Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 05:52:14 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: The Feral Child

			     "The Feral Child"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


Destiny grimaced, and was feral, still.

Destiny, in the night, lay with me in my rude, narrow bed, and
I held to him. He smelled of autumn loam and winter mist, and
was lost in the world of this chateau, lost also to Dr. Henri,
who had used him as a pointer, a device, a mechanism, to
prove the good doctor's own destiny, his own learned papers
and impressed colleagues, and then he had thrown Destiny (I
have named him such; the good doctor named him Remus, for
intended reasons that had to do with fable become scientific
proof, become the good life with fine wine and perfumed
courtesans, and then, once used, the forest boy, forgotten)
away.

Destiny was dense of forest and the essence of coupled
freedom, as he lay naked and shivering with me, this cold
night, in my poor room at the back, where I the maid and the
suggestion of womanhood had dwelled in the shadows, all the
shadows that ever were, not known, not noticed, as though
this forest boy who had been raised by brute animals, had
become the ultimate shadow, the shadow of sexuality and pain
and a rough kind of love, that had to do with not counting, that
had to do with reams of papers stuffed down the throats of
Parisian scientists who huzzahed Dr. Henri's discovery, like a
new Punch and Judy show. With all the attendant twenty franc
words, and all the hoopla that the newspapers could give it.

Then the star left the circus, since he was a side show boy, and
the circus stood without him, the tents though beginning to
caper to the ground, and the beginning loss of glitter residing
in "you should have seen" and "my god, the kid had balls the
size of tomatoes, and his penis was always hard, so big for
such a little boy" and "just an animal, just some denizen of a
cave, and my god how fortunate he is to have found such a
nice home" and "Henri has gone above the call of duty, he has
extended humanity to something so inhuman, so barbaric."

The good humanity slept peacefully, forgetting the boy ripped
from his cave and his stream and his friends and his forest of
food foraging, who slept sheet entangled with me. His breath
was hot on my neck. His heart raced like an animal heart. He
was shadow scissors, and if he could cut the shadows with
those scissors, what would there be, when the sides were
pulled apart?

What would there be when there was nothing left but the truth
behind those huge testicles and how they got that way? I held
the boy to me and he almost purred like a cat, this subject of
experiments. This subject of nobility that came with certain
injections and certain seepages of mileage scientific goings
over, regardless of their effects on the boy's mind and heart
and first of all body.

There was always the fear of the fear in him, and what he
would one day do about it, this beaker and test tube and
filament and lambent recording device, who was to me
sexuality, who was to me all the wildness that was never
allowed when I was a child, this boy who could kiss me and
bite my breasts and celebrate wonder in the need of someone's
hand on his penis, someone's mouth stroking her tongue there,
and his feeling the need rush through him electrically and his
head bent backward, the awful unearthly howling of him, and
the pit in him, the pit that came from being away from
whatever he was forevermore.

His fascination with my clothing, how his long gnarly fingers
would take my stockings down, would pull my garters clumsily
downward and with his fingernails, dirty and long, as I had
wanted him to be more of what he used to be, and had not
clipped them to almost the quick, as Dr,. Henri did, when he
fastidiously bathed him and primed and primped him and
dressed him in sailor suits, cut his hair, deloused him, made
him presentable, made him a toy, a showpiece, a certain time
clock, the hands of which were always on the hour that read
propriety comes with hard back breaking irritated frustrating
angry slapping humiliating  shouting cursing work.

But with me, Destiny was allowed to have long matty hair, I
purposely did not wash him as often as the good doctor, I let
the shadows come back into his eyes, for those shadows were
purple bruises that seemed to see inward to all that was lost for
a few years of servitude before being thrown in with me,
"make him what you will, Helena, I shan't need his services
anymore" and the boy lay with his pulsating erection next to
my left thigh. And I stroked him and held to him as though it
were the pump handle of the forest primeval.  He was my bed
boy. I sadly admit that. I gloried in seeing him naked and ready
for me.

As though there were only the seeds of him that I needed in me
so I could go into the woods his home with him, so I could get
rid of gas lamp civilization and men who exploit in cruelty and
are lauded in doctrine and printed words and that is all you
know and all you need to know about the religion of the mind
and the greed of it.

