getting more out of life than her (or his) playmates.

It's interestingly emblematic that the finest pyramid in the world, by a hundred times, is the monstrous edifice in south central India devoted to little boy's with big penises. It stands, new looking, carved to a higher standard, by far, than any other similar structure, as proof in stone that an alternative society can sustain. That they were some odd thousands of times happier than we are, isn't the point. The fact that they disprove every word and thought on sexual taboo, is. A thought that should be an utter delight to any pedophiles reading this story is as follows: what if the carvings are not lewd exaggerations? It fits neatly with my theory on excessive oral sex: what if little boys of that culture, cute little seven year olds, had eight-inch penises jutting high between their soft thighs and against their creamy bellies? Just picture then cumming like a young horse in the hands of a pretty little brown-eyed sister, and the image is more or less complete.

Now I'm going around carving temple art, as if I need another feather in my cap. Back to Randy, and not making a pussy of a kitten. No furtive, incomplete quickies. No domination, none at all. No romantic questions or commentary. No quizzing or creepy questions. No pressure. Nothing enabling him as an effeminate. Some stuff that a lot of guys like to do once in awhile. That's the whole pyramid.

A lot of arcing suddenly in the essays. Arcing is bringing a character or situation back repeatedly in the course of a story, but guess what: first, Linden now claims Melissa took the camera, he found it in her backpack, and is bringing it back, second, I ran into the one boy I thought I had once molested, in any true sense of the word, now in his thirties. We spent half an hour talking about South Water Caye in the old days. The third example's on me. The watches I thought were improperly set, were set correctly. So it's typical bird-brained artist, not typical Belize -- a rare reversal of this nature. As an excuse, I asked Andrew three times if he was sure his watch was accurate before I set the computer and microwave oven clocks, and then, as with the wet road, jumped to the wrong conclusion when their clocks agreed with each other. Mind-set it's called. Very dangerous. Another example is when Roman, my efficient helper when I was laid up, stole Samantha's bike. I happed to be standing at my bedroom window and saw him go under the house less than a minute before she found her brand-new bike was gone. If I hadn't happened to see him, I would have blamed Marvin, a notorious thief who lived across the road, and who has reportedly stolen four bikes from my house as well as other valuables. I used to find him sleeping in my outhouse at the old place, and provided him a roof and meals at various times, never doing or suggestion anything. In fact, off all the boys who've stolen things, I've never touched one, and I have had sex with the boys I can trust at least six inches at midday. If I feel guilt over anything in the past, it's not becoming active with Linder. Maybe it would have made a difference, but, at the time, I had two juvenile males and I've never been interested in running a boy farm. Could one orgasm have changed his life? Possibly. Meantime, he's got lots of time to let his good side re-emerge and nothing is more problematic than trying to judge how slightly deviant kids will mature. This was one of Gran's essential messages, and, at age 102, with scads of nieces and nephews, in addition to her own large family, and as an inveterate reader, she knew as much as anyone. She'd seen remarkable changes, both ways, between children and adults, but I do wonder if her advice would apply to our age, with its profound levels of subliteracy. My guess is today's dumb kids are going to stay dumb, and probably too dumb to be fun. That's why I write so many essays.

I did a little soul-searching and summing up today. Kira was asleep on the end of the bed, Randy was smoking through the "Battery Charge" demo. Samantha had conked out on the dining room table. Sim just brought me a fresh stash, I had plenty of cigarettes, and I tried to estimate how my list of toys would compare to my peers. To again quote Tiger Woods: "When I was eleven I had the pretties girlfriend you ever saw, got straight As, and won thirty-two tournaments. Life's been uphill ever since." Man, is it ever cool to be fifty-six and have the cute girlfriend, six novels, plus, and to pay for others to go to school. If I yielded to the siren call of Modesty, I'd be lovable -- enough is enough for one lifetime.

I hope there will be more sex in upcoming essays. Writing novels is hideously hard work and it would be nice to indulge in the tawdry and salacious while I catch my breath.

"You handled me really well," the boy, now breathing normally, said with a shy smile, "I wanted to feel you naked against me, at first, but then I remembered you had a hairy chest, and Father Yen was like a little boy, so I wanted to wait so it could be a separate experience, especially after you'd been with me for a few minutes."

"Two more peas, same pod," the adult said, "Lessen had the same idea. We made half a ceremony of it. That was at the point I was going all out for him, trying to haul him bodily out of his own way. He whispered about it, I yielded, and it's probably where I should have said No."

"Was it your first time together?" Nordstrom asked.

"Yes," the man said. "At first he wanted it to push his boner against my erection, but when I was half naked, he changed his mind, and I knelt on the carpet of the motel room floor as he put his hands behind his neck and wriggled against me."

"Did it feel nice to you?" the boy asked.

"I was more into looking at him," the man whispered, "and I think the physical sensation was probably more intense for him even though he felt nothing but hot against me."

"Did your penis touch his belly?" the experienced child wanted to know.

"We pushed against each other," the man recalled, "but we were still in our slacks and underwear, so it was just hinting."

"How long did you stay on the floor like that?" the thirteen year old wanted to know.

"Half an hour or so," the artist said.

"How'd he end up freaking out if you took so much time with him?" Nordstrom asked.

"He'd been kidnapped from a RV center when he was nine," the teacher explained, "the bikers had a couple of twelve year old boys with them, but there were over twenty of them. They took him to a slave camp and held him for a week."

"That might have an effect," Nordstrom mused sympathetically.

"They were call the Lesser Shadows," Dave explained, "the leader wrote math textbooks and he had a geometry-based ritual were each biker stood at a certain distance from a barn, a certain moment before sunset, and if his shadow didn't conform to the formulae, he had to ride off into the sunset for at least a month."

"I hope they had a bad cook," the thirteen year old said, glad to hear a light note in his master's voice that seemed to foreshadow an alternative kidnapping.

"His mother killed the boy and stuffed the bird," Dave said, "she was a fiend, incarnate, domineering, stupid, and loud enough to alarm anyone hiking under the wall of a canyon. She cooked worse than she was, and made him eat half-burned peas, which are as ugly as they are nauseating. They'd trailed the Atwaters out from a mall, where they'd noted the discrepancy between boy and beast. They let the air out of a tire of their camper, knowing that at mid-day they'd find him changing the wheel. They scooped him right from under the old lady's nose, and gunned up to a hundred so he wouldn't feel like jumping off. They were as gentle as they could be, but they took him back to their camp and raped him. The boy's took him first, then the lesser shadows, then the older guys. Only two adults penetrated him, but he knelt in front of the others, so it was from zero to maximum overdrive in two hours."

"Did they play with him before they started raping him?" the younger male wanted to know.

"First, they fed him, French toast, and eggnog" the teacher explained to his student, "then, yes, they showed some videos of other boys they'd abducted, adding a neat touch by beginning each sequence with a minute or two of the victim's mother."

"What was he thinking by that time?" the boy asked.

"He said it was desensitization at the rate of a forgetful sky diver's descent."

"You know what?" the boy asked.

"What?" Dave replied.

"Don't take this the wrong way," the thirteen year old said, but we're not using a parachute, we're using a hot-air balloon."

"Interesting," his teacher remarked guardedly.

"It was so close while I was standing in front of you," the boy said, "now here we are sitting side by side, you dressed, me still in my shorts."

"That you can be polite about it," the man laughed, "is more than remarkable, almost awesome, because the analogy is perfect. We talk and rise, then stop talking, and settle, only to talk and rise, again, exactly paralleling what happened when I was behind you. Ergo, we get not only multiple, but parallel views rather than a quick descent back to earth."

"That's what I meant," the boy said, relieved, because a gas balloon goes up and stays up until you let the stuff out."

"Choosing between hot air and gas is going to keep me up all night," Dave said.

"I'll be enjoying the views," the boy said, making sure the man loved him as much as he loved the man.

They did get naked. Dave took his shirt off as they sat on the log, exposing his tawny, lightly matted chest. He stood and the bare-chested boy took his hand. They climbed, finding the romantic touch quite practical when it came to Maine boulder beaches, from the "beach" to a shelf of grass at the verge of the pine trees. Sheltered from the light breeze, wildflower dotting the grass, insects humming as ever, they knelt close. Both displayed, and they moved together until their arching chests touched, the delicate child gasping at the rawness of the lightning jetting from his swollen nipples as he swayed against the rugged matting of his mature master.

"You can call me `Lessen" if you want," the boy whispered.

"My nickname for him was `Sennen"," the teacher noted.

"Did you talk while this was happening in the motel?" the boy asked.

"Yes," the man said, "he described what had happened with the Lesser Shadows, taking a nap with the little boys so they could get him ready for the adults, you know, by talking to him. They'd both been kidnapped and raped so they calmed him down from being snatched away from his mother's tire and zoomed off at full speed. By the time he went into the sanctuary to watch the videos, he was nervous and excited but not afraid, except for it hurting a little, which both boys said was a small price to pay."

"I've been thinking about you that way, even with your shorts still on," Nordstrom said, "wondering how much it will hurt."

"The power of suppository thinking," Dave said. "We'll give that a big, hairy miss. With all these rocks, you'd have an excuse to be stiff-legged when we get back to town, but there's stiff-legged and there's stiff-legged, and wise eyes that know the difference."

"How long was Lessen stiff after being with the Lesser Shadows?" the boy asked curiously.

"He had two young boys," the adult said, "both of them ejaculated inside him before the youngest and smallest of what was a slim and fit group, to begin with, followed the boys, and only one of the full-grown males mounted. He'd been picked by drawing straws."

"There should be a law against not kidnapping a kid in a situation like that," the boy said. Acting, it seemed permanently as one, they rose and returned, romantically, to their seat overlooking the calm cove.

"That was even closer," the boy said, "do you know that seventeen forty-ninths is thirty-five percent?"

"Just that madness divided by insanity equals love," the adult answered

"Which crazeth the young, and, alike, the younger, yet," quoth the mathematician to the athletic male at his right.

"It is kind of a numbers game," the boy allowed, "the altimeter goes up, and then the number drop and we're friends sitting on an old, gray log that should have been a telephone pole."

"Driftwood makes me a landlubber," the teacher said, "I mean, if so much of it's out there, drifting, and it's so big and heavy, and so hard to see, aren't the results inevitable?"

"I think the inevitable results of an altimeter reading zero is a crash," Nordstrom said.

"And we prevent that by...?" the man asked.

"Talking so he won't write another essay," the boy winked.

"Character," the man murmured like a drama coach prompting from the wings.

"Sorry," the boy said, "doing what we are. I'm lucky with my mom, but Lessen wasn't. If there hadn't been an accident, what do you think?"

"That could make a guy take up smoking," the man observed. "I don't think he would have been okay. I could reach him, especially after that night in the motel, but Shady reached further. He was too tractable with me, and too wild on the outside. Drinking, friends who reeked of cool; it was hard to see where he was, much less where he was going. `They all find something, none of them starves, no one starves,' that's a line from "Death of a Salesman". His mother had him for eleven years before I got my mitts on him, so he was a forlorn hope more or less from the get-go, in spite of, as I said, playing the compliant, responsive kid when he was with me."

"Booze at that age must be rough," Nordstrom said.

"Alcohol has a tradition of pleasure behind it," the master said, "and to either succumb to addiction, and act out, or be denied the pleasure for life is the definition of the space between ye rock and ye hard place," the man agreed, "plus there was lots of pot, all the time, and ye knife of ye combat vintage."

"You didn't kill him on purpose, did you?" the boy asked.

"I would have used less fire," the man replied.

"You're so amazing," Nordstrom mused, half to himself. "I mean I thought Father Yen was cool because he wasn't a sycophant and was a realist, but that was all kind of passive on his part. Reacting to my questions, and half the time agreeing with my view, or being vague and saying things like you can't disprove the existence of this or that. But your mind isn't trained," the boy went on, "the balloon isn't tethered, it drifts, but somehow you do paddle it around up there, which is helpful when it comes to not being a flake."

"You rowed us out here, champ," Dave responded, "so at least you know what you're talking about."

The master's reply struck the boy as funny. There'd been enough silliness though, he thought to himself, but it wasn't a case where thinking did much good. So he stood, looked nervously at his teacher and then moved between the bare-chested adult's legs. "I want to feel you against me, again," he whispered.

The boy kicked his sandals off as the adult unbuckled him and dropped his shorts, placing them on the log. His hand's went to Nordstrom's waist and he molested the panting boy for several long minutes, then, as the child displayed, pulled his underpants to his feet and removed them The naked boy spread his legs, the cobbles of the beach finally seeming a plus, and his master leaned to him. The thirteen year old was fully adult in size, his baby pink penis uncircumcised. Dave held the shaking youth's hip with his left hand, and gently pulled back the boy's foreskin with his right. Nordstrom gasped as he had at his first carnal touch, and, when he was eased in the crinkly matting of the athlete's chest, and moved slowly up and down, began hissing and mewing uncontrollably as his legs shook and he panted for breath.

Sensing the fast rise of tension in the young teen, the man eased his hard, swollen glans from his chest and stood, pulling the naked child strongly too him.

"Did Father Yen cum off first when you were together in the rectory?" the man asked the panting boy in his arms.

"Yes," the boy whispered.

"I want the same," Dave said, "I want you to watch me cum."

"He used to let me be the first sometimes," the boy said, calming with a few hiccups as they returned to ground zero..

"I'd like that if it ever happens with us," the adult said, "but we're violating enough standards and practices, so that one's sacred."

"Thanks," the boy murmured, "it made a big difference my first time, because I, you know, sort of cooled down real fast when it did happen with me."

"That was Lessen's specialty," the artist said, "hot going in, cold coming out. He even called me a faggot once, but, half way to the door he stopped so fast he fell on a throw rug, and by the time he reached the top of the stairs he was back to his full seven-inch display."

"His what?" the boy asked.

"He was with the bikers for a week," the master reminded his student, "he grew more than is ordinary, and earlier than is ordinary, and, not to tell tales our of school, he had more semen than two normal adults."

"So you really didn't kill him," the student repeated, amazed he could speak at all as the memory of the sensation of his uncircumcised penis against his master's chest half exploded through his trembling loins, causing his boner to swell as his teacher stared down and he leaned back as far as he could while spreading his legs widely. Dave reached across and masturbated the wanton young teen, bringing him fast and close, then again hugging the panting child to his bare chest. He stood and the boy unbuckled him, and in a moment they were standing gently together finding they matched perfectly, the slim pink penis with the rougher, thicker erection of the adult, measuring within a quarter inch.

"I think we traded the balloon for something harder and faster," Nordstrom noted.

"It will happen for both of us," the man said, softly, "I'm not trying to string you along. I'm way out of control, now, myself, but I learned to get past the point of no return with Lessen, and have reversal of fortune, which is the most genteel way I can say it, rule the hour, but Rof, as I've come to know him, is a kindly puppy and knows when to sleep so boys can be boys.."

"When you're an adult does it make you feel like a kid to do this?" the boy asked.

"In a word," Dave concurred, "if it's like this, willing, private, and comfortable, with plenty of time. If it's sneaky, quick, and incomplete, you'd end up feeling like a dirty old man, even at your age."

"Will I like touching little boys when I'm mature?" the child wanted to know.

"Everyone wants to," the man replied, "but the wages of sin is death, which is puzzling, because death is also the wage of virtue, but, moving on, the answer is Yes. You may want it already with a child, or find one at any time. The biggest gift out here on this island is that now you know, from having a second partner, that what you have with your priest isn't a fluke, but just a minor part of life that can be shared from time to time with anyone who feels the same way you do. That's all that counts. How old that partner is, or their sex, are simply not figures in the emotional equation: it's how well the you know each other and what happens during the other ninety-eight percent of the relationship between to people that counts. When you're my age, you won't favor an eight year old over a ten year old because you like little boys, you'll favor the one you know the best and like the best. Women marry men in an age span of fifty years, and if they marry the one they know the best and like the best, they're probably making the best choice. If you were eighteen, I'd like this with you, and I'd like it if you were six. If you were over eighteen, I wouldn't like it with you, because I'm not a homosexual. Even at your age, I wouldn't like sleeping with you every night and waking up with you every morning, as I would with the right female.

"I kind of feel that way, too," the boy noted. "I'd like it sometimes, but if we lived together, I'd want my own room, not just bed."

"If you stay at my place, you can have your own wing," the artist observed, "but that's a pie-crust promise; there's a whole lot more interesting stuff out there than a premature relationship with an older guy, or, probably, anyone, and, as long as you don't let your philosophy of mixing sperm and boy become too convenient, you'll have exciting stories to tell, and, if they're good enough, I might forget I'm not gay and something might happen."

"I hope we do," the boy said.

"If Lessen was still alive, I'd be visiting him," the man said, "even with all that happened. But that's fairly unusual. When you move on, you usually do, to new people as well as a new place. I think that's the way it should be. If less people ran up huge bills on cheap long-distance telephone calls to people essentially out of their lives, the country would be a better place. You should engage locally, not dwell on the distant. You're here with me, now, and not dwelling on your priest. That makes it nice and is no slur on him. If you pulled out your telephone and spent an hour talking to him, that would be different."

The boy grinned. "What if we spent most of it talking about you?" Nordstrom asked, "because we do when we're together. He quizzes me, but the only exciting thing was when you made me dig those holes while you did your wild-west imitation of a wolf with his foot in a trap."

"Nobody's perfect," Dave responded in a mock whine.

"Guess again," the boy said, cuddling close and raising his face for their first kiss. His left hand went to Dave's rugged face, pulling him to his mouth, his right, avoiding the man's scaring, pulled at the adult's left shoulder. Dave eased from the log, bending to the avid boy, and stripped out of his shorts and briefs, yielding fully to the welcome in the boy's strong hands and coming fully against the child's naked body as the by swirled and danced his tongue, seeming to want to lick his partner entirely inside his hot, urgent mouth. As the naked adult pressed between his widely spread legs, the boy broke the kiss and lowered to the rigid penis at his smooth, boyish chest. He licked the wet phallus, then, as his master's hands held him gently he began experimenting with having an adult's penis in his mouth. They spent the boy's initial tries adjusting their position, then, when they were comfortable, the adult displayed as the boy moved vigorously and steadily up and down on his master's long, thick shaft, taking it half in his mouth as his hands worked skillfully at masturbating the now shaking young man. The tableau lasted five minutes, then, as it had before, love and happiness -- the kind you don't want to end -- overcame the heat and lust of the moment, they slowed with each other, and finally returned to the essence of their friendship, which was sitting comfortably and talking to each other.

"You were a little hesitant at first," Dave said, "have you taken Father Yen that way?"

"He says priests are allowed to walk in the Garden of Eden, they don't own it," the boy answered, "we only did things with our hands. I've never even kissed him, and I don't want to."

"Now that he can't own you the way we just were, will he let you use your mouth on him?" the man wanted to know.

"Now there's a theological issue worth thinking about," the boy said, "about as Jesuit as you can get. To have not dominated me: does it convey the right to accept me?"

"I'd carry a big bottle of Advil to a session like that," Dave said.

"You've got that right," Nordstrom grinned, tracing a finger over his lover's scar.

"Would you like to have him in your mouth, if he changes his principles?" the man wondered.

"Yes," the boy whispered softly. "If for no other reason, and I think it would be sensual, than to thank him for being cool, not greedy."

"I hope you figure something out together," Dave said.

"What happened just now," the boy mused in a whisper, "make me want to go up and lie in the grass, on my back, with the back of my legs against your chest."

The man was also in a contemplative mood. "If that happened between us," he said, "maybe your father would compromise on what you want with him and let it happen without hindrance from the pseudo-philosophy part and parcel of all religions."

"In his name," the boy said from that magic land where no one could guess if he was being droll or was innocent.

"Let your will be done," Dave added, "but that's something that never happened with Lessen, and will probably only happen in my life, so I don't want slam-bam-thank-you-man."

"How far did you go with the other boy?" Nordstrom wanted to know.

"In this case," Dave answered, "I was a fellow pea in a pod with Father Yen. I left a lot for others, and should have left more. It was hard, because he was greedy, and wanted it all, but I outweighed him by a hundred pounds, so we stuck to our own small ritual, with all the world to teach him the rest; more to do with what I perceived as kindness and reason than any philosophical take on the matter."

"Was your ritual always the same?" the boy asked.

"Yes," the man said. "We'd dress in the same slacks and shirts we wore on the way to the diving clinic; same everything. We'd reenact what happened in the room, deliberately, didactically, so he'd learn that consistency and redundancy -- a formula -- becomes much more a part of you than anything that happens willy-nilly and here and there, when and whenever."

"And he wasn't satisfied?" the boy wondered.

"His mother always made him hurry at things," Dave said, "he was used to performing at top speed, which meant he needed now things to perform, all the time. I tried limiting him to one video game at a time, play it through, then go on to the next. That helped and he was beginning to respond, but I only spent a few hours a week with him. With more exposure, there might have been that rarest of human conditions, a sea change; an entire rejection of one set of ways and values for another, assumed with passion. Small chance, realistically, but it could have happened."

"I don't want it with you," the boy said, "I don't want even a micro-change until my legs are against your chest and you're looking into my eyes, and I can feel what's happening inside me. At that point, you can freeze us for a million years and I won't get bored."

"I'd never make it that long without those eyes," the man noted, and again they came gently together, lips and tongues promising that once and awhile it would be nice to sleep together, all night long.

"What was your ritual?" Nordstrom asked after some minutes.

"A long talk," the man said. "I'd quiz him about things he wrote in his letters, and what happened in the week after he was hijacked from the campground, then we'd come to a pause and he'd say he wanted to take a shower. That's what happened in the motel. Not very original, but I'd had enough of the ad hoc and extemporaneous to last our the year, so, acceptable."

"Did he stand against the wall of the shower so you couldn't see him?" Nordstrom asked.

"Why, is that what you'd do?" the artist inquired.

"I think so," the boy said, "it would be so awesome hearing a man opening the bathroom door, first, then the shower door or curtain, you know, a minute later, knowing he was going to see how your body was, then almost watching the fear run down the drain with the water as you feel it melting away from what he'd do with you, then the last lump melting and falling off, like ice when you defrost the refrigerator, when you feel the touch of him against your bottom or your back and know the adult behind you has a hard penis, just like you do."

"It was more romantic than that," Dave said, repaying the boy for leaving him between the rock and hard place a time or two.

"That means you talked to him, once the door was closed and he knew you were really with him," the boy responded

"He was playing Shy Baby," the master said, "the same game he'd played in the bedroom when we took his shirt off. Then he continued it by stripping and hiding in the shower, water off.

"The wolf shouldn't look at Little Peter," Lessen whispered as the door clicked shut.

"Then Little Peter shouldn't show the wolf how soft and tender his little boy body is," the wolf growled softly.

