Sweatshops of Romance - Rewrite

Sweatshops of Romance                                                       
                                                                    
     We are refugees wandering the no man’s land between the smoking ruins of an adolescence whose home we can never return to and the offer of asylum in an adulthood whose customs are so strange. But a strange scent comes unbidden. The incense of burning flesh from a funeral pyre feels like a memory but is more likely attributable to campers barbecuing from across the lake.
     Holly’s derriere bounces under her bikini like sun-ripened peach halves in a mythical forest. The legendary heat penetrates with two fingers, one pressing into Holly’s bottom to smolder her and the other rubbing my rear, with me a prisoner to the fashion of celibacy.     
      But my mind is filled with wicked notions of what to do on this summer day. I stride up to Holly and wield a switch made of fern fronds to swat her tush into a symbolic serfdom. She laughs herself into the softness of an overripe tomato. I speak to her with patriarchal love pats lending her lips to protest for my eyes to witness her vassalage.      
     But when I grab her piece of heaven she spins like a whirling dervish into a mystical trance where even I dare not trespass. And so my hands retreat into the hermit crab shell of modesty.     
     Holly reaches into my shorts and says, “Trick or treat. Hey mister, got any gumballs in that sack? Oh, but those aren’t the kind you can chew. But lookie here you have a candy bar down there but that isn’t the edible kind. So you get the trick.” Holly pulls my swim trunks down to my knees exposing me for the world to see.      
     I yelp, “Hey that’s not fair.”      
    She says, “If you stop fondling my fanny in public I won’t set you up to be arrested by the park ranger. Jim, you’re acting like a silver backed gorilla impressing upon me that you own me.”    
     I bob up and down making the grunting sound of an ape. Holly says, “Now that you’re butt nekkid, you’re going to get Holly’s patty-cake recipe guaranteed to jump-start your tallywhacker.”     
     She faces me like the daylight hemisphere of the earth facing the sun. Like the earth embracing the sun, she draws a circle around me and kneads my buns like a baker would dough. She segues from her massage into a pitter-patter of spanks. “When the school-mistress paddled me I had my pants on to buffer the blows,” I say.    
     Holly replies to me, “This time it’s my hand on your ever so soft and oh so sensitive bottom skin.”  
     Holly gives my buns a two-handed cat scratch with her fingernails until I smile like a man getting a scalp massage from his hairstylist lady. “This feels ticklish but with a bit of a sting,” I say.    
     “Just relax your bottom and let my nails do their work. Think of it as a lesson for your impudence.”  
     “When the school-mistress pinched my ear it felt like punishment but your nip melts away the guilty stress stored in my bottom,” I say.   
     “When in a pinch, try not to flinch, just let yourself grow inch by inch,” she says with a smirk.  
     Holly doesn’t need women’s magazines to learn the secret language of men. She got on the job training in the sweatshops of romance. She is well versed in bat winks and lip pouts which promise more than a mere kiss. Her eyes are like two pentagrams locked on my castle tower.
     “Oh prophet of midnight dreams, do not hunch with a crooked back. Stand straight and touch the sky” she tells me.
     “Please, we might get caught.”      
     “This is the offseason” she pronounces.      
     When a park ranger rounds the curve of the trail, Holly retracts her fingers from my posterior.       \
     Holly says, “Jim, pull up your swim trunks” but I freeze like a deer caught in headlights. Holly says, “Oh Mr. park ranger Jim just had to whiz. We thought we were alone here.”  
     “I never expected to be mooned out here. How did his bum get those pink polka dots?”  
     “Oh sir, he got ant bites and the truth is I had to rub calamine lotion on his bottom.”      
     Holly tugs my trunks up and ties my drawstring above my emblem of manhood to cover my coat of arms which signifies my male heredity. “I’m sorry sir he seems to be dazed and confused. Jim, will I have to dress you when we’re married?”      
     The ranger says, “An elderly couple just pulled in with a bumper sticker saying, ‘Jesus saves.’ You folks were lucky.”    
     Holly says, “I’m sorry you had to witness this sordid affair. I promise you, good sir, never to treat this nature preserve as a nudist colony again.”
     Her waggish tongue tickles my ears with the British charm of a peasant girl raised on tongue in cheek earthiness. Déjà vu takes me by surprise as she gives me a sidelong glance with the fiery eyes of a Lass ready to greet the sailors in Blackburn.
     We do homage to our amphibian ancestors by returning to the water where once we were sea dragons spying fish in the murky depths but also from whence we were born into this life from our mother’s inner sea.  
     The caramel-hued lake water bathes us under our Cathedral of pines which cast sunbeams and shadow like the stained glass in our church of mind opening. Holly and I swim like otters under the roof of heaven. We are bobbing apples circled by an aureole of ropes with nipple buoys. Holly’s face blushes like a McIntosh but I am the fruit ready to be picked.    
     I saddle my aquatic horse and the buoy between my legs feels like an extension of my own cylinder where time and space collide. Holly grabs the bull by the horns by mounting behind me on my plastic pony. Like a ruby-throated finch, she serenades my crest of Apollo with a song of laughter as she bucks like a bareback rodeo rider. Her wet body pounds my back with the supple gold of a woman teaching me to swim in foreign waters. Yet my rocking horse is a friend that I am loath to give up.    
     She dismounts and her smoky eyes are aimed between my legs like she is confident that her gaze alone is enough to tip the battle.      
     She grasps the end of my floating balance beam and begins to gently bob me with her hands inches from my pencil of love. She jiggles my horse with madhouse glee until my bells jingle. She splashes my pear, cocooned in its wet cotton swim trunks.    
     “What if the ranger shows up again?”  
     “Do not be a prisoner to your fears. Rise oh Delphic oracle and feel the smoke from my pentacle gaze,” she incantates.  
     My flag pole is already at half mast. Her salvo of water lengthens me with a growth spurt and thickens me into the muscles of a runner on steroids. Her eyes travel the span of my plantain.
     Holly says, “I do so love carnal knowledge with a male who is no longer a boy but not yet a man. When I take a lad like you it makes me feel young again. Why it seems only yesterday I was pillaging those lean wrestler guys in the Lyceum in Athens.”
     “My darling, if it pleases you to plunder my youthful flesh then just be delicate with my heart.”
     My white flag pokes out of my swim trunks in a surrender of my modesty. She says, “I never forget a dick. Yours leans like the Tower of Pisa like my husband’s did back when it was called a tallywag.”
     I say, “You’ve been reading too much, Shirley MacLaine.”
     Holly says, “Ha! You believe I have an overactive imagination prone to fanciful delusions. Jim, I never expected such robustness from an effete guy. How shall we celebrate this discovery?”