A man named Russ Florida and a female grocery worker are standing in front of a lottery machine called THE GRAIL. A plastic cutout wizard looms above the machine holding a magic wand that is blinking blue at the tip. One of the wizard’s eyes is open wide while the other winks. They attempt to feed a dollar bill into the machine but it keeps being rejected.
Directly into his nose came a scent from the girl below him, who smoothed the creases and unfolded the edges of the dollar. When Russ looked up again, he shot entirely into that sorcerer’s predator eye and was consumed by his aberrant soul.
The spirit was not entirely foul. Nor was it without humor. A pleasant sort of comedy played there, like a tiny girl standing tiptoed on a chair to steal Mammam’s lemon cookies. The sorcerer wanted only a taste of sugar when his tricky imagination got going.
The dollar was spit back out.
“Oh, what is wrong,” shouted the girl, laughing. “What in the damn blazes of hell is wrong, Merlin. Why won’t you take what I am giving you.”
But Russ Florida did not hear her. Nor did he try to smooth out the dollar.
He was still in the wizard’s eye.
The visions lit up his mind. No more than a fraction of a second passed as these images flickered into Russ’s psyche.
***
He was inside a haunted castle turret. Odors crept through the stone floor. From the dungeons they lifted up a molded age along with moans of the tortured and the long departed.
On a bed lay Adhan, Merlin’s mother. Behind the bed, on a straw-colored banner, a violent red lion stood on its hind legs with its tongue flaring from its mouth. The lion’s eyes were violent and its long cock erect. This was the symbol of her family. The spectacle of heraldry. The banner billowed gently on the wind of a coming storm.
Adhan was far from a lion of any kind. She was merely a maiden who scarcely had the courage to speak to even her most intimate of family members. When a roasted duck was brought to her royal father’s table she would blush. She would watch timidly as her father, and his knights, ate the meat vulgarly with grease running down their faces. She winced as they crunched their teeth into the crisp, red-and-gold skin.
Even the changing of the seasons made her blush. When the flowers came up so fragrant and vital in the spring she could hardly bear how ashamed and red she became.
The approaching storm smelled of salt on the wind and the maiden Adhan’s face flushed crimson. She shut her eyes as the thunder came so she did not see the demon enter through the oriel window.
But Merlin saw him.
The wizard had arrived earlier on a gust of wind. He was concealed by shadow as he leaned back against the stone wall. Merlin observed his mother throw a small white pillow to her face as each new gust came through the window. He thought he heard her giggling while her face was pressed into the pillow.
The appearance of his father was not as Merlin expected. Not scaled or clawed like a demon at all. He had the appearance of a man, although Merlin noticed quickly that none of his looks passed down to him. The wizard blushed as much as his mother when the man tore off his tunic to reveal the blonde hair on his golden chest. He shed his trousers without missing a step. His movement was so natural and heathen that Merlin and Russ both thought it inhuman.
The blonde and gold-fleshed demon stood at the foot of the maiden’s bed without saying a word. When lightning flashed through the window, and the sound of rain began to splash onto the sill, Merlin’s mother opened her eyes and her already red face became a shade of purple as she began crawling backward on the bed like a crab. The gold demon seized the bedspread and tore her back to him. His clever fingers pulled the white shift at the shoulders and in one whipping motion the maiden was completely naked on top of sheets, the garment stripped from breast to toes.
Only for a moment did Merlin see his mother’s blush extend down around the areolas of her plum breasts before she pulled the coverlet up to hide herself. Merlin’s demon father was there in an instant to rip that away, too, and all the other blankets and pillows until all she could do was accept her nudity in the center of the bare mattress. And around the bed he stalked her, taking as much of her in as he could, as she held her breasts in her hands and tried to hide her face and other intimate parts from his lascivious stare.
Merlin had stepped out of the shadow. When the torchlight danced on him, his father turned. The sorcerer thought himself to be invisible as he traveled through time but he was not altogether certain. His father’s aggressive eyes looked to where he stood. And then he saw his mother seem to notice him too. Adhan looked right at him as her arms slowly dropped away from her breasts. She turned the rest of her body toward him, raising up onto her knees and straightening her back.
“Mother,” he whispered as he saw the red blush on her face and how it blemished her pale shoulders and around her pink nipples and down her stomach. Merlin lifted his hand to wave but neither her or his father reacted to the gesture so he turned around to see if anything behind him had gained their attention. There was only shadow.
