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o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
o The 'Bookshelf collection' offers a very wide variety of o
o stories. They have been submitted by people from all over the o
o world. Also from alt.sex.stories (Newsgroups). There is no o
o particular order other than offering them to you in alpha- o
o betical directories. o
o I don’t believe in categorizing things. "I don’t want to o
o be typed therefore I don’t type things myself." I think it’s o
o a lot more fun to browse around and find 'little' surprises o
o that you might not have even thought of looking for. o
o Lest we forget!!! This story was produced as adult en- o
o tertainment and should not be read by minors. Kristen o
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Carillon (MF)
by Anne Turney (annet@news.delphi.com)
**
The girl swings her heavy hair into William's arm, making his coffee slosh
over the Styrofoam cup. She smiles but doesn't apologize; apparently he's
supposed to take the physical contact as a recompense. Half the coffee has
spilled. The clerk at the outdoor snack-stand notices him refilling his cup
and demands an extra twenty-five cents. The girl is already gone, sitting
on a bench under a eucalyptus tree.
The December climate makes William irritable. Sunlight slams into his
forehead, and the lush Santa Ynez mountains yawn at his foul spirits. He
carries his coffee to Van Orman Tower, where he will spend the next
forty-five minutes playing Christmas carols on the carillon. Then he will
go to the auditorium to administer the final exam for his music theory
course. Finals week is ending; the campus is almost deserted. Everywhere
you can hear the gossip of palm and eucalyptus.
When he gets to the top of the tower, he looks down and sees the woman with
the heavy hair standing up, gathering her books. A wind off the Pacific
comes billowing under her skirt, whisking it over her waist. The fabric
floats, as free as a torn scrap of parachute, over her buttocks. They are
the color of iced tea.
In his dreams that night, the girl's glassy hair lashes his body. Its
strands are sharp and cold. She whips her head back and forth over his bare
chest, inflicting a thousand microscopic scratches on his skin. He laughs;
the pain is exquisitely embarrassing.
She is wearing the same light dress. The bodice is tight, but the skirt is
full and sails upward whenever she moves. The dress is printed with tiny
pink roses, a design that reminds him of a toaster-cover in his
grandmother's kitchen. The girl clambers off him, leaving him sprawled out
and blushing on his bed.
"Why would I make you think about your grandmother's kitchen?" she laughs,
reading his thoughts.
She's right. She would be alien to that Depression-era room. Her body is a
product of light and abundance. People wouldn't think of covering their
toasters in a world that generated such a luxury of muscles, skin and hair.
That world is a careless theater of rare things, a world measured by
twelve-hour airplane rides and the seasons of opera and ballet.
She reaches for the ceiling, grabs the light fixture, and starts to swing.
William jumps up, protesting, but she ignores him. The weight of her hips
carries her like a sensuous pendulum from side to side. As he stands
watching her, she suddenly swings backward and flies toward him, spreading
her legs wide, then bringing them together and pointing her toes.
"I love the carillon. Will you take me up there sometime?"
He promises that he will.
"I'll swing from the bell rope, like Quasimodo!" she cries.
And all at once her weight is on him, pushing him back on his bed. He
kisses her before she can crawl off him again. She straddles his thigh and
rows gracefully up and down it--a swan riding a bicycle.
Her name is Kim Lindley. She is one of three Kims who registers for his
Bach class, which can be plugged in to the liberal arts curriculum as four
art appreciation units.
"Excuse me," he addresses her one morning. She is talking to a friend while
he lectures about the liturgical structure of the cantatas. He is
describing the Church as a bride and Christ as a bridegroom, trying to
convey the sacred eroticism of it. In the end he makes it sound as
tantalizing as a sandwich of wheat toast and steel wool.
"Excuse me," he repeats. His voice comes out with more pedantic peevishness
than he intended.
She turns and looks at him over her shoulder. The rest of the class
watches.
"I'd prefer you didn't talk while I'm lecturing," he says.
I'd prefer you didn't lecture while I'm talking, he can hear her thinking,
but she is too well bred to say it.
"Sorry," she mutters, and rights herself in her seat so that she faces the
blackboard.
William asks if anyone in the class listened to the cantatas he assigned.
Someone raises his hand. William asks him to comment. The student remarks
hopefully that he noticed a lot of counterpoint.
"Excellent," William says wearily. "That's a brilliant observation."
Bach lived in Leipzig, William drones. He hardly ever left. The farmers who
cultivated cabbage all week went to church on Sundays and got to hear Bach
playing the organ, something William will never be able to do, though he
knows more than enough about the lower middle class and its cabbage
patches.
