Nine Kinds of Naked

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Nine Kinds of Naked

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Copyright © 2008 by Tony Vigorito

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19 th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Vigorito, Tony.

Nine kinds of naked/Tony Vigorito.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Coincidence—Fiction. 2. Tornadoes—Fiction. 3. Life change events— Fiction. 4. Life—Fiction. 5. Experimental fiction. I. Title.

PS3622.I48N56 2008

813'.6—dc22 2007047968

ISBN 978-0-15-603123-3

eISBN 978-0-547-54283-6

v3.0916

For my family

Something unknown is doing

we don’t know what.

—Sir Arthur Eddington

1 THE MORNING the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm was the morning a runaway serf dared a dreamer to untie the fourth and final knot on a ratty strip of leather. The dreamer accepted the dare and untied the knot, and life would never be the same.

The morning the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm was the day Dave Wildhack colored his kitchen wall with an old box of crayons. Afterward, it would finally dawn on him what his late wife had meant by her last words.

The morning the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm was the morning Special Agent J. J. Speed woke up in his hotel room to find a grandfather clock lying in bed next to him. Later that same day, he would encounter a simulacrum of himself, completely and unabashedly naked, gallumping on a donkey around the streets of New Orleans.

The morning the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm was the day that Diablo was seduced by his goddaughter. It was a daring and lovely match of intellect and wit, although it would take two tornadoes and a crusader’s cajoling to convince Diablo to open his heart.

The morning the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm was the day that Elizabeth Wildhack quit her job as a stripper. This would vex her afternoon clientele considerably, particularly an obstetrician-gynecologist by the name of Dr. Rip Blossom, although Elizabeth only knew him by various aliases, and knew nothing of his profession. His is a sad and pathetic story, and one we hope not to dwell upon at length, although at this point in the telling we must warn you that anything is possible.

And anything is indeed possible. A world containing phenomena as astounding as tornadoes should never be underestimated for its ability to startle one’s expectations.

2 TWENTY-FIVE YEARS before the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the eye of the storm, Bridget Snapdragon was stung by a bee.

Bridget Snapdragon’s legal name was Bridget Wilson, but as far as she was concerned, her last name was and always would be Snapdragon. Regrettably, Bridget Snapdragon died nine months after that bumblebee pricked the sunburned skin of her left butt cheek.

Bridget Snapdragon lived in Normal, Illinois, a midsized college and insurance town an hour south of Chicago. Bridget found residing in a place with the awelessness to call itself Normal to be a troubling circumstance. After all, though Catholic by heritage, Bridget Snapdragon fancied herself pagan. She fancied herself many things, but alien, outlaw, and pagan were her favorite and most frequent secret identities. Normalcy, in other words, was no aspiration of hers.

On the other hand, her husband, Dave, was a gainfully employed actuary who kept a well-organized basement. Dave thought his wife’s imagination charming initially, then peculiar, and ultimately dangerous. He expressed his fears and misgivings to their pastor, Father J. J. Speed, one Sunday afternoon over hot dogs at a church picnic. Father J. J. Speed chewed his toothpick, which was a perpetual presence on his lips, and though he couldn’t care less about Dave’s problems, he nodded in feigned compassion.

The feminine mind, Father J. J. Speed explained, is particularly vulnerable to such ominous whimsy. You don’t have to be ordained to understand the role of Eve in Adam’s fall from grace. Women are more susceptible to temptation, and are apt to seduce men into evil as well. He deftly snatched his toothpick out of his mouth before biting into his hot dog.

What should I do?

Take comfort in the fact that you are not alone. Father J. J. Speed swallowed hard and continued. And remember, you’re her husband. It’s your responsibility to see her through her temptations. He grabbed Dave earnestly by the shoulder, thinking all the while how satisfying it would be to slap the crap out of him. Jeezus gawd, how he loathed his panty waist parishioners. Pray for her, Dave.

And so he did. In fact, shortly thereafter, while Dave knelt praying in their front room, Bridget scampered off into the woods behind their home. A sizable creek chattered through the woods and was large enough to form a swimming hole at the base of some mild rapids. Bridget liked to pretend she was a wild woman of the woods—a sylvan maenad, she determined—and on this particular day she decided to go skinny-dipping. She stripped down to her panties and bra under the cover of the low-hanging branches of a nearby willow tree. After peering around for other people, furtively at first and then warily as she fell into character, she tore off her undergarments and skedoodled twenty paces across the rock and shale until she splashed gasping into the cold water.

