An Impossible Desire

For years I thought I needed to search for her. Time and again I studied the nineteenth-century Japanese print ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’ and read everything I could find about its genesis, but that didn’t help. The pursuit of the same subject in contemporary pornography and hentai seemed vulgar, and it lacked any connection with my fantasy. I read and reread the Odyssey, all the available sea legends and a certain passage from Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’.  

There came a day when I had to acknowledge that all possible leads had run cold. Since then I’ve been reduced to believing in fate. I realize now that everything is out of my hands and I can only struggle on through life in the hope that it takes the turning I long for. If it doesn’t, I’ll have led the most wasted of lives; if it does, perhaps the most astonishing.  

Meanwhile I’m the grey mouse with an office job, the quiet earner in a chequered shirt. Excesses of any sort are pointless for me, because my dreams are not diverse. All I’ve allowed myself during the long wait is a little country house by the sea where I’ve spent my holidays for the past few summers. I doubt it helps. 

I believe I saw her just once in the municipal swimming pool, for a split second. She was sitting in a corner on the bottom. I didn’t dare look again. I hurried home as fast as I could in the hope that she’d pick up my scent and by doing so find out where I lived... 

She didn’t visit me that evening but I cried with joy because for an instant I knew for certain: she exists! 

Sometimes, alone, I become absorbed in the cool blubber of my desire: 

I sit in the armchair. She enters as if soundlessly. I don’t move. She determines what will happen. She slowly comes over to me and looks at me with a serious smile. She’s wearing purple eye shadow. She has long, wet, dark-blonde hair and a large but elegant nose. She’s naked but she keeps her breasts hidden. No matter. I cannot imagine how her upper body joins her lower body, but what her lower body looks like I do of course know: purple, smooth, ever in motion. 

She is close to me now. Slowly two arms wrap round my ankles, two round my thighs, two round my wrists. With her foremost arm she clasps my neck; with her hindmost she caresses me wherever she likes. With her human hands she clutches my face and gives me the wettest of French kisses. She plays a little with my limbs, lifting them up and laying them down. She takes me to the bedroom, if she so chooses. She speaks in motherly, mildly teasing primal sounds. 

Then it begins. My sex is in her cavity and the sucking commences. It’s a gentle tightening-loosening, a contraction-relaxation. The natural effect is infinitely better than that of even the most advanced sex toy. Through her suckers she feels and responds to everything, my slightest tremble. Sometimes it seems as if she’ll squeeze it to pieces, as if it’ll never be able to do anything after she’s finished with it, not even pee. 

Yet there’s no definitive highpoint, it’s an ocean of endless waves. 

I don’t know when I come, but come I certainly do, perhaps several times, she makes sure of that. She has let go now; my penis and everything around it is black with ink. I want to stay awake for a bit but she rocks me so softly. I just catch sight of one long tentacle sliding away before the blackness overwhelms my body and mind. My final thought: female octopuses can be impregnated only once and they die shortly after the birth of their offspring. Is that why she waited so long? Or is she, with her black interior, perhaps after the white of my seed, in need of it for her survival, and is that the reason she’s spared me as much as possible, and is that why she’s so adept? 

This is my great desire. 

Perhaps no such creature exists and I’m crazy to believe that it could. Perhaps everyone has the same unspoken desire and we all live under the spell of the cruel Octopus goddess, who wants to be worshipped without ever having to submit, except when it pleases her. I don’t know and don’t need to know, if only she comes. Oh, if only she comes...  

This story is written by Thomas Eeckhout for Het Rode Oor 2020. Het Rode Oor (The Red Ear) is the annual erotic writing contest in the Low Countries, curated by the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren in collaboration with Company New Heroes, Hard//hoofd, ILFU and the Writer’s Guide (to the Galaxy). This story is translated by Liz Waters.