Body of Knowledge (Alexandria)

“Just stick up for yourself,” she said.

You looked down at the ground then back up at her.

She looked at you through the rims of her glasses. “What?” she said and smiled her winning smile. “It doesn’t take much. You just put your foot down. He wants that grade as much as you do, and if you’ve been pulling most of the weight, there’s no way he’s going to give up all you’ve done on the project just because you’ve asked him to do a fraction of it.”

You looked back up at her, showing in your face that you understood the logic of what she was saying.

“You can just say no. He’ll push. You don’t really have to fight back. No argument. No raising your voice. Just a simple ‘no’ will do. Sit back. Make it obvious that you won’t lift a finger. And he’ll have no choice but to do it. His grade will be on the line just as much as yours is. He’ll get the hint and do it. That’s all it takes.”

You looked at her for a second, then you nodded your head. “Okay, mom.”

She smiled. “And tell me how it goes. Okay?”

“Sure,” you said, and you smiled awkwardly.

“Okay. I’ll see you later. I have a key, so lock the front door before you hit the hay.”

She left out the front door, and you stood there, watching her walk to the car through the window. As she went, the neighbor watering his flowers with a garden hose leered at her from across the street. When she had finally pulled off, he looked back at his garden, and seen that he drowned his flowers.

“Serves you right,” you murmured, and you closed the shades.

You went over to the couch with a pit of worry in your stomach. ’Just say no,’ you thought. It was easier said than done. At least for you. Your hand was on your chin as you were hunched over, thinking about it. On the mantel, above the fireplace, a 6’ inch statuette of The Thinker sat, nude in mock-marble, leaning over with his hand on his chin in a pose not unlike your own. Below him, on the base of his stand, said in bold letters “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.”

You looked up at it and you smirked dismissively. You wished that that was the way it was. But you knew the truth: “POWER IS POWER.” No matter what anyone said. And your project partner had a good 4’ inches on you, both in height and the width of his biceps. “No,” you thought. “I’ll do all the important stuff, and let him do the mindless busy-work he’s always been doing. Not only will he not take ‘no’ for an answer. I don’t trust him to be able to do anything properly anyways.”

Your eyes wandered to a photo of your mom leaning her shoulder on one of the columns of the Parthenon. Her body shielded from the Athenian sun by the shade of that pillar.

“At least mom is working an evening shift tonight,” you thought. “I won’t have to deal with him glaring at her this time.”

You looked back at the statue of The Thinker, his brows perpetually creased in focus.

The only men good enough for mom are all long-dead. They don’t have bodies to be vulgar with, only words. Timeless, immortal words. Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Arabic, German, French, and Victorian English, just sitting, waiting for her on those pages, to make love to her with their thoughts. You had nothing to worry about. The men in question, the only ones who stacked up, no longer had hands to feel her up with, never mind anything else to do worse with her.

You looked at the clock on the wall. You both agreed that he’d be here by now. That meant you had another twenty minutes to yourself. Might as well get started without him. What difference would it make anyways? He had nothing to contribute.

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Your mom pushed through the revolving door and she stepped out and into the main floor of the city library. Before her was walls and aisles of bookshelves under all-illuminating orange light, filled with books, each with hundreds of pages, give or take, and the main aisle went down endlessly, with rows of long tables going down the middle, splitting the aisles, and the second, third, and fourth floor terraces, in two. People sat at the tables in sporadic droplets, looking down through glasses or squinting eyes, running their fingers through pages, some with notes to the side, and with pens or pencils clutched in their focused hands. Even still, your mom in their peripheral was the only thing that could burst the wrapped-tight bubble of their concentrations.

Your mom slowly turned the occasional head as she passed, the clicking of her heels drawing attention, and the shape of her body retaining it. And as the heads turned, they didn’t stop their visual pursuit until their necks could no longer pivot enough to track her. She climbed up the staircase on the right, turning heads as she passed by aisles on the second floor, and then took another staircase upward, and did so again, until she was on the fourth floor.

The last set of eyes to drape themselves over her before she entered the City Blueprints and Archive office were those belonging to a bespectacled old man, who examined the movement of her backside with focus before she disappeared inside the comparably plain room.

“Ah,” he mumbled to himself quietly. “Thar she blows.” He looked down at his open book. At the top of the page, it read ‘Mating Habits of Praying Manti.’ The book clapped when he shut it, and noticing the sound, he slowly shut his blue notebook. Then he put his notebook into his leather bookbag and took out another notebook, its cover an eye-catching red. He laid the flat of his hand on the cover with admiration.

Your mom came into the room. “Sorry I’m late,” she said.

“You’re not late,” her co-worker said, looking at her watch. “You’re early if anything.”

“I meant with taking the evening shift,” your mom said, as she removed her coat.

“Are you kidding me? You basically saved my life. I’m going out tonight with that great guy I was telling you about.”

Your mom was pouring coffee into her Rene Descartes themed mug. “Oh,” your mom said, as the coffee poured. “Him…” She sounded unsure.

“Don’t tell me you forgot. The dreamy one. 6 feet tall. Blonde. He works in… oh speak of the devil!”

A man of that description glided suddenly into the room like a dream. “Ready?” he asked.

Before your mom’s co-worker could answer, she noticed his mouth drop slightly, and then his eyes lighting up as he stood there, stonelike. She followed his stunned gaze, over her own shoulder, to see your mom standing there, facing away, stirring cream into her mug, turning her black coffee into a warm caramel. Your mom’s co-worker’s smile faded. She looked back at her date, to see he was still looking at your mom, as if in a trance.

“I’m ready,” she said, audibly annoyed.

“Good, good,” he said, looking at her for fraction of a second, before aiming his sights back at your mother. “Is this your…”

“Let’s go.”

Your mom turned around and saw him looking at her.

He lifted up his hand, as if to introduce himself, but he felt his date pushing him in his ribcage subtly. He took a few steps back, as your mom sat down in the desk chair. “Bye,” is all he said to her.

She looked at the two of them as her co-worker managed to turn her date around and walk him out of the room, he looked back at her until the final moment. Your mom watched as her co-worker left without saying anything. Then she said “goodbye” to the empty room, sheepishly, and she shrugged her shoulders.

As she pulled out a book from her purse, she wondered for a moment if she had done anything to offend her co-worker, but a moment was all she gave to it. She was whisked away from daily concerns by the first few words that started off the fourteenth chapter of her book, and then that was it.

The old man sitting on the fourth floor terrace in his chair over his red notebook looked up to see the librarian, looking irritated, and the tall man who had walked in a moment ago, leaving the archive room, and he muttered to himself “An evening shift is ideal.” The archive room is unpopular during any hour of the day. But always more so in the evening. “My dear girl will be alone.” He fidgeted in his chair and brushed the cover of his red book, feeling that sense of overpowering wonder that filled him at the prospect of continuing one of his various lines of research. “An evening shift is ideal,” he repeated.

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He had been twenty-five minutes late, breaking his previous record.

As The Thinker sat on his pedestal, ruminating in vain over a platitude etched on false stone, the two of your sat on the floor opposite one another, with a jungle of papers and two laptop computers sitting on the coffee table opposite one another. As you rummaged through sources, he formatted everything you sent to him, a job which took seconds, and then he celebrated his massive contributions by going on youtube and searching for Olympic wrestling highlights.

You had been stuck with him through process of elimination, the two of you being the only students in class who hadn’t found someone to pair up with. With him, it was a result of people knowing better than to hitch their grade to his meagre intellect and work ethic, and with you, those who even remembered that you were there were intimidated by your place at the top of every exam results sheet.

In the end, the two of you ended up with one another. The odd couple. You had assumed early that it was an alchemical mix that was destined to end badly, and you had assumed right.

As you read over a line, and began transcribing it in your own words, he suddenly burst out with a “fuck, that was beautiful!” You shuddered at the sudden explosion of sound, and let go of the stapled-together booklet, losing your page as all those pages which you had already cleared flopped back down over your spot.

You gritted your teeth as you sat there.

“Whoah,” he said. He was reacting to some suplex or pin in a youtube video, no doubt. You opened up the booklet patiently and began trying to refind your spot. As you went through it, passing by page after page, you noticed you were nearing the end of the booklet, a fact which had previously avoided your awareness. When you finally did find your spot, it was on the third to last page. You picked it up and turned it over. There was nothing there. You got up on your knees and began shuffling through pages. He took off one of his headphones and leaned over to see what you were doing, hearing something troubling in the frantic noise.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing,” you said.

“No, what’s up? You look flustered.”

“Where’s the write up on our sewer system.”

“The what?”

“The writeup on the town sewer system. J. Peebles. It was supposed to be in this booklet.”

“It’s not there?”

“No,” you said, throwing a booklet flat on the desk. You looked down at the mess. “It isn’t here.”

“Are you sure?”

You looked up at him through the corner of your eye. “Yes I’m sure,” you said through gritted teeth.

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re blaming me.”

You stood there on your knees, not saying anything.

“I printed off what you gave me.”

“And I gave you J. Peebles.”

“I printed that one.”

The word ‘one’ hit you like a dart and you shuddered internally at its impact. “J. Peebles’ On Sewers and Street Management. It’s not here. I have Roads and Bridges. Where is Sewers and Street Management?”

“You never gave me that one,” he said firmly. “If you would have given it to me, it would be here. I printed everything. Everything you gave me.”

You were taken aback by his defensive stance and aggressive tone. You sat there for a second, then you asked as calmly as you could “can I see the e-mail I sent you.” You tried, but he could still hear your frustration.

He took in a deep breath. “Fine,” he said.

As he opened his e-mail, you looked at the list of sources you sent him. You had listed it all as cleanly as possible, fearing that he would miss a link if you didn’t. When he slowly scrolled through, he past On Sewers and Street Management. “Stop,” you said, and you pointed upward. He scrolled up, exasperated. His annoyance heightened as if to counteract the shame any reasonable person would have felt. He clicked on the link.

On the page that opened was a message: “On Sewers and Street Management is no longer available as of 4/06/2021 at 12:01 AM.”

You sat on your knees next to him. “April 6th 2021,” you said. “That’s today.”

“Huh,” he said, deflecting the intention of your statement. “I guess it is.”

“Didn’t I tell you to print it all off yesterday?”

“I did.”

Your teeth were clenched tightly together. “You did. Everything except On Sewers and Street Management.” You collapsed back down onto your ass, pressing one palm against the carpet, and the other against your forehead.

“Fuck you,” he said. “Why didn’t you print it off if it was so important?”

You sat there silently for a second, not wanting to say anything. Not wanting to escalate. But it came out anyways. “Because I thought I could trust you with at least one thing. If I didn’t give you the most simplest of tasks, you wouldn’t have anything to do. I see even that was too much to ask.”

“Go fuck yourself,” he said.

“Sure,” you said, sarcastically. “I’m sure that will make On Sewers and Street Management appear, ready for us – or me – to go through it and…”

“Why don’t we just do without it?”

“You don’t understand,” you said with disgust, meaning it with all the insult of his intelligence it implied. “The entire thesis of our project falls apart without it. Without that work, our entire argument is gibberish. Or haven’t you noticed that yet?”

He looked at the side of your head, a fire burning in his eyes. You could feel it.

You just sat there, melting under his gaze, deep in thought. The Thinker loomed over the two of you, half-bathed in shadows. “We’re boned,” you started, almost mumbling it. Then a moment passed. “Unless…”

“Unless what?” he demanded forcefully.

“Unless they have it at the library.”

He looked at the mess on the table for a second, then back at you. “Doesn’t your mom work there?”

“She does,” you said.

“Okay!” he said, clapping his hands together with affirmation in his heart. “Text your mom and tell her to bring it home with her after work.”

“She’s not home until after midnight,” you said. “We have to finish this tonight.”

“Oh,” he said, his excitement dying. “So when are we going to go get it?”

You turned and looked at him. “We?” you asked.

“Oh!” he exclaimed with frustration. “What now!?”

“We are not going anywhere. I’m going to sit here and finish with what we have. You are going to go and get that article.

“What? Fuck you!”

“It’s going to take an hour to go there, get it, and come back. That’s an hour that we can’t really spare, if you haven’t noticed. And since I’m the one writing the entire thing, maybe you should get up and go get it.”

He glared at you. You sat there firmly.

“So you’re not coming with me then?” he asked.

“No,” you said. You felt a chill in your spine as you said that single word. No.

He sat there, eyes burning. Then after a few moments, he said “okay.” He began to stand up. “I’ll go get it. Just keep writing here.” He pointed down at the table with his open palm.

“Will do,” you said, sarcastically. “Great advice.”

You could feel his rage as he went. It was only then that you started to feel the weight of what you had just done. No. The sound of it flashed in your mind. It had worked. Your mom was right. She always was a clever one. When he went out the front door with his car keys in his hand, he slammed it to show his disapproval. You didn’t take long in celebrating the birth of your spine. You had work to do. And now you had the peace and quiet necessary to do it. The Thinker sat on his pedestal silently as you scratched off a few notes in your notebook. His concentration unbroken, no matter the circumstance.

