Excerpt from “Wonderfreaks,” by Jan Wildt
Six months ago, when I was still in school, I was knocking back brewskis in this bar just off-campus with some guys who used to be my friends. We weren’t hittin’ on women, but we were doing a lot of talking about it. I wound up dancing with this bodacious item – she asked me. Some old ZZ Top tune was blasting and we boogie-oogie-oogied. I went off with her to her table and we exchanged names and that. There was mutual attraction. And suddenly we were in each other’s arms and full-on soul-kissing right there, lost to the world.
Sure, I was up for that.
We tonsillectomized for a minute or an hour until I disengaged, bewildered, with the weirdest notion that I’d just awakened from a dream. It had slipped past me almost completely, but I distinctly remembered about the last two seconds: it was like I was a pad or a desktop, and while we were kissing I had downloaded a huge file from her, ripping like the chatter of runaway tape.
I only caught the very tail end – but I felt surreptitiously and expertly violated, and for much longer than a couple of seconds.
As I puzzled over this, she watched with knowing amusement.
— What.
— By George, I think he’s got it, she said – a line which, more or less, occurs in My Fair Lady (1964) but not its source Pygmalion (1916). See ya around, she said. You’ll have questions.
But I never saw her around.
A tad dazed, I went back to rejoin my buddies. On the way over, it hit me: the Sakutei-ki of Toshitsuna (ca. 1050) lists seventeen taboos for the placement of stones in gardens, one of which prohibits a horizontal stone in a northwest orientation.
