Before it ends

My eyes are fixed on the exposed side of your neck. I touch you there, running my fingers down to your shoulder. Nails dragging from behind your ear down along the line of the tendon, catching on the clavicle. Again. And again. Not deeply, just teasing. You squirm. I wish they were longer or sharper. Deliberate again. I want to mark you. You are moaning, eyes closed, chest visibly lifting and lowering, long deep breaths. My desire coalesces in my mind.  I want to leave a row of short, parallel cuts on your shoulder. Not very deep, short ones, maybe two inches long each. I want it so much it makes me catch my breath and stop what I'm doing and think of a tool suitable for making a thin, neat, permanent ladder of little scars. One of them maybe a little less neat.

I tell you what’s going through my head, and you gasp, your breath hot and rapid on the damp skin of my wrist, ‘’ Yes. Please do that, M. I want to wear your marks. Permanent ones. I want the cuts. I hope they spill a little too much blood…’’ you’re talking in low voice, almost whispering, but it’s steady, as if you were out of the daze or in a different kind of daze maybe, slow and fluid and focused, and this steady fluidity make me feel floaty. You are fucking me up so much, still, after all this time. I love it.

You open your eyes and look up at me,’’Serrated blade, M?’’

‘’Maybe not as jagged as a cheap steak knife, something finely serrated. What you might slice a tomato with,‘’ you offer

‘’A small, fine metalworking blade,’’ I suggest, partially in jest, partially in earnest, my fingers resting lightly on your shoulder, my tongue running along my upper lip, my cunt throbbing.

This conversation, matter of fact and yet somehow surreal at the same time makes me giggle, seems as it should break the spell but actually doesn’t, makes me realise how comfortable we are here, doing this perverted thing that we do.

I think of your leaving and my leaving, of both of us going back to our respective realities, soon - too soon, and perhaps for good this time, because we never know when it’s going to be for good so it’s better to think this way, it’s better to think that this is all the time we have and that every time must be made as precious as the first time and must be treated as the last time, because it might end up being so.

I think of the time we have left before the fantasy ends and reality reasserts itself, and all that we will have done here will seem like a story told on a perverted erotica blog. And then I think of how much the lines between the fantasy and the real are blurred just now, so much that maybe we don’t quite know which is which and that if you really leave in two days’ time  with a neat row of cuts on your shoulder - one of them perhaps less neat than the others, perhaps left to heal without using butterfly strips to keep the edges together - if you take this mark back to your reality, maybe it will remain blurred forever, the curtain never pulled completely closed, a reminder always there, not just in the neural circuits of your mind but obvious, blatant, palpable in the most literal sense of that overused word, to be felt every time you put your fingers there.

This possibility is making my head spin and my breath speed up in a way that goes far beyond sexual, not that the sexual isn’t there, but it’s morphing into something else, something bigger if just a little lower key, a desire to own you -- or at least that part of you that you have given me -- not just fully but with some illusion of permanence, as symbolic and un-real as these things are.

I’m driven by the same impulse which makes people carve their initials in school desks and in living trees, the same desire that I indulged when I took the sharp little blade of a slightly rust-stained knife to the wind-bent pine tree overlooking the narrows the mainland and the island, with the view of that hill on which the last photo I’d sent you was taken before your arrival here, the same need that drove my request to carve a declaration of your submission in that board that’s now not just sanded and oiled but wet with your sweat, wax and probably quite a few drips of precum and saliva too.

It’s going dark outside but it’s a bright dusk, with pale blue-grey sky and a full moon high and silver above the hills on the other side of the water and, unheard of at this time of the year, it’s snowing. Slow, large flakes sailing slowly down, sliding along invisible air slopes, twirling in vortexes of light from the house’s large plate window.

I leave you there for a minute and return to the workshop, picking up possible tools for what I have in mind. My hands are shaking, just a little bit.

‘’Stand by the window, J. Spread-eagled. Legs wide, palms flat on the glass. Well supported, leaning a little,’’ I launch into instructions as soon as I walk back into the room and although you seem a little thrown by all that, you obey.

‘’Closer. Not as close as to touch glass with your cock,’’ I adjust you, using my words and soon after, my hands, small pushes and pulls to indicate the direction, ‘’Here. Yes. That’s great. Perfect,’’ I run my hands down your sides, then up your outstretched arms, checking the new tensing and flexing of the muscles, the changed way your skin stretches.