Destiny liked to enter me from behind, not my bum, but my
cunt, so I would kneel on all fours and he would take me and
his hands were tree branches of night, and his breath would be
pungent on me like the smell of a stagnant pond, and his penis
was long and hard and it would dart into me as though a
massive hummingbird had taken me for a nectar flower and
there was nothing for it but to take its surcease from me two
sometimes three times a night, and he would cry, and none but
I would hear it.

For the good doctor was totally oblivious even to the sounds
of Destiny, even if he no longer laid eyes on him, and he did
not, "get that thing from my sight, Helena, I've tired of it," and
Destiny would push his balls onto my bum bottom and he
would pant and strain and his muscles which were corded and
neatly knotted would find the feral jungle in me and would
explode his stars into me and I would hold to the bed and he
would collapse onto my back, my dress pulled up to my waist.
And he would lie there so profoundly had I been Chopin I
would have written an etude about him, how he was, how he
felt, what life held for him.

He was naked all the time now, oddly hairless, considering his
animal qualities, save for his brown long fly away hair on his
head, and though no one knew his age, the doctor had decided
on 13 or so purely arbitrary number but then so be it, as the
good doctor and his colleagues became inspectors of this
mangy boy, and put all their varied theories on him as the boy
was chained to the dining room chair and looked at the men
who examined him with their eyes and never their hands, never
close up either, "don't need infection by god," his eyes like
arrows shooting darts of death at them, his member erect and
hurting him and his sailor suit pants pulled off by the good
doctor and his shirt held high, so they could see the rudiments
of humanity still in his once deep brown flesh, now less brown
from the confinement of the walls and the ceiling and floor and
"wonder what those wolves did with him, Henri, sexually I
mean?" which would cause an explosion of devil laughter from
these saintly men of science.

His feet splayed, his toes twisted in his shoes that cramped,
heralded humiliation, the need to run still there the need to
scamper on all fours, to play with the wolves, to dwell within
their den, to play with the cubs, to be a cub again, to feel the
shadows of the sun like golden rayed pin cushions of light and
cool and warmth on his flesh as he dashed through the mottled
leaves of autumn and the green foliage of summer, and to
hibernate in a cave come winter and sleep the peaceful months
away.

His anger as the good doctor pulled his head this way and that
and said "look at the grimace, look at the way the face is not
quite human and not quite animal, but somewhere a mixture of
both" and the men would ooh and ahh and I would stand in the
background, my hands gripping my apron and each other in
shame and embarrassment for the boy these men were in effect,
in their grand scientific escarpments and cold serious study,
raping, and how I wished him all mine, to cherish, to nurture,
to hold dear.

Destiny would sometimes, on the rough wood floor, or our
little playground of a bed, tear my clothing in his eagerness to
get to me, and he would sometimes bite my nipples too hard
and draw blood, and sometimes there was a snake rattle in him,
cobra venom in his veins and he would get this moon lusting
vibrancy in the skin of him that seemed to infect the very air
we breathed and made the confined room of mine even more a
cell to him than the rest of the house he was once allowed to
be in from time to time, though mostly he had been leashed and
shackled to the back yard during the day and most of the night,
except when it was cold and the good doctor took pity on him
and let him lie on a towel by the fireplace, still, his hands and
ankles handcuffed together.

Destiny dreamed now, and his dreams had to do with sexuality,
because his member trembled in my hand and his balls pulsed
with action, as his mouth puckered and soft sounds came from
it, not words, though he had been taught a rudimentary amount
of them, not gilt edged poverty bid against the wealth he had
heaped unwittingly and unknowingly on Dr. Henri, the
patrician lean compelling man, the road to finally at long last
fame.

And his thighs were bucking, raising off the bed like a bridge
work, and his ass was trembling and his arms tightened around
me like the proverbial vice in our vice of bed, and I held to him
as though he was a ship cresting on a high and uncertain sea
and I put my face to his chest and felt the slick heat of him, and
his heart hammering hard and fast as though he was a need,
more than a being, as though he was a stage of evolution and
not a boy or an animal, but lost between so many worlds of
what had been, what could have been that I would never try
with my poor mind to evaluate it.

