My unique niche, as far as I can tell. If you know other such fiction, let me know.
I haven’t written anything lately because I’m working on another project. I should highlight and celebrate some of my heroines. They share a yoga-like discipline, an ability to concentrate and achieve. Here goes.
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There was a lull in conversation as the girls ate on the patio. Behind them the snowy caps of the Qilian Mountains shone in the brilliant morning sunshine. Above was deep blue sky. It was only about seven degrees Celsius, but that does not bother Maik-lings. Soon it would warm up.
The patio abutted their house, a simple three-room structure largely constructed by the girls themselves on the weekends. It had a kitchen, an activities room, and a small bedroom taken up mostly by a huge communal futon with no blankets. There were no doors between the rooms. The house had a somewhat vacant look due to the absence of any clothing or footwear. On the walls the girls had painted various creations, mountains, well drawn figures (all of them nudes), abstract color schemes, mathematical equations, quotations from classic Chinese texts, a few corny juvenile jokes. The walls were pretty crowded by now. A low table held a chessboard with the pieces still where Liena had trapped Chyou into stalemate last week. There was no bathroom; the toilet and shower were in the open air, attached to the side of the house.
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“And this is the formal apron the women wore for the traditional Muthirigu dance,” N’Stange says, pointing to an old photograph projected onto the screen. “This was the Kikuyu tribe, which is my tribe. I understand that my great-great-great-grandmother was a tribal elder. . . Now here is a simpler apron girls wore. You can see the shawl also. . . Girls and women, they naturally like to dress up I suppose.” As she points her breasts wave to and fro. She is talking with them as well as with her mouth. “Notice how ornate the beadwork is.”
“What about the boys and men?” Ms. Stanhope says. Though N’Stange doesn’t really need such prompting. Her presentation on Kikuyu culture, well-prepared and delivered in a relaxed manner, is going excellently.
“Men and boys didn’t wear clothes. Well, men did sometimes, like the penis sheath you see on this chieftain. But usually not. And the boys always went naked.”
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Knowing fresh air would clear that question up he ambled through the kitchen and out the door. Ahhhh, life is good. The sun was shining, the birds were singing. The smell of fresh earth, from the ground wet with the melted snow. A little chilly but spring was here.
And as he noticed the yellow VW half-out of the garage, he could make out the best thing about his life, evidenced by the bare legs and feet sticking out underneath, the soles gritty with grease, the fluff of plum-colored pubic hair under the bumper.
“Hi, Baby,” Tami said as he approached, her hidden face still engrossed in her task. He bent down and kissed her on her lower hair. Then tickled one of her soles.
She giggled and with a good nature said, “S---! You made me miss the eight-thousandths!” She was adjusting the valves, a task she did regularly, taking her sweet time, in her own happy world, her and the valves and the screwdriver and wrench and blade gauge. Tami the Motorhead. She had described the ritual to her friends several times. Rod as an engineer was proud he could understand her because most of her friends sure couldn’t. “The manual says to set the intake at .004 and exhaust at .006, but I set both at .008. It makes it a little noisy and there’s a little less power, but what the hell, it’s only 40 horses anyway, and it saves the valves from burning.”
She had been almost finished when he saw her, and now she was done. She replaced the creaking valve cover with a little grunt and scooted out from under the car, her bare back scraping against the concrete. She wiped her hands on a rag and looked up at him, face speckled with bits of crud, grease marks on her bare shoulders, a black smudge covering her left nipple and areola like a circlet. He helped her up and they embraced in a full-body hug, she with the wrench still in her hand, he not minding any stains that might result on his clothes.
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When they were finished Brigid leaned over to reach her little clarinet case on the floor, and got a pencil out. She then leaned forward to write some fingerings in. Her breasts, seeming the size of grapefruits in this tiny room, leaned forward too. They jiggled and swayed as she sat straight up again and played a few notes.
“I think I’m flat,” she said.
Rod snorted. The whole school can see that Brigid O’Dierna is decidedly not flat. Realizing how crude it sounded, he quickly turned his snort into a clearing of the throat to prepare for playing. He blew out a few idle notes.
“Play a B flat,” Brigid said. She was right -- she was flat, at least in the musical sense. Rod adjusted his tuning slide. They tried again and were in tune.
“This is a bad register on clarinet,” Brigid said, and began playing that middle part, working about three keys with each note. Rod thought: Brigid is not one to make excuses. She must be right. “I’m switchin’ keys too much . . . How about up an octave?” She played the section again and it sounded more fluid. “In fact the whole thing can be played up an octave. Watch.” She inhaled and started from the top.
Again, she was right. He didn’t realize a clarinet could go that high. Then she came to the middle section. There was a quick five-note figure that she stumbled on. “Sorry.” She played it again, then again, just that figure. She licked her lips with a furrowed brow and played it again. And again.