‘If anybody came round just now they’d be for a surprise,’’ I snort, my fingers playing with your erection, turning it larger and more rigid. I step away and look. Your body pale, despite the tan, in the low light of the room against the dark that has fallen outside. I switch off the light and now it's just a silhouette, and what seemed to be dark has turned into a purple grey, gently opalescent with the moonlight.

I want to leave you like this, forever, spread-eagled across the window, in the eternal violet charcoal of dusk. I want to keep you like this, forever, in the eternal glass case in the library of my mind. And although some part of you, some version of you is there, just like this, in some version of some reality, it is only a sliver, a lab slice of a symbolic specimen that defies what must be and what is.

I shake my head, almost violently, my hair spilling in a tangle rather than a stylish swish, step back. My palms on your shoulders, fingers moving to meet on your throat, thumbs pressing down, my mouth near your ear ‘’Quiet now. Quiet and still.” You whispermoan a ‘’Yes, M’’ and I start touching you. Methodically. Systematically. As if I was doing everything possible to memorise it all, as if there were obvious and crucial differences between the skin along your shoulder-blade and that covering the tendons of your neck and that over the soft flesh below the ribcage.

The touch varies. I press and stroke. I pinch and scratch. I move my face so close to you that my breath condenses on your skin, blow on you gently or fast, and brush you with my lips. I bite and lick. I leave trails of what remains of my lipstick and saliva and breath, pink grazes and teeth indentations and hickeys.

The cuts come fast and sure, as if out of nowhere, shallow, closer to symbolic nicks than slits designed to leave obvious scars, but there is a spreading net of blood trickles blooming on your back and there is a humming in my head. I take my eyes off you for what’s intended as a split second but ends up much longer.

It’s still snowing. Huge flakes whirling down slow and thick  to settle on the grass, to cushion everything, to muffle time and slow down sounds.

I pull the belt out of the loops of my skirt, double it up in my hand, position myself and take aim. The crack of leather on your butt makes me shiver, as much as your stifled moan, a violent twitch and the way you move your hips in an instinctive flight response to then return to position, your back maybe arched a little more, your knuckles maybe a little whiter on the narrow window frame.

‘’Count.’’

You do, your voice sometimes steady and sure, sometimes breaking, sometimes hardly there, the welts merging together into a greater field of red, hot and tender to my hand when I touch it after the belt is dropped.

‘’Well done, boy,’’ my left hand on your just-belted butt, my right one on your dripping cock, your long moan making my nipples harden against the lace of my bra.

It’s still snowing.

A little later, I lay you down out there, the cold of snow a welcome soothing for your tormented skin, at first, the pink dissolving into dirty green mush under the combined weight of our bodies, I fuck you slow and urgent, deliberate and messy, until we both cry out and come to.

We return inside to tend to the cuts and bruises, to sleep - together this time, the toes of my left foot touching your calf, the fingertips of my left hand nearly-brushing your right one - to wake up to late morning of a pale blue skye, a small, white sun and a huge daytime moon above us, the last night’s snow all gone, to the tidying up of the workshops, to the locking up of the house, to the long drive to the airport.

***


We are standing in the departures, upstairs, just before the security, facing each other, a couple of steps off the main stream of passengers walking past with their plastic bags for liquids and gels, their belts and boots in their hands.

There is a silence around us, a bubble, similar to the one that we stood in, shivering, the first time we met, that day when I slapped him in the middle of the arrivals hall and he dropped to his knees and kissed my feet in fishnet stockings and ridiculously uncomfortable shoes. 

I am wearing old jeans and tattered Converse hi-tops today and neither of us is shivering. But I still reach out to touch his face, my palm on his cheek, my fingers near his ear, my thumb brushing his lips, spreading them apart, briefly running along the damp inside, then withdrawing.

''Fuck. I guess this is it,'' he looks briefly at the ground as he says this, then back at me, our eyes locked gain.

''Fuck. I guess it is,'' I am somewhere between a giggle and tears. 

We embrace, quickly, then he turns away, makes his way to the end of the security queue. 

''Be good for me, J,'' I call to his back. 

He glances at me over his shoulder with a somewhat sad-looking ghost of a smile.

''I will. Endlessly, M.''

Limits

Note: this is obviously fantasy/fiction (and a fragment of a novella-size story), not a play manual.

