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The Lady was right and I blessed her! Whooping like a lunatic I leapt around in the grass. Why did I ever doubt her? There in front of me as I crested a rise lay the brightly coloured bird of paradise feather, exactly as She said it would be.

It fitted my hat perfectly when I wound it around the band, only the very tip of it sticking up like a little antennae which buzzed when I walked as if it was trying its hardest to put me in touch with my ship.

A bird of paradise feather! And I had doubted her. There and then, in the sunlight, I told myself I’d never doubt her again. It was a good tale too, the one she’d told me while I drifted off to sleep the previous night. Birds of a feather she called it, or some name like that. Some tale or other about it being very dark before the first day because god was still asleep in her rose bower. Very dark because the sky itself lay very low down, close to the ground like a blanket. And while some of the creatures in the earth didn’t mind this at all, being worms and moles and other burrowing things, many others began to complain loudly that they were getting just a little bit cheesed off.

“Our knees hurt!” they declared, “from all this crawling, and look, it is so dark we can’t see to write the cheques to pay our bills……”

“Then you must use your credit cards!” a magpie told them pithily.

It was only four thirty a.m but already he was sick tired and fed up with all the other beings moaning. Just then, the magpies mate, who’d been lost in the gloom until the moment she heard him speak, swooped down and settled on the Earth beside him.

“God isn’t awake yet,” she told him. “I went to have a look but the angels shooed me away. They said I’d have to wait until she woke up naturally”

The male birds stared at his mate in the darkness and in truth all he could see was a single pale feather in the centre of her breast.

“What’s that? He asked. Have you hurt yourself? Have you bumped into something?”

The female magpie shook her head. “That’s what happened when she looked at me” she said, “the light from her eyes took away the blackness and left a splash of light behind”

“When who looked at you?” the male magpie asked, mystified.

“Why god of course!” His mate said. “Just before the angels came she opened one eye and looked at me. The angels saw this and did their best to hide her light with their wings but before they could do this entirely some of it shone onto me and bleached the feathers white. Then the angels pulled the sky down so low that I thought it might crush me, so I flew away. That was when I heard you speak to those poor people in the bank”

The male magpie thought about this for some time while all around him in the darkness the poor creatures moaned and complained bitterly as they crawled about on the earth getting sore knees and bumping into each other.

…………

“I have an idea,” the male magpie said at length. “As I see it, god may never bother to wake up at all if she has, as you suggest, so many angels to protect her, feed all her cats and do her housework for her. It is already nearly five o’clock and there is no sign of her yet. We might sit here in darkness forever if someone doesn’t do something”

“So what’s your plan?” The female magpie asked him. She was beginning to like her mate much more, because suddenly she noticed there was something rather attractive in his voice.

Crouching lower on the ground she fluffed up her feathers sexily. Perhaps he will make love to me in a minute she thought to herself, and if I am lucky he might even build me a nest so that I can lay some eggs.

“My plan,” the male magpie said huskily, “is to persuade god to wake up by some other means”

“Oh,” said the female magpie, feeling somewhat deflated, “so you’re not going to build me a nice nest then?”

“Isn’t that just like a female?” The male magpie asked himself. “It is already damned near impossible to build a dwelling suitable for the needs of a wife and strong enough to withstand the ravages of children, using only local materials, in a tree, in a high wind and with only the aid of one’s beak, without having to answer damned silly questions about the why’s and the wherefores of it as well!”

“Oh……!” sniffed the female bird disappointedly.

“I might be black but I am not a magician!” The male magpie said aloud.

“Huh!” snorted the female disappointedly. “So much for your plan! I’ve a good mind………”

“I know you have! I know you have!” The male magpie said condescendingly “but if you’ll just stop moaning for a minute I’ll tell you what I am really going to do”

Oooooh she loved him all over again then, when he put on such a masculine voice. But she wouldn’t tell him so. At least not yet.

“You see those sticks over there?” He asked, nodding his head in no particular direction.

“Oh good, he is going to build me a nest after all” the female magpie thought.

“No,” she said, “I can’t see anything, its too dark remember?”

“Alright,” the male magpie replied patiently. “Just take it from me, there are two long sticks over there”

Well stare as she might into the darkness that poor female magpie couldn’t, for the life of her, see any damned sticks……

Safe within her aura I must have fallen asleep about then. There were comforting colours faintly remembered, a softness quietness except for the sound of her words.

