Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms

by Chuck Austen

  “He’s alive,” Boone said, warmly. Lovingly. “That son-of-abitch!”

  “Mayor Boone,” I said, “Your limo wasn’t an old car. How did it get through the hole?”

  “An old car?” he said with the same, flea-circus on my face expression he’d worn earlier. “You don’t need an old car. You need lead. Lead-based paint—which they no longer use on current cars, so I suppose I can see your confusion, somewhat—and in significant quantities to hold the rift open.” He looked at me and laughed, amazed at my ignorance. “Old car,” he sneered. “How would the age of an automobile have any relevance in this kind of situation?”

  How would anything have any relevance? We’re talking about extra-dimensional nudist colonies, and you’re looking for reason?

  Whatever, old man.

  I ran to the back of the advertising truck and retrieved the coiled rope I’d seen Sophie and Morgan rutting on earlier, then grabbed the piece of limousine trunk that had sheared through the billboard, took the hook we used to lower ourselves out the convention suite window from Wendy, and ran back to the edge of the hole to stand beside Wisper. Just being near the dimensional hole with the trunk piece was already causing the sky to roil once more with clouds and light and sound.

  Encouraged, I tied the hook to the rope, swung a few times, and tossed it into the limbs of a large oak whose branches hung out majestically over the road, just above the now slightly glowing dimensional rift. It hooked a branch on the first try.

  Karma. Kismet. The Law Of Attraction.

  “Take off that shirt,” I told Wisper.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and did so gladly.

  I tugged the rope hard.

  The actual rope, oh you of the dirty mind.

  It seemed to be safely secure, so I held out an arm to my one, true love.

  “Are you sure about this?” she asked.

  “As sure as I am of you and me, and how happy we’ll be for the rest of our lives.”

  “Sooooo…not very sure,” she said, and laughed.

  Aaaah, that magical sound.

  I laughed with her. “Got any better offers, today?”

  She lost her smile and studied me with intense emotion.

  “There are no better offers,” she said with profound sincerity, then leaned in and kissed me passionately.

  “Ready?” I asked her.

  She nodded, and I tugged once more on the rope to test its strength as she leaned in and kissed me sweetly on the cheek.

  “For luck,” she said, and I felt an odd sense of déjà vu. “Thanks,” I told her. “But if you turn out to be my sister in the third movie, I’m gonna be pissed.”

  She laughed again, and with that I held her as tightly as my minimally exercised arms would allow—then just a little tighter—and leaped off the edge of the asphalt and into the blazing maw of clouds, and lightning, and rain.

  In case you’re wondering, I became a television producer.

  I got the idea from the video of Mervin and me. If people would pay money for that…

  I started small at first, buying the rights to the nudist dimension soap opera, Warm Sun Over Port Charles, which I renamed Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms, rewrote a bit, dubbed slightly, and added footage to, in order to make it more ‘textile-world’ oriented. I’d read somewhere about someone who had done the same thing with a kids’ Japanese action show and made a bundle. So I figured, why not me?

  I sold it to Starz as a soap opera set in a nudist colony. The greatest, most expansive, most elaborate nudist colony anyone in that world has seen outside Cape d'Agde, France.

  Given that the acting was really excellent, the actors themselves gorgeous to look at and constantly naked, it became an instant cult hit that draws nearly two million viewers every night. More if you consider the after-premiere fans who watched it on Tivo, DVD, or iTunes downloads.

  I also took a hint from Mayor Boone and created my own comics line because—for some reason—I still love them. I’d had enough of superheroes, though, so I created something with greater personal meaning for me: an ongoing comedy series about some idiots who get stuck in a nudist colony. It’s called Green Valley and it centers on a rich loser, a clueless comic collector, and a conservative minister. Oh, and I threw in a black stripper just to be ridiculous. Not that something like that could ever happen in real life.