"Good wolf's are dogs," the naked ten year old said, "and dogs are okay, but when they see things, they get excited and you have to tell them to go away, then that gets them more excited, and then they're wolfs again, and it's more exciting than ever, so Little Peter takes his shirt of in private with the wolf, and then runs away and hides, and the wolf finds him and looks at him, with no clothes on, and sees everything he wants, almost, and then it gets very hard for the little boy to drive the wolf away because if the wolf is this excited just seeing him all naked, what will happen when the wolf comes up behind him and uses his fingers to touch him? How will the boy ever tell the wolf to go away, after that starts happening? He might not even want to. Or he might go into a trance and dream it's a man standing behind him in the shower, and the man knows the small pink body just in front of him has been in the hands of wolves, before and those wolves has had him for hours and hours, time after time, and that Little Peter has been wet from those other wolves, and so the man doesn't have to teach the little boy anything, turning the man into a wolf that drives away all the others, who are now mere hounds."

"You've never really shared what happened," Dave said, "and you don't have to; it's just that if you ever wanted to, this might be the time and place. Or you can let it go at: `They molested me, you jerk, mind your own business.'"

"That's more how I feel about the old lady," the boy said into the wall of the shower, She's a freak, okay, what's it to you?' Then you'd come back with those burned peas'll do it every time,' and I could hate you as much as I hate the rest of the world that didn't take me away from that ludicrous bitch before I learned to wet myself."

"It would be a change of subject to tell me what happened after they parked the bikes," the twenty-six-year-old teacher said.

"They'd built the place up pretty well," the boy said. "Mal, he drove the bike I was on, handed me a comb, and carried me into the small cabin. He told me they were going to rape me, and the boys inside would tell me about it, then pushed me through the door to where Nicky and Pierre were sitting on the floor playing videos. They had a third controller, so I sat down on the rug between them and started playing along. They told me not to worry; that the Lesser Shadows like to pretend they were persons of the dawn of time, before the world was spoiled by good, but that the big, bad rape would be a torchlight ceremony with everyone dressed way cave. They showed me their costumes after awhile, and gave me mine so they could look at me in it. They had lots of food and eggnog, but told me about what happened at sunset, so I could only eat it until I had my mother's cooking out of my mouth, then we'd eat Mexican food, and not much of it. They both had looked really good in their cave suits and said I did, too, so that was the reason for it. They talked about hunger as an abstraction, when to me it was mother, drunk, again, for the odd two or three days, but I got the message, and seeing so many cute guys when we arrived, they were all wearing tee shirts and cutoffs, was another reason, even in my innocence of such things, to think in terms of being a little hungry, some of the time, instead of fat, all the time, which was their unofficial motto."

"Yet it wasn't a cooking school," the older male said.

"Good food and being away from my mother was all I could think about at first," the boy said, "but then we tried the costumes on just for a minute, and the subject kind of changed."

"Good," the man said.

"How did I know that?" the boy rejoined. "I'd been hauled aboard a Yamaha with an engine for an earth mover and they said it was a hundred, and it was like a hundred and forty or something, with sparks on the turns just so I wouldn't go letting my mind wander, then into the parking lot, and a lot of guys standing around to look, like I was a package from some fairy queen, then into the cabin where the boys are playing video, all in say, ten minutes, so I didn't know when the subject changed whether they were going to eat me or just keep me on a hook in the kitchen for when they needed the blood of an Englishman, because I'm English and my mother is five time more English than the queen."

"It must have been nice, under the circumstances, to know what you didn't want to talk about," Dave observed.

"You make everything funny," the boy said to his tiles, "and it's just so you can be a bad wolf and look at my body, and think about what I looked like in a caveman suit, and think what a whole bunch of young guys without an eating disorder in the group, also dressed a la the cave, looked like when they began to get interested in what I look like even before they took my suit off, and their suits off, and we were huddled together under the torches for over an hour while they raped me."

"I'm still looking at you," the teacher said, "and wondering how you felt when you let them see your penis."

"And you want to see me the way I was with them, too," the boy said sourly.

"I just want to see if there's one side to your schizoid behavior that makes sense," Dave responded. "Maybe it's open carnality, total nakedness with each other, you wet from me, me wet from you, you telling me every secret of what happened under the torches, me asking all kinds of questions, because I don't have any stories to trade for yours, and you finally turning around, when you're ready, so we can watch each other jerk off and you can watch me cum off on your belly, in private, one-on-one. If you're going to slip from Happy Peter to disgruntled victim, then I'll leave you in peace and shower later, no harm, no foul."

"How can I tell?" the boy asked, "until I feel your hands on me, just above my hips, really softly and gently, and down low enough so you'll know my secret, and why I'd be standing this way even if we weren't playing a game, and I was really just a scared, innocent boy."

"And when the wolf touches the wraith, what does it turn into, long-legged and attractive as it is."

"I'm not much of a boy most of the time," Lessen said, "so maybe I could try that."

"And how long would that last?" the man asked.

"Until the wolf turns out to be the one that's a wraith, and reappears as a stick without a brain."

"Well," the adult mused, "if that happens it won't take him but a second to know where he'd like to make contact with your soft-skinned, pubescent body."

"You'd like to see it all covered with young-man sperm," the boy taunted, "just like I did, because they had a video camera over my head looking down my back, and I could watch what they were doing with me while I was lying on the bench in the main lodge and one after another came up and knelt behind me with one of the boys at his hip, and it was a twenty-seven inch monitor, so I saw all the details of what I looked like and that's how you want to see me."

"How did you see looking at yourself that way," the teacher asked, ignoring the child's petulance out of a complete lack of alternatives.

"It was all the way up on my shoulders," the boy whispered, his voice finally settling into the sick-sounding husk, "and on the back of my neck and in my hair. There was a thick white puddle at the base of my spine and the boys used it to keep their hands wet for the bikers."

"That wasn't the first time they raped you?" Dave interjected, hoping a few seeds of reality would keep the boy focused.

"I was on my knees most of the time," the boy said, "but at first they did it inside me, so the other would get excited. That happened while I was on my hands and knees, but they had rented an extra camera and monitor, so I could watch while I got molested."

"I knew there had to be a sane cult out there, somewhere," the man said.

"They didn't worship what happens at the end," Lessen responded, "but they thought it was artistic, which they defined, perhaps a bit conveniently, as beauty lacking symbolism, beauty created for it's own sake."

"There's always a few in every crowd," Dave noted.

"They kind of won me over," the boy continued, deciding not to waste time figuring out whether the deadpan voice behind him was serious or off on one of its droll sidebars, "because a cute boy accepting a cute young man isn't weird and ugly like pictures of bathroom stuff would be, it's somehow on a higher plane." There, let him chew on that and see how funny he'd be next time.

"You were away from your mother," Dave said, "so I don't think you were fit to judge things like that. You probably thought French toast and eggnog were gifts of the food gods, and they're common, so what plane you were on, artistically speaking, having never been on one before that didn't involve the likes of Peter Pan, is not something you were, or are, capable of evaluating impartially."

Speaking of sex and art, Fidel dropped by this evening. He's my "persistent catamite" and the only boy I've raped. I have to turn him away, frequently, otherwise he'd be here every night. Do I dump him as I was? No, I let him hang around once a week and we jerk off together in the bathroom about every two or three weeks. This evening there was a new variation, notably aesthetic. Because of the blustery weather, the front door was closed and the shutter were closed, obscuring the living room from any visitor. I invited him in, at first saying I didn't want to play, as our usual activity is with both of us naked in the bathroom, leading to the possibility of suspicious behavior if there was a delay in answering the door. But with the door closed, and the two of us dressed in the living room, the scene was very different. I told him to stay around for awhile while I decompressed from a Herculean day which had started at dawn and would continue until two the following morning. I made tea and burned a bud.

I've mentioned my world's-most-comfortable chair, and always wondered if it would be good for having sex. It's a ubiquitous plastic chair with the right, front leg missing. The corner rests on a five-gallon plastic bucket, which serves as a heel rest. Just to the left is a low table, and leaning back against the wall, left arm propped, right foot up, is the next thing to an actually easy chair with a foot rest. Yes, it's passed every test in the comfort department, but would it be good for sex? Read on, and you will find out. The answer is Yes. Fidel, with the door closed, began masturbating as I drank my tea. I put my leg up and began stroking, too. We did that, occasionally leaning forward to look at each other, for about ten minutes. If anyone came, we'd be decent by the time we opened the door, so the comfort level was high. Fidel usually wears long pants, heavy socks and sneakers, and, common here for some reason, several pairs of underwear, boxers, briefs, gym shorts, and a bathing suit. I'm probably exaggerating. It takes him a long time to undress, and dress, so the comfort level usually isn't high. Anyway, this time it was, and we were able to take our time. Sort of like working in a lab rather than a Polaroid, to use an anologic simile, so you won't catch me out there, from the world of photography. So we smoked, drank tea, and masturbated a few feet apart, much like I used to do with males in the saunas of bath houses. Without hurrying, we got excited more quickly than usual, and by the time the tea was half done he was standing over me, and I was boy-hard and waiting for him. I usually try to cum with his sperm on my hand, at my age it helps, and we usually use baby oil with each other and ourselves. This time, since he's totally the aggressor in the relationship, I thought I'd observe and not participate in a mutual cum. I know it all sounds dry and half-academic, but that's only the beginning. Fidel is seventeen, extremely attractive, and nearly wanton as a lover, I wanted to see him naked, but with the privacy situation had to make do, which also led to my accepting him without participating. Instead of sharing his sperming, I stopped jerking off and pulled my shirt high as he began spreading his legs to get close to me. For a moment I sat perfectly still to see if there was any tell-tale motion of the building to the rhythm of his stroking fist, but I felt nothing. My chest and belly look like a boy's, hairless, milk white skin, soft as a young teen's (it's never been half as soft as Randy's). Leaning against my left leg, with my right out of the way, thanks to the modified chair, he was able to hold his glans, which had just emerged, against me just under my ribcage on my right side. He tensed for over a minute while I just looked, hands holding my shirt to my neck. I coaxed him a little, verbally, and he ejaculated for about half a minute, leaving two tablespoons of hot semen in a pool the size of a butterfly. After we'd both looked at it for a few moments, I wet my hand as he finished stroking, and tried to jerk off, but, and here's where it gets interesting, there was so much of his seed on my right palm, it felt bad instead of good, and I went for a towel, easing my erection back into my shorts. Live and learn. I think even our usual baby oil, which is messy and leaves a scent, would have been a distraction, that's how artistic it was. Yes, being naked with him would have been more exciting, he's a beautiful boy, but in art there should be comfort as well as lively engagement, so I take solace in that. A beautiful experience, is a beautiful experience, and if wishing it had been perfect keeps it alive, you have a whole new philosophy to cope with.

Fidel and Randy might be something to look forward to. If the younger boy turns out to like sex, a seventeen year old would be more exciting to him than I'd likely be. There are many places he can lead, and I hope none of them are perfect.

Fidel is an interesting research subject. While I don't quiz other boys, because of his (gently) aggressive nature, I do ask him questions. He says he has no other partners, and cums off very heavily, so it's likely true. He displays anally, and says he had an older boy inside him when he was younger. He says he'd been with one girl, and is interested in females. This actually says quite a lot. He's a catamite to the extent I once saw him go up and kiss an older boy on the arm, the older boy pushing him gently away. Anyone could have him. He's, as they say here, simple, but low-key and very pleasant, amply attractive with an almost hairless boy's body, works in town much of the time, and yet is partner-free. This coincides with previous commentary on the sparse attendance at border steam baths, where men can take boys at will. It could be summed up that perverts are indeed a rare breed, but that brings up a very thorny question as to whether the majority wants to be perversion-free, or is mandated to be free, and if they want to be free, why? Natural inclination, or indoctrination? Again, thorny, because how do you know unless you've tried it, and what if you'd had a gentle introduction in a bathtub at an early age, how would you feel, then? Another thorn is how, as things open up, those who've held a homophobic or morally-guided position feel about what they missed out on. The more sensitive of these will also dwell on the pleasure and fulfillment, five-percent sexual, they could have given a few boys and girls along the way, yet denied them. That's enough rocks for one snowball.

The microwave is the computer of the kitchen. I've never lived with one before and found myself wondering how I got along without it, much as the people wondered how they'd ever gotten along without Mssrs. Roebling. (Opera writers who passed on my drama based on hunting down counterfeit compact discs might consider a musical based on the career of Mrs. Roebling's essential role in this most dramatic event of its time.) The primo luxury, so far, is dawdling over a meal, then reheating it a time or two. It's actually strange to finish a plate of piping hot food. In a perfect world they'd have a magnetron tube on the end of a flex shaft hanging from the ceiling, and you could heat things up without leaving the table, perhaps actually keeping the food hot while you chew simply by holding the transmitter to your cheek. (Where my tongue is.)

A universal recipe has never been feasible before, because re-heating food usually means a long wait for a double boiler (and lots of gas), or frying, which adds oil and mashes the food. Now you can dip into your basic rice or pasts, add a chilled sauce, and sprinkle on frozen meat or seafood, add cheese, and it comes out like it had been in a salamander in a hotel kitchen, only probably better. Therefore, two big plastic tubs, one for your basic, another for the sauce, and a smaller one for the meat or seafood in the freezer, and you're in business. Make a huge amount of rice or pasts. It will keep for a day or two at room temperature, so you only need refrigerate a single maximum size plastic bowl. The sauce, with a butter, flour, milk base will keep for days in the refrigerator, and to this you add your vegetables, microwaving the fresh ones in place of blanching or par boiling. Your chicken, meat, or seafood are cooked before the rice and sauce (so you can use the stock), and, when cooled, stored in the smaller plastic bowl in the freezer. When it's time to eat, two or three pot spoons of rice, one or two of the sauce, and a handful of frozen cut-up chicken,, we're talking half a minute, here, and into the nuclear environs for six to ten minutes. It comes out perfect every time, and you can re-heat anytime you want. The only hint I've found is to stir the product stored in the freezer as it congeals, to make it easy to serve. Add a pressure cooker for the meat, rice, and sauce, and about an hour and a half in the kitchen adds up to a dozen or so big servings that can be kept for days or weeks, while your gas consumption is cut by two thirds and your grocery bill by half. (If you don't have a couple of hours to spend in the kitchen every few days, thoroughly re-examine your life.) For tea, the machine heats the beverage, sugar, creamer, and the mug, but not the handle. How cool is that? Ironic, isn't it, that in America the rage is for just the opposite, for fussy little servings, wildly over-packaged in almost indestructible wrapping, and chicken and pork at the price of lobster and shrimp, with everything tasting like minor variations on the Hot-Pockets theme. Burger King wants you to have it your way, but may I suggest my way?

The food is so good, that's the difference; so good that the first thing you want to try is making it look better. I don't know if I'm ready for parsley, but at least I'm thinking about it, which I never did with fried leftovers.

Now I'm in another dither over the camera. I was a little intimidated about taking time off from the keyboard to really explore it last fall, what with like nine-hundred-thousand words to go, but now things are pretty much up to snuff, so I could take a day here and there. I want to hire a pickup truck and borrow Alex's long step ladder and take pictures from ten or twelve feet off the ground, shooting down from high oblique and reducing distracting elements like wires and cables. Dangriga, like Santa Fe, is rich in vignettes of the curtains in a weathered window variety, but these are rarely photogenic from street level.

Another arcing in the essay department. My Chinese watch has moisture under the crystal. What's that all about? I've hardly splashed it while doing Queenie's dishes, and it says Water Resistant. It would be fairly typical to find an otherwise excellent instrument is flawed by some tiny lapse, like a cold solder joint on a circuit board. An infinitesimal more rubber in the seal, and the thing would last for years; without it, maybe not even months. Another example is my refrigerator, a poorly painted Mexican brand. The whole creeping machine is rusting away, while working perfectly. A little more paint, probably fifty cents worth, and instead of lasting five years it would last ten or fifteen. Data and music discs that scratch at the slightest touch are another example. We get a lot of gray-market, factory-seconds, and refurbished merchandise here, adding an element of excitement to shopping for anything that doesn't say Del Monte. The sneakers I bought for Tonton popped the first time he laced them up and the seams of his new pants split, too. In a way, it's a mixed bag because the stuff is pretty dirt cheap, considering the fact we're a hundred miles from nowhere, and with a needle and thread even I can stitch clothes up, better than new, at least. We've repeatedly proven Crazy Glue does not work on sandals that pop in two days, so there's a benefit others probably overlooked. Other benefits are smaller and harder to ferret out. Headphones that sound like talking peanuts just seem like a waste of money, and waterproof flashlights with thin cardboard liners are only interesting as a conversation piece when they light spontaneously, and refuse to blink when you want to see if the fir de lance you spotted the previous day in your outhouse is still there. I saw the snake, the flashlight didn't work, and, I forgot to add, a hurricane was overdue, which is why I bought it in the first place, but otherwise it's a made-up story, except for the cardboard which looked too flimsy to hold a roll of paper towels. One thing's for sure, you have to be a writer to appreciation things like this. Everyone else belongs, legitimately, at Wal-Mart.

To touch or not to touch, that was the question. It was not one of art, the beauty of the coltish body leaning with its folded in front of its face, its chest arching perhaps subconsciously in welcome, its boyish bottom raised in more obvious welcome, was natural-beauty, defined to the extent that the most liberal gallery in a liberal city couldn't display photos or other graphics of nude, partially nude, or studied works of children. "Boy Displaying in a Shower" wouldn't hang before the public eye even if the shower door in the image was closed. But not all agreed, and it sounded as if the Lesser Shadows frankly disagreed. Certainly the society who built the most beautiful temple on the planet disagreed. Art galleries should be filled with interesting and attractive man/boy art and boy/boy work in all media. If the girls are squeamish, let them play dolls, boys are the most beautiful, by a tiny margin, anyway.

Okay, already, he was beautiful, and seemed to appreciate beauty, so? He was trouble on a stick. The best sentence in the English language describes the frustration of dealing with an abused child, sympathize with him as you will, understand as you can, try as you might. They become warm gelatin, press anywhere, they flowed elsewhere, then, in frustration, try pressing fast, and it merely thinned the gelatin the more. Any place he could talk, the boy would want another place, used to being hit so hard, he hated being touched at all. At one time he'd probably been afraid, now he hated, and was old enough and more than sharp enough to take a touch in the shower in the first place and show up at police headquarters, in the second place. But was art something else? Did it, could it, be the transcendent power, the one place where he could be touched and touched again, touch back, and thus open some kind of sustained dialogue, building instead of skittering?

"Jerking off isn't very photogenic," the boy whispered, changing the subject, "not the way it's usually done with you know, your hand going really fast, so Abraham, the art director, had worked with Farro, the choreographer, to come up with something that would work and maintain its artistic dignity when recorded on video tape. Just like "Miami Vice" had no earth-tones, Lesser Shadows had no jerky movements. That's why they'd picked me. I was deemed the cutest boy who'd miss his home the least."

"I owe you an apology," Dave mused, "for jumping to conclusions. I felt the planes you spoke of might have been oriented on lust, salacious carnality, and degenerate acting out under a cloak of expedient philosophy and convenient spirituality."

"We were under torches," Lessen reminded the older male standing inches behind him in the dry shower.

"You could have been under a spell, too," the man said, "they might have bolstered you with LSD."

"I never felt anything like that," the boy said, "it was all solid and real, not wavy and vague, they were into it..."

"For art," Dave nodded. It was hard to disagree with the principle. Liberal galleries in liberal cities displayed no images of children in any media, society deeming anything below a juvenile's head and shoulders erotic. Of course, there was a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel aspect to the issue. Free, the galleries would display nothing but cute kids by themselves, with other kids, or with attractive adults. Once the shock wore off, this expedient, do-it-yourself art form would choke out legitimate workers interpreting non erotic themes. Yet measured simply by beauty, pleasure, and emotion, the kiddie graphics would dominate, and, if ended up flowers choking weeds, it would also end up a monoculture, and that ground was staked out by the advertising agencies."

"No poster boys," the child said to his wall.

"But it does make it legitimate," the older male observed. "It should be the way of all flesh, carnality governed by decency, not morality, privacy, not prohibition, and, if that's the way of a peaceful world, and we're not there, then it's up to the artists to lead us there, because the unions are empowering the leftists, who have always been and are today, destructive brutes with boxes for everything from Festive Occasions to Great Writers and Pornography. Their expedient world is not survivable, forcing an alternative which does not exist under contemporary mores. In the real world," the speaker went on, "it does exist, so the Lesser Shadows become artists in reverse, leading from the abstractions of theology and morality to the age-old reality of adults making love with children, particularly, because it's more intellectually based, men making love to young boys."

"It's nice to know I've served the advancement of humanity in case the ever re-institute the draft," the ten year old boy said.

"What's nice is having lots of evidence proving your involvement," the adult responded.

"It's in hi-res," the boy added. "I look pretty foxy."

"A sane army would let soldiers have pet boys and boys be barracks pets," Dave noted, "so you may not be out of the woods. If your film is too good, it could swing the paradigm so quickly you'd end up in uniform by the time you're twelve."

"In uniform?" the boy asked wryly. Dave smiled at his comic effort but let the comment pass without laughing. Larger issues were on the table, and he'd never worked with his student so well focused. It would be ill-advised to risk the mood with comic relief by responding to, and perhaps encouraging, the droll and witty efforts of the mercurial boy.

"What kind of language did they use while they were molesting you," Dave asked.

"The writer was a tall Swede named Mex," Lessen said, "he had high ideals on that score. The boys, Nicky and Pierre, clued me in so I wouldn't mess up the sound track.

"But that's not to say they were uptight to any extreme degree," Lessen continued, "after all, the name of my film was Torch Dong'. That was Mex Helgendorf's idea, because it set the stage for an interplay, for trapping the audience with their own assumptions by playing them off against parallel variants. The way it worked was juxtaposing a stone age setting with the music of Strauss, costumes of silk, and the English of an Earl of Oxford. We talked quite a bit and he said he like playing with alternative themes to see if it could be done in an engaging manner, not just as a gimmick like in Slaughter House Five', where a survivor opens an old door on a battlefield and steps into a party. More subtle. Cave motif, knuckle-dragging persona, but quiet music and gentle words to go with the repeated rape of a little boy."

"You might not want to audition for the sequel," Dave suggested, "because if he's into variations on a them his next story may take place in an elegant school where the boys behave like Neanderthal toward the captive male, then rationalize violent behavior by virtue of your previous mode of living."

"Doing me worse than my mum?" the boy said, a spontaneous incredulity in his voice that might have deceived another, but his teacher was wise to his retreats into bluster and his adroit footwork under the Blarney Stone.

"It was just a thought, Sessen," the adult said, "your relationship with your mother appears to include intensive reading, and you didn't teach yourselves, nor did you learn in the socialist box labeled School; you've never mentioned your father or any other likely mentor, so guess who's left?"

"Until a year ago," the naked boy acknowledged, "then I stopped being a toy and became a slave. And I went to the school box, and verily it was not up to my standards, nor those of a clown, and lo the jocketh spoke jock, the cuteth spoke cute, and the fateth spoke not at all, which made the whole campus creepy and eerie Of literature, not of trace, no phrase of rhyme from any face. Lo said I unto myself, verily and forsooth, this is not your place. Self, said I, back to myself, it is badder then worse and shoddier than shoddy, but worse is to be had from the land of toddy.