When the wizard turned back around, he saw his father’s gold-tanned hand playing with his mother’s black hair. She continued looking right at the enchanter as the demon dipped his fingers through her soft curls. Merlin saw a streak of jealousy in the demon’s eyes before he slapped his mother across the face. He hit her three times before she looked at him and not the invisible presence near the bed.
Merlin raised his hand to his ear because he swore he heard his mother, the maiden Adhan, whispering. As a way of handling her severe bashfulness she did this at times when the guilt was too severe. Mostly, no one heard her but she had no way of knowing because she believed the whispering to be all in her head and not audible at all.
“I feel too much,” her son Merlin heard her say. “I always feel too much. Blind me. Blind me.”
Her words were stopped as the athletic solar entity, Merlin’s father, squeezed her nose with his fingers and she gasped trying to catch her breath. When she felt the pinch leave her nose she began inhaling deeply through her tiny nostrils before her tongue felt the erect penis in her mouth. As he pulled her head into his loins she began to cough and he let her fall to the bare mattress.
As the tickling in her throat stopped, she felt an even greater one as a wet hardness began sneaking its way inside her. This was all the things she turned away from. All that terrified her. The scent of the pink hyacinths. The mud and cow dung and grass sap and pollen of pine citrus. The musk of the far cattle. The first blush of spring at dawn. The erotic bleeding of the same sun in the evening. The wolfhounds sucking grease out of bones. All of them in this phallus howling wet with disgrace. A magical wand charged with all the things she was ashamed to greet for fear her feelings would take her too far. She did not want to get lost in the excitement of a strange woods. Her son, the wizard Merlin, saw it too as she sobbed. He saw it while she was being penetrated in the most humiliating of ways, fingers in her mouth, forced to taste the cultured oils of the world.
In her head, Adhan stirred a cow patty with a stick to see all the digested green grass inside the brown crust. She wondered how good it could possibly get and what other things she would begin to feel as she kept stirring. She thought she was alone. Then her grandmother caught her. And instead of being devastated by the shame, like she had been years ago in the pasture, Adhan now laughed at the shock in her grandmother’s face as the demon’s penis entered her inappropriate hole.
Merlin watched as his father’s balls smacked his mother’s vagina with the rhythm of summer and spring, the red heart rhythm, the rhythm of the mammal’s jiggling ass. He loved his father immediately. While he listened to his mother whisper, “I’m ashamed, I’m ashamed,” and saw her hands cover her face, Merlin loved her too. Not only did he resemble her with fair skin and dark hair he understood her in his soul. “It is all too arousing isn’t it, mother?” he said.
“Yes,” she whispered, “it is too much. That is why I love all of it. I was only afraid it would taste too good. And it does. It is so awful but it does. I was right to be afraid,” she whispered as the demon’s penis entered and filled her womb. He kicked her on the buttocks and sent her rolling across the mattress.
Thunder crashed. Merlin put his hands up to his chest to feel his heart, to see if it still moved. He found it danced as strange as always inside its milky cage. A sudden downpour splashed through the window but his father was nowhere to be seen. He ran to the window to get one last glance of him but all he saw was the lightning flash across the castle yard like fevered moonlight.
Merlin walked over to his mother who lay collapsed on the mattress and saw the semen leaking from between her weakened legs. His face turned as red as an apple as he looked at the pearly rivulet and then up at her breasts. His mother gasped when he touched her. He lifted the legendary semen to his face and stuck out his tongue. The wizard stopped before he tasted it. He laughed and his mother lifted up in the bed terrified. She looked all around but saw no one.
“It is okay, mother,” he said, seeing the blood on the mattress. “I get off on my shame too. I am the son of a demon and an angel, as you know.” He thought a moment and said, “As you will know.”
He walked over to her and wiped the semen in a figure 8 over her womb and said, “I love you.”
The fair erstwhile maiden Adhan scuttled in retreat to the far end of the bed.
“It is good to be haunted, isn’t it, Mom,” said Merlin. The blood had started to diminish from her face. “Ghosts! To fear the dark again! To believe gods again! Don’t they make you feel yourself? Aren’t they all just incidents of love?”
A wind rushed through the window and the great pressure whipped the fighting lion banner, filled it like a sail. Merlin’s mother began to weep on the bed. The pressure from the wind seemed to fill her stomach too. She placed her hands there in an attempt to quell the discomfort. But it was too late. Thirteen minutes was all it took for the wizardly worm to bore into the egg.
Merlin’s face reddened at once. What a great embarrassment it was to be in this world. That is what made it so good. And how extraordinarily good this shame felt for the sorcerer as he began to weep alongside his mother. His crying sounded so devastating in the torch-lit room that even she wiped away her tears and became concerned. Her motherly spirit had awakened and it came so suddenly, erasing all of her fear.
