Furious Horses

>”The first thing you’ll notice is that there central heterochromia.” The salesman had his pitch down to a smooth art. His fingers worked their way through the dog’s body like he was conducting a detailed autopsy, which, perhaps, he was.

We peered in closer, following his fingers. The husky stared straight ahead, seemingly unfazed by all these pairs of fingers flitting across its vision. The salesman was right: each of the dog’s eyes had green swirls sliding circularly across the ice-blue pupils.

“Nothing wrong with him, of course,” said the salesman. “Just melanin levels in his eyes is all wronged up. Course you don’t often see such interesting patterns. Usually you get one eye that’s brown and one that’s green, something like that.”

He was right. This dog’s eyes were startling. He was the only Husky in the lot that wasn’t shifting around nervously in the unseasonal heat.

“We’ll take him,” I said.

Richard nudged me in the side. “Um, Tracie?” His face told me all I needed to know.

“But look at him,” I pressed.

“You don’t want to check any others out?”

“This one just spoke to me. I don’t need to see any others.”

The salesman grinned a sharky smile. “He’s a beaut, that’s for right sure.”

Richard relented. “Your choice,” he told me. “Your choice.”

>Somewhere, a cat is crowning. 76 000 readers turn the same page of a newspaper. These are simply the facts that permeate this oh so strange world. At four pm, someone will become a professor. At the same time, an associate professor will arrange some photos in an album, removing all those pictures of that holiday where The Great Sadness fell upon him. Later today, a timpani will be made. One ant will make his decision to kill the Queen. A young woman, who has just come off her lunch break at a hardware store will suddenly consider the phrase “hatchet job”. You will have to take that left-hand turn. I will refuse to douche.

>Anti-tank dogs were employed by the Russians in WWII to combat those pesky German Panzer tanks, which were just too damned fast to combat. The dogs were systematically starved, then trained to fetch food from underneath tanks. Explosives were strapped to the dogs’ backs, and when they went under the vehicles, a small wooden lever attached to the explosive packs would depress, causing significant damage to the exposed underside of the Panzer (and even more significant damage to the dog). It is estimated that the trained dogs took out at least 300 German tanks.

What is less well-known, however, is that many of these anti-tank dogs did not always do what they were supposed to. There are numerous instances of the dogs simply turning around, content to seek food under Russian tanks, and, in turn, blowing up their masters. The anti-tank dogs were officially retired at the end of 1942.

Unofficially, there are a few notable instances of these dogs turning up well into the late 1940s. One such dog, known only as испаряющая шерсть (roughly translated: volatile fur), fell into the hands of a family in the western Russian city of Belgorod. The family’s youngest son, Gregor Polikanov, was reported to have found the dog wandering in some woods near the family home. Luckily for all parties concerned, Gregor Polikanov was of a particularly standoffish disposition, and was certainly not the type of young boy to run up and hug a strange dog, least of all one nearly starved with a suspicious wooden box attached to its back.

The dog followed Gregor home, and Gregor didn’t really care much about this one way or the other, as he was the sort of boy who took little notice of things that didn’t concern food or marbles. Gregor’s father, Ivan Polikanov, welcomed the dog by patting him on the head. Ivan also was not the sort of man to put his arm around a dog, even one his usually antisocial son had seemed to take a shine to. Even more luckily, the entire Polikanov family were abnormally tall, and as such, their tables and beds were constructed as to be unusually high off the ground.

As can be imagined, the dog maintained a fairly successful life with the tall-tabled, socially inept Polikanovs, until one fateful day when the mayor, Igor Klosov, dropped in to see if he could count on the Polikanovs’ vote in his upcoming re-election. They mayor, a man whose politicking skills were honed to a fine point, never missed a chance to kiss a baby, shake a firm hand or pet a beloved family pet. He, of course, misinterpreted the wooden box on the dog’s back as some sort of peasant potato-harvest accessory (these were desperate people, after all, he thought, who could not afford a strong ox to plough their fields). Moreover, when he saw the lever attached to the dog’s box, his voting-day instincts kicked in and, while leaning over and thinking Vote One Igor Konstantine Klosov! he pulled heartily on the lever.

