“But Daddy, since the sickness, nobody care about money no more. Bitches gettin’ jacked for they socks and hand sanitizer,” Candy said, emphatically, trying her damnedest to sound small and afraid. But she was too hard and too strong for her own good, and she could coax not even a drop of lachrymation to support the act. The stinging slap that had been delivered to her made-up face so many times before came with extra callousness this time, and as the entire side of her head went numb, then warm and pulsating, all she could do was look down at her weathered, fake-leather pumps and try to appear as contrite as possible.

Pumpkin, named as such thanks to the orange shade of his finely marcelled do, which matched the color of his Italian suit, his bowler, and his shimmering 1979 Lincoln Continental, was the fly-est pimp east of the 12th Street tent city. He ruled the game with an iron fist and a stable of girls known for their good looks, their skills in the sack, and their willingness to accommodate esoterica licentia. If you were one of Pumpkin’s hoes, you made mad money and you were protected; but you did not cross Daddy…ever.

Pumpkin bent his 6-foot-8-inch massiveness, like one of the freight loaders of the Oakland port, to bring his eyes, dark as cardinal sin, level with Candy’s. She could smell the stench of cognac and OG Kush on his breath, and she knew from bitter experience that the mixture of hard booze and potent marijuana could be an explosive one for Daddy’s central nervous system.

He gently kissed her once on the lips and spoke softly, “Little ain’t-shit niggas might not care about money—but Daddy do.” He straightened himself then snatched Candy about the throat with a massive paw, his fingers nearly touching at the back of her neck. “And Daddy don’t give a good got-damn about no muthafuckin’ virus that take out little sickle-cell niggas,” he continued, tapping Candy uncomfortably on her cheek with the heavy, golden lion’s head adorning the end of his walking stick.

As Pumpkin strutted back to the Lincoln, Candy quickly wiped her lips with the sleeve of her blouse while his back was turned. Who knows, she thought, maybe even Daddy had caught it. “I saw that, bitch”, he chuckled, as he lowered the blackened window halfway. “I be back in 2 hours. I need fo-hunnid. Know that!” he shouted as he drove away with the sweet funk of blunt-smoke billowing like ghetto cumulonimbi.

Where the fuck was she going to get $400? Money meant almost nothing as the adumbrations of the apocalypse seemed like they might be coalescing into high-def visions of hell on Earth. 90 million people had already been infected, and the CDC expected another 100 million would be infected by the end of summer. Toilet paper, canned goods and clean socks were the new currency. People were being murdered for what was in their pantry instead of their wallet. Her old, reliable Johns were either staying at home with their wives, too scared of the virus to lend their patronage, or they were flat out dead, put down 6-feet by a nano-sized monster that evolved in an Asian hot-pot of sweaty bodies simmering in the blood of endangered species.

How she had not yet contracted the virus was some kind of a bitch’s miracle, perhaps handed down from Saint Nicholas of Myra, the patron saint of sailors, thieves, and prostitutes. Candy wasn’t Catholic, but she did believe in God, so she said a little prayer to the Big Pimp in the Sky to bless her and keep her in those times of woe.

New business—that’s what she needed if she stood any chance of getting Pumpkin his money. But new business would mean the possibility of additional exposures. Perhaps she could limit her services to oral-only and swab down any expectant phallus with the Lysol wipes she kept in her knock-off Marc Jacobs bag. She could handle a little disinfectant in her mouth; what she couldn’t handle would be Daddy’s pimp stick upside her head. It was a whore’s trade-off like one she’d made so many times before, one she’d be happy to make in order to keep Daddy happy and her face pretty.

Candy carefully navigated the uneven sidewalk of 16^th avenue, keeping her hand inside her bag clutching a blade just in case. The night had grown uncomfortably cold against her long, exposed legs, and she resolved to beg Pumpkin for leggings when she—if she—wound up scrounging up his $400.

