Mnye etoh nadoh kahk zoobee v zadnetze.

Those stories you hear, about how animals caught in a trap will chew off their leg, well, any coyote would tell you a couple bites beats the hell out of being dead.

Hell . . . even if you're Russian, someday you just might want those teeth.

Otherwise, what you have to do is—you have to twist around. You hook one elbow behind your knee and pull that leg up into your face. You bite and snap at your own ass. You run out of air, and you will chew through anything to get that next breath.

It's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date. Not if you expect a kiss good night.

If I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever again eat calamari.

It's hard to say what my parents were more disgusted by: how I'd got in trouble or how I'd saved myself. After the hospital, my mom said, “You didn't know what you were doing, honey. You were in shock.” And she learned how to cook poached eggs.

All those people grossed out or feeling sorry for me . . .

I need that like I need teeth in my asshole.

Nowadays, people always tell me I look too skinny. People at dinner parties get all quiet and pissed off when I don't eat the pot roast they cooked. Pot roast kills me. Baked ham. Anything that hangs around inside my guts for longer than a couple hours, it comes out still food. Home-cooked lima beans or chunk light tuna fish, I'll stand up and find it still sitting there in the toilet.

After you have a radical bowel resectioning, you don't digest meat so great. Most people, you have five feet of large intestine. I'm lucky to have my six inches. So I never got a football scholarship. Never got an M.B.A. Both my friends, the wax kid and the carrot kid, they grew up, got big, but I've never weighed a pound more than I did that day when I was thirteen.

Another big problem was, my folks paid a lot of good money for that swimming pool. In the end, my dad just told the pool guy it was a dog. The family dog fell in and drowned. The dead body got pulled into the pump. Even when the pool guy cracked open the filter casing and fished out a rubbery tube, a watery hank of intestine with a big orange vitamin pill still inside, even then, my dad just said, “That dog was fucking nuts.”

Even from my upstairs bedroom window, you could hear my old man say, “We couldn't trust that dog alone for a second . . .”

Then my sister missed her period.

Even after they changed the pool water, after they sold the house and we moved to another state, after my sister's abortion, even then my folks never mentioned it again.

Ever.

That is my family's invisible carrot.

Now you can take a good, deep breath.

Because I still have not.

2

Under the next streetlight stands the Reverend Godless, next to him a square suitcase. It's still early morning enough that every color is black or gray. There, the black fabric of the suitcase is scarred with silver zippers running in every direction, a black Swiss cheese of little pockets and slots, sacks and compartments. Reverend Godless with his face—just red-raw meat around a nose and eyes, steak stitched together with thread and scars, his ears twisted and swollen—his eyebrows are shaved. Then, sketched on with black pencil in two surprised arcs that rise almost to his hairline.

Watching him climb up the bus steps, Comrade Snarky fingers open a button of her jacket. Closing the button, she leans close to the tape recorder tucked in the Earl of Slander's pocket.

Close into the little red RECORD light, Comrade Snarky says, The Reverend Godless is wearing a white blouse. A woman's blouse. With the buttons on the left.

In the dim streetlight, his rhinestone buttons sparkle.

Down the next stretch of road, around the next curve, standing outside the circle of a streetlight, standing back in the shadows, waits the Baroness Frostbite.

First her hand reaches in through the open door of the bus, a normal hand, the fingers yellow where she's held her cigarettes. No wedding ring. The hand sets a plastic makeup case at the top of the steps. Then a knee appears, a thigh, the swell of a breast. A waist belted in a trench coat. Then everyone looks away.

We look at our watches. Or we look out the windows at parked cars and newspaper boxes. Fire hydrants.

Baroness Frostbite brought tubes and tubes of lip wax, she said, for the edges of her mouth. For when they cracked and bled in cold weather. Her mouth, it's just a grease-shiny hole she screws open and shut to talk. Her mouth, just a pink-lipstick pucker in the bottom half of her face.

Leaning in to the Earl of Slander, whispering close to his tape recorder, Comrade Snarky says, “Oh my God . . .”

As the Baroness Frostbite takes her seat, only Agent Tattletale watches her, from safe behind the lens of his video camera.

At the next stop, Miss America waits with her exercise wheel, a pink plastic wheel the size of a dinner plate with black rubber grips poking out each side of the hub. You'd hold each grip and kneel down on the floor. You'd lean forward to balance on the wheel, then roll forward and back by clenching your stomach. Miss America brought the wheel and some pink leotards, honey-blond hair coloring, and a home pregnancy test.

Walking down the aisle in the center of the bus—smiling at Mr. Whittier with his wheelchair, not smiling at the Missing Link—with every step, Miss America overlaps one foot a little in front of the other, making her hips look thin, always the forward leg hiding the one behind.

“The Fashion-Model Waddle,” Comrade Snarky calls it. She leans over the Earl of Slander's notepad and says, “That color of blond is what women call lifting the color.”

Miss America had written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, smeared there for her boyfriend to find in the motel room they'd shared, for him to find before his morning television appearance: “I am NOT fat.”

We had all left some kind of note behind.

Director Denial, petting her cat, she told us she'd written a memo to her entire agency, telling them: “Find your own objects to fuck.” That memo she left on every desk, last night, ready for her staff to find, this morning.

Even Miss Sneezy wrote a note, even if she had nobody to read it. In red spray paint on a bus-stop bench, she wrote, “Call me when you find a cure.”

The Matchmaker left his note folded to stand on the kitchen table, so his wife wouldn't miss it. The note said: “It's been fourteen weeks since I had that head cold, and you still have not kissed me.” He wrote, “This summer, you milk the cows.”

The Countess Foresight had left a note telling her parole officer he could reach her by dialing 1-800-FUCK-OFF.

The Countess Foresight steps out of the shadows wearing a turban and wrapped in a lace shawl. Floating down the aisle of the bus, she stops a moment next to Comrade Snarky. “Since you're wondering,” the Countess says, and dangles a limp hand, a plastic bracelet loose around the wrist. The Countess Foresight says, “It's a global-positioning sensor. A condition of my early release from prison . . .”

One, two, three steps, past the Comrade and the Earl, their mouths still hanging a little loose, without looking back, the Countess Foresight says, “Yes.”

She touches her turban with the fingernails of one hand and says, “Yes, I did read your mind . . .”

Around the next corner, past the next shopping center and franchise motel, beyond another fast-food restaurant, Mother Nature sits on the curb in a perfect lotus position, her hands painted with dark henna vines and resting on each knee. A choker of brass temple bells tinkling around her neck.

Mother Nature brings on board a cardboard carton of clothes wrapped to protect bottles of thick oil. Candles. The box smelling of pine needles. The campfire smell of pine pitch. The salad-dressing smell of basil and coriander. The import-market smell of sandalwood. A long fringe sways along the hem of her sari.