I do hope we all know that nobody should attempt to use a powerful whip on another human being without mastering the skill first. This piece is a direct follow-on from a little scene which left us here:

You sit down on the sand by my feet, look up, follow the line of my sight, look at me again, a mixture of disbelief and realisation in your eyes.

“Fuck.”

I smile.

There are two just above the sand, about three feet apart, next two roughly at the waist level, closer together, two more at six feet high and four feet apart.

“Later, though. Make a fire, boy.”

**

We are standing by the wall with the eyelets. The light is falling onto the higher parts of it, specks of fool's gold bursting out of the almost-anthracite blackness of the rock. The toys on the sand, in the rock's shade.

“There, J. Take your shoes and socks off and get in position. Hands up first.”

You obey without a word, standing close to the stones, your arms spread. I know my way around these cuffs and carbines now, how to fasten them just tight enough to make sure your hands won't pull out, but with enough space for my finger to just about slip between your wrist and the leather, your pulse heavy on my skin as I check that the blood flow won't be restricted. The short lengths of rope between the cuffs and the eyelets get fastened next, then the same process is repeated on your ankles while the belt goes just below your waist, more to support than to restrain. My black silk scarf around your eyes, to start with.

“Ready?”

“Yes, M. Please.”

My fingers are on the back of your neck, just above the collar, rubbing down to the hollows of the clavicles, feeling that thumping pulse again. I take the knife out of its sheath, gently placing the blunt side of the blade just under your hairline. Normally you'd know what it is, but the coldness of the steel and your covered eyes magnify the sensation and you groan, your shoulders jerking, your head shifting sideways as if you were trying to get away.

I put my left hand on your shoulder.

“Stay still, J. I don't want to hurt you. Not yet.”

I cut the clothes open, at first carefully, then faster as my hands gain confidence, switching between the knife and scissors. I can feel your body flinching and tensing when the blades, their edges blunt as they are, momentarily touch your skin. The shirt is hanging in rags off your upper body and all it takes me is a strong tug to strip it off completely.

The jeans are harder, especially in the tighter places and I get impatient hacking around the back seam, the tools suddenly less than adequate, the temptation to just slash through it from the outside tightening my throat, folding me in half there on the sand, the sickfucksickfucksickfucksickfuck mantra deafeningly loud in my skull just behind my eyeballs. I blink and my hands are gloved in blood, a mute thick scream forced down my lungs; I blink again and my fingers are doing their thing, carefully pulling the fabric away from your skin before I cut, and it doesn't take that long after all, the remains of the jeans fall onto the sand over your feet, the boxers just need a small nick before I rip them off and the misaligned St Andrew's cross of your naked body appears on the dark background of the rock.

I wait, allowing your breathing to slow down to semi-normal, your tense muscles to relax as much as they can in the spread-out position your are in.

I get up and walk closer, take the blindfold off and, pick up the riding crop, slowly run the end along your spine, down the crack of your ass, lower down and forward to my cock.

“Now. Tell me how you want it, J. Tell me what a greedy painslut you are.”

The flapper of the crop rubbing against your balls, ticklish on your inner thighs, resting on the left upper curve of the buttocks.

“Please. M. Please. I want it bad. I want your best pain, M.”

"I need it, M. Please."

I move the crop up, slide it softly along your temple and jaw, to your lips. You kiss the leather just before I pull it away; a swing, the first light strike on your ass. You twitch against the restraints and I hit you again, the swish of the crop in the air and the sudden dry slap when it lands, a split second before the groan. I aim for the prescribed areas, the fleshier ones where the muscles that underlay the skin make the pain more bearable and safer.

Your ass is getting covered with a pattern of pink splodges, the sharp sting of the flapper must be getting to you now because you're are starting to whimper, your body tensing against the cuffs and the belt before each swat lands. I unleash a series of brisk ones, then stop.

I let the crop dangle from my wrist and get closer, my hands resting on your hips just under the belt that holds you across your waist. You are moaning, I don't quite know if it's pleasure or pain, or that quite irresistible mixture of both that I'm addicted to.

Your skin feels hot under my fingers, the welts swelling tender and lovely, a flinch when I stroke them and a yelp when I suddenly smack your ass with an open palm, a yelp that makes me want to moan too, a moan that turns to a hissed 'Fuck' as I slap you again, and then once more.

