“So, changing your skin color, I can understand how they do it with makeup. But your height?”
She took a deep breath. “My height isn’t really changed,” she said softly. “I just look as if I’m shorter.” I couldn’t help looking amazed. “Actually,” she said, looking a little embarrassed, “I can change my height—the height that I look like I am …”
“Your apparent height.”
“… yeah, my apparent height—fairly easily. Just a little.”
“Oh God, this is all too much for me … elves, and changing height … I wish you were just an ordinary person, Liz … You being an Elf is … hard for me.”
She replied very quietly. “And I wish you were … an Elf, Lauren.” I was totally taken aback at that. “You’re very much like an Elf, anyway. It would be so much easier …”
“But I’m Black!”
She shrugged. She had studied human body language very well, obviously, in Witness Protection School. “There are Black Elves, Lauren. Actually, I’m one of them.”
“You are?” I was staggered.
She just nodded. She explained that she had taken on this skin color just to blend in. Her present, darker color was closer to her natural shade, she said.
Soon she had met with the manager and the HR person who had come in, and she was back working at the Deli department. Unfortunately, that was the department where she had to deal with the most meat, but having started there, she wanted to remain there. Somehow they found things that she could do, and life settled down.
When we were walking home that day, I asked her what she did outside of the lunchtime rush, and she said she made vegetarian canapes for special occasions. She had brought a few along, and as soon as we got home, she shared a few with me, and they were the yummiest things I had eaten in a long time.
Somehow, being at home together made me feel rather needy, and just as I was wondering how I could get her to give me a hug, she slowly came up to me, and put her arms around me, and it felt as if everything was going to be all right. And then she surprised me.
“You make me feel as if everything is going to be all right, Lauren,” she said, and then she pulled away, and looked right into my eyes, just holding the tips of my fingers, and I was feeling hopelessly lost. But the feeling that I wanted to be skin to skin with her had disappeared. I didn’t know whether she consciously controlled my feelings about her, or whether what she felt somehow affected how I felt. But I remembered that, at one time, I had been crazy for her, and the previous evening we had been—very intimate indeed. But I could not remember exactly what we had done.
Weekend
One day, it was an off day for both of us; we had been out of phase until then, and neither of us had been off work on the same day, because they rotated these days around, to keep the store open on Saturday and Sunday with a full staff.
I usually ran on my off day; my exercise routine had been reduced to this, because I hadn’t had time to hunt down a gym that I could get a membership in. The previous night I had told Fern—her name was Liz, but I still thought of her as Fern—that I could show her around the town that day, but I was getting my run out of the way, first.
I got into my shorts and a tank-top, and my sneakers, and belted on a little purse in which I could take a little money with me, hoping to sneak into someplace where I could get a breakfast sandwich, like an Egg McMuffin, or similar. But Fern saw me getting ready, and wanted to come along.
Suppressing a groan, I waited for her. She reappeared in running tights, in obviously elf athletic clothing that wasn’t too different from what some people wore, but without her usual loose togs, she looked awesome. Not an ounce of unnecessary fat was on her, she looked good enough to eat.
I stared at her up and down, and asked whether there was some way she could look a little less spectacular.
“What … the clothing, or … my build?” she asked quietly.
I shrugged, and said either one, whichever was easier.
She went back inside, and came out with shorts over her tights, and a loose sweatshirt, and looked perfectly normal. I nodded approval. In a big city, girls often run wearing clothing that would drive anyone mad, but our standards in town were a lot more … old-fashioned.
We set out on my usual route, with me leading, and from the moment we left our street, Fern was softly exclaiming, saying she had never seen this before, or that before. Oh, what was this place for? It’s a playground for little kids! Oh, what was that?
She had evidently very little experience with pets. There was a fully grown dog with one group, and a puppy with another mother and daughter. The dog was growling at her, while the puppy was straining at its leash, trying to come closer to us, its tail going at a terrific rate. The little girl was gazing at Fern in pure adoration, and the look in Fern’s eyes was just as adoring.
“Oh, please, let’s go look at the child!”
Now, usually I hated to break the rhythm of my run, but I was a sucker for puppies and little kids, too, so with a sigh, I slowed down, and walked towards the mother and baby. The little girl was about two, or thereabouts, a lovely little redhead, and the puppy was a mutt, about half golden lab, and half some small dog, like maybe a terrier.
