Katherine says:

Ought to be something of a blue cheetah, keeping her head as she brews the leaves in that contorted Chinese snakes and toads pot she likes because she says it infuses her dawn relish like the mists of the Serengeti where she might have existed once.

She spent the night “en tête à tête” downstairs and she’s manicured and groomed like an expensive doll, wearing one of her wild boro robes innocently left gaping. She tells Gauthier and me that Hugo took pictures of new antique jewellery he has acquired displayed over her body, like old times, and rocked and rammed her over to her dreams. She affects a distant pose but succeeds at arousing the halcyon knight sitting next to me on the couch enough to let a boastful garden gnome loom up from the purple terry peignoir. The little boy’s head still smells the night’s fervours. Sarah laughs and sits at the table, her perfect Schoenmaker model nose in the effusive Darjeeling scents. In the cashmere socks, her left foot crawls over the right into the felt slipper.

Katherine says:

A bizarre message rings in my phone and i take a few seconds to leave Gauthier’s sweet trapano and read an urgent plea from the shop girl I hustled a tad, one fine afternoon, during our last Venetian rally. She says she arrived in Paris and needs my help, so, I call and tell her the address. I am rather proud of my catch, her frizzy gold thatch around the absinth green eyes had bewitched me as to give her my number and ask her to call.

Sarah hops into a leisure gown of grey cotton and back into her indigo rags, I fetch a pair of jeans and a frayed grège sweatshirt, buckle my boots to go downstairs where I help Fanny pay the cab.

She’s all bustle and fuss, when she hugs she smells like the girl who slept in her day clothes, a vague hint of orange bloom with baby fawn sweat. She instantly cries. Rather fazed, I pull her through the door and upstairs where she collapses on the couch to the amazement of the other two.

I pull off a lichen green corduroy parka, a rust knit scarf, take her hands and ask her what she would like to drink. She says she needs the bathroom, so I lead her and start to undo her shirt and pants while she cries. Then I see the bruises and contusions on her ribs and back, along her thighs, it is appalling so i shout. She sits down to pee and there’s blood in the basin, Sarah surges and mumbles in awe. Fanny wants a shower, we stand contemplating the horror as she faces the running flow and we both stroke her martyred body with soft sponges and lather. She carefully wipes herself and combs her hair

Back in the room, while she dips the apricot toasts Sarah has spread, we decipher the shreds of her ghastly epic. She speaks good English, with random dialectal rocks she doesn’t notice. She has been beaten by her stepfather, who has sold her to a powerful gang leader of the Balkans. She hitchhiked with cars and trucks and had to give head a couple of times but did not need identification.

Fanny was abandoned in Bosnia, probably an offspring of rape, as it happened routinely during the ethnic cleansing wars. She was given to an officer who went to live on the Croatian coast and Trieste. He abused her from early age like it was her given fate, in undisputed good conscience; it wasn’t physically violent anyhow, a progressive taming to which he dedicated all the time needed, satiating his urges randomly . At eighteen she moved to Venice without his consent but he found her eventually and began marketing her to the mob. A man called Vukan came to lurk at her in the shop where she attended and paid half the price of a house to her father to possess her; they trapped her in a safe house and raped her together madly, only sparing the sale value of her face and body.

She was in a ground floor cellar of an old Venetian house, she heard some rattling through the planks and called out. A woman heard and listened to her horrifying tale. She came back with her burly husband who bashed the partition down and helped her out, blushing because she had no clothes. They lived in an adjacent house, They did not hear any noise from the jail. the next morning he went to the shop, talked to the terrified owner, found the key to Fanny’s room and grabbed all her stuff in a bag and found her telephone oddly left there. All her hair in a knit cap, she took busses to Milan, then tried her luck at the highway rest area, pleased a first bastard who took her to Turin, a second one as disgusting to Lyons, and a third to Paris who paid her dinner and did not ask for more.

Sarah says:

 I shake and feel my stomach wring. I need to tell Hugo and call Camille. We ought to call the Doctor. Kate holds her hands. Gauthier asks to see Fanny’s phone and the applications in it; soon he knows there is at least one tracker in it, wonders how to disable it but eventually plots it would be wiser to lure whomever follows it to a faraway place of the world. He personally knows flight crews and it would be a game to circulate the toy around the planet.

Fanny likes her phone, but Gauthier promises a new one with her own data saved. Grasping his forehead for a minute, he lays an escape plan like a master spy. He asks Fanny what she brought with her, a bag of chic clothing. Nothing we can’t replace, we can dress her and strip her alike for a good while. Anything can conceal devices these days. He will at once take everything away, thus avoiding to set Hugo’s house under siege. Fanny fetches a pouch of jewellery that Gauthier scrutinises close, and a few notebooks and papers in the middle of which is stuck a square patch she has never noticed. He cuts the page and puts it back in the bag. At least book a room in a small hotel nearby and leave the bag.

The Doctor asks us out of the bedroom. Hugo has come up and wants update. He holds me and Kate and says this is all too serious and he will call some people. Fanny will take refuge with Camille, we will exfiltrate her in disguise through one of the backstreet path

Fanny needs to go to the ER, we will go along, there might be damage to the kidneys. Hugo calls the ambulance, we collect what we may think of and walk downstairs, then through Hugo’s domain down to another yard and the car already waits for us. She wears a black hoodie and jogging pants, nothing like what she looked like when she arrived.

Kate is turning greenish as we wait in the small and rather homey hospital waiting room for hours, so we find a couch where we may hug desperately and tell each other what our nights have been. Fanny stared wild when the nurses stripped her naked and wrapped her disgraced body in the inevitable grey parsley printed butt-free shirt, checked every nook, drew blood samples and asked us to leave. All personnel were calmly reassuring, except considering us two with a hint of circumspection before their boss was put on in a conversation with Hugo’s practitioner

Katherine says:

Camille has joined us when a self important Doctor calls us asking about Fanny’s situation,  but we know rather nothing so he tells us he has to refer to the police. I tell him she has fled from the men who beat her so she needs secrecy. We give our own identification at the desk and ask for another car to Camille’s.

Fanny’s thrilled by Sarah’s old room, we stash pillows and camp around her on the large bed, she lays in dawn coloured heavy silk satin pyjamas, half covered with the pristine duvet that has been our nest so many times. When she falls asleep we cannot leave her. The Doctor has said we should not let her sleep long but wake her every hour so Camille sets a convenient timer to a lamp and joins us.

It is late in the evening when I wake up along side Fanny who seems appeased and fresh. Hugo and Gauthier bring fruit and delicacies, a plateau of macarons and a new telephone. Camille brings a large pitcher of kefir.

The escapee reaches for my shoulder and slides a warm hand to my belly. She murmurs in my ear when she asks if I am with Sarah, who snuggles on Hugo in a mist-blue leather egg chair. I tell her very gently that we are more than together, that she can have me but not for her own, and not worry before she is set free. She wonders about the unexpected world she discovers, whereas she had only foreseen a sweet lesbian sister that could help her out of damnation; she’s distraught, wild astray and beaten and now all she can do is sound my eyes.

Hugo says:

My call to the spheres of the Powers That Be intensified at the ring of the moniker Vukan, investigation is cooking. Doctor Prinz, a good friend, who oversaw Fanny’s examination, put some ease to my mind in a telephone call, the beating she suffered was intended to hurt the most but not break; he agreed on rest, balm and massage but he was more concerned about bleeding and ordered daily controls for a while. Camille would lend her own masseuse in the morning.

Fanny’s telephone and frippery will sit in the hotel room under scrutiny. For now, she will hide her hair and eyes for some time because they are so notable. There is enough intrigue and charm spawning from the most instant vagary in one Kate reviving moment. Come what may from a swift shenanigan happening in the fitting room at a cosy shop in Venice,

Sarah says:

Fanny’s hands have fiddled with seams and stitchery so as to mutate into ethereal ornaments for my lustful eyes. Happy gloves revel in the powder of iris cajoling a minute flock of hasty fingernails. Wish I earn myself a pass at the dazzle gleam and the baby hind I glimpsed. My Kate besotted like a cherry orchard and yet my own holy vein.

