Gwen, in Green

She had been at one with the world. She was a living entity merged into the whole. She dozed in the sun, her skin oiled. She felt lazy and comfortable. She felt as if she could sleep forever and not dream, and yet she was not asleep. She could hear the wind in the treetops and the far rumble of the heavy equipment. They were digging the canal on the inland side of the waterway. Work con­tinued on the spoil basin as machines pushed up dikes fifteen feet high to hold the mud and living shells and broken grass which would, when the dredges began work, be pumped back across the waterway into the basin. There it would stand, a two-­mile-­long, fifteen-­foot-­high mesa of stinking, reeking mud, smelling of ages of rotting vegetation, dead oysters, and salt marsh. But the equip­ment sounds were distant and familiar. Those sounds acted as a soporific, lulling her into the most delicious state of drowsiness she’d known in weeks. And into that pleasant state came thoughts, feelings, and an awareness which, in retrospect, was druglike. She was on some kind of high. Like most young people, she’d experimented with drugs of the milder variety, grass, once a good grade of hash. And yet the high was not the dulled, stuporous, out-­of-­it thing which came with drugs. It was a clearheaded realiza­tion that she was breathing, living. She felt the flood of blood in her body, and felt the function of her organs. Strange things happened to her ears, without seeming at the time to be strange. She could hear, the sound of the wind and heavy equipment only a background, the warm hum of a bee; she could feel the moisture of the earth, the sweetness of it, the delicate giving of soft particles under bare feet as she walked through newly plowed Illinois loam. She was more aware of the sun; and she could feel its life-­giving rays entering her, penetrating warm. There was a sense of timelessness in her aware­ness. Thoughts moved with pleasing slowness, crawling, possessing her. Every nerve ending was alive, and in­dividual cells pleasured themselves as a hot, spreading sexual awareness crept up and over from her nether regions and engulfed her.

There, just beyond her reach, was the answer. Some magic of mind, some lunacy of brain, had moved her out­side of herself, leaving the frailties of Gwen Ferrier be­hind, and forcing away her natural and induced inhibi­tions. She stretched languidly, knowing her body as she’d never known it before, ignoring a small, clamorous voice deep inside which questioned, screamed negation of her newness.

He came floating into her awareness as a spore slowly floats on the wind. Fertile, natural, ripe, she sat up, holding the halter in front ­of her tingling breasts. “Come here,” she said, letting the halter fall. It seemed to take forever for the gaily colored piece of cloth to fall and drape itself over her bare leg.

“Look, lady,” the man said, looking around nervously.

“Don’t talk,” she said, holding out her arms, her breasts aching with ripeness. A bee buzzed and settled into the open petals of a wildflower beside the clear pond. She sensed it, knew it, felt the penetration of its honey-­gathering tube, and knew the ripe feeling of merged pollen. She held her arms out, smiling. No question of morality. No right. No wrong. It was the way things were. Fertile, ripe, passive, she accepted him, eased his fevered haste, and bathed him in the sweet juices of her body. Abandoned, wild, silent.

The thing which hurt most was her inability to remem­ber a single time when she’d been so at peace with George. Never, in seven years of marriage to a passionate man, had she known the quiet-­thick, pleasure-­ripeness of it. Never had she so opened herself, willingly, peacefully, exquisitely ecstatic. Never had her inner tissue drunk so thirstily of male juices.

That she was pregnant was unquestionable. That and that alone could explain the beauty of it.

To release the safety, she had to invert the gun. The small metal button moved with a click. The weapon took on new meaning. Now it was ready to play its role. Deadly, small things inside its blue metal tubing were tense, ready to leap forward, and perform their function.

She was calm. There was no answer. She could live a dozen lifetimes and not know why she’d done it.

She positioned the weapon slowly and carefully. She kissed the cold metal with parted lips, an obscene kiss while death grinned and waited. Her mouth was open, teeth grating on metal. She positioned her foot and wiggled her toe experimentally. She had, according to George, toes like a monkey, movable, small, and thin.

“Please understand,” she thought.