Totentanz by Al Sarrantonio

of
those movie lenses that they smear with Vaseline: the outer edges
fuzzy and the inner part sharper, though still indistinct. He
couldn't remember: had he been looking at the sun? In science
class, Mr. Weiss had once yelled at them not to look at the sun
during an upcoming eclipse: they could focus the eclipse on white
paper, but they shouldn't look at the sun directly because it would
burn out their retinas.
    Had he looked at the sun and burned out his
retinas? No, he hadn't looked at the sun. He had been looking at
the rabbit. If he remembered correctly, he thought that burning
out your retinas meant that you would be blind in the center of
your eyes but could still see things around the edges. That warning
had scared the whole class into not looking at the sun during the
eclipse and had convinced Pup not to bother with the eclipse at
all. He had gotten Jack to help him with his report, and since Jack
had had his telescope taking pictures of the thing, Pup was able to
wheedle one of the pictures out of him and had gotten an A.
    But where was the rabbit he had been looking
at? And where was Sprinkles? Everything was fuzzy. The rabbit was
gone. Should he call the rabbit? Should he call Sprinkles?
    "Sprinkles," he tried to say, and he found
that his mouth wasn't working very well either. It came out
sounding like "Spin-key." Was that him who had said, "Hello, Pup"?
Why would he say his own name? There was really something wrong
with him. That wasn't his voice, was it?
    "Pup," the voice said again, and now he knew
he hadn't said it. It was a smooth kind of voice, low and almost
sexy. When it said "Pup," it sounded as though it was drawing the
word out with its tongue and wrapping it around him. Was it a
woman's voice? Wouldn't a sexy woman's voice make his name sound
like that? Like the voices you imagined telling you all those
things about themselves in Penthouse?
    He yanked his head from the rabbit to the
place he thought the voice was coming from. His head lifted too
high, and he saw a slate-gray patch of lowering sky and some
fluttering red-and-white pennants on poles and a rounded pie-piece
slice of the Ferris wheel, and suddenly there was the open red car,
stopped on the bottom platform, its door swinging open languidly
and the car itself still swaying back and forth, and there,
standing on the platform in front of it, the smiling, nude form of
Lavinia Crawford.
    "Oh, Pup," she said, her voice low and
gravelly, like a sexy woman dee-jay. She stepped toward him, down
off the platform. Pup watched her bare foot as she did this small
liquid act, and then his eyes swung up to her smiling face again
and down to her perfectly round breasts and the move of her
hips.
    "Lavinia?" he asked, but it came out. "Lars?
Vina?"
    "Yes, Pup," she answered, moving closer to
him.
    He wished he could think straight. There was
something horribly right and horribly wrong about this: this must
be Lavinia Crawford because it looked like her—at least the face
looked like hers, and the body looked like hers had that time he'd
seen her in her window through the telescope. But how could it be?
How did she get here? How did she know he would come to her? Did
she really want his ugly body? She was no slut. Was it because he
had seen her that time and she knew it? That happened in the books
his father kept hidden, so it must happen in real life. But could
it happen to him? Why not?
    She was so close now that he could smell her
odor. And then, even in his confusion, a terror seized him again.
Why didn't she smell good? He thought she should smell like
perfume, or at least clean like his mother did. His mother always
smelled like rose water. Not like this. This was the worst body
odor he had ever encountered. Like sewage. And he couldn't see her
face now: it was as though someone had rubbed Vaseline all over the
lenses of his eyes.
    "I want you," Lavinia purred, and Pup
stumbled away from her. This wasn't right. She smelled wrong. He
turned and tried to