The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (11 page)

“Mira,
please
, the waiter’s coming over.”

“You think he’d like to watch?”

She closed her legs and pulled down her skirt, but didn’t bother to refasten the buttons of her blouse.

“For God’s sake . . .”

Mira grinned. She put the octopus tentacle between her lips and began to gobble it with noisy, smacking sounds.

“You’re fucking drunk.”

“I’ve had half a glass of wine.”

“Close up your blouse. Your tits are falling out.”

Mira giggled and undid another button, revealing small pink nipples that were celebrating their exposure with exuberant erections. She felt appalled at her audacity, astonished, and yet elated, too. There was merit, more profound than her mind could shape at present, in this loss of dignity and decorum, but if so, C.J. was blind to it. She gaped in horror at her lover as the waiter, unable to contain himself, came over and stared down at Mira’s chest.

His eyes bugged, and he muttered something that Mira didn’t understand. Others had turned to stare now, diners abandoning their meals to ogle the impromptu cabaret act.

“Please,” said C.J., through gritted teeth. “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but cover yourself up.”

Mira stuck out her tongue at C.J., waggled it around, and slowly, so slowly that the act of covering herself became more seductive than the original unveiling, began to close the buttons.

The diners, murmuring now among themselves, continued to stare, looking from Mira to one another and back to Mira again with an expression more of wonder than disapproval.

A muscular young man with blindingly white teeth, evidently C.J.’s new Greek swain, approached the table with a hand held out to greet his American friend. His eyes were fixed on C.J. until, at the last moment, his gaze took a sudden detour onto Mira’s semi-naked breasts. He gulped, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, and blushed bright crimson. Murmuring something in Greek, he backed away from the table as though the barrels of two .45’s had suddenly been trained on him.

“Stavros,” C.J. called out. “Stavros, wait.” She pulled a fistful of drachmas out of her pocket and slammed them onto the table. “Come on, Mira. If you’re not drunk, then you’re high or sick or something. I’ve got to get you out of here before you cause a riot.”

And, at least in part, Mira agreed with her. Yet if, indeed, she’d somehow tripped or blundered over the edge of insanity, then surely this was an experience far more pleasurable than her previous, albeit limited, study of mental deviations (mostly undergraduate psych courses) would have led her to believe.

She felt, indeed, more energetic than she had in years, infused with a heat so galvanizing that, as C.J. half dragged her along the street, Mira thought surely she must be radiating light.

“Where are we going?” she laughed.

“Back to the room. Where you can sober up.”

“But I
am
sober.” Mira tried to stop giggling for C.J.’s sake, but with every effort to compose herself, the laughter only burst from her in more lusty gales. “More sober than I’ve ever been.”

“Then you’re having some kind of breakdown. Heat prostration maybe.”

They passed a group of men. “Wait,” cried Mira. Pulling free of C.J.’s grasp, she bent over, flipped her skirt up, and wagged her naked rump at the startled passersby. This small act seemed insufficient, however, to encompass her frivolity. Reaching back, she spread her cheeks, exposing the pink and puckered eyelet at her center.

The men stopped in their tracks.

“Mira!”

C.J. yanked the skirt down. With her right hand, she cracked Mira a resounding blow across the face. “Do you want to get us both arrested? Thrown in a fucking Greek jail?”

“Fucking Greek jail?” echoed Mira. She rubbed her stung cheek. Her face hurt, but something else, something altogether wonderful and unexpected, was distracting her from the pain. From the nearby plaza: music. The first music Mira had heard since they arrived on this godforsaken lump of rock. A lyre, sweet and lyrical, and joining it, the chimelike notes of a
laouto
.

“Fucking Greek jail!” sang out Mira and she began to dance.

Her legs, despite this morning’s trek, were suddenly feather-light. She was a bird, a bawd, a buxom ballerina. She was great, unholstered, jiggly tits and quivering fat ass and a canyon of cleavage. She was madness, mirth, and celebration.

“Mira! No! If you don’t stop this instant, I’m leaving!”

“Then go!” cried Mira and danced away.

