Earnest

With thanks to all who read my tales, especially those who - during the many weeks since my most recent appeared - have read way back to stories posted more than a year ago, I offer this new one with deep appreciation. Question: Is there a discussion group out there someplace where readers recommend authors' old stories? I ask because even some of my stories recognized by hundreds are being read every day alongside certain items which have attracted thousands - and that phenomenon has my curiosity. I'm as a close as e-mail and would love to hear from you

To spare him the attention of students in my classroom, I met the new transfer student in my office. Didn’t wish him any embarrassment of writing his first piece while others were well into their third.

“I see you’re going to be an art student. That’s distinguishing. My five current students are variously oriented, which makes for the best class discussions and written work. One’s going into coaching athletes for sure, another into librarianship, and the others are considering photography, procurement, and porn star management.”

Mild curiosity showed. Otherwise, his eyes sported a slightly faraway look.

“Without any instructions or rules from me nor any restrictions as to subject matter, your starting point with us will be what you write for me now. Relax, let your inner self speak – openly. Nothing your write can be anything but right. It will be not be critiqued, read only by me. Never shown to anyone else…unless you wish.”

His eyes looked left, ahead, and right as if considering.

“You may remain clothed or remove any or all of your clothes to write, a choice I leave to my students always. That freedom of choice liberates young minds. Should you need anything under your desktop, the option is yours.”

He peeked, blinked. “How much time do I have? I’m not real fast.”

“All the time you require to write, then to go back over what you’ve written. Just ding that bell when you’re done.”

“You’re going to leave me here?”

“After you’ve gotten underway. Privacy’s primary for this period.”

With a smile of my teacherly best, I took a place on my two-seat sofa a few feet behind him. Note please, I’ve been here and yon in pre-college education long enough to know what I’m doing now and – to come – with a fairly decent looking transfer kid entering my writing class.

He saw where I sat, that same, distant look in his eyes. Turned, and began.

“Do you need a dictionary?”

“Hardly.”

After some minutes, his task absorbed him. I slipped silently out my office’s other door.

* * *

The bell never rang.

When I looked in, he was gone. His alarmingly enigmatic paper remained:

I completed school after I was born.

No uphill that.

The part of life I didn’t complete before dying, has been, now that there was time.

It’s all non-existent anyway. Most of all, me.

Mirrors look back at you but they don’t talk. So, they’re safe.

Living in your own shithole is better than living with your parents in theirs.

I step out in the world where no one knows anyone, nor I among them. It’s perfect. No expectations. Only surprises when everything’s not the same.

The life of my art is more real than anything in real life. Some art represents life. Mine is life.

Happy as a fetus in formaldehyde, nothingness can’t laugh. Existence can but doesn’t ground me the way a good buttplug does. A spank or a fuck is temporary but a plug stays with you all day, all night as needed. I took the one from under the desktop, like you said.

No signature. Just pristine space where one might have been.

Who is this student, and where did he go? Was he suicidal before he found the plug?

A re-read of his would-be essay caused me to consider the majority of its strange use of words and phrases surreal. No, not that – something existential. Brain clicked back to Sartre’s dreary Being and Nothingness from college days.

As you know from reading elsewhere (Cf. see here), I teach really well, my methods proven many times over. To do the job I do, it is necessary to know about my students here at Gomorrah Junior High.

So dutifully, I checked the funky looking, skimpy transfer file and learned his name, Earnest Lee, his age, fifteen, his grade point average C+, but not his address. The space, empty, had a notation clipped to it, “Family in transit.” That made no sense. A psych eval? Where was that? Oh, there had been one in pencil. Some busybody had tried to erase it.

I squinted to make out – “withdrawn” – “non-communicative” – “no social skills” – and something about “sex.” Damn!

Across the street from our facility was the Fussell Art Gallery. The kid’s interested in art. Perhaps…

The white walls were hung with what to me were sling-and-dab messes on frameless canvases of un-trued angles. No one in sight, I strolled in. Spotted a couple of watercolors on a table. Subjects: dicks. Rather small, erect ones drawn with a red pencil, basic pubic hair added by a black pencil. Captions: “I WISH 1” and “I WISH 2.”

Sounds from behind a curtained doorway attracted me.

