IT WAS BEING angry at C.J. more than any spirit of adventure that drove Mira to go off alone to explore the island that day in early summer. Not that there was much to see on Kirinos. The small Ionian island was the sixth in a string of islands that she and C.J. had visited, some more flat or mountainous or lushly wildflowered than others, all redolent with heat and goat piss and retsina. So far, Kirinos was the least promising of the lot. Something about the people, Mira decided, as she pedaled the rented Schwinn along the dirt track that led away from the town. They seemed a glum and lifeless lot, not just more taciturn than the townsfolk she and C.J. had encountered on the other islands, but downright moribund.
The heat, perhaps, thought Mira, as sweat scrawled long itchy lines along the cracks between her breasts and buttocks. You could fry squid on the rocks here (and judging from some meals she’d had, maybe that was what they did), and it was barely ten o’clock.
Yet she pedaled on, determined to find something of interest or note to justify such an expenditure of energy on so blistering a day.
C.J.’s energy, as usual, was being vigorously conserved, unless you counted the hoisting of glass to lips to be a form of weight training. If so, Mira figured her lover would have set some sort of record for elbow-bending by the end of their vacation.
She’d left C.J. slouched at one of the ubiquitous waterfront tavernas, nursing a hangover with what, to Mira, seemed an unlikely remedy – a glass of ouzo and a plate of stuffed grape leaves and taramosalata, a gummy-looking paste of smoked fish roe.
But then, despite what Mira thought was an unseemly love of drink and indolence, C.J. seemed to require no exercise to maintain a body that was both athletically lean and pleasingly curvaceous.
Whereas, I, thought Mira with not a little envy, could pedal from here back home to Scranton and still have a bum like a wench in a Bruegel painting.
Not for the first time, Mira wondered what C.J. saw in her – a fat and dowdy bookworm with plain, freckled features and eyes that squinted myopically from behind heavy lenses. Perhaps it was that C.J. felt her own good looks were shown to best advantage next to Mira’s plainness, that her own extroversion sparkled with more brilliance contrasted with Mira’s shyness. The idea of being a mere foil to highlight her lover’s sex appeal made Mira pedal harder, fueled by despair and self-disgust.
At least, she thought, by way of preserving some modicum of self-esteem, I’m out and about, exploring something besides the beer and wine list.
Trying to, at any rate.
The reality was, so far at least, Kirinos seemed as stolid and uninviting as its citizenry. On both sides of the dirt track, olive groves stretched to a flat, unpromising horizon. Bands of scrawny, brown and white goats eyed Mira from the shade of stunted trees, but her passing was acknowledged only by a ribby dog, who came lunging at her rear tire with unnerving, if short-lived menace, before sensibly retreating to the shade.
Still, as her surroundings gave Mira more and more reason to feel discouraged, she pedaled resolutely on. She’d spent much of the last nine months cooped up in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, studying for an M.A. in Greek and Roman literature. Her pasty skin and pudgy thighs attested to her scholar’s dedication. Now she had three weeks of freedom before summer classes started. Hot and weary though she might be, she wasn’t going to be like C.J. She was damn well going to see something on this trip besides the insides of tavernas.
An hour more into her trek, she passed a pair of girls herding a desultory tribe of goats along the roadside. Mira stopped and asked, in her limited Greek, what there might be of interest up ahead. The girls shared that look of dull slow-wittedness that Mira had come to recognize as characteristic of Kirinos’s inhabitants, a vacuity that suggested spirits no less desolate than the barren landscape.
The two girls conversed in low whispers before one said, in Greek the gist of which Mira was able to comprehend, “There’s the ruin of a temple close by, but you don’t want to go there. It isn’t safe.”
“It’s been abandoned for a long time,” the other said.
“A temple to the goddess Baubo,” said the first.
“Baubo?” Mira repeated, unfamiliar with the name.
A faint trace of slyness leaked into the first speaker’s large and bovine eyes, the closest thing to an expression of amusement that Mira had seen since coming to the island.
Mira wanted to question the women further, but the goats were straying, the girls obviously impatient to be on their way. Mira thanked them, hoping she had understood correctly, and pedaled on.
A few miles farther on, she walked her decrepit bike (no less ancient, however, than her legs were beginning to feel) up a steep hill topped by stands of poplars. Wind-flogged for their entire lives, the trees were permanently bent before their batterer, slanting out of the loose and rocky soil like broken bones set by a sadist, all weird twists and angles.
