Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

PRISCILLA LIVED IN A STUDIO APARTMENT. It was called a “studio” apartment because art is supposed to be glamorous and landlords have a vested interest in making us believe that artists prefer to sleep in their workrooms. Real artists almost never live in studio apartments. There isn't enough space, and the light is all wrong. Clerks live in studio apartments. File clerks, shop clerks, law clerks, community college students, elderly widows, and unmarried waitresses such as Priscilla.

(Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)

Back in his home city, his offspring had been raised communally in a nursery adjoining the harem. The nursery was a female province, as foreign to his bootsteps as the serpent-seared cliffs of the edge. Now he discovered children, and the discovery blew blasts of sugar into every chamber of his heart.

Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”

I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception. But I want to be consulted. You know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots.