Status Updates From Saints and Strangers

(…) she is satisfied to stick to simple gluttony and she eschews all overtones of the sensuality of indulgence. Since she relishes not one single mouthful of the food she eats, she knows her ceaseless gluttony is no transgression.

[The Fall River Axe Murders] Five living creatures are asleep in a house on Second Street, Fall River. They comprise two old men and three women. The first old man owns all the women by either marriage, birth or contract.

(…) the Puck, a constant inquisitive spy on mortal couples come to make the beast with two backs in what they mistakenly believed to be privacy, had noticed there is a vexed question of handed-ness about caresses, so that all right-handed lovers truly require left-handed lovers during the preliminaries to the act, and Mother Nature, when she cast the human mould, took no account of foreplay (…)

(…) it might well be formidably labyrinthine. Yet there is always a way out of a maze, and, even if you cannot find it for a while, you know that it is there. A maze is a construct of the human mind, and not unlike it; lost in the wood, this analogy will always console.

I am Herm, short for *hermaphrodite verus*, one testis, one ovary, half of each but all complete and more, much more, than the sum of my parts. This elegantly retractable append-age, here ... is *not* the tribade's well-developed clit, but the veritable reproductive erectile tissue, while the velvet-lipped and deliciously closable aperture below it is, I assure you, a viable avenue of the other gender. So there.

Thunder, lightning, and, at night, the blazing stars whizz down and bomb the wood... nothing temperate about your temperate climate, dear, I snap at Aunt Titania, but she blames it all on Uncle Oberon, whose huff expresses itself in thunder and he makes it rain when he abuses himself, which it would seem he must do almost all the time, thinking of me, the while, no doubt. Of ME!

The Albatross can fly around the world in eight days, if only it sticks to the stormy places. The sailors call the huge bird ugly names, goonies, mollyhawks, because of their foolish clumsiness on the ground but wind, wind is their element; they have absolute mastery of it.

(…) she wondered what the distinction was between dancing naked in front of *one* man who paid and dancing naked in front of a group of men who paid. She had the impression that, somewhere in the difference, lay morality.

[Black Venus] Although his regard made her luminous, his shadow made her blacker than she was, his shadow could eclipse her entirely.

This is a short book but a *long* read.