I am reluctant – no, more than that, I am actually scared - to do what comes next, but I also know that I want to do it perhaps more than anything I've done so far, that this is what I might have came here for. It hits me dizzy for a second or two when I step away and kneel by the rucksack to get what I need, my hands and shoulders shaking, in fear and in anticipation.

It's a medium-length whip of plaited leather with a wider, pointy, flat, arrow-head shaped end, and when I grip it, the handle fits perfectly.

I remember that feeling from when I bought it, the almost irresistible urge to use it there and then in the black-and-purple decorated, almost ridiculously Gothy looking fetish gear shop, the experimental swing or two against my own thigh, then quite a few more at home at more suitable practice targets. And the weird energy, now instantly back, creeping in little tingly bursts of a flame along a fuse wire, from my fingers to my spine at the chest level, up to my head and down to my cunt, as I raise my arm, as I swing it against your barely touched upper back.

It strikes with a different sound, much less of a swish, and less of a slap, quieter; partially because I'm slow and very much learning how to use it, these first swings more of a test of my aim, of the way the leather curves and falls as it lands between your shoulder blades, the point making its first mark, much different from the crop ones, sharper even at this practice stage. You flinch again, a deep 'ooohhh' and a hissy, muffled sigh, as if you understood something that I am myself not yet quite clear about, something that's happening in me, to me, just now.

And yes, we are getting there, even if I don't know where the fuck "there" is and how many veils there are to flay off and if I even really want them to rip, and if it matters at all what's behind them.

And then I know that it doesn't, I know that what matters is herenow, and there is nothing else but that thing that was your body, but is not yours anymore, given to me, given to me as truly as it's possible; and my hand, steady, my breathing slower and deeper, my back straight, my head clear, in perfect focus, my body and mind one, all in that hand.

And so I hit you again, harder this time, the whip snaking against the shivering, shimmering curve of your back. I can see the marks appearing, and I can see myself, standing there on the damp sand in my walking boots, jeans and t-shirt, strands of my hair being pulled out of the band I tied it with, getting tangled by the breeze into its usual mess; my legs apart and my arm raising and falling, gaining a rhythm, letting myself breathe between the strikes.

I see you struggle against the restraints, hear the pleas and yelps, delirious laughs and then moans, see the marks appearing on your skin, welts like strokes of a paintbrush dipped in pain, I see you shake and shiver when I hit you, a mixture of avoidance and asking for more despite the pleas to the contrary. All this makes my skin crawl with electric currents of power and desire, takes me to that exhilarating, scary, heady place high up there.

The time slows even more, slows right down to the ground, each blink a minute, each strike smooth and flowing, the whip slithering between the suddenly visible molecules of air. I'm counting, not aloud, to the soundtrack playing in my head.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.

“More, more... MORE...”

I can hear it, low and faint, from behind the music playing in my head, and oh god I'll give you more, more than you bargained for.

A foam topped crest of arousal breaks in my lungs, pulls my face up to the sky, makes my teeth clench on my lower lip; spills out in the spaces between my fingers, makes me grip the handle harder, a flash of a shadow of a doubt just under the surface, heavy and dizzying enhancing it as much as making my throat tight.

Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty one. Twenty two. Twenty three. Twenty four.

And we are back in what feels like real time again, and the music is over, and you are screaming, the voice rising to a feminine pitch.

“No no no Stop Stop please no more I can’t take any more noooo...” but the safeword isn't there among the nos, and so I don't stop, even tough the doubts are rising in my mind.

What if consent is not necessary? What if it's just a rationalisation of the ethical mind and all this would feel just as good without it? Am I simply playing a game we agreed on, or is every 'nooo' and 'stop, please' becoming real now? What if this rationalisation isn't enough to stop me when I must stop even if I don't want to?

I want you to safeword now, not even for your sake but my own, so I can check it, so I can test myself, so I can be sure that I will stop. To make sure I don't fall from that ridge I'm on.

Twenty five. Twenty six. Twenty seven. Twenty eight. Twenty nine. Thirty. Slower, with longer gaps.

Less than five minutes must have passed in real time, and your back is bloodied where the end of the whip has bitten; red, damp droplets gathering together. My left hand is clenched into a fist, the plaster damp with sweat although I can't feel any pain, I'm too high up to feel anything but the way the whip flows through the thick air, the way it strikes you.

