Yorkshire Puddings (standard:humor, 1376 words)
Author: Atticus	Added: Oct 25 2002	Views/Reads: 3638/2371	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A surreal and ironic look into a person with quite an incredible identity crisis.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

after a fourteen-hour flight, and discovering you'd left your handbag 
at home.  Sylvia scratched her forehead - droplets of sweat burst 
through the cracks in the supposedly impermeable layer of make-up, 
causing a sinking feeling in her chest following the realisation of the 
heat damage - the intricately spun web of deceit had entangled her; her 
pop sox had fallen inexplicably to her skinny ankles, and showed rather 
undesirable hairs and scabs where her shoes rubbed, which, again, she 
was helpless to stop.  Jean raised her eyebrows pointedly to remind 
Sylvia of her existence. 

Brushing alarmingly long talons, treacherous in the extreme to all and
sundry who found Sylvia 'that way out', Syl took a long overdue sigh; 
common-sense would be elusive in this twilight world of cabalism, 
cannibalism, and tea leaves.  Her mother's image, dying and 
incontinent, flew at her - obviously, not literally - as it always did 
in times like this; a knicker-dropping, toe-curling episode of mammoth 
proportions.  But mummy could be no help to her here.  Not with Jean; 
she was in communion with the dead anyway. 

Jean's eyes flashed, suddenly, and with alacrity.  Sylvia's eyes dimmed,
sharpish, and with a tremor of fear.  "Your mind wanders, but your body 
stays put.  There's something to be learnt there," said Jean, who was 
lifting her pendulous buttocks up individually, to ease the pressure 
accumulated from sitting down too long, obviously.  "Dearest," she 
added, as an afterthought. 

"Oh."  Sylvia replied, monotonously, understanding nothing, but smiling
knowledgeably, as if she did.  "I see," she continued, but didn't, at 
all. 

Sylvia caught sight of a large pack of cards on Jean's lacquered table,
hidden amongst the piles of dog ends and mystical paraphernalia, but 
visible nonetheless.  Feeling a shiver of anticipation and a flush of 
colour in her seemingly decaying cheeks, Sylvia, she thought 
charitably, crossed Jean's hand with silver, but it was promptly 
returned, "I want more than that, you cheap-skate.  Fifty p isn't gonna 
get me off this fucking estate, is it?"  Chastened, romantic ideals 
quashed, embarrassed, annoyed, Sylvia took another deep breath.  Jean 
went for the jugular. 

"Look at you, fawning...like a fawner (at a loss for another, wiser
comparison).  If your mother could see you now!"  Jean suddenly shifted 
her position, faster than a turkey strutting its stuff but with more 
chin, and said nothing, and said nothing. 

As another cover up, Sylvia squawked, "Are yer gonna read me cards or
what?"  Sensing a cat fight about to erupt, simultaneously handing the 
twenty quid over, hearing a dog get savaged by another outside, and 
feeling the relevance of that one brutal act reverberatingly and almost 
predicting the same inside, Sylvia said, "Androgeny is appealing, but I 
feel like a woman although I feel like I was once a man; but I don't 
like men and I want to be a woman." 

"I see," Jean replied, sagaciously, understanding everything in an
instant - from Sylvia's turquoise coloured nails hiding another's 
beneath, to her incongruous (not) identity problems.  And there were 
several. 

Feeling vicariously cliched and rhetorical, Jean snapped, to disguise
her true self, like Sylvia, "Take 'em, shuffle 'em, and give 'em back." 
 Sylvia, enraptured with Jean's analysis of her man-eating tactics, 
took the cards instead, shuffled them, and then gave them back.  A 
spiritual exploration of divine dimensions ensued; Sylvia learned the 
rudiments of her supposed past, and Jean made the decision never to 
read her cards again. 

Finally, laconically, the question, "When I'm clubbing, I feel great. 
But why do I never pull?" proffered Sylvia, meritoriously. 

Jean, on the other hand, "I see.  Loneliness kills; so the ads would
have us believe.  A cup of tea's more beneficial to your health than a 
man.  Or a woman." 

Panicking, sussed out, sweating, and wanting to go home, Sylvia walked
feverishly to a home alone; transparent, insecure, conspicuous. Rueing 
herself, the cards, and the lack of a moral to be learnt from anywhere. 



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