Post 16: Surprise!
This story took place in 1976
Authors Note:
When I grew up in the fifties, Saturdays were the best day of the week. My mother would give us each a quarter, and I would walk a mile with my brothers and sisters to the local movie theater. For twenty-five cents each, four or five hundred unaccompanied children were treated to a dozen cartoons, a serial, and two feature films. I remember watching serials like Superman, Lost Planet Airmen, and the Green Hornet. Each episode ended with the hero in peril of imminent death. At the end of one chapter, Commander Cody was left clinging to the edge of a cliff as the villain ground his heel against the noble hero's gloved hands. The next week, Commander Cody turned a valve to operate the reserve fuel supply to his rocket pack and flew to safety as the evil-doer muttered curses. Last week's cliffhanger was always resolved in the first minutes of each new episode.
My writing coach recommended the use of cliffhangers at the end of my Literotica chapters to lure the readers back. So in the last post, I tossed my heroine over a cliff, and this note is just my way of adding to the suspense by delaying her inevitable demise.
Chapter 42
I screamed one long, blood-curdling scream as I fell tumbling over the cliff behind my aunt and uncle's home. The chain attached to the choke collar around my neck rattled as the steel links rasped over the top of the concrete retaining wall. For a second, I caught sight of a large boulder below me, rushing up to kill me on impact. I hoped I would die the quick death my aunt had promised when the chain snapped tight and broke my neck. Otherwise, I would lie bleeding and shattered on the sharp rocks until death put an end to my pain.
Somehow I escaped that fate and landed on my back on a small mesquite tree. I heard a series of sharp snaps that had to be my bones breaking. The choke collar closed tight as I spun around and grabbed the stem of the broken tree. My whole body screamed in pain as I struggled for breath.
I was wearing socks over the bandages on my injured feet and couldn't get any purchase on the loose soil at the base of the retaining wall. Every time my feet slipped, the choke collar cut off my breath, and the weight of my body jerked against the wobbly tree. It was too much for the precariously situated tree, and I panicked as I saw the roots ripping from the loose soil.
I reached up and grabbed the chain with both hands, and propelled my body in an arc across the cliff. I almost reached the boulder on my first swing, but my tender hand slipped off the rough surface. The choke collar tightened around my neck again, forcing me to scrabble for a grip on the chain. I drove my body back for another run at the massive granite rock. My arms were trembling with fatigue, and I knew this was my last chance. My speed slowed as I got to the end of my arc, and I hopped away from the cliff. My body hit the face of the dirty boulder hard, and I clawed for a handhold. I felt myself slipping off and screamed a curse. The flat stone slid a foot down the hillside, and I grabbed the top of the rock as it settled against a massive eucalyptus tree.
I crawled on top of the boulder and gasped for breath. I had ignored my uncle shouts the whole time I was playing human pendulum, but now I looked up at the top of the retaining wall and saw the silhouette of my uncle. He was waving his arms and shouting.
"Jean, Jean, are you OK? On my God, please say you're all right."
"I think I broke every bone in my body, but I'm safe until this boulder slips."
My uncle started to lower his body over the cliff using my chain for purchase. I screamed when I realized his intention.
"Michael, for the love of God, stop! The rock will never hold your weight."
Thankfully, wisdom prevailed, and my uncle ran back to the house and roused Manu from his sleep with a frantic phone call. The police chief brought in a three-man volunteer mountain rescue unit composed of his Samoan relatives. They arrived along with Manu a half-hour later and quickly got into a fight over who would be lowered down to save me. It seemed they regularly helped hikers in the coastal foothills, but they had never had the pleasure of rescuing a young naked girl. Eventually, Manu selected a cousin who was the lightest member of the team. They quickly had me up to safety once they stopped squabbling. One member of the group was an EMT. He checked me out and announced that except for numerous scrapes and bruises, I was uninjured. Evidently, the sharp snaps I had heard were the limbs of the mesquite tree breaking.
When the leader of the unit questioned Manu about the choke chain around the neck of the young woman who had played Venus at the Exhibition, the police chief muttered something about treatment for chronic nymphomania and asked my aunt to explain. The three Samoans seemed dubious until she asked for their help in treating me. Suddenly, they were enthusiastic supporters of Cathy's diagnosis.
My aunt took me inside for a shower while my uncle prepared several batches of Mimosas to entertain my rescuers. Cathy gave me another birth control pill before turning me over to the eager volunteers for therapy. The morning disaster turned into a day-long party with an endless supply of drinks, food, and sex.
Maybe it was the terror I had experienced falling over the cliff, or possibly it was the lack of sleep, but the party failed to cheer me up. I felt depressed. My body was still eager for sex with the Samoans, the Mimosas were delicious, and the endless supply of warm food was terrific, but I felt overwhelming despair. Would I ever make it back to law school? What would happen when my boyfriend found out how I'd spent the summer riding a dildo and then fucking every able-bodied man in Santa Teresa? I shuddered to think about how my God-fearing mother would feel if I ever managed to get home.
I felt relieved when my aunt told me depression was a natural side effect of Ecstasy. The drug had released every molecule of serotonin in my body. It would take several days until the levels of my happy molecule returned to normal. Still, I felt so depressed, I didn't bother to write in my journal for the next week. I didn't even have the motivation to ask Cathy to bring my jailhouse dairy out to the doghouse. So, I'll only relate a couple of events from the next two weeks that made a big enough impression for me to remember them.
Chapter 43