"I meant the old lady, of course," the boy said, his latest dance under the stone leaving Dave weak-kneed at the lightning savagery of his spontaneous genius. A lot of voltage for a bottle. Handle with care.

"You had me going for a minute there," the man quoth, "generic critiques, understandably, make teachers nervous."

"Wolves make naked boys nervous," the child responded, "because they're immature and don't know if it's just a game to play in a boring motel, or whether the man is feeling things with a rising intensity from looking at the child's smooth body and imagining it on a big screen in hi-def video covered like a snowy mountain here, and a snowy plain, there, and a spring melt well under way with the snow sliding over milky meadows and forming rivulets leading to a richly flowing stream just above each slender hip. No sound intrudes other than the harsh whispers and panting of young males with a wet boy. If that's how you see me, and what you hear, then you're not a canine, you're a man who'll sooth my fears, and pretend I'm his little girl, and he's my daddy, and I want him to teach me, so I led him here."

"Is it time for school, or do we have all night?" Dave asked.

"It's just pretend," the boy whined, "make some of it up yourself."

"You were out front changing the tire on your bicycle," the man began, finally dropping the boy in his tracks. Lessen fell on the towels covering the floor of the shower, assuming a tight fetal position, his hysteria mute. In mime, the master blew firmly across the tip of his index finger, holstering his imaginary pistol as he knelt to see if his disciple yet lived. It was easy to tell, as Lessen, for all his occasional stoicism, could not help panting, gasping and hiccupping, nor voluntarily ebb the flow of teas actually dampening the peach-colored bath towel.

"I knew there was a varmint in you somewhere," the master soothed, "and I just wanted a shot at him. I didn't mean to knock you off your feet. You looked beautiful on your feet. I was standing with my penis just an inch or two from you slim, white back for a long time, so I know," the male continued, "and I liked standing close and feeling the heat of you against you, and picturing you as one beautiful young male freshened your snowfields with fresh, hot blizzards, one after another, gasping and panting over your beautiful pre-teen body and at the memories of seeing you gently and fully mounted by their own. I wanted that for us, not a basket case looking for a laundry behind iron bars. I want you mostly the same, with occasional freshness, not fresh all the time, and occasionally the same. I don't think I can make it happen, your mother having years on me, but I could be wrong. Allowing for that, I decided to swim with you. We changed in different rooms, so there was nothing to that, but in the pool you were aggressive and seemed to know what you wanted. We'd talk for an hour or two on each date, and that may have been a mistake and I should have responded to your displays more readily. But I have an out there because you were hanging with trogs and banging with trog wanna-bees, leaving me little time to work ways on you, mysterious or otherwise. Your mother, for some reason just the beast you describe, indicated that you'd been punked out, so that put carnality in play. You led, I followed, but you diverge at will, spreading bread crumbs on all the paths. This is fun after school, fun while you're working on your dives, but, alone, in a locked room, the whole night ahead of us, what's fun as we ride down Elm Street is what you were talking about in Heller's film, contrast as a gimmick, which lasts about as long as it takes to say the word. I'm not tired of it, and I hope I never am, but this isn't the time or place."

"You're fighting fire with fire and you've got more experience," the boy said.

"But," the adult responded, "what if I point out that you're the one with Lesser experience? You might take it as a play on words, and then I'd be stuck trying to revive my goldfish at the bottom of his aquarium."

"I thought I was meant to be a little girl," the boy noted sourly.

"And I thought I'd never have to resort to chains and a medieval rack to straighten your kinks out," Dave said. "I though you telling me the details of what happened would help, and I hoped openly molesting you for a couple of hours might be the answer."

"They'd beat your trying to be funny all the time," the boy retorted, "the rack would be child's play, and you doing me over in the shower, well, that's close, but sophomoric tangents and bush-league asides get so tiresome you could stick me against the wall and it probably would be an improvement, you know, say there was a line of your other students at the rack and I didn't want to waste the whole day."

"Humor is a terrible thing to fail at," Dave agreed, "any lack of levity can affect the self-esteem of the one who thinks he's funny, and scar his victim, senselessly."

"My mother, generally speaking, the Lesser Shadows, specifically speaking, and now you, unspeakable, and I'm still young, meaning not matter how sick I get of it all, you're still going to picture me as Nicky and Pierre let me to the altar on the set and the youngest of the Anglo gods was led behind me while I lay over a sheepskin covered in read silk and watched him approach from two angles on the monitors. You just want to ask me if the twelve year olds stripped out of their primitive fashions before they massaged us with gel. You want to know how close everyone huddled, and how long it took for them to all get naked, and what it felt like when Nicky guided Johan against me and what the eighteen year old looked like as the other naked young males helped Nicky and Pierre get Johan and I comfortable. All that stuff and what it looked like at the end with two cameras less that two feet away from what was happening between his athletic teenager's body and my little-boy body."

"We'll get to outlining in two months," the teachers said, "and meantime, it's better to start with a full text, and derive your summary from that."

"Great!" the boy enthused, "I'll leave out the funny stuff, then the text will serve as its own sketch, and I can hang out with dubious friends."

"For a full moment there I thought you were going to say you'd be hanging out with your mother," Dave said.

"Nothing could make her look good," the ten year old noted, "but you seem to make her look less bad."

"Funny you should put it that way," Dave responded, "because you have long moments of making the entire human race look better."

"I was trying to be funny," the boy explained patiently, "so you'd stop wolfing around me and wondering how gentle Johan was and how much Nicky helped him and what his expression looked like on the monitors, and the noises two dozen handsome young males as they huddled around trying not to do anything fast because it would spoil the shot. You want to know what Pierre whispered when he knelt by my head and coaxed me. You wonder how long it was before I felt his teen loins firmly against me and Pierre figured out, out of all the males, who the most excited was, and how he guided Bergo into position squatting and blocking my view of the monitors while Johan rested against my body, and how Nicky, who'd been very successful with what he'd done now came and knelt at Bergo's left leg and put out both his palms in front of the twenty year old's penis so that when he, Bergo, did what Johan was going to do in my belly, I'd know exactly what was happening. You'd want to ask if Bergo, squatting just in front of me, shaking and trembling and sweating, filled both Nicky's palms when he spilled his hot, young-adult seed; even, you'd want to know, how much sperm splashed on Nicky's arms, and if any of his spraying seed splattered on my shoulders and neck, here and here, and stuff like that."

"You've got a point," the master mused, "but I prefer thinking of you as a boy I picked up hitching, you know, running away from his mother. He's a nervous and shy little boy but we have lunch together and we begin to relax even though I'm reluctant to enter into a plot to ice his old lady. We get to the motel after a long afternoon of driving together. While driving we have left both cabbages and kings to our betters and he's told me that he wants to go camping with the handsome young bachelor living down the hall, and his mother is threatening to have his friend investigated by every cop in town. I feel sorry for the tyke and agree to call his teacher to arrange a date for them the following evening, when we'll be back in town, the boy and I. He thinks that's great, but then he gets shy and embarrassed and finally murmurs that he's inexperienced and doesn't want to disappoint his friend when they're out in the tent. I respond sympathetically, telling him he can be frank with me and ask any questions he wants, and I'll tell him as much as I know. This leads to a long dialogue, ten or fifteen pages, if it was written out, and, after awhile, he begins teasing me, and, yes, in an hour or so I'm a big bad wolf and he's hiding in the shower with towels on the floor so ye wolf might dine in comfort on his naked young body."

"Is the wolf full of hot seed?" the boy responded, his voice suddenly lily soft and boar feral.

"The boy is going to spend all night alone with a young adult," Dave replied, his own voice lowering to a cactus scratch, "so, yes, the wolf spends his seed as he allows the boy to practice what he's going to do in the tent."

"Does the boy take the thick, white cum of his adult partner in the shower, or do they go lie on the bed so they can talk and make it last?" Lessen wanted to know.

"I'll have to ask him," the teacher said, "all I know for sure is he wants me to cum off on his little-boy belly, because he wants his cute friend's seed in his mouth, but he wants to see what happens with an adult, too."

"I've done it in private with just one adult," the boy whispered in his new voice, "Mex Helgendorf, the writer."

"Were you alone with him for a long time?" Dave quizzed.

"He was a writer," the child allowed, "they get paid for the long ball."

"So lots of quizzing?" the man asked.

"Yeah, but he knew how to do it," the boy said. His words might have had a cold edge, but apparently his memory was of warmer things, for the ten year old suddenly released from his curled position, and pushing his head and shoulders out the shower door, re-arranged the towels as he wriggled, ending arched over the sill, his arms stretched high above his head on the bathroom floor, his legs spread as wide as the luxury shower stall would allow, and his hips thrust high in the air. Dave moved between the boy's legs, kneeling so his penis probed the child, then rested solidly against the young boy's full, teen-size erection. His left hand fondling the silky inner thigh of his student, he used his right to jerk off, cumming heavily on the young male's tense belly and panting chest. Not wetting his hand with his own heavy cum, because we learn as we go, he stroked the now mewing and lashing child until the boy tensed like cold iron and after a long shuddering pause sprayed repeatedly high and fast, soaking his own wet, slick chest with a heavy, splattering shower of thin, watery sperm.

"What happened next?" the boy asked.

"He went on a `more' jag," the man said, "which was predictable enough. I guess I would have been surprised if anything else happened. He became persistent and demanding, even acting out in class by hinting at what was going on, and, when we were alone, blackmailing me into doing what he wanted. I traded in my car for an older model with driver's side, only, airbags, then began giving in and promising I'd do some of the things that had happened while he was with the camera club. Eventually along came a wet foggy night, and I gave in. I'd pushed the right buttons to get him to want to use his mouth with me while we were driving. I thought it was going to be easy, if killing a ten year old can ever be called easy, then he began a long, graphic account of hiking off into the woods with the writer, Mex."

Nordstrom looked up at the man at his right shoulder and rolled his eyes. "Did you say the writer?" he asked, "as in paid for hitting the long ball?"

"Crime, trauma, and disaster on a dark road on a damp, foggy night, and you're wondering about what we talked about while I got up my nerve?"

"It beats sitting on a log by the bay watching the tide," the boy replied.

"But what it probably doesn't beat is a young and inexperienced Nordstrom, age eleven, becoming mature in the hands of his priest," the master whispered.

"You may be right," the boy allowed, "but my story doesn't beat what happened to Father Yen when he was a fourteen-year-old gymnast, so I should start with what he told me while we were getting ready to be naked with each other."

"It doesn't seem to have corrupted you, so I guess I'm old enough," the artist said.

"Lassitude, lack of moral fiber, degeneracy," the boy responded, "I've had to grow up with them all, as well as food, the hairball step dude subbing for Dad, while I'm hoping he, Dad, doesn't go off the deep end thinking of that smooth ball of nothing tensing up over his wife and ice the freaking moron, and my sister missed angel camp by at least a thousand summers, and food, again, and hanging out with the stoners, who aren't bad company if one lives on a stone, instead of grinding Plato with you, and now there'll be talk about you and me, and however Lessen died, he'll be reborn, so, compared with the top half of the A-list, a little corruption seemed like a day off, and, guess what, still does."

"It is the Fourth," Dave said, "so you're not exactly ditching."

But I'm going to ditch for awhile. We're just passing the 350,000-word mark, with two-million characters and five-hundred pages also in the offing. I've always had trouble mixing numeric and spelled-out numbers. Strunk and White say use one or the other, don't mix them, but I do it, anyway, perhaps having something of the rebel in my and wanting to act-out in novel fashion, bursting the surly bounds of humdrum fiction with a 10 here and a ten there, brassy, devil-may-care, a proper urchin through and through.

Writers seldom acknowledge each other in print, just like Macy's doesn't tell Saks, but maybe if it can be part of the story it would be okay. What I wanted to do was eliminate John Hughes, original author of my previous derivative effort from an image I do want to sketch. This original story is more apt. Being off the net I'm not able to find who wrote "Man Without A Face", only that Mel Gibson directed as well as starred. Anyway, there's one so totally cliché scene, when Gibson yells at Nordstrom for looking at his scar, that the writer gets to stand by the harpsichord. The scene, from "Amadeus", is the presentation of Salieri's welcoming march. "An interesting little piece, but wouldn't it be better...?" No derisive laughter on my part, though: the script, in its original, was probably heavier than the film. You know, so many people hired on to cut and say No. In contrast, I have so few hired on if I want to pack us bag and baggage off to China, we're behind the wall faster than Mimi shipped Drew.

"Yen, my son, you grow so tall."

"Yes, uncle," the fourteen year old said, "I'm like the stork or the heron. It is most feeling of embarrassment that I walk with."

Ni looked at the nephew half his age. There was a forming cragginess to the developing face, a trace of dark, silken hair on his upper lip, a golden softness to his liquid brown eyes. He had grown nearly a foot since the prosperous salesman's last visit, not a year earlier, his body now exaggerated in its long-limbed, big-footed, knobby-kneed coltishness. Lanky and spare, the child nonetheless moved with a solemn grace, and was capable of standing still, head bowed, anytime doing so seemed to please those around him.

"The eyes of others follow your beauty," Ni said softly to the boy, "not the distance between yourself and the sky."

"But they pin themselves as the iron of a compass pins itself to the iron of the north," the boy said, "they follow like prints in snow, and it is now the wish of my mother that I begin teaching younger boys that of the bars and mat and rings which has been taught to me, and by old custom that means the pool of the boys, some the age I've sought successfully, but most as yet unsuccessful in that pursuit by as much as three anums, for the duration of one hour following each class."

"You feel they will tease you, my nephew," the older male said, "and I understand your fear."

"None are even close," the boy continued, "they climb in sense of mocking one upon the back of the next to speak with me."

"Well," the uncle mused, "they are gymnasts."

"And a light heart doth conquer such?" Yen asked, "or the elder does leave free himself of the feelings held in the heart of the younger?" His English was imperfect but his message as sharp as a Sherwood arrow.

"Yen," the man said gently, "as the wobbly child of the stage becomes a stag, so you will grow, so you will reach full manhood. At that time, because you are wise and gentle, all will look up to you; you will be above all. As a youth, it is perhaps good for you to learn of being tall only in stature, as your new students see you, to be treated as less than you are, to be humbled by the taunts of boys and serve as the object of their foolery. Others are beset upon with fist and blow, and that you are spared, but to be spared all is to be a flower grown under glass, When it is the glass that breaks, it is the flower that dies."

"I see the poetry of your thought, dear uncle," the boy said, "but my mind is not a dwelling of comfort the logic, for should your metaphysical glass not avail itself of wholeness, in the first place, no stem or bud or leaf should endure beyond the first sprout of the seed."

"The organics of a weed or flower or grain of rice, my nephew," the man said, "should not so engage your attention that you take them seriously. They are for poets and those unfit to fill any role but that of scrivener. Dwelling off their flimsy pages means the winds of the world blow on you, not by you, and that you lean in their direction. Since time immemorial, the winds have always ceased, have returned as pleasing breezes. But, my nephew, as your song of flower and sheltering glass is of a student's mind, my winds are of a teacher's, and both are equally wrong when it comes to the burdens you face. If you were normal, Yen," the man continued, "your young gymnasts would respect your knowledge and love you for your gentle ways, but you are a supreme boy, taller, kinder, and this is merely a distraction, a novelty, calling on the same instincts that made our ancestors note the markings of prey and food. Now the rice comes steaming hot in porcelain bowls, and heat from the combustion of oil, yet the instinct for the different remains, the obsession with any change in the pattern that began with the trail of the beast across a valley floor."

"Hooves to grass to carve a path to stop the wandering man," the fourteen year old student said, doing his best with a language the equal in complexity of his own, "feet stopping of the man, foot changing the way they go, but uncle, is it food or the eye of the tiger's glow?"

"My son," the man replied, "it is hooves you find, not the print of the paw found only in the wet of the mud; they are domestic beasts, and you have only startled them, caused them to mill nervously, and react by teasing, which is the only way known to them."

"So it is the bearing of the cross with slackness not accorded the upper lip," the boy mused in his own way.

"Not so fast," Ni said, adding: "I picked that one up on my last journey over that vast sea and sequential sojourn in the land of the pink walrus, `not so fast'. If they could run, it would fly from their lips as they flew on their wings of plastic no larger than the hands of a child."

"The wings of magic legend seem of a fantasy, calling forth the massive bird of gobble-gobble and far aloft feather and all, suspending him for forty-seven years. Compounding interest in the legend, pages as paper washed in the finest clay, so bright are the colors and crisp is the text promising the turkey will almost never have to pay."

"Let the problems of others be a solace to you, my son," the affectionate uncle said, "while regarding them not for their entertainment value, alone, but as cautionary, for there, with unlimited food backed by the unlimited magic of the plastic wing, go you and I; go we, go us all. The village of the glossy walrus does not teach us anything but the true nature of ourselves, for in it are blockages to alert movement of all colors, including our own. They warn us with frank and open display, of how we will look one day, and are masters at inspiring the search for any other way."

"I am but a student of their language," Yen said, "and have yet to be guided to its faultless interior, but preparation for the journey, casts doubt upon the trip; their tongue seems most inferior, advancing like a rock of stone buried almost to its tip."

"Oh, they merely wobble as befits those who are fatigued," Ni said, "for ten-thousand years they've brought us, with their code of risk and greed."

"Then, uncle," the tall adolescent said, "protecting us, how is it to be done? from the rubble of their vast collapse, when their plastic's done?"

"You take the view of a little fish," the man said, "because you live in a lesser pond, see with smaller eyes, because they bestow on us a wondrous gift, and a magnificent surprise."

"Such as?" the boy asked, demonstrating in a respectful way that though his years be tender he, too, had delved and divined amongst the vagaries and variances of the foreign tongue, and been rewarded with a nugget or two to hold, to cherish, and to use as he might."

"The planet is a tired place," the uncle said, "its oil going up in smoke. Some end is near, some end is clear, but it's our end, that's the joke. But twice it needs of thinking, and twice must it be surveyed, for what is funny the outside, may betoke fine plans well laid."

"Who would know and how would you find," the boy said, "what is going on, their language offers no hint or clue, seems naught but verbal con."

"If of nothing they speak," Ni responded, "then nothing there is, getting to the heart of the issue, for eternal peace is their offer to us, an end to the world via tissue."

This is excessively difficult to write and could easily get tiresome to the reader, so from here on out I'll translate their hype, and know you'll still follow the leader.

"There is a philosophical sub-set," Ni said to the tall boy in the passenger's seat, "who see our time on earth cut short by certain realities, concurrent with an end, though a spectacular end, to inventive genius, which, in the end, simply invented it all. This branch of doctrine, informally called Free Spirit, allows us to gratify ourselves on alternative paths; to live more of life in fewer years. Free Spirit philosophers know, in the first place, they may be wrong, so decorum rules their behavior, and they are good citizens in every outward way. However, when the doors are bolted for the night, and the shutters drawn and latched, they believe taboo should be left to sleep in the barn, that men and woman should not just yield to their desires, but become avid in their pursuit. This pursuit includes family members, principally fathers and older brothers with their daughters and younger sisters, and also includes extensive involvement with small, stable groups outside the family.

"I'm bringing it up," the driver went on, "because of your situation with your gymnastic students, which constitutes a small group, and a group that is likely to endure for several years."

"Assuming I don't drown the freaking lot," the boy muttered, "I suppose you're right."

"What I have in mind is an experiment," Ni explained, "an exercise to determine if ways once accepted and sustained over thousands of years, by many cultures, can be re-kindled in our time, a, because that time is running short, and, b, because little new remains to engage our attention and draw us forward as we have been drawn for the two white centuries."

"And `heads of knuckles' are meant to take the place of computers and cell phones?" the boy asked dubiously.

"With taboo sleeping in the out buildings," the man said, "and outside any lock that is locked when someone's around, there are options in a club of maturing boys, that, while illegal, lead to the discovery of pleasures so intense and enduring they justify their forbidden status. In a building world, these sins of the flesh compound enervated and degenerate behavior, slowing the building, but in a static world, it is the filling of time that becomes paramount, not the use of it, and what was once deemed cretinous lust, becomes, instead, the hub of small groups who make up internally for that which is not available, or not worth the effort, externally."

They tried it in Chinese but Yen still didn't follow, so they relaxed as a few miles passed, then turned in and parked in front of the athletic center, checking their watches and agreeing they were early.

"Is there any boy among your students whom you personally dislike?" Ni asked, "never mind the pranks and silliness. Any individual to whom you have a real aversion?"

"I'm half-kidding when I complain," Yen said shyly, "they're all okay, and I must look kind of freaky to them."

"Is there anyone of them you especially like?" Ni asked.

"Husu So," the boy murmured, "he's never played tricks, and he's suddenly getting tall like me, so his eyes `meekly look', and are warm with understanding."

"Do the other boys like him?" the uncle asked.

"Yes," Yen said.

"Have you and he spent time alone together?" Ni asked.

"I think he'd be embarrassed if I asked," the boy murmured.

"At your ages," the man responded, "excitement can be mistaken for discomfort, very easily, as to a maturing boy both go hand in hand. Does he stand close to you, when he could stand or sit further away?"

"Yes," the boy nodded.

"And if you are the new arrival, is it the same, do you seek his company?"

"Yes," the boy murmured softly.

"If you were alone with him and he told you, in secret, he was deeply involved in taboo behavior and repeatedly sinned with an adult male, how would you feel?" Ni asked.

"I don't know," the boy replied.

"Give it more thought," his uncle suggested, "would you think less of him, maybe to the point of annulling your friendship and even telling other boys, or would you want to know the details of who his partner was and what kind of acts they performed when they were alone with each other?"

"I wouldn't `feel for the sword', but I might be very confused," the boy said.

"Assume," Ni continued, "you had many hours together, perhaps an entire night, in a private place, and assume what he told you was very positive, that he liked being handled by a handsome young adult, that he learned to trust the man, and be free when he was in the man's hands, and, further, that he wanted to tell you all the details of what happened his first time with the adult, and, further yet, that he wanted to teach you some of the things that had happened during their private times together. Would you want to remain alone with Husu, or would you make excuses and return to your home?"

"I would want to hear his story and stay with him," the tall child whispered.

"How do you feel speaking of these things with me?" the twenty eight year old asked, secretly thrilled at the creation of a zygote.

"In view of the underlying philosophy, and in view of their wide-ranging historical precedent," the boy answered, "I feel less nervous and self-conscious. I like the way your voice sounds when you ask me personal questions, and I think you are what the lesser walruses call `way cute'. Talk of similar things fills the air, but of young girls most is spoken, yet what better for a boy than to leave his first mastery to an older male?"

"How old are your gym students?" the uncle asked in return, embryonic in his thinking and hoping he wasn't proceeding too rapidly.

"Husu and four others are thirteen," the boy said, "and Yo, Fan, and Muy are twelve."

"I didn't mean to be suggestive," the man said, "but rather to lead you to the way of many thoughts, not so that you might lose yourself amongst them, but so you might find a discreet and shady way of private passion and pleasure, not only for your fresh loins, but to share with the young bodies of others, Husu at your side."