Bridget was soon floating lazily on her back, breasts bobbing the surface like apples in a Halloween barrel, ears underwater listening to the muffled waterfall. Her bronze hair drifted free of constraint, billowing like a jellyfish in the lusty currents of the water, and her imagination stirred. "Hoodly-doodly, she sang out. Her voice chimed hollow and distant in her submerged ears, as it might sound to one’s spirit unshackled from the flesh. Doinkery-dinkery-dick," she snickered, attempting to summon a spontaneity of song. In Bridget’s mind, glossolalia was the proper language in which to cast a spell, though she rarely had a specific purpose in mind, and knew she had never really attained the flawless abandon that constitutes the diction of the Holy Spirit. On this day, however, after a few more false starts and self-conscious stumbles, she achieved a perfect and poetic nonsense:

trippety flips,

o fabulo mickey,

dracula dickey

jeskers a lee.

sluckery yuck

ta wimble zoo doo.

quabbery pips

gimbles le bloo.

kottle-ree-vockle-dee-mastle-nee-jee.

wee wee-he,

go go-she,

ta baxery bee.

She laughed loud a few beats after triumph, loud enough to attract the attention of a terribly sad twenty-year-old man desperately trying to stroll through the woods. His name, or the nickname with which his unit had tagged him, was Diablo. For reasons that have no place next to a naked woman at play, Diablo could not accomplish this supposedly pleasant endeavor. I’m taking a walk in the woods, he kept reassuring himself, but it was having neither the calming nor the grounding effect that kitchen calendars so often suggest that it will. No, Diablo’s consciousness was a cold observer once removed from the ape in combat fatigues trudging along the trail. He was out of his head, and he was scared to death of life.

But all of this disappeared the moment Diablo’s ears caught a whiff of the outspoken and mellifluent music glancing through the trees. He snapped immediately present, and the psychopathic cacophony he had been nurturing in his head like a cracked rotten egg fell suddenly silent. Indeed, he would realize upon reflection that it was the first time in years that he’d felt like something as straightforward as himself.

Diablo followed the melody toward the creek, but it ended before he could zero in on its source. He paused, holding his breath, silent and perfectly still, goose bumps popping all over his skin, then nearly leapt out of his sweat at the eruption of wild, fierce, and benevolent laughter that burst out less than twenty-five feet from where he stood. Acting only on an instinct of childish curiosity, he crept forward to the tree line of the creek. There, he was greeted with a scene of such majestic sensuality that enchantment was his only possible reaction.

And how could it be otherwise, trailing as it did the accidental spell pronounced so playfully by Bridget Snapdragon? But here all agnostics must pause and murmur. "Yes, but was it really a spell?" Perhaps not, or at least no more than we are really who we think we are. Skepticism is commendable, but it can be as blinding as faith, and sometimes such assertions destroy the experience and undermine the immanence of our story, which is to say, the significance of our existence, and this is precisely the realm Diablo inhabited before stumbling into the watershed moment of his life. We do what we do because of who we think we are, or who we think we ought to be. Bridget Snapdragon thought she cast a spell, and so for all intents and purposes, she did.

And she really did. Nine months later no one in her church could doubt it, though she never told a soul.

3 MOMENTS PASSED before Diablo noticed a pulsating purr complementing his vision. Several more passed before Diablo realized the throbbing thrum was not the background hum of the ecstatic universe, but rather the drone of a very large bee buzzing laps around his crown. His trance vanished with an irate swat, which solidly whapped the insect and sent it spiraling drunkenly away. Moments later, Bridget Snapdragon, who had been gliding across the surface of the pool on her stomach and pretending to be a water pixie, yelped and frantically splashed to her feet, one hand on her rump and the other clawing its way out of the water. Ouch, ouch, ouch, she gasped in ever-louder cries, whimpering in between breaths. Once out of the water she began to run but slipped on the slick shale, falling gracelessly sideways but catching herself with the hand that had been clutching her posterior. Her tumble jolted Diablo out of his stupefaction over witnessing the inadvertent consequences of his irritation. He reanimated his slackened jaw and would have hailed an offer of help if Bridget had not leapt up from her spill, burst into a panicked bawl, and broken into a full-speed adrenal flight into the trees.