But the sight of the ghastly hématomes all over her diaphanous complexion grips my throat and tears a sob through my chest.

I have told her story to my father, because I know he supervised some intelligence in the Balkan mess. In a second message, he said he would need portraits of Fanny and all of her belongings rest at the hotel like she would be back; he warned us not to snap if card-carrying agents approach me or Kate. He was unusually specific, he said messages will be sent to Fanny’s phone from different numbers to keep her ghost alive. Unswervingly, each time I reach for him I feel my feet in a gentle stream where blue weeds flutter and a shiver of light in my chest.

In another room, Gauthier reads Far’s messages and agrees enthusiastically. Hugo comes along and I find myself between the two of them and they lay me down on the shady bed and as Hugo holds my head with both hands and kiss my skull like it was a miracle, Gauthier pulls down my track pants and wrests my sneakers off. I spread my thighs as open as the future of a doomed angel rescued from a pit of muck.

Katherine says:

 I was zonking out, again, so I peeled off my jeans and stuff and insinuated myself along the silk on Fanny’s poor back. After a few waves she found my arm adrift and brought it to her womb then dived again in a still silence and I flew quietly like a mist over a magic pond.

Later, I perceived Camille testing for temperature with her lips on Fanny’s forehead, caressing her cheek so as to make her eyes open and ask her where she thought she was and why, then telling her she was all fine and rounding herself in her breath.

Girls in white gossamer gowns like jellyfish in slow waves, their hair floating amongst dead birds and washed flowers, newspapers covered in black and red signs, rats swimming swift through the debris at the bottom of the slippery stairs where I stand naked, the bells of Venice laugh like stone spiders around my heavy swaying head. They lay on broken bricks and tiles, their faces erased and dove white, torn ropes still at their fists and ankles, sinking into the ground. The smell of incense, wax and ether raise from the swirls of iridescent stains on the black water and I think I have forgotten to cry then a child’s voice calls me from a faraway shore and I can’t believe it. The sand will wipe off my skin because the breeze is very mild, I brush my shoulders and turn my head when I remember I came with someone, but there is no one on the railway and the toy like train is trembling away through the dunes. New faceless girls on the pale skin of whom the newspapers ink have bled in moving petroglyphs walk up the stairs passed me in a smell of lotus and I admire their delicate arched feet and ask myself why I cannot move when masked men holding heavy sticks walk out of the train station with a menacing attitude and the white girls flee rather blindly. In a delicate footprint I see a gold chain with a round medal attached to it and a number nine engraved. I pick the jewel and hold it on my very flat chest so the scary men do not see me. I want to tie the necklace to my neck but it is closed without any clasp; I try to hop my head into the chain circle when a tickling lizard climbs up my head and eases the jewel down then chirps into my ear and voices say my name.

Fanny has dropped the pyjamas and is giving me an avid kiss on the mouth as I still hear the bells but they are Saint Sulpice’s. She is quite lively an she tells me she did not bleed this morning. I want to grope the impish goblin but I remember in time not to.

Camille and Sarah bring up a grand plateau with warm delicacies, tea and coffee. Hugo and Gauthier have gone home. There is a message saying everything rolling, it reminds us to take nice pictures of Fanny, no smile. Camille gives her a flimsy Missoni jade jersey and can’t help cheering the tangerine dreams in the move. Against a pearly grey wall, with all the lights on and the curtains opened, Sarah takes front and profile; with a little help from a handy software, the photos are classy, we choose the best and she sends them to her Daddy with a nasty sous-entendu.

Katherine says:

There’s a feeling that the grand trap is strung. Meanwhile, a nurse shows up to draw blood and retrieve an urine sample. She asks us to leave the room. On her way out, she feels positive and recommends chary massages with a soothing cream, she agrees on the balsam of Peru if the patient is not allergic. Hugo will rejoice in that part and we expect him soon with vials and jars, tubs of ointments from his athanor; he will play the laying-on of hands beautifully, Fanny is in for a flight into the unknown!

When the two young men in cheap suits carrying black cases flash their cards at the door, our refugee is stone-asleep by the virtue of some snoopy hands. Hugo welcomes them and introduces the whole cast, plus the maid Eliz. They ask if they can use a separate room to interview each of us, so Camille leads them to an office at the back of the gallery where they wish to begin with Hugo, whose intention it was.

I, myself, do not conceal the hustling side of my encounter with Fanny and yes, in the course of our frolicking, hearing that I lived in Paris, she had asked for my number with a disarming smile. I only wear a white tank top and fuzzy-print leggings and I can tell at least one of the agents in aroused. He hasn’t seen the main witness yet.

When all the accessories have talked it behoves me to bring back the glider to our altitude by the means of kisses on the temple. She smells acacia and elderberry with tarragon as I furtively lick her armpits. Drowsy but smiling she lets me dress her carefully, the silk T-shirt doesn’t cover the bruises on her arms, so I find some long sleeves and decide for a white shirt and black leggings of Sarah’s with relatively fitting loafers. I insist firmly not to leave her alone for the questioning and to my surprise they agree. They take her prints and a DNA swab, showing they want to prevent any misstep. Among her poor possessions, she is able to show some papers relative to her being found around the corner at a Red Cross hospital in Mostar and some written in a Balkan idiom. They take pictures of everything and also her notebook pages with a hand scanner, and, again, her face.

They set a small camera on a tripod on the table and start to listen to Fanny’s story not flinching to her English. As she pleads her miseries she briefly sobs and reaches for my hand and eyes as I try to hearten her silently.

She doesn’t recall much of her small childhood until they move to a house near Split and she spends most of her time with a sweet woman called Sara Novak, seing he busy stepfather once in a while in different uniforms. She doesn’t like him, he smells of Cologne and sucks strong mints. He fondles her all the time as a manner of complimenting her growth, he makes her feel like an animal.

When she has reached his shoulder’s height, at eleven or twelve, an afternoon Mrs Novak is absent, he draws her to a bedroom and forcibly undress her despite her cries, open her legs and masturbate over her, his seemingly monstrous thing out of his fly. When he is finished, he orders her to stay naked, arms and legs spread open; he stands by the bed and pounds his words with a scary voice that I am his, I am nobody, I am a leftover of a dead whore and I will please him and his cock to pay for my food and things. He is deadly menacing, I have never heard that voice before, most of all he says he will slay Mrs Novak in front of me and rip my eyes off if I tell anyone.

“From that day on, my life becomes an endless enigma, I still see other girls at the international school which is free for children like me, and I begin to sense those who live the same ordeal as myself, their total helplessness, our souls as a footprint in the mud. He comes once or twice a week and orders Mrs Novak out, tells me to undress and obey his fantasies while he masturbates, then gradually he tells me to do it, to take it in my mouth one sad day he ultimately rapes me and laughs about my heavy tears.

Mrs Novak guessed what took place on those days, she wasn’t deceived by the apparently good care he took of me, bringing presents and jewels, giving her money to buy me clothes, letting me have a computer and the best phone, petting me as his whore in a word. She insisted I should partition my soul and get the most of the normal teaching, learn languages, training me in English and Italian, giving me affectionate hints that I would need it someday. She was never there when the Captain fucked me, he took away the laundry himself, all she could was guess and I did not want her to die.

I fled to Italy in a truck by sleeping with the driver who paid me. I went to Venice and tried all the shops, I was very lucky to be hired by a kind woman who also lent me a room and I do not want to give her name because I had no papers. That is where I met Kate and let her hustle me because I had understood she came from Paris.

The Captain eventually found me through his networks, he was enraged and treated me like a bitch, coming to my room at night and bringing other men, and then he sold me to that frightening man Vukan who did what the Doctor described yesterday on the certificates you have. I am still not quite safe about my kidneys or something”.

She collapses on me and we start to cry together, me unable to speak a word of comfort, the two men still in awkwardness.

