[A story]
Murky Gervaise, a short guy with straggly whiskers and pouchy eyes, worked for a porn monthly called Beaver Damn! Each issue featured pictures of nude women, often in groups of three, involved in athletic sex, along with a couple stories that relied on four or five verbs and a satchel-load of repetitive adjectives.
What made Beaver Damn! distinctive was that every photo or story had to include an image of a plant or wood in some form. A girl might, for example, be stroking a sapling or making cellulose eyes at a redwood, and there was much possibility for perversity involving twigs and blossoms.
Murky’s job was to check each feature for botanical accuracy. The editor, Chesley Frazier, had a policy that no two pictures or stories in any issue should contain the same species of tree or shrub, nor should there be a preponderance of sawn lumber over standing timber or flowering bulbs.
Over the years, Murky became an expert on birch, beech, poplar and hemlock, on poke, goldenrod, nettle and jewelweed, on twig, branch, limb, trunk, stand, spinney, copse and forest, on bark and heartwood, on stamen, pistol and calix. He even mastered the arcane study of erotic dendrochronology, the determination of the age of jailbait through the counting of tree rings.
His private life, however, left him less satisfied. The women – and sometimes men – of his romantic and erotic activities had begun to assume a disquietingly impermanence for him. They appeared pulpy, squishy, like a felled log invaded by fungi. In time, they lost form altogether in his eyes, taking on the insubstantiality that a moss-mat might have for a hound-dog.
His analyst believed, mistakenly, that Murky was suffering from the repressed recollection of a childhood trauma – perhaps a grisly woodland murder – or that disciplining at the hands of his parents had featured unduly severe paddling.
As treatment progressed, Murky was subjected to hypnosis, but nothing was revealed except dark whorls and pasted-on patterns of cheap panelling. His entire past seemed a peculiar wasteland, a desert arena beset by winds carrying organic detritus. His free associations seldom left the confines of the vegetable kingdom.
When he retired following 34 years at Beaver Damn!, Murky was presented with a pocket watch made by craftsmen of the Black Forest. Its case was ebony, its gears of lignum vitae, its filigreed hands of bamboo whittled by a needle. When he rose to express his thanks, no words came, only the slow creaking of his jaw hinges, the sound of a severed ash as it begins its fall.
Following three days of catatonic rigidity, he passed away with a soft sigh. His autopsy revealed mildew, black spot, and three forms of incipient rot. He required no embalming.
lickhaven 