Is It a Crime

1.

My grandmother told anyone who would listen that she got my father when she was a 60 year old widow by beating the devil at cards.

Obviously no one believed her, nor did we believe that Abuela was 60 when she became pregnant with Father. But with no birth certificate for her we had only her word on her age. Implausible as it may be, she certainly looked the part, tiny, wizened and clad in black, with dense eyeglasses that looked far too heavy for her head to support.

We tried to poke holes in her story, as if it were a game. We asked, by the devil did she mean Satan, and was Dad Satan’s son. Abuela just responded it wasn’t like that. We asked if she was really over 100, and if so how could she get around so well. She just shrugged in resignation, saying it must be, because she was the age she was. We asked why no one ever sees the devil around anymore, and she simply said that’s how it was in Spain, she couldn’t help how it was in New Orleans.

We did know she came to the states so her only son could be born a US citizen. There were records. And we knew that he attended a prestigious university on a wrestling scholarship where he met and impregnated a girl born to old Southern money, prompting a hasty marriage, followed by my birth. I was named Max, and I was the only child they ever had together.

For all the force of his personality and physical presence, precious little of it showed in me. I had his chestnut hair color, but otherwise the stuff of my body seemed borrowed entirely from my mother’s line. I had the body of a gentleman, fit but slim, and my mother’s features in masculine form. It was as if his Y gene was enough to prompt me into existence, but had nothing more to pass on to me thereafter.

After college Mother’s wealthy parents brought Father into the fold and started him in a construction business, which he shrewdly parlayed into his own fortune and diversified so he could sit back and watch his money earn more money, effectively going into retirement by the time he turned 40. The son of a poor immigrant, Francisco Tosco became Frank Tosco, lord and master of a former plantation house. He livened the place up with his bold, boisterous nouveau riche ways, which never failed to gall Mother.

And we learned that in all the ways that matter, he might as well have been won from the devil. 

2.

Father was a bull of a man. 

He looked like a bull, with a block of a head on a thick neck and dense shoulders. His blunt nose had nearly always flared nostrils, and his lips and tongue were fleshy. His abundant brown hair was meticulously trimmed into a masculine crop, barely taming its curls and licks, as was his thick mustache. His appearance was brutal, but handsome.

His suits were tailored to his physique, and it was evident how powerfully built he was beneath the fine fabrics. He maintained his athlete’s body with rigorous workouts in his own gym for hours every day, growing thicker and more intimidating with age, looking more like a seasoned pro wrestler than a southern gentleman. His thick slabs of chest muscle heaved under his dress shirts, and his lats spread his jackets wide. No one else was built like him on our plantation, or in our social circles. I could practically see the testosterone waft off him.

I imagined that everyone in a five-mile radius could pick up on his musky scent and wet themselves, intoxicated on his odor. The one person who let it be known did not feel that way was Mother, who was transparent in her disdain for Father, as only an old money southern matriarch can be.

“He doesn’t need me for sex any more, thank Heaven,” she’d say. “He’s got every whore in the state on his bankroll.”

With Father’s wandering eye and Mother’s grudging acceptance, their marriage was more an arrangement from antebellum days than the 1990s. Father could just as well have been King Cotton rather than an investor in software and oil. There’s a timeless quality to New Orleans, especially if you lived at either extreme on the economic scale. Middle class people might contend with modern day conventions, but if you had enough money you could be insulated from them, and if you had not enough money, they were too elusive to matter.
 

3.

I’d known Ash my whole life. His mother was a maid at the house, which made him, by extension, something like unpaid staff himself. He was often called on to be my playmate when it suited me, obliged to play what I wanted and to let me win every game. 

He was never one for athletics, the preferred pastime for boys in my circle. But he had other gifts. A flair for story telling, a wit suited to gentle mockery. And pantomime, I guess you’d call it. He amused us frequently with his hand articulations, acting out scenarios with his long graceful digits. 

The fingers of his right hand lightly fluttered between us, each tip tracing its own erratic path.

“What’s that one?” I asked.

“That’s Butterflies migrate south for the winter,” said Ash. 

I could see among his shivering fingers the flock of butterflies.

