Mind & Body
edited by Cecilia Tan
Published by Circlet Press, Inc.
Mind & Body
edited by Cecilia Tan
Copyright © 2008 Circlet Press, Inc.
Smashwords Edition
This electronic version was produced from the same files used to manufacture the finished book on paper, and was converted to the ebook format through the Smashwords Meatgrinder. It contains all of the text and stories, but does not replicate the design or layout of the physical book.
Please report any problems you find with the ebook to us at "circletintern@gmail.com" or by visiting the Bug Report section of our web site (www.circlet.com).
We'd also love to hear if you enjoyed the book!
License Notes
Please do not support online piracy of copyrighted works. This ebook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the purchaser only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, or if you received this ebook copied from a friend or by other means, please support the writers who made it possible by purchasing a copy yourself from Smashwords.com or one of the publisher's other retail partners. Thank you for your support.
Mind & Body Table of Contents
Diving Into Oceans of Air, Renee M. Charles
Garden of Angels, Elizabeth Coldwell
Burnt Offerings, Thomas Roche
Snow, Fire and a Sleighbed, J.M. Zennitz
If You Want Something, Nicky Talas
Flesh of my Flesh, Recondita Armonia
ESX, Evan Hollander
Winged Memory, M. Christian
Narcissus, Wendy Fries
The Arena, Nik Flandré
Mortals Among Us, Robert Knippenberg
Introduction
For all the complications that can result when one thinks too much about sex, the origin of this book is pretty simple. I've always had the fantasy of a telepathic lover. My first published erotic story was "Telepaths Don't Need Safewords," after all. I don't know what it is that makes the fantasy of being able to meld minds as well as bodies such a compelling one, but I can make some good guesses. On the one hand, there's the romantic notion of knowing one another "inside and out," of something more than animal-flesh meeting animal-flesh occurring. Someone asked me recently if I believed there was such a thing as soulmates, and I had to say I was too agnostic to say yes, but too much a dreamer to say no.
With me, I've had the experience of feeling like I could read someone else's mind in three different circumstances: while making music, while performing theater, and while making love. In all three cases, the best of all performances resulted when that feeling occurred, when communication on a nonverbal level took place in order to create something beautiful. As a writer, I love words. But sometimes what we can communicate without them is more eloquent.
Of course, in creating exciting fiction, it can't all just be little Cupids and hearts, and perfect people melding mind/heart/soul in perfect harmony. That would be just a bit tedious after a while, so never fear, although the authors here have created plenty of stories to feed my own personal fantasy, their entries are far from simplistic interpretations of the theme. Sometimes technology is needed to capture a thought, sometimes a thought can be too much trouble. Sometimes thoughts can take on lives of their own.
May these tales stay in your thoughts for many nights to come.
Cecilia Tan
Cambridge, MA
Diving Into Oceans of Air
Just as I sliced open the packing tape which sealed the large, flat box of Gunter Bloom posters I'd special-ordered directly from the photographer's native Germany, I heard the metallic whump! of my old-fashioned horizontal-flap inset in my shop's front door (which was occasionally useful for my infrequent snail-mail, like my Empaths Unlimited newsletter), followed by the muffled whuff! of something thick being wedged tightly into the narrow opening. After ripping open the top of the greyish box and confirming that they'd sent the right set of art-quality blow-ups (that almost take-off of Lewis Hine's "Steamfitter" with the beautifully lean and slick-haired model posed against a grittily rendered piece of machinery, , the hair on her pubis wiry and fierce against her taught thighs), I hurried over to the door, where a tightly wound roll of sticky dots-sealed-paper jutted through the tight labial opening like a crude dildo.
The Blum posters could wait; the Empaths Unlimited newsletter only came out once a month, snail-mail thanks to it being too massive for an e-mailing. . . and I'd been a long time between mind-seductions.
