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, we had only her word on her age. Implausible as it may be, she certainly looked the part: tiny, wizened, and perpetually clad in black, with dense eyeglasses that looked far too heavy for her head to support.
We tried to poke holes in her story, treating it like a game. We asked if, by the devil, she meant Satan, and was Dad Satan's son? Abuela just responded, with a dismissive wave, that it wasn't like that. We asked if she was really over 100, and if so, how she could get around so well. She just shrugged in resignation, her answer always the same: 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 U.S. citizen; there were records for that. 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 refined features in masculine form. It was as if his Y chromosome 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. He diversified his investments 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, a constant source of friction.
And as the years unfolded, we learned that in all the ways that truly mattered, he might as well have been won from the devil himself.
2.
Father was, undeniably, a bull of a man.
He looked like one, with a block of a head set on a thick, corded neck and dense, powerful shoulders. His blunt nose had nearly always flared nostrils, and his lips and tongue were fleshy, full of unspoken appetites. His abundant brown hair was meticulously trimmed into a masculine crop, barely taming its wild curls and licks, as was his thick mustache. His appearance was brutal, yet undeniably handsome, a force of nature barely contained.
His suits were tailored to his physique, making it evident how powerfully built he was beneath the fine fabrics. He maintained his athlete's body with rigorous workouts in his private 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, like wings. No one else was built like him on our plantation, or in our social circles; he was singular, a physical aberration. I could practically see the testosterone waft off him, a visible haze.
I imagined that everyone in a five-mile radius could pick up on his musky scent and wet themselves, intoxicated on his primal odor. The one person who conspicuously let it be known she did not feel that way was Mother, who was transparent in her disdain for Father, as only an old-money Southern matriarch, wielding generations of entitlement, could be.
"He doesn't need me for sex anymore, thank Heaven," she'd say, her voice dripping with cool contempt. "He's got every whore in the state on his bankroll."
With Father's wandering eye and Mother's grudging acceptance, their marriage was less a union of the 1990s and more an arrangement from antebellum days, a relic of a bygone era. Father could just as well have been King Cotton rather than an investor in software and oil; the illusion was complete.
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 utterly 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 different kind of strength. A flair for storytelling, 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.
Fingers lightly fluttered, each tip tracing an erratic, ethereal path.
“What’s that one?” I asked, leaning closer, already captivated.
“'Butterflies migrate south for the winter,” Ash answered, his voice a soft current.
In the delicate tremor of his digits, I could almost feel the collective flutter of a thousand wings, a fragile, mass movement unseen.
His hands dropped low, slowly writhing upward on delicate, twisting wrists. His fingers, initially tight buds, unfurled with agonizing slowness, before settling into a gentle, almost hypnotic sway. Wisteria in spring, he'd convey, and the very air seemed to sweeten with imaginary bloom.
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, her Spanish a low pronouncement. "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 a terrible thing to say to Ash. And if she was too blind 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, her conviction unwavering, but it made no sense to me. She sighed and threw up her hands in exasperation, conceding nothing.
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, a knowing flicker in his gaze. "God bless you for a liar."
He didn't know enough Spanish to understand Abuela's words, 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 on earth.
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, oppressive nature of life in Louisiana.
Ash gestured and his fingers became leaves, first rustling in a gentle gust, then transforming into the wind’s currents, whipping up into a furious gale. A crest rose up from below, crashing into the weak barrier of his fist until it trembled and collapsed. All his fingers spread wide, a drowning wave covering the entire surface of the table between us.
“What's that?” I asked, a genuine shiver running down my spine. The air in the room felt suddenly charged.
Ash fixed a witchy gaze right on Abuela. Adopting a mock Cajun patois, he declared, “Dat's de hurricane gon' come and wash dis ol' debil city away one day.”
Abuela held a fist to her chest, her face pale, and rose to her feet. Everyone knew she was terrified of hurricanes, and she didn't need any English to grasp Ash's chilling meaning.
Ash laughed as Abuela left the room, her steps echoing, and I sighed, the sound heavy. My mind, however, was already 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, her figure sculpted by the distance.
"Doesn't she look beautiful up there?" asked Father, beaming with pride for her sculpted poise. His voice was deep and gravelly and instantly 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, instantly, 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 in eager invitation.
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, Frank transformed. He'd devour me, his powerful frame a relentless force as he filled me with his big, bull cock. He had a primal urge to breed, and even after filling me with his hot cum, he would stay driven deep inside, lubricated by his own load, his immense stamina pushing me to my release, 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, an untamed surge, matched only by his voracious appetite for my ass and throat. Though athletic from years on the swim team, I could barely keep pace with his bull-like drive. His ruts were powerful, raw, an almost unconscious rhythm 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 embedded deep, milking out whatever traces escaped his full, heavy bull balls.