After long minutes, they gently ask for a description of Vukan but all she can tell is blackness, eyes, hair, beard, boots and clothes. He has tattoos, a wolf crowned with snakes on his chest and an eagle on the stomach with wings down his thighs in a way that his penis is part of the bird. He is very clean and manicured and shows twitches. He made her snort and blew cocaine in her vagina and her anus.

The agents gather their stuff, close their cases and, visibly moved, leave the room. On her way, they have a conversation with Hugo and also Sarah, who surely inform them of her intervention but they have already been posted, some, and they obviously feel a tad spooked about that. Sarah probably is pulling her disarming tomboy face. The goodbyes sound quietly forma!

Here I am with a big girl on my lap, pouring warm tears in my neck I am afraid to really hug as strong as I would. We all go back to Sarah’s room. Camille fetches soft kerchiefs and cautiously pats Fanny’s swollen eyes, the pillows are wet. Sarah brings a buttler tray with tea and chocolates, steering the thoughts around a better course of events as it seems. Comments on the two officers release the blood strains and Fanny blows her nose like a nature girl.

Camille says: 

The bitter taste of soap and medicines or whatever a desperate child could catch hold of in the narrow alley between the dead bottles and the suffering fridge in my mother’s kitchen, the linoleum corridor while she sells her lowers to gropers that smell like warm sewers and she says I sit with Melany the one-eyed doll. They go butt-naked to the loo and sometimes I stare and it shows like the black and white photos I found in the dismantled cupboard with the boxes of brittle paper covered with scribbles.

I have cried back to the showers in the dreary plains of lifelessness, the vain cemeteries of speechless death like cotton wool in the water behind the rusty coffers at the factory depot. I have shut down at the hospital when neighbours found me convulsing on the cellar’s stairs, when passers by called the black police bus because a raggedy nipper laid vomiting in the gutter.

Who was it who saved a scrap of the lace that had been my soul one long gone afternoon in the rainbow sprinklers? My mother would have then worn the bird like shoes that she forsook in the broom dungeon when the black caught upon her.

The ever-abiding seamstress inside the high tower discards as many loose-ends as there are thorns of rust around the deserts of unjustly suffering. Like jellyfishes in shreds the innumerable souls amongst the clamorous swarm of this world, here, mingle indefatigably like numbers across the galaxies. The reedy voices call around in no language, the singled irises with no meaning, the dance random.

As it once came for me beyond the hammering through my shivering chest I need to reach out for the defiled slave and I will sweep the road clean for her wherever she will.

Sarah says:

My father writes there is a scheme going on with agents circulating Fanny’s telephone around Paris and returning to the hotel at night. The room is barded with electronics and they have reverse-tracked the hunters. Fanny’s bag contained three other devices, I should lend her spares, says he. He assures me I did right, he was delighted to hear my testimony. He asks when I will show my work in the gallery.

Gauthier and Hugo left, there is an important sale in London tomorrow morning and they feel we can team with Camille well enough. As a matter of fact we fight for who will massage the angelo and we badger her to know who of us is the best. She is quite in love with Kate, they are together desirable, but I wouldn’t dare, yet. She loses none by waiting.

Now that she has spilled the embers for the cops and Kate, she seems in need of talking. Camille knows the currents of that stream of thought and questions ever so lightly. Fanny rests her testimony on Mrs Novak who appears to be the only truly sane person she has encountered. She has no recollection of any stepmother, there probably wasn’t any, the Captain did not refer to any institution regarding the child. She sometimes thought he knew about her real parents but he never let his tongue slip while terrorising her.

In the house overseeing the olive groves, she stayed with Mrs Novak and an occasional servant from Bosnia who spoke part Turkish. Mrs Novak was Czech, she had been a nurse with the Red Cross and spoke Croatian, English and French, understood Serbian. The Captain never tried to speak with Fanny, he gave orders and have her removed when she complained. He liked her hair, she was a pet he cuddled on his lap.

Physically she grew fast and skinny. He forbade her to wear pants or tights, bought her light girly dresses under which he snooped easily, then asked for her knickers and smelled them, then in the years he forced on her the whole array of his unleashed fantasies, calling her his perfumed bitch and demanding lipstick and nail varnish.

Except for school hours when she was shunned by most kids, she could find no other reference than Mrs Novak who timidly pulled her out of prostration, bringing foreign magazines and endlessly insisting on languages and knowledge as a tool of a future freedom, dispensing whispers at the awkward comments, deft as a nun in a fine-tuned subtext.

The Captain was trafficking, cars came up in the middle of the night, he brought men to Fanny’s bed. She opted for a safeguarding obedience, performing the part but never simulating, thus letting him feel the deep scorn she resented. She says she became skilled at expediting the animal pulsion and then go freshen herself. But he was roué beyond the core of his soul and could play on her for long hours, tie her and fiddle with a panoply of sex toys, make her wet herself without knowing.

Now we all rest on the bed, Fanny holds Kate’s face and licks the tears and asks if she will let her be her fine bitch. Kate answers there’s a full basket of expert bitches on her bed, but she faintly says it scares her and gives her the feeling she will fall apart. Camille takes my hand and draws me to her bed; I tell her I am wet as a fountain, she strips me and moans inside my undies, calling me a slut.

Fanny ponders:

Safe am I? That fire glow I had seen on Kate’s forehead when she wooed me into the curtains and unravelled my blouse was doubtlessly auspicious till here, where magazine fairies inhabit perfumed galleries and feather beds as deep as the sea.  that precious instant she wore the live stone to her deft fingers and I dared hook her real number.

Allies at the gates of salvation, true caring hands around my hurt sack of dead birds, cough the repelling carrion and his miserable staff of stench. I am born at the hands of the dancing sprite now, I will die cold and unspoken if she fails me, I will crack open the dark pot of my shambles and call the stars out of the sky, I will never have been, mind you, river of light?

Mrs Novak was a crystal of patience, She taught me languages through reading, one year in “David Copperfield”, a year with “The Tempest”, many articles in the New-Yorker and “Elle” magazine; she showed me films on her computer, she had this cold wired will and gripped my hands when I collapsed. Later we surveyed quality erotic literature as another genre and it inspired my quiet duplicity,

He was losing his vice in my uninspiring stillness, he uttered he was bored of my arse and he would sell me for skin. I ran, I felt I could cling to the branches like any wild monkey, the cicadas and the stars had been my jail, I would buy my way to Paris and pretend, like all of them. I would try the choice of a self taught Juliette in a disabused wonderland.

The boar had seen nothing of my stealthy upbringing, he professed such a deep scorn for literature, furthermore in other languages; he treated me so low that he could not realise what person I was becoming. I offered ease for the sad Willy, buttered my entrances and squeezed out the rot of his vice as fast and smooth as I could. He fed me pills in fear of pregnancy, uttering it was enough of me.

What I feel for Kate is unknown to me, frightening, almost painful. Her friends and her show compassion and lust together, restraint, wit and natural wantonness. I see they share souls and their lightsome bodies also with men as a clear atmosphere so pure I can’t breathe. I want to cling to Kate like a filly in her legs, suckle the mist out of her eyes, enslave my skin to her smile.