He, fully quickly animal awake, pushed me aside with a rush, a
tear, a sigh, and lay down on his back, his knees up in the air,
his legs spread open,  looking like a large mantis, praying, and
gripping his penis with both hands and rubbing it hard, banding
his hands like claws on it and thrusting it to the ceiling,
thrusting his pained balls with it, rubbing them, the hurt of
them, the results of experiments and conditions and
possibilities "don't worry my lad this is for your own good and
won't hurt a bit I guarantee" and his lips pulled back and his
teeth were crooked and sharp like stilettos, stilettos which I
would loved to have plunged into the breast of the good
doctor in his dreamless most highly normal sleep no doubt, for
what he had done to my love, to my wolf child, as he pushed
upward again, his body, and ran his hands over his chest and
beaded blood from his nipples, as his eyes opened wide in their
spectral darkness, as his hips slammed up and down on the
bed.

And it seemed his thighs were more muscular than ever before,
it seemed his chest muscles were stronger and of a man than
they had been before even, and sweat perfumed in pungency
his body, and the entire bed and begun to shake with his self
pleasuring that looked more like self flagellation, there was
such a welling anger, there was such a defying, such a
connotation as of peals of bells within him, peals of certain
grunting gasping wisdoms that had nothing to do with
language codes that humans devise and tell themselves that
using those codes to impress their fellows who understand
them makes the persons somehow rarefied, makes them
somehow above it all and not just hiding behind stupid sounds;
no, this was a wolf elegance; this was a feral child calling to
someone in the only way his body knew how.

In trying to make the boy forget his animal body, the good
doctor had concentrated totally on that body thus making him
more sexual than ever before, I feel at least. A sweet irony.

Dr. Henri had taught the feral boy words and numbers by using
building blocks, had read to him out of school primers, had
forced the boy to become what he was not, as though leading
him impossibly, blending him through a wall, step by step, easy
and merging with it somehow and telling him he would get
through the wall to the other side and he would become like
his brother human children.

And no longer of the kind that ran on all fours and bayed at the
moon for all they were worth, and then had made him stuck in
that wall, not giving a damn about such a silly thing as keeping
his word to the boy, then had made him part of something that
cut the breath, that strained the heart, that strained the dark
well pool of eyes also that looked ahead to see the secret land
that was left behind, and I tried to get to him, I tried not to use
him, but of course I did.

I used him every bit as much as Dr. Henri did, though I am
selfish enough to admit that I hoped there was at least a little
Christian charity and compassion behind my dark deeds that
my conscience told me they were but I needed this boy.

I needed his member in my mouth, I needed the grainy taste of
his sperm, I needed to feel his otherworldly shy frightened
arrogant innocent eyes on me, as his eager hands pumped my
head up and down on him and then he would shoot a geyser I
had such trouble swallowing, and now, now he was on his
haunches and he was loading his stick out penis with his hands
as though it was a revolver, as though he was in serious
contemplation of blasting this world that had done such mean
things to him into oblivion.

And something in me knew then, something in me could not
allow the deception any further, and I sat up, more than a little
frightened in my nightgown of heavy fabric and sachet
smelling, and I put my head with his, and heard this buzzing in
him, as though he contained a hive of bees ready to disperse,
ready to fly out of his mouth at a moment's notice, as though
he was to burst apart, and I was taken into a wrestle with him
and he pulled me down onto him.

And made my mouth take him and bite him and tongue wash
him, and put his penis to the far back of my throat where it
almost gagged me and I had to un-impale myself for a time to
cough--and then went back on him who was like a bucking
horse who was like an untamed steer who was like the forest
erupting with anger that this child who had been deposited in it
who knows from where from what loss from what
abandonment from what terrible trick of fate and life and
destiny, had been left with such a trickster, after the good
doctor finished with him, as me.

I, the champion monster, I who saw him yes, but also myself in
him, in Destiny, Remus, and he was not what he appeared and
I was neither; this trained chimpanzee the good doctor had
taken to Paris to the opera house no less who had walked him
down the boulevards, who had had coffee with him in a
sidewalk cafe, who had seen the Arch de Triumph and the
Eiffel Tower with him, who had posed for handshakes and
newspaper reporters and who had his and Remus' portrait
done by a sidewalk painter, who had stopped at book stalls and
had had the boy/wolf pick out books as he would like to read
and all the crowds that followed them everywhere loved them,
applauded them, loved the good doctor and this boy he had
stolen from a parable and had made a scientific sun at the
center of everyone.

