• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I sighed heavily again. This was how it had to be, clearly. Mindie was all I could handle emotionally. If she left me, it wouldn’t hurt. Eventually, I would only disappoint Wisper, and she would rip my heart out. So we were both better off with someone else. Me with Mindie, and Wisper with—anyone else. Even the rich man who had wanted her so badly, whose interest had made her flee Nikkid Bottoms in the first place would be a vast improvement over someone like…

I froze as my brain finally stopped moving like a limbless frog struggling to escape a bowl full of tapioca and began functioning as it was generally intended to. I turned to the woman behind the counter and looked at her intently. I could see no family resemblance, but…

“Mrs. Nuckeby?”

“Yes?”

My heart skipped a beat. I gasped for breath and must have looked like a goldfish that had gotten above its station and learned— drying out on the carpet—that he really does need water to breathe. I felt jolts of anger flash through me, and they made my testicles— Grinch-like—grow to three times their size that day.

Wisper was putting herself up for auction.

To Washburne.

Even in my mind, his name sounded like a multi-legged, garbage-dwelling creature that needed stepping on.

I was jealous. Ragingly so. And I couldn’t contain it. Sandy’s real genetic affiliation had changed everything.

“You just want your daughter to be happy, don’t you, Sandy.”

“Of course,” she said, as if it were self-evident.

“So do I,” I said and ran out the door.

With Morgan close behind, magazines flapping over his crotch, I raced to my hotel room and found a naked man with white hair, glasses and a satchel waiting outside with the equally naked Ms. Waboombas.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Hey, Corky,” Waboombas said. “Mindie’s in a snit.”

“Why?”

“I’m Doctor Wedgwood King,” Doctor Wedgwood King said, as if I’d been expecting him. He could see by my expression that I hadn’t. “Someone called me?”

Still nothing from me.

“Is this your room?” he asked me.

“It is, yes.”

“Someone rang my office. Said it was an emergency, but the woman inside won’t let me in.”

“Why does she need to?”

“I don’t know,” he said, exasperated, and pointed toward the door. “But she admitted she needs a doctor, and she won’t let me through. Should I just leave?”

“Mindie needs a doctor? Why?”

“I just said, I don’t know.”

My brain was finally beginning to catch up with the actual conversation in the hallway and disengage from the one in my head. Talking to naked people often meant needing an extra few sentences to stop the internal dialogue of ‘look at his dick’. ‘Stop looking at his dick’.’ ‘Look at his ass’. ‘Stop looking at his ass’. Before you could actually pay attention to the sound coming out of their mouths, far, far north of your unintended point of interest.

Rather than try any more actual attempts at speaking, I pulled the key-card out of my pants pocket and slipped it through the slot on the door. It beeped, and I pushed.

The room was dark, curtains pulled tight, and Mindie began screaming almost immediately.

“GET OUT! GET OUT!”

“Mindie, it’s me! What’s the matter?”

“Corky?”

“Yes. And I’ve got the doctor here.”

“DON’T LET HIM IN! HE HASN’T GOT ANY PANTS ON! I SAW HIS THINGIE THROUGH THE PEEPHOLE!”

“Mindie, we’re in a nudist resort,” I said, honestly tired of saying it. “Even the doctor is a nudist.”

“I’m not going to have a man touching me while his thingie is out.”

“Why do you need a doctor anyway?”

“I’m sick,” she said pathetically.

I moved farther into the near-blackened room and tried to see where she was.

“Sick, how? What’s the matter with you?”

“STAY OUT!”

“Mindie, this is ridiculous,” I said.

I turned on the light and screamed myself. I was really going to have to take some vocal deepening lessons.

Mindie lay in bed, under the covers, and wearing someone’s pajamas. Every bit of her exposed flesh—and, one had to assume, her unexposed flesh, as well—was covered in boils, welts, and red splotches. Her head looked like a bubbly pomegranate with spiked hair. She was scratching like