His hands dropped low and slowly writhed upward on delicate twisting wrists with fingers in tight buds that opened slowly and then dropped into a gentle sway. Wisteria in spring.

Ash was the most elegant creature anyone at the house had ever seen, more feminine than any woman on the estate. He was the very image of his beautiful Creole mother, with the same full lips, pointed chin and high smooth brow, different only in a lighter complexion, presumably from his unknown father.

Abuela alone did not enjoy Ash’s hand magic. One day she read Ash’s future in his hand, studying his infinitely graceful palm under her weighty glasses.

“You are a lady of evil luck,” she said, in Spanish. “You will desire to be what you are not, longing to stay where you can only visit.”

While Ash waited for me to translate, I told Abuela in her own tongue that it was terrible to say to Ash. And if she was too blind if she to see that Ash was a boy, not a lady, how could she possibly be trusted to see the lines in his palm? She pointed with her withered finger at the creases so I could see myself, but it made no sense to me, so she sighed and threw up her hands. 

I lied to Ash, pointing to his palm, “This means you will be famous and successful and marry the love of your life.”

Ash gave me a skeptical side eye. “God bless you for a liar.” 

He didn’t know enough Spanish to understand Abuela, but he could see enough of our exchange to guess at our disagreement. And of course he was sensitive to my lies, knowing me better than anyone else.

In truth the future I foretold did not seem very likely for a skinny, effeminate Creole boy with a housecleaner mother. And it seemed even less so, sitting in an old plantation house, maintained like a monument to the unchanging nature of life in Louisiana.

Ash gestured and his fingertips were like leaves blowing in a gust, then like the wind currents themselves, whipping up into furious gale, and then a crest rising up from below, crashing into the weak barrier of his fist till it trembled and collapsed. All his fingers spread wide, drowning the surface of the table between us.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Ash looked right at Abuela with a witchy glint in his eyes, adopted a mock Cajun patois and said “Dat’s de hurricane gon’ come and wash dis ol’ debil city away one day.”

Abuela held a fist to her chest and rose to her feet. Everyone knew she was terrified of hurricanes, and she didn’t need any English to take Ash’s meaning.

Ash laughed as Abuela left the room and I sighed. My mind was on other things.

Father and I flew to New York that afternoon for one of our weekends away. Mother said goodbye to us from the top of the grand staircase, never one to let personal affection get in the way of a strong visual.

“Doesn’t she look beautiful up there?” asked Father, beaming with pride for her sculpted poise. His voice was deep and gravelly and arousing.

In the car, behind dark glass, he nuzzled his face against my ear and neck with hot kisses, and whispered “You’re so much like her before she got hard.” I was hard myself, in anticipation of our time away, and when he leaned in to kiss me and wrapped his meaty hand around the bulge in my pants I spread my legs wide.
 

4.

Our weekends away were something Father and I did alone, and always in hotels, never our family properties. We’d see some sights, dine at both exclusive restaurants and local dives. I loved walking the streets together, so proud to be on his arm. I hoped the more cosmopolitan would assume we were a handsome couple, Father with his manly face and muscular form, me in the prime of my youth with a lean, fit body, the dark coloring I inherited from him and my mother’s refined features.   

But the real point of the weekends was the fucking.

Father would instruct the hotel staff that we did not wish to be disturbed. Once the door locked, he would devour me and fill me up with his big bull cock. He had a powreful urge to breed, and even after filling me with his hot cum he could stay fucking me lubricated by his own load until I came in my own fist or his, or most often just into the bedsheets, provoked by nothing but his slamming me inside. 

We’d fuck for as much of the weekend as we could, going out to shows and meals between ruts to build up for the next round. As we recharged, we’d begin to flirt with each other, knees brushing under the table, brushing our fingers together, coaxing each other’s balls to another load. Sometimes we couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel, and Father would take me to the men’s room to shove my hand down his pants while his thick tongue plunged into my throat. Or he’d had the driver cruise for hours while we blew each other in the back seat.

Father’s stamina was stunning, as was his appetite for my ass and throat. I was athletic from my years on the swim team, but I could barely keep up. His ruts were powerful, and he could be lost in them as his cock drove home into me until his consuming climax. Sometimes after a hard fuck, I’d drift off to sleep with his cock still in me, milking out whatever traces escaped his full bull balls.

