XX.
I like being up high looking out of the apartment
window elbows on the
sill is one of my favorite occupations. Or up on the roof watching
the grass
grow, but the window is nice because I can watch movement on the
street
without watching who's watching me. I like looking down on
people.
But I go down the stairs and out and up the hill
to the shopping street
where holiday women walk about in their street clothes warm
weather
T-shirts and tight trousers of light tacky fabric. I gape but
sideways at
breasts swaying and bulging just beneath the surface, imagine the
brush
of their nipples on those flimsy shells as if they are my own
beginning to
feel dizzy with the underpants I am wearing today becoming damp
and
uncomfortable, my tail bound up between my legs chafing and
scraping
in the constricted space getting somehow smaller.
But don't you trip, don't you slip in love with the girls on the avenue.
So I go and sit down on the rim of the fountain in
the park nearby, sit
down and wriggle and watch. A young girl comes up and sits down
next
to me. She is the same pretty of all girls before they get to about
16 or 17
when something happens to them and they start to do things to their
bodies
as if they suddenly hate themselves.
She says to me suddenly, "Are you a boy or a girl?"
"I've got long hair haven't I?" I say back.
"That doesn't matter anymore," she says.
"Well, what do you think?" I ask her.
"How many holes have you got?" she asks back.
So I start counting from the top, "Two ears, um,
two nose holes, a
mouth, um, navel - that's not really a hole anymore - then, piss
hole,
sexhole, asshole - so, eight holes I guess, oh, and then I have
two
holes in my earlobes, so that's ten, and one hole at the very top of
my
head that you can't see, but it's a pretty good one, I can see a lot
of
stuff with it that my eyes can't...so that's eleven
altogether."
"That's how old I am," she says, "eleven."
"11 is the best number in the universe, " I say.
"Your name might be Lynda Sue Dixon," she smiles.
"It makes me see things other people can't see
now, you are too young
to know that one, " I smile back.
"My mother plays a lot of crap around the house,
see," she says rolling
her eyes and then points at my stomach, "What's that then? It looks
like
a prick to me." And she folds her arms and presses her lips like an
old
schoolmarm.
I look down. I have jeans on today and I've done
the tail up through my
legs where there's a convenient diamond-shaped space, then up the
groin
to one side and kept it there with the elastic of the undies. The
bulge is a
little obvious, and what's funny is that the tip is showing above the
top of
my jeans.
"That's really a tail," I say, and I tug at it a
little so more of it shows.
"Look, it has fur," I say. Well, in fact I haven't shaved my tail for
about
a week, and it gets a little furry if I don't.
"It still looks like a prick," she says.
"Yeah, it looks like a prick, I use it as a prick,
but it really is, um, a stand in,
a ...you know, ah..."
"You mean a phallic symbol, we have to read that
stuff at school, some
French jerk off called La Can, it's really boooring." When she
says
'boring' she makes a nice explosion with her lips on the B.
"Can I touch it?" she asks me.
Now I think, this is becoming a little hairy. I
look around. I don't mind
being inspected by a curious child but I know that other people
don't
like such an idea of hands on experience for the young when it
comes
to organs sexual, and my tail seems to have an awful lot of nerve
endings
for a useless and symbolic appendage, so I wonder.
"Oh, alright then," I say, and she reaches out and grabs hold of the end.
"Wow, it's hard," she says.
"Well, there's a bone in there, after all," I say.
Just then, I hear a shriek.
"Babybear! What are you doing? Come away from there, you hear?"
"Oh no," she says, "that's my mother."
"What did she call you?" I ask.
"Babybear. That's my name. Yuk, Babybear Brady,
it's awful. My parents
are awful too - my mother - she married her brother, yuk. But they
split up,
you know. Marcia's only got me now."
"It isn't so bad, they aren't actually genetic brother and sister you know."
"I don't care," she says, "It's still incess chew
us, I know that from school -
Look out, she's coming over here now."
I look, and see a middle aged slightly fat white woman hobbling closer.
"What's your name?" BB asks me keeping an eye on her mom's progress.
"Well, my mother called me Lynx, because I looked
like my father, she said,"
I tell her.
"Then we are both named after animals," she says,
looking up at me from
under a frown, "We are both animals."
Then, her mother is in front of our faces, wagging
her finger, rumpled, angry,
wheezing slightly. "Why don't you come when I call you?"
She smells of fear and rage and another odour,
sexual desire unsatisfied, and
the hormones start doing their job on the fear, and the hair on my
back is
prickling me. My tail starts to flip about real uncomfortable in my
pants.
"Get away from that thing," she says.
I get up and hightail it out of there.
I've had enough of being on the ground for one day.