Not that I didn't get my fill of illicitly-obtained fuck-fantasies gleaned from the fuzzy little brains of my customers, the men and women who either boldly or timidly entered my establishment to fulfill whatever moist fancies their minds and bodies craved, but after a while, their craven wants grew tiresome and even easily anticipated--the stately, perfectly coiffed matrons who selected the largest, thickest dildos to use on their college-age lovers, both male and female, the "I'm buying this for my collection" types who were already yearning to shoot a steaming wad at the model in the sexcapades CD Rom they'd just shoved into their initial-adorned briefcase, or the eyes-cast-at-the-floor meek ones who tried to rip the edible panties they'd just bought off their own bodies once they got them home and wiggled into them in their lonely, steamy bathrooms.
I could picture and feel each one of their memories, their wildest (or tamest) conceits, as they drifted about my store like wind-borne dandelion seeds, aimlessly letting their eyes drift over items they had no intention of using, would never want to own, lest I discern their true desires should they hone in too quickly on the object of their longing. Perhaps I should have written "Warning: Telepath/ Empathic On Duty!" under the heading under the existing lettering on my store's front window, but as it was, I thought that "Homme-Donna" was already a bit artsy-classy, surely enough to keep away the truly vile and the hopelessly tacky away from my establishment.
Glancing quickly at the clock above my counter, I noticed that it was close enough to closing time for me to turn around the "OPEN/CLOSED--PLEASE COME AGAIN" sign resting at the bottom of my discreetly mauve- curtained window and turn my full, pussy-throbbing attention to my torn-open newsletter. Once I'd seated myself in plain view of the Richard Avedon framed, non-glare-glassed posters opposite my counter-stool (several actresses and models whose names I only vaguely recalled caught in nude, but dignified glory), I flipped through the "Women Seeking Men", "Men Seeking Women", "Men Seeking Men" sections (each bearing that alphabetical string of abbreviations along the bottoms of the pages: M= Male, F= Female, E=Empathic, T=Telepathic, PC=PreCognitive, G=Gay, Bi=Bisexual, FT=Fetishist, N/D=No Drugs, N/S=No Smoking-- a list that purposely omitted the more typical Singles Paper designations, B=Black, W=White and H=Hispanic because that particular point was a moot one when it came to espers like me, and the other readers of this newsletter) until I reached "Women Seeking Women".
Three pages worth in this issue, both sides of each sheet. But after I'd scanned the first page and a half of listings ("BiFT seeks open-minded/open hearted G/BiFT/E for discreet but intense shared visions
of--") and come across nothing but the same-old, same-old variations of "Let's blend feelings and fantasies" with no inherent bite, no suggestion of something fresh in their advertisements--let alone the one or two word "MindBytes", those teasers which, when concentrated upon by the reader, gave off a faint, residual echo of that person's thought-waves, their finger-print-like unique signal which could be momentarily savored like a whiff of encapsulated molecules trapped between the folded strip of paper in a magazine insert.
By the time I was halfway through this month's crop of psi-potentials, my mind was gummy with afterimages of romance-novel-cover tepid embraces under the ubiquitous full moon and wisps of cloud, and cloyingly cuddly mental snuggles under post-card perfect, sunny skies; weren't there any hot-minded lesbian-or-bi empaths left anymore?
The offerings in last month's issue had been little better; I'd received a long-long- distance virtual finger-fuck from a woman in England who was expert in transmitting her bodily sensations to me via a phone line (her voice was even sexier than her mind) and the telepath over in Queens who'd been too timid to phone me was marvelous at pseudo-cunnilingus while we both literally pictured ourselves in a Grecian temple, but neither woman was seeking anything more than a one-mind stand, as it were. Once the last of the orgasm died down, I felt their minds gently but firmly close to me, leaving me sated but hardly satisfied. . . .
