the sydney fishmarkets and tantric sex
The Sydney Fishmarkets on Saturday. Crowds of visitors, mostly Asian. So noisy. The stink of seafood waste almost generates its own heat. Flies thunder around in dark squadrons and a million silver gulls brawl for the food tossed to them from the restaurant tables. Rats on the wing.
Inside the main building there is so much food. Every fish known to man, great piles of crabs, bugs, lobsters, oysters, prawns, octopi, squid – everyone shouting, nobody listening, everybody hungry.
Twenty tables of chinese are all eating lobsters, if every sound bar their chewing was turned off we would hear surf.
– and amongst this industry and bustle a man and his wife stand together in the main concourse, she is holding the back of her neck. Not an unattractive neck, slender and alabaster coloured, faintly perfumed. Small and intimate curls of hair are visible beneath her long auburn tresses.
She is telling him something, urgently, and he moves around behind her and runs his hands through her hair, gently. Almost a caress. He exposes her flesh there.
A couple of passers-by stop to watch. Street theatre ?
Voyeurs all, they gather and stare.
He whispers in her ear.
Perhaps Australians like their foreplay in public because surely this is an intimacy. Geoffrey Chen from Malaysia nudges his new wife, he knows Australians well. Geoffrey has spent five years working as an assistant accountant for an IT company in North Sydney. His wife though has a high country modesty ingrained in her and Chenno (as he was known) wishes to change that. He remembers the high-rise brothels and the camaraderie of corporate shenanigans.
~
Meanwhile
The man draws closer to his companion and with a thumb and forefinger he buries a deep pinch into the back of her compliant neck. She shivers and places her hands over her breasts, she almost yelps. Then she opens her mouth wide in unrestrained relief – or ecstasy.
A small and silent crowd has developed around them now and some of the men are smiling, children are being pushed back behind their mothers’ skirts. Geoffrey is agog. Surely Australians have not discovered Neo- Tantric sex so early.
Now the man gently turns the woman around so that she faces him, and he places the pinched matter into his other hand, his open palm, the source of her pleasure, and she shivers again with physical release. Her eyes close, somebody applauds and is instantly hushed.
Then in an intense symbolic gesture, he drops the seed of lust onto the floor of the fishmarket, and stamps it down hard with his foot. Surely here is a denunciation of the common embodiment that infers physical intercourse is the only source of sexual pleasure.
Hundreds have gathered now, the fish stalls are silent, all commerce has ceased – and the man and woman stand isolated in the midst of this great crowd as they gaze down at the filth on the floor, and the crushed remains of an Avalon shellback.
Note: The shellback tick – the paralysis tick – known to favour necks and knees. Endemic to the northern beaches. Can be removed by a swift tug of thumb and forefinger.
petebowes.com 
Fish markets, sex and insects…. artfully woven Pete.
Amazing you find the time to entertain us while the surf is pumping, thank you.
As for us, plenty of time to read as Huey has ignored our sheltered edge of the pond.
Ok, I stand corrected, that’s all I can think to say. Is I stand corrected, Ok! I read it to fast cause I was a little bit drunk, my brain, the size of a planet, minor planet, in the outer. One out of the blue.
Every now and then Shank old pony, you write gold.
Thankyou mate.