Like a banshee, heralding the death of the modern way of life, an empty BART train wailed from somewhere in the distance, a derelict ghost ship driven by algorithms, the only things that seemed to remain of what used to be. The sky was opaque with clouds, as any light from Heaven had forsaken the streets of Oakland. She came upon the The 18^th Hole, an ironic moniker given to the quickly expanding shanty-town at the edge of International Boulevard. She’d had luck here before. There were out-of-work techies who still had a couple thousand dollars left as vestiges of their formerly privileged lives.

She smiled at a young man with as much feigned lasciviousness as she could muster. He sat on a camping stool outside his tent, his Patagonia fleece tattered and dirtied but still proudly displaying its Salesforce.com monogram. He peered up at her with hungry eyes, tracing the lines of her figure from shapely calves, to her ass, over ample bosom, and finally to the taught lineaments of her tired, but youthful face. But when his lips parted to smile, he expelled a dry, sinister cough. She quickly broke eye contact and hurried along. “Cover your mouth, goddammit,” shouted someone drunkenly, from the neighboring tent. “Fuck you,” he wheezed back.

“I ain’t sick, baby,” proffered another young man—Ted was his name—from a perch outside a shanty constructed of wooden shipping palettes. His eyes were as vitreous as blown glass, an aftereffect of insufflating crack smoke. He even agreed to all of her terms: no touching, no kissing, and she would wipe down his cock with sanitary towelettes. It took 15 minutes of jerking just to make him turgid, as he rambled the whole time, mostly incoherently, about compilers, VCF files, and how Python was the opiate of the masses. But once Candy started using her mouth, he finished quickly, mercifully, and without much fanfare. He somehow maintained enough cognizance, despite the neurological haze of crack-induced euphoria, to find $60 amongst the rubbish and bric-a-brac piled knee-deep in his hovel. Candy wiped her mouth, snatched the 60-bucks, then dipped into her purse and put a tab of something under her tongue.

She plied The 18^th Hole three times over, but Ted was her only taker. Sixty goddamn measly dollars: that was it after an hour-and-a-half of honest and diligent hooking. All she could see in her mind’s eye was an 18-carat gold truncheon in the shape of a lion’s head. And all of Pumpkin’s girls knew about Shanella, the former Queen Bitch of the stable who could no longer suck a dick because of the mis-healing of her jaw. Panicked, she hustled down International Boulevard, smiling into every doorway and at every pair of headlights that lit up the night. She texted every number in her phone. She knocked at random apartment doors. She prayed. She fingered her blade and wondered if 4-inches of steel would even penetrate the layer of fat that protected Pumpkin’s demonic entrails. And just when she was about to give up hope…

Music. Jazz. The frenetic sizzling of hi-hats overlaid with modified arpeggios articulated by dexterous fingers. Dancing bass holding everything together. Minds united, the creative spirit uplifted through cannabis smoke, temporary madness sublimated to beauty. Candy became entranced. She knocked on the door spray=painted with the letters XANADU. A young man opened the door and gesticulated for her to come inside off the street. His face was warm and inviting, not even a soupçon of malevolence was present—envious ghosts could never penetrate his armor of love.

Candy passed a smiling girl with long, blond hair. She was an elf, a protecting spirit. A few flecks of dried paint were on her face, and her hands were marked by the tenacious residue of masterpieces almost done. The space held thick aromas of love, honest sweat, baking spices, and life not undone by the virus. A different elf put a dram of ambrosia into Candy’s hand. She sipped. It burned. It reminded her of being alive. The walls were adorned with portals into higher dimensions where beauty reigned, where whores were given angel’s wings. The tab she had dropped was in full effect.

“What’s your name,” asked one of the elves, a girl, in a voice high and beautiful, her words skirling into space like a eulogy.

