Diagnosis

On the walk home, once I turned the corner I took Electra out of the carrier to put her in my jacket pocket.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“Mama Branch has a big sylph fetish!” Electra said.

“Wouldn’t a big… sylph… be a normal person?” I asked.

“Oh, shut up,” she snarled.

“And, a fetish for the normal… The word for that’s… Well, normal, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t sign up for this.” Electra doesn’t really like riding in my pocket. It’s either too warm from my body heat or too cold if she pushes the flaps open wide. Right then she grabbed the zipper pull and shut herself up.

But I knew she could never get far enough in the pocket where she couldn’t hear me.

“Wait, so a big sylph is a contradiction in terms, and a big-sylph-fetish is a contradiction in terms. So in one sentence you probably gave yourself verbal whiplash.

“Or wait, maybe you’re just a vector. YOU’RE okay, but your speech patterns would hurt people who were good at English.”

I went on for a while, talking about how there were treatment programs for the vocabulary challenged like her. How even the stupid could hope to live a normal life, as long as they took care to avoid difficult sentence structures, words of many syllables.

I half expected her to chew her way through the bottom of the pocket to escape into the jacket lining.

It was another time I should have shut up, but couldn’t. I don’t know if it’s a symptom of something.

Eventually we got home, I put the cash in my savings box (and made sure Electra saw me put $3 into her mason jar), put my sylph in her cage, and got ready for bed.

I was just getting between the sheets when Electra climbed up into her treehouse, a little box on top of a tube sticking above her cage.

“Conrad?” she called.

“Electra?” I replied.

“All joking aside, Conrad, you, uh…” She wrung her hands a bit. I sat up and gave her my full attention. “Well… If I said I didn’t want to flash the dads any more, would you let me?”

“Of course,” I said. “You know that. Mr. Fallon was too creepy, and I didn’t force you to strip for him, did I?”

“No,” she agreed, but it felt like she was pausing.

“What’s really going on, Electra?”

“Mrs. Branch. I think she really wants to play… Adult… games with a sylph.”

“Are you afraid I’ll watch?”

“I’m afraid you’ll whore me out,” she said. She said it quickly, something she’d been thinking of for a long time and finally worked up an instant of courage to express it.

At least, that’s how I took it. And you have to be good at reading people to be the class clown. If you’re not, you end up as the guy who never shuts up and gets hit a lot more than laughed at.

I broke a long-standing rule Dad set down on the very day he’d met my sylph. I reached over and picked her up, holding my sylph while I was in bed.

I brought her close to my face and broke my own rule: I used her real-person name. “Jennifer, don’t worry. I wouldn’t force you to do anything you didn’t want to, not for money or popularity at school or even getting the Thompson twins to shut up.”

She released a breath she’d been holding, sagging visibly in my palm, relaxation just radiating from her form. Then she tensed up again. “But, but, what if you had a girlfriend who had a sylph fetish?”

“Would I use YOUR body to get ME laid, is that what you’re asking?” I asked. I lifted her closer to one eye. “Would you believe me if I said no?”

She burst out laughing. I knew she’d been expecting me to swear I’d never do that, but she wouldn’t have believed me. I wouldn’t have believed me.

The fact that I respected her enough to be honest, though, that made her feel better.

She was still giggling when I slipped her into the opaque part of her cage and turned the light off.

“Besides,” I muttered, “no one gets to play with naked Electra before I do, god damnit.”






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Index

2. Mrs. Branch
4. Princess