Oh shit, Diablo swore, half-mortified and half-amused, because, let’s face it, people look funny when they stumble, especially if they’re without permanent injury and stark naked besides. After Bridget disappeared from sight, he called out a not-too-loud apology, sincerely sorry but helplessly elated. He swallowed his grin, shook his head, and caught sight of her abandoned red blouse beneath the willow tree across the creek. The least I can do, Diablo reasoned, is get her clothes back to her. He resolved to follow her trail and leave them anonymously on her porch. It seemed a basic kindness, and intoxicated by the purity of his experience, it never occurred to him that she might find this creepy, which, as it turned out, she did not.

As for Bridget, she tore through the trees and the brush like the divine madwoman she so often imagined herself to be. Indeed, as she would exaggerate to herself later, the souls of a thousand maenads were drumming at her heels, and all creatures fled the elemental ferocity of her path, embodying as it did the howling, yowling fury of all that is wild but unfree.

4 DAVE WILSON had dozed off while praying for his fallen wife. Toppled sideways from his knees, torso sprawled inelegantly on the surface of the sofa, he would have looked like a fresh corpse to a passerby. Upon closer inspection, however, the passerby might have noticed a telltale bulge stretching the fabric at the top of his left trouser leg. Assuming rigor mortis was not to blame, this had to indicate the fires of Creation still crackling away. In fact, Creation was roaring like a raunchy pagan bonfire. Dave was enraptured by the sort of dream he had experienced more or less annually since he was thirteen, when his mother woke him from an afternoon nap on the sofa with blows from her heirloom hardcover edition of the King James Bible after seeing that his hips were throbbing to a carnal cadence. Despite the rude awakening, he ejaculated uncontrollably, and was beaten the worse for that. It was his first, and to date his last, sexual climax.

This annoyed Dave considerably, though not for the epicurean reasons you might suspect. No, Dave’s motives were properly immaculate, for while he desperately desired a child of his own, sexual congress with Bridget was invariably a filibuster. No matter how hard or how long he thrust, he could not find the edge of the waterfall. Bridget, meanwhile, came again and again, thrashing and moaning into her pillow like a banshee in heat and quite horrifying Dave, who feared he was turning his wife into a terrifically lusty sex beastess. Hence, while their lovemaking was famously furious, it was equally infrequent. It was simply impossible for Dave to maintain the illusion of puritanical procreation in the face of his squirming wife’s unchaste and unabashed pleasure.

To be sure, Dave knew the pleasures of the flesh. He just didn’t enjoy them, at least in retrospect. Nonetheless, the latent hedonism of his body took advantage of any loosening of the gnarled fist of his sexual repression to saturate his brain with forbidden hormones and thereby trigger vivid and wildly absurd fantasies. It was to be expected, really. Repressing a natural urge increases the pressure of the eventual surge, while stubborn naïveté of the unrelenting thrust of existence only succeeds in dilating the boundaries of the imagination.

Thus, the dozen or so naked and oily women who were smothering Dave in their frenzied attempts to experience his manhood simultaneously began screaming like sirens on a roller coaster. Their shrieking stridulation so startled him that he threw himself off the sofa as he kicked awake, just in time to see Bridget, inexplicably stark naked, charge wailing into the room.

What’s happened!? Dave thundered, frightened, flabbergasted, and floored.

Help me, Bridget choked through her hyperventilating sobs and pointed at her swollen derriere. A bee.

Oh, honey . . .

It . . . stung . . . me, she stammered between blubbers.

Okay, okay. Dave leapt to her side. It’ll be all right. Not yet awake enough to be baffled at her nakedness, his skin merely prickled with a vague awareness that he was helping a damsel in distress. He felt humbly good—chivalrous—as he unbuttoned his shirt and slung it over her shoulders. No matter that his pasty torso lacked the slightest hint of muscle definition. No matter that the only scar he had was a little white dot beneath his armpit where he’d had a mole removed. What mattered was that he felt the archetypal rightness beneath the situation, the valiant courtesy, the gallant nobility. Sure, his swashbuckling swagger stumbled when he couldn’t get his last button undone, but he succeeded in the end, and perhaps even lent the scene an element of high drama when he popped the button off after a couple of desperate yanks. He cloaked the frightened woman, and in so doing fulfilled that purpose to which he imagined his whole life to have been directed. He defended. He protected. He provided. This was it, his masculine crescendo, and his performance was extraordinary.

