Coming from the Cottage, Slope Finds Herself in a Stroller

A stroller was being strolled down the street. The woman inside the stroller was called Slope. She worked for a grocer named Stan. Stan was a vicious, cruel man. He had lost all his fingernails in a game of UNO, and he deliberately plucked off all his eyelashes. Slope hated Stan, and Stan hated Slope.

Inside the stroller Slope thought of fabulous things. She thought about pigeons and plums and corduroy and celery, she thought of Ms. Lop, a woman without teeth but with very fine ivory gums, she thought about tongues and tubes and tennis, about cleaning tiles and combing someone else’s hair, she thought about goats and rags and nostrils and soup, she thought about Clod, a dwarf, whom she had slept with eleven times, she thought about how she had once forgotten how to spell Slope and about how she hadn’t forgotten again since, she thought about tiny bell peppers she had seen reflected in a mirror and about a can of tuna fish she had smelled and then thrown out. Then, suddenly, Stan appeared.

Slope, he began, where have you been?

She tried to think of something reasonable to tell him. The aquarium, she said.

Impossible, Stan replied.

And she agreed that it would have been impossible.

The supermarket, she tried.

Absolutely no chance!

And again she agreed that there was absolutely no chance.

The cottage, she said.

Stan looked hard at her. Yes, he said, yes I believe you have been at the cottage.

And Slope, too, believed that she had been at the cottage.

Now get to work, Stan said.

And so she got out of the stroller and got to work.