“I don’t need you. I’ve got a plug.” It was Earnest’s voice.

“You steal it?”

“No.”

When I heard, “You little shit,…” I pushed aside the curtain, stepped into the shithole of a back room, and declared, “I gave that adornment to Earnest.”

A trashy looking man had naked Earnest over his lap. “Who the fuck are you?” Blatantly, he fiddled with the plug.

“I’m responsible for Earnest. He’s mine during school hours.” I made it sound as though it was true by growling, “He’s coming with me. Haven’t you ever heard of In loco parentis?” I knew he hadn’t. “It means, I’m his parent when he’s in school.”

“He ain’t got no parents.”

With a step closer, a glance at my watch, and my voice lowered, I said, “I’m his parent. Earnest, put your clothes on, son. As for you, Mr. Fussell, unless you want your lights to go out for the next few hours, you shut your trap. “C’mon, son.”

* * *

In the safety of my office, Earnest confessed – a lot. Not a word was said about the two pencil drawings (which I had confiscated). I dismissed the class early and drove us to my house. A ham and cheese sandwich vanished down his mobile throat along with a glass of wholesome milk.

“Thanks. I needed that.” Without prompting, he stripped and stood before me bare. Underweight, lightly sexed, overall untidy (as I guessed earlier), I judged him a ragamuffin with no potential to be, when freshened, a stud muffin. “I’m a mess.”

“A mess with a brain. You have writing talent.”

He dithered. “I’m all hung up. Just can’t get things out, except sometimes on paper.”

“Go on,” I said, taking him from kitchen to bedroom and taking off my clothes. “You’re doing well. Keep talking while we have a shower.”

He did. Let me have the plug to wash, then put it back. No expression as he did so. Just put it in. When dried, he gave me his hand as if expecting something.

“Let’s lie down. You want to tell me about your two WISHes?

Eyes fixed on the ceiling while I listened alongside, my head on the other pillow, Earnest told me, “I drew two dicks, one I wished was mine and one I wished to fuck me.”

If you wait long enough, you don’t need to say or ask anything. The other person will fill the silence. Earnest did.

“People talk about you. How you inseminate your pupils to bolster their writing talent. How all the ones you certify win scholarships at universities and get jobs in publishing, as journalists and editors and ad executives and some have families and everything and…”

“Earnest, slow down. Take a breath. You’re running sentences together. Listen, let’s try another approach. I’ll let you replace your plug with my cock, even though it’s not like either one you drew.”

Sheepish question: “Can we?” Then, “You’ll be willing to help me?”

I settled back comfortably. His eyes did their best to reconcile what loomed with the abandoned plug’s dimensions. “Afraid or just unsure?” I asked.

No reply.

“Take your time and you will like it. Others less well-shaped for it have been grateful – and profited. Scoot yourself up and crouch down just until your hand can locate my cock and put its head to your special place. Yes, like that. Now, work it around to warm your membranes and to lube them with my pre-cum. Beautiful. You’re exciting us both. Keep your balance and, when you repeat the lines of poetry I’m going to speak, let yourself sink a little way onto me.”

“Okay. Can we try a trial run?”

“Of course. It was many…”

“Didn’t go in. Just like, bumped.”

“You need a little more of my pre-cum. Mmm, yes. That should do it. Here goes for real. ‘It was many….’”

“Oh. ‘It was many…

“…and many…”

“Uh-huh. ‘…and many…’”

“…minutes ago…”

“’Minutes ago.’ Oh, I’m down – just barely.”

“…in this bedroom…which belongs…to me…”

“Ouch. ‘…in this bedroom…’ go slower. ‘…which belongs…’ I’m about two inches onto you. ‘…to me…’ or you mean, you. Whew!”

“…that a good boy there lived whom we both know…”

“Oh my. Oh my. Oh my! Another three inches.” He listened in wonder. Said not a word.

“…by the name of Earnest Lee…” My remaining two accepted in his well-spread ass.

He sat still on my pubes for the next line, spoken without stresses: “And this good boy lived with no other thought…”

Encouragingly, I smiled as I pushed thrice with the full force of iambic pentameter: “…than to love and be loved by me.”

