~~~
Alan Annand is a writer and astrologer. His NEW AGE NOIR crime novels (Scorpio Rising, Felonious Monk, Soma County) feature astrologer and palmist Axel Crowe, whom one reviewer has dubbed “Sherlock Holmes with a horoscope.” (Websites: http://www.sextile.com, http://www.navamsa.com.)
Find his books on Amazon, Apple, Barnes&Noble, Kobo and Smashwords.
~~~
~~~
Alan Annand is a writer and astrologer. His NEW AGE NOIR crime novels (Scorpio Rising, Felonious Monk, Soma County) feature astrologer and palmist Axel Crowe, whom one reviewer has dubbed “Sherlock Holmes with a horoscope.” (Websites: http://www.sextile.com, http://www.navamsa.com.)
Find his books on Amazon, Apple, Barnes&Noble, Kobo and Smashwords.
~~~
CyberVegas was the IT industry’s annual group grope of code and data addicts. An entire hotel was booked, its rooftop terrace party central when the day’s presentations were over. My buddy Troy and I went up there for cocktail hour. The haze above the vapor patio was so blue I thought I was on Uranus. Maybe we were. The place was crawling with weirdos.
“Get you something?” A waitress slithered up in a sexy lizard body leotard, like the reptilian alien Diane in the TV series V. I wasn’t sure if she was a real waitress or just acting out some cosplay script. But she had a tray in her hand, so I took a chance.
“Dirty vodka martini with a slice of jalapeno,” I told her. “Two shots of vodka, easy on the vermouth.”
“Dry and spicy,” she said.
“Like my wit,” I said.
“Whatever.” She looked at Troy. “You like it dirty too?”
“Uh, yes,” Troy said, but his answer revealed that her appearance had caused a short circuit in his logic.
I knew his drink was a Bloody Mary, two stalks of celery, no salt on the rim. Troy was currently on a health kick, so his drinks had to be nutritious, fruit or vegetable juice, fiber, low sugar/sodium content. And he was going easy on alcohol, no doubles.
Suddenly he’d gone completely off his own program. Distracted perhaps by her spectacular figure, poorly-concealed beneath a micro-thin gauze of lizard-skin. I was a little distracted myself, but at least I’d got my drink order right.
She headed for the bar. We watched her reptilian buns shimmy with luminescence across the terrace.
“Houston, I think we have liftoff,” Troy said.
“Isn’t it a little early to be breaking your resolution?”
He’d sworn this year he wouldn’t make a fool of himself. Last conference, he’d been netted in a tranny bar raid and held overnight in a crowded jail until I could bail him out. Meantime, he’d lost most of his clothes. There’d been pictures on Facebook, LVPD mugshots, enough memories to last a lifetime…
“This is different,” he said.
“Like how?”
“There’s something exotic about her.”
We drifted toward the bar, scanning the crowd for unfamiliar faces. We already knew half the people there, either because we worked in Silicon Valley, or had met at other conferences. Anyone half-serious about their career was here.
Aside from boning up on cloud coupling and deep-data derivatives, it was a fabulous hookup scene for nerds of every perversion. Sorry, persuasion. I was looking for someone I didn’t know. Someone who could take me places I’d never been before. Flesh drive fantasy.
Troy and I nodded to a crew from CalTech, every one of them an inventor with patents up the yahoo. Super-geeks. Guys so far out there you needed radar to track them. The alpha geek was an Iranian they called Dr. Aquarius because no one could pronounce his real name.
As we neared the bar, our waitress materialized with two martinis. I drank mine straight off and pried Troy’s from his hot hand. “He needs a cool nutritious beverage.” I told her the recipe for his Bloody Mary.
“Okay.” She was back in less than a minute, as if a Bloody Mary had been waiting at the bar. Maybe she had a mic in her lizard-collar, bluetoothing her orders to the bartender…
“Thanks.” Troy sucked absently on his drink as he scanned her up and down. Maybe he was still trying to decide if she was real or not. There were some nice bots out there but nothing quite like this.
“Have you guys been to Area 69?” she said.
“What’s that – an alien crash site?” I said. “Or a strip bar?”
She gave me a look.
“Where’s Area 69?” Troy said.
“Out in the desert. I’ll show you later.” She touched him and I saw electricity run like blue fire up his arm.
“Does it have anything to do with aliens?” As rational as he was, Troy was also into UFOs. “Can we go now?”
“It has everything to do with aliens,” she said. “But you can relax. The shuttle doesn’t leave until midnight.”
“Shuttle?” Troy looked around. “Who else is going?”
“Just enough people to make it interesting.”
She winked at him but it was creepy. Her main eyelid stayed open as a gauze-like film partially obscured her pupil, but you could see she could still see you. Maybe it was 
some sort of bio-patch dreamed up by one of those super-geeks. Or maybe she really was part-reptile. Ever since David Icke had discovered lizards under the Denver Airport, there’d been sightings all over the Southwest.
“What’s your name?” Troy said.
“Phoebe.”
She went back to work and Troy and I went out onto the patio for a smoke. The sun had set an hour ago. We could see planes coming in from all over to land at McCarran.
We each took out our vaporizers. In private we’d occasionally share one like you would a joint, but in public it looked too gay, which we weren’t. In fact, we were just the opposite of gay. We were distinctly unhappy.
