Sleep Disorder

last, she theorized. But at least this one had lasted four times.

She lay back naked against the pillows and read.

Dearest Clara,

I've made an unbelievable find. I've discovered a new thallophyte classification that is absolutely remarkable.

At first it appeared to be a typical deuteromycetic shelf fungus, unusual enough, though — and you will appreciate this — in that it possessed a mammalian parasitic propensity. I found it on the carcass of a dead ocelot that had crossed one of the tributaries of the Cautario River which cuts out of the nearly impenetrable Guapore Botanical Reserve. What, you may be thinking, could cause an ocelot to cross water through such a treacherous perimeter? I pondered the same, and fast realized the obvious. Of course! The animal was fleeing the northeast fires, and had no doubt picked up free spores during its trek.

It grows at an incredible rate, Clara, with a strangely fibrous and unusually active mycelic network. And the evidence is clear — the fungus body was growing while the animal was still alive! Absolutely unheard of for a deuteromycetes! It's beautiful, too. Large, blood-red ridge bodies and bright white sporaphores. Gorgeous!

I'm calling it Vermilius Moleyus. The journals will be bending over backward for the story. I'll be famous!

More later. The Team Leader and I are about to autopsy the ocelot. Argh! Please write.

I love you, Howard

She tossed the letter aside, rolled her eyes again.

He discovers some new shelf fungus and acts like it's the Holy Grail.

Why did he even write at all? She'd deliberately answered none of his letters. When was he going to see the light? She was having too much fun now even to think about Howard. Too much fun and too much… God I'm insatiable! she thought.

She reached for the phone. Just about anyone would do now, she realized, flipping through her address book.

Anyone but Howard.

The old professor's face thrust forward. 'Do you know what you're saying?'

All at once, then, Howard did.

If it feels good, do it, thought Clara. And this felt incredible.

She'd picked up Barney and David at Kaggie's, one of the more raucous off-campus dance clubs — and now they were playing a delightful game called 'Sandwich.'

Clara was the cheese.

She felt squeezed in a vise of lust. The bed shimmied; she thought of a truck driving over railroad ties. This definitely scratched her itch, relentless alternating thrusts drawing in and out of her… lower places. Yes, Clara was the cheese, all right…

Her next orgasm went off like subsurface demolition.

They lay there three abreast in bed, lolling on one another as their sweat cooled. Clara's perfect, tanned skin felt shellacked. And these two guys? Meat-rack jocks. Typical 1.9-average campus boneheads whose only genuine endeavor seemed to revolve around the perpetual emptying of their seminal vesicles. It was too bad the university didn't offer a B.A. in intercourse; they'd each put the proverbial blocks to her three times already, and it wasn't even midnight yet. They were, in other words, perfect male specimens as far as Clara was concerned.

'Well,' Barney said, 'now that we've played Sandwich, how about we play another game?'

'We could play doctor,' Clara suggested, fully unabashed in her gleaming nakedness.

'Sounds good to me,' David offered, stroking his elephantine penis just as unabashedly. 'And it just so happens that Dr. David has a first class proctoscope.'

'Let's play Ballgame instead,' Barney countered.

'Ballgame?'

'Yeah, and tonight's a doubleheader. Get it?'

Barney began to stroke himself too. 'Or how about just a good old all-American game of Hide the Salami?'

'Maybe I'm a vegetarian,' Clara slyly remarked.

'In that case, honey, I've got a summer squash that'll make your day!'

Jock laughter erupted forth. Both their penises, hard yet again, bounced like springboards. But then Barney interjected:

'Say, I wanted to ask you something. Is it true you date Howard Moley?'

Jesus! Howard again! 'Don't be ridiculous. We went out a few times, that's all. It was…an aberration…'

'I heard you were gonna marry him,' David added.

'Howard Moley?' Clara lied. 'Are you kidding?'

'No, huh? So then what's this?'

He reached over to the nightstand. Howard's latest love letter lay open there.

Shit!

'I noticed all the pretty postage on the envelope. Noticed it right away.'

She tried to grab at it. Her breasts bobbed in his face. He kissed the still-moist surface of one of them and held the letter out of reach, laughing. Turning to read.

'Come on! Give me that!'

'Hmmm. Sounds like things are still on to me.'

'Give me a break! He's nuts. It's not my fault. The guy…imagines things. He keeps writing me these crazy love letters! Like he's supposed to mean something to me. I haven't answered one of them. Doesn't matter. He just keeps on writing.'

David laughed. 'So you want him to get the message and he won't. That it?'

'Exactly.'

'Got a Polaroid?'

Clara's brow creased. 'Yeah. In the closet.'

David got up and went to the closet. She admired his muscled backside and then admired the rest of him when he turned around.

'Loaded?'

'I think so.'

'So let's send Howard some pix!'

'Hey. Terrific idea!' said Barney.

The smile blossomed on her face. 'You guys are geniuses,' she said. The mere idea, in fact, filled her more than plenteous bosom with wanton heat. More heat trickled elsewhere.

She took on Barney first while David played close-up lensman. 'Say hello to Peter,' Barney introduced. 'Peter likes to be talked to.' The flash popped as her mouth engulfed his penis. 'I'll bet you always wanted to be in pictures, huh?' David suggested. Another flash pop as Clara climbed over Barney and put it inside her. And then again as she rode him, his hands squeezing her breasts.

David was using a lot of film but it didn't matter.

There was another pack around there somewhere.

* * *

The forest teemed with vibrant color. Insects buzzed the mosquito net. Strange birds whooped and cawed.

The forest didn't care.

Three of them were dead.

Three of the team's five members. Howard and the elderly team leader lay in a field medical station in a grubby thatch-and-mud village called Alta Lidia, consuming IV Ampicillin. Tomorrow they'd be helicoptered to the