Page:Beyond Fantasy Fiction Volume 1 Issue 1 (1953-07).djvu/64

 ly slender arms around the glory of your soft and yielding torso and felt the rapid and elated beating of your heart. And I led you gently from your heavenly steed to the quiet coolness of my love-dwelling.

AWOKE before you did that bright morning after the night you came to me. For a long time I lay beside you, thrilled by the warmth of your flesh, my eyes closed to the delicious experience. And then, you too awoke and my mind made contact with yours.

"Where am I?"

As you spoke these words your eyes traveled up and down the length of my reclining body. I entered your mind half hesitantly, fearful of what I would find there. For I am still young and ill-formed, running to slenderness instead of to the corpulence that is the universal mark of beauty.

But, oh, my darling, what a great and overwhelming pleasure it was to find that you seemed to approve of what you saw, and in your mind I beheld visions of pleasures which I had before then only dreamed of. Somehow, to you, I seemed beautiful, and I was glad.

And then I felt the tenor of your thinking shift and you repeated, "Where am I?"

I told you with my mind, and then again with my voice. But still you did not understand. And so I drew on the ground a picture of the sun and the other five planets and wrote FRTH in large letters by ours, the sixth planet, and made you realize that this was where you were. Then, I pointed to the fifth planet and again at you.

In your supreme cleverness you caught on at once.

"No," you said softly, "I am not from there." You drew on the ground some distance away another sun, surrounded by nine planets, and pointed out the third. "Here's my home."

OU smiled then and lay back on the couch. Your mind clouded a bit, and although I could follow all your thoughts, many of them seemed strange and incomprehensible.

"Good ole Mother Earth. Home, Sweet Home. I don't even know where it is from here. Lost, that's what I am, lost. Maybe I'll never see New York again, never again eat clam chowder, never watch another baseball game, never again see her."

You began to cry. I reached out to you, taking you into my arms, running my fingers slowly through your hair, sending you comforting and sympathetic thoughts.

"I hated it. I despised Earth—loathed it. And everybody on it,” you wept. "Most of all I hated her. Oh, I loved her, but I came to hate 62