Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [141]
“Apparently.”
“I’m out of a job.”
We sat silently for a moment, absorbed by the immensity of it. Morgan looked up from his magazines.
“Hey,” he said, pointing to the television. “That looks like the president.” He squinted at the tube. “Is he naked?”
Waboombas and I sat for over an hour clicking through stations, checking channels, watching movies, and taking it all in.
Sporting events, reality shows, cooking shows, newscasts, soap operas. All the people wore little or no clothing. Though politicians wore ties.
There were some ‘adult’ channels where people put on clothing and had sex. But you couldn’t see it. It was always hidden under the folds of fabric.
I kept flipping through the stations, hoping that at any minute the channels would right themselves, and we’d be back to normal television—like Oprah.
Then I found Oprah, and she was naked. Tom Cruise was jumping on her couch, and he was naked.
“Wow,” I said. “Who knew Oprah was so hot?”
“Just turn it off,” said Waboombas.
She lay on the bed, massaging her head as if Hades, Poseidon, Hestia, Hera, and Demeter were having a massive slam-dance party inside her skull, and her fingertips were trying, Zeus-like, to squeeze them all out.
Morgan had gone back to reading.
“Ha! Spiderman had a little dick,” he laughed, and chewed on a muffin. “Then he got bit by the spider, and it swelled.” He took another bite, and said more to himself. “Man, I gotta get bit by a spider.”
“This doesn’t change anything,” I said, shaking it off and gathering myself. “It just explains a few things. Let’s still go to the Festival and the auction.”
“But…“ Waboombas wondered, “…are we stuck here?”
“I don’t think so. Wisper came to our world. There’s got to be a way for us to get back too.” I was amazed at how calm I was. Years of Star Trek and comic book reading had obviously well-prepared me for just such a trauma as this.
“But what am I gonna do if we can’t get back, Corky?” Waboombas moaned.
It was unsettling to see her off-balance this way. I was used to the confident Waboombas who controlled everything and everyone with a word, and a bend, and a strut. Apparently this turning upside down of the rules had left her—like all of us—a bit lost. Even her crazy sense of reality no longer applied.
“I make my living off people who want me to take my clothes off. No one’s gonna care here.”
“We’ll get back,” I assured her. “Even my Aunt Helena did, when she dropped off Ms. Nuckeby.”
“Hey. That’s the same name as the restaurant,” Morgan said between chews.
“What a weird coincidence,” I said flatly.
“Yeah.”
He looked at me for a moment, as if waiting for something more. Then the hamster lay down and went to sleep again, and Morgan returned to his comics.
Waboombas sighed, heavily. “All right. If you really think so. But I’m gonna be pissed off if we get stuck here and I have to put clothes on to make a living. I like getting naked.”
Then a light seemed to go off in her head, and she smiled suddenly. I frowned at her, curious as to what she was thinking.
“What?” I asked.
She thought for a moment more.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Then—you’ll still do this?”
“Absolutely,” she said and smiled, a little menacingly. The Great Black Shark, Waboombimus Maximus Dominatricus, scented fresh blood in the water, and was circling her prey.
A little bird was telling me I should be worried, but other than in cartoons, who listens to little birds?
Mindie ran through the bushes for what seemed like hours. Breathing hard and terrified beyond words, she couldn’t manage to bring herself to stop no matter how much her legs ached.
She was slashed, cut, bruised, and boiled, and her skin itched insanely. Once or twice she thought she had seen or heard animals in the undergrowth, but fortunately, they always seemed to scamper off in a direction other than toward her, and nothing had yet attempted to dine on Butterwycke a la Poissone Oake.
The sun was going down in the late evening summer sky, and through the shadows of the foliage it was difficult to see farther than a few feet in front of her.