Pavlov's Parallel Realities

Lenore stirred half-awake, to the foetid, thick funkiness of weeks of commingled love juices, spilled on mildewing blankets and allowed to incubate in damp jungle heat.

She could tell where she was from the tinny way outside sounds were muffled -- inside the broken laundry van, somewhere in South America.

She barely had time to groan, "Oooh, Fuck", before something behind her forehead split wide with the painful, multi-orgasmic paroxysms of a weeks-overdue hangover. Between the migraine aura's ragged pulsations, she discerned a dull, unfamiliar pressure in her nether regions. She fumbled sleep-numbed fingers down toward the source of her discomfort.

"Must've fell asleep on Milo's damn thermos again," she surmised, groggily.

It wasn't so much under her, as up her... With a sticky pop she extracted a half-empty mayonnaise jar that Milo, unbeknownst, had left jammed in as a drunken parting gift.

Milo. Suddenly aware of a darker void in the night beside her, Lenore groped for Milo.

She was alone. She bolted upright, and furiously hurled the jar at the van's opposite wall, where it thundered hollowly. She scrabbled for clothing, tried frantically to don too-tight jeans so she could go search for her missing lover. Their waistband ran aground forcibly at mid-thigh. Momentarily defeated, she sank back against the greasy metallic wall, and her sullen gaze lighted on the van's door.

It was cracked partly open. Just wide enough, say, to let a certain increasingly grim and uncommunicative rat and his precious thermos squeeze out, unheard, while she was passed out. The pit of Lenore's stomach, before her mind, told her with shocking clarity that he was gone for good.

Like a tight-wound spring uncoiling from an alarm clock dropped from a great height, Lenore launched herself across the van, bare-assed and hobbled by her own pants. They tore asunder as she ripped the door wide on rheumatic casters, and lept, surprisingly light and catlike, to the ground.

Then the unspent unfamiliar momentum of her pale floundering breasts and massive ass caught up with her. They bounced crazily under the sharp inertial shifts of her short flight and stiff-legged landing, and she reeled, shocked by her own body. Then she steadied. Her red-rimmed eyes blazed like crusty tea candles dropped into twin piss holes in a snowbank. Her puffy cheeks lit as if from within, with a sacred fire of a type generally reserved for crazed medieval holy men dressed in Hildegard von Bingham drag.

Lenore clenched small fat -- fat??!! -- fists, gritted her teeth, and loosed a long, baleful, jaguar-like shriek up into the night.

"Milo Pavlov! You did this to me! I will personally spit-roast your dick in the fires of hell, if it's the last fucking thing I do!" she hissed.

Another beach party, not far away...

2011-04-12T08:40:00.000-07:00

As Lenore rose sleepily from the shallow depression in the beach sand in which she had nestled the night, instinct turned her face east, where a slightly less inky-dark-promise-of-the-dawn stretched edge-of-vision fingers into the sky. An almost imperceptible breeze touched the planes of her cheekbones. It smelled barely of the sea. And something else. Something... familiar.

She sniffed and stepped lightly, barefoot, tacking quietly into morning's gentle caress. Abruptly the moist carpet underfoot became granular, and she wondered, idly, “Maybe cream of wheat?”

The already-shifting Prussian blue of the night had already begun to evolve noticeably into a dapple of purple-grays, and she became able to discern hints of wavelets on a calm sea, sprawling into the darkness that would soon be the sky.

As she moved, Lenore sensed some anomalous thing on the beach ahead of her, and she narrowed her beautiful, lemur-like eyes to sharpen them. At first it just looked like two giant, angular masses, stretching away dark on the sand. As she neared them, the blotches resolved into masses of faces... hundreds, or perhaps thousands of them.

With a nearly-familiar sense of half-dreaming, Lenore abruptly realized she was naked. She paused, drew a sharp breath, straightened her shoulders and thrust out her breasts. Thus prepared, she began a slow, ceremonial march up the broad center aisle between two masses. The faces were in lines, seated as if in pews under a cathedral's nave. All, as far as Lenore could tell, were women. Women with a real cross-section of fashion sense. All turned in their chairs as she passed, tiny smiles and nods binding their collective, approving stare. As if to bless a bride on her way to an alter.

Oh... “Twat! That smell is twat!” Lenore suddenly thought, finally identifying the powerful waft of rising estrogen in what from a distance had hinted at an odor of kelp and saltwater. “So that wasn't sea air...”

Lenore reached the head of the aisle. She turned to the women and facing their silent gaze steadily. Then, a lone figure rose from among them and began to declaim, underscored by a low, tormented wail that rose disembodied from among the throng.

"Gods! Why am I so eternally dissatisfied? Why do you demand that I learn what a wreck my life is? Am I doomed for all time, to insignificance? If there is a purpose to this pain, then tell me so I can learn to live with it! Why have you made my soul so very strong, but neglected to offer me a purpose? Give my life meaning!!!"

“Jeez,” Lenore wondered. “Bergman?”

At that moment the crowd's attention was snatched to the horizon, from which a great strange light had begun to spill – not the pink-orange of sunrise, but a pure, searing white that spilled from what appeared to be a sharply defined aperture in the sky itself. The beam began to shudder with brilliant strobes of rainbow colour that intermittently spotlit what looked to be another huge gathering some distance along the beach.

Lenore turned, narrowed her eyes again and strained to see. Then, from behind her, a warm hand rested gently, briefly on the night-coolness of her bare thigh. She turned back and widened her eyes at a slender woman in a house dress and apron, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Barbara Billingsley.

The woman beamed a toothpaste smile up at her. Her lips moved, her voice too low to hear over the keening around them.

"Pardon?" said Lenore.

The chorus quieted as the woman's lips moved again, allowing her words room to be heard.

“Don't let that son of a bitch get away with it, sweetie!”

The wail crescendoed.