The Fall of Thesaurus

by Bruce Costello

There was something about Encyclopedia’s darting green eyes that made Thesaurus wonder if his lipstick was on crooked or his fly buttons undone and his assets revealed.

He opened his mouth, but for once he was wordless.

So this was his mother-in-law to be, a fabled creature both loved and hated by his fiancée, feared and loathed by people throughout the land – an hermaphroditic beauty with the sultry eyes of an Art Deco flapper and a bosom resembling the humps on a steam engine.

Desire welled up inside him and overflowed into guilt, acrid as reflux in his mouth. Her gaze was on him as his eyes devoured her body.

She moved towards him, her lips pursed like a camel summoning a glob of spit. Thesaurus gazed at her as a mouse does on glimpsing a snake’s tonsils. He felt a beetroot flush appear on his man curve and spread to his butt cheeks.

“Come to Mama,” Encyclopedia whispered, her basilisk eyes watering, her forked tongue flicking around the corners of her lips. “Come to Mama, my darling, come.”

Thesaurus shook himself like a three-headed dog that had fallen into a long-drop dunny in urgent need of emptying, sidestepped his way to the door, and stumbled onto the street.

Encyclopedia stood in the doorway. The theme song from ‘Hair’ burst from her lips and pursued Thesaurus along the footpath. Strands of ponytails, rat tails, bobs and buns snared his senses and he felt himself falling, falling, falling…

“Encyclopedia!” Thesaurus cried out, his vocal cords thick with lust.

“Thesaurus!” Encyclopedia called in a voice like dark molasses.

He wafted into the air on a cloud of flatulence and jetted towards her outstretched arms across dark paddocks, starred with radioactive sword-wielding ninja cockroaches and Liberace’s undies.

Bruce Costello is a New Zealander. After studying foreign languages and literature, he spent a few years selling used cars. Then he worked as a radio creative writer for fourteen years before training in psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy and spending twenty-four years in private practice. In 2010, semi-retired, he took up writing for fun and to avoid housework. Since then, he’s had sixty-five stories accepted by mainstream magazines and literary journals in six countries. He still does housework.