His cock was huge, 10 inches by my measure, thick around, dark, veiny and fierce, and Father said he never knew anyone else who could take it the way I did. I was made for this, for him, and though he could be rough Father was invested in my pleasure. I experienced so much more sexually than most people my age, and loved it all.

He’d made me wait till I was eighteen, though my lust for him was abiding and only deepened with time. He had his own sense of propriety, in these matters. But once we began I knew I’d never be done. Everyone else seemed so tepid and insubstantial beside him.

In our New York hotel I leaned against the full length window overlooking the long streets of the city, lit with tiny lights like diamonds as  Father sunk his beast cock into me, stretching me to fit his needs. His thrusts filled me as his one fist pumped my erection and the other pressed me flat against the glass. All I could see was the city where we’d live one day, wed to each other. No one needed to know the circumstances of our union, only that we were a handsome couple, and that of everyone he could have, Father chose me.

We’d return home, sated for a time, drifting back into daily life, building our fervor for the next trip. I never felt I was disloyal to Mother, and even thought I was helping them both by taking the burden off of her to meet Father’s sexual appetite.
 

5.

When I went away to college it was hard to go so long without my weekends away with Father. We could steal away now and then, but it wasn’t as often, and we met more awkwardly. 

I suspected his marriage to Mother might suffer without me to distract them both, her for conversation with the only person in the household she’d consider a peer, him for weekends away with me to take the edge off his needs for sex as rough and as often as he liked it. I supposed he might use prostitutes in my absence. He certainly could meet a fee that would ensure both discretion and accommodation for any demand, but I understood that couldn’t be as satisfying as my authentic and deep seated desire that matched his own.

Ash became my eyes and ears at home. He was already working part time for the house then, and after he graduated high school he would go full time. He said things seemed much the same. Mother managed appearances, Father managed business, Abuela scuttled through the house like a black beetle, redundantly cleaning or rearranging the work earlier done by the housekeeping staff.

Ash himself was taking dance classes. This seemed like a ridiculous luxury, given his situation. His mother’s earnings as a housekeeper were meager, and if he wished to use them for education it ought to be something more practical. It galled me a bit that he was so self indulgent.

I had a charmed life, born to advantageous genetics just as I was born to money, and both made me an appealing catch, even among the privileged. I dated a girl with an appropriate pedigree, but also fucked other boys. Unlike my times with Father, I was the top. I never considered bottoming for anyone but him, knowing they all were bound to disappoint in comparison. My ass was made for him and no one else.

By the end of my freshman year I’d fucked more boys and men than I could be bothered to count. Many were peers at University, smug but sheltered sexually with no clue what a real fuck meant. Others were locals from the wrong side of the tracks who were a better match sexually, and two were professors.

I mounted and bred each of them, a fledgling bull in my own right, and could have had more, but none were the one I most wanted to be with.
 

6. 

Ash’s mother died after my freshman year, and Ash stayed on as a house employee. Though he was 18 and in theory free to leave, he was bound to the house in his own way as much as I was.

Father took us to Spain that summer, for Abuela’s first visit to her homeland since the day she left. He asked Ash to join us as to provide me with a travel companion my own age. 

It was hard to have Abuela and Ash along on the trip because they hampered our ability to be alone together. I schemed for our moments together, sneaking into his bed to hold myself against his hard body. I was greedy for contact with him and his attention, cupping his heavy cock in my hand as if to assert it was mine entirely.

When I could I’d swallow him, taking the length of his erection into my throat as if it were carved to his proportions. I doubted anyone else could do this for him, but who else could be as devoted to worshiping his cock then me, the son it made? I’d forego my own breath to feel the hot gush of his semen in my throat, choking me till I swallowed it all. When he reached down to brush the tears from my watering eyes, I trusted he'd count each as a sign of my devotion.

Afterwards, if time allowed, I’d rest my cheek against  the downy fur on his chest and repeat my deepest desire, that after college we’d move away together. Just us, in a penthouse overlooking Manhattan. We could be done with New Orleans and its weary history. Father’s money could be used to skirt the details of our exact relationship, and Mother could be free. Didn’t he think it would be best for everyone? I could hear his heart under my ear through his muscled chest, I do, I do, I do.

