There was once a curious young scholar who, on a lonely december, decided to escape the frigidity of the city and the ivory tower of academia. Unfortunately, it seemed that the december would remain lonely no matter what: he had no sense of home, and he lived with his nose in books. He spent the wee hours of the night in a damp, dark basement, descending from the fourth floor of the library, where all he could hear were shoes rising from the carpet, to his bedroom, where all he could hear were mice scratching at the locked door.
The basement that he called his apartment served as little more than a place to sleep and to masturbate. When he masturbated he thought he heard a scratching on his door, something that seemed to call to him but that he couldn't locate. He only assumed that mice, on the other side of the basement, tried night after night to nibble their way into his bedroom. But sometimes the scratching intensified and sounded like claws, or at the very least sharp fingernails digging into the wood, gradually scratching so that their nails vibrated against the wood, penetrating through to the other side. The young scholar disregarded this. He preferred to pay attention to the text in front of him, or when he was in bed, his penis. But sometimes his disregard failed him, and the vibrations against the wood sent a shiver down his spine, causing him to shudder when he ejaculated, so that his climax blended orgasm and terror.
He'd had his share of women but they rarely made it to his bedroom. He was earnest, intellectual, and in the darker recesses of his being, opportunistic and brutal. He had an insatiable sexual curiosity. Yet, his curiosity wasn't always expedient in the moment: he doubted his own instincts, and began to step back from the act, viewing a woman's luscious mid-section as a field of study rather than as a body to enjoy. His recent heartbreaks put him more in his head and, if one observed the young man stroking himself, his figure would appear so caved inward, his spine completely curved over like a mountain peak, that the observer may think him crying or desperately studying his own penis. Still, if the young scholar's animal grunts had echoed beyond the basement, any woman with fingernails to scratch and a darker imagination may clench their teeth, shudder, and dig through his wooden door.
The young man was a dreamer. He dreamed of wild romps through Europe with his last love interest, an exotic girl who loved to tease him. The exotic girl knew how the young man desired her and she treated his attention with a coy smile until one day, on Halloween, he lunged at her across a restaurant table for a passionate embrace. She rejected him and almost needed to drag him across the floor so that he could pick up his broken heart and walk away.
But on this day in December, he resolved to mend his broken heart. He craved a valley to roll in, not a basement to descend to. He longed for a woman who made his rigid penis twitch, and as he studied the words in books of the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, strands of flowing brunette hair emerged before his eyes, replacing the sentences on the dog-eared page. The young man only saw the silky hair and its wave-like structure, much more sensual and curved than the linear, mechanical text that he examined day in, day out. The hair seemed to reach out of the book and fall with total abandon, reaching out of the book tossing itself wildly off the desk and brushing against his penis, tickling the tip, slithering around the crown. The hair was endless and, as the pages became blank, an infinite amount of hair bounced off the desk, circling around his cock with tender, teasing strokes, swimming in his drops of precum. Ten circles, a hundred, a thousand, he felt the cool undulations against his shaft until his penis exploded onto the bundle of hair, shooting proof of his manhood everywhere, coating the hair with his semen until the brunette strands looked like a naughty mermaid emerging from Poseidon's ocean, or a nymphomaniac using her lover's sperm as hairspray.
The young scholar shot his glance away from Heraclitus' pages, and looked at his watch. He realized that his plane back to Massachusetts was in two hours. He unzipped his leather bag and threw in two outfits, two romance novels and two boxes of condoms.
Not that he expected to satisfy his sexual fever over the next month. The trip home was to enable him to take time to himself, escape the library and the basement, and perhaps the least promising option, visit his family. But if he wasn't to have erotic encounters, he couldn't imagine to what lengths his family's country road would flood with his genital cream. If he couldn't ravage a woman, he anticipated stroking himself so consistently that she would swim in his semen.
The entire street, the entire town, waving their arms above his phallic fluid, sobbing, crying for help, at the mercy of his penis.
When he arrived in his small hometown on the New England countryside, he panicked at the sound of trees swaying and the steady wind whistling. He had grown so accustomed to wind smacking through his coat, in what was seemingly an effort to rip into his skin, that the sudden quietness alarmed him. This is ironic, he thought to himself. In contrast to the city's violent chill, his hometown possessed a romantic frigidity that he had long forgotten. He lay down, in his bed that seemed to sit in the middle of a patch of woods, shut his eyes and plunged into a restless sleep.
The young scholar awoke to the sound of water dripping from the long limbs of the trees outside. He peered out the window and his jaw dropped. Thick ice covered each tree behind his bedroom head-to-toe. He ran to the front door and looked up and down the street, and the smooth, wet ice rendered the rough concrete invisible.
The young man quickly dressed, putting on his jacket and scarf, and ventured outside. It seemed an ice storm had attacked the town. The pine needles drooped toward the ground, and suddenly he felt like he wasn't totally alone. Or, at least he shared the trees' loneliness. His head hung low, his shoulders slumped, his knees bent and arms descended just like the lanky limbs of the trees, weighed down by the smack of mother nature. He felt powerless, just as the pine branches were powerless in a ruthless, subzero grip. The young man longed to stare at the Heraclitus book again, and surrender himself to the gentle grasp of the brunette locks. But as Heraclitus himself said, nobody can step into the same river twice. The hair would never stroke his shaft in the same way again, and he would probably never climax that vigorously again. At least not here—his fantasy hair would freeze and disappear into jagged, apocalyptic ice.
Upon a closer look at the street, the young man stopped obsessing over the drooping trees behind his bedroom. He began to imagine himself as one large tree beside the road, a tree that had fallen smack down and engaged in extended intercourse with the power lines. Felines danced and slinked on top of the ice, showing no sign of cold paws, and the young man thought he could hear the faint sound of purring, a soft, sensual, comforting sound blowing through the branches.
The trees started to sway along with the felines, as if dancing together, moving in some rhythm, possessed by the sound and by the kittens' invitations. The young scholar simply stood and stared at all of this, and started to feel weak in the knees. He closed his eyes, hearing nothing but meows and purrs, and chunks of ice falling from the trees, dissolving, as if the kitties freed the branches and the ice melted at their purrs.