She went on with that figure ten times, twenty times . . . She was lost in her own world, just her and that figure, trying to master it. Rod watched as her face got a little red, and then the area over her breasts started getting red too. Her toes slowly wiggled and flexed on the floor with her level of concentration. This is typical Brigid, he told himself. Practicing over and over, just like with her baton, determined to get it just right.
“Got it!” she said, exhaling. She played the figure perfectly, then smiled at him with satisfaction. “Sorry, I get caught up in these things.” She leaned her bare back against the chair, relaxed the instrument between her legs, then stretched out her leg and propped her bare heel up on the chair to the side. They both watched her stretch her toes as she caught her breath.
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She returned to shoveling. The short water break at 10 o’clock, then they went back, advancing to another series of dirt piles and another truck. She was in the middle of the line, distinguished by her nudity and by being the only one using her shovel left-handed. She noticed that this was the sixteenth time during her captivity that they had done this earth-moving work; and the fifth time this month. Judging from the bus routes, the locations were all close to each other. She also knew that earthen barriers were used in the nuclear reactors that this country was suspected of building.
The ability to observe minutely, and to remember what she observed, were critical to her mission and she continued to use her professional capabilities while an inmate. She had been noticing that the guard for her wing (she thought of her as “Tasha”) did not like being given orders by her boss, a kind of sergeant (whom she thought of as “Natalya”). And that Natalya seemed to be in bad graces with the Assistant Warden. And that Natalya seemed to come to work with a hangover a few times recently. A guard with an alcohol problem, disliked by the others and afraid of losing her job, could perhaps be cultivated. The nude prisoner had noticed that Tasha had not been at her post a few times. Last month the nude had looked, with a calculated degree of surprise, at the empty station on the wing -- so that Natalya noticed her face and then the empty station. Natalya no doubt put Tasha on report, and was grateful for the tip.
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“Nnnn!! Oh God! Ohhhh!” Janeane was coming, probably not for the first time. Her cries rang out in the clear winter air, fortunately getting swallowed by the snow before it carried any distance. Out here the snow was about a foot deep, slowly melting after that big blizzard last week. Lisa and Corey stopped and looked with mixed emotions. The Blanke Schande life was designed to abolish female inhibitions. Straight or bisexual girls could “do their business” in the guy’s room, with a door that could be closed, but lesbian sex was by definition always on view. And Jane and Janeane had graduated quite naturally from tonguing each other in their doorless room with guys watching, to doing it in front of guys in the laundry room, then out in the woods, ever more in public.
They should know better. It was hard to escape the conclusion that their ultimate fantasy, which they were realizing in stages, was to 69 each other to orgasm right in front of the quad with the whole campus watching. Both Lisa and Corey watched with increasingly unsympathetic gazes. Now as Janeane climaxed again, her body turning red in her trademark all-over “orgasm flush”, Jane was doing what everyone by now knew was her specialty, spreading Janeane’s butt wide and spearing her tongue into Janeane’s anus in time with its spasms. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! . . . Oh!”
“Oh shit,” Corey said. Walking up the concourse was Mr. Joseph Karasik, the BSC Dean for Alturas, with Professor Outler, the geology teacher, serious men in casual suits, talking no doubt about serious things. Corey and Lisa looked at the spasming couple in the snow, and out of decency waited for Janeane’s climax to run its course. It went on and on as Karasik and Outler approached. Finally the last spasm -- no! There’s another one!
It was at the very last minute. Corey whispered loudly, “Karasik!!” The two naked lesbians got up and scurried into the brush and out of sight like squirrels, their toes kicking up bits of snow behind them.
Karasik was cordial and unsuspecting. “Hello, Ms. Tornelli, Mr. Kaminsky. . . Lisa, Mr. Landau has to talk to you about next week’s meeting. They want everyone to go down to Olive Beach.”
Lisa contained the barest eye-flick toward the woods where Jane and Janeane had recently disappeared, then looked up to the Dean. “What for?” Usually to accommodate her and Mr. Landau, the writing instructor who acted as the Alturas faculty rep, the Board of Governors meetings were done by speaker phone.
“They want to make a presentation, a lot of documents and a slide show.”
“Oooh, a slide show,” Lisa said in gentle sarcasm. “Popcorn too?” It was an unspoken triumph of the Blanke Schande ethos that this naked female standing barefoot in the snow could be so self-assured surrounded by two clothed authority figures as well as the clothed Corey.
Karasik smiled. “Seems odd to me too. Well, bye.” And he and Mr. Outler passed along.
After they were gone, Corey and Lisa looked into the woods. The lesbians had completely disappeared. “I don’t know why we keep protecting them,” Corey said. “Before they get us all in real trouble, somebody should talk to them.”