But for the grotesquely warped trees, the hilltop appeared as forlorn and barren as the rest of Kirinos, abandoned even by the wind today, but for a sluggish breeze.
And Baubo’s temple? If it existed at all (and Mira was beginning to imagine that she’d been sent on a wild-goose chase reserved for the most gullible of tourists – a Greek snipe hunt, as it were), it must be on still higher ground, well beyond the capacity of both her bike and calf muscles.
Still, the idea of coming back from her day’s excursion with not even a small discovery or adventure to recount was incentive enough for Mira to make one final assault on the hilltop. Leaning her bike against a tree, she forced herself on foot up a rock-strewn incline that offered, to mountain goats perhaps, a facsimile of a path.
She reached the top panting, legs atremble.
And halted, disappointment smiting her like a blow across the cheek.
The temple, if that was what it once had been, was now a crumbled relic, defiled by weeds and shat upon by birds. Small lizards sunned themselves on its chipped stones and scurried into shaded cracks at Mira’s approach. Only two half-columns yet remained – the rest were tumbled over, sections scattered here and there in what looked, to Mira, like the vertebrae of some long-dead dinosaur, huge cousin perhaps to the toy-sized ones now baking on the stones. The decay and desolation of the place was both disturbing and, somehow also, morbidly alluring. Mira had seen fallen temples before, of course, but either in museums, their bleached stones carefully divided up and labeled, or cordoned off and renovated for display, tramped across by infestations of noisy, camera-snapping tourists.
This was something else. This ruin was deserted, empty, private as a tomb. A tumbled wreck, it well might be, but for the moment, it apparently belonged entirely to Mira. And if the temple was less than she had hoped for, the view from her high perch was stunning, the first vista Mira had found worth setting eyes on. From this vantage point, the sea was so bright it seared spangles on her retinas, each wave composed of a treasure trove of individual gems – turquoise, topaz, and emeralds in a seething jewel box of light.
Clambering over a row of fallen stones, Mira unhooked her daypack and sank down onto the ground. She spread her lunch out around her – a canteen of ice water, now tepid slush, granola bars purchased in Athens, grapes and pears from the kiosk outside the hotel.
A breeze nipped and flitted at the damp hair on the back of her neck. She sank her teeth into a pear, its nectar overflowing her lips and dribbling down her chin, and thought of C.J. back at the taverna, probably chatting up Greek girls and maybe boys as well, if she’d imbibed enough retsina.
But maybe, Mira thought, C.J. had the right idea. At least she’s never lonely, isn’t eating her lunch right now at the bitter end of nowhere without even goats for company.
The breeze picked up a bit, moaning plaintively through stunted tree limbs.
It died off, but the moaning didn’t. The sound continued unabated and took on, in fact, a distinctly human timbre.
Mira froze, unsure of what to do. To pursue the sound might invite involvement in some drama in which Mira, as a foreigner and tourist, could ill afford to embroil herself. Neither was it clear to her if the sounds were fathered by great pain or by pleasure. If the former, then decency demanded she investigate. There could be a hiker hurt, a young child lost, even an injured animal, although more and more, Mira doubted that the noise could have any except human origin.
She crept forward as quietly as her bulk allowed, scuttling the last yard or two on hands and knees, and peered between some scrubby bushes.
At first glance, she saw but didn’t really see, so improbable was the spectacle before her that she assumed her vision must be playing tricks, creating the illusion that a trio of the bleached and fallen stones were now a woman’s round thighs and ivory belly. No hallucination this, however, Mira realized; the flush and jiggle of abundant flesh was all too real.
A woman, endowed with Junoesque proportions, lay spread out upon the rough ground. Her knees were bent, thigh’s widely V’d. With three fingers of her right hand, she rhythmically fucked herself, while with the left she parted the pink creases of her labia, plucking at the engorged clitoris with her thumb. Though she lay in shadow, sunlight broke through in places, dappling her flesh with spots and splashes the color of buttered Brie. With each thrust of her fingers, the woman moaned and arched her back, black tresses tumbling over the earth like so many writhing serpents. Sweat rolled off her mounded breasts and belly, shimmered on her nipple tips like opals.
