Contessa

By Joe Bondi Beach

Alejandro is broke. An apparently mysterious stranger offers him a job. She claims to be royalty, a contessa, but there's no way of knowing for sure. Alejandro needs the work, and the contessa's insistence on giving him a work name and her unusual disciplinary methods come as a surprise, not entirely an unwelcome one, Alejandro discovers.

Things come to a head during the village's summer solstice celebration, when Alejandro and the contessa's chef plan a surprise for the contessa, one they believe will teach her a lesson she needs to learn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781794809048

Book preview

Contessa

CONTESSA

Joe Bondi Beach

Also by Joe Bondi Beach

California Central Valley Summer Heat

Swimming with Kate

Sarah’s Honeymoon

Cheerleaders in Paradise

A New Life for Julie

Chloe

A Picnic with April

Julie

Emily

Micol: Three Stories (Ed.)

Emily and Daniel

Spring Break in Napa

and Other Stories

Morning at the Baths

Julie’s Spring

Goddess

Redemption

Promise

Cocksucking

Azotea

Stockings

Sarah’s Honeymoon

and Other Stories

Harper

Amélie

Fred

Copyright

CONTESSA

Copyright © 2018, 2019 by Joe Bondi Beach

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

Second ePub Edition

December 2019

ISBN: 978-1-79480-904-8

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Clearing Rain Press

El Cerrito, California

[e-mail]

Acknowledgements

The cover image is a derivation and transformation of William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Lost Pleiad (1884).

†

With thanks to S, always.

CONTESSA

The show must go on.

— Traditional

1

PLAN

Kitchen Girl and

I

tossed the contessa into the lake under a brilliant full moon precisely at the summer solstice, which that year was twenty-two minutes past midnight. It was our surprise addition to the contessa’s show, a fitting climax to the village’s midsummer orgy, and a suitable sacrifice to whatever god lived in the dark water of that supposedly bottomless lake.

It was also the lesson the contessa needed. If she survived. She must have wondered whether she would in those last seconds before the freezing water took her.

†

The lake sat

there, quiet, dark, cold, unprepossessing on the overcast afternoon the contessa, Kitchen Girl, and I arrived to spend the summer in this village on the coast. The lake wasn’t very large. Barely more than a hundred meters to the far shore, probably three times that long as it lay in the old river valley, its lower end blocked by an ancient landslide. There seemed to be an air of brooding surrounding it.

The locals had a story about the lake, the way locals do everywhere about these things. No one knows how deep it is, they said. No one has ever been able to measure it. They didn’t claim it had a monster, there was no Nessie, although some villagers seemed a little uncertain about that last part. In these days of super-sensitive sonar gear I thought the bottomless lake story pretty unlikely, but