Home / Fiction / Speaking in Tongues

Speaking in Tongues

There is always a certain elegance in an exotic woman that appeals to desperately repressed American men.

We are told from a very young age that women are lesser mortals, and that those who appear different must appear so because of an innate quality of corruption or evil in their souls. It is a very narrow and dogmatic view that is particularly prevalent in the strained southern society where I grew up. For a man like me, these are the kind of women that set our blood on fire.

It is with an almost Oedipal lust that we fixate upon these strange deities. It becomes an act of rejection against arrogant fathers who would call these women “freaks” or “tramps” or, worst of all, “foreigners.” We attach ourselves to these women with an incredible intensity, as if to say: “You see, father: you were wrong, Now eat shit and die, you conceited bastard!”

Our attraction to these women represents the leftover guilt we felt as children upon seeing our fathers smash coffee pots against our mothers’ fragile skulls, and knowing that there was nothing we could do to stop it.

These women are our Salvation.

Devyn was not exotic in any conventional sense. She had grown up in the same tiny Texas comunity that I had, but I had always sensed something unique and powerful behind those shy, quiet brown eyes. She never flirted with me, ever, and it drove me absolutely wild. The idea of coming onto a man was repulsive to her. She was intensely feminine in the sense that she needed to be taken. She never came onto men because that would mean having to take a man into the private universe of her sensual will, and she was intelligent enough to realize that such a conquest would only serve to strengthen the control of that sensuality over her.

Devyn found true ecstasy only in submission to my will, and the light of her beauty glorified us both.

I had first met her at one of those sweaty Baptist church functions in the one-hundred-and-five degree Texas heat. She was standing with an awkward group of teenagers on the steps of an archaic and decaying church downtown. She was wearing a white tank top, and the beads of sweat on her body made the cloth almost transparent. She was approximately my height and looked just the slightest little bit slimmer than I was at the time. She had long silky black hair and dark sensual eyes that set perfectly against her rich Puerto Rican skin. She was the beautiful creature I had ever seen and I knew, somehow or some way, that she would be my first.

Church was always an awkard experience for me, as a teenager. I was fifteen, and newly awakened to my own peculiar brand of violently anti-church spirituality, but I went to church every Sunday anyway, just to be near her and hear her laugh. She really was beautiful, and soon I fell completely in love with her.

One of the most beautiful experiences of my life was kissing Devyn for the first time in that church. The preacher, with his sly, devilish, perverted ways, had asked us to go together and retreive some boxes from the basement, and we jumped at the oppurtunity to be alone together. As soon as we had rounded the corner into the hallway our hands were on each other in the rabid excitement of possession over the body of another.

Her skin was smooth and dark, and when she ground against me all I could see was her face with her lips parted and her eyes rolled back in pleasure.

We worshipped each other with a holy reverence for the sexual act. While our friends sat motionless and depressed in the pews every Sunday, we would quietly disappear downstairs to the basement where there was a large comfortable couch and an ancient, sturdy pool table set aside for the youth.

I don’t think anyone ever had any idea how much use we actually got out of these accommodations.

While the church upstairs stood in forced compliance, singing hymns and benedictions, Devyn would fall to her knees on the basement floor in her own state of worship. We were our own gods, and the communication between our bodies became its own kind of prayer. I never felt the presence of God as closely as I did when I knelt at the shrine of her willing body, between her legs, speaking in tongues.

XXX

William Travis Cook is an alcoholic writer with a cat named Jimi Hendrix. Look for him online at The Waco Examiner, Urbis.com and coming soon to a street corner soapbox near you!

Comments