"This is an ancient way?" the boy asked.

"It comes and goes," the uncle said, "at times men dominate with young boys, at other times, more restraint is called for by the social order -- confused boys make poor warriors -- and dread torments are reserved for those who'd tamper with the fighting stock."

"But I've heard it told the other way," Yen said, "that the most dangerous fighters `gird for the boy in their shadow'."

"They were not confused as boys," the older male said, "they grew to as great a code as any, proved it better than most, and passed it on, here for five-hundred years, there for a thousand, and, before that, no one knows."

"If it happened very early," Yen said, "as man first left the cave, how would a boy, with a handsome young hunter, seek that which his young heart craved?"

"You mean the man's hands gently on his body," the adult said, "possibly as they lay in wait for game?"

"Yes," the tall, lanky youth said.

"He'd show his belly," Ni said, "as a female would her breasts. He would lie against his chosen male, arranging his dress so his nakedness would press against the hunter, perhaps wriggling and thrusting his hips to his partner."

"What would the hunter do?" the boy asked.

"If the sun was warm, and no game in sight, he'd roll the child on his back; strip from the youth, all his clothes, and play gently at pillage and sack. His mouth he'd use, on the bare young chest, finding each nipple in turn, then naked he'd be, against the youth, slowly kindling the body of the panting child, and finally letting him burn."

"We still have ten minutes before the other begin arriving," Yen whispered softly, removing his big, coltish hands from his lap, leaning back, and for the first time in his life let the solid mass, long and heavy, bulging his gym short hugely be seen by the eyes of another. His uncle's eyes slowly left him and looked into his eyes. "The boys were not teasing you," the man whispered, utterly sure of his ground, "they were displaying for you. If you think back you'll probably recall they seldom if ever wore any kind of shirt when they were stunting and cavorting."

"That's why I like Husu," the boy responded, "he kept his shirt on. Very modest."

"Did you let the boys see you bare chested?" the man asked.

"No," the teen said, "I think that's why they fooled around, to try to get me to take my shirt off with them, but I was meant to be their teacher, and it didn't seem proper."

"It wouldn't have been," his uncle agreed, "as Free Spirit behavior intrudes, so it damages, leading to draconian reprisals. The sure way to prevent this is to limit the intrusion, and a teacher or coach, on duty, should maintain the decorum that comes naturally to you. On the other hand, it is teaching that is going to happen, and a lot of fast learning, so there is flexibility, especially for the first time, when the teaching aspect is valid. If this is successful then the same rules apply as if the common interest were video games or reading; as they add, they are good, as the substitute for that which is better, they are bad.

"In his wisdom," the older male continued," the creator gave his domain a day of twenty-four hours, leaving ample time for utility and social convention, with an hour each day for that of the free will's invention."

After staring down at themselves for long moments, their eyes met again. Yen slowly pulled his gym shirt high up on his chest, exposing his childishly soft, hot honey skin to the raptor's eyes of his handsome young uncle. As the adult reached for the child, his head lolled against the seatback and he thrust in welcome. Ni touched the boy, gripping him gently and fondling him by sliding his hand back and froth along the mature child's fully adult penis.

"Come swim with us after practice," the boy whispered.

"That's too fast," the man said, "we can hint strongly if you and Husu leave with me in the Jaguar, and the boys know we're heading out for lunch and to spend our Saturday together at the water park. In a few days, perhaps you could choose two or three of your team to join us, and after that, say in a week or two, I would love to join you in the pool after your practice. Perhaps we could even rent a suite and some of the boys could stay overnight."

"Yes," Yen panted, pulling his shirt higher as his athletic uncle stared at the creamy softness of his hairless torso. Ni slipped his left hand into the boy's shorts, feeling wild heat through the youth's athletic supporter. A car pulled into the gym's parking lot and with a hard squeeze, Ni left the boy and Yen dropped his long, baggy gym shirt. "Are you going to stay for the practice?" the boy asked as he stepped from the car.

"I'm going to find us a hideaway," the man said, "so I'll meet you here in two hours, with Husu invited if he wants to join us."

The boy nodded and peeked into the closing door. "It felt beautiful," he whispered, "you were right about everything. It may not have made me a new man, we'll see how the team scores in practice, but you have as your lover the most freshly minted boy in Nanjing."

"I'll try not to forget," Ni smiled as his nephew closed the car door.

Much of the magnetism between Yen and Husu was a product of their near mirror images to each other. The one boy, six months the elder, had only an inch or two and ten pounds on his younger friend. Both had eagle faces with high cheekbones and prominent brows over lively eyes, both were of an equal golden tint, of boyish skin, of a last childish softness at their naked bellies.

Lunch had been a nervous affair, and Ni had let it remain so rather than entertaining the new boy with tales of the often dramatic roads he traveled representing those who represented to levels at the end of small, fast elevators. He had just chartered a sports fisherman for the season, and he felt the boy might be interested in that, but no, he sat quietly eating as did the two young teens. He was nearly silent on the ride to the water park, intentionally not luring the boy as much as an inch, indeed, just the opposite, saying he could wait in the club house and play darts. Husu had tried to hide a look of disappointment, and so he'd smiled On-the-other-hand, and, changing in the adult facility had joined the boys in line for the first ride.

All eyes were on the tall, athletic threesome. Ni looked for any trace of discomfort in their handsome guest's face, listened for any awkward strain to his voice, and, the more-so, any tendency to display or reduce their budding relationship by the lewd to the crude. Yen's modesty he was assured of, and he trusted his nephew to pick his like as any kind of friend, and this he had done for the boy merely smiled shyly at the more obvious glances from attractive young people of both sexes and remained focused on his hosts.

Were their manners almost too good? The tubes for the river ride held one or two, and both boys insisted the other be first to ride with their six-four adult companion, while he suggested the boys ride together. Finally Yen whispered to his uncle: "I'm too nervous to find out if he wants to stay with us, but you'd know how to do it, so let him ride with you first so I wont have to wait to find out." That made sense, so the issue was settled and they ordered one double tube and one single, then floated off on the ten minute ride, the thirteen year old in the young athlete's lap, Yen holding the larger vessel as they swirled out into the river.

"I'm glad you two boys finally had time to meet," Ni said to the child in his lap as they splashed and tried to paddle their round donut of a boat.

"We never knew what to say to each other," Husu said, "and it was strange looking so much alike and sort of different than most of the other boys."

"Well," the man observed, "if one of you drowns, that will solve that problem."

"You've already done that," the boy laughed, "because when I get alone with Yen I'm going to ask him a lot of questions about you, so we'll have a lot to talk about."

"Is there anyone you'd like him to ask questions about?" the man wondered.

"If the questions were really private and the answers really secret," the boy said, "I'd like to tell him some things so we wouldn't have secrets from each other."

"Would you have a lot to tell, or a little?" Ni quizzed the handsome boy.

"A lot," the boy whispered.

"To a boy your age a lot can be watching the family cats," the older male noted as Yen waved good-bye and paddled off on his own.

"Something did happen in the family," the boy said, if grabbing at a straw of a segue, thrilling the older male at his shy willingness to share.

"Yen and I are going to share secrets tonight," the adult said. "We're staying at the sleaziest hotel for a hundred miles," he added, "and we were planning to lock phobias and fantasies out of doors and burn candles an incense indoors, alone, with all the sounds one hears around him in a shoddy building. If you'd like to join us it would be my nephew's and my joy to please you."

"All night?" the boy asked.

"We'll have our own car," the man replied, "so anytime you might wish to leave, you'll be home in ten minutes, but we'd like you to stay for morning showers and breakfast."

"May I bring Lei, she's twelve, but she's very petite, like a ten year old. She's my sister."

Ni waved deliberately at Yen, attracting the boy's attention and bidding him paddle back to the double tube.

Randy was over at seven this morning, backpacked and uniformed for school, just dropped in to chat and bring me a man made of dough. We found egg shells for the eyes, the only thing that suited for a nose was a cigarette butt, and we used foil from a pack of smokes for the mouth. He is under some kind of pending reunion with his mother, who lives in the States, but that is almost universal here, some of the kids get to go, and my guess is, overall, the lucky ones get to stay. It takes a lot of money where I come from to equal borderline poverty here. He is one sensationally nice kid and probably old enough, at twelve, to stay that way, baring intense peer pressure to get with it and join the teen scene. I've mentioned casually that he can come and live here and he smiles and nods, but we haven't talked about it. He wants to clean up for the cats, Maybe it's a sign of age; he thinks if I go under the bed I won't have the strength to get out. In any event, they're my freaking cats and he's spared.

Clarence was over yesterday and everyone was gone so we were able to spend half an hour in the bathroom. He's still growing and has matured to exceed me. I take him like a little boy, left arm around his chest, right hand, slick with baby oil, on his big penis. He becomes wantonly active, thrusting and panting wildly as I try to match him with my hand, his penis hotter, harder, and more erect than Andrew or Fidel. He tells me when he's cumming, five to ten minutes, then spurts heavily on his belly with sperm flying everywhere. We are very careful when we clean up. This house is going to attract a lot of snicker when it opens as a museum, for there, just as I say, is a cement bathroom; solid and ridged, so that a shaking, shuddering, bucking, panting teen doesn't feel like an astral earthquake as he cums off heavily on the floor above. Andrew and I also spent half an hour there the day before yesterday. Writing porn means exaggerating some facets of clinical sexuality, I'm sure you understand, just as a science fiction writer exaggerates the speed and maneuverability of the vehicles transporting his characters; it's part of the craft, and I plead guilty, but to offer extenuating circumstances due to the fact that Andrew has, several times, had climaxes lasting several minutes. He's not cumming hotly and steadily the while time, but spilling as he tenses to ejaculate fully, which he usually does. But day before yesterday, he was in long pants and shoes and didn't feel comfortable getting naked (me, either). He pulled his shirt up, but couldn't spread his legs as he leaned against (for the tourists) the north wall. He spilled three times, slick, hot, and salty, but not fully, even after ten minutes. He tried bucking against my teeth and upper lip, but it didn't quite happen. I suggested next time he wear shorts and sandals so he can be naked as he leans against the wall, hands behind his head, and legs widely apart, this by was of eliminating the five minute, incomplete, orgasm.

Image time. Randy and Clarence together in the shower, the child taking the heavy cum of the mature teen. From the standpoint of research, it would be interesting to be taking Clarence, then have Randy, naked, come into the bathroom and start using his tiny, soft hand on the bucking older boy. Would the teen cum off at the soft touch and the sight of the beautiful, smooth body, or would Randy have to be hard and fast with him, as I do?

Time may tell, and, in the meantime, it'll be awhile before I can think of a better way to wake up than with a half-hour chat with an all-boy cutie. He jumped in my lap and kissed me, and then was off for school. The carnal pendulum. I was just thinking the other day that it had probably been the longest time, a month or so, without a partner, in memory, then Randy, Andrew, Clarence and Fidel on successive days, restoring the writer to his established place at the center of the universe, while probably costing posterity less than two thousand words (two hours) of his deathless prose.

One girlfriend, four closet boyfriends, one lean, gray lamb in wolf's closthing, with Daryl and Rhageedha on the periphery and Kira as a future interest. That should keep me out of the bars. And, as a bonus, there's Queenie as a daily reminder that I don't hit on anyone obviously, insidiously, or in any way direct or indirect. Free will, free spirit, call it what you will, kids are cold dough without it as two fleeting experiences taught me, both recorded elsewhere. Taboo may be an abstraction, but it can cross wires, and the fact these don't exist in a healthy child is no relief to an unhealthy victim. It must be remembered that man is born in no state at all. The Pennsylvania babies, kept alive but severely neglected do to the circumstances of their illicit births, display, as they grow, not even the human qualities of a rodent; have not a scintilla of grace or trace of spirit, nor the least hint of devil or angel. That, unarguably, is the essential human. Everything that makes Haley Mills "Pollyanna" is the result of indoctrination, with intelligence and talent just as subject to the whims of fate as nursing and toilet training. Once we are human we become varied and the story gets interesting, but we start with absolutely nothing, and a million moppets bathing with their loving daddies will love bathing with their daddies. And this is not saying guide, for, more, but suggesting we guide against, less.

The water park had been a good idea. Husu felt creamy and soft in the hard arms of the athletic older male as the child lay now comfortably back against the sinewy adult, and Ni could have floated happily for an hour, one boy in his hands, the next bubbling along at his side. What could intrude on such an idyllic scene? Altered the building excitement in the three beautiful young males? Truncated their afternoon at the elegant park, with its tunnel of love for later in the day? As usual in a long novel, it started with a story. They found a reedy backwater in the artificial river and Yen joined his uncle and friend in the big inner tube as the younger boy began.

"Did you see him again?" Lei asked, poking her pretty face through her older brother's door. Husu looked up from his book and smiled at the girl, his heart skipping a beat at her perfect, quiet Asian beauty, her delicacy, her soft beauty belying the fact she was every bit the athlete he was.

"Yes," the thirteen year old said with a blush. The girl's pretty eyes brightened and she ran to her room, left off her school things, and returned in a moment to sit on his bed and gaze at the tall boy at the desk.

"Tell me," the twelve year old asked.

"He just looks a lot like me," the boy murmured, looking down at his text.

"We're growing up," Lei said, "we don't have to avoid things we don't understand, anymore, we should try to understand them so we can grow up more."

"He's just a kid," the boy said, not himself sure who was trapping who with their topic, nor whether he wanted to be the trapper or the trapped. Any option was better than more algebra, so he blushed shyly, letting the bright beauty lead.

"That's like saying Lin Ya is just my friend," the girl said quietly. You know how I feel about her, how about I think of her all the time and can tell her laugh a hundred feet away; you know I dream about her, because I tell you. I even tell you my daydreams where we find a quiet pool and bathe together, staring into each other's eyes for and hour until we're like prunes, then drying off with towels and lying on a blanket in the grass until we're nice and warm again, still staring into each other's eyes.

"I know it's just a crush," the girl continued, "but that's the sweetest love of all because it comes without a houseful of kids and piles of bills."

"That's a good place to start," the boy allowed, his nerves screaming at the proximity of the tiny beauty bouncing gently on his bed and tying his tongue which was so dry it hardly needed any knots.

"It's dazzling," the girl responded, "to look and lose yourself and remain lost as long as you look and find each other when you blink"

"I wonder if it would be the same with glasses," the boy murmured, quipping nervously since they both had perfect eyes.

"I wonder if it would be the same with a boy," the girl mused in response, "a tall, handsome boy who you loved more than a crush; a forbidden boy and secret love."

"Yen isn't forbidden," the brother observed, "you'll be at his school next year and you can see him all you want."

"Surviving an obtuse brother for a week makes a year look like a century," Lei said, "plus, he is forbidden to you, something to do with sex, I think, and that's plenty to think about, you know, if you wanted to."

"I guess you and Lin Ya are kind of forbidden, too," the boy said softly.

"That's not why we look at each other and talk about kissing," the girl said, "not because it's bad, because it's whole and sure and natural and might last for years if the Clan of the Walrus doesn't clean the corners of the trough."

"They're more likely to block access by all but trained mountaineers," the boy remarked, finding refuge in the scary stories she loved to hear of the monster looming on the far side of Taiwan.

"Then never mind them," Lei suggested, her eyes locked on her brother's craggy face.

"Okay," he whispered, his head bowed now in her direction, his eyes seeming to dare where he was to weak to follow. Slowly the handsome face rose, but caution was useless, the heat of her gaze was instant and full; compelling, finally, irresistible.

"Boys are boys all the way through," the girl whispered from somewhere in Husu's tumbling new universe, "more fire, more danger, less sweetness and light; more: I'll be left with something than an equal sharing. More primal need than sensual diversion, more fit for analysis than glib and superficial giggling, more there there, more heat, more depth, less grace and beauty, and," the pixie continued, "not to put too fine a point on it, more physical reaction on the part of the female, and that's something I could show you if you want to lock the door for a little while."

Now Husu was trapped. As a gentleman, he should rise and do the girl's bidding, but he'd been doing his homework in his underpants, specifically because his sister was dropping by to chat ever more often and he was a male animal. But to rise, face her, then cross to the door, her eyes cartoons of lightning and smoldering embers, that was more than he'd bargained for.

"Nobody will be home for an hour," the brother murmured.

"Yen," the twelve year old said softly, "I want this to be very private, and I need to hear the lock click, even if it's just a whim; please?"

Figuring just how trapped his tongue was might take an hour, the boy knew, and untangling his long legs the rest of the day, and that would have been if he'd just been a kid sitting with his legs under his desk. Now there was a long, hard hugeness to him, an ear of corn it seemed in his white cotton briefs, throbbing and pulsing hot and fast, as never before and as he never imagined even when he lay in bed at night thinking of the newly-formed athletic team he'd recently joined and the shy new coach who added strains of secrecy to Lei's stories of the beautiful Lin Ya.

"Take your shirt off before you get up," the girl said, "so I'll feel more comfortable with you when it's locked."

The boy sat, not even his eyes moving as he stared at the sixty-pound beauty in from of him, her arms now over her shoulders as, still gazing, she undid her hair from its school-girl berets, letting it flow over her delicate shoulders, raven, shiny black and thick and luxuriant as the mane on a priceless beast.

"I'm wearing a bra, that's why," the girl coaxed that statute, wildly handsome, so close, so lifelike in its eternal stillness.

"Maybe there's too much light," the child observed after several long minutes, "I'll be back in a minute with candles, meantime, if you want to, you can get up and lock the door, and it will be as if nothing ever happened, always, I promise. But if you leave it open, I want to take my skirt and blouse off, after the candles are safe, of course, and I want to go stand in the corner of your room and pretend it's a shower at your new club, and I want you to pretend I'm Yen and we're too nervous and bashful to say anything to each other, like Lin Ya and I are, but I want you to teach me what you'd do, and even though it's not a real shower, and there's no actual water, you shouldn't wear your underpants, and you should get me naked just like you'd want to strip Yen after he said Hi when he felt you close behind him."

The girl looked steadily at the beautiful boy for another minute, then rose from the bed and kissed him tenderly on the forehead. "You are very beautiful," she whispered, then quietly left the young male's bedroom.

Isn't this getting a little commercial? Suppose you were watching the drama unfold on television; would you be inclined to raid the `fridge or visit the john? Make a quick business call? Respond to the scent of smoke on the air? Or would you stay glued to the set, mesmerized by the pretty little blond girl prancing and preening for a trip, courtesy of the sponsor, but unflinching though it is in fact a Tyne Daley trailer that shows? I don't have anything to sell, so will occupy the time by suggesting you cut Nifty a nice check, actually write it, sign it, and mail it, or use your credit card. No institution does more to bring some balance to the world, and none is more worthy of your support.

I suppose if the water were running, it would be a soap opera, organ music sighing and cresting. This is New York by the knot of the necktie, nose an inch away, me saying words to the effect of This is how it's done. These are the values. This is love. Get out with your neurotic smarm

"Hi," came Husu's soft whisper.

"Hi," the twelve year old whispered back, her voice, even uttering a single syllable, soft, husky, and welcoming.

"Do you want to talk?" the naked boy whispered as he stood behind the child in her bra and panties."

"Would you want to talk with Yes?" the girl whispered back.

"Yes," Husu said.

"I want to when this happens with Lin Ya, too," the girl said, permission obvious in her husky voice. "Do you want me to ask you a question?" she added.

"Yes," came a soft whisper.

"What if I hadn't left to get the candles, would you have stood up?"

"I didn't have my pants on," the boy said, "I don't know, I just..."

"They were on your bed, Husu," the girl noted, "I wasn't teasing you, I wanted to see."

"I wasn't sure," the male said, "and it's kind of different with boys. More stuff happens. I thought you might think it was really weird and get sick, or something."

"It's embarrassing with girl, too," Lei responded, "I feel so different than I usually do I was afraid to let you see. That's why I changed my mind and thought up this game. It's one thing to be brave in uniform, and another thing, when, you know..."

"This is better," the boy agreed.

"But you know what?" the girl said.

"What?" her brother prompted.

"We could do it both ways. Sit like we were before, but dressed like we are, now, then I could ask you to lock the door. Then we can come back here in the corners, and pretend you're with Yen so you can show me how you'd touch him."

"I'll go put them back on," the boy rasped to the delicate girl. The couple ran their lines again, and Husu, naked but for his bulging briefs, pushed back his chair, sitting a moment for his sister's avid eyes, then slowly stood and faced the twelve year old hardly two feet from him.. Arms at their sides the two children stared down at each other.

"Will it all be over when we touch?" Lei asked.

"Either way," the boy husked in a straining adolescent voice.

"Do we need to hurry?" the girl wanted to know.

"It would be better if we do everything very slowly," the boy replied.

"Do you want to play the game more," the sister asked, "because I'll be just as happy if something happens on the bed the regular way, whatever that is."

"I like playing it," the brother replied, "looking at you from behind and wondering what it would be like if it was Yen who came up behind you, and you said Hi to him."

"Would you stay and watch everything," Lei asked, moving back to her make-believe corner, "or would you let us have privacy?"

"I'd want to be with you, but I'd go if you wanted," the boy said.

"And I'd want to be with you while he watched," the girl whispered.

"If you were me and he was behind you, where would you want him to touch you?" the boy asked.

"I'd want to feel him naked against my back before he put his hands on me," Lei said, "then, after I was a little bit used to him, I'd want to feel his hands under my bra so he'd know boys aren't the only ones who change when they are with a partner they love."

"Sometimes boys can't control themselves when they're inexperienced," the locker-room-wise boy noted to his sister, "so if something starts happening while I'm talking to you or after you've let me start touching you, you should tell me what you want. Should I keep it private in my underwear or under my hands, or do you think you'd want to watch, even if you weren't ready?"

"You could hold me against you in a way that I couldn't see," the girl said, thoughtfully, "then, afterwards, I'd know what happened, but not exactly how it happened, so the mystery might be deeper than ever."

"I'll help clean you off if I do have an accident," the boy promised.

"What do you mean, `clean', the tiny beauty said, "the cleanest thing I can think of is the seed of my beautiful, kind, sweet brother."

"I guess some people have dirty minds," the boy noted.

"It would be dirty if you sneaked in on me or held me down or demanded anything," the girl said, "but not if you showed me where you'd touch Yen if he was standing in front of you, even in this pretend shower."

"Here," the tall thirteen year old whispered, easing the tip of his full, man-size penis against the honey-silk warmth of his sister's slim back, then placing his hands on her flanks, just above her slender hips.

"You feel hot against me," the wraith said, panting at his touch

Gently they pressed together, the female instinctively raising her arms as she leaned against the wall, welcoming the hands of the male as he found her belly and began openly molesting the petite twelve year old. "It's a little weird when you think about it," she whispered to her tall, naked brother, "you know, Ford doesn't have to go around crudding up walking to sell cars, but the church has to crud up what we want together to sell religion. They invented sin to sell a savior."

