So Timmy went to Tommy and tried to pick him up while Daddy Mike had a talk with Buster and Scotty. But Tommy was big and heavy, so Timmy had to grab him by the feet the way Daddy Mike had done, and then drag him to the house.
This was hard work, but Timmy finally got Tommy into the kitchen, where Mama Jane was waiting. Her big pot of water was boiling now.
"My goodness, child!" Mama Jane exclaimed. "You've left a bloody smear all across my kitchen floor!" Then she scooped up Tommy and dropped him into the boiling water. Tommy's feet stuck up out of the water and wiggled.
"Why are you doing that, Mama Jane?" Timmy asked. "And why did Daddy Mike chop off Tommy's head?"
"My goodness, child!" Mama Jane exclaimed again. "How you do go on!" With that, she put on a pair of heavy rubber gloves, pulled Tommy from the water, and plunked him onto the sideboard. Then she started yanking out all of Tommy's feathers.
"Doesn't that hurt?" Timmy asked.
"It would if I wasn't wearing gloves," Mama Jane said.
After all of Tommy's feathers were gone, Mama Jane used a cleaver to cut off Tommy's feet. Then she took a shiny knife, sliced Tommy open, and yanked out his guts. She put most of the guts into a pan and gave the pan to Timmy.
"You can take these to Buster and Scotty if you like," Mama Jane said.
So Timmy did just that. He watched Buster and Scotty play tug-of-war for a while, and then he went down to the barn. He found Daddy Mike milking Maybelle the Moo Cow, and while he sat in the corner to watch, Daddy Mike sprayed him in the face with milk.
"Ha ha!" Daddy Mike laughed. "Look alive, there!"
Later, Grandma Eula, Uncle Augie, Aunt Pearl, and Cousins Fred, Earl, Cookie, and Poot all came over for Thanksgiving dinner. Tommy had been cooked all golden and crispy on the outside, and when Mama Jane placed him in the center of the table, Daddy Mike cut him up into juicy, steaming chunks.
"Give me a drumstick," said Cousin Fred. "That's the best part."
"No, no," said Cousin Cookie. "The neck is the best."
"You're both wrong, children," said Grandma Eula. "There's nothing better than a nice plump thigh."
"It's a slice of breast for me," said Aunt Pearl.
"I'd prefer a wing, myself," said Cousin Poot.
"You're all loopy," said Uncle Augie. "I dibs the gizzard. That's really the best part. Did you remember to fry up the gizzard, Sister Jane?"
"I surely did," said Mama Jane, and she brought Tommy's gizzard to Uncle Augie on a special silver plate.
"Yum!" Uncle Augie exclaimed, and he gobbled up Tommy's gizzard in three quick bites. Then he leaned back and gave Timmy a big grin. "And now," he said, "it's wishbone time!"
"What's that?" Timmy asked.
So Uncle Augie showed him. He held one side of the wishbone while Timmy held the other, and then they both pulled. The wishbone broke in two.
"You got the big half!" Uncle Augie cried. "You get your wish!"
"What did you wish for, Timmy?" Grandma Eula asked.
"I wished for rattlesnakes to bite all of you until you swell up and stink like Maybelle's calf Pansy did," Timmy said.
So Mama Jane said it was all right if Timmy went outside to play, and he did just that. After a while he wandered down to the trash barrel by the barn and pulled out Tommy's head.
Timmy walked across the barnyard with Tommy's head cupped in his hands, thinking that perhaps he would take Tommy to the top of Towering Grain Silo at last.
But then Daddy Mike came down from the house, calling, "Timmy! You can come back now! We have punkin pie!"
Timmy didn't want Daddy Mike to know that he had pulled Tommy's head from the trash barrel, so he did the first thing he could think of, which was to pop Tommy's head into his mouth, chew it up as best he could, and swallow it. By the time Daddy Mike reached him, Tommy's head was all gone.
