by Alison Tyler
“Perfect,” I say. He puts the sneakers back in the bag. His luminous eyes shine like jet and he is looking at me, smiling happily as if he finds me beautiful. Shyly, I return his gaze and our eyes lock and hold in a warm embrace. I remember I have to pay him and get out the ten I have folded in my jeans pocket for this purpose and hand it to him. Once again our fingers touch and this time the heat that passes between us is even stronger, insistent, like the steam rising from a pot.
Just then, the bald Russian stomps in, carrying a bag from Forever Bagels up the block. I look down and the shoemaker turns away. “Das vadanya,” says the bald Russian, and then, more insistently, he says it again, “Das vadanya.” A few Russian words float up from the bottom of my consciousness. “Smirnoff, Stroganoff, Stolichnaya,” I say as I grab my sneakers and f lee the store.
Out on the street, I cradle the sneakers between my breasts. When I put up a hand to brush my unruly bangs from my eyes, my fingers smell like leather. I imagine I am dancing with the sexy shoemaker. I am wearing a strapless white dress with a wide skirt and the sneakers. His hand is firm on my waist as he whirls me around and round.
After I get home, I take the sneakers from the bag and handle them, knowing he touched them. I imagine his fine fingers clasping a silver knife, carefully cutting away the old worn sole with sure movements. I want those fingers on my back and pulling me to him with the same intensity with which he grips the knife. I want his big tool deep inside me. I am getting wet.
I kick off my shoes; take off my clothes, my fishnet tights, my bra and panties, and put them on the kitchen chair. Then I put on my sneakers because I know that he has held them in his hands. I lace them up and head into my bedroom, go to my bed and lie down on top of the covers. I think of his fingers, taking pride in their handiwork, proudly patting the soles of the sneakers. Then I see those fingers move up, brushing my ankles, stroking the muscles of my calves, holding my knees open. He parts my thighs, looks inside. He licks his lips at what he sees and then buries his mouth inside me. His supple tongue laces its way up to find my clit and then he is sucking me slowly, methodically, showing me the way a master cobbler works with extreme patience. My clit swells, throbs, my cunt quivers and my whole body shouts, Yes, yes, yes! My flesh softens, becomes more pliable. He can stretch me; mold me any way he wants.
He reaches up, and his hands envelop my breasts, his fingers rub my nipples, with the same rhythm with which he is sucking the tender button between my legs. I feel the quickening inside that means I am about to come. How I want him to fuck me! The metal buckle of his belt presses into my belly. Below it, through the fabric of his jeans I can feel something else, the solid proof he wants me.
I reach down, unbuckle the belt, fumble with his zipper and pull it down. But then I hesitate, shy about touching him. He helps, puts his hand inside and pulls it out. It is a deep purple color, and so long it reaches to my navel. He is uncut, my preference. When he leans his body on top of mine, his master tool, hard as steel, presses into my vulva.
It is only then I lean over and get my giant Blue Rabbit vibrator out of the drawer in my bedside table. I don’t need any lube because I’m so wet from my imaginings that my juice is flooding out of me, running down my legs. I lie on my back, put a pillow under my hips and close my eyes. The cobbler is standing over me, his pointy cock combing through my pubic hair. He is my prince who knows just how to find the way inside. My legs spread even wider. I flip on the switch to the vibrator, loving the sultry purr. Easily, it slides into me and I imagine my prince moving in me with a steady rhythm. The joyful friction between us makes sparks fly. I push the speed button on the vibrator up to high. The pulse between my legs quickens into a roar and then I am opening up, turning inside out, flooding with waves of bliss that carry me out to a calm warm sea.
I don’t know how long I drift there. My bladder is full and the dildo still inside me. Reluctantly I pull out the dildo, imagining it is his thumb sliding out of me. I hold it as I swing my legs over the bed and stand.