Although Abuela was the only native Spaniard among us, she looked the most out of place. Her perennial black dresses and shawls made her more a ghostly shade of the past than a living Spaniard in a modern age. Still, she never bemoaned the loss of what had been, saying all was fated to happen and it was pointless to fight what came to pass.

In Madrid we went to the bullfights. Ash said he didn’t want to see animal cruelty, but Abuela insisted there was nothing cruel about it. She explained that in the final stage of the bullfight the matador draws the bull with the motion of the red cape to maneuver it into position to stab it through the heart, the strike called the estocada. 

A clumsy estocada extends the beast's pain, and is shameful to the matador, even raising protests from the crowd. If unsuccessful, the matador must then perform a descabello and cut the bull's spinal cord to kill it instantly. If this too is a failure, the bull is paralyzed and must be dragged away. This is the greatest shame to the Matador, to have made the bull suffer through his own bad form or weakness, rather than giving it a quick end.

Ash was so fretful for the bull that nothing Abuela or I said could console him. Father kindly offered to take Ash to see more tranquil sites while I stayed at the fight with Abuela. We met them later at the hotel and by then Ash was his usual self. After dinner I asked him what he saw with Father. He thought for a moment and showed me with knuckles gently rolling, then jerking abruptly, tourists on Segways. Then with long digits flowing over each other, his hands became the palace waterfall at Parque del Retiro.

I laughed, but Father was uncharacteristically reticent. I was sorry he had to miss the bullfight over Ash, and thought I should have gone with Ash myself so he could have stayed for the spectacle. Over the years I would wish it many more times.
 

7.

After that trip things changed. Father was more serious and more distant. In my own way I was as well, getting more engaged with school, and my peers there. I continued with my girlfriend, and boys as well, even as I missed the feeling of wholeness I’d had with Father’s erection lodged up inside me. Mother became more rigid in her curation of our home and herself, Ash worked for the house and Abuela continued to compress with age into a tiny lump of coal.

By the summer after my sophomore year the tension between Mother and Father was intolerable. I felt it even far away at university. They fought daily, saying the most horrible things to and about each other. I felt responsible, thinking my absence had removed the pressure valve they both needed to stay married in relative peace. Even Abuela was distressed by the rancor of the household.

Despite my guilt, I made myself scarce, spending large spans of the summer months outside New Orleans, with the families of my peers. They were strangely free of the drama that plagued my family, and I immersed myself in their simplicity and decorum. That didn’t stop the phone calls.

“Max, honey, he’s humiliating me,” Mother cried into the phone to me. “How can I hold my head up in society the way he carries on?”

“Mother,” I replied, “are you smoking cigarettes again? I can hear it in your voice. Besides, you all should get out of there. Hurricane Andrew is all over the news.”

“Max, honey, no, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving him alone to degrade me in my absence. This isn’t like the other times, with his whores. He’s different.” There was a chill in her voice. “I think he’s in love. Honey, I think he’s going to leave me.”

As she sobbed into the phone I understood that the human heart would never make sense. She hated Father, she would be so much happier without him, and had probably wished him dead dozens of times. But somehow the thought of him leaving her was the worst thing in the world. I could only suppose it was not the leaving her, but the leaving her bearing the cumulative weight of so many endured slights that made it simply too much.

I couldn’t tell her it was impossible that he could be in love with someone else, because I was the someone else and always had been. If he were to leave it would be with me, and I’d know. Of course I’d know. But her claims planted a seed of doubt in me that I’d never known before. 

I phoned to talk to Father, but Abuela answered. She was frantic, telling me the hurricane was coming. She said it was the witch bringing it, the bruja. I asked for Dad and she said the bruja had taken him too.

I knew I had to go home immediately.
 

8.

Most in New Orleans wouldn’t leave no matter the weather warning. Some were stubborn and some had seen it all before. Many who would have left simply didn’t have the means to do so. Gas and hotels, even bus tickets, all cost money. And if that is the one thing you don’t have, you instead hunker down and hope for the best.

Despite all this, over a million evacuated Louisiana as Andrew approached, and I was the only fool desperately trying to get in.

