Terwilliger had stumped up to be with them. Phoebe turned to the fish.
“What—what is it?”
“The Bombardyx is a type of hermit-crab creature, a small organic slug. This one appears to have taken up residence in a leftover Symphonium device from the Disintegral Era of the Lesser Splenetics.”
“Is this within the rules?”
“Apparently so.”
Now the Bombardyx began to perform.
It started by duplicating Miracle Factory’s entire set, note for note. Then, like a master jazz improviser, it elaborated on all the tunes, reconfiguring them into a whole ingenious suite.
When the hidden creature was finished, Phoebe knew that they had lost.
Glyphs burned in the air. Terwilliger gasped.
“It is a tie! The Bombardyx lost points by stealing your compositions. You both must perform again!”
Phoebe had not an ounce of energy left in her. Looking at her sagging friends, she knew that they did not either.
Her eye fell on the bottle of Sam Adams.
She lifted it, and the others brightened. The guys grabbed theirs, and everyone chugged them down.
The familiar invigorating spell cast by Modine’s adaptation of the Earth brew swept through Phoebe’s limbs.
Miracle Factory began their encore.
As Phoebe drummed, she felt strange changes overtaking her: swellings and tentative writhings along her midriff. Things were growing beneath her shirt!
There came a ripping sound, as her shirt seams popped.
She looked down at herself.
She had sprouted four extra arms, two on each side. Fully formed limbs, apparently—yes!—under her complete control.
Without hesitation, she grabbed up her extra sticks.
The guys missed a beat, then recovered.
“You go, girl!”
Phoebe began to drum. Really drum. For the first time in her life, she could do everything she had ever envisioned—with sticks, anyhow.
The others had stopped now.
It was just Phoebe, drumming up a storm.
It was the longest drum solo in history. Not to mention the most complex.
An hour later, she was done.
Phoebe collapsed. The guys clustered around her, lifting her up. She clung to them with all her hands.
Unimpressed, the Bombardyx began to vent its reply.
A platform swooped down on the stage, interrupting the building-sized creature. Out of the vehicle stepped a biped.
One with six arms.
The alien turned and faced the audience, and began to speak.
Terwilliger translated. “He says you are plainly a lost larval form of his race, the Sextuples. As such, you cannot be clients. This contest must be deemed null and void.”
Phoebe couldn’t believe it. Getting to her feet, she let the guys help her from the stage.
Modine was waiting for them.
“I told you, did I not, to hope for the best?”
Phoebe drew herself up. “You did this, didn’t you? We’re not any relation to that race.”
“The Sextuples happened to owe the Bowerbirds a favor. A simple cell-potentiator with morphic overlays and some neuronal enhancers in your drink did the rest.”
“Now we can go home!” said Scott.
“And Earth is saved!” said Mark.
“Thanks to Pheeb!” said Frank.
Lifting Phoebe to their shoulders, the guys paraded her around, Terwilliger frolicking at their feet and Modine flapping around Phoebe’s head.
“I assume these extra arms can be gotten rid of fairly easily?” said Phoebe sternly to the canary.
“Yes. A simple resorptive—”
“I’ll have it now, if you don’t mind, Mister Bird.”
“As you wish.”
“But I’ll use it when I’m good and ready!”
Are Pia Zadora and Danny DeVito truly the products of the gene-engineering of Lovecrafiian Old Ones? Is Randy Newman’s career decline explicable as an act of revenge for just a single song? If you were Snow White living alone in the woods with the Seven Dwarves, would you sleep easily at night? Is there a secret race cohabiting with humans, and if so, does that make getting a date for Saturday night easier or harder?
Do you really think I have the answers?
Queen of the Pixies, King of the Imps
l. Thumbelina Complex
The circumstances surrounding my parentage and birth were never clear. At least not to me. I deeply suspect that Aunt Itzie might have been able to tell me more about my origins than she ever chose to. But for whatever reasons, she never so chose. Shut up tight as a frightened armadillo when I asked, and said that what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. And now she’s gone, so I can’t ask anymore.