Some questions popped into my head, from nowhere, and I just knew that Fern didn’t trust herself talking to these people, so I was supposed to ask them. How old was the puppy? About a couple of months, said the woman, smiling sweetly. How old was the little girl? “How old are you, Megan?” and the little girl showed two fingers, and Fern was so delighted, she hugged me. Meanwhile the puppy was so eager to get up and sniff Fern, it was standing up on its hind-legs and barking and whining. Fern dropped down to puppy level, and began to murmur to it, and stroked it, and the little guy licked her like crazy, and Fern looked up at us, with a look of pure sappiness on her face.
With some difficulty, I managed to disentangle Fern from the little family, and we resumed running.
“Oh, what a treat that was!” murmured Fern.
“You like kids, huh.”
“Well … all Elves like kids, Lauren. Kids are very rare, you know.”
“Really? We have kind of a fairytale tradition, that baby elves are rare. So it’s true, then.” I didn’t even know where I had picked that up. I was amazed to realize that I was now talking about elves as if they were an everyday thing. “There’s a really obnoxious tradition that … elves steal human babies.”
Fern gasped. “That is not entirely a lie, Lauren.” Somehow, I was not shocked. “It is a horrible vice, and … the lives of those infants are often very unhappy.”
I could only shake my head.
Another thing that Fern loved was enormous old trees, true to our myths about elves. Oh, let’s go and look at him, she would say, seeing a tree in another park somewhere, and I would ask her to go ahead, and keep running round the park, without slowing down. She would go to the tree, and I would lose sight of her. All I could see was that she was touching the tree, and hugging it, and kissing it. I ran a full circle, and then went up to her and called her away. “I’ll tell you how to get here,” I said, and the sarcasm found its way into my voice. “You can come and visit it anytime you want. Hey, there’s an enormous maple in our back alley! Why don’t you talk to him?”
“I did,” she said quietly, looking at me reproachfully. “It’s a her, anyway.”
“Okay, then,” I said.
By the time we got home, I was perspiring freely, but Fern was hardly winded. It seems that she needed very little daily exercise as such, and her body responded to it in very different ways than mine did. But, she said, occasional extensive exertion was good for her, a lot better than daily exercise.
We did some laundry, and she calmly figured out how our washer worked, and put a lot of clothes to wash, because I hadn’t had time to do it since I had come home from school. Fern did not have a lot of dirty clothes, but she explained that she needed more clothes, but hadn’t brought the kinds of clothes she would prefer, because her guardians insisted that she traveled light. Obviously, a trip to a department store was in order.
I sat down and explained that there were roughly three sorts of sources for clothing. There were department stores, which stocked supposedly high-quality, new clothing, at quite high prices. Then there were discount stores, which stocked clothing imported from poor countries, at inexpensive prices. Actually, I said that I suspected the department stores got their stocks from the so-called Third World Countries, too, but somehow their quality was significantly higher. Finally, there were used clothing stores, such as the Salvation Army, where you could find clothing given away to charity.
“Really?” she asked, when she learned about used clothing stores. “We could bring it home, and wash it carefully, couldn’t we?” I said that that was SOP. “Let’s do that, that’s the best!” she said, and that was fine by me, because at college, most of the time I had shopped in those stores.
That’s where we went. It was quite interesting to go into one, with a friend who didn’t look very different from many of the other shoppers, who were Latino, and a few Asian as well. But somehow Fern looked just a little more foreign than everybody else. The way she would peer at everything made it clear that some of these things, such as a toaster, for instance, was completely outside her experience. I didn’t expect that her enemies would be watching, in such a place, so I just rolled my eyes, and let her do her thing.
Of course, there were numerous kids, shopping with their adults, and Fern had her fill of them. If I was nearby, I would get her mental summons, to come and help to talk to them, and I would obediently go over. If I was across the store somewhere else, looking at junky novels to read, she was on her own, and tried to communicate with the kids somehow!
Just at about lunchtime, we went into an organic foods store, where I was hoping Fern would get some food supplies of a better quality, and we did find some. Then we went into an International Grocery, where I was in heaven, but all the sorts of things that she could really use were in fairly close proximity to some sort of meat, and though she did find a lot of supplies for us, the experience was unpleasant for her. As we walked home—we walked everywhere—she had an unhappy frown on her face, which gradually faded out, until I was filled with relief by the time we got home.