His spews of sperm I caught and, when they stopped coming, I offered their total to his mouth. “Hold this. Do not swallow it. Lean forward and transfer it with your tongue into my mouth – for a kiss I’ve allowed no other student, Earnest.”

For a newly deflowered transfer student with a cock yet in his ass, Earnest kissed naturally, unashamedly with a lover’s ardor. His tongue spread throughout my mouth and was sucked on as I swallowed long and hard.

His head shook as I returned his tongue to him, sat him up, and said gravely, “This lesson’s exam is the final stage to your acceptance into my class.”

“Exam?” Concern marked his youngster’s face.

“If you’ve learned from my rhymes and consistent meter the basics of simple poetry, then you must respond with a poem of your own, one of rhyming relevance.

He gasped, “Now?”

I smiled, “Whenever or never is up to you.”

He stood straight up, dropping my cock from his bottom. “I’ve never written a poem. Can’t I draw your penis instead?”

“So, the example of my teaching that you wanted has been a waste of my time? Where’s that plug? Find it, put it in, and go – or risk the spanking of a lifetime. You know where the door is.”

He pranced, antsy, from the room. After switching off my bedside lamp. I squiggled under the sheets and began to doze. At some point in the night, a lithe body nestled next to me and was there when I woke. Oddly, as my fingers drifted along Earnest’s form they encountered a carefully folded piece of paper nested in his damp ass crack.

I was an unravished child

Of manner ever so mild.

My senses knew

I needed a screw

From no one less than you.

Your students had said

They’d rather be dead

Unless fucked to learn

With deep concern

As is your skill.

I felt a chill.

Would I merit

Your flow of spirit?

Already freshly leaking, my cock sought to take more than the poem’s cushioned place. It inched forward. I shuddered at the sensation of fleshy muscle slowly yielding. An uncomfortable moan clued me toward caution. I inched back, rubbed my wetted rigidity into Earnest’s furrow, applied gentle pressure, focused on coaxing it to open and, ages later I thought, found my way into the boy’s bottom and through to its glowing core.

With no effort to move, I relished little contractions dreamily taking stock of every quivering inch. He must have recognized however subconsciously the presence of a man’s meat where only one – mine – had been before. Fitting himself totally to me, he became inert, reverting to the claim of sleep, his channel’s suppleness in-waiting. Time passed.

Gentle to-ing and fro-ing summoned me from sleep’s embrace. Earnest seemed half-awake and to be taking his pleasure without intending to wake me. Something about it was so sweet that my eyes simmered, my mind hovered. Should I stake him to make him mine, then tell him he’d made it into my class, or give him the news and then fuck new consciousness into him?

Presciently, he said, “You’re giving me a message, I know. Don’t say a thing. Just deliver.”

I went with him as he proned himself, widened his legs further than I imagined they could go, and rested his chin on crossed arms. I slipped in like smoke under a doorway – invading without seeming to. His mouse-brown head of hair responded to touches of lips and tongue as I began constantly to fluctuate in and out until it was safe to swing back and forth, to hoist high and plunge low. Fucked him like the true student he wanted to be. It was wonderful.

Because…

The more fired my furnace became, the more he seemed to become molten. All of him shook with rippling effect. Even his joints seemed to jellify. In my paroxysms, volleys of scalding cum flushed forward until even I was close to blacking out. Earnest took it all in, quivering furiously on my monolith and clasping hysterically for more.

My erection remained sunk where it was until our passion subsided and we both came to realize the fuck was over.

I clambered off and went for a refreshing shower.

He left behind a two-word note: “Damn you.”

* * *

Earnest attended my class each day of the next week, arriving punctually at the beginning, sitting in the rearmost desk, adding not a word to any of the discussions (tennis tactics and athletic bodies, videography, on-line gay research expertize, benefits for sex workers, and developing investment strategies for rising porn stars), and departing when the bell rang – without saying anything to me or his classmates.

I should point out, his were not mesmerizing features: his skin, while smooth, was not beautiful, his fluffy hair had no shimmer to it although it had taken well well to being pulled during sex, his eyes lacked puppy-ish charm, his ass was adequately rounded but not of porn quality.

Yet.

Earnest Lee, I felt secure, was to be the greatest fuck of my lifetime.