A local postal worker happened across the sad scene some days later. The remains of the Polikanov house consisted of one chimney, pointing sadly at the sky. The postal worker kicked among the remains until he spied the obtrusive glint of Mayor Klosov’s official badge, dinted, burnished, but still intact. The postal worked shook his head. He muttered to himself, будет эт мы ые для?, which, roughly translated, means, Is this what we fought for?

>We were sitting in a room very similar to this one. Three of us: Henry, Colleen and I. Henry’s this pouch-faced fellow who looks as if he’s stepped out of the 1500s and Colleen’s been the object of my sexual fantasies since I was 15. As I said, the room was remarkably similar to this one, right down to the dubious objet trouvé that seems to have so enchanted the decorators.

In fact, Henry’s eye was immediately caught by some painted driftwood-and-wheel-spoke number and he went over to it and remarked on its “naive beauty”. Colleen and I shared a look and then she snorted with laughter. Henry reeled around, as he so often did, with an imperious air. Henry was always reeling.

“Oh come on,” said Colleen, “you surely can’t think that this is art?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Henry, “I think you’re missing a lot.”

“I think you’re missing a lot,” I said, tapping the side of my head. Which was a far less clever line when actually said out loud.

“Anyway,” said Colleen. “We’re waiting for him here, so we’d better get used to it.”

This “him” Colleen was alluding to was her so-called partner. When Colleen first used this word, I had hoped it referred to either a business associate or grizzled cowboy. Unfortunately it meant neither. His name was Jack, but out of respect for me (I like to think) she just called him “him”.

Henry pulled out a pack of cards—pretentious gold-leafed cards and shuffled them in what he hoped was a nonchalant way. In fact, bug-beads of concentration sweat grew noticeably from his temples. “Can’t be long now,” he said.

“Can’t be long,” I agreed.

>Features now include
Sound proof rooms
Gimps get in for free

>Buggs watched his silhouette stretch away from him, across the painted yellow lines, all the way down to the wall at the far end of the carpark. He shifted his weight on the bonnet of his Skyline, relishing the familiar creak that accompanied it. He bent his neck in sympathy, feeling the crack in a dull place behind his left ear. Somewhere in the distance, there was a bell: the church, or an alarm or something.

Nothing was happening in the afternoon, but he sort of thought that something might. The Arcade carpark was empty as a collection tin. He squinted up his right eye and kneaded his lips for an absent cigarette. Maybe down at Bellie Park, he thought. Maybe something going down at the grandstand.

The automatic door behind him shivered, and a fat woman came out, holding a brown string shopping bag. Her possessions stared out from their carry-cage: the bulge of a generic sugar pack, a log cabin of chocolate bars, two giant oranges like fat testicles. The whole image, the complete lack of effort this woman showed annoyed Buggs immensely. He hated people who didn’t make an effort. He let his glance drip down her like grease, then he spat at the ground. The fat woman hurried on, back to her car, her ankles drooping over tight canvas sneakers.
Buggs entertained the thought that he might follow her, trail her in his car at snail’s pace, make her speed home with chocolate melting on the dashboard. He snuffed out a laugh, and felt nothing much at all.

The sun was going down at the wrong angle behind the bandstand, its colour bleaching at the edges, shaking like one of those giant Chinese gongs. Buggs pulled his car in from the far side of the street and parked it across two spaces. He opened the door and stepped out, feeling, not for the first time, as if he was unfolding himself. He took off his cap, pushed back his hair, put his cap back on. A little ritual: keeping everything smooth.

He saw Courtney sitting on the broken end of the boat swing, her feet scraping hard cavities in the dirt. Her white Adidas hoodie glinted like a road sign.

“What’s going on?” said Buggs, knowing he was too far away for her to hear him.

Courtney looked up. She lifted up her feet and put them back in the swing.

“What’s happening?” he said again.

“Nothing,” replied Courtney. “Just sitting here.”

Buggs leant a hand against the swing, pushing it slightly. “Anyone else around?”

“Shell was here, but she nicked off.”

“Got a smoke?”

“Only got one left.”

“I’ll buy you some more tomorrow.”

Sighing, Courtney reached into her jacket and pulled out a folded pack of Marlboros. She threw it into Buggs’ chest. He grappled at it childishly.

“Jeez,” he said. “Marlboros? You got no taste at all?”

“Give them back if you don’t want them. Nathan got them for me.”

Buggs rubbed his chin. “Fuckin’ Nathan. Tell him I want to see him.”