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Your mom sat in the living machinations of her mind’s eye. The words on the yellowing page of her book becoming real to her, bursting through the drab structure of her surroundings and replacing them, as if she could wallpaper over the stubborn greyness of life with the color of fiction. A woman walked into the room, escaping your mom’s notice, and she began examining the shelves silently.

The room would be quiet on any day, the only noise to ever make its way inside being the dropping of a large book, which, if happening in the main hall on the first floor, would echo through the high ceilings of the building, but during the evening shift, your mom always felt like she was locked away from everything. Like the world outside this tiny little room had just stopped. This room had that quality. There were even times when she’d nod off, much to her own surprise, only to wake up hours later. That was a common evening shift occurrence. She was shocked that it had never become an issue though. Such was the City Blueprint and Archive Office. It had been placed within a break room once management had realized that nobody was using it, and they needed to make room for the ever-growing erotic novel section.

Your mom had been transferred to Blueprints, and she was quite okay with it. She enjoyed the solitude, and for the most part she was left alone. She could count the number of library-goers who came on that shift on one or two hands, and the lack of action, and something in the evening air, must have been quite the sedative, because she’d often find herself falling asleep, only to wake up hours later without anyone noticing or caring. Even the number of questions she had to answer in the evenings were few, and if it weren’t for Dr. Pretorius, that eccentric old man who liked to visit from the University, your mom would spend a large number of those shifts not even speaking a single word, just eight uninterrupted hours of reading (and napping), something she was more than fine with.

And here she was now, settling into the silence, ready to be carried away by phalanxes of the written word on each page of her book.

And then she was interrupted by a familiar voice.

“Alexandria!”

Your mom’s butt clenched in her seat.

“Have you found another classic to add to your vast shelves at last?”

Your mom could never tell if he had truly gotten the strange notion that her name was Alexandria somewhere, or if that was just a playful name he had assigned to her.

She lowered the words of her book from view, and there he stood at the doorway, looking in at her through his thick-rimmed spectacles, a familiar site. Dr. Pretorius was a kind enough old man. He was a little eccentric, unsurprisingly for someone who worked in the zoology department of the university downtown, but he was always very cordial in his awkward sort of way. And though he liked to chat the librarians’ ears off, none of them had anything bad to say about the old coot, most of them finding him charming for his warm-heart and intellect, despite what he lacked in usual social graces.

He smiled at your mom from across the room. Your mom smiled back, clenching her butt cheeks together in her seat as she did. It wasn’t that she had reason to dislike the old doctor, in fact, as far as she could tell, he was a true academic who lived for his work, and he didn’t have a malicious bone in his body, something she knew was almost definitely true. Even still, she wouldn’t had known how to describe the feeling she got whenever she saw him, or worse, heard his voice, had she not read it in a book the week prior. The book had described a similar relationship, one where the aggrieved personality described the other as “like someone who did something bad to me in a past life or a dream, I know he isn’t an enemy to me, but I feel exactly the opposite.”

Your mom, putting her trust in her thoughts rather than her feelings, forced herself to smile back at him. Even still, it was her mouth that smiled, not her eyes. Someone who was more intuitively aware of the emotions of others would have noticed. Dr. Pretorius never did.

“What is this?” he asked and poked up the face of the book in your mom’s hands with his index finger. “Ah, Moby Dick!” He looked into her eyes. “You’ve never read?”

“No, doctor,” she said, slightly embarrassed. “I’ve always put it off because of its length.” She held the unfinished pages between her index finger and thumb as if to showcase the gargantuan nature of the task before her.

“And because it doesn’t have a love story, I’m sure. Women love a good love story.” He said it with one part authority, and another part inquisitiveness, as if he were sure of the general rule, but not if it applied in this case.

Your mom could feel the large surface area of her inner butt-cheeks clamped against one another. She had asked the other female librarians about him asking questions like these, probing questions couched into seemingly innocuous statements. They looked at her with amused dismissal, falsely assuming conceitedness on her part, as if maybe she imagined that she was so attractive, that even kindly Doctor Pretorius, a man of dry facts and interests, had no choice but to slip innuendo into his one-sided discussions with her. They had claimed, consistently, that they’ve seen nothing like that out of him, not to them, or to anyone else. They refused to believe that he was any different with your mom, and your mom, in turn, was left without closure. Each time she had convinced herself she really was imagining things, another moment would come, strange words combined with a bend at the corners of his mouth, filling her with doubt and ever-increasing unease.

He removed his finger, and when he did, the top ridge of the book’s cover fell flat to the desk because of the limpness in your mom’s wrists. The words on its page sat below him as he looked into the corner of the room inquisitively, his usual tell when he was thinking about something deeply. His eyes squinted, showing he had arrived at a thought. “Or is it a love story?” He looked at your mom with a grin. “After all, Captain Ahab, overwhelmed with maddening obsession, chases his darling whale all over the various oceans and seas. Doing any thing in his power just to jerry-rig another chance encounter, no matter how remote. Just because there is no romance, doesn’t mean it’s not a love story. After all, how could one not love the object of one’s obsession, healthy or otherwise?”

Your mom smiled, this time with her mouth as well as her eyes. Her butt cheeks began to relax themselves, their tension evaporating.

“As a zoologist,” he began to explain. “I know what it’s like to love the animals I study. Never studied whales though.” He looked at his suit coat and began to play with its buttons.

“Maybe you will one day,” your mom encouraged him softly.

“No,” he said, and smiled amicably. “I don’t think I have that long left in me to get there. A big subject, whales. In more ways than one perhaps. Besides,” he said, running his open palm on his side. “I’m in the process of studying a much more worthy animal. Many times more complex. And in much more fascinating form.”

Your mom’s cheeks reclenched themselves. After a moment of silence, internally assuring herself that it was nothing, she had worked up the resolve to ask.

“What animal is that?”

He looked down at her at that question, his eyes open and focused on hers. And for a moment, he didn’t say anything. He just looked down at her, unblinking. As she sat there, unnerved but without knowledge as to why, she felt a strange tingling in her backside, and a sense of weirdness, like that she had felt in a recurring dream. One where she sat bent over a table, being examined by a female proctologist with strange equipment and tools, and begloved hands that probed invasively in the cold pragmatism of a professional space.

Before she could ask a follow up question, even if just to kill the tension, a sweet voice broke in, doing that for her. “Excuse me, miss?”

Your mom looked up to see a woman at one of the shelves.

“I’m having issues finding a textbook. Can you help me? It’s kind of a niche issue here and…”

“Of course,” your mom said.

As she got up and straightened her skirt, Dr. Pretorius said “ah, Alexandria. Duty beckons you.”

Your mom smiled politely as she walked past him and to the woman.

He watched her from behind as she walked. Perfect, he thought to himself, as he opened up the flap of his book bag. She couldn’t have chosen better attire for today. Not that it’ll matter what she chose in an hour. He fished out his red notebook, being careful to conceal the title on its cover, and thumbed it open to a new page, passing by pages with glued-in polaroids extending by their white corners off the natural end of the paper.

“Rivers,” your mom repeated the request of the lady. She put her finger up and ran it along the spines of a few books. “You’re in the right place. Are you looking for something about rivers in regards to city planning, or in the case of seasonal flooding? I assume it’s one of the two. It’s always one of those two.”

After he had found his lank page in his book, he looked up at your mom as she busily thumbed through the spines of textbooks.

A zipper, he thought with amusement. And right down the middle, no less. How perfectly convenient. As if someone sent her to me, ready for easy examination. If only dissecting frogs were as simple.

He fished in his pocket for a pen, and realizing he didn’t have one on him, likely leaving it within the pages of one of his books now tucked into his bag, he furrowed his brows.

He looked around, and saw your mom’s pencil holder, a cup emblazoned with the image of Charles Darwin, filled with pens and pencils, sitting on her desk next to her mug Descartes, filled with caramel-colored coffee. He smiled to himself as he grabbed a pen.

A natural selection, he thought to himself. And he looked up at your mom as he placed the pen into the circular coils of his book.

He kept his eyes on her as he fished for something in his coat pocket. The rooms much more crowded for this than what I’m used to, he thought with a tinge of nerves, not expecting three library-goers to be in the tiny room at once, especially not during his much-coveted and cherished evening shifts.

Your mom looked down at a book, and then quickly back up at the woman. “Johnson and Wollsbury?”

Be patient, he told himself. It’s been a few weeks. You’re excited. But all the more reason to not make a careless mistake.

“That’s the one,” the woman said.

Your mom bent down to go grab it.

Dr. Pretorius pull his clenched fist from his pocket and extended his stubby arm towards the desk.

“Wait!” the woman said.

Your mom looked up.

Dr. Pretorius pulled his fist toward his sternum, clenching it tightly there.

The woman looked down at her notes. “Uhh…”

Your mom looked at her as the woman mused at the paper in her hands. Dr. Pretorius looked at your mom from across the room, waiting for his moment with his fist clenched tightly.

“Umm,” continued the woman, unsure. “It says… right here… that it’s… that’s it!” she exclaimed. “Johnson and Wollsbury. Yes.”

“Sure,” your mom said.

She turned back around.

Dr. Pretorius, now having his window for action, quickly extended his fist over the mug, and, without looking at it, gauging from the corner of his eye, dropped the contents of his palm silently into it, before pulling his hand back and placing it as a fist against his sternum, looking exactly like he had before your mom turned her head away.

She grabbed the book from the shelf and handed it to the woman with a smile.

Dr. Pretorius smiled as well. Living dangerously Doctor, he thought to himself. She almost had you there.

He thought of her as a tiny furry creature now, embedded, though she would never know, within the sticky embrace of his trap for her. He knew he should feel guilty for such comparisons. But he saw his activity as harmless. It would bother her to have knowledge of what was coming next. And this is why he had taken such covert means for so long now. This had been his only desired subject where simple examination for the purpose of the body of man’s scientific knowledge would ever have posed an issue. Sure, he could have obtained plenty of willing research subjects, willing to go through what was not only needed for the purpose of his research, but was also extremely harmless, laughably so, in the grand scheme of things. Those subjects existed, but none of them were right. None of them had what he was looking for. Not like Alexandria. He had felt a sudden rumbling, like he was within the expanding electrical field during the sacred moment he first laid his eyes on her. And he knew, against all odds, that it was her he would be examining one day, no matter what it took. Like it was a coming fact, being dragged along by the whim of fate or destiny, its whim dwarfing the whim of man or woman, creatures of more finite form and often meager vision.

He had come up with the right dose when his colleague needed a tranquilizer for examining a white-tailed deer at the zoo. “3 hours,” said his colleague. “We don’t want to put the poor girl out of commission for any longer than that.”

“We sure don’t... ” said Dr. Pretorius. “…the poor girl.”

His batch ended up working perfectly. His colleague thanked him for it, and he, now having his perfect tincture, moved on to using it for his own devices.

“Poor girl,” he said, the first time he came into the room to see her lying on the couch, her empty coffee sitting innocently on the desk. He closed the door behind him.

After a few close calls with the surplus of this mixture, having library-goers standing outside, perplexed, long after Dr. Pretorius had left the room and was watching from his seat nervously, looking at the sign on the Blueprints and City Planning door that read CLOSED (luckily none of them took the issue to another librarian regarding that room tucked away on the fourth floor), the good doctor had realized that 3 hours was much too long a window of time, needlessly multiplying the possibility of complication. She was a working girl after all. She had books to stack. He would have to improve it.

In the proceeding weeks, he had managed to tinker with the formula to milk a full and unwaking sleep - with signs of short-term memory loss occurring a half-hour before its primary effect took hold, and another twenty minutes afterward – while also shortening the length of its effects to about half as much time (approximately 1 hour and 28 minutes).

When he told his colleague about his accomplishment, his colleague questioned why Pretorius was so eager to help him with his own work on a poor white-tailed deer, when Pretorius obviously had his own research he was eagerly pursuing. Dr. Pretorius responded with a smile: “Research for one cause helps all others. Wouldn’t you say?”

When Pretorius seen that his tincture had worked as designed when put into the water bowl of that majestic deer, seeing its eyes slowly and peacefully fall shut (they were so innocent in sleep), he knew that his statement was correct.

That tincture, in exactly the same volume and concentration, now sat, being absorbed within your mom’s coffee. The die was cast. The only obstacle in his path now the unlikely chance of your mom clumsily spilling the contents of that mug and having it be soaked up harmlessly by the carpet below.

She went to go place the two unnecessary books in her hand back into their places. As she did, one of the books bumped the shelving and dropped.

Dr. Pretorius smiled as he pulled the pen from the coils of his notebook. Alexandria, he thought. It appears one of your numerous admirers has followed you in here. You’re giving him quite the view.

It was rare that he got to examine his subject in this context, with other subjects not only present, but participating. It was an incalculable boon to his research, as it allowed him to add more threads to the beautiful web of his theories, contributing more evidence and proof for the tangled mess of hypothesis upon hypothesis that that swam through the pool of his mind.

He began jotting: The subtly and tact most apparent in older male specimens seems underdeveloped in younger males when examining attractive females of the species. Whether this is due to the brain being underdeveloped or from lack of crystallized learning is unclear. Improper socialization seems to be less of a factor, as age would be irrelevant in that context.

He finished off the thought with a period and then began a new one.

