This story was told to me by another traveller, just passing
through. It took place in a foreign country, as everything
does.

When he was young he and another boy constructed a woman
out of mud. She bagan at the neck and ended at the
knees and elbows: they stuck to the essentials. Every sunny
day they would row across to the island where she lived, in
the afternoon when the sun had warmed her, and make love
to her, sinking with ecstacy into her soft moist belly, her
brown wormy flesh where small weeds had already rooted.
They would take turns, they were not jealous, she preferred
them both. Afterwards they would repair her, making her
hips more spacious, enlarging her breasts with their shining
stone nipples.

His love for her was perfect, he could say anything to her,
into her he spilled his entire life. She was swept away in a
sudden flood. He said no woman since then has equalled her.

Is that what you would like me to be, this mud woman? Is
this what I would like to be? It would be so simple.
 
 

Magaret Atwood