Living in a red-light district suited Mandy and Zvi. They could both
sleep through police sirens, and Mandy had the requisite level of skill in
warding off people who mistook her reason for walking past them. (While it
mostly boiled down to body language, she had experimented often with
props. A bag of laundry strangely deterred no men at all; wearing goggles
worked beautifully.) The local businesses brought in a steady stream of
patrons for them to peer down at through their front windows, and Zvi
liked how his paintings came out if he did them by secondhand neon light
at night.
    At street level, their building had a 24-hour deli, one of whose
booths Mandy would often study in until 3am while Zvi slept upstairs.
And he rarely minded if the returning Mandy woke him up to engage in some
of the better local customs.

    Zvi bounded home one day with a shark he had gotten at the flea market
where he went for inspiration. It looked uncannily lifelike for a stuffed
animal, but horribly misbegotten if it was real. Neither Zvi nor Mandy
wanted to cut it open to learn the truth.
    "Should it be this soft?" she asked, petting a squishy ridge on the
dorsal side.
    "Sharks are always soft. Pillows of the sea, they call them. Whales
can't sleep right unless they have a whole pile of sharks under their head
arranged just so."
    By way of rebuttal, Mandy bit him.
    "I'll put him on the couch," Zvi said. "Or her. I want it to get a
good look at its new surroundings." The shark went without a fight.

    The puzzle of the shark's origins began to nag at Mandy. It was just
over a yard long: too big for a toy, too small for a real shark. Unless it
had been a young shark, she thought, or some species of midget shark-- if
there was such a thing, a prospect too entertaining to ruin by looking it
up.
    Open-mouthed, toothy, the shark seemed happy to ignore her theorising
and gape at the businessmen carrying off sacks of porn on the street below,
the teens egging each other on, the dancers overdressed for a smoke break.
Mandy examined the shark's dusty tongue, then affectionately brushed it
off.

    "Quims nightly," Mandy read from the marquee across the street one
evening. "Quims?"
    Painting, Zvi replied, "You shouldn't use such arousing language
around the shark."
    "It's heard worse. And since when do strip clubs call it a 'quim'? Do
the girls wear bustles?"
    "No, it's like... a picnic in the shade... artichoke leaves in butter
and tea from far Cathay... then, in the bushes, demure innocence is irrev-
ocably soiled."
    "Might not be what the rubes come here looking for."
    "The shark is nodding."

    Late that night, aglow with pride at convincing the deli owner to
start stocking better toilet paper, Mandy ascended the stairs to find Zvi
uncharacteristically awake. "Everything okay?" she asked.
    "I just can't get the face right," Zvi said, showing Mandy a canvas
where the shark's body ran with unreal blues and purples.
    "I feel your pain, but I'm going to bed. Shall I get naked?"
    "Yes," Zvi said, then, "No. I vote for just the goggles."

written for Ivy in my living room 10/22/08

Since I can't backtrack or erase while writing these, lines that particularly need good phrasing are often preceded by several minutes of staring into space, then swift action lest I spend even longer thinking. I jumped the wrong way on the last line of this one.

I meant M+Z to be a good fit for their environment, despite, oops, leading with the discouraging details.

For this story I put away the internet, which I think I've gotten over-dependent on for spot-checking little details. Maybe lots of adult sharks are three feet long, right? That said, I was kind of imagining New York City (where a 'deli' is often also a convenience store), but I don't think they allow full nudity in strip clubs there, making the marquee even less likely.

Normally I feel bad if a requested word is only in scare quotes or the subject of someone saying "Man, what kind of word is THAT?", but "quim" demands it. Plus, if I remember correctly, when she gave me the request card Ivy and I had just had a conversation about it being a great word despite its absence from the US Scrabble dictionary.

Occasionally I will get the sense, two-thirds of the way through a page, that I've just written the same story twice in a row. The resemblance may not be immediately obvious in this case (c.f. #96).

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

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