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                       Choice: Six

Trying not to look rude, you grab the black cup. I’m sure this’ll be more pleasant than torturous.

The drink slides down in a nervous sip. Nothing happens. The same can’t be said for your host. Timur sinks into a deep stupor and falls back. Irem laughs at her father with a giddy yip. This a surprise. She seemed so composed only moments ago, but now ecstatic, alive, and immature, she has become someone else.

This transformation attracts you even more than her previous existence. In her introduction, she was a whispering force of physical intrigue, but with her laughter, a tender glow of humanity appears in her eyes. She has wonderfully brown eyes; they remind of the most fertile earth. From them a woman walks out of that ground. A strange, strange woman: skin like clay, hair like moss, and eyes just like Irem’s. You trip while you attempt to approach this feminine phantasm. She laughs again and runs towards you. Alone and unafraid, you grab the woman’s hand of soft sand, and she swells in vigor and beauty until she eclipses all things.

“Oh mother,” you whisper. “Earth Mother. Greatest mother. More scared than any Madonna.”

Taking your hand, she dives into the rock, slipping past the pool of pink stone without a trace of a dip. The cold, musty smell of concrete runs all over you, whilst twirling through the underground rock and sand. You fly downward and feel the warmth that the layers of Earth give way and you dive deeper, past the mantel, across rivers of mica, iron, and beautiful silver. Lewis and Clark hands explore dark mountain tops and virgin pink valleys. Honey poppies warp neurons with photosynthetic exhale in between climax after climax, all lovingly interluding into memory as each one slowly collapses under growling hips of joy shuddered with suffocating chlorophyll.

Erupting laughter pushes out and in with thrusting mayhem. Living colors swim all over each other in the Pollock nightmare of falling. Then, black.

“You don’t have to laugh. It’s not funny anymore.”

Deep inside the world, you feel lost in the blackness, but are not afraid. Who could be this warm, this calm, this connected, and still feel afraid? Life swings gracefully in bobbing ellipses all around. With every rotation, another exhaustion in the arms of the other.

Then, when you awaken, you find yourself in bed next to Irem. She is asleep. The both of you are still nude.

She still smells like concrete and sand.