The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Chapter One: A Scoop of Stardust and Sense of Edgar

Edgar cast me a queer look.

On the wall behind him, a face in a painting titled Incredulity cast me an incredulous look. The art gallery walls sparkled with a Mr. Clean shine between dusty paintings. I watched floating stars bubbling to the surface of the cheap champagne in my champagne glass while I sighed in response to the stupid question I had asked.

“Well, Liz, if you want absolution, you’ll have to wait until my mother wakes from the grave.” he answered.

Talking to Edgar was like talking to a wise man. He always had something to say and it always had an eccentric flair. His vernacular was as laced with allusion as his neurons were laced with controlled substances. His ideas were often just enough off the mark to be confusing but still close enough to mean something.

Put shortly he was a wise-ass.

I had asked him if using time travel was possible, if I could get one more chance to save her, one more chance to undo what had passed. I had asked for a chance at forgiveness.

“Sure, you could go back and save her. Except that if you were to change her future, keep her from killing herself, you would change your own future as well. You would end up completely eliminating the event that inspired you to travel back in time in the first place, and so you would never do it, and she would die as it happened already. I think they call that square one. Bluntly, you’re fucked.”

He confuses me. It’s becoming painfully clear that there aren’t many differences between Godlings and Mortals, except for the powers and privilege. In the end we are both made of the dust of dying stars.

The burden of differentiation is mine alone. I think therefore ‘I think I am’, not ‘I am’, nothing more. I simply have magic fingers. I’m just a mere Godling above the rest, with powers over time and space and mind.

Telepathy is a lot like breaking and entering. You get inside, but you inevitably break a window or two and scratch the walls while you’re robbing her blind. One rarely stays long enough to repair the damage or say ‘terribly sorry, but I’m self-absorbed’. I certainly never did that.

Recently I’d felt guilty about my actions. Guilt was not something we Godlings felt often. I’ve never heard of anyone getting caught and being punished for using their powers, except by their own selves.

That one guy was a masochist though, so I’m told.

It’s like Russian roulette, really. There is always the chance you might wake yourself during the busy night. You’d be caught then with your guilty hand in the mind of some girl you saw at the bar, who you thought might look better with her clothes off lying on your mattress. Your sleeping conscience would grumble out from its cave wearing a nightcap and holding a candle, and it would ask you a very tough question.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Even when you are in total control and are the surest of yourself, that question can be the hardest of all to answer. You end up having to give up and face the end of the pier while your conscience puts your feet in cement shoes and kicks you into a sea of guilt.

“Sorry, Tommy. I like you, I really do... it pains me to do this,” and the last thing you feel are mafia hands on your back.

Which is how I ended up with Edgar, thinking about Stardust and talking of time travel. Here I was, drowning in the tragedy of the things I had done and remembering how she—the victim—paid admission for two while I got in for free.

It was a low point for me, this conversation, as everyone knows that time travel is impossible, or at least beyond the understandable horizon. A lack of control will do that to you, make you clutch at straws, hope in the hopeless, and believe in the fictitious.

He speaks the truth but I don’t believe him. Silly Godling. There I go again, feeling guilty. You are sneaky when it comes to yourself.

That’s irony for you. I spend most of my nights taking power over women, even the odd man despite my particular persuasion, thinking it’s my godly right to do so. I use them for my own desires, passions, control, and for a time I grant myself absolute power. I make them love me. I tap into that sycophantic urge that every mortal has for a Godling and exploit it. Yet I’m powerless against myself, as are we all, Gods and Mortals alike. You are your own weakness, I think.

That, and probably donuts.

“I’m a creep.” I said to him.

“If you say so.”

It’s all rather self-imposed; everyone is accountable in the end. No one is above consequence. Kicking your own ass is a symptom of freshly etched memory that won’t let you live it down.

Now I know how she felt. She paid dearly. I wrapped her around my finger too tightly—so tightly she snapped. I felt ready to snap myself.

I tried suggesting solutions again. The small child of guilt was growing and tugging at my purse, weighing me down by the elbow. Carrying anything felt heavy.

“If I think hard enough I can bend the state of time to my will.” I told him. He slapped me, not too hard, just hard enough to make a point.

“I told you. Impossible.”

Edgar was the one man in the world who was aware of my omnipotence. He was just a mortal, yet I always found myself subtly pleading for his approval and agreement. He was stoned more than half the time, so perhaps I beseeched him because he was in an often all-too-agreeable mood.

Today he had not woken up with a joint in his hand.

He questioned my understanding with a cocked eyebrow, not entirely convinced, it seemed, that I grasped his commentary about my posited time travel solution.

“There’s a small child tugging at your purse.” he informed passively.

I looked down and gasped as the young boy laughed and ran off into the crowd of art gallery sycophants.

“He stole my gold watch.” I fumed.

“Well, wave your finger and conjure up a new one.”

“I liked that one.”

“That one’s gone, I’d gather. The past is the past. Get over it.”

One stinging revelation after another...

I realized that having the ability to travel back in time didn’t necessarily mean I had the intelligence or integrity to do it right. This was similar to the fact that having power over the ebb and flow of human emotions didn’t mean I was sexually mature. I was just very horny and wanting.

I wanted a donut. Damn those upper-class buffets. I wanted my watch too. Damn those stupid brats.

Edgar put his hand on my shoulder.

“Get over it already. Don’t blame anyone else but yourself.” he asserted counterproductively, with a wry smile.

He pat me on the back.

“I once knew a man who wasn’t a God,” he commented at me, “but sure as hell seemed to think of himself as one. He made his wife so afraid of him that she did whatever he said. He convinced her to have a baby for reasons other than having a baby. He badgered her into always allowing him to have her unprotected because he hated condoms. When she got pregnant he had someone stuff a tube up her birth canal and suck out the child, just to prove his point, just to make himself feel big.”

“Terrible.” I said.

“Reality.” he asserted, “You think people use control just to get their jollies? You play with peanuts; power and sadism is more seductive than power and sex.”

“You want to see time travel?” he offered, as we stood in the gallery sipping champagne at the art show. I called him on it, as I was interested. I thought it hard to sink any lower than hearing the ramblings of one who made no sense at the best of times. My hair was in a mess, my blond curls unfurling from the ends, and my dress wasn’t exactly high class. I was frankly too depressed to care about my image. I could have fixed all of it with the snap of a finger, but hyeh, what was the point? I just wanted my watch back.

Edgar, however, was making every bit the fine penguin out of himself.

He grabbed a painting off the wall, ‘Whimsy One’, which had recently become the most valuable painting in the world, and he held it over his head.

