Touch: A Fable {Short Story}

Her childhood was spent in a remote coastal island off the Agean sea, with a father who fished on the waters and drank like a fish while on land. The nearest neighbor was 3 miles away. A cranky wrinkled old woman who couldn’t hear very well and believed everyone who came in the vicinity were after her bag of exquisite rose colored shells.

She grew up with salt water, shells and the sponges that floated in. With deft and strength her nimble fingers would allow, she’d grind, shape and file the shells, shred and mixed the sponges into large columns of art. The sand was her refuge. The water her medium and the shells stood tall and regal  cementing them all together. In the setting sun, the sculptures rose, like vestiges of her thoughts and time.

He had appeared out of nowhere one evening. A strong aquiline nose with a pair of dark shell horn glasses on his square face. She first saw him next to one of her many pillars. A strong form unlike any other she’s seen before. Spellbound, she watched.

He moved slightly. Bending forward and leaning in slightly as he traced the crests and the valleys of the surprisingly rough surface. He knelt to look at the base, the way it rose from the sand, the intricacy of the engineering feat. He moved from one structure to the other, gentle, subtle, observing, grasping, marveling and digesting.

She watched. In a trance. It was a dance. His movements, fluid and precise, subtle and firm. She had forgotten to breathe, and gasped as he came close.

Beautiful.

Powerful.

Overwhelmingly aching.

He was now a few feet away, and he looked up at her. Straight into her eyes.

A dance.

The kind that hearts do when no one is watching: the quick staccato, the gentle jazz, and the the heightened salsa. The urgency of the hip-hop in the opulence of the ballroom. Incongruent but in rhythmic harmony.

His eyes roved. Fiercely dark, exploring and sure. The eyebrow arched, with a smile hovering his lips, mimicking the one her hair made at her throat. Eyes locked, they moved closer. The sand making way, without a rustle, the toes drowning in the grains, and rising up with every shuffle.

Plush. Not unlike the excitement they felt within and between.

He stopped. His palm resting on the pillar next to him.

Eyes still locked, she moved closer. Raising her arm to rest beside his.

It was a dance of the fingers now.

Forefinger inching towards the thumb, the retracting of the pinkie, the slight hairs on his forearm arrested in their form. The want and need now mingled heavily into a thick mass of desire. The kind that can be quenched guardedly. Simple and smooth, one wrong move and the dance would stop mid-way. To treasure the moment, to freeze it and revel in it.

The charge. The electricity. The dance. The fingers. The eyes. The breath, or the lack thereof. The eyes. The fingers. The dance. The magnetism. The charge.

..and they touch.

In the dusk that engulfed the pillars, the sea, the wind and the shells, while the rest of them watched over in hushed silence and curiosity

the touch of the fingers, they made love.