"It's time for dessert," Daddy Mike said. "And then we're each going to say what we're thankful for. Can you think of what you're thankful for, Timmy?"
"Yes I can, Daddy Mike," said Timmy. "I'm thankful that I'm not adopted."
But as they walked back to the house, Timmy realized that there was something he was even more thankful for. He was thankful because he and Tommy now had one more secret, the biggest one ever, that only the two of them shared.
The secret was this:
No matter what anyone else thought, the head was the very best part of all.
Savage Breasts
Nina Kiriki Homan
I was only a lonely leftover on the table of Life. No one seemed interested in sampling me.
I was alone that day in the company cafeteria when I made the fateful decision which changed my life. If Gladys, the other secretary in my boss's office and my usual lunch companion, had been there, it might never have happened, but she had a dentist appointment. Alone with the day's entree, Spaghetti-O's, I sought companionship in a magazine I found on the table.
In the first blazing burst of inspiration I ever experienced, I cut out an ad on the back of the Wonder Woman comic book. "The Insult that Made a Woman Out of Wilma," it read. It showed a hipless, flat-chested girl being buried in the sand and abandoned by her date, who left her alone with the crabs as he followed a bosomy blonde off the page. Wilma eventually excavated herself, went home, kicked a chair, and sent away for Charlotte Atlas's pamphlet, "From Beanpole to Buxom in 20 days or your money back." Wilma read the pamphlet and developed breasts the size of breadboxes. She retrieved her boyfriend and rendered him acutely jealous by picking up a few hundred other men.
I emulated Wilma's example and sent away for the pamphlet and the equipment that came with it.
When my pamphlet and my powder-pink exerciser arrived, I felt a vague sense of unease. Some of the ink in the pamphlet was blurry. A few pages were repeated. Others were missing. Sensing that my uncharacteristic spurt of enthusiasm would dry up if I took the time to send for a replacement, I plunged into the exercises in the book (those I could decipher) and performed them faithfully for the requisite twenty days. My breasts blossomed. Men on the streets whistled. Guys at the office looked up when I jiggled past.
I felt like a palm tree hand-pollinated for the first time. I began to have clusters of dates. I was pawed, pleasured, and played with. I experienced lots of stuff I had only read about before, and I mostly loved it after the first few times. The desert I'd spent my life in vanished; everything I touched here in the center of the mirage seemed real, intense, throbbing with life. I exercised harder, hoping to make the reality realler.
Then parts of me began to fight back.
I reclined on Maxwell's couch, my hands behind my head, as he unbuttoned my shirt, unhooked my new, enormous, front-hook bra, and opened both wide. He kissed my stomach. He feathered kisses up my body. Suddenly my left breast flexed and punched him in the face. He was surprised. He looked at me suspiciously. I was surprised myself. I studied my left breast. It lay there gently bobbing like a Japanese glass float on a quiet sea. Innocent. Waiting.
Maxwell stared at my face. Then he shook his head. He eyed my breasts. Slowly he leaned closer. His lips drew back in a pucker. I waited, tingling, for them to flutter on my abdomen again. No such luck. Both breasts surged up and gave him a double whammy.
It took me an hour to wake him up. Once I got him conscious, he told me to get out! Out! And take my unnatural equipment with me. I collected my purse and coat, and, with a last look at him as he lay there on the floor by the couch, I left.
In the elevator my breasts punched a man who was smoking a cigar. He coughed, choked, and called me unladylike. A woman told me I had done the right thing.
When I got home I took off my clothes and looked at myself in the mirror. What beautiful breasts. Pendulous. Centerfold quality. Heavy as water balloons. Firm as paperweights. I would be sorry to say goodbye to them. I sighed, and they bobbled. "Well, guys, no more exercise for you," I said. I would have to let them go. I couldn't let my breasts become a Menace to Mankind. I would ra
ther be noble and suffer a bunch.
I took a shower and went to bed.