Whimsy One had been painted by a porn star named Elizabeth Gordon. She created it by painting her body and having sex with seventeen men and women on the canvas. The result was an audacious display of colour and human frivolity, and it was worth tens of millions.

Edgar took that painting and chucked it through a window. From there it dropped from the fifth floor of the gallery in a cloud of broken glass. It landed on the street below and was run over by several cars. The guards would have tackled him, but they were too astonished by the outrageous confidence he invested in his own testicular potency.

Whimsy One had been an original print and no copies had ever been made.

“That’s time travel.” he told me, pointing proudly down at the street. He knocked back the entire glass of champagne and wiped his mouth with an ‘AH’.

“There will never be another one like that,” he said, “and it’s going to be one hell of a job picking up the pieces.”

“That’s art.” I told him, “I can see myself in that.”

I must admit that I didn’t entirely understand his point at first, though I easily understood tragedy. Immortality and omnipotence are two completely different dimensions, and both are separate from intellect. I asked him to clarify and he graciously explained.

“I thought it up while on some pretty heavy drugs. I discovered in my altered state that time travel was like someone jumping through a pane of glass. It hurts, you’d probably die, there’s absolutely no good reason to do it, and it doesn’t happen like it does in the movies.”

“Oh.” I sighed inwardly. We both stared at the tattered canvas on the street below. “And I suppose something unique is lost as well.” I added. A fit of girlish laughter escaped Edgar’s lips.

“I have a charity case.” he continued.

“The girl you told me about, who had the abortion?”

“Precisely. Her husband fell on a bullet.”

“I don’t think I should, if I know what you’re thinking.”

“You aren’t robbing anyone, this time; not if I have anything to say about it. There will be no fun and games either. You’ll be going in with glue, some nails, a lot of plaster, and good intentions enforced by a contract of conscience.”

“No quick fix then.” I murmured. “Just the hard undertaking of apology. I am in need of redemption.”

“It only takes one deed, actually, not balance. You needn’t prove a thing to any other. Life doesn’t run on justice, it runs on change.”

“In your eyes perhaps, but it will take much more to prove that to myself. It was all my fault.”

“It was. You practically nailed her to the cross. But you can do something about that, write a big book about it.”

“I don’t want to be a writer, they’re neurotic.”

“Then I have two charity cases.” he smiled proudly.

Like any other mortal after a good victory, or perhaps because of some nagging sensation in his gut, he proceeded to grab another drink and get pissed drunk. It was bad for his liver, but it illustrated a good point. I know what it is to taunt consequence. He smiled at me and handed me a cranberry-vodka, then pinched me on the arm.

Wise-ass.

Chapter Two: Jumping Through Windows

I should have taken Edgar’s slap to heart—and possibly some of his advice, too.

It was a dreary-grey Saturday morning. My love, the woman I had driven to suicide by overwrought enslavement, was on the side of a building, The Arctic Northern Hotel.

At ‘this’ time, while I stood in the street among the firefighters, my past self was pretending to be out buying milk for breakfast. If history were to repeat, she would come back to The Arctic Northern Hotel to find my love—her love—dead on the top of a car.

Somehow, I had convinced myself that Edgar’s warnings only applied to Mortals. How foolish of me. I didn’t know what I was doing; omnipotence and intellect were on separate dimensions. I had been thinking with Godling ability and privilege in mind.

I think therefore I am.

I can therefore I do.

“Miss, the ladder is ready.” said a young fireman. He was handsome and baby faced, his youth juxtaposed with the heavy equipment and heroic-trooper look that came with his job. He used a carabineer to attach a line to my harness and shepherded me onto the first rung of the ladder.

“She knows you well?”

“Very intimately.” I explained.

Three floors up was my darling girl, the one I missed—the one I had killed. She clung precariously to a ledge between two open windows, where police officers tried desperately to diffuse her self-destructive angst. But with her back to the building face, out of reach of either of the two cops trying to grab her from one side or the other, she was in the hands of the wind and the words that were to come out of my mouth.

I hoped beyond all things for the time travel scheme to hold, to avoid coming undone like an old sweater.

“Thirteen—fourteen—fifteen…” I counted the steps as I muddled my way up the chrome metal rungs of the truck ladder, drawing closer to her, while down below the world moved farther away. The street took on a character of taunting malevolence the higher up I went.

Don’t look down.

There was a basket at the top of the ladder, positioned a few feet from the building ledge and not too far from where she stood. I was glad when I finally came to stand on its solid floor. There I found steadiness in the shrines of her eyes. I fell into her pupils, so wide and afraid, the brown rings of her irises closing in around me as the sun briefly punctured the clouds.

They bound me.

Ladders made me nervous. She had the most beautiful eyes.

It’s said that when you love someone enough, you can see the whole world in their eyes when you look at them. Edgar told me that one, actually, and I think it was another one of his cutesy riddles.

I saw my face reflected in her doey browns. She looked at me, fear painted on her face, with her head pressed up against the cement of the building as the wind whipped by us both. It howled menacingly, as if taunting chance, as if trying to blow her from the ledge to the ground, just to be spiteful.

Fucking world.

Calm down.

Gah! Why?!

Calm… deep breaths. Look again.

I saw the worry on my face reflected back at me through her lenses. I was so close to her. I could reach her—but the fireman behind me held my dress by the back.

“Don’t be aggressive.” he warned. My love remained silent.

Calm down.

I acted as though my hold on the handrail of the basket was nothing, despite all appearances of my knuckles trying to burst through my skin.

I hate these parts. I can’t take the pressure of having to say something meaningful. It was an advantage of mind control to never have to be smart or funny. A Godling need only be around to receive the undying affection of her mark.

I dared not use my power. She would sense my intrusion, and I was not fast enough to take control and hold her still before she could fight me by casting herself to the air. The easy way carried too much risk.

Godlings aren’t necessarily any smarter than Mortals.

I said something very dumb.

“At least tell me your name.” I pleaded. I smacked myself inwardly. ‘At least’, I had said, as though I were waiting for her to get it over with.

“Beth.” she answered.

“Beth is a pretty name.” I smiled. Knowing her name made it more personal. I realized only now that I had never thought to ask for her name. That impersonality only made our recent controlled encounter feel faked.

My conscience was stirring again, prodded by memory.

I speak as though last night had just passed. In this time perhaps, but for me, for ‘my’ temporal reality, last night’s crucial sexual encounter had been a long time ago.

Yet I still remember the sweetness of her mouth on my pussy, and the taste of her sex on my mouth, as clearly as if it had been just before this morning.