……damned sticks……

No little men with hooked noses and murderously sly looks about them. No haughty, poisonous females riding like a queen in the stern of a sailing ship.

“I’ll take your word for it” the female magpie answered resignedly. Which was alright for magpies but not much use for birds of paradise, especially the one who was fated to donate one of their best feathers in order to decorate my hat.

I’d laughed at her tale when she began it, seeing no connection between magpies and birds of paradise. I couldn’t make the connection next morning either so resigned myself to thinking she’d made it up, more or les there and then in order to cheer me. And whilst it appeared to be a pleasant sort of morning I remained somehow wary. What with birds and fairies, I really don’t know what the world was coming to.

Yes I know, an end! That’s what everyone says! But not yet I hope because I’ve a lot to do and a lot of people to meet and talk to and go to bed with.

She hadn’t made anything up specially for me I found our later, because when I got to my destination at the end of that day I discovered she’d put a little book of stories and verse in my rucsac.

All Her own stuff it was and all of it as thought provoking as any wanderer could ever need. She’d signed it too when I looked, unusually on the colophon instead of the fly.

“From one wanderer to another! May your heart never weary, even if your feet do!” she’d written all symmetrically finishing off at the bottom with a stylised cowrie shell made into a kiss.

“May your heart never weary!” That was one of the middle degree keys as I recalled, the first part, though rack my brains as I might I could not remember the response.

……………..

By midday I’d reached yet another turning point, this time one which was self made. I desired chocolate and decided to turn off the straight and narrow unscheduled to go in search of it. Any chocolate would do, the problem might be in the finding.

The turning point was in fact a real live crossroads with a recognisable bus stop. Which would have been alright had I been in possession of the relevant coins. Dismally I considered all the small change lying around in the van. Hell if I counted it all I’d probably discover I was worth a fortune!

Which I am anyway.

Alas and bravo, fortune and fortunate being both very similar brought Lady Luck’s intervention about here. In the shape of a motor vehicle which slowed as it drew abreast of me until the driver, peering awkwardly, leaned over and stopped.

The lady driver sat alone in the car with some music or other quietly burbling out of here and there. She offered me a lift into town before it started to rain, she said, and feeling adventurous I accepted.

“Have you walked very far?” she asked when I got in.

I shook my head.

“Are you going very far?”

Again I had to shake my head. Well I sat with my hat on my knees.

“I’m not going anywhere in particular” I told her “I……..I’m just sort of………wandering”

She looked at me strangely for a moment, while we sat there side by side in her car.

“A wanderer eh!” she exclaimed, winding down the window. “With a wonderful hat. How exciting! Do you, I mean, don’t you get very tired?”

“Sometimes” I admitted, not looking at her.

“Well I think it is very exciting!” the woman murmured “And should I say also something like ‘may your heart never weary’”

I turned and looked at her boldly when she said that, slipping my sleeve to show her my shell.

“Who’d have thought!” she chortled gaily “that I’d encounter another Cowrie all the way out here!”

……………

I suppose I ought to have known when and where I was but I didn’t. As the car whizzed along the road, obviously going somewhere, I discovered I was suddenly completely lost. Two days ago I might have said I was a league or two south of the Narr River but for a Wanderer things are never that simple. And for those who carry Her shell thats a never which is ten or a dozen times more unlikely.

Or likely, depending upon your point of view. In this instance it was better in the shape of Una, the lady who’d picked me up and was currently carrying me somewhere in her car. Lost I may have been but, as she drove I felt as if I’d known Una for a hundred years.

She even had chocolate in the car, huge bars of it, some in advanced stages of being unwrapped.

“Help yourself!” Una suggested, waving in its general direction “And…….” she pulled a face suggestively “I’ll have a piece as well…….”

So I snapped the nearest bar into little blocks and held one up for her to pop into her mouth.

On the pretext that she might drop it I kept my fingers there for a moment. She didn’t drop the chocolate of course but she did, quite deliberately press her lips against my fingertips. It was an act which could have been taken any number of ways and some moments passed while I considered the most obvious.

Maybe she was simply being friendly and putting me at my ease. Maybe she did it as a habit. Maybe she did it………

Sometimes I do tend take the bull by the horns before considering the consequences. Sometimes I have been known to take the brute by the bollocks as well, and damn whatever might happen next. And sometimes I forsake reserve completely and allow my feelings and my instincts to run their course.

She sucked my fingertip in when I crooked it to ease the cube of chocolate into her mouth.