I was congenitally saturnine. Tory was legitimately sad.
His tenth girlfriend had just broken up with him. Not because he was a bad guy. In fact, he was such a good guy I think girls felt bad about keeping him to themselves, and released him back into the wild so other girls could have a taste too. Girls, when they weren’t being bitches with each other, could sometimes be very tribal that way.
Why did women dump him? Beats me. He made a quarter mil a year running cloud ops for a Fortune 500 company. He spoke three languages, ordered wine with confidence and picked up any tab within reason. Maybe he was a dud in the sack. But I couldn’t ask him about it, never mind talk to his exes.
I ignited my vaporizer. It contained a blend of cannabis and gotu kola that made me feel hip and smart at the same time. While my eyes drifted across the patio, looking for that someone special, Troy stared off into the sky.
“Did you see that?” he pointed to the northeast.
“What?” I looked but all I saw was the Las Vegas Freeway lit up like a neon snake with thousands of cars running on a dream.
“A plane just dropped out of the sky.”
“Saturday night, planes are coming in here every five minutes. Plus which, Nellis Air Force Base is out that way…”
“No, I saw a light – vertical as a plumb line. It just dropped out of the sky – way out there.” He pointed toward the black horizon.
“You want to call 911 or TMZ?”
He laughed, but I knew he was ticked that I didn’t take him seriously. He was a bit of a Star Wars trooper, prone to spin out of orbit, but I’d learned not to follow him.
We had another drink and went downstairs to the dance lounge. They had a funk band with singers in miniskirts, and a Latina shaking her castanets. These nerd-fests were notoriously short on women, so Troy and I split up and prowled like hungry men at a buffet. When I spotted a tall brunette in a blue mini, I knew the night would never get better.
Her name was Rhea, the lead developer for a high-tech Montreal firm doing special effects for movies. Cutting edge graphics, lots of mathematics. In minutes we were deep into a conversation about fractals.
I caught the bartender in pause mode and ordered her a drink. Personally, I never liked gin and tonic, or guys who drank it, but the women could be interesting, especially if they drank a lot of it. I got her a double.
We hit the dance floor and ripped it up for fifteen minutes, which is all the cardio I need after three drinks while still trying to keep my armpits dry.
We returned to the bar for another round. I hadn’t seen Troy in a while, but it was early and he couldn’t be in trouble yet. Besides, he had a shuttle to catch at midnight.
I excused myself to visit the washroom. Rhea had to go too. We headed off together for the washrooms. But when I entered the men’s, she followed me.
“Uh, the women’s is over there.”
“I know, but I’m a man,” she said.
I stopped dead in my tracks. “Okay, I didn’t see that coming.”
“Gotcha.” She flashed a wicked grin and went into the women’s. But she had me going there for a minute. She was tall for a woman, lean like a runner.
When I got back to the bar, Troy was there with Phoebe. She was wrapped around him like an anaconda. I really began to wonder what her job was.
“Where’ve you been, man? The shuttle’s leaving in a few minutes.”
“I’ve got to wait for this woman I met.” I didn’t want to lose her now, having had a drink and broken sweat together, almost shared a bathroom…
“Rhea went on ahead,” Phoebe said. “She’ll meet us on the platform.”
“How do you know her name?” I said.
“I know everyone who wants to come.” Phoebe led us to the elevator.
We took a ride down. Phoebe got off at the lobby to pick some people up, she’d meet us on the platform. We continued, me and Troy and a few geniuses from CalTech, 
another four stories underground until we emerged on a subway platform. A few other familiar Silicon Valley faces were there already, held spellbound by Rhea with her spherical geometry and harmonic coordinates.
“Where’s Phoebe?” Troy said.
“She’ll come on the next car,” Rhea said.
A subway car pulled up, bullet-nosed like a giant dildo. Rhea waved us all aboard. I threw myself into a seat as the car accelerated, my back thrust hard again the seat. Then we decelerated, and I came half out of my seat in almost gravity-free space. We braked to a halt and the doors opened.
We took an elevator to the surface and emerged from inside a rock formation at the edge of a sprawling desert – an ancient lake reduced to a salt flat. Phoebe was there to greet us.
“How’d you get here first?” Troy said.
“We overtook you in the passing lane,” she laughed. I thought she was joking but there she was with half a dozen nerds whom I’d seen in the lobby when she got off the elevator.
Troy and I joined the others under the infinite night sky. We couldn’t see the lights of Vegas. I looked up and tried to find the Big Dipper to orient myself. The other geeks milled in circles, waiting for something to justify having left the conference after-hours party.
A pillar of light dropped from heaven. In a blink it was replaced by a giant chrome thermos bottle settling onto the sand. A portal opened on our side. Red tentacles rippled out in a sticky net and pulled us inside.
~~~
I woke up curled naked in a shower. The bath towel on the shower rod read, Hotel Nevada Blue. I didn’t remember checking in but at least I wasn’t waking up in jail. Now if I could just find some aspirin for this massive headache…
I wandered out into a huge suite overlooking the Strip. A dozen geeks were sleeping in various states of nakedness. The TV was on, it was Friday morning and the AM show hosts were talking about this weekend’s weather.