"The problem is," the boy whispered, ravishing the girl as gently as he knew how, " they are fundamentally right, but not absolutely right, especially historically speaking. If men and boys spent all their time molesting their daughters and sisters and getting them pregnant we'd end up a bunch of rattling skeletons, all sizes and shapes. But that is not to say responsible kids who do well in school and are focused, overall, can't spend a few hours a week together in private, and be just as responsible about what happens between them as they would be if they had to baby-sit a sick child."

"We'll have to be very responsible when I get older," the girl whispered in response, "I can tell that from what I feel against my back. There's a solidness and heaviness to you that tells a girl you're very ready to be a father."

"I hope you feel the same way when Yen has his body pressed against you," the boy said, "then you can marry him, and I'll marry Lin Ya, and we'll all live together with no secrets, and two guys in the house to cook and clean when our girls get lost in each other's beautiful brown eyes."

"It would be beautiful to watch you with her," the sister said, "or even listen through the wall if you wanted to be private with her."

"You and Yen, too," the boy husked, his hands now on Lei's bra, "lying on the floor next to your bed in pitch dark, seeing of I could tell from his breathing when he was going to pant out his warning to you."

"Are you going to warn me before it happens?" the girl asked.

"Yes," the boy said, "the male always does. It's meant to give a female a last chance to save herself, but I think most boys probably tell the girl so she'll welcome him."

"Will you tell Yen?" she asked.

"I'll try," the boy said, "but books and the Net only tell you so much, and they tell you you can't always be sure of things, especially when you're inexperienced."

"But you will tell me?" the girl said.

"With you it's safety," the boy said, "so I'll practice so that when you're mature and we take a risk together, it won't be too big a risk."

"Should I practice pushing you away?" the girl asked.

"If you could do it while we're together for the first time it would prove you were very responsible," her brother answered.

"You're so powerful," the girl said, "you'd have to be very responsible, too."

"What if you had your arms and legs around me and were begging me to stay?" the boy asked, "would I be responsible if it happened inside you?"

"I don't know," the girl said, "right now I know you're getting ready to put your fingers under my bra and I wouldn't dream of stopping you if your freedom with me meant twins in two hours."

They huddled close, the female still stretching against the bedroom wall to welcome the handsome young male, his face buried in her neck as he hunched over her, his slim adolescent hips thrusting gently but ceaselessly against her perfect young body. A feral grunt from the boy and echoing hiss from his sister signaled the will of his fingers and her will for his touch. "I'm twelve year old, not ten, and I had to grow somewhere," she whispered as the tall boy gasped and moaned at the firm mounts and big, hard, sexy nipples bound to her flat chest by her training bra.

"Does Lin Ya know?" the boy choked.

"No," the child said, "I'm very careful, no one does."

"But you're so mature," the boy whispered, "you could get a baby from me."

"Feel down inside my panties," the girl responded.

"Nothing," Husu was just thinking, "could get me to leave her shocking and exciting chest." Guess again. His right hand lingered long moments on her big mound and swollen nipple, then traced down over her panting chest and belly and finally underneath the elastic of her girlish underwear.

"Oh, Lei," he whispered, "we're going to have to be so careful."

"All our lives, I guess," the girl agreed, adding: "but not now. I'd rather die from tonight than die without it, from you, than without you."

"Our doctors are adept at saving girls," the boy comforted, "if it happens, you may have to date a cute medical student, is all, which would be more in keeping with what we have, you, Yen, Lin Ya, and I, than paying a regular doctor."

"But only tonight," the girl said, "tomorrow you teach me the ways of experienced girls so we can be together until we have me on the pill."

"Yes, darling," the boy whispered, the girl now yielding herself to his strong gymnast's arms. He turned with her and moved to the bed, bringing his pillow under her bottom as he lay her on her back. Staring at each other, the male moved behind the female. Lei raised her legs, grabbing behind her knees, and pulled them nearly flat against her heaving chest. The boy used his right hand to find the girl as he knelt close behind her, then with a soft grunt, lowered himself to his arms to he could stare into his sister's wide, hot eyes.

For long moments the tall, coltish athlete surged gently against the thighs of the tiny girl beneath him. The child's hands stroked his face, her eyes locked on his. She mewed her welcome and experimented with thrusting her inexperienced loins to greet his gentle urgency with her. From time to time they'd stare down between their beautiful young bodies, at her teen breasts, at his mannish size as he continued his timid rut.

"Husu," the girl murmured, urgency straining her voice, "be free with me. I'm an athlete, not a fairy princess.

The rugged teen fell to the petite girl, moving her hands from his face to high above her head, he prodded her inner knees as he lay panting on her, and the girl spread them wide. He raised again on his arms and stared hotly into her eyes as his powerful hips surged hard and fast against her tender body. Her eyes grew wide and then filled with shock as he began lunging against her, penetrating her scalding, tight wetness almost violently until with a loud cry he crushed himself to her and froze on shaking arms as the girl hissed and panted, writhing underneath him and mashing her heels into the mattress as she thrust against his rigid male body. Gradually she eased, finally lying still beneath him. Husu lower to her breasts, then heavily to her. "Are you okay?" he whispered.

"Very," the girl murmured almost sleepily. "I just found out it's going to be easy to cum with you and I almost lost control."

"It was beautiful," the boy said.

"Did you warn me?" the girl asked, fright tingeing her almost brown eyes, "I wouldn't have heard you."

"No," he said with a soft smile. "It didn't happen. You can still push me away if you want."

"If I move a muscle," the girl whispered, "I'll go all the way and I won't feel it and share it when it happens."

"Do you want to pretend?" the boy asked. "You could call me Yen, or you could pretend I was a man raping you to give you something to think about so you wouldn't move."

"I've got enough to sort out, already," the girl responded. "Wanting your child, not being able to have it, and the test strips so I'd know soon enough so a medical student might be able to save me, so what's going to happen isn't completely dangerous, then whether to have your baby or Yen's, and what it will be like living with Lin Ya when she's growing with your child, and how long this passion with you will last, and how I'll feel as our daughter matures and falls as in love with her dad as I am with my brother, and how you feel inside me now, and what it will feel like if you get excited by fantasizing we could have a child now and you showered with me every night before bed to see if you could feel it, and the thought of doing what we were doing in the corner, only in the warm, steamy shower, would make you want to be completely free with...

"Oh,..."

They trembled rigidly together for almost two minutes, then the buck settled to the bare chest of the fawn, softly kissing her.

"Did she get pregnant?" Yen asked Husu as the younger boy decided to try the smaller tube.

"It happened on Wednesday, so we don't know yet," the boy said, "but I did find a medical student -- Lei looks cute in pictures -- so she'll be okay if she is."

"It would be kind of romantic to keep it for a week or two," Yen said, "I mean, if she is, anyway, wouldn't that make it more exciting?"

"Yes," the younger boy said looking fondly at his coach. They floated to the terminus of the river ride, look around with a sense of yearning at all the rides and thrills they'd be missing, made a phone call, and boarded the Jaguar.

"Is there more to the story?" Dave asked.

"It was a pretty seedy hotel," Nordstrom replied.

"Good," the master replied, "because I'm beginning to want to lie in the grass with you as much as you say you want it, and I'll need something to distract me from the feeling of your body and my will."

"I still want it," the boy whispered, "plus you've got a kid to kill off in chapter and verse, so it should be successful."

The naked males petted the fire and snacked, Dave offering the boy a plastic tumbler of white wine before they found a soft patch of grass and Nordstrom lay on his back pulling his knees against his chest. Dave knelt behind the boy, coated himself and the child with mineral oil, and then huddled over the beautiful naked teen. Feeling he could maintain better control over the hot, tense situation if he told a story, than if he listened, Dave began whispering to the dirty-blond fourteen year old as he thrust experimentally against the inexperienced young male.

"My main wish was that he come to a happy end," the man began hoarsely as he felt the slick boy begin to yield to his gentle but persistent half-inch thrusts. "That was the only option. An ordinary kid, and you'd follow the law, ditch him when he proved intractable, and hope for the best leaving him to the mercies of a liberal land. But not Lessen. He was massive and he didn't fit, fit less all the time, so it was inevitable his suffering would be massive, with his mother or without her. He'd die of exposure, aids, privation, or be beaten and raped to death.. For kids of brute mentality, that's bad enough, but for a fairy princess mind, and a had-enough-already soul, it would be one cruelty too many. Only a god could tolerate that much pointless suffering."

Nordstrom's hands went to his master's face and shoulder and he experimented with thrusting cautiously against the huge, hard shaft entering ever more deeply into his young teen body. "What happened?" he whispered, "what buttons did you push?"

"I wanted to set some stability and surety in his life and our relationship," the tall athlete said, "not diddle with this and fool with that. With that in mind, for all the good it did, I only wanted to molest him in the shower, only wanted to jerk off on him, on his penis, then masturbate him as he stretched against the wall of the shower. Set a ritual, a specific time and place we could be free with each other, long enough to cum two or three times, so the experience would be complete, and let it go at that, as far as sex was concerned.

"It worked for awhile," Dave continued, "he was calm, responsive, and satisfied. I thought the issue had dissolved, that he'd begun to stabilize; that we were making progress, however alternative our route, it was working for us and especially for him. He was a beautiful lover and on his own initiative even bought some girl's clothes as the thrift shop to add a little taboo to our private times when we had the locker room at the pool to ourselves, or when he was spending the evening at my place. He made a devastating schoolgirl, cowgirl, ballerina, and negligee model, inventing sweet stories about being trapped alone by a blizzard with `her' handsome daddy. There'd usually be some problem with the hot water, leading to his (her) saying we were both mature people and shouldn't be embarrassed about sharing the shower.

"That went on for almost a month. His letters to me resumed, very different than his first efforts. We spent more time together swimming and just hanging out. We lingered longer in the shower and became more intense with each other. Everything was better than I thought it could be, week after week, but life has this unfortunate way of being year after year and finally decade after decade. I suppose that's good for most of us, considering the alternative, but it wasn't for Lessen Rudolph. It started, and I guess `returned' would be more accurate, five or six weeks after the night at the motel. He began sliding off here and tripping there, deliberately turning nominal events into points of conflict; burgers or chicken, chicken or pizza, pizza or sushi, the arcade or the moves, movies or the theme park, this channel or that channel, this video game or that. We should have gone and lived in a cave where the choices would have been this squirrel or that rabbit."

Nordstrom moved his hands from the artist's face to his gently heaving flanks, massaging the adult up and down, his hands gripping more tightly as he brought them higher on the straining torso of the lithe athlete. "Are you okay?" Dave whispered.

"It hurts," the boy said, "but I'm sure glad it's you."

"I think I can hold still for awhile if you want," the master informed the sweating teen.

"You'll make me into another Lessen," the boy responded, his eyes glowing with amusement. "Do I want you gently, or fully?"

"It's not wanting them both," the man said, "everyone wants that, it's wanting them both at the same time; insisting on them both at the same time. When it comes to things like sushi pizza, sometimes a kid catches a break and can have two things at once, but it's pretty hard to watch a film and ride a coaster at the same time, and it gets annoying to see half a movie and then suddenly have to leave and implement Plan B, then wait in line for an hour until someone in a printed tee-shirt walks by and Plan C becomes, all at once, the new must-see inanity.

"With other kids it would be the almost inevitable conflict between childish ways and boring old adult behavior, and we would have parted company, no harm, no foul. Not with young Mr. Rudolph. He had no other options; his mother was ever worse, probably going clinically insane, and he would have run away from any foster care arrangement. He had an enormous amount to offer, but only as an artist, and no field requires more structure, self-discipline, and dedication. By this time I was mixing his glass with half Pepsi and half Coke. He wasn't pushing to see far how he could go, where the limits were, what constituted a comfort zone, like most kids, he was pushing for all he was worth, staying out to ten with his stoner buddies led to staying out to eleven; twenty bucks for the arcade merely whet his appetite for fifty; a fifty mile trip, for a hundred mile trip. If he could have refocused so that a ten page story lead to a twenty page story or a B in history led to and A, he would have ended up master of more than he could have imagined, but he was a wrong-way kid, I guess to the bone and first breath. The fickle and fluke didn't teach him perspective, they became be-all, end-all goals. The Lesser Shadows taught him the stakes could be high and the drama extreme, and, where a normal kid might have used the experience to transcend conventional boundaries and succeed, the boundaries, themselves, became Lessen's fixation, and, as ever, the closer he got to them, the further off into the distance they moved, and ten at night became two in the morning, sober became drunk, and his manners, rudimentary to begin with, trailed off into ironic commentary and sarcastic put-downs. As this began to happen, the sex, at least, remained a constant. He avoided the hustlers and creeps that gather where drugs and kids are to be found, and actually became hotter and more potent as his body matured By this time, he'd turned eleven and was cumming more heavily than the pros in the porn videos, and getting the same response from me."

"That changed, too?" Nordstrom asked, knowing he was being mastered by a beautiful and sensitive male and wanting the experience to last as long as possible, an unfortunate proclivity for a character in any novel of mine and a good example of why we are cautioned to be careful of what we wish for.

"Not subtly, either," the man affirmed, slowing his thrusting and becoming still over the boyish teen. "I don't want it to be over yet, so I'm going to have to leave for awhile," Dave whispered. The boy nodded and they parted slowly, nesting in the warm grass like drowsy deer, the back of the younger male against the chest of his master as the adult gently molested and masturbated him.

"'Not subtly,' I think you said," Nordstrom prompted, breathing softly and apparently content with his role as boy bookmark.

"I tried to get involved in nothing extra," Dave continued, "nothing to do with supplying weed or booze or wheels or letting them party at my house. I had my plate full with teaching, art, and running heard on a kid of a dozen. Fat lot of good it did. One night he shows up with Jimmy Reardon, brother of Al, who, wouldn't you just know it, is in jail and unlikely to get out for the odd five or six years. Jimmy, nine, is essentially homeless, and guess who has a home. So this lead to that, with me thinking, Aha, maybe someone to look after will be the catalyst I've been hoping for.

"For awhile it seemed to help; my lawyer kept an eye on things and Jimmy moved in with us; Lessen tracked on his new brother and went through another improvement cycle. We were extra discreet with what happened in the shower, and life went on.

"Jimmy's been asking me questions?" Lessen said.

"He can't stay nine year old forever," Dave said; "about us?"

"I don't know yet," the eleven year old said.

"Tell him," Dave said, "or I will. I've been meaning to, but I haven't had a chance. I don't want to inveigle an encounter, I want it to come up, and I'm not in any hurry for that to happen. Our family secret is about half of what most are, and I figured he could handle it or I wouldn't have invited him to shack up here."

"He doesn't just ask questions," the boy said.

"How long have you been alone with him?" the master wanted to know.

"A few hours," the boy replied.

"I want that. I guess you assumed that even though I've never come out and said it. Baring normal parents, it's my theory a child needs a love center to his or her home, and that can include the taboo, as long as it's affectionate and consistent. I've been doing office work at school I could do here to give you two privacy. You're two extremely attractive young males and if the Shadows indoctrinated you with the beauties of dancing outside the spotlight, your only reaction should be happiness with your partner."

"What should I do?" the boy asked for the first and last time in their relationship.

Only one thing the teacher knew or had thought to try had worked in the past. It hadn't worked well, but nothing else had worked at all. Full inclusion. Anything else seem inherently creepy and devious. Barring inclusion, if the younger boy showed any discomfort, disclosure, as detailed as Jimmy wanted to hear it. It was an exercise in taboo more fitted to a writer than an artist; how would you render it other than as gossamer white wraiths seeping in through the heating ducts? No, taboo couldn't be illustrated, it had to come as the thousand words, not the picture. The odd thing to Dave was that he could find none of it, however closely he knew it to hang. Even if Jimmy were a weekend guest from an engaged and lively family, a boy's boy of boys, if he wanted to spend a few hour whispering with a handsome male two years his senior, how could that possibly hurt? If that whispering led to an attractive and gentle adult, how? And a neat sidebar: boys their age could be whispering about hacking on the Net, getting a gun, finding liquor, or a dozen like mischiefs, both thinking pervs were creeps, and to what philosophical conclusions did that lead? "Yes," Dave sighed to himself, "the heavy hitters use a word-processor."

Lessen's question hung in the air, cloaked in irony. Here the boy was asking advice -- should I take algebra or history? -- and the topic was likely to lead to gentle hands removing the underpants from an arching little boy. But it was the last play of the game; Jimmy was a quiet kid, gentle and affectionate, passive and somewhat detached. How much damage would be done to him if things went wrong? It was hard to imagine any at all. Versus the total destruction of Lessen if the anchor didn't hold, if he didn't swing to it, get his bow into the wind, and fucking keep it there. Two ordinary boys, and he would have passed: spent some time in the shower before turning on the water. Lessen and a passive boy? Deal.

"Take him a candle," the master instructed his student. "Stay while it burns down. I don't mean to get sappy, but use its light well. If it brings the house down us, at least we tried." He realized he'd said too much, that the sensitive boy would interpret we tried' correctly as he', Dave, `had tried', which would open a can of worms involving what he had tried or was trying and why he had or was trying whatever it was he was, or was not, trying. Luckily for them both, Jimmy was a slim Anglo cutie with big eyes and freckles, and the thought of him in candle light overcame the mercurial older boy's ever edgier interpretation to his disadvantage of everything he heard and half of what he saw.

"I want to leave his bedroom door open so you can listen," Lessen said.

"As long as you tell him," the man said, reviewing his last-ditch, no-holds-barred strategy in especially diplomatic terms, half wondering as he did so if it wouldn't be better to grab the yokel by his shirt and scream at him that if he wanted more than this out of the human race, he was crazy. Unfortunately, a major psychiatric sub-set agrees that mental illness is largely voluntary, amounting, simultaneously, to an attention getting ploy and slacker's cop-out. Being crazy gained Lessen a lot, when one came to think of it; for openers, he had a sex life that would stump a goat, extra this, especially time, more of that, especially time; more time than all his other students, combined, instilling, as time went by, the need for more. You don't fight a fire with gasoline, but you might use it to start a backfire. It wouldn't work, but it was the only option.

"Come down if a few minutes," Lessen said, and left to find the candles. Dave stripped to his briefs, wondering if he'd ever reach the age of even fifteen. He felt as nine as the boy in the guest bedroom on the first floor of the house. He was harder than he'd been their night in the motel with Lessen, harder, longer, thicker, more throbbing and rouge at the tip than he'd been since he'd pretended to have trouble with his athletic cup when he was twelve. The lust was feral, an atavistic common denominator demanded by the god of the second spear. Yes, it was the penultimate hunt, but the loins came so soon before the belly that it might seem to a crude sort of interpreter than the food of the first spear directly nourished the second, and its hunt was for spears to add to the hunt, i.e., not to be ignored. But it wasn't feral, it was abnormal. A sleeping girl, that should be the wild man's summons, his siren, her belly, her breast, her welcome, and yes, he'd go for it, but not raging, pulsing, hammering as he was over just the thought of Lessen alone with little, freckly, Jimmy.

How abnormal? He'd read the true story of the waifish prostate, appearance that of a child, with `no sign of being a women', and how the first cruising car always stopped. How many men would have pushed the immature body away if they'd found it to be that of a boy? Odd. That made it highly abnormal. The tall athlete shook his head. If writers were the power hitters, they sure had to work for it. He shook his head, again, and descended the stairs, still huge, arms as his side.

The soft light glowed across the gray carpet of the hall, spilling from a wide crack in the door. Dave eased against the door frame, and remained still.

"It doesn't have to be tonight, if you're tired, it could be anytime, and some kids your age aren't interested, or they're immature and think it's gross, or they have like this la-la home life, and they don't have time, so it's just that we kind of have a secret in the house, and we don't want you living here and thinking something's going on, and it makes you nervous or uncomfortable, and, you know, you're too embarrassed to like ask questions or talk about it, so if you want I can stay and we can hang out by candle light, and tell stories, you know, mature ones, not the regular kind, or I can go because usually I take a shower about now, anyhow, okay?"

"I just told you a little stuff, before, because I felt the same way you do. I didn't want to get you embarrassed."

"I thought you kind of hinted at something."

"Did you tell Dave?"

"Yes."

"What did he say."

"Bring a candle."

"Cool."

"He tries. He's an adult. What else can they do?"

"He's a pretty cute adult."

"It takes one to know on in that department."

"You, too."

"Ditto."

Nervous laughter.

"Are you kind of a lot experienced or a little experienced?"

"Kind of a lot, I guess. How about you?"

"I spent a week with a club that was making videos, when I was ten."

"Were they gentle with you?"

"Yes. How about you? Was the man gentle?"

"He touched another boy while I watched, then I said I wanted him to teach me."

"Where was it?"

"We were building a tree house and he had some old wood in his back yard. We asked if we could use it. He said we were welcome to it, and Norry, he's my friend, twelve years old, asked Robert, that's whose house it was, if he'd help us lift up some of the heavy pieces. Robert invited us in for milk and cookies and told us he'd built a tree house a couple of times. He asked if any other men like our fathers were helping us, and we ran the list of dysfunction and alternative orientation that kept us least half-free of the parental umbrella. When I talked he found out I read a lot, Norry, too, so we became more friends. He said when he was our age, he did mature stuff in his tree house with older boys, and he liked experimenting, and we shouldn't invite him to stay after he helped us if that kind of thing made us too uncomfortable or nervous. Then he went down in his basement to get a pulley and some rope, so we could talk. We looked in our pockets to see if there was anything we could give him, you know, like as a present for helping us, but we only had some junk. Norry was good at thinking, way good, so he went to the sideboard and stole a silver salt tray with a blue-glass liner. When we got the last board up for the floor, the man helped us brace it and lay on some old plywood for the floor. He came up the ladder to check it and Norry gave him the salt tray and said it was all we had if Robert would stay. Robert was very touched. He stayed all afternoon, and we built a bed and two pretty good chairs using just a saw, a drill, and a screwdriver."

"He sounds pretty okay."

"He was even more cute than that. Athletic, like Dave, tall, too."

"I'm surprised you risked all on something as minor as a salt tray."

"It was the thought that counted."

Silence. Dave listened extra hard. More of the same. "Well," he thought to himself, "at least they're not a pair of giggling idiots."

"What happened next?"

"Robert said when the man helped him build a tree house, they worked in their underpants to get used to each other."

"Did that make you really nervous?"

"Before I could even look at Norry, he said he had to go back to his house, and that we could come over if we wanted, after we'd talked, and he'd be back in an hour with some pizza which he'd bring if we left a rock on his patio. So we didn't have time to be too nervous, because we wanted to help him take his tools back."

"Did you talk with Norry at all?"

"We just nodded."

A brief silence could have been attributed to Lessen nodding: "I'll bet!"

"Then what happened?" the eleven year old asked his nine year old friend.

"We walked back with him. He said he had some old sofa pillows we could use and a tarp until we got a roof built and that we could pick them up the next day or he could help us carry them into the woods if we wanted to talk more. We nodded to each other and said Okay. He said we could leave our clothes at the house if we were ready to experiment with having the feelings older boys get. His house was pretty alone, but not completely isolated, so that made us kind of nervous, and he explained he thought it would be cute if some neighbor did see us walking into the woods that way, because it was natural for boys to spend time with men and not always talk about killing things or scores, and that we'd be very discreet and private most of the time, but once in awhile we could let the world know that real people had real preferences that were not exactly the same as everyone else's ideals."