Right up to this day, I still couldn’t say for sure whether Itzie and I were even truly related or not, whether she was my actual by-blood aunt. In a way, I kind of hoped she wasn’t. Considering the fantasies I had about her during my adolescence. (And, to be honest about it, straight into my rather lonely adulthood.)
The first real memory I have is of Aunt Itzie holding my hand as we walked to school on opening day. The September sun warm as flannel pyjamas. My leg braces and little wrist-support canes occasionally clacking together like castanets. Kindergarten, I assume, since the braces finally came off in first grade. I was four or five, of course, and Aunt Itzie was—well, she was an adult, however old. Had plainly done all the growing she was ever going to do.
Yet the top of my five-year-old head came up to her shoulder, and my cowlick probably stuck up above that point.
Itzie was an appreciable but not overwhelming measure over four feet tall. And that was in three-inch heels, her favorite footwear, and with her strawberry-blonde hair piled high. I doubt she weighed more than eighty pounds. Her wrists and ankles were sparrow-delicate; her charming, always lipsticked mouth small and perfect as a fairy rose. Yet she wasn’t a dwarf or a midget, or any other kind of oddly formed person. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Itzie was an ultra-petite knockout. A doll, a looker, a babe. Any other non-PC term you can think of conveying head-turning pulchritude. I said she wasn’t oddly formed, but that’s not quite true. Like a (modestly) scaled-up Barbie, her measurements were slightly skewed. More on top than seemed supportable by her narrow ribs and waist, but the whole harmonized by undeniably fertile hips. She generally accentuated her curves with a tightly cinched belt. Her whole manner of dressing, in fact, without being overtly provocative or tasteless, was maddeningly sexy. At least to me, the more so naturally the older I got.
Over the years, as I got to know Aunt Itzie with more adult insight, it seemed to me that her appearance, while plainly calculated, was almost out of her control. It was as if her curvaceous form helplessly and naturally exuded a preternatural, almost genetic allure, which even muffling with sackcloth would have failed to mute.
Another thing she naturally exuded—and you don’t have to believe me, if you don’t want to, but I never saw my aunt use perfume—was a spicy scent most similar to that of viburnum. A kind of cinnamon tang.
Now, I understand there are some people who aren’t turned on by beauty in miniature. They find it too cloying or alien or fragile.
Obviously, I’m not one of them. And judging by the number of male—and even female—heads that turned when Aunt Itzie walked down the street with her young charge (on that specific day and many general others), I’m not alone.
Itzie was not her real name, of course. It was Fritzie. Fritzie de la Mare. (I’m Wally.) But my initial stumbling childish speech christened her “Itzie” and the nickname stuck.
For obvious reasons.
Aside from not knowing my parents and being raised by a very small single-parent-substitute, I had a perfectly normal childhood. One exception. A lot of trips to the doctor. As an infant, I exhibited a congenital leg deformity that necessitated corrective braces and, over many years, a course of mysterious
injections whose purpose I never really knew or questioned.
As long as Aunt Itzie assured me it was for my own good, I had no doubts or worries.
Anyway, by high school I had grown up into a healthy lad, slightly over six feet. My looks were—well, “rugged” is the conventional euphemism. No one would ever call me conventionally handsome, but I wasn’t a monster either. If you imagine Tom Berenger without whatever panache landed him a Hollywood career, you’ll have a good idea of my features.
I was a normal guy in all respects. Sports, studies, hobbies. Save for one thing.
Girls proportioned to my own size failed to excite me.
Any female much over four feet tall struck me forcibly and viscerally as a gawky giantess, ugly despite any superficial beauty. They just didn’t attract me. A fair number of these “big girls,” as I came to mentally label them, tried, however, to gain my interest over the years. But I just couldn’t honestly reciprocate.