“You know where he lives.”

“Fucked if I’m gonna visit him.”

Courtney shrugged her shoulders and looked off across the park. Buggs noticed her hair was held back with a rubber band. He felt a kind of rubber pain in his own head. He quickly unfolded the Marlboro pack and probed inside it with his index finger.

“It’s empty,” he said.

Courtney looked at him blankly. “There’s one left.”

“Bullshit there is.” Buggs held up the mangled pack like a lawyer with an evidence bag.
Courtney snatched it from his hand, reached in, and pulled out the Marlboro. “Magic,” she said.
Buggs was never sure of Courtney. Her mouth sagged where someone had hit her once, and she always had an expression like she was pissed off. Everything she said—serious or not—came out like an accusation.

Buggs lit the cigarette expertly, shaking his head as he breathed in the first smoke. He sniffed, and put one foot on a step on the side of the swing. Courtney didn’t move, so he climbed in, sitting on the opposite edge. The council had taken down the other two boat swings a few weeks before, because of safety concerns. They sat at the other edge of the park, abandoned, run aground.

“Wanna find something to do?” asked Buggs.

Courtney sniffed. “Not with you, anyway.”

The main street was dead, too. The usual lights were gone, turned out by an invisible switch, absent like a heartbeat. The power had cut out just after six-thirty according to the radio. Wild storms behind The Range. Courtney had switched the station; it was a new one that played the same stuff Buggs saw on TV every Saturday morning. She had her elbow out the window. One hand tapped the beat out against her knee.

Buggs turned his head. “So what do you want to listen to this stuff for?”

“What do you listen to, then? Classical FM?” Courtney’s top lip had freckles on it that quivered when she talked.

Buggs swung his eyes back to the road. “Just don’t see the point of this chicken-shit music.”
“Shows what you know.”

The headlights on Buggs’ car lit up the main street, casting shadows over it he hadn’t seen before. A couple of bodies loitered outside the Sports Club bar, but Buggs didn’t feel like a big crowd. A low moon had come out, and it sat big and dirty yellow like a baby’s head. Buggs came out of the main street and heaved his steering wheel all the way around the roundabout. He took the last exit, out of town, out towards the highway. KFC and Red Rooster lit up on either side of the road. Buggs thought it was pretty sad that they were the only places in town that thought ahead enough to have generators. The amount of blackouts this town had.

Courtney rested her head against the side of the window. Buggs was annoyed that she had let her seatbelt slip around her waist. “Where are we going?” she said. Stray blonde hairs whipped across her face with the outside wind.

“Dunno,” said Buggs. “This place just dies sometimes, you know?” He bent his neck down and peered up through the windshield. “Maybe we can go somewhere and watch the stars.”

“The stars?”

“I mean, there’s no other lights, hardly. Means we could see them all, if we wanted.”

Courtney made a sound like a stubborn horse. “Fuckin’ . . . stars,” she said. “You’re just weird.”

“At least I’m making an effort,” replied Buggs. “What else are you going to do tonight? Drop by Shell’s, smoke some weed, stare at the wall?”

“Yeah,” said Courtney defensively, “sounds good.”

“Maybe you’re just keen on her boy. What’s his name—Cliff?”

“Clint.”

“Yeah. Clint. Cunt. You like him?”

“Get fucked. He’s a loser.”

“What’s it to be then?” said Buggs. The car groaned as it began to climb the hill.

Courtney sighed. “Okay,” she said. “But staring at the wall or staring at the sky, you owe me some smokes.”

Buggs shrugged. “Fair enough,” was his reply.

>There were five faces pressed against the windows of the taxi as it sped past. Susan looked at them without really looking, only left with an image sitting there in the night, Polaroid-bleached, long after the vehicle had passed.

She returned her gaze to that big pulsing moon, which tonight was a cracked heel, a blister, in the air. Beneath it, old-fashioned clouds were building—childhood billow-busters with lightning at their hearts.

There was smoke somewhere very near, thick as fists, scratchy as matchsticks. Susan held one hand with her other, safe in the cave of her jumper pocket. She walked on.

