The Pear by Konstantin Antioukhin, 2010,She opened her thighs. Vera reached, gently, with careful, f

The Pear by Konstantin Antioukhin, 2010,

She opened her thighs. Vera reached, gently, with careful, ferocious hands, pulled wide her own thighs. The bees moved. It was love, it was pure love, her body beginning to move, again, unable to stop and yet no longer urgent, the hiving bees arriving home, the whole nectar of her world-old virgin body poured into their instinct to begin again.

The men, below her, downriver in the valley, in the town: they heard the surrendered call. Years later, they would claim to have smelled the moment too: the crocus and cold earth smell, the smell of spring earth, breaking alive. Vera, moving, not able not to move, crushing the silken stems of the crocus bed, breaking the petals back from their pollen-yellow tongues. They heard the outcry of her painful joy, those men, the extremest coming; they heard, each of them, and they knew. Not knowing her name, or where she was, or what had touched her into that fierce and passionate and desperate ululation: they knew no man would satisfy her. Not one. No mortal man would satisfy her.

- From What the Crow Said by Robert Kroetsch.