644 - Nothing More Beautiful

A cascade of screams... little girls’ screams fell on my head as if He filled His cage with them.

The Lock... but not water, not air, screaming pain.  My fists clenched and I glared up at Him.  “Yes she should,” I snapped.  “I've never understood why you created women with those parts at all if You wanted them gone!  If they were not supposed to be there, if women were not supposed to feel pleasure there, then it was a design flaw and to inflict that kind of pain... that makes little girls lift grown men off the floor writhing with it, kills them in their wedding beds and their child beds bleeding their lives away, makes their flesh suppurate, makes other body needs painful and unhealthy, is just wrong.”  I paused, breathing hard and then thought oops. How dare I SCOLD the God Himself?  How dare I critique His work or His decree? I drew in a gasp and continued, trying to make my words less... critical of the God.

“From my limited experience, with my wife and my partner, a woman’s pleasure is as intense as a man’s.  As deeply felt as a man’s.  As beautiful.  There is nothing more beautiful than the joy of a wife or husband’s or an alesinas’s pleasure shared.”  I gulped.  There was no lying to Mikas, no half truths here.  “It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever experienced (seen, felt, tasted) and it must have been a mortal mistake or misunderstanding of Your will on the matter.  I truly believe that with all my heart.”

He didn’t melt me, strike me dead for my impertinence, turn me into a salamander.  He gazed at me and then the most stunning smile spread over His face.  He leaned back and His laughter shook me through and through, moving my bones it felt like.  I had to laugh with him, a little limp from sheer relief, a little frightened still that he was laughing before he wiped me off the Earthsphere.

“I accept your thought-out passion.  Continue.”

My laughter with Him faded to just chuckles as He spoke, and then to a sigh that relaxed me all up my centre, the middle of my body.  I tried to hold to that, as I bowed my head to Mikas, now merely stone once more.  How are They here so I can see Them?  Are other people seeing Them too?  Or are They just seeing me respond?

I caught my lip in my teeth as I reached toward the searing hot threads of glass surrounding me.  I would have to walk through them, in perfect faith.

I tried not to cringe away as my hands felt the rising heat.  People might remember how they learned to shy away from heat, even without the ‘Careful, it’s hot.” Warning from their nurse or from their mother.  Those threads were far hotter than glowing coals, the air between each flowing stream shivering hot as the air quivered from merely touching them.

It was hard to keep reaching.  I must.  There was a shock when my fingers touched, when the streams diverted from their straight downward track and flowed down my hands and my wrists to continue their heavy, scorching way downward.

A shock enough to be almost sickening but then everything was cool.  My hands cupped and puddle the glass, pooling like a lake before overflowing my encased fingers.  I remembered the Jitzmitthra dance Ky and I had made, beside the little pond and my hands moved.  I watched as my fingers, of their own accord, drew that scene from my memory and two figures were pulled out of the puddle glass.  Dancing.  They were smooth, with no features but were clearly male and female, dancing a falisas, mid twirl so that her skirts and his sleeves swirled together, as if they were one.  Thank you, thank you, Mikas, Risae, thank you for so much beauty.

I stepped through the curtain of glass, feeling the warm flow as if it were a gentle cascade of syrup and my hands and arms, above the glass statue I had made... my hands encased separately from it somehow.  I shook my head as I cleared the glass, teardrops chiming away from me, from my face and my hair and my body, a shimmering, ringing sound that somehow melded perfectly with the song from the glass organ.

It was like stepping from a silent space into one filled with joyful, startled, cheering people, yet somehow I still carried a seed of Mikas and Risae’s peaceful, creative silence with me.  I handed the statuette to the dekinas waiting to receive it and stepped forward and up to Dimae, feeling more and more full of dream as I went.  My hands and arms were still encased in glass, like thick, warm, clear wax.