Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms (73 page)

At the front of the church, once everyone had been seated, you could have watched my brothers and Morgan as groomsmen in their freshly pressed tuxedos paying no attention whatsoever to anything other than the naked bridesmaids standing opposite them. Their mouths and eyes hung open so widely they looked like a display case of elegantly dressed fish.

Opposite the men, you would have undoubtedly noticed the aforementioned maids—Sophie and Ms. Waboombas included—as they stood quietly and beautifully, their faces framed beneath the broad brims of dainty, veiled, hats. In their attractive, delicately gloved hands, each woman cradled bouquets of red and white roses accented with baby’s breath. Their lovely feet were adorned with high-heels, the straps of which wound provocatively up their calves almost to the knee, while the rest of their bodies remained ornamented only with the gifts God and/or genetics and Doctor Pflemmel had provided them.

Had you been studying the maids, you would also have seen that even Mimsi, who Wisper had graciously included as one of her coterie, had gone native, and didn’t seem bothered by all the male attention in the least—possibly because she was getting so much more notice from a rather stunning woman in the third row.

For the men, this must have seemed to them what it would be like living in the Playboy mansion—or even better—since they didn’t have to compete with an aging Hugh Hefner in his robe and slippers, carrying a seemingly endless supply of lotion bottles. The looks on their faces said bliss, coupled with rapture, wrapped in a blanket of joy, and I imagine they intended to make the most of it at the wedding banquet afterwards.

Fortunately, none of the ladies seemed to mind.

“I could tell they were made for each other the minute Wisper started talking about him,” Petal, the maid of honor, said, barely pausing to catch her breath. She might have been speaking to my brother Daniel, my best man, across from her. But it could have been
anyone
she was talking to—or no one. “There was just something in her voice, and I would know, because every man in town has always thought she was sooooo pretty, and been after her like ants on cookies at a picnic, and since we used to share a room together when we were little, she would tell me all the time everything she felt about every one of them, and it wasn’t until she met Corky that I realized, ‘wow, this one doesn’t sound like a total jerk’, and we would lie there at night, and she would be talking about
him
, and I would be talking about this guy I knew from school who was kind of cute, and I’d be disappointed as we masturbated that her guy was getting her so much more excited than mine was getting me…”

Daniel nearly fainted before the ceremony and had to be supported throughout by Morgan.

Had you been at the chapel, that day, no matter how hard you looked, you wouldn’t have seen Grandfather on either side of the aisle, since he had declined to attend. But of greater importance to me, Helena and Pjuter
were
there, seated happily on the bride’s side so as to be, as Homer Nikkid would have wanted it, comfortable. Even Mervin Wosserman had come, sitting on the groom’s side with Mrs. Abrososa and one of her many male children; one that, at nearly forty, had not yet married, nor had children, nor ever considered same, if you get my drift.

Had you come, as so many did, that day, and perhaps arrived a little late, you would have walked up the aisle, between the clothed, and the unclothed, toward the altar and seen Wisper’s fabulous, naked behind standing nervously beside mine as we faced both pastors, Winterly and Summersby—he clothed, she unclothed—each reading out their individual sections of the marriage ceremony.

“Do you,” Summersby said, finally nearing the end of the ritual, “Corcharan Wopple-see-down…”

“Whoop-uls-duhn,” Wisper and I quietly corrected simultaneously, then smiled at one another. “Jinx, you owe me a coke,” Wisper said.

“Oops,” Summersby said, looking genuinely embarrassed. “We went over it a hundred times and I still screwed it up.”

“You’re going to have to get used to that,” I told my future wife.

“I look forward to it,” she replied and smiled, reaching out to squeeze my hand with hers, which I dutifully squeezed back.

“Don’t let go of it this time,” she said.

I told you I’d be paying for that until the day I died.

If you had made it only to the very end of the service, you would have heard Pastor Summersby ask me if I would take Wisper, then heard Pastor Winterly ask Wisper if she would take me, and you would have heard each of us—as though there was no better moment in our lives—sigh out that single word, “yes.”

And then you would have seen us kiss—warmly—deeply— lovingly.

Bloop.

Damn.

And you would have heard everyone in the church either gasp, or chuckle, or both.

“Well,” Wisper said, smiling down at it, then back up to me. “Let’s go do something about that.”

