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By Root 534 0

felt his soft tongue going all around them, and my toes felt like pearls the way they feel in an oyster, and I felt his eyes looking up at my pussy as he sucked my toes, one after the other. And then I looked up just as Chas walked into the room and saw me. He looked confused and then angry, and then he walked out of the bar. When the man was done sucking my toes, he stood up and tossed a hundred-dollar bill into my lap and walked back to his table, and he and his friends started talking and laughing again, and I wasn’t sure if I’d fulfilled my mission, but then I looked at the hundred-dollar bill and it told me a little story. The story was about a jungle that the Imagineers turned into a park. They took out the trees and put in upside-down trees that grew out of the sky, and the tallest ones brushed the ground. They took out the parrots and put in pigeons. They took out the three-toed sloths and put in squirrels. The sloths kept getting their toes sucked. The sloths were lazy. But their toes sure felt good. The squirrels weren’t lazy. The squirrels climbed to the top even when the trees were upside down. The squirrels fucked as well as sucked.”

She stares at Ursula as she speaks, confusion in her eyes and, somewhere beneath that, pain. Ursula reaches across the table and takes her hand, but Ivy doesn’t seem to notice. She continues staring at Ursula’s face as though it were a movie screen showing her the story as she goes on telling it.

“I walked out of the bar, and Chas was there waiting for me. He brought me to his place, and when we got there he told me I was doing drugs and they were fucking with my head and he was going to keep me locked up in his apartment till I was straight. But I wasn’t doing drugs. I begged him to let me go. I told him that the resistance had given me a secret mission, that people needed to see me, that my image was the drain magnet in the glamour continuum, that my image could save the world. And he told me I was crazy in more ways than one, that my image would only make people feel unhappy and lousy about themselves. I didn’t know what to do then. I told him maybe I’d cut my face off. I asked him if that would make people happy. And he shrugged. And he said maybe. And I went into the bathroom and I found his straight razor and I came out with it. And I said, I’ll cut my face now. And he laughed. Because he didn’t believe me. And he was right. I couldn’t make myself cut my face. I heard your voice, Ursula, telling me my face was too beautiful to cut. And I couldn’t cut it. And he laughed again.

“I went into the bathroom and found a bottle of Mercurochrome, and I used it to mark my thighs, vagina, tummy, arms, breasts, face. I looked at myself in the mirror, and then I took the razor and I sliced along the red lines. I did it quickly, before I could change my mind. I thought about how I could still have plastic surgery and be beautiful again. And then I thought that if I was ugly, I would turn into something new, something dark and slippery like a stealth bomber or a manta ray, and I’d go wherever I wanted and nobody would know, and I’d be happy like I could never be happy before. I went ahead and cut everywhere but my face. I didn’t cut that because I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me. At first I felt fine. And then I felt the pain and I was scared. It was too much pain, it was like someone was pressing me against a stove burner, it was so much pain I felt my soul fly away from me, back to the long-ago time I came from. I ran after it. I ran through the apartment. Chas was in the bedroom, staring out the window. I ran out the door and down the block and into the park, chasing after my soul.”

Ivy’s strange stare is too much for Ursula, and she has to look away. Turning toward the window, she finds her sister’s image reflected on the pane as well, not just one but two, ghostly and superimposed on the doubled glass. Ursula closes her eyes, and the two Ivys follow her into the darkness, one of them joyful and seductive and strong, the other one sick and helpless and lost. The two visions