And so it was with perfect clarity that Dave helped his wife to lie facedown on the sofa. Once she was settled, he whispered into her ear that he would be right back, and waited for her fearful but trusting nod to release him. Flawless was his valor as he strode stouthearted into the kitchen, where he fetched an ice pack and a dish towel, then on to the bathroom for some tweezers.

Bridget, meanwhile, lay on the sofa in ponderous exhaustion, breathing heavy but considerably calmed. Dave’s tenderness soothed and pleased her, and she solicited seconds by whimpering when he jogged back into the room clutching his improvised surgical tools. Here we are, honey. Dave genuflected beside his wife and stroked her brow, eliciting a tenuous sigh. This will take the edge off the swelling. He wrapped the ice pack in the dish towel and moved to place it on her fanny, pausing for a moment to glimpse its tumescence. Bridget sensed his gaze and smiled with her face to the cushions. She moaned ambiguously as she allowed her butt to rise and meet the ice, gasping at the first touch. Dave, suddenly aroused, jerked his hand away with the blind speed of having touched too hot a surface. He turned his head momentarily, then stole a grunting glance.

Good Dave Wilson belonged to that subcategory of men known popularly as the ass man. He delighted in the rump, and this was no small part of the reason why he always sat in the last row of pews at church—he probably could have described in impressive detail the rear end of every woman in his parish if he were thus interrogated. Though he never admitted it to his conscious self, Dave was irresistibly attracted to the gentle but daring slopes of a woman’s hips. At any opportunity, his eyes would sneak across the borders of the nearest patootie, stroking it ever so softly with his gaze. Again and again, his eyes swerved unerringly through the slick curves, careening into the danger zone and back like an invincible teenager late for a midnight pottery class. If Dave had not believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible, he may well have entertained the notion that woman was formed not from the scraps of some naked guy’s rib, but shaped from the clay of the earth and turned on the wheel of life by a potter both sensual and depraved.

Baby? Bridget’s voice interrupted his reverie. Do you think you’ll be able to get the stinger out?

Dave’s eyes went wide. Oh, he fumbled. Yes. Yes I do.

Bridget smiled. She knew she had a fine ass, and she knew Dave knew it too. I think it’s numb enough now, she offered.

All right. Dave removed the ice pack and scrunched his brow in an effort to squash the bawdy excitement roiling his physiology like a tickle tussle in a hot tub. Thus focused, other details became suddenly apparent. Where are your clothes?

Bridget bit her lip. I went swimming in the creek, she admitted, knowing her husband wasn’t going to like it.

Naked? Dave asked, tension tightening his voice. Skinny-dipping?

Oww, she pouted. Can you take the stinger out, baby?

Of course. Dave leapt again to the duties of chivalry. Gingerly, he touched the area around the epicenter of the sting. Her skin was cold to his touch but an erotic heat throbbed just beneath the surface. Okay. He picked up the tweezers. Here we go. With princely precision, he caught the exposed tip of the stinger on first grasp and slid it free. The effect was immediate as every muscle in Bridget’s body relaxed.

Mmm, thank you, she sighed.

You’re welcome, he said, and stroked the swollen peak of her bun, smirking. So how did you get stung?

I was swimming, Bridget said sleepily.

But how did it sting you there?

On my pumpy? Pumpy was Dave’s favored term for her bottom.

Mm-hmm. A helplessly lewd grin scampered across his face.

I was on my stomach. I guess my pumpy was above the surface of the water.

The image of the shimmering mounds of her buttocks rising out of the water like twin islands of buoyant pleasure overflowed the guilt-built dikes of Dave’s imagination. His breath shortened, his heart quickened, and his willie stood at heroic attention. Oh, he said after a few moments.

Will you kiss my boo-boo, baby?