Kate dreams:

In an empty yard in the blaring sun I contemplate my shadow and observe it is purple, I say to myself I do not wear shoes and sweep the dust with my right foot. The deep blue sky seems to ripple with the shrieking of cicadas. War airplanes storm over with the sound of static in an amplifier and make the colours glare negative like I would close my eyes to the sun. Fanny moans in the last triangle of shade, leashed to a a dilapidated kennel with a clock in the gable. She is nude and scruffy, tears have drawn furrows down from her eager eyes. An emerald snake crawls on the rubble and hits a wall and slides in a fissure under the house on one side. I take Fanny in my arms and we roll inside the kennel with the noise of another airplane. We fall on bales of dry seaweeds as I am entangled with her chain. I sweep her skin clean with my tongue, she tastes chalk and anise. The ground is covered with dusty egg shells crumbling under our weight in trills of needle-sharp screams as the green snake glides as quicksilver to our feet, legs and cachotteries. Her head sways away from my kiss and she tells me to look out in a language unknown, her eyes roll aside as if she were hurt, seeing the shells became skulls and bone ashes we are in the shaft of a dead furnace, tumbling down a dreary chute. Her chains have spawned new snakes around my neck and arms as we land on fresh grass, waking pink fireflies that sound like icicles and tickle my nose. We slump to a shallow swamp and swindle upon barbed wires, I pull her against my stomach to protect her, she is a small child, a baby girl drenched and babbling vaguely. Three dark horses stamp away sprays of moonlight as the nightly vault is rent in spiraling tatters. She shies away in the broidered rags I gathered on my chest, her pale bum in the air as the juvenescent wonder. The horses hurl themselves in the wires and rip their bloody flesh with an uproar of holler and grunts when men in sleek black glazed outfits circle the herd with whistling shocker prods and whirling sputtering skulls over their heads with thick ropes. Having sheltered Fanny under my arm, I throw a metal wire over their heads and thus entangle their slings so as to make the heads of fire explode in a blast of shards I deflect from us with the chain before widening a fissure in the mound behind us and pulling the grownup Fanny into a warm corridor bestrewed with tear-shaped mirror cabochons and illuminated by spiderwebs through the ceiling. Along the walls stand upright dark wooden coffins with glazed lids; older half-collapsed men masturbate inside, wretchedly demented, some are dead with their faces smeared on the glass, the smell is that of leather and sperm, shoes, urine on ploughed earth.

Down a flight of spiralling stairs we find ourselves on the polished floorboards of a vast hall moonlit through five undecipherable stained-glass bays as tall as opera curtains. From the high beams hang long distressed rags and torn patches, all in the shape of a ruined city upside down. An owl flies away from the top of a partition clad with blackened ex-voto, grazes the ethereal tatters without a whisper and vanishes in the other end of darkness; a few wisps glide for a moment and dissolve. Fanny murmurs in my ear and I see her sounds in gems dancing around my head, fluttering strands of pearls like whims in Champagne. Light beams glare through the glass cliffs and cast accents of colours on the cascades of derelict veils, echoes of male voices drift around and gun shots clasp my lungs. She huddles between my legs, she makes herself small, she fades out. I stand naked in front of the six soldiers in disparate uniforms pointing their guns at me and shouting gibberish. I can smell rut, the immemorial scent of blood in the snow, I start to insult them in German with all the most vile I recall, I run to the wall where a rope hangs, I want to climb but then the bells ring and they lower their guns and uncover, walk backward to the far corner of the room. Fanny is behind me, wearing white linen ran by gold shivers, presenting silver shoes on a folded dress of thin blue velvet all studded with stars and celestial symbols. She helps me with layers of holy lingerie, pulls white stockings up my knees and we walk hand in hand through a grand portal to the moonlight bathed terrace. She gives me a head-twirling kiss and I feel like a swift wing on my forehead; when I open my eyes, I see the ruins of a very large monument, scattered with carbonised war machines. Somewhere in the shimmering mist, horses flee some danger. The owl hoots.

Sarah says:

The morning nurse has done her cares in the bathroom and drawn samples. Now Fanny holds Kate’s fevered head as she emerges from a deep-in-the-down dream, both of them bemused at the overturn of roles, then at once frolicking for my keen eyes. Obviously, Hugo’s ointments have healed the young loins of our survivor, but I decree a new round of sly rubbing in the accomplishment of which I cannot be dismissed.

Tossing the duvet aside, once I noticed her legs regained some lively colours, I seize her classy feet for a merry treatment I learned from my father, the only one that quieted me in my blue crib. With the balmy cream I roll the many little bones like stones in a tumbler, I delineate the tendons and strings, I grab and pinch the doughty cartilages until the little runners try to flee my rage.

There are two of us softening away the bruises in the holy scent of exotic remedies; Fanny and Kate have tossed their shirts, I crave I did but I dare not yet.

When Camille joins in with a cart of fresh douceurs she spreads her arms and inhales then creeps up to the source of elation and boldly kisses her mouth. She says the Secret Service will be there later and we may choose to offer them a tableau vivant, or dress up. She nastily pulls my sweatpants half-down for Fanny to watch.

Fanny moans with pleasure as she stretches easily on the carpet so as to show her healed youth. I plot my tactics to reach for her while stuffing a croissant with blackcurrant jam.

Sarah says: 

In a message, Far gives a number where I should call him in the next two hours, which I do already. Detecting my short breath, he engages small talk in our own Danish, I tell him how much Fanny moves me and everyone.

He says the traps are in place and the villains are very much wanted; for a while, It would be ideal for Fanny to stay at Camille’s under the same arrangement she had with me, if she would like. She will be granted a new identity with all new paper works better than real ones but the Services will have to settle first with her alone, for all legal implications. He says he is proud that I thought to call him and he trusts me too, he asks me to visit in New York with my friends and I should call my mother, too. I tell him he will certainly travel to Paris where the hotels are so profound and we laugh.

Katherine says:

My best boy is delightfully envious of my catch, if ever I am not the one caught here. Wouldn’t I share my fortunes with her? I gave her my brother, from hell.

Grey men, not French, came over and took Fanny apart without me. I feel frustrated after the chaste night and the epic dreams. On the contrary, Camille is enamoured of the feline cabin boy whose eyes twinkled when she spoke her bizarre vernacular with her Far. If I did not know her past, I would think they did it.

Camille wears a bronze green silk jersey gown printed with big scattered letters, soon hitched up by Sarah whose ass is so available. A moment short lived for we might no be so sure the serious ones appreciate.

To accommodate the waiting, Sarah transmits her father’s invitation and reminisces once more about the Tudor City grandeur over the East River. She still wears sweat pants and sneakers so I slide my hand.

The authorities need to check the situation with Camille and take her to the office. I need to pee and so does Sarah. We go to the bathroom, I drop my leggings and sit on the loo, she straddles me and I feel her flow as we share tongues. She’s vivacious, the odour of piss acerbates the scent of the morning balsam, she flies me back to the ruined cathedral and I finger her easy ass.

Sarah says: 

Kate made me come. Now, we are still quietly entwined on the toilet, she fiddles my violet while telling me about her heavy dream and I rest my head in her neck, eyes closed, travelling in her moonlight as a blue bat.

At some soft knocks on the door, we wake up and pretend normal. The Agents are leaving, they gently ask whom of us is Miss von Kettelær, they  gratify me with some sort of low-bow.

Fanny is beaming, she shows us a French document bearing the photo I took yesterday, photoshopped for shorter hair, and the name Fanny Kaplan, born in Slovenia exactly twenty-one years ago, father and mother unknown; her address is with Camille. There is also a smaller card with an official heading and a simple telephone number to be called in any case. A real passport should be ready soon. She boasts her new telephone and explain it is tracked by the spooks this time.

She will have to cut off her all too recognisable golden mane and wear glasses outdoors like a celebrity.

Katherine says:

At noontime, Hugo and Gauthier land in  with a pyramid of glossy red cartons of petits fours. Hugo has hot news. During the night, Vukan has been killed on his boat by Italian Coast Guards and Special Forces, twelve women have been freed. The house of  Zadar Focasjic, Fanny’s tormentor stepdad, has been searched but found totally empty of all traces, except for some scribbles inside an old dog kennel in the yard, currently analysed. At these words, Fanny cries that she can tell what is written and by whom.

Three reported criminals have been stealthily captured around the Benji Hotel where Fanny’s phone lives. It will travel to London and New York tonight. Hugo asks Sarah if she would introduce him to her father; he seizes her slender waist and at once slides his hand into her pants. She makes sure Fanny sees that.

Camille says: 

I earned myself a new pet child of great beauty, the redeemed victim of the furthest ravage upon innocence and it resonates in my own intimate chime as a blind murmuration of roving souls, it summons the shudder of a candle in a cave of coal, a handful of primroses in a barrage of dark overcoats, a windstorm of bad breaths over my candy mouth.

