The Furrow of the Beast (novel)

.

.

The Furrow of the Beast

The Grands-Chênes farm, isolated in the heart of a valley in the Creuse, seemed that day to be consuming itself under a leaden sun that transformed the wheat fields into a sea of sulfur. Marguerite, thirty-five years old, adjusted the collar of her linen blouse, feeling a bead of sweat crawl slowly between her breasts. Married for ten years to Henri—a hardworking man whose passion had withered to the rhythm of seasons and balance sheets—she lived in a state of sensory lethargy. Her life was a sequence of immutable gestures: the milking, the cheese-making, the accounts, and the silent nights where her husband's only presence was the regular rhythm of his heavy breathing.

But this summer, the balance had tipped. Henri had hired Jonas to help in the stables and with the heavy labor. Jonas was a man of few words, a brute force whose physical presence seemed to suck the oxygen out of every room he entered. Marguerite had first observed him from afar, fascinated by the power of his shoulders and the suppleness of his gait—that of a quiet predator accustomed to taming the earth.

That afternoon, as the heat made the air unbreathable, Marguerite headed toward the large stone stable to check the fodder stocks. The relative darkness of the building offered an illusory respite. She stopped dead at the entrance, her breath catching. At the back of the central aisle, where the freshly spread straw cast golden reflections, Jonas was working.

He was entirely naked.

In this isolated farm, far from any prying eyes, he had abandoned his clothes to fight the furnace of the stable. He was mucking out the stalls with the regularity of a metronome, his bronze muscles rolling under skin covered with a fine film of sweat and dust. Marguerite, hidden behind a pile of bales, felt her heart beating against her ribs like a captive bird. She had never seen anything like it. Jonas was not simply muscular; he possessed an animality that transcended the human.

Suddenly, Jonas stopped and turned slightly. He hadn't seen her, but he seemed to react to an internal impulse, or perhaps to the muggy heat of the afternoon. Marguerite nearly fainted at the sight of his sex. In a state of full erection, it was of a truly monstrous disproportion—a column of dark flesh, veined and throbbing, that seemed to defy the laws of anatomy. It was a vision of raw power, evoking the vigor of a draft stallion, the attribute of a pagan god risen from the depths of the earth.

The head of the member was wide, crowned with a ridge of purple flesh, and the total length of the organ seemed capable of cleaving the soul as much as the body. Marguerite felt a damp burning invade her intimacy. The contrast between her tidy life and this promise of carnal destruction was unbearable. She already imagined this mass of flesh sinking into her, filling every void, every lack, every year of solitude.

Jonas resumed his work, each movement of his hips causing his colossal member to swing with a provocative heaviness. Marguerite could no longer tear her eyes away from the spectacle. Her mind, usually so well-behaved, began to drift into forbidden territories. She imagined herself entering the stable, no longer as the mistress, but as a beast of burden. She saw herself kneeling in the straw, hands sinking into the humus and dry droppings, offering her rump to this colossal laborer.

"You shouldn't stay here, Marguerite. The smell of the beasts goes to one's head."

Jonas's voice, low and raspy like a roll of thunder, made her start. He had stopped and was now staring at her with his stormy eyes. He made no move to cover himself. He displayed his nudity and his erection with a sovereign indifference, conscious of the effect he produced.

"Jonas..." she stammered. "I... I didn't mean to..."

"You wanted to see," he interrupted, approaching her, his sex swinging heavily against his thighs with every step. "You wanted to know if there was still life left in this farm."

He stopped a few inches from her. The scent of the man—a heady blend of sweat, leather, and raw virility—dizzied her. She lowered her eyes and saw the tip of his member, just inches from her belly, seemingly pulsating with its own life.

"Get on your knees, Marguerite," he ordered without raising his voice. "Like one of your cows. Show me that you understand."

Submitting to this natural authority, Marguerite felt her legs give way. She let herself slide to the floor, into the crackling straw. She got on all fours, head low, buttocks raised, in the position of absolute offering. Her linen blouse rode up, revealing the whiteness of her skin against the ochre of the litter.

"Yes," he whispered, "this is your place. The place of the female waiting for the male."

He stepped behind her. Marguerite felt the searing contact of his erection against her perineum. It was like a white-hot iron bar. She imagined the sensation of this excess penetrating her entrails, tearing her apart to better rebuild her. She saw herself as an arid land finally receiving the plowshare, a deep furrow that would mark her flesh forever.

"Can you feel how big it is?" he asked, seizing her hips with his calloused hands. "Can you feel how it demands your blood and your breath?"

He did not penetrate her immediately. He played with her, rubbing the head of his member against the opening of her femininity, flooding her with his own desire. Marguerite moaned, her head buried in the straw, her fingers clawing the ground. She wanted to be possessed by this beast; she wanted this stallion-penis to strike the bottom of her womb, to nail her to the land of her ancestors.

In her fantasy, Jonas took her with a sacred violence, each thrust an earthquake that shook the foundations of the stable. She saw herself screaming with mingled pleasure and pain, accepting this disproportion as a penance for her years of boredom. The rhythm of the embrace would be that of a war machine, an incessant pounding where flesh would be nothing more than malleable matter under the weight of the beast.

"Look at me, Marguerite!"

She turned her head and saw Jonas, his face distorted by a savage concentration, the muscles of his torso bulging under the imaginary effort. He was the god of the fields, the universal progenitor, and she was but his vessel.

"You are mine, Marguerite. Your husband owns the land, but I own your flesh. I am going to fill you until you forget your own name."

He placed his hand on the nape of her neck, pinning her to the ground. Marguerite closed her eyes, feeling the tip of his sex force the entry, one inch after another, a slow and irresistible invasion. The sensation of fullness was beyond anything she had ever known. It was an absolute, an organic completeness. She was finally "full," inhabited by a force that surpassed her.

The eroticism of the scene lay in this disproportion, in this will to fuse the human and the animal in a cry of deliverance. Marguerite was no longer the respected farmwoman; she was the beast in heat under the French sun, waiting for the superior beast to come and complete its work.

Suddenly, the cry of a raptor outside broke the spell. Jonas stepped back, his member still erect, but his gaze had grown distant. Marguerite remained prostrate in the straw for a moment, her body still vibrating with the echoes of her unleashed fantasy.

"Go now, Marguerite," Jonas said in a muffled voice. "The boss will be coming back."

She stood up, staggering, readjusting her clothes with feverish hands. She left the stable without a word, her heart pounding, the sensation of that monstrous erection still imprinted on her mind. She knew she would never look at Jonas, or her husband, the same way again. She had glimpsed the truth of the mass, the power of the furrow that one carves deep within oneself.

Walking toward the house, under the sun that was beginning to set, Marguerite smiled. She carried within her a burning secret, an image of excess and animality that would henceforth be her unique refuge against the tepidity of the days. Jonas would remain the naked laborer of the stables, the possessor of her carnal soul, the man whose sex was a promise of eternity engraved in the stone and the flesh of the Grands-Chênes farm.

.