I dash out of the bedroom down the hall to the bathroom but am stopped short by the vision I see in the mirror on my bathroom door. An old hag carrying a brilliant blue sex toy, its bright, happy color a mockery. My legs are still shapely but my small breasts hang down, having lost all their bounce. What would the shoemaker think if he saw my body? Would he laugh, feel sorry for me? Maybe he is just being nice to an old lady? Maybe he looks at all women with desire no matter their age? Some men are like that. I know I’m driving myself crazy. I seem to be doing this a lot lately. At least he has inspired a delightful fantasy. I make use of the toilet and then, in the bathroom sink, I lovingly give the Rabbit vibrator a little bath. It will never laugh at me or mock me.
When I wake up the next morning, I feel loose and free. It’s been cold; a lot of rain; today is the first sunny day. The temperature check on my computer says 72 degrees, in April no less! If the polar ice caps continue to melt, maybe there will be no spring this year, but I’m in a springtime mood. Today, I will put away my winter clothes and get out my spring things.
I go to my closet, sort through my skirts, blouses and jackets. I decide to give away my old beige trench coat and get a new one, maybe in a flower pattern. I sort through the great pile of shoes in the bottom of the closet. I pick up one of my torn red leather pirate’s boots and see the shoemaker holding it, then, his fingers flashing, he uses a big pointy needle to sew up the rip in the side. As I put them back in the pile, I see a flash of silver, my dancing shoes.
I got them for five dollars at the Salvation Army years ago when I first moved to the neighborhood. They were black, lace-up vintage shoes with a low stack heel. As soon as I tried them on I knew they would be my dancing shoes. I wanted to make them dressier. I went up to Natasha Shoe Repair and got shoe spray paint and sprayed them silver.
I did the salsa in those shoes, the tango, lindy hop, waltz, rumba and the cha-cha-cha. I never lacked for partners and many were the nights I danced my way into a fine gentleman’s bed.
Now the shoes are worn and shabby. The silver paint is chipped off and the holes in the leather over the big toes seem to gape even wider than before. If anyone can fix them, my cobbler can.
I apply lipstick and fix my hair. I put on my favorite maroon velvet blazer. I wrap the dancing shoes in a bag and go up at noon. I hope the bald Russian will be out to lunch. I am in luck. He is playing chess at one of the tables outside at the Chess Classic Café, a few doors down from his store. He is so involved in his game, he wouldn’t notice if the entire Bolshoi Ballet whirled past.
I enter the store and ring the bell. My shoemaker seems to grin when he sees me. but maybe it is only my own wistful thinking. “Yes?” he says.
I feel embarrassed like a shy Cinderella who wants to run away. I try not to look at his crotch but am not successful. I take the shoes out of the bag and put them on the counter.
“Can you fix these shoes?” I ask him.
“Sure,” he says, “but why you paint them silver? I see they used to be black.”
I tell him they are my dancing shoes. “I wanted to make them special,” I say.
“How long you have these shoes?” he asks. I wonder if this is an oblique way of asking my age. I decide to go for broke and tell him the truth. “Twenty-five years,” I answer. His expression does not change. “You have good times in these shoes?” is his next question.
“Oh, yes,” I answer. “I love to dance.”
“Me, too,” he says.
Gold, On Snow
Janine Ashbless
You wouldn’t think, to see me crouched here among the rocks in my black rags musty from the damp, the hems heavy with mud, that I am a queen. I have made sure of that. I will not be recognized. My hair is white, my back hunched and my sunken mouth almost toothless—though my limbs are still strong, as I’ve had miles to walk to reach this place in the black heart of the forest. Not that anyone will see me, because I’ve made sure of that, too. Sprinkled wi
th fern seed, I will pass unnoticed unless I draw attention to myself, which at this moment I have no intention of doing. I’ve scrambled up the outside of the hollow limestone outcrop that serves my stepdaughter as a home, squeezed under the roots of a birch clinging to a cleft in the stone and positioned myself so I can look in through one of the window holes.
There she is, asleep. She looks so innocent, doesn’t she? But don’t be fooled; there is no innocence in her. She lies on a bed of bearskins, her head thrown back, one arm crooked over her eyes to ward off any sunlight that might creep into her stone house. Her long hair looks as glossy and black as split charcoal, even against the dark pelts. She’s wearing a dress of doeskin—very well made, I imagine, considering who she got it from, but laughably rustic.