As I theorized before, the sight of the female buttocks appears to be a focal point for male appreciation. Alexandria’s buttocks seems to be unique in the staggering amount of attention it receives from males of the species. The common factor setting hers aside from others can only be narrowed down to the prodigious amount of stored fat within each cheek, which appears to be well over the average when compared to females of the same species, at least when controlled for total bodyweight. The stored fat in this appendage appears to benefit from an attraction multiplier effect due to its round shape, and size when compared to fat stored in other areas of the body. I.e. Males of the species seem to be attracted to Alexandria in particular due not simply to the amount of gluteal fat, but in combination with its round shape (possibly implying health factors related to hormones and nourishment), and the extent of its fat within the context of little to no fat in other areas of the body.

Your partner stood there in the room you had exiled him towards, now a witness to the total and unguarded majesty of your mom’s swollen and bending ass in all its ignorant glory. He had come to your house, disappointed to see it would be scraped empty of your mom’s magnificent glowing presence that evening, especially knowing that this would be the last he’d ever hang out with you, for both your sakes, as once the project was finished, the two of you had no reason to ever speak to one another again. He was happy about that, all things considered, though he had looked forward to his final moments he’d get being able to ogle your mom like she was an exotic breed of horse. He was now glad, in a roundabout way, that he had gotten his last chance to do so. Because even though he knew where she worked, and that he could come back at any time to gawk at her some more, he also knew he’d never be coming to this library again, not for nothing, not even to get a glimpse at her. If it wasn’t for his wrestling scholarship, he’d never would have touched a single book post-high school graduation, not even to throw it on a fire or to balance his desk to watch pins and reversals on his laptop.

The fact that your mom didn’t seem to like him, no matter how much she tried and failed to conceal that fact, and the general vibe that permeated off of her every fibre, that of an intelligent and bookish type, his exact opposite in personality, made glaring at her, knowing he could never have her, that much more exciting. Like his ability to do so was sort of a power over her. A sort of ‘fuck you,’ to establish in her mind, and he hoped it was registering, that he could do what he liked with his wandering gaze and she couldn’t stop him. Her image, though just an image, a shadow of her real self, belonged within the confines of his mind, a toy to play with and pose as if his thoughts had hands and arms to grab her by her ankles, shoulders and wrists and twirl, turn and place her as he imagined. And no matter how much book smarts you and her had, this was something neither of you could take away from him. The power of his brain may have been limited, but the strength and depravity of his imagination was not.

If she doesn’t like it, he thought. She shouldn’t be wearing such a tight skirt. The round object of his thrill and frustration sat there, slightly turning and twitching as your mom organized books, unawares of his thorn of a presence there.

He silently promised himself to maintain his glare, even when she finally noticed him there, but as soon as she turned around and finally did, he looked away.

And even if she wore a loose one, he mused, masking his sudden timidity to himself. Fuck her. I don’t owe her anything.

After running his finger over the spines of a few books, mechanically, as if he knew he should look busy, he turned back to look again to see your mom still looking at him.

“Oh, it is you,” she said, surprised. “No project today?” she asked.

Your partner blushed. “Umm, no. I mean, yes. It’s not that. I’m just here to grab a source. Your son forgot to print one of the sources so I told him I’d get it.”

“Uh huh,” she said and nodded her head with a puckered bottom lip.

He could hear in her tone and see through the subtleties in her expression that she didn’t believe him. And through that, he could hear the vague history of conversations between her and you, conversations involving him. Conversations of a less than flattering nature. And when he caught the vague outline of what those conversations entailed, just through intuition, not yet imagining their content, but almost tasting their flavor regardless, he felt that bitterness swell again. That same one he used to feel when little Robert in eighth grade proudly stuck up his obnoxious hand into the air to correctly, and it was always correctly, answer the teacher’s question.

Dr. Pretorius looked on with wonder. An acquaintance of Alexandria’s, he thought, curiously. A friend of her son’s no less. And more than that. An admirer of her gluteal fat. The planets have lined themselves up wonderfully this day. He began to hastily scribble in his book.

Hypothesis: Alexandria’s male offspring would prefer it if his mother was not admired by other males of the species. She almost certainly is, though he likely tries to ignore or forget it. Would this be something that takes a toll on his emotions?

He stopped and thought for a second.

Further Hypothesis: Her male offspring would prefer it even less in proportion to his dislike for said male of the species. In other words, the more negative the stimuli of the male’s looks, statements, personality, and experiences from the male offspring’s perspective, the more the stimuli, whether through sight or knowledge, of the male copulating with his mother becomes upsetting to him, likely to an exponential degree when represented on a line graph.

Again, and as usual with Dr. Pretorius, inspiration came in a form that was as much an art as a science, and the image and sound of young men insulting one another, a sound he had witnessed often through the years passing them on their playground jungle gyms on the way to the university, by promising, or rather threatening, to achieve intercourse with each other’s mothers.

Further Hypothesis, he wrote again in excited strikes at the page. The negative reaction to the imagined stimuli of another having relations with one’s mother, in the mind of a male of the species, is an order of magnitude weaker in intensity to the negative reaction to one’s mother being had by another male of the species in actuality. If this logic follows, the emotional sensation resulting from said situation would be beyond maddening. Making it among the worst possible emotional states in nature, likely achieving a state of mind containing shades of shame, disappointment, embarrassment, feelings of inferiority, feelings of violation, feelings of regret (the wish that one could turn back time), feelings of hopelessness (the knowledge that one can not turn back time), and disgust. In other words, the act of copulating with another male’s mother might be among the most powerful ways to disrespect said competing male. It’s possible that almost nothing else comes close and a victory of such sort would be impossible for the losing male to bounce back from.

Again, the good doctor was possessed by revelation, but this one of a much more personal nature. It occurred to him then, late as all matters of human sentiment were for him to discover, another reason why it might be the case that scientific examination, of the type he had been conducting with your mom, had to be done with such high level of subterfuge and privacy. It wasn’t just out of respect for the fine lady’s autonomy, a principle valued highly in the species, but also to protect the emotions of those close to her. It reminded him of research he had been consulting for his own, from books and studies within the social sciences (disciplines much inferior to the hard science of zoology, in his mind), which stressed the historical, psychological, anthropological, and political phenomena of the guarding and/or controlling (depending on the politics of the academic making the claim) the bodies of the female of the species from certain unsanctioned sexual contexts. It was a strange phenomenon, reminiscent of rudimentary analogues in other male species, but like all aspects of the nature of the human animal, this process took on an exceedingly complex and detailed form when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom.

Your partner fumbled awkwardly. “J. Peebles,” he murmured to himself. “Peebles.” He was surrounded by books on all sides, a fact which disgusted him, and he had no idea if the random section of shelving he had started at was even close to what it was you commanded him to look for. He didn’t even know where to start, and helplessness was only now starting to sink in.

Your mom looked back up at him and saw him scanning over the entire aisle without stopping, and then moving onto the next one. “Need any help?” she asked.

He looked back at her. She looked in his eyes, at first glance innocently, but he knew that judgement lie behind those neutral eyes. It always did, at least on matters of his intelligence. He could feel the clever glaring down at him like a peanut’s gallery whenever they spoke to him. And it had always drove him mad that the same segment of humanity that was the most willing to take matters of violence up to the authorities was the exact segment that he wanted most to punch in their arrogant faces the hardest. Any problem he had with a fellow wrestler would be settled within the round confines of their grappling power, pushing, pulling, throwing, holding, anything short of punches and kicks; and a crowd would watch it all, a hundred spectators noting who was the bigger man, even if they never thought it in those words. That luxury, that expulsion of martial finesse and brute strength came up against a brick wall in the shape of those dry be-spectacled faces, which only glared at him with a blankness that burned like the sun. He clenched his teeth at the thought of that pondering physiognomy, whether male or female, faces that sat before minds filled with equations and syllogisms that he could take no part in, yet sat victim to in the webs of life that these types weaved all around him.

“No,” he said. “I’m just looking for something to recontextualate our thesis.” He could see the twitch in her brow. He knew that look. He had seen it in a thousand other faces. He had said something stupid. He looked down. The worst part of all was knowing that he’d never know what it was. “That’s all,” he said, sheepishly.

“Okay,” she said and smiled in a way that appeared to be self-consciously non-threatening. “Just don’t be afraid to ask if you need any help. I know this place like the back of my hand - not a grand accomplishment, it’s a small room – and a good grade for you is a good grade for my son.” She laughed. “So I’d be glad to help.”

“Sure,” he said, irritated. “But like I said. I got it.”

“Okay,” your mom said softly, and she turned back to finish organizing the shelf.

He walked off.

Fucking asshole, he thought. Sends me out here so his p.a.w.g. mom can judge me. Stupid bitch and her pencil neck son.

His strategy of striking back at her through openly and aggressively admiring her own body had crumbled with his self-esteem. It was as if his processing bandwidth, when flustered, became so narrow that the act of at least looking halfway competent to counter her perception of him had also gone by the wayside, and instead of going one shelf over, he had walked off, now heading to a completely different side of the room as a shot in the dark.

Dr. Pretorius watched your mom walk with fascination.

Hypothesis: The natural movement of the female’s posterior, especially when containing much stored fat, is particularly attractive to male subjects. Movement that seems to attract male attention seems to be anything from its natural motion while walking, or in a state of bending or being pressed against objects.

His eyes went wide.

At the end of his last hypothesis, he wrote, in brackets: (If this hypothesis is proven correct, how does this play into the action of a female of the species running from a male? Would it be reasonable to assume that this motion within the stored fat of the backside spurs on the male to give chase further, those that were willing to make that chase having an evolutionary advantage over those that weren’t?)

As your partner scanned more shelves randomly, hopelessly, Dr. Pretorius noticed something in him. It wasn’t for his posture, awkward movement, milky facial expression, or the sulky way he combed the shelves, almost with passive aggression, as if the vibrations of his tantrum could be felt, not only by your mom, but by you as your sat at home typing. Dr. Pretorius had no ability to pick up on these subtleties of expression. Instead, what he noticed, as clear to him as the hair raising on a dog’s back in moments of agitation, was your partner’s face flushing a pinkish red. Now that was a signal he could understand. Your partner was embarrassed. Possibly ashamed, though he hadn’t been seconds earlier. Something your mom did had upset him.

The plot thickens, he thought with a grin.

He continued to jot down notes: How do feelings towards the female on the interpersonal level effect attraction of the sexual kind? Do males of the species require a positive estimation of the character of the female in order for attraction to persist? Is sexual attraction separate from positive interactions with the female interpersonally? Or do the two have a much more complicated relationship? He thought about it a few seconds more, and then continued jotting. Can sexual intercourse be deliberately used as a weapon by slighted males; as a way to punish the female?

As your mom fixed and organized the section of the shelf your partner’s unsure hands had disarrayed in his indecisiveness, trying to do so as subtly as possible as to not make him feel bad about it, Dr. Pretorius watched her ass twitch and dimple in its chosen fabric. As much as he was enjoying this rare look into human anthropology, he was a zoologist first, and he was growing eager for his much-cherished examination period.

“Alexandria, my dear,” he called playfully, while dotting his last full stop and pressing the pen he forgot he borrowed into the binding coils of his notebook.

He saw your mom’s butt tense up, and she looked over her shoulder at him. He didn’t notice the tinge of startled frustration in her. Your partner looked over at the old man calling, and then at your mom, falsely assuming he had called someone else, and then feeling confusion when he realized it was your mom this strange old man was looking at. Alexandria? he thought. Is the old man senile?

“Do allow me to be so bold,” the old man said. “But you look a bit on the tired side. Have you been getting your beauty sleep as of late?”

“I guess that’s what coffee is for,” she said, and then she smiled with the bottom half of her face alone.

Dr. Pretorius smiled. “Indeed it is,” he said. “I hope you won’t be too busy later. I might be coming back for a chat later tonight if you’re in the right mood.”

She had already turned around and began busily organizing the shelf. “Sure,” she said, flatly.

As Dr. Pretorius moved to leave the room, he dragged his sight from your mom’s bent over store of fat and locked eyes with the young man, who stared back at him in a strange bewilderment. Dr. Pretorius looked away, smiling, and exited the room.

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“I knew I shouldn’t have let that idiot go,” you murmured. “It’s going to take him an hour to find it.”

You hadn’t realized it yet, but your anger was getting in the way of your writing. After every few sentences on the page, you’d devolve again into a quiet rage which would eat up minutes in inactivity and fruitless musing.

You sighed in disgust suddenly, as if just on the realization of an uncomfortable fact. “And I was looking forward to him not seeing mom today.” You typed in a few more words. “I hope he’s not burdening her now.”

You typed for a few moments more, and then stopped after feeling your thoughts being intruded upon by frustration. “Is there something in our family genes that makes it so we’re continually the ones burdened with this lunkhead?” He typed out another sentence, and then sighed. “But what am I supposed to say. Dr. Hartman, can I do this project on my own? The guy you paired me up with has the IQ of a goldfish, and the fact that he can gawk at my mom’s ass for so long without needing to blink only underscores that point.”

You realized then that you shouldn’t have said that. The thought of him there now, gawking at her as she placed and replaced books instead of looking for your source made you feel sick. “Get a look while you still can, fuckhead. That’s all you’re going to get, moron. That’s the one girl you have zero chance with.”

