1
Sunday morning's service should have alleviated the dull throbbing in Temperance's sex, but it hadn't. She could not deny, as she sat alone in her pew that morning, that the persistent, not altogether unfamiliar, prodding in her most private of parts, undulated and writhed like a creature alive inside her. It had made Temperance self-conscious, as if its corporeal nature made it visible on the outside, an untamed thing she was obligated to bring to church and tried to control while Pastor Tuddle addressed the congregation, pulling it to her, whispering in its ear, pleading it to just sit still and stay quiet.
To the best of Temperance's recollection, her slumber of the night before, like most nights, had passed untroubled. Sleep, to Temperance, was like lingering in God's wilderness. It had held her in its own warm embrace, a warmth that had also ushered her into waking, though only to realize yet again the wakeful world's betrayal, a not unfamiliar tackiness between her legs and an animal desire unleashed inside her depth. It had been lurking in the darkness, growling deep in its throat and staring with its glowing yellow eyes. It prowled and dug its claws in dark corners. It's sinuous form leapt to reach some edge, to find some escape, but only to come back down and resume its pacing, circling, pausing occasionally to lick herself clean or contemplate her prison.
Temperance had never not had her in check. It was cleanliness that kept the cage locked, cleanliness, God and food. Temperance was familiar enough with the secular world to know that she could be labeled obsessively compulsively disordered. But no one, not even Tryststessa , Temperance's good friend and trusted ambassador to the world, had no idea exactly how relentless the animal could be, how deeply her claws dug at her faith or how powerfully its tongue lapped at the pool in her moral core.
Certain that the persistent ache would disappear during the service, Temperance arrived at her routinely punctual twelve minutes early, clean, dressed in her Sunday blazer, blouse and long skirt, and smelling faintly of bleach. Though she disagreed every time Tryss brought attention to it, Temperance, going on a young maid's twenty-six, was capable of turning heads.
Her hair was brunette, normally cut neck length, though her tresses had grown out so that a gentle cascade framed her oval face. Her eyes, shaped with a gentle oriental slant that was actually a characteristic of her Icelandic lineage, were a dazzlingly luminous hazel. Her frame, also characterized by her genetics, was stout yet voluptuous and filled her Sunday best nicely, though Temperance was well aware that if she gained a few more pounds, something roomier would be in order.
She sat sedately in her usual pew, seven pews back and in the rightmost corner. That Sunday, like so many Sundays that had come before, there was the uplifting sense of unity as the nave filled with the usual faces and their warm, contented smiles. There were the ambient melodies of the organ, a soft rippling through notes to chords, which would continue as the background for the singing that always lightened Temperance's heart. There was once again the wisdom of Pastor Tuddle and his oration of scripture she would open her mind to for the cleansing. And, bridging the silence in between, weaving through the enrichment like invisible flights of white winged moths, were Temperance's prayers.
She prayed for the continued health and happiness of her family at large, including the heathens and reprobates. She prayed too for Tryststessa's health and future redemption and she prayed for wisdom. Once again, she believed that she had God's ear, imagining Him before her, as she did every Sunday, considering her, his expression solemn but his eyes smiling. For her, God had a celestial depth in His eyes, eyes which followed her everywhere and saw everything. However, as for the eyes of the mortal men in her congregation, especially on this very morning, Temperance made a point of not returning their glances. They looked, she knew, but they were not seeing her. They thought, imagined, Temperance knew, but she would not be complicit in their envisaging crimes against her by meeting their falsely intended gazes.
Yet, in spite of her best efforts, after Temperance departed from the nave for the world outside, she was not fully at peace. "Under a vast light cerulean blue sky, the hot bright sun seemed to reach its rays deep inside her an fuel the already indefatigable sensation, as if the feeling and the very world itself were as antidevotee to devil, conspiring together to spite her, until, by the time she'd arrived at her car, Temperance was on the verge of stumbling, fearing a now unfamiliar degree of engorgement in her down there.
Did she need a doctor? Was it actually an illness coming on? What could she do? She thought of chocolate cup cakes with cream cheese frosting. Then she thought of fudge, and then, when the fudge didn't help, Temperance thought of a cool, very cool, chocolate Sunday with chunks of cookie dough, shards of toffee and a heaping crown of whipped cream, and not that canned stuff either, with a bright fluorescent red cherry on top. Oh my, she worried, nothing's working. Not wanting to be approached, though desiring to try again to pray the seating animal away, she drove from the church's lot to the lot of a doughnut shop a mile away.
There, Temperance prayed and prayed more, until the swelling and the pressure past and her stomach began to churn with hunger, which was when she decided to buy a dozen doughnuts to bring over to Tryststessa's. It was then only a matter of ten minutes after she'd left the shop's lot that Temperance had consumed three of the doughnuts in relatively quick succession, a glazed, a chocolate glazed and a Boston cream...
A visit to Tryststessa's always followed church and, if it hadn't been doughnuts, sweets, confections, confessions, being her indulgence of choice, Temperance would have brought an apple pie, a red velvet cake, cherry cheese Danishes or Italian pastries. It was the first time however, that she'd indulged before Tryss had a chance to pour the coffee. Yet it wasn't as if she didn't have a good reason. She had gotten dangerously close that morning, feeling the heat and the stickiness, touching it ever so lightly so that there was just a little bit to smell on the tip of her longest finger so that she could smell the mysterious vastness and depth of an ocean in which she could not swim.
It had been just like that morning years and years before, the time Temperance was around nine, when she'd formed up one of her pillows in such a shape that it made it worth bouncing on in that funny way, the way that turned from good to better and then very nice, until her older sister caught her and twisted up her parts, making them sting, ringing her underwear like some wet cloth out of the wash, squeezing the joy out of her so that it went away, running scared for years after.