His cock was monstrous, a full ten inches by my measure, thick around, dark, veiny and fierce—a true beast, and Father often said he'd never known anyone who could take it the way I did. I was made for this, for him, engineered to receive his formidable power. Though he could be rough, his intensity was always intertwined with my pleasure. I experienced a depth of sexual intensity few could imagine, and I loved every searing moment.
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, as the city glittered like a scattered jewel box below, I leaned against the full-length window. He sunk his beast cock into me, an almost violent possession, stretching me to fit his overwhelming needs. His thrusts filled me completely, each powerful drive a declaration, as his one fist pumped my erection and the other pressed me flat against the cold glass.
I grasped for his thick wrist, my fingers digging in, needing something solid to anchor myself, adrift in my own pleasure. All I could see was the vast, luminous city where we'd live one day, irrevocably wed to each other, as my own orgasm surged, pushed by his cock in the deepest depths of me, pouring through his fingers clenching my shaft. No one needed to know the wild, binding circumstances of our union, only that we were a handsome couple, and that of everyone he could have, Father, with his untamed power, 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 our meetings felt more awkward, tinged with a new distance.
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 any fee that would ensure both discretion and accommodation for any demand. But I understood that couldn't be as satisfying as my own authentic, deep-seated desire that mirrored his, a primal, unyielding match.
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, and Abuela scuttled through the house like a black beetle, redundantly cleaning or rearranging the work already 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, more grounded. It galled me a bit that he was so self-indulgent, wasting scant resources on such frivolous pursuits.
I had a charmed life, born to advantageous genetics—classically handsome, with a lean, strong body others visibly desired—just as I was born to money. Both made me an appealing catch, even among the most privileged circles. I dated a girl with an appropriate pedigree, but I also fucked other boys. Unlike my times with Father, I was always 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 sexually sheltered, with no clue what a real fuck meant. Others were locals from the wrong side of the tracks who were a better match sexually, raw and uninhibited. Two were even professors.
I mounted and bred each of them, a fledgling bull in my own right, seeking to exert my burgeoning power. I could have had more, taken more, but none were the one I most wanted to be with, none could fill the void left by him.
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 to provide me with a travel companion my own age.
It was hard to have Abuela and Ash along on the trip because their presence inevitably hampered our ability to be alone together. Still, I schemed for our moments, each stolen breath of proximity a treasure I craved. I'd slip into his bed, pressing myself flush against his hard, slumbering body, greedy for the contact, for his very presence. My hand would find and cup his heavy cock, asserting my claim over it entirely, a silent declaration that this powerful part of him was unequivocally mine.
When I could, I'd worship him, taking the full, thick length of his erection deep into my throat, as if it were carved to my exact proportions. I doubted anyone else could accommodate him like this, but then, who else could possibly be as utterly devoted to the worship of his cock as I, the son it had made?
I'd forego my own breath, a willing sacrifice, just to feel the hot gush of his semen flood my throat, a tidal wave that would often choke me until I swallowed every last drop. When his hand reached down to gently brush the tears from my watering eyes, I trusted he'd understand, that he'd count each one as a raw, undeniable sign of my absolute 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, a city pulsing with ancient history and vibrant life, we went to the bullfights. Ash said he didn't want to see animal cruelty, his discomfort evident, 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 precise motion of the red cape to maneuver it into position to stab it through the heart—the decisive, fatal 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 left paralyzed, a helpless mass of muscle that must be dragged away. This, she emphasized, 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, honorable end.
Ash was so fretful for the bull that nothing Abuela or I said could console him, his empathy outweighing any argument. Father, with uncharacteristic kindness, 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, light-hearted self.
After dinner, I asked him what he saw with Father. He thought for a moment, then showed me with knuckles gently rolling, then jerking abruptly—tourists on Segways. Then, with long digits flowing over each other, his hands became the serene palace waterfall at Parque del Retiro.
I laughed, but Father was uncharacteristically reticent, his gaze distant. I was instantly 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, 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 with boys as well, even as I deeply missed the feeling of wholeness I'd had with Father's erection lodged up inside me, a void no other intimacy seemed to fill. 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 gnawing guilt, I made myself scarce, spending large spans of the summer months outside New Orleans, seeking refuge with the families of my peers. They were strangely free of the raw drama that plagued my family, and I immersed myself in their simplicity and decorum, a desperate attempt to breathe normal air. But that didn't stop the phone calls, like tendrils reaching out from the storm brewing at home.