Huh? Troy and I had only attended day one of a week-long conference, and gone to Area 69 on Monday night. I was missing three days.
I looked around for Phoebe and Rhea but there was no sign of them. Just Troy and six guys from CalTech and a handful of other code-runners from the Valley.
“What’s going on?” Troy awoke with a start, shocked to see he was lying on the sofa with some other nerd in only his underwear. He leaped to his feet. “Christ, not again!” He turned on me. “You were supposed to keep an eye on me. What the hell happened?”
“This was different,” I reassured him. “No trannies. And no police.”
“That’s a relief.” He got a bottle of water from the fridge and headed for the shower. “But why do I feel like someone took my brain out of my head and used it like a sponge to get a stain out of a carpet?”
I phoned room service for food and lots of coffee. One by one the Valley wunderkind woke up with blank looks on their faces, headshakes sounding like a pair of dice in a tin cup. Snake-eyes, sucker. Did somebody say, mindfuck?
Gradually we pieced it together, although it was like one of those paradoxes from quantum physics. Dual state realities, entanglement, spooky action at a distance, Schrodinger’s pussy.
The Monday night consensus was, we’d all met two women named Phoebe and Rhea. They were both very attractive in a weird way, but details of their clothing were contradictory. According to some, Phoebe wore the electric blue mini-dress. Rhea, the tall one, wore the snakeskin jumpsuit. Both shimmered with an alien light, but served great drinks.
And then it got fuzzy. Some remembered taking the shuttle with Phoebe or Rhea to Area 69. Others said the thermos bottle came right to the hotel, hovered above the rooftop terrace and sucked guys off the vapor patio like dust bunnies in a hand vacuum.
My most vivid memory was of the tentacles. They looked wet but they were actually made of fire. They took hold of me with a reassuring grip and pulled me into their body-temperature hull. I should have been terrified but it was all very pleasant. It was like being massaged by God.
I remember lying there as a blue doughnut of light collared my ankles and raised my feet above my head. It squeezed me like a tube of toothpaste – up my legs and across my waist, up my chest and onto my face. It rotated my head until something popped. Then it went back to milking me.
As plasma began draining from my head, Rhea placed beneath me an urn of glow-in-the dark metal. I felt everything start to whirl, like I was in a centrifugal drum. It felt nice, like giving blood for a good cause.
But what cause? That, I’ve forgotten.
~~~
Alan Annand is a writer and astrologer with the moon in Scorpio.
Find his New Age Noir series and other mystery novels at Amazon, Apple, Barnes&Noble, Kobo and Smashwords.
Every blue moon or so, Mercury retrograde looms as a triple seasonal menace – this year, a holiday hangover of unpaid credit card bills, a political circus, and more terrorists in the news than you can shake a Bible at. Times like this, you need to get away, as deep into the soft underbelly of your wounded psyche as a hibernating bear in a boreal snow bank.
But forget about going south, because fun in the sun will only distract you from the mindfulness necessary to understand your sorry existence. To contemplate your navel fuzz in total isolation, please consider our Mercury Retrograde Winter Retreat, nestled deep in the Canadian hinterland, accessible only by a torturous train ride from Toronto.
Our igloo village hermitage is an oasis of self-imposed exile, buffered from the world by a 10-foot wall of pristine sub-Arctic snow pack. Here you can ride out the astrological affective disorder known as Mercury Retrograde Syndrome, a psychological malaise that recurs three times a year, bringing much of western society’s rational thinking to a grinding halt.
Each guest igloo is constructed in the form of a geodesic dome with tempered thermo-pane glass. Our trademarked design provides superlative shielding from high-intensity northern lights, harmful radiation of Mercury Retrograde, and frequent assaults by marauding polar bears foraging for tourists.
Not only the upper atmosphere gets excited by solar flares at high latitudes. Thanks to the ambient room temperature of 40F (4C) maintained in all guest igloos, you and your retreat companion will have little choice but to share your body heat. Many couples report having more sex during Mercury Retrograde winter retreats than they actually even wanted. You’re welcome!
For those who come to the hermitage alone, room service will provide hot water bottles filled with your choice of mulled wines, grog, hot toddies or high-proof cider. For a small extra fee, our qualified staff can set you up with an IV drip or a therapeutic enema.
Our lakeside spa offers crystal-clear water chilled to within a few degrees of hypothermia. After emerging from near-death immersion, you’ll be gratefully reborn as attendants whip circulation back into your body, using birch branches blessed by a local shaman. Brandy, cognac, schnapps and other anti-coagulants are available from the patio bar.
Since Mercury Retrograde already provides adequate food for thought, we’re not into the whole culinary thing. But our cafeteria is open 24/7, with a limited range of tasty fast food. Try our Polar Pizza (wolverine salami with seal cheese), Boreal Burgers (minced caribou with a heart-smart spread of lichens) and our perennial dessert favorite – Eskimo Pie.
Although the Mercury Retrograde Hermitage is designed to insulate guests from both the world and their fellow refugees, we offer evening leg wrestling and snuggle sessions in our communal lounge. Every sign in the zodiac (even Virgo and Scorpio) is welcome to enjoy the ambiance of our coal-fired braziers. And for those who neglected to pack adequate clothing, complimentary leg warmers, hand-woven by Inuit artisans from hypo-allergenic muskrat hides, are available in a limited range of hair densities.
