Some Women Love Brains

     Harold was in the jar again. It was the seventh time in sixth months.

     "How many corpses can you run through, dear?" he subvocalized--or whatever it was--and the words appeared on the brilliant blue screen.

     He called each acquisition's shell a corpse because it was easier that way. Better not to think of them as they actually were: his students.

     Serena did not read the screen, she brushed it with the long ornate nails of her left hand, that is all.

     And Harold felt it.

     Or did he? Maybe the ripples that he imagined against the grey/pink flesh of--well, of himself--maybe it was all a mazy madness. He knew he was not immune to madness. All that was left of him was the whorled flesh of his brain, the labyrinth of his own mind inside it. But he was not a solipsistic sort, not he; and therefore he did not ruminate on the irrational or the irreal for very long. Instead, the eye-camera attached to the jar which held the brain which was all that he wore (or was) watched the girl. Harold felt almost that he was swaying in the gentle amniotic breeze . . .

     Serena glided like a model on a runway, hips an elaborate architecture and eternal yet unattainable rhythm. Brain that he was, disembodied and defleshed as he was, if he could swim he would, in circles like a fish. And what would have been a hard-on in normal circumstances was only a tickle in a distant toe, a toe perhaps scratching at the surface of the moon or the scummy bottom of a long forgotten specimen jar.

     He watched her ass move like the last wagon train across the dead plains of Araegetheneaa--

     He watched her move like the first blush of creation.

     He watched--

     He reached out and felt the silk (or whatever it was) on her back and underneath that the fine bra-strap which he followed to the bra's cupped edge--

     He felt her turn rigid like a statue.

     He withdrew his hand.

     She turned slow as a mannequin in a rotating display case to face him. He stared at her eyes, the color of green silk, he admired her hair like any inky Cleopatra waterfall, the crease of worry on her pale brow, the gleam of her purple-hued lips. He stared at her eyes and felt her stare through him--

     He watched her turn away.

     He plunged his mind back in the bucket, watched the filthy foam rise, and shot an envious glance at the brain in the green glass jar, floating pale and ugly like an old whale in some salty old sea.

    Distant but not, there was a shadow, feminine fleshed yet carrying a hammer.

Finis.