Saturday morning came. Wearing only a bathrobe, I went out for the local paper which lay on dewy grass. As I turned back, there, asleep in my porch swing, was Earnest. His appearance the worse for wear, his dirty hands held paper of another kind.

Forty-three sheets in number, laboriously handwritten, titled, “A Student Story.”

“Earnest,” I said loudly enough to wake him, “get in the house and use the bathroom for its proper functions.”

The newspaper and his paper in my clutches, I followed behind, pointed his way and informed him, “Stop by the laundry room and put your clothes in the washing machine. Use plenty of detergent. When you’re clean inside and out, as you must be when here, then find something of mine to put on – or not – and come for breakfast.”

With coffee percolating, pecan rolls warming, and pre-fried bacon heating, I started reading.

Written in the third person, present tense, Earnest’s prose spoke of a lost boy, Bung, who wanders a dystopian land in search of sustenance of body and soul. Where roves take him, rogues (mostly male and older) offer subsistence feeding, occasional housing and, always, abuses of several kinds. Bung is but a thing on the move; however, a real boy unused to care, inured to neglect and hard usage. He steals a student’s bagged lunch, is caught eating its pimiento-cheese sandwich not by the student but by a witness to the crime. The witness, whose name is Bumbeater, drags him into a store nearby, fingers his ass until the sandwich is consumed, then punishes Bung by means of a spank and a fuck. Freed, Bung runs into the group of students that listens, sympathizes, and tells of a marvelous teacher who, with their wellbeing in mind, treats their bodies and souls to precious, individualized, internal coachings. They instill the idea of Bung’s salvation if only he can get into their school, Gomorrah Junior High. Acting as the first friends Bung has known, they concoct a scheme to get him there. It involves faking transfer records…

Unread pages were set aside when, a damp towel about his waist, Earnest came barefoot into my kitchen.

“How ready are you to face the day?” I asked.

He smiled, turned around, took the towel from where it was wrapped like a sarong, secured it around his neck like a cape, bent over, and showed me the butt plug that now was his.

I rose, patted it appreciatively, felt his loveliness on either side, kissed him on the lips, poured our coffees, extracted rolls and bacon from their respective ovens, and handed him a fork. “Let’s take the time and enjoy this phase of sharing our morning, okay?”

Into our second cups, he couldn’t bear the tension of my silence. “You didn’t like it” – was halfway between a statement and a question.

I circumvented, “Your poem showed thought, feeling, and impulse. It was the good result of your responding to the stimuli you received from me. ‘A Student Story’ was thinly disguised autobiography, yourself with the self-deprecating name Bung. Minimally imaginative as the result of surely your life’s most fabulous, second fuck. Unoriginal. A report, really.”

Deliberately, I didn’t ask what happened.

His chin trembled. He drained his cup. “My brain had exploded from being overcrowded with ideas. You know, everything about me was churning out of control. The confusion I was in gave me no choice but to cling to the merest facts of what happened. Blatant, I know. Crude. Bung I chose because it’s just a hole. I’m not much more than that – yet. You must agree, from that expression on your face – it’s so droopy.”

“It’s not you. I’m disappointed because I thought the fuck I threw into you would have resulted in something actually creative. You adjusted to the rhythms of sex as to the manner born, met my challenges fully, showed appetite for…”

“Not quite,” he said, removing his plug. “You’re flattering yourself. I tolerated your highhandedness because I asked you to deliver your message. Hence, my adapting that sleep mode, so you were free to fuck at your finest. But, my thought is that you became ego-centered, made the fuck about you.”

Earnest busied himself with my bathrobe. “The result of any of your fucks has even one of your students written as many error-free, vivid pages of prose as my forty-three?”

“Honestly, no.”

He had me by the balls, literally. Palpating them with thumbs, weighing them in warm palms. “How many students have slept with you this last week?

“None. My students never spend the night. I wouldn’t want them to. Things might get out of order. I wouldn’t want to lose their respect. Certain ones are writing really well.”

“Well, then, am I in the wrong place?”

I stared.

“Two goals motivate me: to learn to write in a distinguished yet communicative manner; and, to develop my expressivity as a visual artist which, at this point, is unlikely because my manual skill does not match my mental images. I just draw WISHes.”