Things were getting so bad for me, I'd recently been trying to tune in on the thoughts of some of my customers after they'd left my shop, discreetly-bagged purchases in hand, but tracking them amid a clamoring, seething ocean of mental voices and bodily sensations was often much too difficult--aside from one evening, when I'd seen/felt an outwardly confident young executive type receive a deliciously thorough whipping/humiliation from her surprisingly femme-looking Mistress, my efforts at connecting with Unawares were close to futile.
The best Mindfuck occurred between two espers, period. Which is why the. . . Unlimited was created--the only trouble was, most of the truly hot and gifted espers already had partners, and didn't need to advertise for a mind-mate.
As I morosely flipped through the remaining listings, letting my gaze wander over to that opened cache of Blum posters (what was in that model's mind, I wondered), I was sorely tempted to run my own advertisement: "GFE/T wants to know--are there any hot G/Bi/E/T/PC's out there? With imagination and libidos to match?". . . until my eyes drifted back down to the tight column of newsprint and saw:
TIRED OF MIND-F--KS THAT LACK IMAGINATION?
Try me. I'm G/T/E, N/D, N/S and a water F/T;
seeking G/Bi-? to swim the steaming waters of my mind.
Shed those clothes along with your hang-ups/inhibitions!
Think *OCEANOFAIR
If the . . .Unlimited's listings weren't so blasted PC (and I'm not thinking PreCog here), she could have come out and said "Mind-Fucks" in print, but knowing that she was thinking it, and not wallowing in pseudo-Romanticism only, was a most bracing revelation.
Squirming in place on the already-smoldering vinyl cushion of my stool, I closed my eyes, let my mind go placid, numb, figuratively limp, then clearly imagined the huge, cerulean word OCEANOFAIR across the forced-clear backdrop of my minds-eye.
So suddenly I felt almost literally cold, actually drenched, my body was diving into a horizon-to-horizon ocean of wave-lapped, slightly frigid waters, and once I was submerged, I wiggled forward with almost no effort, toward a waiting, legs-scissoring figure, whose dark hair was clipped professional-swimmer short, with only a gently waving thatch of sea-grass shifting hair on the top of her head and a matching close-trimmed wedge of sharply angular pubic hair covering the rising Mound of Venus. The straps of her diving gear criss-crossed between her small, nipples-jutting breasts and the clear diving mask over her nose and eyes revealed a light dusting of pale freckles over her nostrils and lower bridge, and a pair of orbs whose dark-brownness was intensified by the light-diffused blue-green waters around her.
With each kick of her flippers-encased feet, she moved closer to me....me, who wore no diving gear at all and who just then realized that I didn't need it. My own legs and lower body now sported overlapping, glistening scales, which culminated in a fin0leg tipped with delicately feathered fins which undulated and writhed in the rippling waters which surrounded me.
Glancing down at my own breasts, I saw that they were coyly cupped with purple-and-white mottled shells, strapped with thin ropes of sea-kelp. My hair--now suddenly long, waist-touchingly long, was floating about me like a nimbus of green-tinged gold. As she moved nearer, her left hand reached out to caress what would've been my own mound of Venus, but now, as I glanced down at it, was a small, tight vertical-lipped orifice parallel to my former hip-and-pelvis area. As her fingertips, cool yet subtly ridged along the finger pads, made contact with my rippling, scaled flesh, I quivered. The touch of her skin on my own transformed fish-skin was exquisitely sensual, like being finger-fucked with a leather-gloved digit.
As the first pulsing wave of pre-orgasm rippled through me, moving in ever-smaller concentric rings toward the narrow base of my tail, my body began arcing backwards in the cushioning waters, until I completed a full circle in that ocean. She maintained contact with my transformed mermaid's cunt, keeping that one pressing, gently probing finger in contact with me as she matched my gyrations in that soothing liquidity, now using one of my breasts to better hang onto my whirling body.
Remembering that I, too, was free to touch her, I mashed my hands--now greenish-tipped, with pearlescent nails--over her taut breasts, feeling the tender, puckering nipples dig into my palms. As her ribcage heaved toward me, pressing her mamma tighter into my kneading hands, she shoved her finger all the way into that hermetic glory-hole, until the tip brushed against what had to be my deeply buried clit.
