The Semelparous Lover Who Saved It All for Me

Walking home from work, I decided to grab a drink at the Heaver’s Beaver, a bar across the street from my office building. It had been a blubbery day of slow work shoveling papers into one of the clappers — thin chalk-like electrical men whose consumption of discarded paper helped fuel the city’s power grid. It was exhausting work, but it needed to be accomplished by women like me whose feminine touch helped to facilitate the digestive process through certain pheromonal interactions releasing relaxation endorphins.

At the bar, I ordered a flixelbab and tequila mix, which gave my eyeballs the tangible fizzies to help me relax. I normally wasn’t interested in meeting men or anyone else at the bar, and the amount of times they’d propositioned me in the past was enough to inspire me to maintain a tunnel vision contained to the TV as the Sportstick players hit each other on the screen with their masculine hick sticks and balls.

That day would be different, despite my constipated reservations, as I looked over to the right and spotted a man walking in with the brightest head of sun-yellow hair and glowing neon-green eyes I’d ever seen. His cheeks had the largest bounty of plug holes I’d ever seen, so impressive were they that I felt sweat drip down my neck to my chest and belly before traveling back up my spine.

He sat on the opposite end of the bar, and whether or not he was meeting anyone there was unclear as he ordered his drink from the bartender, who promptly transformed into a large purple lava lamp upon seeing the man — an appropriate reaction to seeing someone so visually incendiary.

I couldn’t help but stare, and this made me guilty as I imagined that most were tempted to do the same, his cheek holes enough to draw you in like suction vessels pulling your gaze until you’re lost and hypnotized in black voids. He sipped at his orange-milk drink, bioluminescent eyes so sulked in depression that I didn’t understand what could be the cause. How someone so appealing could be so miserable seemed unfathomable as we sat on opposite emotional and physical poles, despite my perceivably miserable day at the clapper mill.

I turned back to watch the Sportstick game, which saw the two offending teams beating the sole defending team 34 to -15. The game was in its 16th quarter and three players had been decapitated by rudding sticks, halftime sideline funerals in progress. It was a dismal turnout to a dismal day, but I found solace whenever I glanced over at the man nursing his drink, cheek holes flexing, as I found comfort and a need to remove his visible discomfort.

Eventually I looked over and I noticed one of his bright headlights looking back at me. His solemn scowl morphed into a smile, then a bare grin as he put down his drink, which splashed all over the bar before evaporating. My heart skipped several beats as the man kept smiling, and I found myself magnetized in some ethereal way to him. I put down my own drink and walked over to him.

“Hello, here I am, Gregina Gorinthalize,” I introduced, holding out my neck, which he slicked with his index finger to form a “V.”

“Victor Vincentizomente,” he responded with a Maltese drawl. I felt my breasts melt with tingles.

“Sexy name.”

“Yours as well. I would love to make love to it alone.”

I giggled, my tongue briefly crawling out of my face to slick my forehead and make it shiny for the luscious Victor.

“Very limber tongue as well,” he crooned to the tune of a Taylor Swift song I couldn’t place.

“Mmhmm.”

“What brings you here?” he asked, leaning in.

“Just drinking after work,” I said.

“There’s something special about you,” he mentioned, “but I can’t quite place it.”

“I don’t know what’s so special about me.”

He leaned in even more, those eyes turning from green to fiery yellow to match his hair. “I sense something divine. I feel it in your everything.”

Unsure of what to say, I blushed and felt the blood spill from my own three cheek holes.

He was quick to grab his napkin and hold them up to the holes. “Oops, you’re making a little mess here.” His touch was pure, warm and soft. It was enough to stop the cheek-bleed in its tracks.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you come back to my place and we can discuss more about your ‘specialness.’”

“Oh-okay,” I muttered, making sure to prevent my cheeks from leaking more blue-green innardic fluid.

He paid for my drink and I was too smitten with him to even question going home with this man whom I knew nothing about apart from his delicious name and aura.