Her sandals slapped the cobblestones. Leather on stone, fuck, fuck, like lusty mating. Mira laughed and kicked them off. She whirled and capered, spun and leaped, and the musicians picked up the beat and Mira danced, and did her blouse fall open of its own accord or did her fingers tease the buttons free? She didn’t know, but somehow her tits flopped out, and the musicians yodeled at the sky like moonstruck hounds and then the moon itself swelled from behind the clouds in all its naked splendor and Mira sang out, “Fucking Greek jail!” and danced and danced.

A few villagers gathered round to stare and grunt, before retreating, like shamed wraiths, back into their houses, white as bone shards beneath the yellow moon.

And the musicians’ energy waned, and they put away their instruments and slunk away, but still Mira cavorted, her white skirt swirling, pink nipples dancing their own jig and she was like a Catherine wheel, all light and glamour, spinning wildly in the dark.

A boy, barely beyond his teens, watched her with a rapt and avid gaze, wetting the corners of his mouth with a tongue made sopping by desire. Mira danced to his side. She took him by his thick black hair and buried his face between her breasts, each one of which was easily the size of the boy’s head. She let him suckle, leaving her nipples silvery with saliva, then pushed his head down and hoisted up her skirt and straddled him. His tongue knew dances of its own, quick, darting strumming motions and deep, luxurious slurps and she opened up her folds to him and took his tongue in like a raw pink fetus seeking reentry to its fleshy nest.

The boy stood up and unzipped himself, took out a bobbing, uncut cock. The sight of it made Mira giggle with delight and recommence her dance, though the music to which she capered was now within her head.

An old man rushed out from a nearby doorway. He grabbed the boy and shouted in his face with much agitation. Mira heard the word “Baubo,” but didn’t understand the rest. Beneath the elder’s scorn, the boy shrank both literally and figuratively. He slunk away, the old man’s arm prodding him roughly along. Leaving Mira panting, bare-breasted, and alone in the center of the plaza. She looked down at herself and gasped, began buttoning her blouse. Wetness ran between her legs, the boy’s drool and her own juices. From her groin and armpits wafted, unmistakably, the pungency of lust.

The door was locked when Mira at last returned to the hotel room. She knocked and pleaded a good long time before C.J. let her in. C.J.’s tanned face was tracked with angry tears.

“I talked to Stavros. Tomorrow morning, he’s leaving on the first ferry back to Piraeus,” said C.J., crawling back into bed. “I’m going with him. I want you to come with us. We’ll find a doctor for you in Athens. An English-speaking one.”

Mira took off her soiled and rumpled clothing and slid naked into bed next to her lover.

“I can’t do that,” she said. “I don’t understand what happened out there, but, oh God, it felt so wonderful.”

“When you exposed yourself, you mean. When you mooned those men.”

“Yes, wonderful,” said Mira, her voice awed and tiny. “I don’t understand. It was like I couldn’t stop myself. And I didn’t want to.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t beaten up or arrested. These people are conservative. They aren’t used to things like this. Did you see the way they looked at you?”

“What’s happening to me, C.J? Am I crazy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you had some kind of fit. Maybe some blood sugar thing. But Stavros thinks it’s . . .”

“Yeah? What does pretty little Stavros think?”

C.J.’s voice became so tiny Mira could barely hear her. “This sounds crazy, but . . . he says this island used to be dedicated to the worship of a deity named Balbo or Baubo or something. Anyway, she’s the goddess of obscenity, of lewdness and sensuality. And he thinks . . . oh, forget it . . .”

“He thinks that I’m possessed. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why he wants to leave. Before whatever I’ve got gets spread around.”

“Look, I’m sorry I said anything. It’s nonsense, silly superstition. Stavros isn’t educated. He still believes the old Greek myths and legends.”

Mira looked at the smooth wall of C.J.’s back, remembering the woman at the temple, her kisses like honeyed darts, both sweet and penetrating. She wanted to tell C.J. what had happened, everything, but she knew that would be impossible. C.J. wouldn’t understand. She’d only be more convinced that Stavros was a beautiful but superstitious rube and Mira was simply crazy.

“You have to leave here tomorrow when Stavros and I go,” said C.J.

“Your new lover.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But he will be.”

“Maybe.”

Mira thought about it briefly. “Go fuck yourself.”