>If you really want to trace the whole thing back to its point of, let’s say, origin—though some might argue termination—you must understand that Dr Fur was under “a whole lot of pressure”, which, to some people may seem a rather arbitrary measurement, but, as Dr Fur was not in the habit of telling people exactly what he was thinking, it was just as accurate an estimation that could, with any confidence, be ascertained. Dr Fur broke his glasses. To be more specific, a filing cabinet broke his glasses when—as is so often the case in a life too full of dedication to a profession and not full enough of the repetitive practice of simple motor skills—Dr Fur had so much trouble catching a pen thrown to him by a colleague that his head came into damagingly forceful contact with an open metal drawer. Amidst the panicked confusion that generally strikes a white-collar office when faced with a relatively domestic emergency, Dr Fur’s mind had a rare moment to itself. Lying on the thick waiting room carpet, blinking blood from his eyes and onto burgundy shag, watching blurry shapes he knew as his co-workers and patients buzzing ineffectually above him, Dr Fur began to wonder what he was actually doing. It was not quite the existential query that prompts so many textbook epiphanies, but rather a simpler, more prosaic wondering of why we are who we are. Dr Fur realised he had no idea how and why his life had led him to this particular point: i.e. prostrate, slightly concussed, bleeding, in the vestibule of a highly regarded psychological research institute. As Dr Fur tried to move his arm, and found he couldn’t, he reflected on the awful paradox of him being an avid instigator and discoverer of the mind, and yet unable to find a simple reason for his current position in not just his own life, but everyone else’s. How did he arrive at this moment in time? Who decided where his dot would land on an axis of x, y and z? But, such was the nature of Dr Fur’s personality that, when asked if he was alright, he said, “Yes. Of course.” Which, in point of fact, was a lie.

Dr Fur’s vision came and went, like a camera shot just below the water line, lapping between two refracted worlds. He wasn’t actually worried until someone who sounded very much like a television doctor said, “The first minutes are crucial when there’s broken glass and eyes,” and Dr Fur thought he’d knocked over a vase or tumbler before he realised that it was his glasses that were being talked about, which weren’t, obviously, made of glass, but rather some sort of Perspex compound. He put his hand up to his face and felt a mangled twist of wire where his spectacles had once been.

“Get him a glass of water,” said the television doctor, whose voice Dr Fur suddenly recognised as the colleague who had thrown him the pen. Other voices made murmurs of apparently professional agreement. What he needed most, Dr Fur knew, was a bowl of clean water, a towel, and a basic first aid kit. The irony hung over the room like a palm tree: How many PhDs does it take to put on a band-aid? Although he was feeling mostly alright, Dr Fur remained on the floor. He was ready for a little sympathy, and was enjoying the uncomfortableness of the people around him. The room, as it happened, just happened to contain most of the great regional minds of paediatric behavioural psychology, and as such, a fair chunk of Dr Fur’s regular social circle. They had been gathering for the morning session of a particularly regular conference meeting at the offices of a certain Prof. Ptarmigan, employer of all present, owner of the waiting room, and indeed the research institute to which it belonged. Now Dr Fur’s friends and colleagues proved as useful to him as spinning tops on a sinking ship.

Dr Fur sat up, observing, first, the constellation spatter of blood down his aquamarine shirt. He removed the sad post-script of prescriptive lenses from his face. The filing cabinet drawer still stood ajar, seeming to have sustained nowhere near the level of injury he had. The drawer, in fact, remained stuck in a pulled-out position, as if the force of a grown man’s head was not even enough to force it into its most basic function: rolling inwards. “Smarmy bloody thing,” said Dr Fur, under his breath. He added this incident to a growing list of things that were wrong with a compartmentalised society.

A face appeared: very pink, very much a nose, very many red tributaries linking all vital features. Professor Ptarmigan was nothing if not noticeable, with or without corrected vision.
“Can’t imagine this will put us too much behind schedule,” was his observation of the situation.
Dr Fur replied, “Can’t imagine it will,” and attempted to stand up. In the usual way of overweight men, this involved arranging both legs into a position normally associated with marriage proposals and knighthoods, then pushing the body up with both hands braced against the upright knee. When Dr Fur arrived, eventually, at an upright position, he found himself in the middle of an almost too well arranged semi-circle of bodies. Eight esteemed psychologists, including Ptarmigan and the television-doctor-voiced-pen-thrower, looked at Dr Fur as darts players would a fresh board. They all seemed, to Dr Fur, to be staring intently at his hand. When he looked down, he discovered to his surprise that he had actually caught the pen.