I was fixated on small women. Very small women. Precisely, of Aunt Itzie’s size and build. Whether I had been conditioned or conditioned myself, or whether it was some neurochemical or genetic quirk, I just couldn’t get interested in any body type other than the ultra-petite.
Needless to say, my choice of potential mates was very limited. The population of my smallish high school numbered about five hundred, and there were only two or three of my classmates who were anywhere near the dimensions I dreamed of. Not just any very small woman, it eventuated, would match my odd parameters. She had to exhibit most of my Aunt’s features to interest me.
In the end, only one girl existed who really fit my idealized portrait. She was a very popular girl—although, mysteriously, she had no steady boyfriend—and I had to build up my courage for months before I dared approach her.
Her nickname was Pidge, short for Pigeon, which bird she resembled not a little, especially in the bosom. When, amid much coughing and stuttering, I finally expressed the possibility of a date, she regarded me curiously, as if trying to see beyond my exterior somehow, searching for some elusive quality. But in the end, she said, “No, I thought for a second— No, I’m sorry, Wally. I just can’t.”
And so I was left to take the horny adolescent’s usual path of gonadal self-relief, aided and abetted by mental images of Aunt Itzie in various poses which I still blush to recall.
Of course, I was completely unable to share this dilemma with my guardian. Rather awkwardly, she tried to give me dating advice, me all the while unable to tell her how useless her words were.
Perhaps if Aunt Itzie herself had by example taught me how adults got together, I might have grown up more socially adept. But the odd thing was that Aunt Itzie, attractive as she might have been, had absolutely no love life. None. No suitors, no one-night-stands, no old flames come to console a grieving widow (if widow she even was; the prior existence of an Uncle de la Mare was strictly conjectural on my part). In the twenty-odd years of our relationship, she never, to the best of my knowledge, deviated from an old maid’s lonely existence.
Which is not to say Itzie had no libido. Rather the contrary, since hardly a midnight went by that I did not hear unmistakeable sounds of self-vented passion emanating from her room.
Of course, such eavesdropping simply added fuel to my own frustrated needs.
But until the day she saddened me more than I had ever been saddened by precipitously dying without undergoing any prior illness—she was then perhaps sixty, perhaps older, her ageless, marvelous figure utterly intact, only her blonde hair to some degree whitened—Aunt Itzie never knew, I hoped, the role she had played in my psyche.
But who can be sure about anybody knowing anything?
Aunt Itzie’s death seemed to free me slightly from keeping silent about my compulsions, enough anyhow for me to try visiting a professional. After several expensive sessions, the psychiatrist felt confident enough to utter a diagnosis.
“Mister de la Mare, I have some good news and some bad news. First off, you are definitely neither a pedophile nor some misogynist who must render women symbolically insignificant in order to approach them. Your symptoms simply don’t fit the clinical profiles.”
“Well, gee, thanks, Doctor. I never felt like either of those types, but it’s good to know for sure.”
Professionally oblivious to my weak sarcasm, the man continued. “What you do have, I believe, is a very rare neurosis, one I personally have never encountered before outside of texts. Thumbelina complex, we call it. A fixation on women of diminutive stature. There’s been no real success in curing past cases. But it should not interfere with your living a happy and productive and companionable life.”
“I agree, Doctor! If only I could find the woman of my dreams!”
“Have you considered soliciting potential dates perhaps an inch or two taller than your, ah, optimum? You could work your way up the spectrum. Perhaps after a few, um, satisfactory intimate encounters, you would find even a five-foot woman agreeable.…”
“I suppose.…”
I left that day, poorer but just as frustrated, and never resumed therapy
In fact not only did I leave therapy, but also my job, and my home state, relocating far from the painful memories.
I was resigned to spending the rest of my life alone, without female companionship of the only kind that would make me happy.
Two months later, Pia Zamora came to work in my office.
Young Aunt Itzie’s twin.