Smart, I said, “Since you need practice rendering what you see in your mind, let me help you to form a secure mental image of my cock as it feels in you then, later, if that yields illuminating results, you can draw or paint that experience. Words written in my class couldn’t capture it, but your art will. I am unanimous in that."

On my bed, he sprawled, fingers pulling apart his just-washed butt cheeks. “Check my hole. See if it’s okay. Felt good to me in the shower.”

A perfectly respectable, mid-teen rosette ready to be serviced in the name of art – what man my age could abstain? In Earnest’s case, its joys already known to be of five-star quality, his rouge-blush rosette appeared almost virginal. Not a hair in sight, no sign it ever had stretched to fit a plug, to exploration by my fingers, much less around the size and shape of my cock, nor served as doorway to a lobby for the delivery of my busloads of cum.

I marveled. Spat directly on it and slipped my forefinger into his young body’s unseen treasure path. Quiescent, he had made no sound. I ran my free arm beneath his right armpit and chest to claim with my hand the left side of Earnest’s neck. His exposed ear responded to my nose’s tracing of its convolutions, to my pursed lips following their lines, to my tongue in its recesses – the while, my finger feeling inner velvet.

“Use your thumbs. See how wide they can open me.”

Exactly the width of my most personal part, then firming and beginning to drip. I continued to hold him as I jostled to let pre-cum moisten what it could. The wetness on inner skin brought out its usually hidden, throbbing color and incited me to center, enter, and sink into his yielding anus’s core.

Such tender surroundings generated a sensation of peace so paradisiacal that it caused mental strain not immediately to want the greater thrill of hurtling into my usual steeplechase toward orgasm but to linger, like a steed grazing, appreciative of the ‘taste’ and its calm delights.

My mind crazy with imagery, I was besotted.

He was not. I was spared only a backward glance before he said, “Don’t go to sleep on me – yet.”

I stirred slightly, barely perceptively, on the brink of cataclysm, looking at his nearly translucent skin beneath which youthful blood pulsed and glowed. It was too much. I gave myself to him in a luge-swift plunge.

Hard as a rifle barrel, my cock raked his ridges until they flattened under my rampant sweeps. Earnest’s “Yes!” sent me cartwheeling into instant orgasm, the ecstasy of which relieved my tension but gave me no cause to pause. To the contrary, I continued drilling his ass with the full complement of my lust to sensitize his creativity. My muscles – arms, chest, lower back, stomach, and thighs – complied. I delved in and out of him with adrenaline-fueled rapacity, hoping to elicit some reaction.

What I could see of his face’s expression – vacuous as a statue – betrayed nothing beyond the force of my body jolting his. His head lolled.

Some satisfaction lay in that.

Perhaps different inflections of my moves… Some mellowing of attack…

“Wondering what to do?”

He intuited, despite my constant thuds to his juiced depths, that I wanted to provide more.

Stroking him still, I listened to words that came as music, “Melt my heart. Make love to me.”

I glided deep toward and from Earnest’s belly. Smoothing and soothing in both directions, I plied him, arousing sensations that brewed his emotions to their boil. His interior tightened on me. I rolled to meet head-in his trembling butt’s thrusts, spitting him as for barbeque and, with ever-lengthening strides, jarring his bones.

Flinging himself back at me, he set in motion something akin to a mutual blaze. Able to move from the bed again after our joined detonation, he went to the desk and wrote this description, “The sun rose from the horizon, peaked at noon with burning heat, and settled into a sunset which glowed like hot coals.”

I did not see it at the time, waiting as I did for him to return to me, to wrap his legs with mine, his arms with mine. Our limbs furled our bodies like a flag its pole. Eventually, he shifted his lower limbs that my cock could find its place. We merged once more, and came softly together.

No theatrics nor feats of athleticism, no dynamics. It was as though we tapped each other’s resources. Their liquidity trickled as we shivered in our feelings.

Earnest’s elaborate abstract, “Sweet Love,” in acrylics on a hugely wide, flattened, diamond-shaped canvas required weeks of work outside of school and home – in fact, in the Fussell Art Gallery’s space. It took the threat of a report to our local police about the owner-operator’s attempted rape of fifteen-year-old Earnest to acquire use of his facility (and the promise of a thirty-percent commission). Passers-by watched through the window as the days passed and the complex image emerged in intricate interminglings of colors and values. Art lovers came in but were cautioned not to ask questions. The news media were allowed to take pictures and videos, their commentators speculating to the public about the “mysterious, untrained young genius” whose name and origin were rigidly concealed.

