Armpit
I start with a fan letter. It has nothing to do with the main part of the submission, but nothing to do with, is something I think I do quite well.
Dear Peter Pickles,
I really don't like most of your writing. I think you try to write too fancy. It just bores me. It did give me a chuckle that you named your last story Tufts. Tufts is pubic hair, right? What you going to name your next story. Armpit?
—Jake M.
Eyes Open / Maybe Waterloo
Clouds filled the sky above the outskirts of Ao Nang and I flashed on their near cover of blue as I felt the brush of one of her Scotch breasts as we lowered to sit on the shirt I had discarded so that we might be together on the early
morning sand.
We were side to side. Thigh to thigh. She turned her head to me. "I know you're married, Lawerence. You don't wear one, but I saw the ring on her."
She had seen my Filipina at the pool and though not introduced had apparently seen at a glance the gold of indenture. She said, "That's ok. I think you're gorgeous."
I said nothing.
The weather was a little sticky and I could have used a pha yen to cool my face and desire.
She told me to close my eyes, and then bent and applied her lips upon mine. I felt the kiss electric.
Slip and slide have all the press but the intercourse of a kiss has its own coil, somehow more private and intense, and its spring a force of other moments such as adolescent tippings, and in current tactile, I felt the slight force of
her pull, and the sweetness of toothpaste, and the dance of her wet tongue touching mine.
My eyes opened. She was smiling.
The rain began then.
"We better go," I said. (Better than losing it and coupling on a beach of regret.)
—
We drove back on her rented motorcycle and I told her to stop and drop me off at the like 7 Eleven small market in town. I saw my friend Billy sitting out front on one of those white plastic chairs drinking beer. He was quite good at
drinking beer, and did so each morning, and later in the afternoon. He was originally from Manchester and lived the easier life here.
I went inside, got my own quencher, and sat with him. "Your shirt's all wet, Yank. Got caught in the rain, eh?" He liked to call me Yank, knowing where I was born, and then moved, and naturalised. He sometimes called me
Rebel.
Billy's of a type common: Brits around the globe scattered by the gloom of the mother island. He has told me he makes a fine living with the computer, buying and selling stocks. In my inherited snobbery I am skeptical, by his accent
and old age, and suspect the secured monthly of the pensioner. It is fine to sit with him and drink and joke and talk football and the botch of politicians; and to sour myself with the smell of lager to masquerade to my wife any smell of floating
perfume from a beach encounter.
Frequently one of those small buses passes and stops and picks up a passenger quickly and then continues on. It is not like Bangkok where the bigger transports bustle and are stuffed with the tired. The dogs of Ao Nang seem rested and
less hungry. Their eyes rove slower as they saunter along the ocean road and are not nervous and hungry and flickering like the soi wild ones of the big city.
Ao Nang is a tourist town and has its attractions. Amid the cheap souvenirs are some true art if you look closely. It has the imitation foreign foods but also the rich fish and home dishes. Most of all, it is an opening to the islands
and routes easily reached.
And at the moment, it is home to dangers to my marriage in the form of an athletic lass just university passed interested in vacation sexsation with a married man a decade older with a committed case of erectus to the cockle when around
her. Possibility to the femme-sanuk, but to me, with a first drink, flow down to Songkran.
HOME INVASION
When I walked in the hotel room my Filipina welcomed me with a silent smell. I knew what she was doing, but the molecules from the beach kiss had withdrawn and I was safe.
Soon we were on the bed. Isn't it odd that a previous swoon with a lady not your wife can stimulate later fxxxing with your legal femme.
The race started touch. Skin swimming. Strokes increasing. Dipping towards paradise and then into my mind a pixel of betrayal: flash of the kiss of lust upon the sanded ground.
—
When she had dropped me off earlier she had said she would be later at the swimming pool.
I had not gone. Before my wife and I had left the room for a day trip to a thousand steps up to a Buddha, I had ventured out onto the small balcony of our room, which offered a view when focused of the pool. I looked and saw there down
the white back of the kiss maiden with the red fire of her hair.
I went back into the room. The swimming pool was left without my entrance that day.
___
In the early morning my eyes opened and I heard crickets and other insects and a knock.
I left the silk skin of my wife next to me and in only underwear went to answer. I opened the door and saw her smiling with her hair flowing. I remember being startled by the brightness of the red, and then feeling panic.
Stickman's thoughts:
Panic indeed!