2. Ignatz Intrudes
Tom T’s was noisier than I’ve ever heard it. A group of state workers from the Registry of Motor vehicles was celebrating the millionth nervous breakdown they had induced in a customer. Or something similar. The bridge-and-tunnel crowd was acting like members of a suburban chapter of the Hellfire Club. A passel of theatergoers was rehearsing the entire soundtrack of the musical they had just seen. Songs and lyrics by the famous team of Schmaltz and Glitz.
Even though Pia was seated just the diameter of a small round table away from me, I could hardly hear her speak.
But this was good. Because it meant she couldn’t hear me sound like a fool. Which is what I’m sure my babbling would have conveyed.
So instead, while she sipped her drink (she had declined alcohol, and chosen just a Sprite), I contemplated her and my luck.
The tips of Pia’s pumps barely grazed the floor. She was dressed in a tight green angora sweater and plaid wool skirt. Her tiny waist was belted. Tightly. Her styled hair was a deeper auburn than Aunt Itzie’s, her complexion darker. But her mouth was the same perfect cupid’s- bow, her eyes showed the same flashing impulsive nature.
My throat had closed up to the size of a straw. I sipped some of my beer.
For three weeks, I had dreamed of this moment. Watching Pia across the office at her desk, hardly daring to believe in the reality of her. When she stopped for lunch or a snack—I noticed she favored finger food, mini-Ritz, Chicken McNuggets or the like, things that would disappear in a few small nibbles—I was amazed that she was earthbound enough to need to eat. I spied on her as she laughed and chattered. When I had plausible and neutral reasons to talk to her, I found myself zoning out at the sound of her voice. It seemed to pluck the strings of my central nervous system.
At last, after ascertaining that she had no boyfriend, I had dared to invite her out for a drink. It was the last possible moment that week, since she was starting her vacation the next day. Going someplace abroad.
She eyed me the exact same way that high school-era Pidge had, and I held my breath for the inevitable refusal.
“Why, sure, Wally. Sounds like fun.”
I was washed by a wave of lust that felt like a blast of hard radiation. It was all I could do to make it back to my desk.
And now, I was going to blow my one chance so far at a normal male-female relationship—or at least as normal as I could hope for—by clamming up or spouting nonsense.
Wake up, Wally! Say something halfway intelligent!
“Um, P
ia, your last name? Is it Spanish?”
Lips pursed around her straw, she gurgled up the last of her soda before speaking. When she set the bottle down, I was struck once more by the perfection of her miniature hands. Painted nails the size of dots punched from colored paper.
“Mexican. My Mom was born in Mexico City. Dad hailed from Denmark, though. He was a diplomat stationed there. Mom and I eventually became American citizens.”
“And you use your mother’s maiden name?”
She looked genuinely puzzled. “Why, of course.”
Then, like an idiot, I blurted it out. “Were your parents both as small as you?”
A certain wariness stiffened Pia’s spine and features. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no real reason. Just curious, heh-heh. I could never— I mean, one doesn’t— That is, it’s quite unusual—”
My obvious confusion seemed to relax Pia. “As a matter of fact, they were. Could you get me another soda, please?”
Dumb as I was, I could recognize when the subject was being changed. “Sure.”
On my way back from the bar, I was surprised to see a stranger at our table. He and Pia seemed to be engaged in some kind of passionate confab.
The newcomer was a fellow with a well-developed upper body. The kind of guy who either worked out a lot or was simply lucky enough to manufacture massive amounts of testosterone. He wore a plain white tee shirt with the legend MICRODOODZ across the back. His youngish face was craggy as a weathered cliff, topped by black hair thick as a goat’s pelt. Leaning across the table, he had Pia pinioned by the wrists. She wore a look not of fear but of lofty disdain.
As I threaded my way through the crowd, anxious and curious, one of those weird public silences occurred. The music and conversation and laughter and shrieking hit a momentary dead spot. In the lull I could plainly hear an exchange between Pia and the stranger, though no one else seemed to pay any attention to their low voices.
The man’s tone was gruff. “You will marry me and give me an heir soon, my Queen! Willingly or not!”
Fractal Paisleys Page 24