Mira knew she had no business witnessing this display and yet she couldn’t bring herself to look away. She gazed on, rapt, and was still staring, fingers of one hand lightly touching her own bosom, tweaking at a nipple, when the woman’s eyes suddenly flashed open and she looked directly at the spot where Mira crouched.
Her eyes held the force of twin beacons. Mira cringed before their power, determined to keep silent, but the very underbrush was bent upon betraying her. A twig snapped beneath her shifting weight; a stone, dislodged by her heel, went skittering.
“Who’s there?” the woman called out in Greek.
Mira’s head thundered with blood.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I’m going.”
“Wait.”
Mira halted, bracing herself for a lambasting the individual words of which she might not comprehend, but whose meaning would be all too clear as well as justified.
The woman, who’d made no attempt to cover herself and whose garments, Mira noted, were nowhere in view, stood up and approached her. And kept approaching, past that invisible boundary which varies with each culture, but whose limits with regard to personal space are normally respected.
“Pedhi mou,” my girl, whispered the woman and put her mouth to Mira’s.
Her kiss was hot and salty, tasting of sweat and sex and female juices. It was, thought Mira, like giving head to a woman in the final stages of arousal, the pussy dripping with desire, the vulval lips engorged and oozing sex.
This is madness, she thought, and yet her lips were parting to allow access to her mouth and she was unresistant when the woman began to unbutton and peel off her blouse and shorts, her sweat-drenched undergarments. Mira’s large breasts were squashed against a bosom far more abundant that her own. Her head spun with the folly of her own lust, with a passion so unnatural to her character that she felt at once transformed and yet possessed, as though surely something outside herself inspired this abandon.
The woman’s body, lush and hot, bumped and rutted against Mira’s. Fingers probed and parted her, a tongue both skilled and playful teased her lips and lashes, then ducked down to drink from the tiny cup of sweat that was her navel.
And all the while the woman made noises – sucking, gobbling, slurping, laughing – as their bodies thumped and squeaked together in a carnal melody. The woman guided Mira to the ground onto a bed made of her discarded clothing. Her avid lips sought out the mouth between Mira’s parted legs, where she drank of sweat and cunt juice. Mira thrashed and cried out as an orgasm shuddered through her, contractions like a birth of pleasure throbbing all the way into her womb. The woman’s tongue explored new crevices and creases. More climaxes were wrung from her, the last of these so violent that Mira locked her thighs together and cried out for a respite.
Her lover, however, suffered no such loss of appetite. Leaving Mira on the ground, she pranced and strutted like an obscene jester, tweaking brown nipples the size of coffee saucers, strumming at her clitoris with the fast and fluid motions of a virtuoso guitarist. Muttering some words that Mira didn’t understand, she squatted over the rough earth, reached down and spread herself wide in a parody of childbirth. Astonished, Mira watched this spectacle, unsure if this outrageous lewdness was prelude to some new bout of lovemaking. Her nether lips still throbbed and tingled from the force of her last orgasm. She felt undone, sapped senseless by the heat and the intensity of sex. She had neither the strength nor will to do anything but recline and watch the dance.
Which turned suddenly, before Mira’s bewitched gaze, into a monstrous birthing. The woman spread her thick thighs wide, parting vaginal lips that hung down more than an inch below the black thatch of pubic hair. She released a gust of laughter that stirred the still air and raised the hair on Mira’s arms with it’s dark mirth.
Something slick and shiny glistened wetly at the lips of her vagina. The thing pulsed there for an instant, like the damp head of a grotesquely misshapen child, then fell to the rough ground, where it uncoiled powerful hind legs and leaped away.
Mira gaped, unable to comprehend what she had seen, but the miracle was only just commencing. The woman was giving birth to toads, hordes of the wet and mottled creatures dropping from her cunt, a slithering rain of amphibian life upon the stones. Born full grown, they leaped in all directions, a sea of bright, bulging eyes and livid mouths.
Mira gasped and clutched both hands across her breasts, although they offered scant protection against the unnatural hordes that were still plopping, like dollops of green dung, from the woman’s cunt.
A toad leaped at Mira’s face and landed in her hair. Another bounced across her belly, a third’s passing marked her breast with smears of dirt from its webbed hind feet.
Mira screamed and writhed, dislodging the toads on her legs and head only to find three more arranged like horrid tumors upon her breasts and belly. The largest of these, endowed with shining amber eyes, seized the soft flesh below Mira’s navel and delivered a painful bite. Blood slicked the toad’s wide mouth, and bile rose up in Mira’s throat. The world turned. She tried to rise but found her limbs were powerless, her vision growing inky at the edges.
Through a gauze of sick terror, she could still see the horrid birthing taking place. As she passed out, her ears rang with the woman’s mad laughter that almost – but not completely – drowned out a sound far worse, the soft, throaty glugging of the toads.
“You shouldn’t have gone out in the heat today,” C.J. said, nibbling at a piece of fried octopus. “You look like hell.”
“I’m all right,” said Mira, cutting into the leg of lamb the waiter had just set before her. “Just hungry.”
Hungry and – if truth be known – bizarrely energized. Her belly throbbed, but not with pain. More like concentric circles of appetite and energy radiating out from the wound on her stomach. The toad appeared to have nipped out a tiny chunk of flesh. The bleeding had been copious on her bike ride back to town. Mira had been forced to hurry back to the hotel, where she had shed her filthy clothing and stuffed it deep inside her duffle bag.
Fortunately, other than remarking on Mira’s appearance, C.J. had shown little curiosity about her day. Now she added some more water to her glass of ouzo and sipped the milky liquid with that look of studied smugness that Mira had come to recognize as presaging some admission aimed at provoking jealousy.
“I met someone today. His name’s Stavros. He grew up here, but he worked in his cousin’s restaurant in New York for a couple of years, so he speaks really good English.”
Mira shrugged and forked a chunk of meat into her mouth. “So did you fuck him yet?”
C.J. recoiled. “No, of course not. I’m with you, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“Jesus, we’re in a pissy mood tonight.”
“So what’s the point of telling me about some guy you met? To make me jealous, right? To remind me how fucking desirable you are to each and every gender. Well, fuck him if you want to. Suck his dick until it falls off. I don’t care.”
“God, Mira, what’s got into you? I only said . . .”
“This looks so good,” said Mira, reaching over with her fork to poke at C.J.’s food. She chose the longest piece of octopus, a tentacle pale and tender as the flesh of an armpit, studded with small, rose-colored suckers.
C.J., misunderstanding her intention, said, “I thought you didn’t like octopus. You said it was disgusting.”
“I didn’t say I was going to eat it.” Mira plucked the tentacle from the fork and held it between her fingers. “Look here.”
She glanced to either side of her. Only a few of the tables in the taverna were filled and these by locals whose faces, in most cases, were either directed at their plates or wreathed in a fog of cigarette smoke. Slowly, savoring C.J.’s agitation, she undid the top three buttons of her blouse, revealing ample cleavage unfettered by a bra.
“I wonder if your friend Stavros would like to do this with his tongue?” She slid the octopus between her freckled breasts. Up and down, down and up, leaving a sheen of grease against the pale skin.
“Jesus, Mira, stop it.”
“But then your tits are smaller than mine, so he might rather tonguefuck you other places.”
She slid sideways in her chair, pulled her cotton skirt up to mid-thigh. She wore no underpants, and her cunt was moist and ready. On the first push, the tentacle got away from her and slid so far inside, she almost lost it. Mira threw back her head and howled with laughter at the thought of walking around being fucked with an octopus dildo inside her, but then her vaginal muscles clenched and pushed the slippery stob back out. It slithered into her fingers.
“Mira, please, the waiter’s coming over.”
“You think he’d like to watch?”
She closed her legs and pulled down her skirt, but didn’t bother to refasten the buttons of her blouse.
“For God’s sake . . .”
Mira grinned. She put the octopus tentacle between her lips and began to gobble it with noisy, smacking sounds.
“You’re fucking drunk.”
“I’ve had half a glass of wine.”
“Close up your blouse. Your tits are falling out.”
Mira giggled and undid another button, revealing small pink nipples that were celebrating their exposure with exuberant erections. She felt appalled at her audacity, astonished, and yet elated, too. There was merit, more profound than her mind could shape at present, in this loss of dignity and decorum, but if so, C.J. was blind to it. She gaped in horror at her lover as the waiter, unable to contain himself, came over and stared down at Mira’s chest.