You put your palm to your eye, breathed in deeply, and then exhaled. You really needed to get your focus back on writing. You looked at what you had just wrote down:

The general nature of canals is not just one of great practicality, but also of great aesthetic concern. The guy you paired me up with has the IQ of a goldfish, and the fact that he can gawk at my mom’s ass for so long without blinking only underscores that point.

You stared at the sentence with your eyes wide. “Okay,” you said. “No matter how pressed for time I end up being, I’m doing a second, third, and fourth draft. That’s for sure. Imagine if I sent that in to Hartman.” You blushed red with embarrassment. “I’d have to kill myself if anyone saw that.”

After erasing your verbalized shame, you continued writing, and again overtaken by thoughts, you wondered if your mom would know when she saw him there that you must have followed her advice and put your foot down with him. You began to smile. “It worked, mom,” you murmured. And then after a few more written sentences, you began to ask yourself if she would be more proud of you for saying no, or more annoyed at his presence in her cramped little workspace.

The Thinker sat there. His brow possibly wound as tightly as it was due to thoughts of this exact nature, trying to understand the emotions of the women in his life.

You thought about it. “It’s funny. Women aren’t an easy creature to understand, never mind predict.” You finished another sentence. “They’re the one thing on this planet that I don’t think I’ll ever understand. No matter how much I try. You’d need the greatest intellectual in the world to do that.”

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Dr. Pretorius plopped himself down on his chair.

In his self-satisfied and careless act, his bookbag dropped from his shoulder and fell to the shining floor below.

A rainbow of notebook covers slid out in a beautiful cascade, each color a bit off due to the overpowering orange-yellow light coming down from the ceiling.

Oh, my pretties, he thought, looking down at his adored treasure-troves of knowledge. I abuse you so.

He put his bag back on his lap, and it made a busy noise as he did, and then he reached down, first for the blue book. The title on its face in a messy scrawl in permanent marker said “The Sex Lives of Insects.” He placed it within his bag lengthwise, after clearing space for it by brushing aside a tape measurer, a ruler, and an old film camera. He reached down and grabbed the yellow book, entitled with the same marker and scrawl “The Sex Lives of Fish and other Deep Sea Creatures.”

As he picked it up, a pen fell out from within and rolled out onto the ground.

There goes my pen, he said as he placed the book neatly into his bag, again brushing aside equipment to do so. He then pivoted on his chair and reached down and grabbed the pen lying against his green notebook. I’m about to put you to good use. Never say your life was without purpose, my little friend.

He then reached down and grabbed a purple book given the title “The Sex Lives of Reptiles.” He placed it neatly between the blue and yellow book. Then he grabbed his green book, and lifting it up, it said “The Sex Lives of Plants.”

After placing them all in their allotted spots, he took a deep satisfied breath and grinned. He looked down at the red notebook. And last, but definitely not least, he thought, and he pivoted on his seat to get low and reach it. My greatest work.

He grabbed the red notebook. He lifted it to the table and took the borrowed pen from its coiled spine. Then he sat there looking down at it. He placed his hand over the cover affectionately. “It’s going to be a good day,” he murmured.

He took his hand off the book.

Its title, “The Sex Lives of Human Beings.”

He looked to his left and his right. The only human being he saw was an older woman on the other side of the fourth floor, which was separated from his terrace by a bridge which loomed over the main aisle on the first floor. The library was as silent as sleep. He would have heard a pin drop, never mind footsteps coming in his direction. It was as good as being in his own office, except without the coffee stains and clutter.

And with that sense of security, he opened his book about halfway, to an image that made him smile.

He laid his hand over the photograph and brushed its image.

It was the image of a nude, round, and heavy female ass.

He brushed the image with just as much affectionate pace as he had the cover of the notebook itself.

He winked down at the inert globes of ass flesh. I’ll be seeing you soon, he thought. Better get powdered up because I’m going to be taking some more photographs.

He turned the page.

The same smooth female ass sat there, still giant, still naked, with the worn hand of an old man grabbing its right cheek, and pulling it open, exposing the space between the cheeks to the camera. Alexandria, he thought. How full of mysteries you are. Very few have the key to your invaluable basement. I’m one of the lucky few, if anyone any longer. And I travel its vast storage with gentle respect, near-crushed by the weight of its dusty and cobweb-strewn revelations.

He turned over the page.

The unbroken buttcrack of the ass now had the yellow length of a tape measurer running alongside it. The end of the tape starting at the very top of her crack, and its source hanging down her inner thigh, as if its manipulator had to use his other hand to snap a photo. That was the downside of having to work in such hushed conditions, you couldn’t bring a professional to smooth over the process. Like the old days, he’d always say. Before the bureaucracy made a monster of itself and multiplied into a hydra of ethics boards and public relations memos.

He flipped the page again.

The next image was a side-profile shot of the ass, displaying its perfect roundness, with one hand of an old man pressing a ruler in-between its cheeks, holding one end of it at its top, so that it started measuring from the exact beginning of her upper crack, so he could get a reading of where the crack ended when measured by the ruler when its edge was placed at the dead-end in between her cheeks.

He flipped another page.

This time your mom’s face could be seen, as she was being photographed from behind, lengthwise with her body, her peaceful face resting on the throw pillow of the Blueprint and City Planning room’s couch, her ass open and up-close for the camera, with what looked like sticky page marks placed along certain parts of her inner left-cheek.

Another page.

Her butt was now closed, with her sleepy face still visible and ignorant within the shot, and the ends of the page marks jutted out from between the cheeks, some of them just barely, while others hung out at most of their total length.

Flip.

In the next shot, same angle and day, the good doctor must have snapped the picture with his chin, as both his hands, now gloved, were in the process of pressing his muse’s butt cheeks together from their sides with real pressure as could be deduced from his tensed forearms.

Flip.

In this shot he was pulling them in opposite directions, the page markers visible again, some peeled off and sitting mangled at the bottom of her crack. Your mom’s ass was discolored now with pail lines about the width of a human finger, which had left tracks all over her like the dance steps of bees.

Flip.

Now one ass cheek was being pushed upward, with the other pulled downward, toward the camera.

Flip.

The same but in reverse.

Flip.

Her butt-cheek was being poked with his begloved thumb. It gave way quite a bit, with the tip of his thumb disappearing, swallowed whole, within the fat of one butt cheek alone.

Flip.

One butt cheek was being squeezed with both hands. It spilled out between his fingers.

His eyes were glassy with warmth as he walked through memory lane. It had been months since his research on Alexandria had started, just over two seasons, but it felt like a lifetime.

He had never felt this close to a human female before.

His mother had been rather cold in personality, making her useless as a confidante, mediocre in intellect, making her less than capable as a friend, and flat in the backside, making her unfit for research.

But Alexandria was the perfect research specimen. The knowledge which could be extracted from her was as prodigious as the fat stores in her butt cheeks. It was almost as if one were the representation of the other. On top of that, she was rather warm and agreeable, making her easy to impose himself upon, and in turn, get close enough to her coffee mug. And she was relatively intelligent, giving a competitive dynamic to his little cat-and-mouse game with her. It was like a playful competition that she hadn’t known she was playing in. Just the knowledge that he was continuing to best her gave an edge of espionage to his proceedings. And to shut off that warmth, and to shut off that intellect, leaving only the backside and her use as an inert object of research, was profoundly satisfying, given the strength of said warmth and intelligence. He saw those two traits as variables he could control for, shutting them off at a whim.

He flipped through the pages, allowing images of equal nostalgia and illumination to pass by. Shots involving all types of positions, involving different conditions, with your mom’s skin around her private stretches of flesh contrasting with it with different tones, depending on the time of year. Even this became a point of interest for him, as there was a shot with him lying naked next to her, her being pale from her thighs up to her lower back, and he from his feet up to his neck, with her eyes shut peacefully, and him laying there, pail as a beluga, with his own camera pointed down at the two of them, as he smiled up into it, with wondrous eyes and a flaccid penis.

Shots with q-tips, and squares, swabs and tongs, tape and magnifying glass all flashed by as he machine-gun flipped through the pages of his illuminating tome. He even had shots he had taken one day when he brought a photographic microscope. As each page flashed by as fast as sound, your mom’s ass did a dance to his sight as cheeks suddenly opened, cheek closed, cheek compressed, cheek uncompressed, almost as if he had taken these still pictures for the purpose of this illusion of animation the way bored students in his class did with the bottom right corner of their notebooks when they drew images of stickmen jerking off and other obscene things unfit for serious students of zoology.

As he looked up at the open door to his favorite room in the entire building, his device for the day sat in wait in his bag. He had borrowed it from his friend in the geology department, the second closest woman to him, though he had never, and never wanted to, take the opportunity to study her (due to her abnormally flat behind). The device was one used to work a camera at the end of a snakelike object into crevices within rocks and boulders in order to snap photographs of obscure places. When his friend had told him about it, he had begged her to borrow it. When she asked why, he said “the animals I research have many such tight spaces...” She consented to borrowing him the device, but only under the condition that he sanitize it thoroughly after use. Not seeing the joke, he assented without a smile, his full focus down on the device just handed to him. What uses it would provide…

Technology had a way of greatly increasing the effectiveness of scientific research. Whether it was the nifty new device sitting, waiting for its moment to shine, in a pocket within his bookbag, or it was innovations in tranquilizer formula, a field which he had contributed to since the 70’s, it had all come together to make research on less-than-willing mammals into a breeze. Something Aristotle would have killed for, Pretorius was sure.

The doorway sat there, open, with the dull bluegrey walls within in deep contrast to the golden-orangebrown glow of the library without. Whenever he could finally close that door behind him, putting up the sign to ward off library-goers, the rest of the library disappeared, and an hour or more passed by without awareness. All that mattered to the good doctor was those two round stores of fat and the truth they stamped within the lined pages of his notebook with a warm weight.

He looked back down, flipping another page.

The image that sat there was of a wired electrode taped to her right cheek. That was a good day. He had borrowed that device from the university and used it to test the reaction of the cheeks themselves. Humorously, they clenched together desperately at the shock stimuli, even as the rest of her remain motionless and unaware and loose. The pressure of those clenched cheeks looked intense, but when he tested it by placing a pencil, eraser-first, a few inches into her anus, with the bulk of its length hanging outward, the softness of her cheeks kept them from snapping the pencil. When he seen how relatively harmless those cheeks were, he did the same experiment but with his index finger, finding that instead of any pressure, he only felt the feathery sensation of Alexandria’s pillowy “basement” up to the knuckle on his fist. The sensation was rather delightful.

Next to the photograph, on the page to the right, he had written: The softness of the human female must be a point of attraction to the male. This may be another factor in the reasons for dimorphism in the species. While females appear to be attracted to traits in males which make them more physically and psychologically assertive and territorial like that of large primates, males seem to be positively stimulated by traits that make the female more similar to that of a bunny rabbit or kitten.

He then flipped a few pages forward to find another series of pictures involving the measuring tape and ruler. This had been when he noticed a slight increase in size since the previous evening of measurements. That had been after a month of him bringing a donut to her every evening shift. It was only then, after the fruit of controlling the calory intake of his subject, that he had confirmed to himself that the buttocks was in fact a store of fat, and that your mom, his Alexandria, was different from most women in that her body prioritized storing fat there at a significantly higher ratio per calory consumed than the human female mean, exaggerating the positive qualities of her shape. In other words, she was a prime evolutionary specimen for this modern age, where calory access is in a state of surplus rather than scarcity.

Today, he thought. Without a month’s worth of provisions in the form of those those extra donuts, we should see a slight decrease to her baseline of size and weight.

He flipped through the book rapidly until he found a blank page. Its barren white spaces between the blue lines thrilled him with the possibility they implied. They always had. He put your mom’s office pen to good use.

Attraction to the female backside for its size and shape can be confirmed beyond reasonable doubt. But what part, if any, does skintone play? And while its obvious that the attractiveness of the backside relies in the two appendages colloquially referred to as “cheeks,” is there any part played by the cleavage in between these ‘cheeks?’ The likely answer is hard to determine, though some foreshadowing of an answer may be found in the western custom of determining a bikini, many of the modern forms of which expose both cheeks to both male and female view, as still being clothed, while any exposure of that cleavage in between cheeks is determined by most to signify nudity. The fact that most males would not view seeing a bikini-clad female as a victory, although seeing a female without any bottoms on at all, would, likely means that the cheek cleavage plays a major role in attraction. Whether this role is biologically determined, or possibly the result of socially determined taboo, is yet to be seen.

He thought about your mom in a bikini, though he had found out from her once, through the simple question he had asked in July of whether she had visited the beach yet, that your mom hadn’t been to the beach since she was very young. It wasn’t a place she enjoyed. “I could relate,” Dr. Pretorius had said. And though he smiled, he felt the field-research sized hole in the amount of knowledge lost from not being able to witness her, and the men around her, in such an environment. “I guess it keeps you from squandering your finances on a bikini,” he had said, only trying to be relatable. She smiled back with her mouth, but her eyes were far behind in expressing that feeling of mirth.