“Cand…I mean, Samantha,” she replied. “Am I…am I still alive?” She was surrounded by a group of the elves. One was draped in fine silks. Another in iridescent chainmail. Another two, obviously lovers, were as an androgyne and spoke as one. The elves looked at each other and laughed beautifully. The jazz band entered a diminuendo where double bass softly thumped in the higher registers.

“Of course you are, silly,” teased the androgyne.

“I love your outfit,” said the blond elf.

Samantha almost did not know how to respond. She hadn’t heard a compliment in years unrelated to the swell of her breasts or her skills at fellatio. “Thank you,” she said, simply, genuinely. “Aren’t you all…afraid…afraid of the virus?” she asked.

“What virus?” said the boy-elf. They all laughed again—not to humiliate, but out of genuine amusement.

“But what about all the infections, the deaths?” Samantha was confused.

“Do you know anyone that has died?” asked the boy-elf.

She thought about it momentarily, about all her dead Johns. She had no actual proof that they were dead—just fearful murmurs from the other girls like susurrations in the night.

“Mostly hysteria,” said the blond elf. Her smile was as convincing as expert testimony.

Samantha felt a cursory pang as she realized that Pumpkin may have been justified in his disdain for the dangers presented by the virus. Someone from behind placed his hand on Samantha’s shoulder—the warmth of his skin on her skin was reassuring—and thoughts of Pumpkin evaporated. It was the boy from the door. He spoke:

 

“All things pass

A sunrise does not last all morning

A cloudburst does not last all day

Nor a sunset all night

What always changes

Earth…sky…thunder

Wind…fire…lake

Mountain…water

These change

And if these do not last

Do man’s visions last?

Do man’s illusions last?

All things pass.”

 

Samantha closed her eyes and let the words hang in her mind for a few sweet moments. All things pass. The virus will pass. Her many predicaments will pass. Pumpkin will pass. The frantic scramble for $400 will pass. Fear will pass. All things pass.

The elves took Samantha, arm in arm, to a place where she could get off her feet. They fed her, gave her warm spiced cider. They continued to use their gentle powers of persuasion to disabuse Samantha of visions of societal collapse and corpses in the streets. She imbibed the ambrosia and inhaled the smoke from elfin leaf, which led her mind to higher dimensions where the gods were happy and had no sharp teeth. The elves convinced her she didn’t need a job. She didn’t need money. The universe would provide. She could spend her days communing with source, her nights writing poetry. She could shed anguish and guilt like useless skin. She could live ensconced in love instead of fear. And by the time daylight broke through the windows of Xanadu, the elves had persuaded Samantha to stay with them and promised they would hide her from Pumpkin and all the other hungry ghosts.

Sipping coffee in the garden, wrapped in raw silk from the Himalayas, surrounded by new friends, watching as dew turned to vapor in the morning sun, for the first time in a long time, Samantha was content, and there was no Candy.

 

Part 2

 

It took seven years. Seven years of living at XANADU with its cadre of high-vibration individuals—the yoga practitioners, the situational vegetarians, the poets, the activists, the artists. Seven years of organic gardening and putting her hands in the soil and eating things that filled up her spirit as well as her belly. Seven years of having a dependable group of humans who looked after her like one of their own. Seven years of having stability in her living arrangement so she didn’t have to spend time in the street or living out of a car. Seven years of volunteer work. Seven years of late night conversations over chamomile tea in front of the fireplace debating politics, art, religion, or whether Dr. Seuss was better than Richard Scary. Seven years of not having violent, hysterical late-night arguments with some boyfriend, or pimp, or boyfriend-as-pimp while swimming in the mental distortions of methamphetamines or crack cocaine. Seven years of trading alcohol and hard drugs for the mind expansion of psychedelics. Seven years of not eating meat. Seven years of exercising regularly. Seven years of reading good books. Seven years of hiking in the wooded hills above the city getting to know the coastal live oaks, Pacific madrones and Monterey pines, the hidden chanterelle spots that gave up their gold ’round about Christmas-time…