His eyes bugged, and he muttered something that Mira didn’t understand. Others had turned to stare now, diners abandoning their meals to ogle the impromptu cabaret act.
“Please,” said C.J., through gritted teeth. “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but cover yourself up.”
Mira stuck out her tongue at C.J., waggled it around, and slowly, so slowly that the act of covering herself became more seductive than the original unveiling, began to close the buttons.
The diners, murmuring now among themselves, continued to stare, looking from Mira to one another and back to Mira again with an expression more of wonder than disapproval.
A muscular young man with blindingly white teeth, evidently C.J.’s new Greek swain, approached the table with a hand held out to greet his American friend. His eyes were fixed on C.J. until, at the last moment, his gaze took a sudden detour onto Mira’s semi-naked breasts. He gulped, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, and blushed bright crimson. Murmuring something in Greek, he backed away from the table as though the barrels of two .45’s had suddenly been trained on him.
“Stavros,” C.J. called out. “Stavros, wait.” She pulled a fistful of drachmas out of her pocket and slammed them onto the table. “Come on, Mira. If you’re not drunk, then you’re high or sick or something. I’ve got to get you out of here before you cause a riot.”
And, at least in part, Mira agreed with her. Yet if, indeed, she’d somehow tripped or blundered over the edge of insanity, then surely this was an experience far more pleasurable than her previous, albeit limited, study of mental deviations (mostly undergraduate psych courses) would have led her to believe.
She felt, indeed, more energetic than she had in years, infused with a heat so galvanizing that, as C.J. half dragged her along the street, Mira thought surely she must be radiating light.
“Where are we going?” she laughed.
“Back to the room. Where you can sober up.”
“But I am sober.” Mira tried to stop giggling for C.J.’s sake, but with every effort to compose herself, the laughter only burst from her in more lusty gales. “More sober than I’ve ever been.”
“Then you’re having some kind of breakdown. Heat prostration maybe.”
They passed a group of men. “Wait,” cried Mira. Pulling free of C.J.’s grasp, she bent over, flipped her skirt up, and wagged her naked rump at the startled passersby. This small act seemed insufficient, however, to encompass her frivolity. Reaching back, she spread her cheeks, exposing the pink and puckered eyelet at her center.
The men stopped in their tracks.
“Mira!”
C.J. yanked the skirt down. With her right hand, she cracked Mira a resounding blow across the face. “Do you want to get us both arrested? Thrown in a fucking Greek jail?”
“Fucking Greek jail?” echoed Mira. She rubbed her stung cheek. Her face hurt, but something else, something altogether wonderful and unexpected, was distracting her from the pain. From the nearby plaza: music. The first music Mira had heard since they arrived on this godforsaken lump of rock. A lyre, sweet and lyrical, and joining it, the chimelike notes of a laouto.
“Fucking Greek jail!” sang out Mira and she began to dance.
Her legs, despite this morning’s trek, were suddenly featherlight. She was a bird, a bawd, a buxom ballerina. She was great, unholstered, jiggly tits and quivering fat ass and a canyon of cleavage. She was madness, mirth, and celebration.
“Mira! No! If you don’t stop this instant, I’m leaving!”
“Then go!” cried Mira and danced away.
Her sandals slapped the cobblestones. Leather on stone, fuck, fuck, like lusty mating. Mira laughed and kicked them off. She whirled and capered, spun and leaped, and the musicians picked up the beat and Mira danced, and did her blouse fall open of its own accord or did her fingers tease the buttons free? She didn’t know, but somehow her tits flopped out, and the musicians yodeled at the sky like moonstruck hounds and then the moon itself swelled from behind the clouds in all its naked splendor and Mira sang out, “Fucking Greek jail!” and danced and danced.
A few villagers gathered round to stare and grunt, before retreating, like shamed wraiths, back into their houses, white as bone shards beneath the yellow moon.
And the musicians’ energy waned, and they put away their instruments and slunk away, but still Mira cavorted, her white skirt swirling, pink nipples dancing their own jig and she was like a Catherine wheel, all light and glamour, spinning wildly in the dark.
