notoriously tight-assed. She experiments, jam-
ming her foot in the door; MM jumps. Assured
of the flexibility of that aperture, she glances
upward to the other hole, further away but far
less foul. keeping her foot wedged in the crack
she sticks a finger up his throat; MM gags.

Both routes are open to her.

Which out should she take?

FLATULENCE

MM ejects a fart and holds his nose in indigna-
tion. The cream of the art world thins around
him. Many noses are held. How could she, the
bitch, upset him so? He excuses himself grace-
fully from the room, leaving his smell behind. Is
he stuck with her forever? Must he pay with his
immaculate reputation for one night’s over-
indulgence? O she is lodged there in his gut,
forcing him to take strong measures.

GLUTTONY

“I'd like to eat you up,” he had said. She had
been enthusiastic. Whose sin was it then? Defi-
nitely food for thought, his and hers.

HIS AND HERS

HIS: She tempted me.
HERS: He ate.

INDIGESTION

“I'm carrying her around. She weighs me down.
Really, I'm not a free man anymore,” Manuelo
confided to his friend the doctor, picking his
teeth with an indigestible sliver of fingernail.
“You must get her out of your system,” replied
the learned doc. “May | prescribe a laxative?”

JUSTICE MORE OR LESS POETIC

She hadn’t cared who drove into her. iHe had
had a full set. It was good sport yes. And what
a balll He had swung hard, lifted high and,
rimming the cup first with a brilliant display of
control, had dropped right in: hole in one.
Manuelo Manchik was not the sort to putter
around. Well, neither was she.

“You're a real swinger,” he complimented her.
“Just par for the course,” she replied, refering
of course to her life.

Now she was teed-off, finding herself in the
trap. O she had been green in those green days,
but she would lie in the roughage no longer.
With a method to her madness she slices into

his intestine with her teeth. MM howls then
doubles over, squeezing her (according to plan)
more closely together; his cramp adheres her.
When he straightens up she delights to see the
connections: her legs secured to her groin and
her groin to her torso, o classic venus though
still not Olympia for her breasts and arms are
still somewhere adrift. And her head, that ob-
stinate be-bumped ball, is lying slightly off-
course, planning the next shot.

KIDDING

When she reached twenty-five, her psychiatrist
had said (though gently): “All kidding aside, my
dear, you are no longer a child prodigy.”

She had run home crying to her mother, blurt-
ing the tragic news. “So? What are you going to
do with yourself?” mother had asked, heart-to-
heart.

“| gotta grow up sometime, ma. He’s right. So
here’s what: I’'m gonna have a baby!”

“What? What?” disbelieving ma had hollered,
flinging her daughter from her sacked-out
breast. “I’'m going to have a bastard?”

“No, ma, no,” she calmed her mother. “I'm
gonna have the bastard.”

The child was born crying and one gulp of air
later, died. The bereaved not yet a mother in-
vited her psychiatrist to the funeral and told
him then and there that they were quits. That
was how he would remember her: standing
gravely at the grave, dressed all in black, a
grown-up color.

LIKE

“| like you,” MM had said (as had others), think-
ing to flatter.

“No you're not,” she retorted almost at once,
angry almost. “You're not like me at all.”

MILK OF MAGNESIA

He takes the prescribed dosage and waits.

NO ANSWERS

In the park, Abigale is lying on her belly, wait-
ing as pre-arranged for her best friend, the
putative Olympia. She pokes with a spring twig
at the underside of a caterpillar, trying to hurry
it out of its skin.

“Where are your wings, caterpillar?” she asks.
“And where was | before | was born?”

“And where, sky, do you get off, looking down
on me?”

Everything is mute. The silence is its own
question.

55