Like Glass
Alex was smooth and delicate. Like Glass
Delmore Schwartz ended Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day with the line: Time is the fire in which we burn. As the creative wick on this particular husk grows shorter, I couldn't agree more.
Like Glass2009 by Eldyran
Alex was smooth and delicate.
Like Glass.
Everyone, himself included, accept this. His beauty was so flawless, so innate, that no one gave it a second thought. And like a well crafted glass figurine, Alex's personality glittered when shined upon. When no looked at or cared for him, he was just as content to collect dust as well.
But that was just Alex's way.
He always kept his black fur glossy, so much that light seemed to sparkle off it. Like many foxes, Alex was slender and thin, albeit a bit shorter than most others. His large ears emphasized the angular cuts and well defined lines of his muzzle and face. Rather than give him a rugged masculine appearance, when combined with his small canid nose and delicate muzzle lips, they gave him an androgynous beauty that time could not touch.
His father named him after Alexander the Great. No one really knew why, and the archaeologist never felt reason to give one. It never occurred to Alex to make any comparisons of himself to the great Grecian conquerer. Alex's extended, often distant family blamed the single father for his son's introverted nature, many times taking his son along to peruse the most extensive libraries the ancient world had left to offer.
In his young age Alex learned to become self sufficient, absorbing himself in quiet study and reflective thought. When his crafty paws discovered the medium of charcoal, his patient and artistic nature flourished. His father always found Alex sketching out their adventures together for hours at a time. They traveled the Near East and surrounding areas, marveling at the monolithic wonders of the Old Kingdom.
At age fourteen Alex watched his father excavate Ab..« al-H..«l from underneath the Giza sands in 1925. Despite the ghoulish excitement of the necrophiliac academics around him, Alex's sketch of the Sphinx drew unexpected attention from a well made inventor of some local distinction. It was here that Alex met the jackal who called himself Sutekh-Peribsen of Syria.
* * * * *
Sut, as he preferred to be addressed, came from the eldest Assyrian bloodlines to emerge from the timeless sands. The skin under his golden fur was dark, bronzed by the rays of a puerile sun. He was a tall, swarthy jackal whose energetic gait parted a busy market. Exceptionally fluent in English, Aramaic, Akkadian, as well as Sumerian, his peculiar accent stilled the flapping tongues around him with an incontestable, regal voice. The only one more entranced by Sut than Alex was his father, who found the jackal's unusual insight into the early dynasties fascinating to say the least.
Alex tutored under Sut for a number of years until a freak accident buried Alex's father under one of his own excavations. After that tragedy, Sut became the young fox's guardian, mentoring him in a wide range of bizarre arts and sciences. The handsome, malevolent jackal found Alex's beauty so captivating, that the fox would often wake up to see the insomnia beset Sut smile wickedly at his delicate and flawless body.
One night Sut slipped into Alex's tent and slid beneath his sheets like a shadow. Alex whimpered as Sut explored his responsive adolescent body with his experienced paws. Sut's boundless energy extended into far more erotic areas than just eldritch knowledge. Alex would never forget that first night of new raptures:
The feeling of the jackal's warm muzzle on his young sheath. The soft rasp of the jackal's canid tongue across his slim chest and taut nipples. The wondrous delight of the jackal's thick knot buried deep under his tail. The two canids became lovers soon after and traveled the world, setting it ablaze.
Quite literally.
Their first stop in Madrid ended in disaster. While catching a show at Teatro de Novedades the theater burned to the ground, killing more than a hundred. Chaos seemed to crawl behind the two wherever they went. Civil war slithered after them during their stay in Afghanistan. The Holodomor famine hopped over with them to the Ukraine.
But Alex didn't mind. The unassuming fox rarely batted an eye when such horrible things happened. He was quite content to sketch the aftermath with an impartial artistic eye, as long as Sut would be there later that night to push his larger jackal member deep into his sweat matted vulpine body.
One of Sut's unique inventions was an impossibly small kiln powered by a strange blue, almost ethereal electricity. For Alex's 22nd birthday, Sut produced seven black glass figurines from it and presented them to his young lover that night. The exhausted fox rolled his head on the cum streaked bedding away from his nude pharaoh to gaze quizzically at the seven figurines. They looked like a bizarre menagerie of odd hybrid anthromorphic creatures, molded in star speckled ebony glass.
Beautiful aren't they? Sut whispered. The jackal grinned manically and nipped Alex's black vulpine ear, which flinched against his ivory fangs. His dry breath smelled of frankincense and the desert. They will never age. Their beauty will never fade. Just like yours. Sut raked the sharp points of his claws down Alex's quivering belly fur before nipping down the younger fox's bare abdomen.