“Okay,” I said.

And so, we did.

Later that evening, Mayor Boone, sitting by himself in bed— naked, pale, reading a Scientific American article about hyperspace and pretending to understand—was trying hard not to think about what Wisper and I were doing at that particular moment, when suddenly, out of the dark and the silence that his home had lately been filled with, he heard the faraway tinkling sound of breaking glass somewhere on the ground floor below.

Chilled and terrified, he grabbed the bat he always kept at hand since Washburne had gone off, slipped into his long-dead wife’s fluffy, pink slippers, and moved slowly down the stairs, creaking that damned third one more than he had intended to, and paused. Waiting.

No one seemed to hear.

After a few deep breaths, he finished descending and crept around the corner of the foyer, heading toward the dim, moonlit kitchen. His heart skipped a beat, and his breathing accelerated when he saw a shadow flit past the window above the sink, heading in the direction of the knives, forks, and other sharpened instruments.

Suppressing his fear and burying it beneath mounting anger, and a creeping sense of violation, he raised the bat over his head and moved quietly through the archway that opened into the kitchen from the dining room. His heart pounded like the deposit-covered piston of a car that doesn’t use the right fuel additive, and nearly seized when he heard a rubber seal break and watched light slowly, insistently, spread outward from the opening of his refrigerator door.

He was struck to the core at whom the light revealed.

A woman. A stranger. Searching for food.

Not Washburne.

Mayor Boone reached for the nearby switch and ignited the overhead recessed lighting, flooding the room with illumination and momentarily blinding the lady, who shielded her eyes and winced at its intensity.

The uninvited guest stood, slowly, and turned to him with no apparent fear, shame, or concern, continuing to chew on whatever she had taken from his fridge. As she looked him over, taking in his naked, aging physique, and poofy, pink slippers, she took another bite and chewed deliberately, almost defiantly.

For a long moment they stared at one another in silence.

She was dirty, smallish, and thin, but tough looking, rugged, and tan. She wore nothing more than smears of mud, and a revealing, makeshift bikini fashioned from what appeared to be wet, pungent, animal skin. Her hair was wild and filled with bits of dried leaves, grass, and twigs, and she smacked her lips as she finished the piece of what the mayor now saw was this evening’s brisket, tossing the bare bone back over her shoulder and into the sink.

As Boone stared in awe, she grabbed another hunk of meat from behind the door she still held open and ripped away another, brazen bite.

Slowly, apparently certain now that Boone was no threat, she let her eyes wander around, and over the opulence of the kitchen, taking in its expensive cutlery, cookware, and furnishings with practiced, discerning eyes.

“So,” she said at last, “You’re rich.”

Boone stared a moment longer, then shook his head to loosen the gears.

“Yes,” he said, and suddenly got nervous, squeezing the bat a little tighter. “You want money?”

The woman smiled and ignored his question. “You single?”

“I…what?” Boone asked, slowly, confused, and unsure where this was going. “I’m…yes. My wife died…many years ago, and I have a son, but…well…he’s…eh…moved away.”

“Ah,” the woman said, smiling. She tossed the second bone backward, without looking, into the sink, then wiped her greasy fingers on her enormous breasts, breasts Boone kept glancing down at with obvious interest—trying not to ogle, but failing miserably.

Eventually, she held out a marginally cleaner hand for him to shake.

“My name’s Mindie,” she said. “I’m single, too.”

Chuck Austen wrote comic books for several years during

the early part of this new millennium. He wrote some forty

issues of various X-Men titles, more than a dozen
Superman

stories,
JLA: Pain of The Gods
,
Captain America
,
US War Machine
,

and many, many others, including his own creation:
Boys of Summer
,

a manga available from TokyoPop. He left the industry

to write novels, and screenplays. Chuck also co-created the hit

television series
Tripping The Rift
, which won the Playboy

Animation Festival Grand Prize, and is the only comic book

writer ever to win the Genesis Award for Outstanding Artistic

Achievement. Before that, he worked for many years on the

popular, animated television series
King Of The Hill
.

He lives in Los Angeles with his lovely wife, lovely son,

two lovely daughters, lovely dog, and even lovlier birds. This is

his first book. But not his last.

You can check out his current projects at:

www.nekkidbottoms.com