Being wild

      As he went down on me, I started looking up at the ceiling. I had been drinking quite a lot and then, he had rolled a marihuana cigarette in seconds and we had smoked it together while laughing about people that we had met in our pasts. We shared a lot and we knew it but, for the night, we had decided to remember certain things and not the whole picture. We hadn’t discussed it with so many words but it was clear to both of us the moment he had stepped in my apartment that night.

 It felt nice what he was doing and, I have to say, he looked better than ever. He had recently entered a gym and the results were already showing. Granted, he might never become an Olympic athlete or nothing like that, but he did look amazing, just like I remembered him from the past, or even better. Back then; he was tall but very skinny, with a beautiful body that had virtually no curves. I never complained then because our relationship was based on love and he had been my first love.

 This time around, however, as I closed my eyes out of pleasure, I knew that everything we did was simply based on lust. That love that had united us so many years ago had been dead for almost as long as we had been apart one from the other. We had lived a lot and we hadn’t spoken much through the years, only following each other on Facebook and such social networks where you can take a peak on the lives of others, almost always just to have something to regret.

 But then, we reinitiated our relationship by talking at least once every two months and then more and more often. As the time passed, we realized we had grown to be very different people socially but very alike in everything that had to do with sex. Sometimes, we would chat online for hours, talking about what we would do together if we could and things like that. I didn’t mind at all, as I had vowed to be a single man for a long while. I was certain that kind of flirting wouldn’t amount to anything.

 Him, however, had a very different life going on. As we started talking, he wouldn’t say much about himself and would often prefer to talk about me or about the times we had been dating. But eventually, he had to confess that he was not only dating someone, but that he had been doing so for more than a couple of years. Furthermore, he hinted to me once that his partner had proposed to him with a ring and everything one would imagine, but that they had agreed on marrying after they were able to afford living together and everything that came with that.

 At first, I had decided to slowly pull away from that friendship of sorts we had developed. For a while, I couldn’t understand why someone that was almost married would talk to me like he did. Furthermore, it was outstanding to read how he described my body with a precision I would never imagine a surgeon to have, much less a boyfriend I had spent less than half a year with. It scared me but at the same time it felt very flattering, as no one else was telling me the things he said so often.

 Then, one day, he wrote to me on my cellphone one afternoon. It was a weekday and he just said “Hi”. I said the same thing and then we engaged on the typical conversation one has with any living person: we talked about what was going on with both our lives, what we were doing right then and there and, finally, the weather and such things most people don’t really care about. Then, after about fifteen minutes of filler, he finally said what he had been wanting to say for a while: “I’m alone in my house now…”

 I immediately understood what he meant with that. He clearly wanted me to drop by and have sex with him. In minutes, he confessed he had been thinking of me for some time and that he wanted to feel again what he had felt with me back in the day. He was very flattering, telling me a bunch of stuff I was very glad to read. He told me I had been the best lover he had ever had and that my body was ingrained in his memory forever. He said all the right words, in the right order.

 However, I was reluctant because I remembered his almost husband. And I have to confess something: I have not been an angel all my life. I have been known to go to bed with people that had previous engagements, me knowing about the whole thing. The difference this time was that I actually knew him and I had been in a relationship with him. Somehow, that changed it all and I had to lie in order not to meet him for sex. One part of me wanted to but my true soul gained the upper hand.

 Not that my decision changed anything. Especially not after, one night during a shopping spree with a friend, I stumbled upon my former boyfriend and his fiancée. We couldn’t just pretend we hadn’t run into each other, so we decided to shake hands and talked a little in the middle of the mall. I don’t know how, but I ended up chatting it up with his partner and I have to say I found him to be a very nice person. He wasn’t the type of man I had envisioned for my former lover, but he was undeniable a good person and I understood why that relationship had formed and had lived through the years.

 However, I had no idea why the guy wanted to cheat on that nice man. I didn’t understand it at all and didn’t understood either when he called me out of the blue in order to invite me to a “game night” at their place. According to my former boyfriend, it had been his fiancée’s idea. I struggled with the decision of whether to go or not but finally the decision was taken for me, when the fiancée himself called me on my cellphone and begged for my presence. After that, I couldn’t say no.

 The evening, I have to say, was pretty tame. They drank conservatively and their jokes were just like their level of general fun: just average. Other friends of theirs were there, thank God, so the evening passed without a hitch until my ex-lover pulled me aside on the kitchen, touched my genitals over the fabric of the pants I was wearing, and told to my ear that he really wanted to fuck around with me. When he realized nothing could happen there, he told me the story he had created for his almost husband.