As I once woke up  a sharp whore in a mostly brainless world, she unearthed her own maddening  gem of lust in spite of the most harrowing slavery,  then as she readily fondled our own Queen as soon as she saw her, she pushed a first knot out of the chrysalide and the wings will be for us to dance with in the merry glade.

Hugo has known where I rooted under a silent rock of despair, my mother wincing one last time in the ramshackle staircase and I would climb the stairs evermore in hate of her in her smoke infested dress, her cohort of destitute innocents none of her poisons could alleviate or wash.

Were it the new suns at the hands of new children or one simple voice unbeknownst? An overflow of clear water drank in the common metal cup chained to the monstrous fountain on a summer wave? A perfect prayer heard through the racket of the hurtling métro? Some instant constellation wrested me out of my dead mother’s embrace by sheer attraction and I started to hoard my pebbles and wring out the all available lust.

Furthermore incestuous child from the labyrinth, embraced with Kate on the blissful cloud of an auspicious whim, A delicious foot escapes from the cover of the grey satin, a rosy ankle Sarah baby would honestly deem an edible “Frenhoferian” tribute in all manners of art.

Like myself and million others, she sold her skin like ever new matches, and kept warm enough until the propitious dawn of freedom, I will wash her feet in my own blissful tears, She is home.

Katherine says:

As we all breathe Hugo’s miraculous decoction, Fanny has abandoned any attempt to coyness, and Sarah’s hands wander free up to her chin when they kiss while I triple check the contours of her regaining carnality and I hurtle down her runnel for the first real time with a taste of sweet prowess. As it goes, she plays and tears off Sarah’s threads to rag on her kind jingleberries.

Gauthier has stopped telling his short encounter with his old comrade in arms Donovan at the Auction House because now they all watch the pleasant unravelling of Fanny until Camille entraps Sarah in another dance and bring her to the welcoming gents. She shoots diamonds in the blue of her eyes when she digs out the Knight’s sword out and eases it in her mouth. Hugo fumbles about Sarah’s derrière along with Camille who unbuttons his trousers.

On the bed this side of the room Fanny lays wide opened as I cajole her leaning head, the beryl green twins of her eyes resting in mine.

Katherine says:

A platoon of five assail Slimane’s private hair salon for it is time to proceed. He offers to buy the childish blond strands for a stupendous sum and so be it, but I demand that he designs a traditional short nape with a little length on top kind of boyish cut.

An Ethiopian assistant first washes the profuse mane and carefully combs it in order. Then, using his sparkling steel sharp tools so fast I cannot read what is happening, Slimane styles out a new Fanny, with a tantalising lily-white neck and a dashing kind of a skull.

Flapping the air with a long-bristles broom around the dizzy puppy, he executes his best war dance around the chair, tossing his pony tail all over, flashing a carnivorous smile on his long swarthy face, rolling his blazing chestnut eyes in contentment. In a drawer he fetches a fat batch of bills, counts a lot and shoves them into Fanny’s hand.

Under Hollywood shades, in a fuzzy grew print hoodie and a black icebreaker gym suit, she needs black high-laced combat boots to break out of all the dress codes she might have been described in, she’s exhilarated when she watches herself in the windows, she holds me so tight and her fresh mop titillates my cheek.

Gauthier says: 

Fanny’s a new person, that black body suit makes her as willowy as Sarah with a sylphic girly bum more in Kate’s magnetic field of lust; her bare feet on Camille’s carpets circulate a swarm of eager glances she understands so well she lazily quits the refuge of Kate’s bosom and let’s Sarah have her legs and feet. But the day has been hectic so she dozes out of her recovering body when we pull out the fine wool so as to anoint it. Quite auspiciously she’s far from the awareness to this realm when we lay the duvet on her dream. Hugo feels her pulse for some minutes and smiles as he strokes the dishevelled thatch on her head burrowed into the pillows.

Hugo says:

Sarah is visibly moved by the newcomer, her eyes sway at times as they did when Kate was lost; it makes her all the most beautiful as she stretches back on the armrest to battle my hungry tongue while the cunning Gauthier tastes another kind of dessert between her thighs slung apart. Camille knows her minute triggers and infuriates the sister droolberries; undressed at once she offers first her bum cheeks to the rakish chevalier, whose magic is already deep into Sarah’s nymph, so he may further his practice in lick-a-daisy before she crawls under the happy one and gobble my proud gentry.

Fanny dreams:

It’s the blaring zenith of summer, white and dry as a bucket of powdered lime, the heat hissing as high as the shrill of the cicadas in the olive grove. I am standing nude in my silver shoes trying to wipe the dust from my legs and my navel. A flayed lamb runs in the empty rooms, belching blood and watching me. I shoo it away with a bunch of withered lilies where from a flock of doves scatter and smash onto the ceiling forming clouds of wriggling blind snakes and silvery ropes entangling with my hair and lifting me through a flurry of frenetic fondling until claps of hands precipitate the knots into pebbles of pumice that tumble in a warm heap over me. Pushing the light stones aside, a gathering of blond scorpions needle my flossy rill and clatter together as dusty old peasants with thick mustaches peek through the bomb hole in the ceiling. My foot is caught in a shiny tight loop and I am drawn through the rubble to a long shaded corridor where the horse pulling me turns round and neighs causing a general hush; the bloody lamb cuddles along my hip and dies, flies swirl and echo under the vaults overran with stains in which I read faces and bodies and weird paraphernalia, acrobatic couplings of contorted chimeras against humans, children and undecipherable jumbles swarming with rolling eyes. Bullets shatter the windows as an warplane is hurled over the house and closes night. Horses with long light mane ramble across the long room and shy off me when a shaking heavy lorry blazing its headlights tramples next to my head; a soldier wearing some elaborate goggles over his face seizes me and tucks me away in his black and smelly jacket. I scent his armpit and my head tips over; I gather the silvery rope on my bosom and make myself as small as an angel hearing his heart pound and his breath pant.  His finely gloved hand searches for my head and pats it as he eases his shoulder for it. He is running up some stairs to a small round room with a straw bed; he lays me down in the leather jacket and covers my eyes with a sweaty kerchief. He licks my whole body like a cautious animal, he topples me over to softly ravage my defenseless rivulet and when he looks up again he has the face of a wolf and thick fur bursts out of his shirt. So am I too, then, covered with fawn and grey hair and giving way to his stabbing surge while biting his throat when the claws grip his face and the mighty beak of a great bird rip his eyes away. He runs frantically against the walls whiist the tower tumbles and the eagle grips me in the jacket and flies me to the rocks in the moonlight as the ruins blast with gunfire. The white stone is warm, I untie my only shoe left and coil the rope around my neck, wriggle into the torn leather jacket and look for the eagle; three blue flames float in the air and slowly back away, pulsating a tenuous ring of white light at my heart’s rhythm, I feel my slavery slit with my twitching fingers.

Camille says:

Deep inside this crystal we learn to call the soul, there is a truth we constantly measure against the knit of our otherwise shambolic lives. Fanny sleeps like a drowned angel, she has cast her last penny in the well and surrendered any wit to Kate’s, now she spins the threads of her poor skein in the unforeseen refuge of my home, scales every tear at the corner of her eye for bliss or despair when it blurs the stars.

Colonel Ranko Varadejc, Fanny’s tormentor, has been found dead with two bullets in his head near his family home in Bosnia. His car was entirely burnt. He was the father of three children. Doctor Theresa Novak was found hung to a tree near her house in Klis. Both had been hunted as war criminals. Arrests have been made based on data extracted from Vukan’s telephones, boat and homes. Fanny will be recorded as dead in Split’s hospital.

Fanny’s healing fast, Kate and Sarah play doll with her and she’s talented at letting them do; but now she will have to hear the final sentence of her past. She’s in bed with the girls when I ask her if she wants to hear the most important news; she clings to Kate’s shirt and pulls Sarah as a second wing. Only the death of Mrs Novak impacts her composure, she falls inanimate on Kate’s bosom and cries like a child, I fetch a few thick towels to wipe her beautiful face, and mine. The daylight fades, we let the night settle. She wants Kate’s mouth.