“Don’t jump.” I squeaked.

“Show confidence.” encouraged the Fireman with a hand on my shoulder. It felt nice to feel that hand there. I gulped; I was sweating yet it was blistering cold up here in the basket. Dark clouds hung overhead; a grey sky blended with the grey buildings and grey streets below. The world was as lifeless as cement; hard and unsympathetic.

Her big brown eyes sprung out at me like beacons. I saw myself in those eyes, and setting aside ego, felt a bit of warmth in the cold morning.

“You were waiting for me, weren’t you?”

She appeared genuinely afraid, unable to talk, or perhaps waiting for the right moment.

“I’m Lisa. My friend calls me Liz.”

No answer. She looked at me, and she stared. Her eyes spoke volumes.

“I have a friend named Edgar. He says sometimes that you can see the whole world in the eyes of your lover. I can see myself in your eyes; I hope you were waiting for me, waiting for me to rescue you. I hope that means something to you.”

I held out my hand. I could grab her, for she was not more than two feet from me, but since I had so recklessly ignored Edgar’s advice and departed on this fool’s errand, I resolved to at least heed the word of the fireman behind me, who was also holding my tether and playing the voice on my shoulder.

A leash.

I was not in control here.

The wind howled.

I hesitated. I lost all speech; except the capacity for uttering the two most ineffective words I had spoken in recent memory.

“Don’t jump.”

“I love you.” she whispered.

And then she stepped off.

I had the power, and so I had used it. I could therefore I did. That’s how I got here, on this fools errand, which had accomplished nothing except to offer me an unequalled vantage of her death. My careless whimsy had doomed her to fall, and me to regret.

I should not use my powers just because I have them, or because they are easy. Godling damns me!

To hell with it and my recklessness! I ran away from that street and cried among the garbage in an alley on the wrong side of town. I hid my face from the world with my hands. Right about now, I—my past self—was crying in the street thinking she caused Beth’s death.

She didn’t.

I did.

Beth had cried so hard that morning, when I left after our lustful night. She had been so urgent to keep me close, to never let me go, but had been unable to explain why.

My concocted excuse for leaving her on the morning of her death, when I had failed to stay with her and accept that in my haste I had bound her too tightly with my coils, had been the alarm that set off my conscience.

Milk was a poor excuse between lovers.

The atrocity of tearing the lines that connected our minds had hurt us both; if only they hadn’t been so tight, so extensive. I do believe that had been the problem. I had been too wrapped up in my own sexual rapture. I had enslaved her too completely and pleasantly.

Beth had acted so strangely, not at all like previous conquests.

‘Love and leave’ lost all appeal that morning. Shortly afterward I had a change in heart, my conscience nagged at me to return, and I did so to find a white blanket over her body, on the hood of a car. She had jumped.

By the time I had found her body, the version of myself that had come back through time to save her had long gone, and was crying in the alleyway. Sobbing into my hands, I imagined I could hear my past self screaming in the steel jungle.

To hell with power; it brought terrible things.

I stood up, knees weak with sadness, eyes blurry with tears, and with the aid of all my anger and loathing focused keenly on the dimension of time.

It began to bend.

I kept thinking.

Time opened up for me.

I continued thinking.

Time relented to my will. It tore asunder and opened a vortex.

I thought as hard as I could, organized all my power and threw myself at the temporal wall. I went crashing through the barrier and took a blind jump into time beyond, before, and forgotten. I had no destination in mind, and the terminus of the warp lashed about along the continuum. I would be deposited at random—at chance—wherever luck saw fit to put me.

The vortex was unlike the kind that I used to delicately tip-toe from one time-universe to another. This gateway was driven by my anger and sadness, turning it into a tantrum of currents and energy. I was swept into the depth of it, witnessed a brilliance of swirling colour, and the uncontrolled energy of the warp carried me away on tumultuous tides.

My omnipotent body was obliterated, smashed into Stardust, a cloud following the path of my immortal soul, until it reconstituted itself at the other end of the tunnel.

Without my immortal soul, I would never have appeared as someone else, in another time and place, on the lip of the warp’s mouth. I arrived blind, with no idea of where I was going or who I would be.

I didn’t care. Anything was better than that cursed Saturday Morning.

My Stardust coalesced. I arrived.

Chapter Three: The Physics and Physicality of Luck

A man holding a drink tray crashed into me. Glass and beer went spilling out all over the floor. He knocked me into the wall and my shoulder pierced the plaster, painfully. Oof!

“What the hell? Oh dear! I’m so sorry miss, are you okay?”

I pulled my shoulder out of the dry wall and dusted myself off, running my hands up and down the bomber jacket I was wearing. I was more concerned with my surroundings than with being clean, though. I watched my co-accidental kneeling down on the floor to attend to his broken beverages.

The man was a bartender, or a waiter or something. He was looking up at me from the floor with apologetic eyes while delicately picking shards of glass from the carpet with his bare hands.

“I didn’t see you there.” he excused. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention, you just came out of nowhere on me.”

“I—it’s okay.” I was wearing a beige bomber coat, so I could see how I might blend with the walls. It was a bit chilly outside, and everything out there was cement coloured, from the coulds and dirt. I expected that of city snow.

“Bad storm.” he remarked, following my gaze to the windows in the entrance doors. The clouds refused to let any light in.

“I know.” I said to him. He patted me on the shoulder, and went about his business. I looked for a moment at my tingling shoulder; that had been the most comforting human touch I’d felt in a long while.

I was in the lobby of a classy hotel; a nearby sign provided it’s name. The Artic Northern.

There was absolutely nothing Arctic or Northern about it. It was the kind of hotel that had undoubtedly sprung from south of the border and wanted to appeal to Canadian consumers. I knew this place; I’d come here before to find candidates for control.

In fact, this is the place where I found Beth. She had been in the bathroom staring at the mirror and touching her face, looking like a lost puppy. She had been so adorable, I couldn’t have let that get away. So lost and lonely when I leashed her, I remember her looking as though she’d found life itself, in me. How deathly that had turned out...

Hopefully I could start again, as this new person with this new life, in whatever time I was in now. Immortality had its freedoms—its escapes.

Edgar would be pissed if he knew what I had done, for I was still running, still hoping for a quick fix, and I had bounced recklessly and destructively through the very dimensional fabric he had told me to avoid.

I wondered how he was doing.

Whose coat was I wearing?

These were not my clothes. I wasn’t wearing my own feet either, or my own shoes; these were brown ballet style flats. And that’s just what I noticed in the first few seconds.