A boy, barely beyond his teens, watched her with a rapt and avid gaze, wetting the corners of his mouth with a tongue made sopping by desire. Mira danced to his side. She took him by his thick black hair and buried his face between her breasts, each one of which was easily the size of the boy’s head. She let him suckle, leaving her nipples silvery with saliva, then pushed his head down and hoisted up her skirt and straddled him. His tongue knew dances of its own, quick, darting strumming motions and deep, luxurious slurps and she opened up her folds to him and took his tongue in like a raw pink fetus seeking reentry to its fleshy nest.
The boy stood up and unzipped himself, took out a bobbing, uncut cock. The sight of it made Mira giggle with delight and recommence her dance, though the music to which she capered was now within her head.
An old man rushed out from a nearby doorway. He grabbed the boy and shouted in his face with much agitation. Mira heard the word “Baubo,” but didn’t understand the rest. Beneath the elder’s scorn, the boy shrank both literally and figuratively. He slunk away, the old man’s arm prodding him roughly along. Leaving Mira panting, bare-breasted, and alone in the center of the plaza. She looked down at herself and gasped, began buttoning her blouse. Wetness ran between her legs, the boy’s drool and her own juices. From her groin and armpits wafted, unmistakably, the pungency of lust.
The door was locked when Mira at last returned to the hotel room. She knocked and pleaded a good long time before C.J. let her in. C.J.’s tanned face was tracked with angry tears.
“I talked to Stavros. Tomorrow morning, he’s leaving on the first ferry back to Piraeus,” said C.J., crawling back into bed. “I’m going with him. I want you to come with us. We’ll find a doctor for you in Athens. An English-speaking one.”
Mira took off her soiled and rumpled clothing and slid naked into bed next to her lover.
“I can’t do that,” she said. “I don’t understand what happened out there, but, oh God, it felt so wonderful.”
“When you exposed yourself, you mean. When you mooned those men.”
“Yes, wonderful,” said Mira, her voice awed and tiny. “I don’t understand. It was like I couldn’t stop myself. And I didn’t want to.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t beaten up or arrested. These people are conservative. They aren’t used to things like this. Did you see the way they looked at you?”
“What’s happening to me, C.J? Am I crazy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you had some kind of fit. Maybe some blood sugar thing. But Stavros thinks it’s . . .”
“Yeah? What does pretty little Stavros think?”
C.J.’s voice became so tiny Mira could barely hear her. “This sounds crazy, but . . . he says this island used to be dedicated to the worship of a deity named Balbo or Baubo or something. Anyway, she’s the goddess of obscenity, of lewdness and sensuality. And he thinks . . . oh, forget it . . .”
“He thinks that I’m possessed. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why he wants to leave. Before whatever I’ve got gets spread around.”
“Look, I’m sorry I said anything. It’s nonsense, silly superstition. Stavros isn’t educated. He still believes the old Greek myths and legends.”
Mira looked at the smooth wall of C.J.’s back, remembering the woman at the temple, her kisses like honeyed darts, both sweet and penetrating. She wanted to tell C.J. what had happened, everything, but she knew that would be impossible. C.J. wouldn’t understand. She’d only be more convinced that Stavros was a beautiful but superstitious rube and Mira was simply crazy.
“You have to leave here tomorrow when Stavros and I go,” said C.J.
“Your new lover.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But he will be.”
“Maybe.”
Mira thought about it briefly. “Go fuck yourself.”
Daylight splashed across Mira’s sleeping face like hot liquid. She gasped and clutched the pillow. A warm breeze gusted in the open window where sunbeams streamed in to form an avenue of light.
C.J. was gone, the only evidence that she had ever been there the indentation of her head still on the pillow.
Mira got up and began to dress. The wound on her belly twinged. She looked down past her swollen breasts and saw that it was still open, a tiny bud-red slit below her navel. She touched it lightly with one finger and almost had an orgasm. Pleasure swam through her, stem to stern. Her head spun with the delirium of last night’s ecstasy as she made her way outside into the village.
She had considered her few options and made a decision: She would go back to Baubo’s temple and see if she could find some clue, or better yet, some respite from the madness that had overtaken her. That, at least, was her rationale. In truth, she hoped to find her lover of the day before, the goddess who gave birth to frogs and, perhaps more frighteningly, had incited her to last night’s wantonness.
The day was furious with heat, the breeze offering no respite except to stir and redistribute the torpor as Mira started up the dirt track to the temple. No one was about. The village seemed deserted, even the taverna on the waterfront bereft of its usual clientele of domino-playing males. She moved slowly, her body stiff and achy from last night’s outlandish exercise. At a crest in the journey, she paused to look out over the water and saw a large boat, a ferry, plowing westward in the direction of Piraeus.
