My Cardboard Balcony

Calico Pants by Belinda Roddie It's not that we couldn't get along, or we couldn't sip from the same spoon when offered the communal bucket of soup, dripping cream on our fingers where we slurped it off each other and drooled out euphoria in aluminum cans. It's that somehow, whenever I wore my calico pants, you became frightened of me, afraid I'd become a patchwork madman hidden in the lurch of the wharf, another bush man, or racist guitarist shrieking below a diner and a sundae shop, shrunken head laden with bay salt as extra seasoning. I thought, to Hell with the abrasions, when a carnivore wearing herbivores' leaves decides to shred me up like freeze-dried meat on a stick. I'll keep with the slacks because at least they don't think I'm foaming at the mouth half past nine.

"I thought the play was absolutely savage." "Well, I think it was splendid." "That's because you are a barbarian," said Lord Milgard, wrinkling his nose in scrutiny. "A beautiful barbarian, perhaps, but a barbarian nonetheless. There is sometimes something appealing about women who decide they can enjoy the uncouth and reckless and deformed - but other times, it is absolutely prehistoric." "In that case," Lady Olivia earnestly replied, "I may as well live in the Jurassic era!"