by Cheyenne Blue
(11/30/05)

Taidgh lived where the rolling peat waves of bog met the rolling gray waves of the Atlantic. He was younger than he looked, prematurely aged by the weight of the sodden sky above him, the low-lying cloud of a rain-swept island, rain-swept Ireland, that skated the sea west of England. The cold and the damp leeched into his bones as if they were blotting paper, until he felt that his bones were so heavy that they might disintegrate under their own weight.

His house was made of falling dry stone, crumbling wet stone, settling down, sinking slowly into the yielding ground. Three rooms downstairs, two up, and a new bathroom tacked onto the shabby kitchen as an afterthought. It stood outside of the village, down the bog road, down past the pub, the post office and the corner shop, along past where the farms ended and the wide bog ocean began.

Taidgh was a man young enough to be lusty, attractive enough when he scrubbed clean in the postscript of a bathroom, handsome enough to be getting second glances from the Galway girls and foreign travelers that passed through the town. A few men saw, and looked long at his lean body and rounded buttocks, curved like river stones. They glanced again and chanced their luck. And they were just as likely to win, as if the waters had shown him a man then who was he to go against?

He knew when to go to town, when to seek what he saw, and when instead to seek the solitude of a corner of stone wall, back humped against the wind, hand-jerked seed splattered to the ground.

Taidgh spent his days watching the sheep wind through the bog, cutting the turf the slowhand way. Sometimes he sheared his sheep the slow way too, nicking their quivering white skins with the clippers as the fleece fell away. Mostly he wandered the unseen paths through the rafts of marshy ground, his world a tapestry of gray walls, slate sea, and stone sky.

He saw things sometimes, visions maybe, in the pools of water. Only scattered scenes of his life to come, never a complete unveiling of the future. Mainly he saw slow burning sexual pictures that created an answering low burning deep in his belly. He saw himself with a redheaded woman, her wild wet hair draped over a rose colored couch, himself crouched between her thighs, thrusting deep in dusky places where it was as wet inside as out. He saw himself with a dark woman, a foreigner, short and earnest, her spectacles glinting in the dim light of a rented room as she went down on him, engulfing his cock with her mouth. Once he saw a man, and himself tenderly parting white and trembling buttocks to slip inside, down deep into the place where the women never let him go.

Why he saw the pictures, he did not know. It had always been this way; the tea-colored bog water, a gilt and dark mirror of what was to come. He never knew when to look; there were no special seeing places in his barren and boggy world. But he would stoop to peer often, and sometimes the water would slide back its dark color to show him its secrets in fractured kaleidoscopes of images, a mosaic set between the drowned flat blades of grass and water plants. Only himself he saw, and those whose paths he was destined to cross, never that which did not concern him.

On a heavy day in October, Taidgh saw the woman who would become his wife, her image rising up like a selkie through the waterweed. Her coarse and flat-boned face intrigued him; she had the solidity of someone used to the cold and the damp. He waited for the water to show him how it would be with her -- would he take her from behind, grasping her wide and bovine hips, later bury his face in her pendulous dugs and take his share? Or would she ride him with a lightness and fluidity that belied her solid shape? But the water was fey and this time it showed not the act, only her image, unmoving, unsmiling, a fixed portrait contained in the shifting medium.

He was not one to deny what the waters told him, so he took himself into Galway that night, sticking his thumb out on the main road and sharing a silent ride into town. There he found her, not in a pub, but in a fast-food hamburger café, where she gulped a cheeseburger with ferocious intent. Not his sort of place -- the bright white light and red Formica tables unnerved him -- but he'd seen her through the window, and known her from the water. Olga, her name, a sad and mournful name, as heavy as her body. She was a refugee from Romania, and her dark and choked vowels excited him.

When communication became awkward, for he was a man of few words, he took her home, hitching a ride with a distracted young couple. In the back of their small sedan, he ran his hands up her solid thighs, underneath the thick and tweedy skirt seeking the damp mossy crevices where he would lose himself later.

Taidgh showed her the afterthought bathroom, made her a cup of tea, and watched silently as she ladled sugar in her cup with a heavy hand. Then he took her upstairs, and watched just as steadily as she shed her clothes with deliberate movements. Her firm body aroused him, with its sallow skin and dark hair, spreading like the kelp beds down her thighs, and a line of it from her navel to her thick thatch of pubic hair.

He was hard and needy, rampantly erect, wanting to plunge between her fencepost thighs and begin without waiting, but he contained himself. First, he suckled her pendulous swinging breasts, until the large dark nipples stood erect like little brown cocks. His fingers traced circles on her belly, followed the sparse line of hairs down from her navel to disappear in the dense dark pelt below.