"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, my own voice tight with frustration, "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’d never heard before. "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, delivered through her sobs, planted a tiny, insidious seed of doubt in me that I'd never known before, a cold pinprick of fear.
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 a raging beast, tearing at our home.. 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. A cold dread seized me—I was too late, I thought, utterly 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 thick trunk of his semi-erect cock pushing unmistakably 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, a physical punch to the gut. The world tilted. 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 crumpled 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—now a violent flag—in the grip of her fist whipping in all our faces. There, in the eye of the hurricane, I felt a sudden, terrifying 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 name a whisper on my lips.
The thoughts hit me as hard as blows from Father's fists, each realization a crushing impact.
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 blind, naive fool I'd been.
Abuela and the housekeeping staff gathered on the ground floor, watching the fight spiral above them, their faces pale in the dim light. As I understood how I too had been betrayed, my fists joined Mother's, both of us against Father together. Ash sobbed, a heartbroken sound, 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, his focus on maintaining his precarious stance. One more blow hit him, a jarring impact, and his face went funny—a fleeting mask of surprise—as he tipped back over the balustrade, his legs flailing wildly 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, a silent, sickening descent, hitting the ground below with a hard jolt, flat on his back, perfectly still. Mother screamed, a guttural sound of horror, and I could only manage a choked "No, no no."
Even in that crumpled, silent stillness, beneath the rising storm, the powerful, magnificent lines of his body were undeniable, a terrible, brutal beauty in ruin.
Abuela dropped down on her hands and knees, hunched over Father's broken body, sobbing and praying in anguished tones.
Ash howled, and Hurricane Andrew made landfall in Louisiana.
9.
Father was never the same. Confined to a wheelchair, the wild, untamed spirit that had always animated him utterly extinguished.
His doctors tried to convince him he could still lead an active and fulfilling life, that even sex was not out of the question with some special accommodations. But for a man like Father, such compromises would not do. He was broken, a magnificent bull humbled, and he simply shrank into himself, speaking rarely, and then most often in the soft, distant cadence of Spanish.
It wasn't only the break to his spine that left him in this state. I had sided with Mother, intentionally distancing myself from him as much as appearances would allow. I was so profoundly hurt by the indignity he had 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 with an iron fist after. She took over, with a banker's eye for the debts that must be repaid, and with interest. I think she truly relished her ascendancy in those days, a long-denied triumph.
Her first order of business was to establish that Father's fall was the tragic, but purely accidental, result of a domestic dispute gone awry. There would be no investigation, no charges, and certainly no ugly rumors that Father had been shoved. When it truly mattered, Mother was a Southern lady and I a young heir, and Father was merely 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, and it held its sway.
She privately ordered genetic tests to determine that Ash was Father's son, using hair samples Ash unwittingly left behind in a brush. And 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 direct threat to my inheritance, so the sooner his existence was utterly 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 dare 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 fervent zeal and wounded pride as Mother, a cold fury.
Only Abuela seemed to care about Father in his despair. As usual, she eventually came around to accepting fate, reasoning that she'd won Father in a deal with the devil long ago, so of course the devil would now take his due. She reverted to caring for her hard-won child as she had in his infancy, 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, to have been granted that quick end, 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, led 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, a silent agreement of avoidance.
By her count, Abuela was almost 130 years old, yet 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, speaking barely a word of Spanish, inhabiting a world far removed from the past. Abuela and Father were just eccentric fixtures in our home, relics of a life few understood. 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 perhaps I was simply 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.
Mother divorced Father not long after the fall. Her lawyers could have left him as indigent as the day they met, armed 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, his fortune would all come to me anyway. She left him with his wealth 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, a gentle balm on old wounds. 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 levees could take before they fell under the relentless pounding of nature's fervor, a city finally succumbing to its own burdened history.
I would lie if I were to say I had abandoned my lust for Father. Even in his condition, he remained a powerfully built and coarsely handsome man. He used the therapeutic gym I had built for him, meticulously maintaining his powerful torso, for no obvious reason I could discern. His t-shirts revealed the thickness of his biceps, 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 through 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, a magnificent engine idling in silent disuse.
Even penned and broken, his essential animal nature was evident, and it still pricked at my senses, a constant, sharp reminder of what once was and what could never be again.
11.
We rarely took Father out in public, but for my 45th birthday, my wife arranged a special show for us. Abuela stayed home with the children, trusting no one but family, even with a nanny on site. We dressed for the occasion, and Father, though somewhat disinterested, appeared handsome and distinguished. If Mother had taught me nothing else, it was the paramount value of appearances.
