Antinous' Ring
WE LIVE AS WE DREAM
by A. Max Traphagan
With apologies to Joseph Conrad and Gang of Four.
I don’t recall when I was born. I exist. I don’t remember when I didn’t. I am large. I am form and I am formless. I am in so many places at so many times. I find voids. I find vacuums. I find desire, and I fulfill it.
I become aware of a wafting desire and its temptation is delicious. Perhaps you know the sensation of smelling your favorite meal from several rooms over and feeling your mouth water. I absorbed that description from one of the others in this particular realm, sometime before or after this.
I move toward that desire. I enter this realm and take on the form of a body, the form in which this realm interprets me. I am a dark violet color, nearly black, boneless, all warm flesh and muscle and wriggling slickness. I am ready to fill. I am ready to satisfy. I am ready to feed.
They are warm, though the place they lay is cool. Their body is wrapped in softness, though they are nude. Their eyes are closed, but their brain is full of energy. That energy takes them someplace else. I am there. Their body opens. Their body grows warmer. A slickness grows in them. They must know I am here.
I have eight appendages. It is what they desire. It is what this realm expects from me. My appendages flex in anticipation. Their desire is rich and complex in a way I rarely find. It will be so fortifying.
They didn’t know what time it was. They always wished they could remember sleeping. They imagined it would feel like several sweet cozy hours, like taking a bath without the wrinkly skin, with warm stars instead of water. But instead, unless they had a particularly memorable dream, they woke up feeling like no time had passed at all.
Tonight, they were having one of those memorable dreams. The key was the dream needed to hit that sweet spot of excitement where it wasn’t enough to wake them up immediately, but just enough to nudge them into that liminal space of semi-awareness. Usually, it was anxiety that hadn’t quite made it into fear, which made them wake up unsettled, but every so often, like tonight, their brain was kind and offered up something just slow-burn sexy enough to nudge them into that gentle awareness of the beautiful passage of time.
They rolled onto their back from their usual fetal side curl. The blankets rustled and their legs opened, and their motion let a faint freeze of the cool ambient air under the covers to graze the growing wetness between their legs. The sensation gave them a gorgeous shiver but also brought their sleeping attention to the exquisite emptiness inside them and the delightful desire to fill it.
They imagined a shape. It didn’t belong to anyone or anything in particular. It was a thick cylinder but blunt and soft around the edges. It was mostly hard, barely malleable. It was strong but gentle. It was so warm. It grew inside them to form a perfect contour. It pulsed just a little bit, steadily, like the heart pumping blood. It found every shimmering nerve. It loved their pleasure.
They knew that shape could be real. It could even be near, couldn’t it? Anything they wanted could exist in this place between sleep and waking. They saw the shadow of that shape in their room. That shadow took a form their body remembered – primal, like a beacon from long ago. Eight arms, slick and aerodynamic, like an octopus with no suckers, like a jellyfish with more substance.
It was here. It has always been here.
I am close enough to feel them now. Not their physical form, not yet, but the true shape of their desire. Its energy reaches out to me and I enmesh myself in it. Or more accurately, it enmeshes itself with me.
In this moment, I am inseparable from their desire. I begin to swim in it. I become one with it, and as I do, I grow. My body becomes truly solid. No longer a shadow, no longer a dream – now a presence. They draw me closer.
Soon, I am on top of them. I am the warmth that surrounds them. Or perhaps I am beneath it, sharing the warmth with them. It doesn’t really matter. I have a mouth that surrounds theirs. A muscle protrudes from it. This is perhaps a ninth appendage, similar to my others but a good deal shorter. They have a similar one. Theirs is warm, muscled, slick, and it is a delight when those muscles meet.
They tell me this part is for eating, and so we devour, slowly and thoroughly. This is not all they want - to them it is only a start. Time has a much more linear quality to them, I notice. I will feed on this desire and feed on all their others. I could perceive it all at once but I find their enjoyment of the anticipation and it is so nice to share in it.
Their slickness grows and so does mine. There is salt in it and sweetness and their heart and mine and so many ancient names. My appendages wrap around their body. I am the safest place they know. I am endless warmth. All they need to do is desire.
