Nathan cried his rapture to the Gods… and they were prepared to listen and take note. It was a personal experience of taste and tenderness.
It was the tale of snails or oysters.
He listened to his social worker speak to him at the pub. He had a new one this time and he was just getting to know him and so the man spoke quickly to let him know he was all right and that everything was all right. In him he learnt home truths and the piths of the various industries he had worked in. Like an oyster, Nathan took out the pearls of wisdom like the Gods on Red Planet. Nathan’s mind wandered… Nathan took the conversation like a man just like man took the oyster from the sea as he too had perhaps emerged like some Creature from the Black Lagoon with the taste of iron and salt in his blood. Red Planet beckoned if he could control himself.
After one glass of wine, he felt it was time to dip his senses into the saline solution that was life.
Oysters were on the menu and the barmaid seemed to like his oomph. They had to be natural of course, none of that Kilpatrick shit – natural like the comparison to the inner vagina of old: perhaps wet, slimy at times but not the smelly horror of putridity which so many imagined. The texture was hard to define to the uninitiated except that they cost $14 for four.
Would he treat himself to a wet vagina while he was there on Red Planet and on the plate? Or would he deny what his bank account already spelt out?
He went to the bar to order in anticipation of what he knew so well… Large, they would be, and stupendous, dripping in their own legend, possibly big enough to hang from your ears, the best money could buy.
Already he had been enticed by the barmaid as he sat in the separate smoking area – her leg lifted on Red Planet behind the bar to reveal black stockings and no panties. One leg in the air like some wild curtsy as her hand pulled up her skirt. The oyster was ripe to pick, so young and tender as her middle finger went to stroke the flesh lifting the fold of her vagina to reveal the pink bits beyond the triangle of Bermuda where Nathan had forever been somehow forbidden to voyage with this fairer sex.
Yes, I will have oysters, he thought. Not snails today as the porn he had watched the previous evening had seen him pinch his cock to the point of a black pulse and maybe even a heart attack.
All in the wonder of snails and coming at that very moment the other came… But the wonder of oysters, the taste of oysters on his cancerous tongue. It would suffice. The cancer was oyster shaped, ready to touch her oysters, the ones served from between her legs and on the stainless steel plate. It would be a miracle cure if only for a moment.
She still enticed and tried to tell him not to buy, like the warning of some siren, but it was too late as he had made his decision and the only other one was should he have two or eight?…
No, but a taste, as oysters were like honey in their natural juice.
“Do you serve honeyed oysters?,” he asked her as he thought of the possible taste of vaginal juices draped over the flesh – salty and sweet.
“Do you keep honey?,” asked Nathan and she checked with the chef and shook her head, her dance of the oysters over.
“Could you imagine it on Masterchef?,” said Nathan as he thought of oysters paraded with honey, so simple as fucking.
Oysters. Oysters. Oysters… the word conjured up some sort of Spanish fly for his limp cock to be stimulated by; the prepuce now covering his glans through lack of circulation.
“Can I please have four of your oysters?”
“Natural?”
“Of course…” he said to the barman, androgynous in his sexuality, boyish in his manner.
And Nathan went back to his position in the back of the bar and supped his wine.
The anticipation wouldn’t be too much. It was like eating a new or old lover. He knew this place and they would be engorged oysters, large ones and possibly Coffin Bay fresh. They would be like a washed woman cleansed by the sea and ready to meet at any time.
They arrived and it was she who delivered them as Nathan wondered what she really thought of this dirty young or old man she had charmed with a thank you as she set down the plate.
Chilled to delight, he felt like some decadent wastrel for ordering this extravagance. These disembodied leeches so abhorred by the kosher and so repulsed by those who misunderstood them.
He plunged his fork into the inches and lifted it to his mouth unbroken and uncut by knife ready to fall and engulfed and consumed, touching the cancer which grew like a pearl…
Taste it, eat it, fuck the oyster in the mouth – suck it momentarily and move your tongue around it… the oyster so misshapen, it ugliness finally hidden by orifice.
The taste was apparent; salty it was and of the ocean and he felt at one again with his nature so debased these last months by others and by himself, especially on Red Planet. Heaven in a half shell I think they called it.
Then to swallow it like jism, a mouthful of which he imagined as he didn’t know its hidden truths.
The second was just as good, the third oyster as well. He savoured the last one. It sat ripe in the shell and Nathan kind of missed the pearl that was not there. The prize that it promised. Even as she did her dance of the oysters there was no pearl of her clitoris. It was just an oyster to a callow teenage boy otherwise who did not search the depths of its beauty. And yet it was the whole experience to taste and then to swallow.
Snails or oyster. Lemon or honey?
The fourth reminded him of a boy’s cock but not a young boy’s, but the underdeveloped cock of his man lover on Red Planet – ready to suck and yet still perfect. That texture of flesh unparalleled, he thought until now. Not since he was a child… end thought. Not since he got hooked on oysters and not snails.
As he slurped down that last oyster he knew the girl’s revulsion of him and his obesity, his ageing flesh of which the oyster plucked fresh from the sea could never judge. It is that moment where the oyster enters the mouth which many cannot abide. He imagined her squirm as he dived for that pearl as if it was her own … but it did not detract from the transcendent feeling this fruit of the sea gave the oyster lover. The lover must be all-consuming.
And it was over and he gave his glass back to the young barmen. She was gone. Perhaps she was never there, her legs spread like mermaid offering her wares.
“Do you like snails or oysters?,” Nathan asked.
The joke lost in translation, he answered: “Probably oysters, I don’t think I could come at a snail.”
Someone in the bar sniggered.
The taste gone, he raptured to the Gods of his discovery of an
Cult Film Alley 