R.V. Roush
As The New Dead Advocate�s advertising executive, Amy set policies for acceptance and trained her editorial board, Liz and Jane, to reject tasteless stories like the implantation of replacement organs. She drew an activist line, boycotting companies dedicated to convincing the new dead that they should conform to the ideals of the living. Unlike Dead Image, which ran ads by Artful Cosmetics, Inc. who guaranteed that all who hadn�t died in ideally pristine condition could nonetheless be made cosmetically beautiful, The New Dead Advocate ran ads that asked the public to accept victims of shotgun blasts to the face, explosives, and fire; these people were beautiful without makeup.
Readers recognized a similar philosophy in articles that Amy wrote for Victim�s Advocate. Amy scolded women who tried to make themselves beautiful for men. If lonely women accepted their own appearance, then, her argument went, acceptance by men shouldn�t really matter. She didn�t bother to empathize with women who wanted to compete for the attention of men. She spoke for the idea. For articles in The New Dead Advocate, the idea was that hideous and dead was not a problem of the new dead, but of the living.
Liz Marzanno and Jane Ayres, who both did a little writing, a little layout work, a little photography, a little decorating around the house, a little print shop gofering, and a lot of snacking, shared an office in a closet under the massive stairway that led to the community meeting rooms upstairs. Space had been cheap for the builders in an earlier construction era, so the closet, with its front wall cut away, was large, though cozy enough for the two women to enjoy one other�s company.
�Hi,� Amy said to them as she pressed her toe on the lever to set the front door�s foot latch, holding the door open and letting in the morning sun. She heard the snap as the spring released and the quick thunk as the rubber-coated post of the jam hit the lacquered pine wood floor.The breeze that wafted through the screen door was cool and refreshing.
Amy had long ago decided that it was okay for women to call other women �girls.� She found it even more excusable for Jane, since Jane was the butch half of the relationship, though she played that role only when Liz felt vulnerable and insecure. Liz and Jane had met each other five years before on vacation at a Bahamian infertility pawpaw.
They�d come as a pair to interview for the two positions that Amy had advertised. They were both good natured, friendly, and capable of controlling the muzzle flip of their pearl-handled 32s when shooting at men who had something nasty to say about their cellulite, which they laughingly referred to as dormant muscle. They�d once played connect-the-cellulite dimples to create images of cervixes and breasts traversed with roads and highways that faithfully mapped Conover, Georgia. Liz and Jane thought it was prophetic that a suffragette conference had been held in Conover seventy-five years ago. Other evenings, in their afterglow of a bag of Chips Ahoy and tubes of reducing creams, they toyed with the idea of tattooing lunar modules on their thick, cratered thighs.
All the women in their poetry had mythological breasts, breasts as round as drops of mercury in corn oil, as jostled as crochet balls in a bread sack clipped to a clothesline, as appetizing as jelly rolls, as ripe as cantaloupes, as drunken as olives in a martini glass, as bouncy as snow tires let loose down a flight of stairs. Their breasts were �native to every buffet,� �juicy cornucopias of estrogen overlooking the fecund, rolling hills of meaty stomachs.� There was also the sadness of tearful restraint in their poetry that accompanies maternal choice; as lesbian goddesses, they decreed that they would let their wombs lie fallow. They would grow large with food, not child.
� 2004 R.V. Roush