We arrived at his apartment, a penthouse, and he had me sit beside him as he poured me a glass of pigs’ wine.

“In the bar back there, I sensed something about you unlike any woman I ever encountered from the shorelines of Utero to the outermost rim of Intolerance.”

“I’ve never been to either,” I whispered.

“That’s part of what makes you pure. You’re not overly worldly, you have an essence about you that livens me, keeps my mind in a tailspin as if tossed from the tallest mountain.”

“What is it about me? I only work at a clapper mill.”

His grin grew wide and perfect, the symmetrical nature of it enough to entrance any woman or man or entity in its line of fire.

“A clapper mill,” he repeated, looking down. “That explains a lot of it. The women there have a certain je ne sais something about them, a pheromonal advantage. But you, you go beyond just that. Something in your eyes, through them. Where were you born?”

“Mundanity,” I replied.

The grin turned Glaswegian as the skin at his oral corners split to allow for a wider smile, which left me so flattered I blushed and nearly bled from the cheeks again.

“Mundanity,” he sighed. “I went there once. Its name is as ironic a name can get, producing the most spectacular of everything from animals to people — the lushest forests and cleanest oceans with pristine air that contains intoxicating molecules. I understand they only called that land Mundanity in an effort to deter people from visiting it and thus spoiling its purity, like a cancer arriving to blacken its lungs. No wonder I saw something in you that was, well, anything but mundane. Why did you leave it, may I ask?”

“I wanted to see what else there was,” I answered. “Also, even a place like Mundanity can live up to its namesake when there’s an over-saturation of paradise. Go on a vacation for too long and it feels as banal as everything beyond its veil. So, I left as I should have to experience something different.”

“True, that is true. And I suppose I wouldn’t have found you if you hadn’t.”

“Where are you from?” I asked, leaning into him as I became trapped in his essence, the scent of pure evergreen musk emanating from him unlike any other man I’d met.

“I’m originally from Utero,” he muttered.

“I hear it’s nice there,” I commented. “I thought you were Maltese, but that explains it.”

“Yes, near Malta.” He looked sad again for some reason, eyes dripping fuchsia. “It is nice there, but I’m afraid I’ve led a lengthy, lonely life because of my origins there.”

“Why do you say that?” I lay on his chest, which twitched as tendrils beneath the skin writhed in comfort.

His sighs released a growl that shook his torso on my resting head. “I was born to an unusual group of people in Utero, who were cursed with semelparity through gene experimentation.”

“Semelparity?”

“Yes. I have to tell you,” he began, picking my head up and having me look directly into his pulsing eyes, “I can only mate once, with one partner, before I die. I didn’t think that partner would come anytime soon as I had been saving myself my whole life for that particular person, but then you came along, and I sensed in you the perfect blend of normality and extraordinariness. From your gaze to your aroma, I believed I had found that ideal mate.”

He gave me a long kiss that told me everything through a psychic internal tethering: Most people are iteroparous and can have sex many times throughout their lives, but Victor belonged to a group of isolated Uterans on whom several malevolent Swedish defectors experimented to develop semelparous beings using a combination of human and cicada DNA, which would enable them to mate once in a lifetime before dying off, preparing their kind for periodic waves of existence like the cicada, only painfully conscious of this limitation as they ached for love for many years in a sort of agonizing dormancy.

“I found you,” he told me, which in this context made me feel more special than if those words came from any other man’s lips. “I want to give you all of my energy, all of my love, before I end this painful life. Would you grant me this? And whether or not there is a byproduct of this tryst in the form of offspring, I only want to live and die with this ultimate experience, to feel the touch I’ve craved for nearly fifty years.”

Fifty — he looked twenty-five.

I nodded with acceptance, willing to give this man his first and last lovemaking experience here, in this nest.

Victor moved in and we kissed longer, tongues mixing and reaching for each other’s scalps to feel the fibers of our hairs as they all squirmed in lust.

