Armed with scissors, thread and pins, Marianne flitted about the tight-fitting midnight-violet dress, tailoring it stylishly around her mother Élise’s svelte curves. She was as fashion conscious as her mother was not, but then, being a working, single mom for the last fourteen years left little time or money for Élise to have a “life”. Between her former marriage and later, an ill-fated flirtation with a male coworker, Élise came to avoid and distrust entanglements.
Penny moaned. The red-haired business manager just calculated the time span of her enforced no-smoking for her spur-of-the-moment out-of-town conference. “Thursday I won’t be able to smoke for at least fourteen hours.” Depressed, she pondered, “That’s how long I’ll be in the air, in taxis and presenting our strategy to ‘corporate’ while conferring with our clients.”
"When did I start cigarettes?" Babs said. "I was a junior at Elmwood High School, but even before that, I'd sneak a puff off of my mother's Kent smoldering in the ashtray. Jackie Kennedy set that year's fashion standards and everyone followed Liz Taylor's romance with Richard Burton."
Her dripping skin streams off the rinse water in silvery rivulets.
Deliciously naked she stands up from her Jacuzzi, splashing the almost-drained bathwater with her feet. For half an hour, Ingrid has been steeping in the fluid massages of the Jacuzzi’s hydrotherapy. Reluctantly she rose from her steamy refuge; needing to dry off and get dressed.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