Our guest igloos have no phone, TV, radio, WiFi or cellular reception to distract you from your introspective sojourn. So just lie back on your mattress of organic cedar boughs and enjoy an unobstructed view of the northern stars, the contemplation of which will remind you of your insignificance in the face of the cosmos.
Mercury Retrograde – when you just need an excuse to do absolutely nothing for three weeks.
~~~
Alan Annand is an astrologer and writer of crime fiction. His New Age Noir mystery series (Scorpio Rising, Felonious Monk, Soma County) features astrologer Axel Crowe, a criminal profiler whom one reviewer has dubbed “Sherlock Holmes with a horoscope.”
Read reviews here and buy these and his other books at: Amazon, Apple, Barnes&Noble, Kobo & Smashwords
Capricorns at night…All I wanted for Christmas was a few days off. But my boss suggested that, if I hoped for a bonus this year, I should volunteer for holiday overtime. Our company’s next board meeting was the first week of the New Year, and they needed our year-end report. It had been hanging over our heads like Damocles’ sword since the first of December, and now it was time… Chronos, that old bastard, demanded his due.
Saturday morning, the last weekend before Christmas, four of us gathered for duty at one of our branch offices. The plan was, out here in the suburbs we would toil without distraction, finish the report by day’s end and join our fellow employees for our office party tonight in the downtown entertainment district.
There was Karen from HR, a total slave driver with an eye on the VP’s office. Since we all expected to go straight to the party afterwards, she was wearing black leather pants, little boots and a crisp white blouse with military-style epaulets. I didn’t know whether to salute or grovel at her feet. Maybe later she’d bring out a whip and clarify my options.
Irving from Finance had arrived in his dark blue pinstripe. An archetypal brown-noser, he worked every Saturday anyway. Rumor was, he had a specially-designed Murphy bed with a desk, and liked to work on Sunday mornings too. Many of us suspected he wore dark blue pinstripe pajamas.
Joan was there on behalf of Marketing. Whereas Karen’s hair was black as a vulture’s wing, Joan was a platinum blonde with a body modeled after a 
Barbie doll. None of it was real of course, but that was marketing for you, and we all knew that if Joan didn’t make it to the top of her ladder, she could always go into politics.
The day went by in a blur of coffee, pizza and more coffee. We convened in one of the conference rooms at six to review our draft. Multiple errors were found in the report, and fingers were pointed in a paroxysm of passive-aggressive accusations that left everyone with wounded egos, acid stomachs and looming migraines. We again hunkered down over our respective contributions and toiled until well past nine PM.
By this time we’d missed dinner with the rest of the office staff downtown. We’d be lucky now to join them for drinking and dancing at a popular club. Seeing the evening spiralling into a black hole of corporate servitude, someone from Operations (maybe me) scooted across the street and bought a few bottles of wine before it was too late to salvage any happiness from this day.
We poured a round of drinks into four of the Marketing department’s complimentary coffee mugs and pressed on into the night. Another review revealed more errors, unleashing more recriminations, more cursing, more tears of frustration and anger. I went to the bathroom and cried for a little while until Karen came in and dragged me out by the ear.
It was after midnight before we were finished. If it weren’t for the fact that we’d been drinking as steadily as we’d been working, I would have said, screw this shit, I’m going home to bed, see you Monday morning. But there was something in the fact that 
together we’d wrestled this 40-page bear of a report to the ground, and stood upon it now with leather heels on its bloodied snout, beating our breasts – both natural and enhanced – in a blood-curdling cry of defiance. We are corporate, hear us roar!
We were ready now to join the gang downtown and rip that joint. The trains had stopped by then so we had to call a cab. It was there in minutes, an Atlas taxi whose driver was a middle-aged man with a mustache the size of a gerbil. As soon as we told him our destination, he sped off toward the highway but when we got to the on-ramp, he went through the underpass instead and headed north.
“Hey, that’s not the way downtown,” I said.
“Big accident on the Metropolitan,” he said. “Alternate route.”
“North? Downtown is south of us.”
He didn’t answer me.
I examined his driver’s card posted on the door column above his shoulder. Bahman Bazouki, it said. I looked in his rear view mirror and saw him glance at me.
“You are going to a party?” he said.
“Yes,” Joan said from the rear. “We have wine.” She was a bit loaded, and was cradling the two remaining bottles of wine to her breasts like they were babies.
“Wine is proof that God loves us and likes to see us happy,” the cabbie said.
“If God wanted me to be happy, he would have let me sleep in today,” Karen said.
The cab pulled off the road to enter a long lane that ran through empty fields beneath a full moon. We passed through a perimeter of cedar trees, within which was a house, a barn and several sheds. There were lights in the house and dozens of people dancing around a backyard bonfire.
“What is this place?” Karen demanded.
“This is where your worldly ambitions go to die,” said the cabbie.
“Sorry,” Karen said, “I already gave at the office.”
“By going under, you shall cross over,” the cabbie insisted.
“Thus spake the lunatic?” Irving looked at our driver. “Who are you? And do you have a night pass, or does the asylum just let you out every full moon?”
“Doctor Bazouki, at your service.” The cabbie got out and opened the door for Karen.
