The Honey Witch

Chapter XVI





Ana sat on the morning bedside: a seductress offering a bowl of ripened spring strawberries. She held a succulent berry to my mouth and as I accepted her offering, she bit a piece of the fruit into her own mouth. I wondered, in that instant, if I participated in yet another allegory of my own doom and wondered, too, why I was making no move to stop it. I kissed her strawberry stained lips and gave no further thought to any mortal temptation, in lucid dreams or out of them.

The hours over the following days were spent among the wild things, the fruits and herbs of the forest in conjunction with simple rituals of delivering bread and honey, medicinal potions and poultices to the remote homesteads Ana visited, like clockwork, during the middle of the week. I summoned dispassion against speculation and observed her movements as though she were merely an atypical specimen worthy of note.

She took both the joy and misery of living in stride, allowing neither to weigh on what I came to view as an unspoken trust: she held to herself a gift of healing and to this gift she served without introspection. In the evening, she placed the gifts of return: a handful of seeds, a spool of thread, a rhubarb pie, swatches of cotton fabrics, a burlap sack of nuts, coins and jars of jellies and jams into cupboards and baskets.

On a particularly mosaic and warm morning, I awoke to find not Ana nor her servile fog within reach. Breathing in the clear mountain air on the front lawn, I toyed with the idea that she might be testing my resolve to stay...or leave by stealth, at the first opportunity. I considered walking down to Pennock’s for coffee, but with the intent came the sight of a doe and her fawn standing unobtrusively at the entrance of the footpath. Having no wish to disrupt their passage nor fall prey to nonsensical Fitch-inspired notions, I decided on the alternate route along the Cutler.

The path leading to the river trail was less trodden, more narrow and at times seemed to disappear altogether. I brushed aside the occasional gossamer string of spider silk, and disrupted clusters of black damselflies from jewel-weed patches when the path ended in one spot and continued in another. A tremulous sigh rippled just above the forest floor and infiltrated the very atmosphere with the melodious intonation. The sonance was detached, richly and precisely, sumptuous.

I turned around in a full circle, crazily beguiled by the intensely pleasurable reverberation. Stepping around a row of maple trees bordering the path nearest the river, I saw her: Ana, clinging high against a sapling tree, the hem of her floral cotton dress rolled up her smooth and pearl fleshed thighs, while the trunk gently swayed back and forth to the resonance of tantalizing gasps and disembodied murmurings. The expression on Ana’s face was serene, the giver and receiver of pleasure at the exact same moment. The sighs reached a crescendo and she laughed. I turned from the captivating scene and leaned back against the rough exterior of the maple trunk, closing my eyes tightly amidst my own shallow breathing.

The moment I opened my eyes, I found her standing in front of me. I felt as detached from form as the surrounding undertones of sound, even as I reached my hand around the back of her head and grasped her hair, pressing her lips against mine.

And the taste was honey; a savoriness not of poetic summation, but flavor in flesh and scent of breath. Falling leisurely against the moss and leaves, I possessed the velvet mysteries of Ana Lagori through the hypnotic cadence of the forest making love to itself.

In the drowsy aftermath of love-making, Ana stirred softly in my arms embrace and nestled closer against my chest. The sensation of sinking into the soft, spongy moss beneath our bodies was arrested by a droplet of dew splashing against my eyelid. I wiped the moist bead away and there came another. I rubbed the moisture between my fingertips and there came yet another. Looking up into the maple leaves over our heads, it was clear the drops were descending from the tree itself. In glimpsing the immediate environment, the bark of trees and the leaves of the brush shimmered under a cover of pungent moisture.

I nudged Ana gently. “Ana, wake up. Something is happening.”

Ana’s eyes opened and a driblet of water fell against her brow.

“What is it?” I wondered aloud.

The chime of Ana’s laughter was fine-spun; echoing, not unlike the clear vibration of sound of a tap against pure crystal glass.

She slipped her dress over her head and gathered my discarded clothing.

“Come with me, lover” she entreated. “Dress quickly and I will show you a secret.”

***

The moment Ana again shed her dress and stepped unabashedly into the clear spring-fed pool, I noticed the color of her skin manifesting a blushed hue, and the strands of her hair were taking on tints of ripened wheat. Glancing up at the sun’s rays through the long, graceful leaves of a nearby willow tree and the tops of thick oaks and cottonwoods beyond, I surmised this change to be illusory; a mix of forest pigments against her ivory complexion that somehow created a change in optical perception. Looking back at her eyes, I imagined them to be more strikingly violet in cast.

“Come in,” she entreated, “and let the water feel your flesh.”

I found her choice of description rather whimsical. Whether the water felt my flesh, or I it's clear, cleansing wetness, I tossed my own clothing aside with boyish abandon and jumped into the whirring blend of splashing water and the dulcet spray of her laughter.

I discovered, quite quickly, the brilliant clarity of the natural pool to be deceptively deep and the moment my bare feet touched the smooth sand at its bottom, I felt the power of suggestion take hold.

