Twilight in the Morning

The sky is purple, bringing out the green and blue in the trees. I’m talking to my downstairs neighbor’s dog, Percival, who sounds like my first boyfriend. “Judy,” Percival says, leaning dangerously over the hibachi in the gondola, “you don’t understand me.” His voice is intensely like Peter’s. Percival becomes Peter. Peter leans in as if to kiss, but he doesn’t. He leans back and talks to a woman who wasn’t there before. She kicks at the heels of the gondolier and yells, “I don’t speak Urdu! I don’t speak Urdu!” I get up to grab at a passing barge pole and get off of this boat, but the boat is going too quickly, at least forty miles an hour now.

“Aren’t you scared?” Peter asks, right into my ear. An intense feeling comes over me. I can smell him, salty sour and burning sex in my nostrils. I’m frozen now. I feel his beard at my thighs, his nose buried deep in my crevice. “Judy,” he says, “aren’t you scared?” But he can’t be saying that, because my legs have been pushed apart, his tongue sliding along at my clit. Another wave of the smell and electric pleasure falls into me like an interior blanket. I’m ready for him to talk again, but I don’t hear him. I try to move, to test it, but I can’t.

I’m pulled out of the dream like air bubbling through water. When I arrive, grey and still on the bed, the pleasure doesn’t go away. I open my eyes slowly, the tear of the first blink of morning, and bend my head just enough to see the top of a man’s head below. I close my eyes and stay inside.

Two men in hospital scrubs to the waist hold my legs open and watch. A third, bent over the edge of the bed, straps my pussy lips open in long, elastic belts. I’m exposed to him. Still in sleep paralysis, I can easily imagine the men holding my arms down as well. They look me in the face, but with curiosity instead of sympathy, then watch, panting, as the man in the middle begins to lick.

My ankles are lashed down too, my breasts crisscrossed with similar elastic bands, only the nipples out, pointed up at the ceiling, helpless. One of the men in scrubs licks his thumb and twists the pad along one of the nipples, testing it for hardness. My neck bends back, the licks at my pussy getting stronger, harder, wetter. Another man in scrubs appears and pulls his green pants down below his waist. He looks at the other men, who inhale with anticipation. The man turns my head and begins to jerk off over my lips.

The bed quivers as my husband rearranges himself, but I don’t pull myself into reality. I resolve it in a twist of the gurney. The other two men in scrubs have scorching erections, but they can’t touch them, their hands occupied in holding me down. They begin to hump the gurney, slowly, their hands grasping tighter, painfully, onto my arms and thighs. My clit is battered some more, rubbed and slapped and dug into. The forth man, the latecomer, begins to moan just audibly. He gasps. He’s going to come. I need to see it, to feel it, to taste it. The one between my thighs feels me shake before I do and finds a tight structure, a steady, rising tempo. I can’t move to slow it. I can’t hide or twist away or close my legs. The man above my mouth yells out and the other two, the green scrubs so tight on their hips, gasp with him. He shoots all over my mouth, above it, inside it, across my cheek and some in my nose. The smell fills me again.

I lose control, lose sight, lose the men in my head, fall under the spell of a twisting tongue at me, and my back arches, my mouth open, and I wake myself up with the sound of my own cranked growling, something leftover from my dream, as the barge poles are whipping past and Peter asking, “Aren’t you scared?”