They start slowly, romantically, this time, as though the three of them are fitting together, following something innate and inborn rather than dictating their private needs and wants to one another. The spicy smell from the pillow fills the room, fills them all with a floating lightness as it blends into the walls and furniture and turns everything into sunlit forest, soft and cool and green. Then a luminous mist with hints of green and gold in its depths is swirling languidly around them as they make love in the long green grass with the tiny red and yellow wildflowers all around… as they rise up together in the glowing air on their long, golden-tipped, ivory-feathered wings, beating their way gently and without haste ever higher, until at last the world is lost entirely beneath them and they swoop and turn with ever greater rapidity and grace, falling and floating, all three intertwined now, through infinite golden clouds, St. Jacques’s double phallus jade and ruby, twin coiling serpents of light, there deep in both girls simultaneously as they all three cling to one another, not moving, not needing to move anymore, spinning and turning through the cool foggy luminescence of infinite space, the skies beyond the sky, and St. Jacques knows that this is what the phallus in his dreams had always masked and revealed, this ultimate unmoving union, this joyous fusion of flesh and sky.
“I told you that it was just a venal sin, and he’d come to his senses soon,” he hears Terri say to June in a voice that is as much his wife Veronica’s as it is Terri’s, as much Terri’s as it is Veronica’s.
“Angels always do. I owe both of you an apology,” he hears June say in a voice choked with laughter, a voice as much Mother Isobel’s as it is June’s, as much June’s as it is Mother Isobel’s.
“On the contrary,” St. Jacques says, “I’m the one who has to apologize. I’m delighted that Veronica brought you along and gave me the opportunity to make amends.” They all burst out laughing and fall intertwined into the sky.
St. Jacques realizes suddenly that on awakening he will remember only the phallus, the multiple penetrations and spasming releases, that the unity and love and the way they’re all five melting through one another into the infinite sky will be as beyond his own conscious mind’s ability to accept as his earlier, purely sexual fantasies had been beyond Mother Isobel’s comprehension.
The alarm clock goes off and he just has enough time to remind them all—June and Terri and Veronica and Mother Isobel and himself—to forget what’s happened as soon as they awaken. They agree, and then all of them fall laughing out of the sky into their separate selves.
Veronica and St. Jacques wake up beside each other. They stare at each other, wide awake, more refreshed than either can remember having been in years. Neither remembers any of what passed between them in the early morning, when Veronica’s symbiote had finally reached the critical point in its interaction with her nervous system and begun affecting her dreams in the same way her husband’s had been affecting his—a change that had been delayed several days in her case, because she’d eaten so much less of the moldy toast than her husband had that the mold which had taken up residence in her had needed that much longer to multiply to a point where it could affect her.
They smile at each other, feeling a rare mutual sympathy and tenderness and rather surprised by it, unaware that anything has really changed. They then separate to live their separate days, St. Jacques to worry about improving his teaching methods and fantasize endless daisy chains and orgasms, though perhaps a little less obsessively than before; Veronica to work with her geology students and swim team while she daydreams about astral projection and the wonders of heaven.
It took them almost a year to realize and accept what they’d come to mean to each other, decades more to begin to fully integrate their sleeping and waking lives. Sometime during that first year they began making love to each other in the flesh again, and eventually two children were born to their union. And in those two children and their many, many descendants, the blue-green mold lived happily ever after.