I arrived after midnight, the wind raging. There was not a single light to be seen in the house, meaning the power was out. Even from the doorway I could hear shouts and wails on the upper level, coming from one side of the grand staircase. I was too late, I thought, too late.

I ran to the top of the grand staircase, dripping wet, where the scene was unfolding. Mother was there, shrieking. She was furiously stripping a frail young woman of a red negligee, lashing out with nails and fists, the young woman crumpled to the ground unclothed and submissive.

Father was there, shouting, shirtless and in pajama bottoms slung low around his hips. I could see the trunk of his semi erect cock pushing against the fabric of the pajamas. He was yelling at Mother to stop. She turned her attention to him and her rage cycloned, striking him hard, howling.

“You’ve gone too far Frank!” she screamed, “Not in my own house, not in MY HOUSE, not with that child! Not with your own child!”

My breath seized in my chest at that. I didn’t know how Mother knew about Father and me. But we’d never done it in her house. That made no sense. And what did it have to do with the naked sylph of a woman on the floor?

“My heart BLEEDS for you!” Dad screamed in response, striking his bare chest hard with his fist like a drum, his hair raised and all the muscles in his wrestler’s body coiled to fight. “You CUNT!”

I rushed between them, but they were already on each other, spit flying from his Dad’s lips as he spewed obscenities, Mother shrieking and the damn red negligee in the grip of her fist whipping in all our faces. There, in the eye of the hurricane, I felt a sudden calm as Mother and Father spun in a slow motion blur around me.

I turned to, and recognized, the woman on the ground, looking on in fear. “Ash?” I asked.

The thoughts hit me as hard as a dozen blows from Father’s fists. 

Father with Ash, wearing Mother’s negligee? Mother said his own child? Who was Ash’s father? What happened in Spain? I could see suddenly the unbreachable cleft between Father and myself, how I’d lost him to Ash, beginning the day of the bullfight in Spain. What a fool I’d been. 

Abuela and the housekeeping staff gathered on the ground floor, watching the fight spiral above then. As I understood how I too had been betrayed, my fists joined Mother’s, both of us against Father together. Ash sobbed as we struck and shoved him, the floor slick with rainwater from my coat. Father fought to keep his footing instead of battling us, balanced just so. One more blow hit him and his face went funny as he tipped back over the balustrade, his legs flailing out from under him. He grabbed for anything to hold onto, catching only the red negligee in his grasp, which slid out of Mother’s hand like smoke.

For a long horrible moment Father fell, hitting the ground below with a hard jolt, flat on his back, perfectly still. Mother screamed, and I said no, no no. 

Abuela dropped down on her hands and knees, hunched over Father’s broken body, sobbing and praying.

Ash howled, and Hurricane Andrew made landfall in Louisiana.
 

9.

Father was never the same. Confined to a wheelchair, the whatever animated him was extinguished. 

His doctors tried to convince him that he could have an active and fulfilling life, that even sex was not out of the question with some special accommodations. But for a man like Father that would not do. He was broken, and shrunk into himself, speaking rarely, and then most often in Spanish.

It wasn’t only the break to his spine that left him in this state. I sided with Mother, distancing myself from him as much as appearances would allow. I was so hurt by the indignity he visited upon me that an icy fist closed around my heart, and I went hard. I really was like Mother after all.

If the pace and tone of life in our house had been dictated by Father before the fall, Mother’s reign began after. She took over, with a banker’s eye for the debts that must be repaid, and with interest. I think she relished her ascendancy in those days.

Her first order of business was to establish that Father’s fall was the tragic, but accidental, result of a domestic dispute gone awry. There would be no investigation, no charges, and no ugly rumors that Father had been shoved. When it really mattered, Mother was a Southern lady and I a young heir, and Father was a poor immigrant’s son. Money runs deep in New Orleans, but old money runs deeper still, all the way to Hell according to some.

She privately ordered genetic tests to determine that Ash was Father’s son using hair samples Ash left behind in a brush. So I learned Ash was all along my own baby brother, as well as the greatest rival for the love of my life. As far as Mother was concerned, this made Ash a threat to my inheritance, so the sooner his existence was erased, the better.