Hugo says:

I am told that Fanny’s testimony has knocked down a Macedonian mob operation across the Mediterranean and beyond; her phone is still alive in America although she was declared dead in Split.

Camille empathises forcefully with the little whore she once was, the Jewish aura of her own tragedy notwithstanding; she will excel in piecing the mosaic to life again, mend the splices through and through so as to nullify the scars as she herself did.

As a privilege granted, Dr Schubert has agreed to read a two-page letter about Fanny, in case he saw any appropriate suggestion given Fanny’s languages, through which, says I, a structural reset might untie the gamut of affects, with all due reference to professional responsibility.  (and no, Jolly Jester, I am not buying my way to Fanny’s arse, I already own it)

Sarah says:

Camille is troubled by sensing Fanny’s underlying terror, albeit she knows her house is safe on all counts. When the two honeybuns roll into slumberland, one’s head in the other’s neck, she dances me to her bed and strip me like old times.

She smells her own distinctive spellbinding tuberose, crafted by Hugo, mentally ornamented on her skin with fast flings of surprising harmonies, in the mood of linden flowers, lilac sigh or the drowning lotus from her pubis down. On such a day of keen emotion, her armpits suddenly allude to hemp tips and nettle.

Deep under the duvet, she unleashes over me her retained urges when a message rings and the timings says it is Far; he’s asking me to call him back at a given number. I call him while Camille broiders an arabesque with the tip of her tongue over me and even rummage my holy fount. It is a libertine dare she enjoys brashly so she follows me to the bathroom where I could have withdrawn firstly.

Far takes his caressing voice when he hears how thankful we are for the sake of Fanny’s. He asks a little more about Hugo whose name has come up and I might as well tell him his daughter is a filthy debaucher when, in spite of the skilful torture about my misty bud, I produce the impeccable portrait of our godly mentor, sparing Far’s share of my beating heart. According to ritual, he carries on in our Danish vernacular before I even notice thus Camille’s meticulousnesses become incestuous in me, although Far and I trade magic signals like he held my hand in a hayfield along the shore.

Katherine says:

In the bathroom, I find her, deserted and hazy for a few seconds, then visibly she wakes layers of sentience and eventually rests her gaze in my soul. As I need to pee, I offer my hands and dance a move aside, intuitively checking the waters in the bowl for colour and myself peeing over, nosing her healing womb in its fuzzy forelock.  She has used an expensive shower gel and gives me chills of reminiscent passion because I have trailed that one before on my best Kettelær toy-soldier’s body all along our flirty chases. Around her sylphic volute it shuffles another garland of incitements tuned along a blond keynote, peachy as her timid breasts whereas the brainy blue Sarah distilled an afterthought of blackberry leaf. How would I not swoon over both delights in one play? The conspiracy of a shared folly is rooted into the cluster of my lust since probably the Venetian shenanigan and Fanny must have sensed the flurry of wavelengths amongst the household; however tamed by compassion and respect towards her; but weren’t we all schooled in the grand bed of Camille, anyhow?

Using the same gel and Sarah’s sponge, she cuddles my body under the shower with all possible liberties, and she knows. Crouching between my obediently parted legs, she fucks me straight with her whole hand until I dangerously pant, then tastes my sheepish philanderer and, having shut the rain, offers me a devastating smile.

Later, in the aquamarine tiled kitchen, we mingle fruit and yogurt with flakes when Sarah sneaks in and greets us with a ladleful of innuendo; as I grasp the loose end of her peignoir’s belt, she stands exposed to Fanny’s unabashed amusement and paw, a sway of her hips meeting Sarah’s who begs for a kiss. Proud of my handling, I gently disrobe the blessed orphan and read a swift shiver in my lickerish mister’s eyes. Fanny lengthily polishes her sweet abs and twiddles the boonberry sisters most equally, inasmuch her head doesn’t fall under Sarah’s stubborn tongue-wrestling.

I breathe in Fanny’s foppish ear a litany of lewd compliments while I wank her sensitive back-knot then Sarah embraces both of us in her inkish blue robe and we hum over the head of the shorn angel.

Sarah says: 

I’m fiddling with the gamine’s feet on my lap when Camille croons in, a turban onto her wet hair. She needs combing so she sits next to us after having opportunely petted Fanny, innocently offered to her slyness. As she admires the revived complexion on the Tanagra figure, and leisurely takes advantage of her morning arousal, we comb gold around her reassuring face.

She inquires if Fanny will care to stay live with her as family or take the smaller maid’s room upstairs when security settles. I tell her that, a few years back, I lived upstairs first then moved down in the grand nest of Mistress Stern who never questioned my liberties and taught me the keys to the noble art of gold mining. She says she has understood our life ways since Kate almost raped her in the shop and she has been raised a skilled harlot anyway. I slyly add that I used the garret for my occasional shags, when I wouldn’t risk to let a wolf in the fold.

Camille’s wealth of hair smells of sunny chamomile, lime and honey. She embraces the beaming runaway elf and says in her face that she wants her, that she knows it, and she lets her hand wander again in her dinky tuft.

Fanny raves:

That was some run-up, but it seems real I jumped into a pond of lilies and the fragrances are rich, no funny smells or nasty thorns, only spooks and fairies wooing in tune around my arse. I wanted that haircut anyhow.

I wish I kept my three pixies lovers since they gambol prettily with one another already, as far as I can see. I might try the bright knight and the Godfather if there’s fun.

Kate is different now from the light headed princess who tumbled me over in the shop booth. she’s appeased, although she gropes fast with sly hands; her eyes show no thrill of emotional lapses as I had perceived on that mellow afternoon; she’s bold now, and all the more lovable.

She wants to share me with her smart buddy Sarah, sublime ambiguous with swanky hands and feet to promise the dancing dizzy spell; her narrow face with erased cheekbones; her straight-up little nose; her swift eyebrows and elevated forehead; that, crowned with thick black curls and the reigning blue shards of her loyal eyes would be steel cold scary without her truly childish pouty lips I surrendered to, like forever.

The Queen bee is a tad older, with rounder hips above slender legs like an adult grace with the flat belly of a warrior. Her eyes nail you, or not. She devoured me from toes to nose and she said welcome pressing the back of my hand on her cheek.

Katherine says: 

These half-peaches feel botticellific under the poplin shirt, a wicked hoard I can cover with my hand, or both. She still smells of the quivering meadows Hugo has devoted in the remedy we still dab on the pale child.

There is a privileged arrangement with Dr Méant on Sunday night, obtained through an intermediation by my own gold watch Dr Schubert. As long as she rests in my neck, there is no alarm under the subdued manners, she likes skin as much as we do and she is prettily thirsty at the bloomer wells.

As the weather was lively, we walked to Le Bon Marché for bags of new attire to make her feel first hand. Sarah and me went liberal with easygoing accessories and lingerie, uncompromising  about quality and genuineness. I caught Sarah testing panties with her hands in it, Fanny is the fitting room Madonna.

I guess our men’s eyes have already been caught by her cheeky spade of a bum, my jaws tickle, so much I feel like biting in it, or else, as she slides into jeans and leggings. Sarah harvests stockings and socks in all exalted threads of refinement, and she knows. As with the whole loot, Fanny will hold the childish grant of breaking the flattering seals of the newness.

In city life, shoes are essential tokens of human rapport. Instinctively, they root the body upon verticality and balance; they also tease the onlooker by the the mastery of the sheathing they glorify the foot with, but they warn about which speed you will walk away at. Flats are paragon to the feet of free youth; heels are for dependant puppets and cunning whores. Only did Ginger Rogers move rightly on bespoke contraptions designed mainly for heightening her at Fred’s hand. A smaller woman of appealing proportions can move swell on sneakers, hi-tops, loafers, regular boots or the sublime K. Jacques sandals! Therefore, we jostle Fanny’s choice of footwear in the like of three pairs of coloured basic sneakers and one of shiny black preppy loafers; she already has the boots on. One last attention is for grey Finnish felt slippers, should we look for flannel pyjamas, too?

