EROTICA VEGETAL by Lee Ann Kirkpatrick She stopped. She had entered the damp and heavy silence of the swamp. Listening--with her ears, her skin, her mind--she searched for him. In the time it took to fill her lungs with tepid air and release an anxious sigh, he surrounded her, warming the air around her and the ground beneath her feet. For a moment, she forgot what he was . . . and was not. She felt him entering her, changing her, offering himself to her in the only way he knew. She longed to transcend the limits of her physical form, to merge with him in the deepest and farthest sexual netherlands of the psyche. She knew he expected her to do that. She had given him every sign that she was willing. "But no, wait," she signaled silently. "That is not enough." Tightening, as though constricting a physical orifice, she slowed the penetration that had already begun. He felt her resistance, and he stopped. She had laid before him needs he could not satisfy. Or could he? Did he really know the limits of his power? Could he give her what she desired, or what she would desire if she knew what it could be? A shift was in order. He shifted. He, too, could explore the unknown. I will take all of her, he thought, and give to her all she needs. Slowly, without letting go of her completely, he merged back into the moist, fragrant, life-teeming swamp from which he had come. Drawing from fluids and tissues, from warmth and darkness and light, from the heights of the swamp and its depths, he changed. The hidden, separate, life-giving metabolic pathways of all the living creatures slothfully cycling here without end arranged themselves within and around him as never before. When he was ready, he called to her. "Come and lie with me," he said, in a voice she felt but could not hear. The voice seemed to touch and commingle with her skin and hair. She knew him, she desired him. Yet, she was fearful. What did he mean to do? She hesitated, not knowing exactly how to "lie with" him or what it might feel like. He had always felt cool and damp to her touch, and slightly prickly with growing tips of things. Now, she knew he meant for her to touch him intimately, to remove her clothing, to go to him, to trust him completely. She wanted to, but it was not an easy thing to begin. But he was linked to her mind, and so he felt and responded to all her fears and hesitations. "Come and lie with me," he said again, and this time she came. Removing her clothing she felt the warm air, thickened with moisture and earthly perfumes, tickling like gentle fingertips up her right side. Her buttocks and breasts, never before exposed to the freely wandering touch of nature's breath, tingled with heightened sensitivity. She felt so vulnerable standing there naked and alone. Turning, she lifted one foot and touched, with her toe, a soft green mat of leafy growth where she sensed his presence. Shocked, she recoiled and almost fell. He was warm! She approached again, kneeling now to feel him first with her hands, then her breasts and belly as she lowered herself to him. Her skin seemed to burst with tiny explosions as blood rushed to amplify each softly prickling touch. Looking, she saw that he was growing new things. A host of tender leaves was uncurling, each covered with velvety hairs and little red glands which at her touch released a marvelous fluid . . . slippery, warm, and musky-sweet to the taste, she found, as she touched her lips and tongue with fingertips moistened on the gentle slope of his inner thigh. Laughing, she threw herself into the warm, sweet, slimy mass and rolled like a puppy, tickled and kneaded as he also heaved in playful waves beneath her. Gradually, their movements slowed and became more sensual than playful. Between her legs she could feel juices flowing and flesh swelling and parting, inviting she knew not what to enter her. Now his movements became more directed, more controlling. Her body was being arranged, she could tell, and she did not resist. Velvety leaves and tendrils were quickly growing, clasping her gently, holding her like hundreds of furry fingers, giving if she pushed or pulled, and then pulling back at her when she relaxed. His mass beneath her was shaping itself to her contours as she lay supine, vulnerable breasts and loins open to the sky. She felt vulnerable--too open, not quite trusting, a little fearful really. But at the moment she became conscious of this feeling, she also sensed a change. The matter beneath her and all around her was roiling with activity, a froth of cells dividing, warming her with the heat released from their frenetic activity. She saw walls rising around her, strange purple sheets of tissue reaching and stretching toward the sky, enclosing her in a protective chamber, within which the sweet fermented odors of floral sexuality threatened to suffocate her until a light breeze fluttered the petals and gave her relief. The enclosing petals softened the light. She felt safe. Changes were still occurring beneath her. A mound of tissue was slowly elevating her hips, and between her legs, inches from her swollen nether lips, something was rising, swelling, growing towards the sky. The velvet glandular leaves and tendrils holding and caressing her were never still, never firm, never quite letting her go. Her skin was tantalized and caressed in a thousand ways at once, little furry slippery fingers probing every crevice, squeezing every fold or mound of flesh, large and small; breasts, nipples, clitoris, all over her face and her belly the fingers traveled, sending jets of ecstasy through every nerve, overloading her circuits to bursting with wave after wave of orgasmic shuddering pleasure and pain. She was totally given over to it now, riding on waves of steaming, pulsating vegetal jelly as in a dream, her own juices mingling with