War and Peace
Steven Schutzman
Zeus, ruler of the Gods, wielder of the mighty thunderbolt, lover, shape-shifter, throne potato, was profoundly bored on Mount Olympus. His wife, the goddess Hera, was beautiful and sexy, sure, but she was also demanding and complicated and smarter than him, a real turn off, especially when all Zeus wanted was a quick, bodacious romp. In order for Zeus to even bed his own wife, Hera had to be bathed and anointed, her body toned and spirit cleansed, the stars aligned, libations poured and incense lit and they had to practice what she called ‘mindfulness’, a mild state of non-judgmental attention to and contemplation of their godly natures, looking into each other’s eyes and other such nonsense. In order to get Hera to give him a freaking blowjob, once every eon or so, she had to be assured that all he wanted was a little variety and that he wasn’t just using her in a fantasy of divine domination. As for letting the other Gods watch to enhance Zeus’ feeling of domination, fugetaboutit. So the ascendancy the ruler of the gods felt he deserved was denied him and the quick romps and deep throating he craved denied him, and the other mindless fantasies he dreamed up denied him. Life can become very boring when there is no such thing as time.
When Hera did consent, the sex was absolutely heavenly since she was made of magnificent godflesh, moonglow, sushi and sweet apricots woven through with silk, dark chocolate and jazz, and she knew how to turn his body into a quivering mass of pleasure and to cause his genitals to shoot white-hot torrents of godly semen and his head to explode with galaxies unforetold at the speed of light. Zeus would then forget why he was so upset with Hera in the first place. He would walk around satisfied and stupid in love for half of infinity.
But when the spell wore off finally, it galled Zeus no end that Hera who could do this to him also knew how to fend him off until she was good and ready to do it to him again. It also galled him no end (for there is no end in heaven) that Hera would take her roaring, blinding, quaking orgasms for granted and refuse to become his abject sexual slave. Zeus was a god who wanted to be worshipped utterly, insanely, eternally, and such.
So Zeus was frustrated and bored in heaven and began to watch what was happening on Earth and to desire the human women he saw living down there.
Human women presented several advantages for Zeus. First, they weren’t on Mount Olympus where one of the other gods, especially wise and just Athena, might rat him out to Hera. Second, by some ridiculous accident, unlike any other animals, human women were made in the image of the gods. Human women had wanton mouths and sculpted cheekbones, round breasts and magnificent backsides, shapely legs to die for and plunge-worthy genitals covered with fine hair in which Zeus wanted to stick his face and eat until he was as drunk as an Earl in the hay. Third, human women were very gullible and didn’t know much about sex yet. Fourth, human women were unaware of the gods and so Zeus could garner the worship he craved, once he revealed himself to them in all his phallic glory, if he played his cards right.
For his first foray on the Earth, Zeus chose a region of Russia known in later years for turning out toned and tawny tennis players and sullen, lanky runway models. These human women were lithe and athletic, with great bone structure, shapely breasts and tidy genitals, and they burned with a smoldering sexuality they themselves didn’t understand.
How could these human women not understand their own sexuality? Because they were inexperienced. Because their sexuality was nascent and unformed, budding hard but never blossoming. Because their human men were only interested in four things; riding horses, making war, looting, and trying to ferment every fruit and vegetable into alcohol. Often gone for long road trips on horseback, marauding through sleepy villages, the human men would return to drink around the camp fire until they got roaring drunk and fell into sentimental sobbing about their most glorious, bloodiest battles and such, after which they would drop off to sleep on top of each other like so many puppies. Sex for a human man meant pushing a human woman down on all fours, shoving into her from behind without ceremony and then humping her furiously until he was done, the sooner the better, like the men saw their horses do.
Hiding behind some bushes, Zeus spied two beautiful, young women, Anna and Olga, dangling their feet in a sun-dappled stream as they sat shoulder to lovely shoulder, naked and unashamed, their bodies vibrant, luminous, and quivering with untapped erotic energy. Already, Zeus had a mighty, pulsing, white hot rod on his hands. He could have stirred the sea of stars with it like a great oar. He could have laid waste to forests with it like Paul Bunyan’s axe. He could have beaten mountains down with it like Ares’ war-hammer. The girls’ innocence really turned Zeus on and he had to practice great restraint not to reveal himself and have his way with them too fast and too soon. This was to be a seduction like no other. Innocence must be led step by slow step to ultimate, godly ravishment.
