– A Horny Short –

The moment I stepped out of the car and my foot felt the loose gravel that was scattered over the parking lot, I grew excited.  It could have been the crisp day, the bright yellow leaves dotting the path like autumnal confetti.  Maybe it was the feel of the slightly-too-big Pumas that I had just bought from a nameless hot guy on Poshmark.  Nope.  I knew the flutter in my stomach really came from the expanse of empty macadam surrounding me, telling me that my time ahead would be gloriously uninterrupted by bikers, power-walkers, and loudly chattering joggers.  

I smashed the button on my key fob and inhaled the smell of vulcanized rubber that greeted me as the car’s hatch popped up, the hydraulic arms whispering their little glissandos.  “Hello, friends,” I murmured to them as I lovingly ran my fingers over the pair of black Hunters.  Powdery bloom had gathered on their shafts since the last use.  Nothing a good christening wouldn’t fix.

The rubber folds squeaked with anticipation as I clasped the pair together and slammed the trunk.  Perching on the back bumper, I held my phone aloft and smiled at the screen as I took a picture of the pair of dull boots nestled between my spotless Pumas, a few coppery maple leaves scattering the paved background.  Positively Instragram-worthy.  I felt the familiar electric thrill as I kicked the sneakers off, felt the October air whisper through my socks, and folded the hems of my jeans over each ankle before sliding my feet into the boots, soft and cool.

As I moved quietly down the abandoned trail, leaving behind the openness of the parking lot and letting the trees envelop me, I thought about how this had all started.  I had been nine years old–maybe ten.  It had been another boring rainy Saturday at grandma’s house, and since the grownups had claimed kitchen for their conversation, the kids had been relegated to the “other room,” the living room, which sat in relative darkness to the warm invitation of the kitchen table.  As such, we had been granted the rare privilege of exploring grandma’s scant collection of television channels and–after the obligatory sibling rivalry–had settled on an “I Survived” kind of docuseries.  

I vividly remembered a specific episode that centered on a mudslide.  Dramatic re-enactments had interspersed the survivor interviews, and in one particular montage, the screen was filled with a close-up of a man slopping his way through deep, pudding-like mud in rubber boots.  I could remember wishing that I could stop the footage and rewind it like we could our VHS cassettes.  Something about the way the boots curved over his legs and feet was pleasing to me.  When they cut through the gelatinous mud, I had felt the most peculiar stirring sensation–like an itch that you chased around but couldn’t quite scratch in the right place.

If that had been a seed planted in my youthful mind, it received a good dose of fertilizer a few months later, when on another afternoon when I had joined dad to visit grandpa in his basement workshop.  It was a place I rarely saw as it was only accessible by ladder through a hatch in the laundry room floor, and I was considered too little to be trusted near grandpa’s woodcarving gadgetry.  “There’s a lot of very important stuff down there,” grandma would always say dismissively, using an impatient tone she seemed to only reserve for the male grandchildren.  And so on this day, I was thrilled to explore the contents of the low-ceilinged room as grandpa droned on to dad about chisels and dust extraction systems.  It was in a dark corner of the basement, outside of the harsh cast of the fluorescent work lights, where the wood lapped walls stopped and stretches of dirty, loose rock began that I found them.  

Suspended from a ceiling beam near a lone light bulb were grandpa’s brown fishing waders, like a pair of legs that had fallen through the floor above.  I remember running my hands over them, lifting them and noticing the sponges that were attached to the soles.  What were they even for?  Traction?  Shock absorption? I still don’t know.  But the thought of them squeezing through water and mud had been exciting in a way I had never experienced before.  I had my first erection in that musty corner of the basement.

At this point, I veered from the path and shuffled down a slope covered in freshly fallen leaves, headed for a place where I knew the stream that meandered by the trail often bottlenecked in heavy rains.  My heart was beating in my throat and there was a rousing tremor within my jeans as the tops of my boots grew shiny and became sluggish to pull from the wet foliage that decoupaged the boggy ground.  Stopping at one particularly soft place, I could feel the ground pressing through the rubber against the sides of my feet and decided to indulge in a little leg pumping.  Like a cat kneading its paws in a blanket, I shifted my weight from one leg to the other.  A satisfying slurping noise issued from beneath the colorful leaf mosaic, and a thin stream of black water crossed the top of my left boot, yet it was not proving to be the thrill I anticipated.

Only slightly deflated, I turned and headed back for the trail, pausing to thoughtfully consider a blushing sapling on the hillside as a lone woman jogged by on the path above, her ponytail dancing behind her like a dog overexcited to be outside.  I climbed the slope and resumed my hunt for right terrain, the divining rod between my legs twitching and showing me the way.  There was plenty more trail. 

Not many other personal experiences stanchioned a fetish between that fateful day at grandma’s house and–say–the advent of YouTube, where just about any fantasy I could fathom involving a man’s booted feet in mud could be witnessed with just a few lucky keystrokes.  The fixation had mostly been dormant, a chamber of roiling magma not far below the surface, waiting for the right set of circumstances to–well…erupt.  I did remember one time when, as a teenager, I had been enslaved one summer to help my uncle landscape his yard.  It had been a seemingly innocuous situation.  Uncle Max was wearing a old pair of eight inch leather work boots–Wolverines, I think–which were dark and cracked like overcooked steaks wrapped around his feet.  On their own, they had done nothing for me.  