The show was at The Jewel Box, a small, exclusive club, its very name whispering of hidden treasures and intimate secrets. The performer was Ishtar, a European sensation on a limited engagement in the States. Her shows weren't just talk; they were an obsession among those in certain social circles who could afford the steep cost and possessed the refined taste to appreciate such rare artistry. Ishtar, my wife had told me, would perform only seven numbers—songs by others, reinterpreted—and each, according to her sources, would be a masterpiece, a self-contained spell.
Owing to Father's chair, we were seated upfront, right before the intimate stage. When the lights finally came up, Ishtar stood with her back to the audience. Her long, glossy black hair lay like a snake against her impossibly thin frame and shimmering white gown, a stark contrast against the purity of the fabric. One arm extended fully, palm up to the jeweled ceiling, and the audience was captured already. As the music began, her fingers curled like smoke, and the hand drew in and down, a silent, magnetic gesture that seemed to pull the breath from the air.
I knew even before she turned that Ishtar was Ash. My heart surged, a frantic beat trapped in my throat, recognizing its ancient counterpart, friend and foe.
When she finally turned to us, my eyes confirmed what my gut and heart already knew. It was Ash's face: the café au lait skin uncannily unmarred by time, her eyes heavy with thick lashes, lips plush and painted blood-red, a vision beyond mere human beauty.
She broke the silence, going straight into her first song without introduction. Words would have been tawdry, an insult to the moment. She sang with a languid ease, in a voice that modulated between male and female, astonishing in both depth and range. Her delivery was a captivating blend of playful charm and poignant depth, deftly tugging us all along in any direction she wished to take us.
Of course, each song was paired with hypnotic pantomime, grown beyond the simple magical hands I once knew to full body enchantments. Ishtar didn't illustrate the lyrics but became the song itself. Each gesture was a silent incantation, every shift and sway a spellbinding articulation of image and idea. She commanded the air, drawing us into her illusion with the subtle power of a sorceress.
Father watched in absolute, unbreathing silence, as ensnared as the rest of us.
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"
The lyrics were penned by Helen Adu per the program, but felt like a private confession, aimed directly at our table. Ishtar looked directly at our table, her gaze a piercing, unyielding force, sweeping over me, then settling on Father.
Is it a crime That I still want you And I want you to want me too
Father's eyes were visibly wet, and his nostrils flared, almost a snarl of recognition.
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 dropped deep on the word "wider," as profound as any man's. Her long arms spread impossibly wide, beyond their natural reach, then came together, rising upright like the rigid, gorgeous art deco lines of the Empire State building, before dropping to her sides, plunging into imaginary ocean depths. The air crackled with her power, a palpable force in the intimate space.
I can't give you more than that, surely you want me back
At the last line, her voice rose to its loudest, most heated pitch—smooth, deep, and searing straight into us. She slid in a mesmerizing, serpentine motion off the stage, stepping directly before Father, her magnetic presence eclipsing all else, effortlessly reducing the rest of us to voyeurs in their intensely private 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 visibly choked with emotion, his struggle palpable, as if battling a powerful, internal tide. Ishtar, with a soft, knowing touch, kissed him gently on the lips.
And I could swear I saw the distinct bulge in his crotch, undeniable, begin to rise, a testament to her potent, inescapable magic.
12.
Father received an invitation to meet Ishtar in her dressing room. Of course, he couldn't go alone, so I sent my wife home while I escorted him.
Ash, now Ishtar, was radiantly beautiful. I couldn't fathom what transformation she had undergone in all our years apart, but she wielded its effect powerfully. The enchantment of her hands had expanded to her entire being; every turn and gesture was laden with profound meaning. Even in a dressing robe, she was as elegant as strands of wisteria blossoms swaying gently.
Ishtar largely ignored me, her gaze fixed solely on Father. She kissed him fully on the mouth, their tongues intimately seeking each other. Her hands caressed his face, then unbuttoned his shirt, her fingers tracing over the drum of his chest and down to his still flat belly.
He had gone gray since the night of his fall, his chest hair matching the muted silver. Yet, beneath Ishtar's touch, he still retained the powerful frame of an athlete, his torso more fit than any man his age, though fallen far from his prime. In Ishtar's loving hands, I could almost see the dying embers of his past vitality being stoked, rekindling with each powerful breath in his manly chest, a great crest, with each deepening intake.
She unzipped his pants, and his cock sprung to life with a startling—impossible—vigor.
"That shouldn't..." I began, my voice a stunned whisper, 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 truly magnificent. Thick and rigid, perfectly curved and richly veined, it was already oozing a stream of precum from its sturdy crown—a potent, undeniable sign of life. A faint, musky scent, uniquely his, intensified in the air.