So, for the time being, Zeus must forget about his oar, his axe, his war-hammer, and slowly prepare the girls. He turned himself into a cute, little songbird in a tree nearby and sang songs that suggested thoughts into the girls’ minds.
Zeus sang and Anna, obedient to the song, dipped a hand into the stream and poured water over Olga’s breast. Olga laughed and shivered from the stinging cold. Zeus sang and the two women watched Olga’s nipple change texture and shape. The women’s eyes widened with wonder as the skin, an apple blossom pink, pruned and hardened in the cooling air, magnetic with desire.
Zeus sang and Olga felt an unfamiliar yearning, an aching like a hunger of the skin.
“Touch it,” she said to Anna.
Zeus sang and Anna lifted Olga’s breast gently from underneath as if it was a small animal sleeping in her hand. She circled her thumb slowly over the puckering skin of her nipple. Zeus wanted to turn back into his regular guise immediately, wield his mighty rod and penetrate the girls everywhere, very slowly and for a very long time but no, patience, godly patience, he told himself.
“Wow, Olga, it’s so hard and so soft, so rough and so smooth, at the same time.”
Zeus sang.
“Do like an infant does,” Olga said, obedient to the song.
Anna took her friend’s breast into her mouth and suckled like an infant does. Kissing was unknown at the time, the girls were just now discovering it. Horses didn’t do it, so human men didn’t either.
“Oh, Anna, your mouth is like a hot laughing fire.”
“It is?”
Zeus sang.
“Bite it, Anna.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Anna took her friend’s nipple between her teeth and clamped down a bit.
“Harder.”
Anna bit down harder.
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“It hurts but feels good too.”
“That is really, really weird.”
Anna bit Olga harder. Olga took Anna’s head in her hands and crushed it to her chest. Zeus sang and Anna sucked and bit her friend’s breasts as if she was going to devour them and Olga, in a swoon, felt like she wanted to be devoured, to feel her body become part of her friend’s body bite by bite. What was this strange feeling that made her body laugh so? It was pleasure but Olga didn’t know that yet. She looked up at the clouds in the sky and thought, Now I understand clouds.
Zeus sang and Anna too felt an unfamiliar yearning, an aching hunger in the mouth, a hunger that grew hungrier the more she devoured her friend’s breasts, the skin exquisitely soft, the nipple electrically magnetized. She looked down at herself.
“Look, the same thing is happening to my breasts without the cold water,” Anna said.
“What could it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either but I want to do to your breasts what you just did to mine. I want to devour your breasts so you can feel what I just felt. Please, may I?” Olga, a polite, considerate future tennis star, asked.
Zeus, the little songbird, didn’t have to sing suggestively anymore.
The women switched positions. Zeus watched Olga bite and suck Anna’s delectable breasts. He wanted to be that mouth, those breasts, and to be right where they met and clung with exquisite magnetic yearning. The girls’ breathing sounded like the heaving oceans, their syncopated heartbeats like a drumming in the Earth. Anna fell back on the ground, swooning with pleasure, her legs spread as open as could be. Zeus wanted to sip and drink her delicious, glistening sexual dew exposed to his sight now, to get drunk on it like sweet wine. Her genitals were so beautiful, Zeus immediately up with the ideas for creating roses, sunsets and filet mignon, which still exist to this day. He wanted to plunge into her and shake her with orgasms only known to the gods. His erection was huge and thrust toward the sky like a golden rocket about to be launched. Such naiveté, such potential. Anna and Olga. Olga and Anna. Such ripeness ready to be plucked and conquered. The girls smoldered yet remained ignorant of how to burst into flames. He would show them.
Zeus knew it wasn’t yet time to reveal himself in his divine phallic magnificence. Too much of a shock, they might not survive it. So he took the form of a great lizard and slithered out of the shadows of the bushes. The sunlight warmed his cold lizard blood. His eyes clouded over with the rising mists of the primordial swamp. He became stupid with new heat, drunk on it, and had to struggle to remember who he was, the ruler of the universe, out for divine pleasure and conquest, not a mammal- devouring reptile.
Zeus’ long flicking lizard tongue speared molecules of fragrant female smell on its prongs as he neared the entwined girls. The smell sent the reptilian beast into a state of savage hunger. He wore his hunger like chain mail on his skin. It pulled him forward like a cold rope of desire. The lizard wanted nothing but to suck the heat and life out of whatever was around for no other reason but that it could. If things died senselessly, it was of no matter to this monster. When the lizard pulled his body forward, it sounded like heavy chains dragging along the ground. His flinty lizard teeth ground together and sent off sparks as he came forward like some terrible, sparking electric machine you windup with a key on its back. His voice made the awful sound of rocks cracking open.