He took my hand and guided me from the couch to the bedroom, where he slowly disrobed as I did the same. From his back emerged a set of wings, transparent and veiny, each fiber of it glowing green like his irises. He moved over me as I lay on the bed and I saw that his donglis was particularly fibrous, the texture of a tree trunk, but he assured me it wouldn’t hurt as it would soften upon entry into my top haglus.

My three breasts began to breathe on their own in readiness, heaving as my nipples reddened and elongated to meet his four, the most I’d ever seen on a man, remembering that he was much more than a man, which only inflamed my loins even further. He began to go down on me, using his prehensile tongue to reach places that no man had ever even bothered to reach. After a few minutes of this to intensify the heat of the experience, he moved up to meet my face.

“I want to convert this curse of mine into a gift for you,” Victor whispered into my ear, breath warm and sweet like cinnamon as it drifted into my nose and cheek holes.

While most men’s donglises don’t tend to do much, there was something about Victor’s that moved me immediately as it entered, the way it seemed to warm up and reach around—like a blind creature looking for something to hold onto in the dark—that made me shriek with pleasure, my cheek holes spreading with the rest of me.

Two appendages emerged from Victor’s shoulders as they stretched and reached for my shoulders with little hands. They scared me at first, but when the small chitinous claws latched onto my shoulder skin, I felt comforted even further, as if I had become a true part of him and vice versa. His wings flapped and fluttered, making the sound of a fan behind him, and a tail I didn’t know he had, brown and sinewy, wrapped around my waist as if cradling me.

With every thrust I felt a swelling from the donglis and it filled me up so fully. Meanwhile something protruding from his navel reached down and stimulated my clit, curling around it and flicking it, and then something from that protrusion inserted itself into my clit as it seemed to reach the entirety of the wishbone-shaped organ, reaching near to my ovaries. It writhed deep inside me along with the donglis, stimulating my two corpus cavernosa and crura as I could feel his own engorge. It even reached both of my bulbs as they palpated. I screamed the loudest I ever had in ecstasy, losing my thoughts, even the concept of language, all higher functions reduced or perhaps heightened to sheer orgasm.

Normally I wouldn’t want a man to last for more than around a fifth of an hour, but Victor was willing to expend all of his available energy for nearly half a day as I couldn’t get enough of the sensations. He continued to switch positions, from missionary to doggy to, of my choosing, pile driver, until he had released all of his thick ice-blue cum inside of me. I felt it ooze throughout the session, I suppose his death ritual, as he continued in seemingly endless passion. I wanted to give him all of the pleasure I could in his last moments just as he seemed eager to give me everlasting memories to carry with me beyond that of a physical sentient remnant.

The shoulder claws made me bleed, but I felt no pain as we continued in our hysterical frenzy. By the end of it, Victor had wrapped us both in a thick green cocoon that glowed in its veins like his eyes and wings, but the light had gone out steadily as our window of lust closed.

I was exhausted as he removed himself from me, wet with both of our juices and left in a literal afterglow as he had transferred some of his luminescence into my body through the donglis and navel protrusion.

I was on birth control, and a part of me felt guilty in the idea that his single mating session wouldn’t leave him any lasting legacy, but he was understanding.

“I just wanted to feel good and to make someone else feel the same,” he assured me. I looked over at the spent man beside me as he lay in what looked almost like defeat, as though we had battled and I emerged the victor. His ribcage was visible through his veiny chalk-white chest, his donglis retracted and dripping, his eyes no longer glowing but still greener than any man’s I’d ever laid my eyes upon. His hair was also greying rapidly as he returned to the fetal position from which he was developed, from which we all were.

I continued to watch and placed my hand on Victor’s shoulder as his bones dried, followed by his skin which went translucent and papery. His wings had been reduced to ashes and so soon would his body.

I left the apartment, understanding that we had both given each other a gift unlike any other, that of a mutual need to create a moment for each other that would leave its permanent imprint. I knew that I would never find a man who could live up to Victor, who would never live to find another woman like me.