She stepped out and walked a few steps toward the fire. I saw the curve of her thighs limned against the firelight. Her hip twitched, picking up the rhythm of an extremely loud and funky dance tune that was blasting from quadruple speakers around the courtyard. “This looks like fun.” She snapped her fingers and we all followed. Because if you can’t trust HR, who can you trust?
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said Dr. Bazouki. “Who will pay the fare?”
“Finance,” I said, and Irving coughed up. Natural order of the corporation.
“Could I also ask of you some small assistance?” Bazouki said.
“Sure.” I could give him the name of a good barber. Or a vet. Whatever it took to trim that gerbil down to a less frightening size.
“Give me a hand with these?” He opened the trunk to reveal three cases of what I assumed was wine.
Irving and I each took a case and walked with Bazouki to the house, a big old two-story brick monstrosity from the Victorian era.
“So you’re a doctor?” I asked to make conversation.
“In Iran I was doctor of psychiatric therapy.”
“You’ve come a long way,” Irving sniped.
“This is true.” Bazouki stopped us just outside the verandah. “Shoes off here, please.”
I could see a protest half-formed on Irving’s lips. But we looked around and saw there were rows and rows of shoes laid out on wooden planks, and each plank had a number from one to 17. We took off our shoes and left them there on plank number 13.
“Now you are grounded,” Dr. Bazouki said.
“Does that mean I can’t hang out with my friends at the mall?” Irving quipped.
Dr. Bazouki led us down a hallway to a giant kitchen which featured two of every appliance. We opened the cases and put out the bottles. I noticed that it was not wine – neither red nor white nor blush – but a smoky cream that looked like organic apple juice with a bit of milk added.
“What is this stuff?” Irving said.
“Soma,” said Dr. Bazouki.
“Which is what?” Irving shook a bottle and held it up to the light. “Some kind of shampoo?” He looked around, suddenly realizing that almost everyone around us was making out or working up to it.
Couples were standing in the kitchen, seated in the dining room, lying in the living room. And yet there was constant flux, people getting up and going outside to where the music was pounding like tribal war drums, and people were coming in, breathless and laughing, to grab something to drink from fridge or counter, and relax wherever they could find space, to hold hands, kiss and more…
Dr. Bazouki insisted on pouring us each a tall glass of soma. We had little choice for the moment, since Joan with our remaining two bottles of wine was out there in the crowd somewhere with her other two jugs. Irving and I took tentative sips of our new drink. It tasted like Bailey’s and milk after a trout had swum through it. Irving drained his straight off.
“Like a slightly chilled matzo broth,” he said, and poured himself another glass.
“Mazel tov,” said Dr. Bazouki, raising his own glass to Irving.
I nursed my soma. I had learned from hard experience not to dive into dark waters. Like that year in college when I’d eaten five bags of morning glory seeds and almost passed out with strychnine poisoning. Other than wine, I was now a Scotch man. Single malt and smoky, like the way the air smelled right now…
I followed my nose outside. I don’t know what they were throwing on the fire to make it smell so good. Pheromones, maybe. There were about fifty people dancing around the fire and they all looked hot. Out here in the courtyard, there was primal magic in the air. The drums thudded in my bones. The bass was doing something to my gonads.
I saw Karen in the middle of the dancing mob. She’d pulled the pins from her bun and was now flailing a dance-mate with her waist-length hair. This dweeb, as stoned as he was, looked a little bit frightened. As well he should be. Because when HR gets down and dirty, they’re going to rip someone a new one.
“Karen!” I called and waved.
She abandoned her dance partner and came out through the crowd to hug me. “This is fucking wild.”
“What about the office party?” I said. “The cabbie’s still here. If we want to go, we need to go now.”
“Go now? Are you insane? We just got here. What are you drinking?” She borrowed my glass and took a bold sip. “What the hell is that? A sperm smoothie?” she took another sip. “With banana and turmeric?”
“Don’t ask me, I only helped deliver the stuff. It’s called soma.”
“It’s som-a good!” Her Italian imitation was terrible, but she drained my glass.
“Where’s Joan? She has our two bottles of wine.”
“I don’t know. I think I saw her making out with two guys she just met.”
“What?”
“Just kidding.” She punched me in the shoulder. “What are you, stoned?” She tried to look me in the eyes but I’m sure all she could see was the reflection of dancers in the firelight. “Whoa!” she said, squeezing my bicep.
“What’s the matter?”
“I saw something in your eyes. It looked like you and me naked.”
“How would you know it’s me?” I said. “You’ve never seen me naked.”
“I’ve imagined how you look.” She corrected herself. “I mean, I can imagine…”
She paused as someone came running through the crowd, screaming like a banshee, and jumped over the bonfire.
“Holy shit!” she said. “Was that Irving?”
“I think so.”
Before we even had time to rush to the other side of the fire, to give him artificial respiration, or piss on his burning clothes, Irving came dancing around the inner ring. His jacket was on fire but he’d taken it off and was whirling it over his head as he danced clockwise around the fire. As the flames reached his lapels, he flung the jacket into the fire and screamed like a dozen women all giving birth at the same time.
