The spirits are departed. Wind pulls final desiccated leaves, clutching, scrabbling from their roost to litter the frozen riverbank. Turbulent waters drift dark and insistent toward the abandoned flatlands to the south. Under scrutiny, the icy hedges bear no witness to summer days—no cigarettes, foil wrappers, empty bottles—no hint that children under scorching sun might once have pierced their shaggy borders, forging footpaths in fertile fields through the waning solstice.

Barren. The archaism fixes my body to the permafrost: desolate ground where scattered seed finds no root. April is the cruelest month when dead land breeds hyacinth through the alchemy of spring rain. Desolation changes with the seasons, but only for the soil. Undaunted by the impotence of winter, the loins of the hills bear fruit from bleak sterility.

When I was young, I was besieged by phantoms of fecundity. Paralysing revenants of domesticity arrested my prospects and rendered bittersweet the pulse-pounding ecstasy of sexual awakening.

I am eighteen, legs and lips parted in the bench seat of a hatchback. Eager hands bunch a dappled skirt around my waist. My cheeks burn at the sight of my lust disclosed in Rorschach blots of moisture blooming through cotton fringed with lace. And yet, what psychology the splotches reveal in him can be measured in the stalwart phallus he aims with a juddering grip: throbbing, jaw-clenching desire. Snow accumulates on the windshield, obscuring the soft glow of twinkling lights.

What was I thinking wearing these panties? Just pull them to the side, it’s faster. Patchouli and cinnamon blend with my perfume, embedding in our sinuses as the scent of promiscuity. Zealous fingers rummage for purchase on the thin fabric to expose my downy flesh to the light. Thanks to the perverse magic of youth, I am as damp outside as I am dry within, and his tip burrows burning between my lips, opening within me bewildering frontiers of sensation; perception; consciousness.

There is more to me than I have known.

It is yet a few years until my breasts are fully developed, and their gentle swell finds its apotheosis in puffy rounds of stippled pink flesh. The youngest person to suckle at them will not be a wriggling infant seeking milk, but this boy with rough lips and a tender smile seeking to fill me with his own milky seed. Thrusting vicissitudes of pain and pleasure prefigure far more than they achieve. His firm flesh within me is a revelation, the ache an apocalypse, unveiling vistas that draw me forth as a flame to the starless night. I wrap my legs around him, luring his smooth muscular frame to meld with mine; willing him to pervade me, to permeate my honeyed slit and fuse my very being with his. Pressed tightly between my thighs, he activates a nub of ecstasy, stimulating mysterious muscles within. I tighten around him and his face is transfigured, unleashing a mellifluous torrent inside me. Such a lavish exchange, for now he is empty, and I am full. ‘Tis the season.

——————

Rumour. I am initiated into this social cognition as soon as I can speak. True to experience and slack with the facts. You can’t get pregnant at the start of your cycle. It is gospel among us, we who are fixated on complexion and blind to countenance, our grasp of biology as tenuous as the shine of our hair. But my body is less suggestible than I. Anxiety rises, turning to panic as the days and weeks go by, my Advent calendar a doomsday clock ticking merrily away. I cannot look at him, cannot bear to hear his voice. I pass evenings on the toilet, longing for blood to decant into the stagnant pool below, praying for my abdomen to contort and spiral, to shed its past, to deliver my future.

One morning, I wake to fair fronds of ice refracting pale light across my bed. Pulling back the duvet, I see stains spread between my legs once more, now not limpid but sanguineous, now not a sign of pleasure but its cause. Stigmata adorn my garments with divine favour, with wanton, heedless, profligate grace. Relief shudders through me, my breast shaking as I stifle a sob. On my knees, I make a vow of perpetual virginity, consecrating myself to carnal poverty in recognition of this gift. Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.

For the Greeks, Eros bespeaks the restlessness that haunts the heart of the world. It is potency in search of act, emptiness questing for fullness, matter seeking form, a promise waiting irascibly to be fulfilled. Eros contends that we are incomplete, yearning to be whole. It tugs, wrenches, twists, inducing me to greater folly than I am wont to confess. It does not heed my resolutions.

—————

Nutmeg and icing sugar hang in the air. A percussive cadence interrupts the still afternoon, our moans a breathless leitmotif syncopated with clapping flesh. I am twenty-one, jeans around my ankles in the kitchen of my small apartment. My nipples brace themselves against cool stone. He is long and lean inside me, energetically driving his hips and clutching my waist with calloused hands. A call and response commences. With each thrust a whimper. With each grunt a groan of delight. As he pulses and spurts a key scratches against the lock. I have just buttoned my jeans, his warm emissions leaking from my lips, when my roommate walks in. Over the course of our festive dinner, the crotch of my panties soaks up his seed, clinging, cool and damp, to my skin.

——————

My head rests softly against the tufted headboard, the Charvet pattern stamping onto my neck and shoulder blades. Marching bands and cartoon balloons float across the screen in the corner.

Do you believe in God?

He is thrusting gently, holding himself above me. I glance up at him, smiling.  

You’re not from around here, are you?

I was just thinking about how perfect it feels, being inside you. Like someone made my bits intentionally to fit with yours.

Your bits huh? And this makes you think of God?

Or maybe meaning and purposefulness, which I suppose is the same thing.

I contract my muscles around his shaft and his mind quickly returns to earth.

Whether because or in spite of my early frightful brush with pregnancy, I have in my thirties developed an insatiable taste for insemination, the delectable dessert they call creampies. These days, I am further emboldened by my hunch that I may lack the blessed affliction of fertility. Rolling us over, I plant my feet on either side of his hips and begin to squat slowly on his erect member, breasts thrust forward between my elbows. I slide to the very tip of his extensive glistening manhood before quickly dropping down to envelop him entirely within my pink mound—a foolproof method for extracting what I seek, the sticky sweet seed that now erupts inside me. I reach down to feel it drip, rubbing it across my clit with two fingers before dropping to my knees to grind on him, holding tight his sensitive, spent shaft inside me. After I cum, I dismount and suck the cocktail of his sperm mingled with my own sweet juices from his engorged cock.

The beauty of my addiction is that its object is just what he is most eager to give: our pleasure escalated and redoubled in the gratification of the other, receiving most by giving and imparting most by taking. This is my protest, my dissent against the competition and exploitation that mark the world outside. Pleasure me with the fruit of your delectation, satisfy me with the nectar of your delight. What, after all, is love but to desire the good of another: to take joy in their satisfaction?

Sweet Thames run softly ‘till I end my song.

As I age, I feel the metaphors shift. The earth brings forth its like, year by year it multiplies itself, an endless expansion to make the world in its image. My body abstains but is not barren—its fecundity is generative not of life itself anew, wailing and suckling as it enters a world no longer fit for such frail and unimaginable beauty. Rather, it embodies a deeper, eternal exchange where we find ourselves by losing ourselves.

It is not that I seek my own empty pleasures in another—one-night stands rendered hollow in the pale dawn—rather I seek the emptying pleasures of another, an average night rendered divine as I kneel before his fleshy tip, dripping with the primordial cordial of consummation. Kneeling over his mouth, he too drinks of it as it seeps from my cunt to find his tongue.

All who lived are now dead, and we who live are now dying, patiently.

As the snow stills at the river’s edge, wind carries murmurs of maternal lamentation. Fill me with the juices of your love and I will carry them like a candle against the gloaming. I will not be immortal but fleeting: fleet of foot, fleet in memory, fondly fading from focus, hauntingly fungible but firmly rooted in this—I am the finest fuck you will ever find.