Farrah took calipers and gauze and filleted the chest rising on the studio floor, shaving, shaving aside the ruddy rows, gristled ribbons falling to each side. And on either side her sisters marched out, screaming in matching suits—studded in buttons, beating top hats and sticks, cracking the down-beats upon the studio floor—roaring down the flimsy windows and wildly waving their arms.
The studio walls collapsed into a wilderness of tents, and there a far-off outcrop and cliff—the sisters’ brassy lungs shivered and shrunk in the desert air. Farrah dragged the remnants into a low-slung tent, plucking up a cup of reddened ashes, still giving up its smokes. Lavender suffused the air, fuming, swooning the sisters, who fell from formation... Farrah continued her work, and by the muddy banks of the on-clopping night emerged, bearing the flushed head, besmirched and shorn.
-2001