He looked more alive, more himself, than he had in many years, and my own desire for him was rekindled with a fury I couldn't have predicted, an almost unbearable ache. Of concern to no one but myself, my own erection strained savagely against the fine fabric of my briefs, longing with a desperate hunger 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 perfect, soft counterpart to Father's fierce masculinity, designed to receive him. She rose up with a grace that spurned gravity to straddle her lover, letting the full, monstrous beast of his cock enter into her in a long, steady penetration. Father gasped aloud, burying his face in her breasts, groaning as his cock returned to its true home in her body.
I was compelled to give them some privacy, stepping behind a screen, but they were beyond my presence already, lost in their own world. I could hear them as Ishtar rode him, a rhythmic creak of his chair, and then the distinct, wet smacking sounds of their bodies joining, a steady, powerful rhythm building.
His heavy breathing and snorting intensified, like a powerful animal returned to its natural state, now in the throes of mating. I could hear the long, slow strokes, the deep insertion and withdrawal.
I reached into my own pants, my hand blindly seeking release, stroking myself, envisioning the tower of his erection plunging slowly in and out, then moving faster, pummeling tender flesh, preparing to breed, to make its claim.
I heard Father's huffing, deep in rut, and the sharp gasp of his climax, followed almost instantly by the soft quiver of Ishtar's. I quaked, my own body convulsing in concert with his, and pumped out my load, my hand drawing it out of me and onto the floor of the dressing room, a silent echo of the primal act I had just witnessed.
13.
On the drive home, Father was unusually alert. He watched everything that happened on the streets, every fleeting glimpse we passed, as if seeing the city for the first time, his senses sharpened. 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—Ishtar—was enough to resurrect Father's cock, to bring him back from the edge of disinterest, while every day my unwavering existence went unnoticed by him. We'd once fucked like beasts in heat, a primal pairing. I'd worshiped his body like no other could. How could he choose Ash over me? I wanted to ask, the question burning on my tongue. "I fell in love," is what I guessed he would say, and the thought was a fresh stab.
I had long ago become his legal guardian, and his choices were mine to make. And so we were bound by law, a twisted kind of marriage. It wasn't the way I'd always wanted, this legal tether, but still it made him as much mine as he would ever be, a prize secured through obligation.
During our ride home, I reflected on the days when we were all together, before this rupture. I remembered Abuela's palm reading, her solemn pronouncement 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. And the tightening knot of dread in my gut told me which one it might be.
14.
At home, little Marta was awake, a small, stubborn silhouette against the dim glow of her night light. She 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, my voice rougher than I intended, "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, like all mothers, worried about him. I read about how the men came to find a bull for the fighting ring, and how Ferdinand was stung by a bumblebee, 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 terrified of him. But when he saw the flowers in all the ladies' hair, he simply 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 finally free to sit in the shade of his favorite tree and smell the flowers, forever content.
"Why are you sad, Papa?" Marta asked, seeing my heartache clearly play out in my face.
"I was thinking," I sighed, a heavy sound, "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 he also fell in love. And then he died in the bullfight ring anyway."
In Hemingway's story, the bull who loved fighting was chosen for breeding because he was so strong and ferocious; 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, with magnificent spirit, 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, flatly.
"No," I said, chuckling through a sniffle, the sound a mix of amusement and profound sorrow. "And I'm a little sad because I don't know which of the two stories to believe."
"Why don't you pick the one you like the best?"
15.
Years ago, Ash became Ishtar, a transformation long ago documented by shoddy, faked paperwork overseas. My attorneys handled the cleanup, and by the time they were done, the paper trail verified beyond any reasonable doubt that Ishtar had always been Ishtar, never Ash—adjusting the legal record to match what we knew to be true—and certainly was not related to Father in any way.
It was illegal to falsify the records, yes, but it was such a small crime in the sweeping, tumultuous story of our lives. I was certain the universe, even in its vast indifference, would excuse it.
Ishtar and Father married that spring in Spain. In this way, they could be together, openly, and Ishtar could be assured of one day receiving the inheritance she was owed if Father passed, all while keeping their biological relationship a carefully guarded secret.
I set them up in a house there, a quiet retreat where Ishtar could become a famous musical recluse. Or they could choose to leave and go somewhere else entirely. I'd meddled all I ever would, leaving their choices to them now, my influence finally withdrawn.
When I last saw them, they were there, Father in his chair and Ishtar on his lap, nestled under a shade tree. For all I know, they are there still, sitting just quietly. I like to believe they are very happy.
END