A huge roar went up from the crowd. People started following Irving around the fire, jumping and turning in a massive conga line. Some tore off their shirts, belts and skirts, and flung them into the flames. People poured out of the house, carrying glasses and bottles of soma. Suddenly, there was Dr. Bazouki at our sides with a bottle which he thrust into our hands.
“Dance the night away,” he said.
“You’re the doctor.” Karen poured herself a glass and gave me the bottle. She resumed dancing, and for the briefest moment I saw her as a cobra undulating in the firelight, her body a sinuously erotic mirage, her tongue flicking toward me.
I took a swig from the bottle. This felt good. Not another five-bags-of-strychnine night. I could feel the wave beginning to rise beneath me. I had my feet planted firmly on the board. I was the big kahuna and I was going to ride this monster all the way in to the breakers. I began to dance, doing the old shuffle to the left, shuffle to the right, grab your baby’s ass, it’s going to be all right.
“Ooh, what’s got into you?” Karen shimmied a little closer, holding her glass off to one side so that she could press herself up against me.
“The Devil,” I screamed.
“What?”
“Over there!” I pointed, but by the time she turned to look, he was gone.
“Are you hallucinating?” Karen said.
She thought I was crazy but I knew I’d seen him, just for a moment, a giant dancing goat with one of those big Pan flutes and an erection the size of a Louisville slugger. He’d scooped up two blondes – I think one of them might have been Joan – and run off into the woods behind the compound.
The music, as if it couldn’t have got any louder, rose in waves to buffet us from all sides. We danced like crazed marionettes, heaving and crashing into each other like slam-dancing punks in some testosterone-charged mosh pit of epic proportions.
I don’t remember finishing the bottle. Tell the truth, I don’t remember any other details from around the fire. I do remember Karen leading me by the hand into one of the sheds at the back of the compound. I remember tearing at each other’s clothes and collapsing onto a pile of burlap bags that smelled like potatoes or goats or both.
And I remember her saying, just before we did it, “You know what a non-disclosure agreement is, right?”
“Of course.” You could take the man out of the corporation, but you could never take the corporation out of the man.
“Well, I’m invoking one,” she said. “Right here, right now.”
“Is that a verbal commitment, or oral?”
“If you shut up, you can have both,” she said, and sealed the deal with burning lips upon mine.
In the morning, the place looked like the aftermath of a tornado, where capricious forces of nature had scooped up a Club Med party along with a business convention, mixed them violently in a giant cocktail shaker and spilled them back onto Earth. There were clothes and half-naked bodies everywhere, and a pall of hormone-scented smoke hanging over the courtyard.
Fortunate to be early risers, we gathered up some clothes here and there, not caring if anything matched, like survivors of some inexplicable natural disaster. We found Irving and Joan naked in a corner of the barn. Unfortunately, we’d lost our phones and were unable to capture the moment for posterity and years of leverage. Maybe it was just as well.
The four of us walked to the highway where we hoped, despite our dishevelled appearances, to hitchhike a ride back into town. Along the edge of the lane, where the soil was black and muddy, I saw the prints of a giant cloven hoof. It might have been a goat, but I’m not much of a farm boy, so who knows?
~~~
Alan Annand is a writer and astrologer with the moon in Scorpio. Find his New Age Noir series and other mystery novels at Amazon, Apple, Barnes&Noble, Kobo and Smashwords.
After my fiancé broke off our engagement and moved in with his Ethics professor, I joined a book club to get my mind off killing him. I immediately felt at home with this bunch of brainy gals – a librarian, magazine editor, travel agent, lawyer, pastor, romance novelist, yoga teacher, etc – whose high IQs and barely-repressed libidos offered a sapiosexual buffet of eligible women.
Out of the dozen, usually only half of us attended any given discussion night. Duality was our middle name and commitment, however much we bemoaned its absence in our male acquaintances, was thin in our ranks too. We did a survey once and counted 17 divorces among us, and only half of us had been married.
We all lived within a half-hour’s drive of each other in a large Midwest metropolis. One of the women owned a farm, a 50-acre property she’d inherited from her grandmother. All she had was a dog and two cats but we were always bugging her to get a cute little goat or a miniature pig like George Clooney’s.
Whenever GC’s name came up, we typically lost focus. The librarian had to remind us of our agenda, asking us to refer to any notes we’d taken since reading our assigned book. We’d then discuss the merits, literary or otherwise, of whatever we’d deemed worthy of our scrutiny. Other than George and his little porcine pal.
When we met last Thursday, it was a perfect summer evening. We were gathered on the deck of our hostess’s recently renovated farmhouse. It was a full moon and everyone had brought wine. Instead of sipping coffee and sampling “I’ll have-just-one” pastries, we were getting loaded.
For once everyone was here, and all in good humor. Nobody was complaining about bladder infections, migraines, or menstrual cramps. We suffered only ennui. But WTF, we were 21st century women. Notre pays, c’est ennui.
“Drinking and driving is not an option,” our hostess reminded us. “I have two extra bedrooms with double beds. There’s a sofa-bed in the living room and I have a tent that sleeps four.”
“Actually, it’s so warm tonight,” the travel agent pointed out, “you could probably sleep in the open.”
“Naked,” the romance novelist added, and a titter ran through the group.
“There’s also the barn,” the pastor suggested.
“I’m sure someone suffers hay fever,” our hostess objected.
