July 19, 2006
Fiction
Mo’o and the Woman
There’s a story the people tell on Maui, about a creature called “Mo’o.” Mo’o means “lizard,” but in these stories it means a kind of demon, who looks like a voluptuous young woman. You see her on the beach at dawn or dusk. She is always naked and has long black hair and big breasts and hips. When you see her, she doesn’t speak, but she beckons to you with her webbed fingers, and in the strange half-world between night and day you don’t see anything wrong with going to her and touching her. Then she will jump on your back, wham!, and ride you to her cave, where she rips off your clothes and licks you all over, getting the salt from your sweat. Her tongue is really long, like three to six feet. Her tongue is so long, she can use it as a surfboard. That’s what they say.
Of course, you know these stories never have happy endings. If you can’t escape, and no one ever has, she’ll ride you to death, lashing you with her tongue so you’ll fuck her on and on and on, in whatever way you can. They’ll find your body rolling in the surf, green as grass from her spittle.
Some people say they’ve really seen her, the Mo’o. There was a Japanese fisherman, a new immigrant, who said he accidentally trapped her in his net, but when he saw her tongue he screamed and passed out, and when he woke up she was gone. He didn’t know anything about the stories people tell. He didn’t speak any English yet. She’s just what he saw. At least, that’s what a friend at the Senior Center told me one time.
I always wanted to see her, just once. I’d had a boring life, you know? School, helping my parents with their store, getting thrown out when they caught me with a girl, roaming the world — well, the Islands, and southern California for a year — working the tourists with card games and trinkets, maybe living with someone for a few months here, a few months there, just enough to keep me from noticing that, really, I had nothing. And now here I am, menopausal and gray and getting a bit fat around the middle, like a pineapple. I live in a little apartment complex with scrubby palms outside my window, watch TV, go to the Senior Center. And I swim. I can still swim. It’s even good for old people. That’s what my neighbor told me, the one who takes off her bikini on the roof so she won’t have tan lines. I asked her if she knew about Mo’o, too, but she didn’t.
I had dreams about Mo’o. I would wake up and wonder what she would do with a willing partner, if she would let her live. I wondered if that woman would get power or just pleasure beyond imagining. My dreams didn’t say. I didn’t really care. I just wanted something different. Something where I could say — well, I wouldn’t really be able to say to anyone, or I’d find myself in a Home getting fed with a spoon, but — I wanted something. Something in my life no one else had.
Mo’o is sacred. Her and the ocean and the waves. Getting taken by her would be like swimming into the morning surf and not making it back to shore, sacrificing yourself to the gods, the way they used to in the olden days. I started spending all my time hiking the beach looking for magic, looking for Mo’o. I slept out there for months, like I had done when I was a kid, only this time without the bottles and friends. But Mo’o never came. Finally I gave up, just gave up and went back to my tiny apartment, killing time at Bingo and events at the Senior Center. I felt stupid, you know?
Weird things happen to you when you get old. You start wondering what you were up to all that time, and what you’re going to do with what time you have left.
So I took my Bingo winnings and left Maui and got a job renting bikes on Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, as far away as I could afford to get. I couldn’t quite stand to leave the ocean behind, even though this is a different ocean, not so warm and blue, and the sand is harder and greyer and everyone seems to be either white or black, nothing else or in between, even the tourists. And it’s hot. Too damn hot. Jekyll’s far, far away from home.
I had sex a few times with the woman who runs the snowball stand down the path. She’s younger than me, most people seem to be, but not so young I felt like some kind of lady chickenhawk. It was all right. Not like I’d imagined with Mo’o, but nice. It had been a very long time for me. Rhea told me that in the winter, she goes back to Savannah to live with her unmarried sister, so when winter comes I’ll be alone here with the caretakers and recluses. I could live with that.
Rhea talks slow and velvety like the sand seeping between your toes after a long golden morning back home on Maui. If things were different I might go to Savannah with her, come November.
“You aren’t satisfied, are you?” she says, and “I could eat you out if you want. I like doing that.” She says it like a slow curvy wave and if I’d found her a long time ago, we might have lived a long and happy life together, just for that sexy voice. But she’s not magic. I’ve made a mistake, coming here.