It took seven years for Sam to finally, completely molt and cast off the dead scales of what had been Candy, for her to change her mentality from one of fear and scarcity to one of abundance—material abundance, intellectual abundance, nutritional abundance, housing abundance, joyous abundance. But the changes came. And one day, without notice, like an eviction demand slapped on the front door, Sam woke up not as a hoe, but as a scholar, a feminist, an empowered woman of the 21^st century. Within a year she had her G.E.D. Six months after that she was enrolled at Cal-Berkeley. She traded in her dinged-up, fake-snakeskin pumps for sensible New Balance sneakers; she had gained a good 17 pounds and looked healthy and radiant, her face having lost the sunken, skeletal sadness of addiction; she carried a leather backpack filled with over-priced text books and the usual utensils of higher education, a far cry from her old vinyl clutch stuffed with condoms, lube, and a rusty switchblade. If one of her old clients had happened upon her, he would not have recognized the butterfly metamorphosed from some crawly thing.

Samantha had a knack for languages, she found. Chalked it up to her creole blood, passed down from her mother’s side tracing back to the slave days in Louisiana. Sam remembered that even her grandmother spoke French, Spanish, English, and a long-lost, ancient Biafran dialect. And as she sat by a window of the cafe just across the street from campus, her eyes shining like brandywine in the late summer sun, she sipped coffee as a French major with a minor in Gender Studies, not as a prostitute desperate for cash and drugs. In less than 15 minutes, she would have first office-hours with the teaching-assistant of her Introduction to Feminist Theory class; and after that, she would have completed her first week of college. Sam needed to steady her mind, but she couldn’t help day-dreaming about being a translator, a French teacher…maybe even a professor at the Sorbonne one day…perhaps get back to her roots in Louisiana and matriculate for graduate studies at Tulane or LSU. Rien ne vaut son chez-soi.

 

#

 

Of course, Sam would never be able to fully rub off the psychic grim of the streets. And so she still disliked first meetings, much preferring goodbyes, which could be executed anonymously, maybe in the middle of the night, with subterfuge to avoid all the crying and screaming. Firsts were often messy and awkward and followed by much pain and sadness. For this reason she sat at the back of the room, which she did the first day of all her classes. She would later move to the very front, not because she wanted to seem engaged or out of any other pretense—being a “pet” was something in her past, something she would never return to—but because she wanted to discern what went on in the eyes of her teachers. The eyes are the windows to the soul as the cliché goes—they often telegraph intent and motive. In these ways Samantha had retained part of her feral spirit not tamed by seven years of kale salads and yoga. She would still circle warily, analyzing pheromones, before coming close to a diffident, outstretched hand.

“I’d like to ask everyone to put their phones away, please,” came a booming voice from the front of the room. The teaching assistant had already set up his desk with his computer and a notepad and had written his name on the chalkboard—Mr. Ferguson—while Sam had been daydreaming like a teenager. She hurriedly shoved the device back in her pocket and sat up straight in her desk, surprised to find that their t.a. for Intro to Feminist Theory was a man.

A big man.

A big black man wearing an n95 mask and a plastic face shield.

“My name is Mr. Ferguson, as you can plainly see. I’ll be your t.a. this semester. I am a third-year graduate student getting my PhD under Professor Halvorson. My thesis is titled Street Equity: The Case for Federal Legalization of Prostitution in the United States as Analyzed Through a Feminist Lens a la Derridean Deconstructionism.” His voice was loud and commanding, even behind two layers of protection. Some of the other female students in the class snapped their fingers approbatively at the gobbledygook, as if they understood and agreed vehemently.

“And please, please make sure you wear a mask when you come to this classroom. I have a pre-existing condition—sickle cell anemia—and if I catch the thing it will not be good for me. So for next time, please make sure you have a mask, or I will not be able to admit you to the classroom.”