"Was he a salesman?"

"Airline pilot."

"Oh... that's cool."

"He flew to Manila. There was a club there that taught American men how to be with young boys. He told us about it and showed us some pictures so we'd all be the same when we took our shorts off."

"Were you?"

"Like totally."

"Were you embarrassed having Norry look at you that way, and, you know, looking at him and Robert?"

"He said it was okay to blush, so we did, then he took us down to get the pillows and some camping gear while we started to get used to the way we looked, and in a few minutes we were back up on the floor of the fort. That's when he sat back against the trunk of the tree and pulled us onto his legs."

"Really close to him?"

"Norry more, because he was older and I wanted him to let things happen, first. He could see that I'd gotten really nervous all of a sudden, so he said I'd be more comfortable if I sat Indian style on the other cushion, and that I could even light the stove and make tea if I got bored, because only some of it was exciting to look at."

"And making tea's exciting?"

"He was just trying to protect me if I got embarrassed."

"So you stayed and watched?"

"Yes."

"From how far away?"

"It was a tree house."

"Sorry, you're really good at telling stories, I forgot."

"That's okay, it was kind of small, so details are important."

"I just wondered if, you know, your legs were touching them while you watched."

"Not at first, but almost. I was by Robert's left knee, but in awhile I was under it, you know. Plus, I touched them some when I pulled Norry's underpants off, and some more when Robert let me help him get his briefs off."

"Did that happen right away?"

"No, we had a lot of questions so it was like half an hour."

"Did they get you naked, too?"

"No, I wasn't ready for awhile. I mean I was, but it seemed to me I was getting readier all the time, and we had plenty of time because he'd invited us to dinner, so I felt if I kept getting readier from watching them, it would be more exciting."

"Dave likes to make it exciting that way, too. We used whisper a lot when he got behind me in the shower, and we still do some, and he still takes his time."

"I know, I listen outside the door."

"Cool."

"Does he let you get on your knees in front of him?"

"No. He's into definition, as in defined relationship, so much, and no more. It's meant to be a stepping stone to me as responsible, dutiful kid."

"You're too much the artistic type to be all dull and same-old, doesn't he see that?"

"He's the best artist you ever saw, so he knows all about it, but he was lucky because he got brought up with all that discipline and tenacity stuff; I got brought up on colonial romances by John Masters, Robert Ruark, and older ones like Kipling and Stevenson, then, just when I'd figured out that was the life for me, at least learning about it and writing about it, someday, if I couldn't actually go around Cape Horn on a windjammer with some cute mate who wanted to take me down along the keel to show me the golden spike, and it was time to start paying attention in class and going baa-baa when the teacher called on Lessen Rudolph.. That coincided with ye olde tumbler of ye extreme grog, so dedication and perseverance got trapped by the ankle in a grate as Port Royal settled into the sea, drowned, and make no mistake, lad, drowned `till ye sockets housed crabs."

"I was lucky with Norry and Robert. It doesn't take long to figure out the only was out of the hard stuff is getting it out of the way, but someone does have to show you, not just yell at you to hurry up all the time. They taught me in a few weeks, mostly Robert, of course, but Norry was older so I could see how he learned and copy him. We ended up with a beautiful tree house on two levels, painted and varnished and even with geraniums because it was so cool and dude we could get away with it. Just a few weeks, and after that, nothing else mattered except working extra slowly and taking extra time and getting it exactly right, and then maybe learning to do it a little faster, though Robert felt that was best left until someone paid you."

"You either get it or you don't. It can't be modified in after purchase like big speakers for a car. You can't fight your way back to retrieve it like a lost ice ax You can't put Humpty together again, and he gets real mad if you try."

"Humpty's okay the way he is."

"Thanks, but Humpty's got a loose rudder pintel and one of these days it's going to break. No rudder for the kid."

"Maybe the wind will blow you in the right direction, and you won't need one."

"That's already happened, how come I ended up here, but the wind always changes."

"But Dave lets you be a boy in his hands. I watched that happen with Norry in Robert's hands, and, I mean, you're not related or anything, but you and Norry are boys, and Robert and Dave are men, so you could, you know, if you were fooling around in your head, and you wanted to be, like, funny, not think of it as the wind always changes, and makes storms, but as the son also rises. Only it should read, for you: always rises'. And I'm not just making up something dumb, because the key word is definitely always', so, if the son always rises, the wind may never blow. I mean, it's a stretch, but there's got to be some answer to drifting out there with all those other derelicts and crashing into them, first, and then into the rocks."

There were several moments of silence.

"Do you want to?"

"Yes."

"We're both experienced so we don't need to do foreplay, do we?"

"Next time."

"Cool."

"You wanna turn our back?"

"Okay."

"Hi."

"Hi"

"Are you that way because of what happened when you were ten?"

"Yes."

"Are you bigger than Dave?"

"We're about the same."

"Does it happen like a teenager with you?"

"I think so. Like a big kid, at any rate."

"It's starting to happen with me, too."

"Is it white?"

"A little."

"That's good for nine."

"I like thinking up dumb stuff so I can write for morons on television when I get older, so I think of it as: `Dragonballs Me'."

"Television's yesterday's news. You can write for the Web."

"That would be cool."

"Then you could tell everything that happened while Robert was teaching Norry and you were sitting like an Indian at Robert's left knee, and, you know, you wouldn't have to leave out what happened at the end when the man's leg went over you, because sometimes that's the best part."

"It was all the best part, especially pulling down his underpants and seeing how grown-up he was."

"Did he lift his hips up to help?"

"Yes."

"Be sure to put that in. That's what happened when I went for a hike with Mex He was the writer on the film I made. We met a kid who was out fishing. We were wearing caveman costumes we borrowed from wardrobe, they were like stylized, made of silk instead of animal skins, so Kevin got interested in how we looked and we started to talk and Mex had worked in a restaurant in college so he knew how to clean fish, so like we were cavemen preparing raw food and it was easy to pretend and make up stuff. Kevin thought we were really funny, but it got kind of messy, too, because Mex was a what-happens-next? kind of dude, so by splashing us with gross water from cleaning Kevin's fish, he made it a good idea to swim in the pond and wash off. Our costumes cost eight-hundred dollar, each, so we couldn't swim in them but we had to rinse them off so Mex asked Kevin if it was okay if we did it there, where he was, or if we should find a private place along the edge of the pond. He said he lived in the nearest house and it was isolated so not many people ever came around and it would be okay. Then Mex asked him if he'd like to come in swimming with us. Kevin didn't say anything, just kind of nodded, you know, like he wanted to but was scared, which is how I felt when I first arrived on the set. We took our costumes off and led him into the woods at the edge of the pond. The ground was soft and mossy, so we lay him down and took his shirt and jeans off. We asked him if he wanted to keep his underpants on, and he raised his hips way up high."

"Do you want to get on my bed so we'd be more comfortable?"

"Could I do it a little from behind you, first.?"

"Okay, but don't do anything fast."

"I know. My director was big on going slow, and the art director, even more."

"Robert, too, he was really slow with Norry, that's why he thought I might get bored."

"It would be, if you watched other guys very much, but it's exciting at first."

"Yeah, like whispering. I'm glad my first time was with someone who liked to talk. That way I found out Norry's secret that he wanted to tell me, but was embarrassed, but Robert made him feel grown-up, not like a little kid, so he could tell."

"What happened?"

"Wait, let me get behind you and you can tell me about Kevin, then I'll tell you."

"He was thirteen."

"Had he been molested before you took his underpants off?"

"More exciting."

"You're kidding."

"No I'm not. See if you can guess."

"Nothing like with animals or anything?"

"Not."

"That's a relief. Then he played with like a little boy, like seven or something?"

"You're getting warmer."

"Maybe there were two of them."

"Colder."

"One?"

"The one and only until we came along."

"Did it happen a lot with him?"

"Yes."

"So it must have been someone he could be with a lot, but he lived in a rural house, so that means it must have been someone he lived with. Brothers don't usually like to do things together. Am I getting warmer?"

"Lisa."

"His sister?"

"Yes. She was really cute, but she was eleven and too old for me. I just watched."

"She came out to the pond to be with her brother?"

"She brought him a picnic lunch and got to the pond after Mex started molesting us . By that time we'd talked quite a bit, so we didn't need to hide anything. She swam off with her brother while he told her who we were, then he brought her over to meet Mex. She said Hi to me too, and I could see in her eyes that she was sad I was too young, but when I turned to go she grabbed my arm and led me up to the grass and sat me down, then waited in front of me for her brother and Mex."

"She sounds nice."

"We were more friends than she was with the older males, but when it came to the kind of things that happened when I made the video, she was with them."

I view writing as making a beautiful puzzle picture out of imperfect pieces rather than a bland picture out of perfect pieces. It's tempting to comb back through and curry out all the inconsistencies, file and sand each sketch so ages and personalities fit with Teutonic precision, but this is a mural, not a postage stamp, and it's free on the Net, not something you paid thirty dollars for. Additionally, I have enough ego issues as it is, and knowing I turned out letter-perfect copy at rates exceeding fifteen-thousand words a day might empower the conceit that drives the reindeer to a more Santa kind of guy.

Samantha in the pouring rain. She's a muscular little thing. She's off on a church fandango and last night was foraging for bucks to carry on the trip. Wide open rain, cold, blowing a gale, and the dripping lark landed on my veranda, tapping at my door. I stopped the ran with fifty dollars, and, since she was expecting twenty, brought out the sun, as well. She said my wife was a lucky girl, and went home to pack, leaving me to find comfort in more than mere status as a literary god.

I guess microwave ovens have been in common use for over thirty years, but they still have a new-toy appeal. It took awhile but I finally noticed that the revolving platter turns exactly one revolution every ten seconds, so if you open the door at the end of three minutes, the handle of the cup is at your finger tips. If you wait for it to beep and go off automatically, it turns another quarter circle, and if you get really careless, the handle ends up away from you; awkward, to say the least. If this sounds on the trivial side, you may be right, but the muses have been pulling their little thudding hearts out and they need some slack. There are not signs in literary heaven, no posts to guide the way, so in addition to doing all the work, they need to guide the sleigh (but if held on a gentle rein, they dance along the way).

Hum-drum-drum. That, I was just thinking, is my life. It's been nice having gray, cold weather to liven things up a bit, because otherwise it's a freaking coal mine. Yes, they perform well, but they need a good secretary to type it all out, and, perhaps over cared-for, they do like to prance along prodigiously, so the typing mounts up, hum-drum-drum.

I rode in a symphony the other day. A local mini-van bus that had so many rattles and squeaks it was like a wet dog which and industrious had festooned with a thousand bottle caps. If I was rich I'd buy this ultimate rattle trap, drop a crate engine and new drive train in, and cruise the back roads of Mexico at twenty miles an hour in rust-bucket heaven. My idea of a good time.

I was thinking when you molest a boy you don't give him an immediate gift. For instance, if Randy and I happened to be staying the night in a hotel, I doubt he'd follow me into the shower or climb in my bed, willing as he would be to have me follow him in to bathe, or get in bed with him. And immediate gift, so to speak, would engender proactive traits, and these are not in evidence with him or other boys. He comes here on his own, he wants what happens, as I did and many boys do at his age, but he doesn't initiate any activity. So the gift it is, is long-term, teaching him that nothing god-awful happens, so, as a man, he won't be scared to teach a willing boy. I didn't even know what Jon had done with me at Timberlake, didn't even know how to masturbate, though I'd jerked him off several times; only as an adult, with Jose, did the lesson come home, that I could touch him without turning either of us into interplanetary zombies. Contemporary society views this very strangely, pointing out that boys who were molested then molest others, as if it were bad (a boy who chances to get hooked by an older male, while fishing, doesn't, as an adult, teach little boys about being hooked, and might even teach them to avoid it). It goes with frequent saying, if any kind of rape, psychological or physical, is involved, if the younger partner is in any way unwilling, social norms are right, but if the circumstances are otherwise, as they very often are, then the conventions are not only wrong, but highly destructive, and man teaching boy is not only acceptable, but, in a confusing and hazardous world, usually preferable Again, and always, not for all, but for more than enough to legitimize the fight against arbitrary taboo. The minorities got recognition thru militancy, burn-baby-burn, but they turned out to be worth little more than token inclusion. Healthy pedophiles are movers and shakers, through and through, and should be mildly bolder, not militant, in promoting their relationships. If I lived in New York, for example, I'd wear a "Nifty.org" tee-shirt (but wouldn't hang out with bare-chested roller-buddies). Steven and I pushed it to the limit in Dubuque, or at least to the tune of three police interviews, but there's a long way between talk and the walk, so we made out fine, and if it hadn't been for a jealous sister (over material things, not psychological), we wouldn't have had problem one. Push a little and be accepted a lot. And, to add interest, if I'd pushed any harder, I would have had Beth, too. Trouble was, I didn't like her, nine-year-old beauty that she was.

I still think it's cheeky to write derivative stories longer than the originals, but, at the same time, can't help feeling a little smug knowing it is unlikely anyone will pull the same stunt with "One Fish". My apologies, again, to both authors (and others) for overusing their work. I doubt providing crutches for a colleague was not on their minds when they typed: "FADE IN".

"How long did she have to wait?"

"The pond was kind of cold, but she was looking right at them so it didn't take more than a minute."

"Did you like watching it happen to them?"

"Yeah, they were both really mature. I got that way pretty fast, myself, off of making the movie, but for an inexperienced kid, because I'd never seen, you know, that part of it before, it was really exciting."

"Did they molest Lisa, or just rape her."

"They were like I'm being with you, like I'm not kissing you and petting you and cuddling with you and whispering romantic stuff, I'm just making it so you can feel everything a boy does. They were the same, like they were doctors doing a medical experiment on a patient, you know, so she could feel it like you are."

"Did you lie down on the grass so you could see between their bodies?"

"Yes."

"Did they go up over her so you could see everything?"

"Most of the time, until they started shaking too much, then they'd rest against her chest for a minute, sort of like learning to breathe again, but they couldn't stay against her for long because her hands were way out over her head so her nipples pressed against their chests when they lay with her, and that made them rise up and their hips go, again, I could tell, even though I was supposedly too young to understand details like that."

"Did she put her legs around them like in the movies?"

"No, she kept her knees on the grass, but she beat her heels into the ground a lot when she felt it happening from them, inside her."

"Were there other ways you could tell what was happening?"

"She got like totally wet with them. Mostly from Mex, and he wanted to feel incest cum on his penis when he was inside her, so he mounted between her legs after Kevin. Then she had to get up right after he sprayed, because her dad was home and she wanted to go take a nap with him while her thighs were all slick and white. After she left, Kevin told us that her dad was the only one she'd let make her cum, so we pictured what was happening in the farm house over the hill while Mex and Kevin molested me."

"Did you make it a story?"

"Yeah."

"Do you want to tell it?"

"Sure. But don't forget Norry and Robert."

"As if."

"Dad, don't turn around," the girl whispered through the workshop door.

"What's up, kid?" Griff Howell said

"I just want you to get ready to look at me," Lisa said.

"I'm always ready to do that, darling," the man said.

"No, Daddy, not like I'm a kid," the child prompted, "but like you do in the special way now. After I've been for a walk with Kevin."

"Did you lock the door, Lisa?" the man said, his voice reduced to a husky whisper as he gazed steadily at the mower he'd been repairing.

"Yes, Daddy."

"Do you really want to be like this?" the man stammered, "I don't want you to think we have to be together every time you've been with your brother; just when and if you want to, angel, okay?"

"Yes, Daddy," the eleven year old said, "sometimes I like keeping what happened with him private, but this is different. Dad," she whispered softly, "I was with an adult. He was molesting Kevin and Lessen, he's only ten, in the pond. I was really handsome, tall and athletic like my beautiful dad, and I took my frock off and swam with them, and Kevin told me they were making a movie in Wife Valley, at the old Campbell ranch, so we swam over and he introduced us. I really liked the boy, he had fiery eyes, so I wanted him to stay and see what happened with Kevin and Mex."

"Did he watch you, darling?"

"Yes, Daddy, he stayed. And afterwards I didn't clean up, Daddy, and I didn't put my dress back on. Not even my panties. Daddy, I know how you get excited when you find out I'm wet from my brother, but this time it's from a tall, handsome stranger. A man."

"Sweetheart, did you?"

"No, Daddy, I told him and we made sure. I told Kev it had happened with us, because he can't make me cum yet, and I don't want him to feel self-conscious about it, but I thought if I came right home and sort of surprised you, that might help me let go, you know, if you were just a little more like you when I've just held Kevin in my arms. He was the last one I lay underneath, Daddy, Mex, after he'd watched my brother be successful with me, and he was so big and hard and deep in me I had to beat my heels on the ground so I wouldn't let go. It would have happened if I'd wiggled my hips even a little, but I want to be in your arms the first time; maybe, someday, in my brother's, but, now, yours, now."

"Can I look at you now, Lisa?" the boyish thirty year old asked.

"Yes, Daddy," the schoolgirl whispered. She had flyaway brown hair, a thin boyish face, slightly big mouth and teeth, and the unformed belly and hips of a younger girl. Her nipples tipped, with delicate pink flowers, the developing mounds typical of a young teenager. Griff turned on his stool as she approached, his breath hissing at the sight of her. He long, coltish legs joined in a slime of clotted semen, and thick cum coated her inner thighs. The man stared, from a foot away, gently touching the child's wetness. She pushed closer and he began kissing her and licking her clean. His hands worked quickly as he bent to Lisa, removing his boots and socks, then unfastening his overalls. In a minute he stood, pulled down his briefs as she stared down at him, her hands fondling her big, hard nipples, and stepped naked to her. The girl took her tall, athletic father's hand and led him to the old sofa at the side of the garage. Lying back as he stood watching, she secured her left ankle to the seat and splayed her right leg on the floor, thrusting high to the naked male towering over her. Griff knelt and found the child's wet thighs with his lips and tongue, finally using his mouth directly on her as she gripped the sofa with white knuckles and bucked and squealed, welcoming his avid use of her young body.

"Daddy," she cried out and the tall father manhandled his long-limbed eleven year old from the sofa, fell on his back, and guided his naked daughter to his waist. Her eyes were huge as they paused, the male going rigid as the female positioned herself, then nodded privately. He thrust fully into her hot wetness, and she leaned forward to stare into his handsome face as his strong, greasy hands clamped hard on her soft, childish waist.

Griff had always mounted his little girl as she lay with her legs spread beneath him, so they spent a gentle minute experimenting. Looking down at her dirty waist the girl commented that that was one way to invite a girl to take a shower. Then they found each other and her eyes widened. Bracing her right elbow on the sofa, where her heel had just been, and gripping her father's right shoulder, Lisa found she could set a fast, hard rhythm against the beautiful, panting animal beneath her. "Oh, Dad," she whispered, "it's going to be so easy."

"Yes, darling," the sweating man whispered, quickly matching the short, fast urgency of his daughter as she massaged herself against the hot thickness of his huge penis, "now you know you're beautiful to a strange male and you have felt his spill in your belly, so you know the truth, and that is that you're a free woman and not some captive of a father who caught you with your brother."

"I want it to happen with him in his bed tonight, Daddy," the girl whispered hoarsely. "I want to set at the breakfast table with both of you tomorrow and know I've gone all the way in both your arms, so I can have the same feelings I had the morning after you walked in on us and I sat at the table knowing both your seed was swimming inside me."

"Darling," the man said, his daughter having found a smooth, comfortable rhythm, her boyish hips moving confidently, her breasts swelling fully to the gentle touch of her mate, "I honestly thought it was a loose shutter squeaking in the wind. I never meant to intrude."

"I know, Daddy," the girl replied, a fresh warmth to her voice, that of a girl fully confident of an ultimate act and now happy to linger over its mystical approach, "it was our fault for losing control."

"Were you trying to cum with him?" the man whispered.

"Yes. We should have put a blanket on the floor and a pillow underneath me, then it might have happened."

"Was it the closest you ever were?"

"Yes," the girl said.

"You were so beautiful together, the way he was sweating and your hair was all damp and lank, and his sureness with you, the power of his lower back against your slim leg splayed out from underneath his hips; it took me a whole minute to try and figure why there was anything wrong with the picture of my baby mounted by her beautiful, mature brother, then it occurred to me that any wrong was in the eye of the beholder, and that the beauty should be universal, allowing for clinical realities much as you obey the traffic lights on the way to an art museum."

A little art museum here, tonight. Randy came at sunset, alone, and stayed four hours. Elsewhere, I've credited Steven as the perfect lover, and when it came to raw carnality, he was mysterious, intriguing, and awesome, but he had liabilities, too. He was highly neurotic, almost completely learning disabled, and he never wanted to kiss. He didn't want to suck, either, but did once, or a few seconds, as a reward for some treat within a treat. Randy is not neurotic, doesn't charge after one type of homosexual experience and reject others, he's calm, cool, and quiet, and he loves to kiss. I had him naked, and just the sight of him against the north wall, in the classic stance, legs slightly spread, was enough to remind me what a solid and enduring rational there is to pedophilia. How indoctrination can exist that would defile just his appearance, soft belly blending into silky thighs with his hard, pinky-size boner jutting up a quarter arc from his waist, to say nothing of his silky, resilient warmth, simply demonstrates that the communists, with their ideological hammers and counter-revolutionary sickles, are probably right. To indoctrinate against something as natural, affectionate, and friendly as attractive man and willing boy is to indoctrinate -- brainwash -- with the germs of insanity, so imbuing a political franchise must be, relatively, a walk in the park. Look around. The fat, the dysfunction and misery amongst wealth and peace. No one in human history has done less with more. That's democracy. Me the criminal, and the judge that sends me away will cost the State two-hundred- thousand dollars before her massive body runs up a big bill at the crematoria.

We played computer Hangman for an hour. He lay back on my chest and I molested him while he used the controller. I had to get up to clean the mouse, and when I lay back down, he lay on top of me, pulling his jersey high, and I fondled his totally, extremely, soft, warm skin and his beautifully sculpted belly and thighs for another ten minutes. Then we switched games, so he had to get up to use the keyboard. He pulled the chair right to the bed and lay half across me while I showed him the new game. Out of four hours, we had play for about half an hour, and this was on our first extended time alone together. The lesson is simple: don't pester and demand nothing. If I'd been younger and more responsive, I could have cum on him, but that can wait until the weather's warmer and we can be naked together. Meantime, he's at least temporarily and answer to the central dilemma of waiting for Samantha, who, if anything, seems to grow more detached, or finding another girl who is more mature, cutting Samantha out of the loop. Randy kisses so avidly I think he will use his mouth on my teen body, and that's a possibility whose fantasy is half enough to rule the world. When I had him naked and was kneeling in front of him I asked him if he'd like to spend the night sometime, and he nodded readily, so there's a fantasy for the other half of the world. My idea of a big tent.