No real peasant girl would be asleep at this time of day, not with the sun setting and the evening meal not yet prepared.
When I married her father, the girl was already notorious. Beautiful beyond the norm, she’d broken the heart and nerve of every page boy and stable lad and done the rounds of the squires; she was working her way through the grown men, those not wise enough to resist her games. Ungovernable, they called her; a sly and shameless tease. Or more candidly: the royal slut. They wondered why her father the king didn’t put a stop to it, but all he did was execute or exile any man he found to have succumbed to his daughter’s appetites. Nor did he seek to find her a husband and rid himself of the problem.
I tolerated it, more fool me. Newly married, I was not yet come into my full power over her father or the realm. These things grow slowly, like the roots of ivy that cling to a wall and work their way into the cracks, eating the mortar—until those roots are the only thing holding the wall together. I recognized in the girl the signs: the old blood burns hot in those of us who carry it. And I knew that it was not only her bad reputation that kept her in the parental home and not only her rank that protected her from punishment. She had, perhaps without knowing it, worked an enchantment that ensured the king kept her close and safe. So I tolerated her behavior for years, until the day I saw that she had turned her eyes upon her own father, my husband.
That was when I determined to do away with the girl.
Uncomfortable, I shift my withered body against the stone and glance about the clearing. It is tempting to accede to my impatience and take the opportunity now, while she sleeps and is alone. But I’ve learned to be more careful than that. I’ve come across her late in the day and I doubt she will be alone for much longer. She didn’t build this house herself—this parody of a human dwelling, carved from the living forest rock. And from what I saw in my mirror, her protectors are not to be treated with contempt.
Almost a year ago I picked a soldier with, I thought, the right temperament and told him to take her secretly deep into the forest, into that trackless gloomy labyrinth of needles and moss under the canopy that blocks all sunlight, and there cut out her heart. He failed. To mask his failure he brought me back the heart of a hind, and it was many months before I realized my error and extracted from him the true story.
Shadows are lengthening from the tall firs that hem this lonely clearing. Only the tops of the trees are still touched with light.
When my stepdaughter had realized what he intended, she’d wept and opened her clothes and begged him to let her live and promised him her neat little furrow or her sweet pale rump to plow in exchange for mercy. He’d laughed at that—Do you think I would have chosen a softer-hearted man for such a task?—saying that he could and would take those things just as easily after slipping the knife into her. Then she’d promised him the pleasure of her mouth, pleasure beyond imagining, just for a few moments’ delay. He’d fallen to that trap. I imagine she did keep her side of the bargain, at least for a little while; certainly he’d dropped his guard at some point.
She’d bitten off his ball-sac entire. I made him show me the ruination that she’d made of his manhood. And while he’d screamed and thrashed about on the ground she’d run off into the forest, naked and spitting out his blood and laughing.
I made the soldier hang himself, not for his failure—I am not unreasonable—but for having lied to me.
See her lying there, her lips still crimson as if painted with a man’s blood. But now she stirs and wakes, cocking her head as she rises, and she’s right: there is a noise, a faint sound as if of slow drums, thrumming through the rock to my fingertips. The girl stands and stirs the fire and lays on more wood, moves the pot of yesterday’s stew to the heat, then looks to the door expectantly. The soft leather of her dress, I note with some corner of my mind, clings to her form in a manner flattering her already obvious loveliness.
And here they come, her protectors. Her saviors. They haul themselves up from deep cracks in the earth, from barely visible fissures in the shadows of boulders, and slink toward the house. Despite my disguise I shiver. Ignorant people call them dwarfs, but that is not what they are. Their name in the old tongue is svartalfar, which means dark elf. Certainly they are shorter than most men, but no shorter than my stepdaughter. They are creatures of the deep places and of the shadows. They are the gray of snow that has been trampled underfoot, or black as the shadows under the unending firs or sheened with the oily colors of the dead water that collects among the needles in the hollows where trees have fallen. They dress in leathers that are crusted with dirt. Their faces are lean and hard, but their eyes shine with the colors of gems; blue like sapphires or green as emeralds or red as rubies. They are lithe in the body but muscular across the shoulders, almost top-heavy, from digging and from forge work. Because the svartalfar are artisans. They make objects of peerless cunning and craft, and they prize beauty above everything else in the world.
