Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 17:41:54 +0800 From: mr malaprop <mr_malaprop@graffiti.net> Subject: Boy Galatea [Fantasy, M/b, no sex] Thanks to Dwayne for the original idea, I'm sorry if it hasn't gone where you wanted but I hope it will at least fill some of your desires. Thanks too to my "critical & editorial team" of friends, Freedom, Nick and Thorns for their invaluable suggestions and comments. They have each helped me too much to relate, I love them all. Last but not least a nod of thanks to Thorne Smith, long dead before I was born, whose influence has, I like to think, lent a helping hand in this tale. None of the above are responsible in any way for any imperfections in this story, that responsibility rest solely with me. And finally: If you shouldn't, don't. If you don't like it, stop. If you want to flame me, you're wasting your time. Comments and constructive criticism are welcome at: mr_malaprop@graffiti.net The entire story is copyrighted (c) to malaka/mr_malaprop 2003 - HCFU Boy Galatea Five centuries I have stood here on this plinth. I stood here first in Italy and then in Vienna and finally now, for the last century and a half or so, in small town Britain. A naked boy on a marble plinth, plain and unadorned, right leg bent, right foot resting lightly on a toe, the other foursquare on the ground. My right hand rests behind my head, my left sits on my waist. To give me balance and keep me upright I lean on a marble tree stump artfully crafted to look almost natural. A marble vine grows up it, my marble loincloth lies carelessly across it. A collectors fancy and fantasy brought me here in the days when Victoria sat upon the throne and Empire ruled and a young man, with far more money than either sense or taste, spotted me when on his Grand Tour and bought me from the impoverished minor noble who had loved me so and shipped me off to sit in a warehouse for fifty years and more whilst he accumulated more wealth and never looked at his vast collection gleaned in his early years - much of which, from what I can see, was dross, but there are a few exquisite pieces and, even if I say it myself, I am one of the best! It was under warmer skies I had my birth. I was ripped unformed from my mother's womb with pick and wedge and hammer as a solid asymmetric block from an Italian hillside and shipped to Siena. I sat and waited patiently for a year or two. Many men came and looked at me but I was a little misshapen and not quite square, I had a chunk missing from one side so was not the perfect block. Then a bearded man, light and young with a sparkling eye came and looked at me. He went away and my hopes were dashed but the next day he was back. He had them move me into an open area and he walked around me several times - I got excited thinking he would buy me but then he walked away and looked at other pieces. He bought two and left me there, devastated. The next few days I hoped he would return but he did not. After a week I had given up all hope when he came back. He had a boy with him this time. A beautiful boy, a stunning boy of eleven summers I would guess. I was still in the middle of the yard so the man had the boy stand next to me and move and pose and move again all at different angles. They laid me down, the boy lay down too and moved and turned and posed and still the man was not sure. He had them turn me on my head, though head as yet I had none, and had the boy turn and pose again. Suddenly he became excited and grabbed the boy and embraced him and twirled him around me in a madcap impromptu dance. He haggled a price with the stone yard man and then had me loaded on a barrow and trundled off to his studio. I had heard talk of studios from other artists in the yard and envisioned something grand and glorious and artistic with friendly visitors, sparkling conversation and an atmosphere of dedication to Art. What I got was a ramshackle shed and an area outside, where I was hoisted on to a huge tree bole plinth. The area was covered over with hides stretched on a wooden frame to protect me, or more probably them, from the weather. The leather stank but at least I was bought and could now become something new and beautiful and shapely. As I stood there, still upside down [or so I thought then] but getting used to it, the man closed the gates to block out prying eyes and called the boy to him. They embraced and kissed for an age and then slowly the man undressed the boy and had him pose for him, as he had in the stone yard. He ran his hands all over the soft warm flesh and made the boy giggle with tickles. He got the boy posed as he wished, with more kisses and caresses as the boy tried to undress him too. Then he came to me and rubbed his hands all over me and looked at the boy and then at me and then again at the boy. He dashed to the boy and grabbed him round the waist and twirled him around the yard with more vigour than they had shown before. They kissed at the door of the shed then disappeared inside for an hour and all I knew were the giggles and sighs and groans and then the cries of a consummation I knew I would never, could never enjoy. A while later they emerged again. The boy bathed by the rain barrel and grabbed his clothes and clad himself anew. He kissed his lover and fled into the evening gloom promising to return on the morrow. The man sat and looked long at me, then moved his rustic stool and gazed again, boring with his eyes below my rough exterior. He grabbed a