She hired men to harass and give chase to Ash, threatening him at every turn, driving him out of Louisiana in ways so merciless he’d never return. Hera’s wrath had nothing on Mother’s, and Ash was cursed with being the known face to represent every infidelity she’d endured, even though the greatest of those infidelities was secretly her chief accomplice, me. I didn’t lift a finger or utter a syllable to discourage her campaign. I hated my old friend with the same zeal and wounded pride as Mother.

Only Abuela seemed to care about Father in his despair. As usual, she came around to accepting fate, reasoning that she’d won Father in a deal with the devil, so of course the devil would take his due. She reverted to caring for her hard won child as she had in his childhood, feeding him by hand, wheeling him outside for sun, bathing him and humming him to sleep.

It would have been a greater mercy for him to die in the fall, but life is not kind.

 

10. TWENTY FIVE YEARS LATER

Father and I did come to live in Manhattan finally, but not the way I’d dreamt, not as defiant lovers. Instead he was in my custodial care, with no more say in the matter than a bull with a ring through its nose but to go where guided. My penthouse was palatial, with spectacular views and abundant space, even the commodity of a private gym, so we could go almost days without seeing each other. 

By her count, Abuela was almost 130 years old, but still tending to Father’s daily care, his feeding and bathing, replacing his catheter and wiping the shit from his ass. My daughters and their mother were metropolitan and beautiful and spoke barely a word of Spanish. Abuela and Father were just eccentric fixtures in our home, and I suspect some of their friends thought Abuela was nothing but hired help.

I waited until I was on the older side to marry and have my own children. When my eldest was born I was 40, about as old as Father had been at the time of the fall. Maybe I wanted to avoid his reckless path, hoping age would tame in me any passions ill suited to a conventionally happy life. Or I was waiting to meet the love of my life. But I already had, and I wasn’t his. So I made a prudent choice in a bride and enjoyed a highly civil marriage, a meeting of the minds if not the souls, you could say.

Mother divorced Father not long after the fall. Her lawyers could have left him as indigent as the day they met, with a catalog of infidelities she could articulate like an opera diva. But that would have meant more public disclosure than was desirable, and in the end it would all come to me anyway. She left him with his fortune largely intact, if unused, and married a more wealthy man, one not tainted by old world curses, foreign languages or strange appetites. In fairness to her, she was adored finally, and it softened her. She enjoyed her marriage in a sort of second spring of her life.

Ten years after we left New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina devastated it. Ash’s prediction of the hurricane coming to wash away that devil city had come true, nearly. Maybe it was an actual prophecy, maybe just inevitable. There was only so much those ancient levies could take before they fell under the relentless pounding of nature’s fervor.

I would lie if I were to say I had abandoned my lust for Father. Even in his condition he was a powerfully built and coarsely handsome man. He used the therapeutic gym I had built for him, maintaining his powerful torso, for no obvious reason. His t-shirts revealed the hairy thickness of his arms, the v-necks exposing the soft fur that clung to the curve of his pecs where I’d once rested my head. And the girth of his cock, now useless as it was, was often visible to me in his sweatpants. It nearly broke my heart to see it catheterized in clinical gloved hands, sanitized and reduced in function, bereft of its power for pleasure and breeding.

Even penned and broken, his essential animal nature was evident, and pricked at my senses.

11.

We rarely took Father out in public, but for my 45th birthday my wife arranged for us to go to a special show. Abuela stayed home with the children, even with a nanny on site, because she didn’t trust anyone but family. We dressed for the occasion, and Father was a handsome and distinguished, if disinterested, participant. If I learned nothing else from Mother it was the value of appearances.

The show was at The Jewel Box, a small exclusive club, and the performer was Ishtar, a European sensation with a limited engagement in the States. Her shows were the talk of those in certain social circles who could afford the cost and who had the refined tastes to appreciate the artistry. Ishtar would, my wife told me, perform only seven numbers, songs by others, reinterpreted, and each would be a masterpiece, according to her sources. 

Owing to Father’s chair, we were seated upfront, before the small stage. When the light came up, Ishtar’s back was to the audience. Her long glossy black hair lay like a snake against her impossibly thin frame and white shimmering gown. One arm was extended in full, palm up to the jeweled ceiling. As the music began, the fingers curled like smoke, and the hand drew it in and down.