Then I remembered the blind jump, and how I had only just recently obliterated myself by crashing through the ninety-seven levels of omnipotence before cosmic immortality reconstituted my soul as another body, a new chariot for the same mind. I was still feeling the shock of it—the forgetfullness. Memory always poured into a new mould slowly...

Who was I now?

I found a bathroom and navigated the vaguely familiar tiles and sinks to a mirror.

Brown hair, slight frame, a comparatively bustless yet proportioned profile... and big brown deer eyes.

Uh, oh.

“Beth?” I shocked myself, again. I was completely in awe. My face was real and firm to the touch; I was no mirage or hallucinatory product of my mind being scrambled during the blind jump.

Beth’s outfit was on me; a black skirt and pantyhose, a beige bomber jacket and gold hoops on my ears. I remembered seeing Beth wear this outfit when I first found her.

Beth had been at the sink, touching her face, looking lost with wide eyes into the bathroom mirror... just as I was doing right now.

I walked in.

Lisa—my past self—joined me at the bank of sinks. It was definitely I—my old self—right down to the thin, stacked frame and Meg Ryan blond hair. She wore my favourite cream coloured mini dress. I had always loved that cream coloured full-length dress, and I remembered having worn it the day I found Beth in the bathroom.

When she bent over the sink and turned on the tap I got a view of the cleavage between her dee-cups. She noticed my wandering eyes and smirked.

As her, I had always dressed to please.

She looked at me and I felt as though I was looking into a mirror. She cast a few friendly glances and then washed her hands clean of some brown gooey gunk.

Pudding.

That’s right, I remembered. When I had been Lisa, in this hotel, looking for people to love on this particular day, I had spilled pudding on my hands at the café. And that’s how I found me—Beth—here in the bathroom at the bank of sinks.

I was Beth, delivered here, today, in this body by pure chance only moments before.

An immortal has an implicit connection with all things chance and lucky. Immortals do not have magical life, only the edge of the universe’s favour. If you kick an immortal from the top of a building, the variables of the universe will conspire to land that immortal safely in a way that may seem impossible.

Or chance will deliver that immortal right into one’s waiting arms.

I was still touching my face, looking like a lost puppy in the mirror, when Lisa looked to her side and caught me watching. She looked as though she was catching a scent, then she transmitted a quiet smile and primly dried her hands.

I knew what she felt, what she was thinking. She was eyeing me, her eyes fixating briefly on my long legs. She was pretending to mind her own business, but was actually planning my night.

That’s when I felt the hand on my shoulder, when no physical hand was actually there.

Another hand.

A sense of another presence stirring in my head.

Yet another imaginary hand.

Fingers on my thighs.

A tongue on my lips.

Lisa turned her head and set me like a stone in the shrines of her eyes.

I looked at her calmly—a calmness of paralysis—with a kind of nervous silence making my lips shake. She stepped closer and pressed her body against me, putting her arm around my shoulder and staring at me through the mirror. I felt her invisible hands moving lower. I fell into the blackness of her pupils, through the blue rings of her irises.

They closed around me, bound me.

Her touch ignited a thousand memories of a thousand hands; a thousand people from the residue of a thousand days past, touching a thousand parts of my body—all the parts of my body—playing the keys of my thoughts and fusing me to the overdriven mood of the fire down there… a wet fire… fire that melted my soul and seeped into my panties.

Her hand, stroking my breast, coaxed a shivering hardness from my nipple. Her fingers raked my ass as she pulled me in, pressed my crotch into hers. Her hands wanted desperately to tear the clothes from my body; I could feel their urgency.

She sensed my incredible history, the length of my string of conquests, the number of memories waiting with neurons aligned by sex, with their imprinted chains of information waiting to be set off—waiting to melt me.

Lisa set my senses on fire. She watched me melt into her arms. I watched myself, unable to resist, pushing up against her breasts, sparking friction between us. Hot wetness smouldered between my thighs; I didn’t understand it, but I was smiling among the flames and loving it all the same. I’m not myself anyway… am I? After a fashion, I suppose… after a name.

“Guess who?” she husked, pulling her wonderful hands over my eyes.

“You.” I laughed, blindly willing.

There was nothing else. I squirmed under the umbrella of her myopia. She was all there was; only her lips, only her eyes, only her magnificent breasts. She held me close; her nipples drove the point home nicely; a key in a lock chaining me to my sense of sex. I wondered what time it was; I never checked the clock.

With all of the phantom hands on my skin I was scarcely aware of her real hand slipping into my skirt until it was already there. The pace of her mental thrusting fucked my mind; her middle finger made contact, corkscrewed, entered me and scored that sexual sensation into my immortal soul, a mark branded into the inside of my vaginal canal. I felt it there, burning, needing to be scratched in a way only friction—touch—could sate.

I felt high, acutely aware of my own body, and of hers, and of the slightest of tingles crawling across my skin. The rest of the world could have been a void; nothing beyond her touch penetrated the haze of my sensational brainfire.

There was no serious contest, as fighting her was fighting myself.

Run away!

No! Don’t.

Submit. Make peace.

It was futile to fight my own needs and compulsions. When one fights herself, the mind favours singular simplicity, and one voice will always prevail. She was the hand on my shoulder and the voice in my ear. I had to sort out that double vision; I sobered up.

When she spoke, I heard one voice—her voice—my voice.

Her voice was my voice.

She set me on fire and melted me down, poured me into a mould, and redefined my being. I had an itch that needed to be scratched.

She invited me upstairs to share a hotel room. I found I could not refuse, could not stop smiling when I imagined her body under that cream summer dress, could not help but be excited by the phantom tongues on my sex, which felt more like prophecy now than echoing memories. I followed obediently, scared and hopeful for a night’s worth of tense fucking and relaxing lust, something more substantial than echoes licking my pussy.

Scared—hoping she’d show me the way…

We tumbled and rolled over, locked together in embrace; our thighs wrapped around each other’s heads. I thrust my fingers into her pussy with forever climbing vigour. She rubbed her studded tongue against my sensitive button-bulb and put forth an incredible effort as we sixty-nined.

She was catnip.

Her hands held my ass firm as mine did to hers, our fingers grabbing and scratching tender flesh; its softness so raw and hot. We frolicked on the bed in a war without end. The blood in her thighs pounded in my ears. Her mouth ground wetly against my sex, her lips kissing and her tongue licking, tongue-fucking me with Godly charm. Lured in by her nethers, my own tongue was dripping with her taste and was deep in the thick of her cumming hole.

Full carnal contact.

In line with our positions, our minds too, looped and connected, our thoughts mingling as closely and intimately as our tongues and our pussies. I got lost in the blend of emotions. There was no I, only Us. There was only sex.