We put everything away, and luckily for me, she found that the way I arranged our supplies were reasonable to her. We got the clothes out of the washer, and she refused to put them in the dryer. She found a drying rack that mom had kept in a storage area, and with a big smile, set it up in the backyard, where there was a bit of sun, and hung up her washed clothes on that. “These dry quickly,” she said, with a smile, “but they’re not natural fiber, you know. What do you call it? Plastic?”
“Well, it is plastic, but for clothes, we say synthetics.”
“Oh, I think I knew that.” She shook her head in mild disapproval. “Some of the things we brought, from …”
“Goodwill?”
“Yes, right; from there, are pure cotton, you know? So much more comfortable.”
“Then, there’s silk, and linen, and wool!”
She studied my face closely. This meant she was picking my brain, but by now, I didn’t mind it. Her touch in my mind was gentle, and just curious, and sometimes very loving.
“Oh. Linen. Was one of the skirts we got made of linen?”
“Yup.”
“And you got a wool. I think we have wool, too, mostly for the colder weather.” I nodded. “And silk … I think, at one time, we had silk, but … somehow, we didn’t take care of the little silk animals, and I think they all died out.” I was shocked, and she nodded, solemnly. “It was long ago, but … it is a sad thing.”
By this time, her clothes were already dry. She held them out, for me to look at, and they were mostly simple items, like chemises, and tank-tops, and a couple of bras, which were just beautiful, and panties, and shorts, and then there were skirts, one opaque, and one translucent, and then there was something like a nightgown, which would have been utterly sexy. She blushed spectacularly, showing that to me, and I looked into her eyes, and they were no longer dark brown, but a lovely grey-green. Immediately, they turned brown.
I looked at her gravely. “Don’t do that while people are watching, hon,” I said. “Earth people can’t do that, and it will freak people out.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, softly. “Can I change back?” I nodded, and the eyes were grey-green again.
“Is that their … natural color?”
She nodded.
“And your skin?”
It took longer, but she became a rich mahogany. And then she grew taller; about five-foot-ten, and her hair grew long as I watched; down to her buttocks. I knew she wanted a hug, and so did I, and I went into her arms, and … I had a strange kind of sexual release. It wasn’t like an orgasm, where your feelings are a sort of surge. It was a long, sustained release; I felt my briefs get soaked, and I could feel something similar happening to her, as well, and she was vibrating, and she was feeling as intense a feeling as I was, and her hands held me tight. So this was how it felt, to belong to an elf … and I wanted it; I didn’t care about the clothes, I wanted to have this release forever.
“Oh … you are so young,” she said, and kissed me, delicately, several times.
“And are you that much older than I am?” I asked softly, kissing her back, and running my fingers through her soft, long, wavy hair.
She nodded. “Will you be upset?”
I said I didn’t know, but I’d like to find out.
“I’m … I have to calculate … about eighty Earth years!”
I was shocked. “Eighty?”
She nodded, and gave me a sad smile. “Normally, I would live to be … a hundred and twenty earth years!”
I sighed, not meaning to show Fern how hopeless I felt. My hope to be Fern’s love, somehow, was dying. “Earth people die a lot younger; like … in their eighties.”
“I know,” she whispered, and she reached out an arm to touch me lovingly. “Elf couples … usually die within a day of each other.”
I felt a sort of twisted smile on my face, and I didn’t know what to think. If Fern had her way, I knew, the two of us would never die! She was that kind of person, who wanted the best for everyone. I was beginning to understand what she felt for me, and it was more love than she had felt in her life, if I could believe the feelings that I was getting from her. But what else could I do?
After that, we needed to find something affectionate, but not so intimate as to make us wet our clothes again. We had to put what we had been wearing to wash again, wipe ourselves down—or rather, wipe each other down, as I blush to recall—and change.
“I’m going to braid your hair,” she announced, suddenly, her eyes wide and excited.
“I don’t usually have my hair braided,” I protested.
“I’ve seen so many girls, with those tiny little braids, like dozens of them!”
I shuddered. “That’s a little too ethnic for me,” I complained.
“What’s ethnic?” she wanted to know.
“Well, it’s styles and customs that people of African descent like to revive, to pay respects to their cultural origins, you know?”
“Ethnic …” she repeated, softly. “That’s a lovely idea! I could do some ancient Elf customs and styles … at least the more positive ones,” she mused. I was strongly reminded that their history was not entirely admirable.
