The Burning One

Fiction Friday

There is always this moment. The still twilight of the auditorium before we begin, the hungry silence of the audience. This moment; my spine against her breasts, this resonance of intimacy, when her need for me is total, when I am most alive.

Lights up.

Picture two bodies, upon a stage.

One is of cool flesh, lavender-scented. Sleek, dark hair, parted perfectly in the centre, is pulled back into a chignon, revealing the white arc of throat, the shadow formed by the sweep of her jawline as she bends her head in concentration. Black silk accentuates the pale sheen of her skin, her dress cut wide against the shoulders to reveal her collarbones, and the stretch of her swan-like throat. Slender hips cradle a spine which draws itself, erect as a candle-flame, towards the ceiling. She has arms of alabaster, impossibly long, arms of a conjuress. Her eyes are closed, her nostrils open. She breathes music into her, as if it were all she needed to exist.

The other is smooth and gleaming, the light from the chandelier creating honeyed ripples on the surface of her flesh, flesh of maple. She is shaped to hold secrets. She is hollow, yet fecund. Bodies such as hers are made for the fervent embrace. Flesh such as hers will not erode easily, even from the rituals of the most devout of lovers. Her senses are so exquisitely honed that a flutter of fingers at her throat forges fire in her womb.

She feels the strength of the thighs clasping her hips, the tender determination of hands upon her spine. With the first coaxing stroke of the bow, she is summoned from silence. She cannot but yield up her music.

Picture us — the cello-player and her cello. And listen.

Is this how I was born into consciousness, the bow keening across my strings, animating them with music? My cords, through which I sing and speak, and feel. She calls me Seraphine, her burning one, her angel. No matter where we are in the world, I feel as if I am always here; caught in light, cradled in her arms, pivoting on a single point of pain like a ballerina, poised between grace and chaos.

She makes love to me each night on stage, each performance a fresh seduction. Together, we weave sound and silence into incantations which bewitch and benumb those who listen.

Those who come to sit in the dark and watch are nearly always men, no matter if we play in the theatres of Paris, New York or Cairo. It is when the lights are directed away from them, when lulled into the roles of mere observers, that the truth of their lives is revealed in their faces, all yearnings and disillusions. Men with hungering eyes and lonely mouths. Men with laden wallets and leaden hearts. There, in the embrace of the illuminating dark, they become my performance.

I am of wood, yet something of me is woman.

Bow poised like a wand, my mistress weaves her spell of enchantment upon the audience, to which I am her necessary accomplice. Her hands describe luminous hieroglyphics in the air, predict miracles upon my strings; her fingers unstitch and extract the very essence of the composition.

I love my mistress. But she has a heart made of wood. She does not respond to the caresses of love. It is only music that makes her soft, Bach that brings fire to her cheeks, Schumann that coaxes a languorous curve from her lips. Only for Brahms does her body quiver with desire, yielding to the vibrations of notes through my body. But desire for what? Strangely, it is I who long for the touch of a man, I who am fashioned from the finest of maple wood.

Perhaps, one night, whilst playing me in a frenzy of passion, she transferred her heart to me.

There are stories woven into the sinews of my strings. My mistress slices her bow along them like a scalpel. Effortlessly, she extracts them, impales them, gleaming yet intangible on her bow-tip. With theatrical flair, she tosses them carelessly into the eager laps of the men in the audience as she plays.

But there are stories and there are secrets. The secrets I keep deep in the hollow of my body. These she shall not have.

I love my mistress. But equally, I love desire itself, the sensual energy that dances between two beings. And if I cannot be completely fulfilled myself, then to invoke desire in others is what I will do.

Each performance, I imagine that my music bewitches the men in the audience, and they are drawn up onto the stage, their hands stretching out to stroke the curves of me, their fingers running sensuously down my strings. I mesmerize them; there is something feminine about how the strings stretch and quiver their way towards the centre of me, something sexual about how the timbre of their touch, drawn lovingly into the hollow of my body, begets music. Sounds that tremble and vibrate like tender flesh when caressed; tremble and build, to a crescendo of ecstasy, reverberating out of my body and through their centres. Music made tactile.

Despite their differences, these men emerge from the velvet womb of the theatre, blinking, dazed and humbled. I picture them returning to their wives and mistresses, opening a cacophony of bedroom doors to find them sleeping quietly on their sides, moonlight and streetlights through blinds and windows, transforming the silhouettes of their slumbering curves into erotic instruments, waiting to be played. I see the men undressing, sliding between sheets to cradle the breasts and thighs of them, to seek out their unique song, curiosity renewed for the intricacies of woman.

Suddenly, there is a compulsion to enquire into the harmonies possible between the softness in the crook of an elbow and the tautness of a nipple, between the pulse at the base of the neck and the pulse deep inside the mouth of the sex. All are notes on an infinite scale of ecstasy. And these men, transformed into crazed composers, must play. I imagine the women’s symphony of pleasure, rising up over the night-swathed houses, to hover like mist made from melody.

The men do not comprehend from where the change has come. And I, shaped to hold secrets, do not tell.