  Green Valley spawned an entire line of spin-offs about naked people and the wacky situations they often get themselves into: Spoodgie and His Frat House Pals, (I never said they were intellectual) Jezzebelle, Nikki The Nude Model, Nyna The Naughty Nudist, (alliteration is fun and easy!), and one superhero book called I Love A Girl In Tights about horny teenagers who dress up and don’t fight crime.

  I then took the money from these and other projects I’d sold back on my world and started using it to capitalize original material here in Nekkid Bottoms.

  Er…I mean Nikkid Bottoms. Wisper hates it when I do that, almost as much as she hates the way my artists draw all the women with big tits. Comic book guys. What can you do? It’s in the blood.

  Wisper and I had our occasional difficulties, of course, but she learned to trust that I wouldn’t backslide, and I now actually prefer to be naked—when it’s warm—and have stopped being an embarrassment to her family. Well, her father anyway, doorstop man from Nuckeby’s. Her mother accepted me almost instantly.

  Wisper, in turn learned to stop running, went back to college and got a degree in history, specializing in nudism and its historical trends. She now teaches at Nikkid Bottoms Community College and frequently gets hit on by her young students. I visit her often at lunch.

  Wendy and River continue to be an item, and I’m continually amazed at how compatible they are. It’s fun to see her boundless, sexual energy so focused on someone other than me, and River certainly enjoys being the target of her unbridled lust.

  Morgan had to do some Nikkid Bottoms community service, and a little jail time for his ‘wandering hands’ bit on the auburn-haired stunner from the beach—for which I acted as witness for the prosecution—as well as take an online course in sensitivity training. But I think we all know how that turned out. He and Sophie also broke up, as expected, but she still occasionally has sex with him, so he doesn’t actually mind.

  Once the road in both dimensions was repaired and Reverend Winterly worked out the supposed attempted child-molestation thing, he began to make regular trips to our naked shores, got himself into fighting shape, gradually grew less stern, and although I’ve yet to see him naked, I’m fairly sure Reverend Summersby has.

  Woodruff never left. He took the cue from Homer and got comfortable almost immediately. In short order he found a nice, older lady, who was neither revolted by, nor terrified of, the thing that lived between his legs surviving on a regular diet of birds and small rodents. Not surprisingly, she was a direct descendant of Homer himself.

  Washburne, apparently, came back into town immediately after the car-blowing-up incident and spent a lot of money in a very short time on some frivolous things. Then he got word that we—and his father—had made it back in spite of him, and he quickly disappeared. No one’s seen hide or hair of him since.

  Good riddance I say, especially if he stays gone and doesn’t come back with guns.

  Oh, and no one knows what happened to Mindie. She’s eluded the police and anyone else who’s gone looking for her for over a year now. I can only assume she’s still living in the woods somewhere, and in the stories parents tell their children at night to scare them into behaving.

  If you had happened by the Nikkid Bottoms First Methodist Church on Saturday morning, June the sixth, you would have seen a sign out front that read, in white letters on black:

  The Wedding of

  Corcharan Wopplesdown

  and

  Wisper Nuckeby

  And just beyond that sign, you would have spotted several men, about half wearing tuxedos, while the other half wore ties.

  Just ties.

/>   You also might have seen my Aunt Hyapatia, and her husband Bernard, as they walked up to River Nuckeby and witnessed her nearly pass out with a combination of giddiness and renewed, postmenopausal lust as he took her arm and asked her the question every man asked each of the newly arrived.

  “Friends of the bride, or of the groom?”

  She waved her arms to indicate her rather puritan dress, shoes, and old-lady ankle-stockings. “You have to ask?” she purred.

  As he guided her in, she ogled his substantial member, rippling muscles, and bare behind rather shamelessly, and smiled the smile of a woman expecting, imminently, to drink from the fountain of youth.

  Uncle Bernard seemed not to notice, or more accurately, to care, as he followed them in through the church doors.

  Within the hour, once inside, you would have seen a church divided into two equal halves. On the left, a set of pews for the uncomfortably clothed, and on the right, a set of pews for the comfortably nude—each side taking occasional glances at the other in either amazement, horror, or delight—and often various combinations thereof.

