In between rows of Victorian houses painted in greys and beiges that blended in with the concrete of the streets and the parked cars sat a small and unassuming cottage. Old and boxy, the left side of the cottage was squished flush against its neighbour. The gate on the right side of the house opened into a long, tight walkway with surplus vines crawling up a tall fence that pressed up against the stucco of its neighbour. At the end of the walkway waited a wrought iron gate with more vines weaving their way through the gate’s bars to obfuscate the land past the door. Attached to the gate, a framed sign read:
RULES:
BE RESPECTFUL.
DON’T BE WEIRD.
NUDITY REQUIRED.
(and please be quiet so the neighbours don’t call the cops)
–THE ENTITY
Just past the gate, amongst the large lemon tree and the innumerable potted succulents, a hot spring emerged from the dirt. You couldn’t tell, from your plebian knowledge of hot springs and hot tubs, whether the spring in the middle of the yard was here first and the city sprung up around it, or if it had been built into the land.
You learned about an oasis of warm water and nudity in the middle of the cold city from a friend, who simply told you that it seemed like a place you needed. Your friend had learned about the spring from another friend, who had apparently heard about it from her aunt. The ancestry of your knowledge ended there.
Your recommender cleverly did not mention the requirement of nudity when they said that it was a place you needed, and you probably wouldn’t have visited it if they had. You turned around at the inner gate after reading the sign on your first visit. Nudity required just didn’t sit right with you, even with the proclamation to “not be weird” before it.
When you showered that night, as you soaped up your inner thighs, your mind wandered to naked spaces. When was the last time your whole body felt the heat of the sun against it, with nothing in between? You twisted and twisted, but you couldn’t remember it. Had it ever happened? Certainly, once, when you were a child. You ran around naked in the yard. That happened…right?
The second time you visited it, you shed the skin of the version of you hardened by the city immediately after closing the iron gate. Nobody watched you. Nobody said a thing.
Being naked didn’t have the freeing feeling you expected, but your body’s unremarkability did. You felt unusual in it normally, or people treated you unusually, and it sometimes made you feel unusual as a result. For the first time in many, many years, you felt mundane.
On your second visit, you didn’t enter the water. You stayed on the outskirts, lay on a lawn chair, and let the sun lick at every inch of your skin. There were only two others in the spring at the time: a balding man and a young woman you estimated to be no older than twenty-five. Plenty of room for one more mundane body, but your head swam with fears about bodily fluids and bacteria.
On your fourth visit, you made idle small talk with another visitor as you lazed amongst the potted plants. He’d been coming to the Entity’s hot spring for four years now, and he tried to come once a week. He claimed he didn’t feel embodied when he skipped weeks between visits—that it was the only thing that could keep him tethered to his corporeal form. This visitor, just like you, had received a suggestion from a loved one that the spring was a place that he desperately needed to experience. That loved one was correct, he told you.
Later, as twilight descended upon the potted plants, you shared that you were curious about the Entity, and how the little oasis had come to be. He’d never seen the Entity, as far as he was aware, but he had heard they were a diminutive elder, seen scarcely and who spoke even less. He asked you if you had gone in the water, what you thought about the temperature today. You shared that you had not been in the water, ever. He frowned, looking disappointed in you, and suggested that you try it before he got up to leave.
The fifth visit included a small party in the spring and a very quiet happy birthday sung to a soft-looking bear of a man turning forty. On the sixth visit, a cute queer triad was having an orgy in the sun and very politely asked if you wanted to join them. You weren’t getting much reading done in the sun anyway, and their sweet and shy offer touched you. With flushed cheeks and hot skin, you basked in the rays of the fading afternoon, and the triad became a quadrad. You lost count of the hands on your body, the hand of the Sun and the breeze that almost made your skin tighten with goosebumps until warm, soft hands rubbed against you, a transference of their warmth and love, all of them, into and through you. The four of you became a closed current, electricity flowing from your body to theirs and to theirs and to theirs. Later, as you laid in a pile of squishy and hardened bodies, they asked you if you wanted to join them in the spring. You were comfortable in the sun, and you weren’t ready to try out the water yet. One was surprised, one looked hurt, and the other confused. They abandoned you in the grass to cuddle in the warmth of the water.
On your seventh visit, the little oasis didn’t have a single naked person in it. After you stripped, you walked around and considered your usual spot in the sun. It didn’t call to you like it usually did. Instead, you sat on the cool stone surrounding the spring and put your feet in the water. The temperature was the same as you were. You sank your body into the water and it was like going home and draping yourself in your favourite fleece blanket, like what it might feel like to be a caterpillar wrapping itself up in a warm cocoon, soon to emerge as a refreshed butterfly. You closed your eyes and let the sun caress your face. In the distance, you heard the door to the little house open and close. You didn’t open your eyes; the subtle noise didn’t disturb you. The sound of a cane tapping slowly along, stopping, fabric falling to the ground, more tapping of the cane, and eventually, the water next to you moved. When you opened your eyes, a small, naked, and bald elder sat next to you, a gentle smile on their face.
“What do you think of the water?”
“It’s perfect. Exactly what I needed,” you replied.
The elder laid their head back against the stone and closed their eyes as sunbeams filtered down onto their face from beyond the great lemon tree. “It always is.”
