“One of my lifelong friends loved sex, and in his old age his health went bad, so he had no sex for years—then, when he was more ill, called me to his deathbed, said, ‘My friend, I know you have loved me, and I have loved you. You are left here now, and I ask you, when I am gone, for this last wish. I want you to make love ten times, each time to someone new. Let the first have skin dark and soft as the night sky in May, let the next be one shade more light, her skin like the ink-scent of her breath, the next a shade yet less dark, her back like the Rhone in rain, the next less dark, then less, and at last the one so white she puts new milk to shame.
‘Do this for me, my friend, and when you come to the end my soul can take wing.’
“I was dumbstruck. ‘Old friend, I have a wife, and I am an old man, too, like you... how in the world...’
“Years have passed. Such a cruel thing my friend asked, who claimed he loved me.”
Gerald Fleming | Clean Man Contents | Mudlark No. 56 (2015)