Leave me alone, she had thought. Please.

Later that same night, Dr. Pretorius turned the knob on his nifty machine, and watched her butt cheeks clench that pencil.

He looked up at that open doorway, feeling that sense of thrill before discovery. Then he looked back down at his notes.

The importance within the sense of sight, and possibly touch, to human male attraction has been well established within this research. But what part does sound play? Are there any sounds which could be made by the female body alone, or even by Alexandria’s body in particular? Do males of the species enjoy these sounds if they do in fact exist?

He flipped to the next page where an old man’s hand pressed the cold circular shape of a stethoscope to her right cheek. Next to the photo it said, scrawled in black pen, The female buttocks makes no unique sound.

When he looked up again at the doorway, he was slightly startled to see a male form there. Inside the room, the young man from earlier was still there, visible now by side-profile as he scanned the east wall’s set of shelves. The pink-red tinge within his cheeks still visible from this distance, though even if Dr. Pretorius was close enough to see the furrowing of the young man’s brow, he would never have understood it to represent the great deal of perplexed frustration within the young man’s mind.

He thought about the image he had witnessed of the young man staring straight into your mom’s bent over backside. What a gift that young man has given me with just that simple impulsive action, he thought. Dr. Pretorius could deduce the high degree of attraction males of the species had to his subject and her backside just through the frequency of their glances at it, and the quality of their length of glancing. But through your partner, he had been given an example that even he, with all his social difficulties, could read the emotions of just due to their utter lack of subtlety.

He put his pen to the page, spilling over with exciting ideas.

The subtlety and tact most apparent in older male specimens seems underdeveloped in younger males.

Then he moved on to a separate, though related, thought.

The female buttocks in states of movement and an unrelaxed position is exciting to the male. Much more exciting than the gluteal fat in a state of baseline shape and tension.

He thought about the wonder in that young man’s face. A wonder quite like his own at the same object, but for quite the different reason. This brought on a new epiphany, like the dawn of a new sun.

While the female face is major stimuli for male attraction, much more so even than the handsome male face to female sensibilities seem to be, the female buttocks seems to elicit a much more animal-like and magnetic version of that attraction. Often attraction to the face elicits empathy and the need to connect, but attraction to the buttocks elicits a tendency to objectify the subject, even at the expense of the empathetic connection previously established. The female becomes that which needs to be conquered in place of that which needs to be understood and protected. In that sense, an objectified female becomes more like that of an enemy rather than that of a companion, subterfuge and conniving filling in the spot where previously compromise and sacrifice were slotted.

He stared off at a random bookshelf for a moment, not seeing the bookshelf, as if he saw past it, to some approaching truth. And then, to his pleasure, the truth arrived, and he was back to writing.

Perhaps this is why anthropologists record that in all cultures, though in each to massively varying degrees, the female body is guarded. This seems to be whether it’s the body (and occasionally the face) entire, like in many Islamic cultures, or a small part of the body, like the cleavage between the cheeks of the backside in almost all cultures.

He wished he could thank that young man, who still stood at a distance with his face red examining the shelf in vain, but he had nothing to offer him. Nothing that he would want anyway.

I wish I knew enough of human social protocol to know whether it would be a faux pas to show him my research photographs. Dr. Pretorius sighed. He knew even this had profound scientific value. Though due to the nuances of the world he lived in, one he had always felt distant from by some unknown variable, he had no inkling of what was or was not a good idea besides that which involved no other mind to contend with. No human mind at least.

And this brought him to his next quandary, one that weighed on him with the mass of the sun. It bulged its sad shape into his conscious awareness again when he turned the page.

In the next photograph, the flaccid penis of an old man sat impotently, laying on the long buttcrack between two giant butt-cheeks.

Next to the image, on the opposing page, it said What does sex within the species look like?

He flipped the page.

His flaccid member was shoved fruitlessly between his subject’s cheeks. It was embraced by her warming fat on all sides, a sensation that was quite pleasant, but still, another missing part of what it meant to be human, a part he had never had or known, had become an obstacle to him with its absence.

He remembered back in his younger years, female students, though never too attractive, would come to meet him in his office hours with questions and requests for help which superficially contained their own logic, though with deeper examination became obviously frivolous, with his conclusion, after shooing said girls out of his office politely, that they had already known the answer. He initially chalked this phenomenon up to female students, especially the plain ones, having higher standards, and using his office hours as an opportunity to test his knowledge on the subjects and his willingness to help on call in case the need arose later in earnest. It wasn’t until talking to a colleague about it that he began to understand that these students hadn’t been coming to the office for the purpose of learning at all.

Even still, with female students coming to him, giving him signs with their faces and gestures that he couldn’t pick up on, he now knew what it was they had come for. And though he had been flattered, his interest in pursuing such ventures was non-existent. After all, he hadn’t been pursuing research on human sexuality yet, and wouldn’t be interested in it for decades to come. So what purpose would a bedroom romp serve him other than that of distraction from more pressing matters?

He flipped the page.

His flaccid penis and pair of testicles sat on the side of your mom’s face, sluglike.

He found it the greatest tragedy in the world that human sexual activity only relied on the willingness of the male, and lack of successful resistance from the female, in order to happen, but because erections to him had only been things he had woken up with in the morning without purpose, and flesh, whether male or female, had meant nothing to him except for an acknowledged fact on his part, even the woman he had admired above and beyond all others would have done little to extract one from him, even in the prime of his wet dream phase, when he’d awake from a dream filled with abstractions and angles to an underwear and covers filled with excesses of a process he had no desire, inborn or otherwise, to play any part in. Though he did put some of his ejaculate under a microscope out of curiosity.

And because of this failing, one which he viewed as a boon in all times prior - keeping him clear-headed and focused toward his primary goal of expanding human understanding – he would never know or understand this process. And most crushing of all, he would never know and understand it through the beautiful creature he had grown to adore more than any other object in his life. He didn’t want to understand it if he couldn’t understand it using her as his primary tool.

There were times when he thought about risking it all and inviting a male, possibly one of lower status and therefore lower expectation, up to that room on another pretext, and then slowly introducing him to the possibilities contained within the existence of the sleeping Aphrodite waiting there on the couch. And though through this method, he would never discover the “song and dance,” as it was called, which lead into the uniquely private moments of human male-on-female copulation, he would still get to be a witness, a witness of it involving his beautiful sleeping opal, to the act of copulation itself. And it would be his dear Alexandria who was being copulated with, with her nature-given backside being utilized the way nature had intended it to be, by the animalistic thrusts of some dirty vagrant or disbelieving and wide-eyed coffee barista who was saving up paychecks to buy his first car.

He had a vague notion of the process, drawing ideas from mammal species. So he knew enough to know that males didn’t mate with separated female eggs like fish, or transmit their seed by the leg of bees like many common species of flower. These were all easy to understand, and more so, easy to witness. But why was human copulation so shrouded in mist and secrecy, as if it were the mating habits of undiscovered deep sea creatures that swam silently through endless miles of chaotic darkness? And what was the defining catalyst that separated the moments in between a sexual encounter with a sexual encounter itself? He wished he could be a fly on the walls of all his married colleagues or dating students and see that moment just before, and then all the elongated moment afterward, and get a sense of its nuances and common structure. Were there words spoken? Was it a look or a sound? A touch perhaps? And just how much effort, energy and precision was put into the act of intercourse itself? What facial expressions did those involved make? And what did the male and female look like in their moment of much-desired orgasm? Dr. Pretorius wondered if it shared any commonality in sensation with what he felt at a moment of great discovery. Because if it did, he understood why this act must have been so central to so many other’s lives.

He looked down at the sentence, scrawled in unusually desperate strokes: What does sex within the species look like? And before he could be weighed down in the sadness and sense of loss, he spared himself of it by flipping the page.

Your partner looked at the spine of a book.

Pipes, it was called. By Jonah Peabody.

“Is that it?” he mumbled to himself.

You were just a phone call away but he couldn’t bring himself to draw your judging eye upon him. He hated nothing more in life. It was that thinks-he-knows-everything eye. He had seen in a million others, and he wished he could live in a world without it. But the brawny arms of his wrestling scholarship had dragged him kicking and screaming into campus buildings stuffed with bodies, most of them having at least one eye just like that. And yours… yours were among the worst he had ever come across.

So while he stood there, feeling the presence of your mom behind him, just knowing that she must be asking herself if he knew what he was doing here and how to do it, the space behind his nose and eyes tight with frustration and mild panic, that the last thing he’d ever do, under any circumstances was acknowledge the self-apparent limits of his own mind by giving you so much as a single confirmation of it in the form of a text.

He slowly turned around, making as if he wanted to examine the books on the portable steel shelving in the center of the room, and when he did, he took a glance over at your mom. She sat there, looking down into her novel. He wondered then if she actually enjoyed reading it, or was reading just a put-on she, and so many others, had done performatively to separate herself from the herd?

The only book I would ever read, he thought, as he impotently thumbed through textbook spines. Is one with a lot of pictures. Especially if they were pictures of your sweet ass, you bitch. He had amused himself with that thought. Forget rivers and dams. Why not fill this room with books full of Little Miss Delicious’s ass. Why couldn’t books like that exist? He knew it would have shut you up if they did. And that would be sweeter than your mom’s nude ass itself. Maybe.

Its funny, he thought, as he impotently thumbed through textbook spines. She doesn’t seem so special when her ass is behind that desk and nobody can see it. Just another face. Bud, he said, imagining he was speaking directly to you. The most important thing your entire family has to offer is your mom’s ass. Everything you do is to make up for that. She looks in the mirror and she knows her ass is bigger than her brain, and she can’t do anything about it. She could read a million books, and it wouldn’t change that.

He laughed at the thought.

Your mom looked up at him innocently. He looked back at her, and she looked back down at her book when she saw he looked startled.

Startled as he was, his humor was still wiry mixed with his acute frustration and feelings of inferiority. His cock had stiffened in his pants, and he was riding a cloud of his own amusement above all the petty concerns of the world below. But after a few more moments of looking, that coping mechanism began to lose its power, and all that was left was his own heckling conscious at war with himself.

You’re an idiot.

You’re not good enough.

They were right about you.

These were all bad enough, but the next thought scarred the deepest, because it was the one that ate at the root of his anxiety.

Dad got so excited when he saw you win the school division championship because it was the first time he had ever seen you be good at anything. If you had an ACL tear tomorrow, you’d be useless. And he’d never smile at you the same way again. Nobody would. Because you’re useless without wrestling. It’s the one thing you have.

He stood there, surrounded by pages full of written word, his oppressors. And he realized that he had no choice but to push forward. His grade was relying on it. And failure meant no wrestling. He had no choice.

He looked up at your mom. Her book was in her delicate hands and her coffee mug sat empty on the table obscuring its cover from his view.

She looked down, eyes neutral, focused on her book, and instead of seeing the intelligence in her eyes, which aggravated him so, he instead tried to focus on, though he didn’t know that this was what he was aiming to derive from her, her motherliness. And when he did, her features began to soften in his mind. Her eyes wider, the cheeks on her face pinker and rounder. Her bottom lip hanging oh-so-slightly open in anticipation for the next paragraph.

And as he entertained this transformation, he tried to bury the thought of what she was sitting on. That round and luscious pot of gold, now alone in the room with him. It combined with her face, especially now in its motherly interpretation, into something angeringly arousing. She really was a perfect storm, he thought. A needle in the haystack of life.

He slowly began to approach her, feeling himself getting smaller as he went. He struggled to not conjure up the sexual dynamic of his submissiveness to her in this moment. The euphemism kissing her ass did him no favors as it flashed into his mind. And he knew that such male submissiveness was always a step-back anyways. Something that could be exposed to prostitutes paid to stomach it, but never something that one showed to a woman if one dared to have her in any sexual context. He had had his share of other’s girlfriends and crushes knowing exactly that. But with your mom he couldn’t help it. Insecurity oozed from his pores. The pen mightier than the sword. Brain over brawn. Especially between the columns that held up the lofty arcade of civilization. In high school he had never felt anything like it, at least not for any extended period of time, but as soon as his post-secondary education began, he felt like a caveman let loose in the streets of Manhattan, blinded by the lights and noises and men and women going any which way, all with purpose and direction while he grunted and moved hunchback through the crowd with shameful aimlessness.

And here he was, internally grunting, his posture curling without even self-awareness, as he moved toward your mother’s perfect mind and body. She looked down at the page of her book, not even seeing him approach in her peripheral, as if she were purely absorbed by the strength of the written word.

He was close enough now.

“Excuse me.” His voice came out in a higher pitch than he had ever remembered hearing it.

She was still looking down.

He stood there uncomfortably for a moment. “Excuse me,” he said again. If he had known your mom’s first name, he would have called her by it.

Her forehead raised, as if she heard him, but her eyes seemed as if they were glued to the page.

His smallness became more visceral within that moment, but then, paradoxically, something began to bubble in him and it worked in the opposite direction of his insecurity, though it was only a mustard seed then.

She slowly looked up at him. Her eyes blank. Careless. Distant from him and his little concerns. He felt his insecurity being swallowed, or rather transformed whole, into something else. It was rage. And before he could ask about the book he was looking for, he asked, as if compelled by some affliction, in place of it: “You think I’m dumb, don’t you?” It spilled from his mouth aggressively, and he could only regret saying it. An act of defiance that held within it its own seed of humiliation. He had screwed up now. He knew it.