Raised in the climate mildness of the Croatian coast, Fanny will dread the Parisian cold season. When asked what coat she would have never worn before, she chooses a Danish ethnic inspired multi-layered anorak after we had frowned against any fur. Sarah wants to offer personally a bronzish tweed saharienne with deep pockets, then we know where to ferret for knitted wools and make a killing of jumpers.

I reckon she will need a choice of casual sleek Japanese stationery and pens, she can’t, in the least, refound her soul without writing miles of improspection, as Sarah names that. What she will tell the gold watch will stay in it; whatever shall seep out in her dreams; or slumber trips, if she will.

Sarah says:

The day waned in the mid season scent of the nearby park when the four of us walked to the posh lair of Dr Méant. Unwavering in our intent to escort our girl, we had books, cookies and a Thermos of oolong.

Dr Méant is a thin man in his sixties, wearing the babyboomer black cord elegantly as a signal of laid back starkness. In a seductive tone of voice, he greeted and wanted to guess whom was the concerned one, held Kate’s hand a tad longer but called Fanny by her name. He lead us to a plush salon of green velvet and polished oak, subtly lit through silk shades, ask all telephones be put in silent mode and invited Fanny behind double doors.

In the truly luxurious silence, we gathered together in a deep settee; Camille in the middle had brought an eldritch Japanese graphic novel so we read it along while warming our hands in different hidden places. Fortunately, the intrigue was intensely intricate with cleverly threaded clues as to which inferable ghost would disperse the poison; the drug; the ultimate lie. Depending on the ongoing twist of the narrative, alliances appeared, excuses for heated kisses and further groping. The ghosts held strong, with the help of tea, into the night, until Fanny was brought back, half hazy, from the practitioner’s den. The Doctor asked if we would be available the next night and we warmly agreed, showing the wittiest of ourselves as if we had passed an audition. We tidied up our gentle mess and walked out in a huggy crew, keeping the silence as light as the moon.

A long black car carried us to Camille’s where we listened to celestial music in the dark, picking chocolates and drinking white tea. Fanny kept the three of us close, bits of clothing fell all around the grand bed before we fell asleep like a replete litter; she bore no expression, she asked Kate to come with her to the bathroom, she looked down.

Camille says:

On the day after the first visit to Dr Méant’s, I woke up in the middle of a battle field bestrewed with adorable body parts, Soma FM streaming long chords into dawn. As I stood up on my way to the loo, nifty muzzles raised from under the quilts and soon followed me in line. Kate held Fanny’s dear bonce while she peed and Sarah hurried them, in need, eventually leaking in the washbasin with a fine smile.

Hugo showed up during breakfast, not in the least jaded by a court of half-nudities; he shortly asked about Dr Méant but made clear he wasn’t asking any kind of report, then said Fanny needed a proper passport photo before her appointment with the Services across the Seine. She could do that with her servants in the afternoon.

He cornered Sarah, made her put down her cup and cuddled her neck softly while untying her robe halfway; she recapitulated the course of events and wished for a playful reunion soon. He then left, en route to Amsterdam for a few days.

That was a happy flash in the shower and Fanny beamed and started the pee contest; she fingered her way into the merry vale as we shampooed Kate, so I dared a slippery finger in her available ass and knew she liked it.

The sun was bright, we arranged to go to the offices early, stopped at a store big enough to house a photo booth and walked, Fanny wearing a black cap and her shades in her new saharienne. At the given address we were met by a drab grey suit and led to some large office, having crossed no one in the building. Soon, our two acquaintances showed up and proudly executed the magic, dirtying Fanny’s delicate fingers and scanning her face once more for the chip inside the passport, then the youngest took all the material in the next room and came back pronto with a French European passport and all the paperwork attesting to her new nationality. The older officer explained slowly in French that there was no trace left of her old self anywhere and Miss Köstner was duly registered at the office of foreign-born citizen with her specifics and DNA they had sampled at the first meeting. A tad bedazzled she gave her freshly washed hand to the two men and burst in tears in Kate’s shoulder.

I discussed matter-of-factly the legal details of my new tenant, trying my best at showing off deep gratitude, tingled by the sensation of having lived through a thriller story, pulling my seductive strings to make the two officers relax, both coveting my artistically displayed legs. Sarah saw what I was doing.

Armed with all this, tucked in my bag, we were led to another entrance and driven away in an unidentified car to Charfignies, on our side of town, were the layered cake confirmed our survival and hot chocolate curled up Fanny’s lips; on the low sofas, she straightened up two or three times like a rescued bird almost ready to fly. But she remained gently clung to Kate’s side, though accepting sly touches of avid Sarah.

We walked home through the closing park, I locked up the papers in a safe, showing Fanny where they were.

Katherine says:

Needless to prattle about my own soul wrestlings, Fanny boats her makeshift raft down the obscure stifling streams since absolutely nowhere in time, then , in amongst any other place Venezia, the moist deviation de La Mandola, she moored her naïve line upon me, only back afloat under my thin sails, to breathe a mere future through my eyes?

Long years of an horrifying marriage, a bag of filth over her blond head, in the whirling sphere of silence or the hiss of crazed insects, disowned of a simple self, cobbling together evasive images around an espied shell and now rest, root hastily on a tatter of love.

Millions of them, all over this shamed planet, used and abused like sacks of pain, trapped in all the voids of human morals, sisters in agony scattered on the dumps waiting for the bulldozers of universal vanity.

Fanny, shorn pretty in your virgin haberdashery, the newcomer at the discreet phalanstery, the garden  of free slumbers.

A master listener will make you untangle the threads in your upended soul, if I would call it that. He will let you spread out on the crystal plate the lines of your pure desire inside out and over. He will alleviate the questions, soothe the burns for the while and make you float on your own gravity center. Then you will collapse into a pile of sand, your lungs will hurt, you will scream like death. You will open your eyes and retrieve the dimensions; the only new feeling will be that of self conscience, and the urge to cry on somebody, let it be me, Fanny.

Sarah says:

Kate and Fanny have confided together in bed while Camille and me surfed the waves. My Far sent a love letter with the demand that we come to New York for new year, promising to be here.

We reach the Doctor’s house in it’s cosy impasse and besiege the same comfy salon, with the same recommendations, the warning that it might last longer, and permission to use a vast kitchen across a corridor.

Kate has brought a book by Cornelis Fantin, “Chandourles”, that Hugo gave her, thinking of her own story with Simon. Camille takes me along into art magazines and strokes my flitty dots over my shoulder until I pass out.

Ivo Castorp, Eilbert Kursai and me sail the Øresund, under the bridge, on Ivo’s sailboat “Hereby”. I have known them in Falsterbø and I know why they offered me a ride. Great patches of blue streak the midsommer skies, the wind is haunted with calls and howls afar; I am all nude and Ellbert caresses my rump complimenting the colour of my skin. I refuse the beer he offers, he pushes me on an unknown diagonal black and red flag, he kisses me like a bunch of lilies with frenzy while he tries to shag me with his small stiff dipstick. Ivo licks and bites my feet and steers my legs up to own my arse. Ellbert has found a way into my navel and pants as I enjoy both manhoods in my frantic womb. My head dives as I realise the boat is sinking, rammed by a huge white ship populated by a troupe of dishevelled monkeys wearing black hats and jewellery throwing blue money on us. Ivo still in me swims for both of us while Ellbert wanks on my face, his legs beating wide. A school of silver herrings swim along my legs and body, curl up my neck as I fall into a garden of corals and the boys have lost me, argue with the horny monkeys. Purple and green butterflies quiver out of the riotous bush of red twigs; they gather on my glittering scarf and tickle around my open navel from which blooms a crystalline baby jellyfish with one blinking eye of changing colours. The monkeys have pinned the butterflies to their hats and masturbate on enormous black tortoises. Kate drifts by in a disorderly armour of abalone shells, holding a small Fanny inside a thorny crib; she picks the shy staring corolla and gives it to amused Fanny who makes a costume with it, placing the new eye inside her navel. The monkeys rattle their bling as they gather around the cradle and bleed on the prickles with great laughs that agitate the herrings around my neck which eyes have turned into pearls. Her hair floats around her face when I embrace Kate and feel the child inside my womb singing high stirring notes. We are carried away in the black and red flag through a fog bank; the monkeys all sport yellow brollies and fly a long board with technical lights and signals. Still tight on Kate, I hold her head at the tip of my fingers and feel wings grow on my back and unfurl into a great Fanny angel laughing at the monkey who throw their bling and drool. Ivo and Ellbert call from the Hereby deck and hook my feet. I won’t let go of Kate and Fanny so they cast a white sail and embark us like we were wet laundry; the monkeys climb the rigging. Now they share Fanny and Kate on the bunk and they laugh as the monkeys sack the boat. I look at my midriff and the eye winks as I lift a thin veil adorned with iridescent fish scales; I have an elegant penis erected like a schoolboy.

