Metaphor.
Wednesday January 21, 2009
He wore a long grey robe, and though the hood of it was down about his shoulders it was hard to make out his face in the dark room. When he spoke, though his did not raise his voice, his words echoed eerily; some sort of tube on the plinth before him caught them and threw them about the space: “Please disrobe,” he said.
“What, just like that?” she said.
“Please,” he said. “Remove your clothing.”
She was already unknotting her corset stays. “Usually,” she said, tugging her chemise free of her underskirt, “they buys me a drink, first. Not that I’m complaining, the cash you’ve given me.”
He said nothing. There were colored lights set in the top of the plinth, and they lit up and died down in rhythmic patterns, chasing his face with greens and blues and ugly reds. He had a beard of uncertain color, and a nose as long and sharply edged as his cheeks. He pressed a level, and suddenly she was lit up in harsh white light. She stood there a moment, blinking.
“Stockings, too,” he said. “And underthings.”
“It’s chilly,” she said. “I said, it’s chilly!”
“It would be best,” he said.
When she’d laid the filmy stuff on the heap of her discarded outfit and stood there, arms about herself, shivering under that light, he stepped out from behind the plinth. He limped as he walked, and something under his robes thumped dully with every step of his right foot. “Lie down,” he said.
“On my back?” she said.
“As you like,” he said. “Stimulate yourself.”
“Stimulate?” she said.
“Manipulate your orifice to generate the lubricative juices. However you might prepare yourself for a customer.”
“A customer?” She sat up, resting back on her elbows, blinking against the light. “Look, sir, I don’t know what you think I am, but—”
“A doxy,” he said. He turned and limped back to his plinth. “Are you ready, then?” He did not wait for an answer, but raised one hand as all the lights on his plinth flashed, bathing him in a lurid stew of color.
The wave that washed over her was at once cold and hot, and started somewhere down near her toes and hiked her knees up, toes stiff, thighs shivering with an uncertain effort. She cried out as it slapped her chest and throat and face, and her hair was suddenly soaked—with water? Sweat? Come? She cried out, and she moaned, jerking, and fell back, raising one leg up into the light, her back arched, as a second wave washed over her from nowhere at all.
When she opened her eyes, she lay in a sticky puddle on the stone floor. He stood at the edge of the bright white light, making notes with a stylus on a wood-framed tablet. “Thank you,” he said, or she thought he said, over the ringing that still sounded in her ears. “It helps, to make the metaphor concrete.”