“They’ve been talked to, Cor, it was no use,” Lisa replied. She stepped over to the side of the path into deep snow up to her knees and squatted, the bottoms of her butt cheeks staying just clear. Elbows on her knees, a stream of piss began dribbling out and soon was cutting a yellow hole into the snow. “They just don’t see what’s wrong.” She exhaled and the pee came out faster. “If Karasik sees them, or God forbid the mayor when he visits, it would be The End of Blanke Schande.”
She kept peeing as Corey looked down. Lisa was beautiful no matter what she was doing. “No, if the men were naked too . . . That would be The End of Blanke Schande. Maybe you should get Haelters involved.”
Evelyn Haelters was the guidance counselor and what passed for a disciplinarian at this rugged little campus. Lisa looked up at her boyfriend as the pee gathered force and then began to subside. Steam rose up from the yellow hole. “You mean get her to talk to them?”
“She won’t mind if she knew you tried with them first.”
“Maybe I should tell them first, that I’m going to tell Haelters.” Lisa coaxed the last few dribbles out and then gathered snow from in front of her with her hands and pulled it forward to cover all traces of yellow. Then she stood up, shaking her muscles all over. “I’m getting cold,” she said. And they got moving again.
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The stage is brightly lit and easy to see from where I am. And the sound carries. Sukie and the boy in the red sweatshirt are acting out a scene. Another boy is behind them, silent. Suddenly I recognize the play and I can’t keep from rolling my eyes. “Our Town”! A popular play for high schools to do, years and years ago. This little village I’m visiting is so 1954. The boy behind must be the “Stage Manager”. Sukie and the boy in the red sweatshirt are supposed to be a young couple, I forget the names, but they’re debating whether to get married, or something.
Sukie’s voice projects better than the boy’s. The kids stop as their teacher, out of view, says something. Now they get a little closer. The boy recites louder now, his sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers contrasting with the unspoken nudity of his companion. The overhead theater lights cast sharp, interesting shadows over her body. Shadows of her head on her bare shoulder. Long, pointy shadows of her nipples and breasts cast down her flat tummy. She turns around, gesturing, her soles like quiet sandpaper across the floor. Shadows of her butt cheeks onto the backs of her thighs. Shadows of her ankles. Her acting is quite animated. Too much so -- the director asks her to not move around so much. As I recall, these characters are supposed to be dead.
Now a clear snatch of dialogue. “Emily, you’re just naturally bright, I guess,” the boy says.
“I figure that’s just the way a person’s born,” Sukie says, one hand on a thrust-out bare hip. This makes me smile.
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[naked girl submerges] [Prof. Hin, looking on, speaks] “Min-jeong can hold her breath for four minutes now, which allows dives down to 30 meters. At that depth one can find specimens of much greater size. We believe the water at that point is roughly 9 degrees Celsius, but she can withstand it for short periods, with physiological assistance.”
[underwater scene, naked girl swimming toward a colorful bank encrusted with very large oysters, abalones, sea cucumbers] [silence except for voice of narrator] A special camera lowered onto a rock allows us to see what Min-jeong sees. This is a world known only to her. [girl uses blade to cut free a large oyster, places in her basket; then moves away toward another bank] She is careful to harvest selectively to maximize new growth. [girl moves toward camera, then moves in profile, nipples hardened in the cold water, then anchoring with one foot to cut a large abalone; now she looks around] This quiet girl seems to enjoy the solitude and serenity of the undersea world. [she swims away from the camera] The yellow stream coming from behind is not urine, but runoff from the ginger root.
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The books were surprisingly diverse. Not all were in Chinese; a good many were in Russian, some were in English, some in Korean. Books were exotic artifacts to the Chinese girls, except for Xifeng, whose mother was a temple keeper. They were somewhat less strange to Tami. Not all were technical manuals or official PRC histories. Their favorites were short novels, like those of Kurt Vonnegut (in Chinese) or Tie Nin. They would read one together, clustering around, turning a page only after everyone had gotten to the last line. “Oh -- my -- God!!” they would say when there was a plot twist, or something shocking. These Chinese teenagers were easily shocked. They were the product of the rigorous but constricted Communist education system. Their innocent eyes widened as they were exposed to new worlds.
The big dusty bin had perhaps two hundred books. “I can’t believe it!” Huiqing cried, rummaging around the bottom -- Mr. Tang’s book on Taoist sex!! Evidently he wasn’t even given the chance to clear out his office. They devoured it, fighting over how quickly to turn the pages. But it was a huge letdown. The philosophical stuff they had mostly heard before; they were looking for tips on how to induce stronger and more numerous orgasms. Taoist men who weren’t allowed to have any orgasms themselves, and had to concentrate solely on their wives’ pleasure, might know a few things . . . but the techniques shown were, to them, lame. The Mailgirls knew a lot more than the book. “There’s nothing about anal, nothing about circling the clit, nothing about four-finger,” Ngo-kwang pointed out, this last referring to her specialty of playing two fingers in the vagina off against two in the anus. “We should write a book,” Xifeng said.
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