We All Bring Something Different to the Table
So consider for a moment what is represented by this primary union of individuals within the Home for Wayward Souls.
Ash is in his early thirties. He is handsome and physically fit. He represents a fusion of theologian and showman, an entertainer who desires to bring higher consciousness and spiritual union to an audience. He is as drawn to providing exposure to a diverse range of ideas and influences as he is to eschewing dogma and doctrine.
His wife Kali is a little older and in her early forties although she looks much younger. She is the Earth Mother; the high priestess of Sacred Sex and cunning practitioner of the knowledge and wisdom of Wicca. She is soft and feminine and her body is a lavishly lurid testament to the sexual superiority of women and the power of the Moon.
Merle is the preternaturally tall lanky, and enormous embodiment of all things masculine although he also possesses an occult fascination with women’s apparel, especially their undergarments. He is a shaman, a chemist, a botanist and archetypical prototype of the aboriginal peoples of what is now called America. He is predominantly Apache although he admits to a white Spanish ancestor far back in his lineage. He is the magician and medicine man of the family; the sorcerer and brujo of the chemistry of the body and mind. He is also in his early thirties and the third leg of the triad of Ash, Kali, and himself.
Suki is forty; the child-bride of Charles. She is the unlikely combination of a powerful Eastern-European warlock and a Japanese Tsukimono-suji (white witch). Once a lean and athletic hard-body, a seemingly endless series of health problems, childbearing and the complacency of a decade and a half of marriage left her overweight and out of shape as her libido took a nosedive.
Because of their parents’ association with each other, she had known Charles all her life and had a life-long crush on him despite the fact that he treated her more like a baby sister until years later when they met at a family reunion.
They both had been “swingers” both before and after they fell in love as adults until she seemed to lose all interest in sex.
Charles’ infatuation with Jennifer had reawaked her from her long winter’s hibernation as she exercised and dieted her way back to fitness before she met Gerard, who reawakened her sexuality and vitality as well as opening her eyes to the benefits of Polyamory, despite his monolithic desire to possess her completely.
Charles was the worldly designated elder of their family of eight. He had a rapacious desire for all manner of knowledge with an uncanny ability to “connect the dots” of seemingly unrelated semantic memory and vast personal experiences.
He had either received training or worked at one point or another in so many different and seemingly unrelated occupations that it was difficult to imagine how he had managed to acquire so much experience in his sixty-plus years, especially because few people would have guessed him to be over fifty. He looked distinguished and mature despite his compulsively iconoclastic and mischievous behaviors.
He was Ash’s right hand man and jack of all trades who not only helped engineer and bring to fruition many of Ash’s wildest schemes, but frequently came up with a great deal of creative inspiration of his own. He was a catalyst for almost everything that took place within the Home for Wayward Souls.
He often described himself as a “pervert’s pervert” and “something of an acquired taste like Scotch whiskey, Cuban cigars and anal sex” which was a marked contrast to Suki’s almost instantly likeable, outgoing and social nature.
For the last eight years he had worked as a telemarketer. It was supposed to just be a summer job until something better came along. Because of his involvement with The Home for Wayward Souls, he really didn’t care if something did…for the first time in many years, what he did for a living…for money…was not the most important work in his life, no matter how good he got at doing it.
Darcy was a thoroughly Southern thirty-something gal who had been around the block a few times, the sadder-but wiser woman who had risen above her working-class background of alcoholism, and the seemingly endless line of men who would limit and betray her until she got straight and became first a veterinary technician, then went on to college to become an animal behaviorist. She was still working on her master’s degree when she met and fell in love with Mark while working at the Habitat.
She was tall, blonde, thin and pretty. Even pregnant. Being almost six feet tall herself, she was very much attracted to Merle, who was the only man she had ever been with who towered over her. She became infatuated with his enormous uncircumcised cock and the way it made her feel like he was going to split her apart as she encouraged him to violate her savagely. Her advanced state of pregnancy lately had required considerable discretion on Merle’s part as well as hers.
And just to round out their perspective as well as teach them how to communicate without words we have Frederick, a Chimpanzee/Bonobo hybrid who insisted on being called a Bonanzee. His DNA structure had somehow crossed the abyss of non-human primates and closely resembled the first known hominids that later became Man.
Even before he was given The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, he was the most sentient of primates other than man, and to all knowledge, the only one of his kind.
He taught them of the chimpanzee legend of the Origin of Man and how they had made the Great Eurasian Leap Forward during the Upper Paleolithic Revolution by way of interbreeding with aliens who came to Earth to give them something that resembled The Knowledge, thereby imparting sentience to “The Talking Monkeys”.
