[*Anya*]

It was a dark and stormy night...the wind blew cold and then it blew as hot as a sandstorm across the desert in Morocco or the hot breath of her former lover that always seemed to smell as though she bathed in a vat of onions.

She didn't know if she should put on a heavier coat or take off her dress. It was very confusing to her and it did not take too much to trouble her mind or to wrinkle her brow...though having just had her latest series of Botox injections; it was not exactly a brow wrinkle.

She almost looked as she did the one time a rabid bat flew into her tiny, one-room apartment and startled her so much that she dropped a pot of spaghetti sauce and it appeared just like it was fresh, dripping blood splashed up to the ceiling on her yellowed, kitchen wall, right next to the stove, heavy with grease that she never washed off because grease made her sick.

Her BFF told her what had happened to her when the unlicensed plastic surgeon injected her with Botox. It appeared he *"Spocked" her! She shrugged off that thought because thinking about it upset her and upsetting thoughts would only beget more wrinkles. It was a vicious circle really and a circle of hell as vivid to her as Dante's 7th.

She decided she would take off her dress to cool off. It was a lovely shade of purple that she had bought at a thrift shop because it had a wide, black leather belt that went perfectly with her red patent leather tennis shoes that she picked out because they helped her sprint like a tornado when she last ran with the bulls on a trip to Spain the summer her father married for the 3rd time.

Much better she thought. I am now comfortable. Her smooth and untroubled forehead, though relaxed from the injections, smoothed out further and life was good.

*” As in brows that go up at the ends like Spock.