Love and Death in a Time of Guano

Lonely, lonely wasn't the world. Painful maybe, but lonely didn't encapsulate the way he really felt. He thought it was funny, a little sad maybe. "Sad" he thought, that the happiest times of his life were also the worst. He had better lodgings now, a better life, but the years of pain that defined him had now left him behind. Armond, grew up as so many young children do in the lower Antilles, Destitute, living from meal to meal, hoping that the next day would arrive and pass with no more strife and pain than the day before.

Children often left home when they were old enough to work to send money home for the family. When he turned nine he went to work in the phosphate mines, that is where he met her. Her name was Coreen. She was older than him, by four years. Having some maternal tendencies she quickly took him under her wing. Holding him close at night while he cried. Consoling him when he was so far from home. He soon grew to love her, and she him. A sort of platonic love of at first, one that exists between those who give care and those who are cared for. As they grew older this changed. Awkwardness manifested itself for every part of their relationship, both feeling a strong internal desire that they could not express or fully understand.

Work in the mine was difficult if not nearly impossible. A day would be about sixteen hours long. Scraping and transporting bat shit off the walls and floors to be used for fuel. The feces permeated everything in the workers' lives. It was everywhere. On their clothes, covering their hard and muscular bodies, in their shanty homes located not far from the mine.

It eventually happened one day. He was eighteen she was twenty-two, as beautiful as ever. She carried with her a grace that makes her seem nearly divine. He still possessed the awkwardness of adolescence. They were alone in a tunnel that was not being used for the guano. It had been harvested the month before and still needed more time for worthwhile resources to accumulate. They often stole away once or twice during the long day to break for fifteen or twenty minutes. Coreen sat on a small ledge of the corridor. He turned towards her, smiling through the dirt and the grime plastered on his face. She gently gripped his hands and pulled him close. He wiped the bat shit from around her eyes and gazed into their hazel beauty. He leaned in and their lips met gently. She withdrew from the kiss with a harsh gasp. The culmination of their desires was occurring right before her now. She looked down and saw Armond's enlarged member. She pulled his pants loose and let them fall to the ground. She grabbed a handful of the guano and rubbed it up and down his cock, as hard as all of the muscles on his toned and strong body. He moaned, this feeling being better than anything he could have imagined while masturbating behind the shanty at night. The bat shit lubricated his cock while Coreen slid her calloused hand up and down its length. She guided him inside her. They made love while she sat upon the guano covered ledge and he stood thrusting in and out of her cavern, as deep and magical as the mine itself. He finished while she held him close and whispered in his ear that she loved him. He loved her too.

This went on the same way for two months. They would meet, once, twice, sometimes three or four times a day. After that time Coreen Became very ill. She became unable to leave the shanty, so sick and so weak, she just lay on her small straw palle. Armond took her to a hospital; a young doctor saw the two of them, so in love and so helpless. The doctor had yet to be emotionally hardened by years of seeing the impoverished die. He decided to help them even though they did not have money. Coreen died thirty six hours later. The doctor told Armond that she had toxic shock syndrome. She has gotten a bacterial infection in her cervix from all the sex using guano as lubricant. She would be gone, gone forever.

Armond sits alone on a hill overlooking the ocean, behind him the mine still functions. Young people were still living out the story that he and Coreen had. He paused to exhale the smoke from the joint in his left hand he had been puffing on. A bottle of grain alcohol lay in his right, already half gone. Armond had lived without her for ten years. He sat on that hill over looking the ocean twenty-eight years old and finished with life. He left the mine after Coreen died and began working as a fisherman, barely eeking out an existence. Better than the mine though. He looked in to the sunset, tears streaming form his eyes. He still lover her, perhaps even more now than the day she left him. He put down the joint and the bottle into the grass next to him. Slowly Armond reached into a paper bag and pulled out the revolver he had purchased from the old blind fisherman. He lifted the gun's barrel to his head and let out one last slow breath and pulled the trigger. Her kiss still lingered on his lips.