Your mom stared at him longer, her face unchanged. No fiber of her being adapting to his unwounding pathos. He clenched his teeth. The need to double-down on what he now felt to be an unwinning bet already in stumbling motion before he could catch himself.

“Don’t you?”

Your mom grabbed her Seneca bookmark which sat flat on her desk, parallel to its edge, and she placed it within the page of her book. She put the book down flat, and she stood up. Her thick thighs and wide hips were visible to him, transforming herself before him, like a butterfly out its cocoon. And just before she looked like she was about to do something, step out from behind the desk or reply to his rhetorical inquiry, even he noticed something wasn’t quite right.

And that’s when she fell down face-first. The side of her head landing on the cover of her book in a giant thud, so loud it could be heard four floors down by a library-goer reading Milton.

He stood there, looking on with his mouth open in the following silence. She laid there, her chest slowly expanding and deflating, her head still, her body motionless.

“Hey,” he called out, dryly, almost silently. She didn’t respond.

He slowly approached her.

“Hey,” he said again.

He rounded the side of her desk, his eyes on her all the while. Her empty mug sitting there, coffee residue within, marking the volume she had consumed.

As he went, her body came into view, her giant backside filling her office chair in a way that few could. He put the three fingers of his left hand on her shoulder and nudged her. “Hey,” he said. “Are you alright?”

In place of answering, she just lay there silently, her shoulders rising with incoming breath, and lowering as she exhaled peacefully.

“Hey,” he said, and shook her.

Nothing.

He touched the side of her face with his three fingers and then pushed gently into her head. “Are you…”

Her head bobbed on top of the book, but her eyes didn’t open.

He stood there for a moment looking down at her. Then his eyes followed down her back down towards her bottom sitting in that chair, working its circular groove into it, of which all other sitters sat in the center of, with no hope of matching its diameter. Her skirt was filled with flesh, and holding its two struggling ends together was a zipper which ran down the center suggestively. Its silvery flash beneath the yellow light underlying its mechanical spirit of function.

He looked at the zipper pull-tab. It sat unused on the clenched mechanical teeth that only it had the power to force together or separate.

His mouth was dry.

He looked back up at her face, her eyes clenched tight without judgement or discernment. Her bottom lip open slightly.

His next exhalation was a trembling one.

He inhaled with purpose and a knowledge that something special awaited. He moved his hand toward the zipper tab.

He felt it.

He placed it between his thumb and his forefinger and he tightened his grip.

His teeth chattered as he exhaled again.

A book was dropped on the second floor, answering the silence, and the sound reverberated up in a muffled shadow of itself in through the door of the room, reminding him of a world outside.

He looked up at the open door. The sound of a throat being cleared somewhere in that giant mausoleum of a building also flittered through.

Then he looked at the “Sorry, we’re closed” sign sitting on the file cabinet that peeked out from behind the open door.

He looked down at the zipper sitting on the underside of his index finger, and then back up at the door.

“We’re going to need some privacy,” he mumbled to himself. “This is between me and Little Miss Smartipants.”

Pretorius sat there, looking down at his favorite specimen’s ass as photographed by his worn fingers, which was dotted with electrodes on its inner right cheek. He smiled down at the photograph fondly. Like a geode or the ruins of some great structure, it sat there, unaware of its worth to the intellect of the humanity that observed it. He knew it selfish for him to say, but he couldn’t help but think of what wonders he could do with his little pet had she been sitting naked in the corner of some exhibit, eating donuts from a steel bowl pushed through the rectangular slot. Looking through a one-way mirror, pondering at its great length, and on the other side, supporting notepads in their palms, a team of his best researchers noting with wonder the reshaping of her gluteal fat against the carpet that sat in imitation of her natural habitat below her.

He would stand amongst them, proud, describing his specimen, embarrassed by his own giddiness betraying to the others that she was in fact his favorite, a designation that no zoologist should set aside but set aside he had. And being his favorite, she sat in a mock living room and study. A refrigerator dotted with photographs from her life. A couch with a TV which showed old romantic films in silvery black and white. And a large bookshelf, filled from end to end, on each level of shelving, with books he lovingly pulled from his own collection for her. Joyce, Woolf, and Shakespeare. Sappho and Yeats. Books which would be cycled out after reading during her tranquilization and peaceful removal to the examination room. He would stand over her then, smiling lovingly, with a team of young researchers, probing and measuring, recording and notarizing, her naked form. Standing at her head, stepping out of the way of a young promising female with a clipboard, and looking up at a young man, standing at her waist, pulling apart her abnormally large stores of gluteal fat, his professionalism just barely overriding his not-so-abnormal urges. The other young men grinning to themselves at the rookie, and the good doctor grinning with them, waiting for the perfect moment to inform the newcomer the part he was about to play in the day’s research, and how the expanding appendage he failed to conceal at his groin level, rather than something he should hide from his superior, was something he would be asked to make bare and make useful in a few moments. And he would do it all, for science.

Dr. Pretorius heard a coughing in the distance and he looked up and over to the fourth floor terrace across the bridge seeing nobody there. He then looked back at the door to the City Blueprints and Archive room. Then he looked back down at the photograph. He stopped for a moment, being hit with some sort of internal bafflement. He looked back up and ahead.

Sitting there, where once was empty space in the corner of the fourth floor which allowed a view into the City Blueprints and Archive room, now a door stood. On the face of that door a sign saying “Sorry, We’re Closed.” It was the first time he had seen what that door and sign looked like from the outside. A bitter taste overwhelmed the palette of his awareness.

Open Sesame, he said internally. It was as if he were in shock, and it had yet to register what he was seeing, instead in its place, filling the void with the first literary reference that jumped to mind.

He laughed quietly and looked down at his photographs and pawed them. Then he stood up, forgetting to close the book, and he stumbled out from behind his desk, the chair falling behind him, and he moved strangely toward the door, a smile still on his face, though not right, would be the way to describe it if someone were only there to witness and relay.

The message on the door took on an expanding surface area within his mind as it did the same within his approaching vision, and his smile began to crack and invert, and his eyes transmorph into something pathetic. He stood next to the door, looking down at the ground. He slowly lifted his hand to the knob, and when he felt it in the grip of his old hands, he turned it imperceptibly slow.

Just as the counter-clockwise motion of the knob found its dead-end and became stiff in his hand, he heard a voice.

“Just me and you, Mrs. Smartipants, just me and you.”

His eyes went wide.

It was happening.

He heard a sudden smack, dulled by material, and he knew the sound well. She was still clothed. Her sanctity violated. An act of great privacy and of even greater scientific worth was only beginning, and he stood there, feet away, separated from it by only a door and a latch.

It can’t be!

He had been dabbling in statistics and their beauty for his entire life. And he stood here, within a frantic instant, having just fathomed the minisculity of this very moment. The mustard seed at the bottom of the canyon that the molecule of fate had just happened to fall on top of being dropped from the furthest reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. A mustard seed that he had prayed on, in the only way a man of science could, through conception of hypotheticals, and which now sat so close to his own presence as witnesser, an experiment of quantum physics placed within a box. And all of it, all of its utility, all of its beauty and knowledge sat hidden from him, on the other side of that door and its maddening sign.

Before he could lose his composure and tear that sign into pieces in a fury of cursing and a red-faced throttling of phrases, he saw the crack under the door, and the reasonableness of his nature gave way to childish hope, and tried to keep quiet, even through the pain, as he lowered his aching and worsening body down to the tiles. When he managed to lower his head to the floor, a feat he would have thought impossible moments ago, he could see only a thin strip of existence within the room.

Your mom’s feet and the delicate shoes that cupped them were visible to him, opposite a pair of brown loafers. Suddenly, her feet floated upwards off the ground, and her shoes fell from her toes, leaving them clad only in stockings. All above her ankles was suggestively invisible to him now.

He turned his face toward the floor, blind to the world now, and he began to sob silently, with his hands around his head, shielding out all light.

Alexandria, he pleaded in his grey head. Don’t abandon me in the moment of your highest worth. He thought of her as his whale, his primal beauty of shape and size, a marvel of dimension and second-order effect: spray and waves which ejected from the force of her gargantuan thrusting tail and delicate motion through the shimmering waves of the ocean, the playground of her careless feminine ways.

As if an act of mercy, the majestic image and reality of the whale filled his mind, numbing the unbearable pain of the moment in what was sure to be short-lived distraction. Whether aware or not of the psychological purpose this distraction afforded, the good doctor recollected on the whale, the animal that got away. The animal he would never touch. The one he would never know. And he thought about its various parts. Its fins and its dead eyes. Its tale and its shape. The greyness of its hard flesh, rubbery and impenetrable. Its teeth that were harmless but for the give they allowed, brushing one as one slipped within. And of course, its most famous of pieces which made up its gestalt, the blowhole. And he thought now, a thought which he had had before, the ease at which he would have to examine it now that he had a…

His head shot upward.

He heard another muffled smack against fabric and shape beyond the door, spilling through the crack underneath it, but he looked over in the opposite direction. Sitting there, resting on the leg of his usual desk, stood his bookbag.

He slowly and painfully got up, deaf now to sounds within, for to be deaf now was to have the scales fall from his eyes later.

His eyes were wide with hope and purpose as he approached, and his throat almost squeaked with the mercy and ascension of it.

When he finally reached the desk, he grabbed the outer hem of the book bag, almost spilling the contents within as he pulled them up to his waist, and with his other shaking arm he plunged within the darkness.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

You had been so hard at work, your focus laser-like and intense, that when you had finally finished everything you could, looking up at the clock was a sudden shock.

“Where the hell is he?”

He should have been back an hour ago, if not sooner.

“Fucking idiot is probably lost in the cookbook section? Either that or he’s combing through the archive of old Playboy issues.”

The Thinker mused with you in the dark shadow that covered the bulk of his form. The platitude KNOWLEDGE IS POWER sat obscured in the darkness of the ending day.

You grabbed at your phone, irritated that there wasn’t a single saga within your mutual project that didn’t involve you cleaning up his mess. But you had already broken the seal on whipping him up into shape, your birthright as his intellectual superior, or at least you were starting to feel under the strength of your growing gusto. And you texted him now with pretensions of doing just that.

-----------------------------------------------

His shoulders jerked when he felt and heard the vibration. Your mom sat silently, her face against his jean-clad crotch. Such a beautiful sight laid helplessly against such a jagged and wanting irritation.

He reached under her head and into his pocket. He pulled out his phone.

“’Where the hell are you? I’m done everything else,’” he repeated with a hazy smile, half smug, half happy disbelief in his lot. “That’s a good question,” he said, looking down at your mom’s face resting against his clothed erection. He grabbed the side of that face, not so smart-looking now, and with a few sensuous turns of his hips, felt his cock, through two layers, being massaged against that intimidating cheek. She opened her eyes lightly, and the wisdom in them was gone, not even replaced by a discerning bewilderment. Just a blank glare at his belt.

In that moment, imperceptible to him as much as her, a little visitor, wormlike and metallic, snaked in silently beneath the door, and then it curled upwards in an arc, now facing them with its one uncritical but ever-focused eye.

It watched as the reflected, inverted, and fish-eyed image of your partner removing his pants, and then sitting there with your mom’s head resting on and against his precum-wet underwear. Dr. Pretorius sat on the other side of the door, his desk almost killing him in his act of carrying it over, with his notebook laid atop it now next to the screen of his nifty new device. The light from the screen illuminated the shadowy nook, and the glasses on his face, and the eyes behind them, were alight in the sanctified image that he was now capturing on micro-SD card. On the opposing terrace, only a single woman thumbed through the shelves, unaware of the joy that bubbled in the heart opposing her.

He barely took his eyes off the screen as he wrote.

It appears that the male genitals are so aching and overcome with arousal at the moment of approaching possibility of copulation, that much of any contact will do. Either that or profaning the sacred quality of a woman’s face may provide some sort of satisfaction. The male subject’s face appears to be flush, and he seems to be closing his eyes as if in deep thought, though its possible that he is instead riding the sensation of deep satisfaction in one form or another.

*thwap*

Spanking the gluteal fat storage of the female appears to also confer some sort of titillation. Whether this behavior will continue if or when the female’s clothes are removed is yet to be seen.

“Oh god,” your partner said in a hushed glory, as he worked out the joy of his moment on your mom’s face with his thrusts. “It feels better than I could ever imagine.” He laid his hand flat on your mom’s ass, and then he clenched his fist down on it, squeezing it. “Ohhh,” he sighed with sad-looking eyes.

The Good Doctor smiled down at the ritual. His breathing had picked up in response to his childlike excitement.

It appears that squeezing the gluteal fat also plays a purpose in increasing arousal. Also, the male subject seems to be speaking in hushed tones. Whether these soft tones are due to the nature of the moment, where privacy if of essence, or whether they are integral to the process itself, and likely responsible in part for its tendency to remain private in the species, is a question worth pondering. The phrases the male subject is repeating to himself seem to be arbitrary, their content being relevant but mostly unnecessary, but the process itself likely increasing arousal.

