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Gum She watches me watching her. She says: "My body is a throwback to a time before Kate Moss." She stands backlit and naked against the window, gray light leaking in through slightly parted heavy drapes. Air shaft beyond and the sound of the rain, dripping on the ledge and beyond that, the dull gray drone of the city this moment has made far away. The room is small and dark with that grimly clean smell of disinfectant over disturbed dust. A swing-out lamp is mounted on the wall next to the bed and perched on the arm just past the swivel joint a blob of chewing gum is parked, patient, waiting. A globe. A sphere. A misshapen skull. An unformed world, waiting. Waiting for her to come and claim it. Her hands are behind her head. She unpins her hair. She is all ripe softness and curves. Birth of Venus. Botticelli on the half-shell. Impossibly young. She descends over me, a devouring wet goddess, a tangled mass of scented auburn promise. She claims me. She says: "Kiss my nipples and tell me again about Peer Gynt." It is not until sometime later in the dull gray rain along Lexington, with the scent of her curving ripeness still damp against me, that I wonder if she remembered her gum. --
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