I would like to experiment with Fidel and Randy. He's a tall, very handsome seventeen year old, and cums quite easily and very heavily when he jerks off on my belly. Randy should experience being with a hot young adult, and Fidel comes with no diseases and no strings.

In all Dangriga, in all my years, I've only known one twisted kid, a friend of Bev's named Jocelyn, a late-teen male. That's what can happen. Jocelyn was prancing, mincing, lispingly effeminate, and overtly miserable; gushing about a man an hour like an American stereotype. He was well liked and hustled here and there like most boys his age (work, not sex). He's the only one I've known in my time here who died of aids, although Malcolm also had a long-term friend who died of the disease. The chance of making Randy into a Jocelyn, then, mathematically, is one in five-thousand. Margaret Mead writes of how the boys who'd been to the homes of the English overseers came back to their villages, and as I recall, does so derisively. Presumably, she found them lazy and dissolute. Well, that's how all the kids are here, anyway, so I don't who's going to notice. Enervating young loins and punking young heads are probably realities, but I can't speak from personal experience because I liked to read before I coaxed Jon into molesting me repeatedly, and I liked curling up with a good book, afterward. As far as I can remember all the effect it had was to teach me that there was a dramatic extra facet to life, and one I hoped I'd learn more about when I got older. I do remember a passage from "Something of Value" wherein a young warrior mounts a female child of the enemy, and picturing Jon's thick, heavy spurts of semen after I'd stroked him a dozen or so times with my inexperienced hand. Perhaps that's when I began wondering if there might be an aesthetic side to deviance as well as the organic, criminal, and emotional aspects occasionally delineated in the media. That it would one day make me a permanently archived and widely read children's author never occurred to me at the time, of course, and even Jose's heavy cumming on my chest didn't inspire the muses to harness themselves and gallop toward the moon. So who does get the credit? My fellow writers on the alternative Web sites. I mean, there were so few novellas and short stories based on algebra, a subject I sorely missed in my school years, where else was I to turn?

Randy climbed in my lap and kissed me as he left, and that was enough art for this essay.

"He was spraying in me the second time, Daddy," the girl said, "that's why I couldn't focus when I saw you in the door."

"I guess we were two lost souls for a minute there," the handsome young man said as his naked child, half braced on the back of the sofa, bucked her young hips confidently against him, her face soft and confident though she was beginning to pant heavily.

"I'm just glad we found each other right away," the girl whispered, glowing to the whiplash of approaching absolute womanhood she felt rising as a sure tide radiating strongly from the base of her spine.

"Darling," her father responded, "I've always been so premature with you before, but you're different now."

"It's from being with Mex," the girl said, "watching a strange male get huge just at the sight of me. Maybe it's like wives going wild with their husbands after having a second baby; they know, that's all; they're not learning, anymore, just like I'm not learning with you. Plus," she went on, "there's even a theoretical side which, and I made this up myself, holds that the semen of the first male acts as an anesthetic on the second male's penis, allowing him to mate with the female longer, and release more sperm than he would if he didn't feel the heaviness of the first male inside the girl."

"Sweetheart," the now shaking male whispered, "have you seen it happen? Did Kevin show you?"

"Yes, Daddy," the girl said. "It was the night Janice Kirk dumped him because he had an outbreak of acne. I thought it made him look so cute and masculine, like a boy, plus he's ever so nice, as the English say, and I couldn't figure her out. I thought I must be crazy, so I had a long talk with Kev on the porch, and it happened out in the woods about an hour later."

"Do you want to talk about it more?" the man whispered to the slim beauty gazing down into his eyes, her eyes on fire as her body began tensing.

"After it happens," she rasped, "oh, Daddy, be with me, hold me, oh, oh, oh-my-god." Then she was lost to a full seizure, collapsing on the adult beneath her and mewing softly in his ear as she pushed with all her strength against the arm rest of the sofa, driving her thighs as hard as she could her fathers huge penis and spasming violently on him, her body instinctively milking his hard and fast. In one of those neat little arcs that can make a good novel a great novel, it so happened that Mex Helgendorf, anticipating his hike with Lessen Rudolph, had remained celibate for the three days preceding their meeting the thirteen-year-old fisherman. Lisa, fresh from his mount, found her father still hard and hot and fully inside her as she began sighing against his panting chest. "Oh, Daddy," she whispered, this time re-entering the world she'd recently departed as her first orgasm stole from her bucking hips and shook her like a terrier shakes its prey for a full, endless minute. And he was still with her. He hadn't lost control in spite of her cries and crushing spasms. She regained enough strength to lift her head and smiled softly at him, then slowly rose again, supporting herself on the back of the sofa, and mewed to him in welcome as she felt the gentle confidence of her shiny, shiny new lover. His strong, greasy hands again returned gently to her large breasts and they continued mating openly as the eleven year old girl told her handsome, athletic father what had happened after she'd taken her big brother's hand and led him from the porch.

"Janice's a pinworm disguised as a gnat," the girl said to her brother, "a rodent in a reptile suit with cockroach breath and rotten-egg eyes, you know, the kind the drip all gray and green and lumpy."

"Then how come she smells so nice?" Kevin, almost fourteen, said to his sister who had just turned eleven.

"That's your nose, not her scent," the sister said, "and it's sniffing something from a bottle, not the essence of moron the rest of the world gets a whiff of when she walks by."

"You used to like her," the brother observed.

"I still do," the girl responded, "but I love you and I think she's a nitwit not to go out with you over Dickie Hold-The-Mirror-Still Durham. Not to put too fine a point on it, you're sexier in a week than he is in a year."

"I look dorky this way," the boy said.

"You look craggy, and rugged, and hawk-eyed, and mature, and beautiful," Lisa whispered. "You're not handsome, you're the most beautiful person, male or female, I've ever seen in person or on television, specifically including Ruthie's big brother, Simon, on "7th Heaven"

"Phew," the teen remarked, "I thought you were going to say Matt, CEO of Hairclub for Boys."

"As if," the girl responded, "but Simon is pretty close."

"Thanks," the boy said, "it's weird, you know, she always makes me feel worse, and you always make me feel better; most kids, their sisters drive them nuts, and their girlfriend is the one who makes them feel good."

"You don't need to feel good," the younger sibling observed, "you are good, and nice, which is even better, you just have to stop feeling bad. Janice's okay, but she's nothing special; I don't think she's read ten books in her life, and they were probably `Nancy Drews', plus, she's tending towards largeness, and if those aren't two strikes against her, then I don't know a baseball from a peanut. Upshot, you have nothing to feel bad about, in italics, about which you should feel very not unhappy."

"I'm feeling unhappier talking to my kid sis," the boy said, "who is, herself, the world's best brand-new eleven year old."

"Do you like it that I'm starting to grow up a little?" Lisa whispered, her voice suddenly low and husky.

"I'm not meant to," the teen said, blushing.

"And I'm not meant to wonder if you like looking," the female noted, "so we're both wrong, only I'm wronger, because I like looking at you, plus wondering if you're noticing anything with me."

"You wear more clothes now," the boy allowed.

"Come on Kevin," Lisa whispered, "you can say it."

"You've started wearing a, you know..."

"Why?" the girl coaxed gently, her voice as petrifying to her maturing brother as the awesomely embarrassing topic at hand.

"Because you're getting, you know..."

"It'll really make me feel like a girl if you say the words," she went on, "won't it make you feel like a boy?"

"Yes," the shy, handsome teen admitted.

"Then just whisper it in my ear."

"I'll try," Kevin said, pausing as the pretty girl with brown flyaway hair looked up into his eyes.

"Then go ahead," she encouraged.

"Okay," the boy whispered in a strangled adolescent voice, "you're wearing a bra because your breasts are developing. I noticed it right away, then I spent so much time not thinking about it it was hard to think about anything else. You know, I like wondered if you looked at yourself in the mirror, and if you thought they were pretty, or they're like a nuisance, or something, and I guess I wondered more stuff, like it you went out with Mark, if you'd let him see you or put his hand up on your chest so he could feel you."

"Do you ever look at yourself in the mirror?" the girl said, "I mean, you know, when you're alone in your bedroom with the door locked, so you can really look."

"Sometimes, I guess," Kevin said.

"I do, too," the girl responded. "I'll bet sometimes we did it at the same time. That I was looking at myself and wondering what you would look like, while you were looking at how a boy gets and wondering what I looked like. Do you think?"

"More than that," the boy responded.

"You mean just before you go to sleep?"

"Yeah," Kevin murmured.

"Me, too," Lisa said, "I watch my bedroom door and wish it would open really slowly and quietly. I even take my nightie and panties off and like on top of the covers so if you sneak into me you'll know right away that I'm not mad and I want you to stay with me."

"I do what boys do on my covers, too," the thirteen year old said, "and I think if you came in I wouldn't stop, I'd just let you watch me in case you were inexperienced and wanted to, you know, learn about it."

"Learn about what, Kevin?" the girl again coaxed.

"Just, you know, what happens when a boy gets really excited," Kevin temporized, again blushing.

"What would I see," came her tiny voice, "whisper it in my ear like you did before."

"What boys have," he said.

"What do boys have? and not the locker-room word, the biology one," she continued, aroused until she was quaking by such gentleness in her tall, coltish boy of boys.

"The same thing they call it in biology," he tried.

"You just have to say it once," the girl said, "so we can share growing up, you know, more completely, be closer because you said something private to me that you've never said to anyone else."

"I haven't even read it," Kevin admitted, "I skip over it in the books."

"Why is it so embarrassing?" she asked.

"Because it's so intense," her brother explained, "it's like what a boy is, but hidden away most of the time, then you start finding out that it's not just you that's involved, but it has a lot to do with girls. Then you find out it gets girls pregnant, and that it's in porn films, and sometimes boy show it to each other, and that a lot of men want to see it, and, by that time, its bad enough, but then you find your sister wants to talk to you about it, so, you know, it gets a little confusing and uncomfortable, while at the same time it's more exciting than three circuses in one tent."

"I don't think so," the girl said, "I mean the excitement part. Look at everyone going crazy when they watch a close ball game or horse race. Those are more exciting, or we'd hear yelling and screaming from the houses when we walk around town after the movies. I think it's more feminine, more graceful and gentle; exciting in the abstract, but when something happens it's not a first down and five."

"How about in soccer where they `scoooore'," the young teen quipped nervously.

"I was going to let you whisper it in my ear, and you could even have had your eyes closed," Lisa said, "but after that clever little aside you, a, get to say it while you're looking into my eyes, and, b, say it out loud, not whisper, and, c, put into the interrogatory case by posing it as a question to which I can either nod or shake my head in response."

"Olay," the boy finally whispered, "I agree. Look up at me and hold my hands." The girl complied and the handsome teen gazed into her pretty brown eyes from half a foot away. "Ready?" he asked. The girl hesitated for a moment, then nodded, now shy herself.

"Love?" the boy said, in a little more than a whisper.

The pixie's eyes brightened suspiciously before she sighed "Yes," in response, pulling her brother's slightly scarred face to her neck and whispering softly, directly into his left ear: "but even if it isn't as exciting as a three-three pennant race, I still think it would be very, very nice to have the hot sperm of my teenage brother under my new bra."

"Where do you want it to happen?" Kevin asked.

"Forgive the symbolism," the girl replied, "but there's a big cherry tree, you know the one. The last few times I've passed it I've thought about my door opening slowly while Dad's asleep, and how my bed squeaks when I pretend things the things girls do, and that I'm a virgin, and that it's a pretty place, and very private, and other things."

"It's not far," Kevin said.

"But far enough that if it is, you know, at least a little like football, we won't have to whisper what we're feeling so the other will know and can share." She stood and he followed, she crossed the lawn and anyone could tell from the slight distance between them and their shamed posture that taboo beat its insidious little drum and piped its sickly flute. In the woods, away from any possible eyes, they seemed to shake off their disease as babies shake off fevers. But appearances can be deceiving and ye who think young innocents now wander, need but listen to have your illusions founder.

"Kevin?" the girl said after minutes of silence, her right hand in her brother's left squeezing tenderly.

"Yes?" the boy responded.

"I know you've got a lot to think about," the girl said, "I mean, I do, too, so I don't want to add to it, but even more I don't want to have any secrets from you. For example, if something did happen with Mark on a date someday, I'd tell you about it if you wanted me too, even all the details, but there's something even more secret than that, and I want to tell it to you before we get to the tree, okay?"

"What is it?" her brother asked.

"Dad," the girl whispered, squeezing the male's hand. They walked another minute in silence. "Do you understand?" Another minute passed as they walked, heads now bowed as hot surge of shame radiated through their souls. "Not just tell him," she went on, "be with him. Be with both of you, not together, but a lot, no secrets. His door opening some nights, your on other nights, and lots of nights everyone behaves as if Grandma Prude is sitting in the hall all night with her heaviest rolling pin."

Again they walked a minute, slowly, in silence. Kevin stopped and turned his sister to him. He looked into her pretty but troubled eyes. "He is pretty cute." They didn't skip from then on and throw leaves and twigs at each other, but walked so normally they would have been indistinguishable in a crowd milling toward an arena.

"Will it make you uptight if I come from his room to yours once in awhile?" Lisa asked.

"Guys kind of accept that," Kevin said, "you know, they have affairs with married women and date girls who have other boyfriends and marry widows and divorcees. You'd think it would be a bigger deal than it is, you know, because basically it means one male may have to support the child of another, but we're civilized enough to grin and bear it, and since we often leave our seed in other females and someone might be out there raising our child, it's not all that lopsided."

"How will you feel watching me leave your room, naked, and turn right in the hallway, instead of going back to my own room?"

"I hope you'll stay with me all night once in awhile so we can discuss it," the handsome boy said, "because, as you just mentioned, there's also the issue of how I'll feel when you come naked from his room to mine."

"If I open the door to Dad's room suddenly, would I ever catch you listening?" the eleven year old waned to know.

"Yes," the boy had to admit.

"I knew you were sexy," his sister said.

"I thought you were, too," Kevin responded, "but you keep getting more that way so I must have been wrong."

"I'm going to wait a few weeks before telling Dad," the girl said as they approached the hidden tree, "I want it to be solid and sure with you before the issue gets confused."

"You could keep it secret, if you want to," the boy said, "I'd never ask you or spy or anything."

"My dream, at this point," the girl said, "is to live with both of you forever, keeping house and having kids just like a married lady. No secrets. No tension. No locked doors other than for physical privacy, like in the bathroom."

"It might work," the boy allowed, "especially if you had a couple of lovers so you'd know you weren't some weird family toy or something."

"Most of the movies about incest show the male as fat, hairy, and old," Lisa observed, "plus insidious, demanding and abusive. That's where the weird comes in. If they showed Roy Scheider off camping with the girl in the bathing cap in the swimming-pool commercial playing his daughter and tilted the camera up when the flap on the tent closed, it wouldn't work, dramatically, because there'd be no conflict, and nothing to resolve."

"It might work as a happy ending," Kevin said.

"I don't think so," his sister responded, "or at least only in the context of a conventional love story, because everyone in the audience would be thinking to themselves, `Hey, they belong together, so why make a move about it?' The point is, if I'm a family toy, it's not weird, it's a beautiful family and I want to make it bigger, preferable with two or three daughters so I could be sure my handsome buck and stag were always home at night."

"We'd be home," the boy said.

"Kevin?" the girl asked.

"What?" the boy said.

"I know we haven't done anything physical except hold hands, but I wondered if, you know, by talking about things if we've had enough, you know, foreplay, for the first time. I mean I'd like to experiment with kissing and petting tonight when you come to my room, but I'd like to try the sex part without anything else, you know, any kind of strip tease or anything."

"I can try," Kevin said, "but I want to make love to you so you may have to dodge and jump a little." His affectionate tone, even though he spoke in a hoarse whisper, made her feel safer than houses. By accord they turned their backs to each other, stripping out of their summer clothing.

"Kevin?" came her voice.

"What, sis?" he responded.

"I'm going to keep it on and let Dad be the first one to take it off. I know that probably sounds frivolous, under the circumstances, but I want there to be some ritual, okay?"

"Yes," the boy said, learning a fast lesson in relativity. He spent a second reflecting on the subject of disappointment. How he might have felt if Janice didn't want him to see and touch her on a date, that would be pretty major, and his sister's wish for the same privacy, as he skinned down his briefs and hung them on a branch, which was an equal disappointment, under circumstances which seemed to reduce it to a triviality of little consequence. His amateur philosophizing did little good. He looked down at himself, monstrously huge and hard, half on fire high between his long, coltish legs, needing any input but the soft rustle of cloth behind him as his pretty little sister readied herself to welcome a male for the first time. It got worse. There was the faintest imaginable trace of silken sound. She was stripping out of her panties.

"Kev," came the frightened whisper. He turned and both stood three feet apart, arms at their sides, each drinking hotly of their first partner. Lisa's nipples pushed hard and big against her training bra, accenting her slim, boyish body like exclamation points wrought in gold. Kevin's big boner bent to his right. It was almost six inches long, circumcised, and probing up from his slender hips hard and hot. "Hi," they whispered simultaneously, then went back to staring each other up and down. Kevin was feeling more masculine by the moment. He turned and backed into the tree, reaching above him for branches, then spreading his legs widely and summoning the fawn with a gentle sway of his hip. The female approached slowly. Hesitated, then reached for him with her tiny, feminine hands. He thrust gently to her and froze in blatant summons. She found him very low with her left hand, and wet his flaring glans with the fingers of her right hand. She looked hotly into his smoking eyes and began stroking him with a rhythm both children had often seen on the farm. They said nothing, their breathing deteriorated rapidly to ragged panting. She wet him again with the now heavy spill of his seminal fluid, gripped him more firmly with her left hand, and began to openly masturbate him, his penis inches from her pretty, school-girl face. The boy began trembling wildly. "Don't stop when it starts happening," he panted.

"Think of looking through the keyhole of Dad's bedroom door," the girl whispered harshly, "you'll probably be able to see some of the things we do." The boy closed his eyes, trying to shut out the image of his handsome father's athletic body responding rhythmically and persistently with his pretty kid sister. There was too much truth in the image. Too little fantasy. And then her lips were on him, her pretty face against him as his head sagged with the shock of her inexperienced tongue and nibbling teeth.

"I'm cumming," he whispered to her.

She eased her mouth from him. "Next time it will be in my belly," she whispered, positioning herself in front of his shaking hips so she could fit the tip of his hot shaft under the left cup of her new bra. Both gazed down for long moments until the teen boy stopped shaking and panting and shaking, going rigid as stone. That's when it started. The hardness of her nipple against the most sensitive area on his wildly swollen penis and the mystery of her hidden by the merest taunting silk stripped him of his humanity, and his sister's urgent whisper rendered him a beast. "Get the bra really wet," the girl coaxed, "so I can show it to Dad in case I have trouble getting him interested."

She gripped him hard and held him still, perfectly against her school girl body. He whispered, "Oh, baby," and began ejaculating, his sperm soaking her immediately and gushing from under the pink fabric so that the child mewed in shock. Three times she squealed in response to the hard jolting in her slick hands, then she was soaked and burning with curiosity. She eased him from under the silk cover her slick left breast, holding his throbbing penis inches from her face, her eyes crossed as the focused on the dark pink, swollen glans. His hot semen rushed from deep within him like stuttering bolts of lightening, like fighter jets with rusty wings. She squealed again at the shock of him against her gripping hands, then gasped as a jet of thin white sperm gouted two feet straight into the air. Such erotic beauty was not to be wasted, and by the time the male's huge spurt splattered on her naked body she had her brother back under the silk and was watching, numb, as he soaked her right nipple and breast as wantonly as he had started with her. That he was ebbing, the heavy flow from under her bra diminishing, was, for the moment, unbearable, and she pulled the male free of her immature chest and took him hard and full in the mouth, using everything she had and making up the rest in hot panic as she went along, instinctively greedy for all his male heat. "I'm cumming," the boy rasped again as her tongue went wild and she sucked fast and hard. The reward was thick and salty, filling her mouth as she mewed and hummed, urgently signaling her adoration in a way the tall, coltish athlete understood. Again, she sensed an ebb, but she was not human, nor was he. She pulled him roughly from the tree, rolling back on the grass as he fell on top of her. He broke his fall with his strong arms, and she used her now experienced hands quickly, finding his massive maleness, easing it against her, then spreading her legs widely and thrusting hard and deliberately to him, hissing in passionate welcome. He penetrated her fully, high between her slim legs, with an involuntarily thrust of his own. He stared into her eyes as she went wide with the shock of him, then they softened, sparkled happily, and widened again in shock as he began taking her like a hot goat for minute after wild minute, then easing to become gentle and tender with her. "I'm cumming," he gasped for the third time, she mewed his name, and he began spraying and kept hotly on, mashed fully against her widely spread young thighs, until his arms gave out and he collapsed against her chest, losing consciousness for a moment with his final thought a picture of their handsome father slowly removing his kid sister's silky, pink training bra.

"You didn't," he whispered gently as they regained the path leading back to the farm.

"I know," she responded, squeezing his hand, "it's meant to be harder for girls with their brothers or dads. Something about pheromones. You know, by and large, it's best if brothers don't mate with their sisters, so nature makes it less likely by favoring outside partners."

"But it was okay?"

"It was probably more intense because I didn't climax," the girl said. "I felt everything, all of you, every move you made, especially when you became all soft and gentle on the outside but bigger than ever inside me while you were pushing like a man between my legs. It was very private, very personal, and very intimate; you were so tender and gentle, you held so still and held me so still against me. It was almost like we were looking through a microscope together, or threading a needle, then it was almost mechanical, like a bridge of life between us, and your seed was rushing into me again and again while the bridge jumped and heaved. I mean, that's kind of gross, because it was more alive feeling, like religious, like everything there is and the reason for it all, and it went on so long there were even moments for offshoot thoughts like why doesn't every girl share this if she loves her brother or her dad? You know, that denying it even once would be a crime."

"You were so ashamed, sweetheart, when you followed me from your brother's bed to mine. I didn't want to quiz you. I was wondering why you were wearing your bra, and, you know, noticed that something had happened, and I thought it might have been under your blouse. I knew it was something very private, so when you stood by my bed with your head hanging and your arms at your side I just turned you around and unsnapped you, looked at your tomboy back, then turned you around while you dropped it on my knees, but if I'd known how special it was I would have molested you and quizzed you before you showed me.

"Of course," Griff added, Lisa again tensing as he thrust hard and held himself deep, "if I'd known how he'd cum off on your chest while you watched, it would have made me even more premature."

"I want you to be, sometimes, Daddy," the daughter said, "it's exciting for a girl to know at least for awhile she's unbearably attractive, sort of a love thing like the feeling at the end when we're still together, something special like the shaky bridge that's almost religious, plus, I loved watching Kev, so sometime you could let it happen on my tummy or my legs and not try to stay in control."

