Muffy was tired of the hallucinations, tired, tired, tired. No sooner had she begun a new career in Utah as a sword swallower than the phantoms resumed plaguing her. Strange images teemed in her brain. Logos. Starseed. Plaster of Paris. Paris itself. Would she never find the peace she craved almost as much as she craved the sweet caress of studly Rudolfo?
Perhaps I need a new challenge to distract me, Muffy mused. A career change.
She approached Mex with her ideas-- fat lady, tattooed woman, siamese twin, bearded lady, dwarf, juggler, strong woman....she put herself forward for each of these positions.
Mex shouted angrily at Muffy, "You peevish boil-brained snipe! You gorbellied fool-born bladder! You dankish ill-composed whey-face! You craven pox-marked lewdster! You mewling boil-brained hedge-pig! You lumpish foolborn foot-licker! You goatish fat- livered scut!
"Muffy! you weigh 90 pounds, you have no tattoos, you have no attached sibling, you are entirely hairless, you are six feet four inches tall, you couldn't juggle an orange, and you are weak as a worm! What is wrong with you, girl?!!!"
Slowly it dawned on Muffy that perhaps her resume needed work. "Is there any position for which you think I might have an aptitude?" she asked Mex plaintively.
That is how Muffy assumed the position... of Cannon Girl.
The very next morning, she held her arms at her sides, stood as stiffly as she could manage, and allowed herself to be screwed, right into the barrel of the cannon, by her darling Rudolfo, who proceeded excitedly, willingly, to light her fuse.
Muffy was so ready to be shot out of the barrel of a cannon by this time, that she was not displeased when the moment of discharge arrived. Boom!, went the cannon.
Unfortunately, Rudolfo's aim with the cannon was not all it should have been, or perhaps he fired it off prematurely. In any case, our heroine overshot the mark, and was violently catapulted not into the waiting Net of Life, but beyond it, and she found herself traveling at such a great velocity that when her hurtling form, legs spread, arms spread, impacted the high brick wall to the far side of the circus grounds, she broke through it in a trice, and was surprised to note, in a quick glance back, that the hole her passage through the wall had created formed an exact silhouette of her splayed body!
Muffy had little time to ponder this oddity, which in any case seemed natural to her, because as it turned out, the brick wall was the divider between the circus grounds and the great highway across the vast salt flats that constituted the area.
The hapless girl was deposited unceremoniously onto the highway, and not at a very auspicious moment, either: Rolling toward our misadventurous heroine much too fast for a dazed Muffy to do more than raise her head from the prone position in which she awaited the end and watch in some alarm its rumbling, looming approach, was an enormous steam roller!
Poor Muffy! Sweet, hapless girl! We loved her, and yet we must see her rolled out like a pie crust, flat as the proverbial pancake-- and, friends of Muffy, equally as bloodless! Yes, perhaps the strangest chapter in our heroine's strange, strange life was its last. Muffy's flattened form was unblemished, unbloody, and in appearance not so very different than would have been a color photograph of the virginal vixen. Its dimensions, of course, differed from Muffy's original ones, being some twenty seven feet tall and perhaps four across.
Now in this season in Utah, you must be aware, it happens that the salt flats are subject to sudden sharp, warm winds, gusty squalls of surprising force.
It stands to reason that a ninety pound girl flattened to such a degree will be very very thin, indeed will be paper-thin, and will quickly desiccate in the merciless sun.
So, it should come as no surprise that when the long highway over the dry salt flats was assailed by great blasts of hot air, the almost weightless form, if so two dimensional an object as Muffy now was could be said to have "form," was lifted aerially from the ground, and set aloft, rising jerkily, wafting here and there, right and left, sometimes rising, sometimes falling back, but overall steadily rising, into the desert air, rising and wafting and floating like a leaf, off to the west, and farther west yet, out to where there was no shady spot on which it might land, nothing at all beside the hot salt flats, those miles and miles of parched, inhospitable terrain, with the negligible exception of a modest pond some thirty feet in length and five feet wide, save that one exception, no cool spot in which our dear child, dear girl, dear woman, our misfortunate Muffy, might take her eternal rest. |