  At the front of the church, once everyone had been seated, you could have watched my brothers and Morgan as groomsmen in their freshly pressed tuxedos paying no attention whatsoever to anything other than the naked bridesmaids standing opposite them. Their mouths and eyes hung open so widely they looked like a display case of elegantly dressed fish.

  Opposite the men, you would have undoubtedly noticed the aforementioned maids—Sophie and Ms. Waboombas included—as they stood quietly and beautifully, their faces framed beneath the broad brims of dainty, veiled, hats. In their attractive, delicately gloved hands, each woman cradled bouquets of red and white roses accented with baby’s breath. Their lovely feet were adorned with high-heels, the straps of which wound provocatively up their calves almost to the knee, while the rest of their bodies remained ornamented only with the gifts God and/or genetics and Doctor Pflemmel had provided them.

  Had you been studying the maids, you would also have seen that even Mimsi, who Wisper had graciously included as one of her coterie, had gone native, and didn’t seem bothered by all the male attention in the least—possibly because she was getting so much more notice from a rather stunning woman in the third row.

  For the men, this must have seemed to them what it would be like living in the Playboy mansion—or even better—since they didn’t have to compete with an aging Hugh Hefner in his robe and slippers, carrying a seemingly endless supply of lotion bottles. The looks on their faces said bliss, coupled with rapture, wrapped in a blanket of joy, and I imagine they intended to make the most of it at the wedding banquet afterwards.

  Fortunately, none of the ladies seemed to mind.

  “I could tell they were made for each other the minute Wisper started talking about him,” Petal, the maid of honor, said, barely pausing to catch her breath. She might have been speaking to my brother Daniel, my best man, across from her. But it could have been anyone she was talking to—or no one. “There was just something in her voice, and I would know, because every man in town has always thought she was sooooo pretty, and been after her like ants on cookies at a picnic, and since we used to share a room together when we were little, she would tell me all the time everything she felt about every one of them, and it wasn’t until she met Corky that I realized, ‘wow, this one doesn’t sound like a total jerk’, and we would lie there at night, and she would be talking about him, and I would be talking about this guy I knew from school who was kind of cute, and I’d be disappointed as we masturbated that her guy was getting her so much more excited than mine was getting me…”

  Daniel nearly fainted before the ceremony and had to be supported throughout by Morgan.

  Had you been at the chapel, that day, no matter how hard you looked, you wouldn’t have seen Grandfather on either side of the aisle, since he had declined to attend. But of greater importance to me, Helena and Pjuter were there, seated happily on the bride’s side so as to be, as Homer Nikkid would have wanted it, comfortable. Even Mervin Wosserman had come, sitting on the groom’s side with Mrs. Abrososa and one of her many male children; one that, at nearly forty, had not yet married, nor had children, nor ever considered same, if you get my drift.

  Had you come, as so many did, that day, and perhaps arrived a little late, you would have walked up the aisle, between the clothed, and the unclothed, toward the altar and seen Wisper’s fabulous, naked behind standing nervously beside mine as we faced both pastors, Winterly and Summersby—he clothed, she unclothed—each reading out their individual sections of the marriage ceremony.

  “Do you,” Summersby said, finally nearing the end of the ritual, “Corcharan Wopple-see-down…”

  “Whoop-uls-duhn,” Wisper and I quietly corrected simultaneously, then smiled at one another. “Jinx, you owe me a coke,” Wisper said.

  “Oops,” Summersby said, looking genuinely embarrassed. “We went over it a hundred times and I still screwed it up.”

  “You’re going to have to get used to that,” I told my future wife.

  “I look forward to it,” she replied and smiled, reaching out to squeeze my hand with hers, which I dutifully squeezed back.

  “Don’t let go of it this time,” she said.

  I told you I’d be paying for that until the day I died.