Curiosity engendered interest, reserved at first, from a regional museum’s curator of contemporary art. Observed being too curious about my boy with his hands, I had the gallerist notify the museum’s director of the potential fallout from a scandal should his curator not show more than passing interest in the work itself. Wisdom prevailed. Offers were made to purchase the unfinished canvas but were declined politely: “Until complete and signed, no value can possibly be attached to the work of an unknown. But do keep in touch. You may be the lucky discoverer of a great new face in the art world.”

Members of my writing class took turns posing under me for drawings and sketches as intimate as could be in exchange for portraits in colored pencil of their bright teen faces. Those assured their surveillance of snoops around our school, Gomorrah Junior High, and pleased every parent.

“Our son has been drawn by the ‘mysterious young genius,’” they bragged to anyone who would listen. Of course, among themselves, they self-congratulated repeatedly over their sons’ essays, poems, and stories soon to be printed as Anality: An Anthology by the prestigious New York firm Simon & Shyster.

Enrollment inquiries grew. Our small faculty rose to the challenges of the necessary anal auditions and other testing, assisted from time to time by the administration and a nurse-practitioner on loan from a nearby but otherwise unassociated agricultural institution. Anal health and happiness via education is what we are known to achieve.

Thanks to consultations with experts in several scientific fields, prescribed medical boosters, and a selectively nutritious diet, I thrive in my horizontal duties to the students in my writing class and in my cock’s devotion to precious Earnest’s artistico-emotional yearning. Priapic at night, regardless of daytime service to my other students, I inhabit Earnest’s splendid rectum, now fitted perfectly to my penile conformation.

Gooey, sweaty, somewhat smelly, and happy, I was sluicing my boy in the early hours of this morning with cold water before getting in a second session with him before breakfast. A dream woke him around five, one in which a savage was raping his missionary ass. He said, “I’ve got to have it. Stir yourself, sleepyhead. Listen to what I want you to do and you can use my shoelaces to tie my wrists.”

What a pest! He kept at me until I got mad. Roused myself. Saw the clock. A big day was staring me in the face. Needed my rest. Got madder, especially when he grabbed a dildo and tried to put it up my ass. Smacked him for that.

“You can’t make me behave,” he sassed, a particularly nasty expression turning down the corners of his spouting mouth. “Certainly not with that dinky dick of yours!”

I saw red. The next events blur in my memory, but they resulted in his big toes being tied together by shoelaces, his arms immobilized by an ingenious use of a spare pillowcase (you can imagine), his tush striped wickedly by my wide, suede belt, his yammering mouth crammed with the largest butt plug I had, and my swollen dick ripping him a new back way in.

A revivalist minister would have whooped, “Glory Hallelujah!” at the rush I felt when pummeling his ass at full speed. “Tighten up, you slut,” I yelled, “you’re as loose as a two-bit whore” – knowing full well that the way I was ramming him, he couldn’t do a thing but take it. Friction brought on our first furious emissions. They burst like holiday fireworks but didn’t assuage the pyrotechnical buildup in our connection. So, in and out of his now truly hot, cum-streaked hole, intoxicated with dominance, I found my second wind and redoubled my punishing fuck.

Rag-doll limp, Earnest gargled against the plug in his mouth. Saliva and efforts at words escaped. Under his oozing erection, his balls flopped amusingly. Impetuous intensity raised the beat of my heart to war-drum madness. Locked tight in my embrace, I thundered into Earnest’s cleft without mercy, none being called for as his balls were drawing together ahead of another prostate explosion. Catch-up time for me!

Rapt in the ecstasy of approaching orgasm, I shouted, “Earnest Lee, I goddam love you!”

Anything he may have tried to say when we went through our second climax vanished, all consciousness forfeited to the event.

I came to first. Freeing my beloved boy of his bonds and plug, I lifted and carried him to the shower, turned on the cold water – which woke him and braced me – then placed him gently on the tile to administer a warm water enema and two flushes with water from the cold tap. So weak was he, that I dressed his shivering body and made us breakfast. Hot, strong coffee and toast spread with heated honey revived him and revivified me.