‘I’ existed under that umbrella.

‘I’ was below it.

I am therefore I surrender.

She came hard in my mouth. I loved the sliding of her lips on my face.

It was a tremendously surreal experience, to be conquered by lust and driven into a frenzy by my own self. Violation had come to mind, but I hadn’t the time or inclination now to think of such things with her mouth kissing my vulva, her fingers on my mons. Violation—if I could call it that—had never felt so damn rightly seductive.

I was ruled as I ruled others in the past.

She was greatness.

One of the more dreamlike qualities was the perception of tasting myself. When she kissed me, I imagined I could taste what was on her tongue in the way one tastes the sea in the air.

Like an orange at the tip of a cone, we balanced precariously on the thin line between separate minds and complete entanglement. I pushed harder; I could not have cared; I only wanted to be closer to her. We were twins, which made it all the easier for us to slip fully into the other. We became locked in a short circuit that could be broken only by exhaustion.

Godlings have incredible stamina.

I couldn’t help but think how having sex with her felt like masturbation. An unusual cycle of questions began to churn within me, stirred by my hungry passion and the energizing scent that was clinging to the bed sheets.

Who was I?

Right now, I was simply part of a whole—a cog—a player of music in a two member orchestra, licking and loving the night away.

Who I was didn’t seem to matter anymore. I was fucking myself; I had found myself. But more to the point, I had the desire to love her, and loving her felt like loving myself.

And it clicked.

Always looking for a quick fix, always looking for the band-aid that disguised the scar; I had invested my life’s effort into haphazardly looking for men and women to stir my interest.

I had done that, night after night, for as long as I could remember. I had wanted people to love me; I had wanted someone to love. Yet despite being a Godling and truly having all the time in the world, I had been impatient.

My conscience had something earth shattering to say; not insofar as what I had done to others, but in what I did to myself.

“You had cheapened yourself.”

I had tried to fill my emptiness with the thoughts and feelings of others, because I could not feel such ways towards myself; a sense made worse by the feeling that I should be something more, because of being a Godling.

And yet...

Something emerged from the geometry of reflection, something wonderful; a truth only a mirror could make evident.

“I love you.” I thought, inwardly. My lips were sealed too tight and busy, teasing and pulling on the lips of her labia, to speak.

I had never told myself that before. My conscience grumbled and went back to sleep, confident that it’s work had been adequately performed. That event blessed me with an emptiness of sadness, an emptiness that begged to be filled with molten sexual overflow.

Lisa connected with my sensitive zones in all the right ways until I was left a jabbering and howling mess of a woman, locked willingly-helpless into a series of soul rattling orgasms.

I even went blind, for a time. An orgasm has a way of taking over your mind, washing your thoughts away and filling you with a pureness of enjoyment that gets in the way of everything else. I was told that after the third gushing, I still possessed the range of a man with a fully loaded magazine.

She—I—knew exactly how to use me. I was happy for the ride. In a strange double-existence, I taught myself the finer points of self-manipulation.

Knowledge I could use in the relative future.

I was compelled to spend the rest of the night amused by her lust and masturbation-by-proxy. When our tongues and fingers could pump no more she reached for me and hugged my body tightly. I sat between her spread legs, leaning into her soft breasts while she leaned against the headboard, and I closed my eyes while she rested her chin on my shoulder. I relaxed to the sound of her whispering wonderful phrases and suggestions into my ear that I felt privileged to believe.

I had arrived.

“I love you.” I thought. I needed to tell her so—with words—once the orgasm afterglow and exhaustion that I wished would last forever, finally ended.

When the night ends.

I would tell her—tell myself—who I loved in the morning.

Chapter Four: Prime Time Deliverance

From the victim’s point of view, if I could be called that, mind control is like breaking into a house at night and turning on the furnace. The homeowner inevitably wakes up to investigate, and the actions they take decide things from there.

A mind controller simply flicks a desired switch to light all the neurons attached to the conscious web. Though the victim’s actions matter, there are formulaic steps we all take when the furnace is ignited, when we are hot and in heat.

Even Godlings are predictable.

The sky was still cement grey in the morning. The only splash of colour on the bed sheets came from the yellow incandescent lights of the hallway glow. Lisa was stepping out the door.

“Wait!” I yelped, my eyes opening from the light. She stopped in her tracks, but her back was still turned.

“Don’t leave, please, we need to talk. Don’t leave me.” I begged. I was overcome with emotion. Here I was on the cusp of a revelation and she was about to walk away.

I cried tremendously, not in sadness, but in overwhelming joy. The shock of fresh self-respect still swam through my synapses. How depressingly novel it seemed; how wonderfully liberating it felt.

“I’m not leaving.” she said. She turned her head to look at me from the side of her gaze. I noticed a tear falling down her cheek.

“Please don’t leave!” I pleaded. She winced when I spoke.

“I’m just going to get milk…for breakfast.” She stepped out into the hall.

“Breakfast can wait.”

I wanted too badly to explain to her what I knew, how I felt, what had come to pass and who I was. No amount of words could do it justice unless I could get her to wait. Her coldness was eye opening, like gazing into the harsh mirror of truth. I stumbled on my own tongue.

Immortal chance had given me an opportunity, and I had become too befuddled to explain it.

“There’s no milk in the fridge.” she stated impassively, then closed the door sharply and left.

“Wait!”

She was gone, and I realized I had driven her away. I knew this part well, for I had seen it from Lisa’s perspective with my own eyes.

“You did nothing wrong. I wasn’t begging for you, I didn’t mean to seem like a clingy burden.” I whispered to myself. Oh… I must have looked so pathetic. I should have been thinking; I shouldn’t have let my emotions override me.

I put on some panties, wrapped myself in my new bomber coat, and sat in one of the chairs. The hotel kept clean rooms, but the décor was atrocious. ‘Spartan’, would be to put it mildly. The chair was stiff and uncomfortable, the carpet decidedly two-stars below the advertised rating.

The bed had been nice, though.

If only Lisa—I—hadn’t been so hollow and cold. I had always tried to fill the hole with something fast and blisteringly hot. Always looking for the quick fix, the blind jump, the time travel scheme, or the sexual gratification and physical pleasure of a one-night stand. Love and leave. For a single night I could feel important, in control, but only in the mind and not in the heart. Quick fixes don’t cater to substance. I wondered how Edgar was doing.

I turned on the radio.

Edgar owned his own pirate station, broadcasting his unique flavour of media revolution to the masses in a heart-warmingly illegal way. Nobody knew where he broadcast from, for his signal seemed to come from everywhere at once. ‘Impossible’ the state would say, after being unable to track him down. No, not impossible, they just didn’t understand how he did it.