You are whimpering, little sounds and gasps, quieter and lower, rising higher into screaming 'no's' only when I hit you; but still not safewording, still taking it.

I keep going. I keep thinking ''safeword, you obstinate bastard, I want you to scream that fucking safeword now'' and at times it feels like it becomes another struggle between us, as if I was trying to whip the ultimate surrender out of you.

And then the power itself disappears. There is no struggle anymore. Not in my mind, and not between us. We are somewhere else, in that place where all the power is illusion, that place where it disappears, where the difference between the one that's holding and the one being held, the whip and the skin, the palm and the face stop meaning anything at all.

All there is is your body, given to me, because you wanted to give it, and because I wanted to take it; given and taken willingly; responding to each lash, the pain flowing between us in bluewhitesilver flashes every time I  touch your back with the point of leather.

And then I stop, not for any other reason but because I want to stop, because it's the time to stop, because I do.

The whip falls on the sand and I move close to you, hanging somehow limply from the cuffs, supported by the belt, blood seeping into the welts on your back, your head lolling, your eyes opening slowly when you feel me near.

I move my face next to your skin, you shiver under my breath; my mouth touches the marks, my tongue teases a low, long moan that doesn't even sound human, out of somewhere deep in your throat. My hand slides between your legs to find my cock, hard and hot; grips it, strokes slowly, in synch with my tongue sliding along your battered skin.

“Wherever else you go, you're never leaving here, J.”

I grip harder, move my hand faster, twisting at the base and the top, my fingers occasionally trailing to your balls on the downstroke.

Your repeated, mumbling, semi-articulate “Yes, M, yes, yes, yes… yours, M, yours, yours...” come out through another growl.

A moan as metallic as the taste of your pain on my lips; as thick and sticky as the precum oozing onto my fingers, rubbing dry as I stroke; as choked as your stifled, higher pitched whimper when you get to the edge; as low as my own “Yes, J, now” just before your back arches, your hips buck and come shoots out of my twitching cock; as long as the gasping intake of air and the long exhale when my hand stops.

My semen-covered fingers slither up along your side and to your back, brush across to pick up a yelping smear of sweat and blood; slide wet and sticky between your lips for just one taste, I move down to lean against the rockside, my head almost touching your side, the fingers of my left hand wrapped around the belt that runs across your body; the right hand down my cunt, rubbing the cum and blood and sweat and saliva on myself, rubbing you onto myself, the filthy slut, the beautiful boy, that you are that I am that we are, and I'm panting, moaning, screaming, flying off that ridge, coming into herenow, then coming to, down on my knees on dampening sand.

I unclip the lower restraints and rub your ankles until you are able to support your weight on your feet, cut the midsection belt with a Stanley knife. You lean against the rock when I uncuff your hands, slumping slowly to your knees, then turning towards me. I hold you under your arms, slowing that movement as much as I can, drop down to the ground again, this time with you.

My hands, suddenly terrified of even brushing the lash marks, are looking for a patch of skin that hasn't been violated, end up on your neck and in your hair, not pulling or grabbing but just there, holding you as your head slides down my front, your shoulders shaking, and I am shaking too.

I'm not sure if it's convulsive sobbing or delirious laughter, or both, or something else yet again, spilling out of you to fill my lap, past my clothes, past my skin and flesh and bones, down my spine, onto the ground and into the rocks I'm leaning against, and underground all the way to where the sea grinds the shingle relentlessly down to fine white sand.

-- end

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Cut Clean

It's a late morning of our last day when I open my eyes, look at him asleep next to me; half on his side and half on his front, the blanket having slipped down. He's moving a little, but his breathing is deep and his eyes are closed so I get up quietly, tiptoe out of the door and start gathering the gear for today, load the rucksack into the car and sniff the air from the back deck; a sharp, bright day with a breeze, the sky a cloudless blue, the world itself giving me a nod.

And so we go, a short drive to the end of the peninsula, parking the car by the gate at the end of the estate road.

It's an easy walk at first, hardly more than couple of miles of a stony dirt track undulating between a rocky hillside and the sea, with views to the mainland. We turn off the road onto a side trail. This last stretch is steeper and narrower, needing more attention on the narrow stone-made path.

I am climbing down from the log bridge over the burn, making my way through a tight space between one of the last trees on this path and a drystone wall, when my boot slides and I lean forward to regain my balance. My left hand slips down to the mossy stone, catches a sharp edge of something, reddening now with the blood from the gash that's split the fleshy left edge of my hand.