As we cart-wheeled into the aquatic free-fall, the depthless blue of the water now frothy with bubbles, I hear her clear, chime-like thought-question: Your name...what is it?
Not missing a rotation in those buoyant waters, I thought back, Sima Rozyczka...that's Scottish for "listener" and Polish for "rose."
No sooner had the thought burst from my mind than she and I were out of the water, out under the low-hanging brassy sun, resting on a beach covered not with sand, but with millions upon billions of tightly curled, dried white rose petals. Their scent was an overpowering contrast to the salty brine of the sea, whose waves lapped at our now bare feet and outstretched legs. Both of us were nude, our shining skin covered with dewy beads of some exotic scented oil. I was once more shorter-haired, the artfully braided and beaded coils only reaching down to my shoulders, and at glance at my pelvis revealed my usual thatch of golden-brown curls. Beside me, her sheared-short black thatch was dried to a lacy covering over her swelling labia and high-rising upper mound. But both of our breasts were tipped by raising-shriveled nipples, the darker brown flesh around them dimpled and pulled taught above the smoother pale mounds below.
As she lay on her side next to me in that shifting shore of petals, she fluttered her thickly-lashed dark eyes and thought: Mine is Claudia Muirfinn...the latter is also Scottish. For "dwells near the beautiful sea." My sea is beautiful, is it not?
An encircling expanse of calm azure waters surrounded our isle of convoluted, deeply curled petals, the sunlight shining off the surface like a wide-flung scattering of golden coins.
Very beautiful, I thought back: then, as I rolled on my back, letting the sun press down on my waiting body, I asked: And Claudia stands for...?
I felt a swath of shadow cool my midsection when she stood up abruptly before padding out to the edge of the sea with long, loping strides. Turning her head sideways towards me, so that I could see one dark winking eye, she flashed back: Something you'll find out all too soon...I'll swim back to you soon. What is your MindByte?
She was already diving into the waters as I concentrated: Listener! As her left arm rose up above the waters, followed by the strong kick of her legs and feet, I almost slid off the counters tool, and broke my almost-fall by slamming both hands hard against the inside edge of the counter.
That had been the most intense MindByte sample I'd ever experienced. Usually the newsletter's customers only expended a minimum of intense imagination when leaving their MindByte, just enough for a brief taste of their mind. But Claudia Muirfinn's Byte was more like a feast, a gushing forth of long-stifled images and experiences, concentrated in--I glanced up at the clock, and was astonished by what I read there--a mere three minutes of actual thinking-time.
But, as I massaged my sore palms after getting to my feet, I realized that Claudia's MindByte was merely that. Her ad clearly stated that she was an Empath, too, yet I hadn't felt one thing she was experiencing during the Byte.
For Claudia, "soon" meant a mere hour later, when I was back in my west-side apartment, soaking in a tub filled with a sprinkling of fragrant herbs and a few drops of lavender oil. As I went to gently massage a huge sea-sponge between my slightly parted-at-the-knee legs, I instead felt her fingers wrapping around mind. We lolled in a circular tub whose surfaces were not of porcelain, but of close-set slightly-domed individual small tiles, in a mosaic of somber blues, violets, indigos and deepest black, a swirl of grout-divided color that extended onto the deep ledge which also surrounded the tub, extended out three feet or more. Beyond the tub and the ledge was a room mirrored in black-veined smoked mirrors and dividing panels of oiled ebony wood. Only one of the wooden panels was knobbed, a smooth black-enameled irregularity in all that linear shining perfection.
The waters which lapped and splashed around us were lit from a frosted greenish bulb set into a fixture located at least twelve feet above us in the domed ceiling. The bathwater itself felt sensuously silky, almost oily; its warmth brought the scent of sea salt and some bright, green order to mind, something living, something tangy to the nostrils, yet sweet, too, as if concealing a flowering center.
