by Paul Dueweke
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Martha’s Family
Elliott peddled the dimly lit streets with an impotent headlight challenging the obscurity ahead. The beacon could barely sire a shadow. Elliott’s eyes probed the somber light, searching for a course through the confusion. But the greater confusion was one of feelings not shadows, of exhumed passions not exacting passages. His progress was slowed more by a reeling soul than by any unseen peril. Images filled the darkness ahead with laughing teeth, blonde hair falling over bare shoulders, and sanguine nipples pressed between famished lips. The images were alien, impressionistic. They could only be inventions. He had stumbled upon an oasis and feared that his interminable desert had created a mirage conceived in desire.
Maybe Guinda’s forest green dress with the single button undone had transported him to some dream world, a soap opera where that button had been a subtle invitation. In that world, such incidents led to cryptic flirts and double entendre, then to passionate touches seasoned with frenzy. But tonight wasn’t like that—was it? Could it have been real? And kissing Guinda had not been the harbinger of something greater. It was one with what followed, an essential element of passion. One flowed into the other like dew condensing from a summer fog.
Would reality deny him this? He and Guinda were separated by chasms of reality.
Tonight, however, he had become a dream, a passion perfected. He had lingered in the soft flesh of a goddess beyond reach. But he’d somehow reached her. She beckoned him to her where she molded a man who had never existed before. It happened as naturally as the sun fondles the earth, and the earth invites the moon. He dared not fear that it was a fantasy, or it might be.
He stopped to clear his mind, to banish the images, yet begging for their reinstatement. Tonight’s journey home would have to be accompanied by these cherished ghosts. Elliott would have to rely on reflex.
