Page 39 of Way Down Deep

Okay, it’s over. You may return from the kitchen.

While you were gone, the horse swam away to live forever in a beautiful space meadow. It’s the director’s cut.

Oh, how lovely that idea is. Like rewriting things that have already happened.

I’m highly giftedat denial. It comes in very useful.

Teach me your ways, sensei. I don’t want to get emotional about a film with a giant talking turtle in it.

You’ll haveto choose between a soft heart and a pickled liver—alcohol definitely helps.

I’ve never beenable to drink. But I’ve often wondered how much fuzzier it would make things. How much softer the sharp edges would get.

You needto get the dosage right. Too much and you just wind up weeping inconsolably. Or I imagine you would. You don’t seem like you’d be an angry drunk. Definitely a sentimental one.

Or maybe a silly drunk.

IwishI had your confidence, there. Silly and sentimental sounds okay.

Sorry, now I feel sort of … I dunno, rude, I guess. To talk like I know you well enough to think you’re not capable of anger.

No, my Malcolm. Not rude. Not wrong either, exactly. I’ve never been an angry person. I just always fear that it’s in me somewhere, waiting for alcohol to bring it out.

Doyou think you deserve to be angrier than you let yourself be?

Oh shit, there’s the dragon. Ignore my prying. It’s about to get creepy.

It’s okay, you’re not prying. I do wish I could let myself be angrier sometimes. But now it’s hard to be because Atreyu is making a dragon that looks like a penis moan in ecstasy.

I’ll pry again soon. But not tonight.

I’mready for your prying, when soon comes. After we discuss the wang-like qualities of this dragon that seems to get really stoked over being rubbed.

He’s like a downy, scaly, flesh-colored flying puppy-phallus. Shudder. And I don’t remember these people at all.

They helpAtreyu get past the eye lasers I think. And she’s the old witch from Willow.

Ican’t waitfor the lasers. That’s the bit I remember best. Probably because: boobs.

Gigantic boobs, if I’m recalling correctly.

Without hyperbole, one of the formative sexual experiences of my young life.

I had a girlfriend who said David Bowie’s pants in Labyrinth were that for her.

Oh, here we go. Boobs ahoy!

Ithinkthe Bowie thing must have affected all us girls, like a bulging contagion.

“Bulging contagion” mademe almost spit out my drink.

I don’t think I’d make it past the sphinxes. My heart’s a hot mess.

They’d probably zapme from seventeen miles away.

My god, those boobs really are skin mag quality.

Nipples and everything.

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