The inside of the tub gently sloped, so that we could recline side by side without slipping to the bottom. My hair--now pinned up to the top of my head, only ringlets hanging down to my wet shoulders on each side of my face--rested slightly damp on my head, as if Claudia had imagined me being in the tub so long that he surrounding moisture would wick into my tresses. Claudia's hair, while short, still sleekly wet, had been coed into one coy, tight curl along the left side of her forehead. Letting my hands glide down along her lithe, limber body, I rubbed my fingers over her Mound of Venus, the short here down there now silky smooth and soft over her fleshy cleft. As I eased one finger into her slick, tight quim, she reached over and began fingering my nipples under the water, massaging each of them in a counter-clockwise motion, while she thought: This is better than your tub, isn't it? Would you like to body-feel it? Actually...see it?
So this is real?
A mental pause, as the fingers spread out over my breasts to tenderly cup them, then: Doesn't it feel real? Doesn't it sound real? She bent one of her legs at the knee, so that it broke the surface with a liquid splash. Working my fingers deeper into her, gently rubbing her clit with my middle finger, I returned: Yes, and yes, but...I feel the tub so I feel your flesh, but...how do I feel within you? You're an empath, so--
The hands on my breasts stiffened, then slid down off them, to the slightly rounded convex roll of my belly, then down, down, to my waiting watery-drift of loose curls, and the slightly gaping ache between them. I had to lean back against those tiny, knob-like tiles. First she fingered me, then, after shifting around so that she was facing me, ducked her head under the surface and began tonguing me under the rippling waters until my pelvis began thrusting upward in short, hard pulses. I started to reach my arms outward, hugging the surrounding curve of the tub, while she thought; Just relax, feel it...never mind about me. Just let it flow--
And as the shivering jerks of the orgasm made my leg muscles writhe under the damp flesh, I felt her tongue narrow and burrow deep within me like a bee tunneling into a half-opened rose. When the tip of her nose brushed against my clit, I lifted my pelvis free of the water, feeling the air touch it warmly, yet with a strange complexness--When I opened my eyes and took in my own familiar bathroom in all its familiar pink and whiteness, it was like being exposed to a flashing bulb, for my eyes had grown so familiar to that soothing blue-violet-blackness.
But as I slid deep into my bath, letting the water rise up to my chin, my lower lip, I heard Claudia's parting thought, slightly distant and muffled, as if shouted underwater, but nonetheless clear:
I'll tell you the meaning of my name when you visit me...
I moved to an upright position with a noisy splash, asking: Visit...as in see-see you? In...person?
This was something almost unheard of in esper circles. The whole purpose of the newsletter, of all the esper singles newsletters all over the world, was to facilitate meaningful and mental relationships. Not the pretty body-dates which were based solely on looks and other uninspired, mundane aspects of our bodily trappings. Phone calls were only used as a tool to better solidify an esper transfer. For most of us, making voice contact intensified the images, made the empathic bonds all the more tactile and real.
Since Claudia's bond was already so strong (if lacking in my being able to read her physical responses, something I'd chalked up to some sort of shyness on her part), I already thought we had something special something even a phone line couldn't really improve upon. But her answer was unmistakable, if faint:
Of course...how else do people visit. Phones are for wussies. Dive in, the water's fine here.
Before I lost all contact with her, I leaned forward in the tub, my forehead almost touching the spout and shouted:
How do I find you?
Her reply was as faint as the distant drip-drip of a faucet left barely turned on in a far away room:
I'm in the book, Sima...
Although she wasn't in the Manhattan directory, there were plenty of view-phone books for surrounding cities in my shop. The next morning (after a night spent wallowing in moist, blue-tinged dreams) I shoved aside the still unpacked box of Blum posters and looked under my counter, through every view-phone book on the shelf, until I finally found the name Muirfinn, C.A., in the Lake Placid directory. Hers was the only address listed for the particular street (Blue Fin Drive, appropriately enough), so I suspected that hers was either one of those spreading country-style estates, or a private cul-de-sac.