“One summer when I was a kid,” one gal said, “my cousin and I slept in my uncle’s barn. We made a bed of blankets in the hayloft and told each other dirty stories all night.”
“Do you remember any of those stories?” the romance novelist said.
“Don’t get me started.”
“Fifty shades of hay,” the librarian hooted.
“We should hold tonight’s discussion in the barn,” the travel agent said.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” our hostess said.
“It’s a perfect setting,” the librarian countered. “After all, we’re discussing The Horse Whisperer.”
“There’s a motion on the floor,” the lawyer noted. “Do we have a second?”
“I second that,” the pastor said.
“All in favor of moving to the barn, raise your hands.”
Everyone but our hostess raised their hands. “It’s not… clean out there,” she protested.
“Some of us like it dirty,” said the romance novelist, followed by a group roar.
“The ayes have it,” the lawyer said. “Everybody bring a chair, a bottle, whatever you can carry.”
We all trooped out to the barn, opened its double doors and settled ourselves in a circle of chairs. There were stables on both sides with haylofts above them. Each stall had a low door that functioned as a gate. Most of the doors were open, revealing empty stalls, although a few at the rear were closed. But as far as we knew, our hostess had no livestock.
A single light-bulb hung from a rafter overhead, providing sufficient light to consult the margin notes in our books. As usual, the librarian started the discussion by recapping the plot.
“The Horse Whisperer is about a teenage girl who loses a leg in a riding accident. Her horse is traumatized and becomes so temperamental that her father wants it put down. But her mom learns about a horse trainer in Montana who’s renowned for treating equine PTSD.”
The novel is poignant, and the Robert Redford movie had rendered it an absolute tearjerker. Anticipating an emotional discussion, we’d all brought tissues. The romance novelist was already weeping, probably thinking of the huge gap between her lifetime earnings and that of the bestseller’s author.
“So mother and daughter take the horse to Montana where the horse whisperer cures its neurosis and, as a bonus, has an affair with the daughter. When mom learns this, she rides off in a huff and gets caught in a mustang stampede. In saving her, the horse whisperer is killed. Mother and daughter return East with the horse, and a bun in the daughter’s oven.”
She paused. “Who’d like to start? Any thoughts on story, character or theme?”
“What’s that smell?” the pastor said.
“What?” the librarian liked to run a tight class, and this immediately threw her off stride.
“Smells like horse.” The yoga teacher turned and looked toward the stables in the rear. As she twisted in her seat, rotating her shoulders, she crossed one leg over the other and twined her ankles together. You had to admire her form, she was a total yogini.
“It’s just the hay,” our hostess said. “It’s been so musky this summer.”
“Musty, you mean,” the editor corrected her.
“Say what you will, it does smell musky.” The yoga teacher stood and sniffed the air. “Horse musk.”
“Nonsense,” said our hostess. “The place just needs to be aired out. Let’s move our chairs closer to the door. Better yet, let’s return to the deck.”
“What’s that sound?” the pastor said. She was small, but had the nose and ears of a church mouse.
“I didn’t hear anything,” our hostess said. “There’s nothing out here… to hear or smell or feel…”
“Feel?” the editor said. “You mean, to see?”
“Quiet,” the librarian snapped and we all shut up.
There in the silence of the barn, a dozen women holding their collective breath, we heard a muted whinny, like a horse that needed to clear his throat in the middle of the night but didn’t want to wake you. We all looked at each other.
The travel agent looked at our hostess. “Do you have a horse?”
“A horse? No.”
From the back of the barn came another whinny and the stomp of a hoof. We rose and moved like a herd in that direction. The travel agent opened one stable door after another. We crowded behind her as she came to the last one.
A good-looking guy stood leaning against the door, half-naked and built like a football player, a tight end or something. We could only see him from the waist up but so far, so good. We all crowded in a little closer.
The scent of horse was strong. At first whiff I didn’t really like it but it quickly grew on me. I inhaled deeply. It was like your first scent of man stuff – musky, yeah, but maddeningly so. Full moon and all, it was enough to make a gal tip her head back and howl.
Everyone turned to give me a look. Even the guy in the stable looked alarmed. God knows how much our hostess had paid him to show up for this, but now he was probably wondering what he’d got himself into. Were we a coven of witches who liked to barbecue long-haul truck drivers on the full moon?
“Sorry,” I apologized to the group. “You know I have Tourette’s.”
The travel agent extended her hand to the guy. “I don’t believe we’ve met. My name’s Pam. Do you like books too?” She peered over the gate to get a better look at the rest of him.
Before he could answer, she shrieked, “Oh my God, he’s a centaur. Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, where’s my phone? I’ve got to get a picture of this. Of me. With him. Or it. Definitely me and… and…”
“No phones allowed in book discussion,” the librarian reminded us. Our phones were all back in the house, in a Rubbermaid container atop the fridge.
“Just as well,” the yoga teacher said. “No telling what could happen here. Maybe we don’t want any evidence.”
“What happens in the barn, stays in the barn,” the lawyer said.
There was a bunch of damn-rights and no-shits from the group.
“I’m serious,” the lawyer said. “Motion on the floor for non-disclosure. All in favor, show of hands.”
With everybody holding both hands aloft, we looked like a herd of excited elk with horns erect. We pressed forward as the travel agent opened the gate.