Her heart caught and hitched as though a claw had punctured her aorta – C.J. and her new toy Stavros were surely on that boat.
Something moved on the horizon in the corner of her vision. She gazed behind her and staggered backward. Running, stumbling up the dirt track, came a dozen or more villagers. The man in the lead looked up and saw Mira. He pointed, beckoned to the others, urging them on. They began to run in earnest.
Mira stumbled forward in blind panic. So C.J. had been right – last night’s escapades were not so easily forgotten or forgiven. Perhaps she would be jailed or expelled from the country. Or worse – something in the villagers’ pursuit put her in mind of fates more ancient and punitive – adulteresses stoned and wanton women entombed alive in cloister walls.
She began to run, thinking only that she must reach the temple, that Baubo – witch goddess, whatever she might be – might help her, offer her a place to hide.
Her limbs were flagging, but terror lent her strength. She cut through fields of olive trees, skirting the sea, and climbed at last to the crest of the final bluff where the madwoman had given birth to toads.
And stopped, the breath rasping in her chest, unable to summon even one last reserve for further flight.
They were waiting for her. Hundreds of them. The entire village. They had known that she would come here and had arrived first, leaving only a handful behind to goad her into flight.
“Please,” said Mira, but she knew the word was meaningless. They had not gone to all this trouble to merely turn away and leave her to her madness.
She took a few halting steps. The villagers stared.
Someone pulled out a dulcimer and began a melody. Another blew into a primitive bagpipe, the tsambouna.
The music threaded through the silence like a golden needle passing through white cotton.
Laughter started.
Mira didn’t realize until some moments later that the weird, manic laughter was produced by her own throat, but its effect was instantaneous. The villagers began to jerk and twitch in what, at first glance, appeared to Mira to be a crude dance but which was, in actuality, a clumsy striptease. They began to caper and leap about, flinging items of their clothing into the air. Their aimless exuberance reminded Mira of the frogs’ mad leaping, except that now the random jumping was accompanied by a hundred small obscenities.
A young woman with a baby on her hip exposed large rosy-nippled breasts. She squeezed and twisted a breast and milk squirted forth. It struck the face of a dancing man who opened his mouth wide and gobbled. Others gathered round. The woman emptied both breasts into the throng, milk running in hair and eyes, dripping from smacking lips.
Old women clad in widow’s black scattered their funereal garb across the temple stones. Cackling, they caressed themselves and capered in lewd jigs.
An old man bent over and let loose a hornpipe melody of exuberant flatulence. The rhythm of his obscene tooting kept time with the tsambouna and the dulcimer while others laughed and clapped.
A woman lifted up her breast and suckled from her own nipple while with her other hand she milked the semen from the penis of her partner. A dog joined in the fray, aroused and thrusting at the dancers’ legs. Some women dropped onto their hands and knees and vied to suck the canine’s crimson stalk.
And madder grew the dancers and wilder their excesses with flowers plucked to make bouquets protruding out of anuses and cocks garlanded with spring anemones and vaginas sprouting orchids and rockroses.
The celebrants grabbed Mira by her hands and breasts and buttocks. Their feverish caresses stripped her clothes away and she was swept into the orgy. They peppered her with kisses but reserved the most ardent tonguings for the wound upon her belly, where Baubo’s kiss had left a puckered replica of a tiny cunt.
“Baubo has returned to us,” some of the old ones murmured. “Baubo has a priestess now, and we can dance again.”
In the evening, before returning to the village, they brought Mira jugs of wine and beer and platters of the finest food. The women cleared the earth and made a bed for her amid the ruins of the temple. In the growing dark, alone now, she squatted naked on the hillside, gazing out to sea, trying to remember what was lost to her.
There had been a life for her out there once, school and home and lover, but all that seemed pale and vapid now, dim and distant as the far-off stars and moving rapidly away from her. She let it go with a sense more of relief than loss.
In the night, when she awoke in brief confusion, with fear plucking at her like the beak of some flesh-eating bird, she had only to touch her belly wound and pleasure spiraled up her spine. Her body bloomed with orgasms and her heart with song.