AUGUST, METEOR SHOWER

It’s August – the month of shooting stars – on the remote island of K. A sudden rain of stardust seizes some people with basorexia – a burning desire to kiss. They finally find the courage to confess their desires to one another. Like Bruno and Harold, two men who only meet in summer. Bruno is a forty-year-old engineer with a house on the island. Harold, thirty-eight, travels from Munich to the strictly Catholic island each year, spending much of his time with Bruno. Or Bettina and Isolde – two women with long red hair, both lecturers and researchers at the University of Budapest in Orbán’s frigid, regressive Hungary. They own a dilapidated little house on the eastern side of the island. And then there’s Mare and Lukas, an attractive older couple from the Netherlands, who return to their island retreat each summer, escaping the city’s commotion. All of them are suddenly overcome by love, desire.
The muggy scent of sheepskin mingled with the sharp aroma of rosemary and the dry, moss-covered rocks that had absorbed the August heat all day. The earth beneath those rocks seemed to breathe; in the underbrush, wild boars rustled, their snouts rooting for insects and tangled roots. Inside the sheep pens scattered across the island, the thick scent of unshaven wool hung heavy in the air, mingling with the musty breath of the animals – an intimate, stifling warmth, repulsive yet strangely alluring.
The eroded Glagolitic letters, etched into rocks on the barren southern coast, formed the traces of an ancient, half-forgotten text – sensuous in its decay. All day, the air had pulsed with the sound of chirping crickets. At sunset, silence. All you could hear was a goat bleating stridently in the distance. Nothing happened for hours.
Then night fell – 13 August 2024 – the sky erupting into a swarm of falling stars.
Bruno and Harold sat in Bruno’s garden, wrapped in the scent of bay leaves and jasmine. Bruno – engineer, amateur astronomer – pointed skywards, speaking of flashes of light, of invisible touches, of stardust. Harold stayed silent. First, he looked up. Then, without warning, he turned and pressed his face into Bruno’s armpit. Bruno abandoned his hesitation. A first kiss, then another and another – Harold’s lips trailing down Bruno’s soft, hairy belly; Bruno’s mouth finding the curve of Harold’s neck, then lower, along his back …
Bettina and Isolde sat inside their colourless little home, translating Hildegard von Bingen by candlelight. ‘How wondrous is that breath that roused humanity to life.’ Through the window, they caught sight of the first cluster of falling stars. Bettina opened the window. Stardust fluttered inside. Their laughter shifted, suddenly, into an unexpected urgency. They had been eating tiny pickles and saltines, drinking walnut liqueur. Salt, sour, sweetness lingered on their tongues, circling restlessly around each other. A candle fell over, snuffed itself out on top of a text full of handwritten changes, left a black hole in the paper. In the dim candlelight, blind without their glasses, they stumbled over stacks of books and papers, their red hair falling like a curtain over the scattered pages. ‘I’ll tell you everything I’m going to do to you,’ Bettina whispered. ‘In well-turned phrases. You only have to tell me yes or no. Right now, for instance, I will …’
As falling stars streaked across the sky, something rustled in the underbrush – the wind, yes, but bodies too, human and animal, finding each other in the dark.
The moonlight streamed into Bruno’s garden. Bruno – half undressed, his shirt unbuttoned – and Harold, bare-chested, kissed and bit into every inch of each other’s skin. ‘Here, sit down …’
Harold whispered, leading Bruno towards an easy garden chair. For a moment, Bruno’s glowing length was bathed in moonlight – until Harold’s head gently obscured it.
That same moon spilled through the sunroof of the ramshackle hotel near the rocky shoreline, illuminating the graffiti on the walls and tracing the pale, naked silhouettes of Lukas and Mare. Beneath the sycamore figs, their heavy fruit dropping – soft thuds, smears of sweetness on the concrete – they enveloped each other. A growling, snorting organism with a combined age of 120 years, in heat, enfolding one another, kissing, biting. A giant praying mantis was watching their movements aloofly from the fractured floor. The tall oil refinery pipes and the seaport town’s lights were visible in the distance.
A boar, damp with muggy soil, shook itself, snorted and began chasing another boar. It placed its front legs onto the very furry back. There was a raw, deep ‘now’ and ‘do it’; the smell of mud, leaves, pheromones, mixed with the salty odour of the sea.
That night, the scent of wool was stronger – intoxicating – as if the sheep in their pens were exhaling something more than air. The rocks that had been on the island for centuries emitted a warmth nobody could explain. Even the shadows of the old Glagolitic rocks seemed to shift, whispering: keep going, it feels so good – the sea, warm and wet; the grass, springy and soft; the rocks, sturdy; the olive tree trunks, hard. It glistens, it tastes, it smells, it steams. Watch your knees there, my back, ouch, ouch, my back – but don’t stop. No don’t stop. After all, isn’t it O for oh, oh, oh, ooooh, and A for ah, ah, ah, ah, all of it, all of it …
Such wondrous things rarely happen in cities – if they happen at all. Under the city’s bright lights, a meteor shower like that would barely be noticed. Stardust would land fruitlessly on car roofs – once in a while, a lone resident on a balcony or at a pavement café might inhale a trace of it. That’s when eyes begin to glisten, gazes become restless. But the night’s blanket is harder to pull over bodies here, with cell phones flickering everywhere. Occasionally, someone might Google basorexia – but here, it’s an old, timeworn idea.

by Manon Uphoff

Short Story

Published in Extra Extra No 24

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