Sweet Susie— A Country Girl’s New Year’s Resolve
Sweet simpering, chubby girl Susie didn’t believe she would ever have a man. A man of her own to hold her and help her manage life.
Surrounded by locals she knew since childhood, she avoided the farm-flavored men, deciding they just would not do a long time ago. They, like her, had parents that released their devotions to family farming and subdivided their happiness into land parcels, ATVs, and doublewide mortgages. They like her, were flirting with early death from obesity, diabetes and boredom.
Instead of milking cows, she drove four miles to work at the Nice and Easy gas and coffee every morning. She opened the store at 6:00 am and greeted and cashed customers until 3:00 pm. She wedged herself behind cigarette stacks and lotto tickets and processed sales all day. At times she would get up to refill the coffee carafes and wipe the counters, otherwise she’d sit and stare, feeling her body expand beyond the limits of her jeans. Unhappy, she’d leaf through the magazine racks, glaring at GQ photos, studying the come-ons in the twinkle in their eyes, the raised eyebrows, the shaded bulges in their crotches.
Beauty disgusts me, she sneered.
“It disgusts me too!” whispered a skinny slight blonde bearded man one day. Leaning over the counter, he pointed at the pack of loose tobacco behind Susie. “One bag of non-menthol, and Tops rolling , please.”
“Menthol?”
“Non-menthol.”
There was a long pause for Susie to absorb the instructions. “Okay, without menthol,” she said, screwing her face into small defiance. She retrieved the tobacco bag and rung up the purchase. The blonde long-haired man, grimy and dressed in tattered winter overalls and muck boots slid his bejeweled hand and a credit card toward her.
“Don’t you hate it?” he asked.
“Hate what?” Susie gawked at his ring—it was a hand-made poison ring, silver, huge and hinged, set with a black onyx cabochon. The sheen of thoughtful craftsmanship and perhaps some devilish art and magic slammed Susie with sudden odd attractions.
“Winter, working, snow, tobacco, people, life.” He grinned at her, displaying straight but tragic stained teeth.
“Oh yeah.” Susie scanned his credit card and totaled his purchase on the register.
She squinted at the skinny man. Despite the roads of soot on his face, his features were stunning: Elven or Nordic-God-like. His dramatic blonde hair, at least waist length long was pulled into a braid. She blurted, “Are you an artist?”
The skinny artist smiled and pocketed his credit card. “Yes and you are?”
Susie flushed, she sat up from her stool and adjusted her apron. She was speechless.
The blonde man squinted at the name tag pinned crooked on Susie’s chest.
“Well, Susie, I see you are a Susie.”
New Year’s eve brought Susie to tears. With no friends to celebrate another year’s end, she decided to drive the nighttime countryside, gazing into lighted neighbors’ yards.
She watched window silhouettes and counted cars in frozen lots. Driving her economy sedan deep into Amish country she noted the straight wood houses and the flat vinyl modulars were all dark. No lights, no celebrations, she thought. Yet further on, the unhorsed carts, with shafts dropped down, parked like headstones around the community church, yes there she saw candles glimmer. They must be all celebrating at church, Susie concluded in misery, even they have parties.
It was weeks since she last saw the skinny artist at the Nice and Easy. She scolded herself for not asking his name.
The name skinny artist would do, she thought.
He was all she could dream about. Think about.
She recalled his complaint of the blisters he suffered from walking to the store up and down Sanders Hill, just to get cancer. Maybe, crafty Susie, imagined, the skinny artist lived on Sanders Hill. Why, he couldn’t walk any further than that to get his tobacco. Could he?
Not having anything else to do but feel sorry for herself, she turned off the next dirt road and headed west, back towards the Nice and Easy.
She would find her artist.