 He hadn’t told him that I was a former lover or boyfriend. He told him we had gone to college together and that we had gone out several times together because of mutual friends. But his lies proved unnecessary, because his fiancée never asked anything. He was being a gracious host and a nice person overall, not drilling into people’s lives or anything like that. That made me feel even worse when I got home. So that’s why I’m staring at the ceiling right now, trying not to think a lot or feel much.

 When he came back to kiss me on the lips, I did it in a very distracted fashion. He had come in to my apartment out of nowhere, as his fiancée had left the city for a couple of days because of a death in the family. He was in mourning, who know where, as the love of his life was getting rid of all his clothes and my clothes as well. Yes, I felt guilt but then I realized, or told myself at least, that none of that was my doing. I wasn’t the one doing something wrong, or so I told myself.

 As I had sex with him, I tried to dedicate my senses to the moment. The marihuana kicked in right when it had to. I heard his moans and I felt the heart of his body very close to mine. And we spent hours doing the same thing, in different ways.

 When he left early the following day, I realized that I was one kind of person. And I have to tell everyone that I’m not ashamed of that. I am the person that fucks someone that wants it and I’m the person that does something knowing the consequences and ramifications it could have, if any.

Wild Space

   Above them, the various pieces that made up the space station had caught on fire and were falling at high speed to the ocean in front of the islands. It had been a miracle that the planet had a archipelago in the right place, or their pod would have landed in the middle of the water and they would now be dead. As the biggest pieces collided with the surface of the water, the five survivors of the station looked at the water in horror, as an enormous creature roared, visibly enrage by the fallen projectiles.

 There, above the ground and the sky, their life had been ideal but not perfect. They had everything they could ask for, such as running water, food, information, communications and so on. The program they were involved in was only about civilians in space, so none of them were actual astronauts or scientists. They were all normal people, in the sense that they only had the basic knowledge of how to survive in space. And now, survival skills were the most needed.

 The group started walking downhill, as their pod had crashed against the highest part of a mountain that seemed to be made of something sand-like. Shock wouldn’t have let them move but they noticed the ground shaking below them and the monster in the water became a second problem. In front of the team, Richard was leading them towards the beach, where he thought they could be safer. No one really said anything, they just followed and tried to hear everything around them.

 Richard had been a boy scout as a kid. He had camped in various national parks back home and he had enjoyed it thoroughly except for a traumatic experience that made him retire from the scouts. Their parents never demanded to know why and he concluded it was better like that. Now he was walking under a blazing sun, with four other people he barely knew, even after living together in a space station for a year. That, somehow, had not been enough time to get to know one another.

 When they arrive to the beach, the first to sit down was the only other man, a man called Sebastian. Despite the English sounding name, he was actually Swedish and spoke with a very thick accent. Sebastian was older than Richard and he had been a magazine editor back home. He had become a part of the team as they all had: paying a big sum and basically winning a lottery. He wanted to get out of the Earth fast, as his wife had died only a few years after getting married. He felt so heartbroken that he decided to leave on an impulse and now there he was.

 The three women were called Maria, Kim and Victoria. Maria had only win the lottery. She had won the only seat in the station that was up for grabs without the need to pay anything. She was a janitor back on Earth and had decided to join in order to get away from her family, who she secretly hated. Kim was a famous supermodel, tired of being in the spotlight and Victoria was an architect from Angola, named after the queen that had conquered the African continent.

 The three of them seemed tired but none sat down on the ground. They instead watched the ocean, looking for the creature. At some point, it had disappeared, along with the wreckage from the station. Richard was still trying to understand what had happened but it had all been so fast… They were all sleeping and the alarm started beeping: apparently the ship’s hyper drive had ignited by itself and they were now ramming against a planet. With only minutes to decide, they jumped on the pod and saved their lives.

 As they had no idea how that world worked, they agreed that the best thing was to walk along the edge of the ocean and look for something to eat. Then, they would try to find some sort of cave or safe place to rest. After those two things had been achieved, they could be thinking about the future, if that was a possibility. They walked in silence, watching the strange bushes growing by the beach, hearing the strange squishing sound coming from the greenish water of the ocean.

 Not of them wanted to talk too much. After all, there were originally six people in the space station. A man called Bruno had not come to the pod after hearing the alarm. They never knew what he was doing, if maybe he had been the one to make the hyper drive work. In any case, he was now dead, spread across the skies as the station fell to the ocean. He was a strange man, always hiding something from the rest of them. He seemed much more tormented than all of them put together.

