Halien, Part 9

A little voice inside says, you're not writing enough mc blogger


THE REST OF IT GOES HERE
caressed the stubble of my sand-encrusted cheek. We rose from our sand-angel impressions. The sky was indigo, and sputtering on with a beckoning plenitude of stars, white and red and blue and yellow.
"I think we know what's next, my darling Chuck," she said
I scanned the immediate vicinity. Driftwood everywhere. "Shall we make a fire, Haley?" She nodded to my rhetorical, and it was quick work gathering enough wood to last well into morning. She said she was an expert fire-maker so I dug out a pit and let her arrange the logs and sticks into a perfect flammable pyramid. I offered my lighter, but she waved me off; instead igniting a match on a rock and touching it to the smallest bit of kindling in the pit's center. To my astonishment not only did this work, but the flame immediately spread throughout the structure into quite a conflagration. She jumped
up and down, and clapped like a little girl upon doing her first important thing all by herself, and I joined her in the joy. We laid beside the flickering, tempting heat. We laid on our backs in awe before the stars. Now and then I'd name them, and she'd give my naked chest a little congratulatory rub. "There's the Summer Triangle, Haley!" I pointed. "Vega, Deneb, and Altair." Her hand descended to my navel. "And there's Arcturus at the bottom of the ice cream cone, and straight up from that is the handle star of the Big Dipper, and in a line up from the bowl pointer stars is Polaris, and true north, and--"
Her hand dipped into my shorts, and as her light warm fingers gently drum-tapped there I stiffened instantly and instantly rolled onto her yielding softness. Without thinking of anything else, of any fear or consequence I plunged, first to her mouth then to her neck, teasing my tongue along the white course of it. She sat up and tore off her top. She allowed me the pleasure of unclasping her satin, indigo bra. Her breasts were petite flowers of flesh and strawberry-sweet to my suckling. They were all that, and the agony of now is their absence. It was she who tenderly nudged me further down, down to the cinnamon-raison navel, down to the incense-fur as she slid her bottoms off, and how she gasped! I was swimming in a hallucinatory ocean of bliss in which all of our usual senses are so heightened as to lose all rendering into language possibility. But I can tell you this: She tasted like everything good. She tasted like healing. She mounted me amid the violent crash of night waves, and as I lay back facing her, the full moon was bobbing in and out of view at her right shoulderblade. Obscured and revealed as she bobbed upon me
and I thought curiously that it's so much like the vital needs of our souls: obscured and revealed; obscured by ego things perhaps, and perhaps revealed by our all-too-temporary ego-transcendences.
It seems crazy to have thought of anything during that crazy, buckling moon-beamed, star-dusted and tide-applauding conjugal. At the moment the vacuum-suck of her loveliness received all essence and seed her eyes flashed indigo, but it didn't bother me. Somehow it seemed appropriate in the surreality of it all. She collapsed upon me. Between her strawberry breasts I felt the joy-hammering of her heart answering mine, life-affirming beat upon life-affirming beat. It was our God-hymn of oneness, it was our song, the song of two Gods made one on the sand alone beneath a dazzling sky-dome, and I buried my nose into the vanilla-sweet coils of her ear, and I whispered, "I love you, Haley;" and she started to whisper something, but then I realized they were sleep sounds. She was asleep on top of me. I gently rolled her onto the sand and curled an arm around
her. Wasn't long before I was out as well. My consciousness knew bliss then, and I know it was a night of no dreaming, perhaps the only deep dreamless sleep of my entire life.
And then I woke. And Haley was gone. The embers of the fire still glowed a deep red and still gave off hand-warming heat. The tide gently lapped against the shore. It was early dawn, and the sky was the thin pale color of watered-down milk. At first I thought she must've risen early and went for a walk, but as I picked up my boxer shorts I learned otherwise. A note, and the strange nine-petaled clover I now twirl in my fingers, bereft for missing her. The note was succinct. It destroyed me.
I got lucky Chuck. I've been summoned home. Don't try to find me. I'm far, far away. Haley.
It made no sense. It didn't matter to me that I was stranded on the coast with no ride and no shoes. My God had gone, my God was inaccessible now, and even took the trouble to tell me not to try to find her. How did it go wrong? It couldn't have gone wrong, but she was gone, and the dread’s dirge-beat within my heart and head funereally blackened my soul knew that there was no finding her again. I found my way home. I quit my job. I moved out of the city and away from friends, and that brings us to now, and the unopened letter before me. Well, guess I'll open it now.
Chuck tears the envelope carefully and pulls out what first resembles a folded piece
of tin foil. But upon opening it the creases vanish and two shallowly-indented hand
imprints become manifest. Charles' arms tingle with electrically-charged expectation.
Ok, Haley. I should've expected this. Chuck superimposed his hands on the imprints and immediately found himself transported to the indigo-desert world that he'd