Her dripping skin streams off the rinse water in silvery rivulets.
Deliciously naked she stands up from her Jacuzzi, splashing the almost-drained bathwater with her feet. For half an hour, Ingrid has been steeping in the fluid massages of the Jacuzzi’s hydrotherapy. Reluctantly she rose from her steamy refuge; needing to dry off and get dressed.
Armed with scissors, thread and pins, Marianne flitted about the tight-fitting midnight-violet dress, tailoring it stylishly around her mother Élise’s svelte curves. She was as fashion conscious as her mother was not, but then, being a working, single mom for the last fourteen years left little time or money for Élise to have a “life”. Between her former marriage and later, an ill-fated flirtation with a male coworker, Élise came to avoid and distrust entanglements.
“You can tell things about a person by the way they smoke, like what they do for a living, but that applies to women more than men.”
Marsha pauses that thought to seize her cigarette pack from the picnic table, against the green glass ashtray cradling a handful of lipstick stained butts from the five women of today’s chit-chat gathering. All four neighbors brought their lawn chairs to huddle under the shade of Marsha’s beach umbrella, pour cups of fresh-brewed Folgers and turn the ambience of the Clover Hill Trailer Park to a mid-morning backyard social.
“But Denise, there IS a way to signal hotties if you can’t text’em,” Lauren said, laughing underneath the sun umbrella at the patio table. “You don’t hafta dial their cell if you know Crypton.” She flounced her platinum pixie cut in the breeze and plucked Denise’s smoldering cigarette right out from her slender fingers.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