I go down to the beach at night when the water comes up high, high. I wish I had a surfboard or a boat so I could paddle out and float around in the twilight, waiting for her. Waiting for Mo’o to surge up out of the warm fishy ocean and stretch her warm salty body on the board with me, smelling of warm musky woman and fish. I want her. Why won’t she come to me? I want to go home. She and home are the same thing.
I wade in water that slaps my ankles. I’m wearing a swimsuit, but there’s nobody here to see the varicose veins on my legs and my sagging breasts and belly. They warn the tourists not to go on the beach after dark because of the water rising. I strip off my suit and flip it up on a rotting wood pylon half-covered by drifted sand. Little broken seashells press at my calluses as I trudge through the rising water wearing nothing but my shell necklace. The water slapping my knees is her bathing, soothing tongue.
It was like this: she never made any sound in my dreams, so I didn’t know how to call her. I talked to her anyway. I think she liked it when I talked to her in the cave afterwards. Her hair looked like seaweed but felt like worn cotton sheets that are so soft you can hardly feel them on your skin. Her tongue gently, oh so gently, curled around my clit and slithered up and down, around and around . . ..
I would wake up and I would be leaking salt like the sea, both my cunt and my eyes.
Maybe she didn’t mean to hurt people.
I dive into the sea, swimming as hard as I can. The oncoming wavelets beat at my genitals, bathing me, fluttering each tiny fold. I tread when the water gets deep enough and look at the magic shimmer surrounding me. From algae, they say, but maybe it’s magic. I can see my hands in the green glow, see little fish under the surface. I hold my breath and pull myself under the surface, kicking hard, watching the colors of the water. Maybe Mo’o sees like this. The colors change when I go down deeper, and I want to see more, but then I need air. I break the surface, gasping and flinging droplets off my hair. My cunt aches with a pounding like the waves.
I don’t need my hands to tread water. I reach down with one, then the other, touching myself gently and swirling around like her tongue. Is she there? Can I bring her to me? My fluids wash off or float away and I’m not very slick, but my own touch still feels incredible. I’m balanced perfectly at the edge of coming: I can tell I’m just going to glide into shore, fast and smooth enough to take my breath away. The waves rock me and my hands speed up. I’m close. Waves slap my back, hard enough to sting. I’m too close to care. I try to freeze, make it last, but it’s too late, too late, and I’m coming with the ocean.
I see double as I jerk and spasm with pleasure: moonlight reflecting off water, green haze over grey stone flecked with black, her hair making a curtain before my face.
Her hair. Black as the sky above, with streaks of white reflecting starlight and green algae. The stories don’t tell you she’s going gray. I can’t see her face very well, but I know she’s smiling. I hold out my hand to her.
Mo’o doesn’t talk. The stories say that, but they don’t say she makes other noises instead, whimpers and barks like a puppy. I know she’s not an animal, though. I can see that in the gleam of her eyes, in the purposeful way she puts her webbed hands, scaly but soft, on me, under my neck and back until I’m floating in the sea.
I can’t see her tongue, not really, just a gleam of green and a shine of reflecting dampness before it touches me, soft and searching, encircling and tasting, drinking the salt off my skin until I writhe and gasp, then her tongue is tasting me inside, and I never want it to end.
•
I open my eyes to the sun. I’m on the beach, my skin parched and my ass sore. The sun hurts my eyes. I don’t know how I got to the beach. The sand feels deeper than it ought to. Then a surfboard glides in, missing me by a foot, and I recognize the guy whose mother runs Bingo. I’m on Maui.
Did I ever leave? Was that brief vision real? If she was, why am I still alive? I don’t feel powerful. I just feel alone.
Wasn’t I good enough to give to the sea?
I don’t ask anybody how I got here or what day it is, or if they remember me getting on a plane for Savannah a few months back. I know what would happen then. Senile, they’d say. Alzheimer’s. Put the old lady in a Home. Can’t have old ladies talking about sex.
I don’t talk to anybody. I sit in the sand and wait for the dusk. For Mo’o.
When it gets full dark, she comes.
• • •
is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her erotica has been published in Best Lesbian Erotica 2001-2004, Best Women’s Erotica 2002 and 2005, Tough Girls, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Vol. 5. Her story “Poppet” will appear in the upcoming Sex in the System, edited by Cecilia Tan.