“Okay, you know what? You could do a single braid, and I’ll wear it for the weekend!”
That satisfied her, and she smiled softly, and got me seated so that it was convenient to fool with my hair, the fool stuff that I both loved and hated, and I prepared myself for a few minutes of torture.
Very soon, I realized that this was going to be quite different. Rather than how my college buddies played with my hair, her gentle fingers were magical, in a non-elf-related way. She was filled with pleasure to be able to touch me, like this, and that pleasure was transmitted to me through her fingers. I was chewing my fingers, my feelings too intense to just sit relaxedly, but I don’t think I had ever been so relaxed in my life.
She finally tied it off with a little gadget she had, and turned me round to look at me from in front, and she liked it so much, she pulled me close and kissed me.
“I must look great, eh?”
“You look like, well, like an elf! But a really handsome one! I love your ears, you know. Pointed ears are … a little too common. I love earth-type ears!”
“Would you like me to braid your hair?
“Yes! You know how?”
I made a dismissive gesture, as if to say that everybody knew that, but then I realized that with hair as long as hers, it would be a whole ’nother thing.
“Close your eyes,” she commanded, and I did. When I looked again, her hair was just down to the middle of her back. “It doesn’t just look short, I made it short; so it’s not going to be difficult to braid.”
So we traded places, and I picked up her hair, which was much, much more soft than any hair I had ever held in my hands, and I began to plait it. Pretty soon, though, I felt the same intense pleasure as I had felt when she braided my hair, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
It didn’t take long, and she asked for me to give her the finished end, and she put one of her gadgets to tie it off, and we looked at each other, and felt really pleased.
Fern sighed. “You make me so happy,” she said, and her eyes glowed, and the two us were becoming so full of happy thoughts, that I felt my protective shell of cocky cynicism might disappear forever. Cynicism was just me; I never had any patience with sentimental foolishness. The cockiness came from the fact that I had such an amazing education, which was paid for through work, and through government programs, that I was equipped to sift all the news and the rumors and other sources of information to separate the truth from the lies. But now Fern’s elf-culture was making foolishness out of everything I thought I knew. But I could not reject what I was getting from Fern as superstition, or anything like that. She would only tell me something of doubtful factuality if she had been deceived somehow.
As far as happiness: Fern filled me with a different kind of happiness than I had experienced as a kid. In spite of her stunning innocence, she filled me with an adult sort of happiness that I loved so much; it was as if all the people we knew, and all our neighbors, and everyone at work were our kids, and I felt like petting their heads, and telling them to be good.
She sighed, and put her hand in mine, and we leaned back against the sofa. “If I had known that … loving you would have made me this happy,” she said, “I would have tried to come to Earth years ago, and I would have found you, and got you alone, and …”
“And what?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered, leaning against me, and resting her head on my shoulder. And I could hear her thoughts, and I knew there was more. It was all about becoming this one person thing, where all my crimes would be hers, and all her crimes would me mine. It was getting very close to when I would have to learn what had brought her to the attention of the authorities in their world. But for the moment, I just wanted to sit here, next to her, and just vibrate with the feelings she was giving me, and apparently I was giving her.
Weekend: the Second Day
All that first day off, we clung together, and then broke apart to do something, and came back to touch each other.
“Show me how you work that grass-cutting machine,” she said. We were still at the time of year where we had to mow the lawn once a week, and she had seen me doing it earlier in the month.
I showed her, and she started doing it. She came up with a way of doing it so that the cut lawn looked very velvety. She complained that the blades were dull, and I was surprised that she was able to sharpen the blade herself, something that I had to have a professional do for me. Meanwhile, I had got out the weed-whacker, and done a little tidying around the edges of the lawn.
“Lauren!” It was Mrs. Berger, my neighbor, you will remember. I headed over to the fence to say Hi, and Lauren shut down the mower, and hurried to join me. She could never resist meeting someone new.
“Hi Mrs. Berger!”
“You’ve got a friend living with you now, I see!”
“Oh, you should meet her,” I said. “This is Liz! And Liz, this is Mrs. Berger, who was good friends with my parents, when they were alive,” I said with a smile.
“Hello, Mrs. Berger! You can call me Fern. That’s what my friends call me!”
“Fern! What a nice name! Well, it’s nice to have you next door! And now I have to mow my lawn too; yours looks so pretty!”