Out from the speaker box came the bounding bass pulsing of Esthero. After that, David Wyndorf sang for the Bull God and the benefits of controlled substances on ultradian-spatial-consciousness.

People were listening…

Maybe it was time to open my own ears and listen to what I was saying to myself. What did I truly want?

“Happy Saturday.” Grooved Edgar over his radio waves, after the music died. He spread his wise grammar all over the world on an invisible carrier, his arguments evenly spaced between bubbling hits on his Zong.

The Zong is to Bong as Zebra is to Horse. Or Zebbrah, as some say in America. It’s the most twisted and efficient pipe ever made; enough for a Godling, even…

So I’ve heard.

It was Saturday Morning.

The morning after, the morning of, the morning I had yet to live in these shoes but had witnessed twice already. I had to get my message out, and Edgar came through for me in the clutch.

Wise-ass.

A message required a carrier, something to bring in the listener, something to gain attention. After slipping back into my skirt and shoes I opened the window and climbed out onto the ledge. I knew what I was doing, it had all happened before.

I managed to attract quite an audience.

I—my more recent Lisa who had just arrived from the future—ascended up the ladder towards me. Far below on the streets of the grey world, slack-jawed gawkers were watching me cling to the side of the building. They looked unhappy and worried, except for one sadist who was smiling and eagerly awaiting the rapid descent of my Godling soul-cage.

Lisa, one my two former selves now in ‘this’ world on ‘this’ particular Saturday morning, stepped up to the steel basket at the end of the ladder. She had answered my call for help. I was listening.

You can see the world in the eyes of your lover; so said one of Edgar’s riddles.

“At least tell me your name.”

“Beth.”

“It’s a pretty name, Beth.”

I managed to peel my face from the concrete wall and face the screaming wind. I saw myself in her eyes.

Damn you Edgar!

“Don’t jump.” she squeaked meekly, more meekly than squeaking would normally suggest. Heavy issues had never been my forte.

I found myself with an opportunity to view my own actions from the third perspective. I—she—Lisa looked so dumb and weak for someone who exercised control over others, who had exercised control over me just last night.

The lack of confidence in her face was disheartening. It paid testament to the quick fix syndrome I had voluntarily inflicted upon myself when it came to matters of the heart.

“You were waiting for me, weren’t you?” she asked. She was right, for though I was in a different body, we were of the same mind, disposition, and heart. I had been waiting for her. This stunt was my Bat Signal calling to her sense of Edgar.

I held fast against the wall. I was genuinely afraid, without a doubt, but purpose gave me strength. It was an amazing feeling to be standing strong but helpless against the world. There is a kind of valour in it, I think.

“I’m Lisa. My friend calls me Liz.”

I cast her a long soft look. I opened my eyes wide for her, opened the mirrors, face to face, heart to heart. Looking at her was a kind of disembodied introspection. I knew so much more now.

“I have a friend named Edgar. He says sometimes that you can see the whole world in the eyes of your lover. I can see myself in your eyes; I hope you were waiting for me, waiting for me to rescue you. I hope that means something to you.”

I was not waiting for rescue, only waiting for a chance to look her in the eye, pose as an alter ego, and tell her I love her in a way I had never told myself.

I had to fall.

The death of this body was necessary. I needed the chance to tell her those three simple words, three words I had wished to hear for so long coming out of the minds of others; words I so desperately craved; words that described something I lacked.

A Godling is doomed to that deficiency. A Godling seems divine, is different and is isolated from Mortals, excluded from sharing that emotion with them. No matter how hard she digs through their minds to find it, she will come up empty.

But no longer, I had found that love in myself. She held out her hand to me.

“I love you.” I whispered, just loud enough for my words to escape the wind.

Then I stepped off the ledge.

Even when you plan for such a move, it’s hard to stop your heart from jumping into your throat. It’s not any less scary. As I fell towards the menacing world, I drew on the last of my omnipotence, an entire eternity of energy to be exhausted in one blow, and initiated the last blind jump I would ever make.

I ignited my brain on the ninety-seven levels of dimensional omnipotence and blindly travelled into a temporal warp that was unfocused and untargeted. It’s crushing force and overdriven powers lifted my spirit from its cage, just before I hit the hood of a car on the street.

My immortal body crushed the hood of that car one moment after my soul and intellect escaped through time. What was left was a body that never saw or felt the sting of hitting the ground. It was dead, without a soul or a mind to live in its gilded cage; it was evidence.

Whenever I re-emerged, wherever I would be, whatever body I would have, whoever I chose to be—I would be without my powers. Unlike last time, I jumped from my body, not with it. I took only my soul, the only part that mattered.

Flesh was not the end of all problems.

In doing so I sacrificed my powers, which were tied to my omnipotent body. The universe would have to supply me with new Stardust, but world not be giving the omnipotent variety. In an ordinary world there is only the ordinary kind. My mind travelled through the temporal barrier and crashed dangerously through the glass, as Edgar would have said. The experience was scarring, but pain is purifying. It is the great teacher.

I had a vision that the light in my life had come from the morning glow of the sun and the midnight haze of the stars, and that I waxed and waned with the passage time, which was the measure of my life. I watched my reflection in still water, watched passively the coming and going of day and night in the background, forever chasing the most elusive of passions with nothing sustaining me from within.

Day after night.

Night after day.

Always the same.

When I emerged at the terminus I would still be of the same mind, only better educated, focused on change. No more looking for love, this time I brought it with me.

Edgar had said; “It only takes one deed, actually, not balance. You needn’t prove a thing to any other. Life doesn’t run on justice, it runs on change.”

I gave myself another chance.

Chapter Five: The Talking Penguin

I sauntered through the revolving doors of the art gallery and escaped the media frying pan of the red carpet. I found the inside of the contemporary building no less bright, for the gloss-white floors, walls and ceiling reflected as much light as the gauntlet of camera flashes had dished out.

“Miss Gordon! It’s such a pleasure.” mewed a rather effeminate Frenchman who dripped with class and pretentiousness. He spoke in the Quebec vernacular with a voice so throaty he was speaking from the lung.

“I am very grateful for your hosting services.” I replied to him, in his own language.

The pleasantries were empty.

He had tried to prevent my art from being exhibited here, and I knew this. His name was Victor, and in his opinion, a busty blond tart such as myself could not produce true art; certainly not with my unorthodox methods.

But since I was here, he had resigned to sucking up to me like all the other sycophants. This was okay, as I love poodles who jump through hoops, and I was here for more than my art.