block of clay from a bin and wet it and worked it and wet it again to make it plastic then began to fashion a rough figure from it. He worked all the night as I untiring stood looking on. Stone can know no weariness, and I who had been laid down millennia before and then pressed and crushed for millennia after stood there and watched him work. By the light of candle and lantern he worked and fashioned a foot high model of the boy, rough and unfinished but still of beauty. He looked at it and walked around me and then looked again. He stroked my sides and if stone could shiver, I would have done so. At dawn he rested and opened wine and grabbed bread and cheese and meat and olives and sat sprawled before me whilst he ate. Then he curled up on a rough bit of matting and slept a few hours until, with breakfast bread fresh baked and fragrant in his hand, the boy came back. They kissed and ate and loved and played and the boy admired the clay model. Then, in the afternoon, the man took fine iron chisels and a maul and began to chip away at my flesh. To lay bare to the world the form that lay within, just waiting for his touch. He worked on me on and off for months but I was a labour of love, as he told the boy, whereas the other pieces were commissions that had deadlines to be met. When other people came to the studio he cast a cloth over me so that I would be hidden from prying eyes. It was not only these commissions that caused delay, twice we had to flee. Or twice he fled, the man. Both were much the same, a priest unwilling to pay for a completed work, and knowing nothing of love, shouted sodomite and raised a mob to drive him out of town. Later the boy came to me and directed men to load me and the other uncompleted works on carts and carry us first to Pisa and then, on the second occasion, from thence to Venice. By the time I was finished the boy was changing and the man joked that he would have to fashion my genitals from memory as the boy had grown so much! The boy laughed and asked if he minded. "No," said the man, "all is as it should be, but this is now how you were not how you are. It will be an eternal tribute to your beauty as a boy. Your beauty as a man is still emerging." When I was finished the man and the not quite boy asked friends to come and see and to admire. Many of the men had boys with them too and I knew that they were couples, lovers by the way they stood and looked. Many came and stroked my cold flesh with their warm hands. At night, after they had gone, the man and not quite boy made love in front of me. Slow and sensuous love whilst I looked on and blessed them. The rumours that the man was a sodomite and pederast caught up, of course, as all hate eventually does. The man had to flee again and I was left in a new courtyard but never was collected. Much of his work was destroyed but marble is not easy to break and does not burn. After a while I was carted up again and carted off. I was installed in the private garden of a cardinal where he would come and gaze at me with quiet, gentle longing in his eyes. For a brief season, a year or two, the cardinal had a companion, a chorister or so I gathered, from the cardinal's private chapel. They would come and gaze upon me and rub my toe then the boy would kneel before the cardinal and minister to his need. What other acts they did in private I do not know. All things pass, of course, and for stone like me human lives seem impossibly short. The cardinal died and another took his place and I was not to his taste so was moved into a side room in the palace. For many years I was rarely seen, the room was used occasionally when a great assembly happened at a festival time but mostly I was alone except for being dusted and for an aged friar, a good Franciscan brother, who came and sat and communed with me for hours without a word. He would sit and look and then look down and appear to pray then look again. One day he came and ran his hand down my leg as if I were really flesh. He did that for many a day then would stop coming for a while and I would be alone. After one long break he returned, now even older and frailer and more bent. He came right up to me and again stroked my leg, before, oh so gently, stroking his shaking palsied fingers across my genitals. He sighed and called me beautiful and left. I never saw him again but pray, if stone can pray, that he found rest. The second cardinal died and I had another new owner. A dour man. A man of no soul, no love of art. His heart belonged in the Inquisition. Wherever he looked he saw only sin and vice and degradation. He would have been a better Calvinist than Cardinal! To say he had no love of art is wrong, he hated art! He went through the palace and scoured it of all things beautiful. Being a prudent man he did not destroy us but put us all up for auction. He sold us to the highest bidder. For betraying beauty he got more than his thirty pieces of silver. I was bought by a rich merchant, Venice had many in those days. I was placed inside again in a little anteroom, though little does little to give the impressive size of the place. The room was as big as many houses of the poor and well found too, well furnished with other pictures of boys upon the walls and some lewd drawings in folios upon the table. My master's wife knew nothing of my existence, of that I'm sure, but I knew of hers as my master and his friends discussed her in front of me at times when they were not perusing the other art or talking of