Bahia
Into that dream again. That deep, dark, dangerous dream.
Matted mulch underfoot, crisping with each barefoot step she tentatively takes, stubs of twigs and empty seed pods prickling her soles. Tinted sunlight welding leaf to stem in the thick slotted living canopy above, brazing corrugated tree trunks, ricocheting off dangling fruits and nuts, tangling in hairy thickets, dripping in amber sparkles off the arcs of lianas. Secret language of insects droning hieratically in her ears, bird calls like cryptic commentary punctuating her passage. Moist air cottoning against her—unclothed? yes, completely unclothed—body.
Step by step the fecund jungle lures her deeper within itself. For an indeterminate time, confidence and pleasure swell within her. Her hands stretch joyously out to either side to caress warm golden boles and waxy jade foliage. She kneels to lap aromatic rainwater from the impossibly clean ciborium of a pitcher plant, pistils tickling her nose. Lugubrious lizards lunge from hot plates of stone to shelter beneath welcoming tented fronds. A parrot with a red-streaked beak jitters along from branch to branch parallel with her chance-dictated course, winking at her with cocked head. Butterflies large as women’s dainty handkerchiefs and stitched as prettily shimmer round her momentarily before dispersing.
Then she chances upon the lone fat bold paw-print, blazoned into a square of bare soil.
The sun pulls a passing cloud before its frightened face. An unseen beast coughs roughly. A banded snake slips across the trail, a squiggle of movement linking two absences. A monkey laughs. The paw-print seems to swell in her sight until it fills her whole field of vision, freezing the day, its negative space conjuring up the instrument that stamped it: four strong clawed toes, rough palm-pad wide as a cup’s saucer, dew-claw that dragged a thin line in the dirt.
Three or six grains of sand crumble from the edge of the print into its receptive depression, restoring time. Suddenly frantic, she begins to run.
Now the jungle does not invite, but hinders. Branches slap her arms, raising welts. Thorns needle her flanks. The concealed mouths of rodent burrows invite broken ankles. Trees slide closer together to bar her passage.
Her breath rasps from her lungs. Sweat stings her eyes. Her tongue captures a trickle of blood meandering lazily over her upper lip like the first drops rilling from an ineffective dike.
She crashes out of a wall of whipping foliage into a broad short-grassed clearing. Exposed, she realizes too late her fatal mistake. She tries to go back, but the withy latticed curtain now defies penetration. Hopeless, she starts to sprint across the clearing toward some theoretical safety.
Halfway across, she risks a compulsive look backwards.
The jaguar has emerged.
Bigger than her, its massive presence dominating the clearing like a fallen chunk of starless space, the kingly cat wears its black fur like a garment woven of pure night. Despite the gap between the woman and the animal, the cat’s features fill her sight to the exclusion of all else: its whiskers, thick and lucid as fiberoptics, stretch a foot to either side of its blunt muzzle; its garnet eyes glitter; its nostrils flare wetly; its throat pulses with the rude vigor of its heartbeat. A tongue like a velvet washcloth strops up, around, and down before disappearing. A tail like the sinuous scribble sketched offhandedly onto canvas by an old master lashes the stolid air.
Nearly paralyzed with anticipatory fear, the cat’s image bonded to her soul, she tries to resume her run, stumbles after only a few yards, and falls to hands and knees.
Instantly the jaguar is upon her, atop her, cloaking her like a heavy cape, its weight immense. She is too terrified even to scream.
She tenses for the bite that will sever her spine at the neck.
The slash of teeth never comes. Slowly, acid sweat burning her armpits and some small sanity returning, she catalogs finer impressions.
The jaguar’s forelimbs compress her ribs below her flooded armpits, furry staves barrelling her torso. The cat’s heavy head lolls on her right shoulder, its left ear cupped to her right one like mated shells; should she turn, she suspects her eyes would lock with its slitted pupils. Warm meaty breath washes her cheek. The jaguar’s muscled back legs clamp hers from the outside, and a dew-claw digs into one calf, causing the only pain.
Then she feels a ponderous, prescient unsheathing between the cheeks of her ass.
The jaguar’s stiffening prick emerges from its furry case, already juiced and thick. A knot as big as twin walnuts swells in the penis, much closer to the root than the tip. The hot length of the cat’s member seems to lay a brand on her sensitive flesh. She feels her traitorous cunt responding with lubrications that make no distinctions between man and beast.
