The Mammoth Book of Women's Erotic Fantasies by Sonia Florens Page A

kneels into the soft sand and laps the clear, babbling water. Grazes for a
while then eats a few miliums, though generally he never eats them.
    All round him a bad aura touches everything. It is in my purples, mustards and navys; it is in the way my shapes are square and sharp and hard. People ask me what the shapes
and the lines and the colours mean. Why should a painting have a meaning? It means whatever they want it to mean. It is a feeling. This one is the feeling of a unicorn and the ravine and the
miliums and the shapes and colours in my paintings are the life of the unicorn and my own breath in him. My paintings are the flowers my grandmother scattered here and the herbs she grew and the
spring of camomile under my feet.
    The ravine is mine. It had been my mother’s and her mother’s. All mine and I love it. It’s as if I have to hold it and take it into me, just as woman has to take the body of a
man she loves into her.
    Frame 3. Alan and I amble down the gentle path leading to the bottom of the ravine. It’s easier to walk here than to walk down the path of this marriage. Three children
make it important to keep on the path. I rub the rough, hard barks of the walnuts; finger the tips of the yellow-green sprouting plants and soak in the thin spring sunshine which shines through the
bare branches.
    This is also a picture painted by me: Alan is forty, tall and thin as one of the bare poplars, stooped, with a halo of fair blonde hair. He always gives the impression of being deep in thought.
That kind of glazed expression most men have as they are about to come. I’m younger than Alan but not much. And so short I barely reach his shoulders. One of the things he liked about me was
my size. His “little dwarf he used to call me affectionately and I called him my “gentle giant”. We used to be quite the cliched couple.
    My bad habit of putting every situation and every experience into a picture.
    “What do you think?” I say.
    “About what?”
    “You know . . . about widening the path so we can take a garden tractor down and bring up fire-wood. If we could bring up the dead and useless wood it would improve the health of the
remaining trees.”
    “Come on, you’ve been reading too many leaflets put out by the Department of Agri. You sound like one of them. You know as well as I do the work of making a proper path
wouldn’t be justified. Not worth the cost of any wood we may, or may not, use.”
    “Not just for the wood – for fun too. It would be nice to come down and smell the herbs and . . .”
    “Your kind of fun, I don’t need,” he says, his face still blank. “And as for your herbs! Look where all that rubbish got your mother. Ended up in the
nut-house.”
    “What about me? I’m not my mother. Come on . . .” Smile. Paint a picture of a smiling woman. He walks ahead. Keep smiling.
    “We shouldn’t be too long,” he says over his shoulder.
    “Why hurry?”
    “Have to be in the city by four.”
    “Forgot.”
    “Oh, you had a lot to think about.” He laughs, an insincere, dry laugh. “What do you, of all people, have to think about? Oh, yes, you have to make sure you have some paint,
the odd canvas and as long as you have a couple of hours a day dabbling you’re happy. The artist, the great artist, is then satisfied.”
    “I am an artist. I do sell my paintings and I almost keep myself by my work. I make a contribution.”
    “You whine too much.” My immediate subjects are gallows, firing squads and electric chairs. What is wrong with him? We box in shadows. For some months I have suspected the colours of
another woman round him and then brushed them off as a reflection of my own overabundant shade of green. Yet . . . we hardly make love now and when we do it’s a mechanical run to the end, not
a process in itself. Images of men with soft hands and tender lips and armpits smelling of sweat.
    Move past him and stop to face him. “Odd, isn’t it, that after all this