Sure, he squeaked, trying to sound casual but trumpeting a strangled falsetto instead. Forgetting to breathe and becoming thus breathless, he glanced wildly about her behind. After several aborted lunges, he finally mustered the grace to lean gently forward. His hand preceded his lips, and the moment his index finger brushed the surface of her skin, Bridget purred and arched her back like a cat in heat, rolling her flesh into his lips. At that, Dave lost all control, kissing her venom-hot skin not just with his lips but with his mouth wide open and his tongue slip-sliding all around. Involuntarily, he fondled her callipygian contours like a blind man groping for paradise.

Bridget was thrilled, and moaned her encouragement. She was nonetheless surprised, however, when Dave scrambled to his feet, frantically unfastened his belt, yanked his trousers down, and kicked out of his pants. When he eventually worked his way between her thighs, she accepted his invitation and guided him inside. As soon as he entered her fully, however, the situation became altogether too much for Dave. Tendons pulled his entire body taut and centered on his groin. Life cracked its whip with an ineluctable hiah, and sent his entire body thrusting against her. Within seconds, Dave’s frenzied slamming suddenly ceased. He whimpered a wheezing groan, and his body relaxed upon hers.

Two decades after his first wet dream, Dave had finally experienced his first conjugal orgasm.

Hiah!

5 AS ANYONE who has ever chased a tardy white rabbit can attest, curiosity is chaos without fear, and is a necessary precondition for wonder. Bridget, of course, was content to drift along the serendipitous currents of the curious and discover what she might. Hence, following Dave’s premier ejaculation, as his breathing slowed into a postcoital trance atop of her, Bridget’s thoughts bewildered toward a recollection of the occasion when they met. It was a wedding, and when she’d heard that the reception was dry, she stopped by a liquor store after the ceremony and purchased three liters of tequila. Bridget, quite Irish in her Catholicism, did not believe in sober weddings (indeed, she was offended by the notion), and so she resolved to spike the punch into makeshift margaritas. There was no punch to spike, however, only orange juice, and so she succeeded in mixing up a very stiff bowl of Father J. J. Speed’s favorite nightcap—tequila sunrise less the grenadine. Stressed from the day’s work—weddings did little more than remind him of his own begrudged celibacy—Father J. J. Speed wound up drinking three tall tequila sunrises within the first hour as he related wedding mishaps to Bridget, all the while gnawing on his omnipresent toothpick and laughing increasingly close to her face. After pouring himself a fourth, he excused himself and sauntered over to flirt with Joycie Hammer, his most devout parishioner whose lusty confessions he had heard every single morning except Sundays and Christmases for years. He was back within minutes to ladle a tequila sunrise for her, and soon they were guffawing uproarious, falling into each other, the whole mess.

This might have raised a few scowls, for this was not a congregation to turn a tactful eye from scandal, but just about everybody else was already either animatedly engaged in their own loud conversation or riling up the dance floor. Aside from the jazz band, who were lit on their own variety of intoxicant, the bride and groom were the only people at the wedding who had not made it to the buffet. Alas, their dancing was hopelessly out of sync with everyone else’s, and guests kept jostling into them, gushing apologies and slapping congratulations. The bride and groom looked increasingly stern in their matrimony.

Everyone has their one dumb thing, their one karmic blunder, their one high heel on a jackass, and this was Bridget’s. If she had stopped to think for a minute, she might have guessed that the alcohol-free reception had a purpose other than sanctimonious temperance. But that was not her way, and so Bridget did not discover for weeks that the bride and groom had met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. And though they had avoided alcohol for two years together, they certainly knew what it smelled like on someone’s breath. Slam-dancing guests slurring Sorry! in their faces left little room for doubt.

Bridget was unaware of all of this. She was rather pleased with herself, in fact, and decided to chase the impulse, to spur the moment, and that is what brought her to Dave. He was leaning against the wall draining his second tequila sunrise when Bridget bounced up to him.

Is your name Dave? Bridget ventured, though she was quite certain of his name.

Yes it is, Dave replied, straightening and effortfully avoiding measuring her hips with his eyes.

Dave Wildhack, right? Bridget gushed like a groupie. She knew his last name was not Wildhack, though she would have liked it to be.

Wilson, he corrected her. Dave Wilson. I’m sorry, you must have me confused with someone else.

