(Crazy Satanic Lesbians of Centuries Past, continued from page 72)

face down in a bowl of soup at an elegant restaurant. I looked up, startled, into the warm avuncular face of Andre Gregory. Ah yes, that's right---I was having dinner with Andre. It had slipped my mind, what with all that business with the succubus.

"I sincerely hope I'm not boring you, Vern."

"Oh, no, not at all!" I protested, wiping the soup off my face. "Please! Do go on! This is most interesting!"

So he continued to talk about this, that and the other, his startling theories, his sojourns in faroff lands, all his amazing encounters and experiences. I found it hard to concentrate, not because Andre was uninteresting, but because the corner of the table had a chip on it which seemed to fold itself up like an inchworm each time I blinked, which got me to thinking about my third vasectomy, and the way fetuses move their hands, and a recent Bigfoot sighting I had read about, and several other things. Noticing my attention begin to drift again, Andre bit his lip in suppressed pique, and Swedish meatballs of sweat began to trickle down his weathered brow like disparate desperate skiers down the slopes of the Matterhorn. He was stopped midway in this act of volcano sodomy by a nervous-ticking inscrutable waiter with apparent swaddling clothes draped over his wrist.

"Fortune cookies, gentlemen?" he croaked.

"No! No!" I cried out. "I despise fortune cookies!"

"Oh, come now, Vern," Andre coaxed. "Let's both have one and see what the future may have in store for us."

"You can have one, but I'm not touching them! I always get the most morbid, grotesque fortunes!"

"Two fortune cookies, please," he said peremptorily to the waiter. "Okay. First I'll open mine. And what does it say..... 'Pleasant days are just around the corner.' See, that wasn't so bad. Now you open yours."

I held the cookie in my trembling hand, and Andre finally prevailed upon me to open it. "The dead boy is hiding underneath his kidneys." I rocketed through the ceiling of the restaurant, Andre grinning and waving goodbye. "It's been real, and it's been provocative, but it hasn't been real provocative. See you around, Vern, or should I say adrift?" (Since that day, I have been convinced that Andre Gregory is one of the few remaining Crazy Satanic Lesbians.)

copyright 1982, Vern Pat Nelson.





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