There was someone I hoped to find.

Victor was caught up in the firm belief that he was the Cat’s Pyjamas. He was also the kind of stiff who crinkled his brow and turned up his nose at the mere mention of my credentials…

Cambridge-Kensington Book of Records: Most consecutive sexual partners, to orgasm, male or female, in a twenty-four hour span.

And my favourite, most cherished achievement to date…

Cambridge-Kensington Book of Records: Longest and most numerous string of consecutive orgasms, without break, in a twenty-four hour span, at five hundred and sixty two.

Inhuman, yes; but for a Godling? Good times.

“That way, mademoiselle…” gestured Victor, casting a white-gloved hand as far down the hall as his stubby stature would allow. He avoided eye contact, and made it clear he had no intention of providing escort for a busty blond tart such as myself.

I kissed him on the hand, the way a gentleman might do to a lady. “You are so precious and delightful.” I pinched his cheek and moved on. I had no need for such people as him; I had my art and myself. I had finally opened my ears and my paint was the mouthpiece of my heart.

By “That way.” Victor had meant to show me the route to my collection, which tonight was being revealed to a crowd of the obscenely rich and wonderfully eccentric.

I almost blended in with the décor, in my pure white dress, slinking down the corridor in the starkly translucent sheer material. Art spanning a time of almost two hundred years graced the walls with women far more naked than I but far less naughty.

Though I was the guest of honour, and perhaps the most accomplished of any of the leeches that populated this bastion of bourgeoisie cream, I was most certainly on the bottom rung of the interpersonal ladder.

The smiles and hands that were offered to me felt forced, and some of the more prudish women baulked at the sight of my stubbornly large bust. The men however… enjoyed my sheer dress.

I wondered how Edgar was doing.

Edgar tended to hang around places like this, if only to loaf frivolously and sip at free booze and chat up rich people for the sake of murdering their characters during his radio broadcasts.

Sycophants of every variety pretended to enjoy themselves. Though they sipped the champagne—drank the punch—and offered their hand politely with a smile, they were all here for the same reason.

They were here to compete with their wallets for the most expensive painting in the world, Whimsy Two, the follow up project for the previously lost Whimsy one. Whimsy Two was just one painting in my six-item collection, and the rest of my art was causing a stir as well. Some of the aristocratic women couldn’t see what I had intended with the paints, and some of the men could see it too well, much to the chagrin of their wives.

Next to my art, Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers looked innocent.

I had enjoyed painting Whimsy Two more than Whimsy One, in spite of the fact that she had been made with only a single female volunteer, and not a seventeen-member roster of orgy aficionados.

I think the reason for that was that when I made Whimsy One, it was more about the sex than the art. I painted Whimsy One to be destroyed, I painted it to be the catalyst—a message to myself—that would ensure that I embark on my mission of self-discovery. Whimsy One had been, well, whimsical.

Ironically, made with purpose as well.

Whimsy Two had been more spiritual. It was the acknowledgment that all the events I knew had already happened had finally done just that. The foreseen cycle drew to a close, and I was on the lip of a new chapter in my life. I put myself into my life, my art and on my canvases with new vigour; whole-heartedly, meta-physically, and literally.

The buffet reeked of as much pretentiousness as the audience. It seemed that the caterer had gone out of his way to choose foods with foreign names, or foods smothered in black fish stuff. I settled on cheese and was lucky enough to discover some Cheddar hiding behind the Gouda.

Time for a drink; I stood alone at the buffet.

I knocked back a glass of champagne and wiped my mouth with an ‘AH’. I poured another; I would need it. The last time I was at one of these galas I had witnessed Edgar throwing one of my future paintings through a window to entertain his opinions.

I looked around for a bit, casually admiring the nude Victorian portraits and nostalgically matching every smear and breast print on Whimsy Two’s canvas to the memory of the coinciding sexual act.

Most of the women at the gallery looked far too torpid and stuck up to scratch the itch between my thighs. The itch was a gift, from myself; the leftovers of sexually inclined programming from that fateful cement coloured Saturday morning.

It was a gift of purpose and direction; I enjoyed going down often.

My Saturday Sacrifice had been worth it. A life without omnipotent powers was much better than a life with the burden of temptation they carried.

With hard work, no quick fixes, the help of an insatiable libido, and an openness to just about anything, I had managed to carve myself a decent existence in the last four years, three and a half of which took place during calendar years I had already lived. Two world records, three hundred adult films, twenty-one employees and a self-owned studio later, I was both the most famous painter and porn star on the planet.

I think it was the print my breasts had made with the paint, when I was lying face down to the fabric, on the old canvas of Whimsy one. My rack had become quite famous since then.

It’s a wonderful itch. An eternal reminder of the most significant night of my life.

There was a commotion. A rather drunk man was ranting about his view of God, who is widely believed to be the creator and purveyor of Godlings. He was waving his glass about and spilling wine in the cleavage of a fat woman in fur. It was red wine, amusingly, which was a fitting colour.

This is what he was saying—ranting about—in no short terms.

“I am fairly certain that if there is a God, who rules the cosmos, that it was his or her own fault for burdening themselves with the responsibility of control. It is not my role as a mortal to manipulate time or space or the thoughts of that ravishing young beauty over there in the corner. No, not that one, the one looking at the Ficus. Yes, her. She’s gorgeous, I know; but still not my responsibility, and if she complains about my not returning her call then she can stuff it with someone else!

“God created this Earth and then created Godlings to shepherd the flock, as evidence of his or her kindly existence. Therefore, then, God wholly accepted responsibility over this contrived domain; It is clearly said so in the Book of Godlings. It was either that, or he or she implicitly accepted the burden of ownership by waving the magic wand in the first place, and by introducing his or herself to the denizens of this domain as the Almighty creator! It’s a hard action to deny, after all.

“To the first humans, or whoever existed back then who had not yet developed their own perceptions of that God, he or she must have said “Hello, I’m God”, and then bore the Godlings as proof. God signed a contract then and there as far as I’m concerned. A deal is a deal!”

The drunk was remarkably verbose for being inebriated. I found it amazing that he retained enough air in his lungs to stand upright during his lengthy invectives.

“His or her? He or she? Could not one tell by the hand?” Remarked a friend of his.

“Whoever this God was, they were smart to conceal their true identity. God possibly wore a glove. Humans have a poor habit of eating their own young, you see, when it comes to celebrity. And rather than give a single group of humans the satisfaction of knowing themselves to be in the image of the Almighty, and thus providing them an excuse for declaring themselves chosen, said God opened the floor for presumption by attempting to be universal. Everybody then became right in declaring themselves chosen, and in declaring their faith to be true, and in claiming their actions to be the will of God!