Oh, I’m not confused, Bridget grinned. I just like the name Wildhack. I made it up. She clinked her glass against his and took a sip.

Oh you made it up, Dave smiled, though he was nonplussed. Wildhack. He raised his glass to her toast and nervously took a large swallow.

Do you like it?

Like what?

Wildhack.

As a name?

Bridget bit her lip and nodded. It’s a fetching name, don’t you think?

I suppose.

Tell you what. Bridget nudged him with her glass and affected a Southern-belle accent. If a dashing Dave Wildhack were to ask me to dance, why I don’t think I could possibly decline.

Dave nodded, utterly mystified. You’re telling me you want my last name to be Wildhack? Bridget shrugged, and Dave fumbled as he struggled to grasp the situation. Would you, uh, like to dance?

Is your last name, uh, Wildhack?

Dave hesitated. Yes?

I’d love to, Bridget chirped as she led him out onto the dance floor. Dave followed, unpleasantly confused.

During the set break thirty minutes later, it occurred to Dave to ask his nominator the minor detail of her own name. He was not reassured when, with a flash of her eyes and a lick of her lips, she declared, "My name is Bridget Snapdragon!" just before catching the bridal bouquet.

6 DAVE DID NOT realize for weeks that this new woman in his life was not recognized by the state as Bridget Snapdragon, but Bridget Brown. He only discovered this at all because he idly happened to glance at the mail on her coffee table one evening while she was still getting ready to go out. He may have accepted that the gas company had her name wrong, as she tried to persuade him when he demanded an explanation, but it was absurd that the senders of all six pieces of mail were uniformly confused as to the proper designation of their addressee.

What is it with you and names? Dave was exasperated. Such wanton disorder vexed him greatly.

Oh, you’re one to talk, Bridget retorted. You led me to believe your name was Dave Wildhack in order to get me to dance with you.

Dave blinked and shook his head as a dozen different expressions fought for the territory of his face. What?

Bridget crossed her arms and pouted. That was her strategy of last resort when reason overwhelmed fancy, and here, fancy was as overwhelmed as a windmill in a tornado.

"Okay, listen, from now on we just call each other by our real names, okay?" Dave, satisfied that the matter was settled, nodded in agreement with himself.

Bridget shrugged, though she did not, as a matter of principle, believe in any such concept as a real name any more than she believed in any such concept as the state. Besides, she was only acquiescing to become Bridget Brown as her undercover alias, thereby launching an evening of espionage and intrigue for secret superagent Bridget Snapdragon, whose top-secret mission impossible was to discover the sexual fantasies of Dave Wilson, a.k.a. Dave Wildhack, renegade spy extraordinaire.

Secret superagent Bridget Snapdragon accomplished her mission, and before the night was through, Dave Wilson asked her to marry him.

7 IN BRIDGET’S VIEW, answering such an audacious invitation is like tearing off a piece of plastic wrap. It’s all or nothing, and a moment’s hesitation will get you tangled up in misery. Bridget said yes, of course, and immediately, too. Some three years later, as her naked-except-for-his-socks husband lay snoring on top of her, she was consequently able to reassure herself that she truly loved him.

He was getting sweaty, however, and beginning to drool as well. A slight nudge was all it took to awaken him, at which point he scrambled to his feet, glanced down at his shriveled penis, and muttered, Holy . . . , leaving his blessing ultimately unfinished. Bridget sighed sleepily, and Dave collapsed into cravenly mortification. Sorry, was all he could glurch as he gathered his clothing and fled from the room.

8 THE HUMAN FACE is the most playful countenance among all creatures, capable of stretching its muscles into more than seven thousand distinct expressions. Among this catalog of looks and lineaments, however, there exists one particular visage that has featured only once in all of human history, and that was way back in the ninth century when a runaway serf glimpsed a debauchery of dryads before an enormous oak upon which he was gazing snapped back to its accustomed rigidity. The circumstances of this incident are beyond the scope of the present paragraph, but suffice it to say that it inspired him to pursue his freedom to the end of his days.

This expression of unmitigated awe—which really had less to do with his musculature and more to do with a surge of sensual divinity within—made its second appearance on the face of Dave Wilson when Bridget announced she was pregnant. Like the serf of yore, it filled his lungs with ambrosian atmosphere and left his face shining