that of the girl, “Did something go in you, to leave behind this growing belly?”
Her trust in Mother Gothel still intact, the girl answered dutifully, “A man slept with me, in yonder bed...but he spoke the same words you do, so I knew it was all right to let down my coils of hair for him. He is a man most fine, with most...unusual sources of pleasure—”
Now while Mother Gothel was well-versed in the ways of love of her own kind, she did not take kindly to the thought of a man having his way with her Persinette, especially before she herself had partaken of her love-gift, so, in a rage which caused the errant young woman to stand, shocked into mute silence, in place before Mother Gothel, the sorceress snatched up a sharp bread knife in one hand, and, after she’d grasped Persinette’s braids in the other hand, then wound them into a coil upon her fingers, she sawed through the fiery hair, until only a short mane of it covered Persinette’s head. But, when the greater length of her tresses were freed, the hair that remained curled and clung so cunningly and so tightly to Persinette’s head that the lonely enchantress was captivated by its resemblance to that hair which sheltered the sweet fruit below the girl’s now-full belly, and instantly felt her angry heart soften with love and pity for the sadly-used girl.
Using her magic powers, she sent the girl wafting downward on the wind, to her secret, fecund garden, and bade her to dwell in the little well house amid the flowering trees and bushes. Then, in order to quell her desire to savor the already-tasted girl, just in case her condition was a sign of full ripeness after all, Mother Gothel busied herself with unraveling the shorn braids, and wound each strand in turn on bobbins she’d carved herself from the fallen branches of her departed witch-woman’s persimmon tree. And as she worked, Mother Gothel thought to herself, Each hair is so strong, so supple...much like the string which stretches the simple length of wood into a deadly bow....
And so, knowing as she did the ways of men, especially men most fine bearing sources of unknown (to her, at least!) pleasure, Mother Gothel was well-armed when she heard that harsh (again, to her ears) voice implore:
“Persinette, Persinette my own,
Uncoil your wreath of curls.”
Peering out from the lone window of the tall tower room, she saw the man standing far below her, looking up toward the distant window—and, perhaps because the window was so far away, he did not realize that the finger-thin arrow which was aimed at his heart was, indeed, an arrow (and not the tip of one of Persinette’s braids) until it had been propelled by Persinette’s springy-hair-bow, and it sank deep into his manly, fine chest....
* * * * * * *
And once Persinette’s belly-ripened to the point of full persimmon-berry-like roundness, Mother Gothel was there to deliver her twins, which—once they were wrapped in downy blankets, and tucked into a wooden box fashioned of cured persimmon wood slats—were dutifully left under the cover of darkness at the door of the neighbor couple, who always seemed to have room to spare for yet another child.
And, because Mother Gothel was so good to Persinette in her time of confusion (the pain of the birth alone was enough to convince the young woman that unusual sources of pleasure had most unpleasant consequences), once the secret places within her had healed, and longed once more for pleasure, Persinette gladly let Mother Gothel partake of her sweetness and ripened juices, for now she was truly a woman fit for the tasting, which Mother Gothel did most gladly and gratefully.
And so it came to pass that the two women shared the task of caring for the aged persimmon tree which had brought both of them such gladness, and such fruitful times of pleasure and because the blood and bones and flesh of the fine young man nourished the persimmon tree so well, it too enjoyed its most fruitful time of life, giving forth sweet berries which bore a glistening red-orange hue, each of which was savored by Mother Gothel and her sweet love Persinette.
AFTERWORD
This story originally appeared under one of my erotica pen names, mainly because at the time I felt it was a little too out there for my main audience. Looking it over now, I think it is a slightly better fit for this collection than for any of my purely erotica e-books over at Circlet Press.
I came up with this after reading through a volume of unedited/non-bowdlerized Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which included an appendix of supplementary material in the back—in it, I learned that an early version of the Rapunzel story had different character names, which I used here. In many ways, I’m not totally sure why I wrote this; I suppose I was trying to approach fairy tales form a different point of view. I think it may have been written for one of those slightly-more-adult fairy tale anthos which were published back in the 1990s, but I cannot remember for sure now. At any rate, it wasn’t accepted if I did write it for that antho....
I suppose being sexually abused by my grandmother may have had something to do with this; I’m not 100% crazy about this story, but it’s here, and I figured someone might like it, or at any rate might find it of some interest....
LITTLE NIPS
“I wish I had a buck for every time someone has asked me that same question.” She took another drag on her half-spent cigarette, holding the smoke in as if it were a joint instead of a hard-pack menthol, then letting it out through her nose where tiny wisps of steam-fine smoke filtered out from the piercings above each nostril even as the rest of the smoke billowed out from the pair of there-from-birth nostril-holes—and she smiled again when she noticed my slightly appalled stare. When she smiled, the ball-tipped studs in her lower lip, tongue-tip and upper lip winked in the bar’s neon beer-sign lights like miniature Christmas tree bulbs strung across the bottom of her face; tiny winking orbs of flashing green, blue and red, joined by thread-fine chains of silver rather than the usual plastic wrapped green wire.
Even after she became silent, waiting for my lame comeback, probably, I could still hear her, with each breath, each drag on her smoke, her face (hell, her whole body—or at least what was exposed in that smoke-filled, noisy bar on that smotheringly hot August evening) tinkled softly...a metal-touching-metal chiming/clanging sound that should’ve been swallowed up in the jabber of voices and discordant layers of drinking and eating noise...but wasn’t.
The reflective web of chains that looped around and over and into places which were most likely pierced but hidden by her halter and shorts may’ve been eye-grabbing, but the thing about her which had caught my attention a few minutes earlier was just how those loops of chain-work were attached to her body.
This woman who had sat down next to me at the crowded bar wore studs and bars and rings and sharp-pronged French wires in just about every spare bit of flesh that could be easily pinched up and pierced—plus a few places that defied reason or ease of puncturing with a sterilized needle. Tender, thin, vulnerable places, like the edges of her eyelids, or the flesh between her finger—places she nonetheless had pierced and subsequently adorned with hair-fine loops of silvery wire and linking chainmesh. And at the base of each visible puncture, I saw barely-healed, almost raw pinkish spots where the flesh was poked through and through, then adorned with circles and solid balls of shimmering silver. She wore seven earrings in each ear—four holes in each small lobe and the rest poking through the rounded top part. And each earring was chain-attached to some part of her face so that her pasty-pale cheeks were imprisoned by fine links of forged metal radiating from each ear to her upper and lower lips, her nose, and her eyelids and eyebrows. Plus an open-weave headpiece consisting of even more chains which looped over and around her buzzed-bald head so that the ropes of silver rested in a bed of eighth-inch high dyed-black stubble.
And as I said before, that was just her head...more chains dangled down to her nipples, her wrists and between-the-fingers, and even some from her be-ringed navel to some spots below that just had to be pierced, too—why else would she have other
