When I made the move for my coat at 3 a.m., having spent the previous hour filling up on coffee with lone survivor Mrs. Dumpy, I wondered what had happened to Colleen. As I bent over to retrieve my coat, knocked off its hanger to the floor of the hall closet in the murky Precambrian dawn of the evening, I was answered around the waists from behind by an ambush of arms. I about-faced to find Colleen beaming back a wide Harpo Marxist grin. I felt a violent erection beginning. I managed a self-effacing “It’s very late.” She said nothing, but her thigh, saluting my penis, retorted “Love me!”
I peered over my shoulder through the half-open door of the sitting room. My view, partially obscured by a hunk of door, exposed a nightshirted Amy-Katherine pulling the panties off of a recumbent Doreen on the sofa. I squirmed in order to crane my neck for a better look-see. Colleen, misinterpreting this as an escape gesture, tightened like a boa constrictor.
I retaliated by squeezing her breasts.
It occurred to me that I was Charmin’s fussy, bespectacled Mr. Whipple, moral arbitrator of a grocery world, whipping around the bottomless bowels of post-midnight UHF-TV, whining, constantly whining, “Ladies, PLEASE.”
We stared at each other. Maybe a minute passed. Though we had not as yet kissed, we were poised.
Suddenly, like a car-horned Godzilla blowing seltzer water out its top: a suspicion someone was watching. Paranoia?
No. Mrs. Dumpy. She stood, the odd person out, in the kitchen threshold. We had been transported, pullets on a conveyor belt, down the skull-paneled, wriggling eyeball-carpeted hallway by some unseen, diabolical Frank Perdue of a God. The walls vibrated. From behind, a strangling noose of arms coiled around my throat.
I chickened.
Extricating myself from the mangled wreckage of hands, arms and thighs, steam hissing, I lunged for the door and staggered out. No. I was in the kitchen. I tried to double back but instead bumped into the refrigerator, which I embracingly kissed heartily. The buzz from the automatic deicer, the beast’s metallic heart, made love to me, singing:
Everything’s smiles,
Cheer’s the style;
Don’t look glummmmmmmmm,
or you’ll be the bummmmmmmmmm.
But the hint of irony unmanned me. I slid to the floor, balled into a fetus and wept.
I awoke shortly after seven. Not only did silence greet me, it roared. A surgical thermonuclear first strike? I looked around. Sunlight seeped in through the mangled Venetian blinds to form blobs of light on the kitchen floor. Peeping through the open crack of the sitting room door, I saw what I braced myself to see, debris and dead bodies. Blood, or what I feared was blood, perhaps melted skin, it was yellow, covered y flannel plaid shirt.
A look in the mirror, however, xed Armageddon. Eggs! Smeared into my hair. Oozing out the scalp. Yolk streaking my face like streamers of snot. Someone, something, has a devious mind, I thought. I picked the eggshells out of my hair and off my shirt only to discover a mother lode down the backs of my pantlegs.
I grabbed my coat from off the hallway floor, curiously littered with a wardrobe’s store of panties, bras and stockings, and limped the two blocks to my car. On the way home the whistle-tweeting policewoman on the Marlboro billboard, insinuating My Throat is Sore, winked knowingly.
