METAMORPHOSES

Emmanuelle de Maupassant

There’s a dark cloud coming over. Hurry, Miss Jenkins, or you’ll miss the quarter-to-six bus.” “You’re a good girl, Evie.”

Miss Jenkins’s feet are aching and she’s more than ready to head home. “Cheerio then. See you in the morning.”

Miss Jenkins puts on her headscarf and gloves, and readies her umbrella. She made a good choice in appointing Evie as assistant librarian. Such a helpful young woman; it’s the third night in a row she’s offered to close up.

Miss Jenkins encourages the last few stragglers as she goes. “You’ll be late for supper, boys. They’ll be ringing the gong. Put that one back carefully, Philip—it’s heavy. No running now. The prefects are on the prowl.”

She’s out the door, the boys ushered ahead, and Evie is alone. The first drops of rain are hitting the window. The lights flare, then dim. The electricity was only put in the year before. Better than gas, more reliable, unless there’s a storm.

Evie’s tidying the card index when she hears the door open, the swish of a gown, and the familiar footstep.

“Good evening, Headmaster,” she says.

“Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Third stack down I believe, top shelf.”

Evie comes out from behind the desk, heading to the Classical Literature section. Yesterday, it was Alice in Wonderland, the day before that, Byron’s verse.

She slides the rolling ladder along from its resting place at the end of the row.

The upper shelves are dusty. She makes a mental note to clean them; Miss Jenkins can hardly be expected to climb ladders at her age.

Evie’s on the fourth rung, stretching up, when she feels his hand on her ankle.

“The green volume, not the blue,” he tells her.

Her fingers fumble on the spine. It’s now, beforehand, that she feels most unnerved. She’s still herself: apple of her father’s eye, church on Sundays, doesn’t stay out late. She’s a good girl, isn’t she?

Since she began working here, she’s not so sure.

Beneath her dirndl wool skirt, his palm traces her calf. She shivers as he skims the crook of her knee. On and up, until his fingers are hooking the top of her nylons.

She knows his wife wears silks. Not as practical; they catch so easily.

He unclips the suspenders, just on one side, and rolls down Evie’s stocking, until it’s bunched at her ankle.

With one side up and one side down, she feels faintly ridiculous. She supposes that’s the point.

Evie rests the lower edge of the slim leather-bound edition on the shelf in front of her.

Cool against her warmth, his hand waits on the bare flesh of her inner thigh.

“Begin, Miss Evesham. It’s a translation. You’ll have no trouble.”

She lets it fall open. Evie knows what’s coming. She aches for it, has been waiting. Yet her fear and excitement are like the first time.

He’d asked for Milton’s Paradise Lost. Out of sight of others’ eyes, his fingers had snaked about her wrist, his lips placing a careful kiss there, claiming her pulse. Like Lucifer, he’d tempted her: with knowledge, with experience, with the unthinkable.

He’d read her.

She forms the words, her tongue dry and thick.

The lamps flared up, and all the rooms were bright

With flashing crimson fires…

He seeks out the soft fringe of her fur.

…and phantom forms

Of savage beasts of prey howled all around.

Evie’s voice flounders on the final word, as his thumb pushes to enter her. His fingers are never explicitly invited. Nevertheless, her legs part and she swells at his touch. Her slipperiness comes quickly. The hungry mouth of her sex draws him upward.

There is no going back. She pauses to swallow, gripping the shelf in front of her as she reads.

Among the smoke-filled rooms, one here, one there,

The sisters cowered in hiding to escape

The flames and glare…

He withdraws his fingers to remove her knickers, guides her feet as she steps out. He drapes them, peach with a lace frill, over Cicero’s Collected Speeches. His cap, the mortarboard denoting his status, he places on top.

The lights flicker again. It’s dark outside, rain heavy on the windowpane opposite the fourth stack. If someone pressed their nose to the glass, they’d see them, surely—if they wanted to, if they came close enough.

Five buttons on the back of her skirt, and it drops. He folds the garment carefully, beside her underwear.

Her buttocks are exposed to the chill of the room. She shivers, but it’s only partly from the cold. She’s glad for her cashmere sweater. Darned at the elbow, but who notices such things? She continues, a slight tremor in her voice.

…and, as they sought the dark,

A skinny membrane spread down their dwarfed limbs,

And wrapped thin wings about their tiny arms,

“What beautiful diction you have, Miss Evesham. We should have you join us in assembly. You might read to the boys, just as you are doing now.”

His hand on the small of her back indicates his desire that she bend at the waist. She squeezes her shoulders through the open rungs of the ladder, only just keeping hold of the book. It’s undignified, the metal pressing cold against her lower belly.

He taps at both her ankles, reminding Evie to part her legs. She feels his breath, from his mouth, his nose. She’s never looked as he’s looking, at her sex laid bare, exhibited.

In some ways, he knows her better than she knows herself. In their Eden, he doesn’t see her as a single floral note. Her scent is complex: lily, jasmine, and hellebore, bitter orange and tuberose.

The electric lights dwindle, flare brighter, then settle, but dimmer than before. She has to concentrate to see the print.

And in what fashion they had lost their shape

The dark hid from them.

The flat of his tongue runs through her wetness, stroking, probing, drinking her, and she’s helpless in her shame, choking out the words through a sob of humiliation and desire.

Not with feathered plumes

They ride the air, but keep themselves aloft

On parchment wings…

Tires crunch the gravel outside: Evie’s father, driving from the bank, collecting her on his way home. Twin beams arc through the window, illuminating shelves of European history and politics.

Taking her toward the edge of where she wants to be, the tongue inside her flicks. He never smiles, but she imagines him doing so now.

Barely a whisper, her voice is ragged, catching.

And when they try to speak

They send a tiny sound that suits their size,

And pour their plaints in thin high squeaking cries.

Ribboning, her wail lifts and rises, winging bat-like over the stacks, leaving her mute and breathless, transformed behind the red veil of her ferocious blood-beat.

He has no need of the book, as he takes over.

They loathe the light; from dusk they take their name, and flit by night.

The car horn summons her.

Rolling up her rumpled stocking, Evie clips it into place, reassembles herself, until her appearance is as it was.

It’s inside that she shimmers: knowing and known, transformed.