Sam felt something deep within the pit of her stomach, as if the newly released butterflies of spring had been caught in a net and were soon to be jarred up with cotton balls soaked in acetone. That man. That voice. Those hands. The title of that thesis. It just couldn’t be… But that old, visceral instinct she had honed over years of having to survive like an animal was jumping up in her amygdala, pulling the fire alarm. All those step dads came back. Those pimps. THE pimp. Those abusive boyfriends.

She started having a conversation with them in her head. Bitch, you ain’t no yoga-bitch. Gitcho ass back on the skreet and make Daddy some money. College bitch thank she know some. She ’bout ta find out! Sam felt frozen in place; but the more Mr. Ferguson prattled on and scratched and erased on the chalkboard about long dead French guys, with their googly eyes and their smoke-breath and their predilections for little boy ass, the more she felt like she wanted to sprint from the room. But that would involve moving toward and past him. And that could not be done in her present state—so she sat frozen.

“Hello…hello…”

Sam started, coming back into her body from East 12th Street. Her feet even ached from those old raggedy pumps. He was sitting on the desk in front of her, one leg up, foot in the seat, one leg down. No one else was there—class had ended. His masks were off—she could see that it was him. Definitively him. He had lost a lot of weight, grown out dreads and was bespectacled. He spoke type-3 English now and didn’t stink of marijuana smoke.

“Wow, didn’t expect to see you here. Actually didn’t expect to ever see you again at all. You were probably thinking the same thing about me.” He smiled. Sam did not recall ever seeing him smile. But she had seen his teeth before and they were now different. No gold caps, just unnaturally white porcelain fronts. But in her estimation, his good teeth didn’t make him seem more respectable…just more like a predatory animal—a jaguar or a bull shark.

“I can see why you’d be reticent. Don’t suppose our interactions were good ones back then.” He may have learned words like “reticent,” but his voice still dripped with the blood of the streets, like he could put one upside her head any minute now.

“You’re probably wondering how I got here. I know I’m wondering how you got here, but I’ll go first.” He slid down into the desk to sit in it sideways, avoiding eye contact with Sam. The academic formerly known as Pumpkin leaned heavily on the metaphor of a very-bad-time-as-nightmare. Talked about the pandemic scare drying up all his pimpin’ business, followed by a vaccine that caused every dick in America to go limp. Recalcitrant Erectile Dysfunction the government called it—RED!, a convenient acronym as they blamed it all on the Chinese. Talked about how he almost had to live in his car, but then the reparations checks came… followed by the notification from the IRS that he owed a monumental amount of back taxes, which clawed back most of the gov’ment money. Had to sell the old orange Lincoln, reminding Samantha that she had had the privilege of riding in her a couple times. Sold off his chains, his watches. Sold off his stake in the weed operation. Got a bartending job at Baggy’s by the lake, stabbed the owner and got fired. Then almost out of spite went and got his GED and an online degree in criminal justice.

“Then got into this here graduate program,” he said. “What can I say? They loved my thesis proposal. I mean, who could possibly know more about feminism than a muhfucken pimp, nah mean?” In an arrogant tone, he described how he might leave California after getting his PhD. Might head back east for a faculty job at one of the Ivies or maybe slum it at Vanderbilt or the Research Triangle just to stay close to his people.

“Esscuse me,” came a small voice from the door. “I need clean, please.” The small, paunchy woman smiled. “Thank you.” She stood there with the waste basket in her hand, waiting for them to leave.

“Samantha, huh? I forgot that was your real name,” he said. He wetted his purple, slug-like lips with the tip of his tongue. “Higher education looks good on you.”

Mr. Ferguson gathered his personal belongings from the desk. Nodded to the custodian. Looked back one last time at Samantha. “See you next week,” he said, before leaving.

