Quiver

The third, a curvaceous Indian, stretches one arm up behind her head, revealing a luxurious bush of jet black underarm hair. She bends down and adjusts her flat leather sandals. The sun hat she’s wearing falls off and floats on a hot breeze down along the gutter, to stop at the foot of the huge tire of the bus. Its gentle floating reminds her of a holiday in India she had with her American husband, of him reaching down and catching a wreath of flowers floating down a river. She begins to walk toward the hat.

Her movement is a signal. The brunette first, followed by the blonde. They all move toward the side door of the bus. In the distance an electronic school bell indicating the last lesson goes off.

Jerome pulls the door of the hatch shut. Silently he unlatches the door. He then sits on the counter, his legs spread, his cock rising up from his fly like an aberrant purple popsicle.

The door’s rusty hinges squeak in the heat. The Indian woman glides in, confident, the light transforming the shadows on her face into a mottled blue. Then the blonde, smaller and frail-looking. She stands close to the wall, her cheeks the shade of Jerome’s deluxe vanilla, paler than cream, warmer than white. Lastly the brunette, who towers over both women, walks noisily into the cabin. The bus rocks slightly with her step. The three standing women make a triangular formation. Not a word is spoken. The Indian woman reaches into the freezer and lifts out a family-sized choc block. Tearing the silver wrapper with her teeth, she peels the foil away from the large chocolate-covered block of ice cream. She places it carefully onto the slab of white marble beside Jerome, taking a sideways glance at the others as she does so. Cold air rises off the ice cream like mist.

Her action is a sign. One woman moves behind her and shrugs off her loose silk shirt. Brown breasts tumble free, sweat glistens between her thin, coffee-colored shoulder blades. In slow synchronicity the three bodies move together. The brunette pulls down the blonde’s skirt, slipping it over her hips and letting it fall to the ground. In the same moment the Indian is unfastening the back of the brunette’s bra. White breasts bounce into view. Jerome watches silently, quivering slightly in the disturbed air. For one moment the three women are motionless, their skin pale in the filtered light, stockinged legs glittering red and green. Jerome thinks of popsicles in their garish syrups. He thinks of mermaids, of catching fish with his hands, the skin slippery and writhing in the water.

A corner of the ice cream melts away in the heat.

The brunette scoops up a handful of ice cream. Bending forward, she rubs it carefully over Jerome’s engorged member. She fastens her lips over the tip and runs her tongue down the shaft. Jerome leans back, a blush spreading up from his neck and across his cheeks, toward those heavy, closed eyelids. Behind the kneeling brunette, the blonde is pressing frozen cherries against the dark flesh of her friend, whose nipples unfurl slowly as the cold red juice runs down to join the droplets of sweat that are beading on her belly. With her head leaning against the steel fridge door, her eyes hooded in pleasure, she gasps as the small blond woman slowly rotates the fruit. Jerome leans down and with his large hands lifts the brunette up over his lap. As she squats, spread and ready, the two other women ease her down onto Jerome’s cock.

A trickle of ice cream slips away from the melting choc bloc.

He moves slowly into her. Her sex is completely peeled back, her torso arched, her head, with the wavy brown hair, flung back. The two women move her things slowly up and down. Pleasure on a stick. The blonde carefully extends her right hand, her small, thin fingers pull gently at the swollen clitoris. The silence is momentarily broken by a moan. Sweat runs in rivulets between the women’s breasts as they move in time. Jerome’s cock slips in and out in the center of the room, glistening, the four bodies creating a white-and-chocolate starfish with a blinking red eye in the middle.

I am living in my skin. I think nothing, feel nothing but him entering me, each pore of his velvet skin, thinks the brunette. Each thought is a silver fish, a glint in the heat of sensation. Soon she forgets herself, she has become one huge vulva, her mind has become an enormous sphincter that pulsates with each thrust. She is coming, she is coming.

Her fluttering eyelids are another cue, her moans make her friends move in sympathy, in unison. They want to be taken. The blonde reaches for a popsicle and, falling suddenly to her knees, parts the lips of her impatient friend, flicking the small erect clitoris. With one hand she unpeels the wrapper, nudging the blue tip into the wet mouth of her swollen sex. The Indian grabs a handful of blond hair and presses the blonde’s head to her cunt, the salt of sex and the sugary syrup mix. Faster and faster, the blonde thrusts the popsicle in while her warm tongue flicks across the clitoris.

“Sugar and spice and all things nice,” the refrain runs through the Indian woman’s mind over and over. The image of a huge naked Humpty Dumpty perched on top of a chocolate wall floats before her.

I am going to explode in pleasure, she thinks, and then melt down into a sugar princess ready to be licked.

