lustrous, slightly rough and coarse so that when touched by her fingertips elecric impulses would tickle her knuckles and cause her palms to swell and sweat, her hair grew on her legs and reached out
and touched the wind and met the water and when touched by other
flesh sent thrills into the marrow of her bones and turned her almost
inside-out with pleasure.
her hands too had changed, her fingers looked now much like her
nose, and her fingertips resembled vulvas, her Mount of Venus had
thickened and the lines in her hand were deep, almost cavernous,
and her ass, which as a woman had been mostly for shitting and occasional rape, had become an interior tunnel into which flesh sometimes flowed, or honey it seemed, or ice cream, in fact, the whole space between her ass and mouth had become a winding energy
passage so that any touch or breath in either place caused sweet
chills and exquisite tremors.
bertha schneider, once a woman, then a celibate, had become an
androgyne—and when I tell you that she lived happily ever after, I
hope you will know what I mean.
bertha schneiders unrelenting sadness
as she kissed his neck, bertha schneider remembered her unrelenting sadness, this was her hidden part, all covered in the luxuriant twine of personality, learned facts, sardonic humor.
“oh, what a life our bertha has led, ” said the ignorant, as she held
forth on her research into remote jungle tribes where hymens were
impaled on wooden spikes and urethras were split wide open to
resemble precious cuntlike flowers, it was almost as if she had been
there, heard the tribal drums, drunk the sweet or nauseating brews
of livers and brains of deceased enemy warriors, danced the raucous
gyrating dances of birth, death, and rebirth, but bertha, truth to tell,
had in fact been to the New York City Public Library at 42nd and
5th, especially on snowy storming days, there she had sat under that
pale and dreadful light (which, she believed, was part of the very
design of that building, calculated by those who wanted no one
civilian to know too much), books opened up like leaves fallen on the
earth in late October, her giantesque thighs pulsating on the stiff
wooden chairs to the beat of the cold hum around her.
bertha schneider had unrelenting sadness flowing through her very
veins, and this had been a fact all of her long lived life, it was her
heritage, in fact—a sadness so large, so soft, so sweet, so resonant,
that it interjected itself right into other peoples sentences and punctuated her own. the dead of bertha schneiders russian past churned in her, whole dead bodies of sadness never buried deep enough, this
sadness had passed, first in mother russia itself, from mother to
daughter and from mother to daughter and from mother to
daughter, in those dark grim russian urban alleys where her
forefathers had lived and studied Torah and died, the unrelenting
sadness had been bom, on those narrow dirt and stone streets, amid
shops and pogroms, amid hard benches and mountains of laundry to
do and meals to prepare and yes candles to light and heads to be
covered, that sadness had been bom. amid the hard screaming births and the quiet obedient deaths, amid the bone poor hunger and the melancholy prayers, amid the vile hatred of her kind, the sadness
had been bom.
bertha had her own idea, in fact, as to how the sadness had been