“Mmm MMMmmm!” she moaned. Then the moment passed and I picked up a bit of chocolate of my own.

Una drove quickly and without appearing to pay much attention. A couple of times she was forced to brake sharply and once, when another vehicle flashed its lights at us she flashed back with a loud “Goddam!”

I ate another piece of the chocolate and waited for Una’s next move.

“My trouble is……” she murmured eventually “……I’m getting distracted. Y’see when it came to me that I’d be meeting a wanderer for some reason I presumed it’d be a man…….”

“Sorry to disappoint you!” I said.

“Hell no!” Una retorted “I’d resigned myself to meeting a man and right up until the moment I saw you I was feelin’ kinda let down, if you know what I mean?”

“Men are alright in moderation?”

“Right! Right! But then……

“How did you know about meeting me?” I asked suddenly. It was the only thing I’d found puzzling.

Una shrugged, “Just a feelin’” she said casually “How does one know any of theses things? Instinct perhaps, or a sixth sense. Something like that perhaps. A feeling which tells you to take a few days off work, pick up a stranger in the middle of nowhere and drive with them to a wooden shed on a beach miles away. You get my meaning?”

“I……I think I do!” I said.

“’S my escape capsule if you like. From the world of liars and cheats and the bullies of international commerce!”

“We all need somewhere like that”

“Damn right we do!” Una said. “That’s why I’ve got my shed!”



It was rather more than a shed, I saw, when we got to it, bumping off the road onto gravel and drifted sand behind a hummock of dunes. It was more a two storey house made of windworn red bricks and tarred weather boarding.

“Shangri La!” Una said, a different person as suddenly as our arrival which had brought about the change.

There were a couple of supermarket bags in the back of the car. Una opened it and we carried them the two dozen yards from the car to the door.

Shangri La was cool and quietly fragrant inside, Una motioned me in, followed me and closed the door.

We put our bags side by side on a table in what I took to be the kitchen then, in the gloom, with the sound of the sea hissing distantly we somehow blundered into each other’s arms.

Not surprisingly her mouth tasted of chocolate. I suppose mine did too, along with my sweat and saliva and everything else. Theres a lot of good tasty stuff in chocolate isn’t there? A lot of which goes to make for good tasty women.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, once we’d drawn apart enough to be able to draw breath.

“Ravishing!” I said with a little laugh.

…………….

A waning moon was rising by the time we’d gathered together a bottle of wine, two glasses and made our way upstairs. Una opened the two tiny windows on the seaward side of the bedroom to allow both moonlight and the sounds of the surf to wash in unhindered. We undressed unhurriedly, casting curious glances at each other, making all those little noises that girls make when they’re getting themselves ready for bed.

Both of us looked better by moonlight than we would have in the cold light of day but neither of us made any comment. I spent some time brushing my hair while Una fiddled with creams and potions and took off her makeup. Easily and naturally our evening evolved, from gentle kisses and cool bedclothes to the point where it might have been nice if one or other of us really had been a man.

That point came and went very quickly, marked only by Una lifting her head very briefly to utter her favourite expletive ‘goddam!’

That made us both laugh and gave us time, in between everything else, to kiss each other again. Some traces of chocolate still remained, if you’re wondering. Some but not much.

The moon was drawing long triangles on the floor by the time we both decided we’d cum. Hours had passed in no time at all, days would probably pass similarly at the rate we were going. End to end we turned to each other again.

“You know its called and eighty eight when its two girls together, don’t you?” Una asked.

My ears must have been the only part of me that wasn’t engaged in something else and even then I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

“Sixty nine, surely?”

“Only if one of the party is a man!” Una corrected “Eighty eight if its girls!”

It sounded logical and must have been my lesson for the day because after that Una shut up. No I mean she didn’t say anything else, she didn’t close her legs or anything like that. She just didn’t make any recognisable sounds except moans. And then somehow, without even trying we both got to the same part of our journey with very little effort at all.

You know I’ve often thought there might be more than one place in an orgasm where you actually orgasm, if you see what I mean. The way Una and I had been going felt like one great long cum. A soft little one, one that didn’t blind you momentarily, make you break fingernails, bite someone else’s bits off or swear. In a way it was a lot like the tide going out along the beach outside, with little wavelets rushing, breaking and receding again. The tastes too were akin to the ocean. Salty, sweet and rather like a really good gin.

The moon had taken its triangles with it however, when it went to its own bed, for there were none on the floor when I looked the next morning.

© Aahlu. 191010.