Massage

      She was fat and not that pretty kind of fat, you know, that kind of fat, smooth skinned curvaceous type, that giggly, pretty fat girl, that wasn’t Maureen.  She had a crop of short red hair and a powerful build, Scottish stock.  She didn’t put up any airs, she was loud.  I say loud but maybe she just seemed loud the way an older confident, larger woman can seem loud.  When I met her at the farmers market, when I had that horrible stiff neck, she was wearing a loose fitting black dress, with a purple scarf, a shawl,  made somewhere in India. Four big silver hoops dangled on her ears and clinked like wind chimes.
I walked rather skeptically up to her booth, “Maureen’s Body Work.”  There was this sort of whale music playing, that kind of new-age meditation music.  I explained to her my problem, my neck, the popping noise that it had made when I tried to bench-press too much weight, how for the last two days I hadn’t been able to turn my head from side to side, the loss of mobility.
“Hop in the seat pumpkin,” she told me, “ I’ll check you out in a second.”
I was willing to try anything, having a pain in the neck is, after all, a pain in the neck.  I sat in the massage chair and rested my head face down on one of those special made head-donuts, exposing my neck and waiting for her diagnosis.  As I sat, my head buried, I heard Maureen talking to a passer-by in in Spanish.  ‘Huh,’ I thought, I didn’t expect that woman to know Spanish.
She came close, and I heard a plastic bottle squirt it’s contents into her hands.  The smell of patchouli oil or something very similar found my nose.  I rolled my hidden eyes.  Then I felt her oily hands on my neck.  She wasn’t playing around.  Her hands instantly found tight knots high up on my neck.  That place that almost never gets attention where the very end of your spine connects to your head.
“You men, you macho men, lift weights like gorillas.”
I didn’t reply, I couldn’t, the sweet pain of her strong, knowing hands kept me quite.
“Women, they know when they’re overdoing it, you need to breath when you work out.  Does that hurt honey, Is it too much?”
“No, esta bien,” I said, showing off my own Spanish.
“Oh you speak Spanish! That’s good,” she said her hands were kneading me, caressing me, curing me.
“Spanish is my love making language,” she said.  She reached down gave my butt a push, it tickled. I jumped a little.
“You see you are sensitive down there.”  She continued on my neck with small karate chops.
“We are taught in the west that sex is dirty.  That makes certain areas on our bodies sensitive”
“Ahh mi amorcita me cojes el mejor que he estado cojida.”  She said in dirty Spanish, it basically means, “ahh my little lover you fuck me the best I have ever been fucked.”
“You, see how sweet that sounds in Spanish?  Oh baby fuck me!"  She said and gave a couple of gorilla grunts.  “Now that just sounds horrible.  But you know that don’t you honey?”
She told me to sit up, I did.
“Try to move you head now Hun.”
I did, and I looked to the left and to the right without any pain.