 

#

 

Samantha could scarcely focus on anything other than the enormous circumference of Dr. Halvorson’s cranium. Well, that and the handful of scraggly hairs that grew out of her chin, which actually helped form a zone of demarcation such that the chin area could be discerned from the beginning of the neck. In other words, she was a fat woman. But it wasn’t a matronly kind of fat…it was more of a sumo wrestler kind of fat. And she wore a sort of muumuu. When Sam was able to shift her attention from the beastly physiognomy of the good professor, she surmised that the muumuu was probably homemade, judging from its inconsistent stitching and poor construction. But Dr. Halvorson had honest eyes and that was the important part. Honest. Vitreous. Protuberant eyes. With slightly yellowed sclera and teeny-weeny red veins like worms that showed the arcs of their bendy little bodies in all that yellowed milkiness.

“Ms. Sterling, I’m sympathetic to what you are telling me, I really am. But we are well aware of the fact that Mr. Ferguson is a reformed criminal—an ex-pimp. It was one of the strongest aspects of his application, in fact. And that thesis of his—Street Equity—ooooooh, doesn’t it just give you goosebumps?” Halvorson shuddered with delight thinking about all the grant money.

That was not the response that Sam had anticipated, and her curdled expectations now sat like a turd in her feminist punchbowl.

“But Dr. Halvorson, he made a career out of beating women. Exploiting women. This woman in particular. I could tell you some anecdotes that would… that would… well, that would be very upsetting and disconcerting. At the very least, there’s no way that I can continue to attend his t.a. sessions.” Sam was keeping her cool, but just barely.

The good doctor bent forward with an amused look like a child, the springs of her chair groaning and popping. “Tell me some of those stories. I want to hear them in your authentic voice.”

Sam had spent much of the last seven years trying to forget about the life she had lived on the street with Pumpkin lording over her. Countless meditation sessions and enough psychedelic therapy to wig-out a horse had gone into her recovery; and now she was being asked to bring it all back to the fore. PTSD be damned, she wasn’t ever going back—couldn’t ever go back—to a classroom with Pumpkin standing at the front. She recounted the sad story of Shanella, the former Queen Bitch, who acquired the unfortunate nickname of Shigella after Pumpkin had forced her into unspeakable acts with a valuable client obsessed with butt-play.

“Fascinating,” blubbered Halvorson, taking notes. She brought up the girl Gemini who tried to get clean and get out of the business. When Pumpkin found her three states over working as a checker at the Piggly Wiggly, he kidnapped her, strapped her to a box spring, and had a buddy from prison tattoo a dick across her forehead so she could never again acquire a normie job.

“Just a dick… or with balls?” asked Halvorson, pen in hand.

“It had balls.”

“Disgusting,” remarked Halvorson, frowning and scribbling. “Men!” she shouted, rolling her eyes. “How big was it?”

“This doesn’t even include the things he did to me.” Sam held up her left hand. “Cut off the end of my pinky with a cigar cutter. Raped me twice. One time he…”

The good doctor leaned way back in her chair, smiling incongruously given the dark nature of the conversation. “Sam, I’m just going to come out and say it: I want you to work with me.”

“Pardon?” Sam tilted her head.

“Yes, yes, yes. I want you to work with me. I want you to do your undergrad thesis under me. I can get you into honors and everything.”

“Wait, what? Why? I mean, maybe I should just shut up and not look a gift horse in the mouth… but… why?” Sam tried hard not to think about being under Dr. Halvorson, but her mind kept conjuring up images of southern roadkill.

“Because of your story,” whisper-shouted Halvorson. “It’s incredible. It’s scintillating. And conveyed through the feminist lens, it would be oh-so-valuable to our discipline. Besides, it falls directly under my new favorite area of scholarship—street equity, as I’m calling it.”

“Street equity? Isn’t that what Pumpkin—I mean, Mr. Ferguson—is writing his thesis on?”

