As the firstborns are put through their battery of tests, subject to the painful whim of any government granting or other ostensibly official disbursement, many, though, private and so privately festishistic, insane, Ben’s kept waiting, shifting in one of the waitingroom’s armchairs, sloppily womblike, leaking its stuffing. His appointment scheduled for a lifetime ago, hours, an hour. Reduced to the abject, demeaned by each knifing lick of the clock above, He’s become its lowly ward, and that of the desk below it, too, not to forget behind the desk its girl, sitting low as if unaware of her power. All the waitingrooms, and there are many, as many of them as there are hells, even as many as there are ways and means by which to earn your hell, to become cursed and damned, to deserve it here on earth — all are the domain of this young woman, the offices’ shared receptionist and sole fulltime employee; according to the nameplate her employers would often fantasize nailing to her forehead, her name’s Minnie Tung de Presser.
No, I have Misses Abernathy down for three this afternoon.
Yes, she says, she dialed me frantic from work and I just managed to squeeze her in…squeezes herself, then realizes the telephone’s disconnected, plugs its jack back into the wall. What did she do, what didn’t she do: she’d settle disputes in case of scheduling conflicts, though often she’d be the one responsible for scheduling the conflicts, in an effort to assert her dominance over the doctors who’d woo her, this hourglass shiksa maybe a few grains shy of legal age. Domineering, like she’s making double what she makes, with spoiled ascension pretensions though of trashy stock, a Midwest import, eightfathered Bible Beltbeaten provenance, this who does she thinks she is requiring no analysis and even less anatomical enhancement. The Doctors Tweiss, they’d both been trying to bed her for years, to no avail, though they’ve become quite successful at their fantasy, wetdaydreaming of penetrating her small, pinch-veined, hairless, O so tight nostrils with what they think, they hope, passes for professional abandon; straddling her face, their testes dumbly smacking like tonsils her soft lips glossed in red, then leaving their seed there, shooting it deep and up to store, gunking her septum, behind her eyes then to her brain, giving her recurring sinus headaches they’d surely charge her to cure, deduct it from her minimum wage. They give her no insurance; they pay her in cash only when they don’t miser her in coin. To sit with her breasts rising from the fall of her halter uniform, midnight pleather; her chair’s retrofitted with a dildo, its modification to her feeling natural, the ultimate in cervical comfort, and a bonus to her employers, too, who for relaxation would sniff and lick it after hours: she’d sit impaled on it all day, her legs dangling for the floor, their feet nude, vanillapale and perfect. If perhaps indicative, or so the doctors would only wish, of the laterlife lymphatic — edema, a swelling from pregnant idle. If only she’d let them inseminate; if only impotence wasn’t physiological, too — then, they couldn’t have cared less. Dominatrix pleather except for the naked feet with their toes tapping to the rhythmlessness of her altogether tuneless hum, both accomplished at a volume enervatingly low amid the loud of her lipchewing, gumclacking, and the sucking of her sweets, which are ostensibly sugarfree, a panoply of red and green lozenges she’d enjoy herself while denying them to the uninitiated impatient from a jar atop her desk; rationing them in return for humiliation, to be perpetrated only during breaks from her work of all break, which is nothing more than losing things, not limited to files and office supplies. Abutting the jar, a holder hosts a single businesscard, lonely, its corners crumpled stale — that of the funeralhome director, having long required his own services.
