I wanted everything uber-guestfriendly today. I wanted Oksana allured. A plan was planted for her to eat over, and my buddy Canten beguiled me with assertions that doe who stray to other stags' forests are sniffing them out as potential mates. Even if she was already mated, she had no secure nest. She was not deer enough to him. He was a cold hart. Canten’s words did not hinder me from microbeautifying every mite of territory I owned in preparation for her arrival. I tidied bits of my nest I’d never noticed before. Christians prepare for Christ's Return. I prepared for my girl guest.
I gave my burrow the thrice over, gleaming up the wood and glassware, and making it natty and nuptial. It became the Natty Bower.
Not wanting to let the commune's officiated cook cook for my guest, I came out a gourmet chef and put my own dish with the communal meal. The house was full of food-loot as supplement to personal shopping. The sum result could beat out the finest restaurant in town. Here we could make a meal out of two hundred fresh ingredients at low cost – if we knew how. I produced a cream of onion-cum-peppers soup stocked with coconut milk, spices, cream cheese and tempeh. I made quinoa griddlecakes stretchy with eggs, topped with brambleberries and cream. Oksana’s a valiant vegevore - so I took out the fleshmeat and put in the flaunt.
I would taunt her with the best tipple too. I stacked four flasks of mellifluous mead behind etymological dictionaries in my room – hand-aged honeywine from my own honey vats. The golden barm had newly gone to bottle, and it frothed under the corks. The dew was rank and ripe. If you poured it, it made suds on top of the mug. Malt barley gave it bubbles, but honey gave it bite. I’d learnt the art from Vikings of the Orkneys and Shetlands. Norse girls would let their braids fall down – long maiden ropes wrapping their men. Óðinn had seduced Gunnlǫð the Giantess this way: Three sips of bloody honey from a goblet. Good Glapsviðr Óðinn, Beguiler Óðinn, had bemused a fertile giant.
I looked out with raven eyes as I slid over the ice. I was back from the store. The wolves pulling my sledge stopped and gave a hungry whine. I took off the cushions from my coach. I felt like a cateran specialising in conjugal conjury. I cut some runes off an ashen stave – they blew up in flakes. Letters fluttered in the air.
At rare moments in my life, the shadows of images turn into real light and living skin. Perfectly minding my own business, I stooped over my cooking pot, head potted with projections, and turned and stared at her. At her herself. What on earth was she doing there, even then, even there? Had I séanced her out of the stovetop?
She asked voluminously,
‘What are you cooking?’
‘A giant’s meal! What are co-ops for?’ We sneaked up to my room on the top floor. Her questions made me tingly. They kept me on my toes too.
‘Do you ever have conflict in your co-op? Do people mind you eating off alone in your room instead of communally? How do you govern twenty-seven people in one house!? How long have you been studying old Germanic languages and why did you start?’
I was smitten by her questions – it took two hours to answer them. Whenever I looked at her, she never seemed bored. Her lips and eyes sucked it all in. If my mouth went dry, I poured in some burning liquid. Our honeymouths could say no wrong. Still, my diction seemed to drown the thoughts I wanted to say.
She often made long pauses, the kind a person makes who wants something but is afraid to ask. I fancied her hips grew heavy in her chair, freezing her there. She seemed almost pregnant, about to give birth. She could not look away, nor stop asking and answering. Normally very disciplined and orderly, she lost track of time. I looked at her tongue loll behind her cheeks. I saw what she wanted, but daunted. Demure for pretend.
The snow fell on the roads and on top of her car. She fidgeted. I saw her head sag and think, ‘How will I get back uptown?’
Our faces sat flushed, hushed. The love-bower warped our time. A gust made an hour, a breeze made a sigh. Our tongues heated the air around us. Mouths melted. Discourse volubly enveloped a spell – mouth-spell, eye-spell, tell-spell. Locked in locution, we told our tales till night-spell, when winter-spells forced her goodbye, and our talk tolled Ten pm. Time told me a lie, left me lost in the last hour – what conjuror had shifted all the clocks?
I watched her in her chair, how far and near she was. Had she moved closer? In trance, the object of observation will seem farther and nearer, and a person will forget who is looking at who, or who is saying what. Was she doing it on purpose – melting me into her – or was I doing that to her? Her face kept filling like a wine goblet. Her hips gave little heaves. I noticed I’d nudged forward the legs of my chair.
Now and then she pulled herself up – she’s gonna leave, I thought. But then she’d slink down, sit even heavier in her seat. Maybe she wouldn’t go uptown after all, I fancied. Safety wasn’t everything – the strongest prison is pretty damn safe. Whereas I lived in this free-house of love and honey. Twenty-seven people are safer than two. Here we were all deer. All genders rutted.
At her request, I stopped pouring mead into her glass. I left the leftover sizzling in the bottle, waiting to shoot off its cork another day. Firm in her will, torn from my tale, she planted her feet. She stood up like a tree. Frost covered her fingers and branches. Snow fell on her crown. Outside we glided to her icy metal box and its hot motor rolling. Howls came behind us, wolf-tongues lolling off my pets chained by the drive.