That night I had wild dreams. Something was chasing me, and I was chasing something else. I thought maybe I was chasing myself, and that scared me silly. I kept trying to wake up, but to no avail. When I finally woke, exhausted and sweaty, in the morning, I discovered my sheets twisted around my legs. My powderpink exerciser lay beside me in the bed. My upper arms ached the way they did after a good workout.
At work, my breasts interfered with my typing. The minute I looked away from my typewriter keyboard to glance at my steno pad, my breasts pushed between my hands, monopolizing the keys and driving my Selectric to distraction. After an hour of trying to cope with this I told my boss I had a sick headache. He didn't want me to go home. "Mae June, you're such an ornament to the office these days," he said. "Can't you just sit out there and look pretty and suffering? More and more of my clients have remarked on how you spruce up the decor. If that clackety-clacking bothers your pretty little head, why, I'll get Gladys to take your work and hers and type in the closet."
"Thank you, sir," I said. I went back out in the front room and sat far away from everything my breasts could knock over. Gladys sent me vicious looks as she flat-chestedly crouched over her early-model IBM and worked twice as hard as usual.
For a while I was happy enough just to rest. After all that nocturnal exertion, I was tired. My chair wasn't comfortable, but my body didn't care. Then I started feeling rotten. I watched Gladys. She had scruffy hair that kept falling out of its bobby pins and into her face. She kept her fingernails short and unpolished, and she didn't seem to care how carelessly she chose her clothes. She reminded me of the way I had looked two months earlier, before men started getting interested in me and giving me advice on what to wear and what to do with my hair. Gladys and I no longer went to lunch together. These days I usually took the boss's clients to lunch.
"Why don't you tell the boss you have a sick headache too?" I asked. "There's nothing here that can't wait until tomorrow."
"He'd fire me, you fool. I can't waggle my femininity in his face like you can. Mae June, you're a cheater."
"I didn't mean to cheat," I said. "I can't help it." I looked at her face to see if she remembered how we used to talk at lunch. "Watch this, Gladys." I turned back to my typewriter and pulled off the cover. The instant I inserted paper, my breasts reached up and parked on the typewriter keys. I leaned back, straightening up, then tried to type the date in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Plomp plomp. No dice. I looked at Gladys. She had that kind of look that says eyoo, ick, that's creepy, show it to me again.
I opened my mouth to explain about Wilma's insult and Charlotte Atlas when my breasts firmed up. I found myself leaning back to display me at an advantage. One of the boss's clients had walked in.
"Mae June, my nymphlet," said this guy, Burl Weaver. I had been to lunch with him before. I kind of liked him.
Gladys touched the intercom. "Sir, Mr. Weaver is here."
"Aw, Gladys," said Burl, one of the few men who had learned her name as well as mine, "why'd you haveta spoil it? I didn't come here for business."
"Burl?" the boss asked over the intercom. "What does he want?"
Burl strode over to my desk and pushed my transmit button. "I'd like to borrow your secretary for the afternoon, Otis. Any objections?"
"Why no, Burl, none at all." Burl is one of our biggest accounts. We produce the plastic for the records his company produces. "Mae June, you be good to Burl now."
Burl pressed my transmit button for me. I leaned as near to my speaker as I could get. "Yes, sir," I said. With tons of trepidation, I rose to my feet. My previous acquaintance with Burl had gone farther than my acquaintance with Maxwell yesterday. Now that my breasts were seceding from my body, how could I be sure I'd be nice to Burl? What if I lost the company our biggest account?
With my breasts thrust out before me like dogs hot on a scent, I followed Burl out of the office, giving Gladys a misery-laden glance as I closed the door behind me. She gave me a suffering nod in return. At least there was somebody on my side, I thought, as Burl and I got on the elevator. I tried to cross my arms over my breasts, but they pushed my arms away. A familiar feeling of helplessness, one I knew well from before I sent away for that pamphlet, washed over me. Except this time I didn't feel my fate lay on the knees of the gods. No. My life was in the hands of my breasts, and they seemed determined to throw it away.