boys seen in the market or the choir. One old man came one day and knew me as I, after much thought, knew him. As a chorister he had been a cardinal's lover some years before and remembered kneeling at my feet, though not for me. He told my master that he had often wondered what had become of me. He told too how the old cardinal loved me so and, with a glint of tears in his eyes, how he had loved the cardinal. I was honoured and revered in that palazzo by the Grand Canal. Lovers came and kissed and caressed my feet and promised themselves to one another with me as witness. They kissed one another too and made love in front of me sometimes wiping their nectar across my marble lips where I, with great regret, could not taste it. As he grew my master's son inherited his father's artistic tastes and so when one master died I had another and still I was loved and revered and was silent witness to a trail of boys and men who loved one another and me and completed the circles of their lives. I saw boys I had known as boys become men and take other boys as lovers and their joy in consummation and continuation of the line of love. When my second master died without an heir it was back to the auction block again. The son had spent his father's fortune but done nothing to refill the coffers and died deep in debt. I was sold to a nobleman from Vienna and was carted north into the cold and dark. Even for ageless stone the journey lasted a long time but what joy when I arrived and instead of the cold and dark I feared I was placed in a light and airy salon. I had a place of honour in a broad recess well lit and hung about with the richness of purple velvet. In the salon I heard such glorious music, all the greats of Vienna came and played there over the years, the Haydn brothers; Salieri, so full of himself; young, precocious Wolfgang; bad tempered looking Beethoven increasingly deaf and yet writing so well - and, of course, my dear Franz Schubert and his friends who came not just for the music but also to worship at my beauty. He too was a beauty when he was young and was much sought out by certain older men - but he had his own crowd of friends and followers. His music was little revered in his lifetime but after he his untimely death it was suddenly the talk of the whole city. After the music and the dancing and the crowds had gone away, one by one and two by two the young lovers came and rubbed my toe and stared at me and kissed one another. It was more furtive here perhaps in Vienna than it had been in Venice but the same romances bloomed and still they came to me for blessings which, although they could not know, I freely gave. The master of the house, my new owner though he loved me dear never worshipped himself but freely let the others come, he was a sympathetic man. Then war and rumour took its toll and my owner's business was destroyed by fire and the Viennese house was closed up and sold and I was moved to his country estate to live awhile outside in parkland where rustic men and boys saw me and revered me just the same. Their loving and their rutting was no different than that of other classes. Love is love is love - it transcends all bounds of class and creed. My fortunes changed again one warm spring day when my owner was, shall we say, well past his prime. He was, if truth be told, a doddering old fool, quite broken by his poverty - for poor he was though he tried to keep up appearances. A young man came with an older companion, a tutor I later learnt. They were from Britain, a land across the sea, and the young man was completing his education by touring foreign lands - a notion quite alien to me who stood so still for so long and yet felt myself quite educated in all I needed to know. The young man and his tutor had been, it seemed to me, a lot closer than they admitted but now were growing apart. They took a fancy to me, however, and I seemed to rekindle something dying in them for a while. My owner was loath to part with me after half a century but the offer they made would, with prudence, feed him and his family for a year. I was crated up and shipped off to Britain and knew nothing for a while. Indeed I never heard of the tutor again and learnt of the young man only after he had died another 70 years later. For those 70 years I languished in a warehouse, a cold bare place, with other goods and chattels they had collected on their travels but never once did either of them visit. Occasionally I was dusted but little beyond that. One man in the warehouse crew looked at me with interest more than once and readjusted himself within his rough work clothing. I could tell he was in awe of my beauty but daren't approach and touch. I was in despair. I languished in deep loss, it took me half an age to work out why, but what else had I to do? I was born in love. The young man who created me, and the boy whose image I was, had loved one another. Together they loved me. All my years I had been surrounded by love, cardinals and choristers, nobles and merchants, even rustic Austrian shepherd boys and now, now I had one man gaze upon me only and then he dare not touch. The years of longing loneliness stretched on and on and I, a celebration of love, was left to mourn. Whilst I languished in my dungeon, or my tomb, Europe was torn asunder and on the fields of France and Belgium uncounted young men died. The young man who had bought me long before outside Vienna lost a son, a son in law and two grandsons there. By the end of