The girls stopped what they were doing and looked up in wonder at the terrible beast. They clutched each other but didn’t try to flee because the lizard was so beautiful; his bejeweled, glittering body edged in soft green flame, his cold purple eyes aglow in his head, his mouth sparking with lightning.
In order to ravage them better later on, Zeus wanted to teach the human women their ultimate vulnerability, not only pleasure but the pain that made pleasure what it was, for without pain everything is pleasure and without pleasure everything is pain. The lizard lashed his razor-sharp tongue along the inside of Anna’s thighs, a thin whip, a master nerve bringing her other nerves to life. The tongue slashed her flesh open, blood seeped from her skin in a thin line before the cut magically healed as if it had never happened. The lizard flicked his tongue at Olga’s breasts, cutting and then healing them in the same way. At each flick of the razor tongue, the girls’ bodies flashed with sensation, pleasure and pain, and they wanted more, more, more sensation, and never to stop until they were completely ravaged by the terrible beast. They were mortal. Life was hot just like they were. Death was cold like the lizard was and they wanted the lizard to fuck them to death, to enter their bodies and tear them open in order that they might feel all they could feel in this life. They would live and they would die in an alternation of pain and pleasure. The girls motioned the lizard forward but he stayed crouched and unmoving, staring at them with glowing purple eyes, radiating the magnificient sparks of a godly indifference. What did it want?
“He wants to make us feel an ecstasy we’ve never felt before,” said Anna.
“What’s ecstasy?”
“I don’t know but I think we’re about to find out.”
Zeus transformed himself into a terrible jaguar with jaws so strong they could snap a man’s leg with one bite. When he clamped those jaws around Anna’s pelvis, she grabbed onto the fur on his head, insisting that he clamp down harder. Zeus bit down as hard as he could without tearing her flesh. Anna pulled on his head again and the jaguar clamped down even harder and shook her body from side to side as if making a kill but the girl was laughing, thrilling to the ride. The jaguar set Anna down gently and his great tongue began to slowly swab and lick the swollen flesh of Anna’s ripeness. Oh she was fragrant and delicious, sweet nectar and the tender flesh of innocence. Soon, Anna screamed out in an ecstasy of pleasure, the first orgasm ever in a human land. Languages were born in that scream and tribes and justice and rock music and Albert Einstein and a new human knowledge of mortality. Anna reached for Olga, pulled her head down and they started kissing, madly, deeply, exchanging tongues and fluids so that what was happening to the one was happening to the other, both human women shuddering in simultaneous, oceanic orgasm.
Now that they were fully prepared to be fucked by a god into god-like oblivion, Zeus took on his human guise, his perfect skin, his muscular frame, his sixpack of abs, his mighty penis. But they were not alone anymore. From all around women had come in response to the ecstatic cries and now they all wanted what they had not known before. “I’ll have what she’s having” echoed down the halls of time. Seeing this bevy of soft firm breasts and lush genitalia aching for pleasure, Zeus could not resist their will. The women leaned the god against an oak tree so that his erection could be attended and knelt to, and partaken of by each human woman in her turn. They cooed and laughed with delight and anticipation, not in the worship Zeus had craved but in the lusty expression of human womanly desire, finally set loose upon the Earth where it roams still untamed to this day. Each woman wanted turns with the endlessly replenishing phallus and its torrents of godly semen. Zeus abandoned his original plan to make a feast of woman flesh. They would make a feast of him. Zeus penetrated thousands of women as the idiotic warrior men, trembling behind the bushes, watched in awe and confusion this garden of earthly delights, this god being joyously devoured and magically replenished, this ecstasy of female desire that burned but was not consumed.
The men, behind the bushes but no longer trembling, turned on, decided to have at each other just as the strange god and the human women were, abandoning the ways of their horses finally, bestowing love on another’s phallus as if it was their own, making love not war for the first time with their fellow men, and that is why the history of mankind has been a tale of unbroken peace and harmony down to this very day.
STEVEN SCHUTZMAN has published fiction in Pushcart Prize, Alaska Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, and Gargoyle. He’s a seven-time winner of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant for creative writing excellence. His novella A Bride at Every Funeral, A Corpse at Every Wedding is available at Amazon. Find out more at steveschutzman.com