Across the river and up Sanders Hill, Susie drove in the black night. The car’s high beams uncovered a landscape corn-chopped short until she came upon an unusual place, a forest amongst the fields. This forest was not just the overgrowth of an unloved homestead. It was thick with thorns and sprawling spy apple trees. The mailbox, attached upside down to its post announced someone must live up the snow rutted drive deep in the thicket. Judging by the painted gold eye on the box, Susie decided this must be the place of her artist.
She turned lowering her lights, and inched up the frozen drive. Ahead she saw a fire’s glow. A campfire? No too small. Closer to the shadows stood a small wood frame house, and several dormered barns forming a courtyard.
In the middle of this courtyard the fire burned not for a camp, but some sort of furnace.
What was she doing, out all alone in the dark, trespassing? Susie lost her nerve and stopped the car to reverse it when she caught the movement of a man in the open barn.
Susie trembled with guilt. She shouldn’t be here. Gripping the steering wheel she hunched in wait for the light rap on her window.
Rap rap.
Susie must have held her breath, for she punched the car’s electric window button, and waited for the glass to disappear in its frame before gasping for air and looking square at the illuminated face of her artist.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted.
“Well Susie,” he gurgled.
He remembered her name.
The artist leaned against her car. He was drunk, that much Susie could assume. He twinkled a smile at her, no maybe he just leered. Susie wasn’t sure. The artist sensed her change of will and he backed away. “I am not a wolf in cheap, I mean sheep clothing. Come out Susie. I am just a wolf, a nice wolf. You are safe here.”
Susie unbuckled herself and stood between the car and its door shielding her body from the artist. “I saw the fire, I…”
Susie could not come up with a better lie.
“Do you want to see what I am doing?”
Well, relieved Susie gushed, “YES!”
The artist dove into a monologue about his art, his craft and the small open propane fueled furnace full of molten bronze in front of them.
Susie sat in the offered lawn chair feeling its rotted webbing give under her weight. She accepted his canned beer.
“Some so-called friends dropped this off to me earlier,” the artist explained. “Better finish it up before I get to all of it.”
He smiled across from her, poking the molten metal with a graphite rod.
“I make jewelry and sculptures.”
Out here in this wild, thought Susie.
“I seclude myself so I can make my art. You understand don’t you Susie?”
Susie nodded and raised her hand, numb from gripping the blue can of Keystone in winter chill. She gulped the swill down.
“Here have another.” The artist tossed a beer can at her. “Five more to go.”
Susie shook her head and cracked open the beer. “I can’t drink all that.”
“Don’t have to I will join you.” The artist sat in the other lawn chair. His body like air, collapsing in its snowmobile suit. His hands ruddy with cold and poor circulation, the calluses and chew-down fingernails did not interfere with the poison ring gleaming on his finger in the fire’s light.
He opened his beer and gulped all of it down and flung the empty into the night behind him.
Susie flinched at the wild glint in his narrow blue eyes.
He looked at her and she looked at him.
“So that’s it isn’t it?” he asked. “You thought I might be someone you could capture to have and make yours?”
Susie shook her head no. She didn’t know what to say to this alien, this artist. He spoke above her yet to her, in no way anyone else ever had. She liked the danger about him too.
The artist coughed a phlegmy laugh. “No maybe I am someone you want to take care of then?”
Susie clung to her chair. Her feet frozen to the ground. She should leave. He was getting too close to her emotions. Why did she come here?
“Uncomfortable?” he asked.
Susie nodded yes. She finished her beer and rose to return it to the open twelve pack box.
“Grab another for me and for you,” he said. “So do you like my art?”
Susie could answer this question. “Yes. I like your ring.”
“Mmm, trivial things. This ring. You should see my sculptures. Susie do you want to join me in my studio and see my sculptures?”
“What about the metal?”
“Well what about it? It will be here, right in this pot. It will be cold and ready to heat again.”
(Besides, I think, there is a more urgent fire to tend to. Don’t you think Susie? )
The artist rose and offered his ringed hand to Susie, she accepted and allowed him to raise her to her feet. She felt the beer slapping her fears away and she wondered if she should grab another can to take with her. To calm her before, before what?