hostilities he had only his daughter left. His son had been betrothed but not yet married when he had left in 1914 to join in a war that, so the politicians said, would be over by Christmas! I did not know of this until later, of course. Statues do not learn news the human way. My owner died of grief, I do believe. He was old by then of course but I am told he lost the will to live. He died peacefully with his daughter at his side and she was left a widow and an orphan, her children dead too, to sort out a financial empire. It was a shock to her to discover the warehouses full of collectables from another century, another age, as it then seemed. In his memory and that of her husband and her sons she endowed a museum in this grey northern mill town and gave us all as a gift for posterity. It took some years to build the hall but what a hall it was, spacious and airy! I was a bit risqu^Â for the times so was not given pride of place. I was prominent in a side room and well lit and I was happy as I was once again adored - and this time in wider view. All social classes came to see us all; and for me, and soon, there came the men and the young men and the boys in ones and twos and groups. I could always tell them from the ordinary folk who wandered in and out. There was something about the eyes and the looks they gave me. And, of course, the looks they gave one another. Many a couple met for the first time beneath my gaze and then came back later to ask my blessing on them. I saw it all as I had seen it before, the couples, the singles, the couples growing up, the younger boys becoming men and then bringing other boys to be blest awhile as they loved and grew and learnt then, in their turn, taught. Although I would have wagered if I could that the teaching held much of learning too. The Great Depression came and went and I saw poverty such as I hadn't seen since Italy 400 years and more before. The old woman, as she was now, who had donated us all and had the hall built insisted that the museum remain free to all so in the bitter northern winters of those years many folks came in just for the warmth. It was passing strange, or not perhaps, that the ones who came and sat on the benches in the side room where I was were mostly young and male. The same eye contact went on, the same furtive glances, the same walking out in pairs, the same coming back to ask for blessings, which I still freely gave. The pitiful, pitiless decade dragged on in all its misery and then culminated in another bout of tragedy and destruction. We faced no bombings where I am but I saw the headlines and heard the discussions. And I had many men and boys come to see me before they went away to fight a greater evil than their fathers had fought. So many never returned. So many that returned were changed so much, so many hurt, so many lives destroyed. But even in the war still they came, still they looked on me and on one another and loved. Boys came, men in uniform came, old men came too and wept to see me there. Peace came eventually and time passed on, the austere years after the war gave way to the celebrations and prosperity of the 60s and beyond as yet another bubble burst. All the time I stood there patiently and watched them come and go and grow, my boys. Decade upon decade of joy as I watched them come and go and grow. Then one day, not long ago, he arrived. The Boy. I saw him through the door when he was still two rooms away and knew him immediately. How could I not when he was me, when I was him? He came on quietly with his mother, or so I rightly guessed. He spotted me then and left his mother and came and gazed at me. I loved him instantly and knew he loved me too. He was not quite the boy of five hundred years before, the colours of his hair and eyes were different but the features were the same. We gazed at one another and I knew he sensed I was more than just some lump of marble. His mother came in the room then and saw me and stopped short in amazement. She got him to stand beside me and looked at us together - my plinth made me taller but in reality I was only a little bigger than he was, and he, of course, would grow. Before he left he stroked my toe and a shock went through us both. I know because he turned and stared at me then grinned. That next weekend he was back with both his parents and a younger brother. It was busier then than it had been in the week but still the embarrassed Boy was made to stand beside me so that his father could see the resemblance. He was as amazed as the mother had been, the younger brother too. As they talked about it other people came and went and commented. The Boy was so embarrassed and stretched his hand again on to my toe, and again we connected and he looked up at me and we shared the secret moment unbeknown to all the others. I learnt from the conversation that he was ten years then - an age I thought from my experience quite ready for love. He came every day after that - he came and stared at me and rubbed my toe and pondered things with me standing quietly by. With the openness of youth he talked to me too, if there was no-one else in the room. He told me of his happiness to find me, he told me I was beautiful and then because we were twins he must be beautiful too. He told me too that he knew I understood, that he knew I was more than mere marble. No-one had ever told me that before but he would have to know because we were twins as he had said. In him I truly saw how beautiful I am - his was not