But then I remember trucking load after load of wheelbarrows full of fill to the back corner of his property, which sat at the base of two steep, adjacent embankments and was always boggy.  He kept telling me where to dump the dirt while he leveled out the mounds with a garden rake and then paced back and forth on top of the freshly-placed earth, trying to pack it solid.  You know how when you try to rinse paint from a brush, it doesn’t seem to matter how long to hold it under the stream of water, the paint keeps coming out?  You rinse and you squeeze, rinse and squeeze, and still the cloudy paint-tinged water makes its way through the bristles and curls down the drain.  That’s what it was like with the water that seemed to well up from under Uncle Max’s backyard, mingling with the loose fill under the tread of his work boots.  Each time I left for a new load, the ground had been freshly coated in powdery dirt, and every time I returned he was marching through a glutinous layer of loam, the relentless stamp of his feet having churned all the former layers of delivered topsoil into a slurry that grew ever deeper until eventually it began to top the stitched edges of his toe boxes.  By the time Uncle Max was ready to give up and declare that area a permanent wetland, the squelching had become rather insistent, as had my rigidity.

The trail widened here as it swept around the side of a ridge that overlooked a small valley that held junction of two waterways–the winding creek I had been following since I set out from the car, and another smaller stream that tumbled down over the opposing slope.  And overhead, cutting diagonally through what would have otherwise been a picturesque hollow, an overpass slanted obscenely through the trees.  I could have been indignant that the concrete monolith made no attempt to be in harmony with its surroundings, but the fact is that nothing so magically produces copious amounts of sloppy mud than an overpass.

I think it has something to do with the fact that it so efficiently blocks all the sunlight, ensuring that nothing will put roots through the ground beneath it.  Add not one, but two steady sources of water running through it, and you have the perfect makings of a swamp.  I smiled fondly at the graffiti-riddled structure, the crotch of my jeans made their own salute, and my Hunters once again abandoned the trail.  

I knew within the first few steps that I would not be disappointed.

The moment my boots found the first mud, naked of leaves and devoid of undergrowth, the treads began to glide beneath me, scooping the chunky pattern of my treads across the ground—my first marks on this brown stretch of canvas.  As I pressed deeper into the shadowy recess beneath the bridge, the wet earth began to gather heavily around my boots.  My feet were beginning to resemble the infamous no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookies our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Hower, used to make.  “Chocolate Flops,” she called them, although I never understood why.  They were more like misshapen clumps, just like my Hunters were now.  The sticky sounds that issued from the mud squeezing between the grooves under my boots slapped ominously off the pocked stretch of concrete suspended overhead.

“Damn, that’s nice,” I said softly to my feet.  Just saying the words out loud hardened me with a new determination.  I didn’t usually let myself cum in the midst of the act itself, but I thought I might today, given that I was utterly alone.  I ventured closer to the flow of water that babbled through a little depressed fold in the sodden ground, attempting to shake the heaviest nuisance globs from my feet.  

Maybe you understand that the most exciting thing about exploring mud in a pair of rubber boots is the unpredictability.  One moment the ground is firm but coated with a treacly veneer, the next it crumbles and sinks beneath you softly like wet sand, and immediately after that it swallows your leg entirely with a dull, unassuming “thwock.”  Every step is a gamble because the ground often just isn’t as it seems.  And the thrill of the unforeseen never diminishes.  I was intimately familiar with this particular brand of titillation on this day, as I took a single step that became a tumble forward, and all but two inches of my right boot suddenly disappeared from view and a sea of freshly churned slime threatened to climb inside it, I found myself involuntarily grabbing myself and hissing “oh, fuck!” at the glorious mess.  

I brought my other boot alongside the first and groaned audibly as the ground eagerly accepted that one as well.  Little bubbles danced and popped on the surface around me like tiny applause in anticipation of my performance. Indeed, I could feel my own bubbles slowly welling up, slickly coating my underwear and making their way out from under the edge of my briefs, a cool kiss left on the inside of my thigh. I shuddered with pleasure, watching the adjuster straps on the sides of my boots slide from view as the caramel ooze pressed against my legs.  My Hunters had become two rubbery Venus flytraps, clamping around my jeans like they were helpless prey. 

I tested the mud’s resolve, gently bending and straightening alternating knees like I was on a ski machine. The ground surrounding me responded unambiguously.  It wobbled and undulated, nestling itself closer against the shaft of my boots and climbing to the rims. “Shit,” I murmured, realizing that I had just passed two points of no return—I wouldn’t be leaving here without plastering my pants both outside and in. I smiled and shrugged to myself in eager defeat, leaning on my left leg just enough to let a small rivulet of silt top my boot and run down a fold of my jeans. I peeled back the rim so that I could watch the flows progression toward my foot.  I pulsated with anticipation.