Last God Standing by Michael Boatman Page A

on Surabhi’s face later that night when I gave her the ring – and the night of passion sure to follow – when she snatched open the door to her apartment.
    “Yo,” I said. “What’s crackin’?”
    I moved in for a kiss. Surabhi grabbed my lapels and screamed, “Kiiiiyaaaaaahhh!”
    In one fluid movement she shifted her center of gravity downward and backward, pulled me forward onto the balls of my feet, planted her foot in the center of my chest and I was sailing head over heels across her comfortable living room. I landed on my back in the center of a deep mound of sofa cusions, comforters and fluffy pillows.
    Surabhi jumped on me and sat on my chest, smashing me back into the pillows, her face alive with martial excitement. Even though she was restricting my airway, I marveled at what time, circumstance and several million years of natural selection had wrought.
    Surabhi Moloke was the most beautiful woman since the advent of Homo sapiens. Imagine cinnamon-brown skin, smooth and rich as warm cocoa, wide brown eyes shot through with glints of gold like flecks of borrowed sunlight. Imagine curly, reddish brown hair, and a generous mouth armed with perfect white teeth and a ready smile. Throw in sharp cheekbones, and an aristocratic nose with perfectly arched nostrils , finally, stack all that on top of a body toned by Pilates; thrice weekly Jujitsu/Karate/Muy Thai kickboxing classes; Saturday morning African dance workshops and/or Brazilian capoeira jam sessions and you’ll get the picture. Surabhi had muscle in all the right places, a dancer’s grace, and the lethality of a shaolin monk.
    My girlfriend was constantly learning new ways to disarm, disable or disembowel people. She regularly attended self-defense seminars, and had earned an instructor’s certification in Savate by her fifteenth birthday.
    She’d grown up in an upper middle class suburb of London, the eldest daughter of Magnus Moloke, Ethiopian soccer legend and entrepreneur, and Marian DotsonMoloke, an attaché to the American Ambassador to the UK. Now she sat astride me: the Amazon Triumphant; beautiful, intelligent and capable of killing a water buffalo with her bare hands.
    “Judo,” she said, breathlessly. “The principle of using your attacker’s momentum against him. It’s brilliant!”
    “Can’t… breathe.”
    “Oh, my god! I’m sorry, babe! Do you need your inhaler?”
    Surabhi shifted her weight while still holding her position. I didn’t mind, now that oxygen was flowing to my brain.
    “Not anymore,” I laughed. “Hi.”
    Surabhi smiled. “Hello, loverman.”
    She kissed me. And everything – the fight with Zeus, the battle with Hannibal and my fears about a satanic takeover attempt – downsized themselves on my list of priorities. We were good. As long as that never changed, everything else would work itself out.
    “I need you to change.”
    “What?”
    Surabhi reached over and grabbed a plastic garment bag off the back of a nearby chair. Inside the clear plastic bag dangled an expensive-looking dark suit complete with a crisp new shirt and tie. In the other hand she dangled a pair of freshly polished, even more expensive-looking, leather shoes.
    “I need you to wear this.”
    “Why? What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”
    For our big moment I’d selected the dark brown suit I’d purchased for my college graduation. It was a little snug in places – that was to be expected since it was seven years old, but Classic never goes out of style. For color, I’d added an excellent black T-shirt featuring Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. The exact matching T-shirt in Surabhi’s size featuring Elsa Lancaster’s “Bride of Frankenstein” was folded neatly inside my satchel. I’d planned to present it to her before dinner, and taken the time to have the date stenciled across the fronts of both shirts to commemorate the occasion. I’d used some of the advance Herb gave me to buy a new pair of lime green