Pretorius noted as your partner’s hand rubbed your mom’s cheeks, starting with one, before moving over the crack and to the other to feel it as well. He then let his curious fingers wander upward toward her zipper pull-tab. And he clutched it in his forefinger and thumb.

He looked down at your mom, whose head was bobbing up and own on his thrusting cock. “You just came perfect for easy-access today, didn’t you? You really are a smart girl.”

He clenched the tab tightly, and then with one fell swoop, leaning over rapidly to accommodate the motion, he tugged the mechanism down to her lower thighs, and in doing so, unleashed the unwieldly weight and volume of your mom’s naked and uninterrupted ass, which jiggled at its release and reacquired breathing space. It was no stranger to the walls of this room, but to the eyes that glared down at it with intensity, it was a new acquaintance.

His cock pressed tightly and aggressively against the side of your mom’s sleeping head as he groaned angelically “oh god!”

The look on Dr. Pretorius’ face was one of a madman. The light of the screen shining into it from underneath doing its nooks and lines no favors, aging him considerably. The sound of his forceful scribblings might have been audible within the room were it not for his male subject’s sudden explosion of heavy slaps against your mom’s now free cheeks.

Alexandria has the power in her form alone to induce a sort of mania in the male heterosexual of the species that is enough to bring him back to the primate simplicity of their ancestors. The notion that Alexandria is unique in this ability, or at least unique in its degree, is a matter of intuition with me rather than of evidence. One that I’m willing to bet my year’s salary upon. He wrote this with the strange pride of a father. Rather than watching his offspring, cheering at her successful clank of the softball against her clumsy bat and the traversing of 4 bases without obstacle, he sat there, watching through a screen with wild pride, as the voluminous flesh of her ass spilled through the fingers of her surprise suitor. The inserting of fingers in the various holes appears to be another on the long list of psychological pleasures, as the digits of the hand obviously possess no pleasure sensing apparatus beyond that of basic massage, of which the female anus and vaginal opening provide no unique aptitude at performing. He knew this to be true from experience. Penetrating the body may also be a condition of symbolic victory. A way of breaching the walls, so to speak, of what seemed an impenetrable fortress before the moment of copulation.

Your partner thrusted in the air, holding his hips up there in exaggerated form, his crotch cradling your mom’s head above, and he slipped his thumbs into his underwear waist and began to pull them down. The fabric over his crotch followed, and slipped in between him and your mom’s face, and once it cleared her, it snapped down to the level of its opposing part.

Your partner’s cock snapped into view, making its introduction both to Pretorius’ sight, and to the flesh of your mom’s cheek and temple. Pretorius’ gasped at the red irritated sight of the exposed appendage. He couldn’t help, even with his scientific and literal mind, but to anthropomorphize the throbbing piece of flesh as angry, a thought which he found strange, as it ran counter to the rest of his male subject, which seemed to express nothing but that which could registered in man as wild and ecstatic joy.

Then, in contradiction to even that, your partner grabbed at your mom’s hair viciously, pulling her face off of his then-hardening dick, and thrusting within the mouth which had just fallen open. He began thrusting forcefully into her face.

Pretorius shifted his weight on the heel of his right hand to scribble down a thought, and in doing so in such an urgent and excited manner, he dropped his pen. His teeth chattered as he picked it back up again and he put the pen’s ink to good, immortal, and clumsy use.

The wetness and warmth of the female mouth seems to offer a space of pleasurable sensation to the male’s penis, which gets so hard as to appear hatefully angry in arousal. Again, whether this is Alexandria’s doing in particular is unknown to me, though the thought that this sudden rise in aggression has occurred after the exposing of her backside would indicate to me, that yes, it is her power, and her power virtually alone, at least compared with females within walking distance from here. He looked back at the screen, then back at his pen and pad. This sexual practice of oral copulation, serving no obvious reproductive purpose, is likely useful for fulfilling the three motivating carrot-and-sticks previously mentioned. Positive sensation along the sex organ, a penetrating of the female body for its own sake, and a visually and sensory profaning of the sacredness of the female face.

Your partner’s expression contorted into that of mobster’s scowl as he thrusted rapidly into your mom’s inner-cheek. “Say something smart now with my cock in your mouth.” She was mute. “If your son could see you now.” His voice was hoarse, almost messianic. “It would wipe the smug grin off his face.”

My hypothesis about the son’s relations to such an event were correct. As was my hypothesis on the profaning of the face. The excitement at this profaning is likely escalating his arousal and the satisfaction, both attached and separate, that comes with it.

Every sentence jotted was a finished sentence. Every word an immortal word. Dr. Pretorius knew that if he died right here, right now, that which had been ascertained within the last few minutes could not be wiped so clean from the slate of knowledge. And he still had so much more to write.

Your partner pulled your mom’s face off his glistening cock and lowered it to his testicles which were sucked tight to the underside of his shaft and guch. “Lick them,” he said. “Suck my balls.”

To both his and Dr. Pretorius’ surprise, your mom did as she was commanded, though sleepily and indefinitely

It appears my tranquilizer fails to shut down functioning completely. The female subject appears to be responding to simple direction. ‘Sucking balls’ must be a slang term that’s well known in the animal of this language or location for the licking of the scrotal sack. Alexandria seems to be aware of this term, and can even follow it as a direction even when activity within her prefrontal cortex is slowed to a blip.

“Ohh, that’s good,” your partner said, and he shifted around erotically on the couch with his lower half, it possessed by the wiry energy of sexual perfection.

It appears Alexandria is good at this activity, Pretorius noted, blushing with pride. She is good at ‘sucking balls.’

Your partner pulled your mom’s open skirt out from underneath her thighs and he threw it at the shelfing. Then he began to reach over the two side of her torso and begin unbuttoning her shirt as she continued to lick his nether region. After clearing each button, he reached in between her open shirt and began to remove her breasts from the cup of her bra and he felt them in his hands.

“Ohh,” he said pleasurably, again thrusting his testicles against her tongue. “If only they were as big as your fat ass is though.”

It appears breast size is also a lusted after quality, one which Alexandria lacks in sufficient degree for our male subject. There was a perturbed, and likely hurt, look on Pretorius’ face, one which was washed away like sand on a beach by the wave of his continuing intellectual bliss birthed from his furious curiosity.

“Okay, get off of me, you stupid bitch.”

This was the first insult from your partner that was literal enough for the naïve doctor to pick up on unequivocally. Disrespect of the female subject appears to be a point of pride. Underneath he wrote Alexandria=Stupid Bitch with a sort of giddy humor at being able to see the side of someone who failed to witness in her what he had, and a playful sweetness in the knowledge that his little pet was being so undeservedly abused by one who just didn’t see her endless worth. It was the same humor shared among researchers, sometimes rooms of which, witnessing an animal trapped within an unwanted sexual context, like the time him and his research assistants witnessed a male bear being humped by another male bear, and they had all shared a laugh at the look of the receiving male’s bewildered face.

Your partner threw your mom’s shirt off of her and it landed on the floor below, just next to the examining mechanical eye of the doctor.

“Get your fat ass up,” your partner said.

The Good Doctor smiled at that turn of phrase: fat ass. It appears, he wrote. The male subject is well aware of his much-cherished appendage’s nature in that he seems to know it stores fat.

Your mom got up, and your partner watched her ass, waist, and thighs with intensity as she did. His cock throbbed, a subtlety the doctor didn’t pick up on.

“Okay, now be a good mommy and suck this cock off right.”

While looking on, fascinated by the sight of your mom’s bent over backside, he was also bewildered by that statement. He wrote Is mother-son incest a common form of sexual contact in the species? He knew that this couldn’t be the case, as the genetic consequences for it would have been catastrophic for the gene pool of the human animal. He then thought for a second, staring at the image of his Alexandria fulfilling her private and desperately hidden role before him (and posterity) unawares, then he asked himself Perhaps oral pleasuring of one’s son provides a sort of opportunity for bonding? on the page. It made complete sense to him the more he thought about it. It may fulfill the same role of cuddling after a bad dream and express to the son the extent to which the mother is a source of warmth, comfort, and positive sensation.

He thought about how his mom had never done such things for him, something which didn’t bother him too much, but which did poke a worrying hole in his theory. Then again, his mother’s cold nature may have been enough to explain her selfish reserve in this regard.

His Alexandria, on the other hand, made him proud with the effort she put in. Effort which bought a look of satisfaction so brazen on the face of her successful suitor that even The Good Doctor knew it for what it was.

“What a perfect cocksucker you are,” your partner said with hushed intensity.

Dr. Pretorius put another equation in his notes. Alexandria=Perfect Cocksucker

“Read my pubes,” your partner said, and then he placed both hands firmly on the back of your mom’s head and he plunged her down onto his cock until the tip of his penis penetrated the beginnings of her throat.

Dr. Pretorius almost chuckling at the cleverness of the statement, and somewhat moved by the allusion to his Alexandria’s favorite activity, though he sensed a disgusted dismissal in the statement, began to become fond of his new male subject.

As a conquered female, positive traits in Alexandria seem to bring pleasure when used against her as insults of some sort.

“Look at those sweet cheeks,” your partner said. “Shake them for me, you stupid bitch.”

The Good Doctor watched with delight. Alexandria, he thought, endearingly. You use your fat stores nicely. Make me proud, my little pet. He felt a sentimental tightness in his throat, a sensation quite unlike him to feel.

He began to jot. It appears my musings regarding the gluteal fat in motion seems to be correct. The shaking of these ‘sweet cheeks,’ though seemingly random and without specific goal, is in fact a strong positive visual stimuli for male arousal, so much so, that Alexandria seems to be primed to do it, even in the simplicity of her chemically-induced reduction to the functioning to the more primitive parts of her brain exclusively.

Your mom’s ass was still red with the slap marks of your partner. To Pretorius, the sight of it reminded him of the red paint on the walls of caves, placed by the hands of cavemen to leave their mark to time, the only way they knew how. Alexandria my dear, they couldn’t have left it on a more timeless wall than you, he thought.

The smell of your mom and your partner permeated the room, seeping into the soft pages of books, their subtle traces rocking out with dust as the books opened to new and receiving faces. This was supposed to be your mom’s workplace. Her private spot. The illusion of that privacy had never been more stripped bare. This was no longer her space, it was an artificial habitat tailor-made, with care, for her examining. As her soft-spoken mouth filled with the fleshy instrument of your partner’s cock. And outside a scientist examined from a safe distance the reality of the human animal that was your mother. And he waited for bated breath for the next piece of slang that would bring this finest day in his field to the next step.

It came in the form of “hop on.”

Your mom “hopped on.”

Pretorius watched with intensity as your mom’s opening hole was pressed against the head of his male subject’s penis, and then his breath stopped as he saw the length of it disappear up and into her lowering body, slowly, with the look on his male subject’s face reflecting inexpressible joy at its every swallowed inch.

“Ohhhh fffucccckkk”

Just as I suspected. The erect penis and the welcoming vagina are designed in regards to one another. Though without the penis being erect, sex is not possible, as I have learned with my own example. Whereas the female’s sexual organ, having less natural barriers to proper use, outside of social barriers, can be utilized by males for sexual pleasure any time, even in circumstances beyond her knowledge, acceptance, or control. This further allows for the female’s use as an object when desired, rather than as a companion. In our current example, Alexandria has reached the highest ideal in the male mind, of woman as object rather than autonomous being, in being incapable of expressing no, usually a right both possessed and utilized thoroughly in females of the species, much to the frustration, and sometime relief, of males.

When your partner’s full cock, throbbing with pleasure, had disappeared within the all-surrounding warmth and humidity of your mother, he gave her one last cathartic command, now being her brain her for her, no matter how meagre.

“Bounce."

The Good Doctor again found charismatic humor in this. The way your mom’s ass was vaguely shaped like a large sports ball, and the way it was commanded to bounce, an action which it was doing a good job of becoming a living metaphor of.

“Oh my god, Miss Smartipants, this aassssss!”

Pretorius smiled and mouthed it to himself, “Smartipants,” and he wrote it down next to his duelling pet name for her, noting mentally the wonderful synchronicity of it, as well as musing if the reference to Alexandria’s pants was also a coincidence, or whether it was what those in the psychology department referred to as a “Freudian slip.” Then he wrote Not only is the vaginal orifice’s interior tailor made to bring an almost unique pleasure to the penises of the males of the species, but it’s likely the size, shape, texture, and softness of the fat stores of the behind feel good when bouncing off of the male’s pelvis, thighs and testicles. Why would such violent motion be tolerated otherwise?

The smacking that eminated from the violent contact of the male’s pelvis and your mom’s ass was also noted in writing. Along with My earlier query about whether or not the female body makes a sound is answered now. It indeed does. And this sound, reflective purely of the volume within Alexandria’s “cheeks,” is almost certainly that which brings arousal to the male subject, as it’s another in a long list of indications of size.

Your partner began to grab at the hooks that kept your mom’s underwear, or whatever was left of it, together. “Let’s get you as naked as you should be, at home baking cookies.”

