Why must one spank one’s wife? What a silly question. It’s a necessity. There’s no option, really. None at all. Its pretty much a matter of physical reality, obedience to the laws of Tycho Brahe and Nicholas Copernicus, not to mention Galen and Vesalius, that compel me to bend her over my lap, pull up her skirt, or pull down her pants (depending-she prefers pants in winter, against the cold, as she does get cold now), and spank her till her bottom glows the prettiest shade of red, till her sex melts and the smell of her pleases the air and graces my lap, spank her till she cries little diamond tears.
I suppose I should explain about my dreams, winter dreams; when there’d be a snowstorm, I’d have the dreams. Dreams of floating, not floating up, but floating down, floating down with the moonlight-that was how they started. My house seen from above, from a great distance, from the surface of the moon. And rising from the moon’s surface, looping and twisting in the dance of the orbits, following a serpentine path through the Trojan points, careening into the Earth’s gravity, arcing across the sky, dancing on my roof.
There was also a girl. I would fall asleep and hear something on the roof, and in my slumber I could hear footprints, blue footprints, in the heavy snow that piled above the eaves. Dainty blue footprints, pools of lapis in the cottony snow; that’s what I heard, little puddles; not seeing them directly, I could hear that they were blue.
After the dream recurred for several nights, I did think to climb a ladder and look on the roof, to see what might be there. I didn’t really expect to find anything, and I didn’t.
I was content to dream more; that seemed to be where the answers were. I craved sleep, not for relief from the day, but as entry into a brighter, sharper, more fully saturated existence. Is it odd that I became more successful in my waking life than I’d been before? Waking life demands that the imaginative spirits be quieted, settled, put to bed, and I was now fully content to accommodate.
I learned to live more concretely, and the waking world appreciated the change in me. I walked into the office and made polite noises. I’d found a way to reduce all of business to polite noises, reflex arcs that do not engage my higher faculties. No one minded.
Its easy if you have a routine. I developed a routine. I have a secretary, Phyllis, who is familiar with my routine; she is comforted by it. She has grandchildren in parochial school, she has a husband with emphysema, she had a problem with a DUI that I helped her with many years ago. She likes things the way they are, and she likes to work for me, because I know how they ought to be, so as not to surprise.
I sleepwalk through my waking day, squinting at the too-bright sun, finding my sunglasses where they ought to be (left inside vest pocket,) driving by reflex, parking by reflex, eating by reflex, auditing jumbo and other non-conforming mortgages without a moment’s creativity or intuition.
Abe Koppelman, who brought me into the business, gave me that advice as a young man “avoid creativity” – everything you need to know about a loan is in the boxes; if there’s something about the loan that doesn’t fit in the boxes, it is, by definition, a bad loan.”
And one more piece of advice “Dreaming you do in bed, or on a Sunday afternoon, or anytime at all — just not when the markets are open — do you understand me?”
I’d nodded. He would be satisfied with my work effort now; my imagination is exhausted more productively, there’s none left for the office.
My bride is in orbit around the moon. I know this, because I can see her, when I dream. So many things are only seen clearly when I dream, my waking moments are like being blind by contrast. When I close my eyes, things are visible clearly; when sleep comes, I can aim my telescope at the heavens, turn it towards the moon, and watch her being born, expelled from the Mare N_ thrown up into orbit, blue and exquisite.
Like all the beauties, she is made inside the moon, which is pounded by sunlight, fertilizing the silica. Beauties grow inside the moon, under the lunar surface, until perfectly formed, dusted and deep blue. Blue, yes, they are blue, a perfect cerulean blue, all through the flesh, into the lungs, between the lips, the breasts, the navel, the belly, even down in the soft cleft between the legs.
She is quiet and unspeaking, but the most perfectly sexual creature. Sometimes, for the very first time since I was a teenager, I find myself having wet dreams about her. This sticky surprise caused me to wonder for just a moment “What is happening to me”- but just for a moment, as whatever was occurring seemed both inevitable and pleasant.
When I first started dreaming, I wasn’t clear on what I ought to do. I saw her, covered in moon ash, unmoving.
I was walking in a rural village, covered in snow. My breath congealed in the cold, and formed small noctilucent clouds glowing with moonlight. Little houses, rude country huts, some with a bit of flickering candlelight to illuminate them lay before me. I knew that I was walking in an older village, some distance away in time and space.
A door opens in a hut, and a man, thick bearded and sharp eyed, invites me into his home. It is warm and yellow inside, lit against the gloom outside. He is a distant relation, a great great grandfather, a descendant of a rabbinic line, one known for a mystical bent or so family legend has it. He is quite young now, as he sits before me and offers me wine.
I tell him about the blue girl.
“The one in the moon?”
I nod.
“Moon girls, boy, couldn’t you find a bride in a more convenient place?”
I shrug.
“Well, we’ll just have to get her down from there, won’t we?”
“Is that possible?”
“Possible, yes; easy, no. And having gotten her down, just what do you intend to do with her? There’s more than just a transportation problem, you know”
“Like what else?”
“Like the fact that she’s blue? Had you not noticed? And have you noticed many blue girls walking around? In my time very few-in yours?”
I have to agree. In my time, as well, there are very few blue girls to be seen. They are, in fact, surpassingly rare.
My ancestor knows something about this problem, but not enough. He’s got theoretical knowledge of the animate and inanimate, and has read some of Kepler’s works on orbital mechanics with a particular interest, but on the more challenging problems, it appears that we’re going to have to call for help.
