She ran around screaming "Venefica" with the same throaty intonation that Burl Ives as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof belted out "MEN -DACcssss-cITY." The way Burl Ives could get that word to hiss out in the middle like that, snapping the snake into the word as if flicking a farmer's whip into a great grand yowl of whitmanesque variety. More stark white icicle cold than the frosty narrator who spun tales about sad misfit toys.

Frosty face of Mrs. Whitman who taught the lesquels. I hope hers wasn't really a sad story and she really was just one of the released and not one of the lost.

It's often so hard to tell the two apart. Especially when you wonder which one you are. Because no one will ever let you know for sure. Watch out for THOSE people because if they find out you can read subtext (and they will because although they're clueless in the larger sense, they're smarter than the average bear), so INSTEAD ... WHEN they find out you can read subtext and realize you have been reading THEIRS all along, they will kill you.

You will be burned at the stake.

Venefica. Never follow my word, follow yours, follow yours, follow yours, by which you will be following mine, I suppose, if you want to get oblique, but punch out those windmills, my love, because

the worst thing is to miss the train because of a dispute over how to punch your ticket.

IT DOES NOT MATTER.

But you do.

If only the antagonists in the subplot could unravel their own helices, they could have seen that although you knew all along what they were up to, your silence wasn't a threat, a hold you would someday blackmail them with, as someone had blackmailed them so horribly in the past. No. Your silence was courtesy. Their sleight o' hand did not go unnoticed by you. But. By the same closed captioned translations you read, you knew why, all the desperate reasons driving them to such skill, and other tricks of the damned.

But I tell you. It's no use beating Cerebus on Sunday for what you claim he did wrong on Friday. He can't understand. And then you stupidly wonder why his left head is always biting you in the ass.

Let's have a little toast to compassion, shall we? Dostoevski, your "beauty will" do that thing, Fyodor, Fyodor, I only took the poison because I knew it was coming anyway.

And I already went through the dry heat. Deserts, stakes, hell, and shopping malls.

Yell all you want, I'm off. Off on a walkabout, alone, or sometimes with Tiresias, both of us blinded by snow and memory, on the Island of Misfit Toys.