The Souvenir

You arrive home exhausted from your trip but with a head filled with unforgettable memories. You'd wanted for years to visit Egypt and kept putting it off because, not being in a relationship, you didn't want to go alone. One day you found yourself sitting at your desk at work, gazing out the window at a cloud that looked uncannily like the Sphinx, and decided to hell with it and went by yourself and you're glad you did.

Had you been with someone, you wouldn't have met Atef in the hotel bar in Cairo. He not only played the role of tour guide and translator, but also of impassioned lover at the end of each delightful day, made even more delightful by his seemingly insatiable appetite for your body and his forceful approach to lovemaking. More than once, when he was banging you against the headboard of the bed, you had to beg him to please calm himself for fear of having the hotel management at your door. You came seven times during your last marathon session, not more than sixteen hours ago, before leaving for the airport, and it was divine, although you're still raw. You're not complaining. It was an unforgettable experience.

You roll your bags into the bedroom and open one up and there, sitting on top of the clothes, wrapped in a page from

Egypt Daily News,

is the little statuette you purchased in the bazaar. You and Atef were on your way to have lunch at a favorite restaurant of his and the stalls on either side of the walkway seemed to go on forever — this one selling large tooled copper trays, that one ornate hookahs, this one jewelry, that one rugs, on and on. You happened to see the statuette, about six inches tall, out of the corners of your eyes and it caught your attention and you stopped to look at it and as you studied it, it fascinated you.

It looked like a fertility symbol, a woman with enormous protruding breasts, but she also had an equally enormous and protruding penis. You'd seen plenty of pictures of statuettes of fertility symbols of different cultures but never anything like this, with both female and male anatomical parts.

"Do you know what that is?" you asked Atef.

"I have no idea what it is," he said.

He had a brief conversation about it, in Egyptian, with the woman vendor and you kept your eyes on the woman's face and saw her finally shake her head and shrug. Atef turned to you.

"It was sold to her by a black African, but the only thing she knows about it for certain," he said, with that impeccable English of his, "is the price."

"How much?" you asked.

"One hundred dollars," he said, as delicately as possible and looking embarrassed, adding, "and she is firm."

"A hundred dollars?" you asked, amazed and somewhat offended by the asking price. "For that?" You looked at the statuette and studied it some more — the breasts, the penis — and it captivated you and you decided you had to have it.

"Okay," you said and removed a hundred dollar bill from your purse and handed it to her and watched her take a page from that day's newspaper and carefully wrap the statuette and put it in a brown paper bag and hand it to you, without a smile or a word. There was something about the way she was looking at you and the slight upturn at the corners of her mouth. You had the feeling she was relieved to be rid of it and enjoying the fact that you'd overpaid her dearly to take it off her hands.

You take the wrapped statuette from your suitcase and sit on the side of the bed and carefully unwrap it. When the statuette appears, you're just as fascinated by it now as you were then. Your eyes drift from the woman's face to her breasts to her penis and you're also just as curious and confused about what it represents now as you were then.

You gaze at it, lightly stroking the breasts and then the penis with your fingertips, and you feel yourself getting aroused, which doesn't make sense, since the woman portrayed by the statuette isn't at all attractive. In fact, the distorted features of her face and body are grotesque, almost hideous. What is it about it that you find so appealing? You haven't a clue.

So, where to display it? You walk to the living room and eye the various table tops and shelves where other objects are displayed and decide on a shelf where it will always be visible when you sit on the couch and read or watch TV. You place it on the shelf and sit on the couch to see if its placement is to your liking and, seeing that it is, you get ready for bed, looking forward to a much needed good night's sleep.

You know your dreaming, the way you always do when you dream. It's the oddness about what's happening. It's close to reality, but off somehow. People will be there one moment and the next disappear, sometimes to reappear and sometimes not. You'll be in one place one moment and the next in an entirely different place, sometimes elsewhere in the world. You'll flap your arms and begin flying effortlessly. You'll suddenly know how to speak a foreign language fluently — on and on.

The realm of dreams is a funhouse filled with magic. Everything is possible in it and you sometimes wonder what life would be like if it and reality changed places and you spent the majority of your day in a dream and visited reality, briefly, when you fell asleep. The world would be a very different place, that's for sure. For one thing, nothing would ever get done and for another, there would be no such thing as "crazy" because it would be the norm.

