Auspicious Battery

Sated but still licking at shivplate from a round, girlish stone after the fact, horizontal poolside in a white rubber chaise, it's easy to call: Fool's Blessing, Chump's Paradise. After a 16-ladder climb up to the corner shade cave, it better be good, and it better be bad. I had to apologize to the valet-wench when the tip of my hard Italian duffel chipped the "bronze" trunk of a sentinel gomphotherium, stuck obnoxiously there in eternal trumpeting siege too near the beads like a high-security hole sniffer. Then appeared the living creatures.

It hadn't been three steps after checking in when I spotted it across the water, between doric plaster columns among a copse of senatorial nudists with towels, hunched over its tray of ashes. The chest was sunken, and the face was drawn of limits that all spelled bitterness and spite. It could have been so posed at a maiden's breast on a canopy bed, having sucked all the life with her breath, yet still wheezing for truth and light and sympathy. Its toenails bit into the cement. It watched me.

Later that night, I stepped out of my room for a jacuzzi. There was something glowing blue at its lip. Some bodies pose naked because they cook with religion, and he was a doctor of carnal gospel. To take the waters and behold him was to sit in bubbles of pornographic faerie children. His blue light and severed heads, caught in their fright and wonderment, dangled from every nipple, hypnotized all moral superiority. His youth and self-regard, krishna art and wicca, made that night the start of my final auspicious shakedown and battery.