Hilda stands before the mirror clad in a floral print sundress with a quaint, pink derby perched neatly on the top of her permed brown head.

"What do you think, Morris?" she poses, motioning to the derby.

"I think it sucks. What're ya tryin' to prove? You look like a cross between a homosexual English dock worker and Barbara Bush in her "be proud of your age spots" innagural dress. Take it off before I smack you upside the head," Morris responds as energetically as a three- hundred pound, fifty-seven year old man in a Lazy-Boy recliner can. [Voice of the designer at a fashion show] Morris sports a mid-western corn husker goes to Woodstock look in his acid washed Osh-Kosh overalls and leather biking boots. To augment the outfit plastic reading spectacles rest low on his nose and a diamond stud garnishes his left nostril. [Exit designer]

Morris occupies himself nonchalantly with the latest issue of Stud Puppy magazine, as Hilda sweats searching for inspiration from that ever-elusive Muse of Fashion.

Five minutes pass, while Hilda rushes frantically from the mirror to the closet to the kitchen to the garage, tearing out tufts of hair and growing slowly paler in the process.

Ten minutes have passed as Hilda continues her frenetic activities, with no apparent progress. Morris opens the centerfold and concentrates his gaze on the lower half of the vertical layout.

Morris reads Rod Stiff's turn ons and turn offs. Hilda emerges from the doorway, no longer frantic, toting a dusty gray burlap sack. A glazed look, like the sheen of a bald man's head, has come into Hilda's eyes. She seems to have found a detached composure previously unknown in her hurried attempt at a life. "I got it, Morris. I'm gone," Hilda voices, disappearing through the same doorway.

Strange hissing, stirring, scraping sounds resonate from the kitchen. Five minutes pass.

Hilda bursts through the bedroom door in triumph. Morris raises his eyes above the spectacles without moving his head. The grotesque image that greets his unsuspecting gaze is Hilda, only worse.

In the kitchen Hilda concocted what is to be her last avant garde fashion endeavor. She stands doused from head to toe in flour, with little bits falling to the ground and assaulting the hard wood floor like a battalion of parachuteless paratroopers, sending up minute puffs of smoke in silent mourning. Beneath her eyes, smeared ketchup provides a gross contrast to the stark white of her flour shower. Her hair is knotted and tangled both from the flour and her own grievous, frustrated yanks. A pair of indistinct, now beige, moose slippers surround her feet. Two enormous, vulgarly-shaped breasts painted in neon green across her chest accost Morris's sense of sanity.

"Hilda," Morris proposes meekly, and with admirable composure, "would you mind getting me a glass of water?" Hilda leaves, presumably to obtain a glass of water for Morris.

With Hilda out of the room, Morris rouses himself from the Lazy- Boy recliner with a great deal of effort, lumbers jigglingly to the closet, procures a hefty bowling ball, and returns, blubber moving in rhythmic waves up his thighs and over his belly, and dissipating beneath his shirt sleeves, only slightly impeding his movement, to occupy a post just to the right of the doorway.

A minute passes. As Hilda reenters the room, Morris brings the bowling ball crashing down on her skull with the force of... you know those stories about mothers who lift cars to save their babies because the terror caused by seeing their babies beneath the car gives them superhuman strength. Also, you've heard the phrase, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Take this fury, add it to the previous description and apply it to Morris, and you've got an idea of the strength with which Morris brought the ball down on Hilda's head. In slow motion, the ball meets the right side of Hilda's cranium and proceeds powerfully onward sending parts of smashed brain and skull spinning, and hurtling, and floating, almost peacefully, to coat the walls and ceiling with gory ooze.

Morris stumbles and tumbles to the ground from the power of the blow and his own burdensome mass. As he lies in an exasperated heap on the floor, the guy from the Oatmeal commercials, Wilford Brimley, enters stage left praising, "It was the right thing to do, and a tasty way to do it." [Exeunt]

"This story is about the stifling of artistic genius by society--the elimination of dissidence and uncertainty from our insecure world." --Gerry Vacant, The Boston Globe

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