12/21/11

The Beautiful Woman
By Tim Jeffreys


He set eyes on her, the first time, when they were leaving the island.  He was standing in a queue of palpitating, sun-red tourists waiting to get back on the ship and float off to some place new.  He was just a fat little man with a fat little wife and two fat little daughters.  His wife noticed him looking at the beautiful woman and pursed her lips in a scowl, her eyes as hard as glass.  In her arms she cradled the awful, bald cat she had named Lady and which she took everywhere with her and which had caused them no end of problems with quarantine laws.  Lady too was scowling at him.  His daughters were not scowling.  Their expressions were expectant, as if they knew there was a perfectly good reason their father was staring at the woman on the harbour with the honey-coloured skin and they were merely waiting for him to explain it to them.  There were times, it was true, when he wanted to knock their heads together for being good.
He defied them all and stared at the woman.  He couldn’t help himself.  She was a thing of rare beauty.  Her hair was slick and black, her eyes dark and daring.  She wore a thin white dress barely able to contain her ample breasts, which bounced up and down as she walked.  The hem of her dress ended at the top of her long long legs.  Her skin was radiant.  As she passed along the line of tourists every man’s mouth fell open and every wife went tut!The eyes of the beautiful woman met the eyes of the fat little man and contained within that brief glance was an ocean full of promises.
Imagine being her lover! he thought, not knowing that he would be meeting her every night thereafter and ravishing her at her own bequest in an endless variety of positions and locals.
Why that very night as his wife lay snoring, he would jump ship and tiptoe across the waves, back to the island where she was waiting for him on the beach with her arms folded, with one ripe breast unanchored from her dress.  She smiled when she saw him, and said in her accented voice:
“But how did you get here?”
“I walked on slivers of moonlight,” he told her.
She laughed again and took his hand.
The moon was full, floating above the ship which sat far out across the water.  From somewhere, still, he could still hear his wife snoring.  It came to him as if carried on the wind.
“Take me.  Love me,” the beautiful woman said, crouching in the foam at the edge of the water.  “Take me here right here, right now.”
He spared a moment for his wife, for the horrible bald cat, for his good little girls.  Then he too crouched down in the foam as the beautiful woman took him by the hand.
“And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” he said.  And the beautiful woman laughed.


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I am UK-based writer of horror, fantasy, and weird fiction.