“The great Rabbi of Prague” he knew about the clay that lives and the flesh that dies. He’s the one we have to ask.”
I give a look, a dismissive look.
“Scoffing never got a girl down from the moon to her earthbound lover, now did it?”
I shrug.
“Then I suggest you adopt a more cooperative attitude. The man we’re trying to reach is a busy man, and very far away now.”
Even sleeping, I feel the need to inject a note of the practical “But . . . er . . . He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Now a scoffing look comes back to me “Dead here, alive somewhere else. Just like me, just like you.”
As he reminds me “Dead is for the material world, not the spiritual . . . just remember that the material and the numinal may seem to be distinct, but if you look closely at the frontier that lies between them, you’ll see that its fuzzy. From a distance, yes, it looks different, like a field of corn abutting a field of oats, but when you get closer you’ll find that there’s no way to define a precise frontier, and that things can pass back and forth and you can see them – if you know how to look for them; and if you apply yourself, you can pull things across to your side.”
He teaches me gravitation, calculations with the orrery and astrolabe, how to devise somnolent gradients, lines of attraction between earth and moon, little eddies of vacuum to pull a blue girl out of the lunar soil. More lines, drawn with a quill pen, written upon the night sky to pull her into orbit, naked and blue, bits of silica catching sunlight and shimmering like a jewel in my telescope.
So that’s where we stand, my bride, in orbit around the moon, glittering, rolling, pitching and yawing; I see her through my eyelids, drifting across the terminator, from earthlight into sunlight.
Getting her into Earth orbit was quite a trick. Many consultations with ancient astronomers were required. It must be done “just so”-too little, and you’ll never get her out of her lunar orbit, too much and she’ll miss her earth orbital insertion “many unhappy men have seen their brides go flying past the Earth-an anxious groom must temper his ardor with restraint, lest an excess of gravitation cause a tragedy;” when Kepler says this sort of thing, you have to pay attention.
The task was achieved. One night I closed my eyes and watched the sky flicker, the aurora dancing with intensity and a sound that grew from the lower registers to fill the air. The noise, a buzz that reached a roar, the sound of the Sun’s tides crashing over Earth’s magnetic breakwaters. It woke me up. I walked out the front door, and found that the night sky matched my dream . . . the conjunction of two phenomena, the aurora and a meteor shower, arcs of fire burning across the sky, sizzling as they found their way across the heavens.
I found her in a snow bank, eyes closed, blue and unmoving; she was surprisingly light, miraculously blue as in my dream. A blue nude girl attracts less attention than you might imagine, though there is the question of what to do with her.
I put her in the guest bedroom. It seemed like an idea. She was perfectly blue, perfectly still. Soft, and yet rigid. I inspected her, turned her this way and that. Ran my fingers over her mouth, felt no breath; peeled back her eyelids, saw only a solid deep blue. Perhaps less reputably, I inspected her more private parts as well, felt the gentle heft of her breasts, then rolled her over and parted her bottom cheeks, feeling the smooth groove down from the bases of her spine to her anus. She was chilly in her core, and bluer still. I could see the depths of her coloration in the finer tissues, when I spread apart her labia the thin delicate flesh was nearly purple.
What do you do with a blue girl? That thought puzzled me as I went to work. As weighty issue of prepayment rates of mortgage backed securities in varying interest rate environments buzzed around me, I could think of nothing but my blue girl. What to do with her?
I resolved to sleep on it.
“What do you think you should do with her?”
That’s what the bearded elder asks me.
“Why do you always have to answer a question with a question?”
“So I shouldn’t answer a question with a question? If you don’t have an answer, why should I?”
Long dead ancestors are not always the most helpful spirits, especially if they’ve got a Talmudic spirit of disputation in them.
He looks at me in the candlelight “what do you think you should do?”
“I don’t know”
How can I be so ignorant in my dreams? They’re my dreams, shouldn’t I be omniscient?
“Think about the thing that will be flesh and isn’t.”
“OK”
“What do you have to do?”
“You got me.” I know, that sounds like a flip manner in which to be speaking to the honorably departed, but I was frustrated.
“All right, genius I’ll spell it out you must remind the flesh that it wants to be alive.”
“How do I do that?”
“Ask yourself this what makes the flesh different from the spirit? How was your none-too-bright spirit brought into your body? When did you draw your first breath? Coax her with that knowledge”
I teased my blue girl. I tried flowers, and watched her nose twitch. I ran hot and cold over her. Little reactions, tiny ones, that raised my hopes up. I thought of the question “when did you draw your first breath” and then I had my answer.
I bent her over my lap. And spanked her. And watched the flesh turn, first a paler blue, then a deep red, finally a pink. I watched the color spread through her as I spanked, red life flowing through the cool blue matrix. As she turned, evidence of life became apparent. Between her thighs, wet, first cold icemelt, then warm and gooey, a river from her sex wetting my trousers.
The warmth and color flowed up her, circling her torso, first in the major arteries and then spilling out into the capillary beds. She started to wriggle and move, and finally, as pink supplanted blue through her neck and head, she coughed, first sounding like a catch in her throat, then pouring cold wet out of her lungs onto the floor.
Then crying as I spanked her, bottom rising to meet my hand, finally turning to moans as I reached down to her sex and found it wet and hot, shuddering to life in an orgasm that made her toes curl and her blood glow.
And that is why you must spank your wife.
© 2006 Eiffel Crisp. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.