 They stopped when they noticed a small stream coming from inside the island. The water was also green. Kim walked closer but Richard warned her that it might be poisonous or have chemical compounds too different for the human body to process them. But Kim didn’t want to drink the water but to observe it. It behave differently, not like a normal liquid but like some sort of creature. The woman got up fast, shaking. She then looked at the ocean and said what she was thinking aloud: what if the water in that planet was actually alive, moving slowly on its sides?

 As she said that, tentacles branched out of the ocean and launched themselves at the group. Richard and Kim ran first. Maria followed them closely, as did Victoria but Sebastian was way to slow and he got grabbed by the ankles. What happened next made Maria scream and Kim almost faint. Victoria vomited right there, just a few meters away from the water, as they saw the most disgusting spectacle that they had never seen. The universe was a place to be afraid of.

 The water, or whatever it was, had absorbed Sebastian’s body through those tentacles. It was like watching a kid drink out of those juices that come in a bag, only that this bag had been alive just moments prior. He didn’t even had the chance to scream or anything like that. The man just died, obviously, his empty body dumped carried by the tentacles towards the ocean. Apparently, the tentacles fed the creature that had been disturbed by the fallen debris. It appeared again, eating their companion.

 Victoria was trembling wildly and Kim had to be helped by Richard, as her legs didn’t properly work. It was Maria who, her face white of the horror, suggested they looked the opposite shore. They had to verify if water was like that all around. It could be the decisive point between remaining alive in that planet or dying without any possibility. So they walked, in silence, still shaking and wanting to scream. But hey feared potential creature in the bushes, so they kept to themselves.

 The opposite shore was only an hour away, cutting through the island. When they saw it from afar, they noticed right away it was a different kind of ocean. When they got closer, they realized it was normal water, the one they knew from back home. Deciding it couldn’t get more dangerous than a stomachache, they decided to drink some. It wasn’t salted, as ocean water on Earth, rather on the sweet side. They each drank a bit and then sat down on the beach, to rest their trembling bodies.

 It was Victoria who started crying first, then it was Maria and then everyone was crying. In a weird way, that united them more than anything before. They hadn’t really been friends or anything back in the station, just travelling mates,. Now, things had to be a little different.

 They were drying their tears with their hands when a loud noise was heard above them. They looked up in horror to discover an enormous ship just passing above them. It was obviously not man made. It had all sorts of inhuman features. And it hadn’t noticed them… yet.

Mjölnir

   From the top of the hill, he looked majestic. It was incredible to see him glide over the water and then fly up towards the sun and then fall, breaking the surface of the lake with his huge body. The creature loved to swim, or so it seemed, and it looked really happy to be there. He looked like a child that meets the ocean for the first time. But he was much larger than just a child. He was more the size of two horses and there were far from any ocean although he could reach one in no time. The people who found him had called him Mjölnir, like the hammer that the god Thor held in battle, the hammer that the gods had created to bring order and stability to a world in chaos. He was that for them, a fantastic creature capable of bringing calm to this world.

 The two explorers that had gone to see him were so amazed that they just stared at him for an hour, never mind the fact that he might fly away in any moment. The locals said he lived deep in the mountains because they were the only inaccessible area of the region. The mountains her were sharp and built by nature like razors. Not any human could climb those and to use any means of transport would be a waste of time because of the magnetic instability of the area, which no one had ever explained. Maybe there was something to mine down there; maybe it was because of him. No one knew. What they knew was that he was, for all intents and purposes, unique. The locals never spoke about another one or a herd of them nor nothing like that. He was alone in the world.

 After a week of the discovery, the scientists had begun to look everywhere in the world with the same circumstances but nothing had come up yet. Maybe he wasn’t alone but they had to help him mate or he would be extinct in a number of years. To be honest, they had no idea how long the lifespan of a dragon was but the general thought was that they could live for hundreds of years, so that gave them some time to organize and look for a suitable mate. They studied him for weeks and weeks and more and more people came to meet him, which was astonishing due to the fact that, in the past, any person that had attempted to get close had died.

 Doctor Lemon was a brilliant biologist. She had discovered many new plants and animals in the deep forests of Indonesia. As for Doctor Samuelson, he was a paleontologist, the one that had discovered the first skeleton of a dragon in China. He was the reason the two of them were granted help from an American institution to go and explore the Razor Mountains and see if its inhabitant was real or not. They had to train hard for days in climbing and trekking and in every sport that could help them pass the mountain range. When they got there, they had to try it several times, risking their lives, in order to finally make the crossing that would lead them to Mjölnir.

