Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

After a while she raised herself, and with great tenderness kissed him upon the mouth and said, “I have no regret of this bargain, my heart, whatever follows after.”

And from his drowsy state he answered her, “Why, what should follow after but joy and content and perchance a babe to dandle upon my knee?”

She smiled and said, “What indeed? Come, discover me,” and lay back upon the pillow and opened her arms to him.

For a little while, he was content to kiss and toy with lips and neck, and let her body be. But soon he tired of this game, the need once again growing upon him to uncover her secret places and to plumb their mysteries. He put his hand beneath her skirts, stroking her thigh that was smooth as pearl and quivered under his touch as it drew near to that mossy dell he had long dreamed of. With quickening breath, he felt springing hair, and then his fingers encountered an obstruction, a wand or rod, smooth as the thigh, but rigid, and burning hot. In his shock, he squeezed it, and Peasecod gave a moan, whereupon Nick would have withdrawn his hand, and that right speedily, had not his faerie lover gasped, “Wilt thou now nay-say me?”

Nick groaned and squeezed again. The rod he held pulsed, and his own yard stirred in ready sympathy. Nick raised himself on his elbow and looked down into Peasecod’s face—wherein warred lust and fear, man and woman—and thought, not altogether clearly, upon his answer. Words might turn like snakes to bite their tails, and Nick was of no mind to be misunderstood. For answer then, he tightened his grip upon those fair and ruddy jewels that Peasecod brought to his marriage-portion, and so wrought with them that the eyes rolled back in his lover’s head, and he expired upon a sigh. Yet rose he again at Nick’s insistent kissing, and threw off his skirts and stays and his smock of fine linen to show his body, slender and hard as Nick’s own, yet smooth and white as any lady’s that bathes in ass’s milk and honey. And so they sported night-long until the rising sun blew pure gold leaf upon their tumbled bed, where they lay entwined and, for the moment, spent.

“I were well-served if thou shoulds’t cast me out, once the four-and-twenty hours are past,” said Peasecod mournfully.

“And what would be the good of that?” asked Nick.

“More good than if I stayed with thee, a thing nor man nor woman, nor human nor faerie kind.”

“As to the latter, I cannot tell, but as to the former, I say that thou art both, and I the richer for thy doubleness. Wait,” said Nick, and scrambled from the bed and opened his pack and took out a blank ring of copper and his block of pitch and his small steel tools. And he worked the ring into the pitch and, within a brace of minutes, had incised upon it a pea-vine from which you might pick peas in season, so like nature was the work. And returning to the bed where Peasecod lay watching, slipped it upon his left hand.

Peasecod turned the ring upon his finger, wondering. “Thou dost not hate me, then, for that I tricked and cozened thee?”

Nick smiled and drew his hand down his lover’s flank, taut ivory to his touch, and said, “There are some hours yet left, I think, to the term of my bond. Art thou so eager, love, to become dumb stone that thou must be asking me questions that beg to be answered ‘No?’ Know then, that I rejoice in being thy cony, and only wish that thou mayst catch me as often as may be, if all thy practices be as pleasant as this by which thou hast bound me to thee.”

And so they rose and made their ways to Oxford town, where Nicholas made such wise use of his faerie gold and his faerie commission as to keep his faerie lover in comfort all the days of their lives.

Broke Heart Blues Joyce Carol Oates

John Reddy, you had our hearts.
John Reddy, we would’ve died for you.
John Reddy, John Reddy Heart.

—“THE BALLAD OF JOHN REDDY HEART”

THERE WAS A TIME in the village of Willowsville, New York, population 5,640, eleven miles east of Buffalo, when every girl between the ages of twelve and twenty (and many unacknowledged others besides) was in love with John Reddy Heart. John Reddy, sixteen years old, from Las Vegas, Nevada, was our first love. You never forget your first love.

And where John Reddy wasn’t exactly our first love (for after all, our mothers must’ve loved our fathers first, when they were young, in that unfathomable abyss of time before our births—and certain Willowsville moms were in love with John Reddy Heart) he supplanted that first love, and its very memory.

Our fathers despised him. We knew better than to speak of John Reddy Heart in our fathers’ presence.

John Reddy Heart.