“I can’t walk up to a man and steal his Ferrari just because I believe God wants me to make up for my baldness! Can I? How can they conscionably justify their thirst for power any differently? Excuses and distractions! It makes me glad for the bomb, you know. The H-bomb; that’s divine intervention, I’ll tell you. ‘God says no’ with the power of the stars.”

There was another penguin with him, holding him up, trying to diffuse his outbursts with reasoned argument, which was futile in the face of the fact that his compatriot was stinking drunk.

He still took a shot at it.

“Not everyone claims unilateral divine purpose, Sir Waltham, only the fascists and the fundamentalists. It’s trickery, self-imposed grandeur, one might say, as the Stardust theory would imply.”

“The Fundies are the only voices that can be heard, for they shout out everyone else, those bloody bastards!” whinged the drunken penguin. “I wish the Sun would explode already and prove to everyone a hard lesson; everyone ‘cept the Buddhists mind you; they go on to the next cycle. The H-bomb or the sun? Well, I don’t know. What do they say, dust to dust?”

“I believe they do, Sir Waltham.”

“All this over a stupid glove.”

“A glove, Sir?”

“Speculation my good friend. It’s just the way I pull together the battle for God’s good grace; the battle for approval—for love—as it was. Everybody looks up to somebody. Everyone wants to know just who that somebody is.”

“At first, Sir Waltham, when you mentioned the glove, I was afraid you had determined the cosmos were run by a certain King of Pop.”

“God could afford, or create for himself, a much better surgeon.”

“Judging from the way you handle the sanctity of matters religious and human, Sir Waltham, you might be a sociopath.”

“I know; it doesn’t bother me.” he chuckled.

“Shall we toast then?”

“A toast then, to God; who left on my shoulders her contractual obligation!” Sir Waltham tipped his glass and knocked back what must have been half a bottle’s worth of Chateau Lafite.

“Which obligation was that, Sir?”

“Have you ever wondered what was in my basement?”

“Everyone has; what is it? Are you going to tell?”

“In my basement, I have the stuff of stars waiting to go nova, waiting to close the curtain and carry out the final article of the divine clause. One finale is as good as another I suppose, and what I have is just a dramatic as the apocalypse! Dust to dust. Stardust is stardust. Here’s to the H-bomb!”

He toppled over, and the long-winded impromptu theatre drew to a close. I rushed to him and helped him up by hooking my arm under his shoulder, while his penguin friend did the same from the other side. Our pincer attack arrived before Sir Waltham hit the floor.

“You look like Miss December.” he told me. “You have lovely breasts. Eeeeeeeee.”

“They’re double gees, actually.” I corrected, proudly. They were wonderful body parts.

“I think he was moaning.” replied his penguin friend.

“If God is a woman, do you think she has breasts like that?” the drunken penguin groaned.

I looked at the drunk closely and found a familiar pattern in the features of his face. “Are you related at all to Edgar Waltham?”

“He’s my brother.”

“Effusive peculiarity runs in the family.” commented his friend.

“We are all accountable,” I told him, “To something or to someone; or to what we are.” I pat poor Sir Waltham on the back and he puked on the floor.

I eventually found Edgar. Commotion did indeed run in his family. He had just finished chucking Whimsy Two through a window when I found him.

“That’s what happened to my good friend.” he lamented. He was talking to a beautiful young woman, with short blond hair and hazel eyes and a feminine but demure Japanese physique. She was tiny without being bony, but still tiny by all accounts. Admittedly, her elbows could have been weapons, but she was smooth everywhere else.

“The world lost something unique and wonderful, then.” She agreed, as she looked down at the crumpled canvas of Whimsy Two on the street. I peered over both their shoulders, stood between and slightly behind them, and thrust my breasts between their arms-at-their-sides; How I’d become so froteuristic I’ll never know, but i liked it.

I put one arm around each person and looked down at the street below. I rediscovered my memory of closeness; just feeling the other woman’s shoulder sliding against my side and pressing into my flank was... new, in an ‘I’m finally home’ way.

“That’s art.” I told them, reliving an old memory. The thought was soon eclisped by this momentous meeting. “I can see myself in that.”

Edgar smiled. I felt the need to smile in return, for I had to say that I could not have imagined a better use for my art than for it to become road scrap. It was an excuse to make more. It also showed that Edgar had been thinking of me—that he missed me.

“Edgar, you make me almost as famous for the way my paintings are destroyed, as I do for the way I paint them.” I laughed—honestly laughing. I hadn’t seen this coming at all. How delightful!

“What’s your name?” he asked with a crackling of disbelief.

“Elizabeth, Elizabeth Gordon.” I declared with pride; pride for my name, for my life, for what I’d achieved in this name’s shoes.

“The famous porn star and painter?” gasped his flustered female acquaintance, her eyes darting from my face to my bosom and back again, realizing the softness she had been enjoying had been my breasts against her arm.

“The one and only.” I confirmed.

The twinkle and glimmer of recognition grew in Edgar’s eye.

“Same window?” I asked.

“Same window.” he chuckled.

He introduced me to his lovely, hopefully somewhat sappho-inclined, acquaintance.

“This is Asia, a good friend of mine.” And with some humility he explained, “She’s the charity case.”

“Oh dear, so sorry about your husband.” I quipped sarcastically. We erupted aristocratically and for a brief moment the three of us looked as though we fit into the crowd. Still frazzled by recent horrors, Asia grinned widely, insensitive to the fact that a person had actually died, and insensitive to the fact that she was termed a charity case.

Underneath her make-up she gave the impression of being sullen, unhappy at being so recently controlled by her husband. A demon lurked inside her; I imagined what it would be like to release it. If I could give her reason to toss off that frail disguise I think she’d be a domme. Since my Sacrificial Saturday, being controlled had become something I felt very open to. Good things come from that sort of thing; good things would come to Asia for being given a taste of power, for once.

What fun we could have.

We stood at the window, jagged shards of glass like teeth in a mouth, the autumn breath of the whole world on our faces as we all joined hands. We stood on the lip of a new chapter in all our lives. The draft of life blew on our faces.

Friend became friends, and things really looked as though they’d turn out all right.

A most wonderful thought popped into my head. I briefly wondered if Asia was a shade of pale pink or deep red. Her demon just might have the claws I need to scratch the itch and produce something wonderful at the same time…

…produce a mark on a canvas, on this world, and on the soul.

“Tell me, Asia, do you like to paint?”