I knew even before she turned that Ishtar was Ash. My heart rose up in my throat.

When she turned to us, my eyes confirmed what I knew in my gut and heart. This was Ash’s face, the café au lait skin magically unmarred by time, eyes heavy with thick lashes, lips plush and painted blood red.

She broke the silence, going straight into her first song without introduction. Words would have been tawdry at that point. She sang with a languid ease, in a voice that modulated between male and female in both depth and range. Her delivery was playful and poignant, deftly tugging us all along in any direction she wished to take us.

Of course, each song was paired with hypnotic pantomime, grown beyond just the simple magical hands I knew to full body expressions of every image and idea.

Father watched in silence.

For the seventh and final song, the music started soft and low.

This may come, this may come as some surprise
But I miss you
I could see through all of your lies
And still I miss you

Ishtar looked right at our table, at me, at Father.

Is it a crime
That I still want you
And I want you to want me too

Father’s eyes were wet and his nostrils flared.

My love is wider, wider than Victoria Lake
My love is taller, taller than the Empire State
It dives and it jumps and it ripples like the deepest ocean

Ishtar’s voice went deep at wider, as deep as any man’s. Her long arms spread wider than they could really be, then came together, upright as the Empire State building, in gorgeous art deco rigidity, and then dropped to her sides, plunging into the ocean depths. 

I can't give you more than that, surely you want me back

At the last line her voice rose to its loudest and most heated pitch, smooth and deep and searing. She slid in serpentine motion off the stage to stand, directly before Father, reducing the rest of us to voyeurs in their reunion.

Is it a crime
Is it a crime
That I still want you
And I want you to want me too
It dives and it jumps and it ripples like the deepest ocean
I can't give you more than that, surely you want it back
Tell me,
Is it a crime

Father was choked with emotion, and Ishtar kissed him softly on the lips. 

I could swear I saw the bulge in his crotch rise.
 

11.

Father was invited to meet with Ishtar in the dressing room. Of course he couldn’t go on his own, so I asked my wife to go home while I tended to him.

Ash, or Ishtar, was radiantly beautiful. I don’t know what witchcraft she learned in all our years apart, but she used it to great effect. The spell of her hands was now of her entire body, and every turn and gesture was laden with greater meaning. Even in a dressing robe, she was as elegant as strands of wisteria blossoms in sway.

Ishtar largely ignored me, but kissed Father full on the mouth, their tongues seeking each other out. She caressed his face and unbuttoned his shirt, running her fingers over his chest and down to his still flat belly.

He had gone grey since the night of the fall, and his chest hair had as well. But he still had the frame of a great athlete, and his torso was still more fit than any man his age, if fallen far from his prime. In Ishtar’s loving hands I could see the embers of what he was being fueled to vitality with each breath in his manly chest. 

She unzipped his pants, and his cock sprung to life. 

“That shouldn’t…” I began, but stopped. 

Ishtar gently removed his catheter and stroked his cock with her magical hands. He groaned at her touch and he grew stiff. When her spell was done she stepped back and let his erection stand on its own, drawing it out with her presence alone.

His cock was magnificent. Thick and rigid, perfectly curved and richly veined, already oozing a stream of precum from the sturdy crown. 

He looked more alive than he had in many years, and my own desire was rekindled with a fury I couldn’t have predicted. Of concern to no one but myself, my own erection strained against the fine fabric of my own briefs, longing to meet Father’s again. 

Ishtar let her robe fall to the ground softly, revealing her most basic and first magic. She had made herself a woman. She was female in every aspect, the counterpart to Father’s fierce masculinity. She rose up with a grace that spurned gravity to straddle her lover, letting the full beast of his cock enter into her in a long steady penetration. Father gasped aloud and buried his face in her breasts, groaning as his cock returned to its true home of her body.

I was compelled to give them some privacy, stepping behind a screen, but they were beyond my presence already. I could hear them as Ishtar rode him and he breathed heavily and snorted. I reached into my own pants to stroke myself, envisioning the tower of his erection plunging slowly in and out, then moving faster, pummeling the tender flesh and preparing to breed.

I heard Father’s huffing, deep in rut, and the gasp of his climax and then the quiver of Ishar’s. I quaked and pumped out my own load, my hand drawing it out of me and onto the floor of the dressing room. 