Which meant that home was not somewhere else, not after
this, that home was in themselves, and this boy had found
salvation, had needed it so desperately, had been turned back
into it, and it made everyone feel so goddam humane and
golden and GOOD. "Why he's one of us after all," someone
was quoted as saying. After all, what else could possibly
matter?

The good doctor in a royal carriage with his charge. The good
doctor and his charge meeting high government officials. The
good doctor and his organ grinder monkey meeting European
royalty who had come to gawk and stare at this find, to laugh
at him.

And the wolf boy bowing stiffly to them and the wolf/boy
saying with such a guttural clipped eclipsed curious sound
from a mouth never meant to formulate words, "good
morning, your highness, good morning, kind sir" and everyone
was enchanted and everyone wanted and waited and watched
and hungered for the boy to turn into a wolf.


This wolf boy as the highly imaginative press called him, had
better deliver, drop to all fours, turn hirsute and click his fangs
together and go after fresh human meat or they would, all
these gentlemen in their frock coats and all these ladies with
their dainty pink fringed parasols, be disappointed, so the good
doctor had taught the boy to growl by one pull on the leash
around the boy's neck, and the good doctor had taught the
boy, at two pulls on the leash, to extend hands like claws and
lash out at this or that famed personage, but not to overdo it,
to make the crowd, the royalty, the government officials, the
press, wait, hunger for it, then a moment met with outward
gasps, pushing back, then laughter, after being sure the leash
was held tightly in the good doctor's hand, as the wolf was
jerked back to boy cover again.

It was all most impressive and the sun shown greatly and hotly
and importantly on them that summer two days in Paris city of
lights that needed a bit of the terror in it, shades of Madame
Guillotine and her swift merciless head chopper promises of
those certainly far less than they.

All tricks, all never was, making the boy into a wolf he had
never been, making him appear even more feral, making a
ludicrous comedy of him, so the good doctor in his all knowing
wisdom and conceit could--voila-- make the boy more human,
equally absurd and phony, could teach him tricks that the boy
did already know, and having nothing to do with Dr. Henri,
and were not tricks to begin with; upping the animal quotient
to where it had never been and with some old prestidigitation
making what already was, even if strained into pantomime, a
new legacy from the good doctor and his highly glowing highly
refined and pure scientific brain.

And all a gambol, all a nerveless fodder already being forgotten
in the public mind and especially so in the scientific
community, as each of those learned gentlemen was looking
for their own gimmick to top Dr. Henri's, to make them
famous for a while, such a jealous and risible bunch they were.
How like packs of jackals.

And now I was sucking off the feral child, the wolf boy and his
loins smelled of humus even though he was now no longer
allowed out of the house because it might perchance be seen
by Dr. Henri who had taken the calling the boy "it" in the last
stages of the game when Dr. Henri was looking for further fish
to fry and escape boredom and use himself for the greater
good of--himself. How calling him "it" cut like a dagger, so
deeply. And how, god, it made me want to distance myself
from Destiny, boy and fate, at the same time.

And the boy, not human, not animal, but more than both,
certainly more than Dr. Henri and his cretins, these so brainy
friends, was confined to this room and because he was alone
most of the day while I went about the house business,  he was
caught up in looking out the barred window by the bed with
nothing more than a terrible sadness in him, in nothing more
than a prison that had been constructed in his own mind and
from which he wouldn't escape, even if he could physically do
so.

 All this would be a brand on him. His life would never be the
same. The wolves might not accept him back. If wolves had
raised him at all and were not just a part of the myth. He might
have forgotten all he knew and starve to death out there or be
killed for being too different.  The elements might finish him
off. He might be as helpless in that world as this..

He never tried to leave this room, though I had always left the
door to it unlocked,  and the front door at the end of the
hallway, unlocked during the day; though he could have bent
back the bars on my window (put there by Dr. Henri so the
wolf boy wouldn't go gallivanting around the countryside and
wind up seen by the wrong people who would know the
civilizing influence of the good doctor was nothing more than a
passing fancy involving a monkey on a string, a sham) with
ease, never did.

He was only in sexuality not docile, only in sexuality the feral
side coming out again, and I could not be a part of tricks
anymore, be a part of lies to this boy cub, for the sake of my
own sanity at least, and would he too push me away? And did
I indeed, in some deep part of me, think him less, think him a
sexual toy, an oddity who would reject even the likes of me?
The thought itself shames me. But I had to know.

