Bert Ormsby
Swapping with laura
CHAPTER ONE
Laura Saunders gazed out the large picture window of her new home in Park Palisades, California, watching the sizable breakers sweeping in off the sea to thrust themselves in a flash of frothy white spray against the gigantic rock formations that ran the entire length of the coast as far as the eye could see. In this section of California, with its starkly emergent coastline, the young wife had the constant feeling that the sea meant to destroy the land. Lord knew it tried hard enough. Every other day there was a report of some additional section of Highway 101 sliding into the ocean and being devoured in the water's bottomless depths.
Did this mean necessarily that everyone then promptly moved further inland in fear. No, of course not, she thought. People around here simply waited for their own house to go – occasionally with them in it. You just weren't anybody in California if your home wasn't occasionally washed into the sea or destroyed in a roaring forest fire. But they always came back, to build again, didn't they? Like lemmings moving resolutely toward destruction, in the exact same area. It was so beautiful here, though, with the sloping hills before windy, wave-broken, steep-cliffed terraces. So beautiful.
Laura sighed. She pushed her fingers into her long blonde hair and threw her head back and to one side as if to smooth out the waves of shimmering gold which ran all the way down her back to the sensual up-curve of her nicely rounded buttocks. In the Quaker home where Laura had been brought up, it was considered a rather serious moral offense for a girl to cut her hair. And consequently hers was as long as a young school girl's.
She smoothed her hands voluptuously over the flare of her well-rounded hips and thought about her new life in this community. Ever since she and her husband had come to Park Palisades there had been one distraction after another, what with Ralph setting up his new practice as one of the town's few physicians, and now being called out suddenly time after time. One's life really wasn't one's own, was it, although Ralph was certainly making good money and had had no difficulty acquiring this fine house for them right on the coast and not far from the forested glades of Big Sur. This stretch of highway from Monterey to San Luis Obispo must certainly be one of the most eye-pleasing areas in the world.
But somehow that wasn't quite enough.
Laura watched the white gulls circle among the rocks of the emerging coastline, and wondered why she felt so uneasy in such a beautiful setting. The stone seemed to be flowing – the sea, motionless. Where they met they locked in a pause more dynamic than motion. Beyond the white froth the surface of the ocean was an endless sheet of rippling glass. The rocks beyond its measured destructive force were like laws of nature – dark, jagged and forbidding. It was wonderful to be able to view nature like this, safe and warm within one's own cocoon – and yet what was missing?
When she watched the sea like this the often felt as if its adventure was being communicated to her in some ethereal way. She could feel it directly in her loins, up inside her full, highest breasts. Laura had been too well brought up to think of this as sensuality, but she did admit to herself that there was a feeling of excitement running in her blood when she watched the waves breaking like this. She couldn't explain it. It seemed merely as if these two vital life forces colliding together – stone and water – produced some sort of vibration inside her hypersensitive young flesh.
Laura turned away from the window. It wasn't good to submit oneself to too much of that, she thought. There were feelings building within her young body which could only be described as licentious, and she blushed as she considered the implications of her thoughts.
If she had smoked, she would have lit a cigarette. But her strict puritan father stayed her hand there, too. Illicit sex, cursing, cigarettes, coffee, liquor – they were all the work of the devil, he'd said it so often that Laura really felt she believed it. The fact that so many people succumbed to these vices only served to prove the hold that the Fallen One had on the people of the world.
"He walks among us," her father used to say, in any number of his many sermons, intoning sonorously through his bushy dark beard flecked with grey. "He walks among us and he takes our pulse, listens to our heartbeats. He is the Evil One who has fallen."