“Yes, he is! And I can tell you, it’s already making waves in our community. The grants have been rolling in like it’s Thanksgiving. It’s also turning Mr. Ferguson into quite the academic star, and his thesis hasn’t even been published yet. I can tell you that he will probably be able to skip a postdoc and go directly into a faculty position at the institution of his choice. UCLA? Wash U? Forget about it. A bunch of losers. We’re talking Yale, Princeton, Harvard—the big leagues.”

Sam felt the air go out of her. She slumped deflated against the backrest of the chair.

“In fact, I think the two of you should collaborate. Oh, can’t you just imagine the impact-factor of those papers? Everyone will be talking about our research. A former pimp and his prostitute, opining on street equity in all the best journals! I’m sure Mr. Jenkins would love the opportunity to collaborate with you again.”

“His name is Pumpkin.” Sam politely excused herself and, to Halvorson’s consternation, abruptly walked out of the office. She endeavored that come Monday she would be dropping the class; and as she strode down the hall, rubbing the nub of her foreshortened pinky finger, she considered that she would probably run into Pumpkin around campus, if not in the very buildings that she would be frequenting, given that she was minoring in his field of study. She hadn’t had a panic attack in years but suddenly felt that tingling sensation in her extremities like one might be coming on. Sam ducked into the women’s restroom to splash water on her face; and as she hunched over the sink waiting for the water to run as cold as possible, she heard the door fling open.

Fuck. She really needed to be alone in that moment and was hoping to find refuge in the toilet of a mostly abandoned academic building at 6pm on a Friday.

“Funny seeing you here,” he said. “Visiting Dr. Halvorson? Me too.” He ran his fingers through the brassy wig that sat crooked on his head. He wore a much-too-short yellow sundress with gay little red flowers printed on it. “Gonna go ahead and come out to Dr. Halvorson. This is me.” He let his arms hang down by his sides and smiled.

“I think she’s going to be thrilled. I don’t go by Calvin or Mr. Ferguson anymore, just so you know. You can call me Raining. Raining Moore. My friends will call me Rain… or maybe Ray-Mo,” he said, continuing to adjust his wig, posing in the mirror above the sink next to Sam. He put his hands on his hips, tilted his head.

Samantha shook uncontrollably, began to sweat profusely. She stared into her own pale face in the mirror, and as the peristalsis began in earnest, she turned toward Ray-Mo and expelled a pinkish column of vomit onto the front of his sundress. Another gut-wrenching constriction and she showered his Air Jordans with puke. For good measure, she sprayed him a third time. He grimaced and stood frozen, arms back, hands up, as if Samantha were a racist cop with an itchy trigger finger. Her old animal instincts locked arms with seven years of self-actualization and a big ole pile of feminist teachings. She stood beside herself. Watched herself pull that switchblade out of her back pocket. Watched Pumpkin’s eyes go wide as saucers as he didn’t seem to know what to do. Watched the blade go into the sundress. Felt surprisingly little resistance. Watched as she moved the blade across his abdomen. Saw his eyes go even wider. Saw the blood quickly soaking through the dress. Saw him sink to the floor in a rapidly growing pool of his own bodily fluids. Smelt the stench of his insides, strangely similar to raw chicken meat and roasted chicory. Felt no remorse for him. Felt he fucked around and now he was finding out. Felt he should have kept his own instincts sharper instead of letting them go all dull and domestic. Channeled Grandmomma’s voodan practice, saw the future—didn’t even need no chicken bones. Saw herself telling the authorities that he attacked her. Saw a slew of dropped charges and total vindication. Saw a whole mess of papers in the top journals like a blue-crab boil th’owed out on a picnic table, new potatoes and corn-on-the-cob and everythang. Saw herself becoming the new, undisputed Queen Bitch of the street equity stable. Saw Dr. Halvorson grabbing her by the wrist and raising her hand into the air, victorious. Saw the title of her thesis in big, glowing magical letters: LADIES IS PIMPS TOO. And for the first time in a long time, she gave thanks to the Big Pimp in the Sky who blesseth and keepeth—through the good times and the bad.