Camille tries to wake me up with a kiss on the forehead. I understand she pulled a plaid over me in the couch. Dr Méant smiles as he holds Fanny’s arm, he apologises for the very late hour and let us call for a car; he walks us to his door; in the corridor I see the mocking monkeys on a framed print in their yellow suits and black hats; they clink glasses of stout in a London pub.

Dawn is looming as the heavy car glides through the empty city. Fanny cuddles on Kate’s shoulder, and I fondle Camille’s pearl necklace as she rummages under my clothes impatiently.

Katherine says: 

She has collapsed in a baby-like sleep, I had to hold her tight to feel her breathe, now she’s been cruising the galaxies all day; I heard live murmurs through the doors, Sarah crept in the bed and I shushed her; later, she brought a butler’s tray with tea and heavenly pastries; she even obtains to lick my cherry beside the sleeping child; she smells an unusual flowery powdered whim; she has been savaged all over by Camille.

Fanny wears a Little Nemo printed cotton flannel pyjama I already wore when I stayed in the house. She stretches out like a kitten and looks at me, vacant. I go fetch some drink and start a kettle in the kitchen, I know she is still amazed by pear juice. She’s back from the bathroom, I sit and my hands slither up her back as she pushes her crotch in my face.

She’s hungry, I have another breakfast with her, she marvels at fruit macarons. We shower and she is still excited to wash her head so easily whereas I ask her help to shampoo mine. We face the flow long enough to conjure the lurking tears, she’s healing. I caress her gently, she responds; she fondles my holiness craftily and gives tongue like a wild teenager.

Collecting my spirits, I kindly press her to dress, she searches through her bags of novelties and I explore the drawers , sniffing many different moods of Sarah’s, keeping my outfit as light as a whim. She dons a long jade cashmere jumper and black cotton boxers. carrying the treats, we run to the music of windy spheres and are greeted by the team and Gauthier who raises up from Sarah’s knees. He is literally enthralled and dives down to Fanny’s feet.

I ask for softer lights; Fanny climbs on me in a large mohair armchair, Sarah perches on the armrest and tells us about her dream in Dr Méant’s couch with flair, for sheer fun. She titillates Gauthier’s ribs with her feet until he handles them as he knows. We engage in a bantering round robin about  the yellow monkeys until she reveals their presence in the corridor, which doesn’t wipe the rap out. Fanny sips a half-smile as she gets our game and trades her feet to the wondered boy who mixes the keys deftly.

Camille sits on the sturdy armchair’s headrest behind Sarah and grills her about the boat ride, confess her feat; yes, she was an underage stowaway on Ivo’s boat on the pretext she wished to see her childhood house in Taarbæk from the sea. But Ivo sailed a motorboat, with a cabin at the bow. She had admired Ivo’s shoulders before, when he dared her to show she wasn’t a boy at all, and wondered how big his boner would eventually become in her. She lowered her eyes when he pushed her down the three steps down and unbuttoned her pants while Ellbert watched from the helm.  She was tall already and frail; her skin remained pale in the Baltic sun and that aroused Ivo as she soon found. He played beautifully, scattering her mind in the heaving, handing her over to his pal, and again. They went as far as the brand new Øresundbroen but they were at least occupied; They were skilled sailors so the boat was not rammed but she sure was along the endless twilight.

Sarah’s subdued tone of voice seduces all of us while Camille denudes the cunning charmer. Fanny reaches for her tryberries and is rewarded a moon fairy smile which is at once stolen by Camille’s avid mouth.

Then my escapee rises from me and soughs she wants to hold Gauthier’s “kurac”, his stiff handle she feels in his trousers. Rather bemusedly, I help her get the toy and the rest of the boy who kneels and waits for a kiss he jauntily gets. She goes down on all fours and licks the galant tow bar like a skillful butterfly meanwhile I contemplate no better part for me than intromit my tongue into her sylphic rill and see it bloom open.

Fanny considers and bethinks the toy’s parts, praising the model and size as a slick harlot in her right mind and sussing out that she is maddening the petit Marquis, capsizes over the edge of the seat and leads the quivering swordsboy into fulfilment. They cavort grandly with their eyes locked while I wander my lips wherever on her she responds, well after the crises has booned and flowed, joined in by the other two bawdy crooks until the victim faints out.

Sarah says: 

The dissipated quintet has entertained my evil plexus but left my own dainty sluice wanting, all the more so that Camille has harassed its edgings like a fanatic during the whole morning. I can revive the lessened stud covered in froth, I suckle it clean and niggle it’s head awake long enough to let me thrust it inside and I am so moist it wiggles and resumes in my lower octave; I let my fuses blow and I see a gang of yellow dressed monkeys laughing.

I resurface in the cloud of heated exhalations feeling Camille’s towel wiping my arse and else. Everybody smells animal dew and spares another shower for the while. Früben of the Marché Saint-Germain delivers a train of gluttony we display on the ottoman for a true Roman scene. The delivery boy had a free glimpse on the way to the kitchen.

Fanny shows no worry at the center of the debauchery, she spreads her limbs in a deliberate body language and still clings to Kate’s neck for any explanations. Between draughts of kefir, of which Camille’s maid brews large pots, I court her sly rosy chink to her obvious complacency. In a respite of sluttishness, Kate asks her about the long trip in Dr Méant’s power; she shrugs vaguely and muses that she could not say if he raped her or not, so close was he into her depiction of her education; she felt she had readily hatched out like the Captain ordained, only the wind was higher, the skies were lighter and she sensed all the ashes being hoovered off. Together with the Doctor they had ascertained the clues she fostered about the real world beyond the dry rubble of the olive groves, as shown in Mrs Novak’s magazines and books, the television set being connected only to a DVD player with no other choice than the Captain’s porn; they had mentally erected a model of the house, then visited every nook in it and collected the rags and sherds on the bed, fetched the lighter on the cooker and set fire to the heap; the blaze would not affect her, she was as nude as we saw now but fresh as a rosebud in a disappearing universe, leaving her in a pitch-black infinite next to the Doctor in his armchair waving his shiny black pen. He asked her about her feet, her hands and all I knew about her body and the way to treat it. He made her feel a star inside her chest, next to her brave heart, pulsating colours and gem-like shapes twirling into the aggrandised reality of the rich room where they conversed.

We hold our breath but she’s as casual as a young strumpet explaining how she woke up on the lavish divan, bedraggled and cheerful. The Doctor told her she should follow her plan whatever it led to now, because she had chosen her shelter herself and no alarm was raised anymore, hearing her account. He granted her access to his personal phone at any time in case of an emergency  and would be pleased to meet her again in a couple of months. I recall the pitiful raggedy Kate we brought back from Dr Schubert’s, some light years back, but the dead had played another card, then; I watch her, and I read the blue-gray urge of Simon’s presence in her eyes, bet the scarred angel will appear soon among us again.

Gauthier says: 

One of so many has jumped over the sewer to our lucky fountain, she is hardy as the phœnix and pretty as a dawn; she fucks like an orchid and flies like an egret. For the while, one worships her narrow arched feet amongst the varieties frisking about these carpets; ten little monkeys fidgeting at ease in graceful oblivion.