Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

“It feels like flesh.” Chiara had marveled when she first ran her fingertips along the carved patterns inlaid within the sides. “Flesh that’s hard.” She couldn’t help but laugh at his smile when she said those words.

He took them both, gargoyle box and woman, into the bedroom.

“I’ll show you flesh that’s hard,” he said, curling powerful hands around her upper arms and drawing her slowly and deliberately toward his own body. Just before her breasts would have touched his chest, he dipped his head and touched first the right nipple, then the left, with the tongue Chiara always felt was itself a highly tumescent organ.

She knew what he was going to do. She still gasped, let her arms pivot together from the elbows, brought her hands down so her strong fingers could wrap around the inches of hard flesh she sometimes joked about as his tongue gone south. When she’d first told him that, he had cocked one eye and said, “Should I then imagine you referring to my tongue as my penis gone north?”

“Whatever,” Chiara said. “I was never very good with directions.”

They both laughed. Then their collective breath quickened.

It always did.

But after this one time, as both of them lay across the bed, skin sheened with salt and heat, limbs akimbo and plaited, passions still humming like a dynamo switched into standby mode, he said, “Just don’t let any of this ever go west.”

Chiara drew back her head slightly so she could look at his eyes and made a small sound of curiosity. Somehow his voice had sounded both resigned and wistful.

“Going west,” he said, “that mythic thing.”

“Oh,” said Chiara. “Right. Like dying.”

“Yes, a lot like dying.”

The box itself. It resembled an ancient and elaborate sarcophagus covered with erotic carvings in relief. It was not obvious, nothing like the crassly amusing coffee mugs covered with giraffes copulating, or alligators wound into complex arabesques of reptilian sexuality. When eyes beheld the gargoyle box, they followed, for a while, the sinuous lines as the human sense for patterning gradually turned shapes into limbs, the limbs into linked bodies.

But, as he pointed out to Chiara, the linked bodies never quite slipped into stereotypical form. Sexual images? Well… maybe. Sensual? Indisputably. Pornographic? Perhaps… with imaginative leaps.

“Use intuitive leaps,” he said one night, holding the box up against the diffused light from the Tiffany torchier.

“Evel Knievel leaps?” She teased him, nestling close behind, rubbing, stroking, trailing her fingertips down his chest.

“You don’t have to span a canyon,” he said, laughing. “Just that old chasm of disbelief.”

Chiara was silent for a few moments. “Don’t leave me,” she said.

He did not laugh at all. “Why are you saying that?”

She didn’t answer for a much longer time. Finally she picked careful words. “You used to tell me everything about doctor’s appointments. It was a pain.” Chiara hesitated. “Now you tell me almost nothing, or else when you do, I feel like I’m getting a completely laundered version. That’s far more excruciating.”

He set the gargoyle box on the bed table and shoved it to the edge of the lamplight. “I’m sorry,” he said, and she could hear the regret in his voice that said he was telling the absolutely literal truth. “I haven’t been altogether forthcoming.”

“Be that now.” She cupped his face with her fingers, leaned toward him intensely, gazed into his eyes. They were lighter than hers. In this diffused light, they looked almost green. The light always changed them; sometimes green, sometimes brown, other times hazel. She said he had the eyes of a chameleon. Or a shapeshifter.

“All right,” he said. He did something he rarely did before launching words at her. He took a deep, deep breath.

Later, she cried herself to sleep.

What perched on the gargoyle box was not the standard, garden-variety dog-faced boy with wings, as he sometimes described other gargoyle art. This gargoyle was feline, with a lithe, muscular body crouched atop the lid in an aggressively watchful attitude. The reptilian wings spread at precisely the appropriate angle to provide the perfect handle for grasping and lifting the lid.

Winged and fanged, the cat looked the part of the fearsome guardian.

“No vermin will come close,” her lover said. “No bugs need apply.” He laughed. “No mice, no rats, no takers to confront such a creature. She’s one fierce beastie. They’re all afraid.”

“I hope so.” Chiara shook her head and let her fingers wander over the obscure curves of the seductive stone. “This one—” She felt she could almost prick fingertips on the creature’s teeth. “She’s only interested in bigger game.”

He nodded seriously. “It’s tough to outmatch a gargoyle. That’s why they’ve got the guardian job.”

Chiara nodded slowly, with gravity. “Can she protect us both?”

“Up to a point, I expect.” He shook his head with sudden violence as though coming abruptly awake from a reverie. “Hey, what do I really know about gargoyle specs?”