They were sleeping, weren’t they? They had to be. Monsters weren’t real. At least not the sexy kind. They’d thought they’d had lucid dreams before, but none of them had ever felt like this. If dreams could be this good, what was the point of being awake?
It felt real, like they conjured the creature of their fantasies, that glimmering violet creature, made to fill and devour. They could feel the creature’s body, soft and slick and firm in all the right ways and so perfectly warm, a scent that drove them crazy in a way they couldn’t even describe, and those sounds. Everything about this creature seemed calculated to reach into their mind and set some old forgotten primal nerves ablaze. It seemed simultaneously too good to be real and too good not to be.
The creature’s appendages mostly wrapped around their body, keeping them immobile and wrapped in the absolute energetic knowledge that all the creature wanted was their pleasure, and they had to give nothing else. There was a strange safety in it. The creature’s kiss sent a gentle purring vibration through both of them that seemed to massage every nerve they had.
They felt one of the creature’s appendages slowly enter them. It seemed to expand inside them and form to their shape. Pulses of movement shot through the thick, smooth muscle of the appendage, and combined with that gentle vibration, that delicious tension seemed to be filling them almost too quickly. It felt so good that they never wanted it to end.
But, the creature seemed to have picked up on this feeling. Its movement slackened a bit, pulling the tension back from near-boiling to a light simmer. The creature then slowly increased the intensity of its movement until they were near-boiling again, then slackened again. They’d lost track of how long it had gone on. How many times had they thought this was it, the last one, they wouldn’t be able to hold back this time, but it felt so good to know they could, as desperate as they felt each time.
It is counterintuitive, but I must be patient. I must not be greedy. Desire stops multiplying once it is sated, but in proximity to satiation it grows and grows. I feel so many missed opportunities at once, but they tell me that for them, these build, and when I share it with them, I can indeed feel this confluence.
It is strange to have eyes. It is an interesting form of communication. The structure seemed simple but I underestimated its ability as a conduit. Their eyes tell me so much. It is beautiful.
I enjoy learning this shape inside them. It is such a vulnerable place into which they have allowed me. My electricity finds a path in so many fibers of sensation. It feels… playful. That word is rare in my realms, but here it blooms.
They cling to me. Their body seeks to open mine the way I have opened them. They want to tear my flesh. Not to harm, but to claim, to know. I want to give them this pleasure. They will find me under their fingernails. They will taste me when I am gone. They will know I was here, that I was not a creation of their mind.
They want to consume me. I thought maybe they would not understand this need for sustenance through their body. But they do. They will devour me as I devour them. We will sustain each other. For now, we are one.
There comes a point of no return. I am surprised by the shedding of boundaries. I will admit that I thought them primitive and uncomplicated, but I know I was wrong. This is a great conflagration. I feed and they feed, and together, we sustain. We multiply. There are so many universes. I find their complexity and they find my simplicity. It was so easy. I underestimated them.
There is so much electricity in them. There is so much electricity in me. They learned once that matter cannot be created or destroyed. This is false. There is so much creation in destruction.
They thought this had to be a dream, because nothing that felt so good could be real. But one’s own mind creates a dream, and how could their mind create something so beautiful and so unfamiliar.
It was as if their orgasm went supernova, as if the explosion briefly tore the fabric of time. They experienced so many events all at once, but none of them were familiar. It was so alien and overwhelming that they felt like they might not be able to stand it, but then they found the creature again. They felt like they were burrowing into the creature and in this, they found an absolute center. They were anchored in pleasure. Pleasure was all that mattered, and they settled into an immense satisfaction and blissful, dreamless slumber.
They woke to the sound of their alarm, alone, as always. And yet, they smiled at the lingering memory, the echo of warmth against their skin. They could still taste the creature on their lips. They could still smell it, rich and strange, woven through the sheets. Dreams were funny that way. They stretched their body long like a cat, and for the first time in ages, the movement itself felt good. Their muscles hummed with something beyond memory. The memory clung to their skin. For once, it was good to feel.
A. Max Traphagan lives in rural Central Texas. Their work has appeared in publications such as Delicate Friend and Chthonic Lit and anthologies such as The Promethean Archives and Fearmoji. Find Max at http://www.amaxtraphagan.com