Daylight splashed across Mira’s sleeping face like hot liquid. She gasped and clutched the pillow. A warm breeze gusted in the open window where sunbeams streamed in to form an avenue of light.

C.J. was gone, the only evidence that she had ever been there the indentation of her head still on the pillow.

Mira got up and began to dress. The wound on her belly twinged. She looked down past her swollen breasts and saw that it was still open, a tiny bud-red slit below her navel. She touched it lightly with one finger and almost had an orgasm. Pleasure swam through her, stem to stern. Her head spun with the delirium of last night’s ecstasy as she made her way outside into the village.

She had considered her few options and made a decision: She would go back to Baubo’s temple and see if she could find some clue, or better yet, some respite from the madness that had overtaken her. That, at least, was her rationale. In truth, she hoped to find her lover of the day before, the goddess who gave birth to frogs and, perhaps more frighteningly, had incited her to last night’s wantonness.

The day was furious with heat, the breeze offering no respite except to stir and redistribute the torpor as Mira started up the dirt track to the temple. No one was about. The village seemed deserted, even the taverna on the waterfront bereft of its usual clientele of domino-playing males. She moved slowly, her body stiff and achy from last night’s outlandish exercise. At a crest in the journey, she paused to look out over the water and saw a large boat, a ferry, plowing westward in the direction of Piraeus.

Her heart caught and hitched as though a claw had punctured her aorta – C.J. and her new toy Stavros were surely on that boat.

Something moved on the horizon in the corner of her vision. She gazed behind her and staggered backward. Running, stumbling up the dirt track, came a dozen or more villagers. The man in the lead looked up and saw Mira. He pointed, beckoned to the others, urging them on. They began to run in earnest.

Mira stumbled forward in blind panic. So C.J. had been right – last night’s escapades were not so easily forgotten or forgiven. Perhaps she would be jailed or expelled from the country. Or worse – something in the villagers’ pursuit put her in mind of fates more ancient and punitive – adulteresses stoned and wanton women entombed alive in cloister walls.

She began to run, thinking only that she must reach the temple, that Baubo – witch goddess, whatever she might be – might help her, offer her a place to hide.

Her limbs were flagging, but terror lent her strength. She cut through fields of olive trees, skirting the sea, and climbed at last to the crest of the final bluff where the madwoman had given birth to toads.

And stopped, the breath rasping in her chest, unable to summon even one last reserve for further flight.

They were waiting for her. Hundreds of them. The entire village. They had known that she would come here and had arrived first, leaving only a handful behind to goad her into flight.

“Please,” said Mira, but she knew the word was meaningless. They had not gone to all this trouble to merely turn away and leave her to her madness.

She took a few halting steps. The villagers stared.

Someone pulled out a dulcimer and began a melody. Another blew into a primitive bagpipe, the
tsambouna
.

The music threaded through the silence like a golden needle passing through white cotton.

Laughter started.

Mira didn’t realize until some moments later that the weird, manic laughter was produced by her own throat, but its effect was instantaneous. The villagers began to jerk and twitch in what, at first glance, appeared to Mira to be a crude dance but which was, in actuality, a clumsy striptease. They began to caper and leap about, flinging items of their clothing into the air. Their aimless exuberance reminded Mira of the frogs’ mad leaping, except that now the random jumping was accompanied by a hundred small obscenities.

A young woman with a baby on her hip exposed large rosy-nippled breasts. She squeezed and twisted a breast and milk squirted forth. It struck the face of a dancing man who opened his mouth wide and gobbled. Others gathered round. The woman emptied both breasts into the throng, milk running in hair and eyes, dripping from smacking lips.

Old women clad in widow’s black scattered their funereal garb across the temple stones. Cackling, they caressed themselves and capered in lewd jigs.

An old man bent over and let loose a hornpipe melody of exuberant flatulence. The rhythm of his obscene tooting kept time with the
tsambouna
and the dulcimer while others laughed and clapped.

A woman lifted up her breast and suckled from her own nipple while with her other hand she milked the semen from the penis of her partner. A dog joined in the fray, aroused and thrusting at the dancers’ legs. Some women dropped onto their hands and knees and vied to suck the canine’s crimson stalk.