My preparations for school were met by a chilly pronouncement, “A painting must be done today. There’s a suitable canvas here. I’ll not go with you.” For a few moments, my mind rattled with possible actions I might take, but I decided simply to leave him to whatever was on his mind. Without a goodbye, I left.

An after-school faculty meeting delayed my arrival home until nearly five. Dead tired, I found Earnest fast asleep in bed. Desperately hungry, I chose to drop my clothes and to slip in beside him, nakedness to nakedness without sexual thought. Only for the comfort of con

He turned to me. “We’re exhausted and famished, aren’t we?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Let’s go out for supper. Make only small talk or not speak at all. And, when we return…I will show you what you enabled, no, empowered me to do.”

Out of town on the highway where no one we knew would interrupt our quiet lay Pearl’s Food Mart & Gas Station, where good beef stew could be had with farm-fresh broccoli and homemade (we thought) apple pie. She eyed us with uncommon understanding, served us hearty portions, and left us to our own devices.

Sated, I paid our bill, left a good tip, thanked Pearl, nodded to some customers arriving also to eat, recommended the beef stew, and motored home.

“Tough Love” was the most violent abstract I had ever seen. Its colors clashed as if shrieking horror at each other. There appeared to be rips and tears, even places stitched together – illusions of trompe l’oeil accomplishment quite beyond any fifteen-year-old’s ability. Yet, seen up close, the canvas’ surface was smooth. My mind rioted at contrasts and incongruities seemingly contrived to upset the viewer’s equilibrium. I recoiled.

Earnest’s arms caught me as I backed away. “My nightmare. I never could have exorcized its terrors if you hadn’t done to me what you did the way you did – and cleansed me as well.”

* * *

When hung on the wall directly above “Sweet Love” in Mr. Fussell’s showroom, the man gawped at “Tough Love” and crudely clutched at what hardened in his crotch. “I’ve gotta beat off,” he said, not immediately heading for his restroom. I advised him that doing so where the public might take offense would create a problem he would not want.

Earnest and I stood around in the gallery, taking in the effect created by the two canvases’ juxtaposition. He admitted, “I’m thinking of your cock in me.” I hemmed and hawed, poised to fabricate but could not deny the idea of my cock in his ass has arisen. He plastered his posterior playfully against what strained my jockeys.

“It’s your paintings. They’re doing this to us.”

Although closing time was more than an hour away and with no sign of Mr. Fussell’s return, we locked the gallery doors, drew its curtains and those of the plate glass windows.

“A bare, polished wood floor – we’ve never done it on such a surface.”

Clothing discarded, his back met wooden hardness. Legs flung aloft, he took me frontally into a new universe of pounding passion. Clawed my back without exclamations. Speech was beyond us. Our mouths were locked as intimately as our loins. And how we fucked, blind to everything except stars shooting behind our eyelids and novae flaring out of existence far beyond.

Tiny clicks pierced ebbing tides of enchantment. Fussell. With a camera.

“Goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” he muttered, shifting positions, clicking his shutter. “Great documentation!”

“What are you thinking?” I wondered, extricating my less randy projectile and groping about for clothes.

“These pictures, matted and simply framed – black, of course – an equal number aligned on each side of the lower point of ‘Sweet Love.’ – spectacular tie-ins, don’t you get it?”

* * *

The public opening was a sensational success – except for protests from the parents of my writing pupils at School. Why weren’t their sons being similarly honored? Their boys were Earnest’s colleagues. They deserved recognition for their talents, literary and otherwise.

Mr. Fussell was only too happy to oblige with his camera but, he pointed out, not for exhibition in his gallery. Nothing but visual art there. Not a place for blah-blah.

An arrangement with the local book seller calmed troubled waters. He proposed a launch of Anality: An Anthology with readings by each author while the previously-unexhibited Fussell photos of me screwing each boy sublimely were projected in action-sequence on screens to either side of a spotlit podium in the store.

Packed, I tell you. Sold out his supply. Twice, locally (to restage the occasion) we had to reorder. Simon & Shyster asked about our producing a new, illustrated edition. Oh, the money we made!

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