(You don’t need that beer. Don’t be scared.)
The studio was a converted chicken barn white washed and etched with droppings. Its floor was heaved concrete; entering it was mounting glaciers carried in a warm sea.
“Watch your step,” the artist drawled.
All around her were black life-size mechanical figures, made of found objects from a VCR age, gloating and glaring plastic gears.
What are these? She wondered.
The artist reached for a switch and the mechanical sculptures became slow-moving horror house props.
In the middle of the barn, presented in a clearing of cabinets, tools and unknown gadgetry, was a high polished bronze horse statue, rearing and glowering at her from its pedestal.
Susie couldn’t resist touching it and she regretted it. “I’m sorry, the fingerprints.”
“No worries.”
The artist walked up and rubbed her grimy prints from the sculpture’s sheen with his dirty sleeve.
“Come upstairs,” the artist said.
Susie stumbled up the wooden stairs and found herself enveloped in the glow of threadbare oriental rugs and log rafters.
“Come into my arms,” the artist said.
The artist breathed on her bare neck, allowing his gold hair to fall free and loose around her face. His thin lips, chafed with wind and dirt, bruised her skin with kisses. She didn’t mind. He undid her tight pants, unpacking her from the layers of nylon and lace and other contraptions she thought might be sexy. Peeling her from her fatness, she now lay like a baby ready for changing. She felt shame for her body and tried to cover herself from the glimmer of the kerosene heater.
“No, you are beautiful.”
Susie trembled at his words. Beautiful, I am beautiful.
The artist stepped out from his snowsuit, naked and erect. His sex thicker than his leg.
He is a tripod, Susie giggled to herself.
The artist caught the smirk on her lips and floating above her raft of flesh, he whispered, “And you should smile.”
He cupped his stiff rough hands around the nibs of her breasts and milked her like a kitten its mother, nuzzling her and biting her quick, sharp, grateful. He peered up at Susie, propping his unshaven chin into her soft belly, sinking into its warm pillow. He descended to her mound, still squeezing her breasts while rubbing his nose then his lips against her fur.
He pointed his tongue and drew a heart around her mound, then circling it and then tickling it with teasing flits. Susie groaned and tried to push her hand in front of herself, afraid he would not like what he found throbbing underneath her fur. But the artist grunted a warning, do not interfere. And Susie gave in, allowing herself to enjoy the shimmer within her.
His tongue remoistened slid itself between her mound’s crack and widened the pink opening until, his eager, squirming tongue found her pearl. Susie gasped. And her juice erupted from the crack and the artist licked and lapped her sweetness, rubbing its sheen across her pearl, mixing it with her fur, sending Susie into shudders.
Aroused, the artist pushed himself back up Susie’s heaving flesh. Her mound dripping with excitement, spread open to receive his enormous sex. Deep deep he inserted himself into the folds of Susie. Rocking his skeletal body side to side. Their bodies hummed with the pleasures of moisture and heat.
Susie’s face beaded with happiness, her legs twitched with sensations the artist plucked from her insides. Nothing like a vibrator, nothing like her fingers. This thing that was inside her was a real man, a human, a living flesh being.
She gripped the artist with her neat painted fingernails, throwing her excitement and new love for him into her embrace, suffocating him with her fleshy joy. The artist pumped her body and brought her to climax several times with his stiffness. Yet he did not ejaculate.
Susie worried herself. Why could he not come?
The artist kissed her troubled brow and slid his pulsing self out of her. He settled beside her, leaking a crystal juice along her waist, poking her skin with ebbing excitement.
Is everything ok, why didn’t he cum? Susie wondered.
The artist smiled and raised his ringed finger up and nudged the tip of Susie’s nose with the smooth cold black onyx.
Her breath steamed the stone’s finish.
“Why, this has been all for you Sweet Susie, not for me,” the artist said, curling into Susie’s heated body, like an infant finding home, at last.
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