She rose naked from the bed and began to move toward the invisible bereaved. “Hallo,” she said, “Is all well with thee?”
Merlin uncovered his face, which was so red it appeared to be bleeding, and looked at his mother through the tears that stung almost sweetly. He saw that motherliness had become like the rest of the lusty things of this world to her. She was again blushing. He looked down at the black hair of her loins and believed this world did not deserve such a creature that had just been fucked into being there. That is what made the enchanter become so woefully shy. He was like the living Grail.
Adhan’s arms went right through him as she tried to touch where the miserable sounds came from. She still heard him sniffling. “You will be well,” she said. “I promise thee.”
Merlin struck his mother across the face. She went reeling back and fell over the side of the mattress and onto the rug which lay over the stone floor. He winked and thought, “The Grail has a strange flavor.” He felt this even more true as he saw her lay there without the nerve to cry. He was delighted with her being disarranged there and completely baffled by existence and what mysterious things were at play beyond the curtain.
That was why he was so famous a character. Even farther back than Myrddin Wyllt he had survived the passage of time. Like the Grail he only had to wish to be discovered and some strange wanderer would be guided to a hill with a shovel. And as they dug, mischievous thoughts would flash on reels of film before their eyes. Fresh new acts evoked depravities and kindnesses which they felt compelled to commit. They would feel close to reality, to life as it was, and they had a new sexual impulse to play around in it and do some loving damage.
This was the same impulse that compelled Merlin to strike down Adhan, his mother. Her abashment was beautiful to behold. Her paleness. Her virginity. All of those were near to the great wizard. They traveled both deep and to the surface with him on his naturally pale skin. But this true nature was only part of him. Being the dominant trait, he despised it because he felt like his mother enough. He grew tired of all this shame. Those were the times he became angered and lashed out.
He watched his mother touch her mouth, and when he noticed the blood on her fingers, he felt a precious thrill. Sometimes this antisocial urge would bring that impish smile to his face, just as it did when he knew he could orgasm at will. When that smile came, he knew he needed to feel like his father. And it was the greatest of fun to feel him there.
But neither Merlin, or Russ Florida, could see Adhan’s true thoughts as she lay sprawled on the rug in the castle turret. Her look of fright was not at all the feeling that was inside her mind as she smeared the blood over her lips.
Deep inside her womb came a warmth that stretched past all her extremities. She felt her arms extending so far out that she could wrap them around heaven and hell and squeeze them together to her chest. All of her former shame was replaced with a brazen disregard for the imagination of mankind with its insipid rules.
And as she stood shakily again, her soft feet on the tightly woven rug, an odor overwhelmed her. The aroma didn’t waft into her nose but up from her glowing womb which was as spiced and warm as loaves of stollen bread on Christmas morning. She turned away from her invisible son and bent over like she was reaching for a present.
Before her fingers touched the rug, she raised her arms and grabbed her slender buttocks. Adhan shut her eyes as the warmth of comfort became too great. A buttery citrus scent penetrated everything. All of the world was beyond humiliating, but that was suddenly exhilarating rather than wrong.
The fair erstwhile maiden sobbed as she spread her backside. A tiny pink button was exposed to whoever watched invisibly near her bed. The cardamom and cinnamon were an entrancing, intertwined fragrance. A little nutmeg and mace, along with candied citrus peel and raisin and powdered sugar.
“This is love,” thought Merlin, who couldn’t keep up the demonic act. He was not like his father most of the time. He began to weep along with his mother. It felt good to cry. This devilish emotion was how the Grail made itself known.
“It is just like a pink aster bloom,” the wizard said.
***
Even the simple representation of the wizard looked altogether unruly above the lottery machine. But there was a sort of skipping, shrugging, winking irony in his unruliness. Russ Florida smelled it immediately as he slipped out of the magician’s eye and back into the grocery store. A much different thing than Christmas fruitcake. He tasted it right on the tip of that splinter clinched in his teeth. Oddly this sweet and strange flavor was similar to his favorite beverage, so much so that it was unsettling. The aura of the wizard, for the moment at least, was close to the taste of Dr Pepper.
“Oh you are dirty, Merlin,” said the girl as the bill was spit back at her again with that motorized sound.
THE GRAIL lottery machine flashed with color and a scrolling text announced, “3.6 BILLION DOLLARS.”
— Glahn is a fantasy writer. He writes about the author John Cowper Powys on Substack (https://glahn.substack.com/).