“Would you like me to do your lawn, too?”
And just that simply, we took over Mrs. Berger’s lawn.
The next day—which was a Tuesday, but it didn’t make much difference—somehow Fern and I ended up deciding to drive out into the country. I had realized that Fern loved nature, and I knew that she was completely unfamiliar with any of the natural formations near where we lived, so it was a natural. Mom’s ancient Toyota was in the shed at the back, and I got it started, and we set out. We filled the tank with gas, and we slowly drove north, which was the quickest way out of the farm belt, and into a state park where our family would often go.
The state park was still there, though developers had bought up the land all around it, and were busily digging it up to build on it. Without a word from me, Fern deplored what they were doing; apparently similar processes were ruining the landscapes of her home planet.
We found a quiet dell, surrounded by trees, and while I set out our cooler on a picnic table, I looked for Fern, and realized that she had stripped completely naked, and climbed a tree!
“What are you doing? You can’t do that!” I cried in horror.
“No? Why not?”
“It’s against the law!”
She lightly climbed down, and stood facing me, not even slightly uncomfortable in her utterly unclothed state. I noted in passing that she was devoid of body hair, except for three patches, one each under her arms, and one between her legs.
“Where did you leave your clothes, Fern?”
She pointed up the tree, and there were her clothes, draped carefully over one of the lower branches.
I got her dressed, after she got her clothes down, and she did not resist.
“Why is it such a big problem?” she asked softly, trying to get the answers out of my head. Of course, there was no logical reason for it; it was all cultural, and I explained that as well as I could.
“If you went to Africa, where my ancestors were from, you would find more people naked, and some just very lightly dressed,” I said. “Even here, you could wear a minimum of clothing, if you want. Like a bikini-bra set, you know. Didn’t you bring one?”
“Oh, the … swimsuit?” I had picked out a pretty orange set for her, and she had brought that along. I had a blue one-piece, and I offered to wear it if she wanted to take her clothes off. She shrugged. “It’s not as good as taking everything off,” she said softly, but she knew she was a visitor, a guest on this planet, and she had to stay within the rules, no matter how senseless they were to her.
Soon we were in our swimsuits, and we took a dip in a stream that seemed clear of anything threatening, dried ourselves off, and unexpectedly, Fern got it into her head to play Tag. She would tap me, and run really fast, but not too fast for me to catch her, and then I would return the favor. Whatever I couldn’t do, I could run quite fast, but I knew she was not running as fast as she was capable.
She was delighted with the game of Frisbee! I would throw the thing as far as I could, and she would run like crazy, and catch it after a spectacular leap into the air. She picked up the skill of throwing the Frisbee very quickly, and she would get it back to me just far enough away so that I had to run to get it.
When she sensed that I was tired, she suggested that we sit under the tree that she had hung her clothes on, and she sat down on the grass, and pulled me up between her legs, and put her arms around me, and I could feel her lithe, muscular body against my back, and her gentle arms across me, and her soft lips kissing me, and once again I felt that soft warm feeling that was becoming so common when I was with her.
“Fern, …”
“Yes?”
“I want you so much … I’m becoming anxious about … someday, if you have to go back home, or … go back to face a judge, or something … I don’t know; I know this is too early to say, but …” My lips were talking by themselves. I hadn’t thought any of this out consciously. “I don’t think I could live without you, Fern.”
She was silent a long time, and somehow we turned to face each other. Her face was now so serious, and her eyes were glowing. “I loved you almost as soon as I saw you,” she said softly. “But this is more than love, Lauren. It is more like …” and she said some word in her own language, and it came across to me, when she held my hands, as ‘Elf-binding.’ Apparently it was a sort of bond between elves that was almost a physiological thing. This is what she said was the basis of how when one elf of a bonded pair died, the other died within a day. “There was never a reason for us to feel this way; two elves suddenly feel this way when … the right one comes along, and both of them feel it at the same time. And when they are parted, it is painful. Physically painful, and the further they are apart, the more it hurts. And the longer they are apart, too. If we become … elf-bonded, Lauren, I could never leave Earth, or you would have to come with me.”
“And leave Mrs. Berger?” I said, and we both laughed and laughed hysterically.
Later, we found a little clearing in the woods, and we spread out a towel, and lay down together, and kissed and kissed for a long hour.
The End
<<<<>>>>
No comments:
Post a Comment