The sociology, history, and politics of the statement went over Dr. Pretorius’s head, as he had very little mind for those subjects, being often confused by their grey nuance which defied the ones and zeros of his usual intellectual fare. Instead his mind pinpointed the reference to cookies as one of possible relevance.

It’s possible that cooking, and homemaking of other kinds, plays some sort of role in the process of copulation, or at least attraction. This would explain the human female’s ubiquitousness in those domains across various cultures. If this is the case, Alexandria’s successful rearing of a now-adult offspring would indeed make her more attractive to male desire.

When your mom became naked from her lower thighs all the way up to the middle of her back, your partner ran his palm from the lowest point of uninterrupted exposure, up to her left cheek, squeezing it in his full palm, before letting his hand slide upwards to her back, and letting it slide down again to the cheek, and then placing his fingers in between the cheeks to test their depth.

The cleavage in between the stores of fat indeed plays a role. The male in this case is testing Alexandria in this regard. Pretorius smiled to himself, cheesily, and continued writing. And of course, Alexandria is passing this test effortlessly.

Your now-perfect mother, lowered herself back onto the appendage of current study, being filled with it.

Nudity is an essential component of the sexual process. Its mere presence seems to imply coming copulation in the species. This is likely why members of the species remain clothed in almost all social settings, likely in preparation for allowing nudity to increase its sense of intimacy at its rare moments of occurrence.

Your partner looked up at your mom’s face and marvelled at the dopey harmlessness of it. The tension of his anxiety and inadequacy had been massaged out by her flesh and her humiliation, her soft, warm breath a tincture, and now he looked up at her and felt only smug dismissal. It was like a phobia suddenly becoming null at the moment the sufferer confronted the harmless reality of it.

Your partner had no inkling of what it was that had shut your mom’s mind down so, but in its happening, and in the fruits of its happening, he had understood her for what she really was. And though he had understood without language, what came to him in thoughtless impression was the wild notion, as true to him now as the sensation of her soft pinkness against his throbbing member, that your mom, with all her snaps to correct intuition, stores of knowledge, leaps in connections, and talented follow-through of form, was nothing more than a better-formed biological machine, a series of ones, zeroes, or of intricate stores and exchanges, in a body and brain that functioned for the purpose of something very basic: survival.

And within the seed of her primitive moans and the incessant and meandering humming of her voicebox, a dumb expression of the void where her mind once was throned, he had realized, again without language to really codify it any deeper than mere impression, what was the best way to sum up your mother in this very instant – and in summing her up here and now, summing up every other intelligent mind he had the misfortune of running into and against – your mom, though to you she was everything, and to herself she was the world as filtered through her own mind, to her friends an angel, and to her colleagues, a cherished co-worker; to your partner, in a clarity much unlike he had ever known, stripped bare of all pretense, bias, bigotry, and assumption, he saw your mom for what she really was, all neatly packaged, and/or unwound or boiled down, without the mist of poetry, or the labyrinth of vocabulary or jargon.

What she was, at her root for anyone who was honest, was nothing but a no-good, eating, sleeping, walking, surviving, being, animal. That’s all she was, it was all she would ever be. It was all anyone would ever be. And in this epiphany of thought without word, a weight that had assaulted your partner’s chest since grade school had finally dissolved into harmless vapor and floated off. He was free. He clung intimately to that truth as if it was personified by your mom’s lower body, and penetrated deeply into it as if it were living in the furthest reaches of your mom’s sweet vaginal hole. He exposed this truth to daylight as if it existed between the very butt-cheeks he pulled open. Your mom’s unique worth had only gained ground now, as the blank canvas in his art of fucking. Or at least that was the shady truth the smartest part of him grasped at, just through fingertip, in the expansive darkness that was understanding. Your mom was just an explosion of feels and smells above him. Nothing more.

On the desk, Moby Dick sat limply. At home, on her bookshelf, sat A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Anna Karenina, Call of the Wild, and Orlando. None of it meant anything. It was Sound and Fury, signifying nothing but itself.

They were collections of words, sayings, sentences, and nothing more. This building was full of said sentences, mountains of them, jumbled up and tangled, a complete mess of clever-sounding words, nothing more. It was a true Babel. A masturbation of minds struggling impotently to matter. And your mom sat at the very top of that palace, inside its throne room. A queen of the intellect. And look what that had gotten her. Her throne was the giant cock of her son’s halfwit acquaintance and the scribbled pages within the book of an unhealthily obsessed madman.

On the other side of that door, Dr. Pretorius sat, in hallowed worship of his favorite animal and his favorite new mate for her. Scribbling diatribes regarding her body in use, a bliss of imagery he had grown to feel he didn’t deserve. A drop of knowledge divorced from the vicinity of his drying tongue. And now he sat here in the partial-darkness, satiated of all thirst. He had touched his intellectual peak, an all after would be its afterglow, which would follow him softly to the grave. He was too sober and analytical to believe that his personality and awareness would survive his ceasing neurons, but he knew the closest thing he had to a soul, that which was collected in this rainbow of notebooks, the red being the crowning ring, would survive long after him, a heaven of the mind. A body of knowledge passed down from one burgeoning generation of students to the next, an ever-elongating snake, of which he was the unquestionable head. And who knows, maybe the primitive cultures of the world were right. Maybe the snake truly did eat its tale, and he would be there to learn, or re-learn, what he had once discovered in another form.

And maybe Alexandria herself would follow him there, to that next stage of life, in whatever form she happened to take, waiting to be examined. Waiting to be understood. Waiting to be exposed to the blinding light of truth. And waiting to be admired for it.

Or hated too.

The Good Doctor had never possessed a rebellious bone in his body, with the exception of the rules that he had to bend or break for the higher calling of scientific inquiry, but he was starting to understand what the wild peers of his youth saw in their wily machinations and scrapes with the unacceptable that they procured along the pavement of back alleys and the glass-anointed flooring of abandoned buildings.

As he peered at the robbed privacy of the two subjects he loved so, invading their veil of secrecy and intimate cloistering, and did so without conscious, he couldn’t help but let the corners of his mouth curve upward in a giddy satisfaction. He felt young again. And more, like a second chance at youthful naughtiness. Like Alexandria, the victim of his careless games, was the only one approaching the mind and duty of an adult, and he had shut it down on her, allowing the situation to be swallowed by a youthful chaos. A youthful chaos that invaded the very sanctity between her legs and robbed her of the dignity placed flat beneath her feet.

And he knew, through piecing it together by the random factoids of the probing he did into her life, that your mom was similar to him in that regard. She had also grown up quickly, as all intelligent people did, leapfrogging over the devilishness of youthful experimentation. Learning from other’s mistakes over her own. And now here she was, pinned between the brain and brawn of two careless devils. The moment was beyond sweet. A true nectar of the gods. A juice squeezed from the fruit of your mom’s cheeks as consistently as knowledge was itself with the duel hands of strength and intellect. Women as a collective only had access to one. Men had both, and the benefit of that merger of two virtues could be seen, heard, smelled and felt within the tiny confines of that little room, the wisest place in that library.

Pretorius’s final note, contemporary to copulation that is, was about the ejaculation the male penis did within the woman, watching your partner press your mom down tightly against his pelvis, wanting to feel every inch of it he could as his body exploded in sweet ecstasy.

Orgasm is the epiphany of the body he wrote. The most beautiful sentence of his entire career.

After your partner was finished, your mom lay down and against him, and he looked up at the roof. His grin was smug and knowing. Your mom’s ass was wet with his warm cum. This was the culmination of the mission you had forced him on. You, who were so infinitely wise, had pushed him in the direction that ended with the full contents of his balls being emptied, massaged out by the sweet tightness of her pussy, all over your mom’s ass, a beautiful gift of an experience that he knew would never be imitated a second time in his entire life.

He looked down at the top of her brunette head and gave it a mocking kiss.

It always was such a wonderful feeling. When the woman, for whatever reason there was, who had such power over you, to become something useless and naked, a dead weight on top of you, which you could feel no regret in ejecting. This case had been like all the others there, except more so. “Get off me,” he said, and he pushed your mom off of his sweating frame, feeling his shrinking penis recoiling at the exposed air as it was robbed of the shelter within her.

Your mom fell to the carpet below. Her face down, her ass up in the air, drenched white with a new study substance.

Pretorius watched and noted as the young subject’s erect and giant penis had slowly but surely shrunk with a prolonged whimper. The ultimate goal of the process from the male perspective is ejaculation. The scratching of an itch. After that, attraction ceases. But for how long?

After floating on the surface of his own afterglow, your partner had been reinstilled with the need for motion, and he got up. He looked over for his pants, and at seeing them, he approached them and began to pull them up his legs. Looking up as he pulled he saw the spine of a book entitled On Sewers and Street Management by J. Peebles.

“Shit,” he said, and smiled in disbelief. “This is it, isn’t it?”

He zipped up his pants, pulled the book from the shelf, and threw it on the couch where all the action had happened moments earlier. After he got fully changed, he stepped over your mom to grab the book, hitting the side of her cheek as he did, causing it to jiggle. He then looked down at her and smiled. He kneeled down and pressed the book between her cheeks. Then he pulled it out with a smile. “When he sent me here, I don’t think he did it with the expectation that I’d be shoving this stupid book up his mom’s fat ass. Guess he didn’t see that one coming.”

Pretorius made another quick note about the ritualistic nature of the victory behaviors he was witnessing. The nature of this unseen vendetta, and what it meant about male territorialism and aggression fascinated him almost as much as the sexual dynamic on its own. And the obvious question arose in him: could the two be separated?

When your partner was finished, he looked down at the naked hump of idiotic flesh that was your mother, smiled, and opened the door to leave.

When he did, he was startled, truly startled, to see an empty desk and chair before the door. A panic overcame him, but no thought as to why that had occurred in him. Just the strangeness of the sight had triggered something in his lizard brain before his higher functions could make sense of them.

He stepped through the doorway, sidestepping the table awkwardly, and began to squeeze in between it and the wall, when suddenly, he felt a hand grab his shoulder.

His eyes went wide.

“Shhhhh,” said a voice behind him.

The woman on the opposing terrace was gone. The library nearly empty.

Your partner turned around to see an old face close to his. And in a moment he had recognize that face from earlier. “Come with me back in here,” the face said. “I have a few things to ask you.”

“I didn’t do anything,” he exclaimed in a hush urgency.

“Young man,” said Dr. Pretorius. “Strictly speaking, I don’t believe that’s true.”

“I swear!”

“Young man, I don’t think you’re thinking quite clearly.”

“Let go-“

“I usually leave her on the couch.”

Your partner struggled more. “Listen man. You need to le-“ He stopped struggling mid-sentence and looked in the old man’s face.

“And her clothes. By god, do you want her to know? And you left DNA evidence all over her- The list of the police’s suspects will be one name long. No others to keep it company. Just… what was your name, young man?”

Your partner didn’t answer, but he walked into the room at the insistence of the old man.

“I just want to ask you a few questions. After we clean her up and get her changed of course. You see, I’m a scientist, and what you just did was of great benefit to my field. Huh… I almost feel as if I’m talking to a celebrity. Do you mind me saying so? Anyways, this couch is as good a place for my interview, don’t you think? Only a few questions. Watch Alexandria, dear boy, you almost stepped on my poor girl. Sit down. Please. Oh, by the way, it slipped my aging mind, before we start, can you please get the door? The world out there wouldn’t understand the nature of our research, you see. Thank you.”

Your partner stepped to the door with the book in his hand. He would eventually get back to your house later that night and hand you the book with an impossible-to-hide grin on his face, at odds with your disgusted scowl. A smugness emanating from him which infuriated you on some subterranean level, one you couldn’t understand. A look as if he knew something you didn’t. As if it were possible for that to be the case. You’d send him home, knowing that he had nothing else to add to the project. He was an idiot. A lunkhead. A dolt. Not just useless to you in the here and now. You knew, as you sent him off and rounded off what was left of the paper for your mutual grade, that as long as he lived, no matter where his life took him, he would never contribute to the wondrous and ever-expanding body of knowledge of the human animal. That was for sure.

The Thinker sat now, completely obscured by angular shadows. Shadows which had half swallowed the photograph of your mom smiling next to a Doric column on the mantel.

But well before that, in that doorway your partner stood, looking out at the library with the goal of his expedition, the only reason why he had entered this building and entered this room, under his arm.

“Well, what are you waiting for, my boy. Close the door.”

He looked over his shoulder at the old man on the couch hunched over his open red notebook with a pen ready in his fingers, with a beautiful woman nude and drenched in his own cum, facedown next to to the intent old man like it was some surreal art piece. He looked back before him at the barren fourth floor of the library and its orange and all-consuming light, illuminating rows upon rows of books. He grabbed the edge of the door and pushed it closed. And the sign affixed to it shook at the clicking shut of the door, sliding back and forth slightly before settling. And that sign, now still, expressed an uninviting exclusivity to all who wished to enter. A magic series of words, letters put together to keep anyone from the thought that they even had a right to enter, and to participate in the process of high intellectual worth that would now take place.

They were unworthy of that.

The sign on the door was emblazoned with the most beautiful sentence that could be found among the literal millions within the shelves and carts of that library, in text large enough, and language succinct enough that even a mongoloid idiot could understand it. It read: Sorry, We’re Closed