She was wet inside, slippery sheened, moist and yielding as the bog and his fingers sank knuckle-deep into her slit, curling around to probe for pleasure spots. She keened her pleasure in an undulating pitch as she contracted around his fingers, her internal muscles fierce and hard, as workmanlike as her solid frame. Bending him back, flat on the bed, his feet flat-planted on the floor, she pulled at his trousers with rough movements. Then she used her mouth in mechanical motion; up, down, hard her suck, good his luck, and her scraping teeth sent shivers of apprehension through his body.

Taidgh liked to finish like that, but this time he wanted the elemental rutting, wanted to make the connection, planting his seed in primitive possession. So he rose up, swelling above her, and plunged deep, one motion, one advance, no time for the condom, just the closing funnel around him. She was tighter than his fist, and her guttural encouragement and the welcoming cradle of her pelvis had him blowing his load in jerky spurts seconds later.

Afterwards, he spread the viscous seed through her thatch, tracing the furred lips, coating them with his spend. She showed no inclination to leave, so they slept together in his bed, and he fed her eggs in the morning, soft boiled, so that the yolks overflowed the shells when she plunged her bread.

Olga lived up to the solidity of her name and seldom left the house. She proved to be insatiable, reaching for his cock at any time, so he did the only thing he could -- he married her. She did not object; indeed marriage was the surest way for her to stay in Ireland.

He continued his walks on the bog, caring for the blindly stupid sheep, and swinging the turf cutter. It was the only way he knew, and why should he change? With no conquests, no need or compulsion left in him, he stopped spilling his seed on the orange and ochre lichens that coated the walls. He stopped peering into the black tea pools between the hummocks, stopped waiting for the next drowned vision.

Olga made a home for him, hanging curtains over his cloudy window panes, putting jam-jars of heather on the tables and cooking him filling food, the likes of which he'd never had before: perogies, cabbage rolls, dense potato pancakes, and cakes rich with honey. Little things appeared, things he'd never worried about owning: a television, a food mixer, a vacuum cleaner, kitchen appliances to open things, seal things, and mix things. He seldom gave her money, but it didn't seem to matter, it appeared she had enough. She seemed content, keeping house for him, asking for little, except at nights, when she would turn to him, breath sweet with honey, and whisper for him to love her. Then he would dive into her body, let the firm planes of her dusky belly slap against his softer, whiter one, and kiss her open-mouthed, letting his tongue stab deep, deeper than his cock lay buried.

He felt he couldn't get his fill of her tautness; she milked him with her inner muscles more surely than his own fist, until he would gush his wetness deep inside. Their incalescent loving never waned, but there never was a child; never did her belly swell, and never did she appear to wish that it would happen.

He hadn't the energy for walking, she drained him so, but the sheep needed tending, so he was out most days, striding the endless landscape, where the sky hung so low that the waves of bog rose up to reach it, pulling down the clouds with gorsey fingers. And he came home to Olga, and her warm kitchen glowing a rich bread-baked brown, redolent with spices he didn't have a name for.

One day, as he wandered among the edifices and miniature cities of stacked turf, he stopped to check on a ewe crouched low down under the gorse. His eye was caught by the water at her feet, and the pictures not seen of late swam upwards through the peaty water. Entranced, he saw his wife's broad-boned face, eyes closed in solemn concentration, her mouth around a long and slender cock.

What man doesn't know intimately the shape and contour of his phallus? What man doesn't know every ridge, every vein, every whorl of hair at its base? Taidgh knew it was not his own. He watched, pulled in by the images, his hand straying down the worn runnels of corduroy to cup his lengthening cock. He watched the wild ride, saw his wife's body, fluid as marshland, rising and falling over a stranger's body. The unfamiliar cock plowed deep, so totally buried that Taidgh fancied he saw the shape of it imprinted from within on Olga's flat and barren belly. The pool spared him nothing; not the gasp and clench of Olga's orgasm, not the emptying groan of her lover, not her thick-lipped mouth licking him clean in the aftermath. Taidgh's own seed arched to the hummocks of grass, to hang suspended like cuckoo spit for a moment, before dropping in great pearly gobs of white.

He arrived home later that day, tramping wetly through the gloaming, to shed his boots on the mat. He kissed Olga, darting his tongue into her mouth to taste the unfamiliar, running an eye over her body; was she flushed underneath the olive sweater, damply gaping from her lover's cock? Not waiting for his supper, he simply reached for her, pulling up her hairy skirt to delve between her legs, fucking her hard and urgently, pushing her back hard against the kitchen press. Taidgh fancied he felt the slickness of another's voiding, but he planted his just the same, banging her buttocks hard against the press, until the door gave way and they fell backwards, into the tangle of electrical cords and shiny white kitchen appliances within.

He saw her image often in the waters after that; his seer's visions swelled to fill his head as he lingered with the sheep out on the wild wet land. And in the evenings when he came home, he picked his way through the crowded kitchen, past the piled breadmakers and blenders, ice cream makers and electric can openers, haphazard piles on the stone-flagged kitchen floor. And when he reached her, more often than not, he'd love her thoroughly, rutting her hard against the shiny white washing machine so that his seed was the last that was in her.

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