The Indecent Docent

Her body stretches to the stars. Arms at her side, flat-butted, emaciated legs parted with plenty of light coming through, she has huge clumps for feet keeping her pencil sticks upright. Featureless face does reveal some shadow where her eyes and mouth had been. There is much Vesuvian about this homespun sculpture, except she had not been caught running from volcanic shrapnel; she was simply nabbed in place with strains of “Is That All There Is” ponging slowly through her brain. A housewife who had given up on a payoff eons ago. Too spent to even shrug.

Had she not been supine under a Barberry hedge, she would have stood seven feet tall, stretched like taffy and charred coal gray by some demented Hephaestus. Poking the Barberry away from her face with his trash stabber, Francis notes no pain in the face, only hints of resignation.