The Stiffening of Her Legs

The Stiffening of Her Legs

       by Big Dong Reimer

                   an acquaintance of mine
                   became a homosexexual 
                   at the age of thirty and now

                   she is heterosexual again
                   married with a kid.

On the Yangtze River there is a place, apparently, where, when you go there they have to take you in. That's the difference between thought and knowledge. There are two kinds of unconscious, the forgetting kind and the memory kind. The memory kind, with a prodigious capacity for recall, and which can never be done with anything, is sick. The Chinese have a saying about this, too. They say that tanpan is not good for your digestion for it stays there and stays there, knotting things up inside until all you can think about is how to finally stop eating and get anorexic, and thus to control the whole show that way. A normal digestion would avoid tanpan at all costs. See, the anorexic (that entity with the digestive problems) thinks back unslakingly to all it has seen to discover if there or there or there lies its sudden error. It always finds the reason in part at every stop, at every little wayside picnic area, and sleeps nights satisfied that this time it has found the answer.

       Gonzalo loved his king because that individual ruled him and he, a loyal servant, had learned well at his mother's knee. He well knew the folly of an Antonio or Sebastian, talking others into crimes or being talked into it by others. Crime paid one with disreputability and that would never do for one able to imagine all new--clothes, skin, sky, land, mind--just from a dip in a strange sea. Why would it? "All new!" is a fine sentiment and a lovely feature of living to have arrived in one's thought. "Let us kill!" is a dreadful and "You are evil!" sort of thought to have come and to reside there. Gonzalo defended his king from onslaughts, at his bidding he threw books into the leaky bark of one subject being set adrift and unbeknownst to them living now on this very island, he called for the punishment of those guilty, he felt no guilt himself, and he divined the possibility of a brand new world here on this enchanted isle. Yes, we walk into the wilderness with Gonzalo and we do so willingly.

       Wickenham Jones, a singer and a writer of folksongs, performed at the Winnipeg Folk Festival only once. He succeeded greatly, drew many spectators to his workshops, and presented to adoration and applause at the main stage event the second night of the weekend. However, he ate something at the Whales Tails Concession that turned his stomach and his mind and he consequently never returned to Winnipeg, though the artistic director implored and offered him double the seven hundred they typically paid average bands. He'd sat down to eat a whale's tail. He did also just finish a Thai chicken noodle veggie combo before this dessert. And as he sat he noticed two girls holding hands and mooning over each other near him, on the other side behind him of the picnic bench on which he reclined. They laughed in a girly way, touched each other's shoulders and hair, giggled at nothing, and dipped and turned and glanced about with a quotient of secrecy that showed to great affect all the coynesses of which they were capable. They were on public display, after all. He loved this scene. The softness and grace of slight women was never lost on him. It isn't on singers and songwriters. With two of these slim ones gracing each other, how could he help but watch and pray.

       Soon, however, he felt terrible pangs in his midriff and thought he would throw up. So as not to make the young waifs think that they were the cause of his indigestion, he hurried to the row of blue plastic toilets where he could jettison his food unseen. He came out when he'd finished and sat down by the fence in the shade to rest. The music from the different stages had grown loud and disturbing to his ear. Near him on the grass two slight girls were wrapped in each other's arms and moving rhythmically together. They seemed oblivious to their surroundings. Their dresses, of pale, sheer material, one lime green, the other lavender, had ridden up their legs in an unseemly way. Wickenham noticed this clearly. He thought about what to do but could and did do nothing. He lit a cigarette and simply watched them, this time not pretending not to. They were close, within a few feet. They never did ask him to desist and lay off. They continued to cavort until one or both of them experienced a transformation on the spot, which made itself plain by the stiffening of her legs and then the slackening of her arms and neck.   

       Wickenham noticed these goings on with disgust and compulsion. When he left the park the next day back to Louisiana where he lived on a farm and grew berries and raised domesticated possums, he not so much vowed that he never would return as he never did so, even when entreated with sincere flattery and forceful request by the artistic director of the event.