And your perfect beauty will drive other's mad with envy ...
Sut smiled, his muzzle lips peppering kisses down the fox's lower belly. He paused before wrapping his long jackal tongue around Alex's slimy vulpine knot, still bulging out of his black furred sheath. Alex whimpered, threw his head back into the black Egyptian cotton sheets as his lover slid his encircled canid tongue up and down his leaking fox cock. A few minutes and several building moans later, Sut slipped his muzzle over Alex's fox tip just in time to catch the molten gush of his young lover's seed.
The dark jackal drank greedily, his slurps punctuating the dark silence between the black fox's whimpered climax.
* * * * *
The next morning Sut disappeared. He left no note, nor any of his eccentric machinations. It was if the jackal simply vanished into the ether. Alex brooded for a time, as any dismissed lover might, but in the end he carried on with his life without complaint. After the British government liquidated the majority of his father's pension and holdings, Alex found that he lacked for not. The budding artist decided to move back into his father's estate in London and devote his easy life to his work. Without intent his morbid, languid sketches grew critical artistic acclaim from local critics.
Acclaim brought about from unsettling night terrors.
The reign of fascist bombers over the skies of London obliterated the spread of what little success Alex garnered for himself. A week after the devastation, his neighbors watched the solemn fox shift through the cinders of his home, brushing aside the ashes of his masterpieces with little emotion. Only after uncovering Sut's ebony glass figurines unscathed did the fox break into relieved sobs, soot streaked tears falling to peppered ash.
After the war Alex moved into a small studio flat overlooking Glasshouse Street in Soho. Alex drifted through the bleak back alley pubs for many years, listening to the wails of amateur musicians, voyeuring the works of drunken painters, watching the short wick of other sketchers sputter in the grip of their own vices. The quiet little fox did little to make himself known, content to let his own talent gather dust among the destitute hacks around him.
No one questioned his company. No one questioned his age. No one definitely questioned the few obsessive sketches he worked on concerning a certain water pump.
No one really knew who the fox was in all honesty, most of his earlier works turned to ash now. Most assumed he was a kamp, plying the plate trade to buy more charcoal. It was a fair trade really; a bit of muzzle for a bit of coal. Soho's regular motley of male prostitutes eyed the aloof, beautiful fox with equal parts loathing and equal parts morbid fascination with his deathless beauty.
They weren't the only ones. Laid off porters from nearby wharfs ogled him from afar, before breaking into sweat gleamed knife fights over supposed possession of him. Their used husks of wives spied this insurmountable competition, pitted themselves against Alex, and once broken, went home to drown their children under worn thin washboards.
* * * * *
Fifty years after meeting the Syrian jackal named Sut, a few drunken blokes decided to have a bit of sport with the fine vulpine dandy making his way back from Admiral Duncan's one balmy summer night. They teased him about his peculiar fashion, ripping his vest and Oxford Bags. They pushed him around, mocking his delicate, twenty something looks. They beat him with pipes, leaving his face and muzzle splattered like so much tacky art deco across the broken cobblestones of Old Compton street.
The next morning they gaped slack jawed and dumbstruck as Alex walked down to Soho Square to sketch its garden, not a single follicle of his perfect looks out of place.
One of the blokes, a rather gender confused deserter of the Queen's Royal navy, stole into Alex's flat that afternoon and smashed to bits the only things that looked valuable. Namely, Sut's ebony figurines sitting in a display case, sparkling in the rays of the mid day sun despite the decades of dust collected on them.
Later that day when Alex came home, he scooped up what was left of himself in his paws and clenched the jagged black shards to his chest. For the first time in his extraordinarily long life Alex became angry. The fox's hitched wheezes of fury broke down into retributive sobs. He calmly stalked out of his flat and marched to Admiral Duncan's.
Alex found the deserter brooding over an empty bottle of scotch whiskey. The once ageless fox confronted the sailor, his black muzzle tight in an accusatory growl. Despite the vulpine's smaller, more delicate frame, the drunkard felt threatened, bringing his empty whisky bottle down upon the fox's head.
And Alex shattered.
Like Glass.
~ Fin ~
As with Path of the Needle, I kept this particular piece tucked away in case I felt the insane desire to get published again. And like Path of the Needle, elements of certain Gothic penny bloods inspired its roots, in this case Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray meets Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep. Now that I'm out of pale imitated penny dreadfuls, maybe it time to crack my claws and get back to things that really scare me. Under the Moonlight of a Buckeye Tree was a good start.
In a dim corner of my room for longer than
my fancy thinks
A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me
through the shifting gloom.
Oscar Wilde - The Sphinx - 1898