“Whoaaaaa.” The centaur did a nervous little prance, like he’d just realized there were a dozen she-wolves in the house.
This was one fine piece of centaur. Below his sculpted six-pack the hair on his belly was thick and glossy down his legs and along his flanks to the rear. Bracing her hands against his chest, the travel agent raised herself on tiptoes to kiss him.
“His breath smells like apple cider,” she swooned.
He whinnied and did another little prance. It was both adorable and arousing, like two Lords of the Riverdance in a horse costume at a bachelorette stag party. And the scent of him, my god, it was intoxicating, it made you just want to vault onto his back and ride off into the sunset.
“I want to ride him,” someone screamed.
We started a chant. “Ride the pony, ride the pony, ride ride ride the pony.”
“Girls, girls,” the librarian warned. “We don’t know if it’s safe.”
“Have you ridden him?” the editor asked our hostess.
“I’d rather not say.” She blushed with cheeks on fire.
“I’ll draft a risk waiver,” the lawyer said, “that we can all verbally agree to.”
“To which we can all agree,” the editor amended.
“Is this for real?” the pastor said, “or an out-of-body experience? I confess, I’ve prayed for something like this, but I never thought it would actually happen.”
“First dibs on the rights to his life story,” the romance novelist said. She’d made little from her books, and wanted to write a screenplay for some serious money.
We all crowded into the centaur’s stall. We didn’t care how dangerous it was. We were women. We ran with wolves. We watched vampire movies. We had periods. We could ride this pony to hell and back.
“God, feel those legs.” The travel agent ran her hands down his two forelegs and moved to his rear. She fondled his knees and worked herself up. “Oh my god, this guy is so ripped. And his butt…!”
This set off a stampede but the stall was too small for all of us to fit back there at the same time. So we adopted the typical buffet-table flight-pattern, circling clockwise like vultures, letting everyone get a taste.
The centaur was cool. He let us run our hands over his chest and legs, and kiss him on the lips. The yoga teacher mounted his back and writhed up and down his spine. It didn’t look like any yoga pose I knew, but the expression on her face was pure nirvana, so I guess she knew what she was doing.
When the pastor finally got to the rear, she’d barely touched his haunches before her eyes rolled up in her sockets like someone possessed. She seized his tail and started whipping herself with it, screaming, “You’re a naughty girl, bad girl, wicked girl. You’ll burn in hell, simmer in a cauldron of boiling semen…”
“Boiling oil,” the editor said. “You can’t boil semen or it will turn to custard.”
“That would be such a waste,” the librarian said. “Semen should only be served at womb temperature.”
After we’d been around the horse a few times, felt him up from fetlock to flank, we rushed to refill our wine glasses. Everyone knew this party wasn’t over, but it would take a lot more than a whiff of horse musk to push a bunch of classy women over the top. How much more? Nobody knew, but pretty much everyone seemed hell bent on finding out.
I lost count of how many bottles went the rounds to quench our collective thirst. But it was a hot summer night, and we’d kicked up quite a bit of barn dust, getting frisky there in the OK corral.
The yoga teacher got the pastor calmed down with some deep breathing. This wasn’t an OBE, she assured her, but the real deal. Show a little faith. Get ready to go where angels feared to tread. Her Come-to-Jesus moment was nigh.
By now, we were all lubricated to the melting point but also a little bit scared. Within the circle of sisters, we’d hefted his balls in our palms. We’d dared to run our hands along a shaft the size of a baseball bat. But after that, a shivering blank screen, a place our imaginations weren’t ready to go…
God bless her, the travel agent was the first to venture into unknown territory. Encouraged by our supportive cries of ride-’em-cowgirl, she went alone to his stall. She was gone for a long while. At one point, we heard her moaning and almost sent someone to check on her. But then we heard insane laughter and we knew it was going to be a long night…
It was dawn before we were finished but eventually everybody got to ride on the pony. Even the pastor bore witness to The Second Coming. Needless to say, no one drove home that night. The beds in the house filled up. A few of us took the backyard tent. Someone slept in their car, and the romance novelist passed out naked on the lawn.
The morning after was not pretty. It’s best not to think about it. And we are certainly not going to talk about it. What happened in the barn stays in the barn.
~~~
Alan Annand is a writer and astrologer with the moon in Scorpio. Find his New Age Noir series and other mystery novels at Amazon, Apple, Barnes&Noble, Kobo and Smashwords.
On a clear night I can see Uranus… ~~~
Alan Annand is a Canadian astrologer, a graduate of the American College of Vedic Astrology and the British Faculty of Astrological Studies. He’s written two books on Vedic astrology: Stellar Astrology, a collection of astrological techniques, in-depth celebrity profiles, and analysis of mundane events, and Parivartana Yoga, a reference text for one of the most common yet powerful planetary combinations in Jyotish.
He’s also a writer of crime fiction, including his NEW AGE NOIR series (Scorpio Rising, Felonious Monk, Soma County) featuring astrologer and palmist Axel Crowe, whom one reviewer has dubbed “Sherlock Holmes with a horoscope.”
Websites: navamsa.com, sextile.com
You can find his books on Amazon, Apple, Barnes&Noble, Kobo and Smashwords.
Sextile 