just a physical beauty as my poor beauty is, he had a truly beautiful soul. I loved him immensely. He visited alone every day for a year except when the museum was closed or the family was away. He was a faithful attendant as he grew in beauty before my eyes. Soon he moved schools and would be just down the road, he was excited and told me it would be easier then to visit. He even came before the school year started in his new uniform with the pressed grey shorts and smart burgundy blazer. He looked so pure, so innocent, so lovable. After the first day of term he came running in to tell me all about it, about how exciting it was and how very frightening. How he was going to have to work hard and about how strict the teachers seemed to be. Within a week he had settled down again and was revelling in the extra work as it stretched his intellect. By the end of the second week he came to tell me that the next week he would see me in school time as well - the art class were coming on a visit and I could see his wonderful art master, new to the school this term! The next week I recognized the teacher instantly amongst the flurry of boys, one of my boys from ten years before returned now to teach another generation. He was careful not to single me out too much. I understood, I knew too well from twenty and more generations of boys how prurient they can be. They spotted me though and the likeness with The Boy. He was teased a bit but there was no malice there, they knew he was beautiful too. He rubbed my toe before he left and the teacher did too. They noticed one another do it and smiled together then glanced at me and smiled again in unison. Or better still, in perfect harmony. When he came to see me after school that day all he spoke of was the teacher; the wonderful, frightening art teacher and the feelings he got when looking at him. He had hardly left when the teacher came in and rubbed my toe and gazed at me long and hard. I remembered then the man the teacher knew ten years before, another teacher too. It continued for some days and I knew the teacher waited outside for The Boy to leave before he came in and looked at me and asked the silent question, should he? How I wished I could answer and tell him yes, tell him that the gift that had been given to him when he was 11 years old had no value unless he passed it on. One day The Boy sat and looked long and hard at me from a bench across the room then came and rubbed my toe and left, leaving his bag behind as he walked deep in thought away and thus it was that when he returned in madcap boyish dash to collect it the teacher was rubbing my toe and gazing up at me. Their eyes met and The Boy stretched out his hand to rub my toe too and their hands touched upon my foot and the shock went through us all. The teacher looked up at me and smiled and said a silent thanks and looked into The Boy's eyes and they melted together in my eyes, not physically in such a space but I knew then they were destined to be one. A flurry of activity in the next few days as I was suddenly to be moved. For three quarters of a century I had stayed in the same room and now I was to be more prominent, I was to stand outside in the portico of the building. It was not very convenient for The Boy and his teacher but they managed to see me still in all the chaos except for the closed few days when the exhibits were moved around. Autumn was moving on by now, of course. Not that the cooler days bothered me at all but it was not so warm for my visitors, not just my twin and his man but the others who came too. But because I was outside I gained a larger public as those who would not go in a museum saw me as they passed. The Boy still visited every day, the teacher visited often but they only visited together twice a week or so. Their visits were the highpoint of my existence, we had such a bond, such a deep connection. As the days grew shorter and dark came earlier they risked a little intimacy upon the benches around the portico. Just a holding of hands or sometimes a chaste kiss in the shadows. I know they progressed beyond this because The Boy told me so before Christmas but I knew no details, it was not my business to know. His eyes changed then, the sparkle of the loved boy burned brightly in them. I know The Boy spent an evening a week having extra tuition in art at his teacher's home - I hoped and trusted the arts he learnt were those of gentle loving. Shortly after Christmas The Boy was ill. He came still in the afternoons but did not stop for long. He said it was "just a silly cold" and would go away but it lingered long, too long. The teacher came to me too and told me of it in whispers to himself about how worried he was. One day The Boy did not come, neither did the teacher. Neither of them for a week. I was distraught. I still gave blessings to my other boys and men but my heart was with The Boy and His Man. My cold stone heart was heavy with grim foreboding. Then one evening, long after the gates were locked the teacher came alone. His clothing was dishevelled from climbing the railings to get to me. He came and rubbed my toe and told me that The Boy had a terrible disease - I who know naught of sickness or bodily ills could barely comprehend the terms he used but I knew the implication. He was talking directly to me now, he knew I would understand. Each night then he would go to the hospital, with the parents blessing, and spend some time with The Boy and often come straight to me to tell