Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [79]
A Verbatim Moment from Corky’s Memories Of His Education in The Classics:
RANDOM LORD: Hey, Curio. We need to get the Duke’s mind off Olivia.
CURIO: No prob, Random Lord.
(To Orsino)
Hey, Duke. Wanna go hunting?
ORSINO: Hunting for what, Curio?
CURIO: I dunno. Deer?
ORSINO: Sure. Of course. The best deer I have, or ‘hart’ as we call them in this day and age. And, you know what hunting deer—or hart—makes me think of?
Olivia.
CURIO: Oh, Jesus.
ORSINO: The first time I ever saw her, she smelled great! It was like she killed the germs in the air or something.
CURIO: A girl who’s basically disinfectant. Nice. Listen…
ORSINO: At that moment, I became like a deer myself, you know? Or hart, as we call them. I want her so bad, it’s like my needs have become cruel, yappy little hounds—Chihuahuas, if you will— chasing me around everywhere I go, and they won’t shut up.
CURIO: Oooookay.
(To Random Lord)
Let’s go without him.
I too felt like a skittish little deer whose desires had become cruel hounds trying to run him down and eat his ‘hart’ alive. It was scary, and at the same time kind of thrilling, like a love roller coaster, yow.
Roller coaster of love. Say what?
Suddenly, I understood how Mister Johnson must have felt. Dying, naked, on top of a hot maid—or in my case, a hot Ms. Nuckeby—now seemed worth all the scandal, dueling lawyers, and money it took to get me there. I mean, really. Who cared? I’d be dead anyway, right?
I glanced toward the Duesenberg, where everyone sat slumped in his or her seat, waiting for my return. Mindie eyed me intently. There was no way I could casually race down the hill and get away with it. But perhaps if I really did throw myself down the stairs…
Good Lord! Was I insane? I couldn’t believe I had actually considered doing such a thing. How cruelly hound-like had my needs become? Was I really so desperate, lonely, and overheated with desire that I might do something so idiotic as to toss myself down a mountain just to see a pretty girl?
“CORKY! STOP DAWDLING!” Mindie screeched. “GOD! YOU ARE SO ANNOYING, SOMETIMES!” Her face was twisted with irritation and rage, and flushed red with hot, asexual blood. It was a face that—within hours—would be staring at me day in and day out as my beloved, my companion, my one-and-only wife.
I threw myself over the edge.
Next to the hairless monkey, this may have been the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. The idea had been to ‘pretend’ to fall, then right myself and race for the bottom. Unfortunately, the pretending part very quickly took on a life of its own.
Mindie screamed. Amazingly, I could hear her wails of horror even over my own.
Fortunately for me, the shock left me with very few memories of the incident, which I will share with you here for posterity, just in case—for reasons, either of stupidity or love, which often seem to be interchangeable I’ll grant you—you feel the need to attempt such Jackass-like lunacy at home.
My first memory is of me taking flight, then impacting that first stairway landing and sailing from those—relatively—painless planks of wood out into nature’s harsher punishments.
That part was kind of fun.
The second memory is of broken branches, twigs, and pointy leaves stabbing enthusiastically into pretty much every one of my body’s most tender tissues.
That I didn’t enjoy so much.
The fourth memory was of a particularly large and rugged bit of stone attempting to remove one side of my skull, and the brain matter contained therein without sufficient anesthesia.
Not gonna do that again ever in my lifetime if I can help it.
Fifth: random, flickering images of a bird which somehow became entangled in my hair, and really seemed quite put out by it, as if I’d done it on purpose. Kind of an Alfred Hitchcock moment, and not many of you would want to experience