This group of eight had been a self-sustaining family of sorts for months now, long before their group marriage would have seemed to close the circle. As much as all of them had engaged in various polyamorous adventures on their own before they became The Eight, including a great deal of casual swinging, they had become a close-knit but closed society that had not been breached for nearly a year.
Once again, we see how rules are made to be bent, if not broken. For every absolute, there is an exception out there waiting to make itself known and with which there will come a day of reckoning.
Anastasia had described herself as “…bent, but not broken” as she had also described Suki, her new lover. Even before they met, they both sensed a chemistry between them that is not often seen in ostensibly heterosexual women that most definitely preferred men but were not afraid to acknowledge what seemed to come so naturally to them.
Perhaps not surprisingly, they quickly added Charles to the mix, although he jokingly remarked how he was simply there “to lend an air of respectability to this otherwise unsavory and disreputable group.”
Anastasia was a retired (disabled) ob/gyn nurse who was trying to break into free-lance journalism. Fortunately, her husband supported her efforts, lest she starve, as assignments were few and far between…especially ones that actually paid spendable currency of the realm.
She started doing “research” regarding the Kink/Fet community for a bi-line she was trying to sell to a magazine publisher because somewhere she had read that one should write about what you know, and what she didn’t already know she was curious and anxious to learn.
As they all lived in Florida and were close enough to represent less than a day’s drive, a “friend of a friend” had told her about Charles, Suki, and their activities and shenanigans and thought it might be a good way to “get inside” their community.
Her paternal grandfather was Sicilian and her grandmother was Lakota Oglala and Brule Sioux. She described her mother’s family as “a bowl of mixed nuts” from all over Europe and South America.
She had lived with her Sioux grandmother since she was twelve years old after her parents divorced and learned the ways of the medicine woman while in her care and considered her ethnicity to be Indian, but did not like to discuss her childhood except for her memories of her Grandmother.
She disliked ethnic labels and stereotypes in general and about Sicilians and Indians in particular, and for years was likewise very closed about sharing her knowledge and practice of Wicca, preferring to be an anonymous solitary practicing witch.
She had a lion’s mane of thick dark hair that she often dyed with henna because she liked the way it brought out the red highlights.
She had the deepest, darkest, most soulful eyes Charles had ever seen. They were kind, loving, sad, and mischievous almost all at once. You could lose yourself in them if you weren’t careful, and she frequently encouraged many to revel in reckless abandon, like the imp of the perverse she embraced.
She was ever-so slightly full of figure, the most mature of them, soft of heart and immense of soul, so much like Kali, that it wasn’t long before she had charmed the Dark Mother too . She was a woman’s woman in every sense no matter how much she liked “the boys” as well.
To watch her care for Darcy either as a nurse or as a mother to a mother-to-be was to give witness to something at once both beautiful and primordial enough to make you smile just to cover the lump in your throat (and if that’s not enough to bring a tear to your eye, I’d say you’ve got spit for blood).
Anastasia was the lioness of the pride, and Darcy was the cheetah with cub. To see them together you’d be convinced they had been cats together before in a previous life. It had been agreed she would serve as mid-wife when the time came.
Charles described Suki and Anastasia discovering each other as being “…like suddenly finding a ripe peach in your refrigerator that you never even knew you had when you were really hungry and would have settled for half a microwaved burrito if one had been there..”
The women encouraged and energized each other in a way that inspired and provoked Charles in ways he had not experienced in many years.
For the three of them, this was heaven. Since weekends were best for the three of them, it had become accepted that Anastasia was their mutual “plus one” for any activities at The Home for Wayward Souls, and she was instantly accepted by virtue of Charles and Suki’s endorsement with the understanding that at least for now, she was their guest.
When she would come to visit she would move in for no more than three days at a time. She said she had good reasons for her seventy-two hour honeymoon curfew, but never got around to really explaining them.
They were generally too busy until they were too exhausted to get around to such discussions, and by the time they were ready, she was already “gone like a cool breeze….”
“Leave them gasping for breath and begging for more before they even know where you came from or where you went…a little mystery is good for the both of them…they have security and familiarity, and I have spontaneity and the enigma of all the women behind the all the veils.”
“I am the other woman that both of them seek because I know of what they dream and know that they will love me when I give them my very self, spun from the stuff of which their dreams are made.”
Anastasia was not boasting. If all went well, she would be back for good one day, and then they could discuss her former reasons at length. Once she had gotten “inside” she no longer wanted to go anywhere else.
And it was good…like the way God said at the end of each day when he said: “… And it was good…” …it was very, very good.
No matter how much they brought to their table, there was plenty of room, with a place always set for Isaiah, lest no wayward traveler go hungry or without shelter during this their time of feasting upon all manner of things.
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