"Scratch a model and you'll find an aesthete." Brandy had said it
earlier in reference to Clarissa's gallery show, but it kept coming to mind
as Fiona and Wendy scuffled on my studio floor.
	Heather, Lissa and Margarethe dispassionately took in the vio-
lence from the safety of a nearby coffee table. "Back-formation, the
erroneous coinage of new words due to misparsings, degrades the
listener, but not the speaker," Lissa said; "Thus its spread is inev-
itable." Wendy's foot caught the inside of Heather's chair, spilling
Heather onto the floor just as Fiona swung a meaty, fresh pineapple
downward. Heather took the blow on her shoulder, rolling with it.
	"My pineapple...!" I said.
	Terri hesitated in the doorway. I'd told her to come at 2:00 so I
could photograph her in basic black, get her portfolio started. I had no
time to warn her, or even to shout, before her epicene figure collapsed,
toppled by Zazie's notorious blind tackle. The two of them flew forward
into the sitting room and stayed down, Terri stunned, Zazie leonine.
	I whirled around to see Heather brandishing a chairleg--hardly her
fault, as I think the chair broke on its own--and trying vainly to
continue a conversation with unflappable Lissa. Heather's leery glances
off to the left pointed me to the chilling sight of Niobe in the corner
drawing a bead on someone with a pellet gun. Three other models wrested
the shocking thing from her hands and boxed her ears viciously. Lissa
cleared her throat and protested, "Bosch's reputation among the college
set obscures a number of major religious themes that I think would
otherwise be more easily appreciated."
	Dialing frantically, Terri twisted the phone cord between the
fingers of her left hand. Then I saw it was all a ruse; at Kristina's
approach Terri pulled the phone's body off the kitchen counter to clock
Kris with it. I turned away, lost in thought. Had I picked her too well?
With a crash, the coffee table behind me shattered.

	To photograph one woman en deshabille may be the dream of many, 
but as in any endeavor, making it a profession cools the blood.

	Persephone threaded her way through the chaos in the atrium with a
single finger raised in promise of potential retribution. "No one would
dispute that mathematics is a language," she told her cell phone, "and like
any language its stalwarts cannot be dismissed just because of the taint of
a nascent linguistic nationalism." The phone squawked at her.
	Niobe's captors wanted something from me, twine or tape. I shouted
to be heard over the din. I wanted them to know that revenge is never
pretty, but they didn't care. I pointed toward a promising-looking cabinet 
that I, however, knew to be empty.

	Am I not an artist? Is not individuality redeemed only when I, or
someone like me, is skeptical of it?

	Margarethe, prone to brooding, sat in an overstuffed chair, reg-
arding the shards of coffee-table glass embedded in the pineapple. I chose
to photograph the pineapple, ripening slowly.

written for Jean Jacobsen in my living room 2/7/02

This one came out completely wrong; it was supposed to be funny, which I don't think it is, and the narrator was supposed to sound much less sympathetic than the models, which I am not sure he does. Let me just say that this was the collision of many, many ideas (I'm not saying they were good ideas!) and so I'm proud that it even manages to be its own thing. Oddly, the more of these stories I do, the more attached I am to each one. I think I was more willing to disappoint people when I started out.

Though I keep saying that submitting a whole sentence as one word will mean I use it as a concept, not a quote, this one sort of fit in with what I was thinking. On the other hand, I dropped one submitted word entirely: "a linguistic understanding". I'm not even sure I'd know what a particularly linguistic understanding was, as opposed to some other kind. (On the subject of things I don't know, I had to run to the dictionary for 'epicene' but am thrilled to have learned it.)

The women in the story all have different initials. I was sort of trying to treat "real" names the same way I treated words-as-names in my novel (which has vanished from the site because I'm slowly editing it). Is there any way to say "my novel" without sounding pretentious?

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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