12.

On the drive home, Father was unusually alert. He watched everything that happened on the streets, everything we passed, as if seeing the city for the first time. He spoke, in Spanish, of seeing Ash, or Ishtar, again.

I suffered in silence. It was so arousing to see his prick hard again, to hear his hard snort as he came, and to imagine his hot breath as if it were on me. But it galled me also. 

Even now after so long, just the sight of Ash was enough to resurrect Father’s cock, while every day my existence went unnoticed by him. We’d once fucked like beasts in heat. I’d worshiped his body like no other could. How could he choose Ash over me, I wanted to ask. I fell in love, is what I guessed he would say.

I had long ago become his legal guardian, and his choices were mine to make. And so we were bound by law, as much as a marriage. It wasn’t the way I’d always wanted, but still he was as much mine as he would ever be. 

During our ride home, I reflected on the days when we were all together. I remembered Abuela’s palm reading, that Ash would be a lady of evil luck and could only visit where she’d wish to stay. I remembered also my hastily made up counter prophecy, that Ash would be famous and successful and marry the love of his — or, now, her — life.

One prophecy could still be true, but only if the other was not.
 

13.

At home little Marta was awake and said she couldn’t sleep until I read her a story. I said only a short one, and she handed me her worn, flimsy copy of The Story of Ferdinand.

“Once upon a time in Spain,” I read, “there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand. All the other little bulls he lived with would run and jump and butt their heads together, but not Ferdinand. He liked to sit just quietly and smell the flowers.”

I read about Ferdinand’s favorite spot under the cork tree where he could smell the flowers, and how his mother worried about him. I read about how the men came to find a bull to out in the fighting ring, and how Ferdinand was stung by a bumble bee which made him snort and butt as if he was crazy, making the men think he was the fiercest bull of all. When it was time for the bullfight they called him Ferdinand the Fierce and all the Banderilleros were afraid of him. But when he saw the flowers in all the hair of the ladies, he sat down to quietly smell them, and wouldn't fight or be fierce no matter what they did. So they had to take Ferdinand home, where he was free to sit in the shade of his favorite tree and smell the flowers.

“Why are you sad, Daddy?” Marta asked, seeing my heartache play out in my face.

“I was thinking,” I sighed, “there was a man who didn’t like the story of Ferdinand, so he wrote another story about a bull who was not Ferdinand. This bull was ferocious, but fell in love. And then he died in the bullfight ring anyway.”

In Hemingway’s story, the bull who loved fighting was put to breed because he was so strong and ferocious and his owner wanted to produce many more just like him. But this bull was in love with just one cow, and paid no attention to any others because he only wanted to be with her. This made him useless for breeding, so he was sent back to the bullfighting ring. He fought wonderfully and everyone admired him, but in the end he died there. The man who killed him admired him the most, and the sword handler said this was the bull who was slain because he was so faithful.

“That doesn’t sound like a children’s story,” said Marta.

“No,” I said, chuckling and sniffling, “and I’m a little sad because I don’t know which of the two stories to believe.”

“Papa,” said Marta, “why don’t you pick the one you like the best?”
 

14.

Years ago Ash had become Ishtar, overseas with some shoddy faked paperwork. My attorneys did some clean up, and by the time they were done the paper trail verified beyond any reasonable doubt that Ishtar had always been Ishtar, never Ash, and certainly was not related to Father in any way.

It was illegal to falsify the records, but it was such a small crime in the story of our lives I was certain the universe would excuse it.

Ishtar and Father married in the spring, in Spain. In this way they could be together, and Ishtar could be assured of one day receiving the inheritance she was owed if Father passed, while keeping secret their biological relationship. 

I set them up in a house there, where Ishtar could become a famous musical recluse. Or they could leave and go somewhere else. I’d meddled all I ever would, leaving their choices to them now.

When I last saw them they were there, Father in his chair and Ishtar on his lap, under a shade tree. For all I know they are there still, sitting just quietly. I like to believe they are very happy. 
 

- END - 

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Credit for the song Is It a Crime to Sade https://youtu.be/U-SHfpm5Bxk?si=m0tsuAPUs_715NY3