West. What had happened to bring about this change? She was a
relic, a Sphinx of some time long past, a symbol of something
outmoded. She was regarded by men and women alike with awe,
sometimes horror, but rarely reverence.
Leona was almost six-feet tall, and weighed over two hundred
and fifty pounds. Though obese, her breasts and hips were so broad
that they made her thirty-eight inch waist look comparatively
slender. More than once in her life she had been referred to as
“volumptuous,” a snide twist of the word that neither insulted nor
complimented her, but merely drew attention to the obvious. She
bore great lumps, enormous fruits of flesh that surrounded anyone in
her near vicinity like an alien orchard. She could induce
claustrophobia in total strangers just by standing near them.
She met Roy on the first day he officially opened Undergrounds for
business. She was working at the Crystal Shipon the Promenade and
regularly took cigarette breaks on a bench near the concealed
alleyway that she would soon discover led to his mysterious
coffeehouse. She enjoyed watching the regulars of the pedestrian
avenue execute their ritual fandangos. It was like a big open-air
theater in which no one realized they were acting.
Stage left: a bag lady collected random elements of some
imagined architectonic, a great future work of art which might
someday be greater than the sum of its parts. She babbled incoherent
fragments of lunatic poetry, unaware she was in fact composing
excellent free verse. Passing her in graceful strides, a female
marketing executive spouted similar gibberish but was excused from
insanity by the tiny phone in her palm.
Out on the wings: A group of anarchistic adolescents, tattooed
and dressed in black, whistled and cursed at the sleek executive,
alternately aroused by and contemptuous of a beauty they would
never possess. Shortsleeved Christians mingled with the punks,
handing out literature designed to save their souls from hellfire, a
fate they might zealously embrace.
Leona watched unmoved as they alternately spun and unraveled
the strange, whimsical tapestry of taste. As all slow, constant or
heavy things were disparaged, she found herself shunted to the
fringe. The reign of her kind had passed. The fertile, volumptuous
earth spirit had finally drawn its last breath after a slow, two-
thousand year slide into exile. Women like her would not be revered
ABYSSINIA
20
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