I slide out into position.You flex and choose a posturethat prepares you for coition;
selecting (from six) the one aperture,that carries the sweet reek of power,that almost-rotting allure,and open it wanton wide. Your flowerof wet flesh puckers and throbs. A drop spatters me. I tongue it and taste the sour
invitation and hunger to fill upyour hunger. Now give me that small sign for us to merge and meet. The very topof your eyestalk grows rigid. I align tentacle to flower, concentrate, struckwith your hungry beauty. Then intertwinesix and six, and hear you start the long suck from deep inside me to deep inside you.If humans only knew the one true fuck
we could talk to them. But what humans do is feel each other’s bodies and excretedumb juices. Not like the way I flow to you.
Hard to sayif they can know each other well at all without this flow. They stand and callout noises based on patterns in their minds.Hardly ever taste or smell. And just plain blindto DNA.
The Dream-Catcher
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific and respected writers in the United States today. Oates has written fiction in almost every genre and medium. Her keen interest in gothic and psychological horror has spurred her to write dark suspense novels under the name Rosamond Smith. She has written enough stories in the genre to have published five collections of dark fiction—the most recent being The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense and The Corn Maiden—and to edit American Gothic Tales. Oates’s has won two Bram Stoker awards, for her short novel Zombie and her short story collection The Corn Maiden, and she has been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association.
Oates’s most recent novels are The Gravedigger’s Daughter, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, and Little Bird of Heaven.
She teaches creative writing at Princeton University. With her late husband, Raymond J. Smith, she ran a small press and literary magazine, The Ontario Review, for many years.
AS SOON AS SHE saw it, she knew she had to have it.
There amid the finely wrought silver and turquoise jewelry, the hand-tooled leather goods, glazed earthenware pottery and baskets and coarse-woven fabrics in the Paiute Indian Reservation gift shop at Pyramid Lake, Nevada, the curious item seemed to leap out at Eunice’s eye: no more than four inches in diameter, an imperfect circle made of tightly woven dried vines or branches threaded with small filmy feathers. An artifact of some kind, exquisitely fashioned, its colors, like most of the colors of the handmade items in the shop, predominantly brown, beige, black. Eunice found herself staring at it, and there, suddenly, it lay in the palm of her hand—virtually weightless. Remarkable! Dream-Catcher the printed label explained. It was so dry Eunice feared it might crack in her fingers. When she lifted it to examine it more closely, noting how the interior of the woven branches was a net, or web, braided with leather thread, in the center of which a tiny agatelike stone dully gleamed, the filmy feathers came alive, stirred by her breath. The feathers, too, were beautiful, finely marked, streaks and speckles of dark brown like strokes of a watercolorist’s brush on a fawn-colored background.
Seeing Eunice’s interest in the dream-catcher, the Indian proprietor of the store explained to Eunice that it was a gift given only to those who were “much loved”—especially to be hung over a cradle or a crib. “The spiderweb inside catches the good dreams, but the bad dreams—no. Guaranteed!” He called out affably to Eunice, as if speaking to a child. Presumably a Paiute Indian, he was a man of vigorous, muscular middle age, who wore a faded black T-shirt, faded jeans, and a hand-tooled leather belt with a brass eagle buckle; his graying black thinning hair was caught in a loose, careless ponytail that gave him a disheveled yet playful look. His forehead was veined and knobby—scarred?—as if vexed with thought and the voice of exaggerated good cheer in which he spoke to Eunice, as to other customers, verged on mockery. From an exchange Eunice had overheard between him and a previous customer she gathered he was a Vietnam veteran. Yet he managed to smile at most of his customers as he rang up their purchases; he certainly smiled at Eunice.
“Yes ma’am!—the good dreams are caught for you,” the Indian said, handing over Eunice’s fragile dream-catcher in a paper bag, “—and the bad dreams go away. You hang it over your bed, O.K.?—even if you don’t believe, something will happen.”
“Thank you,” Eunice said. “I’ll do that.”
Eunice was not so young as she appeared, but with her pale, faded-gold hair and her smooth, fair skin and large, intelligent gray eyes she was an attractive woman, and she was alone. She smiled at the Indian proprietor though seeing that his smile held no warmth. His lips were drawn back tightly from discolored, uneven teeth, and his eyes, agate-shiny, recessed beneath his blemished forehead, were fixed upon her insolently. As if to say I know you. Even if you don’t know me. Eunice, who was not accustomed to being treated impolitely, still less rudely, maintained her poise, and her forced smile; leaving the store, she felt the man’s gaze drop to her ankles and rise rapidly, assessingly up her slender figure. She did not glance back when he called after her, “Come back again soon, lady, eh?” with exaggerated good cheer.
Even if you don’t believe. Something will happen.
When Eunice returned to Philadelphia, to her Delancey Street brownstone, she impulsively fastened the dream-catcher to the foot of her bed, and lay down to sleep. Exhausted from the plane flight, her brain assailed by images, impressions. Her twelve-day visit to the Southwest, to Nevada and Arizona, was the first extended vacation she’d taken in years. How vivid, many of its moments!—the ceramic blue sky, the extraordinary complex, ravaged-looking beauty of the mountains, the dun colors, shimmering salt flats, whitish silence of Death Valley… Yet, travel itself fatigued her, and bored her. There was no personal identity to it. No sense of mission.
Eunice was thirty-seven years old, unmarried, vice provost at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. Her Ph.D. was from Harvard; her dissertation, subsequently published as a book, was titled Aesthetics and Ethics: A Postmodernist Debate. Early on, as a girl, Eunice had hoped for a life that would be a public life and not a domestic life, involved in some way with the arts. She had been the only child of older parents, her father a popular philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and she had a memory of herself as a shy, precociously intelligent child, pale hair hanging heavily about her narrow face. The odd mixture of vanity and insecurity of the “special” child. Yet, disconcertingly mature as a young girl, Eunice seemed hardly to have grown much older in adulthood—a common phenomenon among the precocious. Now in young middle age, she still retained a slender, lithe girlishness; her attractive face unlined, her manner cheerful; she possessed an air of innocent authority that suited her as a professor at Swarthmore, and subsequently as an administrator there, and elsewhere. Her reputation among her professional colleagues was for exceptionally fine, detailed work; she was prized, if perhaps sometimes exploited, for her generous, uncomplaining good nature. It was said of her, not unkindly, that Eunice Pemberton lived for her work, through her work, in her work. If she had a personal life, it was kept very private. If she’d had lovers, she never spoke of them.