In my vision, the men are anonymous except for one, the intensity of his blue eyes seeming to penetrate the solidity of my body. Always the same man, he pushes the others aside, steps forward and breathes into the hollow of my belly, lingering to kiss me just above.

The vision always ends here, as if I cannot anticipate the next movement.

Can one kiss mean so much?

We have come off the stage, and my mistress is carrying me down the corridor to the dressing-room. Through my own elation, I can sense her trembling is not from the thrill of her performance. Abruptly, she shuts me in my case. Despite the inevitability of the ritual, this swift nightly burial disturbs me, for I am reverberating still with desire and have too much darkness already within the hollow of my body to welcome this enforced night. She who so tenderly lifts me from my case before each performance, returns me with a certain cruelty, and an uncertain resentment.

And so, I am left, alone in the dark with my myriad imaginary lovers, left alone with the slowly diminishing thrum of my strings, until they are once again without sound.

It is one of the rare nights when my mistress leaves my case open. I may take the world in through all my senses. As I hear her slow breathing rhythms in sleep, I feel the cool moonlight entwine itself within the whorls of woodgrain on my body.

Once, long ago, I was part of the life force of trees and beasts. I was a graceful maple tree, and a lithe feline creature. I was both flora and fauna. The alchemy of sap, sunlight and rainwater, a sweet elixir within my wood, could be tapped from me in viscous tears. My strings, thrumming with the memory of quicksilver intuition, finely tuned to survival, were once coiled in the furred pelt of an animal’s belly. Now I am an artefact of man’s sophistication and desire to play at being God; to invent and create.

My cords, fashioned from the final guttural howls of an animal’s life, tamed and tautened into this complex language of sound and vibrations called music. My cords, through which I sing and speak and feel; through which I sound my chords of desire.

Faintly, through the wall I hear the crooning sounds of a woman cresting to orgasm, underscored by the sharp groans of a man, playing her to climax. I think of this visceral dance of percussive breath, sighs and cries as the very first primal duet created in the dark by men and women. Voracious, I draw this ancient music deep into the womb of me, as I drift off into darkness.

I dream of lying naked in a forest clearing with a blue-eyed man. He is kissing me everywhere, as I see my arms around his neck, feel the sweat of my skin against his. I feel his hands in my hair, feel the building rhythms of his desire, the intensity of my orgasms in crescendo.

“Seraphine …” he whispers, over and over. “My Seraphine …”

Tonight, my mistress feels tense, like the strings of her emotions have been tuned too tightly. Yet, I feel full of the alchemy of moonlight and my dream, as if I might bloom forth untold mysteries between the notes of the music.

Tonight, more than ever, the embrace of my mistress stifles me; her arms circle me like a possessive lover, a collar, a prison wall, from which I long to use the power of my music to break free.

The curtain lifts. Once again I am caught in light, pivoting between grace and chaos, compelled by the bow and my mistress to offer up my chords of desire.

We begin: leggero graciosso. Slowly, gracefully. I begin my ritual imagining; that between the notes of this piece of music lies yet another composition. My secret dedication to the hungry-eyed men, the lonely-mouthed men. My serenade for my moon-dreaming lover. The sounds wrought from my strings lift the men’s spines in their seats so they sit taller than they have in years. For them, I play an entirely more compelling movement, like a hidden code in a forbidden love letter.

As we swell and crescendo together, I feel her move impatiently in her seat. She knows not which one of us resonate more deeply; her womb, or the sonorous cavern of my body.

As we begin the fifth suite, I feel her hand, vigilant upon my spine, swaying me in rhythm with her own movements, as if we are melded together. My strings sear against her bow, soaring, diving through the music, my interior reverberating with increasing intensity. Through the blur of the footlights, I see them; three, five, seven men, then too many to count, crowding down the aisles, climbing up onto the stage. Their hands, stroking the hips and breasts of me. Eyes closed, somehow impervious to the other bodies on stage, my mistress continues to play me.

Fingers reach out to stroke the sinewed tautness of my strings, to explore my outer curves and inner contours. I am aflame with new sensations. She can no longer play me, for they are drawing the sounds from me now. It is all she can do to hold onto me. Sounds such as those emanating from my body would have held Pan enthralled; earthy keening moans coupled with ethereal flights of sighs. And underneath this all, in the spaces between the notes that are not quite silences; the gasps, the budding, building cries of a woman’s voice, in orgasm.

My voice.

And then, he is there, standing in front of me; the blue of his eyes swimming through my memories. My moon-dreaming lover. He wraps strong arms around my waist, bends to breathe into the hollow of my body. I feel his mouth everywhere at once; my body is changing from maple wood to warm flesh, each awakened cell kissing another, and another into life. I have never known such exquisite ecstasy before.

I am the burning one.

No longer teetering precariously on a single point of pain, I stand firm on two graceful legs. My arms, miracles of flesh and bone, hold him close.

His mouth finds my name, as if he has always known it.

“Seraphine, my Seraphine.”

Melissa Coffey is an Australian writer, editor, poet & performer. She engages strongly with themes of the Feminine. Her short stories, creative essays & poetry are published in numerous international and Australian anthologies (sometimes incognito), and explore desire, female sexuality and gender politics.