There are seven of them in all.
One by one they converge upon the house, upon my stepdaughter. I turn my gaze back through the window hole, to see what happens inside. It seems domestic enough at first. Each of the svartalfar goes up to the girl and looks her up and down, without touching or speaking, almost as if inspecting her. She stands demurely, her eyes downcast but glittering through her long dark lashes and the fall of her fringe. Then they turn aside and go about their tasks. Occasionally one will mutter to another, but they are otherwise almost silent. They light lamps and set them about the center of the room, they clean the tools they have brought home. The wiriest of them stirs the cooking pot, then he chops up and adds ground-elder and a brace of rabbits that have been hanging behind the door. He is the cook; there seems to be no question of the girl doing any chores. When she has been looked over by each of her seven hosts she simply sits again and waits to be fed.
I ignore the insects that whine in my ears as the world darkens at my back. I am all patience. Haven’t I been patient many years? I watch as they eat their stew and lay the bowls aside. Then the girl lifts her eyes to the oldest, broadest and most knotted of the svartalfar. He nods, and two of the others hurry to take an iron chest from the shadows and lay it before him. From his belt he brings out a key upon a thong, and unlocks the chest, setting back the lid.
It is full of gold. Not coin, but jewelry of extraordinary delicacy and beauty. The girl stands. See how the tip of her tongue wets her plump berry-colored lips: she is trembling with anticipation. She moves into the center of the room, the circle formed by the svartalfar on their stools. Then one of them, his eyes the yellow of topaz, comes forward and unlaces her dress, dropping it to her feet then helping her step out.
Skin as white as snow. It is very nearly no exaggeration; in the lamplight she seems to glow. I squirm with envy and with trepidation; the blood of the ljosalfar must run strong in her, and if the svartalfar have given the world wonders then the light elves have bequeathed it witchery. She is absolutely beautiful. Perfect breasts, twin-tipped with pink. Perfectly curved hips. Perfect, flawless thighs. She is as smooth as marble taken from a riverbed, as a polished moonstone, as new-fallen snow. The only colors about her are in the soot-black hair upon her head, her gleaming
dark eyes, her blood-red lips. I hear the svartalfar sigh.
They dress her from the treasure box. They come forward all at once, and work with the patient care of true craftsmen, neither getting in each other’s way nor fumbling, their dark hands delicate and sure on her pale skin: a pair of elaborate earrings, filigree greaves that embrace her shins and calves, wristlets that attach to finger rings by a web of golden links, spiraling armlets. They catch up her hair in a crown of gold lace and drape her cheekbones in a mask of finely pointed mail. Then a collar of gold, and chains that hang down from it to rings that go through her nipples, pulling them up. Rings through her labia and her clitoris. She does not flinch; the invisible holes in her flesh must be old, and she well used to the jewelry. Her whole body is hung with arcs of delicate gold chain, pinned to her flanks by fine wires. Filigree wings attach flat to her shoulder blades. A plug is inserted deep between the snowy globes of her bottom and she bends and takes it with equanimity: when it is in place a gold tail stands in a curve like a cat’s behind her, gleaming in the light of the fire.
See how they admire their own handiwork when they are done, standing back to revel in the full effect? They love artifice and they love beauty; she is now the perfect combination of both. Her lips curve with satisfaction under her chain-mail half veil. She runs her hands gently, gently down her own body, plucking at the wires that pierce her flesh, circling her breasts and hefting their orbs to make the pendant beads dance. She rolls her rear to make her tail twitch. She shimmies her hips. She loves her own body, dressed only in gold. She loves what they have made of her: a pagan idol.
