|
THE KISS OF MACHINERY
There had been such a build up to this meeting within the New South Wales wheat belt that the black crows had predicted storms before daybreak. This man, who lived alone in his mother's shadow after her husband had died, had a shy and lonely smile. The boyish tilt of his head, and wisps of brown hair falling to the side had her curious. She marvelled at the stupid harmlessness of his broad chest and inside his jeans his warm brown cock, hung onto the edge of its own fulfillment. He was in sexual oblivion, quiet and unspent, a private man whose loyalties shifted urgently from the golden ears of wheat to a single woman. She meanwhile ached for his shyness and interest. Suddenly it was as if the wide world was cheeky and cock-eyed like a mongrel. The hesitation and extended side looks entering into the long and loving lake looks, then subsiding again. The flicker of fire inside her, the arms and breasts lengthening into heat, the day droning like hornets fat and sticky, and the talk of his mother becoming more distant, added to this anticipation of early rain.
Then his silly antics with a bull calf, its strong young legs sending it off into the scrub. His nicely rounded backside walked in his blue jeans, a young farmer's arse. The bull calf took off almost kicking him in its haste for the getaway, the open bush. For awhile the mother followed her son, her swaying breasts hanging like bells, until the young farmer came back as silly as a show off. All was forgiven because he was spunky, as he called her longing away from the house. She was hypnotised and attached to the cycles of the planet. That was her function in life, to be taken in the harvest like a tractor. Once he had entered her thoughts, he drove his prick into her cunt from behind. She slobbered down her front as her clitoris quivered and fluttered beneath his nervous fingers. A thick white moth took off from a patch of cabbages beside the house and was taken by a brown bird, its life ended inside a beak devoid of daylight. She was consumed by her own orgasm as helpless as digestion, his hands on her strawberry cheeks, as arse-up the shimmering horizon rocked.
She saw the ripple of mature wheat like a flash of forked lightning, that claims the mirror of flat water. She couldn't see his face as the flood of her escaped and creamed his fingers. Is that me or him?, she thought. She was as wet as a mirage, the flies excited by her body coming out, the super rich smell of woman in the shed. She could have done this years ago, but instead chose to remain lonely, attaching love to fucking. So none of this really happened. Only inside the land of her fantasies while she was masturbating, did she become life's process. The quiet walk away from the house to the shed containing the machinery was intense, like blood pounding inside the veins of the ears and wrists. His thighs were rapidly closing in behind her, as he showed her something that only turned out to be a distant bird of prey hunting down the grass. Soon they were inside, each taking position on the dusty floor, her cunt open and at rest on his abdomen like a tiny kite, her hands moving his hands up to her breasts and neck. His slight breath misty on her cheek, as the dry shed atmosphere opened its louver, so that the clouds outside could drink him up. She hovered, flooding him with her red hair that he ate like hay, not noticing that the window to her soul was locked.
Her shoulder in his eye was as powerful as a tractor blade, and his dusty shirt and brown nipple ripened like wheat before a thunderstorm. Her hand moved along the scar on his chest to his stomach. Some time ago, someone had opened him up and he had trusted them to close him again. His slightly bulging gut was warm, like the corner of a shed piled high with smooth driftwood. His eye watched over his opening like an owl sleepy with dawn. He trusted her gentle palms and was now created from them. The soft brown hairs above his cock were dry lichen. A long way down between his legs, she gathered the hard warm earth. He quickly released the wordless fluids. The heat sighed with him in the wood. She wasn't in the mood and the scene was awkward, on the edge of sensual but light years short of it. The mature wheat stood uneasily filling the dry lakes with its crackling husks. The situation was an endless dryness. The deep thirst of a whole country, aided by the burden of the crops drinking the river, had made it so. The cloud of thirst moved on. Then the voice from the old house, like a crow shrieking it was midnight at noon.
The mother emerged like a goods train coming their way, blasting out his name like a dune. Then, moving back from that mature unrelenting force, that long cool gust brought by carriages, she accidentally squashed a centipede as they crashed into a flimsy wall. She looked down to see its red arms screaming from her shoe. 'Oh my God. I've killed it.' He took the hero's path and killed the second half. 'He's all right now. He won't feel nothin'.' But she knew that the dead felt nothing. It wasn't about that at all. It was instead about her part in it. Her participation, as quickly as the lightning-shaped rain fell down, and the land between her legs was saturated and disappointed. If you're not prepared to walk down the street with them the next day, then don't fuck them in the night. Yet it had been all right out here, where only the day passed by and nothing but the grass stopped to look and tremble by the pump. But enter the protective dependant mother and the centipede who latched onto her son like 'new marriage' and the scene was suddenly tacky. It was now clear that she had detached herself from the situation, as quickly as a bird leaving the wetlands when the shooting started.
Meanwhile, his lips were dry and smooth, the edges of stones wedged into the backs of dry rivers. Her hands stuck down the front of his jeans as the centipede lost its life. It was not on. It was like feeling into a dark toolbox for a spanner, not nearly as complete or ferocious as a snake. She later told her daughter, when I touched him he stopped murmuring and went as still as the land. The wheat in the dry lake stopped rustling and the birds were silent in the twigs. A whip stick bird flashed in his brown eye. A gecko moved to a cooler corner of the glass in the window of the giant shed. Only the thick transparency of that particular square had stood the test of time. She pushed him off as his lips got hot and turned wet. She went to grab his hard cock but her hand landed on a brown snake. It muscled beneath a floorboard beside her petticoat. She screamed, jumped up. He was panting like a kelpie at a dish. For her the whole experience was incomplete, like opening up a space where nothing was filled in. The afternoon was opened by an old continental sun, heavy with rain clouds of promise, but still no rain.
She left him staring at the sky, chewing a blade of tinder grass, its yellow stain on his tongue. His eyes became narrow so that the desert couldn't get in. Later that afternoon, he polished his gun and ignored his mother's cries from the house. His girlie magazine with the bunny tails fulfilled him, wedged into the unused machinery that had been kissed. A drip on the dust. There was no evidence, beyond dryness, that the desert had invaded his heart. Spaces howled inside but there was no thought of her once she had left. She had come close to the boundary fence surrounding the house, where he and his mother lived. He had reached out to kiss her, but by now she was a ghost, shed tools or a component of the harvester. The bush plays tricks with the mind and the box trees reveal nothing but themselves. They want you to see them in a certain way, but you only see grey box and black box. She was back in town looking for her husband. The bakery opening its doors and no buns delivered that morning. She walked down the path, her stomach as empty as the shelves, her mind accommodating that huge distance between human beings, within close physical firing range. |