You recognize where you are in your dream. You're in your hotel room in Cairo, or a curious version of it. You're lying naked on the bed and Atef is lying with his face between your legs. You can't see his mouth, but you know where it is and what he's doing with it and are enjoying it enormously. He's looking at your eyes and you can see his passion and pleasure in his.

You look beyond him at the dresser and see the unwrapped statuette you bought, staring at you. You know you put it, wrapped, in your suitcase when you returned to your room that day, but there it is.

You look back at Atef and see that the features of his face are slowly changing. His forehead is getting higher and his ears more pointed and his pupils tinged red and his nose narrowing and lengthening and he now looks demonic. You're not alarmed, because of the pleasure you're experiencing, but you're curious about what's happening.

You feel his tongue enter you and when you think it has as far as it can go, your surprised to feel it continuing to do so — not alarmed, just surprised — and you feel it travel deep inside you and are amazed to feel him begin lifting you up off the bed with it.

You know this is impossible, but now your looking down at his face and you can see and feel his tongue continuing to grow longer and he begins moving his head in circles and swirling you around the room, faster and faster until the room is a blur.

You can feel the tip of his tongue in your throat and then enter your mouth and you see it emerge from your mouth and notice that it's forked and you feel skewered, which is what you are. You know this should be painful, but you feel ecstatic and hope he keeps you this way forever.

He doesn't, though. He slowly lowers you back down on the bed and removes his tongue and positions himself over you. His pupils are glowing fiery red now and you look at his penis and see that it's forked like his tongue. He wraps his hands around your wrists tightly and spreads your arms wide and pins you to the bed and enters you and lowers himself down onto you. You feel the head of his penis enter you and a burning sensation as it does and you know it should feel extremely painful but it's extremely pleasurable.

Just as his tongue grew in length, so does his penis and you feel it traveling through your body and entering your throat and mouth and see the forked tip emerge and feel yourself being lifted up off the bed and raised up and swirled around in circles again. You know it should feel dizzying, but it doesn't. It's amazing and feels exquisite and you want him to keep doing this to you forever.

He has other plans for you and lowers you again onto the bed and you feel his penis withdrawing slowly through your body and when it's filling up your vagina, he keeps it at that length and begins pumping it in you, faster and harder until he's pounding his body against yours and finally you feel an intense burning sensation as he comes and, again, you know this should be painful, but it isn't. You feel ecstatic and tighten yourself around his penis and milk every last drop out of him, gazing into his eyes as you do.

As pleasurable as the experience has been, you have the feeling that something unholy has been deposited inside you. He lowers himself onto you and brings his lips to yours and kisses you and you feel your lips burning in the same pleasurable way.

He draws his head back and looks at you and you see the features of his face begin to slowly change again. With each passing moment, he begins to look more and more like a woman and when the transformation is complete, he's become the most beautiful woman you've ever seen or imagined.

You've never had sex with a woman and are struck by the fact that you not only don't mind the fact that there's now a woman hovering over you and looking down at you with an expression that tells you she wants to have sex with you but also that you want nothing more than to have sex with her. It's the type of thing that happens in dreams, which is what you love about dreaming.

She smiles, turning up a corner of her mouth.

"Fuck me," she says and you think she means by stimulating her with your fingers but you feel something happening between your legs and look down at yourself through her dangling breasts and see a penis emerging from between your legs and quite a lengthy one.

You watch her raise herself up and straddle you and wrap her hand around your penis and guide it into her as she settles down on it and you do to her what her male incarnation did to you, extend your cock through her until it's protruding from her mouth and you raise her up on it and swirl her in circles and you can see she feels the same way about the experience you did.

You lower her down onto you and slowly withdraw your penis until it's filling up her vagina and then fuck her the same way her male incarnation did you — fast and hard, pounding your body against hers. When you finally come, you feel her wrap her vagina around your penis tighter than any hand ever could and milk every last drop of come out of you and now you have the feeling that you're depositing something unholy inside her.

She settles down on you and rests in your arms, her nose nuzzling your ear and her hot cheek pressed against yours, and as you hold her tightly, she begins shrinking and her features changing, becoming more and more grotesque, and you're alarmed when you wake suddenly and open your eyes and see the statuette, resting on its side on the pillow next to yours, turned toward you and staring at you.

In your mind's eye, you see the woman vendor's expression as you took the bag from her and wonder just what it is you've gotten yourself into.