me of his hopes and fears and love. He never brought good news, not once. On the first real warm day of Spring, as the crocuses poked through and brought some colour to a drab world they came together. The Boy was in a wheelchair and shrouded in blankets. He looked so tiny and so frail within his woollen cocoon. His Man pushed the chair and the parents and the brother came too. They all sat and looked at me and cried. The Boy cried the least, he mostly stared at me and held his mother's hand and his lover's too. The mother said "We'll leave the two of you together for a while, but don't get cold!" and the others left and went back to their car. Unspoken words, unheard, unshared, unutterable thoughts - the Man pushed The Boy forward up to me and they each together rubbed my toe as I looked down at them with unshed stony tears. They stayed awhile, I would have kept them with me forever, but The Boy began to shiver so he raised tear filled eyes to me to say goodbye. He could not reach further so leant forward and kissed my well-rubbed toe and let his lover push him away from me, back to the waiting car and the waiting hospice bed. The man, the teacher, the lover still visited nightly. He came to me for comfort but what comfort could I give? I am a statue, a thing of stone. Old stone, weathered stone. How can I hug and love and comfort? He told me of the progress of the disease, of the loss of weight and loss of appetite and loss of will to live. He told me of the understanding parents who knew the lover was a good man who loved and would never hurt their son. He told me later when the end was nigh. The moment I saw him coming down the pathway under the lights I knew from his walk it was all over. The Boy had died. He came to me and held my toe as he always did and gazed up at me a moment with tear filled eyes then falling to his knees he put his forearms crossed upon my plinth he rested his head upon them and he wept. He did not say the words, there was no need. My cold stone eyes wept too even though the tears were invisible. He wept as I had seen other lovers weep before over the centuries. He wept for grief and loss and emptiness. As he wept I sorrowed for him and his lost love, I sorrowed that one so beautiful should be gone, vanity perhaps as he was my twin in looks but beautiful he surely was and I missed him too. And then I felt him with me. The Boy was there before me in another form but recognisably himself. He shone is his transparency. He was more beautiful than ever - his beauty had been completed by the transformation. There was another with him, an angelic figure, shining and transparent too with a look of vast compassion in his eyes. Wordlessly the transformed Boy told me that he owed me so much, that he had to come and say goodbye to me, and to him, to his dear and grieving lover, teacher, friend. Wordlessly The Boy asked "May I?" I knew in sudden, wonderful, terrible fear what he meant. Wonderingly and wordlessly I whispered, "Of course." I felt him enter into me and as he did so my cold stone turned to warm flesh. I looked at the angel for permission and he nodded and smiled, then spread his wings; not to fly, for he didn't need them for that, but rather to shield us all from prying eyes. The Boy and I stepped down as one and knelt and took the man's head and held it and kissed it. He unbelieving looked up at me, at us, and kissed back with an enormous fervour. I was awestruck by the feelings, emotions, passions welling through me and to me and in me. Through me The Boy whispered to him, "Just for tonight, my love, to say thank you and to say goodbye. I must leave before first light." "You, thank me? For what?" "For my purity and innocence." "But . ., but . ." "No, my love, no buts. You taught me love is innocent and expressing it is pure. No innocence was lost in what we did, it was regained. And then tonight, you knew my time had come. You kissed me on my brow and let me go and blessed me on my way." I will not, cannot tell the tale of what we did that night. The tenderness and desperation of those wonderful, glorious acts. The taste of kisses and flesh and fluids. The miracle, the ecstasy of touch. The tenderness of fleshly lips on fleshly lips. The sensitivity of my old new flesh to touch and to caress! I know the man knew peace at the last and that he knew that he would be loved in all eternity. I knew I would be too. Just to be a part of this was a blessing in and of itself. I, who once had a cardinal's blessing, knew now how stone could indeed be blest. As the sky began to lighten in the east we all knew our time was nigh. The angel looking over us bid me step back and take my pose again. As one newborn, but with a little regret, I leapt on to my podium and took my pose with possibly a slightly larger smile than I had before. As I struck my pose the spirit of The Boy parted from me, kissed me on the lips and whispered his thanks as I returned contentedly to stone. The Boy and the angel vanished, the man stood and rubbed my toe then bent down and kissed it gently before turning and walking home. And on my inner left thigh I bear a slight and lighter stain upon the marble as though some of his precious essence had dribbled down to mark me forever his, forever loved. If I stand here another thousand lifetimes I shall not forget that night - indeed an eternity would be too short to remember and rejoice in such a glorious moment. The entire story is copyrighted (c) to malaka/mr_malaprop 2003 - HCFU