sarah was a strange child.
words used to get stuck in her throat like fish that swam thru a tunnel that tightened around them as they grew bigger and more desperate.
her eyes would widen in direct relation to the growth in her throat until they finally lost themselves to circumfrence and landed her lashes into a tangled mesh of short and long strands, straight and thick.
she didn't eat, ever, but found a deep satisfaction from thrusting her whole fist deep into the middle of pies and casseroles, letting her fingers squeeze back and forth like children in a park running up the tongue of a slide and slipping back again and again.
sarah dressed soley in aubergine and despite her failure to eat anything, she was frantically fat. the meat surrounding the base of her thumb would wobble like lava if she managed to bounce.
***
since there was no chance that one day sarah might actually have sex, she had no fear of being stabbed, even to death, and was actually quite looking forward to it. It would be, after all, the experience of some sort of penetration.
she dreamed as a young girl that she would be stabbed -- at least once, and so waited for it - each day passed as one page in a novel who's pleasures lie in the last chapter.
how long until this chapter would come? how many minutes, hours, days, years? waiting was aguish, and in frustration she would jab broken popsicle sticks into her bounteous thighs.
***
sarah loved to watch football focus.
she would tape every show and play them continuously, back to back, with no sound on.
she knew every word: the voices of each player and manager and every character who passed thru.
she could do perfect impressions of the world this show created for her, but was lost when it came to even thinking aobut the tv world that existed even a minute before or a minute after "her show". football focus existed soley for her.
she also loved to look at katsup.
***
sarah had broken her arm (when she was seven) in a freak bowling accident. having grown impatient, she had decided to walk over and kick the pins down herself. her brother, feeling that she was cheating, commenced to throw a fourteen pound ball at her. He missed, but she managed to slip and slap her ulma into super-shiny hardwood.
she grew attached to her plaster of paris cast which boasted of the the dullest signatured surface ever to grace gimpdom. she had used the grewying surface to practice signing her own name, identically, again and again. 14 years later, the plaster was still somewhat present on her mystery-arm. Little bits of surgical plaster littered the expanding lakes of aubergine colored fuzzy dresses..
sarah also liked to stick butterfly bodies up her nose.
***
sarah was confounded.
"drat" she belched and spewed forth the remaining gust of wind which had been festering in her loins and risen to each empty pocket within her since giving her german shepard the kiss of life, as she did each morning, three to four minutes after she had woken up.
the results were usual, and the dog would heave himself out of death-like immobility, come to a faint seeing the mound of his masters morning face pressed to -what you might call- his dog lips.
he would then stretch out to watch the ceiling fan, trying to guess its pattern, as he had never seen it still; winter autumn, spring, summer, not once in the four years that he had lived there.
quite a work ethic. or at least that's the way shaw, the st. bernard looked at it.
this particular day he lay there until the street lights came on when he realized that all day, sarah had been doing the same. he turned on his side to watch her watching the ceiling fan. he wondered if she had figured out the biggest mystery in his life. he then saw that her chest, the floor, her whole body was covered with scribbled on party napkins. her eyes were transfixed to the fan as her hands worked uninteligible scribles onto the napkins, invariably piercing daffy duck, or simba, depending on what pack the napkins came from.
"drat" he heard her say over and over again.
he stared at her voluminous mouth wondering what these sounds meant.
he whimpered slowly, trying to copy her angry little bark, but he couldn't get it.
the streetlights outside struggled to keep their living room lit, and while shaw and sarah and the ceiling fan worked to adjust their eyes to the dimming light. the ceiling fan, which, incidentally, had only a pattern of fingerprints in thick dust, noted that both the woman and the dog were really QUITE confounded.
***
sarah thought that she had met somebody that tuesday,
but unfortunately,
it was just an illusion.