The Blum posters--and my meager-visioned customers--would have to wait a few days...until I'd rented an old-style gas-powered car (thanks to her place being too far away for an electric car's reserves) and personally checked out C.A. Muirfinn.
And, as if to acknowledge the rightness of my decision, Claudia whispered in my mind: You were right the first time...it is an estate. Right near the lake, in fact, before closing the contract, leaving only a subtle whiff of briny sweetness in my nostrils...
It was a long drive up to Lake placid, and another five miles beyond the city to Blue Fin Drive, which was less than one hundred yards of the twin islet-dotted lake itself. As I made the turn onto her winding, sinuous driveway, which lead in lazy hoops and twists toward a massive, deep-blue-sided, gray roofed deluxe ranch style mansion, couldn't help but notice that the driveway looked incredibly new, as if few cars used it. There was a two car garage near the house, but the gravel before it looked virtually pristine, as if this was the bottom of a fish tank, and not someone's private driveway.
When I exited the car in front of the garage door closest to the house, I noticed that there was no actual landing before her front door, just a slightly sloping-concrete walkway which slanted subtly upwards, plus a metal hand-rail next to it, decorated with stylized verdigris-coated brass dolphins. The house seemed to grow larger as I walked up that slight incline; it had to be over one hundred and twenty feet long, and almost half wide, not counting the garage. That the place was the only one-story didn't detract from its sheer size: in many ways, it reminded me of an ocean of air, capped by a pale, glittering island of silvery sand.
While Claudia had remained strangely silent, even when I'd tried to use her MindByte while trying to figure out how to gas up the unfamiliar car I'd rented at the automated garage a few miles back, during my trip here, she did choose to speak to me just as I was about to place my finger on her door-bell:
You came...you actually did come to see me.
There was an unexpected pause in her mind-voice, followed by something akin to awe in those silvery tones. Before touching the bell, I thought back: But didn't you invite me? Tell me to look you up?
Her answer was as soft as the splash of raindrops on new grass:
Of course, of course...but I didn't think that you wanted to so badly.
Pressing my forefinger against the bell, I was about to think her a retort when I felt a twinge of queasiness ripple though me, the first empathic touch I'd felt from her. Not a physical sensation, but a deep feeling of--what? Could it actually be fear, of me?
Bold Claudia fearing more reticent Sima? On the second ring, the door swung open on its own, revealing a cathedral-like expanse of blue-green violet lit hallway carpeted in what had to be a soothing low-pile sandy broadloom, its surface delicately pebbled in the diffuse light. No furniture adorned that long hall, but the walls were dotted with all-mounted fishing nets from which hung sand dollars, flat shells, and rigid starfish and dried sea horses...and as I entered that passageway, and lightly touched the various reminders of the ocean, I felt the deepness of Claudia's affections for each object, and knew/felt that she'd gathered them all herself.
The hallway stretched out for about fifteen feet before it opened onto an extraordinary room--that same sandy-nubby flat carpeting ringed the outer parameters of the huge room (fifty by fifty, or twice that much?) whose center was dominated by an amphorous blue-green-black tiled pool whose waters gave the room a faint but not unpleasant chlorine smell. This scent was almost masked by the hanging rattan baskets of pungent dried herbs and flowers which dangled from various hook-suspended chains all around the pool area. The area around the pool was bright tiled, with hand-painted sea creatures fired upon their surfaces. The overhead lights cast bright, rippling ribbons of light upon the pale aquamarine waters: almost blinding in their intensity, they made me partially shield my eyes against the glare, sot that I missed Claudia's initial entrance on the opposite side of the room. But when that queasiness gave way to a sense of heart-lopping panic I looked across those waters and saw--