“Does anyone remember,” he asked, holding the pen aloft, “why I needed this?”

>

The grand unveiling came some weeks later, in the form of a large package arriving one morning at my doorstep. I had spent the morning pottering about in my laboratory, enjoying some time following my favoured hobby of viewing biological specimens from the water of a small pond in a lake near my house, but this small enjoyment was interrupted by the loud knock at my door, and one of the larger Worther sons plunging an enormous package into my arms. It was terribly heavy, covered in brown paper, tied in thick twine.

When the Worther had left, I sent word at once for Edwin. I didn’t want to open the copies of the first issue of our Journal without him, so I spent the time cleaning my desk in lieu of the various distribution and invoicing tasks that Edwin would inevitably lumber me with once we realised we had 400 copies of a periodical in our hands and in no one else’s.

Edwin arrived, half-shaved, odd-socked and thoroughly out of breath.

“This is it, old chum!” he said, reaching into the pocket of his greatcoat and removing an alarmingly dangerous looking Arabic letter opener. His hacked away the twine and ran the blade down one side of the package, before peeling the brown paper back carefully. His face went white.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him. I couldn’t see into the package from where I was standing.

Edwin’s hands shook. “Journal … ” he stammered, ” … Microscopical …”

I pushed his shaking body aside and looked into the package. What I saw was what looked like piles of shredded paper. I looked closer. “Oh, they didn’t,” I said suddenly. “They couldn’t have.”

Edwin put his head in his hands. “They did. With my pre-paid deposit.”

“You didn’t sign anything, I hope,” I said, searching somewhere for a receipt.

Edwin just nodded. “The contract looked fine,” he gasped. “How was I to know they’d … oh God!” He hit his head several times, luckily with the hand not containing the scimitar letter opener.

I found the receipt, handwritten proudly by Worther the Elder, no doubt. I read from it, aloud. “For Mr Edwin Lankester, being Four Hundred copies of his scientific magazine The Microscopic Journal of Quarterly Science.”

Edwin just groaned.

I must admit, although I did not make it obvious, I smiled. My colleague and I had become unique, being the owner of England’s (and I would hazard to guess, the world’s) tiniest professional quarterly. I picked one up between thumb and forefinger. “They have done a good job,” I said, “you’d have to admit. This is very intricate work.”

“We’ll be the laughing stock of every worthwhile mind from here to Cornwall,” seethed Edwin. “Imagine the laughter.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “At least we know only people with microscopes will be able to read it. That’s quite a sales angle. In fact, I can see this working.”

“Really?”

Yes, I thought. Really. I pulled the cover off my microscope placed our journal beneath it. I began to read.

>I have this friend who thinks her vagina smells like a wild animal, a possum of perhaps a bat. She seems obsessed with describing it using the smells of things that live in trees, whereas I have never imagined a vagina being something that could fly. I say friend, but really she was sitting across from me at a dinner party. And when you think of dinner party conversation, you don’t really think sex organs. Or at least I didn’t until that night.

I don’t even think she introduces herself by name until the dessert, and by then I’ve already learned about the washing machine and the spray bottle and all those conga lines, and my head is already so full that it takes all I can manage just to hand onto four letters. G. w. e. n.

We all sat around a fancy onyx table and felt slightly woozy because the host of the party was an architect and had filled his house with so many impossible angles and so much improbable stability that it felt like you were working hard just sitting still. So I sat down opposite Gwen, although at that stage I only knew her as Strange Girl Who Stole My Fork. The thing is, before we’d even spoken, she’d leaned across and taken my fork from its place in an impressive cutlery rank. I tried to look as placid as possible. Maybe this is just what friends of architects did. I considered sampling the spoon of the woman to my left, but I thought better of it.

Gwen (SGWSMF) looked me straight in the eyes and said, Rather you than me.

I nodded my head. Was she saving me from my own cutlery?

I had a cousin, she continued, as if we had been talking for hours, well, she was more like a colleague. She got an infection from a dirty fork. Had a keloid growth in her mouth for like three months. And you can’t always cure those.

All through the entree—some sort of horrifying terrine I had to pick up with my knife and translate to my mouth surreptitiously—skin diseases were our sole topic of conversation. And when I say our sole topic, of course I mean Gwen’s. Keloid growths, bullous pemphigoids, dyshidrotic eczema, there was not one dermal fault that Gwen was not well versed in.

