The Undies of an Undine

The Undies of an Undine

One night, he was lying amongst the tulips, listening to the relative quiet, the lapping of the lake and the reeds.   

Then the quiet was suddenly broken by a loud piercing scream.   A long, high-pitched scream that hurt his ears and made his hair stand on end.

A dying man?  No, this was a woman’s scream.  The Moon Maiden?

He went to look.  But she was nowhere.  There was nothing.  All one could hear now was the lapping sound of the lake.    

There were tracks.   Cat tracks, puma tracks, and horse hooves, but then they dissapeared...

Tomek strolls around the pond, looking.   Something caught his eye, in the dark.   Something white, in the bushes, in the reeds.    

There are few finds more lovely than finding a pair of woman’s panties in the bush, crumpled on the ground, rising with the magic and smell of woman.   Her panties lay in a wad there between the reeds, an almost luminescent white beacon amongst the brown.   A wrinkled fabric of two white loops, like a figure ‘8’. 

He stood over them, staring a moment.      

☼                ☼                 ☼

He picked them up.    They were white, but discolored from use.    They were of a thin, worn, cotton, with frayed lace around the edges.   She had hand-painted a couple of small lilac and pink flowerettes on them.  He was sure they were the moon-maiden’s, she had left them here the night he saw her disrobe and bathe. 

He turns them inside out.    They were definitely ‘used’, their crotch crusty, full of her cream-colored, love-honey remnants.   Filaments.   The island people call these the ‘fingerprint of a woman’s soul’, and use it for divining ones future.  Like divining tea leaves.   For no two women ever leave the same markings in their panties.    

Tomek brought the panties to his nose, to sniff, and the intense, rich smells that met him there brought up his man-root, making him stagger.    There was a depth to the scents that could not be described, that went to the backroads of his mind; to the root of time.    It is woman.

He sniffed them again and again, taking deep whiffs, entranced by the mystery of woman.  

Sniffing a lass's panties is a noble act of chiv·al·ry.   For there is her ‘heart’, — there a man can ‘read’ her, there is her smell of love.    The panties are a perfumed handkerchief that she has left for him; —  it is her ‘signature piece’.   The perfume of her soul.

A small, corkscrew, ‘twist of hair’ lay in them, — a remnant of the maiden’s love basket.   Tomek took it out to save, and savour.  

He thought about this ‘twist of fate’, of finding the undies of an undine.  (Undines, you may remember, are the water nymphs of ancient legends.)  Even if he’d never seen its owner, he’d desire her, love her, want her, from just these threads.  For her magical scent.   It is the perfume that leads a man to a woman’s door.   He would use them to guide him to her.   He took another whiff.   

He could almost smell her voice, her song, in there.

☼                ☼                 ☼

Tomek did not hear her again in the next days.   He wandered around the lake, looking for her, the moon maiden.   Listening to the myriad other sounds of the lake. And sniffing her panties.  

Lay along the lake shores, thinking of his life.   

Then decided she’d left, and he packed his bags and left too.