Somewhere in the back of the room the brunette comes in loud cries. The Indian woman wraps her thighs around the blonde, drawing her head right to her sex. Jerome pull

s out of the brunette and presses his cock between the buttocks of the kneeling blonde. The Indian watches the two of them, moving like a lissom dancer under water, her movements reflected in the polished steel of the fridge doors as Jerome thrusts in. She can feel the blonde’s mouth moving with Jerome’s thrusting cock, tongue oscillating. There is nothing but the sound of their panting, of them taking their prompts from each other, quicker and quicker, a measured excitement building. Close to orgasm, the blonde pulls out the popsicle and places it against the anal mouth, drawing up the Indian’s thighs so that Jerome can watch, then on cue he too pulls out of the blonde and rests his cock against the smaller, tighter passage. The blonde dips her head and thrusts the popsicle into the Indian’s ass, the same time sucking long and hard on her clitoris. Jerome rams into the blonde’s asshole. In one long shout all three orgasm and a hundred ice cream cones, shaken from their box, rain down.

Outside, Quin, driving past in his hired Mustang, notices the old-fashioned silver bus. For a moment he wonders why it shakes and, thinking nothing of it, heads downtown. A seagull perches on the edge of the steel roof. It bends its head to preen under one wing. A sudden movement within the van causes it to lose balance. It flies off in search of puddles.

TULIP

Mischa noticed Deidre long before they met. Cursed with a shyness he masked with aloofness, Mischa had hung back, hiding behind the buckets of irises as he watched his uncle serve her. There was a sadness about her that he empathized with immediately. He recognized the stillness that settled over her like a fine mist once she stopped talking. He knew where her focus went when her eyes got that faraway look.

But where he was lonely, she seemed self-contained. She fitted in with the tall buildings, the constant strobing of light that thrust her into shade and back out into day again, the speed of the pedestrians at lunch hour who rush toward their own separate destinies; oblivious. Would she ever notice him?

Everything about Deidre was immaculate and streamlined, as if she was wary of letting a natural curve break out from under the pressed blouses and suits. There had been enough drama in her younger years, back in the seventies and early eighties. In those days she was married. Dave and Deidre. They were one of those couples that were identified as a unit. They even ran an interior-decorating business together: Dave would do the design work and Deidre the accounting. Their marriage was a pleasant haze of work and parties, drunken cruises on the harbor and Sundays spent smoking pot and reading the lifestyle pages of the weekend papers in bed. They became rich together, and increasingly Deidre found herself not only handling the books, but bringing in the clients. All was going well.

Until she forgot to take her pill.

In the same week that she discovered she was pregnant, Dave told her that he’d been having an affair. A day later she found out that his mistress was in fact a man. After the abortion, an event she refused to grieve over, they separated and divorced. Deidre, still in shock, had been so reasonable, so amicable about the whole thing that it was Dave himself who persuaded her to seek legal representation over the splitting of their joint assets.

That was 1982. A past client, who had been impressed with Deidre’s chutzpah, offered her a job at the merchant bank he worked for. Fifteen years later she was still there. It had been a difficult climb, and although she had finally managed to win the respect of her employers, the younger men working with her begrudged her the position she had gained. Rumors of her sexual frigidity were regularly circulated around the office—she was known as “the snow duchess” behind her back. Despite this, Deidre had managed to insulate herself against the absence of invitations to the marriages, dinner parties and celebratory lunches over the years, justifying it as a lack of breeding and class on behalf of the voracious young merchant bankers. Deidre was a snob; it was her anchor in an increasingly bewildering and alienating world.

* * *

She reaches the Square. It is a beautiful day, not too hot, with a southerly wind blowing in gently from the harbor. She is heading toward her favorite flower stall, set up near the bronze sculpture of the Tuscany boar, donated to New South Wales by some obscure Italian general. She always visits this flower stall; they have the best selection of flowers, and because she is a regular, Mr. Gretchka gives her a discount. Mr. Gretchka is an elderly Russian, who immigrated here only five years ago. Deidre suspects that he is overqualified to be running a flower stall. His English is bad but his enthusiasm for Australia and being out of Russia is inspirational.

She stops for a moment in front of the boar. The snout has been polished a shining bronze from the touch of thousands of hopeful hands. It’s good luck to make a wish and rub its nose. Interestingly enough the tip of its penis is also a lustrous bronze, rubbed bright by braver people wanting to wish away their loneliness through the hope of some sexual conquest or intimacy. She hesitates. Normally she would touch the end of the snout, but something inside her kicks back, an ennui, a rebellion against all the small routines that make up her life. Before she knows it she finds herself reaching out and touching the end of the boar’s penis.

“Double good luck,” Mischa ventures. Startled, she whirls around. Standing by the flower stall is a compact young man of Eastern European appearance. He’s handsome, but badly dressed in the way of all immigrants from impoverished countries—his seventies jeans finishing unfashionably short on the ankle.

“Fortune favors the brave.” He winks at her. For a moment Deidre has to fight off the impulse to look behind her. Then she realizes that the remark is directed at her.

“I’m Mr. Gretchka’s nephew. From Russia. You want flowers, yes? He told me about you. You are special customer.”

“I want something for my mother, it’s her birthday today.” As they lean over the flowers, the tentativeness of the young man’s gestures undermines his brash selling manner, which she suspects is the product of his uncle’s coaching and too many bad American movies.