  If you had made it only to the very end of the service, you would have heard Pastor Summersby ask me if I would take Wisper, then heard Pastor Winterly ask Wisper if she would take me, and you would have heard each of us—as though there was no better moment in our lives—sigh out that single word, “yes.”

  And then you would have seen us kiss—warmly—deeply— lovingly.

  Bloop.

  Damn.

  And you would have heard everyone in the church either gasp, or chuckle, or both.

  “Well,” Wisper said, smiling down at it, then back up to me. “Let’s go do something about that.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  And so, we did.

  Later that evening, Mayor Boone, sitting by himself in bed— naked, pale, reading a Scientific American article about hyperspace and pretending to understand—was trying hard not to think about what Wisper and I were doing at that particular moment, when suddenly, out of the dark and the silence that his home had lately been filled with, he heard the faraway tinkling sound of breaking glass somewhere on the ground floor below.

  Chilled and terrified, he grabbed the bat he always kept at hand since Washburne had gone off, slipped into his long-dead wife’s fluffy, pink slippers, and moved slowly down the stairs, creaking that damned third one more than he had intended to, and paused. Waiting.

  No one seemed to hear.

  After a few deep breaths, he finished descending and crept around the corner of the foyer, heading toward the dim, moonlit kitchen. His heart skipped a beat, and his breathing accelerated when he saw a shadow flit past the window above the sink, heading in the direction of the knives, forks, and other sharpened instruments.

  Suppressing his fear and burying it beneath mounting anger, and a creeping sense of violation, he raised the bat over his head and moved quietly through the archway that opened into the kitchen from the dining room. His heart pounded like the deposit-covered piston of a car that doesn’t use the right fuel additive, and nearly seized when he heard a rubber seal break and watched light slowly, insistently, spread outward from the opening of his refrigerator door.

  He was struck to the core at whom the light revealed.

  A woman. A stranger. Searching for food.

  Not Washburne.

  Mayor Boone reached for the nearby switch and ignited the overhead recessed lighting, flooding the room with illumination and momentarily blinding the lady, who shielded her eyes and winced at its intensity.

  The uninvited guest stood, slowly, and turned to him with no apparent fear, shame, or concern, continuing to chew on whatever she had taken from his fridge. As she looked him over, taking in his nak
ed, aging physique, and poofy, pink slippers, she took another bite and chewed deliberately, almost defiantly.

  For a long moment they stared at one another in silence.

  She was dirty, smallish, and thin, but tough looking, rugged, and tan. She wore nothing more than smears of mud, and a revealing, makeshift bikini fashioned from what appeared to be wet, pungent, animal skin. Her hair was wild and filled with bits of dried leaves, grass, and twigs, and she smacked her lips as she finished the piece of what the mayor now saw was this evening’s brisket, tossing the bare bone back over her shoulder and into the sink.

  As Boone stared in awe, she grabbed another hunk of meat from behind the door she still held open and ripped away another, brazen bite.

  Slowly, apparently certain now that Boone was no threat, she let her eyes wander around, and over the opulence of the kitchen, taking in its expensive cutlery, cookware, and furnishings with practiced, discerning eyes.

  “So,” she said at last, “You’re rich.”

  Boone stared a moment longer, then shook his head to loosen the gears.

  “Yes,” he said, and suddenly got nervous, squeezing the bat a little tighter. “You want money?”

  The woman smiled and ignored his question. “You single?”

  “I…what?” Boone asked, slowly, confused, and unsure where this was going. “I’m…yes. My wife died…many years ago, and I have a son, but…well…he’s…eh…moved away.”

  “Ah,” the woman said, smiling. She tossed the second bone backward, without looking, into the sink, then wiped her greasy fingers on her enormous breasts, breasts Boone kept glancing down at with obvious interest—trying not to ogle, but failing miserably.

  Eventually, she held out a marginally cleaner hand for him to shake.

  “My name’s Mindie,” she said. “I’m single, too.”

  If you enjoyed this book, and we’re assuming you did

  since you got this far without dustbinning the thing,