A thousand hands caressed my body, cradling it sensuously as the seconds turned to indistinguishable time. I experienced my body slowly spinning upward without effort to breathe; my ears taking in the nuance of bubbling whispers and soft popping sounds. Then came a rush of an invisible force, pushing my body upward and out into the brilliance of the summer’s breathing air; thrusting me gently against a shallow bar where the rushing waterfall poured into the pool’s edge.

If I were on some sustained reaction to her hypnotic will or her skill with the more arcane uses of plant attributes, I didn’t fight any virtuous battle against being an unwitting participant. All of the ties to yesterday’s affections fell into the waters one by one and all I knew, or wanted to know, was right in front of my eyes.

Ana plucked a clinging strawberry from the mossy ledge of the surrounding rocks and dropped the succulent fruit into my mouth. A spout of water burst upward from the center of the pool and whipped against my face. With scarce a moment to react, feminine laughter sailed through the air. The women dropped into the pool like glimmering spirals from atop the waterfall, disturbing the assortment of fluorescent-winged insects from their domain on the fern lined rocks.

The pulse of advancing time slowed with the stillness of discarded cotton dresses, clinging to the branches of a hovering linden tree, and the farcical surrogate, Molly Lynn, situated under the shade of a ruffled pink parasol. I searched the water, now suddenly absent of human presence.

“Ana?” I called cautiously, slipping easily over the rocky ledge and into the water. And then the four of them, Ana, Jilly, Jolene and the frail, mad Clara rose from the water, in unison, like myths in corporeal form; of haunted ponds and nebulous nymphs; pleasing in appearance, perilously malignant by design.

The apologue of every man’s hidden desire is in reality disorienting. A growing and unnatural sense of separation was once again wrapping its weight around my awareness, and I lost perception of the greater environment beyond the confines of the water.

“The sweet taste of the strawberry,” Jolene enticed, so close I could feel the warmth of her breath against my cheekbone and the velvet roundness of her breast against my arm. Between her slender fingers, she held the ripened berry.

The strawberry. Something in the strawberry.

“No need to shy away, pretty Mr. Boston,” teased Jolene, holding the now curious fruit to my lips. I glanced at Ana, who watched the exchange intently even as I took the berry into my mouth.

The mellifluous laughter of the four women skidded over the water like a skipping stone, and my arms were pulled into the inviting depths of the natural pool’s center. Rising for air, I felt buoyed by the living volume beneath, encircled by the feminine panorama of ancient rhyme and detached desire. I imagined them each, in that scintillating moment, as seasons: the frailty of spring that was Clara, the wildness of summer that was Jolene; the plump health of autumn that was Jilly and the sparkling mysticism of winter nights that was Ana.

I accepted, against the flesh of my tongue, the temptation of the dewy fruit offered from the hands of Clara and then Jilly. I felt the slippery smoothness of cooling juices sliding down my throat, quenching a thirst I was unaware existed.

And I felt myself sinking; sinking into the abyss of the clear and pristine water, no longer held afloat, but pulled lower and deeper until the whispers and bubbles became soothing, like an easy death where one no longer struggles against the inevitable exchange for having lived. I could feel the sensuality of the women’s hair, like silken seaweed, wrapping against my arms and torso, my legs, my toes. The sensation became formless, as though each us, separate, yet together, were falling, falling into an ever-intensifying chasm where the embryonic memory of fluid and earth first separated and became two distinct parts.

I felt myself again spinning slowly to the surface, toward the light of the prismatic sun over water, toward the urgency of breath. With a heaviness of sudden and overwhelming fatigue, I reached the embankment and pulled myself over the slippery, grass draped edge and coughed out a trace amount of water caught in my lungs. A low breeze stirred the grasses and brushed against my body with a humming chorus of voices and whirring sounds. I reached for my jeans and looking back, found the four women treading the water, studying my retreat with various, yet undefinable, expressions.

“Come back,” Jolene pressed. “Come back into the waters, sweet Ethan.”

I smiled only briefly. “Oh, I think I’ll let you ladies have the water to yourselves for now.”

In truth, I was beginning to feel lazy and stupid, not unmixed with the recognition of erotic modulation in this sheltered forest place. I dressed in a state of dreamlike absence and curled into a fetal position, submitting to the powers of the spiced and spectral breezes. The whimsical inflection of the women in the water blended with the chattering of birds and the occasional drill of the woodpecker across the barked expanse. In my ear, buzzed the sounds of insects darting here and there in the soft sway of the grasses as I lay in and out of consciousness, feeling, more than visualizing, the forest swimming through an imperceptible vein of curious vibration.

I breathed in the familiar scent of ferns and roses as the sun dipped toward the late afternoon horizon and shadows began to shift over the ground. Now dressed, Ana knotted her body against my backside, embracing my chest and weaving her fingers through my hair.

And I discovered that all I desired was to please her. In this, I found, in return, a greater pleasure in the space of her company.





~*~