So, in the midst of grappling, I pulled his left hand to me,
pulled his left hand to what he had not seen in the dark, which
was always when we had sex, and gripped his hand to the loins
of myself,  to my dark wiry bush, and with my other hand
unleashed my own cock that engorged immediately I had taken
the band off it, and his hand found the forest tree, or sapling,
of me; his hand had found the hiding of someone different, in
my own way, like him; someone who was both male and
female, someone who had desired all the desires both male and
female know, the secret that was the shameful feral part of me.

The constant mix of seasons in the forest of my soul. The need
to be all the things sexuality could never be to me, and though
my member was quite a bit shorter than Destiny's, it could still
harden, it could still achieve pleasure of a sort.

His hand took to it without surprise, as though knowing it was
there, as though knowing that he could finally pleasure me in
the way he was pleasured, and perhaps he would find a kind of
comfort in that, we two side show oddities, we two outcasts,
we two observers of society and demitasse cups and fine airs
and fancy dress and champagne bottle parties and words that
were in Latin said and therefore more learned than we could
ever hope to be, the using this boy as a monkey, the using me
as a maid and servant, the pretense of them and my own that I
had to keep up of being a woman when I was a man as well.

All of it dovetailed in to this night. In to this surrender, as the
boy still as though afire, pushed my on my back and held up
my skirt and devoured me in his mouth as though he had taken
the forest wellsprings into himself, had taken his home with
him and had given it to me, had given the all of it to me, and
his mouth was  a boy's mouth and a wolf's and something that
was a different font of grapes and sea weeds that he wove into
my body than had ever been felt before by another human
being.

It was like being sucked by the god of all things, by the god of
creation, and he sucked my member as though it were his
lifeline to something so primitive to something so right and
ancestral that it seemed as though he made me a part of his
own boy godhood, for he was that now, I could see it, dwell
within it; he was Icarus, come fly to the sun with me and leave
these silly little mad creatures to impress themselves, tiny
squabbling ants, and for us to forget and never think of again.

And all the men around him, so many baboons compared to
him, these monkey men with their funny clothes and glasses
and long noses or pendulous neck wattles and all sorts of
oddnesses of flesh and bone and spirit, weak and squinty eyed
and pedantic, who studied and prodded and probed and wrote
about and got everything about him so dead wrong, so
laughable they.

As this boy god took my rush, my spermless orgasm in the
caves of his mouth and he thrust his head back and he put his
hands to my breasts, then he put his mouth to my nipples that
were hard and he licked them and he bit them and he pleasured
me all over again. I was spent wasted content, as I had never
been before, not even with him. I panted and breathed then
deeply, feeling him on me. Feeling me on him.

He looked to the barred windows, something in me unleashed
had unleashed something in him, and he looked back at me in
wonderment, in contempt, in that old arrogance I remembered
when he was first captured and brought, rope bound and
kicking and biting all the way, to Dr. Henri for whatever he
would do with him, that arrogance that had been beaten out of
him in the name of making him more human more civilized
more sane so early on in his stay here.

And his hands were claws on me and his long ragged
fingernails bit into my breasts, my dick still throbbing against
him, how long it had been even since self pleasure of self
flagellation of it I could not remember, and the boy got off me,
as he stood at the window,  the moon was creamy on his face,
and I felt the wetness in my eyes as he turned round and
looked, head slightly at an angle, with the old wildness I had
almost forgotten, at me, for instructions, for there was
sympathy in him, there was compassion as an animal feels
compassion, not with strings attached, not with devious
motives in mind, not with self obsession ruling all of it and
telling themselves what a good person they were for taking
time for one such as I; no, the compassion was genuine and
thorough and honest and simple and true, and he waited for me
to say it.

And I said, not wanting to, "Go home, Destiny, forget all of
this. It never happened. It was a most terrible bad dream."

 My voice choked.  I hoped he might come back to me. I knew
he would not.

I turned away from the window so I wouldn't have to see the
going of him. But I heard anyway the bending and the breaking
of the bars. I heard the window being thrust open and his jump
to the sill then over it and gone and I heard how empty my
single room was and I heard another sound, the sound of my
tears..

And the echoes of his howls, running away to the woods. I
hope I have done the right thing. There was nothing else I
could have done.