those of the flower until she could taste herself. The taste, the smell, the feel . . . suddenly she was ravenously hungry and the sounds escaping her throat were sounds she had never made before. Her vulva felt as if it had little petals of its own, like fingers questing, beckoning some unseen thing into its swampy, hungry throat, finding nothing, whimpering silently. Then she noticed the . . . the stamen, yes, that's what it was, but not like any she had seen before. She recognized the stalk rearing up between her legs, with a tumescent double sac at its tip, as the male part of a flower, but never had she seen one so purple, so fleshy, so much like the human organ in a perverted form. It was pulsing, waving, swelling, looking for all the world as if blood were rushing through it . . . but of course that could not be. What was happening then? How was this going to work? Surely this alien thing would not enter her! As she watched, the sac--was it scrotum or anther?--began to change. Becoming translucent, the surface looked strangely brittle, laced with little lines like fractures. Suddenly, it burst! The purple pulsating stalk shuddered and heaved like a dying animal, and a long slit, frayed at the edges, opened each side of the sac. The mass beneath her convulsed, shuddered, and grew still. Glistening points of light, moist and multifaceted, spewed forth, filling the chamber like snowflakes, but unlike snowflakes they were warm and sticky when they touched her. And touch her they did, all over her, quivering motes of light and moisture which tingled for a moment and appeared to die, melting into her skin, leaving scarcely a trace of sheen and a faint scent . . . the scent of semen. Not all of them died. One found its mark. And another. Altogether, three landed not on impenetrable skin but on her petal-like labia, slick with musky juices from her fertile interior. Those that landed in this nourishing fluid began to absorb it and enlarge. She could feel them clinging, one just under her clitoris, tingling and tantalizing her, the other two a little lower just to the right, one teetering on the inner surface, just starting to roll down, inside, but clinging at the last moment to the slippery fleshy rim as it swelled and changed like the others, seeming to feed on her juice and take on new life. A pause, while time itself seemed poised, balanced, undecided. Is this it? Are we finished now? She felt a little let down, began to fall back from the heights of pleasure she had visited. She wondered briefly how to extricate herself from this flower thing, which seemed to be cooling now, resting. But it did not release her. Just as she felt embarassment invade her sensibility, just as she began to grow restless, she felt . . . What was it? Something moving, or growing, into her most intimate crevice, becoming warmer and warmer, larger and larger, pulsing with life. Each pollen grain had germinated, sending out a fingerlike, slippery, soft but firmly pushing tubular growth, following the life-giving trail of scented fluid to its source, the rich interior of her folded vaginal tunnel. Each one followed its own mindless path, random turns and switchbacks, trial and error fumbling for the direction in which the stimulants grew richer. Their sinuous searching probing movements, simultaneously executed, pushed her to new levels of such intense pleasure she thought she had to get away from it or simply die there. And the deeper they went the larger they grew until she was filled to bursting with writhing serpents, sensual and secret, intent on a purpose she barely perceived and could never desire to control. As a scream escaped her throat, compounded of ecstasy, fear, longing, and desperate courage, he stirred under her and entered her consciousness again. An impression of violet color changed to softer pink that slowly greened and cooled as she felt a strange sort of love . . . Was it love? It was so alien. But she found that she could still touch him, and know him, in her mind. As she met him there, a warm fluid seemed to fill her vaginal cavity and seep slowly deeper into the darker place, the cavern of new life, where a sudden warmth startled her. Oh, surely not! Surely he cannot fertilize me! Oh, God, what have we done? Now the fear was primal, heavy, ancient, powerful, . . . and futile. It was too late. She twisted away from him. He let her go. The petals faded and flaccidly fell open. The velvet fingers shrank and receded. The mass of him was very cool now and scarcely discernible from the rest of the swamp vegetation in which he lay. He seemed weak, moved only a little as he released her, feeling sorrow for her pain and fear, not really understanding the depths to which he had both moved and altered her. He seemed so far from her now, as she rolled onto her side, then to her knees, looking around her, recognizing with difficulty the time and place from which she had so recently taken this hazardous journey and returned . . . changed, awed, and frightened. Everything was different now. She had no way to know, but somehow she did know that inside her an alien thing, self and not-self, was growing. She felt a certain power and a certain helplessness, a love and a fear growing together, feeding on each other, feeling out a future for her that to her conscious mind was lost in a fog too dense to penetrate. She walked slowly away, not looking back, not saying good-bye or anything gentle to reassure him or to appease him. She would come back. But right now she wanted, needed to be alone. He watched her go, barely conscious now, slipping ever deeper into the green morass of the swamp, satiated, consumed. So very restful is the swamp tonight, he thought, I may sleep until the end of time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Exclusive to HEAD Magazine 1995