William plays the second movement of Cantata 140 on the Baldwin upright, to
demonstrate its measured splendor for the class. It tinkles out in a
bourgeois propriety that makes him wince.
"Kim was the name of a girl I was in love with," William tells the girl, in
his dreams. "Kim McMurphy. I loved her from third grade until I graduated
from high school. If I hadn't gone East for college, I'd probably still be
in love with her."
Kim Lindley cracks her blue gum, produces a bubble with a snide farting
sound, and shrugs.
"Her father owned a music store. 'McMurphy's Classical and Exotic
Instruments.' It was the only place in Missouri you could get a cithara or
a pan flute. Her mother taught piano at their house. I took lessons from
her because I wanted to see where Kim lived. In eight years of piano
lessons, I saw her walk through the living room twenty-one times. I can
describe to you every second of every one of those times: what she wore,
whether she looked at me, how much of her thighs I could see."
William is sitting at his harpsichord. Kim Lindley sneaks up behind him and
places her brown fingers over his. Her fingertips are bald and globular,
like a child's. Only middle- class girls cultivate their fingernails.
Dirt-poor girls and very rich girls keep them short. Like a pony, she fixes
her mouth to his neck and sucks softly. Against his collarbone, her hair is
icy cold. Her hands, as she slides them up his forearms, feel gritty and
unwashed, and she smells of astringent sweat.
"What have you been doing this afternoon?" he laughs. "Planting corn?"
"Playing volleyball," she murmurs. "At the beach. You should have come to
watch. I lost my bikini top."
Suddenly she lifts her hands away, and he senses her fingers working behind
his back. She is unbuttoning her white cotton shirt, the oversized shirt
with the sleeves torn out. Through its long armholes her bra is visible, a
sly, black flag; he looked away when he first saw it. Now he looks down at
the keyboard and tries stupidly to play a scrap of a toccata, but he can't
get away from the black and white; it's in front of him, on his instrument,
and behind him, on the girl.
He turns around, his eyes closed. She unzips his fly, then slides on top of
him, her nipples brushing his eyelids, then his lips. He nuzzles her
breasts, grabs handfuls of her moist hips, but his radio alarm wakes him
just as he's coming. He explodes to the hyperactive tinkle of a Scarlatti
sonatina.
Bach had his chance to see the rest of Europe. He spent time in Italy, then
returned to Germany, where he continued writing and playing for
cabbage-pickers. He wasn't the sociable globe- hopper that Handel would
become. With Bach's death, the Baroque period ended, and so does William's
course.
It's late March now. Kim Lindley is going to Nice for spring break. She's
been chattering about it with her friends and discussing it in the notes
she passes during class. "Should I go topless on the beach?" she asks in
one of these notes, which William finds abandoned under a desk. The note
feeds his fantasies for the next three weeks. He imagines the girl's waxy
white breasts, exposed to the Mediterranean sun, the nipples stiffening as
she wades in the sea. William has never been to a nude beach, in the United
States or Europe. He did go to Europe once. To Italy, France, Belgium,
Germany, and England, on a three-week tour with his sister. He hated it. He
is one of those people who is born to remain stationary.
One afternoon in April, when he's walking from the auditorium to the
student union, he sees Kim Lindley crossing the campus alone. He is only
twenty-nine years old, he thinks. Why shouldn't he date a former student?
The likelihood of Kim Lindley enrolling in another music class is
remote--she earned a C- as a final grade in the Bach class. To his shock,
she calls out to him.
"Dr. Weber!" she cries. "I heard the most amazing joke! You'll love it!"
He manages a crooked smile as she approaches. Over the break, her hair has
lightened from honey blond to several gradations of silver and platinum.
Her shoulders, under the thin straps of her white top, are the color of
hammered copper.
"Listen," she says. "Why did Bach have so many kids?"
William waits. He's heard the joke before--he hears it from someone at
least once every quarter--but he can't remember the punch line to save his
life.
"Because he couldn't pull the stops on his organ!" she shrieks.
William laughs politely. The girl pats his arm, tells him to take care.
They all say that, these pretty girls. Take care of what? If he understood
their language, maybe he'd be able to win one of them for himself. But his
mind is hopelessly baroque--convoluted, dark, irregular--while their
thoughts are streamlined and weightless, like kites. This quarter, he'll
teach a course on the Classical Era. Classical music is sexier than
baroque, he reassures himself. By the time he gets to Mozart, he could very
possibly have a chance of getting laid.