The lake was not a place they went to look for him. They had seen it from the range and had thought they needed to recharge their water supplies before attempting to do anything else and the lake was probably made of melted ice water from the mountaintops. It was summer, so the lake was not as large as it could be but it happened to be large enough for a gigantic creature to swim in it. It was so strange, for both scientists, to see the creature so at peace and relaxed. If they hadn’t known any better, they would have thought he was a giant dog or something. Not for his looks of course but for the way he behaved in private, playing around and just enjoying himself.

 They had always been portrayed as savages in every single culture. They have been deemed dangerous and quite vengeful but this one did not seem like that. He seemed nice. Maybe that was because in all of the first week, they didn’t see him spout fire. It was possible that he used it only as mechanism of defense but when they saw him eat a deer, they realized he wasn’t able to do it at all. He was a very large lizard who happened to fly short distances but he had no ability to propel fire from his mouth or nostrils. This disappointed many who followed the investigation but he was, nevertheless, a species in the brink of extinction. The two scientist looked all around the area and found the skeleton of another dragon but it wasn’t its partner but its mother.

 The bones indicated it was a larger animal, with a far longer wingspan and a huge body. It was now easy to see now why they had such a clumsy ability to fly: they were too big. They weren’t like the pterosaurs of the past that were light like birds. These dragons were heavy and had to train their whole lives to be able to fly properly. That’s why no one had ever spotted one. Contrary to belief, they didn’t fly that much, they didn’t spout fire and they lived in an area where the magnetic field was just crazy. The area was soon protected by law, so only scientist and authorized people could come in, dare to cross the mountains, and then just watch him to his things.

 Both Lemon and Samuelson stayed there for a whole year and were the ones who set the rules on how to behave while staying in the area. They would explain to any visitors that they had been very careful for him not to se them or be able to smell them. They used a special perfume that made them smell like plant life so he wouldn’t come too close and attack. People always obeyed because it was more important for them to see him and take pictures than risking their lives in a silly way. But like with everything that goes into fashion, most people soon forgot Mjölnir, after only a year. Lemon and Samuelson were happy that this had happened because they needed to investigate more and see how much time he had.

They gathered saliva from the remains of his meals and some scales that had apparently fallen from him. Maybe he was changing skin like most reptiles or maybe he was sick. They had no real idea and that made them insane. For a while, they had to go back to a proper lab and just try to understand more about him. As they did all the tests and experiments they had to do, they realized it was a very difficult job as there was no other creature like it. Lizards and snakes were only similar to him in small things but, in the larger picture, he was a unique creature. And that worked against him hard because it’s much more difficult to protect something you don’t understand than the opposite.

 It was during that time that a couple of explorers in remote parts of the world found more dragon remains and even fossilized eggs. They were brought to a laboratory for investigation and hoping they could lead to a possible cloning project but that was cancelled when they realized there was nothing they could do with the eggs, except noting it features and putting it in a museum. After six months of hard work, they had come to the conclusion that the dragon was about to enter adulthood. His mother had died at least fifty years ago when he was a baby but only know he was beginning to grow up. That explained, at least partially, his behavior in the lake and the way he did things. He was becoming an adult all by himself and it appeared he would die alone too.

 Then the news came. The locals had found his body lying next to the lake. He was dead. Lemon and Samuelson flew to the area but it was too late, another team had come for the body and, with permission and bribes to the locals, they had managed to take the body in a helicopter and now it was far from the reach of those two scientists, the ones that had discovered him. For months, no one heard one more word about anything related to the creature. But both scientists decided to release a book with their impressions and experiences with the dragon. They thought they should at least be the first to say what he was like and how thrilling it was to discover him.

 The rival scientists released an autopsy report saying that he had died from drowning and that they had found the organ that might have produced the flames every single culture in ancient history attributed to the dragons. The discoverers of the creature published an article saying all of that was false and that there was something they weren’t telling and that they should have been able to check the bodies themselves or at least leave someone else do it. But they never did. And the body was never donated to any museum or organization. People, again, largely forgot about the dragon and about them, even as they slammed scientists without scruples every time they had the chance.

 Mjölnir was dead and the truth was he had died because he had wanted to. He was smarter than people thought and his fly over the lake were just an attempt to understand how to kill himself. He was grieving and because he missed his mother. And he was alone and that wouldn’t change. So he took matters into his own hands and did it. People would have never understood that because of the intelligence factor but that no longer matters. We will never understand.