I steady myself, the instinctive movement of my injured hand towards my mouth halted mid-way by the bits of rotting plant matter and dirt that are sticking to it, and stand there, trying to remember where and how deep the first aid kit is buried in the bag.

He's a few steps behind me and when he sees what's happened, dumps the rucksack on the side of the path and comes closer, his eyes on my hand, tracing the rivulets of blood and muddy water dripping off my fingers.

“Let me, please.”

Not quite sure what he's going to do, I nevertheless let him take my hand between his. He drops to his knees, not really ritualistically but because it's practical at this moment, but he keeps his face down, and raises his eyes up to mine, for a moment, as if waiting for permission.

I nod.

~~~

Your lips touch my skin, then your tongue; on my fingers first, one by one, licking meticulously, then sucking; on the middle of the palm next; all the dirt and blood coming off, your saliva drying cool and quick.

You move slowly towards the gash, starting around the cut, slowly, carefully, waiting for my reactions after each lick; your tongue skirting the edges of the wound; slow, feather-light touches from each side, then resting inbetween the ragged flaps of epidermis; a stinging flick to the open flesh in between, a raw burn of pain passing before I really notice it; my blood now cleanly flowing, tasted, scooped up, swallowed.

It's a base, fluid binding, a ritual of purification, a primal, animal-like act that makes my heartbeat pick up all the way to a heavy thump, makes my breathing halt, then deepen.

I lean against the stone outcrop, my left hand still in yours, your lips and tongue still there, licking and sucking my wound clean. I'm getting turned on, despite the dull sting of the cut, my eyes closing, my right hand passes through your hair, stops for a moment, withdraw, moves away and up to my breast briefly, then slips down under the belt of my jeans to the swelling heat of my cunt, throbbing wetter and hotter than my cut hand under your blood stained mouth.

I stifle a moan into a deep sigh, withdraw my hand, remember the tissues in the side pocket, the plasters in the rucksack hood, get you to dig them out, put one on for me before I say anything, your hands shaking just a little when you smooth the edges of the dressing on my skin.

“Thank you,” I say to your back, bent down to pick up the rucksack again.

You turn towards me slowly, eyes down first, then catching mine just before you straighten up, my gaze slipping from your face down your body. I smile and you look away again.

“Yes?”

“I'm so hard it hurts, Ma'am.”

“I know. It's good. You'll probably need that.”

I turn round and walk on, the path getting more level and a bit wider along the field fence on the right.

The pasture is empty of its usual sheep and it's only then I realise that we've met nobody on the way, neither tourists nor locals nor the land-workers, despite the halcyon feel of the day. We walk on, in companionable if charged silence, and it's as if we were walking into another world, a quieter, clearer and slower one, an alternative space just a couple of molecules, a few milliseconds, a tiny Doppler shift away from the usual.

I take my eyes off the trail and look at the little cove opening up below us, its white sand and clear water of tropical perfection bound by a semicircle of dark grey rock, the mountains of the mainland rising in grey-blue strata beyond the water east of us, the islands mere smudges of shadows to the south-west. The colours are shifting in my very sight the same way the time and sounds have done, the greens blueing and the blues pearling; the shapes follow, the outlines sharper and yet more distant.

The rocky path merges into a short grassy slope, we walk down and dump the stuff near the edge of the grass. The tide is high and it's clear where the land will remains dry. I sit down on the low rise of stones, light a cigarette, watch you put the tent up, my eyes scanning the higher, rough wall of rock opposite me for the steel eyelets I hammered into it a few days ago.

You've finished and sit down on the sand by my feet, look up, follow the line of my sight, look at me again, a mixture of disbelief and realisation in your eyes.

“Fuck.”

I smile.

There are two just above the sand, about three feet apart, next two roughly at the waist level, closer together, two more at six feet high and four feet apart.

“Later, though. Make a fire, boy.”

I watch you, the dull throb of the cut on my hand suddenly making itself known in the background. You pick up driftwood, sticks, branches, couple of small logs, build a neat pile surrounded by a circle of stones, light it up, kneel down on the ground to blow at the little flames, your eyes squinting, the smoke blown by a stray gust of the breeze obscuring your face momentarily before it gets lit up by flames picking the thicker twigs.

---

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