It had not been a good childhood with Sally Anne, a big woman with big widely set eyes and a ready mocking smirk. Fortunately, she had only stuck around long enough to finish high school and had eventually found work as a correctional officer in a women's prison in upstate New York, where she was still very rough with her favorite girls.
Would Tryststessa make her feel bad about the missing doughnuts? It wasn't likely. But, if she did, it would be an offhand thing, something harmless to laugh over and dismiss. Though she was not a member of Temperance's church nor of the same faith, Tryststessa, a friend since middle school, had her own healthy fear of God. Her faith, Temperance came to understand, was more an evolving, fluid, thing, unsolidified yet present and ever meandering.
Of course, this was very unfortunate, and although Temperance didn't feel right making it her personal mission to actively help her friend find salvation, she did what she could through prayer. In their friendship, as friendships demanded, she remained patient and faithful. Temperance prayed that, in time, Tryststessa would see through the worldly veil and realize that it was her God that was the one true God.
2
Trystessa, never one to get up early, but one to get up on time, was, by ten minutes after eleven, ready to get her day started. She was leaning on the counter beside the sink in her small kitchen, with her elbows set along the bottom edge of the first section of her morning paper. A glum expression soured her face as she skimmed through the front page. Tryss could only wag her head, saddened by the impunity with which the rich exploited the poor, the spin doctors exploited the gullible or the militantly self-righteous destroyed the innocent.
No news was good news, was one of Tryss's key philosophies, so she immediately switched section 1A for section 3b, the funnies. Another of Tryss's principles was that frowns were not good for the face. Hers, in particular, did not suffer much from frowning. Trystessa's was without blemish and never lost its appeal, no matter how sad, indifferent or maddened an expression she wore. Her eyes were a gold speckled chestnut brown and her thick black hair was wavy and luxurious. As for Trystessa's body, which was also nothing she could really change or frown over, was tall, slight, lanky and long legged.
Three strips in and Tryss had not even smiled. It was stupid to still be getting the paper, she thought. Sure, there were the coupons, but she could start printing coupons from her computer or use her cell, which she hadn't shut off or had not been within reach of for over six years, to look at porn or cute pics or videos of kittens with Hitler mustaches.
Still, Trystessa had paid to get the paper, from Thursdays to Sundays, so she had to skim through the bad news or the dumb stuff until they called to renew her subscription. Absently, she continued to read through the rest of the funnies. Her mind wandered. Inevitably, she reflected on her morning, having wakened out of a restful sleep, having opened the window to let in the fresh spring air as she thought forward to the day ahead with her buddy Temps.
Tryss inevitably whiled through recollection of the more or less routine event of her shower, the cleansing, the neat shaving and the notably glorious satiation she'd allowed herself, having adjusted the water's temperature and the extendable shower head's spray so that the slow, even arcs she graced her pussy with brought her to a climax that was quite sufficient. Still though, as nice as it was, it made Tryss long for something a little less vertical and solitary.
She thought of Bob. Why hasn't Bob called? Bob was, nice enough. Bob, seemed to like her. He certainly liked what they did, in the dark, on the sofa, on the kitchen counter where her paper now lay, on the dining room table- What's that smell? Trystessa looked up over the truncated wall against the back of the kitchen counter that looked into her little kitchen nook. We fucked there too, didn't we? It smells like, hot sand, dry sea grass? Tryss looked back down at her paper.
We did fuck in the nook! It was naked breakfast. I was leaning, like I am now, on the kitchen table, eating my oatmeal. He slicked me up from behind, wanting to do me in my ass, but I said no, but if he was going to stick it in where I allowed him to stick it in, I told him to go get a damp wash cloth and- Where the fuck is that smell coming from? In that instant, it wasn't just the smell. The air pressure in the room seemed to change. There seemed to be some change in the space beyond the counter too, as if something had been suddenly added to it. Abruptly, Trystessa looked up again, screamed, and then jumped back with a start.
"Holy fucking shit!" she exclaimed as she backed toward the knife block, "who are you and why are you naked!?!"
On the other side of the counter, standing in Tryss's breakfast nook, was a dark bronze skinned woman. Her clothing, what there was of it, was very strange. She wore a tall white and gold vertically striped brimless hat, which fit her crown snugly but widened at the top. She wore arm bands and bracelets also of gold. She had a broad necklace of gleaming gold square plates, from the center of which dangled three gold balls. From her ears hung three more gold baubles each.
Her dark brown eyes were beguiling within an artfully applied accent of black liner and blueish gold shadow. Her upper body was bare beyond the gleaming gold sapphire in her navel. Around the sapphire, the woman's belly was flat and, above, her breasts were handsomely proportioned, quite apparently firm, center weighted yet conical, bound tightly in skin that was two shades lighter than the rest of her and tipped in twin brown heaps of areola and two long red nipples.
Trystessa withdrew the longest knife from the block, and then slowly stepped around the counter into the nook. Continuing to cautiously appraise the woman, she saw that the stranger's lower half was bound in a long tube skirt, made of the same white and gold material of her head dress. It was belted in a triangular version of her necklace and came to just above her feet, which were bound in a pair of shining gold sandals. She reminded Tryss of an Egyptian goddess or some pharaoh queen.
"Yeah I get it, said the strange woman, "that this is weird as Hell, but I can explain."
Slightly amused, in spite of the sheer strangeness of her situation, Trystessa had not expected a voice like Rosy Perez's to come out of the woman's mouth.
"I, am Temperance's guardian angel."