"You are getting no less beautiful and no less wondrous to me," the man whispered to his now urgently tensing child, "so it will, love, just like your brother, or maybe all over your pretty hair and face and neck and shoulders." She was able to nod but not speak, her eyes grew wide with shock, then he lost her to a second long, violent seizure, holding her naked young body in his arms as she flailed her widely spread thighs against him, her breath whistling as she shook against him, her hands scratching and clawing, as she felt each hard pulse of his hugely adult penis deep in her belly and for a full minute nothing else in the whole world.

They lay panting and exhausted for half an hour, then giggled at the greasy prints on the skin of the young girl. It was a good excuse for a shower, and they took a long one, knowing they could now face death, itself, with equanimity, for they had missed absolutely nothing of life.

"Way, way awesome, dude, but when did you find out all the details?"

"Kevin invited us to have dinner and spend the night. I asked Griff if he'd wash my hair in the shower. Mex went into Lisa's room and Kevin was tired so he went to sleep."

"Did you run the water in the shower?"

"No. We took towels in."

"I'll bet you thought of something as soon as he had you alone in the bathroom."

"We didn't stay long."

"You went and listened at the bedroom door of the little girl, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"And it was an old farmhouse, so it had keyholes in the doors."

"You're not a kid, you're a psychic."

"I read, therefore I am."

"I read too much, therefore I'm not."

"That's another keyhole."

"Were you naked when you looked through Lisa's?"

"He'd never molested a boy before, so he still had me in my underpants."

"Could you see a lot?"

"It was lighted with candles like a movie. She went out of view for a minute, then came back wearing just a pink bra. Mex stripped and sat on the bed. His penis was even bigger than when he was molesting Kevin and me in the pond and raped Lisa, like over six inches and maybe even seven. They whispered awhile, then he reached behind her and took her bra off, licking her breasts and getting even bigger and harder from the salty taste of her. Then she knelt on the rug beside the bed, laying across it with her arms stretched out as far as she could reach. Mex put her up on a pillow, then knelt behind her. At first he held her hips, which meant I couldn't see quite everything that was happening with their bodies, but then he suddenly put his hands behind his head, and I saw it about ten feet away. He went all the way inside her that way, then bent over her so he could feel her up while he mated with her. I couldn't tell when it happened, but after awhile even in the candlelight I could see sperm running down the inside of her left leg. I told Griff that Mex had sprayed in her, and he took me back into the bathroom and molested me in the shower while I told him what I'd seen."

"I really like jerking off with you."

"I like it with you, too."

"Do you want to cum:?"

"How about what happened with Norry and Robert."

"Okay. We were used to being with Robert in our underpants. He started touching us a lot in front of each other, and we'd look into each other's eyes while he stood behind Norry or me. He taught us how to touch each other and put each of us against a tree so we could experiment with the advanced way. Then he got that way against the tree, with his hands behind his head, and he spread his legs and let us experiment with touching him through his briefs. Then he put his legs together so we could pull them down. We looked at him naked for awhile, then he got down on his knees and pulled me really close, and helped me get Norry naked, then they did me the same way, and we went back in the tree house for privacy, and Norry got in his lap and I got back on my sofa cushion. Robert taught Norry how to touch him and he let me reach over and try, too. We both like the feeling of his penis in our hands, and soon we were sidle by side, kind of pushing each other while we experimented. Norry was older so I let him lead, and pretty soon Robert was sweating and shaking. He told us to stop, and we really trusted him so we did. He lay me back on the floor, first, and told me to put my hands over my head. Then he lay on the cushion between my legs and got me inside his mouth. He'd done it with other little boys so he knew how to be really soft and wet and just go up and down about an inch with his lips and tongue. After awhile I couldn't keep my hands stretched out, no matter how good it felt, I had to sit up and hold his head in my hand while he kept doing it and doing it. Norry got behind me and whispered to me and molested me while my hands were on Robert. His hands were on my inner thighs, spreading my legs as wide as he could without hurting. After a few minutes I began to feel all on fire way down under my stomach. He kept doing it and making it worse. Norry could feel what was happening, so he let my lie back on my back and knelt on my outstretched hands so I couldn't sit up again but had to let Robert do exactly what he wanted between my legs. That made the fire worse than ever, then I started shaking like a fish on a dock, and all the fire was in once place, and he wouldn't stop being soft and wet on me, and going gently up and down, so I couldn't control what happened and I let him have what he wanted and just relaxed almost like I wasn't even there while it happened."

"Do you want to lie back on the bed? I'll try to make it happen."

"No. That was all I want. I like having you behind me and feeling your boner between my legs, and your hands feel really nice on me, especially the way you touch me, but that's all I want. Once was enough for cumming until I can spray like Norry did."

"Was he the next one?"

"No. Robert was. It sort of worked that he knew to make me cum first, because I didn't have sperm and could stay excited after it happened. But Norry was mature, and after it happened with him, he'd like lose interest and get cold for awhile, and he wouldn't want what Robert did, so we got back the way we were, and Norry and I masturbated Robert while Norry told us about what happened when his cousin Mace, who was nineteen, and his sister, Sharon, who was nine, came to live with them for awhile after there was an accident at his uncle's job.

"Do you want me to jerk you off while I tell you what happened?"

"Yes."

"Do you tell your partner before you cum?"

"Yes."

"Just say I'm', not it's', that's my only hang-up."

"Okay."

I just read back through the last few pages and decided to leave the inconsistencies in. As great a lesson as I've had in writing is reading some of the poorly written stories on alternative sites. Most of these, by the way, are on Nifty, because of their highly inclusive access. Badly written stories fall into two categories. First, are stories by very young writers and writers to whom English is a second language. These are often excellent, and, like the Creole dialect spoken here in the Caribbean, far more interesting and expressive than the same story would be narrated in academically correct language. The second group are harder to read, but they do teach how not to do it more precisely than how TO do it can be taught. I've actually winced aloud to see one of my own shortcoming in someone else's story, and tried not to repeat. Therefore, the inconsistencies stay, the student writer or editor is able to evaluate their impact, and, if Jimmy Reardon loses his little underpants twice, remember the Chinese tradition of including a flaw, a token of humility, in every work of art. (Of greatness flaws are sometimes made, for without defect there is no perfect. Mayo Tse-not.)

"Norris, who did all the laundry?" Mrs. Shillin asked.

"Mace did, Mom," the twelve year old said.

"I don't recognize my own basement. It's like a Proctor and Gamble ad down here."

"He just kind of likes to do stuff," the boy noted.

"Do you like having him here?" the woman asked, her tone engaged.

"He's not as dumb as a father, and he's not as stupid as a brother," the tall, slim boy with in impish expression and huge brown eyes allowed.

"High praise," his mother laughed, "almost mighty praise; you be careful or people will start teasing you."

"Someone has to be cool, or else how would we know who the geeks are?"

"And your cousin Sharon?" the mother asked, same tone.

"Mom, she shoots clay pigeons from the hip. She says if she was a boy she'd use a double-barreled twelve-gauge."

"How many does she get?" Karen Shillin asked.

"I guess maybe half."

"And you?"

"Sometimes a box, I guess."

"Now who's hip?" she teased, adding: "Since we're down here with nothing to do, we might as well talk, and I'm just in the mood to make it plenty embarrassing, not because I want to make you squirm, but because your cousin is, to put it mildly, rare; both of them are. They seem attracted to you, again, both of them. Mothers don't clue boys in very often, that's why god invented the world, but I did want to say that you are one brown-eyed, brown-haired beauty of a boy, and you're nicer than you are cute, and that if you feel the same attraction to Mace and Sharon as they seem to feel for you, that's fine with me, and would be fine with a lot of mothers, but not with others. Keep that in mind. I want you to hang out with them all you want, no restrictions or advice other than keeping your eyes and ears open. You're way smart enough to make your own decisions and draw your own limits, and, since you have to do it for the rest of your life, anyhow, starting with your cousins as a good option for lots of kids, and should be better for my number one and only quality-student, nice-kid, twelve year old."

"Mace, I had a talk with mom down in the laundry room," Norry said after knocking on the door of his cousin's bedroom.

"Do you want to stay for awhile and tell me about it?" the tall, athletic teen asked, putting his book aside and sitting up, offering his visitor a choice by waving at a chair and patting the side of his bed. Norry chose the bed and sat at the older male's right hip. "A long talk?" he prompted, seeing hesitation in his handsome young cousin's eyes.

"You know Mom," the boy said, "not too much in the way of words or time, but she said in not so many words that I have a crush on you, and you like me, you know, as a boy as well as a cousin, at least that was my interpretation, and I know she was right about the way I feel, and I thought maybe it would be real embarrassing, or maybe, you know, she was right and you did like me, sort-of really."

"From the first minute," the older cousin said. "Sharon, too. I mean we do a lot of the same kind of stuff at home you do; which is mostly read, but once in awhile she talks me into something a little different, a special project; not to put too fine a point on it, a pipe bomb, so I won't lose my childhood prematurely, and then I'd build her another doll house with more rooms and better furniture, and we'd take pictures of it with the video camera, so it wouldn't be lost forever."

"Trendy people call that `quality time'," the boy noted.

"If you tape the bomb going off at three hundred frames per second, and view it a thirty, the quality is surprising," the older boy deadpanned.

"How do you avoid shrapnel wounds?" Norry asked.

"Luck, and a double thickness of Plexiglas," the boy explained, "plus being reasonable about how close we get."

"Are we going to build one while you guys are here?" the younger boy wanted to know.

"Ah," the older boy said, "the doll house comes first. It's beyond Zen. Hundreds of hours of meticulous planning and work, first the drawings, then the house, then a shining star of a bomb, culminating in an ending fit to break the eardrums of a rocker, then start all over again with a bigger house, and, again, not to put to fine a point on it, edgier chemistry -- learning as we go, but not just retaining, building, advancing."

"If it was a club," the younger boy noted, "the champ would head SAC before he was thirty years old."

"Or build exquisite one-family homes," his cousin said.

"When do we start?" the boy asked.

"As soon as most of the distractions are harnessed," Mace said, "it's no good trying to eliminate them, so we pick a few, exercise them to the fullest, in lieu of all others, and get back to work. Houses and bombs, bombs and houses, ying and yang, with a bang which metaphysically cleanses us of all the sins we omitted during our patient and methodical undertaking. The bang is the spiritual, a chemical Christ, if you will, not absolving sin but rewarding lack of sin. You have to have an elastic brain to get around the whole of it, and, at the highest level, you find it doesn't make much sense, thereby fulfilling any desire for wisdom part and parcel of your search, because of the close parallel to be found in the life which begins anew with each flash of fire and clap of thunder, which reduces all to entertainment, with the obtuse, the theoretical, abstract, conjectural, spiritual, and the mystical joining omitted-sin in a way that makes your ears ring and your head ache from nitrate fumes. It's not exactly a Happy Meal philosophy, but is pretty trite and pre-packaged, nonetheless, and, frankly, if it wasn't for the bombs I don't think Sharon and I would spend two hundred hours building and furnishing a house that could barely fit in the back of a Subaru."

"It's different than school," Norry said.

"But not half as weird, you'll have to admit that," the older boy responded, "and we don't ditch or anything, we have our little world with each other and our sophisticated toys, so we march in step everywhere else, and, besides, if we couldn't trade for stuff at school, we'd have to spend a lot more time on each house."

"I guess I didn't think of that," the younger boy on the bed admitted.

"You don't have a sister like Sharon," the older boy said, "it was all her idea, in the first place. All the girls in kindergarten were trading dolls and doll stuff, and, the way she figured it, if there wasn't some kind of end to the trading, no one would buy new dolls and accessories, and the companies would go out of business, and there'd be no more dolls to trade. I was fifteen at the time, and she kind of looked up to me, I guess, so she explained the problem. I was reading the Greeks and their followers and looking for a doctrine free of any hint of religion or superstition, but the Oriental wasn't probably worth the time to study it, so she came to me, I guess you'd say, at the right moment, and we started on our first house using Popsicle sticks for joists and balsa and cardboard for everything else. It was crude, and we blew it up with a shamefully retarded device, but it was a start. If you want to build one with us, it'll be the seventh."

"How did you keep it secret from your father?" the younger male wanted to know.

"He's the one who made us use the Plexiglas," Mace said, "but otherwise he was cool about it. We weren't watching television and we weren't getting fat and he made us put our hands flat on the breakfast table every morning so he could count our fingers, but I think that was just teasing to make Sharon giggle."

"Now I know why Mom said `no restrictions' on hanging out with you guys," Norry noted.

"She must really trust you," Mace responded.

"She said I'd know where to set limits and draw lines, stuff like that," the younger cousin explained.

"There ARE limits to what we can do," the teen agreed, nodding, "how wide is your back door, for example; how far to we have to carry it to a safe place, all kinds of them, but they're just challenges and they help make our play useful by instilling life lessons as well as providing a philosophical end-game."

"It's sort of ultimate," Norry said.

"And then some," his cousin again agreed, "we miss television, I missed dating, we miss pizza and most of what's known as hanging out; we miss video games and the Net, chatting, downloading music, we miss attending concerts and events, theme parks, included; we go to few movies, fewer barbecues, and on no vacations, so the cathartic effect, as pieces fly fifty feet in the air, is important, but, there's something that's a lot more important, something that provides rewards along the way basing the nonsense of what we do in what is real and important, even enduring, and enough similar adjectives to supply the un-missed Miss Cleo for half an entire commercial."

"You're doing a manual?" Norry guessed. Liking the thought, he went on:. "It could even be a video, you know, take the dog by the collar and shake it. Instead of acting all girly and Jewish about bombing, show kids in livid detail. `The hills are alive with the smell of nitrates.' I'll bet no one would get hurt and suddenly everybody would have an outlet, just like you guys, for all the things they miss out on. Then they wouldn't miss them, because every boy would have the kind of alternative kids understand, so, not missing, they'd do just what you guys did, concentrate on something and do it over and over until they became wicked at it.

"It makes huge sense."

"We live in a democracy," the older boy said,. " If one party promoted it, and everyone thought, at the outset, it was worth a solid try, the opposing party would send urban lawyers in with graphic photos of the occasional accident victim, and the psychological value, since it doesn't photograph well in color, would be swept aside as immaterial. It's just fun for us. Entertainment with underpinnings, imaginary or otherwise. Most kids would rather eat than play with doll houses."

"I -- don't -- think -- so," Norry intoned.

"It is kind of weird," his cousin said, "to think, `What if he's right?' meaning you. We do have killer video. From Number Five on, the houses were I guess sort of masterpieces. The last one had over twenty rooms on three floors, weighed a hundred and two pounds, and splintered and flew apart so realistically we spent a week trying to figure out a way we could do a tornado instead of a bomb, but we couldn't even get a realistic hurricane or flood do to budgetary restraints, though, through a bit of luck, we were able to borrow a high-definition camera."

"It might not be commercial, but..."

"Not so fast," Mace interjected, holding up a hand. " There might actually be a way." He paused a moment, gathering his thoughts. "Security guards will soon amount to a swing vote in the hamlets. A venture such as Sharon's would amount to a full-employment guarantee, police and the major agencies, too. They could mandate it if they knew, and they hang out together sometimes, so it would be easy to spread the word."

"Blow one sky-high in a Winchell's parking lot," the twelve year old noted, "and you'd have to restrain the word."

"Bless my soul," quoth Mace.

Dave had seated himself on the carpet outside the cracked door of Lessen's room. Jimmy was a good story teller, so the master leaned against the wall, and indulged in an occasional smile at the lively interplay of his gang of two. He knew he'd end up right if he thought of it as a respite, so he tried not to, tried to just listen and not even let the most massive and extended erection of his life distract him. They were naked, Jimmy was jerking the older child off, and it was all happening hardly six feet away.

Might as well reprise Randy here, and perhaps even begin to fade Samantha out. He was over for a couple of hours. Fidel dropped by, then Elston and Tonton arrived for dinner before I chanced an opportunity with the twelve year old. My instinct tells me if Fidel and I had gone into the bathroom, he would have been happy to join us, and Fidel would have accepted his presence. Practicing what I preach; even over ninety-percent sure, I didn't suggest it and we had a nominal get-together. My plan is to let Randy come and go without play, unless he instigates it, then take him into one of the spare bedrooms, after he's stripped in the bathroom, turn out the lights, then lie him back and suck him for ten or fifteen minutes while I spread his thighs with my hands and molest him. When that happens, I'll bring up the subject of Fidel, and, if he's responsive, at a future time we'll use a candle so the boy can watch the teen ejaculate.

Meantime, as Samantha grows she begins to follow a common pattern of become more physically reserved, finding herself a big girl, and, for fifty-six good reasons, not wanting me. If she were developing positively in other ways; becoming more responsible and engaged in relationships with others, there'd be a heartache it watching her pull back and drift off. As it is, it's natural. I have to leave my fortune to someone, so it was worth a try.

An interesting thought passed through what passes for my mind the other day. What if Randy were a female? My immediate answer was so positive it made me wonder if I'm "bi", in the least. Cool. Preferable. Makes me very glad he's such an awesome and willing boy. And being a boy counts. Boys are better; freer, livelier, more fun, and better lovers. If my counselor, Jon, had been bi (maybe he was), I'll bet the sleekest actress in Hollywood couldn't make him cum in under a minute, four or five different times. If Jon and I had chanced to spend the night together, in private, experience tells me I could have brought him to a (possibly dry) climax as many as a dozen times, before we got some sleep. I guess it would be redundant to say "cool", again, but maybe the book is long enough to let it stand. So, I'd choose a boy, I'm glad he's a boy, yet being with him as a female would be the ultimate experience. If additional research proves such a dichotomy is the basis of schizophrenia, then I'll have made a comforting contribution to the science of psychiatry and not just wasted the day cranking out yet another novel. And, not to gild the lily, or anything, but what, on the other hand, if Samantha were a boy? This hits home hard enough that my only response is: "No way, Jose."

I think I'm being honest at pegging R.'s influence on my relationship with S. at zero. If she was developing in mundane ways and becoming more affectionate and receptive, she'd be my live-in choice, with Randy as a special friend. This is not happening, of and by its own accord, no outside influences one way or the other. As she changes from girl to woman, she's taking on an adult's interest in the negative, and even muted by the fact she's retarded, this is nothing for an artist to take lightly. Should I say This artist? I think it's more general; any man has to stomp and get his feet wet to excel creatively, and women, having not a philosopher amongst themselves in two-thousand years, instead find their identity by musing over muddy boots.

Randy's a good b-ball-handler, he's avid and attentive with my poor set of computer games, finishing one and improving his score before trying the next. He seems to do things deliberately, with completing them in mind, not sort of batting at them and expecting miracles, as a female tends to do. He has an instinct to take care, not be taken care of, and has twice volunteered to clean up for the cats. He's a bit young for Hell, to say nothing of the fact it's good for a god to visit the place on a daily basis, so I still go to the extreme when it comes to the dirty work.

Well, I was raving about Samantha as little as a few days ago, so it's Mrs. Gump's box of chocolates. I like to think I haven't changed, she has, distancing herself for whatever reason. The issue is complicated by the backhanded demands I place on her. If she doesn't want me, then I'm going to find (and may have already found, without looking an inch) someone else, and my money goes to that person, not her. This isn't prejudicial or punitive, but just how it is: free will, in both our cases.

My consistent issue is coming to grips with the fact I'm over a third of the way into a massive and miraculous novel, and simultaneously, day-by-day, and hour-by-hour, living a personal life parallel to and occasionally exceeding the fictitious accounts in the narrative. It amounts to writing the greatest novel while, simply by coincidence, living the greatest life. (I could write the novel without the harem, and would enjoy the harem if I were back driving the bus in South Central.) Again, the refrain is: Why me? The royal lineage, the staggering IQ, the limitless talent, the ability to work incessantly, the domestic pussy cat, all in one? My only redeeming human quality is arrogance. Without it, people would sniffle at my grave, and what kind of a gift is that for posterity? Of course, being arrogant when one is unarguably the greatest artist to ever live isn't being anything but honest, and this would presuppose a limited role for conceit in such a case. It gets a little Zen, but since it has to do with the psyche of a great player, maybe it should be included under the heading: "Thoughts Without Tracks". A maximum competence and enduring, virtuoso creativity leaving no room for conceit, or, no need for it? That is the question. Further, it could be pointed out that the thorny nature of the conceited blowhard protects his time in the studio, allowing the practitioner to humble himself by responding, with diligence, to the sighs and applause of generations yet unborn. And all this hoopla is related merely to the career. It doesn't even touch on what conceit and vanity might be excusable in a direct descendent of the grass-roots founder not only of The Minutemen, but the country and the entire revolutionary/democratic experience since 1775, as well as a world-class poet and philosopher, and, in significant addition, the most important man who ever lived, the developer and enabler of Bell Labs. The IQ was tested by mensa at four-hundred, but I took the test cold and could probably do better next time. And all backed up by a million published word. Nothing phony, nothing hyped, no cereal in the beef, no sawdust in the transmission. Why me? Why ALL the talent? Sure, in film there's some, but on the printed or electronic page? I mean to tell you. On top of it all is the speed, ten and fifteen thousand words a day; five times that of D.H. Lawrence, and he had editors. I've spent the whole day in one domestic retrace or another, and will still probably exceed five-thousand words before it's safe to shut off Sloggo. Of curse, I could cheat by getting back to the novel, but that would be a glaring inconsistency, because we're not in the novel, but rather an essay with narrative and dialogue off of some comment some character made about moving pictures; specifically, bunkered down in "Man Without a Face".

Would it be cheating to go back? Is it honor that keeps us one-on-one; a dedication to the well-being of the reader? Fatigue? Essays are a break in the pace, if no easier. Is that the rationalization? Any reluctance on my part to re-emerge in the story at hand could be attributed to any of the above, or it may be I'm just a coward with no love of kids with bombs.

"Before," Norry said after a pause, "you were alluding to some motivating force paralleling the pull of the bomb."

"Tell me, again, what your mom said," Mace responded, his voice thickening..

"That there are no restrictions on hanging out with you if you want me to," the boy responded.

"And she didn't know about our hobby, right?" the older male asked the boy seated at his right hip.

"I don't think so," Norry replied.

"But there was something, right? She sort of emphasized it, as if to say: `they're not perfect, but they're good enough.'"

"Yeah," the younger male responded, "it was like that. That there might be different things, but there were enough regular things so that, in sum, it would be cool, not a bummer."

"Okay," the older boy went on, "eliminate the doll houses and sophomoric drama connected with them, and add in the fact we do well in school, that we, in spite of our focus, have always had friends and done a small number of conventional things, so there's nothing odd; there is no alcohol, drugs, shoplifting, tagging, or other mischief going on in our lives and, with a little thought, you might come up with the Parallel Motivating Force, for lack of a better title."

Remember the urban legend of Babe Ruth calling a homer? I want to try it, too. I want to point to the bleachers and say: "Here it comes, duck.", and do it with a single line of dialogue; a screaming, five-hundred-foot whack. The line goes to Norry and reads as follows:

"I'd guess that it was Sharon, if she wasn't your kid sister."

Posted by Thomas@btl.net

xxx