Which brought us, inevitably, to her vagina. During the main course, which thankfully was a seafood gumbo and therefore able to be eaten with just a spoon, she told me about her morning with the washing machine.

I was just putting some clothes into the machine, right? The same way I’ve done, I don’t know, a million times, but then I see a pair of my undies.

I gazed desperately around the table, but everyone else was in a deep and interruptible conversation with someone who wass not me and was certainly not Gwen. I clenched a forkless fist.

And so I noticed the crotch was completely worn away. Only I didn’t think “worn away” when I saw them, did I. I thought, “these panties have been fucking eaten away!”.

Gwen explains her theory in great detail, and as she does, less and less of my meal becomes edible.

Yeah, I mean I sniffed it. Wouldn’t you? I mean you do, don’t you. Because you can’t smell it unless you’re removed from it.

This is where I laughed. Gwen, it seemed, had discovered a rogue element waiting in her nether regions. I told her this, and she wholeheartedly agreed.

And it had this, oh my god, this smell, and I thought, “How long has this been going on?”. Is it so bad that it’s eating through fabric?

The host swooped in, taking our mismatching bowls from us. When he had gone, I asked Gwen what happened next. Her face lit up, and it was then I realised she had snared my interest, in a way my interest had not been snared at a dinner party for some time. Stock options, house prices and mainstream movies were no conversational match for monstrous vaginas. And the number of times she said the word that night, vagina vagina vagina, I saw myself saying it casually at a kindergarten or civic meeting some time down the track and not realising the fuss it made.

Then, oh man. I wanted to clean it. The number of things I tried. I’ve got this chemist who’s this lovely guy who won’t even speak to me now. This man who’s known me since I was 13, who came to my 21st and made a fucking speech, he’s now so disgusted by me that I have to drive all the way to a different suburb just to try a new douche. Can you imagine?

I told her I couldn’t.

So I’m spraying this thing with bleach in a spray bottle like every single morning and then I realise I have to go dancing this one night.

Sweets arrived. Fucking chocolate mud cake. The forkingest dessert of them all. Thick, crumbly chocolate cake. I sat there with my spoon. Not even any cream to mix with.

I’m Gwen, by the way. Anyway, so I have this sort of dancing class I go to every now and again. It changes venues, and one of them is close to my house, so I only end up going once every three weeks or something. Anyway, so there’s this guy that goes, and we’d been sort of doing this whole … thing for the last few classes, like we’d had a few drinks afterwards, but never anything else, and here I am thinking, “I’m probably going to bag him tonight, and I’ve got this freak vagina that smells like a dead owl that can eat through surfaces like acid. That’s brilliant.”

It occurred to me then that Gwen had managed to be talking for three whole courses, and had still managed to clear her plate. I had hardly said a word, and here I was, still hungry.

So I decide I have to go. I mean, like I wasn’t going to go, right? So we’re there, doing this big conga line like we always do to warm up, and I’m thinking, everyone is just smelling my vagina. All down the line, people holding back vomit, being polite, trying to figure out how to get away. The guy I like is all the way down the other end of the line, so he probably can’t smell it yet, but, I mean, it’s just a matter of time, right?

I was actually becoming so involved in Gwen’s story I didn’t notice the sound of ergonomic chairs being pulled out around me, the sounds of farewell. The dinner party was over. I asked Gwen quickly what she did about the dance, about the guy, if he eventually smelled her vagina. These questions were actually coming out of my mouth.

Nah, I mean it was fine. Just my overactive imagination, as usual. Turns out those undies were just old. They’d just frayed away.

What about the smell, I asked her. What about that freaky vagina smell?

This is where I hear that awful nothing sound of people stopping talking all around you. The architect was the first face into my line of vision. His inch-thick spectacles framed a perfectly constructed look of social horror. Throats were cleared, feet were shuffled. Then Gwen laughed, a big black-and-white belly laugh.

The freaky vagina smell is still there, my friend. Don’t you worry. By the way, I think you dropped this.

Gwen held up my fork, her excuse to talk to me all night.

What’s say we take this fork out of here. These people just don’t appreciate the art of fine conversation.

And I really had to agree with her. We took her tree-dwelling-smelling vagina and my empty stomach and our fork and left, with a certain grace.