Burl waited until the elevator got midway between floors, then hit the stop button. "Just think, Mae June, here we are, suspended in midair," he said. "Think we can hump hard enough to make this thing drop? Wanna try? Think we'll even notice when she hits bottom?" With each sentence he got closer to me, until at last he was pulling the zip down the back of my dress.
I smiled at Burl and wondered what would happen next. I felt like an interested spectator at a sports event. Burl pulled my dress down around my waist.
"You sure look nice today, Mae June," he said, staring at my front, then at my lips. My breasts bobbled obligingly, and he looked down at them again. "Like you got little joy machines inside," he said, gently unhooking my bra.
Joy buzzers, I thought. Jolt city.
"You like me, don't you, Mae June? I can be real nice." He stroked me.
"Sure I like you, Burl."
"Would you like to work for me? I sure like you, Mae June. I'd like to put you in a nice little apartment on the top story of a real tall building with an elevator in it." As he talked, he kneaded at me like a kitten. "An express elevator. It would only stop at your floor and the basement. We could lock it from the inside. We could ride it. Up. Down. Up Down. Hell, we could put a double bed in it. You'd like that, wouldn't you, Mae June?"
"Yes, Burl." When would my mammaries make their move?
He bent his head forward to pull down his own zipper, and they conked him. "Wha?" he said as he recoiled and collapsed gracefully to the floor. "How the heck did you do that, Mae June?"
I decided Burl had a harder head than Maxwell.
"Your hands are all snarled up in your dress. You been taking aikido or something?"
"No, Burl."
"Jeepers, if you didn't like me, you shoulda said something. I woulda left you alone."
"But I do like you, Burl. It's my breasts. They make their own decisions."
He lay on the floor and looked up at me. "That's the dumbestassed thing I ever heard," he said. He rolled over and got to his feet. Then he came over, leaned toward me, and glared at my breasts. The left one flexed. He jumped back just in time. "Mae June, are you possessed?"
"Yes!" That must be it. The devil was in my breasts. I wondered what I had done to deserve such a fate. I wasn't even religious.
Burl made the sign of the cross over my breasts. Nothing happened. "That's not it," he said. "Maybe it's your subconscious. You hate men. Something like that. So how come this didn't happen last time, huh?" He began pacing.
"They were waiting to get strong enough. Oh, Burl, what am I going to do?"
"Get dressed. I think you better see a doctor, Mae June. Maybe we can get 'em tranquilized or something. I don't like the way they're sitting there, watching me."
I managed to hook my bra without too much trouble. Burl zipped me up and turned the elevator operational again. "Do you hate me?" I asked him on the way down.
"Course I don't hate you," he said, shifting a step further away from me. "You're real pretty, Mae June. Just as soon as you get yourself under control, you're gonna make somebody a real nice little something. I just don't want to take too many chances. Suppose what you've got is contagious? Suppose some of my body parts decide they don't like women? Let's be rational about this, huh?"
"I mean – you won't drop the contract with IPP, will you?"
"Shoot no. You worried about job security? I like that in a woman. You got sense. I won't complain. But I hope you got Blue Cross. You may have to get those knockers psychoanalyzed or someth
ing."
He offered to drive me to a doctor or the hospital. I told him I'd take the bus. He tried to get me to change my mind. He failed. I watched him drive away. Then I went home.
I picked up the powder-pink exerciser and took it to the window. My apartment was on the tenth floor. I was just going to drop the exerciser out the window when I looked down and saw Gladys's red coat wrapped around Gladys. My doorbell rang. I buzzed her into the building.
By the time she arrived at my front door I had collapsed on the couch, still holding the exerciser. "It's open," I called when she knocked. My arms were pumping the exerciser as I lay there. I thought about trying to stop exercising, but decided it was too much effort. "How'd you know I'd be home?" I asked Gladys as she came in and took off her coat.
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