Degenerative Prose - Excerpt

END OF A FOX by Shelley Jackson

Whenever you saw a crowd milling about a doorway, trouble was like gravity or osmosis. An ambulance dodges a swarm of corpses. Girls want to bite, apologetically. The crowd battered, puffed, windmilled. "Crack," hissed their lethal cameras.

A child photographer snapped. A bank of carbon lights focused on her phosphorescent shame. Her body bore marks of female garments. A blizzard, a "bulldike," Miss Porco, a twisted daughter. A feudal lord in a fairy dress.

Phony marriage, expensive equipment, and a publicity agent - Colonel Coffin, whose grey waterfall black Stetson mint julep manner was his obituary. He attended dead women and bad women. He climbed to the roof and looked at Miss Porco's body through the skylight. He might have been present, brutal. Induction, deduction, seduction - words for his trade secrets.

I went into Life Cafeteria and ordered an egg. The past was a small studio, hot, banging. I saw a mass, knocking feebly at the egg. "Let me in, Betty! Let me in!"

Most "wives" lived with their dominant imp. In the desert a tongue was slipping into a funnel of light. A nymph stunned with sleep fingered the pipes, sniffed the air. "Tobacco smoke. Hickory smoke. Smoke screen," she said. She located a small electric stove behind a Chinese screen. "Do you mind?" She yearned to leap out of flesh, behind the screen. Before I could offer any objections, she had undressed to her panties and the ghost.

Miss Porco was a hedgehog. Belle was emptied abolished, variegated as a fox. Pandora could whistle through her fingers; it was the trumpet of age, the grunts, squeals, and clucking of the animal sky. "Could you teach me to whistle?" she asked the odor of the stallion. Luke eyed her cradle of hay, fingered a plank. A fact can be jammed into a split moment. Bleeding, she was bulls, horses, whistles, flour, groceries, intervals, absence.

In the Village Belle kept dodging, but she found herself trussed, circled. A ring of steel slid out of her throat. She eyed this funneled object intimately. A single item throbbed in her head. Noticing, Betty purred and purred. " I could have left her, but I'm slain and reslain." She tried to jam the swelling back into place. "She punched me groggy. I'm depolarized, rejoicing," She snarled on the couch.

Later Belle married. Betty left a trail of lilac and red down her body. I could myself following.

"I knew - I mean Miss Porco - or - was - a hedgehog - a porcupine. Porco - porcupine - are you playing? I'm thinking of a statement. Confession is phony. You'll find out from the Inspector."

"Quiz," I suggested.

"Love vamoosed."

"Why should a girl mutilate clothes?"

"She didn't," said the Inspector. "She mutilated her body. A razor accounts for 'the man with the limp.'"

"Plausible."

The Inspector looked grim. "A Belle Mason was found in her father's barn - blew the top off her maiden name."

"Her father's barn died first. A corpse borrowed her grave. She went back to leave."

"That's the end of a lesbian," said the Inspector. "Personally I don't like hedgehogs or foxes."